Which, honestly was a smart move, because twitter has shown even before the musk purchases that they cooperate with some horrible governments
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Yes. Just one or two American news outlets of record like the NYT, WSJ, WaPo, CNN, and the network broadcasters completely leaving and starting their own Mastodon instance or post.news account will start the rush for the exits. Corporate brands will follow and that will take a huge bite out of revenue. They’ll cross-post for a while but the writing will be on the wall.
Once von Clownstick returns to Twitter in July the moment his exclusive with his own failing (sad!) social network is up it will become too toxic for anyone who isn’t right-wing.
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Yeah, much like Hollywood in that way. However, I do think the press utilizes Twitter in a way that generates a lot of sustained secondary traffic. Unlike discreet communities, a tweet put out by a media outlet may be retweeted, repackaged and commented on to a degree that’s nigh untraceable, yet point back at the source. For instance, NYT posts an article, some right wing pundit RTs their outrage that it’s not sufficiently obsequious to the Nazis, someone like Ron Filipkowski RTs that with his spin, and meanwhile those all fork into dozens of comments, arguments and analysis.
When Twitter first landed I was truly mystified as to how it could be at all useful. During the “Arab Spring” and Occupy movements I began to see how a rapidly-disseminated bulletin board could be useful in the “town square” sense that Musk will never actually understand. That seems to have been a bit of a tipping point where it became in many ways the primary resource for reporters and allowed them to participate in a real-time conversation that was moving even faster than their .com presences would allow (no editors, no fact checkers, no legal review; not like many of them bother with those nowadays, anyhow).
I doubt that the press and general fourth estate “blob” are a majority of the user base, but they are the backbone of mass-market engagement. It’s really a shame because it seems like the communities you mention are really what it should be about. Like Facebook should be about actually engaging with real friends and family, but has instead evolved into anything at all but that.
ETA: @robertmckenna beat me to it re: Arab Spring. 
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That event was really formative. I feel like the Arab Spring was when “everyone” decided:
A) Twitter is a good thing
B) Journalists can now do their jobs just by retweeting
Neither turned out to be true and maybe democracy will be the cost of figuring that out. 
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I like to remind people that the deciding factor on the Egyptian Arab Spring that really turned it into a mass movement on the street was Mubarak cutting the internet. I suspect if he had not done that, and so many more people had not come out into the street Cairo, he would have probably remained in power… it’s something that many of the media-driven narratives really gloss over.
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They definitely blocked Twitter and Facebook.
January 25th, 2011
Twitter reportedly inaccessible
Twitter was inaccessible in the country in what was believed to be a move to thwart protesters using the social network in their campaign to oust Mubarak.
The US-based microblogging service that allows people to use mobile phones to broadcast short text messages was out of service in Egypt on Tuesday, according to the herdict.org tracking website recommended by Twitter.
A Twitter spokesman declined to comment on what was causing the service outage in Egypt.
“Egypt is going wild and I’m not sure we’ll really have a sense of it until the dust clears,” Digital Democracy’s Mark Belinsky told CNET. “Hard to say whether or not it’s just getting overloaded though…(physically severing) Internet was done in Burma after a while but it usually leads to international uproar. What they generally do is slow down the signal to a crawl, as they did in Iran, which they can then say was infrastructure failure or any other made up excuse.”
[…]
Update: Facebook blocked
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Oh, wow. I had totally forgotten that. That’s why BlackBerry’s encrypted infrastructure had a little swan song during those events. I remember people were pooling BlackBerry phones to send to dissidents. It was a real cat-and-mouse game between the FB messenger, Twitter and BlackBerry as well as some platforms I’m unaware of. I had also forgotten that the Hong Kong protests were around that time and utilized the same tactics. It really did seem for a moment that a super useful arsenal of tools was being discovered.
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YouTube, Facebook and SMS.
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i think the thing that really distinguished ( and distinguishes still, if less every day ) is embedding and browsing
no one allows capturing the contents of a post in a simple form, and then letting anyone go look at related content. the limited character count reinforced that. capturing an entire thought in one block
that’s ( imo ) why it’s been so relevant to media types, celebrities, and even activists. open sharing
facebook ( instagram, snapchat, even tiktok to an extent ) provide mainly walled gardens. they don’t want creators to share outside the garden. ( and even within those walls it can be hit or miss. facebook especially downgrades anything that links outside of meta )
the last vestiges of twitter are proving that by being angry about the new walls ( and less angry about the toxic bs )
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He never thought the leopard capricious manchild would eat his face revenue stream.
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Timeline:
- Twitter and Facebook blocked January 24th.
- Internet goes dark January 28th.
So, no effect in Egypt, but what did happen was that every news report and wild rumor was posted to Twitter in real time, where they were mulled over by “Internet experts”.
Firehose juice can be addictive. 
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It’s gone even further now
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Given that so much of what Musk has been doing undermines this dynamic, I go back and forth between, “Elno really doesn’t understand this particular key aspect of Twitter” and “Elno does understand this - and is actively trying to destroy it.” It’s hard to know where his fascist sympathies leave off and his pure incompetence takes over…
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He understands it in the same way the obnoxious street preacher does; you’re all welcome to be present and take pamphlets, but I brought a bullhorn and a cadre of acolytes willing to turn violent if anyone gets the idea of bringing a bigger bullhorn.
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