Is the new Twitter worth your time?

Twitter is, supposedly, making a comeback.

News started circulating recently that Twitter.now (which now forwards to Tweet.app) has opened its doors. This resurrection of Twitter known as Tweet is apparently run by an organization that’s independent of X, called Operation Bluebird, and founding membership begins at $20 a pop.

There are some interesting ideas at work here, and among their guiding principles is the idea that, “Technology should help people understand what they're seeing, not quietly decide what they should see.” That’s an appealing take, coming from a tech company.

...but is it too little, too late? Here’s my view on what they have going for them, and what they’re missing.

What’s working in the new Twitter’s favor

The Bluebird team has a solid grasp of who their audience is, in a lot of ways. They want to capture the people who peeled off from Original Recipe Twitter when it was bought out–namely, the journalists, the scientists, the left-leaning, truth-seeking folks like us. 

The language they use speaks directly to that, and often has an activism flavor to it: 

“The Square is back. And this time, it’s yours.”

“We're a small team taking Twitter back — rebuilt on trust.”

“You didn't just show up — you stood up.”

An interesting feature they’re reportedly working on is VERA, which basically functions as a user-controlled dial for how much low-trust content is shown on their feed. While I do have questions about what the criteria for “trust signals” are, giving users easy control over how their algorithm behaves is a move in the right direction.

They also take a firm stance against harmful content, saying that they “prohibit threats, harassment, and hate,” and “treat child safety with zero tolerance.” 

Overall, their promise is hefty: they hope to create a safer space for open conversation, where only the most worthy content earns the reach. 

Is the promise of a safer social media platform even possible?

Tweet’s stance on harmful content is a solid start, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned from being a referee in sports, it’s that there can be a wide gap between the way a rule is written, and how it’s actually applied.

Moderation has a consistently difficult needle to thread from the early days of the internet. Whether you got flamed in an online forum in the ‘90s, or reported a content policy violation on Instagram yesterday, you’ve encountered community managers who do nothing, show bias, or over-moderate.

Meta has demonstrated a fairly laissez-faire attitude, with its inaction towards reports of harmful content. BlueSky has made some gestures towards stronger moderation and has even asked for community input on their policies, but they’ve also been criticized for some of the decisions they have made, including suspending accounts fundraising for Palestine.

The fact is, there’s almost certainly no line that will make your entire user base happy, when it comes to content moderation. So, how Tweet’s vision of a safer social media platform will look in practice is a very big question.

The biggest thing that Tweet is missing about its audience

In the midst of all this potential, there is one key question that the Bluebird team hasn’t quite answered yet: does anyone actually want a new social media platform? 

As far as capturing the folks who left Twitter during that mass exodus, Tweet is basically the guy who shows up to the party so late that the other partygoers are starting to head home for the night. If they’d put out this offering around the time that BlueSky launched, they’d have caught their audience still casting about, looking for a new home.

As things are now, that ship has long since sailed. The celebrities, influencers, and designers landed on Meta’s Twitter clone, Threads. Meanwhile, many journalists, artists, and folks in the sciences are feeling settled into BlueSky. 

Regardless of where Twitter expats have landed, this audience is increasingly overwhelmed and exhausted by being online in general, and especially by existing social platforms. Many of us are questioning whether we want or need to be on social at all. (psssst, you don’t, actually)

When you consider that social media use is driven by whether others are actually using a given platform (and who those people are), I have a healthy amount of skepticism about whether Tweet’s efforts will pay off. This is an audience that’s tired, frustrated, and definitely not looking to add to their social media to-do list.