It turns out that Mike Judge’s supposed sitcom Silicon Valley was a documentary after all. My bad, as the people young and in touch enough with the world to have known this all along may still say.
Twitter: Breaking the Bird is a 75-minute CNN film chronicling the rise, fall and possibly end of the social media site that was launched by a group of eager young things in 2006 amid a widespread belief – at least in the Valley – in the power of the internet to remake the world in radically better ways. This, a co-founder or two has come to consider since, may have been a “hallucinogenically optimistic” view. Well, we were all young once. Although that feels – and in no small measure because of Twitter – like a very long time ago.
The original gang comprised Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, Biz Stone and Noah Glass. Dorsey, who became Twitter’s first CEO, came up with the idea of letting the site enable users to update each other on their thoughts, doings and feelings in real time. “Microblogging” is the word I remember being bandied about at the time, although it is not used here. Maybe no one knows what blogging was any more. (It was long-form Twitter. Does that help?)
Twitter exploded in popularity, in part because celebrities were attracted to its immediacy and the apparent clarity of interaction it offered. Politicians flocked there, too, once its soft but extraordinary power began to become apparent, then activists, along with ever-growing numbers of ordinary users.
The only problem was that the site was – please allow me to summarise some of the technical terms here – a piece of rubbish. These were the “fail whale” years: whenever the site crashed, an apologetic message would come on screen accompanied by the image of a blue whale being lifted by many, many little Twitter birds. “It was the loudest platform and the saddest little business,” says the tech journalist Kara Swisher. Dorsey was ousted as CEO, the rest of the co-founders were pushed or walked and a new boss, Dick Costolo, ordered a rebuild from the ground up.
Five years later, he restored Dorsey – and his unwavering belief in free speech – to the throne. At first, as Twitter became instrumental in popularising the Black Lives Matter movement, Dorsey’s belief in his creation as a democratising, liberalising force seemed justified. You will never guess what, though. It didn’t last.
Del Harvey was the woman the boys had reluctantly appointed in the early days to deal with online abuse. She saw the pitfalls of an unthinking commitment to free speech. As Twitter’s former engineering manager Leslie Miley puts it: “It’s not just a naive philosophy; it’s a privileged philosophy.” Harvey had argued from the beginning for various tools and protections, but – I hope you are sitting down – wasn’t taken seriously.
Hate speech of all kinds, especially misogynistic, flooded in. Then, in 2016, Trump arrived. He commanded attention and drove engagement, but his vitriolic posts legitimised others. Debate raged. Should he be banned? Should other users be banned? Should more posts be taken down? Does free speech mean freedom from consequences? Dorsey preferred to, as Swisher puts it, “go stare at a finch in Sri Lanka” than evolve a more sophisticated policy.
Mounting issues meant “Twitter stopped being fun” for Dorsey, according to one of his team. He resigned as CEO and sold the company to Elon Musk – “the singular solution I trust”, apparently because of the billionaire’s commitment to unfettered freedom of speech. X, as Musk rebranded the site, is now a hellscape.
Twitter: Breaking the Bird is a compelling tale – albeit told without flair – of how idealism and ignorance, willed and unwilled, combined to bring down a potential empire. It is an illustration of the profound difficulties we will face if we continue to let young, confident, unformed and uninformed men shape and rule the internet – which is to say our society – without making them look at what they are doing and examine the consequences.
Although it isn’t asked explicitly, one question underlies every scene: has the internet made us monstrous, or given free rein to what was always there? Put another way, when we look at the hellscape, are we looking at the worst of humanity – a self-selecting group of horrors, unrepresentative of the whole – or the essence of it?
Answers come there none. I may just look at a finch in Sri Lanka for a while.