Twitter: Surviving Change: Rules, Retweets, Responsibilities

By Kurt Seapoint

Twitter was once a fantastic seller's market for writers and publishers. But that all changed at the end of 2017. If you've been affected by the dramatic changes to Twitter and are wondering how to survive on the platform, look no further—Twitter: Surviving Change will tell you how.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Aug 10, 2018
• ISBN: 9781732358218

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

Twitter and the Recent Past

1

We’ve had a love-hate relationship with Twitter for several years, but it is an entity integral to our success. We always try to adapt to whatever appears to be allowed, and have managed to co-exist, somewhat prosperously, on the platform. And then, we were caught in the perfect storm of 2017 when politics, Russians, bots, and hate flooded Twitter’s streams and changed the course of our digital lives.

The earlier part of that year we could spend an hour on Twitter and it was essentially a virtual drive through a big city from its seedy side (with no detour from gore, porn, or sheer vulgarity) all the way across town to the Mall (with its chat, billboards, bookshops, films, music, fashion, foods, and friends) or a football game or a Lana del Rey concert. Along the way Twitter users could speculate on Bitcoin or Facebook stock or watch a Tesla as it cruised towards Mars…but it was a trip increasingly encumbered by posts on the American election.

Apparently, there are few of us who realize that the USA Electoral College actually elects the President, that the popular vote is just that: votes by the populace at large. It’s a popularity contest: the losing candidate won by 2.9 million votes.

________

The United States Electoral College is the mechanism established by the United States Constitution for the election of the President and Vice President of the United States by small groups of appointed representatives, electors, from each state and the District of Columbia. (Source: Wikipedia)

________

We weren’t on Twitter for the politics. We were there to promote our business, meet people, find potential clients, read film reviews and great quotes, check breaking news, and of course, see the best daily cat and dog GIFs and videos…

So we blocked and muted and unfollowed or otherwise ignored the politickers (our term for those espousing opinions as indisputable facts, for whom agenda matters more than truth). However, we failed to realize these politickers and Management’s response to them, would forever alter not only the face of Twitter but the future of our business.

In late Autumn of 2017, we noticed people we knew, i.e., familiar accounts, disappearing, sometimes only temporarily but many, it seems, forever. Perhaps they had found happiness on another platform and decided to deactivate their Twitter feed and move on. All within a few days of each other…?

Maybe there was another reason.

Maybe Twitter deleted or suspended those accounts?

Surely, we were just being paranoid.

It soon became obvious that we weren’t.

After Christmas, we lost thousands of Followers in our Twitter accounts and discovered we weren’t alone in this. The same month we noticed several User Profiles we didn’t follow, marked with a warning of potentially sensitive media that, upon investigation, seemed completely unwarranted. [Okay, it’s like stumbling across a train wreck: when you see the sweetest, most innocuous User ID and avatar and there’s a warning that it’s sensitive media???? Of course you have to look!] This was a backdrop to our own daily deflating Impressions on our