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Pattern Matching
How Twitter Is Redefining Itself for a Post-Trump Future
New product features are rolling out to broaden the platform’s appeal. Will they work?
It’s easy to forget now, but there was a time when a popular view of Twitter was that of a largely frivolous platform for celebrities and their fans. Yes, Twitter has always had its serious side — it played notable roles in the Arab Spring circa 2011 and the Ferguson protests of 2014 — and its dark side, including rampant racism and misogyny from anonymous accounts. But before 2016, it was known less as a political and sociocultural battleground than as a venue for silly memes and pop-culture moments, like the Oscars selfie snapped by Ellen DeGeneres in 2014 that broke the record for the most-shared tweet of all time.
Also easy to forget is that, in 2016, Twitter’s future was in doubt. Its user base had stagnated; it was losing money; and worst of all, it couldn’t figure out what it wanted to be. A place to passively follow topics of interest? A second screen for live events? A hub for live video in its own right? It didn’t seem to matter what it tried: As a Verge headline put it in 2016, “nothing Twitter is doing is working.” The company’s outlook was so bleak that it was soliciting offers for a corporate buyout — except nobody…
