Twitter should focus on live news and events, using human editors to create curated feeds
Farhad Manjoo / New York Times :
Context & Ripple Effects
In a June 2015 New York Times column, [[a:830120|Farhad Manjoo laid out the case that Twitter should stop chasing Facebook-style social networking and lean into what only it can do: real-time news, with human editors building curated event feeds]]. It was an argument about identity at a moment when Twitter was struggling to grow.
The corpus shows Twitter took the advice seriously: by late 2016 it was [[a:874700|repositioning itself away from 'social network' toward a central destination for news and live events]], and in 2018 it shipped exactly the machinery Manjoo described — algorithmically curated timelines promoted atop users' feeds during big news events, dedicated event pages pushed through notifications and the Explore tab, and personalized breaking-news alerts for US users.
First-order effects
- Twitter's product roadmap shifts from timeline parity with other social networks toward editor-driven event coverage, putting its curation team — not just its ranking algorithms — in charge of what users see during breaking news.
Second-order effects
- News outlets gain a more predictable distribution surface for live coverage, deepening the dependence on Twitter as a reporting and feedback tool that Nieman Lab would later catalog as a potential loss for journalism if the platform faltered.
Third-order effects
- Once a platform positions itself as a news destination, its editorial and moderation choices — including the free-speech-maximalist direction Twitter later took — stop being content policy and start functioning as news-gatekeeping policy, with advertising revenue (reported at $4B for 2021) riding on whether advertisers accept that role.
The trend: Social platforms have been steadily converting themselves from friend-graphs into edited news destinations, with each company choosing between human curators, algorithms, or some mix of both.