Understand the consequences for the global community if Twitter ceased to exist

What if Twitter died?

That question would have been unthinkable just a few weeks ago, but a cascade of events precipitated by the company’s erratic new owner, Elon Musk, has thrown the platform’s future into uncertainty.

And if Twitter suddenly ceased to exist, the consequences would be enormous, given the platform’s importance to global communications.

The platform is often compared to a digital city square – and for good reason. It is much more than simply a social media site.

World leaders use Twitter to communicate, journalists use Twitter to gather news, dissidents in repressive countries use Twitter to organize, celebrities and big brands use Twitter to make important announcements, and the public uses Twitter to monitor everything in time real.

If the platform died or became unusable due to instability issues, no single space would likely replace it.

“Twitter versus not Twitter is not a simple binary, especially for news journalism. 24-hour global connectivity has changed almost everything about workflows in newsrooms and even for freelance journalists,” Emily Bell, founding director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at the Columbia Journalism School, said in a series of tweets on Friday. “What replaces it, or what Twitter becomes now with an owner expressly hostile and ignorant of the daily reporting business, is really unclear.”

Instead, communications would be fragmented across multiple social media sites, leading to a seismic disruption and slowdown in the flow of information.

Some users would probably go to one of the Twitter clones.

A Twitter-like microblogging platform that has gained traction in recent weeks is Mastodon. But this explosion in popularity is relative: Mastodon is still much smaller than Twitter in scale and lacks the usability to appeal to mass audiences.

Most other Twitter clones were largely designed to target conservatives who have for years, and often unsubstantiatedly, accused Twitter of harboring an anti-conservative bias. These sites include former President Donald Trump’s Truth Social, Gettr, and others.

And of course social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and others are options.

But none of these apps seem destined to inherit all of Twitter’s users — or perhaps more importantly, become the central place for public conversation and debate as Twitter has been for years and years.

One US senator, for example, expressed to CNN on Thursday night – via Twitter direct messages – that he would miss the platform.

“My main concern is that I think some people want to hear it directly from me,” the senator said, “and it’s a very efficient way to curate a newsfeed.”

“So I’m just figuring out what’s next.”