Twitter at 20: How we lost the public square

What began as a real-time public forum now functions as a data engine and megaphone for Elon Musk.

BY Chris Stokel-Walker

Twenty years ago, Jack Dorsey changed the world. He opened his phone and sent a message to a new platform he had created: “just setting up my twttr”. That post carries the ID 20. (A post he shared last week has the ID 2032161152470565367—a small detail that captures how dramatically the platform has scaled in the intervening decades.)

Following that first message, Dorsey’s short-form social network quickly cemented its role in our digital lives. In 2009, as a plane landed on the Hudson River in New York, users followed events in real time as people posted from the scene. In 2011, Sohaib Athar, then living in Abbottabad, Pakistan, inadvertently revealed the mission to kill Osama bin Laden because of a noisy helicopter… on Twitter. It became the place where the press and policymakers converged to discuss the state of the world. It was also where celebrities could interact directly with fans—or share record-breaking selfies, as Ellen DeGeneres did in 2014.

Little wonder that Elon Musk called the platform the “de facto public town square” as he courted the company before buying it for $44 billion in October 2022.

Today, that public town square lies in ruins. The company’s value has yo-yoed, dropping below $10 billion in September 2024 before rebounding to roughly its original valuation by March 2025. User numbers have declined as people tire of puerile shitposting and sexual harassment through the Grok chatbot. The platform is now struggling under a morass of AI slop, its own staff admit.

Musk has framed these changes as a necessary evolution in service of free speech. The result, however, has been the erosion of the utility that made Twitter essential for journalism and public discourse. What was once a kind of public utility—flawed, often chaotic, and frequently mismanaged—has become Musk’s private playground.

Value now comes in two forms. Financially, the takeover looks like a bust. Following the merger of Musk’s companies, recent estimates peg the platform at around $33 billion. That’s up from its low point, but still roughly 25% below what Musk paid—and he bought it believing it was already underperforming.

Yet X still serves a purpose for Musk, even as its civic function has largely collapsed under a torrent of porn and hostility. It remains a firehose of real-time human interaction—albeit among a shrinking user base—and a captive testing ground for Grok. It is also a megaphone for Musk himself. The point of X is no longer to function as a public square. It is to generate data and extend reach across the broader Musk ecosystem. The experience we all have on the platform, attacked by random reply guys, bombarded with gore and titillation, is an echo of his world. But it’s also a lab experiment to see how well his broader goals for his companies work.

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