You keep hearing the same story: Twitter is dead, it’s all bots now, the ads are going to dry up. But then you open the app and see Verizon responding to a customer complaint, Coca-Cola announcing a new flavor, Delta confirming flight delays. It’s like everyone keeps saying State Farm should pull out of their brick-and-mortar offices and only do business through a niche forum, but State Farm knows exactly why they need that physical presence. Something isn’t adding up.
The narrative that brands will just abandon Twitter en masse ignores the brutal reality of attention economics. When you’re a global brand, you don’t get to pick and choose your platforms based on your feelings about the owner’s tweets. You get to decide whether you want to reach the people who are actually looking at your ads right now, or whether you want to chase some hypothetical audience on a platform that hasn’t proven it can deliver. The math is rarely in favor of the latter.
The uncomfortable truth is that Twitter’s problems are precisely why it’s still indispensable. When the world’s attention is fragmented across dozens of platforms, the one place where you can still reach both customers and competitors simultaneously becomes the default location for business communication. It’s not about ideals or principles — it’s about where the eyeballs are.
Reality Check
- Brands don’t care about your politics — they care about your wallets. When you see companies like Target or Allstate maintaining Twitter presence despite Musk’s antics, don’t assume it’s about principle. It’s about the fact that their customers are still there, and their competitors are still there. Pulling out would mean voluntarily ceding visibility in a space where millions of potential customers are actively looking for brand interactions. It’s like a restaurant deciding to stop accepting credit cards because they disagree with the bank’s CEO.
- The “bots take over” narrative is convenient fiction. Every time a platform faces criticism, the same narrative emerges: “It’s all bots now, nobody’s there.” This conveniently ignores the millions of legitimate users who don’t engage in political debates but still use the platform for customer service, industry news, and community building. The people saying “Twitter is dead” are often the same ones who never actually used it for business purposes to begin with.
- Musk’s “free speech” claims are pure theater. Remember when X Corp lost the CCDH lawsuit and the judge explicitly noted that Musk was trying to punish the CCDH for exercising free speech? That wasn’t an isolated incident. It’s the pattern: claim to be a champion of free expression while simultaneously creating a legal minefield for anyone who disagrees with you. It’s like the funniest part of this whole saga — imagine telling advertisers to “go fuck themselves” on live TV and then suing them when they actually take you up on that suggestion.
Antitrust law isn’t a get-out-of-jail-free card for bad business decisions. The FTC’s attempt to frame Media Matters’ ad boycott as an “illegal boycott” under antitrust law was transparently absurd. The judge saw right through it — because the law isn’t designed to force people to do business with you; it’s designed to protect consumers from monopolistic practices. When you’re the one threatening advertisers with lawsuits, you’ve already lost the moral high ground.
The attention economy isn’t going to wait for perfect platforms. No matter how much we might wish for it, there isn’t a viable Twitter alternative that has even a fraction of its attention share. Brands aren’t going to abandon the platform where their customers are until there’s somewhere else those customers will actually go. It’s not about ideals or principles — it’s about where the people are. Until that changes, we’ll keep seeing this bizarre spectacle of companies publicly complaining about Twitter while privately maintaining their presence.
User migration patterns predict platform failure. The people who first migrate to new platforms tend to be the ones most offended by the old platform’s norms. This creates a self-fulfilling prophecy where the new platform quickly develops a reputation that pushes away the more moderate users who might have made it mainstream. That software developer who considered Bluesky, saw the tone of replies celebrating his first post, and immediately went back to Twitter isn’t alone. These micro-decisions create the soft caps on new platforms’ growth.
Should You Buy It?
The real question isn’t whether Twitter is dying — it’s whether we’ve all been sold a bill of goods about what social media should be. We keep waiting for platforms to become these pure spaces where we can express ourselves without consequences, but the reality is that platforms are businesses, and businesses exist to make money. When you understand that simple truth, the whole spectacle starts to make sense.
Until someone builds a platform that can actually deliver the attention that Twitter currently holds, we’re stuck in this weird limbo where brands stay because they have to, even as users leave because they want to. And until that changes, we’ll keep seeing the same contradictions: companies publicly denouncing the platform while privately depending on it. The only way out is to stop waiting for platforms to change and start building our own solutions — or at least accepting that the platforms we have are never going to be what we wish they were.