Is the open nature of Twitter disappearing?

Since 2006, the world has been able to use Twitter to tweet about what concerns users; from personal matters to journalism, as well as threats and politics. Twitter has always been a conservative platform relative to other platforms. The platform has remained independent and there haven't really been any major innovations, except for doubling the number of characters in 2017. Over the years, the look & feel has been modernised a bit, but the platform is still as recognisable as it was in the beginning.

By the end of 2014, Twitter's best days appeared to be behind it. The number of users continued to decline because there was little innovation and there were more visually appealing alternatives. Thanks in part to Donald Trump's candidacy for the US presidency, but also to the adventures of Elon Musk on Twitter, the number of users steadily increased again.

SOCMINT
Within Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) and Social Media Intelligence (SOCMINT), Twitter has always been a stable source of data. Both for local and international current events, and for mapping, for example, networks. The openness of Twitter and its API allows investigators to gather data from the platform and analyse it via (self-built) tooling.

PublicSonar, for example, is a tool that uses the data present on Twitter. The software offers organisations, active in the risk and safety domain, the possibility to look (inter)nationally and regionally at incidents that take place, such as at an event or the recent storms that swept across the country.

So-called third-party websites such as Tweetbeaver.com, where complete analyses of accounts can be made, or Birdhunt.co, where tweets can be searched by location, also work so well because of the open nature of the social media platform.

Twitter's new direction
Troubling for OSINT and SOCMINT investigators is the new direction Twitter is taking with newly announced features. Twitter Blue is one such feature. This is a subscription where the user pays monthly for new features, such as 'undo tweet'. If the user regrets a DM or a tweet, this option gives them 30 seconds to stop its publication. This limits the number of 'mistakes' users make, potentially reducing detection opportunities. Twitter intends to add more and more new features to Twitter Blue, such as recently the option to set a Non-Fundable-Token (NFT) as a profile picture.

Furthermore, a feature has been announced by Twitter called Flock. This allows a user to send certain tweets only to a group best friends; also known as the Flock. These tweets are not visible to other users. If you do not belong to this inner circle as an investigator, then you may be missing relevant data for your investigation.

In addition, they are working on a so-called voting system. Comments or tweets can be given a so-called upvote or downvote. For now, Twitter indicates that this is done to show more relevant comments or content to users. Or in other words, Twitter's algorithm is trained in which content is desirable and which is not. However, it cannot be ruled out that comments or accounts with many downvotes will soon be made increasingly invisible, partly because of this system. There are also conceivable scenarios of abusing this system and teaching the algorithm wrong things, such as what happened in 2016 with Microsoft's chatbot Tay [1] on this same social media platform.

Not all new features remain
Some new features are short-lived. A good example is the Instagram stories clone called 'Fleets' (a kind of temporary tweets) that was introduced in 2021. It was only available for a few months, after which it was discontinued by Twitter due to a lack of interest. Spaces, a Clubhouse-like feature where users can participate in conversations, is also not yet certain to continue.

The future
How it will develop further? As investigators, we will have to wait and see. There are already several platforms that users who are blocked or believe they are being censored by Twitter have moved to. These are platforms such as Gettr, for example, but also Donald Trump's new social media platform; namely Truth Social, may offer a solution for them as a safe haven. Whether the soon-to-be more closed nature of Twitter will cause other users to escape to these platforms remains to be seen.

All in all, as an investigator, it is important to stay well informed about how a platform works and its new features. In fact, proper investigation is only possible when you understand the ins and outs of a platform.

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[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35890188