Twitter for (Livestreaming) Good? Tracking Twitter's
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ASH / TRACKING TWITTER’S IDEOLOGICAL RHETORIC Twitter for (Livestreaming) Good? Tracking Twitter’s Ideological Rhetoric Before and After the Periscope Acquisition Lauren Ash Abstract: Social media, coupled with digital platformization, have emerged as powerful tools in mediated global social movement landscapes. In sustaining its free microblogging platform, Twitter’s corporate evolution and network effects balances geopolitical and social utility with revenue-generating growth fundamental to digital platform capitalism. As such, Twitter’s trailing of the big five Western corporate web giants (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft or GAFAM) produces considerable internal and external trepidation of its financial health, relevance, and survival. This paper examines Twitter’s mythic ‘public good’ foundational ethos and ongoing business practices— restructuring and advertisement strategies juxtaposed against its origin story and social revolution narratives. Specifically, Twitter’s 2014 livestreaming video application acquisition, ‘Periscope’, is highlighted as a distinct turning point in networked protest and monetization models, given its analogous origin story and foundational guiding principles. Building on the temporal limits of Yuval Dror’s “‘We are not here for the money’: Founder’s manifestos” (2015), this research interrogates Twitter’s 2013 public SEC S-1 founder’s shareholder letter manifesto and subsequent publicly available quarterly press earning releases. In doing so, Twitter’s temporal rhetoric is interrogated to reveal how it frames tensions between INFORMATION IN THE AIR: SOCIETY AND THE EVOLVING MEDIA / VOL. 3.4, SUMMER 2018 1 ASH / TRACKING TWITTER’S IDEOLOGICAL RHETORIC governing idealism, previous asset failures, and attempts to enhance profitability. Likewise, it challenges these rhetorical narratives over time to locate specific points of potential post Initial Price Offering (IPO). An inquiry into Twitter’s public self-promotion and projected performance is studied against their claims for maintaining the ‘public good’, explores how their ‘Twitter for Good’ philanthropic mission and social corporate responsibility ideology matches with its contemporary business operations and sustainability practices. Finally, attention is focused on the value of livestreaming and how the Periscope acquisition signals Twitter’s evolution into the livestreaming broadcast sphere. By situating this paper within new social movement theory, platform studies, the historical rise of counterculture and digital utopianism discourse, techno-social-corporatization of networked publics, and the political economy of broadcast convergence, Twitter’s founder’s manifesto becomes an enigmatic temporal document signaling a dialectical backward and forward thinking philosophy. Keywords: Twitter, Periscope, platformization, manifestos, Google, rhetorical analysis, social media, platform capitalism, philanthrocapitalism INFORMATION IN THE AIR: SOCIETY AND THE EVOLVING MEDIA / VOL. 3.4, SUMMER 2018 2 ASH / TRACKING TWITTER’S IDEOLOGICAL RHETORIC Introduction “See what’s happening” – Twitter, 2009 “Explore what the world is seeing” – Periscope, 2018 The past decade bore witness to many major world events and protests, where mobilization and organization efforts became synonymous with social media live streams. From the Arab Spring (Brown et al., 2012) to The Women’s March on Washington (Farhi, 2017) and the ‘Muslim’ Travel Ban Airport protests (Rosenberg, 2017) social media was presented as sites of mobile sousveillance and uprising (Mann & Ferenbrok, 2013; Browne, 2015), where information and (moving) images became mediated in real time. As such, the emergence of “platformization”—which can be understood as growing platform ubiquity and a foundational structural element of the social web (Helmond, 2015) in service to the production of platform capitalism (Srnicek, 2017)—has triggered the temporal and spatial collapse of geopolitical information access and broadcast media landscapes. This is especially true for the microblogging platform Twitter, where progressive politicians and social justice activists alike rely on Twitter’s emergent digital affordances to circumvent the failings of their own democratic systems1 while others, such as the 45th American President, voice their power and penchant for policy making by tweet (Turner-Lee, 2017). Twitter recognizes its own role amidst this activism and politicking in its mandate, emphasizing “Twitter for Good” as a reason to use the service (Twitter, 2013). Founded in 2006, Twitter Inc. is a free, simple, popular, and real-time microblogging digital social media platform that went public in 2013 (Carlson, 2011). Nonetheless, the big five Western platforms— Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft (GAFAM)—not only monopolize the digital ecosystem in user growth, but also overshadow their competition in revenue streams (Manjoo, 2016). Yet, Twitter maintains cultural, social, and political significance, as the ‘Twitter Revolution’ (Jenkins, 2013) examples demonstrate. In addition, Twitter’s text-based microblogging encourages ‘tweet flows’, which produce live streams of what José van Dijck calls “uninhibited, unedited, instant, short, and short-lived actions reactions—a stream that taps a real-time undercurrent of opinions and gut feelings” (2013, p. 78). Often accompanied or complimented by meditated live streaming video, these affordances produce compelling textual and visual information and data flows that elevate Twitter as a digital site for effective material change. However, where and how Twitter fits within their ‘Twitter for Good’ social justice mandate (Twitter, 2018), along with their public company monetization strategies within the GAFAM platform superstructure, remains unclear. 1 In 2016, U.S Congressional Democrats were forced, to livestream their gun-control sit-in in using Periscope after Republican lawmakers and the Speaker’s office switched off the C-SPAN cameras and broadcast inside the chamber (Woolf, 2016). INFORMATION IN THE AIR: SOCIETY AND THE EVOLVING MEDIA / VOL. 3.4, SUMMER 2018 3 ASH / TRACKING TWITTER’S IDEOLOGICAL RHETORIC In essence, this paper examines the origin story and myths perpetuated by Twitter, as the company struggles to achieve GAFAM-level financial success by drawing on recent work from the political economy of platforms and social movement theory. Twitter’s evolution as a platform is relevant not only as a tool for social movement mobilization, but for tracking their ongoing business restructuring practices to compensate for lagging monetization models and advertisements strategies (Lynley, 2017). By examining Twitter’s ideological origins and attempt to become a financially-viable and robust social network, there is evidence the platform has begun to use envelopment tactics — what Gawer calls “a bundling strategy through which platforms attack their target by extending their functionalities through leveraging shared user relationships…as well as common components” (2014, pp. 1241). These tactics are applied to target, monetize, and reframe Twitter’s brand, incorporating all aspects of the digital and broadcast livestream (Hibberd, 2018). Accordingly, this paper considers Twitter’s framing and rhetoric. Distinctively, it first uses Periscope as a case study to ask how Twitter frames the tensions between its founding principles and previous financial and asset failures, while trying to enhance profitability. Second, it addresses the fiscal claims Twitter makes to promote its economic agenda, while maintaining their ‘public good’ platform myth. Third, Twitter’s rhetorical shift before and after the livestreaming app Periscope acquisition is analyzed temporally. In doing so, a comparative rhetorical analysis is performed on Twitter’s founding rhetoric and ‘Twitter for Good’ ideology; these are matched with contemporary business operations and sustainability practices. This paper concludes by explicating why and what makes Twitter’s Periscope acquisition and timing significant, along with how Google’s position as a platform influencer figures into Twitter’s plans moving forward. Literature Review This paper situates Twitter’s historiography, geopolitical, and economic impacts through various theoretical lenses. These approaches serve to create a holistic understanding of Twitter as a digital artifact, along with contextualizing platformization in a capitalist framework. This begins with new social movement history, particularly how contemporary identity politics emerged and organized through various apparatuses to govern the production and circulation of complex information in decentralized and pluralist societies (Melucci, 1994). In many respects, the antecedence of various actions, mobilizations, and collective consciousness translates into the rise of counterculture and digital utopianism (Turner, 2005) which paradoxically planted the seeds that have given rise to the capital machinations of Silicon Valley and the current state of techno-social-corporatization of networked publics and hybrid public-private spheres (Yang, 2016; Tufecki, 2017). The evolution of such movements and platforms can be understood through framing theory, by way of semantics, politics, and discursive rhetoric (Lakoff, 2004; Gillespie, 2010). INFORMATION IN THE AIR: SOCIETY AND THE EVOLVING MEDIA / VOL. 3.4, SUMMER 2018 4 ASH / TRACKING TWITTER’S IDEOLOGICAL RHETORIC Twitter, as with other publicly traded company business models, uses framing to defend, champion, and