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
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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
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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).
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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).
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Twitter, as with other publicly traded company business models, uses framing to defend, champion, and uphold their do-gooder, creative edict within a capital logic. As such, a new brand of business ethics and corporate social responsibility has emerged, where networked digital social media companies and their CEOs market their platforms and products using grandiose, world-saving rhetoric (Hoffman et al, 2016). In particular, Thorsten Busch and Tamara Shepherd (2014) examined Twitter’s Terms of Service and licensing policies to glean how their normative self-understanding and business ethics perspective motivated their commercial practices and non-commercial, civic practices. Busch and Shepherd found Twitter’s ethos and reliance on instrumental corporate social responsibility was morally negligent towards their stakeholders, along with a propensity to regulate and legitimize certain voices over others, contributing toward asymmetrical participatory power. Today, such scholarship falls under the platform studies purview. Critical histories of broadcast and streaming platforms (Burgess & Green, 2013), have created new screen ecologies that evolve into digital convergence perspectives (Cunningham, 2012; Cunningham et al., 2016). This positions Twitter as a platform which activates new modes of production, distribution, and reception — where the political economy of mass communication rests in digital capitalism (Fuchs, 2012; Fisher, 2015). Likewise, a more thorough vetting of platform organizational policy and governance (Pasquale, 2015) establishes corporate sensibilities for “philanthrocapitalism” (McGoey, 2012) that produce instrumental and integrative multi- sided market modalities, in which Twitter’s rhetoric reaches advertisers, content producers, and consumers without alienating any of these groups. This helps Twitter capitalize on platform information exchange, interoperability, and network effects (Gawer, 2014). Since November 2013, Twitter’s publicly traded company has experienced difficulty preserving, leveraging, and cultivating new growth, as well as converting existing user network effects into formidable digital revenue standards (Kastrenakes, 2018). Twitter’s tensions rest in their contradictory desire to monetize their platform data’s network effects, while rhetorically bolstering their technological neutrality. They2 believe in their literal and figurative infrastructural utility, which Twitter maintains operates in the background of users’ quotidian digital lives without recourse (van Djick, 2013). Furthermore, their oft connoted ‘Twitter for Good’ philanthropic mission and “belie[f ] the open exchange of information can have a positive impact on the world” (Twitter, 2017) (re)produces a mythic component of Twitter’s embeddedness within responsible civic engagement discourse couched inside a larger social justice platform paradigm, seemingly alienated from capitalist intent. As such, their ‘Twitter for Good’ philanthropic and global social justice vision competes with the platform’s attempt to capitalize on multi-sided markets. This leaves Twitter with a revenue problem and the optics that their corporate social responsibility and philantrocapitalism approach instrumentally services only their bottom line (McGoey, 2012). Simultaneously, it appears Twitter hedges their bets on the corporatization and privatization of the
2 They’, in reference to Twitter, refers specifically to Twitter’s founders and their corporate rhetoric. Any general mention of the company using pronouns will utilize ‘it’ throughout this paper, so as not to personify the corporation.
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public digital sphere (Tufecki, 2017), performing neither effectively. In so doing, Twitter’s rhetorical discourse belies the activist framework and forms two competing narrative for two disparate audiences: socially conscious users and profit seeking investors and shareholders. This is not a matter of questioning Twitter’s self-reflexivity, as the platform warrants the benefit of understanding its very juxtapositions. Their patterns, and ongoing attempts to experiment with various business models, technological affordances, and governance strategies, signals a desire to bridge this ideological gap in order to placate various stakeholders (Levy, 2015). Media scholar Jose van Dijck (2013) speaks to this stage of “interpretive flexibility”, in The Culture of Connectivity, where she borrows from social constructivism, when “a technology is still in flux and various, sometimes contradictory interpretations are waged before stabilization is reached” (p. 69). In her critical history of social media, she argues Twitter’s organization has to balance “its ambition to be an autonomous communication network and the commercial pressure to become an applied service accommodating advertisers”, which she articulates as being existential, strategic, and ecological questions (2013, p. 69). Given the rise of social media’s professionalized content, Twitter plays a role in the obstruction of amateur use, (van Djick, 2013) and now blurs how users and regulators come to understand platform specificity. For example, is Twitter a networked technology company? Or is it a broadcast media company? Or, can social media platforms like Twitter be understood as private utilities that function as extensions of public spheres? These questions are essential considerations when attempting to disentangle Twitter’s loyalties to activists and advertisers. Socio-technologist Zeynep Tufecki interrogates such questions in her book, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest (Tufecki, 2017). She argues how changes from top-down legacy news media to bottom-up networked public spheres — found on Twitter and other social media platforms — disrupt previously held organizational models. Such changes benefit the immediacy and access to information flows. However, such models lack sustainability by hindering efforts to produce long- lasting change. Though rapid in formation, networked protests are vulnerable to illusory organizational and mobilization capacities, based on loosely negotiated planning strategies and horizontal governing approaches. A networked sphere, such as Twitter, enables rhizomatic3 connections between traditionally silenced groups—a point the company does not let its users forget (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Still, Tufecki continues by heeding warning of this rhetoric,
The networked public sphere has emerged so forcefully and so rapidly that it is easy to forget how new it is… The wide extent of digital connectivity might blind us to the power of this transformation. It should not. These dynamics are significant social mechanisms, especially for social movements, since they change the operation of a key resource: attention… Attention is oxygen for movements. Without it, they cannot catch fire. (Tufecki, 2017, p. 29-30)
3 A rhizome refers to the Deleuze and Guattari’s concept describing a non-hierarchical system, multiplicities without subject or object, and with multiple entry/exit points. Significantly, this system allows for an alternative organizational and philosophical view.
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Therefore, the transition of such power onto newer technologies results in changes to media affordances, while also leaving contemporary platforms like Twitter in a perpetual state of flux. Digital media and communication scholar Stuart Cunningham, among others, sees a way out of such binaries. He explores how digital affordances become opportunities for the coevolution of informal and formal content distribution of social network markets within such media ecologies (2012). Still, technology remains at an infancy. Twitter, like many other smaller platforms, currently remain mutable. Further complicating their affordances and governance are Twitter’s (re)current controversies, having battled accusations and concern over their Terms of Service agreements, infringements on user privacy (Pearson, 2015), anti-censorship, the promotion and elevation of hate groups (Livsey, 2017), along with other ethical misdeeds. Likewise, Twitter’s propensity for user polemics and abuse disproportionately affect women of colour, as cited in the 2014 meta #TwitterEthics Manifesto resistance campaign (Kim & Kim, 2014). Moreover, research and congressional oversight on how Twitter, along with other popular social media platforms, willfully and/or inadvertently enabled Russian interference in the 2016 U.S Presidential election continues (Conger & Cameron, 2017).
Periscope Acquisition
Thus, Twitter’s global influence, and an investigation into potential turning points in their policy and economic and socio-cultural history, warrants attention. This begins with their Periscope acquisition in January 2015, prior to their public launch (Koh & Rusli, 2015). Periscope is a livestreaming application founded by Kayvon Beykpour and Joe Bernstein, which began in 2014 following the accretion of 1.5 million in venture capital (Periscope, 2017). They too share a similar public-good origin story, in that their founders were inspired and guided by principles of information spreadability, especially in the context of livestreaming protest and using grassroots mediated network information sociability (Shontell, 2015). Twitter official’s Periscope launch occurred in March 2015 on iOS (Pierce, 2015) and in May 2015 on Android respectively (Baldwin, 2015) and was propelled by a heavily orchestrated marketing rollout (Johnson, 2016). Furthermore, Periscope’s development was situated within a competing trend toward livestreaming apps, including Meerkat and Facebook Live (Vicent, 2015). The purchase amount was not made public, though reports have ranged from $100-120 million (Koh & Rusli, 2015; Shontell, 2016). From the outset, this acquisition appeared to be love at first stream for Periscope’s origin story; a start-up live streaming app with foundations in protest ideology dovetails nicely with Twitter rhetoric and Twitter for Good’s philanthropic mission. Periscope, located at periscope.tv, acts as real-time, live streaming TV channels and archive, similar to YouTube (Pierce, 2015).
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Methodology
Examining Twitter’s rhetoric temporally is an archaeological dig into their past language. Often, such statements only become accessible to the public before and after major launches and/or acquisitions. A template of such work is found in Yuval Dror’s 2015 article, “‘We are not here for the money’: Founders manifestos.” At the outset, Dror examined Google’s 2004 SEC S-1 Registration statement—a form companies must submit to the U.S Securities and Exchange Commission, 20 days prior to launching the Initial Price Offering (IPO), in order to become a public company. This allows the company to pass various criteria to legally list their shares on the NASDAQ Stock Market. Typically, a banal process, the S-1 form contains financial information for purposes of transparency. However, Google — with its self-labeled mantra as being a “disruptive” company (Google, 2004) — decided to impart its ideological rhetoric and branding within the document. Inside their 161-page form, Google’s founders include an unprecedented 4300 word “letter from the founders” or “owner’s manual” (Google, 2004, p. i) ideological manifesto directed at future shareholders (see Appendices A-C). Google’s letter is replete with philosophical musings about their platform, business practices, unique management structure, employee culture, and most memorably, the inclusion of the company’s motto “Don’t be evil” (Google, 2004). This mantra has since come under scrutiny (Fuchs, 2012). Moreover, the manifesto opens with the line “Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one” (Google, 2004, p. i). Google’s S-1 further views itself as “a company that does good things for the world” (Google, 2004, p. vi). Google has faced staunch criticism for their role as corporate leaders in mass exploitation of their user base, while engaging in an undisclosed surveillance economy (Lindh & Nolin, 2016). Likewise, research into Google search has found that its algorithm recapitulates problematic racial and gender stereotypes (Noble, 2013). As such, Google Capitalism is a dialectical examination Christian Fuchs’ research undertakes (2012). Here, he portrays Google as both the best and worst of platformization — a satanic and godlike digital dualism. Nevertheless, Dror’s research tracks what he labels “the second wave” of web 2.0 companies, using the digital coupon company Groupon, (public in 2011), the online gaming company Zynga (public in 2011), and the social media company Facebook (public in 2012), to investigate their own S-1 forms (Dror, 2015). He found each company’s filings appeared to copy Google’s ideological manifesto logic — a logic that thrives on an emotional capitalism and a new form of networked governance. Using a rhetorical analysis of these S-1 manifestos, Dror concludes that each company’s founders were attempting to “bridge the gap of expectations between two audiences that are reading the same document but searching for different things” (2015, p. 541).
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Ultimately, Dror’s research demonstrates these second wave founders were trying to appease the financial community and everyday ‘prosumer’ (Toffler, 1981; Vikram, 2016), who desires a social, cultural, and moral vision about themselves and the world. Therein lies the difficulty and public relations nightmare. Dror’s findings also revealed the companies used old and new myths to reframe business discourse, while discursively pivoting between the hard power of financial data (revenues, net income, and assets) into soft power (emotion, ideological beliefs, and culture) (Dror, 2015). The cited founders (mostly young men) relied on narrative hooks about how to ‘make the world a better place’, ‘make people happy’, ‘make people play’, or ‘giving everyone a voice’— all very utopian and grandiose (Dror, 2015, p. 548). Meanwhile, they craved legitimacy and desired inclusion into Wall Street establishment. Likewise, research demonstrates neither hard nor soft power is all that effective on its own (Dror, 2015). Rather, the integration of both, called “smart power”, reinforces an actor’s agenda (2015, p. 541). Therefore, the second wave manifestos found success in using smart power to frame their rhetorical discourse. This research builds on Dror’s Web 2.0 ideological manifesto corpus and uses a rhetorical analysis methodology, which his article highlights as “examining the art of persuasive discourse that seeks to influence behaviour. This is done by looking into linguistic strategies of argumentation for the purpose of convincing, constructing or justifying interests, which is not done in isolation but is relational to other social positions” (2015, p. 544). This is applied to Twitter’s S-1 personal letter and quarterly Twitter Investor Relations public media release, since going public in November 2013. The use of this particular analysis assists in gaging Twitter’s empirical rhetoric over time. While there is an overabundance of scholarship pertaining to Twitter’s rising political and cultural influence, there is a dearth of literature on the political economy of Twitter’s contemporary usage of livestreaming, let alone in and through the Periscope acquisition. Busch and Shepherd’s (2014) examination of Twitter’s company rhetoric primarily focuses Twitter’s corporate social responsibility ethics and civic motives, by analyzing their Terms of Service and licensing policies. Moreover, Dror’s analysis of platform founders’ manifestos fails to challenge rhetorical narratives over time, nor does he locate specific points of potential rupture or turning points in the years following each company’s IPO. Finally, Van Dijck’s (2013) critical analysis of Twitter was published a half decade ago, before Twitter went public. Both factors correspond to a political economic need to track Twitter’s platform evolution since.
Findings and Analysis
Twitter’s S-1 letter or founder manifesto (Appendix D) was filed on October 3, 2013. It can be found on page 91 of their 213-page prospectus — significantly shorter than Google’s protracted document. Regardless, it is deliberately coded with important linguistic framing and rhetorical devices. Cognitive
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linguist, George Lakoff, defines frames as mental structures that shape perception. He suggests by activating the cognitive unconscious, frames can be expressed through language, while reframing techniques can change the way the public sees the world, or in this case, the company (2004). Empirical research has proven a capacity to activate frames using language, in order to persuade those who are undecided on an issue. Similarly, persuasion, like politicking or voting behaviour, is grounded in the notion that people do not necessarily act in their self-interest. Rather, they act based on their identity and values. Twitter’s S-1 works to attract its investors without alienating its user base, and vice versa. Mostly, the company interpellates the early adopters into its shareholder fold, mentioning its ‘birth’ date and embedding founder/CEO Jack Dorsey’s first-ever live tweet. Here, nostalgia is framed as a means to connect and identify with the platform. Twitter is literally asking their readers to remember their early years using the platform technology. The S-1 goes on to share credit by insisting Twitter was mutually shaped by the user. In doing so, Twitter not only recounts what affordances were originally developed, but provides attribution to the people for their advancement in ‘strengthening’ their conceptual idea. This statement underscores Twitter’s resolve to seek power in network effects, and a core ideology in which strength in user numbers results in a utopian vision for a democratized/ing platform. However, while early users did use Twitter’s design infrastructure to appropriate the @names to create conversational affordances between and amongst other users, Twitter was never a transparent or open source technology (Pasquale, 2015). Yet, Twitter praises these same users who spawned #hashtags to organize movements and retweets to spread global news; this is a key reminder of how significant Twitter has been, and can be, in changing the worldfor good. In the ultimate feat of audacious idealism, they add “Twitter represents a service shaped by the people, for the people”, as if they are Lincoln and this is the Gettysburg address for horizontal platformization. It is atypical for users to experience significant profit in platform capitalism. The means of platform production belongs to Twitter’s founders and other venture capital investors and shareholders—those who stand to achieve sudden wealth and gain accumulated capital. Twitter is a publicly traded company, not a public utility. As such, Evan Williams, Twitter’s co-founder, was at the time the largest individual shareholder, owning 10.4 percent of the company. Upon going public, Williams’ net worth was valued at 2.8 billion. Jack Dorsey, who owned 4.3 percent, saw his net worth rise more than $450 to $2.1 billion (Mac, 2013). Likewise, Twitter’s section about their objectives or so-called ‘mission’ is analogous Google or Facebook framed their ‘mission’ (Dror, 2015; Google, 2014). While many companies and organizations include mission statements on their websites and in their annual reports, the word mission— similar to the word power — is fairly loaded. It calls on the importance of their platform and why it is needed. This language is followed by Twitter re-emerging into the newly emboldened ‘Twitter Incorporated’, signifying precocious corporate power and all the legal and fiduciary protections embedded into such privilege.
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Twitter’s manifesto reads much like a tweeted ‘request for investment’ proposal letter. It suggests such investments can facilitate the global spread of information, without vexing undemocratic barriers. Furthermore, the use of the word barrier is similarly important. A barrier is defined as an obstacle that hinders movement (Merriam-Webster, 2018). By utilizing barrier, Twitter Inc. is espousing their belief in progress. For them, progress signifies open communication, accessibility, and minimal censorship. Here, Twitter advances a notion that users are perfectly empowered, equal, and have a voice. For Twitter, a tweet is a channel to the world. This statement becomes all too Pollyanna for a plethora of ethical reasons, notwithstanding that digital platforms operate within opaque black-box algorithmic frameworks (Gillespie, 2010; van Djick, 2013; Pasquale, 2015; Tufecki 2017). Therefore, the S-1 produces variable guises and motivations for Twitter’s desired outcome. While their messaging signals idealistic desires to facilitate information flow, spreadability, and global democracy, their ultimate plan is gleaned by an ability to capitalize on their tool and marketability. The S-1 is an entry point towards capital accumulation, using a pro-capitalist business operation — to which public companies must subject themselves. It requires the platform to become beholden to the short-term goals of shareholders. Twitter’s S-1 can read as a window into its affordances and utility. But ultimately, it is a signal to investors of their keen intent to create growth, surplus, and sustainable profitability. The most compelling line reads: “Our business and revenue will always follow that mission in ways to improve – and not detract from – a free and global conversation” (2013, p. 91). Such language, in practice, has often been debunked with regards to whose social media activity (or rather, whose immaterial cognitive and emotional labour) is producing value, and at what costs (Kim & Kim, 2014). As Eran Fisher articulates in his work on class struggle in the digital frontier, users not only create value for these platforms, but are also alienated by their exploitation of user-generated data which, irrespective of ad revenue, creates surplus value for Twitter (2015). Finally, the document concludes with Twitter’s gratitude, thanking their users for their tweets (read business) and asking their base to build with them — suggesting erroneously that users hold any real agency in the direction of this forward mission. In addition to Twitter’s S-1 letter, this research provides a rhetorical analysis of Twitter’s 15 quarterly earnings press releases since its 2013 public launch from Q4’13 – Q4’17 along with a content analysis of any acquisitions announced over this period (see Appendix E). Based on a temporal analysis of these documents, salient principles emerge. When revenue growth fell in quarter one of 2015, (the same quarter of the Periscope acquisition) Twitter announced a long-term strategy regarding new products they acquired. The line “reducing barrier to consumption and delivering new apps and services” stands out. No longer is Twitter speaking to barriers of freedom, but rather, they focus on generating revenue. A marked shift in rhetoric is now made visible. Also present is a shift in business model, where Twitter begins to emulate Google, and even partners with Google on various monetization ventures (Twitter, 2015). In particular, Twitter’s 2015 purchase of the digital marketing firm Tell Apart corresponds with their
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Periscope acquisition. Suddenly, Twitter’s visible change in rhetoric becomes one more focused on viral marketing potential and ad revenue. This includes data licensing, broadcast agreements, and livestreaming sports (much like cable TV) as embedded features, with special promoted video content streamed directly into user feeds. This move mirrors Google’s 2006 acquisitions of YouTube as a streaming platform, along with their acquisition of advertising firms like AdWords and DoubleClick. As such, there are multiple temporal points where Twitter emulates Google, not solely in their rhetoric but also in their history of broadcast streaming and marketing platform acquisitions. Given the propensity for all digital video to be prefaced by advertisements (and therefore, ad revenue), broadcast livestreaming has grown into a lucrative market (Manjoo, 2018). Google’s YouTube and Facebook Live have been successful in understanding, predicting, and setting these market trends for some time, as witnessed by their ongoing attempts and success in capitalizing on embedded live video players (Vicent, 2015; Karp, 2017). Due to these market considerations, Twitter responds with competitive actions that become financially ruinous to other independent live streaming apps, such as Meerkat. In 2015, Twitter pulled Meerkat’s access to its social graph, which led them to shut down (Bohn, 2015). In this event, the public witnesses Twitter behaving more like a monopoly, such as Google, and less like itself. This corresponds to changes in their algorithm and timeline, where Promoted Tweets, Promoted Trends, and now Promoted video ads displace the chronology of a user’s tweets, pictures, and threads. This algorithmic change is weighted by who performs the tweeting and how many followers they have accrued (Tufecki, 2017). These changes are not without consequence. If one minoritized individual in a war zone has not reached the threshold of popularity or celebrity, and this individual has something important to say, it is unclear if their voice or tweet will continue to be heard (Tufecki, 2017). Inexorably, Twitter’s 2017 third quarter media release showcases the ‘About Twitter’ section, where they publicly promote users to watch their live streaming events with Periscope. To be sure, live streams are not necessarily free, nor are they always live, and most are pre-empted by advertisements. Finally, Twitter’s releasing of its 2017 fourth quarter earnings show a miraculous return to revenue growth, which coincides with Twitter’s stock price surge. This serendipitous growth corresponds with Busch and Shepherd’s (2014) argument that Twitter employs an instrumental ethical ethos for the benefit of platform capitalism.
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Statement of Limitations
The scope of this research is limited by only performing an analysis on publicly available documents and releases. Twitter and other social media platforms carry a propensity for proprietary black-box algorithmic structures. Thus, a more technical and socio-cultural audit is difficult to gain within this empirical analysis framework. Moreover, the content and rhetorical analysis was limited to two main artifacts. A more thorough examination of Twitter’s platform narrative can be gleaned by including an additional content analysis of all of Twitter’s quarterly conference calls to shareholders. With more time, qualitative analysis of Twitter’s rhetoric has the potential parse together a more cogent summary of their rhetorical shift. This can be accomplished using qualitative analysis and data visualization software, such as NVivo. Finally, a rhetorical analysis may contain the author’s personal subjectivities and heuristics. The author discloses a history of Twitter use (though infrequent) and therefore, other biases may also be present.
Conclusion and Future Research
This paper has shown marked shifts in Twitter’s temporal rhetoric, after its IPO and acquisition of the live streaming app Periscope. These changes align with Google’s platformization and dominance as the leader of the GAFAM platform monopolization. While the future of broadcast live streaming is still up in the air, it appears Twitter gains from embedded ad revenue video monetization models and anachronistic algorithmic timelines differ from their original social justice mandates. As such, future research would benefit from tracking the ongoing changes to broadcast media, examining whether social media platforms will undergo audits, governmental regulation, and additional oversight. Specifically, research on Twitter’s use of Periscope as a separate channel archive versus the embedded Twitter Live function — powered by Periscope — may point to how the platform envisions its user affordances, corporate marketability, and revenue generation. Likewise, an evaluation of Twitter’s revenue streams in comparison to the big five (GAFAM) will determine if it can survive independently — or if it will be absorbed by another, larger platform entity. Given the monolith that is now Google, a focus on the political economy and digital labour ideologies that surround social media policy should be evaluated; this will determine whether there ought to be greater consideration to treat them as public utilities, stripped of their surplus capital. Finally, Twitter has proven itself effective in the art of rhetoric, insofar as its brand has become synonymous with social justice and revolution; and it has emerged as a major player in the next generation of livestreaming revenue. To comprehend the motivations behind any large organization, it is often important to watch what they do, not what they say. In the age of network effects and platform capitalism, it can be very interesting to do both.
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Appendix A
Google’s 2004 SEC S-1 Registration statement (Google, 2004)
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Appendix B
Google’s 2004 SEC S-1 Registration statement continued (Google, 2004)
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Appendix C
Google’s 2004 SEC S-1 Registration statement – Founders’ Letter (Google, 2004)
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Appendix D
Twitter’s S-1 statement personal letter (Twitter, 2013).
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Appendix E
Twitter’s Quarterly Earnings Press Releases (Twitter, 2015)
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