So much for Elon Musk’s everything app

Suspending emergency accounts, enabling anti-trans speech, and other stops Twitter is making in its pursuit of X

Apr 19, 2023

“dark portrait of a giant flaming x” / DALL-E

Say you’re the richest person in the world, and have decided to build a “super app” — a kind of digital Swiss army knife that incorporates everything from messaging to commerce. To get started, you buy a popular social network — Twitter — to serve as a foundation. You file paperwork to start processing those payments. You lay out a vision for Twitter as a hybrid communications tool, and a financial institution, and a stock exchange.

You do all this without first checking to see whether the company you just bought for $44 billion has teams working on this already. In fact, it does: It’s called the developer platform team. Its goal is to enable developers to build apps of their own inside Twitter: games, fundraising tools, a music player, and whatever else the company’s API might allow.

Eventually, the team was planning to let developers build custom timelines and let people browse them on Twitter. This seems to align with your dream of making Twitter a super app. What do you do next?

If you’re Elon Musk, you fire the whole team, shut down almost all free access to the Twitter API, and then continue hinting that you’re building a super app anyway. Twitter itself was recently subsumed into a new entity called X Corp.

Beyond that, though, is there much evidence that Musk’s dream of a super app is still alive?

News last week that Twitter had been merged into X, coupled with the announcement that the company will partner with social trading platform eToro to let Twitter users trade within the app, led to a wave of stories speculating that a super app could soon be forthcoming.

Amir Shevat, who previously led Twitter’s developer platform, has his doubts. Most super apps open themselves eagerly to developers because it isn’t practical for companies to build every possible extension of their core app by themselves. Lots of apps that we don’t think of as “super apps” — Slack, Chrome, or more recently, ChatGPT — are successful in large part because they integrate so easily with other tools.

“I don’t think [Musk] is being sincere with the everything app. It’s more of an ‘everything Elon wants’ app,” says Shevat.

Let’s take a step back.

In November, Elon Musk stood on stage at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters and answered questions from nervous employees. One asked how he intended to make Twitter a super app like WeChat, as he’d stated he wanted to. “You’re not getting it, you’re not understanding,” he said, interrupting the person who’d asked. “I just used WeChat as an example. We can’t freakin’ clone WeChat; that would be absurd.” He said he wanted Twitter to “add features to functionality that cause you to stay on Twitter and use Twitter.” He called it an “obvious move.” Then he said: “Next question.”

In recent months, Musk’s focus — when not on the engagement his tweets get — has been on Twitter’s core product. He has actively promoted Twitter’s subscription product, warning verified users that they will lose their badges if they don’t subscribe by Thursday. More recently, the company introduced 10,000-character tweets and basic text formatting options.

At the same time, Musk has continued to say things like Twitter should “become the biggest financial institution in the world.” That’s going to be hard for the company to do by itself.

A partnership with eToro could represent a step in that direction. But Twitter is also removing automated accounts that rely on the API, on a case-by-case basis.

In other words: at the same time Musk promises to integrate Twitter further into users’ lives, the app itself is becoming more of a walled garden.

Take the case of the platform’s emergency alert accounts, which often implemented Twitter’s API to broadcast important messages. Numerous accounts belonging to the National Weather Service and municipal transportation agencies began to announce last week that they had been suspended from using the API, and ceased to function as a result.

Some, like @SFBARTalert, complained. “Twitter has shut off its free API, and that means we are going dark until we can find a solution,” the Bay Area transit agency tweeted. “We're very sorry to not be able to provide information on BART service alerts.”

Then Twitter restored access the account, informing BART of the decision via a direct message but offering no explanation as to what had happened.

The shutdown has been chaotic. Rather than cut off access to automated accounts in a uniform manner, Twitter has had employees reviewing every single API suspension, we’re told. The strategy seems to be to cut off as many apps as possible, see which developers complain the loudest, and then restore some of them based on Musk and his team’s private rationale.

It isn’t uncommon for platforms to charge for access to their APIs, particularly for heavy users. Reddit, for example, announced today that it is going to start charging large companies for access to its API — particularly those training large language models. But Reddit API access will “remain free for researchers and smaller developers who build atop the Reddit platform and create different bots and stuff that help people use Reddit,” reported Mike Isaac at the New York Times.

The difference between the companies is instructive. Reddit is offering developers a uniform set of publicly stated rules to follow; Musk’s Twitter, on the other hand, and as usual, is simply making it up as he goes along.

Moreover, Shevat said, there's a misalignment between Twitter’s goals and the goals of third-party developers. Twitter is trying to maximize its revenue from developers at a time when most developers have no clear path toward generating revenue from Twitter at all.

Shevat used Apple as an example. Imagine that it charged tens of thousands or millions of dollars for developers to appear on the App Store, instead of sharing revenue from purchases. Such a move would put developers at odds with the platform. (Apple does charge developers $99 to $299 annually to list their apps.)

Shevat says this is effectively what Twitter has done with its new API pricing, with tiers starting around $500,000 a year. At prices that high, few will be able to contribute anything to the everything app.

And even if Twitter were to walk back its new API pricing, Shevat said many developers would be unlikely to return, given understandable fears that Musk would eventually change his mind and kill off their projects. “They don’t trust Twitter because Twitter has been untrustworthy,” Shevat says. (This problem admittedly did not start with Elon Musk.)

And without the trust of third-party developers, Musk’s dream of making Twitter a super app will likely never be realized.

II.

Another aspect of a successful everything app is advertising. Twitter has made made some inexplicable moves on that front this month as well.

In early April, Twitter quietly rolled back a hate speech policy that banned “targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals.”

The company did not announce the change, either internally or externally. Even employees on the trust and safety team were not told it was happening, sources tell Platformer.

“Twitter’s decision to covertly roll back its longtime policy is the latest example of just how unsafe the company is for users and advertisers alike,” said GLAAD President and CEO Sarah Kate Ellis in a statement. “This decision to roll back LGBTQ safety pulls Twitter even more out of step with TikTok, Pinterest, and Meta, which all maintain similar policies to protect their transgender users at a time when anti-transgender rhetoric online is leading to real world discrimination and violence.”

The move came days before Musk was slated to speak at a major marketing conference hosted by MMA Global in an effort to lure advertisers back to the platform.

Already, advertisers were worried about Musk’s racist rhetoric, and the company’s approach to content moderation overall.

“For many communities, his willingness to leverage success and personal financial resources to further an agenda under the guise of freedom of speech is perpetuating racism resulting [in] direct threats to their communities and a potential for brand safety compromise we should all be concerned about,” wrote Tariq Hassan, chief marketing and customer experience officer at McDonalds, as reported by Semafor. “Further, all of us who lead our brand's investments across platforms were required to navigate a situation post-acquisition that objectively can only be characterized as ranging from chaos to moments of irresponsibility.”

Musk was scheduled to address those marketers today. With anti-trans rhetoric already running high on and off Twitter, Twitter’s new rules seems unlikely to make the place any safer for brands.

Coming Thursday: Snap looks to reset the narrative at its annual developer conference.

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