For a long time, X/Twitter has been a vital part of arts organisations’ marketing and social media strategies. What made early Twitter great, made it the perfect place for “event” based organisations. Instant, heavily focussed on news, updates, connecting organisations and customers, and interacting about shared experiences, it provided something unique that Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube could not.
X/Twitter also become something of cultural significance that other social media channels could only dream of. During the 2010s, there was a trend for news channels just to read out people’s tweets on air and claim them as news (see the 2016 USA election for the epitome of this). Even if you weren’t on X/Twitter, you knew that it was important.
However, X/Twitter has had growing problems. Even before Elon Musk bought the platform in 2022 it was becoming a haven for hate speech and fake news, including being a major part of the January 6th United States Capitol attack. Even before then, it had been slow to react to online hate and had been rightly criticised for a sluggish response in removing far-right figures such as Alex Jones, Andrew Tate, and “Tommy Robinson”.
