A Twitter Obituary

Abstract

Introduction As Twitter passes its twentieth anniversary, it does so amidst a profound reconfiguration of the communicative spaces it once anchored. For much of its history, Twitter functioned as a key site for public communication, enabling the formation of networked publics, issue publics, and ad hoc political conversations that extended the earlier mass-media models of the public sphere (Bruns and Highfield). These publics took multiple forms, including national Twitterspheres (#USElections, #ZAElections), Black Twitter (#BlackLivesMatter, #SayHerName), LGBTQI+ communities (#TransRightsAreHumanRights, #LoveIsLove), and issue-based movements such as climate activism (#ClimateStrike) and feminism (#MeToo) (Mendes et al.). What they shared was not identity, but the infrastructural conditions that enabled them to cohere within a common communicative space. The platform’s recent destabilisation following its acquisition and rebranding as X, however, has unsettled these arrangements. Shifts in governance, moderation, verification, and algorithmic visibility have altered how public discourse circulates and whose voices remain legible. Reduced moderation has enabled the proliferation of coordinated disinformation networks and conspiracy-driven content, contributing to a more unstable and manipulable communicative environment (Graham and FitzGerald). This moment therefore cannot be understood simply as a decline in platform relevance. Rather, it reveals a deeper structural problem: the extent to which contemporary public life has been organised through privately owned, mutable infrastructures whose conditions of participation can be abruptly withdrawn or reconfigured. Twitter’s current status thus raises critical questions about the durability of digital publics and the infrastructural assumptions underpinning digital citizenship. This article approaches Twitter through the lens of what I term ‘platform obituary’. Moving from the existing method of platform biography, which traces the emergence, stabilisation, and evolution of digital platforms as socio-technical and cultural formations (Burgess and Baym), the ‘obituary’ shifts attention to moments of decline, rupture, and afterlife. Obituaries do not simply announce endings; they assemble legacies, attachments, contradictions, and unfinished work, offering a way to think with loss. Obituaries function as culturally structured narratives that do not simply record death, but interpret and frame a life, selecting what is remembered and how it is understood (Ondimu). Read from this perspective, Twitter’s apparent death becomes a generative moment to examine how digital citizenship (Roberts & Bosch) was practiced through the platform, how publics came to rely on its affordances, and how civic life adapts when those infrastructural conditions no longer exist. Platform decline is thus positioned not as an anomaly but as a defining condition of contemporary digital life. Twitter’s death should thus be understood as a critical moment for rethinking digital publics and their infrastructural conditions. While much discussion has focussed on user migration to alternative platforms, such movement does not preserve publics in a straightforward sense. Publics do not transfer intact across platforms; they fragment, recombine, or fail to reconstitute as shared spaces of address. This becomes apparent when considering specific publics that were once sustained through Twitter’s infrastructure. For example, Black Twitter (see e.g. Brock; Freelon et al.) does not migrate as a unified formation to platforms such as Bluesky or Mastodon, but becomes dispersed across multiple spaces with reduced visibility and weakened collective presence. Through the lens of a platform obituary, Twitter’s unravelling foregrounds what does not carry over: established visibility hierarchies, journalistic and activist routines, archives of political discourse, metrics of relevance, and shared temporal rhythms of attention, among others. These losses expose digital publics as fragile socio-technical formations, sustained only by specific infrastructural arrangements. Platform decline thus becomes analytically generative, exposing the dependencies, limits, and uneven durability of digital publics under conditions of platform instability. As Tkacz and Gehl argue, the post-Twitter landscape is marked not only by fragmentation but by the emergence of platforms as distinct political formations, each organising different modes of participation, belonging, and interaction. This article extends that insight by showing that such fragmentation undermines the infrastructural conditions through which publics were once sustained. Twitter and the Infrastructural Conditions of Digital Publics Twitter’s decline becomes legible only when the platform is read as infrastructure rather than as a site of interaction, since it supplied the conditions under which digital publics could cohere. Rather than producing publics outright, Twitter configured the relational, temporal, and material conditions through which public communication became legible. Digital publics on Twitter were thus not spontaneous or self-sustaining collectives, but socio-technical assemblages shaped by specific infrastructural arrangements. Scholarship on networked and digital publics has shown how Twitter enabled issue-based, ad hoc, and overlapping publics to take shape through everyday communicative practices (see Schmidt; Yang et al.; Bruns & Burgess). Hashtags facilitated temporary alignments around events or controversies; follower networks enabled the circulation of conversations beyond institutional media; and retweeting practices structured forms of amplification, contestation, and attention. These publics were neither unified nor stable, but they were recognisable as publics because they unfolded within a shared infrastructural environment that allowed actors to address one another and orient themselves toward common issues. For instance, Black Twitter’s influence depended on high visibility across the platform, where hashtags, tweets, and trending topics allowed conversations to travel beyond immediate networks. Similarly, national political publics relied on temporal synchronisation during elections, protests, or breaking news events, where users could follow and participate in unfolding discussions in real time. LGBTQI+ and activist publics, meanwhile, depended on shared reference points – memes, hashtags, recurring discourses – that enabled continuity and collective recognition across dispersed participants. What distinguished Twitter as an infrastructure for digital publics was its capacity to stabilise particular conditions of publicness. One such condition was the relative predictability of visibility. Although algorithmic intervention intensified over time, Twitter maintained forms of legibility grounded in chronological feeds, shared hashtags, and publicly accessible engagement metrics. Gauthier et al. demonstrate that exposure to the algorithmic feed increases engagement and systematically alters the content environment, amplifying particular political viewpoints and influencing which accounts users choose to follow. Users could thus make assumptions about how content circulated, how attention accumulated, and how publics might coalesce around specific moments. This predictability, uneven and contested as it was, enabled the routinisation of public-facing practices among journalists, activists, and other political actors. As Carlon et al. show, Twitter’s relatively stable and open technical environment, particularly in its early years, supported the emergence of user-driven innovation cultures, including community-created bots that became embedded in everyday communicative practices and expectations. A second infrastructural condition was the enduring nature of public discourse via archiving. Tweets were searchable, linkable, and retrievable, allowing public statements to persist beyond the moment of posting. Past utterances could be reactivated in new contexts, controversies could be traced across time, and claims could be substantiated through accumulated records. This archival quality was central to Twitter’s role in journalism and activism, where accountability, memory, and citation were integral to public engagement. Publics did not simply gather in the present; they accrued histories that shaped how future debates unfolded. Twitter also configured the temporal conditions of digital publics. Through trending topics, live-tweeting practices, and real-time commentary, the platform synchronised attention across dispersed actors. These shared temporal rhythms produced moments of collective orientation, enabling publics to form around unfolding events without requiring prior coordination. Events that once generated synchronised, real-time engagement such as elections or global protest moments no longer unfold within a shared temporal frame. Instead, discussion is disaggregated across platforms, weakening the sense of collective presence that sustained these publics. Finally, Twitter structured public recognition and authority through infrastructural metrics and verification regimes. Follower counts, retweets, likes, and verification badges functioned as signals of relevance, credibility, and reach, shaping whose voices were amplified and whose were marginalised. While these metrics were deeply political and often contested (see Bruns & Stieglitz), they provided a shared grammar through which influence and legitimacy were negotiated. Public actors learned to work within and against these systems, incorporating them into journalistic routines, activist strategies, and everyday practices of public address. These features positioned Twitter as an infrastructure that configured the conditions of digital public life rather than merely hosting deliberative dialogue. Publics on Twitter depended on the platform’s capacity to sta