I dedicated most of my early career to Twitter and probably owe my tenure to the ease of collecting Twitter data once upon a time. Were it not for some timely decisions to diversify what platforms I was looking at, the API cutoff documented in this book would have really messed me up.

Because of how important Twitter was to me professionally, I followed a lot of this news as it was happening. Somehow, though, remembering all of these facts and events as I read them all in one place felt overwhelming. Had Musk really created that much chaos in such a relatively short period of time?

One of my jokes about Twitter research is that it always served as an unintentional history of the platform that no one else was writing down. I’ve read papers that predated retweets as an official feature, and I’ve written papers that predated quote tweets as an official feature. Reading them years after the fact served as a reminder of how Twitter used to be.

Along those lines, I think this book is going to be even more valuable a decade from now. I don’t know what Twitter will look like then, but I do think more of us will be wanting to remember how it got that way—and what it used to be.

This book is great but has some small flaws that keep me from giving a perfect rating. Maybe I’m too academic, but I wish there was more of a throughline rather than a sometimes-overly-episodic list of events. There are some things that could be better explained or better written. Yet, I’m deeply grateful for Schiffer’s work, and this kind of feels like nitpicking.

• Extremely Hardcore
• Zoë Schiffer
• Elon Musk
• Twitter
• research