Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I'm the editor-in-chief of current affairs

magazine. I am joined today by the journalist Zoe Schiffer. She is managing editor of Platform,

former senior reporter for The Verge, and the author of the brand new book,

Extremely Hardcore Inside Elon Musk's Twitter.

Zoe Schiffer, thank you so much for joining us on current affairs today.

Thank you so much for having me.

All right, so let's start with Twitter, aka X, perhaps begin by telling us, I think everyone knows what

Twitter is, but why Twitter is important? Why Twitter is the subject for an entire book

that has taken you a lot of research and a lot of time. Yeah, I mean, Twitter's cultural

relevance always really outpaced its kind of underlying business fundamentals. It had for a long

time the most important people across sports, media, politics, tech. And if you wanted to know

the conversation on the internet was on any given day, it really felt

like you had to be on Twitter. And particularly for a journalist, it was such a crucial

tool for breaking news. And during protests, it was kind of the go-to platform to start social

movements, that it really did have this big cultural relevance before Elon Musk bought the

platform. Yeah, you cite some statistics in the book that I didn't know about, which is I didn't

realize just how much smaller Twitter is actually than Facebook. You said Twitter in 2020 had

192 million active users. Facebook had

1.84 billion. Twitter had 5% of Facebook's revenue. And yet, there is something to Twitter

where they're talked about, you know, in the same breadth. And Facebook doesn't drive the conversation

and never did in the same way.

Yeah, I think Mark Zuckerberg described Twitter as a clown car that fell into a gold mine,

...