Friday’s earthquake revealed how much Elon Musk has damaged Twitter

For a brief moment in time, we got to see the ghost of old Twitter come back to life.

Like millions of others last Friday, my morning was interrupted by the unfamiliar but unmistakable rumbling of an earthquake, making it feel for about 30 seconds like a train was barreling through the ground right underneath my house. And like so many of those who live in the tristate area, I immediately reached for my phone and opened Twitter to see if anyone else had felt the quake. 

Twitter, of course, was abuzz with chatter, as people started flooding the platform with tweets asking if we’d just had an earthquake. But these weren’t just any people — they were real people, and they were people whose accounts I recognized and had known for years, but hadn’t seen in months or even longer. Many of these accounts had gone dormant after Elon Musk’s takeover of the platform, but here they were, coming back to life to participate in the exact sort of activity that made Twitter so great in the first place. Perhaps even more importantly than the accounts that were there were the accounts that were absent from the conversation — like those automated accounts that now spam the platform 24/7 with useless information. You know the ones I’m referring to. Well, they weren’t there. Not even in the comments posting off-topic clickbait. Nor did I see any tech bros trying to parlay the earthquake discussion into a way to promote their latest cryptocurrency scam. It was just regular people, using Twitter for the very thing it was once best known for. 

And so for a few short hours on Friday, old Twitter came back to life — the Twitter that so many of us knew and loved. There were memes. There were gifs. There were selfies. And there was, of course, the usual banter back-and-forth between those on the east coast and those on the west coast, with Californians taking friendly jabs at those of us who think a 4.8 magnitude earthquake is a pretty big deal. Meanwhile, other people posted videos and pictures of their local area, with tweets coming in from all over New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and the surrounding region, which provided a quick way to assess how big the earthquake was and whether to expect any major damage or fatalities. It only took me about two minutes to determine the approximate geographic area affected by the earthquake, solely by looking at the geographic distribution of tweets. 

It is during events like this that Twitter has always shined. Of course, problems like misinformation and hoaxes have long plagued online (and offline) communication during crisis events, but until more recent years, it was generally a manageable problem. On a platform like Twitter, when the vast majority of tweets about a topic are legitimate, then the impact of a small subset of tweets sharing misinformation is minimal. Hence, people used to be able to trust Twitter as a source of real-time information during unfolding crises and disasters — a time when reliable information is often hard to find since it may be impossible to send reporters to the scene or to reach eyewitnesses directly. With its ease of access and rapid speed of information transmission, Twitter became the central hub where journalists, government officials, survivors/witnesses, first responders, subject matter experts, and others came together to exchange information and expertise, clarify common misconceptions, and establish some sense of normalcy amidst the unfolding chaos. As a result, Twitter gained a reputation as a valuable tool for emergency communications, and became a major part of disaster response and recovery efforts around the world. In fact, Twitter was even identified by researchers as the “most useful social media tool” for communicating during crises and disasters.

This is especially true for earthquakes. For years, scientists working on crowdsourcing projects used Twitter data to detect earthquakes in real-time and were able to send out notifications even earlier than those disseminated by the government and emergency response agencies. In recent years, researchers had also begun exploring ways to use machine learning to evaluate the validity of earthquake tweets, thus giving them an idea of which tweets were really indicative of an authentic earthquake and could be used to inform early disaster response efforts.  

Perhaps even more importantly, Twitter was the town square where we could all go to share our own stories and find out what others had experienced in the minutes and hours after a stressful — and at times traumatic or even life-changing —experience. Humans are social beings, and we look to others to help us make sense of the world when the world stops making sense to us. Platforms like Twitter are incredibly valuable for their contribution to collective sense-making among members of the public, many of whom had gotten used to being able to log into Twitter and immediately join a discussion with thousands or even millions of other people who had just experienced something similar. Think about that. How many other places are there where you can go, without leaving your house, and be connected to potentially millions of other people living through a shared experience with you? For many people, including myself, there was something incredibly comforting in the knowledge that I could access such a community at any time just by opening my phone or computer. And practically speaking, the ability to get real-time updates on things like road closures, available shelters, and local impacts was absolutely invaluable. 

And then just like that, it was gone. Thanks to the changes Elon Musk has overseen since taking over the company, Twitter is now just a shell of what it used to be, and its usefulness in disaster response and recovery has been dramatically reduced. As one disaster management specialist warned in the aftermath of the massive earthquake in Turkey in 2023, the implications of the chaos at Twitter and its impact on disaster response could very well have “life-altering effects”.

Thankfully, Friday’s earthquake didn’t do much damage and there were no fatalities or life-altering impacts. But seeing Twitter come back to life for a few hours was like seeing the ghost of an old friend who died years ago. It was a bittersweet reminder of the good times we had on that platform and all that we’ve lost since Elon Musk took over and turned it into a free-for-all that is now overrun by spam accounts, bots, AI hustle culture, and advertisements. It’s not just that a lot of people have left Twitter due to Musk’s poor leadership — beyond that, his failure to maintain basic standards and rid the platform of spam and automated accounts has created a space where useful information can’t even be found when it’s needed because it gets drowned out by the repetitive carousel of viral videos and off-topic memes posted by accounts that clearly are not operated by a human being. 

And I guess that’s really what a lot of this boils down to: In an era when AI and other advanced technologies taking over more and more activities that used to be carried out by humans, a lot of us are simply yearning for genuine human interactions. Sure, it’s cool to have AI tools that aggregate information from thousands of accounts or analyze sentiment from millions of tweets, but in many instances, we still want to hear that information — that experience — from the humans it originated with, not from a machine telling us about what humans are thinking. When we go through a shared experience, particularly when it is frightening, confusing, and potentially traumatic, we naturally seek out others who can understand what we just went through. Artificial intelligence systems may be able to make inferences about emotions by reading our tweets, but they will never understand what it feels like to experience that emotion or to go through an event such as a natural disaster or terrorist attack. By definition, AI can’t empathize with us because it can’t engage in perspective-taking, and it can’t relate to how we feel since it can’t experience feelings, period. 

It was always the people on Twitter and the interactions we shared that made the platform what it once was. Those people are now scattered across different social media sites, trying to figure out how to recreate an experience that now exists only in the past. But even though we may never be able to recreate Twitter 1.0, we now know we can at least revive its spirit, even if only for a brief moment in time.

It was fun while it lasted.