A few years ago, shortly after Elon Musk acquired Twitter, I published an article arguing that the platform had the potential to provide Trust as a Service (TaaS). The basic idea was twofold:
Legacy Media had squandered the trust Americans had in their ability to provide accurate information.
Twitter had the potential to fill that void and act as the new trust broker by helping determine what information people can and cannot trust.
Since then, a lot has happened, and Twitter has been rebranded as 𝕏.
This article will serve as a checkpoint to assess what 𝕏 has done to broker trust and what work remains.
To start things off, we will revisit the original premise and determine whether there is still a need for a new entity to replace old institutions in Trust Brokering. Legacy Media has continued to see low levels of trust:
We can look at it along political lines:
Most Republicans have no trust in Legacy Media, and Independents are nearly halfway there, with Democrats having the least distrust.
The relatively low levels of distrust from Democrats make sense when we look at the political orientation of journalists:
In simple terms, Legacy Media is by Democrats and for Democrats. By only catering to a single political demographic, institutional media is neglecting the majority of Americans.
Even generally, institutions are not doing the best:
The old institutions, not just but including the Legacy Media, represent industries still ripe for disruption.
Experts who adhere to accepted ideas have an easier time finding a place, while those who do not fit in tend to search for other arrangements. There is still a need for a new player to grow into the role of Trust Broker.
Enter 𝕏.
Since Elon started running Twitter, the platform has come a long way. Many features have been implemented that allow 𝕏 to help users discern between trustworthy and untrustworthy information.
We will look at some of these features in relation to how they feed into 𝕏’s role as a TaaS.
In the past, fact-checking was a centralized endeavor. If a handful of media outlets had a particular bias, they could publish fact-checks around that bias. The great innovation with Community Notes was the fact that it democratized fact-checking so anyone could pick up the role of fact-checker, and nobody is safe from being fact-checked.
Presidents have gotten Community Noted:
Legacy Media fact-checkers have been Community Noted:
Even the owner of 𝕏 has gotten Community Noted:
Nobody is immune to being hit by Community Notes; this form of Democratized Fact Checking gives 𝕏 a natural way to protect users from misinformation without stopping anyone’s ability to have their voice heard.
I have written a couple articles around the issue of Woke AI. In short, rival AI tools tend to espouse beliefs more aligned with Radical Leftism, a worldview held by a small minority of humanity, while Grok will give more balanced replies. At a minimum, this gives Grok value in providing different viewpoints from competitors. Out of the competition, Grok is well-positioned to be truth-seeking and provide Truth as a Service, which lets it serve as a helpful tool to social media users on 𝕏.
Posts on 𝕏 now have a small Grok icon in the top right corner:
People can select that icon, which will open up a chat with Grok:
And provide more information on the post. People can continue the conversation and ask follow-up questions.
People can also tag Grok publicly:
And Grok will reply with additional context.
Leveraging Grok has become a good way to vet posts and figure out what is and is not trustworthy.
People who use 𝕏 can curate what they see on the platform and build a social media diet that best suits them:
Following: The first layer of curation; the people you choose to follow will determine the quality of what shows up on the timeline.
Lists: These let people switch between different niches and hear from voices they have self-determined to be trustworthy.
Timeline Filters: Checkboxes people can select to determine what their timeline should include/exclude.
Curation, and the different ways to curate, allow 𝕏 to provide people with a ‘build your own adventure’ type of experience where each individual has some freedom and autonomy in shaping how they navigate the discourse.
There have been several moves towards increasing transparency on 𝕏:
Disclosures: Users can now mark a post as a paid promotion and identify a post as AI-generated content as appropriate.
Country Visibility: People can now see the country/region an account is based in; this mitigates the issue where some users would pose as being from a nation while living elsewhere (e.g., a Martian posing as an Earthling).
These moves help users infer the incentives behind the content that they see creators post on the platform.
People can count on information being available on 𝕏 before other rivals catch up.
Breaking news tends to hit 𝕏 first before institutional media gets around to it; this gives the platform a natural appeal when real-time updates are crucial.
There are circumstances where people want to know something asap; for cases like this, 𝕏 is the best place to check for breaking news. Recently, 𝕏 experimented with timeline filters and included a section for the Iran Conflict; if 𝕏 can do this for other major events, that will be a good way to help users quickly find real-time information on breaking news events.
You can follow accounts and leverage other curation strategies to find content associated with topics of interest, and that will suffice for getting updated information. When was the last time you heard about news that broke on Bluesky or Threads? Even competing social media platforms lack the speed that 𝕏 provides because important people are more often on 𝕏.
A few things 𝕏 can still do are:
Make country transparency more robust by leveraging existing ID Verification, where people who have voluntarily verified their identities can provide an extra layer of confidence about their country location.
Sourcing: A lot of content is uploaded to the platform and often reposted with commentary. 𝕏 can help support original work by automating the sourcing process, where the original creators of content are identified and credited. Sourcing could be a small field at the bottom of a post. Grok can also be leveraged here to help find the original author(s) of content and ensure they are credited.
Grokipedia can be used to host bios of users on 𝕏, and text can be (automatically) linked to the site; for example, if I discuss the Caitlyn Jenner AI Test in a post it can be detected and linked to the corresponding Grokipedia article.
Given the speed at which 𝕏 is moving, there is a decent chance that by the time people are reading this article, some, or even all, of the ideas mentioned here will have been implemented.
This is a far cry from what the platform used to be during the Twitter days, where old leadership’s final months only resulted in a single significant feature: the edit button. The 𝕏 Era is different from the Twitter Era in a way that benefits the users.
Old Twitter was notorious for being slow with rolling out new features. The speed at which 𝕏 has released new updates has been lightning fast in comparison, which has helped the platform move in the direction of providing Trust as a Service. Between Community Notes, Grok, and other aspects of the platform, there are plenty of ways for 𝕏 users to verify if the things they see online can be trusted or not. 𝕏 is well on its way to becoming the Trust Broker of choice.
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