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Fears of a Musk-driven exodus from Twitter are overblown,but the idea it could charge like LinkedIn is fanciful.

It is an unwise move. Twitter depends on the journalists and political tragics,especially in English-speaking markets,to post on its platform. There is no sign that Australian media outlets would stump up almost $400 per journalist annually to have them verified.

Senior sources sayThe Guardianis unconvinced. Nine,which ownsThe Sydney Morning Herald,The AgeandThe Australian Financial Reviewalong with its TV news operations,isn’t interested either. A source at the ABC was equally blunt when asked if the national broadcaster would pay. “No,” they said.

And Peter Fray,editor-in-chief of the smaller news site Crikey,gave a vague but sceptical analogy:“[Social media] is a bit of smorgasbord,” Fray said. “Would you pay an extra $20 for the jumbo prawn that already turned out to be a shrimp?”

It would be equally foolish to forecast a mass exodus from Twitter,despite the headlines suggesting Musk’s ownership and libertarian bent have already spurred a wave of celebritiesto leave. The lists of those who have left are anaemic. The women’s magazineCosmopolitancounted five. US broadcaster NBC had nine,with no genuine A-listers.

The reality is that Twitter has not been a platform for movie stars and models for years;the platform is not visual enough to compete with TikTok or Instagram. Justin Bieber’s 113 million followers hardly ever see a post from the singer.

Instead,Twitter relies on “heavy tweeters”,the 10 per cent of users who generate 90 per cent of tweets and half the company’s revenue.

These people,Reuters reported citing internal Twitter research,have been in decline since the beginning of the pandemic. Cryptocurrency and pornography have been rising,but advertising on those topics seems unlikely to stem the hundreds of millions of dollars Twitter has lost in per cent quarters.

The most obvious explanation for Twitter’s predicament is that long before Musk’s ownership,it was frequently an unpleasant place to be. People on the right are targeted by the left,people on the left by the right. Women and minorities receive more hate than most.

I once asked the then Liberal MP Dave Sharma,who as a moderate received plenty of abuse from all sides,why he was still on the platform.

"I always saw it as a necessary evil,"he said when asked to relive the conversation this week.

"It's like walking the press gallery,you reach journos quickly,you see what your colleagues are saying,and what the other side is saying. But it's not a great medium for engaging the public at large."

But it is people like Sharma – who has stayed on Twitter but rarely posted since he lost his seat at the May federal election – the platform needs to re-engage with if it wants to become a profitable “town square”.

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