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Review: Rethinking media coverage: vertical mediation and the War on Terror

Specifically, the “like” button and the appeal for users to become influencers with the credentials of followers and retweet numbers are user incentivization tools that Burgess and Baym analyzed in the book. The authors are explicit about the connection between Twitter’s current state and changes of its user features embedded with monetizable metrics and datafication practices. However, they are careful not to make claims about any causality between Twitter’s current challenges and its user incentivization practices. The methods presented in the book include a meticulous and novel interview design. Through a small number of iterative interviews following from the oral history method, the authors invited participants to reflect on their everyday practices in Twitter, especially through moments of change. There reflective practices were conducted in two stages, first self-guided by the participants before the interview, and a second one during the interview with the guidance of the authors. Moreover, as regular users of Twitter themselves, the authors went through their own reflexive exercise as well. This design, alongside detailed research on early Twitter’s features and developments from academic and business oriented sources, provide the argument with a rich explanatory power. Twitter is continuously facing a number of challenges, particularly with debates around the platform as a form of journalism and a source for journalism, which lead to discussions about misinformation, disinformation, and the proliferation of bots and trolls. However, the authors are hopeful that Twitter could be transformed into a space for healthy conversations if the platform and the company can reach a balance between intimate everyday communication and its role in journalism. This book stands out because of its theoretical enrichment on the platform’s cultures of use and its focus on finding an emergent, dynamic truth of the ever-changing media ecology. Twitter: A Biography is highly recommended to anyone who is interested in understanding and studying the challenges that social media platforms and users face while navigating the dynamic interplay of various social agents. Twitter’s story is not yet finished, and the biographies of other platforms remain to be written. With this book, Burgess and Baym have provided an ideal model for the platform biography for others to follow.