Was the Twitter clout-chasing really worth it?

Make Me Smart October 11, 2023 Transcript

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Kai Ryssdal 

The great outdoors Jayk. Forget it Jayk. First time anybody’s ever used that line, I’m sure. Hi everybody I’m Kai Ryssdal. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where we make today makes sense.

Kimberly Adams 

I feel like you made a movie reference that I don’t get.

Kai Ryssdal 

Chinatown. Forget it, Jayk. It’s Chinatown. Okay.

Kimberly Adams 

What’s movie is that from?

Kai Ryssdal

Chinatown.

Kimberly Adams

Oh, that’s the name of the movie. Okay. All right. Well, I’m Kimberly Adams. Thank you, everyone for joining us this Wednesday, where we’re already getting smart about things, assuming that not the entire rest of the world knew that except for me. Anyway, it’s October 11. And welcome to the show.

Kai Ryssdal 

We’re gonna do some news, little movie trivia every now and then. And then we’ll do some smiles. So let us begin, shall we?

Kimberly Adams 

Why don’t you go first, since it’s very close to all of us?

Kai Ryssdal 

Yeah. So it was it was I was interested to see this today. So first of all, Twitter continues to immolate, self-emulate or be emulated by its owner. People are leaving in droves, especially after the events of this past weekend and the misinformation and just the horrible stuff that’s going on on there.

Kimberly Adams 

But for people who have actively left the platform, do you mind explaining what went down this weekend?

Kai Ryssdal 

Well, there was just tons of disinformation and misinformation about what happened in the Middle East there were really grotesque distortions of fact, Elon Musk, who owns that company, was promoting antisemitic sites as reliable sources of information. It was just it was really bad. It was terrible. And I, it’s my sense that the move off of Twitter to either Threads or Bluesky or Mastadon, or what have you has picked up in the last like 96 hours. That’s, that’s my general sense. I have no, I have no quantifying data on that. But that’s my sense. Anyway, so six months ago, NPR, left Twitter after the site and branded or labeled it as state-controlled media. And the people running NPR said, well, screw it. We’re not and we don’t need this. So we’re leaving. And of course, there was some wailing and gnashing of teeth, because people both inside and to some degree outside public radio were like, well, what about you know, traffic to your to your content? Don’t you use Twitter links to get traffic to your content. And I confess, while not one of those willing gnashing teeth, that’s what I’d always thought that Twitter engagement promotes engagement to actual editorial content. Turns out, that is not true. NPR has done a survey. And it was published today in a thing called Nieman Reports, which is a which is a thing that covers a publication that covers journalism and issues surrounding it. Here’s the quote, “a memo circulated to NPR staff says traffic has dropped by only a single percentage point as a result of leaving Twitter, though traffic from the platform was already small and accounted for just under 2% of traffic before the posting stopped.” That is kind of amazing. And it’s you know, good news, too.

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah. Especially since we left too.

Kai Ryssdal 

I mean lots of other places did too. Yeah.

Kimberly Adams 

You know, this confirms, you know, something, I think with zero data to back it up, I always kind of suspected that Twitter was better for individuals than for companies in terms of building your individual brand. So it like there were a lot of people who were Twitter famous. And remember, I don’t know if you remember Clout, that one website for a while, like, people got jobs based on how popular they were on Twitter. And so I think if you were to look at sort of the metrics for engagement, for individual, say, NPR reporters, it probably matters a lot in terms of, you know, their own professional, sort of notoriety. But I completely understand like, how it doesn’t do a lot for the traffic. Where does most of their traffic come through?

Kai Ryssdal 

I didn’t read the article long enough. Yeah. And I just saw the whole thing. I’m sure it’s in there.

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah, I mean, this was sort of the it’s sort of like the pivot to video thing. And this thing with all these social media platforms, it’s like, we just don’t know and there’s so many of them. I think media is always trying and experimenting to see you know, what spaghetti had sticks to the wall and stuff like that. So, yeah, that’s it. It’s really interesting.

Kai Ryssdal 

Super interesting.

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah. All right. What do you got? Mine is something that came to me is I’ve been watching all the coverage of the FTX Sam Bankman-Fried trial. And today was the second day of testimony for Caroline Ellison, who was a top adviser and ran Alameda Research and on again off again, partner to Sam Bankman-Fried and some of her testimony today was pretty bad about all the lies that they were doing and all of the sort of toxic environment that they were all working in, and some of the what sounds like, you know, emotional abuse in that relationship. And it just, you know, reminded me of all of the warnings I got from my parents growing up about being careful, like, who you date and who you end up in a relationship with. And I have to imagine, imagine that she’s sitting there and wondering, and probably has, you know, if not for sort of getting emotionally tied to this dude, would she be going to jail? You know, and, sure, she made lots of bad choices and made choices to break the law. But a lot of us do really dumb stuff in relationships, and choosing who you’re going to partner up with, you know, as such, so many repercussions sort of like that thing where they say, you know, don’t don’t marry anyone you wouldn’t run a business with. And this thing is the epitome of that. And you know, I was, it’s interesting to think of it from a relationship perspective, just watching not just the company collapse, but your relationship collapse and your life collapse. And yeah, that’s all I was just pondering it.

Kai Ryssdal 

She’s gotta be alone. Yeah, fair enough. All right, Jayk, let us move on. Go ahead.

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah. So I’ve been getting press releases about this for a while, but it’s getting into the zeitgeist now. So there’s this group of companies that make menstrual products, particularly like the reusable ones, like the menstrual cups, and, you know, reusable, period underwear, and all of these things, or even sort of the organic tampons and Maxi Pads and things like that. There are lots of states where you have to pay sales tax on menstrual products, whereas you don’t have to pay them on other health products. And there’s been a lot of pushback on this over the years. And you know, I’m looking at my home state of Missouri, you end up paying 9.6% tax. So this coalition of menstrual product companies has gotten together to do this tampon tax back effort, where if you buy these products, and you have to pay a sales tax on it, you can send them a screenshot, or you can send them a photo of your receipt, and they will pay you back the taxes that you paid on those products as a way to sort of drum up attention to the fact that this is a healthcare product that is taxed like a luxury product. So I thought that that made me smile a little bit. This has been an effort that people have been pushing for for quite a bit. There’s a law that lots of folks are trying to get passed to stop this from happening at the state level and at the federal level. So that made me smile a little bit because like go girls, and people who use products who are not girls.

Kai Ryssdal 

For sure, for sure and the idea that they get taxed specially is just kind of wild.

Kimberly Adams 

It is indeed. What made you smile?

Kai Ryssdal 

Okay, so there’s an asteroid, bits of which have come back to Earth. So this was like a couple of weeks ago, this asteroid Bennu on which we didn’t quite land but we got samples from and anyway, it’s back to Earth, we now have pictures of the containment vessel of the thing that’s bringing back the the samples, but also there was so much of that stuff, the dirt and the rocks and the grit blown up while it was getting its sample because they like puffs of nitrogen down into the into the asteroid to get this sample stuff that it like overfilled the container and and like jam the lid. So when they opened the container in the laboratory, some of it was sitting there outside the actual sample vessel itself, right? They had they had wrapped it up, they had arranged for it to be sealed, right so that when they brought it back, it would be sterile and, and clean. Anyway, some was like on top of the thing was on top of the lid, now it just kind of looks like dirt and rocks. But it’s crazy that it’s from an asteroid. Hello. It’s pretty. Are you kidding me? It’s pretty. It’s so cool. They found water molecules slapped inside, trapped in some of those clay minerals. It’s just it’s just amazing. There’s sulfur in there. There’s iron oxide. It’s just it’s just kind of wild also, by the way, which I had not realized. Sorry, scrolling, scrolling scrolling. So this thing is about as wide as the Empire State Building was tall first of all.

Kimberly Adams

The asteroid itself?

Kai Ryssdal

Yeas, but yeah, the asteroid itself is called Benu but it is categorized as a near Earth asteroid and scientists say there was a one in 1,750 chance it could slam into earth during a series of very close passes between the years 2175 and 2199. That is not a small chance. It is not a small chance and while it is far away.

Kimberly Adams

That is Powerball odds.

Kai Ryssdal

2175 That’s right. That’s right. It’s way better than you’re odds at winning the Powerball. Right, and I’m counting on winning the Powerball. That’s exactly right.

Kimberly Adams 

You know I’ve never bought a lottery ticket in my life, but I am seriously considering it for this one.

Kai Ryssdal 

Come on, come on it’s like $2 billion now.

Kimberly Adams 

I know I need to go down to the grocery store. I actually, the last time it got this big, I actually did attempt to buy a ticket. And I learned at that point that you can’t buy a lottery ticket with a credit card. Which I really did not know that thing. But that’s that makes sense for gambling. But like, I was just like, yeah, the lady in the grocery store just looked at me like, you clearly haven’t done this before. Anyway, I’m sorry, asteroids. So the odds of hitting the planet. That’s all.

Kai Ryssdal 

Yeah, anyway, so this thing is back. We’ve got samples, and they’re going to do some more analysis, but you should check out this picture. We’ll put it on the show page. Because it’s cool. It’s good. It’s like literally rocks. Right? Yeah, it’s just cool.

Kimberly Adams 

That’s pretty freaking awesome.

Kai Ryssdal 

All right. Yeah. There we go. That’s it.

Kimberly Adams 

Alright, short and sweet today. That is it for us. And we’re gonna be back tomorrow. We’re going to play some audio and chat about it and you’re welcome to send us any audio clips that jumped out to you this week that you think we should discuss. And yeah, send it over to us or your questions, comments, your answers to the Make Me Smart questions. It is 508-U-B-SMART is the phone number where you can reach us we also have an email makemesmart@marketplace.org.

Kai Ryssdal 

Make Me Smart which is the podcast you are listening to for which we are grateful it’s produced by Courtney Bergsieker. Ellen Rolfes writes our newsletter. Today’s program is engineered by Jayk Cherry. Our intern is Niloufar Shahbandi.

Kimberly Adams

Ben Tolliday and Daniel Ramirez wrote our theme music. Our senior producers Marissa Cabrera. Bridget Bodnar is the director of podcasts. Francesca Levy is the executive director of Digital.