Twitter’s new feature can help solve “fake news”…

Twitter just announced a new feature called Super Follows. This allows prominent Twitter users to post premium content behind a paywall that only “super followers” can see.  What we are talking about here is a subscription business model. Super Follows allows Twitter users to build a subscription-based business inside the platform, where super followers pay a monthly fee for access to bonus content. Here’s what it looks like:

This feature comes thanks to a key acquisition Twitter made in January. Twitter acquired an early stage company called Revue. Revue developed the technology that enables the Super Follows subscription platform. And this new feature could be transformative for Twitter.  As we know, Twitter has been a free-for-all up to this point. While consumers clearly love the free model, they can essentially post anything they want on the platform. 

That makes it hard to sift through the oceans of unimportant content to find the information we are looking for. And it turns out that a lot of people are looking for pertinent information on Twitter.  According to a Pew Research Center survey, 53% of adults in the U.S. say they get news from social media sources. And 15% of U.S. adults say that they use Twitter as a primary news source. That’s a lot of people scouring Twitter for information. 

 I’m sure this has a lot to do with the degradation of the mainstream media. As we learned the hard way last year, it is difficult to trust anything coming from mainstream outlets. They have become so heavily biased that they have eliminated nearly all objectivity. “News” is now all about pushing a narrative. 

In fact, we have seen objective journalists like Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi get kicked out of their own organizations because they refused to conform to the bias that was being pushed by their colleagues.  With Super Follows enabled, Twitter could now become an outlet for these journalists who have proven their integrity and objectivity.(edited)

These individuals can start using Twitter as more of an unfettered platform for their work and build a subscription-based business in the process. And for the many people who are turning to social media for news, being able to access these trusted sources directly through the Super Follows feature will be a major time-saver.   No more sifting through content and comments to find information that we can trust. Of course, Twitter wins here as well. I’m sure the company will take a cut of all the subscription revenue generated by Super Follows.  So this is an exciting development. 

I expect we’ll see Super Follows catch on quickly in the coming months. And if I project out a decade, I can easily see this kind of model displacing the mainstream media as the public’s primary source for news. And that means we should keep an eye on Twitter (TWTR). It may become an attractive investment target in the near future.