A Twitter town hall

In April 2020, Clubhouse joined the ranks of the many social media apps. Clubhouse describes itself as a “social audio apps”. Users that sign on can find and connect with contacts they already have on other social apps and join groups of people with shared interests. What made Clubhouse stand out, however, was that communication does not happen through text, like in most social apps, but by live audio chat for large groups, more akin to a conference call but with up to thousands of listeners.

However, as is often the case in tech, sooner or later someone develops a cloned service that copies the key novelty. And so it was that in March 2021, Twitter, a company that has long been seen as hesitant to make major changes to its platform, added ‘Twitter Spaces’ to its existing Apple iOS and Android apps. Twitter Spaces provide the same live audio chat feature of Clubhouse and have greatly simplified it. Where Clubhouse is a bit cumbersome to figure out, Twitter makes it as easy as two clicks to find and join an ongoing space.

Twitter Spaces are organized a lot like real-world town hall meetings. Every space is set up and given a title by a ‘host’ who can appoint up to two ‘co-hosts’ to assist them. All others join the space as ‘listeners’. Hosts and co-hosts can hand out virtual microphones to listeners in the space promoting them to ‘speakers’. Typically, a space can have up to 10-15 speakers in it before technical problems arise. Any speaker can then press a button on their screen to turn their mic on and speak to the entire group. Hosts can take away and reassign mics among listeners at their leisure.

In essence, Twitter Spaces are a walkie-talkie, a push-to-talk radio for the era of apps, with many people listening in on radios. A space can have anywhere from a handful up to thousands of listeners in it. Like every communication platform, the user communities of these live audio chat platforms have developed their own code of acceptable conduct and behaviour.

Use of Clubhouse saw a sudden jump between December 2020 and January 2021, incidentally the period before and after the January 6, 2021, insurrection at Capitol Hill in Washington DC. In Pakistan, Twitter power-users have long included journalists and politicians and remains the go-to place to find news, rumors and opinions that can only be hinted at in cable news talk shows or cannot be aired at all.

To the chagrin of several public personalities, tweets can be archived and on occasions have come back to haunt them later. Live audio conversations of Twitter Spaces are more ephemeral, although anyone determined to do so can record and archive them too. With space for unencumbered public discourse in Pakistan shrinking every year (particularly under the previous PTI government), Twitter Spaces arrived just in time for Pakistani dissidents at home and abroad to provide a relatively safer platform for assembly, debate, and exchange of ideas.

Spaces saw very wide use in the run-up to Aurat March 2022. For months organizers and supporters of the March organized hours-long Twitter Spaces that laid out this year’s manifesto, demands and engaged in moderated debates. The fact that Spaces are not constrained by programme schedules, limited airtime, and bracketed by commercial breaks like broadcast TV means debate arguments do not have to be made in dreadful sound bites. This extensive pre-emptive engagement took a lot of the wind out of the sails of Aurat March detractors, who were organizing Twitter Spaces of their own. While there was still a lot of opposition to the March, its intensity was somewhat blunted.

This year also saw a steadily rising temperature in the political arena during the slow roll towards the vote-of-no-confidence against Prime Minister Imran Khan that ended in an unprecedented constitutional crisis that was ultimately resolved by the Supreme Court by hitting the rewind button on the dissolution of parliament. At the same time that Pakistani Twitter dedicated spaces to the Aurat March, a lot of others were discussing the political situation in the country. While hearings at the Supreme Court were in progress, some spaces were conducted non-stop for multiple days with hosts and co-hosts tagging in and out, probably to take turns catching some shuteye.

Political spaces are frequented by voters, supporters, grassroots political workers and, in the case of some parties, by top-tier elected representatives. From the PTI, early on during summer 2021 when the public debate about the Single National Curriculum (SNC) was raging at its peak, Punjab’s Minister Murad Raas made himself available for questioning on Twitter Spaces. From the PML-N, on several occasions elected representatives Dr Ahsan Iqbal, Dr Miftah Ismail and Mr Shahid Khaqan Abbasi have been found together in the same Twitter Space. According to my knowledge, representation from the PPP’s top-tier has been thin. Recognizable faces of smaller parties, like the Haqooq-e-Khalq movement and the Awami Workers Party, are also frequently found there. Their participation gives voters the opportunity to ask hard questions and give suggestions to their representatives, often with only their civility as a filter. It must be acknowledged, though, that the tone of conversation in these forums can vary anywhere between partisan echo chambers and bipartisan town halls. The next election does not appear to be far off now and, given recent developments, political parties would be remiss to exclude Twitter Spaces from their digital campaign strategies.

And that is where the potential of spaces lies – they can be the app-era’s modern equivalent of town hall meetings. They can provide quick and inexpensive opportunities for public representatives to take the pulse of the nation. For voters, they provide an otherwise rare opportunity to talk directly to public representatives and journalists which they might ordinarily not get a chance to. For listeners, it has democratized direct access to authoritative sources of information. On the literacy scale, spaces provide access to those not comfortable or able to type at length in either English, Urdu or local languages. The live speech medium avoids the kinds of misunderstandings caused by poor choice of vocabulary, the inability to convey tone, or limited ability of expressing themselves in writing that are all too common in lengthy text-based online back-and-forth discussions.

All this is not to say that Twitter Spaces are a cure-all. Plenty of spaces have low information density, have speakers that are light on facts and heavy on anecdotes, opinions, and false equivalences, who are too much in love with the sound of their own voice and keep rambling. But you can always vote with your feet and leave. Nevertheless, on balance, these social platforms are a step towards democratization of demanding accountability, access to power and equalization of information asymmetry.

The emergence of live-audio digital town halls strengthens the case for inexpensive, ubiquitous nationwide internet connectivity to empower a more democratic citizenry. Starlink’s broadband satellite internet service is a likely candidate for a realistic technical solution to this problem for Pakistan’s far-flung areas. Interested readers are referred to an earlier op-ed of mine in these pages (‘Beam me up, Starlink!’, The News, January 31, 2022). On March 2, the PTA issued a press release that announced that the chairman of the PTA met with a vice-president of Starlink on the sidelines of the GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona to continue discussions on technical and commercial aspects of Starlink Internet service in Pakistan.

Paired with access to internet capable devices, communication platforms like Twitter Spaces give more citizens access to public representatives, decision, and policy makers. What the uptake of Twitter Spaces among Pakistanis demonstrates once again is something much of the world has already realized: in the future, access to power and having a voice in democracy will be conditional on access to the internet; internet access is no longer a luxury but more of a human right.

The writer (she/her) has a PhD in Education.