Illustration by Nick Bilton/The New York Times
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The best way to compare Twitter and Facebook is to look at the old children’s story “The Tortoise and the Hare.”
For those who don’t remember curling up in bed as a child, listening to an adult narrate it, this is the old fable of an arrogant hare who loses a race to a slow tortoise. The tortoise beat the hare because it followed the mantra slow and steady will always win the race.
In the world of social networks, Facebook looks like the swift and cunning hare, Twitter the leisurely and careful tortoise. This race is not judged by speed but by a stopwatch with a much longer lifespan, one that is tied to trust.
To run so quickly, Facebook exploded because it slurped up endless amounts of data about its users. It often did so in ways that earned it scorn from those worried about privacy and the implications of personal data used by others. Again and again, Facebook pushed the boundaries of people’s privacy by making things public that had once been declared private on its site. It continually opted people into new features that clearly overstepped the company’s original privacy agreements.
As a result, Facebook users tiptoe through the site on eggshells. A recent CNBC poll found that “59 percent of respondents said that they had little to no trust in Facebook to keep their information private.” Eventually, the Federal Trade Commission stepped in to stop Facebook, but it was eight years too late.
Twitter, on the hand, has taken an opposite approach. The company has never made its users’ private information public when it has introduced new features. Unlike Facebook, Twitter has not endlessly changed its privacy policy. Users of the site trust Twitter more.
The stark difference between the two companies’ approaches to privacy is evident with product introductions.
For example, on Thursday Twitter introduced a feature that is intended to make better suggestions of whom to follow on the service. To make the new service work, Twitter needs to do some snooping. Did privacy groups come out and berate Twitter for its actions? No. Did the F.T.C. announce an investigation into the company’s practices? Actually, quite the opposite. The government proudly announced Twitter’s ability to let people opt out of the new feature.
Sure, Twitter has made careless decisions, specifically with security. In the early days of the service, it was repeatedly hacked, putting users’ personal information at risk. Twitter’s negligence resulted in a settlement with the F.T.C., too.
In the long run, people will trust Twitter more than they do Facebook. And when it comes to building a long-term, trusting relationship with its users, Twitter will take it slowly and steadily, and in doing so, could win the race.