Twitter has been dominating headlines the past few months for a variety of reasons. Why? Because when the richest man in the world buys a company and then swiftly loses the title of "richest man in the world", a whole lot of newsworthy things had to happen first.
Twitter was founded in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams, with the company gaining significant popularity and success following a highly successful integration at South by Southwest Interactive in 2007. Twitter is well-known as a primarily text-based service with a character limit of 280, though it was famously 140 characters for most of its lifetime. In addition, Twitter popularized the use of “hashtags”, or the practice of essentially categorizing posts using a hash tag aka pound sign followed by a word, acronym, or phrase. Over the last 15 years, Twitter steadily grew into one of the world's most popular social media networks, though it is notably much less popular than other networks like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.
With that in mind, why has Twitter dominated so many headlines over the last year? The short answer is Elon Musk, but it is more complicated than one man’s overpriced vanity project. Twitter had garnered a reputation for being the “internet’s town square”, even though only a very small minority of users on Twitter send the vast majority of tweets. Regardless, Twitter was (and still is, to a point) a place where anyone in the world could theoretically reach anyone else. Unlike YouTube and TikTok, one did not have to film themselves or in the case of Instagram, take photos of themselves to be known and heard on the platform. Anyone could write an inexplicably viral tweet and gaining hundreds of thousands of followers overnight. However, you were not and are not allowed to say everything on Twitter.
Content moderation is a touchy subject for many today. Here in the United States, all citizens have freedom of speech, meaning they are allowed to say anything they want to, short of inciting violence, starting a panic, and a few other niche cases. This freedom does not extend to Twitter or any other social network, as they are private companies with their own freedom to determine what content appears on their platforms according to their individual guidelines and values. For people who do not agree with those values, this can be frustrating. Elon Musk was one of the most vocal critics of Twitter’s moderation policy, and the “preservation of freedom of speech” was supposedly one of the chief motivators behind Musk’s acquisition of the social network.
We could likely fill an entire episode just with the debacle of Musk’s troubled purchase of Twitter, but we covered most of the major events in various “Notable News” segments in past episodes. All you need to know for this story is that Musk severely overpaid for Twitter, and his drastic overevaluation of the company’s value has led to a plethora of financial problems for Twitter today. Most of those issues, however, remain somewhat behind the scenes, what most news outlets are focused on are the many changes to the service itself. The most infamous is likely Musk’s attempt to monetize verification, with users briefly gaining the ability to purchase the “blue checkmark” next to their profile that typically distinguishes public figures or brands from parody accounts or imitators. The predictable result was a plethora of parody accounts and imitators creating havoc by making seemingly official accounts tweeting all sorts of problematics things, like this supposedly Nintendo of America tweet with Mario flipping the bird, and this tweet from pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly announcing that insulin would now be free.
Obviously, this blue checkmark chaos did not last long, but that change among others has shattered companies’ trust in Twitter, causing nearly every major company to pull advertising off the platform, with some even removing their companies’ presence entirely. Twitter is frankly a dumpster fire right now, and it is pulling Tesla down with it, as Musk essentially tied the companies’ fates together during his acquisition. Elon Musk has lost $182 billion dollars in net worth over the last year, more money than the net worth of Jeff Bezos. Tesla stockholders are furious with Musk for sacrificing Tesla to gain Twitter, and despite many attempts to ban and silence critics of his on Twitter, a poll of users (that Musk posted) requested that he step down as CEO of Twitter, something he has said he would honor. By all accounts, Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter was one of the worst business acquisitions of all time. This leaves us with the question: what was he thinking?
It is not possible to know the thought process of another person, and all outside observers’ best guesses at Musk’s intentions are somewhat skewed by their personal view of him. He is seen as a tech genius entrepreneur destined to solve all the world’s problems by some, while others view him as an idiot who has stumbled onto some extremely lucky investments that he only able to make because of his dad’s apartheid emerald mine money. The truth is undoubtably somewhere in the middle, but if you are leaning towards that “tech genius” view, you may be disappointed by the rest of this story. Most of Elon Musk’s business career is characterized by him pumping large quantities of money into ideas that he supports, though they could rarely be seen as original ideas. X.com was predated by PayPal, Tesla was not the first electric car manufacturer, SpaceX is just the private furthering of NASA’s goals, and sorry, not sorry, the Boring Company is just trains but worse. At his best, Musk bankrolls the ideas and inventions of people smarter than him, but Twitter is a sterling example of him at his absolute worst.
We tend to avoid talking politics on this show; we want to stick with simple, objective fact reporting. However, we must stress that Musk’s acquisition only really makes sense from a perspective of disagreeing about the content moderation policies that Twitter had in place, and most of those disagreements happened to center around the moderation of almost exclusively right-wing voices on Twitter. There were undeniably some liberal leanings in what Twitter decided to restrict and not restrict on their platforms. However, pre-Musk Twitter had a team of individuals who debated the merit of whether certain tweets and accounts should be allowed or not. Elon Musk has reduced that team down to a single individual: himself. The sad fact of the matter is that Musk’s Twitter is not any closer to free speech than the old Twitter was; it is just content moderation with the goal of propping up a single multi-billionaire’s ego.
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