After firing CEO Parag Agarwal and his core team, Elon Musk’s choice of yet another Indian-origin engineer to help him revamp the microblogging site, Sriram Krishnan, has an interesting connection with Academy Award winning Indian musician AR Rahman – When Krishnan and his wife talked tech with the Mozart of Madras.
Krishnan, who invests in crypto/web3 ventures as a General Partner at Silicon Valley VC firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), co-hosts a podcast on product and technologies called Aarthi and Sriram’s Good Time Show along with San Francisco-based entrepreneur and his wife Aarthi Ramamurthy since January 2021.
The two, considered a Silicon Valley power couple, quizzed Rahman in an hour-long interview on August 4 mainly about his musical journey but also about how he uses technology in his music, Artificial Intelligence and on Indians building technology companies.
To a question on how he applies AI in music, the music maestro said: “If you take mixing, there are certain frequencies we don’t hear. AI helps identify which frequencies are disturbing, what is lacking in a mix, so we can get all that stuff. Some of the organic stuff is really cool. And sorting of samples. It does all those things which took ages to compile. There are many uses of it. Maybe one or two compositions may come out of AI, but any stuff that is cohesive needs to come from a human, so far. That’s a job which can’t be taken away hopefully.”
Rahman spoke about a doing a course in MIT on imaging and AI when he babysitting his kids during a summer course at Berkeley. “I am a synthesiser and work with algorithm and operators and all this stuff for the past 35 years now. So, it’s just a one-step away thing, not a new thing and I have been dealing with microprocessors, synthesizers and computers and samplers,” he told Krishnan and Aarthi.
The show, available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube has also had co-founder Marc Andrreessen of Silicon Valley VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, Oculus founder Palmer Lucky, Indian comedian Tanmay Bhat, entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuck as guests.
In the early part of 2021. Krishnan and his wife launched a Clubhouse talk show that focused on organic conversations on start-ups, venture capitalism and cryptocurrencies. The show featured prominent guests like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Tony Hawk, Diane von Furstenberg, Kanye West, and social media influencer MrBeast. The Good Time Show moved to YouTube from Clubhouse in 2022.
An alumnus of SRM Engineering College in Chennai’s Anna University, Krishnan has held jobs at Snap and Twitter before. On October 31, he tweeted: “Now that the word is out: I’m helping out @elonmusk with Twitter temporarily with some other great people. I (and a16z) believe this is a hugely important company and can have great impact on the world and Elon is the person to make it happen.
PS. Still very much in my day job at @a16zcrypto. If you’re a crypto founder, you know how to find me,” he said in a Twitter thread on Monday.
Krishnan started working with Microsoft in 2007 as a program manager for Visual Studio. He later moved to Facebook where he helped building the Facebook Audience Network, a competitive platform to Google’s ad technologies. He also worked with Snapchat where he built the social media platform’s ad tech platform shortly before the company’s IPO.
After serving at some of the top Silicon Valley companies, Krishnan moved to Twitter where he served as senior director of product and contributed to the core user experience and launching a redesigned home page and events experience.
While praising the development, Anupam Mittal, a judge on Shark Tank India and founder of Shadi.com, offered some advice to the tech billionaire a day after venture capitalist Sriram Krishnan disclosed that he is assisting Elon Musk with Twitter.
He tweeted, “Good call, Elon Musk, on bringing another Indian in. Now quickly make Sriram Krishnan CEO and launch a Twitcoin.”
With “Twitcoin,” Anupam Mittal was hinting at a new cryptocurrency modelled after Bitcoin and Dogecoin. When a Twitter user asked if he would invest in “Twitcoin”, Mittal replied: “Sure. Would be fun.”
Elon Musk and Sriram Krishnan are both interested in cryptocurrency. While Musk favours Dogecoin and has caused its price to rise on several occasions with a tweet, Krishnan appears to prefer Ethereum.
Sriram Krishnan, who is of Indian origin, is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), a venture capital firm that invests in crypto and web3 start-ups. On October 31, he tweeted that he was assisting Musk with Twitter “temporarily” while continuing with his day job at a16z.
His tweet read, “I ( and a16z) believe this is a hugely important company and can have great impact on the world and Elon is the person to make it happen.”
Sriram Krishnan had previously worked with Meta (previously Facebook), Snap, and Microsoft.
After spending months attempting to get out of his deal to buy Twitter, Elon Musk officially owns the hugely influential platform. Now the question is: What will he actually do with it?
Musk’s takeover — which was finalized Thursday night, a source familiar with the matter told CNN — not only has the potential to create upheaval for Twitter
(TWTR) employees but also for the hundreds of millions of people around the world who use the platform daily. It could also impact the upcoming US midterm elections, if Musk makes good on his promise to restore the accounts of users who were previously banned from the platform, most notably former US President Donald Trump, and limit the company’s content restrictions.
In the first weeks after agreeing to buy the company in April, and before his initial move to bail on the deal, Musk repeatedly stressed that his goal was to bolster “free speech” on the platform and work to “unlock” Twitter’s “extraordinary potential.” The Tesla CEO suggested he would rethink Twitter’s approach to content moderation and permanent bans, with potential impacts on civil discourse and the political landscape. He also talked about his desire to rid the platform of bots, even as he later made the number of bots central to his argument to abandon the deal.
During Tesla
(TSLA)’s earnings call last week, Musk acknowledged that although finalizing the $44 billion deal meant “overpaying” for the social media firm, “the long-term potential for Twitter, in my view, is an order of magnitude greater than its current value.” He added that he believes Twitter has “languished for a long time, but has an incredible potential.”
Musk’s plans for boosting Twitter’s value could involve cutting down its workforce, something he’s hinted at before. Previous reporting suggested that he’d planned to cut 75% of staff, although he is said to have told Twitter staff this week that’s not the case. Either way, anxieties are running high. Musk immediately fired CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal and policy head Vijaya Gadde.
In private and public statements over the past six months, Musk has tossed out a wide range of other possible changes for the platform, from enabling end-to-end encryption for Twitter’s direct messaging feature to suggesting this week that Twitter become part of an “everything” app called X, possibly in the style of popular Chinese app WeChat.
There have been more far-fetched suggestions, too. In one text exchange with his brother Kimbal Musk, revealed last week in court documents, the two appeared to discuss the possibility of asking users to pay for each tweet they post with small amounts of the cryptocurrency DogeCoin.
Now that Musk has completed the deal, some of those theoretical changes could soon become reality. Here’s what users should know:
For years under former CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey, Twitter emphasized its work to bolster “healthy conversations.” The company banned many accounts promoting abuse and spam, added labels for false or misleading information, and banned the misgendering of transgender people.
Under Musk’s ownership, Twitter could unwind steps taken to make the platform more palatable for its most vulnerable users, typically women, members of the LGBTQ community and people of color, according to safety experts.
Musk has said Twitter, under his leadership, would have more lenient content moderation policies. “If in doubt, let the speech exist,” Musk said in one on-stage interview in April. “If it’s a gray area, I would say, let the tweet exist. But obviously in the case where there’s perhaps a lot of controversy, you would not necessarily want to promote that tweet.”
Musk on Thursday sought to reassure advertisers that he doesn’t plan to turn the platform into a “free-for-all hellscape” despite his promises to reduce content moderation. The remarks follow questions about whether advertisers might leave the platform for fear of their paid posts ending up alongside potentially objectionable content.
“In addition to adhering to the laws of the land, our platform must be warm and welcoming to all, where you can choose your desired experience according to your preferences,” he said in an open letter posted to Twitter. Allowing all legal speech may not be so straight forward — content rules vary across the world and, in Europe, the new Digital Services Act imposes high moderation standards.
Musk has also said he wants to make Twitter’s algorithm open source and make it more transparent to users when, for example, a tweet has been emphasized or demoted in their feed. (Leaders at Twitter have previously expressed support for moving in that direction, and the company often makes clear when it is demoting certain tweets or types of content.)
But the most striking early change could come from who is and is not allowed on a Musk-owned Twitter.
Musk has said he thinks Twitter should be more “reluctant to delete things” and “very cautious with permanent bans.” That could mean a long list of controversial far right figures and conspiracy theorists, among others, soon find their way back on the platform.
Musk, for his part, has focused on bringing back one of Twitter’s most prominent former users: Trump.
“I do think it was not correct to ban Donald Trump, I think that was a mistake,” Musk said in May. “I would reverse the perma-ban. … But my opinion, and Jack Dorsey, I want to be clear, shares this opinion, is that we should not have perma-bans.”
Dorsey tweeted following Musk’s May remarks that he does “agree” there shouldn’t be permanent bans on Twitter users. “There are exceptions … but generally permanent bans are a failure of ours and don’t work,” he said.
Trump has said he does not want to rejoin Twitter and will instead remain on his own social media platform, Truth Social.
But if Trump were to accept a Musk offer to return to Twitter, it could restore a significant following he hasn’t had since being banned from the platform in January 2021, just as the 2024 US Presidential race ramps up. On Truth Social, Trump has only 4 million followers; on Twitter, he reached an audience of more than 88 million followers.
Another notable change is simply who may be making these sensitive decisions.
Musk has a mixed reputation in the tech industry. He is undoubtedly one of the most ambitious and successful innovators and entrepreneurs of this era. But he has also courted controversy, often from his own Twitter profile, where he has more than 100 million followers.
Over the years, Musk has used Twitter to make misleading claims about the Covid-19 pandemic, to make a baseless accusation that a man who helped rescue children from a cave in Thailand was a sexual predator, to mock people who display their gender pronouns on the platform, and to make countless jokes involving the numbers 420 and 69. He has also tweeted a (since deleted) photo comparing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to Adolf Hitler and has compared the now-ousted Agrawal to Joseph Stalin.
Musk also previously sought to remove a Twitter account dedicated to tracking the movements of his private jet by offering to pay off the college freshman running the account (the account owner declined).
The same day he sent his letter to Twitter attempting to revive the deal, Musk was widely panned for comments he made on the platform about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He suggested making Crimea, a region Russia invaded and annexed from Ukraine in 2014, “formally part of Russia.” Most followers responded “no” to his poll and Ukraine’s Ambassador to Germany Andrij Melnyk replied in a tweet: “F— off is my very diplomatic reply to you.” In a followup tweet, an apparently frustrated Musk seemed to blame the results of his poll on a “bot attack.”
Until now, Twitter has, at least to some extent, been accountable for its policy decisions to advertisers, shareholders and its board. But those guardrails won’t necessarily exist under Musk’s leadership.
Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy is calling on the federal government to investigate national security concerns raised by Saudi Arabia’s role in Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter.
Saudi Arabian Prince Alwaleed bin Talal helped Musk finance the $44 billion acquisition of Twitter (TWTR) by rolling over his
existing $1.9 billion stake in the social media company. The move makes Saudi entities the second-largest shareholder in Twitter – behind only Musk himself.
“We should be concerned that the Saudis, who have a clear interest in repressing political speech and impacting US politics, are now the second-largest owner of a major social media platform,” Murphy said in a tweet on Monday.
The Connecticut Democrat urged the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, known as CFIUS, to conduct an investigation into the “national security implications” of the Saudi involvement. CIFUS, an interagency committee chaired by the US Treasury Department, reviews takeovers of US businesses by foreign buyers and has the ability to block transactions that raise concerns.
Even though Musk already closed his takeover of Twitter late last week, it may still be subject to national security review.
According to the 2021 annual CFIUS report to Congress, the panel has the authority to “review pending or completed transactions” if a member of the committee believes there are national security concerns.
“There is a clear national security issue at stake and CFIUS should do a review,” Murphy said, noting that another major social media platform, TikTok, is owned by a Chinese company. “This is a dangerous trend, and we don’t have to accept it.”
Both the White House and the Treasury Department declined to comment in response to the call from Murphy.
Earlier this month, Twitter shares dropped after Bloomberg News reported Biden officials are in early discussions about possibly subjecting some of Musk’s ventures to national security reviews, including the Twitter deal.
However, US officials pushed back on that report. “We do now know of any such conversations,” National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson said in a statement on October 21.
Twitter’s new billionaire boss Elon Musk tasked employees with developing a new version of the defunct video platform Vine, Axios reported Monday, shortly after Musk floated the idea in a tweet, demonstrating the sway of public opinion on Musk as he remodels the social media service in the mold of his $44 billion vision.
Vine may return six years after shutting down.
Corbis via Getty Images
Key Facts
Vine could be relaunched as soon as this year, sources told Axios.
Twitter bought Vine, a short-form video app that is widely considered the direct predecessor to TikTok, for a reported $30 million in 2012 before shutting down the app in 2016.
News of Vine’s potential resurrection comes less than 24 hours after Musk tweeted a poll asking if there was interest in bringing back the service, receiving four million votes, more than two-thirds of which—or 2.8 million users—supported restoring Vine.
Key Background
Musk only officially took control of Twitter late Thursday, but the richest person on earth (or Mars) has already made sweeping changes at the company, firing its CEO Parag Agrawal and other top executives, planning to fire about 25% of all Twitter staff and reportedly considering charging $20 per month for a verified badge. Musk often groused about Twitter’s content moderation rules before closing the deal, though he said Friday he won’t make any major decisions until a “diverse” council can weigh in. The original Vine consisted of six-second mostly humorous video clips, and many of the app’s most popular users migrated to TikTok. The video space is far more competitive today than during Vine’s reign, with Meta’s Instagram Reels and Alphabet’s YouTube Shorts also major players in the space.
Crucial Quote
“💯,” Musk replied to a Twitter user Sunday night requesting Vine be integrated within Twitter as opposed to living in a separate app.
Now that he’s at the helm of Twitter, Elon Musk wants to charge users to retain the coveted “blue check” denoting verified status, according to a report in the technology publication The Verge.
The Verge said that Musk plans to charge $20 a month for Twitter Blue, a service that currently costs $5 monthly, and expand its features to include verifying users’ identity.
Currently verified users would have 90 days to sign up for the subscription or lose their blue check mark, the Verge reported, citing unnamed sources and internal correspondence.
Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A blue checkmark, which indicates the person behind a profile is who they say they are, has become a coveted marker of status on Twitter, a popular social messaging platform with politicians, journalists and celebrities.
“The whole verification process is being revamped right now,” Musk tweeted on Sunday.
The whole verification process is being revamped right now
Musk has previously outlined bold ambitions for the platform, which has struggled to broaden its user base. His proposals include boosting subscriptions to half of the company’s revenue and growing the service to 900 million users in five years, according to reports by the New York Times.
For now, revenue from Twitter Blue, which lets users edit tweets and removes some advertising, makes up less than 8% of the company’s sales, according to Twitter’s latest earnings report.
Stephen King: “They should pay me”
Since Musk officially took over as Twitter’s boss on Friday, he has made a number of changes, including firing the CEO and other top executives and changing the way the site’s homepage looks for users who aren’t logged in. He plans to cut as much as three-quarters of Twitter’s workforce, the Washington Post has reported.
But revamping his $44 billion purchase into a growing and attractive product will be an uphill battle, social media experts say.
Wedbush analyst Dan Ives told MoneyWatch that Musk’s purchase comes “at the worst possible time,” as social media and the advertising that funds it sees a “massive” slowdown. Meanwhile, some celebrity users have announced they are quitting the platform now that Elon owns it.
In response to the potential $20 monthly charge for verification status, horror master Stephen King tweeted an expletive: “$20 a month to keep my blue check? … they should pay me. If that gets instituted, I’m gone like Enron.”
Twitter’s unending fight against spam accounts is now a problem for new owner Elon Musk, who pledged in April to defeat the bot scourge or “die trying!”
He later cited bots as a reason to back out of buying the social platform. But now that the billionaire has completed the deal, he’s faced with the task of delivering on his promise to clean up the fake profiles that have preoccupied him and bedeviled Twitter since long before he expressed interest in acquiring it.
The challenge carries high stakes. The bot count matters because advertisers — Twitter’s chief revenue source — want to know roughly how many real humans they are reaching when they buy ads. It’s also important in the effort to stop bad actors from amassing an army of accounts to amplify misinformation or harass political adversaries.
Ironically, it was not bots but Musk himself on Sunday who tweeted and then later deleted a link to an article pushing an unfounded conspiracy theory about the attack on Paul Pelosi. The tweet from Musk, coming just three days after he finalized his $44 billion purchase of the platform, raised concerns about the type of content that will be allowed on the social media site under his control.
“How do we make Twitter a better place”
“The bigger picture in my mind is: How do we make Twitter a better place for everybody,” said bot-counting expert Emilio Ferrara, who worked over the summer to investigate the problem for Musk. He cited the “value of the platform as a societal experience, as a collective place to have civilized discourse and talk freely without interference from nefarious accounts,” or scams, spam, pornography and harassment.
To find out just how bad the bots are, Musk hired Ferrara and other data scientists to investigate. At the time, Musk sought to prove that Twitter was misleading the public and advertisers when it said fewer than 5% of its daily active users are fake or spam accounts.
The Tesla CEO tweeted in May that the question of what “advertisers were getting for their money” was “fundamental to the financial health of Twitter.” If Twitter lied or withheld crucial information about the bot count, Musk could have argued that he was justified in terminating the $44 billion agreement.
So how do advertisers know what they’re getting for their money? This is fundamental to the financial health of Twitter.
Ferrara, an associate professor of computer science and communications at the University of Southern California, said he had no real interest in whether Musk ultimately ended up owning the platform.
Instead, he hoped that “any findings would be able to help improve the platform,” Ferrara told The Associated Press, speaking for the first time about his planned role as Musk’s expert trial witness.
The question now is what Musk will do with that information. Ferrara’s presentation — some 350 pages of analysis and supporting documents — is locked up in confidential court filings, and he said he can’t disclose his conclusions.
Twitter’s former leaders and its lawyers said Musk wildly exaggerated the problem because he had buyer’s remorse. Precise counts are “almost impossible” because any bot estimate is based on assumptions that can lead to bias, said Filippo Menczer, a researcher who has been studying social bots for more than a decade and was consulted by Twitter earlier this year.
Not an easy fix
“Nobody knows exactly how bad the problem is,” said Menczer, director of Indiana University’s Observatory on Social Media, who said he was speaking from his role as an academic researcher, not a consultant. “I would guess it’s not as bad as Musk said and not as good as Twitter claimed.”
Many experts also doubt Musk’s ability to easily make improvements, which he’s suggested would rely on using algorithms to track and remove fake accounts and implementing new measures to “authenticate” real people.
Earlier this month, Ferrara was preparing to travel to the East Coast to testify in Delaware, where Musk was defending against Twitter’s lawsuit asking a court to force him to close the deal. But two weeks before the scheduled Oct. 17 trial, Musk changed his mind and said he would go ahead with the $44 billion acquisition. It closed Thursday.
Most legal experts didn’t think Musk had much of a case. The court’s head judge seemed likely to side with Twitter based on the specific terms and conditions of the April purchase agreement.
But that’s not to say Musk didn’t have a point about the bots, according to Ferrara and other researchers hired by Musk’s legal team.
The analysis firm CounterAction, which worked with Ferrara, said it concluded in a July 18 report submitted to the court that Twitter’s spam rate for monetizable accounts — those of value to advertisers — was at least 10% and could be as high as 14.2%, depending on how the rate is measured.
Trevor Davis, the firm’s founder and CEO, said that analysis was based on a “firehose” of internal data that Twitter gave to Musk, but the company declined to provide additional data sought by Musk’s team.
“We expect that access to the withheld data would reveal an even higher true spam rate,” Davis said in a prepared statement.
Good bots vs. bad bots
Musk has long been preoccupied with Twitter spambots promoting cryptocurrency schemes, in part because, as a celebrity user with more than 110 million followers, he sees a lot of them. Some scammers have opened accounts mimicking Musk’s name and likeness to try to get people to think he’s endorsing something.
Not all bots are bad. Twitter encourages the use of automated accounts that report the weather, earthquakes or post humor or lines from literary classics. Twitter also allows for anonymity, which protects free speech and privacy — especially in authoritarian regions. But that practice can make it harder to root out malicious fake accounts.
Ferrara first caught Twitter’s attention in the aftermath of revelations that Russia used social media to meddle in the U.S. presidential election in 2016, when he led a research group that estimated that 9% to 15% of Twitter’s active English-language accounts were bots.
In a blog post soon after, Twitter complained that such outside research “is often inaccurate and methodologically flawed.” The company has repeatedly reported the under-5% number in its quarterly filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission, though it also cautions that it could be higher.
Before Musk’s takeover, Twitter said it removed 1 million spam accounts each day. To calculate how many accounts are malicious spam, Twitter reviews thousands of accounts sampled at random, using both public and private data such as IP addresses, phone numbers, geolocation and how the account behaves when it is active.
Dueling methodologies
But over the past months, Musk and Twitter have tussled over the methodology. Twitter uses a metric it calls mDAU, for monetizable daily active usage.
That “is literally a metric they invented,” Ferrara said. “You cannot contrast and compare that metric with any other service.”
When Musk first started publicly raising questions about the bot numbers after agreeing to buy the company, another firm, Israel-based Cyabra, said it had the answer.
“That elusive number you are looking for … we have it. It’s 13.7%,” the firm tweeted on May 17, flagging Musk’s Twitter handle to get his attention.
Cyabra’s machine-learning technology works by scanning a large number of social media profiles to track behavioral patterns, trying to pick out which are behaving like humans. Such guesswork can misfire — but the tweet caught the attention of people close to Musk, if not the billionaire himself.
Cyabra CEO Dan Brahmy said the company started working with the Musk camp by the end of May. Regardless of what the true bot count is, he said it’s not going to be an easy problem to solve.
“Some bots are definitely nefarious,” Brahmy said. “The trade-offs are between being extremely high on sign-up standards and information security versus being extremely open minded in a way” that fosters freedom of speech and creativity.
Since Musk officially took over as Twitter’s boss on Friday, he has made a number of changes and plans to charge $20 a month for Twitter Blue, a verification service that currently costs $5 monthly, the Verge reported.
Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter has already led to some major shake-ups at the company. Musk named himself “chief Twit,” fired top executives and shared his plans to change the platform’s current content moderation and bans. Many fear the changes will allow hate speech and inappropriate content on the platform, and as a result, several celebrities and high profile people have vowed to leave.
Musk first announced his plan to buy the company in April. At the time, actor and activist Jameela Jamil, activist Shaun King, comic book writer Erik Larsen, wrestler Mick Foley and others said they would no longer use Twitter if he bought it. The $44 billion sale went through in late October.
Now that Musk is officially in control, more stars have become critical of him and made the same promise to leave while others seemed to be on the fence.
Shonda Rhimes
“Not hanging around for whatever Elon has planned. Bye,” the screenwriter and producer tweeted two days after Musk officially bought the company. She hasn’t tweeted since.
Sara Bareilles
The singer said she was leaving the platform in a tweet on October 30. “Welp. It’s been fun Twitter. I’m out. See you on other platforms, peeps. Sorry, this one’s just not for me,” she wrote. She has not tweeted since.
Toni Braxton
The singer said she was appalled by the changes she saw after Musk acquired the company and vowed to stay off of it. “I’m shocked and appalled at some of the ‘free speech’ I’ve seen on this platform since its acquisition. Hate speech under the veil of ‘free speech’ is unacceptable; therefore I am choosing to stay off Twitter as it is no longer a safe space for myself, my sons and other POC,” she wrote.
Alex Winter
The “Bill & Ted” actor said he would leave the platform and kept that promise – his account is no longer active. His last tweet was a meme about Musk taking over the platform, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Brian Koppelman
The “Billions” showrunner tweeted he was going to “take a breather” from Twitter then made his account private. In his final tweet, he instructed fans to find him on Instagram and TikTok, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Ken Olin
The actor, director and producer tweeted about his departure from the platform on October 28. “Hey all – I’m out of here. No judgement. Let’s keep the faith. Let’s protect our democracy. Let’s try to be kinder. Let’s try to save the planet. Let’s try to be more generous. Let’s look to find peace in the world,” he wrote.
In a previous tweet, he said he was going to be using Tribel Social, an alternative to Twitter. “Gotta wean myself off of this soon to be Musk machine,” Olin said. The platform promotes itself as being free of hate and “fake news.”
Mick Foley
The wrestler said in April he’d consider leaving Twitter. “I’ll be giving some serious thought to leaving Twitter for good in the near future,” he wrote. “I do not have a good feeling about where this platform is heading.” As of October 31, his Twitter account was deactivated.
Erik Larson
The comic book writer, who worked on The Amazing Spider-Man series in the 1990s, vowed early on in Musk’s acquisition process to delete his Twitter account if the billionaire succeeded in buying the company. It appears Larsen has left the platform since the buy.
Jameela Jamil
The actor first said that she would be leaving Twitter in April. “One good thing about Elon buying twitter is that I will *FINALLY* leave and stop being a complete menace to society on here. So it’s win win for you all really,” she tweeted. She has tweeted since then, and her most recent tweet is from October 26 – one day before Musk officially bought the company. It is unclear if she will return, but if she keeps her promise, she won’t be back on the platform while Musk controls it.
Rob Reiner
The filmmaker urged people to not leave the platform. “For those who are fighting to preserve our Constitutional Democracy, now is not the time to leave Twitter,” he tweeted the day after the acquisition. He has tweeted since then, mainly to promote the upcoming midterm elections on November 8.
Amy Siskind
The activist and author tweeted in April that she was sitting with her thoughts and watching, but hadn’t decided if she would stay on the platform.
“This platform feels like it is dying,” she tweeted on October 29. “If you are leaving, you can also find my content at Facebook. I have a built an active, moderated community there.”
The actor said he was unsure if he would stay on Twitter. “Large exodus happening on this platform. Not sure if I stay or not,” he tweeted on October 28. “Leaning toward staying, but if today is a sign of things to come, not sure what the point is. Freedom of speech is great. Hate speech intended to incite harm, (with no consequences) ain’t what I signed up for.” He has tweeted several times since.
Verified users on Twitter may soon have to pay to retain their blue tick badges, according to a report by the Verge on Sunday, as the company’s new owner Elon Musk looks for new ways to monetize the social media platform.
Verified Twitter users may soon have to pay $20 a month to retain their blue tick badge.
NurPhoto via Getty Images
Key Facts
In a characteristic vague tweet, Musk on Sunday said the “whole verification process” was being revamped, without providing any details.
Earlier on Sunday, journalist Casey Newton first reported that Musk is planning to charge verified accounts by paywalling the feature behind the subscription service Twitter Blue which presently costs $4.99 a month.
Citing people familiar with the matter and “internal correspondence,” the Vergereported later Sunday that Twitter will charge $19.99 for an upgraded Twitter Blue subscription and currently verified users will have 90 days to sign up before they lose their verified badge.
According to the report, Musk wants the feature to launch by November 7 and the team working on it have been warned they will be fired if they fail to meet that deadline.
It is unclear how this change will apply to verified accounts of government institutions, political leaders or companies, although Musk has previously indicated he wants to charge these entities to use Twitter.
Forbes has reached out to Twitter for comment.
News Peg
Earlier on Sunday, Musk dismissed a New York Times report that he was planning to carry out mass layoffs at the company before November 1. The report noted that would prevent the employees from receiving their stock grants as part of their year-end payout. Under the terms of the merger agreement, Twitter employees would receive a cash payment instead of stocks.
Key Background
On Sunday, Twitter quietly changed its homepage layout. Users who are not logged in are now served with Twitter’s Explore section on the homepage instead of the standard sign-up page that prompts users to create an account or log in to Twitter. On Friday, Musk announced Twitter will set up a moderation council with “diverse viewpoints” which will make decisions about the reinstatement of banned accounts on the platform. A few hours later he clarified that Twitter has not made any changes to its content policies in the meantime. While announcing the acquisition of the company Musk had promised to make Twitter a haven for free expression and even called himself a “free-speech absolutist.” Musk’s statements raised concerns that Twitter would take a laxer approach to content moderation allowing hate speech to flourish on the platform. The billionaire, however, tried to calm some of these fears in a statement last week where he said he won’t allow Twitter to become a “free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences.”
Tangent
Musk and Twitter came under the scanner once again over the weekend after he tweeted an unfounded conspiracy theory about the attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband. In a now-deleted response to a tweet by Hillary Clinton—who linked that attack to GOP-driven hate speech and conspiracies—Musk wrote there was “a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye.” Musk’s tweet linked to an article from the Santa Monica Observer—a website known to share fake news.
“Abolish the IRS!” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) tweeted Sunday, prompting people on Twitter to wisecrack back in droves.
Some, of course, said a better idea would be to “abolish Ted Cruz,” and some suspected the lawmaker was up to no good.
“Sounds like someone who cheats on their taxes,” one tweeter wrote.
Cruz’s declaration is no surprise. He advocates for the elimination of the IRS on his website under “Tax Reform” and proposes a “flat tax” with the same rate for everyone.
While most Americans would like the tax code simplified, a flat tax would disproportionately hurt the poor. A supermarket cashier would be giving Uncle Sam the same percentage as, say, Warren Buffett, former President Barack Obama once explained.
Cruz, who’s hit Twitter with his close-the-IRS talk before, never ceases to rile his critics when he does.
MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan called out new Twitter owner Elon Musk for claiming he wants to make the website neutral but in reality is acting on behalf of only one side.
“He’s already engaged with a bunch of only far-right accounts” Hasan told fellow MSNBC host Ayman Mohyeldin, noting, for example, that Musk quickly replied to a gripe by election denier and conspiracy theorist Tom Fitton with a promise to be “even-handed.”
“Yeah, Ayman, we should all be ‘even-handed’ when it comes to election denial,” Hasan mocked, then wondered what this portends for the future of the platform.
“Is this how Twitter is gonna work now, do you think, going forward?” Hasan asked. “Right-wing crazies make whiny complaints and the owner of Twitter, the world’s richest man, responds to all of them personally? Not only does that not seem to be a good use of his time, but it doesn’t feel very ― what’s the word I’m looking for? ― even-handed.”
Mohyeldin was even more blunt in his appraisal, warning advertisers not to “sit by and watch as this site increasingly becomes a cesspool of racists and antisemites” under Musk.
After a major blunder Sunday on Twitter by the company’s new owner, Elon Musk, he is nevertheless going forward with his plans for major layoffs that could create even more content problems.
The cuts might be closer to 50%, The Washington Post reported Saturday. One of the first to be slashed would likely be the legal, trust and safety division, which oversees content moderation, according to the Post.
The cuts appear likely to boost controversial content, including porn, disinformation and hate speech, as vast numbers of posts would slip by largely unmonitored.
Musk personally became part of the content problem Sunday when he amplified in a post — that he later deleted — a completely baseless conspiracy theory about the vicious home invasion attack Friday on Paul Pelosi, husband of Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
“There is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye,” Musk posted. He linked to an article falsely claiming that Pelosi’s attacker was a lover he had met at a bar in the middle of the night. Police have said categorically that Paul Pelosi and assault suspect David DePape had never met before the attack.
Musk is already struggling with taking control at Twitter.
Several users that had been banned for breaking various company rules, including those against racist hate speech and lies, have reportedly been sneaking back onto Twitter since Musk took over Thursday.
Musk on Friday tweeted that he wouldn’t make any “major content decisions or account reinstatements” until a new “content moderation council” is convened.
Musk has railed in the past at Twitter’s content restrictions, characterizing them as biased and unjustified censorship. But unfettered content could be bad for his new business and in some cases leave Twitter vulnerable to lawsuits.
Musk tried to reassure advertisers in a message last week that Twitter will not become a “free-for-all hellscape.” But he appears to be already struggling with that promise.
Minister of State for Information Technology (IT) Rajeev Chandrasekhar, on Saturday, said that the big-tech companies will be held accountable for everything they do. Chandrashekhar made this statement, during a Twitter Spaces conversation, while speaking about the Billionaire Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover and Twitter’s compliance issue.
The minister, while speaking about Musk’s Twitter takeover, said, “Our policies for the company will not change with change in their ownership. Be it Musk or anybody who would own Twitter, they will still have to comply with the framework that’s been set.”
“Interests of ‘Digital Nagriks’ are at the core of new legislation,” he said while explaining how the latest amendment to IT rules will put more definite due diligence obligations on social media firms so that they ensure no misinformation or unlawful content is posted on their platforms.
Chandrashekhar further added, “Gone are the times when big tech companies could get away. Now they will be held accountable for everything they do.”
Chandrashekhar also said the new rules will deal with non-compliance and under this rule, the organisation will lose immunity.
The government on Friday made amendments to the IT rules, under which it will set up appellate panels to redress grievances that users may have against social media platforms’ decision on hosting contentious content.
The minister also said that all social media firms must publish the rules and regulations, privacy policy and user agreement on their website, mobile-based application, or both, in all Indian languages and not just Hindi. This is also aimed to empower ‘Digital Nagriks.’
He further added that the rules also have made it explicit for the intermediary to respect the rights accorded to the Indian citizens.
The minister said that lakhs of messages around unresolved user complaints reflected the “broken” grievance redressal mechanism. He said that while the government will partner with social media companies towards a common goal of ensuring the Internet remains open, safe and trusted for Indians, it will not hesitate to act, crackdown, where the public interest is compromised.
On whether penalties will be imposed on platforms for not complying, he said the government would not like to bring punitive action at this stage but warned that if the situation demands in the future, that could be considered too. The internet is evolving, as will the laws.
“We are not getting to the business of punity, but there is an opinion that there should be punitive penalties for those platforms not following rules…it is an area we have steered clear of, but that is not to say it is not on our mind,” he cautioned.
“The obligations of intermediaries earlier was limited to notifying users of the rules but now there will be much more definite obligation on platforms. Intermediaries have to make efforts that no unlawful content is posted on platform,” the minister said.
The tighter IT norms raise due diligence and accountability of platforms to fight illegal content proactively (the government has added deliberate misinformation to that list too), with a 72-hour window to take down flagged content.
In a strong message to Big Tech companies, the minister asserted that community guidelines of platforms – regardless of whether they are headquartered in the US, Europe, or elsewhere – cannot undermine the constitutional rights of Indians, when such platforms operate in India.
Just a day after acquiring Twitter, Musk said his social media company will set up a content moderation council and any major decisions related to content or account reinstatements will happen after clearance from the body.
Elon Musk plans to visit Twitter’s San Francisco office this week ahead of the expected close of his deal to buy the company, Twitter Chief Marketing Officer Leslie Berland told staff in an email Wednesday.
“As you’ll soon see or hear, Elon is in the SF office this week meeting with folks, walking the halls, and continuing to dive in on the important work you all do,” Berland said in the email, which was obtained by CNN Business. “If you’re in SF and see him around, say hi! For everyone else, this is just the beginning of many meetings and conversations with Elon.”
Berland added that all Twitter
(TWTR) employees will hear directly from Musk on Friday.
Shortly after the email went out, Musk tweeted a video of himself entering Twitter’s office carrying the bowl of a sink, writing, “Entering Twitter HQ – let that sink in!”
Musk has until the end of the week to close his $44 billion deal to buy Twitter or face a trial, and is reportedly planning to do so on Friday. The deal closing would bring to an end a months-long battle over the acquisition, which Musk previously sought to exit but earlier this month agreed to move forward with the deal on the originally agreed upon terms.
Musk on Wednesday also changed his Twitter bio to “Chief Twit.”
Musk is likely to face many questions from nervous employees when he addresses Twitter’s staff.
The Washington Post last week reported that Musk told prospective investors in the deal that he planned to cut nearly 75% of the company’s staff, and that Twitter had already planned massive layoffs even if the deal did not go through. Following the Washington Post report, Twitter General Counsel Sean Edgett sent a memo to staff saying the company does “not have any confirmation of the buyer’s plans following close and recommend not following rumors or leaked documents but rather wait for facts from us and the buyer directly,” according to a report from Bloomberg. A Twitter spokesperson confirmed to CNN the authenticity of the memo.
Musk had previously discussed dramatically reducing Twitter’s workforce in text messages with friends about the deal, which were revealed in court filings, and didn’t dismiss the potential for layoffs in a call with Twitter employees in June.
Twitter’s new owner and CEO, billionaire Elon Musk, said Friday he was not involved in lifting the restrictions on Kanye West’s Twitter account. The rapper, who now performs under the name Ye, had been locked out of the account earlier this month for making antisemitic statements on the platform.
The Tesla-founder, who officially took control of the social media network earlier this week after purchasing it for $44 billion, tweeted Friday that the company would be forming a “content moderation council with widely diverse viewpoints.”
“No major content decisions or account reinstatements will happen before that council convenes,” Musk added.
Twitter will be forming a content moderation council with widely diverse viewpoints.
No major content decisions or account reinstatements will happen before that council convenes.
In response to that statement, one Twitter user asked Musk why the read-only restrictions had already allegedly been lifted from West’s account. Musk responded that West’s “account was restored by Twitter before the acquisition. They did not consult with or inform me.”
West has not tweeted from the account since Oct. 8, and CBS News has not independently verified whether West’s access has in fact been restored.
Ye’s account was restored by Twitter before the acquisition. They did not consult with or inform me.
Twitter had locked West out of his account “due to a violation of Twitter’s policies,” the platform told CBS News in a statement Oct. 9. Though the reason was not specified, West on Oct. 8 posted an antisemitic tweet in which he threatened to go “death [sic] con 3” on Jewish people. The tweet has since been removed.
When a Twitter account is classified as “read-only,” it means the user is restricted from tweeting, retweeting and liking content, the platform’s website says. The user can still read their timeline and send direct messages to their followers.
“The duration of this enforcement action can range from 12 hours to 7 days, depending on the nature of the violation,” the site also reads.
In wake of his statements, West was also restricted on Instagram after posting screenshots of an alleged conversation with rapper Sean “Diddy” Combs in which West suggested Combs was being controlled by Jews. However, his Instagram account resumed posting on Wednesday.
Several brands have also cut ties with him, including Adidas, Balenciaga, Gap, Peloton and talent agency CAA.
Although many predicted that Elon Musk’s $44 billion deal to buy Twitter TWTR could still fall through, the billionaire did indeed close the transaction on Friday and his restructuring plan was already well thought out and quickly implemented. At least the beginning of it—who knows what turmoil lies ahead?
Musk let go key executives CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO CFO Ned Segal and the head of legal policy Vijaya Gadde, according to the Washington Post. However, don’t shed any tears for the trio, who take with them golden parachute packages and accelerated vesting of stock options worth almost $200 million.
However, that’s just the beginning of the bloodbath according to The New York Times NYT (which talked to four different sources at Twitter) the layoffs will begin on Saturday, ahead of a November 1 scheduled distribution of stock grants (and a key vesting date on some already issued stock grants).
Musk has courted key advertisers and said the platform will be an “advertising destination.” One advertiser, General Motors GM , has already put its Twitter ad buys on hold, although this could be due to Musk’s ownership stake in Tesla.
His ownership also rubbed some high-profile users the wrong way. Media giant Shonda Rhimes, This Is Us executive producer Ken Olin, Billions showrunner Brian Koppelmen and Bill & Ted star Alex Winter all left or said they are leaving Twitter.
NBA star LeBron James expressed concern over hate speech, citing a report by the Network Contagion Research Institute, which studies the spread of ideological content online, who said that the use of a racial slur on Twitter had increased by nearly 500% in the 12 hours after Musk’s deal was finalized.
The app, Bluesky, is gearing up for a test run just after Musk plunked down $44 billion to buy Twitter. It already has a waiting list of users waiting to try out the app’s beta version.
It’s not yet clear what Blueksky will eventually look like or how it will function, but it has been noted as a rival to Twitter.
Bluesky’s “AT Protocol” is being touted as the critical element of a revolutionary “federated social network” that integrates ideas from the latest “decentralized technologies into a simple, fast, and open network,” according to a company blog. Users will presumably be able to move between several social media platforms using a single browser — Bluesky.
As for being a potential Twitter competitor, Dorsey tweeted earlier this month that it’s a rival to “any company trying to own the underlying fundamentals for social media or the data of the people using it.”
It’s a competitor to any company trying to own the underlying fundamentals for social media or the data of the people using it
(But some critics believe Bluesky could be part of a stealth collaboration between Dorsey and Musk.)
Twitter customers could be in the market for a new place to land even as Musk has tried to calm concerns about what Twitter might become under his helmsmanship. He told potential advertisers in a message earlier this week that Twitter will not become a completely uncensored “free-for-all hellscape,” as he has indicated in the past. But his latest actions hint that might be exactly what he’s creating.
Musk quickly repeated that he doesn’t support lifetime Twitter bans, no matter how appalling users’ messages and attacks.
And Kanye West, now legally known as Ye, is already back on Twitter after he was bounced for appalling antisemitic screeds. But Musk claims he played no role in the rapper’s return and that his account was restored before he finalized the Twitter purchase.
Shonda Rhimes isn’t impressed with Elon Musk’s plans for Twitter, and she isn’t stick around. Best known for creating and writing Grey’s Anatomy, the TV mogul shared what might be her last tweet Saturday, telling her nearly 2 million followers, “Not hanging around for whatever Elon has planned. Bye.”
Musk, a self-described free-speech absolutist, completed his $44 billion takeover of the social media platform on Thursday and promptly fired top executives he had criticized for being too suppressive.
While he was quick to reassure advertisers on Thursday that the platform wouldn’t become a “free-for-all hellscape,” not everyone was convinced. General Motors said it would temporarily pause advertising on Twitter, adding, “We are engaging with Twitter to understand the direction of the platform under their new ownership.”
Advertisers, of course, are not keen on appearing near offensive content, and there’s been a sharp increase in that since Musk took control, with Twitter trolls flooding the platform with racial slurs and Nazi memes.
“The danger here is that in the name of ‘free speech,’ Musk will turn back the clock and make Twitter into a more potent engine of hatred, divisiveness, and misinformation about elections, public health policy, and international affairs,” Paul Barrett, deputy director of the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, told the Associated Press.
On Friday, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO tweeted, “To be super clear, we have not yet made any changes to Twitter’s content moderation policies.” That followed him tweeting earlier: “Twitter will be forming a content moderation council with widely diverse viewpoints. No major content decisions or account reinstatements will happen before that council convenes.”
He also offered glimpses into his thinking about the platform’s future on Friday and early Saturday while replying to Twitter suggestions. When a user noted Facebook has something similar to the content moderation council but still angers both the left the right, Musk replied, “Good point. Being able to select which version of Twitter you want is probably better, much as it would be for a movie maturity rating. The rating of the tweet itself could be self-selected, then modified by user feedback.”
As Musk toys with ideas, however, an increase in hateful content may in the meantime drive some users away from the platform—including prominent ones like Rhimes.
According to the Network Contagion Research Institute, which analyzes social media content and predicts emerging threats, instances of the N-word increased by nearly 500% in the 12 hours immediately after Musk’s takeover was finalized.
Evidence suggests that bad actors are trying to test the limits on @Twitter. Several posts on 4chan encourage users to amplify derogatory slurs.
For example, over the last 12 hours, the use of the n-word has increased nearly 500% from the previous average. pic.twitter.com/mEqziaWuMF
— Network Contagion Research Institute (@ncri_io) October 28, 2022
Rhimes, an African-American, didn’t elaborate on why she was leaving the platform. But up until now she’s been a prolific user of Twitter, building a large following since joining the platform in November 2008.
Not hanging around for whatever Elon has planned. Bye.
In late May, something unusual happened at Twitter. Shareholders voted to approve two proposals to change how the company operates — and did so against Twitter’s recommendations.
While shareholder votes are often nonbinding for management, these nonetheless pushed for good corporate governance practices. The first proposal required Twitter to compile a report on the risks of using concealment clauses, such as nondisclosure agreements, to ensure greater accountability for the company and protections for staff. The second proposal required Twitter to disclose its spending on elections.
The developments, however, were overshadowed by something else unusual happening at the company. Elon Musk, the mercurial billionaire, had agreed to buy Twitter for $44 billion the month before only to begin raising doubts about the deal soon after. The deal to take Twitter private, which was finally completed this week, likely renders the votes moot; Musk will have final say, not shareholders, a power he wields over numerous entities.
In the tech industry, and especially in the social media sector, annual shareholder meetings have long been something of a farce that captures the broader power imbalance in Silicon Valley. Rather than hold management accountable, shareholders typically run into an unbreachable wall of opposition from founders like Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Snap’s Evan Spiegel, and Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who control a majority of voting shares at their respective companies.
Twitter was different. The company billed itself as a “town square,” and also operated in a more democratic fashion than many of its peers, sometimes to its detriment. The company’s CEOs, of which there have been several over the years, clashed with the board and left or were pushed out. Twitter was vulnerable to an activist investor, shareholder proposals and ultimately a takeover from the world’s richest man. It was messy, sure. Zuckerberg once allegedly described Twitter as a “clown car.” But at least it was a clown car that partly belonged to the public.
Now, Musk joins the list of rich, white men who single-handedly control social platforms that collectively reach and shape the lives of billions of people around the world. And Musk, who will reportedly have “absolute control over Twitter” according to a shareholders’ agreement, promises to be uniquely disruptive.
In an effort to support his maximalist vision of “free speech,” the Tesla CEO plans to rethink Twitter’s content moderation policies and permanent bans for users who previously violated the platform’s policies, including former President Donald Trump. He also reportedly wants to gut Twitter’s staff. and has already fired several top executives.
Each of these moves has the potential to undo the work of employees who have labored to make Twitter a better platform with “healthy” conversations after years of complaints from users about harassment and toxic discourse. These moves could also upend the many corners of society shaped to some degree by Twitter. While it is barely a tenth the size of Facebook, Twitter has always had an outsized influence over the worlds of media, politics and tech.
That influence now belongs to Musk. There are two vastly diverging views of the billionaire. Many think of him as a generational figure who is a hybrid of Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs and the fictionalTony Stark — an innovative spirit who defies skeptics to build big businesses that better the world. The others can’t look past his history of false promises, erratic behavior and incendiary remarks.
To those in the first camp, Musk serving as the sole decider at Twitter may be cause for celebration. To those in the second, quite the opposite. But both camps have cause for concern.
More than any other figure, Musk has become the embodiment of a level of concentration of power and wealth that would have seemed almost unthinkable just a couple of decades ago.
The world’s richest man, worth more than the GDPs of many countries, is now in control of one of the world’s most influential social networks. One individual now owns or oversees businesses that are shaping the automotive and space industries, rethinking core infrastructure with freight tunnels and satellite internet, building humanoid robots and brain-interface machines and determining how millions connect with each other and find news.
Musk, prone to self-aggrandizement, insists his interest is to aid humanity, but he also insists that he knows best how to do so at each turn and does not seem to take criticism very well. He and his supporters have been known to lash out at detractors on Twitter, where he spends an unusual amount of time for someone running multiple companies. And now, rather than take his ball and going home when countless users criticize him for, say, offering unsolicited advice on how to end Russia’s war in Ukraine, he is buying the whole field for $44 billion.
In 2022, many people may be accustomed to the tremendous power wielded by tech founders. Jeff Bezos, a fellow billionaire and Musk’s rival, also owns a rocket company and used his vast wealth to acquire The Washington Post. But Musk isn’t buying a newspaper, he’s buying the news, or at least one of the key platforms that shape it.
It’s a level of unimpeachable power perhaps only rivaled by Zuckerberg, and there have been clear downsides in this sphere. Zuckerberg, whether he was being truthful or not, tried to downplay his platforms’ influence in the 2016 US presidential election only to spend years trying to extinguish scandals related to it. Facebook has since tried to push off its most difficult decisions to an independent oversight board, but the buck still stops with Zuckerberg. The same will go for Musk.
Elon Musk is a conglomerate, and each arm of his empire potentially gives him more leverage, real or imagined, in advocating for the others. Before lawmakers choose to speak out about concerns with Tesla, for example, some may also weigh whether Musk might discontinue offering his Starlink broadband internet system in Ukraine, or whether he might put his thumb on the scale to promote certain content on Twitter that may disadvantage them.
More immediately, however, owning a social network ensures Musk a different kind of personal power increasingly sought by other controversial billionaires, including Trump (with Truth Social) and Musk’s friend Ye (with a proposed deal to buy Parler). It is the power of knowing that, no matter what he says and no matter how offensive it may be, he can never be turned off.
US-based microblogging site Twitter’s new owner, the self-described “free speech absolutist” Elon Musk’s first move after gaining the leadership position of the social media platform was to fire the company’s top executives. Musk’s this decision speaks volumes about his ownership and his plans for the social media platform’s future.
He fired the company’s chief executive officer Parag Agrawal, chief financial officer Ned Segal, and chief legal officer Vijaya Gadde. He had accused them of misleading Twitter investors over the number of fake accounts on the platform.
Later, the billionaire also posted a conciliatory note to wary advertisers, assuring them he won’t allow Twitter to devolve into a “free-for-all hellscape.”
Musk said that he had bought Twitter in a bid to ‘help humanity’ amid the “great danger that social media will splinter into far right wing and far left wing echo chambers that generate more hate and divide our society.”
Musk also plans to scrap permanent bans on users, Bloomberg said, citing a person familiar with the matter. Musk has indicated he sees Twitter as a foundation for creating a “super app” that offers everything from money transfers to shopping and ride-hailing.
However, the problem is that not even the world’s richest man can have it both ways.
Sites such as Gab and Parler, which have lightly moderated “free speech”, serve as cautionary tales of what can happen when the guardrails are lowered. These small sites are popular with libertarians and conservatives fed-up with what they see as censorship of their perception on platforms like Facebook. Moreover, such sites also reported to be full of trolls and other derogatory content.
This makes advertisers stop promoting their products next to disturbing, racist and hateful posts. Many don’t want to spend time on online sites filled with racist and sexist trolls.
US-based automaker General Motors, on Friday, announced that it would pause advertising on Twitter while it figures out the direction of the platform under Musk.
However, according to Lou Paskalis, former head of media for Bank of America, Twitter’s most loyal advertisers, which consists of many Fortune 100 companies, still believe in the platform and aren’t likely to leave unless “some really untoward things” happen.
Moreover, European regulators also reiterated that under Musk’s leadership Twitter must still abide by the region’s Digital Services Act. It should be noted that European Union levies hefty fines on firms if they don’t control illegal content on their platform.
“In Europe, the bird will fly by our EU rules,” EU industry chief Thierry Breton tweeted. European Parliament lawmaker and civil rights proponent Patrick Breyer suggested people look for alternatives where privacy is a priority.
“Twitter already knows our personalities dangerously well due to its pervasive surveillance of our every click. Now this knowledge will be falling into Musk’s hands.”
Currently, Twitter is struggling to engage its most active users who are vital to its business. These “heavy tweeters” account for less than 10 per cent of monthly overall users but still generate around 90 per cent of all tweets and half of the company’s global revenue.
Another task for Musk will be to deliver on his promise to clean up the fake profiles, or “spam bots” that have preoccupied him. This also matters because advertisers, the company’s major stream of revenue, want to know how many real users they are reaching when they buy ads.
