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MUSK HE REALLY

Elon Musk Has Taken Over Twitter. Here's How The Media And Internet Are Reacting

Molly Bradley
Molly Bradley
Elon Musk Has Taken Over Twitter. Here's How The Media And Internet Are Reacting
From journalists' predictions of what will happen next to, of course, the Twitter backlash, here's everything you need to know about Elon Musk's purchase of the social media platform.
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Yesterday, tech-icon-pariah-mogul Elon Musk strolled into Twitter HQ carrying a sink.



Why? Because he has finally given in and appears to making good on his verbal and contractual threat/promise to purchase Twitter dot com.

For a long time now, Musk has derided Twitter’s attempts to moderate speech on the platform, among other decisions. Musk, a certified Free Speech Guy™️, wanted Twitter to be a platform where everyone is free to say what they please. To make it so, he went ahead and bought Twitter.

But let’s back up: here’s a timeline of all that’s happened to bring us to this moment.


[WSJ]


There are a lot of reactions to the news, from people openly worrying about what a Musk-run Twitter will look like to… well, that’s the main reaction. Here’s how this momentous sale is being covered in media right now, from journalists speculating about whether or not Musk will follow through on his outlandish promises of a Twitter with total free speech to, of course, the tweets and memes about it.


People are skeptical that Musk can successfully run Twitter

Let no one say that Elon Musk can’t start and run a company. PayPal, Tesla and SpaceX all say he can — albeit with some technical difficulties and allegations of racism and sexual harassment.

But there’s fair doubt that Musk really knows what he’s doing when it comes to Twitter — in no small part because he seems to have moved to buy Twitter on the basis of little more than bravado and whim, and because the things he says he’ll be able to come in and fix are the very problems that plague every platform and have no easy solution.

Musk has been founding companies since the dawn of the internet age. He's grown Tesla, SpaceX and PayPal into the blue chips that they are today.

But the financially struggling social media company, which he is expected to buy by Friday, needs something more to become a success story, said Andy Wu, who teaches business strategy at Harvard Business School.

”Musk has no experience in managing organizational change and there's definitely an embedded culture at Twitter that he'll have to change in order to achieve some of his goals," Wu said.

[NPR]

Until relatively recently, Musk’s primary business interests were in building electric cars, rockets, and underground tunnels. Now, he will have to figure out a new, very different business challenge: how to effectively run a social media platform that’s used by nearly 400 million people — including highly influential world leaders, journalists, and other public figures — and deal with the political speech moderation issues that come with that. Musk also needs to figure out a better business model for the company. Twitter has never made nearly as much money as its social media competitors like Facebook and YouTube, and along with other major tech companies, it has also seen a major decline in its stock value in the past year. According to a recent report in Reuters, the service’s most active and lucrative users have been leaving in droves since the pandemic.

[Vox]

The problems with Twitter are not engineering problems. They are political problems. Twitter, the company, makes very little interesting technology; the tech stack is not the valuable asset. The asset is the user base: hopelessly addicted politicians, reporters, celebrities, and other people who should know better but keep posting anyway. You! You, Elon Musk, are addicted to Twitter. You’re the asset. You just bought yourself for $44 billion dollars.

[The Verge]


Musk may not be able to make good on ‘free speech’


Despite Musk speaking passionately and often about his desire for free speech on Twitter, he’s already walked his stance back a little bit, saying that Twitter “obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape,” and asserting that while he will make sure Twitter users have free speech, they may not achieve “free reach.”



Here’s what people think of that.


Musk has pledged to loosen Twitter's rules on what people can post to the platform. He's said Twitter was wrong to ban former President Donald Trump after the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Many Twitter users have openly worried that the network will soon become more racist, sexist, and toxic.

Musk tried to allay some of those fears in his letter to advertisers Thursday.

”Twitter obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences!" he said.

[NPR]

You can write as many polite letters to advertisers as you want, but you cannot reasonably expect to collect any meaningful advertising revenue if you do not promise those advertisers “brand safety.” That means you have to ban racism, sexism, transphobia, and all kinds of other speech that is totally legal in the United States but reveals people to be total assholes. So you can make all the promises about “free speech” you want, but the dull reality is that you still have to ban a bunch of legal speech if you want to make money. And when you start doing that, your creepy new right-wing fanboys are going to viciously turn on you, just like they turn on every other social network that realizes the same essential truth.

[The Verge]

There’s a lot of perfectly legal stuff you can say that is unpleasant to look at: racial slurs, graphic violent content, bullying, spam (more on that later). That type of content is generally bad for business because most users — and advertisers — don’t want to be around it.

Musk knows this. Which is why he has said, paradoxically, that he will use algorithms to promote and downrank content, arguing for “freedom of speech” but not “freedom of reach.”

“I think people should be allowed to say pretty outrageous things that are within the bounds of the law, but then that doesn’t get amplified, it doesn’t get, you know, a ton of reach,” said Musk at the June Twitter staff meeting.

But Musk didn’t explain how he will decide what kind of content will get reach and what won’t, and how it will be any different from what Twitter currently does.

[Vox]


On bringing back Trump

Musk has also vowed to bring back people who have been banned for tweeting harmful views and misinformation, like former president Donald Trump and Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. But some journalists warn that this might not be the win Musk thinks it is for humanity.

In modern times, lack of moderation on social media sites has repeatedly contributed to mass murder. The Christchurch, New Zealand, shooter killed 51 Muslims at two mosques after being radicalized on YouTube, 4Chan, and 8Chan. The shooter who killed 11 Jews at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh had been radicalized on the social media site Gab, which advertised itself as the “free speech” alternative to Twitter. Dylann Roof killed nine people at the historically Black Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, after he self-radicalized online. Investigations revealed that Google searches steered him further and further into extremist propaganda and hate.

[The New Republic]

While many conservatives would cheer Trump’s return to Twitter, it would simultaneously prompt major resistance from people, many of them liberal, who argue that his tweets pose a threat to a peaceful democracy. We’ll see how Elon is prepared to handle that blowback if he does reinstate the former president.

[Vox]


Going forward

In terms of Musk’s next steps — and what he’s done already — here’s what we know so far:


He’s already fired top executives

But he’ll have to pay for it

Google and Meta have been snapping up Twitter employees

Talking to Twitter staff

Musk plans to address Twitter staff on Friday. He's said he wants to trim their ranks dramatically. Time has reported that Twitter employees are circulating a petition, asking Musk to preserve the current headcount and staff benefits.

[NPR]


The Twitter reactions

No coverage of this event would be complete without including the way people on Twitter have reacted to Musk’s takeover. From people plotting to leave Twitter en masse to nostalgic threads of the platform’s best-ever tweets, here’s what people are saying.



Comments

  1. Daniel T 1 year ago

    Musk did not "start" Tesla or PayPal.

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