What does the arrival of Elon Musk on Twitter mean for social networks in crisis | Technology

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Elon Musk carried a sink to announce his arrival Wednesday at Twitter headquarters in San Francisco: “Let it sink in” (or “let that sink in” in English), was the text accompanying the video. sink it’s a toilet, hence the pun in the video, and it’s an expression that has a certain category of meme. Musk’s toilet reveals his intentions: who spends 44,000 million dollars on something and performs an absurd meme to confirm it? Probably just Musk.

His Twitter bio is now “chief twit”, which combines the word “chief” with another that apart from implying “Twitter” in English can mean “fool”; the word for tweet is “tweet”.

His gestures have at least three readings: his ideas and actions are not typical of a millionaire, his understanding of the language of Internet users is refined and he does not care about the opinion of others. Musk decided to buy Twitter in April, in May he backed down, and now before going to trial he returns to assume his final decision.

These are some of the implications of its irruption for the network sector, which has been full of doubts about its future for a few weeks. Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, has just made losses again on its long road to the metaverse and its battle with TikTok. YouTube earned less than expected, perhaps due to the announcement of adding Netflix advertising. Snapchat presented its slowest growth this week due to the advertising break. TikTok is the theoretical champion of this battle, but it is two security scandals away from being limited or banned by the US government with accusations of being a weapon of mass espionage by the Chinese government, where the social network has its company mother, ByteDance.

This decadent landscape is where Musk lands presumably full of ideas and energy. What will you try to change?

1. Twitter suffers like all

When the purchase of the firm materializes, the social network will go public and will save quarterly public announcements. So far, his income has been meager. This week Reuters has published an internal investigation that regrets the fatigue of its most active users and the fall of the best topics.

90% of content is created by 10% of users. This is common on all networks. The most animated users, according to the internal report, enter Twitter almost every day and tweet three or four times a week. This group is “in absolute decline”. The main topics have become cryptocurrency and pornography, instead of other more attractive to advertisers: sports, information and entertainment.

2. Freedom of expression, above all

The most repeated consensus is that Donald Trump will return to Twitter once Musk takes control. “It would be great if the permanent suspensions were relaxed, except for the accounts of spam and those who advocate explicit violence,” Musk wrote to former Twitter chief Parag Agrawal in private messages revealed by the courts. “Twitter should move to the center,” he added.

Trump’s return looks like Musk’s first big gesture. But who else will return? What will Musk’s new moderation policy look like? The usual criticism that the businessman receives is that he has no idea how complicated it is to manage harassment, insults and threats in a social network as public and full of journalists as Twitter. But it’s still surprising.

3. There is no alternative

Despite the progressive criticism he receives, Musk has a card in his favor: those who have become accustomed to visiting Twitter have no alternative. There is nowhere to go to see a similar service. Mastodon is complex and minority. Parler and Truth Social are for conservatives. TikTok and Instagram are not for information. Facebook is not for the last minute.

Perhaps there is a group that ends up entering less or looking for other routines, but it will not be easy for them. If one day Twitter dies, it will be a slow death. However few ideas Musk has, he has room to attract new users without losing regular ones.

4. The beloved advertisers

On Thursday, Musk posted a tweet with a very long text intended for “dear Twitter advertisers”. Musk has a lot of money, but spoiling a substantial part of his fortune is not something even a millionaire wants to do. Twitter should give money.

In the text, Musk promises that he will make the social network a “warm and pleasant place for everyone” and not “a hellish pit where everything can be said without consequences.” In that friendly place, “which will be an important digital common square for the future of civilization”, and where extremists will not dominate, advertisers must see the “most respected advertising platform”.

5. What is a ‘superapp’?

Another big dream of Musk is to turn Twitter into a superapp. The great aspiration is to resemble the Chinese WeChat, which includes a social network, messages and payments. Although if it has not caught on in Western countries, it will be for a reason.

In private messages, Musk dreamed of a network with micropayments per tweet based on blockchainespecially to annihilate bot, but he himself admitted that it was not technically feasible. It is the farthest dream of him.

6. There are new ‘apps’

A new Pew Research survey reveals that TikTok is the apps that is growing the most as a news search engine, especially among those under 30 years of age. Instagram also grows somewhat. All others fall: the percentage of Twitter users searching for news on the platform went from 59% in 2020 to 53% this year; on Facebook it fell from 54% to 44%.

BeReal, which allows you to post photos only once a day, or Gas, which is used to praise the skills of colleagues at the institute, are apps they just got out.

The network sector is therefore not detained in a paradise watered by millions of euros. There is movement, news and falls. Among those changes, Musk’s bets may reinvigorate a whale like Twitter.

7. Geopolitical dangers

A big problem for Musk is the dependence of his other companies on complicated countries. The great example is China. Tesla depends on the Asian territory. Musk has already argued for Taiwan to be something like part of China. Just as he has advocated that eastern Ukraine be Russia. When these governments press him for certain tweets, it remains to be seen how he will defend freedom of expression to the end.

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