There have been lots of feedback on whether Twitter has improved or gotten worse since his buying it. Much of the media has been warning of rascist, sexist, anti-LGBT tweets increasing since the purchase. Has it happened as predicted? I will let you decide but my experience on Twitter has been largely unchanged from before. How has yours? Does your experience depend on which side of the political spectrum you reside?
Here is a listing of Twitter changes/observations since the purchase:
Normal people can now buy a blue check-mark - full disclosure, I have purchased this with a monthly subscrition (8$/month). Previously, only celebrities, people with a large following, corporations and government people could buy this - this created an unbalanced playing field. I did not have to prove my identity so this is incomplete yet. Musk’s idea is that the ability to verify identities will result in a better experience online - I agree. I have always believed that most online users should present themselves as real, identifiable people. Anonomity breeds rudeness and hate speech. However, a small subset of people are safer with anonmity - I get this. The subscription model is meant to offset the almost total need to rely on advertisors for revenue - most see this a prudent move if the subscription provides tangebile benefits - these are promised but not yet fully realized.
This subscription model makes Twitter the product versus the user being the product - the difference is very important.
Musk called the previous blue check system a lords & peasants system.
Announcement that the blue check mark will require identification verification by end of year.
Announcement that the colored check marks will ber implemented by end of year. Blue = Individual (whether celebrity or not), Gold = companies, Grey = Governments
Layoffs of over half of the Twitter workforce - workforce was at 7,500 people at the time of the takeover. This was widely criticized at the time but massive layoffs at other tech firms have supported this move. Many have asked why it was necessary to have that many people manage what is basically an app. Musk has specified that Twitter will have primarily an engineering population.
Twitter has promised faster performance in multiple international areas where it is really slow. Problem has already been identified. Why was this not addressed earlier?
Announcement that multiple mostly conservative people would be returned to Twitter after they were blocked previously. This allowed Jorden Peterson, Kathie Griffen (liberal), Babylon Bee(Parady) and Trump, and a few others to return to the platform - Trump has said that he will not use Twitter but applauded the move. The poll to ask users whether Trump should be reinstated had over 130 million votes - 54% voted to reinstate.
Musk quote: I’m fine with Trump not tweeting. The important thing is that Twitter correct a grave mistake in banning his account, despite no violation of the law or terms of service. Deplatforming a sitting President undermined public trust in Twitter for half of America.
Musk held an online poll asking whether all Twitter users that had been blocked should be accorded amnesty and unblocked on Twitter - he specified that only users who had not done anything illegal would be restored - over 72% of poll responses agreed. This has not been done as of yet but has been promised the week after Thanksgiving.
Announced policy change:
Freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach. Negative/hate tweets will be max deboosted & demonetized, so no ads or other revenue to Twitter. You won’t find the tweet unless you specifically seek it out, which is no different from rest of Internet.
Don’t you think this is brilliant? - protecting free speech but not boosting it to get ad revenue which many believe the ‘old’ Twtter did.
Hate speech impressions down by 1/3 from pre-spike levels, announced by Musk. One of the ways he did this was to reduce the number of tweets that a user could send per day - seeems reasonable.
Twitter has removed the top three hashtags that predators have used for exploitation of children. This has been asked for some time by the advocates of children but only acted on after Musk’s takeover. To support this, Twitter added easier ways for users to report child expolitation on suspect tweets.
Uptime - has it been degraded? Many workers who were laid off predicted a drop in reliability - no reported outage has occured yet.
In Mr. Musk’s first email to the whole company, he said that he was ending Twitter’s flexible remote-work policy on less than a day’s notice. He said he would allow some exceptions. This policy has been repeated by many companies after the pandemic - many believe that productivity falls when working remote.
Musk asked remaining employees (after layoff) to pledge to work hard to expand the platform. Those not signing the pledge would be let go.
Mr. Musk has said the use of Twitter has increased since he completed his acquisition. He has published graphs with usage data. No one has disagreed with this data. This was inspite of numerous more liberal users committing to leave the platform. One week, he posted that Twitter usage grew by 1.6 million users.
Twitter Revenue and profit is ????? Since the buyout, the revenue and profit is not available since it is a private company. Twitter lost 220M$ last year and over 1b$ the previous year. It has only had a profit two years of it’s history.
Added function for readers to add context to Tweets that previously might have been fact checked with a true, false, mostly true/false type of response. This is a tremendous feature that should cut the number of misleading Tweets. The media, in my opinion, has ignored this significant improvement.
Example:
Directly addresses the Tweet’s claim · Provides important context
CBS News left Twitter until they could prove the stability/safety of the platform - they returned within two days. A reminder as you read the news - have you noticed all the inserts of tweets? Journalists will hate Twitter…and need it for the content that is easy to find.
Added policy that all Parody accounts had to add the word ‘Parody’ in the account name.
Added Policy to ban all parody accounts not clearly marked.
Vision statement: Twitter pursues the goal of elevating citizen journalism - entering the news category is very interesting and drives a different mindset. Musk quotes: Twitter needs to become by far the most accurate source of information about the world. That’s our mission. A beautiful thing about Twitter is how it empowers citizen journalism – people are able to disseminate news without an establishment bias.
Previously, Twitter issued a warning before suspension, but now that we are rolling out widespread verification, there will be no warning.
Twitter will soon add ability to attach long-form text to tweets, ending absurdity of notepad screenshots -
Followed by creator monetization for all forms of content. Not completed as of yet. Monetization follows recent marketplace changes driven by platfors such as SubStack. Musk has said that the 8$ fee will be used to reward content creators on Twitter.
Twitter had a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation and they did everything they could to appease the activists. BTW, all of the advertisors that have removed ads on Twitter continue to use Twitter to communicate with it’s adience.
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.
Any other observations on Twitter from your perspective?
Twitter has around 450 million monthly active users as of 2022.
Twitter has 237.8 million monetizable daily active users (mDAU) as of Q2 2022.
Majority of Twitter’s audience (38.5%) belong to the 25 to 34 age group.
Twitter has a 56.4% male audience and 43.6% female audience.
People spend 26% more time viewing advertisements on Twitter as compared to other platforms.
6,000 tweets are posted on Twitter every second as of 2022. If we do the math, it is equivalent to 350,000 tweets per minute, 500 million tweets each day, and 200 billion tweets every year.
According to Statista, a Twitter user spends 5.1 hours in a month on Twitter. If we break it down, it means that an average Twitter user spends 10 minutes on the platform daily.
55% of Twitter users access the platform regularly to get news. Twitter is the #1 choice for getting news among all other social media platforms.
33% of Twitter users in the United States hold a college degree.
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Or based on the picture, is he a Patriot?
So, what does this mean? https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1597165510595989504