11 days after announcing his bid for the company, Elon Musk bought twitter with US$44 billion deal on April 25, 2022.
According to him, he invested in Twitter as he believes in its potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe, and free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy.
All about Twitter
Twitter occupies a unique niche. Its short chunks of text and threading foster real-time conversations among thousands of people, which makes it popular with celebrities, media personalities and politicians alike. Social media analysts talk about the half-life of content on a platform, meaning the time it takes for a piece of content to reach 50% of its total lifetime engagement, usually measured in number of views or popularity-based metrics.
Twitter, as we all know, is one of the most-loved social media from all ages. It has been used for venting out, for trends, and for people who voices out their concerns and addressing it completely.
Tweets that are part of a conversation are shown in chronological order, and, even though much of a tweet’s engagement is frontloaded, the Twitter archive provides instant and complete access to every public Tweet.
Musk’s future plans
To understand Musk’s motivations and what lies next for social media platforms such as Twitter, it’s important to consider the big online advertising ecosystem involving multiple technologies wielded by ad networks, social media companies and publishers.
Musk’s description of a platform free from content moderation issues is troubling in light of the algorithmic harms caused by social media platforms. Research has shown a host of these harms, such as algorithms that assign gender to users, potential inaccuracies and biases in algorithms used to glean information from these platforms, and the impact on those looking for health information online.
Aside from that, Elon Musk tweeted, “Do you want an edit button?” on April 5th.
The buzz over an edit button on Twitter – a long pending demand of users – was rekindled on April 1 when the platform tweeted that it was working on an edit button.
While many users welcomed the announcement, others wondered if it was an April Fools Day joke.
But we all know the effects on an edit button—facts can be twisted, important things can be deleted. It can also be the reason it could alter public record and misled users into every vital information.
So, what’s next for Twitter is something we can’t really predict. We all know it’s going to be a lot of surprises from the most favorite social media app in the next weeks to come.
