Elon Musk spent $44bn to buy Twitter, but why should the average user be worried? Mr Musk, the owner of SpaceX and Tesla has taken on a lot of debt to purchase his favoured social media platform.
Twitter has evolved over the years and 90 percent of its revenue comes from advertising. Can we expect to see more advertising under the new owner’s watch? It’s possible. After all Mr Musk is a businessman and he will want to recoup the investment laid out for his latest company.
Per the Washington Post, Twitter is to charge $8 a month for verification. Mr Musk tweeted that subscribers to his platform will have access to half as many adds, long video and audio and better spam protection. I read this as “Pay up or your Twitter experience will suffer”.
I’ve already noticed one change today, whereby the platform made video recommendations. This is not something I am a fan of, especially because we live in an age of data overload.
Too much change could turn the super users (accounts with millions of followers) off from using Twitter. Author, Stephen King has already tweeted he would not pay to be verified. Eric Idle has also spoken out against the new Twitter policy.
Twitter has been an important vehicle for social change. From Tunisia and Egypt to the black lives matter movement, Twitter has given people a voice. Everyone has the ability to report the news, and in some cases this is not good, because of the amount of misinformation.
BREXIT and the 2020 US Election are great examples of where foreign state actors have leveraged their information war campaigns, designed to cause political unrest. What will Twitter look like in the future? I expect to see Mr Musk rolling out new features designed to bolster his bank account. Whatever he decides, Mr Musk must realise that Twitter uses can leave the platform as quickly as they joined.
I bet Mr Musk wishes he’d never tabled a bid to buy one of the most popular social media platforms.
Thank you for reading the Woz Report.