Twitter | old bird, new king

When Elon Musk walked into Twitter headquarters carrying a sink on Wednesday, the message he was expected to send was a triumphant “Let’s Sync in” — the company and beyond, his detractors in his brand of Internet-friendly humor. But a hit. However, for some in the Twitterverse, of whom he had just been crowned king, Sink was a symbol of the creek he could potentially send the stage.

Twitter is an intriguing piece of property in the Web 2.0 landscape. If its corporate size matches its role in the global conversation around any topic of import, Twitter should be one of the biggest social media platforms out there. It is not. not even close. It’s a fraction of the size of Meta, the company that runs Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. After its IPO in 2013 at $26, Twitter never really shone. Its peak was around $70 per share, and it even fell below its IPO price at one point. In comparison, Meta peaked at about $380 per share.

Mr. Musk is taking the company private again by buying all Twitter shares at $54.20 — quite a high, but appropriate because it’s a tongue-in-cheek reference to marijuana culture. That’s a windfall for shareholders as it was trading at a low of $30 in April when it announced its intention to buy. Twitter has continually struggled to find a business model that fully monetizes its place in the public conversation. In this it has been suffocated by a platform built for autocratic communication that advertisers are wary of, internal squabbles, and part-time CEOs.

dorsey day

Twitter started in 2006 with the idea of ​​sharing status updates among Jack Dorsey’s friends. The initial versions envisaged using SMS messages to share updates; Hence, the 140-character limit that remains in place well into the future. Mr Dorsey found supporters in Evan Williams – the blogger and brains behind Medium – in Biz Stone, and Noah Glass.

It seems that from the very early days, Mr. Dorsey had a vision about Twitter as less a social media app and a communications layer deployable anywhere. This vision is reflected in the Bluesky project which he started on Twitter in 2019. BlueSky is touted as an open-source protocol that will decentralize social media, allowing users to take their posts and data with them as they move between platforms. According to reports, Mr Dorsey is now all set to launch a social media platform based on protocol. Incidentally, one of the key figures on the BlueSky project on Twitter was then-CTO Parag Agarwal, who replaced Mr. Dorsey as CEO in November 2021, and who has now been fired by Mr. Musk.

Mr. Dorsey’s first term as CEO lasted until 2008, when he became the company’s chairman and was replaced as CEO by co-founder Evan Williams. He returned as CEO in 2015 when then-CEO Dick Costolo resigned over criticism of Twitter’s weak performance on key metrics. Mr. Dorsey’s return was to help energize the company and grow its user base and revenue; However, by then he was splitting time between Twitter and his other venture, the payments platform Square, as CEO. Their divided attention has been attributed to living in the quagmire of Twitter. Instead of reforming the company, Parag Agarwal had to spend most of his time and energy on the Musk takeover bid in his place.

This was not the possibility anyone would have imagined for Twitter a decade ago. In early 2010, its user base was growing by leaps and bounds, and the app was on the phone of every young man eager to post his opinion on everything from music to politics. It was the app that helped shake up dictatorships in West Asia and North Africa during the Arab Spring of 2011, some even called the “Twitter Revolution”. Young protesters in countries such as Tunisia, Egypt and Bahrain used Twitter and other social apps as megaphones to voice their views and as tools to coordinate protests. At the time, social media platforms seemed like the West’s new tools for esports democracy, and Silicon Valley seemed appropriate to “move fast and break things,” as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg put it.

However, the coming decade was to prove otherwise. Dictators and powerful started tweeting and tables started turning. While Twitter’s failures in this period have paled in comparison to Facebook’s shenanigans, the spread of propaganda and hate speech on the platform had real world consequences, most notable being the 2016 US presidential election.

trump incident

Donald Trump garnered a huge following on Twitter by taking advantage of the outrage to generate engagement. Twitter’s algorithm, like most other social media platforms, treats engagement as a key metric when deciding what or who its users should be watching. Mr Trump was dog-whistle to his right-wing and white nationalist supporters, and dominated the news cycle with “hot take”, journalists who had become dependent on the platform as a news source. His presence, along with many other strong leaders and polarizing figures, created an entire ecosystem in which propaganda and hate speech flourished. Trump’s use of Twitter to dominate headlines continued throughout his presidency. Some of his tweets were seen as blatant violations of Twitter’s content policies, and the platform was heavily pressured to justify keeping them. Matters coincided with the January 6, 2020 riots on Capitol Hill, Washington, and Trump’s tweets were seen to incite rioters and question the legitimacy of the election of Joe Biden as the next US President. Twitter permanently suspended Mr Trump on January 8, 2020, a decision reportedly taken by chief legal counsel Vijaya Gadde, who Mr Musk has now fired.

If Twitter feared that Mr Trump’s exit had taken away the buzz around the platform, it was unnecessary. It was soon transformed into Mr. Musk, a self-proclaimed meme lord and “free speech absolutist”. Given his success with ventures such as PayPal, Tesla and SpaceX, it should come as no surprise that Mr. Musk garnered a huge audience on the platform. While known as an instinct-driven entrepreneur and a problem solver, Mr. Musk also has a penchant for abusive acts and words. His decision to buy Twitter for $54.20 a share seems to bear this out. He tried to back away from a deal that would require him to put a good portion of his personal fortune into the pot and the company in a lot of debt. However, after some high drama online and offline, Twitter sued them for submission as the shareholders saw significant gains.

new era

While his sacking of the top-order was expected, Mr Musk began his ownership amid rumors of a mass shooting that would affect Twitter’s 7,500 employees in various countries. He also brings up apprehensions about Twitter’s policies around the content. Mr. Trump’s return to the stage is a possibility he has talked about, although one of Mr. Musk’s early announcements as owner was the Content Moderation Council that made all such decisions. Prior to his acquisition, Mr Musk has repeatedly spoken out on the platform about a much more lax content policy, leading right-wing figures who have accused Twitter and other social platforms of left-wing bias. Less restraint can alienate advertisers who may not want to put a brand name next to problematic content. As the owner, however, Musk said to allay advertiser fears: “Twitter cannot become a free-for-all hellscape where anything can be said without consequences.”

Another direction in which Mr. Musk could take Twitter is turning it into a super-app, which will include social media, payments and many other features. While Mr. Musk is known for bringing instability to his ventures, it is also true that if anyone has the means to solve the platform’s myriad issues, including a lack of content moderation and development, he is the richest man in the world. .