This is the fourth week Elon Musk’s picture has appeared at this point in the newsletter, and it won’t be the last. Proving he’s a shitposter who also delivers, Musk this week succeeded in his bid to acquire Twitter.
The news has flung Twitter—both the company and the platform—into a state of uncertainty that could last as long as six months while the transaction is completed.
Still, while current and former CEOs Agrawal and Jack Dorsey can expect
generous paydays if the deal goes through, rank-and-file staff were left
wondering what would happen to their place at the company, and
emotional about potential changes. Management temporarily
banning most product changes in a sign of distrust couldn’t have helped.
Meanwhile. some of those same employees have
felt the wrath of Musk’s unofficial army of trolls who hang on his every word. This came as Musk publicly questioned some of Twitter’s past moderation decisions. It prompted former CEO Dick Costolo to tweet “
bullying is not leadership”.
The platform side of Twitter is having just as rocky a time. Musk has said he wants the company’s moderation to be ‘
politically neutral’, which sounds fair until you realise he’s used
right-wing memes (
more than once) to illustrate his point, suggesting his own idea of neutrality might be a little skewed.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, conservatives were happy with the idea of a more ‘free-speech’ focused Twitter.
Seemingly organic follower count
increases for conservatives and follower losses for liberals followed the announcement of Musk’s deal. It was all enough to prompt Donald Trump to feel the heat and
finally post to Truth Social as he vowed to remain off Twitter even if Musk allowed him back.
But Musk’s understanding of content moderation issues (and how Twitter handles them) have repeatedly seemed
simplistic and naïve. A ‘free-speech’ Twitter could
undermine a lot of the company’s progress on user safety and drive away as many users as it attracts. And advertisers
might not be too keen on it, no matter how much the company
reassures them
The fact is,
we just don’t know what Musk will really do when he takes control. It might not be quite the total hellscape some predict. He’s called for things like
encrypted DMs—widely requested over the years by the kinds of people fearing his ownership of Twitter—for example.
