Elon Musk Wants To Acquire Twitter – The Symbol of the Lost Illusions of Social Networks.
Donald Trump may be a big beneficiary of this Elon Musk takeover of Twitter.
Elon Musk was the first man in history to surpass $300 billion in wealth a few weeks ago, and today he is still at the head of a fortune of more than $260 billion. If his fortune varies so much, it is because it is primarily made up of the market valuation of the shares of his company Tesla, which has been exceptionally successful for several months now.
After making headlines throughout 2021 by buying Bitcoin, then declaring his love for a cryptocurrency unknown to the general public called Dogecoin, Elon Musk has now set his sights on Twitter.
The richest man in the world now wants to buy the world's most famous social network. Like many other wealthy personalities before him, Elon Musk seems to want to buy influence and the means to get his ideas across. Elon Musk is one of the most popular users of Twitter with over 81 million followers.
Elon Musk's plan for Twitter? To make it the global platform for free speech. What a program!
If Elon Musk chose Twitter, it is not by chance. Twitter is the most fragile prey in the world of social networks. Twitter is indeed as famous as it is unprofitable. The company founded by Jack Dorsey only made its first profit twelve years after its creation in 2006. Unlike its competitor Facebook, Twitter is struggling to find a sustainable business model.
Created just two years before Twitter, Facebook is now worth 20 times more than its competitor on the stock market.
Social networks have always denied responsibility for the content published on their platforms
Until recently, social networks did not like to be compared with traditional media. Facebook and Twitter have no journalists and only relay the views of their billions of followers. Moreover, the two godfathers of Twitter, who propelled it to the forefront and perhaps saved it from bankruptcy, are two American presidents from opposite sides: Barack Obama in 2008 and Donald Trump during his term (2017-2021). Prestigious ambassadors, but who did not bring great financial stability.
The brutal ousting of Donald Trump at the beginning of 2021 has, on the contrary, weakened Twitter and also demonstrated that the network was not just a soulless exchange hub, but that it had a conscience, like a newspaper or a TV channel. And that it could therefore be regulated by the political power, which Elon Musk ardently rejects.
Indeed, Elon Musk has always considered Twitter as his space of free expression online.
Constantly straddling the line between non-interference in the conversations of their members, and the limits to free speech imposed by society, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or TikTok realize that a bit of censorship, or moderation in the jargon of networks, is inevitable, to exclude, for example, calls to hatred or violence, or even the dissemination of mass killings.
Elon Musk's plans for the future of Twitter are more than unclear, but Donald Trump is already salivating over them
This unavoidable responsibility is all the more important as social networks, like the press since its origins, have to satisfy two customers, the readers, and the advertisers who make them live. And very well when it comes to Facebook and Google, which value their readers' data to companies. This is how these two have siphoned off three-quarters of Internet advertising... to the detriment of traditional media.
Social networks are therefore not immune to the flaw that newspapers have always been accused of, namely the possible link between advertisers and content. In the past, we had the example of young newspapers that sold good reviews to theaters that bought subscriptions. On TikTok and its Chinese version, some influencers can bring billions of sales to the brands that finance them.
The networks that escape this dialectic, such as personal messengers like WhatsApp or Telegram, are financed by its parent company, Facebook, and by its creator, the Russian billionaire, naturalized French, Pavel Dourov, a sort of Slavic Elon Musk. And every attempt to monetize their considerable public success fails.
Twitter is navigating between these two pitfalls, that of its social responsibility and that of its economic model. With Elon Musk, the social network with the little blue bird is about to lose a few more illusions. Because if Elon Musk takes over Twitter to take it out of the stock market, nobody knows what his plans for the future of the social network will be.
Some Republicans are already imagining Donald Trump's return to Twitter in the name of the sacrosanct freedom of expression that Elon Musk now wants to be the guarantor of at the global level.
Perhaps the worst is yet to come for Twitter or the best. It depends on the point of view you choose to adopt.
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