If their threats are more than hot air, that could perhaps be the biggest change of all.It’s no secret Twitter has changed dramatically since Elon Musk bought the social media platform last October for $44 billion. Twitter’s users-the very thing that makes the site a viable public forum, and therefore a potentially viable business-are talking of their last week on Twitter. As Musk takes his seat at the head of Twitter, it’s not just staff members who are thinking of jumping ship. Those would not be altogether welcome changes. Twitter has already attempted to break out from short messages, with audio service Twitter Spaces and newsletter platform Revue, but mimicking WeChat’s expansive offerings would be Musk’s most ambitious change to the platform. It’s really an excellent app, and we don’t have anything like that outside of China.” “Sort of like Twitter, plus PayPal, plus a whole bunch of things, and all rolled into one, with a great interface. That appeared to be a reference to WeChat, a Chinese super-app that allows users to chat and make video calls but also make payments and play video games, which Musk spoke of admiringly on a May podcast recorded after Twitter had accepted his bid for the company. He tweeted that his purchase of Twitter was “an accelerant to creating X, the everything app.” If Musk’s recent suggestions about Twitter’s future comes to pass, taking that role will keep him very busy. Current and former employees are split about the impact that a mass engineering exodus would have on the future of the platform. In a private text message exchange with investor Steve Jurvetson, Musk said he intended to do away with the highest level of executives and manage software development at Twitter himself. “I, like everyone, read his texts, and he looks like he wants quick changes to things that seem very important to the company,” says one former Twitter employee, who left during the takeover process and believes Musk wants to “gut” the company. Musk has told investors he plans to slash Twitter’s 7,500-strong headcount by 75 percent, according to The Washington Post-a move that has triggered employee protests and the drafting of an open letter that warns such an action would be “reckless, undermines our users’ and customers’ trust in our platform, and is a transparent act of worker intimidation.” In text messages, he expressed concerns about the company’s expenses and “unhealthy” headcount compared to that of other social media companies. Part of Musk’s business plan appears to be to cut costs-and workers-at Twitter. Musk’s suggestion that all Twitter users should be verified has sparked similar concerns because many people are not able to safely reveal their identity online. But while that may boost the platform’s business, she thinks it may undermine Twitter’s role as a digital public forum by limiting full participation to those who can pay. Jean Burgess, a professor of digital media at the Queensland University of Technology in Australia who has coauthored a book on Twitter, believes Musk will seek to expand Twitter’s experiment with Twitter Blue, a version of the app that, for $3 a month, grants users access to features like the ability to edit and undo tweets. Much of the shift was predicted to come from a big jump in subscription revenue. The New York Times reported in May that in a presentation to investors Musk claimed he would cut the contribution of ads to the company’s revenue from the approximately 90 percent it makes up today to less than 50 percent. Musk has also said he would make big changes to Twitter’s business model, which is heavily dependent on advertising. (Researchers at Twitter said that in the US and several other countries last year, right-leaning accounts got more of a boost from its algorithms than left-leaning ones.) Similarly, expert bot trackers have thrown cold water on the idea that Musk is likely to be able to sweep all the automated accounts off the platform. His text messages showed that his interest in the idea may have originated with Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey, who wrote that the service “must be an open source protocol,” much like secure messaging service Signal.īut although researchers who study social media have welcomed the idea of radical transparency in Twitter’s code, they have also warned that this won’t resolve arguments about bias, which can come from other sources, like Twitter’s data or social dynamics on the service. ![]() Musk has suggested that making the algorithm used to rank tweets open source could quash fears of any particular views having an advantage on the platform.
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