The headlines read ‘Elon buys a chunk of Twitter’ and this was not an exaggeration. Elon Musk, the controversial boss of Tesla, purchased US$ three billion worth of stock in microblogging and social networking service Twitter.
Following this deal, Musk, the Telsa and SpaceX Chief Executive Officer emerged as Twitter’s single largest individual shareholder. This was of course not expected as around two weeks prior Musk had suggested that he might even start his very own social media platform.
Twitter boss Jack Dorsey stepped down as CEO to fully devote his time to Square that is now known as Block and was replaced by then CTO Parag Agrawal who is the present CEO of Twitter.
A board seat comes with the purchase that is said to be roughly 9.2% of Twitter. It was assumed by many that Elon Musk will use his board seat to perhaps influence the future direction of Twitter, but it was confirmed later that Musk would not be taking a board seat at Twitter.
The news sent Twitter stocks soaring in price but employees were not very sure and posted their concerns on internal message boards. This was especially with regard to how Musk may alter the company’s moderation of content. A very sensitive subject on any day.
Twitter announced that in response to the concerns of employees it would organize a town hall format session where Twitter team members could ask questions and raise concerns.
Twitter Blue
Musk also perhaps previewed his purchase by running a poll on his Twitter page asking followers if they would like to see an edit button? Over four million votes later, Twitter itself revealed that Twitter Blue subscribers can expect to see an edit tweet button in the coming months. Twitter Blue is the company’s premium monthly subscription service that offers many perks and benefits to users.
Twitter is on an ambitious plan to double its revenue and host 315 million users on a daily basis by 2023. This program has witnessed the rapid rollout, testing and or killing of new features based on user feedback and adoption.
Elegant Media, one of Australia’s learning mobile app developers has extensive experience in creating, testing and deploying new features that add value to the user experience.
Twitter discontinued its version of Stories known as Fleets and also closed down its TikTok precursor, Vine. This was indeed unfortunate as Vine was a popular short form video content platform. Twitter also shut down Periscope, which was its dedicated app for live video just before live shopping and the video-first creator economy went on to mainstream adoption.
Even today Twitter remains true to its original concept as a text-based social networking product but Elon Musk may have another agenda for Twitter and his entrepreneurial experience may be a boost or burden to the company’s exciting growth plans, that are thought to include augmented reality app design.
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Twitter of Today
Today Twitter has over 5,000 employees who can all work remotely alongside an extremely liberal and vocal corporate culture that saw Twitter become the first company to allow employees to permanently work from home. Tackling hate speech still remains a big issue for Twitter. The company has invested significant investments in order to promote its policies and platform rules.
Hate speech can have important impacts and can serve to discredit the Twitter platform. Social platforms such as Twitter can be easily hijacked by extremists of all types that use the extensive reach of Twitter to benefit and further their own agendas.
Twitter is all about freedom of speech or ‘freedom of typing’ as some say. Twitter users can leverage the reach of the platform to share their views, thoughts, opinions, ideas and concerns, very easily and in a matter of seconds.
That is why the proposal to bring an edit button is not welcome by all. Some critics say that such a feature will empower those who promote fake news and dark agendas.
Freedom of Type
By default, all Tweets are publicly visible but Twitter users can restrict their Tweets only to followers or selected audiences. Users can block, mute and remove those other users they do not want to interact with and Tweets can be made via the website, smartphones using mobile apps and even by SMS in certain markets.
As with many other social platforms, Twitter users can gather followers based on the popularity of their Tweets. Original content that is often educational, informational, fun or entertaining is likely to receive more interest, interaction, engagement and followers. Twitter users can retweet those tweets that they like and also popular tweets can be liked by followers.
Jack Dorsey the creator of Twitter posted the very first Tweet in 2006 when he typed “just setting up my twttr”. Such is the value of Twitter the very first tweet was recently sold in 2021 by Jack Dorsey to Sina Estavi, a Malaysian businessman. He received the metadata of the original tweet along with a digitally signed certificate that was verified by Dorsey himself.