Twitter Two

Tags

Top Highlights

• If episode one of Twitter’s transformation under Elon Musk was about the structure of the business, episode two is about its identity. Musk, unlike other CEOs in the social media business, has made Twitter a nakedly political platform by:   publishing internal documents in an effort to paint Twitter’s past ownership as anti-Republican; using the platform to tell his 121 million followers to vote Republican; suggesting that the Democrats took illegal and undisclosed funding from FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried to the tune of $1 billion, and reinstating controversial users such as Donald Trump and Jordan Peterson.   For comparison, Mark Zuckerberg, the much maligned leader of Facebook and other social platforms, has held back from deliberate political commentary. Zuckerberg refrained from stating political views in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal and subsequent controversies including a New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop. He painted Facebook’s role as one in which it simply complied with FBI recommendations.   So what? Musk has wielded the same story like a mace.   He published details behind Twitter’s decision to suppress coverage of Hunter Biden’s leaked laptop files in a thread dubbed the “Twitter Files”. It showed that political interests, including the “Biden team”, would routinely review and request deletion of tweets.   In 2020, when the New York Post published details of an meeting between then-vice president Joe Biden and a Ukrainian businessman, as well as other potentially compromising materials allegedly found on Hunter Biden’s laptop, Twitter   removed links to the story and marked it with an “unsafe” warning; prevented users from direct messaging links to the story, and justified the removal under the “hacked materials” policy without the knowledge of then-chief executive Jack Dorsey.   The “Twitter Files” received limited attention on television news channels other than Fox News.   Musk went on to publish details of Twitter’s use of blacklists and shadowbanning (when a user has their reach or visibility on the platform reduced without their knowledge), as well as its strategy for actively limiting the spread of accounts and posts deemed to violate its terms of use. Musk did so with a deliberate political angle summed up in a recent tweet: “The woke mind virus is either defeated or nothing else matters.”   Musk’s bravado masks an important reality: he is now an activist CEO. He is weaponising Twitter to support an ideology for society, not just the business. He recently said: "My Pronouns Are Prosecute/Fauci", a swipe at US Covid restrictions, Biden and non-binary inclusion in just five words.   Where platforms have typically relied on complicated and inscrutable terms and conditions – and executives who are apolitical enough to politely request that aggrieved users refer to those policies – Musk is making confetti of a rulebook he’s already ripped up.   What will that mean for Twitter’s bottom line and the reach of the woke mind virus? Too soon to call.