Elon's Twitter: Staying a Float

Elon’s Twitter: Staying a Float

On his first day at Twitter, Elon Musk carried a sink, tweeting ‘let that sink in’. Exactly what he meant.

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After acquiring Twitter for 44 billion dollars, Elon Musk is now plagued with issues. In this article, we will discuss more technological issues and less politics and business.

Left wing bias

One of Elon Musk’s motivations for buying out Twitter is to restore free speech and make it the true digital town square. Wokeness is the prevailing culture of the company. Because of their algorithm, conservative viewpoint contrary to the leftist narrative is either a shadow ban or outright cancellation. The permanent ban of President Trump and Babylon Bee demonstrated this.

Fake accounts and bots

Fake accounts and bots comprised around five to eight percent of the total twitter accounts. Bots are automated accounts created by third-party vendors using Twitter’s public API. Like real human beings, they send out tweets, follow other users, like, and retweeting other people’s posts. Bad actors from scammers to politicians used fake accounts to spread fake news and propaganda. To Elon Musk, it’s like he over paid for Twitter. The social media worth is with the number of real people accounts.

Data Privacy concerns

Back in 2019, Twitter was caught up in a privacy scandal. The privacy breach involved the inappropriate use of phone numbers and email addresses in order to serve up targeted ads to users. These phone numbers and email addresses were part of a two-factor authentication security and security procedures. It was never intended to become part of a marketing or advertising database. Twitter pointed out that personal information was not shared with third parties but can not say how many of its 330 million users were impacted. This raised more doubts about just how Twitter actually has on user data.

Financial woes

Although Twitter’s income came from advertising, it has not turned a profit in a decade. In fact, social media lost $222 million in net income for 2021. To cope up with expenses, Twitter did shady deals like user data on sale and collaborating with governments both foreign and local on censorship of its critics.
Elon Musk plans to address these problems with the following solutions.

Twitter Blue

Account to Twitter “It is an opt-in, paid monthly subscription that adds a blue checkmark to your account and offers early access to select new features, like Edit Tweet”. It is the social media’s way to verify an account’s identity. Previously reserved for celebrities, it is now open to the public for about eight dollars a month. Bots accounts are excluded. Furthermore, this discourages fake news as well as provides a revenue stream.

Open source Algorithm

For transparency, Elon Musk will open source the recommendation algorithm to the public. According to the open source company Red Hat “Open source is a term that originally referred to open source software (OSS). Open source software is code that is designed to be publicly accessible—anyone can see, modify, and distribute the code as they see fit.” The source code is “simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comments, written using a human-readable programming language like C or Python, usually as plain text”

Twitter, the Super App

In the 90s, Elon Musk founded a startup online banking company called X.com. Later, it merged with the company Confinity which became PayPal plan and later acquired by Ebay. Elon Musk, continuing his dream with X.com, plans to turn Twitter into an all purpose application similar to China’s WeChat app. WeChat combined instant messaging, social media and mobile payment. Binance, a crypto trading company, partnered with Elon Musk , invested 500 million to add payment features to Twitter.