My thoughts on Elon Musk's Twitter takeover
Elon Musk bought Twitter. 1 With Twitter Blue he tries to put a paywall behind Twitter: You get a verification mark for eight dollars per month. As one would expect this is a way to monetize Twitter, but it causes problems.
Elon Musk stated, that the Tweets or replies of accounts with verification mark will be prioritized. Needless to say, like on every other app, algorithms select the Tweets you should see. But prioritizing the Tweets of the people, that pay money is just wrong. Moreover, this being an approach to remove bots from Twitter is just embarrassing.
Putting a price-shield on speech is utterly insane. Elon Musk bought Twitter to maintain a platform with complete free-speech. Sounds ironic, doesn’t it?
Fake accounts
But let’s get to the real problem: fake accounts.
People can easily get their account verified now. This is a enormous problem because of fake accounts, your fake account can look like a real account so easy now.
US Senator Markey tweeted:
“A @washingtonpost reporter was able to create a verified account impersonating me—I’m asking for answers from @elonmusk who is putting profits over people and his debt over stopping disinformation. Twitter must explain how this happened and how to prevent it from happening again.” See original Tweet
I genuinely had to click on peoples accounts and check wether it is an official or a parody account in the last couple of days. When releasing such a feature, maybe implement a feature that highlights official accounts (e.g. a different coloured verification mark).
But the urgent problem with this is, that there were literally fake accounts making wrong statements and companies such as Eli Lilli and Company would loose billions of dollars.
This feature literally causes stocks crashing2 and companies loosing billions. Maybe plan features better next time, Elon!
My opinion
I do not know if most of the layoffs at Twitter were justified. And if so, I do not have a problem with Elon kicking people out of the company (as long as it is legally okay) — he is a businessman. But since he purchased the company, he did not manage his business right.
Footnotes
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By the way, $TSLA (Tesla, owned by Elon Musk) crashed. ↩