Was it the week that X died? The platform, previously seen as an ideal marketplace for information exchange, has suffered its biggest breach to date.
Bluesky, the latest competitor to X, has amassed 16 million users. 1 million in 24 hours last week. Hundreds of thousands of people have quit Twitter since Donald Trump won the election on November 6th.
The impetus was Elon Musk, owner of Company X and the world's richest man, to transform the social media site and use it as a megaphone to push Trump into the White House.
The incoming US president said Musk will become head of the new Department of Government Efficiency. The acronym Doge, a play on the dog internet meme and the virtual currency Dogecoin, began as a joke by Dogecoin's creators and skyrocketed in value after Mr. Musk. In 2021, he named it “The People's Code.”
Although Musk now sits at the center of the U.S. government, his actions do not require Senate approval and he can continue to work in the private sector. He is allowed to keep X and its 204 million followers, as well as head electric car company Tesla and rocket company SpaceX. For the first time in history, big tech billionaires are directly shaping democracy, not just indirectly through the media.
“I don't know of any precedent for this approach,” said Rob Engdahl, president of technology analyst firm Engdahl, who has worked with companies such as Microsoft, Sony, and Dell.
As recently as 2022, Mr. Musk tweeted “For Twitter to be worthy of the public's trust, it must be politically neutral. That effectively means upsetting the far right and far left equally,” he tweeted. that “Mr. Trump will be 82 years old at the end of his term, far too old to be the CEO of anything, let alone the United States.”
A few months later, when Mr. Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion, he fired content moderators and charged for account verification. This meant that people could buy influence. Twitter rebranded to X, shed millions of users and reinstated Trump's account, which had been suspended after the January 2021 White House riot.
The proliferation of alt-right criticism, hate speech, and bots on X, as well as Mr. Musk's own clash with the British government during the August riots, has increased anxiety among X users. of guardian and observer announced last week that it could no longer maintain a presence on the site and would no longer post. Author Stephen King left, saying it had become “too harmful.” Oscar winners Barbra Streisand and Jamie Lee Curtis left the stage.
“X has effectively become Truth Social Premium,” said Mark Carrigan, author of “X.” academic social mediareferring to President Trump's far-right social media platforms. And the buzz in the tech world is that President Trump's “Truth Social” could be folded into “X.”
If this happens, whose interests will take priority? Will Mr. Musk suppress or encourage criticism of the authoritarian governments he does business with? Who is the puppet or paymaster in Donald and Elon's media show?
“If that happens, a political super app masquerading as social media could become the ultimate amplification machine for President Trump's ideas,” said James Kirkham of Iconic, who advises brands like Uber and EA Sports on digital strategy. It will happen,” he says. “Forget about Facebook and Fox News. The real heart of the Republican digital strategy may be X.”
“I'm hopeful that X and Truth Social will merge,” Engdahl said. “But given how overvalued Truth Social is right now, this could be one of those efforts between Musk and Trump.”
The bromance between the world's two biggest egos is mutually beneficial, as long as the two transactional, power-hungry, impulsive people get along. President Trump is hawkish on China, one of Tesla's most profitable markets. Mr. Trump essentially campaigned against electric vehicle manufacturing. Trump is a protectionist. Mr. Musk opposes tariffs. When it comes to climate change, they are against it.
Jonathan Monten, professor of political science at UCL, is skeptical about the sustainability of the relationship. “What Mr. Musk used against Mr. Trump was private money, both to provide a platform to, or to use, a more favorable pro-Trump agenda.” .
“It's unclear what continuing purpose or use Mr. Musk actually has. Yes, this is some kind of celebrity story, but that's the Trump brand. I've got one story, and tomorrow I'll tell another celebrity's story.'' The early 2010s connected and informed activists, artists, lawyers, academics, policymakers, journalists, and experts of all kinds. Share, exchange ideas and track events in real time.
While it's easy to paint Mr. Musk as a bogeyman, some argue that it was the emergence of TikTok and algorithmic timelines that fundamentally disrupted Twitter. As social media optimizes for scale and profit at the expense of user experience, algorithms will prioritize the “best” content – content that screams loudest or is most specifically tailored to users. It has become. Curated accounts and “latest” content to follow have been pushed to the side.
“I think Mr. Musk has done some harmful things, and I think part of that is the logic of evolving social media platforms,” Carrigan said. “The impact of the ad-based model encourages certain ways of organizing platforms, with negative consequences.”
Bluesky, which was the most popular app in the app store on Friday, has become an option for X refugees, but its 16 million users pale in comparison to Meta's Threads. reported With 275 million monthly active users, X Approximately 317 million..
Defender of “fediverse” is a single account for any social media network, just as a Gmail account allows you to send email to any email address or call users on other networks from your mobile phone number. argues that there must be.
Platforms have power when it comes to blocking social networks so users can't leave. Instead, new social networks, including Bluesky, are built on “ecosystems” that enable interconnection.
No one knows what will happen to X, with predictions ranging from collapse to turning into an anti-Trump platform if Musk and the president get into a spat, or even becoming a training ground for Musk's xAI venture. be. AI could engulf social media, with xAI valued at $40 billion, roughly the price Musk paid for Twitter.
Source: www.theguardian.com
