Chandan Singh Banjara, Age-36,Chakdeopur
Elon Musk has famously called the social-media/microblogging platform that he acquired last year as the Internet’s de facto town square. Some would say the same of Reddit. But all’s not well in any of the town squares, and as the citizens/netizens are increasingly unhappy with the changes, what would be the future of the platforms, and how would they deal with the challenges of the digital age?
Earlier in our blog, we had dug into Elon Musk’s acquiring of Twitter, and the changes it poses for freedom of speech and disinformation. It’s not news anymore that Zuckerberg, the founder of Meta has lost his trust within most of the internet community, regardless of how influential his platform is. To recap from there, “Scholar and Author S. Zuboff says letting such power concentrate in the hands of unaccountable people like Zuckerberg, Bezos, or in this case, Musk, is merely contributing to the rise of surveillance capitalism, while we obsess over what these powerful billionaire men do, and beg their mercy to prevent disinformation and protect users’ privacies.”
And this is important, because Meta has taken the initiative to launch something new, called threads, which looks mostly like a Facebook clone – however, given the current state of Twitter, Meta’s launch saw record signups in the first twelve hours. In fact, Business Insider reports that ‘with 150 million downloads, Threads set a new record for app growth far surpassing Pokémon Go,” the previous record holder. It also managed to reach, within the short span, one-fifth the active user rate of twitter. Most of its user base seems to have jumped from their aggressive marketing and integration with Instagram.
We’ll get to threads in a bit. First, circling back to Twitter under Elon, we see from his own tweet, that the company is not doing great and has lost several advertisers. This isn’t because of threads, though. Going back to our earlier blog post on the issue, we had highlighted how several employees who were not on board with the changes or had critiques of Mr Musk were fired immediately. He had tweeted joking how they can still use their talents elsewhere, which, much to his shock, they did by joining Meta and creating a clone. People do not want to pay for a feature in a platform that does not support creators, that seems to be the TLDR of things. Twitter hoped their blue subscription would be enough to switch from an advertisement revenue model to a subscriber based model, however that did not seem to work out, and now, the advertisers do not want to come back either. Twitter is not really cracking down on the disinformation that seems to be circulating in their platform, they seem to want to focus on a lot of bigoted accounts to try and bring users back, and in the meanwhile, their pretence of free speech absolutism is falling flat.
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