SOPA Images via Getty ImagesElon Musk has bought the social network Twitter for $44 billion.
TWITTER – Many more or less well-known figures on Twitter have reported significant drops in the number of subscribers to their profile in the wake of the announcement of the acquisition of the platform by the controversial Elon Musk, and this is not a priori not accident, according to the Californian company.
“It’s strange to lose about 35,000 subscribers in one night,” wrote, for example, on Tuesday, April 26, the account “Auschwitz Memorial” (1.3 million subscribers), which tweets photos of victims of the concentration camps with their stories every day .
“Strange. I just lost over 8,000 subscribers in two hours. Did I say something wrong?” For his part, Mark Hamill, actor best known for his role as Luke Skywalker in Star Wars, was surprised on Monday night.
Several figures on the American left, from Barack Obama to Bernie Sanders, have lost several thousand subscribers, while elected conservatives have accumulated as many.
Contacted by AFP, Twitter replied that these fluctuations appear to be mainly due to an increase in the number of profiles created or deactivated, rather than routine robot account removal operations.
On Monday, April 25, Twitter’s board of directors accepted Elon Musk’s $44 billion takeover proposal.
The announcement was greeted with excitement by fans of the quirky Tesla CEO, who espouses an absolute vision of freedom of expression, and with horror by supporters of rigorous content moderation, anti-disinformation and anti-speech.
Slogans like #LeaveTwitter have gone viral.
Progressive accounts lose followers, conservatives gain
Former President Barack Obama, the most followed person on Twitter with more than 131 million subscribers, lost 300,000 following the news, according to American broadcaster NBC.
Trump Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene, on the other hand, would have won almost 100,000 more in 24 hours. This controversy-elected official, whose personal profile has been blocked by the platform, has widely welcomed the takeover.
“It’s really quite special to see conservative accounts gaining large numbers of followers today,” Republican lawmaker Matt Gaetz said Tuesday.
Elon Musk says he wants to restore trust in Twitter, which he believes is a global public space essential to democracy. For Jack Dorsey, the platform’s founder, “Elon Musk’s goal of creating a platform that is ‘maximally trustworthy and deeply inclusive’ is the right thing to do.”
He thanked current CEO Parag Agrawal and the multi-billionaire on Monday “for getting the company out of an impossible situation. This is the right way. I mean it with all my heart.”
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