With 238 million users, Twitter is the smallest of the big platforms, but its influence extends far beyond its popularity. In a media ecosystem where the big headlines no longer decide what “is the news that deserves to be published,” to use the famous New York Times slogan, Twitter is the blackboard on which the issues of the day are written appear. It’s the stage where we participate in The Conversation. However, it is not a public service and never has been. It thrives on sponsored content, paid referral accounts and hashtags, and marketing data to third parties, like the rest of the companies that combine third-party content with recommendation algorithms. But unlike other platforms, it has never been good at this business model. In 2021, their net loss was $221 million, comparing well to 2020 when they lost $1.4 billion. Parag Agrawal, the CEO who succeeded Jack Dorsey in 2021, aimed to double annual revenue and reach 315 million monetizable daily active users by the end of 2023. With an industry in free fall that has just collectively lost more than half of its stock market value, it’s unlikely it would match it. On the other hand, by removing the 11% of spam bots said to be hosted by the platform, they would lose more than 26 million users. Elon Musk may have destroyed Twitter, but he may also have saved it from certain death or worse.
When Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post in 2013, the headlines were apocalyptic. “Why Jeff Bezos and not Warren Buffett?” headlined a Fortune magazine article, suggesting that the other option would have been more desirable. It appeared to be part of a trend after Steve Jobs’ widow The Atlantic and Salesforce founder Marc Benioff bought Time magazine. The Internet had sunk traditional newspapers and was about to devour them. “This marks the beginning of a phase in which the main beneficiaries of the Golden Age are reinvesting in our public intelligence infrastructure,” wrote journalist John Cassidy in The New Yorker. References to Hearst, Murdoch and Citizen Kane flew.
A tech mogul with the second largest lobbying budget in Washington competing for big government contracts could only be bad news for the reputation of a newspaper like the Post. With so many conflicts of interest, how have they maintained their credibility? But the legendary headboard was far from its former glory. Under the direction of Ben Bradlee, the venerable local newspaper had doubled its circulation from 450,000 to 800,000 with Watergate and the Pentagon Papers. All of the president’s men cemented his legend 20 years later. “The Post was well established in the national headline circles and was measured daily against the Times for talent, breadth of subject matter, international coverage, sophistication and all the other criteria of an ambitious national daily,” writes James Fallows in The Atlantic. When Bezos pulled out the wallet, the Post was broke. He lost money and fired journalists. It had a circulation of half a million copies, a far cry from the Wall Street Journal’s two million and the New York Times’ 1.6 million.
Like Musk, Bezos bought it above its asking price ($250 million) and offered a grandiose, philanthropic argument. “It is the newspaper of the capital of the most important country in the world and plays an important role in democracy,” he said on stage at the Economic Club of Washington. It also started changing the subscription model. “The Internet has eroded all the advantages of local newspapers,” he says in an interview. A cheaper and more comprehensive subscription model would help them take advantage of their only benefit: free worldwide distribution. But he hasn’t fired anyone, quite the opposite: He’s invested heavily in the editorial team, hired dozens of journalists and streamlined his digital processes with a content manager designed by Amazon engineers for The Washington Post. Within three years, the Post office doubled its traffic and started to report profits. In 2017 they announced that they had one million digital subscribers. It is a newsroom with 900 journalists with new prestige. And it has become “the infrastructure of our public intelligence”, but not through its headlines, but through a content management system: Arc. Today it is the backbone of more than 2,000 titles, including EL PAÍS. Arc fulfills the same role in the news supply chain as Amazon for consumer goods and AWS (Amazon Web Services) for internet distribution. Bezos respected the Post’s editorial independence not to save democracy, but to sell a product that would fit seamlessly into the overall logic of his business. Arc Publishing is part of the Amazon empire, a software service that lives in the AWS cloud and uses its automation algorithms but is sold as “the CMS”. [gestor de contenidos] from the Washington Post.”
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After the rocky purchase of Twitter, Musk has also started changing its subscription model. He wants to protect freedom of speech, but he also wants to get paid $8 a month for becoming a Twitter Blue member and keeping — or getting — the famous blue user verification icon. He says it’s “the only way to beat spam bots and trolls,” and we know he thinks so because he said so in a public exchange with Stephen King. Emilio Ferrara, one of the researchers Musk hired to assess the issue before making a purchase, explained in an interview with AP, “The value of the platform is a social experience, a collective space where you can speak civilized and speak freely can without the interference of these malicious accounts.”
The measure for verifying the accounts is interesting. It could neutralize the army of fake accounts targeting congressmen or spreading Russian propaganda, but it’s unlikely to sway the US president while he’s orchestrating a coup like Trump did on January 6, 2021, and for which he is brief fell on it. . And it’s more interesting in a broader context of new social networks that thrived with the slogan “Protect the right to freedom of expression” after said ejection and accused the big platforms of censorship with their policies of moderation. It is a market of at least 69 million users that includes the social networks Parler, Gab, Gettr, Rumble and Truth, those of former President Trump. The week Musk announced he was buying Twitter, his friend Kanye West, who had canceled over anti-Semitic comments, announced his intention to buy Parler because “in a world where conservative views are considered controversial, we need to make sure we’re expressing the right to liberty.” We’ll see the role they play during Tuesday’s midterm elections, where Biden is playing for the House and Senate.
Tycoon Elon Musk carries a sink at the Twitter offices in San Francisco on October 26. AFP (AFP)
In his early days, Musk fired top management and much of the workforce, and began withdrawing the company from public scrutiny. She’s delisting on Tuesday, freeing the tycoon from the pressure of the quarterly reports that every publicly traded company is required to submit. It continues to have the support of founder and charismatic leader Jack Dorsey, who is expected to be part of the management committee. Like everyone else, Musk says Twitter has untapped potential. Will he want to use it as a tool to defend his interests and manipulate public opinion, or will he follow the path Bezos has taken and preserve the plan’s integrity in favor of a larger project based on his global strategy?
Like Bezos, Musk is privatizing large infrastructures. Throughout his entrepreneurial career, he has attempted, with varying degrees of success, to privatize the money exchange (Paypal), the atmosphere (Starlink), outer space (SpaceX), transportation (Tesla), its infrastructure (The Boring Company), and the human spirit ( neurolink). They are interconnected projects around a vision: a network of vehicles, transportation systems and autonomous buildings controlled by nanosatellites and powered by sustainable energy stored in powerful batteries made from metals mined in different parts of the solar system. A year ago, Musk announced a new policy of alliances in his network of nanosatellites and phone operators to connect cell phones anywhere in the world, starting with giant AT&T. Twitter could offer data connectivity around the world via this new global telephony infrastructure.
Musk has already said that “buying Twitter is an accelerator for the development of X, the app for everything”. This plan could allow Blue Twitter users to call and receive video, voice, and text messages on their phones, computers, and vehicles, as well as pay for purchases and use other services from anywhere without having to transact or exchange money having to pay Starlink. The idea wouldn’t be new: Facebook offers free data plans to millions of people around the world through its FreeBasics program. It is an access to the Internet limited to the applications that Facebook chooses. With Twitter, Musk could provide access to a constellation of apps and services like Android and iOS do, turning Starlink into a mobile operating system. Also on your own internet. In the short term, Musk could be as good for Twitter as Bezos is for the Post. Whether both can be good for democracy remains to be seen.
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