Sonny Aragba-Akpore writes that the social networking platform might lose some of its attractions
If Elon Musk goes ahead with emphasis on subscriptions at the expense of its revenue generating advertising, Twitter may become an all-comers’ platform and, in the process, the glamour associated with it will be lost. Although he has said it will encourage free speech by subscribers, but that too will be an issue as subscribers may take advantage of this and say what may be uncomplimentary to others.
Conscious of the reality of what successful people need to sustain their businesses, Musk last week invited18 of his billionaire friends, all members of his plutocratic club, including CZ, the founder and CEO of the world’s biggest crypto exchange, Binance, to a meeting.
After a presentation to his invited friends, the world’s richest man shared with them his dream for Twitter and how he wants to make the micro-blogging platform more profitable and the beacon of free speech.
He pleaded for their support. After his presentation, his friends doled out a check for $7.1 billion for him inside the meeting room.
Oracle CEO, Larry Ellison the seventh richest man in the world and Musk’s personal friend, led the funding round by writing a $1 billion check. CZ, the CEO of Binance, wrote a check for $500 million. The money raised was for equity contributions and an investment in Musk’s dream to buy Twitter. The idea was to support their friend, his mission, and his cash raising drive to buy Twitter.
One of the investors, Ben Horowitz, co-founder and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, tweeted about the investment with excitement. He said: “Elon is the one person we know and perhaps the only person in the world who has the courage, brilliance, and skills to fix all of these and build the public square that we all hoped for and deserve.
“We invested because we believe in him and Jack’s vision to connect the world and we believe in Elon’s brilliance to finally make it what it was meant to be. Though Twitter has a great promise as a public square, it suffers from a myriad of difficult issues ranging from bots to abuse to censorship. Being a public company solely reliant on an advertising business model exacerbates all of these,” he added.
Musk raised about N5trillion at a sitting, not because he was a magician but because he had good friends.
And as it is, there are two currencies a man needs in the world to grow rich and become more financially successful. The first currency is money and the other is human capital.
Before the Twitter deal was reached last month, it has been an open book with advertising as its major source of income but with Musk taking over later in the year 2022, emphasis shifts to subscriptions whereby subscribers especially those tagged as premium users and blue subscribers will pay more to deploy information on Twitter.
Regulations may be difficult for the new owners as subscribers may be at liberty to post whatever they desire no matter how offensive such posts could be or no matter the harm there from.
It’s not clear how Musk hopes to manage this, more so when a public domain now rests with a private individual who will run the service at his whims.
‘In a tweet, Musk insisted “Twitter will always be free for casual users, but maybe a slight cost for commercial/government users.”
He said he wants to improve the social media company’s ability to make money. “Ultimately, the downfall of the Freemasons was giving away their stonecutting services for nothing,” Musk tweeted.
But despite its high-profile name, Twitter has long lagged behind the growth of Silicon Valley rivals. It’s advertising revenue of $4.5 billion in 2021 was dwarfed by the $115 billion brought in by Instagram and Facebook owner.
Twitter’s 217 million daily active users are a fraction of Meta’s combined 1.9 billion daily active users.
Facebook and Instagram do not currently charge users for access to the platforms and their features. Musk may be seeking to emulate the sales model of Microsoft-owned LinkedIn, which charges users a monthly fee for access to premium features and had revenues of $10.3 billion in 2021.
The suggestion of paid accounts is one of the changes to the platform Musk has mooted. Other plans include adding end-to-end encryption for direct messages, reducing content moderation in favour of greater free speech, and introducing an ‘edit button’ to change the tweets after they are published. “Let’s make Twitter maximum fun!” Musk tweeted recently.
Musk’s bid for Twitter was part-financed by debt commitments from a number of major banks including Morgan Stanley, Barclays and Bank of America. The billionaire also sold $8.5 billion in Tesla shares in the space of a few days, but did not confirm if the shares were sold to part-fund the Twitter takeover.
Advertisers are already nervous of using Twitter if Musk prioritises free speech over potential online harms.
Musk does not see advertising as the primary revenue source for Twitter. His vision is to generate revenue for Twitter from subscriptions rather than advertising. Without having to worry about attracting and retaining advertisers, Twitter would have less pressure to focus on content moderation. This could make Twitter a sort of freewheeling opinion site for paying subscribers.
Before this deal Twitter has been aggressive in using content moderation in its attempts to address disinformation.
Musk has vowed to relax content restrictions after he struck the $44bn takeover deal. He has previously described himself as a “free speech absolutist”.
He has been vocal in his criticism of Twitter’s policies on moderating content, arguing that it needs to be a genuine forum for free speech.
“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” he said on announcing the deal.
He was quoted as saying for the purposes of emphasis that “Twitter will always be free for casual users, but maybe a slight cost for commercial/government users,” he said in a tweet.
But Twitter is yet to respond to this officially. The Tesla chief has been suggesting a number of changes to Twitter since last month. After adding the company to his cart recently, he said he wanted to enhance the platform with new features, make the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeat spam bots, and authenticate all humans.
Even before reaching a deal with Twitter, Musk had suggested few changes to the Twitter Blue premium subscription service, including slashing its price.
Twitter’s ability to shape real-time discourse, as well as the ease with which data, including geo-tagged data, can be gathered from Twitter has made it a gold mine for researchers to analyse a variety of societal phenomena, ranging from public health to politics.
Twitter data have been used to predict health related emergency conditions, measure public epidemic awareness, and model wildfire smoke dispersion.
Tweets that are part of a conversation shown in chronological order, and Twitter archive provides instant and complete access to every public Tweet. This positions Twitter as a historical chronicler of record and a de facto fact checker.
One critical issue is Musk’s ownership of Twitter, and private control of social media platforms generally, as they affect the broader public well-being. He has made several suggestions about how to change Twitter, including adding an edit button for tweets and granting automatic verification marks to premium users.
Analysts say there are numerous ways to retrieve deleted tweets, which allow researchers to study them. While some studies show significant personality differences between users who delete their tweets and those who don’t, these findings suggest that deleting tweets is a way for people to manage their online identities.
The option to edit their tweets could become another weapon that could allow users to selectively distort what they said, or deny making inflammatory remarks, which could complicate efforts to trace misinformation.
But Musk’s description of a platform free from content moderation issues is troubling in light of the algorithmic harms caused by social media platforms. Research has shown a host of these harms, such as algorithms that assign gender to users, potential inaccuracies and biases in algorithms used to glean information from these platforms, and the impact on those looking for health information online.
Because of his other businesses, Twitter’s ability to influence public opinion in the sensitive industries of aviation and the automobile industry may be a conflict of interest, and may affect the disclosure of material information necessary for shareholders. Musk has already been accused of delaying disclosure of his ownership stake in Twitter.
Musk’s 17% stake in Tesla has shrunk by more than $40 billion, almost double the equity portion he pledged in the Twitter transaction.
The purchase of Twitter by Musk, who has vowed to protect freedom of speech on the social media platform, could draw more engagement from young people. The richest man in the world with an estimated net worth of $274 billion, insists free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy. He said he will improve Twitter by enhancing the product with new features while making the platform’s algorithms open source to increase trust, eliminating spam bots and authenticating all users. Is this possible especially in a world bugged by critical considerations on how money should be spent with value?
Aragba-Akpore is a member of THISDAY Editorial Board
