Musk said when he found the right person to replace him, he would abide by the results of this poll.

Musk’s Twitter Changes

Unless you have been hiding under a rock for the last year you might have heard that Elon Musk bought Twitter. Then after Musk hauled a sink into the headquarters of Twitter, parts, pieces and people from the company have slowly been going down the proverbial drain. The billionaire Tesla CEO has been forced to make huge cost cuts and scramble to find more sources of revenue to justify the $44 billion purchase.

Today we are looking at a couple of reporters’ responses to Musk’s efforts at Twitter. According to socialmediatoday.com some of the changes being made might be useful, but for the most part, the writer Andrew Hutchinson says:

“But for all the noise, for all the media coverage, for all the discussion that Musk has generated in his time as ‘Chief Twit’, he hasn’t actually changed anything much. Like, at all.”

Here is a look at just a few changes Musk has put in place

1. Paid verification

Musk’s first big announcement, of course, was his paid verification plan, charging users $8 per month to get a blue checkmark, so they can digitally tag themselves as celebrities in the app. That one flopped. Musk wanted to charge $20 at first.

2. Account reinstatements

A significant signal of his intentions to make Twitter more free and open was Musk’s announcement that he would reinstate the profiles of users that had been previously banned from the app. It later became a poll among users, which has become Musk’s resource for big decisions. Over the last month, Twitter has re-instated about 60,000 accounts belonging to users who had broken the platform’s rules, because Musk wants to start new with a clean slate.

3. No Doxxing

Elon Musk has, however, announced one significant policy shift:

“When someone shares an individual’s live location on Twitter, there is an increased risk of physical harm. Moving forward, we’ll remove Tweets that share this information, and accounts dedicated to sharing someone else’s live location will be suspended.”

After an incident in which his young son was confronted by a stalker, Elon decided to take decisive action against any Twitter account that shares live location info, to avoid potential harm. Most would likely agree with the “no doxxing” policy. But then most of us don’t have a private jet they are worried could be tracked on a public airway tracking app.

4. Banning Links to other Social Apps

Twitter also banned links to selected competing social platforms for a few hours on Sunday, before reversing course pretty quickly due to massive backlash. This was a dumb policy, which Twitter seemingly acknowledged by removing all references to it pretty fast. Essentially, Twitter sought to ban all links to Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Nostr, and Post.

Why these apps? Why not YouTube, or TikTok?

Political Ads Return Revenue to Twitter

Finally, the latest announced change on Twitter was to address political advertising. The apnews.com has a story regarding the relaxing of rules for what seems to most of us to be the very reason Twitter was having problems, to begin with. They unleashed political ads, allowed uncensored political hate speech, and found out rather quickly they had to ban certain people.

A majority of political ads attempted to influence American voters and were being produced by foreign adversaries of the U.S. Well Musk thinks his personal free speech beliefs are more important. I suppose when you spend $44 billion on a smallish troubled media platform you have to find ways to support that investment.

The company tweeted late Tuesday that “we’re relaxing our ads policy for cause-based ads in the U.S. We also plan to expand the political advertising we permit in the coming weeks,” the company said from its Twitter Safety account.

This week it was announced that Twitter has cut its Trust and Safety team. These are the people that were overseeing the content of tweets to prevent violent or sexual topics from being shared on the platform. This can be nothing short of disastrous in many people’s opinion.

So many people have already bailed out of Twitter and this removal of oversight departments at Twitter will likely have many more leaving. It’s rumored that Twitter is considering expanding the length of tweets from 140 characters to 4,000 characters.

Twitter banned all political advertising in 2019, reacting to growing concern about misinformation spreading on social media.

This digital drama at Twitter has only just begun. It should keep us entertained throughout the year 2023. If you have already abandoned Twitter we here at Seeflection.com will try to keep you up to date on the circus of unpaid rent for the Twitter building, laid-off or fired workers or whatever weird idea Musk comes up with next.

read more at socialmediatoday.com

you might also like apnews.com