Twitter’s future after Musk’s purchase, more questions than answers | USA newspaper

New York, (EFE). Elon Musk’s purchase of the social network Twitter was one of the most talked about topics globally this week, but so far there are more questions than answers about the future of this network that currently has 229 million daily users, according to their figures. .
Thousands of articles published in all languages ​​question the power some individuals wield over social networks used by millions of people, the necessity of regulating them or not for the greater good, and warnings of “censorship,” which Musk says are excessive. on Twitter.
The $44,000 million investment that meant Twitter’s purchase of Musk actually forced him to dispose in just three days — from Tuesday to Thursday — of 9.6 million shares in his electric car company Tesla, of which they reported $8.5 million. According to documents submitted by the Securities Exchange Commission.
How do we explain all this effort that the richest man in the world – according to Forbes with a fortune of 246 thousand million dollars – for a relatively small social network, also in a state of helplessness, because it is always at a loss?
Musk’s promises to banks
Yesterday, CNBC Business Channel spoke about Musk’s negotiations with the big banks that helped him fund the operation and explained some of the proposals made by the eccentric South African millionaire, as ideas rather than tough and detailed commitments.
Internally, Musk plans to reduce the salaries of managers, so high that they amounted to $630 million last year (an increase of 33% compared to 2020), while he does not rule out resorting to layoffs within the group, according to another. Information provided by Bloomberg.
As for the best way to “monetize” from a free network to date — with the exception of the paid Twitter Blue, which costs $2.99 ​​a month — Musk’s intentions are unclear after he himself tweeted and then erased his desire to reduce reliance on the ad network.
CNBC suggests that one of the most likely projects will be charged for tweets that contain important information or go viral, or that include content from a verifiable website or third party, but Musk did not provide any other evidence.
moderation and control
But if there’s one thing Musk hasn’t kept quiet about, it’s in his crusade against supposed censorship of Twitter, advocating – here in support of the American libertarian right – a policy of moderation imposed on the network to curb hate speech.
An article in today’s Wall Street Journal asks, “With all the problems in the world, why did Musk decide he could fix this on his own?” , and comments on a group of billionaires in the radical right orbit, some close to Trump, was a major influence in Musk’s efforts to take control of Twitter to lift the brakes off the network.
Musk has been tweeting for days about the far right and the far left, positioning himself in a sort of progressive middle, though he hinted last Thursday that progressive “bigotry”, moving increasingly left, is almost over to the right.
Among the American right, there is a common notion that social networks are being taken over by progressives who enforce “wake up” or politically correct content, and always censor conservative voices, and just yesterday the Wall Street Journal — always close to big capital — published – An article in which he explained in detail entitled “Musk Can Fix Twitter”.
Today, he’s answered by another article in the New York Times that supposedly proves the opposite: citing a study conducted between April and August 2020, revealing that network algorithms in fact amplify the tweets of conservative politicians, over progressive ones, in seven different ways. Countries.
The New York Times itself gave a voice yesterday to Frances Hogan, the CEO who left Facebook to denounce its bad practices, who said that modifying content on a network never equates to censorship – and set an example of strictly regulated pharmaceutical ads – and argued that the US follows Europe’s path to making algorithms More transparent and controllable.
Javier Otazu