EFirst he wanted, then he didn’t want to. After all, Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion. First he throws out the board of directors, dissolves the board of directors and dismisses half of the approximately 7,500 employees by e-mail. Then Musk realizes that he needs one or the other and calls them back. First, the multi-billionaire says he will free Twitter from the supposed yoke of oppression. He then assures advertisers that Twitter is “warm and welcoming” to everyone.
As soon as companies jump off, the “Chief Twit” threatens that he will shame them publicly. Verified subscriber accounts suddenly cost eight dollars a month. If you don’t identify yourself, you’re kicked out. There should be new features that sound as if the rocket man wants to make Twitter a mixture of Amazon, Google and Facebook. With every new statement, with every step, Elon Musk shows that he is not only missing the master plan for his outrageously expensive toy. He has no plan at all. No business model, no concept of political publicity. And he didn’t understand what Twitter is.
Trump will definitely come back
Facebook, Google and Youtube are designed to make billions from advertising. They earn the billions through attention. If they are not prevented by law and order, the corporations are entitled to use all means to stoke this up, including the exploitation of all those who contribute to the digital cosmos. Twitter, on the other hand, is an overrated opinion bubble that didn’t start out as an advertising platform.
The service quickly transports useful and important messages, but above all, rows of choleric people hit the roof and a supposed avant-garde practices rhetorical kickboxing. For demagogues like Donald Trump, Twitter is perfect as an instrument of power. Since his own baiting machine called “Truth Social” isn’t working, he’ll want to return to it – Musk invited him – to seize power in the United States, whether he wins or loses the next presidential election. Twitter is – without moderation – like the similarly timed service Telegram, a medium of enlightenment and overpowering in equal measure.
What Elon Musk, who stages himself as a knight of freedom, has on Twitter, he not only notices from the fact that advertisers jump off, but also from the fact that rows of protagonists contact him who understand freedom of expression as lies, hate speech and propaganda and the destroy democratic discourse. For example, the Briton George Galloway, an ardent supporter of the regimes in the Kremlin and in Tehran, who is a presenter in the service of the Russian state broadcaster RT, complained to Musk that his account was identified as “Russian state affiliated media” – an undoubtedly correct characterization is.
The example quickly caught on among account holders who were sympathetic to the Kremlin: Putin propagandist and RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan asked Musk to free her from the “shadowban”. A “shadowban” means that tweets from specific accounts will not appear or be found via hashtag.
According to the NGO collective Disinformation Situation Center, the Putin apologist Scott Ritter, a former US Army officer who blames the war crimes of the Russian army in Ukraine on the Ukrainians and the US, managed to briefly return to Twitter , before his account was blocked again. Meanwhile, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova called on Musk to break EU sanctions against Russian state media.
Twitter therefore needs a cool, clever, democratically minded head at the top, a business man, but above all a statesman, not a wandering, self-absorbed “Chief Twit”. There is a lot to do there if the service is not to get out of hand. Too much for someone who still builds electric cars and rockets and dresses up as a gladiator for Heidi Klum’s Halloween party.
The fact that Musk recommends voting Republicans for Tuesday’s midterms, the midterm elections to the American Congress, speaks volumes. “Shared power reins in the worst excesses of either party,” the multi-billionaire tweeted. “That’s why I recommend voting for a Republican Congress because the presidency is democratic.”
shared power? Republican candidate Donald Trump has already attempted a coup d’etat by storming the Capitol. He has nothing to do with the separation of powers and democratic rules. We’ll see if Musk is at his service with Twitter.