As a citizen in the world reshaped by Elon Musk, I wrote last month: “Elon Musk is brilliant but there is one thing he cannot achieve: a zero-censorship social media platform… Will Musk provide that freedom? My answer is IMPOSSIBLE.” Yes, I used the word “impossible” for the generation’s finest and greatest innovator.
But today, the news is that Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, has bought a big chunk of Twitter: “The billionaire Elon Musk has taken an almost $3bn (£2.3bn) stake in Twitter to become the social media platform’s largest shareholder.” The market has responded by shooting Twitter valuation up by 25%!
Yes, we were looking for a new social media platform. But he scored a slam dunk by going after an already existing one. I expect Elon to begin to exert his influence on Twitter as the nights and the days break in the coming months. Yet, I am not withdrawing my call that Musk cannot deliver a zero-censorship social media platform. Why? It is impossible.
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People, the Western world censors via private companies. China and Russia censor via the government. And that means Twitter has to censor; I am not sure Elon Musk can change that outcome because, interestingly, censorship is necessary.
Case study: when the US killed an Iranian general via drone attack when Trump was president, I saw the power of fake news and the importance of managed censorship. Iran “retaliated” by sending missiles to a base in Iraq which killed none (it warned ahead that it was sending them). Later, it went on its public TV to show images of “American soldiers” who were killed. That was fake news, but it was a necessary one as once the citizens saw those images, the demonstration stopped because Iran had avenged the death. For that to work, they censored the real news and peace reigned!
The billionaire Elon Musk has taken an almost $3bn (£2.3bn) stake in Twitter to become the social media platform’s largest shareholder.
The world’s richest man, who has a penchant for eccentric behaviour frequently involving posts on Twitter, has built a 9.2% stake in Twitter, according to filings made to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Monday.
The boss of Tesla and SpaceX, who with more than 80 million followers ranks in the top 10 most popular Twitter users globally, paid $2.89bn for the stake at Twitter’s closing share price on Friday.
Shares in the microblogging site soared as much as 26% in pre-market trading on the back of the news, adding more than $8bn to its $31.5bn market value before Musk’s interest was made public. After the stock price jump Musk’s shares are now worth about $3.6bn.
But with a “tweet” of $3 billion, who knows? Waiting to read Trump’s statement on this….
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The man Musk is fiddling with people’s minds, he’s doing a fantastic job at it. He has given Twitter some much needed economic boost, because that platform makes more troubles than money, its popularity hasn’t translated into a better balance sheet, but it’s always at the centre of every controversy in the digital universe.
Of course with his ownership stake, Twitter should move closer to the centre, having been moving too leftward, Musk is on the other side of the divide, at least most times.
But in a world where virtually every opinion has a way of hurting some people, censorship will remain a constant, in a moving target format anyway.