On October 28 of 2022, Elon Musk officially purchased Twitter. With all of the built up anticipation, soon after came confusion. Immediately, Twitter saw new problems. Misinformation flooded the site, and hate speech plagued Musk’s new reputation as Twitter’s new owner. According to Darrell Etherington of techcrunch.com, “he fired CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, General Counsel Sean Edgett and Head of Legal, Trust and Safety Vijaya Gadde basically at the same time he was officially handed the keys.” What followed was possibly even more controversial. He crowned himself CEO to fill the role of the recently fired Agrawal.
Perhaps one of the most intriguing aspects of Musk’s purchase of Twitter is his plan to lay off thousands of employees. According to Emma Roth of The Verge, “Musk already laid off nearly half of Twitter’s 7,500-person workforce after taking control of the company earlier this month, affecting staff members in product trust and safety, policy, communications, tweet curation, ethical AI, data science, and other departments.” Overall from a business standpoint this might make a lot of sense, however thousands are now out of a job.
Musk’s simple plans followed. First, he turned the public company private. With this came his rule changes for blue check verification, which held a “number of perks including verification, fewer ads and more for $8 per month.” This change in verification is where most of the controversy started.
Writing for the Washington Post, Drew Harwell, Taylor Lorenz and Cat Zakrzewski released an article titled “Racist tweets quickly surface after Musk closes Twitter deal.” They clearly spell out Twitter’s influx of racism, writing “the flood of racist posts was among the most prominent signs of how Twitter had changed in the first hours of Musk’s ownership.” The problem with “freeing the Bird” (a phrase coined by Musk), is that freedom comes with a strict price. Unregulated free speech has produced negative consequences multiple times before.
With new guidelines, Twitter’s content has changed drastically. The posts on Twitter have produced nothing but controversy the past month. One significant example of this controversy is a false advertisement for free insulin. Writing for FiercePharma.com, Ben Adams points out the Eli Lilly and Company and their apology for a fake account promoting free insulin. Adams states that “the fake message hit more than 1,500 retweets and 11,000 likes in just a few hours.” The consequences yielded major damage on Lilly’s shares, where they took a beating only a day after the tweet. In addition, Eli Lilly lost billions of dollars from their market cap.
However, misinformation was not the only source of controversy– racist troll accounts swarmed the app.
As if racism and misinformation weren’t enough, Russia has seized the opportunity to threaten the U.S. National Security. The writers for the Washington Post pointed out that when Elon Musk freed Twitter as a safe space for “freedom of speech”, Russian and Chinese media-backed outlets were active on the app. Musk’s policies have weakened the labels that “defend against foreign election interference and misinformation.”
Overall, with his purchase of Twitter, Elon Musk has certainly turned heads with endless appearances across the media. Now overseeing a big platform like Twitter, Musk is directly responsible for what the app amplifies. With improper control of such a big site, Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter can end disastrously.
