Author: philip
After purchasing Twitter in a turbulent takeover five months ago, Elon Musk has surpassed former US President Barack Obama as the most followed account on the platform. On Thursday, the Tesla and SpaceX founder had 133,084,560 followers, slightly ahead of Obama’s 133,041,813. This achievement comes at a time when Twitter’s role as a primary platform for news, ideas, and PR messaging has become increasingly problematic. Musk recently informed his employees that he overpaid for the platform as it is currently worth half of the $44 billion he spent on it. He is also struggling to find a way to loosen content moderation without unsettling advertisers and government regulators.
After assuming control, Musk has significantly reduced the group’s workforce, downsizing it from 7,500 employees to fewer than 2,000. He has also placed his trust in generating revenue by attracting paid subscribers to make the platform financially sustainable, but the outcomes have not lived up to expectations. The app has experienced a series of technical difficulties, such as an occurrence where tweets by Musk unexpectedly inundated the feeds of millions of users, including those who don’t follow him. Musk has urged users to communicate more openly on Twitter and declared that the site will enforce the minimum amount of censorship permissible by law.
From April 1 onwards, the platform announced that the “blue tick” symbol, which indicates trustworthiness, would be withdrawn from specific individual accounts, like those of celebrities or journalists, and would be exclusively available to those who subscribe to the paid service.
