The European Commission has asked the social network X, formerly Twitter, to present a report on its management of violent content and misinformation circulating on the platform. Elon Musk’s company will have to provide information about this “illegal content” before next Wednesday. Failure to do so could result in a fine for disseminating “incorrect, incomplete or misleading information in response to a request for information.”
With this investigation, a new front opens for a company that has not stopped generating news since its current owner took it over a year ago for $44 billion. Now, according to the South African, American and Canadian businessman himself – Musk has all three nationalities – the firm is worth half. Furthermore, its advertising revenue has fallen by up to 60%, according to the most pessimistic estimates. All of this is the result of a series of controversial decisions made by Elon Musk since the day he took command of this network and incorporated it into his business conglomerate X Holdings Corp., which includes the companies Tesla, Neuralink, SpaceX and The Boring Company.
When it came into their hands, Twitter was a microblogging service with almost 17 years of history, a large digital town square, with hundreds of millions of neighbors from all over the world. But Musk did not like it as it was, something he made very clear with his own tweets before, during and after the acquisition of the company, whose main managers he got rid of and whose staff he decimated. Next, changes began to the service itself, which caused the displeasure and confusion of many users, with not a few of them announcing their ‘moving’ to alternative networks such as Mastodon or BlueSky.
Among other changes, The blue sign that guaranteed that the person who showed it on her profile was actually her is now paid, so anyone can show it on a fake or anonymous profile if she has previously paid the fee. The change of the name of the network (now X) itself was also highly criticized and called incomprehensible in business terms, since Twitter was a well-established brand.
Hostility towards the media
The latest controversial decision has been the elimination of the headlines and links of the news that users share “for aesthetic reasons.” In reality, the measure responds to the hostility towards the media of the magnate, who what he wants, maintains Alex Rayón, Doctor in Computer Science and Telecommunications, specialized in digital economy and professor at the University of Deusto, is to “arrange to his liking the town square, which is now yours. Because to understand what’s happening with Twitter/X “you first have to understand the character.” “We tend to evaluate his decisions from a technical or business perspective, when Elon Musk is a very different person from the rest,” says Rayón. «He is someone who wants to transcend in life, he feels that he is fulfilling a divine mandate regarding solving the problems that humanity has. When Musk sets up his companies he always talks about this. Like when he says that humanity will be saved by emigrating to Mars, the planet on which he himself aspires to die.
What did you do with Twitter? «Basically, the pressure led him to buy the network because he is a very narcissistic person and to fix the site where public opinion is generated. He wants to govern the town square better and he believes that he has the solution to do it. Musk is “a very good engineer, but X’s problem is human, he is from anthropology, not technical.” Has he thus killed the network? «We must differentiate between money and use. One thing is the economic results, which have been diminished, and another is that X is still very relevant, as is being seen these days with the Gaza conflict. “I wouldn’t give him up dead, for the moment.”
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