Twitter under Musk has changed considerably, and the finances have also shifted. Here investors will have been less pleased to learn that the micro blogging site is now worth about $15 billion. This represents a 66 percent reduction in value since Musk paid $44 billion last year to assume ownership.
According to Virginia Tech media researcher Megan Duncan: “The decline illustrates not just the consequences of Musk’s stewardship, but the myriad challenges that exist for anyone managing a social media platform.”
Megan Duncan is an assistant professor in the School of Communication at Virginia Tech. Her research focuses on how partisans judge the credibility of and engage with the news.
Duncan adds, tellingly: Buying a social media platform might be easy, but governing it is hard.”
The issues facing Musk include the stakeholders in the social media platform being varied and with different groups each having their own interests and expectations.
In Musk’s defence, he is focusing on prioritising two concepts: Technology and free speech. While these areas may be springboards for success, Musk has hit problematic spots on both fronts.
First, the technology innovations he has introduced have been eclipsed by the problems, from poor adoption rates on Twitter Blue to the embarrassing delays to Governor Ron DeSantis’s Twitter Spaces campaign announcement.
Second Musk is keen to promote ‘free speech’ (at least the right-wing conservative variant) by implementing an ideology because that clashes with the interests of advertisers and users. Brands do not want to be advertising near videos of animal abuse, for example.
Duncan runs a social media course at Virginia Tech and part of the class discussion includes talking about governing a social media platform.
According to Duncan: “Students in groups start the class by writing their version of a terms of service for an imaginary platform…I introduce students to complication after complication [such as] the need to keep child exploitation material from spreading, complying with U.S. and world government laws, demands by authoritarian governments to remove disparaging material, concerns about keeping data safe and private, determining whether and which videos depicting violence will be shown, the extreme task of moderation in 100 different languages.”
According to Duncan there has been a shift with the role and regulation of social media: “The days of moving fast, breaking things, and still seeing ever-increasing valuations might be over for social media.”
