Words: Tom Ward
Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has been a long, drawn out affair. He first tweeted about maybe taking over last year. He finally did last October, spending $44bn, only to attempt to back out of the purchase. A lawsuit was threatened. Eventually, Musk did takeover, only to fire a significant portion of the staff in an attempt to cut costs. Since then, he’s only attracted more controversy.
Tucker Carlson, finally deemed too offensive for Fox News (cough) was given a new home on the platform, tying in with Musk’s and the right wing’s obsession with free speech, which usually translates as the proponent’s right to say whatever they like, no matter how offensive, or the fact that they’re frequently punching down on those socially and economically less fortunate. Carlson’s appointment is also part of Twitter’s move to include more video, part of a wider attempt to make it Musk’s long-promised ‘app for everything’. The first step, rebranding it X.
In a recent Wall Street Journal podcast, reporter Tim Higgins pointed out that Musk is somewhat obsessed with the letter ‘X’. See: SpaceX, the Tesla Model X, Musk’s 1999 website X.com, his new company xAI, and his son named X AE A-XII Musk (yes, really).
“I like the letter X,” Elon Musk tweeted, shortly after the rebrand. “X will become the most valuable brand on Earth.”
Writing for The Atlantic, Charlie Warzel recently tried to understand the Twitter rename. “I have three answers to that question, beyond the simple “Nothing much.”” he writes.
Warzel first points to Musk’s mission to create the “everything app”, with China’s WeChat as a model. “There’s no WeChat movement outside of China,” Warzel quotes Musk as saying. “And I think that there’s a real opportunity to create that. You basically live on WeChat in China because it’s so useful and so helpful to your daily life. And I think if we could achieve that, or even close to that with Twitter, it would be an immense success.”
Similar apps do exist in Asia, Africa and Latin America so it does seem strange the West is yet to follow suit. Warzel’s next guess is that the rebrand to X is just that, a PR stunt, an essentially empty renaming, like when Facebook became Meta. How many of us now check ‘Meta’ instead of Facebook? And are we now supposed to ‘X’ at someone, instead of tweeting them?
Warzel’s final suggestion is that X is a way for Musk to save face. He sells himself as the guy who invents the future so here he is, doing that. By referencing his 1999 website (which merged with another site to become PayPal in 2000) Musk is also calling back to a younger, dynamic version of himself.
Also writing for The Atlantic, Helen Lewis suggests that after users have left Twitter in droves (and they have, for multiple apps, including Mastodon, while TikTok retains its existing dominance) we’re left with a “weird, fragmented world of social media after Twitter”. Forbes asked ‘What the X is going on at Twitter?’ while the NYT opined that Musk is ‘erasing an iconic internet brand’.
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But what does all of this mean for you? As Ruchira Sharma pointed out for British GQ, Musk has celebrated that “the bird is freed” since his takeover. Musk has said he’ll remove limits on how much people can include in a single tweet, clear up bots and bring back banned former reality TV host (and three time indicted former US president) Donald Trump.
Musk has also spoken out about left-wing bias on the platform. As someone who wants to colonise Mars because he believes life on earth is becoming untenable – presumably due to global warming – it’s strange that he could want to give climate deniers such a strong platform. Yes, free speech is good, but already it seems promoters of hate speech have been emboldened to spread their messages online, in the same way that Brexit emboldened anti-immigrant hate crimes in the UK after the vote.
In a worrying move, The Guardian reports that Twitter is suing an anti-hate speech group over ‘tens of millions of dollars in lost advertising’. The group in question, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) has dismissed the lawsuit, saying X intends to ‘bully us into silence’. With that in mind, how much is X really a platform to promote debate and free speech? Or, perhaps it simply ties into Warzel’s third option. Maybe X is just a money making venture and Musk – still the richest person on the planet – doesn’t really care where the revenue comes from, as long as it never dries up.
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