Elon Musk Twitter: Twitter has been inundated with claims of high-profile accounts losing tens of thousands of followers in the hours following the announcement that Tesla CEO Elon Musk would buy the social media platform. The “fluctuations in follower counts” were caused by “organic” account closures, the business stated on Tuesday.
Some accounts on the political right, such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s, R-Ga., saw their followings soar.
- Greene had 632,000 followers by Tuesday evening, up from 539,000 the day before news of Musk’s takeover broke.
In the hours following the ownership announcement on Monday, Twitter did not offer a precise number of accounts that were shut down or enabled. It claimed to be investigating “recent swings in following counts.”
“While we continue to take action on accounts that violate our spam policy, which can influence follower numbers,” Twitter stated in a statement, “these changes appear to be mostly due to an increase in new account creation and deactivation.”
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The accounts with the most significant drop-offs in followers, according to a Twitter spokesperson who spoke on the condition of anonymity, were “high-profile accounts.”
After Monday’s announcement, former President Barack Obama, the most followed user on Twitter, who had gained more than 300,000 followers every day in April, lost more than 300,000 followers.
Katy Perry, the third most followed Twitter user, lost over 200,000 followers after the announcement.
On Tuesday, some right-wing politicians took notice of the rising following counts and applauded them.
Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., tweeted, “It really is remarkable how conservative accounts are seeing tremendous follower increases today.”
The right wing’s increased popularity was not restricted to the United States. Right-wing populist Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro garnered over 90,000 followers the day after Musk’s statement.
Elon Musk Putting Pressure on Twitter Executives
Elon Musk is putting pressure on Twitter executives ahead of the company’s earnings call on Thursday.
Tesla’s (TSLA) billionaire CEO tweeted a screenshot of Apple’s (AAPL) App Store charts showing that Truth Social was outranking other social media platforms like Twitter (TWTR) and ByteDance’s TikTok.
“On the Apple Store, Truth Social is presently beating Twitter and TikTok,” added Musk, who just agreed to buy Twitter for $44 billion.
Truth Social was formed by Donald Trump‘s corporation and debuted after the former US president was suspended from Twitter in early 2021 following his followers’ attack on the US Capitol. Trump was quite active on Twitter before being banned “because of the danger of additional instigation of violence,” according to Twitter.
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Musk has expressed his wish for Twitter to encourage free speech ideals on numerous occasions, most recently tweeting last week that “a social media platform‘s standards are good if the most extreme 10% on both the left and right are equally unhappy.”
The App Store rankings that Musk tweeted could not be independently verified by Barron’s.
According to market research firm SensorTower, Truth Social was rated first among free iPhone apps in the United States on Wednesday. On Tuesday, it climbed 19 places in the charts. On both days, Twitter was rated second, up to four spots on Tuesday.
App Store rankings are dependent on a variety of metrics, including reviews and downloads. According to SensorTower, there has been no meaningful competition between Twitter and Truth Social in terms of pure downloads: the former had 6 million downloads in March while the latter had only 300,000.
Musk’s bid for Twitter raises concerns about the company’s existing leadership, which includes CEO Parag Agrawal, who took over from co-founder Jack Dorsey late last year. Musk stated his dissatisfaction with Twitter‘s use of several fonts in the run-up to his purchase, and experts expect him to leave an indelible stamp on the platform.
The Twitter stock declined 2% in premarket trading in the United States on Wednesday, extending losses from Tuesday, when the company sank 3.9 percent.
Elon Musk Acquired Twitter
Elon Musk, one of the least inspiring Saturday Night Live hosts in history, has agreed to acquire Twitter for $44 billion.
I have no idea why he decided to buy the website where I go every day to embarrass myself, but this is less about the deal and more about Musk himself: Not quite uncool (although it is difficult to be both cool and a billionaire, and yes, this includes Rihanna), but a man who creaks and vibrates with a desperate-to-be-liked-by-the-cool-kids intensity that most of us shrugged off by the end of secondary school.
I shouldn’t be able to tell that a millionaire wants me to like him so clearly. I should just be living in continual fear that he’ll blow up the moon as every good billionaire should always threaten to do.
Anyway, now is as good a time as any to analyze Twitter‘s current state: it is not dead, but it is absolutely dying, and not because Musk has purchased it (though the fact that Twitter was willing to effectively sell Twitter is frankly a red flag).
The thing about social media platforms is that they all eventually devolve into something far removed from the original bright kernel of the idea that gave birth to them – it’s such a shame that David Fincher made such a cool film about the founding of Facebook, which is now essentially a car boot sale where Candy Crush moms and dads “who remember proper bin men” get radicalized – and Twitter is no exception: the bizarre way the timeline never loads in sequential order is a perfect example of this.
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But, more importantly, Musk is purchasing Twitter at a time when the written word is becoming obsolete: Years ago, Twitter began to lose ground to Instagram, which did “interacting with people” and “showing off about your life” far better than Twitter ever did; Instagram, in turn, has been pushed out of the spotlight by TikTok, thanks to its all-seeing algorithm and the fact that advertisers haven’t yet figured out how to ruin it.
It’s preferable to say anything to the camera with closed captions and an elastic facial expression than to type it out in an affected lower-case font if you have something to say on the internet now. Elon Musk could have just as easily purchased a Gutenberg press.