🔒 It's finally over. Elon Musk has taken control of Twitter. It's all his to do with as he pleases. He says he wants to save humanity from itself and create a digital public town square. It's a lofty ambition, and I think he'll fail.
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Let that sink in!
So, it’s finally happened. Elon Musk owns Twitter (although I won’t fully accept the news until I receive the $162.60 that the world’s richest man owes me for my 3 Twitter shares.)
This is the reason this week’s issue of Wiser! is a little late. The news broke yesterday and I wanted to capture the immediate aftermath of Musk’s takeover of Twitter.
We now have the world’s richest man having total control over a social network. Mark Zuckerberg has total control over Facebook, the world’s largest social network, and that hasn’t gone too well (teen suicide and self-harm rates up, loneliness levels up, polarisation of society up.)
Musk has lofty ambitions for Twitter, the relatively small but influential social network he just bought for around $47 billion, inc costs and fees. Creating a mature and civilised debating chamber for respectful discourse is far easier said than done. It has so far escaped mankind in the digital age.
Musk also seems to have a distrust of mainstream media (sound familiar?)
Yesterday he tweeted “A beautiful thing about Twitter is how it empowers citizen journalism – people are able to disseminate news without an establishment bias.”
In his letter to advertisers, posted yesterday,Musk wrote, “much of traditional media has fueled and catered to those polarized extremes.” Not for the first time, Musk has expressed a preference for the opinion of the individual over the reporting of a journalist.
Here I think Musk is totally off track.
