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Journalism of Courage
Shortly after rebranding Twitter to “X,” Elon Musk said in a tweet that the social media platform reached a new record-high number of users in 2023. A graph posted along with the tweet seems to indicate that X has 541 million users. The billionaire’s claim comes at a time when experts are questioning his ability to helm a social media platform.
Musk said in another tweet that the chart covers figures from January 1, 2023. According to his figures, this would mean that the number of X users increased from 531 million to 541 million in a span of seven months. He does not specify whether this refers to the number of accounts on the platform or whether it refers to either daily or monthly active users. In May 2022, shortly after he initiated his acquisition of Twitter, the platform had 229 million monthly active users, as per Reuters.
German data-gathering platform Statista pegs Twitter’s monthly active users at 335 million users as of December 2022.
Since his acquisition, Musk has pushed through drastic changes to the social media platform. This includes the winding down of the legacy verification program and the introduction of a paid Twitter Blue subscription which gives “verified users” a blue tick.
One of the more drastic and most recent changes to the platform was its rebranding to “X.” CNBC reports that the rebranding represents Musk’s ambition to convert Twitter into an all-encompassing “everything app.” Based on his earlier discussions, this would mean developing X into something like WeChat, which is used for everything from instant messaging to ordering food and making payments in China.
In June this year, Musk hired Linda Yaccarino, a former NBCUniversal advertising executive, as Twitter’s chief executive. This move came as the platform faced a nearly 50 per cent drop in ad revenue with advertisers leaving the platform due to its lax content moderation. Advertisers do not want their products and services being showcased next to inappropriate and harmful content.
Getting advertisers back is important for X as the platform is still struggling with negative cash flow despite its many far-reaching cost-cutting moves, including laying off thousands of employees.
But it does not seem like Musk’s plans to bring back advertisers will bear fruit soon. The platform came under renewed scrutiny on Thursday after it reinstated the account of a right-wing influencer who had tweeted an image of a toddler being tortured, the Washington Post reports.
“Only people on our CSE team have seen those pictures. For now, we will delete those posts and reinstate the account,” tweeted Musk, justifying the move. But Twitter statistics on a cached version of the tweet reveal that it got over 3 million views and 8,000 retweets before it was taken down.
Musk’s actions after taking over the platform reveal that he is “totally out of his element,” according to Harvard leadership expert Bill George. “If you had to write a case study on an example of a really poor takeover of an organisation, Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter would fit that perfectly well. I don’t think he understands social media.,” said George to CNBC.
George also labelled Musk’s rebranding of Twitter to X without a specific roadmap as impulsive, with the potential to alienate users. He also had criticism for Musk’s loosening of content moderation standards, saying that it turned off a lot of users who were opened up to “blunt racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny and anti-LGBTQ+ [content],” according to George.
While Musk’s actions after taking over the platform seem bumbling at best and downright incompetent at worst, it could be a mistake to write off the platform entirely. The richest man in the world has seen vast success with other ventures he has helmed like Tesla and SpaceX, albeit in a completely different domain altogether.
George notes that both these companies deal in engineering, research and manufacturing but running a social media company requires a high level of interpersonal skills. Musk’s own brother Kimbal Musk told Time magazine in 2021 that despite being a “business savant,” his gift is not empathy.
