It was just last month when Elon Musk officially bought Twitter, one of the biggest social media platforms worldwide, after announcing an offer back in April. The deal closed after months of legal challenges as Musk tried to back out of the deal, causing Twitter to sue in response, which in turn forced Musk to pay the $44 billion to acquire Twitter. But that’s now old news.
The question at hand is, with Musk, a maybe-free-speech-absolutist, now the executive of the social network company, what does future have in store for Twitter?
Well, maybe not much. Since Musk’s takeover, close to one million Twitter followers have possibly left (possibly meaning possible bots instead of followers) – that’s more than double the typical number of people abandoning the platform. This is likely due to the uptick in hate speech (a 1,300% increase in slurs, for example) on Twitter as users test whether Musk’s plan to allow all speech – regardless of it being false information or hate speech – to Twitter will hold firm.
Musk himself however has grand plans for the platform, hoping to increase its annual revenue to $26.4 billion from its reported $5.08 billion last year and user count from 200 million to nearly 1 billion. How he hopes to fund the platform after denouncing the use of advertising on Twitter, considering Twitter’s “patchy profits,” is up in the air – as Musk realized, backtracking his ‘free speech, no advertisement plan’ in an open letter. Still, he may have scared advertisers off – some are contemplating pulling out of Twitter to avoid having an ad placed next to hateful comments.
With Twitter’s future capricious, users may be pleased to hear that Jack Dorsey, the former CEO of Twitter, has launched a new social media site called “Bluesky.” Or they may follow the crowd to Mastodon, which has a user count of 5.9 million since Musk’s announced takeover, or back to Tumblr, one of the OG’s of social media. But wherever the future of social media goes, the chance is high that it will no longer be Twitter.