The number of Twitter followers of Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has surpassed that of former US President Barack Obama. It has been five months since Musk acquired Twitter.
According to AFP on the 30th (local time), the number of accounts following Musk was 133,084,560, about 40,000 ahead of former President Obama’s 133,041,813.
The news agency analyzed that this result appears to be due to a serious problem with the core role of Twitter, which delivered news, ideas, and advertisements.
Musk previously told employees that Twitter’s company was worth half of its $44 billion investment.
He added that the company is struggling to find a way to unregulate content without irritating governments and advertisers. Musk initially set a policy to minimize censorship by taking over Twitter, saying it was a choice to protect freedom of expression.
Since Musk took over, the number of Twitter employees has shrunk by 70% from 7,500 to less than 2,000. It is known that they tried to recruit paid subscribers (blue) for the platform’s finances, but no remarkable results came out.
Unlike the efforts, controversy was frequent. Last February, an American IT media outlet reported that Twitter employees manipulated the algorithm to increase the number of views of Musk’s tweets (posts). In the past three months, Twitter has had access failures six times.
Twitter announced that from April 1st, the ‘blue tick’ mark next to the accounts of celebrities and public figures will be deleted and assigned to paid subscriber accounts.
Meanwhile, according to CNN, media outlets such as the New York Times (NYT), Los Angeles Times, Washington Post (WP), BuzzFeed, Politico, and Vox have expressed that they will not pay for blue tick marks.
“The blue tick will no longer mean that you are a certified journalist,” said Anita Kumar, senior editor for standards and ethics at Politico.
Source: Donga
Mark Jones is a world traveler and journalist for News Rebeat. With a curious mind and a love of adventure, Mark brings a unique perspective to the latest global events and provides in-depth and thought-provoking coverage of the world at large.