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Notes -
New Twitter policy just dropped:
It's like the man himself says
ETA:
Seems like some large accounts are calling Twitter's bluff. Dril posted a link to their linktree hours ago and so far both post and account are still up.
ETA2:
Musk now polling whether he should step down as head of Twitter, Yes in the lead with 51.5% and just over a million votes cast at the time of this writing.
ETA3:
The link at the top of this post is now a 404, apparently a result of the policy being rescinded, but the internet never forgets.
Looks like he's doing the New Coke strategy. Engagement is way up, no matter how much the media insist twitter is dying. People who promise to quit come back later. That is the genius of Musk's strategy...messing up twitter only makes it more popular and more media coverage about twitter.
Of course engagement is up - it's the world cup and American football time! The top of my "For You" page from a logged out browser in India is #fifaworldcup, ronaldo, #sachintendulkar, golden boot, france 4-2, money money money and greatest of all time. The non-football related topics are #sachintendulkar (a cricketer) and money money money.
A logged out page in America has 8/10 on top being NFL, the last two being "Happy Hannukah" and "Twitter CEO". The top of the page is literally Patriots vs Raiders scores.
I will take the opportunity to re-up a comment I left recently, explaining how Musk can make twitter profitable again: https://www.themotte.org/post/229/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/42105?context=8#context
tl;dr; sports + celebrities. No one cares about paul graham or taylor lorenz, lots of people care about Brady, Belichick and Dicker the Kicker. If you don't know who they are, that's your bubble. The only non-NFL humans that twitter America seems to care about are Tom Cruise, Elon Musk, Lionel Messi and (way down the list) Christina Aguilera.
But political Twitter has some power (hence the FBI's interest), and it should be possible to translate that power into money.
How do you propose to turn political twitter into an amount of money remotely proportional to the risk it poses to sports&celebs twitter?
Soft corruption. Twitter sells extremely expensive advertising to candidates and parties. It is known that if just one side pays for this advertising the algorithm overall greatly favors them.
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