It’s somehow hard to fathom that it was fully 16 years ago that Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, sent out the first-ever tweet: “just setting up my twttr,” in March 2006.
That’s an eon in the timeline of social media.
Now, Twitter has some 238 million users around the world. If, that is, the company’s public relations are to be believed.
Table-turning entrepreneur Elon Musk had said he didn’t believe the PR, claiming that many of the users weren’t real people as such, but rather bots or other fake accounts variously up to no good.
And yet this is the same naysayer who just paid $44 billion for the San Francisco company. Why would you spend a vast fortune to buy something that wasn’t nearly as big as you thought it was?
Those are among the many questions to ask about the Twitter sale, which now takes the company private, under one man’s control.
But our Question of the Week for our readers is: What will Musk’s Twitter purchase do to the landscape of social media?
Are you on Twitter?
Or do you leave that to the political journalists and op-edtaste-makers?
Do you like the give and take of the rambunctious platform, or do you prefer another way of spending too much time on your phone?
There’s a saying that these days young people are on TikTok while Facebook is mostly for seniors posting cute pics of the grandkids — although FB’s Instagram may be in the ascendancy for photo-posting.
Where does that leave Twitter? If Musk is going to lay off 75% of his workforce after already firing all the company’s top executives, how does he hope to grow the business?
Or does he have so much money that growth is of no interest to him — he just wants to tweak the noses of the establishment?
Will Musk welcome former President Trump back to the platform, which banned him for posting untruths?
Will Musk himself, who has already retweeted a conspiracy theory about the attack on Paul Pelosi, be a welcome force protecting free speech or a Twitter pest himself?
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