Time.news – He did not even wait for the formal communication, which Elon Musk had already liquidated half the board and the lawyer at the head of the structure that dealt with the bans. Twitter’s second life has already begun: the Pretoria tycoon has been working on it for at least six months. Maybe even earlier.
The next step? It’s around the corner and it’s called delisting. The notice was filed with the SEC yesterday. On November 8, Twitter will be off the stock exchange (where it arrived in 2013). It was among Musk’s ideas, put in black and white, tweet after tweet it should be said.
The advantages? Unlisted companies are not required to disclose their financial data, are subject to less regulatory scrutiny, and can be controlled more effectively by the owner.
But what else will happen to the social, now that the bird is free? Blockchain, premium services, free to say (but without exaggerating), a leaner company (read, fewer employees. Today it has 7,500), the dream of a super app could be the keywords of the new Twitter. Only they will be mixed in unpredictable ways.
Web3, the blockchain and the bot node
Binance is also among the consortium of investors who supported Musk in the acquisition of Twitter. The cryptocurrency exchange has put $ 500 million on the table. Binance will be part of a team that will write the new rules and that will intervene on the chatbot and spam node (central to Elon Musk’s project) leveraging the blockchain, and will bring the experience gained in the cryptocurrency sector.
“We are excited to help Elon realize a new vision for Twitter. We aim to play a role in bringing social media and Web3 together in order to expand the use and adoption of crypto and blockchain technology,” said Changpeng Zhao ( CZ), founder and CEO of Binance.
Subscription services
Musk’s plans include providing subscription services, earning revenue directly from users instead of relying solely on advertisers. An idea? Give users the ability to use Twitter without seeing ads if they have paid a fee.
Free to say (but not too much)
The crux of content moderation. Musk had promised to transform Twitter by loosening content moderation rules, incorporating new technologies and making its algorithm more transparent. On the platform, republicans and conservative media personalities celebrated the new ownership. The number of followers from different right-wing Twitter accounts has skyrocketed. And former President Donald J. Trump, who was banned from Twitter last year, used his social media platform to declare himself “very happy that Twitter is now in good hands.” It is not yet certain what the tycoon will do (he could decide after the midterm elections).
Elon Musk / Twitter
Will he come back or not? The door is open. Now. Be careful though. Musk had talked about loosening the rules. Not to turn the platform into a battleground of unbridled commentary. Why so much caution? He is easy to say. The first to be wary of an unmoderated platform are advertisers.
“Twitter will form a content moderation council with widely differing views,” Musk tweeted. “No major content decision or account restoration will happen before the council meets.”
The WeChat model
According to Musk’s utterances, “buying Twitter is an accelerator to create X, the app of everything” (so on Twitter on October 5, 12:39 pm local time). Everything app? Yes, a sort of one-stop shop for all needs: chat, payments, social networks, games, delivery, taxi reservations. These are very popular products in China and other parts of Asia and are often developed by tech giants. The first name is the Chinese WeChat, managed by Tencent, the largest super app in the world: a billion and more users. It is estimated that a Chinese person spends a third of their waking life on WeChat.
In June Musk said there is no WeChat equivalent outside of China and to Twitter employees (now his): “I think there is a real opportunity to create it. You basically live on WeChat in China because it’s so useful and so useful for your daily life. And I think that if we could reach this goal, or even approach it with Twitter, it would be an immense success ”. It’s still. He also said he wanted at least one billion people to use Twitter, up from 237.8 million at the end of the second quarter.
WeChat on X-rays
WeChat a messaging and social media platform that has evolved into one of the largest apps in the region in terms of range of services and number of users. It is estimated that in China alone it has 1.29 billion users. WeChat is also one of the largest Chinese payment networks and consumers use it to pay for goods and services and to exchange money.
Much has been written about how its ubiquity in Chinese daily life, operating in a strictly government-controlled company, has seen WeChat become a surveillance and censorship tool. Messages, posts and even accounts are routinely blocked for content deemed politically sensitive, and there are concerns about how they might contribute to the various controversial “social credit” schemes in China, where citizens’ lives may be limited based on their credit scores. banking or social behavior. In 2020, WeChat introduced a scoring system where users get extra privileges if they have good in-app credit records.
A single container of all our data
The WeChat example highlights the main concern of super apps: with everyone doing pretty much everything on a few platforms, these apps end up gathering a vast collection of data on people and could exert immense power over our daily lives. Assuming that Elon Musk’s super app model is this, can it be replicated in the West? If so, how and with what privacy protections?
WeChat’s revenue
What about Twitter in all of this? As it is put, the platform does not perform. WeChat’s Musk primarily wants the business model. If you really want to quintuple Twitter’s revenue to $ 26.4 billion, the way is to make it part of a platform that hosts a lot of payment businesses. WeChat generated approximately $ 17.5 billion in revenue in 2021, largely through the advertising and transactions it processes for games, deliveries and digital services. More than half a billion people then use thousands of mini-apps within WeChat every day.