ELON MUSK TRYING TO IMPROVE THE CONTENT QUALITY OF TWITTER?
As Elon Musk takes over Twitter, he is implementing some of the practices of Mr. Zuckerberg, who leads Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
Elon Musk is an unusual businessman. When he agreed to buy Twitter this year, he said that he would make the social media service a place for free-for-all which means anyone can say anything on this platform as everyone has a right to give their feedback and express their emotions about a thing and even gave an example by unbanning Donald J.Trumps Twitter account. But since closing his $44 billion buyout of Twitter last week, Mr. Musk has followed a surprisingly conventional social media playbook. The world’s richest man met with more than six civil rights groups to assure them that he will not make changes to twitter’s content rules before the results of the week’s midterm elections are certified. He also met with advertising executives to discuss their concerns about their brands appearing alongside toxic online content. Mr. Musk said he would form a council to advise Twitter on what kinds of content to remove from the platform and would not immediately reinstate banned accounts.
These decisions are very familiar because they have been used by other social media companies to improve their content quality. After Facebook was criticized for being misused in the 2016 presidential election, Mark Zuckerberg, the social network’s chief executive, also met with civil rights groups to calm them and worked to mollify irate advertisers. He later said he would establish an independent board to advise his company on content decisions.
He also discovered what Mark Zuckerberg discovered several years ago: Being the face of controversial big calls isn’t fun. Social media companies face the same pressures of users, advertisers, and governments, and there’s always this union around this common set of norms and processes that they are forced to do.