Must I tweet? If you musk
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/DPRG-06-2022-188 |
| Published date | 09 September 2022 |
| Date | 09 September 2022 |
| Pages | 398-399 |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Information management & governance,Information policy |
| Author | Peter Curwen |
Rearview
Must I tweet? If you musk
Peter Curwen
Sooner or later, every company
associated with social media is going
to become the subject of fierce
controversy. Currently thespotlight
has fallen on Twitter. This is somewhat
surprising in the sense that a tweet
provides very little space to fill so the
content of tweets is normally banal in
the extreme. Furthermore, most
“celebrities” –the most likely to amass
huge numbers of followers –do not
tweet for themselves but employan
intermediary to pump up interest in
their activities.
So why has Twitter become
controversial? In a word, Musk –that
is to say, Elon Musk, the boss of car-
maker Tesla. Musk and Twitter have
history. In 2019, for example, he
accused a British diver, Vernon
Unsworth, who had rescued 12 Thai
schoolboys trapped in a cave, of
being a “pedo guy”. Musk had
previously offered a submarineto
help with the rescue which Unsworth
had vehemently rejected live on CNN.
In 2020, Musk tweeted that the “Tesla
stock price too high” which promptly
wiped $14bn from the marketvalue of
Tesla.
Not many, if any, other tweeters can
claim to have achieved so much with
so few words. But any expectation
that his outbursts would resultin his
being ejected from Twitter were
negated by the announcement on 4
February that he had acquired a 9.2%
stake in Twitter, thereby making him
the largest single shareholder. The
Twitter share price promptly rose by
30% demonstrating that his deeds
were as influential as his words –it
helped that he had $3bn going spare
to invest.
Other Twitter shareholders were
delighted. The share price had
peaked at $77 one year earlier but
had subsequently fallen by roughly
one-third –much in line with other
tech stocks and widely attributed to
the emergence from COVID-related
restrictions that had resultedin a
deluge of social media
communication by people stuck at
home with nothing better to do.
However, given that it is far less
taxing to engage in a tweet compared
to a Zoom call, Twitter had in practice
ridden out the move back to the “new
normal” rather better than most. In
2020, total revenue amounted to
$3.7bn; one year later the figurewas
$5.1bn. Furthermore, “monetizable
daily active users” (MDAUs) had
grown from 192 million in December
2020 to 217 million one year later.
Unfortunately, Twitteris not immune
from the curse of so many social
media companies, namely, thatan
ever rising customer base may simply
convert into a dearth of profits.In
Twitter’s case, it had declared a net
profit in only two of the 10 years up to
2021 with net losses amounting to
roughly $1.4bn during fiscal 2020 and
2021. And like other social media
companies, it was regularly being
fined for being “economical with the
truth” about aspects of its operations.
In recent times, the role of social
media companies in relation to
censorship over content being
uploaded onto the internet usingtheir
Peter Curwen is based at Newcastle
Business School, Northumbria
University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.
PAGE 398 jDIGITAL POLICY, REGULATION AND GOVERNANCE jVOL. 24 NO.4 2022, pp. 398-399, ©Emerald Publishing Limited, ISSN 2398-5038 DOI 10.1108/DPRG-06-2022-188
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