Elon Musk TWITTER'ı neden aldı? - YouTube

This is Kane Tanaka,

she is the oldest person in the world

or rather was.

She died last week after living for 119 years and 107 days.

This is Elon Musk,

he is the richest person in the world.

Still.

After struggling for months, he finally bought Twitter the other day.

For a price of 44 billion dollars.

He had acquired quite a few shares through the different companies

he had founded for a few months

and became the largest shareholder.

He then made an offer to buy the entire company.

Twitter tried to resist at first,

even resorting to technics so-called "poison pills" in the financial world,

but that is that.

Elon had come up with an offer that was “very hard to refuse.”

After all, Twitter is not a company like Facebook or

YouTube in terms of profitability.

Who else would give $44 billion in advance?

Elon Musk.

He is one of the most active users of Twitter.

He is among the ones with the most followers.

He cares so much about the platform that

he has many ideas and many suggestions about it.

He doesn't hesitate to be vocal about it.

He has expressed his opinion on almost everything from ...

...the removal of the letter "w" in the name

to the conversion of its headquarters in San Francisco into a shelter for the homeless.

Finally, he went and bought the company as it was.

By the way, we are talking about the privatization of a public company.

So what will happen now?

There are different cases, there are those who say;

a-It will be good

b-it will be bad

c-nothing will change, I don’t care

Before trying to answer that,

Let's try to understand how important or unimportant Twitter is in the social media world.

As I just said,

in terms of monthly active users,

it is not like Facebook with almost 3 billion users or

YouTube with more than 2 billion users.

Let alone these two giants, lower than Instagram,

TikTok, Telegram or even QQ, Weibo, and Qzone

which I think that you have never heard of.

Which are all Chinese.

it ranks 17th in number of users,

Isn't it a little lower than our estimates?

However, it seems much more "important" in perception at least.

Maybe potentially it indeed is.

Of course, Elon Musk himself comes first among those who say that...

...this purchase will be "good".

We understand this from the last two sentences of the official letter ...

..he wrote to the board of directors, to which he submitted his proposal on April 13:

“Twitter has extraordinary potential.

I will unlock it.” He says.

We see Chairman of the Board Bret Taylor here,

I personally remember him very well

because he developed FriendFeed,

which I believe is the greatest social media site of all time.

But he sold the very same FriendFeed, which I love that much,

to Facebook in 2009, and Facebook shut it down completely right after buying it.

The now-iconic "like" button is the legacy of FriendFeed.

Let me give you another interesting piece of information,

Turkey was one of the 3 countries that use FriendFeed the most.

In a strange twist of fate, Twitter, with the same Bret Taylor as chairman,

has now been sold…

“This guy sells wherever he goes.” I have duly noted.

Twitter also has a famous founder

Jack.

Jack Dorsey.

He is no longer actively a part of Twitter,

but nevertheless shared his thoughts on the subject in a song.

"Everything in it's right place" from Radiohead

This post is, of course, a symbolic and encrypted tweet.

Because it's a song chosen from an album...

...about being human in a world ruled by technology.

“As a company, Twitter has always been my only problem and my biggest regret.”

says Jack Dorsey, who founded it.

He says that now that the company has gone public,

it now belongs to Wall Street and thus to an advertising model.

He thinks it's the right step to get him back from Wall Street. In short,

it supports Elon Musk's privatization by purchasing it.

“Elon, the only solution I trust.” he wrote.

“I trust his mission to expand the light of consciousness.”

“Light of consciousness” you say huh.

By “consciousness” he means Twitter.

He believes it is the closest thing to "global consciousness".

This is a very interesting thought and

I was thinking similar things long before he announced it on April 25, 2022.

If the world were a giant organism,

the people living on it would probably be its brain cells.

How does the brain work?

By making connections between cells.

Here, as we express our ideas with messages on an atomic scale of up to 280 characters,

and as these expressions interact with each other,

we see that a gigantic brain begins to activate.

It is as if the intelligence of the world is developing.

But I'm not sure if it's in a good or the other way.

I think Jack Dorsey means something like this when he says "global consciousness".

So whether Twitter is the closest thing to it,

I think is open to debate.

Maybe it can really become that with the steps to be taken after this purchase.

Therefore, the “choice a” we mentioned at the beginning can be realized.

But it can also be "choice b".

After all, Elon Musk is an Iron Man-like superhero to some,

and a Green Goblin-like supervillain to others.

Those who say that the results of this purchase will be bad also have valid points.

They say that it is extremely harmful to leave all control of Twitter in the hands of a single person,

and not just someone

but who has various commercial interests around the world and even space.

For example, in 2020 Twitter said,

it would start labeling some Chinese accounts as “state-linked media.”

However, Tesla, of which Elon Musk is the CEO,

is very active and assertive in the Chinese market.

Now what if the President of China called Elon and

said "Hey Elon come on remove these tags?

In the coming days, we will see more discussions on issues such as democracy,

freedom of expression and propaganda.

So, what will Elon Musk change concretely after this purchase?

We can make some guesses from what he said.

There might be an Edit button.

He tweeted this request in 2019.

He expressed this thought at the TED Conference he attended in April 2022.

“After posting a tweet, even if only for a short time, the ability to edit it should come.

We should be able to reset all retweets and favorites.” He said.

In addition, 73.6% of the 4.5 million people who participated in a survey voted...

... to support this feature.

Meanwhile, Twitter announced that ...

...they have been working on such a feature for about 1 year.

Longer tweets can be written

Twitter had emerged with a 140 character limit in order to comply with ...

...the message restriction on older generation phones.

In 2017, they doubled that to 280 characters.

However, according to Elon Musk, this is not enough either.

He wrote that “Twitter is too late for long-form tweets.”

The end of bots may come

Perhaps the most important problem of Twitter and many social media channels are bots.

Automated-users.

Let me add Non-human users to this.

Elon Musk announced that after the purchase,

only real people will be able to log into the system.

Open source algorithm

One of the most interesting changes is the idea of making the Twitter algorithm open source.

According to Elon Musk, Twitter's current algorithm is biased,

and this problem can only be solved if the source code is made public.

For example like being released in github etc.

“I am worried about de facto bias in the Twitter algorithm having a major effect on public discourse.”

he tweeted last month.

Then he asked the question:

"How do we know what's really happening?"

Content moderation

There may be changes to Twitter to be less strict on content moderation.

Because Elon Musk said

he believes Twitter should comply with the laws of the countries in which it operates

and should not regulate users' conversations otherwise.

Although big technology companies try to be objective, they have a certain worldview.

Therefore,

the rules they bring to their platforms can be structured in accordance with this view.

What did George Orwell say in his novel "Animal Farm"?

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

Here, on social media,

"everyone can speak freely, but some can speak more freely than others."

Don’t mind if I say.

Elon Musk makes an analogy when talking about “free speech”:

“Are you allowed to say something you don't like to someone you don't like?

If that's the case, then we have free speech.

It's very annoying, but that's a sign of a healthy, functioning state of free speech.”

According to him,

if the subject is a gray area, the tweet should be allowed to exist.

“He thinks it is necessary to be very reluctant to delete things

and be very careful with permanent bans.

“Timeouts are better than such a ban.” says.

This issue is especially important in the USA

because Twitter banned former President Trump's tweets ...

...on the grounds that they did not comply with the platform rules.

Let's not try to make any connections, but

Elon Musk went from the 34th richest person in the world

to the richest person in the world during the same president.

I don't know if there is another person in history who has increased his wealth so quickly.

But according to a dataset that analyzed all his tweets,

he didn't use it very often until 2018.

In the spring of 2013, the number of tweets per month suddenly exceeds 100.

What a coincidence, Tesla shares gained 40% in the same week.

As of 2018, the number of tweets per month exceeds 300.

Imagine you are the manager of two large companies and

you still use Twitter on average 10 times a day.

Already after 2018,

the value of his companies, and therefore his personal wealth,

increases in direct proportion to the tweets he sends.

Twitter may not be that important to you to me,

but it sure is to Elon Musk.

In fact,

the media is a very important power for anyone who has power and wealth in the world.

The former richest Jeff Bezos also bought a newspaper years ago. The Washington Post

Buying a newspaper or a social media platform such as Twitter may not seem like

a very logical decision from a commercial point of view,

but it should not be overlooked that there are indirectly very strategic decisions.

I will not go further and produce theories by crossing the line of conspiracy,

and I will even quote Elon Musk's own words,

based on the principle of "personal statements are essential".

Because, about this procurement, he says;

“My strong heuristics depend on a supremely reliable and

broadly inclusive public platform that being hip is extremely important

for the future of civilization.

I am not interested in the economy at all.”

That's what he says.

For a person who says that he does all his projects with the intention of

making civilization have a better future, this statement seems quite consistent.

It's up to you to believe or not.

It is free to choose one of the options a, b or c related to the subject.

After all, the maximum we will live is 119 years.

Kane Tanaka, the world's oldest person who died last week, lived that long.

The year she was born,

the Wright Brothers flew an airplane for the first time.

What a take off.

The year she died, Elon Musk, who dreamed of building the world's largest

and most powerful rocket and establishing a colony on Mars,

bought Twitter. A social media platform.

I guess the whole point is to combine these and similar points

and see the direction in which the arrow of time is headed.

If Twitter is indeed the closest thing to global consciousness, as its founder Jack Dorsey said,

I think it is up to us

to determine our place in that consciousness in a way

that will support the glow of this consciousness, not its traumatic darkening.