Release Date: Release Date – 12:30 AM, Sunday – November 6th
Amit Mishra
Last week closed one of the long-awaited acquisitions in tech history, touted as one of the biggest ever in tech. Elon Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of social media platform Twitter has filled the global mindspace with excitement and pain. This week’s upheaval saw Musk’s poetic assertion to free the caged bird and then unabashedly fire a number of C-Suite-level executives, including CEO Parag Agrawal.
Considering it “the most interesting place on the internet,” the acquisition was based on Musk’s shared philosophy of “improving humanity and the human experience.” As such, acquisitions of social media platforms promise an equally rich experience in which people can exercise creative independence and freedom of expression. For business giants, envisioning a digital platform where people can freely express their opinions or debate them in a civilized way is as important as extending human consciousness to Mars.
Given that social media giants are now going through major changes, it will be interesting to see how the future of social media giants plays out. With Musk disbanding the board and declaring himself the sole director, things don’t appear to be calming down anytime soon. While people are divided in character, the common factor that links isolation is the overarching concept of influence and power across all platforms.
16 years of journey
Twitter, perhaps unknown to many, is the most powerful social media platform. In its 16 years of existence, it has grown into a force driving grassroots discussions, undermining top-down political leadership and thought styles, and giving voice to those who have long been marginalized.From redefining the Black Lives Matter movement to permanently banning the current president of the United States in 2019, the influence it wields is certainly not limited by the reduction in the number of (now 280) roles at the user’s disposal
The fact of influence and power is confirmed by a recent study by Pew Research, which surveyed nearly 12,000 journalists on the use of social media platforms. Twitter became the most popular platform. This suggests that many reports were at least partially influenced by the views of the tweets. Since the past decade, it has affected people too much to ignore. Twitter was used by pro-democracy activists in Libya and Egypt to overthrow authoritarian regimes. It was used by the Americans to occupy Wall Street. Black Lives Matter went viral on Twitter in 2013 after George Zimmerman acquitted unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin.
Twitter is a loser’s dream and a tool for bottom-up organizing that will empower dissidents and marginalized groups, overthrow corrupt institutions and enable ordinary people to talk to tycoons and tyrants on an equal footing. The concept was one of the defining moments of the era. Over the past decade, and driven by these revolutionary movements.
Oxygen cylinders and beds were mobilized via Twitter as the Covid wave hit India. But aid has never been limited to the Covid era. For the past eight years, the Indian government, through its official department, has been helping its citizens with countless requests and pleas, from expats bringing distress from abroad to listening to grievances with rail services. But how did Twitter become so important in modern times? How a scruffy startup became an official behemoth When did a platform with only nerds and a nerdy user base start to have over 396 million followers and over 200 million daily active users?
beginning
success…
Twitter was founded in 2006 with the idea of letting Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone and Evan Williams quickly update text from anywhere in the world. This is a side project that grew out of a podcasting platform called Odeo. The original version of the platform was called “twttr” and was used only by Odeo employees.
Twitter was released to the public on July 15, 2006. Twitter took off at the Southwest (SXSW) festival in 2007, posting more than 60,000 tweets a day, according to technical information and advice site Lifewire. On November 7, 2013, Twitter went public in its initial public offering at $26 per share, valuing it at $31 billion. Since then until its acquisition, its valuation has grown significantly, peaking at $55 billion in the second quarter of 2021. This meteoric rise made all of its founders prominent tech personalities, and when Twitter went public, it established its three creators, Williams, Stone, and Dorsey, as billionaires and Silicon Valley’s biggest success story.
…and betrayal
In all the splendor of success, one name was missing from every victory milestone celebration, and that was Noah Glass, who was instrumental in the establishment of Twitter in its early years. Although it started out as his company—the first office was his apartment, and it was the man from whom he came up with the famous nickname “Twttr”—Glass, known as the forgotten founder, received little from the website. profit. After being fired and removed from Twitter’s history, he took a small financial stake in the company, which he eventually sold a few years later. His co-founder never mentions him by name in interviews, and when someone searches for “Twitter founder,” even with a photo of the four of them, the image of Glass that appears in the search is not his image.
According to Nick Bilton’s book, Hatching Twitter: True Stories of Money, Power, Friendship and BetrayalGlass experienced a depressive episode and said he became a loner as the company grew Isolate yourself from your friends. Twitter certainly wouldn’t exist without Glass. All of Odeo’s early employees and investors agreed that Glass was the only person in Odeo who was most enthusiastic about Twitter from the start.
When asked, Glass modestly maintained that he was not the only founder of Twitter, but asserted that he felt aggrieved and betrayed given that his contributions were largely wiped from Twitter’s history. The story that created Twitter through the words of its founders and executives is always different from the actual story. In their stories, a formal founder will always have a missing piece.
Years of unscrupulous domination
out of favor…
By 2011, Twitter had become an important social media platform for the Arab Spring movement, as well as the wave of anti-government demonstrations that swept Egypt, Libya and Tunisia, and was widely used by protesters to coordinate and spread coverage.
In 2012, Twitter’s active user base grew to 200 million users. 2012 was also the year that Barack Obama used the platform to officially announce his victory in the U.S. presidential election by tweeting. By 2012, it was being praised as a platform that could help those with dissent to organize and express themselves in oppressive regimes around the world. It is now known as a space for the voiceless. By the end of 2013, Twitter had become an unrelenting social media platform with a reputation not only among the sea people but among the elite.
As the platform continued to attract more and more users, no one really expected it to turn into a powerful company that could shape the climate of political discourse in one part of the world and possibly cause unrest and chaos in another. The platform has scaled to the point that it has absolutely no fear of what consequences it will leave its mark on its user base.
Twitter, for example, was Trump’s medium of choice until the end of his administration, when he was permanently suspended for tweeting in support of the Jan. 6 Capitol riots. In the past, when more elite users were banned from the platform, they turned to other social media platforms to wield the same influence they used in Twitter’s heyday, but failed to do so. This is what separates Twitter from Facebook and Google.
Although its user base is insignificant compared to Facebook, Twitter plays a huge role in influencing events around the world. The platform has risen to higher echelons, but years of ascension have also been marred by a bias against censorship. The platform allegedly favors users with a certain ideology and is strict with others.
In a 2020 study by MIT and Yale professors titled “Is Twitter Biased Against Conservatives? The Challenge of Inferring Political Bias in a Hyperpartisan Media Ecosystem,” researchers extrapolated the platform Shows a degree of bias in suspending accounts. In October 2020, researchers tracked 9,000 politically active Twitter users, half Democrats and half Republicans. The authors recorded their Twitter activity six months after the 2020 election. The survey did find a skew in the proportion of users who had their accounts suspended — 7.7% of Democrats and 35.6% of Republicans witnessed account suspensions.
…and take over
That’s where the story of Twitter’s acquisition begins. Billionaire Elon Musk, known for major disruptions in the space and auto industries, is also a Twitter enthusiast (with 114 million followers) and spends a lot of his money. Tweeting in his spare time, he has claimed in the past that the platform is subject to political bias and excessive moderation.
Musk has started to discuss publicly his goals for the platform. He intends to open source his recommendation algorithm and relax the moderation policy. He has promised to remove the permanent ban, except for the bots and online imposters he has vowed to ban permanently. Last spring, he privately invested about $3 billion for a 9.2% stake in the business, almost immediately becoming Twitter’s largest shareholder. A few days later, he changed his plans and wanted a whole pie instead of a piece. He made an offer to buy the entire business for $54.20 a share, on condition that the social media platform disclose details of the bot’s account. After months of protracted turmoil and legal battles, he agreed on Oct. 27 to buy Twitter for $44 billion.
Estimating the acquisition is a tall order, but we’re sure Twitter’s future will require shedding its opacity and making the platform more open source. Musk has championed the same idea at Tesla Motors, where all patents are open source and bound by patent promises, and will seek to follow suit on Twitter. The adage drawn from the lengthy chronicle is that no platform in the world, no matter how powerful, is larger than its user base, and sometimes it takes a billionaire with a good sense of humor to revive and re-establish the values of first principles , As for why the platform exists? It is for user use only.
(The author is an academic assistant at the Indian Business School)
