Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover & How It Plays into Information Cascades and User Value
As Twitter transitions into its new ownership under Elon Musk, it is bound to face many changes to the platform. Less than three weeks ago, on October 27, 2022, Musk closed the $44 billion deal to purchase Twitter. Following this acquisition, Twitter, both the platform and the company, has seen many changes. The first of these included a huge lay off of roughly half of all of Twitter’s employees as well as at least four of the top executives. Musk is also changing the platform’s policies in order to create more revenue – adopting a feature for users to pay a monthly fee to become verified on Twitter. The company announced this new feature as a push for “power to the people”, where typical users can have the same signature check mark as the popular users on the platform. With this, however, comes the issue of impersonation – without the blue check mark to indicate which user is genuine – which has led to Musk implementing a harsher policy against impersonators. In addition to these changes, Musk has also been a strong supporter of free speech, to an extent that leads many users to question the coverage of freedom of speech as a guise of hate comments and discriminatory opinions.
These large changes within Twitter relate to the current topics of information cascades as well as following the crowd. The updates to the platform have caused many popular users to leave the platform, thus resulting in many others contemplating abandoning the short-message platform as well. Information cascades, a concept within following the crowd, describe how other people tend to observe what others are doing, and based on information they infer from other’s action, oftentimes decide to follow others’ decisions. As of now, popular influencers such as Whoopie Goldberg, Gigi Hadid, and Shonda Rhimes have already chosen to stop using Twitter because of the changes Musk has made to the platform. As popular users leave Twitter, many others are starting to follow in their footsteps, illustrating the concept of following the crowd and information cascades. As more people leave, similar to concepts we discussed in class, the less users on the platform, the less value the platform actually has to its users. In other words, the problem of Twitter losing it’s users is that its value is gauged based on how well it can connect people with others, and as the number of users of Twitter decreases, the use provided to the current users who are still on the platform decreases, causing some of them to consider leaving the platform as well. In this way, the concept of information cascades from the first few users quitting the platform then transforms into the concept of the “value” the platform provides to its users, another topic covered in class.
Overall, the changes being implemented to Twitter from its takeover by Elon Musk have caused a shift in the users of Twitter. As of tomorrow, November 9th, 2022, Twitter will be implementing its paid verification system, in addition to the other changes the media company has already seen. As these changes get more dramatic and spark more controversy, many users have decided to leave and/or take a break from the media platform. As we have seen in class, the decisions others make can influence the decisions of the people after them, resulting in many users leaving the platform in succession. Adding on to this, if the number of users decreases to such a significant extent that the current users start to lose their value of the connections on Twitter, Twitter is potentially facing a dangerous decline in its users. Whether or not a decrease in Twitter’s users to such an extent will happen is uncertain, and for now, only time, and perhaps a bit of Network analysis, will tell.
Links:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/27/technology/elon-musk-twitter-deal-complete.html
https://www.vulture.com/2022/11/celebrities-who-left-deactivated-twitter-elon-musk.html
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/25/twitter-losing-most-active-users-internal-documents.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/06/technology/twitter-verification-check-marks.html