Musk is learning the lesson Google and Youtube learned years ago with the “adpocalypse”. If the whole house of cards depends on ad dollars you have to keep them happy.
Unless Musk is going to take X (Twitter) completely subscription only, or fund it exclusively out of his own pocket, he is not going to get that “anything I want goes” utopia he keeps crowing about.
That’s how newspapers got started - they were propaganda organs of the rich and existed exclusively to manipulate public opinion. Things really haven’t changed that much, but somewhere along the way people were tricked into paying for them.
Except that libel laws and regulations exist to regulate things like newspapers, not things like random comments by random users you may not even know is a bot account. At the very worst, they can only report on what people are saying and ignore the counterarguments, not present lies as truth. Not that it hasn’t been eroded, but it’s at least much more costly to attempt to use newspapers for disinformation.
Pretty sure Russia’s owners of Twitter really intend it just to be used as a propaganda backwagon platform, like China’s TikTok, so the funding does not need to be self-sufficient. As long as they get a critical userbase where they can move their propaganda, nerf the criticism, and can’t be taken down because of the ensuing backlash, that’s good enough for them.
Musk is learning the lesson Google and Youtube learned years ago with the “adpocalypse”. If the whole house of cards depends on ad dollars you have to keep them happy.
Unless Musk is going to take X (Twitter) completely subscription only, or fund it exclusively out of his own pocket, he is not going to get that “anything I want goes” utopia he keeps crowing about.
That’s how newspapers got started - they were propaganda organs of the rich and existed exclusively to manipulate public opinion. Things really haven’t changed that much, but somewhere along the way people were tricked into paying for them.
Except that libel laws and regulations exist to regulate things like newspapers, not things like random comments by random users you may not even know is a bot account. At the very worst, they can only report on what people are saying and ignore the counterarguments, not present lies as truth. Not that it hasn’t been eroded, but it’s at least much more costly to attempt to use newspapers for disinformation.
Pretty sure Russia’s owners of Twitter really intend it just to be used as a propaganda backwagon platform, like China’s TikTok, so the funding does not need to be self-sufficient. As long as they get a critical userbase where they can move their propaganda, nerf the criticism, and can’t be taken down because of the ensuing backlash, that’s good enough for them.