Welcome to the tweet trends podcast. Hey, what's trending today? Hey, I mean, hey girl and you are tuned in to try It's the quickest way to find out what's trending today Today I want to talk about Twitter. Let's get started hearing this for the first time But Elon Musk is in the process of purchasing Twitter for somewhere in the neighborhood of 44 billion dollars So let's stop here for a second and ask ourselves.
Who does that? Oh, that's right rich people do. Okay, let's continue on So Elon Musk is purchasing Twitter and right now it looks like it's pretty much a done deal He's two snaps away from being the owner unless something goes wrong with the purchase So let's just go ahead and assume that he owns Twitter now. What does that mean?
Well, that's the question of the day everybody is talking about that What does Twitter look like with Elon Musk at the helm? Well, he's given us a little tiny tidbit of what he wants to do He wants to make Twitter a private company and he wants to open it up for this. He wants to open it up for free speech Okay, yeah, so what does that mean? What does free speech look like coming from an ultra rich white male with 85 million followers on the platform or close to?
Let me say that I'm not gonna give him that extra close to 85 million followers on the platform Well, I can imagine it looks way different than most of the users But especially those who are women or from marginalized communities and those are the people that Twitter has been working so hard to protect over these years So that's why this is such a big concern for everybody You have people saying that the numbers are dropping their followership is falling because well really they don't know why But a lot of people are speculating that it's either bots that are being removed somehow dropped or people are leaving Because they don't want to have to deal with what Twitter is gonna look like once Elon Musk is in control and It's not like they're they're concerned for no reason. Let's go over some of the things that he's done on this platform he's got a lot of experience he's got a lot of followers and He has got a lot of controversy to go along with it Over the years. He's used Twitter to make misleading claims such as the one he made about the COVID-19 pandemic He's made baseless accusations one against a man who helped rescue children from a cave in Thailand as being a sexual predator He's mock people who display their gender pronouns on their platform and has made countless sophomoric jokes about the numbers of 420 and 69 And he's even had tweets removed deleted from the platform one of which is a photo comparing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to Adolf Hitler And he's compared Twitter's CEO Pareg Agrawal to Joseph Stalin Let's take a trip back back in time way way long ago before the internet before social media Back then to get a story to transfer information. It was done verbally and Then we got to a point where it was written you had newspapers and even if a bad story went out a retraction could be written Moving forward to television with the news if a bad story went out a retraction could be presented on the news But even in that the retraction would always get less traction than the initial story because once the initial story gets out It spreads like wildfire same thing with social media now We've got the internet and just about all of us have this little tiny computer that we can hold in our hands And we can pull up any information that we want to in a split second depending on how well your Wi-Fi is or your service yeah, and When bad stories go out a lot of times retractions aren't made and they don't necessarily go with the story because if I put a Post up today someone could see it.
They could copy it. They could share it They can do all sorts of things with it. They can save it to their computer and use it at a later time Say a retraction goes out. It doesn't go to all of those different places It might go to my site, but will they pick that up too?
Probably not because it's not gonna be as juicy or entertaining as the initial item was So even if there was a button that you could push and make all of it disappear Make each one of those connections and even the stuff that someone saved on their computer go away The fact that somebody's already read it and shared it with somebody else. It's in their mind. They can reproduce it They can reproduce it verbally they can reproduce it on the computer. They can reproduce it on paper They can do so much with it.
So damage control how much of it can you really control? There's no such thing as damage control you put something out there and cross your fingers and hope somebody sees it But outside of that nobody's going broke trying to bring back a story that went out that wasn't correct And so that's a part of the issue with this whole free speech thing You know the public doesn't want to see more conspiracy theories and harassment I can remember one time I posted something and it was during the Trump administration and It was amazing I don't have that many followers But that day my phone was blowing up with all of the alerts that someone had commented on what I said and they were all rude nasty comments And it's like wow so if that's what was happening during A time period in Twitter's life when they were trying to prevent that type of stuff from happening I can't imagine what's gonna happen once free speech gets to be the menu item of the day Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity Are debated says Elon Musk. Yeah, so about that debate thing that doesn't happen on Twitter People don't come there with receipts and have a debate where they share information with where it came from and go back and forth that way There are people with weird ideas that go and chase down comments that are made to then start a fight to create a problem I don't see true honest debates taking place on Twitter So I don't know what he's seeing with his people maybe they debate on his page, but yeah I'm thinking that's really not happening. So having said that did you hear about the inaugural sync digital well-being summit to seek greater understanding of digital harms?
Yeah, how about that? So in my best Alana's Morris said saying voice It is very ironic that this particular summit just took place on the 29th and 30th of March in Saudi Arabia Where they wanted to array to raise the awareness of the hidden realities of our relationship with digital services? Hmm sounds like Twitter falls under that category in this two-day summit They brought together academia tech industry titans cultural figures and policy makers for an exchange of ideas and solutions for improving our relationship with technology They had five main points that they were focusing on they were looking to discuss digital addiction Privacy fake news and misinformation relationships and algorithms Well algorithms is one of the things that Elon Musk talked about He said that his idea is to make the algorithms open to the public to increase trust however, the fake news and misinformation portion also comes in with him because if you have a more hands-off approach to content moderation That's a big concern because it to me. It seems like this platform is just going to become a haven for dysfunction and hate speech and that's not good All right, that was today's episode.
Thank you for joining me and this whole talk about Twitter. I was born without Twitter I grew up without Twitter. I'm gonna die without Twitter So can I live without Twitter sure but the only question I really have is so do I need to change the name of my podcast? No, no go figure anyway have a great rest of your day, you know where to find me Twitter Instagram YouTube Facebook at hey That's at a G.
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