Just because Elon Musk owns Twitter doesn’t mean it all of a sudden becomes Willy Wonka’s factory, cut off from the outside world and immune to the rules of business. KevinTDugan writes
Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: Getty Images In the immediate fog of Twitter’s acquisition by the “free speech absolutist” Elon Musk, all the predictions that the platform would become a bastion of hate and bad vibes seemed to be coming true. There was the radio host Mark Levin, who returned from self-exile. Then Tucker Carlson tweeted “We’re back,” after an apparent one-month hiatus.
Twitter sees itself itself as the town square of the world — where, unlike TikTok, unpleasant and controversial topics are what make it necessary. But it’s also a business. Take a look at the company’s statistics on its content moderation: Twitter suspended 1.2 million accounts, and deleted 5.9 million pieces of content during the first half of 2021, the most recent time period available — and the most active period of pruning who gets to speak, and what gets said, in 280 characters.
As the veteran financial journalist James Surowiecki pointed out, that’s more than $1 billion in added interest a year that Musk is going to have to pay out — and that money is going to have to come from somewhere. Last year, Twitter made more than $5 billion in revenue, the most ever, with 89 percent of that coming from ad sales.
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