East Lansing, United States: Twitter has been a lot on the news lately, although for the wrong reason. The stock growth has been cold and the platform itself mostly remained the same since it was founded in 2006. On April 14, 2022, Elon Musk, the richest person in the world, made an offer to buy Twitter and take a public company.
In submission with the Securities Commission and Exchange, Musk stated, “I invest on Twitter because I believe in his potential as a platform for free speeches throughout the world, and I believe freedom of speech is a social necessity for functioning democracy.”
As a social media researcher, I found that the potential ownership of Twitter Musk and the reason mentioned to buy the company raises important problems. These problems come from the nature of the social media platform and what distinguishes it from others.
What makes Twitter unique
Twitter occupies a unique niche. In short pieces of text and threading Foster real-time conversations among thousands of people, which make it popular with celebrities, media personalities, and politicians.
Social media analysts talk about the beak content on the platform, which means the time needed for a piece of content to reach 50% of the total lifetime involvement, usually measured in the number of views or popularity-based metrics. The average lifetime of a tweet is around 20 minutes, compared to five hours for Facebook posts, 20 hours for post Instagram, 24 hours to post LinkedIn and 20 days for YouTube videos. Half Life which is much shorter describing the role of Twitter’s center has come to occupy in directing real-time conversations when open events.
Twitter’s ability to form real-time discourse, and convenience with which data, including geographical marked data, can be collected from Twitter has made a gold mine for researchers to analyze various social phenomena, ranging from public health to politics. Twitter data has been used to predict the visit of an emergency department regarding Asthma, measuring public epidemic awareness, and the wildfire smoke dispersion model.
Tweet which is part of the conversation is displayed in chronological order, and, although a lot of tweet involvement is fronloaded, the Twitter archive provides instant access and complete to every public tweet. This twitter position is a recording history writer and de facto facts.
Changes to Musk’s mind
An important problem is how the ownership of the musk against Twitter, and private control on the social media platform generally, affect wider public welfare. In a series of deleted tweets, Musk made some suggestions on how to change Twitter, including adding an edit button to tweet and giving automatic verification signs to premium users.
There is no experimental evidence of how the edit button will change the information transmission on Twitter. However, it is possible to extrapolate from previous studies that analyze deleted tweets.
There are many ways to take deleted tweets, which allow researchers to learn it. While some studies show significant personality differences between users who remove their tweets and those who do not, this finding shows that removing tweets is a way for people to manage their online identity.
Analyzing the removal behavior can also produce valuable instructions on online credibility and disinformation. Similarly, if Twitter adds the edit button, analyzing editing behavior patterns can provide insight into Twitter user motivation and how they display themselves.
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