Elon Musk began purchasing Twitter shares on January 31, 2022. On April 4, he announced that he had acquired 9.1% of the platform’s shares for $2.64 billion, making him the principal shareholder. After several months of litigation, Musk finalized the acquisition of the social network on October 27 for $44 billion.
To announce this acquisition, Elon Musk tweeted, “The bird is freed,” referring to the platform’s blue bird logo.
Subsequently, Musk immediately fired Twitter’s former CEO, Parag Agrawal, along with three other executives: CFO Ned Segal, Head of Legal Affairs Vijaya Gadde, and General Counsel Sean Edgett.
Musk assured advertisers that he wanted to allow the expression of all opinions on this social network without turning it into an unruly platform where anything goes. He stated, “It is important for the future of human civilization to have an online public space where a wide variety of opinions can debate in a healthy manner without resorting to violence.”
Following a poll launched by Musk, former President Donald Trump’s account was reactivated on November 20, 2022. Out of 15 million votes, a slim majority (51.8%) voted for Trump’s return, while 48.2% were against it. Trump’s account had been previously suspended due to his indirect involvement in the assault on the Capitol in January 2021.
On July 24, 2023, Elon Musk announced that Twitter would change its name and logo. The platform is now known as “X” and can be accessed via x.com.
Musk introduced X’s Premium subscription plan, offering a verification badge, reactivation of suspended accounts, tweet bookmarking, and view counters under each post.
Despite these changes, X has not made significant progress in the fight against disinformation initiated by the previous team. On May 27, 2023, the social network, led by Musk, announced that it was withdrawing from the European Code of Practice, established in 2018, to combat fake news.
According to TF1, a European Commission official claimed that Musk had reduced moderation of problematic content and appeared to amplify the voices of notorious disinformation spreaders.
The European Code of Practice includes nearly thirty signatories, such as Meta, Google, Twitter, Microsoft, and TikTok, along with smaller platforms, advertising professionals, fact-checkers, and NGOs. The signatories helped draft the text, which contains about forty commitments, including better cooperation with fact-checkers and removing ads from sites spreading false information.
To counter fake news, X introduced “Community Notes,” allowing users to add contextual notes to posts. However, the conflicts between Ukraine and Russia, Israel and Hamas, as well as the hate campaign against Haitians by Trump supporters during the 2024 electoral campaign, show the limitations of this system.
Hundreds of photos and videos of Israeli or Palestinian victims have gone viral without any censorship from “Community Notes.” Similarly, rumors about Haitian immigrants, including claims that they hunt animals for consumption, continue to circulate on the platform despite official denials by local authorities. Donald Trump and his vice president, JD Vance, have even spread these rumors without significant intervention from the X team.
Moreover, Elon Musk himself contributes to this hate campaign on his personal page, which is followed by over 197 million people. Musk also shamelessly shares destabilizing messages aimed at weakening the Democratic camp, thus revealing his clear partisanship for the Republican Party and Trump, which goes against the law of neutrality expected in the press.
The fact that certain users are untouchable, along with the spread of false information, attacks on ethnic groups, and shocking photos and videos, makes X a potential danger to democracy.
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