Tech

Diana Bossio, Swinburne University of Technology It’s been a week since Elon Musk strode into the Twitter headquarters with a kitchen sink, signalling his official takeover of the company. Having had some time to let the news of his US$44 billion (about A$70 billion) purchase “sink in”, Twitter users are now wondering what he’ll do with the platform. What’s Musk going to do with Twitter? After months of trying to walk away from his commitment to buy the platform, and just before entering what was looking to be a long, potentially embarrassing and costly court battle to enforce his original

Casey Fiesler, University of Colorado Boulder Elon Musk announced that “the bird is freed” when his US$44 billion acquisition of Twitter officially closed on Oct. 27, 2022. Some users on the microblogging platform saw this as a reason to fly away. Over the course of the next 48 hours, I saw countless announcements on my Twitter feed from people either leaving the platform or making preparations to leave. The hashtags #GoodbyeTwitter, #TwitterMigration and #Mastodon were trending. The decentralized, open source social network Mastodon gained over 100,000 users in just a few days, according to a user counting bot. As an

Filippo Menczer, Indiana University Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter on Oct. 27, 2022 has triggered renewed debate about what it means for the future of the social media platform, which plays an important role in determining the news and information many people – especially Americans – are exposed to. In addition to expanding Twitter’s features, Musk has said he wants to make it an arena for free speech. What that means has fueled much speculation and raised concerns about the effect the acquisition will have on the 2022 midterm elections – and use of the platform by politicians more generally