DMs Are Open
If you don’t do Twitter, you may not understand that title. You’re probably better for it.
For all the focus on “the socials” these days–and at KXEL, we post daily to nine different social media platforms–there’s a massive amount of people who still think “tweet” is the sound a bird makes.
But for those who are “on the inside” of political dialogue, the possibility of Elon Musk taking over Twitter has led to huge reaction–positive from those on the right, negative from those on the left. This was back in the news the past day or so due to Musk reversing course and again pledging to take over the platform, apparently as the foundation for something even broader.
The news outlet POLITICO is not known to be a friend to Donald Trump or those on the right generally, but they are usually pretty rational. That’s why this quote from yesterday caught my attention: “Twitter is enormously consequential to American politics and media, and the takeover by Musk will have major implications.”
Let’s stop there for a moment. A social media platform limiting comments to 280 characters is “enormously consequential to American politics and media”–wrap your head around that. Of course, that was true when Trump was allowed to tweet. Now, however?
The panic, however, that someone who claims to advocate free speech wants to take over a media platform is curious. The fear that he might steer it to one side of the political spectrum is also interesting, given how much of legacy media has gotten whiplash in their turns to the left over the past few years.
This, too, from the POLITICO piece about Musk: “He’s such a micromanager that when Tesla was having production issues he famously camped out on a factory floor to help solve assembly problems.”
So he helped solve a problem…and that is a negative, earning the derisive use of the phrase micromanager?
If the platform is that important as they say…it needs a micromanaging problem solver. And fast.
