Eric Zuniga, Campus Carrier staff writer

Gary Jones, Campus Carrier staff writer

On October 27, business mogul Elon Musk closed a deal to buy Twitter for $44 billion. Musk announced his intention to buy the company in April of this year, but attempted to cancel the deal in July. He did so because he said there were breaches of the acquisition agreement. Musk took control of Twitter one day before a lawsuit filed by the company to compel him to complete the deal was set to begin.  

The deal poses some financial problems for Musk who, despite being the world’s richest man with a net worth of $195 billion, took on $13 billion in debt to finance the acquisition. To meet his debt obligations, Musk will face pressure to make Twitter, a company that has turned a profit only twice in the last ten years, financially stable. While the company has $6 billion in cash reserves, Cornell University senior lecturer of finance Drew Pascarella said in an interview with the New York Times that the majority of this money may be used to pay off the debt. 

“They are essentially going to take all the financial resources of the company and just pour it into servicing the debt,” Pascarella said.

Musk has already begun efforts to cut Twitter’s costs. According to a report in the New York Times, about half of the company’s workforce of 7,500 has been laid off in the past week. Musk also fired five Twitter executives when he took control of the company, including its chief financial officer and legal and policy executive. Daniel Sipocz, associate professor of communication, said that the lack of experienced leadership could pose problems for Musk in the future. 

“He has removed all the people who had institutional knowledge and could help answer some questions,” Sipocz said. “It’s very difficult to make decisions when you don’t have the full context of things, so he’s going to be grappling with this for a while.”

In what may be an effort to increase revenue, Twitter has also announced changes to its verification program. On Sunday, the company announced that anybody who paid for an $8 a month subscription service could receive a blue checkmark next to their handle. Previously, the checkmark was used to mitigate impersonation and misinformation, indicating that a high-profile person or company had verified their identity. Sipocz said that the new verification policy could negatively affect the quality of discourse on the platform.

“If that’s what indeed happens, that completely implodes the current hierarchy and rules that have been established on Twitter,” Sipocz said. 

When Musk announced his intention to buy Twitter, he said that his main goal in owning the service was to ensure freedom of speech on the platform. He has proposed a loosening of Twitter’s content moderation rules and reinstatement of the accounts of controversial right-wing figures, like former president Donald Trump. Actions like the suspension of Trump’s Twitter account have caused some conservatives to accuse Twitter of anti-right-wing censorship. According to Sipocz, these accusations have not been supported by research. 

“By and large, the studies that have been out there that have been conducted on this, from reputable researchers in academia, have shown that no, conservative voices have not been censored or been blocked or limited in any sorts of ways,” Sipocz said. “Traditionally speaking, what we are seeing is that extremes on the left and the right are very polarized. I think the right side is much more extremist and polarized than the left, and so you see a lot more things like hate speech and defamatory remarks and remarks about violence from the right. Those are not constitutionally protected.”

While Musk has said that he will not implement any changes to Twitter’s content moderation rules until after the midterm elections, Sipocz said that there has already been a rise in the amount of inflammatory content on the platform, in part due to the recent layoffs.

“There has already been a noticeable trend in terms of the algorithm on Twitter that indicates that Elon is going to steer this to make money,” Spiocz said. “We’ve seen a rise in hate speech; we’re seeing a rise in previously what would be moderated content, and some of that is also because he’s laying off some of the staffing and so it’s not able to operate as much.”

According to Whitney Adams, visiting assistant professor of English, rhetoric and writing, hate speech has been a major problem on Twitter since before Musk’s takeover.

“One of the issues with Twitter, as somebody that studies Twitter, is that hate speech has really been allowed to flourish on Twitter, whether that’s incel violence, racial violence, antisemitic violence, violence against women,” Adams said. “It’s really hard to have regulation on Twitter.”

Concerns over moderation have caused major advertising firms, such as Interpublic Group (IPG), to advise their clients to pause Twitter ad spending. Musk said in a tweet last Friday that the slowdown in advertising was causing a massive drop in revenue.

“Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation and we did everything we could to appease the activists,” Musk tweeted. 

            Concerns have also been raised over Musk’s ties to foreign countries. Tesla, which Musk also owns, gets about a quarter of its revenue from Chinese sales, stimulating concerns about censorship of content that is critical of the Chinese government. According to Sipocz, Musk’s sources of funding are unknown, meaning that he could be subject to pressure from multiple foreign governments. 

            “We don’t really truly have a full sense of who the financial backers are; he didn’t have $44 billion. The Chinese, Russians, North Koreans, the Saudis, they could be involved; we don’t know,” Sipocz said. “It might be just your typical corrupt bank bankrolling it. I think that’s probably a best-case scenario, but I think people are rightfully so concerned about Chinese influence or other outsider influence because we have shown that social media can have a large impact on the political sphere and how people vote and think.”

            Regardless of the extent to which Musk changes Twitter, there is a general consensus that social media has had a mostly negative effect on civic discourse. Sipocz said that social media has never been as reliable a source as traditional news media.

            “As useful a tool Twitter can be, particularly with disseminating information quickly, it was never as accurate or credible or trustworthy as legacy media like your newspapers, to some degree like your broadcast networks,” Sipocz said. “It’s useful for getting information out there but it’s never been truly accurate.”

            Despite the potential for more hateful content on the platform, Adams said that Twitter may remain popular because of its easily digestible format.       

            “I think based on the nature of Twitter and the fact that it’s shorter bits of information that’s kind of easily digestible, I think the power of language is something that we kind of have to be careful about,” Adams said. “Now with Elon Musk, it might lose popularity but I don’t know if it would ever be completely gone.”