The IT Nerd

Elon Musk is clearly going all in with this free speech at any cost thing of his. Earlier today he did this:

Yeah, he ran a poll asking the Twitterverse if he should reinstate Donald Trump’s Twitter account as he was suspended from Twitter, along with most other forms of social media because of his behaviour after the January 6th riots. And as you can see, the Twitterverse voted to reinstate his account. To which Musk said this:

By the way, Vox Populi, Vox Dei is a Latin phrase meaning “the voice of the people is the voice of God.” Though the cynic in me says that when this goes off the rails, Musk is looking for plausible deniability by saying something along the lines of “It wasn’t my decision. The people spoke and I gave them what they wanted.”

Here’s why Elon Musk likely made a huge mistake by going down this path. Let’s start with the fact that every time Musk has made a major decision, he sends people to Mastodon. How many people you ask? I can help you with that:

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that we’re about to see another wave of people leave Twitter because of this and that chart is about to get another wave of Mastodon users added to it. As in a significant part of that 48% who voted no in that poll. That will start to affect Twitter’s engagement numbers, which in turn will send whatever remaining advertisers that are still on Twitter to the exits because there’s no point in advertising on a platform that people are leaving. That of course assumes that advertisers will want anything to do with a platform who is run by a guy who would pull this sort of stunt, and leave before even seeing the engagement numbers. And keep in mind, advertising is what keeps the lights on at Twitter. So if they go, Musk will be in deep trouble.

Another reason why Elon really played himself, again, with this stunt is that Trump doesn’t want to go back to Twitter:

“I am not going on Twitter, I am going to stay on TRUTH,” Trump told Fox News in April, referring to the website Truth Social. “I hope Elon buys Twitter because he’ll make improvements to it and he is a good man, but I am going to be staying on TRUTH.”

“The bottom line is, no, I am not going back to Twitter,” he added.

On Saturday, before the reinstatement was announced, Trump shared the link to Musk’s poll on Truth Social, saying: “Vote now with positivity, but don’t worry, we aren’t going anywhere. Truth Social is special!”

Now he can always change his mind. But seeing as he’s invested lots of somebody’s money in Truth Social, I don’t see him returning. And again, the cynic in me says that this was a stunt by Elon to get more users onto Twitter. The only problem is that if Trump doesn’t come back to Twitter, it’s highly unlikely any of his followers will. And even if they do, they’ll likely bring all sorts of, shall we say bad behaviour that advertisers will want nothing to do with. Thus Elon will be no further ahead.

The fact is that Elon may think that he’s taken the moral high ground or something by running this poll and reinstating Trump’s Twitter account. But he may well realize that he just played himself for the second time in a week when he doesn’t get the result that he was looking for.

This entry was posted on November 19, 2022 at 9:08 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.