Elon Musk’s first year as X boss was tumultuous

san francisco (Uttam Hindu News): After months of turmoil, Elon Musk acquired Twitter for $44 billion in October last year. A year later, amid the continued spread of disinformation, the controversies surrounding the platform (now called X) have yet to subside.

Anti-Semitic tweets have more than doubled in the past few months since Musk took office, and the European Commission has formally launched an investigation into Still not freed.

As soon as he bought Twitter on October 26, 2022, Musk arrived at the company’s headquarters in San Francisco carrying a bathroom sink, sharing a post saying: “Let that sink in!”

After the acquisition, Musk fired more than 80 percent of Twitter’s 7,500 employees, including its Indian-origin CEO Parag Agarwal, and even disbanded the trust and safety council.

Earlier this month, reports emerged that Aggarwal, former policy chief Vijaya Gadde and other executives ultimately won $1.1 million in legal fees from the Musk-run company.

In November last year, he said on Twitter that “the people have spoken and former US President Donald Trump will be reinstated on the platform.”

In August this year, Trump had hinted at his return by posting his mugshot from Fulton County Jail in the US on charges of election interference.

Musk retweeted his post, saying, “Next-level.”

In February, amid reports that Twitter was losing $4 million a day, the tech billionaire said the platform would soon share ad revenue with creators for ads appearing in their reply threads.

The social media platform finally began paying creators in July for a portion of the ad revenue earned from ads placed in replies to their posts by other verified users.

Last month, X CEO Linda Yaccarino had revealed that the platform paid out nearly $20 million (over Rs 166 crore) to creators.

In April, Twitter announced that it would remove verification badges from older accounts in order to promote its Twitter Blue subscriptions.

It now charges verified users $8 per month, and is launching other paid membership tiers soon.

In June, Musk caused a stir by posting that he was ready for a cage match with Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, a fight that never happened.

Zuckerberg later launched a competitor to Twitter called Threads on Instagram.

In July, Twitter announced the renaming of the platform to X.com, to make it an “everything app” from live-streaming events and movies, live sports, digital payments and more.

“Twitter was acquired by X Corp to ensure freedom of expression and as an accelerator for the X, Everything app,” Musk said.

This month, the European Commission launched an investigation into X boss Musk over alleged spread of illegal content and disinformation, particularly terrorist and violent content and hate speech in the wake of the Israel-Hamas war.

Yaccarino responded by saying the company is actively working with partners, governments, regulators and policymakers to combat misinformation.

Last week, a new study claimed that verified users with blue badges are spreading the majority of misinformation about the Israel-Hamas war on Twitter.

During the first week of the conflict (October 7–14), US-based for-profit organization NewsGuard analyzed the .250 most engaged posts (likes, reposts, replies and bookmarks) on the war, which identified 10 of the top false or unverified stories related to the war. Promoted one.

The results showed that out of these 250 posts, 186 or 74 percent were posted by accounts verified by X.

According to new SimilarWeb data, X Corp lost more than 500 million user visits last month, and the platform fell to seventh place behind Instagram in the global rankings.