Twitter owner Elon Musk tweeted on Friday that the “media elite” will do everything they can to prevent the platform’s goal of promoting what he calls “citizen journalism,” and professional journalists were outraged.
“As Twitter pursues the goal of elevating citizen journalism, the media elite will do anything to stop that from happening,” he tweeted to his 115 million followers.
“Mainstream media will still thrive, but increased competition from citizens will make them more accurate as their oligopoly on information is broken,” added Musk.
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From critics accusing the world’s richest man of wanting to take on elites to suggesting the media would benefit from his changes to make the platform more democratic, Musk’s recent tweets attracted a massive reaction.
“Journalists are citizens,” Condé Nast’s Luke Zaleski wrote in response. “The vast majority are middle-class and working-class men and women doing hard and important jobs. This disgraceful glutton and bully controls perhaps the most powerful combination of wealth and media reach in human history. And he blames the so-called ‘elites’ ‘.”
“Is this tweet from 2009?” wrote Vox’s Ryan McCarthy. “It’s almost as if the last 12 years of Twitter — and the Internet — never happened, and now we’re back to the democratization noise from the first age of social media.”
“Twitter is apparently chasing the goal of being a 2003 blog post,” said Bill Scher.
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The free-speech advocate has said he wants to make Twitter a leading public forum for sharing information and ideas, but Musk’s rapid series of changes to the platform and mass layoffs have caused an uproar among tech and media establishments. . Perhaps his most controversial move has been the $8 subscription option for so-called blue “checkpoints,” which were previously only given to certain prominent public figures.
However, the program was suspended on Friday after a series of impersonators caused confusion online, such as a fake “LeBron James” account with a blue tick leading some to think the NBA star had requested a trade from Los Angeles. Angeles Lakers. Another example was what appears to be Rockstar Games promising a new edition of its popular video game Grand Theft Auto.
Elon Musk has wasted little time making his mark on Twitter since taking over last month.
Musk has been vocal during the rapid changes to the Twitter platform, occasionally cracking jokes and slamming critics.
“Please note that Twitter will be doing a lot of crap in the coming months. We’ll keep what works and change what doesn’t,” he wrote on Wednesday.
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“I love it when people complain about Twitter… on Twitter,” Musk wrote, including a laughing emoji.
