Six months after purchasing the firm for $44 billion, Twitter CEO Elon Musk said running the social media network had been “quite a rollercoaster” and confessed “many mistakes” along the road.
According to Pro Politics, the CEO of Twitter declared that the free Twitter verified badges would no longer be available after April 20.
Musk appeared to implicitly recognize that one of those mistakes was the choice to refer to the broadcaster’s account as “government-funded media” in a live interview with the BBC after accepting a last-minute request for the “spontaneity” of it.
After the BBC objected, he promised to modify the identification on the broadcaster’s Twitter handle.
“We want it as truthful and accurate as possible –- we’re adjusting the label to ‘publicly funded’,” Musk said.
The majority of the money for Britain’s national broadcaster comes from an annual licence fee that is determined by the government but is paid by each household.
This labeling spat comes on the heels of a previous disagreement over a similar action involving the US radio network NPR, which Twitter briefly labeled as “state-affiliated” in the same way it refers to government-run platforms in China and Russia.
In response, the NPR ceased tweeting.
Twitter now refers to NPR, which has close to nine million followers, as “government-funded media,” and it has now done the same for the BBC.
For years, Musk has proclaimed his intense contempt for the news media. More recently, he added an automatic poop emoji response to emails received to the website’s primary media address.
He also discussed Twitter’s contentious decision to remove the New York Times’ blue verified check mark after the publication refused to pay to preserve it in an interview with the BBC late on Tuesday.
Starting on April 20, any legacy verified Twitter accounts that were confirmed as genuine under the previous ownership of the company will have to pay to join Twitter Blue.
Musk stated that he does not want Twitter to support “some anointed class of journalists” who decide what counts as news as one of the reasons for this.
“I’m hopeful that this can be more a case of the public choosing the narrative, as opposed to the media choosing the narrative,” he said.
Twitter, he said, would “treat everyone equally”.
Musk said it had been “a stressful situation over the last several months” while reflecting on his stint as the social media network’s CEO since he assumed the position in October.
“Were there many mistakes made along the way? Of course,” he said. “But all’s well that ends well. I feel like we’re headed to a good place.”
With the return of sponsors, he said that the business was now “roughly breaking even.”
After resigning in response to a user poll on the website, he named his dog, Floki, when asked who would take over as CEO of Twitter.
AFP
