The dark side of Twitter
Twitter’s upcoming lawsuit against Elon Musk for pulling out of his acquisition, coupled with the harsh revelations of its former chief security officer, have only served to create more and more doubts about the company.
Whatever mistakes Musk may have made, the lawsuit can only be seen as an attempt to force him to buy something that, after close examination, he decided was not what he had been told it was. The current situation is basically a repeat of what happened with the failed Disney buyout of a couple of years ago. Disney was interested in entering the social networking arena, Twitter was interested in being acquired because the economic parameters of its advertising business did not work… but as soon as Disney took a close look at Twitter’s operations, it changed its mind and became the runaway bride.
What is it about Twitter that prompts this reaction in potential buyers? The answer seems clear: lack of control. The company’s lax management practices make it easy for anyone to create as many accounts as they see fit, which on the one hand means great freedom and versatility when it comes to managing the presence of a person or company on the social network, but on the other hand means that the number of fake accounts is presumably very high. It may or may not reach the 90% claimed by Musk and corroborated by Chanpeng Zhao, but it is undoubtedly a very high…
