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RFI interviewed Valeria Ramírez, a researcher at the Interdisciplinary Science, Innovation and Society Laboratory (LISIS) of the Gustave Eiffel University (Paris), about the announcements made by Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter, among others, the launch of a service of paid subscription to verify user accounts.
RFI. Elon Musk’s challenge with Twitter is for the social network to achieve commercial success that he has not had until now. Will he be able to do it?
Elon Musk is a little late to the party. When he offered to buy Twitter for $44 billion in April, the world was very different from what it is today. The war in Ukraine was not expected to last so long, neither the levels of inflation that would be reached nor the rise in interest rates. All of this has meant less ad revenue for Twitter.
The problem is that the main economic model of these platforms is advertising. It is through the audience and marketing this audience through advertising that the platforms come into existence. Now, historically, in economic crises the first to suffer are the communication, marketing and advertising departments. All this has generated a greater impact for this social network. It has already been seen, for example, that L’Oreal suspended its spending on the platform.
RFI. And it is not the only company. General Motors and Pfizer have also temporarily suspended their payments to Twitter in a “wait and see” attitude. Musk has announced the launch of a paid subscription service to verify user accounts. Do you think there are already reliable signs about the direction Twitter is going to take with Musk?
Elon Musk is an entrepreneur and has learned to use Twitter as a market research tool. So it should come as no surprise that the messages he is sharing now, and the reactions they are eliciting from the audience, are being analyzed by artificial intelligence mechanisms to identify exactly what the reactions are from both advertisers and the public.
What he (Musk) does is launch messages to see what the reactions are and from there make decisions. That is to say, the announcements and all the possible scenarios are released and then decisions are made with a slightly cooler head, with the reactions that all these announcements generated.
RFI. Lastly, what do you think of Musk’s massive layoff plan, in particular announcing to each employee by email whether he’s leaving or staying? Isn’t that a bit brutal?
Yes, indeed, it is very brutal. Above all, seen from countries like France where we value work as a professional and social space, which goes beyond a simple place where you enter and leave. The fact of running into the decision of your dismissal, when a large part of your identity depends on your work, yes, it is brutal, without a doubt. However, in Anglo-Saxon cultures it is not unusual to find this type of method, that is, the worker arrives one day and they have changed the key of the lock, arguing issues of confidentiality and risks for the company.
