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The hype of Musk's acquisition of Twitter has finally settled, and the Twitter board accepted the terms offered by Musk, who bought Twitter at a price of $54.20 per share for a total price of $44 billion. Twitter is about to become a privately held company.
01
Learn and excel, business and good to buy
With the strong rise of consumer short video Internet and other media, users' reading time is fragmented, the attractiveness of traditional media to advertisers is declining, and profitability has dropped significantly. However, in recent years, the acquisition of media by business tycoons has climaxed,
In 2013, Amazon founder Bezos acquired The Washington Post;
In 2013, sports tycoon Henry acquired the Boston Globe;
In 2015, gambling king Adelson (Trump's biggest financier) bought the Las Vegas Review, Nevada's largest daily newspaper;
In 2017, Jobs's widow Lauren Powell Jobs acquired a majority stake in Atlantic magazine;
In 2018, Salesforce co-founder Mark Benioff acquired Time magazine;
In 2018, Chinese billionaire Huang Xinxiang bought the Los Angeles Times and several West Coast outlets.
Obviously, the purpose of these mega-rich people to acquire media is not to make a profit, and even they don't care about profit, they focus on the huge influence of shaping the narrative through the media to influence the public's thinking mode.
Musk's acquisition of Twitter naturally cannot escape this reason.
02
If you can't get used to it, transform it
Perfectionist Musk tweeted several times, slamming Twitter. Scolding as an outsider doesn't work, you can only buy it to transform Twitter according to your own will.
From Musk's tweets, we can understand that his dissatisfaction with Twitter is mainly as follows:
Accounts are severely blocked, and people can't tweet according to their own will;
Twitter's recommendation algorithm is opaque with traffic restrictions;
Twitter's functionality is not good enough;
There are a lot of zombie accounts on Twitter;
03
The king of discourse
Twitter, the world's number one social networking platform. Twitter's global public opinion is far more influential than other media and platforms. Social networks represented by Twitter have become channels of communication and information acquisition, and they have never been absent from every major event, and even become the biggest driver of the deterioration of events.
The complex real world is edited into just a few dozen words, a few pictures, a video, all according to the wishes of the publisher to complete the narrative. The narrative logic is entirely related to the will of the publisher and has nothing to do with whether it is true or not. Editing narratives with text, pictures, and videos can make viewers thousands of miles away feel immersed in "virtual reality" and unable to extricate themselves. Highly immersive pictures and videos make viewers think they have seen and heard the "truth." At this point, the publisher has completed the emotional shaping and thinking output to the viewer.
Twitter's fission propagation capabilities can spread and "control" viewers according to the publisher's will in a very short period of time. Similarly, losing Twitter can be a failure for the publisher. Then-US President Donald Trump was silenced by a number of social networking platforms, and Twitter froze and restricted the accounts of the Trump campaign and his more than 70,000 supporters. Trump supporters became headless flies, and the capture of Capitol Hill became a farce. That's where the power of social network Twitter lies.
Now the world is watching whether Trump's account will be unblocked!
04
How difficult is the Chinese narrative?
As mentioned earlier, given the position of the world's number one social network platform, the Chinese narrative cannot bypass Twitter, but this road has been particularly arduous.
On August 19, 2019, Twitter announced that 936 accounts that "spread false" and "Hong Kong return" information were banned;
On June 11, 2020, Twitter announced that it had more than 170,000 accounts. The reason is that there are fake accounts controlled by the government;
On January 21, 2021, Twitter announced that it would ban the Twitter account of the Chinese Embassy in the United States;
On December 3, 2021, Twitter announced that it would ban 2,100 Accounts related to China.
05
Musk's acquisition of Twitter to favor China Narrative?
There are two people who have been branded as pro-China in the United States, one is Bridgewater founder Dalio, and the other is Musk.
Musk has always been friendly to China. Musk has visited China almost every year since 2014, and he has praised all aspects of China, eating bun shops, hot pot restaurants, and even pancake stalls.
Musk once tweeted a Chinese tweet.
Musk also tweeted that "China's infrastructure efficiency is a hundred times that of the United States." Musk's friendly remarks on China are too many to be listed by the author.
"I love China very much",
"I think the Chinese economy can do very well in the next decade and will be the largest economy in the world." It is also committed to achieving a sustainable energy future".
"China is a global leader in digitalization"
Most eye-catchingly, Musk has publicly claimed that he may have Chinese ancestry (Maybe I'm partly Chinese).
The descendants of the Ming Dynasty who stayed in Africa after Zheng He went to the West have multiplied to this day. Musk was born in South Africa, of course, from the possibility of speaking, can not be ruled out, not to mention that from the appearance of Musk does have a little oriental face!
Musk tweeted after determining the success of the acquisition of Twitter that he would ensure that even the fiercest critics of him would not be silenced.
Whether it's Musk's attitude toward China or Twitter's future direction, it seems that things are moving towards a narrative favorable to China. At such a difficult time in the Chinese narrative, any improvement in platform management should be valued by us.
However, Musk is only one person after all, and confronting China has become the consensus of Washington. Although Musk's acquisition of Twitter was successful, there are already countless eyes on Musk at this moment. Once Musk commits what they consider to be "out of line," there are so many cards that musk can be hit, and the removal of Musk's right to administer Twitter is entirely foreseeable.