On April 25, Elon Musk acquired twitter, a world-renowned social media platform, for about $44 billion. On May 5, CNBC's Wall Street Live Room said that Musk would temporarily serve as TWITTER CEO for several months. Musk said after the acquisition: "Twitter is a digital square for debate on issues of vital importance to the future of mankind. Also wanted to make Twitter better than ever. Think Twitter has a huge potential — looking forward to working with the company and users through the community to unlock its potential.
The industry has speculated about the reason for Musk's acquisition, and there is a view that Musk is buying twitter data and algorithms, in order to form a powerful database based on the data obtained by Tesla to create a future intelligent robot system and digital currency. Musk has been stressing that his acquisition of Twitter is to promote freedom of speech, so after the acquisition of Twitter, Musk may "unbind" the restrictions on Twitter. But the reason for Musk's acquisition is by no means limited to this, his purpose is actually to expand his business territory, to grasp the multi-layered field of society, the essence is that capitalists monopolize.
Although this is all speculation from the outside world, through the statement released by Musk, it can be seen that Musk sees the advantages of Twitter as a social media and the development potential of Twitter in the era of digital economy. This also shows that the role of social media can indeed not be underestimated.
Why is social media gaining traction? First, the number of people using social media is huge, and social media has become a tool that people can't do without now. As of 2021, there are 4.48 billion social media users worldwide, accounting for 57% of the world's total population, with an average of 2 hours and 24 minutes of social media usage. Second, social media relies on the Internet to publish messages, interact in a timely and convenient manner, and is simple to use, easy for most people to learn, and can establish and maintain long-distance interpersonal relationships. It can be seen that it has become a part of people's lives and is subtly influencing us.
In addition, the purpose of social media use has changed. First of all, social networks have an increasingly important role in political activities, and Twitter is a typical example of twitter, as a world-renowned social media platform, its number of users has exceeded 500 million, second only to Facebook. Former U.S. President Donald Trump, who once held the title of "President of Twitter," saw the influence of social media during the election, tweeted frequently every day, and finally won the campaign. Trump's "Twitter governance" is essentially a public figure attribute opinion leader, this type of opinion leader in reality of high visibility and influence in the social network can be further expanded, therefore, their views are easy to become the focus of public opinion topics and attention, and even affect the direction of the wind.
Not only public figures, when ordinary people in society are treated unfairly, they will also choose to speak out through social media and fight for their rights. At present, there are not a few people who defend their rights through popular social media platforms such as Weibo and Douyin, such as the "Liu Xinjiangge Incident", which has lasted for many years, and the mother of the victim Jiang Ge has spoken out through Weibo, which has been paid attention to and disseminated by netizens, and the influence has continued to spread and gain the power of public opinion.
As social media matures, companies are becoming aware of relying on social media to connect their products with customers, and Perfect Diary is a brand that relies on social media platforms to promote success. From the early days of finding social media bloggers with a certain degree of popularity for large-scale advertising to today's e-commerce live broadcasts on major platforms, goods have fully entered social networks and are constantly changing the way we shop.
There are pros and cons to everything, and social media brings us convenience and disadvantages. Network "opinion leaders", the diversity of views will lead to differences in opinions, sometimes can help public opinion, sometimes will lead to biased public opinion, which may also lead to the emergence of online violence; in addition, social media as a massive information platform, there are also certain rumors, virtuality makes it difficult for us to distinguish the true and false information, which also leads to the reversal of the situation in recent years.
Social media is no longer a single online platform for building social interactions. From the maintenance of initial relationships to today's producers, consumers, communicators, and personalized content production, social media can be used in ways that shape politics, business, cultural communication, and even foster innovation. Although social media will have certain drawbacks, the benefits it brings us far more than the former.