It seems to me that Musk is moving away from advertisements, to trying to build the first social network that doesn't rely on the user being the product, but rather paying for the product.
That's supposedly what tech people root for, but because its Elon Musk, who eschews many of the shibboleths of the Left, people criticise Twitter as a proxy for his political views.
Aside: As a European, it scares and amuses me to no end how the American discourse has become a complete Left vs Right, black vs white, us vs them. I'm not even that old, and I remember when being so politically polarised and eager to fit people and the world in two small boxes was something you'd only hear from drunken lunatics at a bar. These days, it's every-fucking-where on the Internet because y'all can't bloody stop talking about your politics.
I say that in the most polite way possible: you Americans have a lot of internal issues you need to sort out, and quickly. You're polluting the rest of the world with your party politics.
If you are interested in potential reasons why Americans (and increasingly more of us non-americans) are so binary in their arguments, I found the following article interesting. Basically it says that America have always had a kind of us vs them mentality and it's now running internally. And this is combined with the certainty one gets with suspicion. If you suspect someone of being an enemy then you know for certain what their reasons are and you do not need to seek further information. Empathy in the wider sense of understanding what another feels goes against this. Conflicts get resolved peacefully when both sides find shared ground. Paranoia and suspicion remove any idea about even trying to find shared ground.
We see this from all sides from the liberals and the conservatives. What's ironic is both sides see the other side as doing it not them!
> Basically it says that America have always had a kind of us vs them mentality and it's now running internally
This has been a thing in the US since before we were the US. The south vs. north and urban vs. rural divide has deeply affected the entire fabric of the US down to the 3/5ths compromise in the Constitution to placate the southern states to ratify the Constitution in the first place.
Don't forget that time in the 1860's when literally half the country tried to leave as well. This is nothing new, it's just that the rest of the world can see it in real time nowadays (and much more of them speak English) when that was not possible previously unless you were a real international policy wonk.
I'd argue Musk himself has fallen prey to this partisan politics - it is really hard to support a large part of his tweets these days. He seems to have fallen into some strange mental quagmire with the failure of his twitter buyout, and his ego is not letting him accept any other reason for it than partisan sabotage.
But the way he is portrayed in the aggregate here and on reddit is even worse. He is either a genius beyond any criticism, or a complete fool, was always a fool and twitter is now exposing that.
We can't simply accept any middle ground, which is that he is likely a flawed human being who did some pretty amazing things once upon a time. If anything I hope we can steer him back to moonshot ideas, because he had a talent for it.
Musk is perhaps the least partisan public figure I know of; everyone on the left seems to assume he's a right winger because he doesn't subscribe to left-wing orthodoxy, so he must be one of the Bad Other Guys.
TBH it seems clear to me that he is a closeted libertarian who can't safely express his views in full without alienating huge segments of his mostly-red autoworker base or his mostly-blue techworker base.
It's a difficult tightrope to walk in the current ongoing partisan culture brawl.
I'd add that it's not only the extreme polarisation, but also a muddying of terms that have different meanings or uses between the US and Europe (at least my part of Europe).
I sometimes hear people conflating "the left" and "liberals" when... the left is here opposed to liberalism. Because liberalism means economic liberalism. And the local economic liberals are socially conservative. While the left is economically illiberal, and socially progressive. And our centrists are probably the closest thing we have to the US left, but since they are mostly allied with the right opposing them makes no sense.
The real problem is that in the US, we measure everything with a single yardstick that goes from "Left" to "Right".
But the actual, real reality is that 80%+ of people can't be measured in such a one-dimensional way. People have more nuance than that, and to get even a remotely accurate sense of where someone is politically requires a multipolar yardstick.
However, it's important to note that there has been a genuine and very significant polarization of actual American politics over the past ~30-40 years—the seeds were planted with the Reagan presidency, and then Newt Gingrich in the early '90s started pushing the idea that political wins were more important than governing.
It's also important to note that this has been driven primarily by the rapid rush of the Republican Party to the right, from a conservative party with some fairly serious problems with racism, but a willingness to compromise and an understanding of governance, to a radical reactionary party refusing to censure or otherwise rein in the parts of it that are, in some cases, openly and explicitly embracing (christo-)fascism and Nazism, and advocating for outright violence against marginalized people.
This would be a laudable direction to take the company towards ...
... if he didn't start by putting $12.5 billions of debt on the balance sheet after the buyout.
Which means that Twitter has to pay $1 billion of interest each year which it didn't have to do before that hostile takeover.
How many people would need to buy Twitter Blue to offset the interest alone? ~~125 million users which is about a third of its whole active user base~~ 10 million which is about 3% of their active user base (I can't do maths, thanks supermatt, luckily I'm good looking and can program).
>> "It seems to me that Musk is moving away from advertisements, to trying to build the first social network that doesn't rely on the user being the product, but rather paying for the product."
First? No. There have been many attempts at this. The ActivityPub fediverse is the first with any prospect of competing with the VC-funded model. Thousands of servers, all but a few funded entirely by the millions of people who use them.
It's already self-sustaining. Twitter's new era is starting out billions in debt with its advertising base gone and flailing attempts to find some way to even cover the debt service.
>It seems to me that Musk is moving away from advertisements, to trying to build the first social network that doesn't rely on the user being the product, but rather paying for the product.
Won't be first. There was app.net [1]. Gained traction at first and i had nice dialogues with good people, but died out pretty fast.
> Elon Musk, who eschews many of the shibboleths of the Left, people criticise Twitter as a proxy for his political views.
Some probably do, but a whole lot don't. Musk was heavily criticized well before people were aware of his political views, for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with his political views.
It is the same with streaming. I am happy to pay, but not for 100 streaming services to get the content I want (Netflix, Disney+, Paramount, HBO, BritBox, etc).
If I pay for a social network, I want quality content and API access. Twitter wouldn't be the first platform I would pay for.
Buying twitter was never about profiting - at least not the profiting from the company balance sheet. The profit can come elsewhere, by the influence gained from owning and controlling the twitter firehose and recommendation algorithms.
In a way, this is Elon buying a newspaper like rich people always did to influence politics, except that he is buying a modern version of a newspaper.
Musk bought twitter because it is and was an integral part in social media campaigns for the last few elections. Targeted ads on twitter can reach journalists and politicians, their timelines "for you" controlled by Elon's and they might not even understand that they are being nudged by the content shown in the app. Heck, just by unbanning Trump and allowing MFA Russia on the app, he is moving the Overton window a bit.
The proof is in the pudding as they say. How many million people now see Elon Musks personal twitter posts, that did not see them before he bought twitter?
That's supposedly what tech people root for, but because its Elon Musk, who eschews many of the shibboleths of the Left, people criticise Twitter as a proxy for his political views.