An overview of inherent problems, Elon Takeover effect and future recommendations for Twitter.
The problem not visible from outside at Twitter is that user growth and activity has slowed on the platform. If 48 million of the bots creating the 20-29% content being created in US itself is not enough, account verification, content posting, twitter limits, content moderation and subscription model come into play.
The current account verification model comprises of email or phone verification. there is no two factor or employee verification. On top Elon Musk has introduced the $8/month Twitter blue checkmark subscription which makes no sense since the user can change their name to literally anything after getting verified. Content posting and Twitter limits such as tweets that can be posted daily and the no of users followed daily are rather ambiguous and do not contribute much to the trust and safety guidelines associated with the platform. One possible solution to mitigate this disarray of information could be captcha authentication on the content.
These is still not the biggest talk at Twitter. the monster growling and growing at the platform is content moderation. 500% surge in racial slur, 3964 times a day against gay men(risen from 2506/day since Elon Musk Takeover) and Antisemitic posts referring to Jews have risen by 60%. The reason i think have contributed to such a wildspread(!!) fire of tweaked tweets is missing regulation, accountability and compliance on the platform.
Twitter instead of changing paradigms and regimes should have thought of what their users desire and what they desire is content that is easy and manageable. That there is user-control over visibility. A typical user at Twitter would want relevant and tailored content. What they would need is an account censored from illicit information and exposed to unbiased opinions, news, prompt and critical information. So, what is preventing this from happening. I brainstormed a few possible hypothesis being the Twitter addict and doctor that i pre-assume to be. I conjured up lack of human verification in the content moderation process, missing use of the indispensable AI algorithms in correctly flagging false information, not utilizing twitter users opinion and no control over the platform's distribution channel as my main arguments. All of the areas the new Twitter team is not offering much information on how they are being handled moving forward.
Well, I would still recommend Twitter at-least collaborates with third party vendors. One of their partnerships with Ghost Data has helped remove 44000 accounts involved in violation of child safety. On that note, It would only make sense to see what is out there in the market. I researched two more vendors namely Bot Sentinel Inc. which has claimed to spot 254230 problematic accounts at Twitter using AI to detect deep fake technology and TwiBot-22, which is a state-of-the art graph based Twitter bot detection benchmark. TwiBot-22 offers a social graphing algorithm at Twitter far more spatial than any mapping technology used at the platform.
Now we dive into the subscription model. Twitter aims to generate $10M/ year from the new subscription model. It is hoping to monetize by growing Twitter blue users to 69M in 2025 and 159M in 2028. The last goal on their list to have at-least 237.8M daily active users (reasons unknown).
The problem with the above-mentioned goals are that the user sentiment is against the paid subscription model and would prefer a free ad model instead. Also, Twitter has not communicated whether there will continuous verification after a user subscribes to the service. I cannot refrain to share my views on the matter. I am surprised Twitter has not considered a freemium model especially with the limits on video length posting and ads.
They should obviously consider adding monitoring and verification while merging the content moderation and account verification process altogether. The best bet out of them all would be to segregate the main twitter timeline into different kind of spaces such as news, sports and extras, just to name a few. This would give users autonomy and engagement in choosing their subjects as in a traditional newspaper.
At last, i want to finish by saying that the present of Twitter is looking bleak but the future does not have to, given it is the modern information discovery powerhouse of the world!
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