“The tweets
must flow”

In Germany and other European countries, Twitter's potential continues to be vastly underestimated. If you look through Twitter in German, you'll mainly find accounts of politicians, journalists and activists who rip each other apart in debates about diversity and political muckraking that no one outside their bubble notices (or even wants to notice.)

But especially in the U.S., Twitter is considered “among the most important products in history” (Professor Scott Galloway) and, as Elon Musk phrased it, “the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated.”

The example of Donald Trump shows that there is some truth to this: Since Trump was banned from the platform, he has not really been able to gain a media foothold anywhere else. Today, surprisingly little is heard of him. Other trolls and Ex-Twitter stars shared the same fate of sudden irrelevance after their banishment.

Before the sale went through, Elon Musk plunged Twitter into stock chaos. When he first bought his 9.1% stake, the share price shot up 27 percent. But in his SEC filing, he made it crystal clear that he was willing to tank the stock as well: “If the deal doesn’t work, (…) I would need to reconsider my position as a shareholder.”

He added: “This is not a threat, it's simply not a good investment without the changes that need to be made.” But it wasn’t as simple for the company whose stock value was at the mercy of his decision.

Musk had made Twitter’s stock value into a meme – a meme he can control through his immense popularity on social media. Twitter had become dependent on the same power its platform had helped create. Even if the stock could have recovered from a rejected deal, it’s future would have remained volatile and uncertain.

We are increasingly experiencing this phenomenon in the editorial society. Share prices become pawns of individual players if they know how to leverage their power on social media and thus massively influence the perception and valuation of the company. You don't have to be the richest man in the world to do this, as the cases of GameStop and AMC have shown. A critical mass of like-minded people in a Reddit forum can be enough. He who controls the narrative in social media can also control the value of a company.

Soon, Twitter will be a company held privately by Elon Musk, for the transaction prize of $44 billion. And Musk will have to deliver on his big promises to fulfil Twitter’s “potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe”, as he wrote in his letter to the chair of the board.

Twitter, which in recent months has cracked down harder on fake news, trolls, hate speech and conspiracy theories, would thereby take a step back to its Wild West origins. In 2011, co-founder Biz Stone wrote a blog post with the title: “The Tweets Must Flow.” He wrote: “We don’t always agree with the things people choose to tweet, but we keep the information flowing irrespective of any view we may have about the content.”

Ten years later, Twitter decided to permanently ban the former president of the most powerful nation of the world “due to the risk of further incitement of violence.”