While the majority of people, including myself, get Twitter for free from the App Store, Elon Musk decided that he would instead purchase the app for $44 billion. This purchase overtook the internet within hours, with debates springing up on Twitter, articles being posted on news outlets, and Redditors talking as if they know what they are talking about (I can say this because I am an avid Reddit user myself). With this recent transfer of leadership within a major social media platform, it gets us thinking about the big shifts in social media in recent years.
Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter is bound to change a lot [on the platform]. While Twitter used to be considered a place for rants and political debates, it underwent a few restrictions that limited the ability for those conversations to continue. Elon Musk wanted to change that, so he did the thing he could do best: he bought it.
Another recent significant change within the social media industry was the transition from Facebook to Meta. The team at Facebook (specifically Mark Zuckerberg) wanted to appeal more to their younger demographic by making a more low-key, hip, and gen-z platform. In addition to appealing to a wider audience, they wanted to shift the focus of Facebook off of controversial discussions and back onto conversations between friends, similar to how it had once been. With their change to Meta came the creation of the MetaVerse. The idea of a virtual world that can be shared and accessed by people across the world is not a new thing, it has been around for a long time, and there are even a few virtual open-source worlds. However, many people didn’t like the idea of a massive organization like Facebook/Meta being in charge of this world.