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Twitter Just Died Over This Weekend for Some as the Anti-Vax Controversy Completely Overshadowed Elon Musks VivaTech Keynote Talk

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by admin June 20, 2023

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Like it or not, Twitter has become a divisive topic in and of itself – a sea-change for a platform that aims to become the ultimate arbiter of truth, aided by Elon Musk’s still-fuzzy vision of a so-called Truth GPT AI. Those on the left now view the platform as cancerous, while to the political aisle on the right, Twitter is a veritable manna from heaven. Against this backdrop, Elon Musk’s keynote talk at the VivaTech conference in Paris over the weekend offered something for everyone but was overshadowed by the brewing vaccine-related controversy.

Elon Musk began his keynote talk in Paris by touching on Twitter’s sky-high acquisition price, terming his decision to buy the global town square as an egalitarian gesture that aimed to neutralize the “corrosive” effect that Twitter was having on the global civil society.

While clarifying his approach to moderation, Elon Musk again reiterated Twitter’s “freedom of speech but not freedom of reach” policy. Moreover, according to Musk, advertisers will retain the flexibility to choose the content with which their ads would appear.

Elon Musk noted that user growth has been particularly strong in North America following Ron DeSantis and RFK Twitter Space sessions. On the revenue front, the Wall Street Journal reported recently that around 75 percent of the platform's top 100 advertisers have now resumed their ad-related spending, with 99 percent of ads placed next to brand-safe content, as per a tabulation by the Twitter Sales and Marketing team. Moreover, ad impressions are being limited to verified users only to prevent the bots from “gaming the system.”

Elon Musk also touched on a number of features, including shadowban transparency tools and a 95 percent reduction in Child Sexual Abuse (CSA) material.

Separately, Elon Musk confirmed via a tweet over the weekend that a Twitter video app for Smart TVs is in the works right now.

While these developments painted a largely positive picture of Twitter, a separate vaccine-related controversy is now hammering the platform’s standing, at least from the perspective of its detractors.

On Sunday, professor Peter Hotez tweeted that he was harassed at his home by a group of people who urged him to debate the famous anti-vaxxer RFK Jr. Hotez became a target of the anti-vaccine groups after he tweeted in favor of a Vice article that had taken a dim view of Spotify’s lax moderation standards vis-à-vis Joe Rogan’s vaccine-related tirades.

Rogan responded by offering $100,000 to Hotez’s charity of choice if he acquiesced to debating with him. Bill Ackman then upped the wager by adding $150,000 to the honeypot.

Elon Musk then jumped into the melee, speculating on the reasons for Hotez’s reluctance to accept the invite. Musk joked that Hotez might just hate charity.

To some, this episode has served to highlight the supposed toxicity that now permeates every corner of Twitter, prompting the platform’s obituary of sorts.

Written by Rohail Saleem

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