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‘The bird is freed’: Musk takes control of Twitter and racial slurs fly free
It's Musk's first day as the new Twitter boss and the company's fate is already said to be hanging in the balance.
Elon Musk took control of Twitter and fired its top executives. The line between freedom of speech and hate speech is slowly disappearing. Photo: AFP/Olivier Douliery
Elon Musk officially took charge of Twitter on Friday, and all sorts of chaos have erupted since – from the sacking of top executives to the emergence of racial slurs.
Shortly after tweeting, “The bird is freed”, Musk fired several respected, high-ranking employees. In addition, some of his fans haven’t been well-behaved either.
Musk takes charge…
…and racial slurs are the norm
Product strategist Tom Coates pointed out that the Twitter takeover was “being celebrated by thousands of Musk supporters shouting the N-word all over the platform”.
This is likely in an attempt to see if they would be banned from the platform for using hate speech and racial slurs.
To counter Coates, one netizen said, “Can’t wait for actual freedom of speech on here”, while others called for former President Trump’s account to be reinstated.
Another said: “Free speech isn’t good for everyone – just look at this Kanye mess“.
Twitter shake-up
The company’s fate is the balance after he fired top Twitter executives, including CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal and general counsel Sean Edgett.
Musk received flack for his arrival at Twitter HQ on Thursday, and was labelled as cruel and insensitive.
ALSO READ: ‘Chief twit’ – Musk labelled ‘cruel’ for takeover video
Another netizen pointed out: “If censorship was the only thing stopping people from saying that word, then we don’t have a free speech problem, we have a morals problem”.
Earlier, conservative comedian Hodge Twins said Musk is about to “make Twitter great again”, while journalist Emily Miller said it made her happy to see the billionaire at the company’s HQ.
She added: “LET FREEDOM RING!”
‘Digital town square square’
On Thursday, Musk said Twitter is “important to the future of civilisation” and envisions it as a “common digital town square“.
However, Statista created a bar chart which shows the share of social media users who regularly use Twitter.
The top two countries, percentage-wise, are Mexico and India – with 50% of social media users actively using Twitter.
South Africa is third, with only 49% of social media users regularly frequenting the social media platform. Other countries on the list include:
- Spain: 43%
- Brazil: 39%
- Great Brittain: 37%
- United States: 31%
- Canada: 30%
- France: 25%
- Germany: 20%
- Russia: 17%
