Twitter and Elon Musk
Eko Hot Blog reports that Twitter owner and CEO, Elon Musk, has said he is open to creating an alternative phone if tech giants, Apple and Google, boot his social media platform from their app stores.
The Tesla CEO was responding to an American podcaster, Liz Wheeler, who suggested that he should produce his own smarpthone if Google and Apple remove Twitter from their app stores.
“If Apple & Google boot Twitter from their app stores, @elonmusk should produce his own smartphone,” Wheeler tweeted.
“Half the country would happily ditch the biased, snooping iPhone & Android. The man builds rockets to Mars, a silly little smartphone should be easy, right?”
Musk replied the tweet, saying he hopes it does not come to that. But he said he will create an alternative if there’s no other choice.
“I certainly hope it does not come to that, but, yes, if there is no other choice, I will make an alternative phone,” the world’s richest person tweeted late Friday night.
Since Musk took over the ownership of Twitter in October, there have been fears that the social media platform would be removed from the top app stores due to the new owner’s low appetite for speech moderation.
Last Saturday, he reinstated former US President Donald Trump to the platform. On Thursday, he said Twitter will grant “amnesty” to suspended accounts that did nothing illegal.
Last week, the head of safety and trust at Twitter, Yoel Roth, resigned from the company.
In a piece he published in the New York Times after his departure, he suggested that, despite Musk’s dislike of content moderation, Apple and Google will continue to shape moderation policy at Twitter.
“While Twitter has been publicly tight-lipped about how many people use the company’s mobile apps (rather than visiting Twitter.com on a browser), the company’s 2021 annual report didn’t mince words: ‘Our release of new products … is dependent upon and can be impacted by digital storefront operators’ that decide the guidelines and enforce them, it reads in part,” Roth wrote.
“Such review processes can be difficult to predict and certain decisions may harm our business.
“’May harm our business’ is an understatement. Failure to adhere to Apple and Google’s guidelines would be catastrophic, risking Twitter’s expulsion from their app stores and making it more difficult for billions of potential users to access Twitter’s services.
“This gives Apple and Google enormous power to shape the decisions Twitter makes.”
He concluded the piece by warning that the status of Twitter’s app in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store is a conversation already taking place.
“Twitter will have to balance its new owner’s goals against the practical realities of life on Apple and Google’s internet — no easy task for the employees who have chosen to remain. And as I departed the company, the calls from the app review teams had already begun,” the former Twitter employee said.
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