By: Chloe Xiao

Very recently, Elon Musk on October 28 bought the whole of Twitter for a whopping $44 billion after slowly buying stocks starting in April 14 till he owned 9.1% of Twitter’s stocks, and then negotiating to buy the company itself. With Elon Musk at the head of Twitter, things are starting to change rapidly.

Musk has been talking about how he wanted Twitter to be a “…Absolutist when it comes to free speech.” Many republican politicians like the still banned Donald Trump posted on his rival social media account, Truth Social, that he was “…Very happy that Twitter is now in sane hands.” After it was announced that Musk had bought Twitter, thousands of new users signed up, with many Republican politicians earning hundreds more users in a huge boom compared to their average following gain per day.

Many left-wing politicians such as the former president, Barack Obama have seen a major decrease in the amount of people following them, with some losing up to 40,000 followers these past few days. Many other still slightly influential people have been tweeting about how left wingers must stay resilient and speak out against all of this, lest Twitter be filled with hate and false information.

On the other hand, many right-wing politicians are talking about how they would love Twitter’s new policy, and that all freedom loving people would as well.

While there have been numerous changes to Twitter, another rather important detail would be that the blue verified check, originally needing to be 0.5% of a user’s geographic location, can now be bought for $8 on Twitter. Musk stated that he wanted to change Twitter from just earning money from advertisements to being able to be a super app, able to do anything from shopping to texting.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/28/business/twitter-elon-musk.html