Earlier this week, President Joe Biden was askedif the U.S. government should investigate Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter on national security grounds. The President responded that it was “worthy of being looked at”. Yet, strangely, there was no mention of TikTok, which poses a far greater threat to American national security.
For months now Twitter has struggled to keep its most active users engaged, and has plateaued at around 300 million monthly users (by comparison, TikTok has over 1 billion). Twitter has also been struggling financially because it has forgotten that the future is video: relentlessly addictive, auto-playing, effectively infinite video. In 2021, Android phone users spent over 16 trillion minutes on Tikok; in 2022, they spent an average of 95 minutes a day on the app. Facebook reports far greater engagement with video content than other media, and head of Instagram Adam Mosseri confirmed that the app is moving towards becoming a video-sharing platform. It’s no wonder that Twitter is under pressure to reinvent itself.
Leaked Documents Outline DHS’s Plans to Police Disinformation
The most important video of the year was filmed in 1983. pic.twitter.com/uITMW1tGvk
— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) November 7, 2022