All About Elon Musk and Twitter

From The Poynter Report with Tom Jones:

Ezra Klein’s column

New York Times opinion columnist Ezra Klein writes about the big media news of the week in ”Elon Musk Got Twitter Because He Gets Twitter.” Klein notes that many of Twitter’s power users are political, media, entertainment and technology elites. And many are worried about what’s going to happen next with Twitter.

Klein smartly writes, “At about this point, the answer probably seems obvious: Log off! One can, and many do. But it comes at a cost. To log off is to miss much that matters, in industries where knowing what matters is essential. It’s become cliché to say Twitter is not real life, and that’s true enough. But it shapes real life by shaping the perceptions of those exposed to it. It shapes real life by shaping what the media covers (it’s not for nothing that The New York Times is now urging reporters to unplug from Twitter and re-engage with the world outside their screens). It shapes real life by giving the politicians and business titans who master it control of the attentional agenda. Attention is currency, and Twitter is the most important market for attention that there is.”

Other Musk-Twitter stories

• Politico’s Emily Birnbaum and Betsy Woodruff Swan with “Twitter’s top lawyer reassures staff, cries during meeting about Musk takeover.”
• That lawyer was Vijaya Gadde. Musk used his powerful Twitter account to elevate criticism of her and another top Twitter executive. The Washington Post’s Cat Zakrzewski, Elizabeth Dwoskin and Faiz Siddiqui write about that in “Elon Musk boosts criticism of Twitter executives, prompting online attacks.”
• New York Times Magazine story editor Willy Staley with “Elon Musk Is a Typical Twitter User, Except for One Thing.”
• The Washington Post’s Will Oremus with “Elon Musk and tech’s ‘great man’ fallacy.”
• In a guest essay from The New York Times, Elizabeth Spiers with “Let’s Be Clear About What It’s Like to Be Harassed on Twitter.”
• NBC News’ Ben Collins with “Twitter says mass deactivations after Musk news were ‘organic.’”
• Meanwhile, what’s going on with Donald Trump’s Truth Social? In his review for The New York Times, Brian X. Chen writes, “To say I was underwhelmed would be an understatement.”
• Musk tweeted Wednesday evening, “For Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral, which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally.”
• Interesting tweet from The Atlantic’s Molly Jong-Fast: “I don’t understand liberals leaving Twitter because they’re mad about Elon musk. For now, and this might not always be true forever, but for now this is the public square, why cede it?”