Monday 11th July: Elon Musk may have to complete $44 billion Twitter takeover

July 11, 2022

Good morning! Today's newsletter is brought to you by Peter.

Welcome back to the Musk-Twitter roller-coaster. This weekend Mr Musk pulled the plug on the $44 billion deal, citing a lack of clarity on fake accounts. This kind of seems like a smokescreen to cover up the fact that he's maybe just changed his mind.

The reality is, Twitter is pretty much in line with other social media platforms when it comes to fake accounts and they are taking robust action to clear out millions of bots.

That said, we're struggling to understand why the Twitter board would push to complete the deal rather than just be glad to have Elon out of the boardroom. But they're expected to go to court today to push for the $54 a share Musk offered or... and maybe this is the real motivator... they're just pushing for the $1 billion break clause written in to the agreement.

We were speaking this week about the part social media has played in the collapse of trust in news organisations. This piece from Press Gazette highlights the challenge journalists face in using social platforms, seeing it as an integral part of communicating with their audiences, but also leaving women journalists especially open to online abuse.

Over 130 governments worldwide have agreed to meet Net Zero carbon emissions targets by 2050. Publishers are starting to feel the pressure to follow suit, but not from governments - media buyers, listening to the brands they represent, are starting to evaluate publisher ad inventory using rigorous sustainability criteria.

The piece from Wired was a real reminder that not everyone spends all day every day online. While we're banging on about how many billions of people have Facebook accounts, an estimated 2.9 billion people - 37% of the world’s population - has never used the internet, according to the UN's IT agency, the International Telecommunication Union. Just one more area of social inclusion media people should be thinking about.

This week's podcast:

This week we hear from Max Towey, Co-Founder and CEO at RocaNews. Roca is a start-up building a community around the news that lowers the blood pressure; they believe alarmist and partisan coverage has been responsible for much of the news avoidance we’re seeing today. Towey tells us how RocaNews is aiming for balanced and informative coverage of just a few stories a day, and are hoping to rebuild the younger generation’s trust in news.

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