It seems that the climate between Elon Musk and Apple has relaxed a little: in the past few hours, the new owner of Twitter has posted a short video in which he says he took a tour of the Apple headquarters led by none other than the CEO Tim Cook. Musk then said, in a subsequent tweet, that he had a good conversation with Cook, that the whole threat to remove the Twitter app from the App Store was “a misunderstanding”, and that Cook himself vouched that Apple never considered doing this. The “Tesla Phone” therefore seems to be moving away, even if there has been no mention of the other two issues raised by Musk in recent days – App Store commissions and advertising investments.
Good conversation. Among other things, we resolved the misunderstanding about Twitter potentially being removed from the App Store. Tim was clear that Apple never considered doing so.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 30, 2022
Meanwhile, through your official support account, Twitter announces the expansion of the suggested tweets feature, which should now be available to everyone and should have a more significant impact on the timeline – how much, precisely, is not known. Suggested tweets are those from accounts that the user doesn’t follow and that the algorithm deems relevant for a variety of reasons – popularity, relevant to your interests, and so on. “We want to make sure everyone on Twitter sees the best content on the platform,” the company says. It’s worth noting that there’s no way to disable this feature, but it’s possible to kind of pilot it, using likes and various other actions on the platform to tell Twitter what to like and what not.
Furthermore, on the official blog, the platform formalizes the beginning of its second era, or “Twitter 2.0”. Basically it says that the mission of the company, that is to be the public square of the Net, remains unchanged, that all previously established policies still apply, and that the moderation team remains active and well-resourced. However, the approach to experimentation has changed:
As you have seen over the past few weeks, Twitter adopts the practice of public testing. We believe this open and transparent approach to innovation is healthy, as it allows us to move faster and gather feedback from users in real time. We believe a service of this importance will benefit from feedback at scale, and it’s important to be open about our experiments and what we’re learning. We do all of this work with one goal: to make Twitter better for our customers, partners, and the people who use it around the world.
At the same time, Musk said that Twitter is removing a large number of fake accounts, which could have a negative impact on follower counts. The post comes in a pivotal moment for the companywhich with the arrival of Musk has seen a significant number of users and above all advertisers flee Apple itself, as we said at the beginning, seems to have drastically reduced investments in advertising on the platform – the unofficial data speak of a drop of around 50% in recent weeks, while Musk said, more vaguely, that they are “almost completely discontinued”.
