How Has Elon Musk's Takeover of Twitter Affected Average Americans? A UW-Madison Professor Explains

Tuesday, February 14th, 2023 -- 1:00 PM

(Raymond Neupert, WRN) Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter concerns some people, but is it affecting everyday life?

Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter concerns some people, but is it affecting everyday life? UW-Madison professor Dietram Scheufele says that people can get caught in getting their information from a bubble, thanks to the same sorts of algorithms on other platforms.

"So we end up basically getting information or tweets, from sources that we often engage with from people that we follow, that we look at that we that we even follow another platform."

Scheufele says that while usage has dropped among many Americans, those who do use it still have sway. "It's there for politicians, it's there for reporters, it's there for academics and people who have strong opinions, pundits."

Confidence in Twitter as a platform has dropped after the takeover, with fewer Americans trusting the platform overall according to a recent survey by Harvard and Rutgers. 

Scheufele says it's still a popular platform for political talk and pundits. "People you know, like to think about Twitter as our new town square, as a public sphere. And there's probably some truth to that. A lot of the discussions that we used to have in bars and elsewhere we now have on social media."

New research from Rutgers and Harvard shows that Twitter usage has dropped since Musk's takeover and that fewer Americans trust the platform.

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