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Political megadonor tries to oust Twitter co-founder
If you’ve ever listened to a Trump rant, you’ll be aware of his tendency to blame things on his opponents, no matter how ridiculous or implausible, so it’s perhaps not so surprising that he blames any loss of Twitter followers on platform bias against conservatives. While it’s one thing to say this without any foundation, it now seems like some of the conservative movers and shakers are planning to take action to make sure their side of the story is heard, much louder and much clearer than any others, even if that was already the case.
In February Bloomberg broke the news that activist investment group Elliott Management Corp. bought a big chunk of Twitter’s stock in a move that looks a lot like a hostile takeover. Elliot Management’s stake in the microblogging site gave it four chairs on the board of directors, and while it isn’t known exactly how much sway this will have, Twitter only has one class of stock, which means the co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey does not have final voting control over the board (unlike many other Silicon Valley social media companies). The Bloomberg report quoted sources close to the matter as indicating that it was Elliott Management’s plan to “push for changes… including replacing Dorsey.”
Billionaire founder and CEO of Elliott Management, Paul Singer, donated US$240,000 to a Trump reelection campaign in 2018, despite being originally opposed to Trump’s appointment in 2016, with Trump even confirming at a White House visit in 2017 that “Paul[‘s]... given us his total support”. Given the close relationship with the Republican Party and the fact that Elliot management has a track record of using its investments to push shifts in companies like Ebay, AT&T, Marathon Petroleum Corp. and Pernod Ricard SA, it would not be uncharacteristic of the investment firm to push changes that are more aligned with the aspirations of the conservative party.
Twitter is the US President’s platform of choice for getting around the media to talk directly to a large audience, and he publicly accused it of showing anti-conservative bias in 2018 after losing followers, so it makes sense that it would be a potential target for political manipulation. Although a number of studies, some even funded by conservatives, couldn’t find any bias on any of the social media sites tested, the lack of factual support hasn’t seemed to curb the rhetoric.
Twitter did make headlines in October 2019 for banning all political advertising, a decision that contrasted starkly with Facebook’s decision to not-only allow political ads, but to also exempt them from the same fact checking standards as all other types of ads on the site. It also explicitly outlined its plan to combat election disinformation and ‘manipulated media’ like deepfakes ahead of future US elections.
A lot of this is still speculative, since at the time of writing both Elliott Management and Twitter declined multiple media requests to comment on the issue, but regardless there are some massive changes on Twitter’s horizon. We’ll just have to hope they’re not as concerning as what’s been happening at Facebook.