Kyoda.
I'm Georgina Campbell in for Chelsea Daniels and this is the Front Page, a daily podcast presented by The New Zealand heralds. The struggles facing social media platform.
X are back in the spotlight.
In amongst an advertising exodus and concerns over owner Elon Musk's takes on the US election, Brazil's Supreme Court has upheld a ban on the app, formerly known as Twitter. These are just the latest controversies to hit the platform in the two years since Musk took it over. Yet the app still has millions of users and alternatives to
the platform have not taken off. Today on the Front Page, we're joined by Vaughan Davis from Auckland advertising agency The Goat Farm to discuss what the future holds for X and why some people can't seem to just log off.
Burn.
How would you.
Describe Twitter as it was versus what X has become now that Elon Musk owns.
It Twitter versus X Well, honestly, there was a story on the news earlier this week about Golf Harbor Country Club, which is an opulent a once opulent golf course to the north of Auckland. It was absolutely beautiful, but it's been abandoned and the course is still there. You can play golf on it if you want. But mostly it's in the headlines for angry people in caravans throwing things at the locals, and that, for me, is a wonderful metaphor for what Twitter has become.
Right And one of the latest developments in terms of some of these negative headlines that x has been attracting is that Brazil's Supreme Court has upheld a bat on the egs.
The band went into effect on Saturday, and we'll stand pleased until the company agrees to an order requiring next to name a legal representative in Brazil. The ruling stems from an earlier order by a judge for the platform's owner, Elon Musk, to suspend certain accounts on his platform that the government says broke Brazil's laws and spread hate speech.
Good move and a brave move, and I know a lot of other jurisdictions will be looking at Brazil and seeing what happened. The Brazilian government was essentially exercising its sovereign right to shut down what they saw as disinformation, and in the other corner was Twitter saying well, you know, we believe in free speech at all costs. So the only way through was for Brazil to prevent access to the platform, you know, and there are technical ways around that, but you know they've made that move.
And so do you think this could be a serious consideration for other countries looking maybe to follow suit, you know, just thinking about in the UK last month, Musk was accused of spreading disinformation and worsening the situation during riots that were sparked by a stabbing event in Southport. Do you think they could follow suits?
Yeah, absolutely, I think they could. I mean, like any political decision, it comes down to whether they think they would get voter support. You know, if it were Facebook, very different question. You know, imagine the outrage if any government said no more Facebook, and you know the reaction you get from the populace. But you know, Twitter a bit fringed, but Niche maybe not that much of a risk on the part of the government.
The British government has called on Elon Musk to act responsibly after the tech billionaire used his social media platform Acts to leash a series of posts that official say risk and fleming the violent unrust gripping the country must cut post in a comment seeing that quote civil war is inevitable in the UK, and later doubled down, highlighting complaints that the British criminal justice system treats Muslims more leniently than for right activists.
But the other thing in the background, of course, is you know X is also Elon, and Elon is also Tesla. Elon is also Starlink and SpaceX. So you know, do you really want to kick out X and then hope that you're going to get the Tesla assembly line or hope that you're going to get continued Starlink coverage. So there's a lot of moving parts.
Yeah, that's so true.
There's a lot of money and power and resources that comes with Elon Musk And for example, there's this lawsuit that's been filed against some big advertising players accused of a massive app advertiser boycott. What's happening there?
X and Twitter before it have never been great places to advertise, certainly not in a small market like New Zealand, but you know overseas in Europe and in the States, a fair bit of money went towards it. But what we've seen is a bunch of big advertisers have just gone. You know what, we don't need to be there, partly because the audience is shrinking, and you know, we want audiences. I run an ad agency. We want audience as a decent sized audience ideally, but partly because of the company
your brand keeps. You know, it's like saying, you know, racial hatred brought to you by McDonald's not going to happen. So a large number of big advertisers are withdrawing from Twitter and moving or X and moving into other places. And you know, Elon Musk has responded by filing a lawsuit what's called in the States an antitrust lawsuit, alleging
that they've colluded to to take down his business. Chances of success I would say almost zero chances of rolling on for a very long time and costing anyone ever on a lot of money one hundred percent.
AND's some research by data firm can Tar which suggests twenty six percent of marketers are planning to cut at spend in twenty twenty five. And as you say, these controversies are affecting X's bottom line, how severe is that for the social media platform?
Well, I mean it's taken it from somewhat loss making to terribly loss making. So it's just a question of how much longer Musk can keep supporting X, because you know X, other than emotionally, X is not supporting Musk and Twitter and then X have never really been a great commercial proposition, which was perhaps it's great in strength.
You know, Facebook or LinkedIn, on the other hand, have a lot more choices when you're an advertiser as to the sort of things you can run and especially the places you can target them because they know a lot more about their users. X losers on both counts, so there are fewer ways to advertise and they know less about their users. And you know, they're played with ideas about paper play, paper reach, pay for different privileges on the platform, but none of those have proved popular.
Alon Musk has made a big deal of saying that he supports free speech.
What do you make of that claim?
And said he said that since day one, he said, you know, this is going to be the world's town square, and this is going to be the place for untrammeled discourse. That may be true. It may also be true that he just supports shit stirring. And you know, there's a long history of people getting to that billionaire tear and then you know, perhaps losing a little bit of connection with you manity and decided that the whole thing's just a game, so that, you know, don't rule that out.
What do you make of X going all in for Trump?
And recently, you know, we've seen AI images of Kamala Harris being shared addressed as a communist dictator. We've had these live chats between Donald Trump and Elon Musk.
What do you think about, Yes, well, I mean media owners trying to and succeeding in exerting political influence. Of course, is nothing new, right New Zealand we've been a little bit lucky because of the small scale of the market.
There tends to be one kind of dominant player. But you look at the UK, you look at the US, you look at Australia, there are you know more, there were newspapers and their news websites and TV stations and radio stations that occupy different parts of the political spectrum and try to sway their readers to vote one way or another or just confirm their voting behavior. So you know what he's what he's doing here is nothing new.
He came out and endorsed Trump, which is, you know, carries a lot of weight in the American political system, and in return, I'm reading now that Trump is offering to effectively make Musk the David Seymour of the US administration, the efficiency Supremo, going through every aspect of government, finding, finding waste, finding unnecessary regulation, and taking a knife to it. I won't even speculate on the possibility of a Trump win, but if he does, that will be an interesting aspect to watch.
Far right edl founder Tommy Robinson.
Look what we've achieved in six months. We've gone from.
Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.
It's exactly what the CIA wants, and it's just it's it's.
A disaster, a misogynist influencer Andrew Tait all have at least one thing in common reinstated by x or Twitter. After free speech absolutist Elon Musk took ownership, they've gathered more followers than ever before. In Robinson's case, doubling.
Is the platform doing enough to stop the spread of disinformation or what is it doing to address that?
If anything, it's doing very little. And there's there's two reasons why that is the First reason is perhaps lack of will you know, because as we discussed, you know, Musk's a the position that you know, this is all
about free speech. I'm a free speech absolutist. And also because of resource, you know, with all the AI in the world, stamping out bugs, you know, whacking moles is really really labor intensive, and the ex Trust and Safety Department, the workforce is a fraction of what it was under previous ownership. So even if they wanted to, and it's not clear that they do, they just don't have the resource to make it a more truthful and somewhat safer place.
So there are all these criticisms of X.
Lots of people are unhappy about what's going on on that platform, and there have been some alternative social media platforms that have sprung up, I guess in response to that.
So Twitter or X just got suspend it in Brazil. Anyone in Brazil who tries to access the platform are going to get fined nine thousand US dollars. This has benefited some of X's rivals, such as an appicle Blue Sky, which is a Twitter like app which has a small but growing news base, and Blase Guy. I know this more just two weeks ago there describers as the short
King of social apps. They've had an increase one million users in the last three days alone, and now Blue Sky is the number one free app on the App Store and the Google play Store.
He put to the head of Matter's threads.
I'm not sure Blue Sky is the short King anymore.
Can you talk me through some of those?
Yeah, but the biggest ones is just not very big, you know, for context first, right, X has got something like half a billion users compared to Facebook at around three billion. So that's that's kind of the area you're playing in Blue Sky mastered on. You know, they're the kind of the scrappy little startups. They've got single digit millions of monthly active users. They're just not getting the uptake people people are moving. Perhaps perhaps you know X's
time or Twitter's time had passed. Anyway, you know, Facebook, you know, dominates at three billion, Instagram you know two and a half billion, a billion people on TikTok, and that's that's growing rapidly. You know, perhaps that was perhaps it was just a phase. Perhaps that kind of text based social media platform was what we used to do, and maybe video and pictures are what we now do.
And I think also there are people who have tried to move away from that platform but have just sort of gravitated back towards X because the.
Other offerings aren't just quite the same.
I think, because as you say, they're just not as big, so you don't get as many voices and kind of diverse content.
Is that, Yeah, I mean, you can open the best restaurant in the world, but if there's no one in there and you walk past, it just doesn't look like somewhere you want to go. Right. And still there's a number of people in New Zealand, there's still a number of people an X, but it's trending slowly downwards. I was reading this morning that you know, it dropped seven point three percent in the first quarter of the year, which is kind of in line line with GLO the
global trend. I think it's just generally dying out. I think it's becoming more dominated, even more than it used to be, by the Twitter hardcore, who used to be politics, they used to be tech, they used to be media. And for those people maybe it's still a vibrant and dynamic place. But for the rest of us, you know, ordinary, ordinary people who want to share about our days and ask questions of people and understand other people's lives and get a bit of a glimpse into what makes New
Zealand tick. I don't think X is that place anymore.
So what is its future then?
Well, my optimistic future is that in the next little while its owner gets bored or frustrated or upset or has a bit of a tantrum, and at the same time Tesla or Starlink or SpaceX needs some cash and he sells it for somewhat less than the forty four billion dollars he paid for it. I think on the current ownership, on the current leadership, I don't think it's got a great future as an inclusive and exciting and
generous online space. But I think under new ownership the bones are there and a bit like that golf course, right, bit of TLC, you know, working b with the lawnmowers, and you can have that place the writer's rain by Monday.
I feel like that is a very good way to round off the episode.
Thank you so much for joining us Borne.
That's it for this episode of the Front Page. You can read more about today's stories and extensive news coverage at zeb Herald, dot co, dot nzet. The Front Page is produced by Ethan Sells. Dan Goodwin is the sound engineer. I'm Georgina Campbell. Subscribe to the Front Page on iHeartRadio or where is it you get your podcasts, and tune in tomorrow for another look behind the headlines.
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