Lhe marvelous offer is the (dis-)measurement of Elon Musk. For 42 billion euros, the wealthy American proposed, in a letter addressed to the chairman of the board of directors of Twitter and made public on April 14, to buy back all the shares of the social network. Criticism of Twitter’s moderation policy, the billionaire believes that the brand has a bird “will not prosper nor fulfill its societal mission [de liberté d’expression] in its current form. “Twitter has enormous potential. I will make it happen,” he promises.
This hostile and surprise takeover bid on the part of the one who is already the main shareholder, up to 9%, can it succeed? Without deciding, journalists Damien Leloup and Alexandre Piquard believe in The world, on April 14, that “Twitter is, much more than other social networks, an attainable target, because it is in a much more precarious economic situation” such as Facebook, YouTube or TikTok. The company, which saw revenue of $5 billion in 2021 and has 220 million active users worldwide, is loss-making.
“A site more noisy than informative”
Twitter arouses, at its creation, a quite relative interest in the columns of the World. The company was created in March 2006 in San Francisco, but no trace, then, of the slightest twitter – “twitter”, in English – in the newspaper. On May 9, 2007, a short article entitled “The mobile phone becomes the new promoter of “social networks”” is published on Lemonde.fr. “With Twitter, the Network becomes the receptacle for the secrets of mobile phone owners, is it written. Participants are invited to answer the question: “what are you doing?” According to Twitter administrators, hundreds of thousands of messages are sent. “I’m leaving gym class”, “I listen to Led Zeppelin”, “my ten-year-old son is learning to ride a bike”, so many comments delivered by anonymous people in all languages. »
“An endless, addictive and fascinating stream of comments, impressions, and anecdotes. » The world in 2008
You have to wait for 1er April 2008 to see Twitter finally written in the pages of the newspaper, at the start of a column by Sylvie Kauffmann entitled: “Internet, advantages and disadvantages”. The blue bird is mentioned only incidentally. On August 15, 2008, in the middle of the Beijing Olympics, the social network appeared for the first time in a title of the Monde.fr : “The blogger Zola recounts his arrest live on Twitter”.
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