‘Views of Musk, Twitter now converging… is the platform neutral or Republican?’

As India CEO, Maheshwari was in the eye of the storm in early 2021 after the government pulled up Twitter over what it termed as deliberate defiance and failure to comply with the IT rules. Soon after he was booked as part of a probe into a viral hate crime video, he was transferred to the US. “Elon will have to figure things out, realise the problems and then pull together a solid team to help Twitter recover. If he fails to do so, it is a downhill path from here.”

Expressing surprise at how Musk has functioned since the takeover, Maheshwari said: “Why would you act irrationally if you have put so much of your wealth into this? But here, I am beginning to believe that he has a bigger purpose behind acquiring Twitter. It is not purely commercial.”

According to Maheshwari, Musk appears to be focused on proving his point and upholding his ideology at the moment. “He’s already over 50 and has had good commercial successes at SpaceX and Tesla with no dearth of money. So what’s next for him? He is already the wealthiest person. So what do you do next? You may want to become the most influential person politically as well,” he said, suggesting that the Tesla founder also has presidential ambitions for which he is using the platform.

Maheshwari said Musk’s business plan to investors was logical with a three-pronged strategy focused on quality users, real conversations, paying users and revenues beyond advertising from subscription along with content monetisation. “Elon could have thoughtfully executed this strategy to inspire confidence among employees, users, and advertisers. However, what he has done over the last few weeks looks pretty brash and impulsive.”

He explained that Twitter was at the core a “two-sided platform”, one side where content creators and personalities will choose to share information, opinion, news and updates about themselves and the other where people check out what is happening. “If you equalise everything, you have to consider the incentive for a content creator to be on this platform, especially compared to TikTok, Instagram, Mastodon, or Koo in India. Similarly, on the other side, you also have a problem because the followers need to know who they are following because everyone’s the same,” he said on the confusion about verified users on the platform. “If you go down this path, you convert this platform into any other user messaging system. A user-to-user messaging system is different from a digital town square where celebrities broadcast their news and updates. That changes the foundation of Twitter.”

According to him, Twitter needs verified users more than they need Twitter because users have multiple choices. “This network will not be valuable if you don’t have prominent people on the platform. If PM Modi is not tweeting, why would people who follow politics be on this platform?”

Maheshwari feared the way Twitter has shaped itself in the past few weeks will impact its neutrality. “If you favour one side, you are bound to lose the other.”

“So far, Twitter has had the monopoly and the advantage of being the top player. This advantage will be lost when people start fleeing the platform. And if it loses neutrality, it may also lose one side faster than the other. If it loses its user base, it will lose both sides. Either way, it is failing.”

Although India is one of its largest user bases, Maheshwari does not think Twitter will be focused on getting India-relevant content in the short term. “Under Elon, Twitter won’t focus on getting India-relevant content for now. If you do not have someone to contact all the IPL teams to ensure they are adequately covered, people will stop coming to Twitter during a cricket match,” he said, and without this content quality of users, the number of users will erode over time impacting content creators as well as advertisers.

But he underlined that the value of Twitter as a public service has its benefits in plugging the information gap in many countries and in times of natural calamities. “If you remove the political and business aspects, Twitter still has tremendous value purely as a public service platform,” he said.