Speaker 1: Kyoda.
Speaker 2: I'm Georgina Campbell in for Chelsea Daniels and this is
Speaker 2: the Front Page, a daily podcast presented by The New
Speaker 2: Zealand heralds. The struggles facing social media platform.
Speaker 1: X are back in the spotlight.
Speaker 2: In amongst an advertising exodus and concerns over owner Elon
Speaker 2: Musk's takes on the US election, Brazil's Supreme Court has
Speaker 2: upheld a ban on the app, formerly known as Twitter.
Speaker 2: These are just the latest controversies to hit the platform
Speaker 2: in the two years since Musk took it over. Yet
Speaker 2: the app still has millions of users and alternatives to
Speaker 2: the platform have not taken off. Today on the Front Page,
Speaker 2: we're joined by Vaughan Davis from Auckland advertising agency The
Speaker 2: Goat Farm to discuss what the future holds for X
Speaker 2: and why some people can't seem to just log off.
Speaker 3: Burn.
Speaker 1: How would you.
Speaker 2: Describe Twitter as it was versus what X has become
Speaker 2: now that Elon Musk owns.
Speaker 3: It Twitter versus X Well, honestly, there was a story
Speaker 3: on the news earlier this week about Golf Harbor Country Club,
Speaker 3: which is an opulent a once opulent golf course to
Speaker 3: the north of Auckland. It was absolutely beautiful, but it's
Speaker 3: been abandoned and the course is still there. You can
Speaker 3: play golf on it if you want. But mostly it's
Speaker 3: in the headlines for angry people in caravans throwing things
Speaker 3: at the locals, and that, for me, is a wonderful
Speaker 3: metaphor for what Twitter has become.
Speaker 2: Right And one of the latest developments in terms of
Speaker 2: some of these negative headlines that x has been attracting
Speaker 2: is that Brazil's Supreme Court has upheld a bat on
Speaker 2: the egs.
Speaker 4: The band went into effect on Saturday, and we'll stand
Speaker 4: pleased until the company agrees to an order requiring next
Speaker 4: to name a legal representative in Brazil. The ruling stems
Speaker 4: from an earlier order by a judge for the platform's owner,
Speaker 4: Elon Musk, to suspend certain accounts on his platform that
Speaker 4: the government says broke Brazil's laws and spread hate speech.
Speaker 3: Good move and a brave move, and I know a
Speaker 3: lot of other jurisdictions will be looking at Brazil and
Speaker 3: seeing what happened. The Brazilian government was essentially exercising its
Speaker 3: sovereign right to shut down what they saw as disinformation,
Speaker 3: and in the other corner was Twitter saying well, you know,
Speaker 3: we believe in free speech at all costs. So the
Speaker 3: only way through was for Brazil to prevent access to
Speaker 3: the platform, you know, and there are technical ways around that,
Speaker 3: but you know they've made that move.
Speaker 2: And so do you think this could be a serious
Speaker 2: consideration for other countries looking maybe to follow suit, you know,
Speaker 2: just thinking about in the UK last month, Musk was
Speaker 2: accused of spreading disinformation and worsening the situation during riots
Speaker 2: that were sparked by a stabbing event in Southport. Do
Speaker 2: you think they could follow suits?
Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely, I think they could. I mean, like any
Speaker 3: political decision, it comes down to whether they think they
Speaker 3: would get voter support. You know, if it were Facebook,
Speaker 3: very different question. You know, imagine the outrage if any
Speaker 3: government said no more Facebook, and you know the reaction
Speaker 3: you get from the populace. But you know, Twitter a
Speaker 3: bit fringed, but Niche maybe not that much of a
Speaker 3: risk on the part of the government.
Speaker 5: The British government has called on Elon Musk to act
Speaker 5: responsibly after the tech billionaire used his social media platform
Speaker 5: Acts to leash a series of posts that official say
Speaker 5: risk and fleming the violent unrust gripping the country must
Speaker 5: cut post in a comment seeing that quote civil war
Speaker 5: is inevitable in the UK, and later doubled down, highlighting
Speaker 5: complaints that the British criminal justice system treats Muslims more
Speaker 5: leniently than for right activists.
Speaker 3: But the other thing in the background, of course, is
Speaker 3: you know X is also Elon, and Elon is also Tesla.
Speaker 3: Elon is also Starlink and SpaceX. So you know, do
Speaker 3: you really want to kick out X and then hope
Speaker 3: that you're going to get the Tesla assembly line or
Speaker 3: hope that you're going to get continued Starlink coverage. So
Speaker 3: there's a lot of moving parts.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's so true.
Speaker 2: There's a lot of money and power and resources that
Speaker 2: comes with Elon Musk And for example, there's this lawsuit
Speaker 2: that's been filed against some big advertising players accused of
Speaker 2: a massive app advertiser boycott. What's happening there?
Speaker 3: X and Twitter before it have never been great places
Speaker 3: to advertise, certainly not in a small market like New Zealand,
Speaker 3: but you know overseas in Europe and in the States,
Speaker 3: a fair bit of money went towards it. But what
Speaker 3: we've seen is a bunch of big advertisers have just gone.
Speaker 3: You know what, we don't need to be there, partly
Speaker 3: because the audience is shrinking, and you know, we want audiences.
Speaker 3: I run an ad agency. We want audience as a
Speaker 3: decent sized audience ideally, but partly because of the company
Speaker 3: your brand keeps. You know, it's like saying, you know,
Speaker 3: racial hatred brought to you by McDonald's not going to happen.
Speaker 3: So a large number of big advertisers are withdrawing from
Speaker 3: Twitter and moving or X and moving into other places.
Speaker 3: And you know, Elon Musk has responded by filing a
Speaker 3: lawsuit what's called in the States an antitrust lawsuit, alleging
Speaker 3: that they've colluded to to take down his business. Chances
Speaker 3: of success I would say almost zero chances of rolling
Speaker 3: on for a very long time and costing anyone ever
Speaker 3: on a lot of money one hundred percent.
Speaker 2: AND's some research by data firm can Tar which suggests
Speaker 2: twenty six percent of marketers are planning to cut at
Speaker 2: spend in twenty twenty five. And as you say, these
Speaker 2: controversies are affecting X's bottom line, how severe is that
Speaker 2: for the social media platform?
Speaker 3: Well, I mean it's taken it from somewhat loss making
Speaker 3: to terribly loss making. So it's just a question of
Speaker 3: how much longer Musk can keep supporting X, because you
Speaker 3: know X, other than emotionally, X is not supporting Musk
Speaker 3: and Twitter and then X have never really been a
Speaker 3: great commercial proposition, which was perhaps it's great in strength.
Speaker 3: You know, Facebook or LinkedIn, on the other hand, have
Speaker 3: a lot more choices when you're an advertiser as to
Speaker 3: the sort of things you can run and especially the
Speaker 3: places you can target them because they know a lot
Speaker 3: more about their users. X losers on both counts, so
Speaker 3: there are fewer ways to advertise and they know less
Speaker 3: about their users. And you know, they're played with ideas
Speaker 3: about paper play, paper reach, pay for different privileges on
Speaker 3: the platform, but none of those have proved popular.
Speaker 2: Alon Musk has made a big deal of saying that
Speaker 2: he supports free speech.
Speaker 1: What do you make of that claim?
Speaker 3: And said he said that since day one, he said,
Speaker 3: you know, this is going to be the world's town square,
Speaker 3: and this is going to be the place for untrammeled discourse.
Speaker 3: That may be true. It may also be true that
Speaker 3: he just supports shit stirring. And you know, there's a
Speaker 3: long history of people getting to that billionaire tear and
Speaker 3: then you know, perhaps losing a little bit of connection
Speaker 3: with you manity and decided that the whole thing's just
Speaker 3: a game, so that, you know, don't rule that out.
Speaker 1: What do you make of X going all in for Trump?
Speaker 2: And recently, you know, we've seen AI images of Kamala
Speaker 2: Harris being shared addressed as a communist dictator. We've had
Speaker 2: these live chats between Donald Trump and Elon Musk.
Speaker 3: What do you think about, Yes, well, I mean media
Speaker 3: owners trying to and succeeding in exerting political influence. Of course,
Speaker 3: is nothing new, right New Zealand we've been a little
Speaker 3: bit lucky because of the small scale of the market.
Speaker 3: There tends to be one kind of dominant player. But
Speaker 3: you look at the UK, you look at the US,
Speaker 3: you look at Australia, there are you know more, there
Speaker 3: were newspapers and their news websites and TV stations and
Speaker 3: radio stations that occupy different parts of the political spectrum
Speaker 3: and try to sway their readers to vote one way
Speaker 3: or another or just confirm their voting behavior. So you
Speaker 3: know what he's what he's doing here is nothing new.
Speaker 3: He came out and endorsed Trump, which is, you know,
Speaker 3: carries a lot of weight in the American political system,
Speaker 3: and in return, I'm reading now that Trump is offering
Speaker 3: to effectively make Musk the David Seymour of the US administration,
Speaker 3: the efficiency Supremo, going through every aspect of government, finding,
Speaker 3: finding waste, finding unnecessary regulation, and taking a knife to it.
Speaker 3: I won't even speculate on the possibility of a Trump win,
Speaker 3: but if he does, that will be an interesting aspect
Speaker 3: to watch.
Speaker 6: Far right edl founder Tommy Robinson.
Speaker 3: Look what we've achieved in six months. We've gone from.
Speaker 6: Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.
Speaker 3: It's exactly what the CIA wants, and it's just it's it's.
Speaker 6: A disaster, a misogynist influencer Andrew Tait all have at
Speaker 6: least one thing in common reinstated by x or Twitter.
Speaker 6: After free speech absolutist Elon Musk took ownership, they've gathered
Speaker 6: more followers than ever before. In Robinson's case, doubling.
Speaker 2: Is the platform doing enough to stop the spread of
Speaker 2: disinformation or what is it doing to address that?
Speaker 3: If anything, it's doing very little. And there's there's two
Speaker 3: reasons why that is the First reason is perhaps lack
Speaker 3: of will you know, because as we discussed, you know,
Speaker 3: Musk's a the position that you know, this is all
Speaker 3: about free speech. I'm a free speech absolutist. And also
Speaker 3: because of resource, you know, with all the AI in
Speaker 3: the world, stamping out bugs, you know, whacking moles is
Speaker 3: really really labor intensive, and the ex Trust and Safety Department,
Speaker 3: the workforce is a fraction of what it was under
Speaker 3: previous ownership. So even if they wanted to, and it's
Speaker 3: not clear that they do, they just don't have the
Speaker 3: resource to make it a more truthful and somewhat safer place.
Speaker 1: So there are all these criticisms of X.
Speaker 2: Lots of people are unhappy about what's going on on
Speaker 2: that platform, and there have been some alternative social media
Speaker 2: platforms that have sprung up, I guess in response to that.
Speaker 7: So Twitter or X just got suspend it in Brazil.
Speaker 7: Anyone in Brazil who tries to access the platform are
Speaker 7: going to get fined nine thousand US dollars. This has
Speaker 7: benefited some of X's rivals, such as an appicle Blue Sky,
Speaker 7: which is a Twitter like app which has a small
Speaker 7: but growing news base, and Blase Guy. I know this
Speaker 7: more just two weeks ago there describers as the short
Speaker 7: King of social apps. They've had an increase one million
Speaker 7: users in the last three days alone, and now Blue
Speaker 7: Sky is the number one free app on the App
Speaker 7: Store and the Google play Store.
Speaker 3: He put to the head of Matter's threads.
Speaker 7: I'm not sure Blue Sky is the short King anymore.
Speaker 1: Can you talk me through some of those?
Speaker 3: Yeah, but the biggest ones is just not very big,
Speaker 3: you know, for context first, right, X has got something
Speaker 3: like half a billion users compared to Facebook at around
Speaker 3: three billion. So that's that's kind of the area you're
Speaker 3: playing in Blue Sky mastered on. You know, they're the
Speaker 3: kind of the scrappy little startups. They've got single digit
Speaker 3: millions of monthly active users. They're just not getting the
Speaker 3: uptake people people are moving. Perhaps perhaps you know X's
Speaker 3: time or Twitter's time had passed. Anyway, you know, Facebook,
Speaker 3: you know, dominates at three billion, Instagram you know two
Speaker 3: and a half billion, a billion people on TikTok, and
Speaker 3: that's that's growing rapidly. You know, perhaps that was perhaps
Speaker 3: it was just a phase. Perhaps that kind of text
Speaker 3: based social media platform was what we used to do,
Speaker 3: and maybe video and pictures are what we now do.
Speaker 2: And I think also there are people who have tried
Speaker 2: to move away from that platform but have just sort
Speaker 2: of gravitated back towards X because the.
Speaker 1: Other offerings aren't just quite the same.
Speaker 2: I think, because as you say, they're just not as big,
Speaker 2: so you don't get as many voices and kind of
Speaker 2: diverse content.
Speaker 3: Is that, Yeah, I mean, you can open the best
Speaker 3: restaurant in the world, but if there's no one in
Speaker 3: there and you walk past, it just doesn't look like
Speaker 3: somewhere you want to go. Right. And still there's a
Speaker 3: number of people in New Zealand, there's still a number
Speaker 3: of people an X, but it's trending slowly downwards. I
Speaker 3: was reading this morning that you know, it dropped seven
Speaker 3: point three percent in the first quarter of the year,
Speaker 3: which is kind of in line line with GLO the
Speaker 3: global trend. I think it's just generally dying out. I
Speaker 3: think it's becoming more dominated, even more than it used
Speaker 3: to be, by the Twitter hardcore, who used to be politics,
Speaker 3: they used to be tech, they used to be media.
Speaker 3: And for those people maybe it's still a vibrant and
Speaker 3: dynamic place. But for the rest of us, you know, ordinary,
Speaker 3: ordinary people who want to share about our days and
Speaker 3: ask questions of people and understand other people's lives and
Speaker 3: get a bit of a glimpse into what makes New
Speaker 3: Zealand tick. I don't think X is that place anymore.
Speaker 1: So what is its future then?
Speaker 3: Well, my optimistic future is that in the next little
Speaker 3: while its owner gets bored or frustrated or upset or
Speaker 3: has a bit of a tantrum, and at the same
Speaker 3: time Tesla or Starlink or SpaceX needs some cash and
Speaker 3: he sells it for somewhat less than the forty four
Speaker 3: billion dollars he paid for it. I think on the
Speaker 3: current ownership, on the current leadership, I don't think it's
Speaker 3: got a great future as an inclusive and exciting and
Speaker 3: generous online space. But I think under new ownership the
Speaker 3: bones are there and a bit like that golf course, right,
Speaker 3: bit of TLC, you know, working b with the lawnmowers,
Speaker 3: and you can have that place the writer's rain by Monday.
Speaker 2: I feel like that is a very good way to
Speaker 2: round off the episode.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for joining us Borne.
Speaker 2: That's it for this episode of the Front Page. You
Speaker 2: can read more about today's stories and extensive news coverage
Speaker 2: at zeb Herald, dot co, dot nzet. The Front Page
Speaker 2: is produced by Ethan Sells. Dan Goodwin is the sound engineer.
Speaker 2: I'm Georgina Campbell. Subscribe to the Front Page on iHeartRadio
Speaker 2: or where is it you get your podcasts, and tune
Speaker 2: in tomorrow for another look behind the headlines.
Speaker 3: M