I Made Many Mistakes Since Taking Over Twitter - Elon Musk Admits

 

Twitter boss Elon Musk has admitted making mistakes since he took over the micro-blogging platform.

 

This is coming six months after he bought the company for $44 billion, according to AFP.

 

Recall that Musk had announced April 20 as the final date for removal of free Twitter verified badges

 

In a live interview with the BBC after agreeing to a last-minute invitation for the “spontaneity” of it, Musk appeared to tacitly acknowledge that one of those errors was the decision to label the broadcaster’s account “government-funded media”.

 

He said he would change the designation on the BBC’s Twitter handle after the broadcaster objected.

 

“We want it as truthful and accurate as possible –- we’re adjusting the label to ‘publicly funded’,” Musk said.

 

Britain’s national broadcaster is predominantly funded by an annual licence fee set by the government but paid by individual households.

 

The labelling spat follows an earlier controversy over a similar move involving the US radio network NPR, which Twitter briefly branded “state-affiliated”, the same way it styles government-run Chinese and Russian platforms.

 

The NPR stopped tweeting in protest.

 

Twitter now tags NPR, which has nearly nine million followers, “government-funded media”, and applied the same label to the BBC’s account.

 

Musk has expressed deep disdain for news media for years and recently installed an automatic response of a poop emoji to emails sent to the site’s main media address.

 

Speaking with the BBC late on Tuesday, he also addressed Twitter’s controversial move to strip the New York Times of its blue verified check mark after the company refused to pay to keep it.

 

From April 20, any legacy verified accounts on Twitter — which were verified as authentic under the company’s old ownership — will have to pay to subscribe to Twitter Blue.

 

One of the reasons for this, Musk said, was that he did not want Twitter to boost “some anointed class of journalists” who determine what constitutes news.

 

“I’m hopeful that this can be more a case of the public choosing the narrative, as opposed to the media choosing the narrative,” he said.

 

Twitter, he said, would “treat everyone equally”.

Musk, in assessing his time in charge of the social media network since he took over in October, said it had been “a stressful situation over the last several months”.

 

 

He said the company was now “roughly breaking even” with the return of advertisers.

 

When pushed on who was Twitter’s new CEO after he stepped down in response to a poll on the site, he named his dog, Floki.