A White House correspondent has expressed concern that Twitter has not gone under since its purchase by Elon Musk, and shared that concern with White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. The journalist asks:
Are you concerned? Elon Musk says there are more and more subscribers coming online. Are you concerned about that?
Karine Jean-Pierre answers with a frown,
This is something we are certainly keeping an eye on. Look, we have always been very clear that when it comes to social media platforms, it is their responsibility to make sure that when it comes to misinformation when it comes to the hate that we're seeing, that they take action. That they continue to take action ... We're all monitoring what's currently occurring.
REPORTER: "Are you concerned? @ElonMusk says there are more and more subscribers coming online. Are you concerned about that?"
KJP: "This is something that we're certainly keeping an eye on. [...] We're all keeping a close eye on this." pic.twitter.com/ylLmT0SmdX
- Breaking911 (@Breaking911) November 28, 2022
User signups at an all-time high
Elon Musk gave both the journalist and the White House cause for concern with a tweet in which shared several graphs showing the site's progress a month since his purchase.
In several of them, he emphasized the trend that worried the journalist: the increase in the number of users, specifically new users, which are at record highs:
On the other hand, user activity has also increased. The graph shows the number of active minutes, which are also at record highs:
Another indicator of Twitter's success, and one that Elon Musk was particularly worried about before buying the social network, is the number of active monetizable users. As in the two previous cases, these numbers are at levels never seen before:
However, it's not just about the number of users, it's also about what they do. The White House press secretary said she was concerned about "the hatred we're seeing."
Hate speech
Musk also shared the following graph Monday, which shows the rate hate speech on the platform. The frequency of such tweets rose following Musk's acquisition of the company but have since gone down:
The same has happened with impersonations:
Slides from my Twitter company talk pic.twitter.com/8LLLXrwylta
- Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 27, 2022