(Bloomberg) -- Elon Musk’s ever-changing Twitter Inc. content policies, applied haphazardly to justify banning the accounts of a number of prominent journalists who cover him, have attracted the ire of regulators and free-speech advocates.
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The moves have also given the people who make the most content for the social network a reason to flee, which could be bad for business.
On Twitter, a small minority of users produce the vast majority of the tweets. According to Pew Research, 97% of the posts on the service come from 25% of the users. Those in the media, who rely on Twitter’s fast-flowing feed to inform their jobs, are among the top power users. They’re such a crucial constituency that for years pre-Musk, Twitter directly recruited and worked with media companies to sign up their journalists for the site and get their accounts verified.
Reporters are the “heartbeat” of the user base, according to Lara Cohen, former vice president of partners and marketing — a team that was culled in Musk’s recent layoffs.
Twitter needs its power users because more interesting content that appears on its site first leads to more reason for other people to join in order to share and comment on those posts. That generates more tweets, which in turn creates more opportunity for advertising revenue.
Musk is also launching a subscription service that will cost $8 a month, the success of which will depend on Twitter serving up regular valuable information and entertainment to subscribers. And he needs Twitter to grow and succeed financially, in order to repay the banks that lent him billions to purchase the network.
Musk seems to understand this in principle. In his first question-and-answer session with employees as their new owner in November, he noted that Twitter needed to recruit the top talent from YouTube and TikTok and find a way for them to be compensated for their work.
When he released internal documents chronicling decisions by Twitter’s prior management, he made the reporters with access to the so-called #TwitterFiles agree to release their findings on the social network first.
And yet, in practice, Musk is making life harder for his top creators. On Thursday, a half-dozen journalists from the New York Times, Washington Post and elsewhere found their accounts suspended as they chronicled the ban of an account that was tracking his private jet. Some had followings in the tens or hundreds of thousands.