Twitter Controversies & Top 5 Tweets that Hit Differently

Being an open social media platform, Twitter generally attracts several controversies very often, and it happens due to the nature of the platform. The popular social media platform allows users to post about everything except images or videos depicting graphic violence, hate-group imagery and pornography. Though Twitter’s latest policy on pornography permits users with verified accounts to share explicit content within their tweets by marking it “this media is sensitive.”

Also, in the last couple of years, we have witnessed many controversial tweets from all around the world, be it on #blacklivesmatter or #metoo movement and in the case of our country, most of these tweets are coming from a few celebrities and stand up comedians who tweeted their blunt views on patriotism or government strategies, but we’re not going to focus more on controversial tweets because, over the years, Twitter has blessed us with a few good tweets too and before walking into 2022, let’s take a look at the positive side of the platform.

Barack Obama

Let’s begin with the tweet of Barack Obama, who’s a two-term President of the United States and the most followed individual currently on Twitter with over 130 million followers. The ex-president mostly tweets about his activities and work related to his Obama Foundation, but the tweet that went viral and caught everyone’s eyes was “No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin or his background or his religion…”

The tweet, which quotes a line from Nelson Mandela’s autobiography “Long Walk to Freedom”, came after the violence in Charlottesville where a 32-year-old woman was killed, and 19 others were injured when a man allegedly accelerated his car into a crowd of counter-protesters. The tweet stayed on the top as the most-liked tweet until Chadwick Boseman’s family disclosed the news of his demise with the tweet from his account.

Elon Musk

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is known for his contradictory work, theories, tweets and comments. When coronavirus was at its peak in foreign countries like the United States, United Kingdom and China, a tweet from Elon Musk caught everyone’s attention. In a tweet, the SpaceX founder said, “The coronavirus panic is dumb,” even though he doesn’t have a background in medicine or virology. The tweet didn’t age well as globally coronavirus infections crossed over 27.5Cr while killing over 53.5L people and counting.

Breaking the news of Osama bin Laden’s Death

One of the reasons behind Twitter getting popular after 2010 was its news breaking culture. The platform has unveiled a number of top news’ through its wide base of users, and one of them was the news of Osama bin Laden’s death which came out from a tweet of Keith Urbahn, a former chief of staff to defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Before this tweet, one more tweet provided a hint of the news, and it came from a Pakistan-based IT consultant, Sohaib Athar, which reads, “Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1 AM is a rare event”.

#BlackLivesMatter

The hashtags #BlackLivesMatter first came into the limelight during 2013 as the movement to curb police violence gained steam but arose like a spaceship missile during May 2020, when George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, was murdered in the Powderhorn Park. The protest was against incidents of police brutality and all racially motivated violence against black people.

While protesting physically, the protestors also started using the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter on social media platforms, especially on Twitter, to gain the world’s attention and support. Since 2013, more than 41 million tweets have been tagged with #BlackLivesMatter, but one of the tweets that went viral during this phase was from Femi Koleoso, and it mentions a quote from Will Smith, “Racism isn’t getting worse, it’s getting filmed.”

Oreo Cookie & Super Bowl Blackout

If you want to win at social media, you have to focus on creative marketing as people might usually don’t care about the brand, but if you do the marketing job well, they’ll surely remember your brand and then eventually end up having it. One such great marketing tweet came during a Super Bowl XLVII in 2013 when a surprise blackout delayed the game of the National Football League for 34 minutes. A quick-moving tweet from Oreo reads, Power out? No problem, followed by an image that shows a text, “you can still dunk in the dark.”

Is the battle between Tesla and bitcoin at an end?

The Bitcoin plunged 8% as Musk’s statements fueled reports of a total sell-off.

 

Following the tweet, bitcoin prices fell to $44,000, their lowest level since February 2021.
Bitcoin plummeted to a three-month low as investors liquidated cryptocurrencies in response to Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s remark that he is considering selling some of his bitcoin holdings or may have already done so.
Musk’s enthusiasm for bitcoin increased stock prices, so he has been stirring up the market since abandoning bitcoin in favor of Dogecoin, a one-time imitation. The price swings have surprised even the most seasoned traders. Recently, bitcoin sank more than 9% to $42185, its lowest level since February 8, while ether, a cryptocurrency linked to the Ethereum network, fell even farther to $3123.

 

Tesla consumers would be able to purchase the company’s electric automobiles using bitcoin, Musk stated in March. To demonstrate the cryptocurrency’s liquidity as a cash substitute, the firm purchased $1.5 billion in bitcoins and only liquidated 10% of its holdings a month later. Musk declared that Tesla would no longer accept bitcoin as a form of payment due to the transaction’s high energy consumption. He defended his actions too, claiming that Tesla had sold its own stock. It’s unclear whether he’s still checking purchases or simply reporting that he’s been criticized.
Tesla is planning to enter a multibillion-dollar sustainable credit market, according to sources, to capitalize on the Biden administration’s quest for new zero-emission objectives. Musk’s description of Dogecoin as a “hustle” has yet to fully recover, but he did raise the price last week by stating that he wanted to improve the currency’s performance.
Some are now giving up on an asset that has soared this year, with dogecoin increasing by only a small amount, ether expanding by more than fourfold, and bitcoin increasing by 45 percent.

 

I believe this is the case; I believe Tesla has kept the majority of its Bitcoin holdings and is not gaining from Musk’s statements. As far as I can see, he’s just interested in profiting from manipulating the price of Bitcoin — or Dogecoin, or Tesla shares, or any of the other assets whose prices he can influence with his tweets. Sure, he’ll do it for fun now and then, but not in a way that benefits his rational self-interest. I’m guessing what happened was pretty much what Musk said: He went into cryptocurrencies on the spur of the moment because it fit with his image of being fun, futuristic, and obnoxious, but then someone pointed out that it didn’t match with his image of being environmentally friendly and on a whim, he decided to take a break from Bitcoin for a while. And when Elon Musk decides on Twitter, he often sticks to it for hours, if not days. By next week, he’ll be tweeting things like, “We are building a gigantic battery in the desert to mine Bitcoin, Bitcoin is good again, you can use it to pay for Teslas,” and the price will skyrocket, and I’ll push the button that automatically generates this column once more.

 

Musk’s action may also signal that Teslas weren’t flying off the shelves as a result of taking Bitcoin payment and it’s unclear whether Tesla has sold any cars for Bitcoins. 2 I sincerely hope not.

 

I’m hoping Musk can influence the price of Bitcoin by saying that Tesla will or will not take Bitcoins for vehicles, without ever really accepting any Bitcoins for any cars. That has a certain purity to it: Bitcoin’s value is determined by Elon Musk’s attitude toward it, not by the reality of any shady commercial transactions in which Bitcoins are traded for automobiles. The source of value for Bitcoin — for everything — is mere closeness to Elon Musk, not its utility as a currency or economic significance.
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