Social Media – Dirk Verburg

Battle for the Bird – From Twitter to X. Have you packed your books for the holidays already?

14 August 202415 August 2024Dirk VerburgLeave a comment

I am an avid consumer of business books and love books about corporate history (e.g. ‘The Smartest Guys in the Room’ about ENRON by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind or ‘Losing the Signal’ about Blackberry by Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff – to mention two of my favorites!).

Last week I read ‘Battle for the Bird’ by Kurt Wagner about the takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk.

If you want to know

Why Twitter has always been struggling with sufficiently monetizing its business model and why it might be hard for Elon Musk to change this,
Why content moderation is incredibly difficult for social media companies (defining and interpreting criteria), why they can never get it right for everyone all the time, which massive and contradictory pressures they face from all kinds of different interest groups, and
How ‘casual’ billion-dollar business decisions are sometimes taken in the investment community,

then I can highly recommend this book to you!

Kurt Wagner’s writing style is quick-paced and witty (but not too!). Cherry on the cake are some new personal anecdotes about Elon Musk (e.g. taking his mother with him to business meetings, and taking his son ‘X’ with a nanny in tow during the time he stayed in Twitter’s offices during the first period after the takeover).

So, if you have not packed your books for the holidays yet – consider taking this one with you! If you have been on holiday already, I hope you enjoyed it, and don’t worry: this books remains a great read!

Why ‘The rest is politics’ is my favorite Podcast

15 August 2022Dirk VerburgLeave a comment

According to Moises Naim, polarization, together with populism and post-truths, is one of the three p’s undermining democratic societies.

Observing the public debate, which is becoming more and more polarized, it seems we are losing our ability to talk with people who have other opinions. Instead, we talk about them.

We try to classify people who have a different opinion than us, with a label. Once this label has been issued, we feel we do not have to enter in debates with them anymore. On the contrary, we try to prevent debates, since this would provide our opponents with an opportunity to share their opinions.

The difficulty however is that the effectiveness of human societies depends on our ability to cooperate and reconcile our differences.

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Censorship, social media, and self-confident societies

5 September 202030 December 2021Dirk VerburgLeave a comment

The Power of debate in the public domain

The invention of the printing press proved to be a pivotal point in the development of our society because it enabled the dissemination of ideas and information at an unprecedented pace. It is unlikely that, without the printing press, the Reformation in the 16th century would have had such a huge impact, so quickly.

In the 20th century, radio and television increased the speed of information even more. It is likely that the public opinion about the war in Vietnam (the first television war) changed significantly as a result of the coverage of this war on television.

No wonder that many governments tried to control these media, either in the form of censorship, or by creating monopolies for news dissemination (e.g in the former Soviet Union).

At the end of the 1990s, social media platforms started to emerge, disrupting the traditional media landscape of newspaper, radio, and television organizations.

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The Power of debate in the public domain

Social media emerges