A new day, a new enemy. Or perhaps it would be better to say new target, since many of the controversies animated by Elon Musk are born and die on his own Twitter account, without the interested parties taking up the provocation.
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What Musk said against Meta
In the past few hours, the CEO of Twitter shared the post of a Twitter engineer (of one of his own employees, in short) in which one can see the screenshot with all the times WhatsApp would have accessed the user’s microphone without his knowledge. ‘WhatsApp cannot be trusted,’ Musk commented.
Continuing the conversation with his followers, Elon Musk revealed the real target of his rants, recalling that the founders of WhatsApp left Meta to start the Signal project: “They left Meta disgusted, launching the #delegatefacebook campaign”. He added: ‘What they learned about Facebook and the changes to WhatsApp obviously upset them a lot’.
And Musk tweeted: use Signal
This is not the first time the Twitter patron has made similar speeches. At the beginning of 2021, taking advantage of the controversy stirred up by the fact that Mark Zuckerberg’s group had announced a change in its rules and terms of service as of 8 February of that year, Elon Musk had invited all his followers to ‘boycott’ WhatsApp by recommending Signal.
Also as a result of those two words, ‘use Signal’, bounced over 40,000 times, the rival app to WhatsApp had experienced a boom in new users.
Signal itself had to warn users that it was experiencing a delay in sending verification codes to new users due to the high number of sign-ups to the app.
Read also: Twitter changes logo, from the Blue Bird to an ‘X’: here is why
Musk again against Meta
This looks like the second round of a clash that began in 2021. A few hours earlier Musk had already started his campaign against Meta by sharing an article accusing Mark Zuckerberg of having ‘bought’ the 2020 election in the United States.
“During the 2020 elections,” reads the article linked by the Tesla owner, “Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg spent hundreds of millions of dollars to engage likely Democratic voters. But this was not traditional political spending. He financed a targeted, private takeover of government election operations by nominally nonpartisan, but clearly ideological, non-profit organisations.”
Recall that the stolen election slogan was behind the riots on Capitol Hill on 6 January 2021, which led to Donald Trump’s ban from all social media. A ban that Musk has always opposed. That the latest quarrels have political roots?