Elon Musk says the ideal market for Twitter is not the US, but Japan
Twitter’s new CEO Elon Musk wants the social media platform to look abroad for inspiration.
Musk said at an all-hands meeting Monday that Twitter should use its presence in Japan as a model for its future, saying the country is an example of what Twitter should “ideally strive for in every country without exception.” The edge.
“It might seem like Twitter is US-centric, but if anything, it’s Japan-centric,” Musk said, adding that “despite the fact, there are roughly the same number of daily active users in Japan as in the United States USA admits that Japan has a third of the population of the USA” Twitter did not respond wealth‘s request for comment.
Twitter is Japan’s third most popular social media service, according to data compiled by Comnico, a Japanese social marketing agency. Twitter has 45 million monthly active users, behind messaging app Line (92 million monthly active users) and YouTube (69 million monthly active users). This puts Twitter ahead of Facebook, which has 26 million monthly active users nationwide.
Twitter’s reach in Japan ranks the country as Twitter’s second largest market, behind the US, Japan’s biggest brands use the service to connect with their followers, and influencers tweet updates about their schedules and promote their content.
While other services have more users overall in the country, Twitter has “an outsized impact on Japan’s culture, like in the US,” says Jay Allen, editor of invisible Japan, a newsletter monitoring Japanese news and social issues. “Cute viral tweets are a mainstay of morning news shows.”
Twitter has also shaped Japanese society, says Allen. “You get the impression that Japan doesn’t like to talk about politics,” he says, “but if you can read Japanese Twitter, you realize that’s not the case. A lot of the conversations ended up taking place on Twitter and really got the needle moving on social progress, on issues like women in the workplace and sexual harassment.”
Musk appears to want Twitter to repeat its leadership position in Japan in other markets like the US, but experts warn that changes Musk has made since buying Twitter could jeopardize the service’s status in the country.
Why is Twitter so big in Japan?
Jason Karlin, a professor of media studies at the University of Tokyo, says Japan’s use of Twitter increased in 2011 after the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami and during the ensuing Fukushima power plant crisis. “People used Twitter to get instant information about the various crises, especially because the crisis has been so protracted and recovery efforts have taken so long,” he says. Japanese users continue to flock to Twitter for regular earthquake updates.
The Japanese writing system, which uses characters instead of letters, is also more suitable for Twitter’s microblogging service. The marks allow Japanese netizens to pack more content into a single tweet. “We often struggle to keep ours [English] Translations of Japanese tweets to 280 characters!” Allen says.
Japanese users are also drawn to Twitter’s acceptance of anonymity, which Karlin says has long been part of Japanese internet culture. The country’s Communications Ministry reported in 2015 that 76.5% of Japanese Twitter accounts were under pseudonyms, compared to 15% of local Facebook accounts. (A 2017 analysis of a sample of 100,000 Twitter accounts found that 26% of users didn’t use their full name, although the researchers admitted this was likely a minority.)
“Social ostracism can be pretty harsh in Japan,” says Allen. “An unpopular opinion or something that goes viral can have pretty nasty consequences in everyday life.” A “very strong right-wing presence on social media” can lead to intimidation, says Karlin, which could encourage users to be pseudonymous.
Is the Twitter chaos hurting Japan?
Other aspects of Twitter’s presence in Japan may be less appealing to the platform’s new CEO, who values freedom of speech. “Touting Japan as some kind of ideal location for introducing social media seems kind of misplaced,” says Karlin, noting that Japan faces similar problems with political language and content as other countries. He also points out that Japan has stricter rules on political speeches, such as B. Restrictions on when politicians can campaign and what types of campaigns they can participate in.
And Musk’s early decisions as CEO, like mass layoffs and tweaks to some of Twitter’s underlying systems, could threaten the platform’s presence in Japan. According to the company’s Transparency Report, the country makes more requests for Twitter to take down content than any other country.
Karlin says such requests are likely to be handled by a local Japanese-speaking staff. “If these people are cut, there is a risk that content moderation on Twitter will dry up,” he says, “and that will be very worrying for the Japanese government.” (Japanese media reported that some of Twitter’s Japan-based employees are being laid off were made, but the extent of the job cuts is unclear.)
Some Japanese users have considered moving to other Twitter-like platforms like Mixi, a locally developed social network that was popular in the early 2010s and faded with the rise of Twitter. However, Allen says he doesn’t see any “actual big movement” towards alternatives like Mastodon. Allen says Japanese Twitter users are more concerned about Twitter’s ability to keep its feed up and running than content security and moderation, which dominated the debate about Twitter in the US during the Musk era
Musk himself remains a popular figure in Japan, with some Japanese Twitter users He celebrated his push to end remote work on Twitter and reiterated Musk’s belief that working from home is tantamount to not working.
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