Japanese Twitter Becomes Less Political After Elon Musk

Elon Musk bought Twitter and around the world has laid off employees who worked there for years, and people around the world have felt differences in how the social network has behaved.

For example, the Japanese, Twitter is the most popular social network in Japan, as you can see in the chart below that shows which social networks the Japanese use the most, Twitter appears first followed by Pinterest:

But then what has happened? Elon Musk bought Twitter and he fired several employees from Twitter Japan, what the Japanese noticed right away is that the trendinds topics, which are the subjects in focus, became less political.

In fact, politics, K-pop, feminist topics disappeared in the most talked about topics, and now we have trends that show anime like SAO, Uma Musume 3, Gundam, Japanese TV series, movies, J-pop and idol bands etc.

Several Japanese users have reported this strange change, but from what I’ve seen the Japanese are happier this way, with real threads being shown instead of manipulated threads.

Apparently, the topics were indeed manipulated, a Japanese feminist journalist posted the following message in her profile:

“It really looks like the Twitter news feed hasn’t been updated, we, the media, create momentum for our articles, then we contact the Twitter team, after review, they release it or not. We followed that process.”

確かにTwitterのニュースフィードは更新されてない気がする。私たちメディアは自社記事のモーメントを作成→Twitterキュレーションチームに連絡→審査の上ピックされたりされなかったり、という手順を踏んできたのだけど、この作業はしばらくは意味を成さないのかな？ https://t.co/tIQGO6Rbdc

— 竹下郁子 (@i_tkst) November 6, 2022

Honestly, her message clearly says that yes, a team at twitter would tinker with topics to highlight what the newspapers wanted, and now Twitter is really showing what people really want to talk about.

Which are anime, games, Japanese idols, series and entertainment, keep it up.