Barack Obama no Longer Most Followed Twitter Account

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Elon Musk has overtaken former US President Barack Obama as the most widely followed account on Twitter, just five months after a stormy takeover.

On Thursday, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX had 133,084,560 Twitter followers, just ahead of Obama, who had 133,041,813.

The achievement comes as Twitter’s role as a key platform for the exchange of news, ideas, and public relations messaging appears to be in jeopardy.

Elon Musk told employees last week that the company was worth half the $44 billion he paid for it, and the tycoon is still trying to figure out how to ease up on content moderation without alarming advertisers and government regulators.

Since taking control, Mr. Musk has sharply cut the group’s payroll from 7,500 employees to fewer than 2,000 and put his faith in drumming up paid subscribers to make the platform financially viable — but the results have been disappointing.

The app has seen a string of technical snafus, including an incident where tweets by Musk suddenly dominated the feeds of millions of users, even those not following the tycoon.

Elon Musk has encouraged users to communicate more freely on Twitter and said the site would impose the least amount of censorship allowed by law.

The platform said that starting on April 1, the trust-building “blue tick” for certain individual accounts — such as celebrities or journalists — would be rolled back and reserved for paying subscribers.