Elon Musk has always said that Twitter should be a stage for free speech. After several weeks in which the board of the social network has tried to frustrate the intentions of the richest person in the world to acquire the platform, it seems that the negotiations could finally come to fruition. Musk loves to tweet and says he has a lot of ideas that could “unlock the potential” of the platform. But those changes might not be popular with users and advertisers.
And yes, Twitter, of course, has its problems. It has lost money in recent years. It is not growing as fast as investors would like. But unlike the typical corporate raider, Musk has been very clear that it’s not just about making money.
Events. Before going into the matter of the changes that Elon Musk wants for the social network, we must comment that when we say that the billionaire could acquire Twitter, we do not mean it for nothing. The board of directors of the social network, that was contrary to the wishes of Elon Muskhas backed down and is already negotiating the details of the sale of the company to the founder of Tesla, who in mid-April proposed to buy the company for 39,803 million euros. The council appeared to oppose the idea initially, and in fact launched a plan to prevent Musk from taking over the company. Now everything has changed.
As indicated in The Wall Street JournalTwitter’s 11 board members reportedly met to discuss his unsolicited offer with Musk, adding that the parties were discussing details of the transaction, including a timeline and fees to be paid.
A “square for the people”. While we may not yet know his specific intentions, Musk has been no stranger to expressing his thoughts on changing Twitter. One of his goals is to loosen content moderation. Musk has repeatedly referred to Twitter as “the de facto public square” of the modern age, the digital equivalent of a public forum. To that end, he criticized Twitter’s decision to permanently ban former President Donald Trump from the site, following the Capitol insurrection.
“A lot of people are going to be very unhappy with West Coast high-tech as the de facto arbiter of free speech,” Musk tweeted. The CEO tried to explain the approach he thinks the platform should take when it comes to content moderation. “When in doubt, let it exist. In a case where there might be a lot of controversy, you might not want to promote that tweet. I think we want to be very reluctant to delete things and very cautious about permanent bans.”
Freedom of expression, first. Musk believes that Twitter should basically allow all legal speech. If Twitter did this, it could mean disinformation, hate speech, harassment, spam. And these are all things that Twitter and other internet platforms have been cracking down on. He has shown it in recent weeks: in his satellite Internet start-up, Starlink, refused requests by some governments to block Russian news broadcasts. “We won’t do it unless he’s at gunpoint. I’m sorry I’m a free speech absolutist,” he said.
Twitter algorithm should be open source
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 24, 2022
Algorithm Change. Another point Musk has raised in the past has to do with Twitter’s role in shaping society. He polled his followers last month on whether they think the algorithm should be “open source,” a term for software that is freely distributed and can be manipulated by many different contributors. “I am concerned that the de facto bias in the Twitter algorithm will have a major effect on public discourse,” commented.
Musk laid out other changes he would make to make the platform more transparent. If there’s “any change in people’s tweets, whether they’re emphasized or de-emphasized, that action needs to be made apparent. So there’s no kind of behind-the-scenes manipulation, either algorithmically or manually,” he noted.
remove the bots. Some of Musk’s proposals also speak more to his personal use of Twitter than anything else. For example, he previously stated that he wants to get rid of “crypto spam bots”: spam accounts that promote what appear to be crypto-based scams.
Musk has called the Twitter spam problem the “most annoying problem.” He has even publicly pleaded with Twitter to do something about it. “How long should this last?” he asked him in February. In an April 14 interview at TED 2022, Musk cited this issue as the first thing he would change as Twitter’s new owner. “One of the top priorities he would have is to eliminate the armies of spam and scam bots. They make the product much worse.”
Do you want an edit button?
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 5, 2022
An edit button. Finally, Musk is in favor of the edit button that Twitter users have been requesting for years. He has held out the hope that Twitter will one day add an editing feature to its service so that users can correct at least basic misspellings or bad links immediately after posting. His more than 80 million followers overwhelmingly supported adding the feature in a poll. Notably, Twitter recently said that it has been working on the functionality for a while.