Have you ever thought about what you could do with $44 trillion? Yes, I’m going to be that person who takes advantage of the situation to say that with all this money, Elon Musk could have brought up to six times 42 million people from the brink of starvation, or contributed to the fight against the climate currency .
But no, the richest man in the world (or at least publicly) has decided to invest 16% of his fortune in the takeover of Twitter. On April 14, Musk sent them his offer and finally the shareholders accepted: 54.20 dollars per share or, which comes to the same thing, nearly 44,000 million dollars.
Those who have followed the latest movements of the eccentric billionaire will not have been surprised. Just a month ago, he published his intention to create an alternative social network. A week later, he bought 9.2% of the shares of Twitter and won a seat on the board of directors, which he resigned a few days later.
I must admit that I was not very enthusiastic about the idea of having an “Elon Musk” version of Twitter and, why fool ourselves, even less the one that is my reference social network to keep up to date with business is now run by a godlike figure who always gets what he wants.
That said, let’s imagine what the new Twitter will look like with Elon Musk at the helm.
1. Oasis of misunderstood free speech
No one believes that Twitter is the purest expression of free speech, forgive the redundancy. It is enough to spend a morning on the platform to realize all the messages full of hate, insults and harmful comments circulating there without punishment or sanction.
The social network has a policy aimed at combating hate speech. It worked, for example, when Donald Trump’s account was suspended on the grounds that the former US president used his account to encourage his supporters to storm the Capitol.
But those same rules don’t always work well. Clever users have already found a way around censorship by replacing certain keyword letters with similar symbols – “d3ad” instead of “dead” or “k1ll” instead of “kill”.
But it doesn’t work perfectly at the other extreme either, as sometimes Twitter also decides to censor, even momentarily, artistic and other expressions that don’t violate any human rights. This was the case of an illustration by Anabel Lorente, in which she recounted several situations of harassment that women suffer and where a penis appeared.
Granted, the latter surely wouldn’t happen on Twitter as Elon Musk promises, but neither would scenarios in which driving policies fail to serve their purpose. The famous platform will give even more freedom to hate messages, death threats, oppression of minorities.
“Free speech is the foundation of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital place where issues vital to the future of humanity are debated,” Musk said when the acquisition was made public.
“Given that Twitter operates de facto as a public square, failure to respect the principles of freedom of expression fundamentally undermines democracy”, he had already declared at the end of March in his profile before asking his audience if it was necessary to create a new platform.
But the problem, as always, is this misunderstood freedom of expression. Professor and analyst Robert Reich warns of the danger of the wealthiest owning the media, like when Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post or now that Musk has taken over ownership of Twitter.
Nothing new, of course. The oligarchs have always had a certain predilection for the media in order to protect their interests and their own freedom. Reich warns us: “What they are really looking for is the absence of responsibility. They want to use their enormous fortune to do what they want, without being limited by laws or regulations, shareholders or even consumers.”
In the past, Elon Musk criticized the algorithm used by Twitter for favoring, according to him, the discourse of the left. But perhaps we should begin to fear that the billionaire will now use it to his advantage, to modify the public discourse to his advantage.
What Elon Musk is doing is what the plutocrats have done: using money to buy power and power to protect their money, taking over the media to fake speech and guard against resentment, and present themselves as the solution to the very problem that they are.
– Anand Giridharadas @The.Ink (@AnandWrites)
April 25, 2022
And, although he denied that he would return if offered, Musk’s arrival on the throne could mean the reactivation of the suspended account of Trump and all those people who, for serious reasons or not, have had their profile canceled in recent years. years.
2. Authentication: a double-edged sword
To “make Twitter better”, the South African entrepreneur also promised to “defeat spambots and authenticate all humans”.
Bots are a serious problem on all social platforms. These fake accounts are programmed to mimic the interactions that human profiles do on Twitter, such as following other users, “liking” or commenting on other posts.
Bots are largely responsible for this toxic and hostile environment that is unfortunately found in all social networks. They contribute to hate speech and the spread of fake newsand it’s a good idea that Musk has them among his priorities.
In his interview for efile Before the acquisition, the CEO of Tesla put forward how he was going to fight them.
“Twitter can solve the problem of scammers and bots if it allows real humans to be verified with an orange checkmark by paying just one deposit,” he said, adding that spam would lose that deposit. and that it would also limit comments and direct messages. . of verified accounts.
In this way, the platform would deal with fake accounts, but whether this would eliminate them forever remains to be seen. It also didn’t advance how much money should be deposited when creating the Twitter profile, but that should be enough to scare off the bots.
However, this filing will surely not take into account the various socio-economic realities of Twitter users. And, oh what a surprise, it could only end up benefiting the most privileged, for whom the $5, $20, $50 bail means nothing.
It will also be available only to those with a bank account, which, in turn, must be associated with a real first and last name. This will complicate things for those who use a pseudonym in networks to protect themselves.
These anonymous accounts which in the early 2010s broadcast the Arab Spring live to us, these Internet users who denounced the crimes committed in North Korea, these people from the LGBTQIA+ community who prefer to hide behind a pseudonym for fear of reprisals would fall into the ‘story. .
Of course, Musk could choose to offer the option to pay in cryptocurrencies. Again, something that is not accessible to everyone.
3. The dream promise of open source
The new Twitter will become open source. This has been Elon Musk’s dream for a long time. He fantasized about the idea when he first considered starting a new social network. And you’ve already advanced that you want your Twitter to use it now that you bought it.
According to the tycoon, making the algorithm open source would produce greater trust. I can’t help but associate this “increased confidence” with this criticism of the algorithm he referred to earlier, which he says is designed to favor the political left.
But whether or not it uses this kind of source code to its advantage (I have a hard time imagining that it doesn’t), on paper this renewed Twitter should foster collaboration, open not only to developers who work for the company.
This would give users more power than they currently have, but that might not always be a good idea. Of course, making this algorithm public would offer greater transparency to the company and would give an advantage to accounts that would know how to analyze it in their favor to gain more presence and commitment.
Many experts have pointed out the benefits of using opaque algorithms. They are not used as much to promote shadow ban (“phantom ban” or “sneaky deletion”), but rather to combat the bad faith users and spam accounts that Musk complains about so much.
4. New Features: Here and Now
No one can deny that Elon Musk is an avid tweeter. He seems to be aware of the topics that most concern users, especially those related to the improvement of the platform and with which he himself agrees (how obvious!).
You don’t have to wade through many newspaper archives to see a clear example. For years, Twitter users have been asking the platform to add a feature to edit posts. On April 4, Musk posted the following survey on his profile:
Do you want an edit button?
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk)
April 5, 2022
A few hours later, Twitter announced that they were already working on an edit button, although “they didn’t come up with the idea of any polls.” Either way, I can’t argue with how efficient Twitter’s new owner was, even before he became boss.
Musk also set a goal to improve Twitter “by enhancing the product with new features.” We don’t know what other features the billionaire has in mind, but it might be time to pitch your ideas to him to see if he gets them up and running just as quickly.
Here are my suggestions:
- Be able to mention another account at the beginning of the tweet and make it appear in the timeline of all your followers, not just those who follow both yours and the mentioned account
- Be able to include hyperlinks to specific words in a tweet, and not have to include the link at the end of the message
- Have an easier way to verify that the person you are mentioning in a tweet is the right person without having to manually verify in another tab
- Make Twitter Analytics included in the main application
5. Interior renovation
And we end with one of the most impactful internal changes that could come now that Musk has taken over Twitter. Rumman Chowdhury, the company’s Director of Machine Learning Ethics, Transparency and Accountability (META), was joking (or not) about it.
It would be interesting to see how he would run a business without employees
-Rumman Chowdhury (@ruchowdh)
April 11, 2022
One of many Twitter employees who foresaw what could happen if Musk took over: the mass exodus of the workforce. It’s not strange to imagine that the mode of operation of the current workers clashes, at least, with someone who has been so openly critical of the operation of the platform.
The purchase contract should not be finalized for about six months, but nervousness is already installed in the offices of the company. And in Slack channels (a widely used corporate communications platform), according to The Verge, where employees didn’t seem very excited about the news.
Some employees might rebel against these differences of opinion, which the new owner of Twitter would still have to confront by respecting freedom of expression, of course; never censor the opinion of others as he has already been accused of doing with other workers.
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