Elon Musk is an extravagant character, excessive, sometimes cryptic, but always unpredictable. His latest maneuver has left the world speechless, at least the world of technology, since just a few days ago he announced that he had bought the popular social network Twitter for the dizzying amount of 44,000 million dollars (more than 50,000 million euros) .
Following the announcement, many people wondered what impact that would have on issues such as censorship and freedom of expression on the platform, as well as the spread and control of misinformation and fake news. Well, although it is still too early to know what Musk’s lines of action will be now that he is the new owner of Twitter, he himself has given some clues in interviews and statements from his companies about what the new Musk era will be like on Twitter .
Content moderation
It is one of the most controversial areas in any social network. Facebook (renamed Meta) is going through its worst reputation crisis precisely for that reason, for allowing the spread of fake news and conspiracy content as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, information that systematically reached millions of people around the world every day.
Elon Musk has often been concerned about the working method of Twitter moderators who, in his own words, go too far by intervening too much in what people comment on the platform, which he himself has defined as “the public square” from all over the internet.
He spoke precisely about this in the statement where he announced the purchase agreement of the social network: “Freedom of expression is the basic element of any functional democracy, and Twitter is the digital public square where many issues are debated, some vital for the future of humanity”.
In the document, the tycoon also expressed his desire for Twitter to be much more functional, applying improvements such as open source algorithms, or the effective blocking of bots and spam. In a tweet just before announcing the purchase, Musk assured that his intention was for even the most critical users to continue using Twitter because, from his point of view, that is what freedom of expression means.
In a tweet just before the announcement of his deal with Twitter, Musk said he hoped even his “worst critics” would continue to use the platform “because that’s what free speech means.”
open algorithm
Musk wants the Twitter algorithm to be open source, that is, to be public and all users of the platform can see it and check the impact of the posts, how they go viral, how they are shared, etc. The billionaire assured that with this open source method, promoted tweets would work much better, and people would have a much more global vision of what is really happening in the world.
better use
Before buying it, Musk had already expressed his concern about the relevance of Twitter, accusing it of being politicized and of becoming a space for insults and malpractice by a large number of users.
