Now that he is the majority shareholder of Twitter, tycoon Elon Musk has presented some bold plans, although it is still not very clear what he intends to do with the social network to transform it into a place of “maximum fun” once he finalizes the purchase with $44 billion and turns it private.
What the owner of Tesla and SpaceX has made clear is that he intends to open the concept of freedom of expression of users, the fight against fake users and those used to generate spam and the implementation of artificial intelligence in social networks.
A “politically neutral” Twitter
However, his priority is his vaguest concept: to make Twitter a “politically neutral” digital public square that allows as much freedom of expression as the laws of each country permit so that this is its true regulation.
On this issue Musk himself has acknowledged that his plans to reshape Twitter could be uncomfortable for left-wing political groups and would please right-wing groups. anger the political left and mainly please the right.
Although, he has also not been vocal about what he intends to do with conflicting and suspended accounts, particularly that of former U.S. President Donald Trump, who leads a group of public figures who have posted tweets that violated the company’s restrictions on topics such as hate speech, violent threats or harmful misinformation.
Musk has not ruled out suspending some accounts, but has explained that falling into this situation will only be on a temporary basis.
Open source algorithms and Artificial Intelligence
Due to Musk’s fondness for artificial intelligence, he has promised “to make the network’s algorithms open source to increase trust,” in reference to the systems that classify content and distribute it in each user’s feed.
However, he also did not comment on “shadow banning“, a function that supposedly reduces the reach of users who violate the rules of conduct of the social network, but whose accounts are not disabled.
On the issue of bots and spam removal, Musk wants Twitter to “perform authentications of all humans who are part of it,” although he did not give further details on how to do this.
To do so, he could implement mundane identity controls such as two-factor authentication or the use of pop-ups that present images that correspond to a specific word.
This would help deter people trying to build armies of fake accounts or, alternatively, increase the number of blue badges that correspond to verified users.
Twitter without advertising
Finally, Musk has floated the idea of building an ad-free Twitter, although it is not one of the priorities mentioned at the time of announcing the purchase.
Probably, it is because the elimination will be gradual while they design another way to make money, although this would also be creating a new business model different from what currently exists and would also be dangerous as ads accounted for more than 92% of Twitter’s revenue in this year’s quarter.
Twitter even created a premium service known as Twitter Blue, which so far has had little success.