Elon Musk’s Plans to ‘Fix’ Twitter

Elon Musk, one of the world’s richest men successfully negotiated a deal to buy the social media platform for $44 billion. Musk gave a statement with a shortlist of goals for the platform, many of which he has recently floated to his 83 million followers on Twitter. “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” he tweeted. “I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spambots, and authenticating all humans.”

But are Musk’s goals actually feasible?

Musk’s hardline rhetoric about free speech flies in the face of Twitter’s recent evolution in this area. In 2018, the site came under fire after an MIT study showed that misinformation spread faster on Twitter than real news.

While Musk has said that hate speech would be banned, he has yet to parse out the gray areas, and it seems possible that more lenient policies for content moderation could lead to more of the toxic behavior that Twitter has been trying to stamp out for years.

And fewer guardrails around speech could be bad for Twitter’s bottom line: advertisers might be less likely to pay money for posts that might sit next to racism, bigotry, or sexism. Musk will also have to contend with the wishes of national governments, who all have their own definition of what kind of speech is and isn’t acceptable.

Musk called spambots the “single most annoying problem” on Twitter. Bots flood users’ feeds in an attempt to lure unsuspecting victims. Twitter already has a rigorous process for weeding out fake accounts: the company uses software during the registration process to detect patterns of automation. But bootmakers are getting more slippery and sophisticated, allowing many to pass through Twitter’s censors undetected.

While Musk faces plenty of challenges, he’s overcome daunting obstacles before, whether at SpaceX or Tesla. And he acknowledged on Twitter that he is ready to hear from his critics, no matter how loud they might be: “I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter because that is what free speech means.”

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