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PROVIDENCE, RI —When Tesla CEO Elon Musk bought the social media platform for $44 billion and made it private, he laid out some bold, yet still vague, plans to turn Twitter into a place of “maximum fun.”
But animating what is now little more than a mix of vague principles and technical details can be much more complex than he suggests.
If Musk goes after his ideas for free speech, fighting spam, and opening the “black box” of artificial intelligence tools powering social media trends, the following could happen.
FREE TALK CITY SQUARE
Musk’s most ardent priority – but also what has his most ambiguous roadmap – is to make Twitter a “politically neutral” digital town square for the world’s discourse, allowing as much free speech as each country’s laws allow.
He acknowledged that his plans to reshape Twitter could anger the political left and often please the right. Former President Donald Trump did not specify exactly what it would do about other right-wing leaders whose accounts or tweets that were permanently banned were contrary to the company’s restrictions on hate speech, violent threats, or harmful misinformation.
If Musk goes in this direction, it could mean bringing back not just Trump, but “many others removed as a result of the QAnon conspiracies, targeted harassment by journalists and activists, and of course all accounts removed after January 1. 6. False information at Harvard University “This could potentially be hundreds of thousands of people.”
Musk hasn’t denied suspending some accounts, but says such bans should be temporary. His most recent criticism has centered around Twitter’s 2020 blocking of a New York Post article about Hunter Biden, which he described as “incredibly inappropriate” and which the company said was a mistake and fixed it within 24 hours.
OPEN SOURCE ALGORITHMS
Musk’s longstanding interest in artificial intelligence is reflected in one of the most specific proposals he outlined in his merger announcement – his promise to “open source algorithms to increase trust.” He talks about systems that sort content to decide what appears in users’ posts.
What partially triggered distrust, at least for Musk supporters, is the knowledge of the “shadow ban” on social media among US political conservatives. This is a supposedly invisible feature to reduce the access of abusive users without deactivating their account. There is no evidence that the Twitter platform is biased towards conservatives; Studies have found the opposite, especially when it comes to conservative media.
Musk has called for the release of the underlying computer code that powers Twitter’s news feed for public review at the GitHub coder hangout. But this kind of “code-level transparency” gives little insight into how Twitter works for them without the data the algorithms process, said computer scientist Nick Diakopoulos of Northwestern University.
Diakopoulos said Musk’s broader goal was to help people understand why his tweets were upvoted or downvoted, and whether human moderators or automated systems made those choices. But this is no easy task. Too much transparency about how individual tweets are ordered, for example, could make it easier for “disloyal people” to play with the system and manipulate an algorithm for maximum exposure to their goals, Diakopoulos said.
‘BEATING SPAM BOTS’
“spambots” impersonating real people have been a personal nuisance for Musk, whose popularity on Twitter has inspired countless impersonator accounts that use his image and name to promote cryptocurrency scams that often appear to come from the Tesla CEO.
Of course, Twitter users, including Musk, “don’t want spam,” said David Greene, director of civil liberties at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. But who defines what counts as a spambot?
“If I follow a Twitter bot that takes historical photos of fruit, do you mean all bots? I choose to follow it. Is this not allowed to happen?” said.
There are also numerous spammy Twitter accounts, at least in part, run by real people who run the gamut from selling products to those promoting polarizing political content to meddle in other countries’ elections.
‘VERIFY ALL PEOPLE’
Musk has repeatedly said that he wants Twitter to “verify all people,” a vague proposition that may be related to his desire to rid the website of spam accounts.
Speeding up mundane identity checks like two-factor authentication or pop-ups asking which of six photos show a school bus can deter anyone from trying to assemble an army of fake accounts.
Musk may also be considering “blue-checking” more people – the verification checkmark found on key Twitter accounts like Musk’s to show that they are who they say they are. Musk suggested that users can purchase checkmarks as part of a premium service.
But some digital rights activists are concerned that these measures could lead to a “real name” policy similar to Facebook’s approach to forcing people to verify and use their full names on their profiles. This seems to contradict Musk’s focus on free speech, as it can be dangerous if an opposing message is attributable to a particular person, by silencing anonymous informants or people living under authoritarian regimes.
AD-FREE TWITTER?
Musk came up with the idea of an ad-free Twitter, although it wasn’t one of the priorities outlined in the official merger announcement. This is because cutting off the company’s primary means of making money can be a challenge for even the richest person in the world.
Ads accounted for more than 92% of Twitter’s revenue in the January-March fiscal quarter. The company launched a premium subscription service known as Twitter Blue last year, but it hasn’t made much headway in getting people to pay for it.
Musk has made it clear that he prefers a stronger subscription-based model for Twitter that gives more people an ad-free option. This also fits with Twitter’s effort to relax its content restrictions, which is largely favored by brands because they don’t want their ads to be surrounded by offensive and hateful tweets.
ANOTHER?
Musk has tweeted and voiced so many for Twitter that it can be hard to know which ones he takes seriously. He joined the popular call for an “edit button,” which Twitter says it’s working on, that would allow people to fix a tweet shortly after posting it. A less serious proposal from Musk has suggested turning Twitter’s downtown San Francisco headquarters into a homeless shelter “because no one’s come in anyway” – taken as an excavation of Twitter’s pandemic-era workforce rather than an altruistic vision for the building. a comment.
Musk did not make an emailed request to clarify his plans.
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