Elon Musk’s big plans for Twitter: What we know so far

PROVIDENCE, R.I. –

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has made bold but vague plans to transform Twitter into a place of maximum fun once he purchases the social media platform for US$44billion and makes it private.

However, implementing what are at the moment a mixture of vague principles and technical details could prove to be much more difficult than he suggests.

Here are some possible outcomes if Musk continues to pursue his ideas regarding free speech, fighting spam, and opening up the “blackbox” of artificial intelligence tools that can amplify social media trends.

FREE SPEECH TOWN SQUARE

Musk’s most ardent priority, but also the one with the most vague roadmap, is to make Twitter a “politically neutre” digital square that allows for as much freedom of speech as each country’s laws will allow.

He acknowledged that his plans for Twitter’s reorganization could upset the political left, but mostly please the right. He hasn’t yet specified what he’ll do regarding former President Donald Trump’s account that is permanently blocked or about other right-wing leaders who have violated the company’s rules against hate speech and violent threats, or harmful misinformation.

Musk could go in this direction. It could lead to Trump’s return, as well as “many, much more” others who were expelled by QAnon conspiracies and targeted harassment of journalists, activists, and, of course, all accounts that were deleted after Jan. 6. saidJoan Donovan is a Harvard University researcher who studies misinformation. “It could be hundreds of thousands.”

Musk isn’t ruling out suspending certain accounts, but he believes that such bans should be temporary. He was most critical of Twitter’s 2020 blocking of Hunter Biden’s New York Post article. saidIt was an error and it was corrected within 24 hours.

OPEN-SOURCED ALGORITHMS

Musk’s deep interest in AI is evident in one of his most specific proposals in his merger announcement. He promised to make the algorithms “open source to increase trust.” He is talking about systems that rank content to determine what appears in users’ feeds.

At least among Musk supporters, the distrust stems partly from U.S. political conservatives’ belief in “shadow banning”, a ban on social media. This is an invisible feature that allows you to disable accounts of bad behavior users and reduce their reach. Twitter is not biased against conservatives, but studies show that it is.

Musk called for the public to see the source code that powers Twitter’s news feed on the coder hangout GitHub. However, this “code-level transparency” gives users very little insight into Twitter’s operations without the data it is processing. saidNick Diakopoulos (a Northwestern University computer scientist).

Diakopoulos saidMusk’s overall goal to help people understand why their tweets were promoted or downgraded and whether humans or automated systems made those decisions is noble. It’s not an easy task. Diakopoulos says that too much transparency regarding how tweets are ranked can make it easier to “disingenuous” people to manipulate the algorithm and game the system to gain maximum exposure for their cause. said.

“DEFEATING THE SPAM BOTTS”

Musk has found “spam bots” to impersonate real people a nuisance. His popularity on Twitter has inspired many accounts using his name and image to promote cryptocurrency scams that appear to be coming from him.

Musk and other Twitter users “do NOT want spam,” saidDavid Greene is the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s civil liberties director. But what defines spambot?

“Do you mean all the bots, like, for example, if a Twitter bot pulls up historical photos of fruits?” I choose to follow this. “Is this not allowed to exist?” He said.

There are plenty of spam-filled Twitter profiles, at most partially, that are run by real people. These accounts range from those selling products to those encouraging polarizing political content in order to influence elections in other nations.

AUTHENTICATE ALL HUMANS’

Musk has made numerous appearances. saidHe wants Twitter to “authenticate every human,” an ambiguous suggestion that could relate to his desire to get rid of spam accounts.

Anyone who tries to build an army of fake accounts could be discouraged by simple identity checks.

Musk may be thinking about offering more people the “blue check”, which is the verification checkmark that’s worn by prominent Twitter accounts like Musk’s, to verify their identity. Musk suggested that checkmarks could be purchased as part of a premium subscription.

Some digital rights activists worry that these measures could lead the to a “real name” policy similar to Facebook’s, which requires people to verify their full names in order to use them on their profiles. Musk’s focus on free speech by muzzling anonymous whistleblowers and people living under authoritarian governments where it can be risky if a dissident voice is attributable, would appear to be in contradiction.

AD-FREE TWITTER?

Musk suggested the idea of an ad free Twitter, but it wasn’t one the priorities in the official merger announcement. This could be because it would be difficult to cut off the company’s main way of making money, even for the richest person in the world.

In the January-March quarter, more than 92% of Twitter’s revenue came from advertisements. While the company did launch a premium subscription service, Twitter Blue, last year it didn’t seem to be able to get people to pay.

Musk made it clear that he favors a stronger subscription-based model of Twitter, which gives more people an ad free option. This would fit in with Musk’s push to loosen Twitter’s content restrictions. Brands largely favor this model because they don’t want their ads to be surrounded by hateful and offensive tweets.

WHAT ELSE?

Musk has tweeted so many ideas for Twitter it can be difficult to tell which ones he is serious about. Musk has joined the Twitter call for an “edit” button, which Twitter claims it is already working on. This would allow people to quickly fix tweets after they have been posted. Musk made a less serious suggestion, suggesting that Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters be converted into a homeless shelter. This was more a dig at Twitter’s workforce in the post’s pandemic era than an altruistic vision of the building.

Musk did not respond to an email request to clarify his intentions.

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Barbara Ortutay (AP Technology Writer) contributed to this report.