After months of spending trying to undo the deal he initiated, Tesla founder Elon Musk now owns Twitter.
Musk is said to have wasted no time making major changes. Yesterday, washington articles reported that the company’s chief executive officer, Parag Agarwal; CFO Ned Segal; general counsel Sean Edgett; and Vijaya Gadde, head of law, trust and safety policy, have both been fired. Segal has since updated her bio to “former CFO and current fan” of Twitter.
Such sweeping changes are unlikely to happen once. In April, when Twitter announcement Musk agreed to sell it, Musk said he wanted to “make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making algorithms open source for reliability, beating the spamming and authenticating all humans.”
Entrepreneur’s public tweets and statements since then — along with private text messages was brought through Twitter’s lawsuit seeking to enforce the agreement — ambitiously detailed but sometimes contradictory for the company. Many have raised concerns from those who use, study or work at Twitter that the world may lose an imperfect but unique open online space. If Musk implements his idea even partially, Twitter users could see massive and confusing changes in the platform’s features and social dynamics.
Musk’s most consistently stated ambition for his version of Twitter is for it to function as a “digital town square” that provides a forum for free speech where anyone can are welcome. That may sound commendable to many, but while Twitter, like other major social platforms, is currently trying to remove other harassing and objectionable content, Musk said he objected. any “censorship goes beyond the law“And want to fix the error”strong leftist bias. “
In America, this means a characteristic of anything that happens. In late April, after Twitter accepted Musk’s offer, bot followers saw a flurry of new right-wing accounts and warnings that people had abandoned Twitter after his posts or accounts they are repeatedly deleted by moderators are returning to the site in anticipation of Musk’s regime. .
All of this has led online moderation experts — including some on Twitter’s online safety advisory board — to fear that Musk will usher in a new era of trolling on the platform. Christopher Bouzy of Bot Sentinel, a popular bot detection system, said: “A Twitter owned by Musk could be catastrophic for women and marginalized communities facing abuse and harassment. purposefully on this platform.
Musk said at a Financial Times events in May that he would reverse the ban that had led to Donald Trump’s removal from Twitter following the January 6 uprising, called the decision “morally wrong and stupid. ” But in a private text message, he also stated that “Twitter is clearly not going to be turned into some right-wing organization” and said he will “work towards the goal of being as broad as possible.” good”.
Musk has suggested that creating the algorithm used to rank open-source tweets could quell concerns about any particular point of view having an advantage on the platform. His text messages suggest his interest in the idea can be traced back to Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, who wrote that the service “must be an open-source protocol.” , like the secure messaging service Signal.
