Twitter has officially reached a deal to sell itself to Elon Musk for roughly $44 billion USD. Twitter’s 11-member board met with Musk over his bid to buy the company beginning Sunday morning, with negotiations coming to fruition within the last few hours.
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Under the terms of the deal, Twitter will become a private company, compensating current shareholders $54.20 per share. Further, over the past few weeks, the Tesla CEO has given more and more hints as to what he would change about the social media platform.
“I invested in Twitter as I believe in its potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe, and I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy. However, since making my investment I now realize the company will neither thrive nor serve this societal imperative in its current form. Twitter needs to be transformed as a private company. Twitter has extraordinary potential. I will unlock it.”
So how exactly does the richest man in the world plan on unlocking said potential? Here are three changes Elon Musk could seek to address.
1. Free Speech and Content Moderators
Elon Musk has frequently expressed concern that Twitter’s content moderators intervene too much on the platform. He believes Twitter serves as the internet’s “de facto town square,” meaning all ideas and opinions on a given topic should be heard. This has led many to wonder how Musk will handle the banned Twitter account of Donald Trump. Musk has not commented publicly on the matter, though his free speech comments have stoked speculation that under his ownership, the former president could be allowed back on the platform.
2. The Algorithm
At a TED conference this month, Musk elaborated on his plans to make the company’s algorithm an open-source model. This would allow users to see the code showing how certain posts came up in their timelines. Musk says this open-source method would be better than “having tweets sort of be mysteriously promoted and demoted with no insight into what’s going on.” Companies that are open-sourcing their algorithms and software into the development community include LinkedIn, Microsoft, IBM, and Google.
3. Usability
More specifically, this pertains to who uses the platform and how. Before Musk offered to buy Twitter, he expressed concern regarding the platform’s relevance. When an account posted a list of the 10 most-followed Twitter accounts – including Barrack Obama, Justin Bieber, and Katy Perry – Musk noted that “most of these ‘top’ accounts tweet rarely and post very little content. Is Twitter dying?” Musk later added a desire to defeat spambots on the platform.
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