The soap opera was short-lived: three weeks after buying his first shares in the company, and ten days after his takeover proposal, Elon Musk ended up taking control of the social network Twitter, Monday April 25. The businessman has spent more than 43 billion euros.
What concrete impacts can this handling have for the platform and its users? The tech mogul’s past statements give some idea of what could change in the weeks and months to come.
An exit of Twitter from the Stock Exchange
Twitter “will not prosper nor fulfill its societal mission [de liberté d’expression] in its present form, explained Elon Musk in a letter addressed to the board of directors of the company and made public on April 14. Adding: “Twitter has enormous potential. I will make it happen. »
To do this, the founder of SpaceX wants to transform Twitter into ” private company “, i.e. taking the company off the stock exchange. Such a change could allow him to have a freer hand to modify the functioning of the social network as he sees fit and, from his point of view, allow the company to survive.
New moderation rules
First area in which the operation led by Elon Musk should have an impact: moderation. “Freedom of expression is the foundation of a functioning democracy”he says thus in the press release announcing its takeover.
On numerous occasions in the past, this libertarian, historically close to American liberals, has made it known that he finds the moderation rules of the platform too restrictive. “It is very important that there is an open arena for freedom of expression,” he had thus affirmed on April 14, during a TedTalk conference, comparing the social network to a “village square” and adding that a network’s moderation rules should be limited to the laws of each country.
The billionaire therefore wishes to adopt a more flexible approach in terms of moderation, considering in particular that the permanent banishment of Internet users who have violated the rules of use of Twitter is not the solution.
This does not mean that Donald Trump, who has been excluded since January 2021, will make his comeback. Even if Elon Musk did not hide his sympathy for the former president of the United States, he never publicly said he wanted to intercede on his behalf if he managed to take control of Twitter. For his part, Donald Trump has also told Fox News on Monday that he did not hear “return to Twitter” but rather “stay on Truth Social”the new social network he founded himself.
New tools, like correcting tweets
In his message formalizing his takeover, Elon Musk also claims to want ” improve [Twitter] with new features ».
The businessman has already expressed his desire to grant users the possibility of making changes to a tweet already published, for example to correct mistakes. At the beginning of April, he had even organized a survey on the subject : 70% of the 4.5 million users who responded had shown interest in such an option.
On his side, Twitter confirmed working on such a project, arguing however that it had nothing to do with Elon Musk’s public statements. We do not know for the moment what exact form this functionality would take, but the firm’s teams claim to take the full extent of potential manipulation that it could generate.
An open-source algorithm
In the early years of the platform, tweets posted by people a user follows appeared backwards. Since 2016 however, in addition to the most recent tweets, users are also offered other content that may be of interest to them.
In his short statement, Elon Musk reaffirmed his intention to make the operation of the platform more transparent by having his algorithm made public so, in his words, “to increase confidence” users. Making the source code accessible is in theory allowing Internet users to better understand why a particular message has been suggested to them. “Twitter’s algorithm should be open source”, asserted Musk already in March. A supported position by the founder of the platform himselfJack Dorsey.
The fight against bots
Bots are automated accounts that can, for example, be used to carry out harassment campaigns against certain users or to artificially inflate the number of people speaking on a given subject in order to make it appear in the “trends” of the platform. shape, and thus make it more visible. In his statement released on Monday, Elon Musk affirmed his intention to “defeat spam bots”echoing a promise made on April 21.
If our twitter bid succeeds, we will defeat the spam bots or die trying!