Elon Musk has assured that his intentions as owner of Twitter are to unleash its extraordinary potential to become the platform for freedom of expression around the world.
Twitter’s board of directors has announced that it will accept the takeover offer from Elon Musk, the world’s richest man. This surprising capitulation, is it beneficial for users?
Musk is offering $54.20 per share, giving the company $44 billion in total price — one of the highest prices ever paid for a business acquisition.
Morgan Stanley and other financial institutions will lend $25.5 billion to Musk, who will contribute about $20 billion of his own. More or less the amount of the bonus that he expects to receive from his company Tesla for having met the objectives of the last quarter.
Musk has assured that his intentions as owner of Twitter are “unlocking its extraordinary potential to become the platform for freedom of expression around the world.” He thus specifies it in the letter that he has sent to the current president of the company.
This belief in the potential of a social network to become a model of unlimited freedom of expression is based on an idealistic approach to social networks that has been around for a long time .
In fact, that Twitter has a single owner, whose own tweets have been false , sexist , self -serving , and probably defamatory , poses a risk to the future of the platform.
Will there be a radical change?
Musk’s move may be perceived negatively because it gives him unprecedented power and influence over Twitter. He himself has already pointed out some changes that he would like to make to the platform, such as:
- Restructure the current management team , since he claims not to have confidence in them.
- Add an edit button to tweets.
- Limit current moderation control over tweet content: use temporary bans instead of outright bans.
- Explore a transition to a paid model like Spotify’s, where users can pay to avoid the most intrusive ads .
Earlier, just after becoming Twitter’s largest single shareholder in early April, Musk had said : “I don’t care about the financials at all.”
Although the bankers who are going to lend him the 25.5 billion dollars to make the purchase are probably worried. Musk will feel that pressure if he doesn’t make Twitter profitable. Although he says his priority is freedom of expression, advertisers on the platform, for example, may not want to see their products advertised alongside an angry extremist tweet.
In recent years, Twitter has implemented a range of measures for the governance and moderation of content . For example, in 2020 it expanded its definition of what constitutes “harm” , to guide its treatment of content about covid-19 that contradicted authoritative recommendations.
Twitter ensures that all the changes made to date in its approach to content moderation “are in the service of the public conversation” and focus on misinformation and misleading information . It also claims that it responds to experiences of abuse or incivility that users face.
But this implementation of measures to moderate content can also be interpreted as an effort to maintain its reputation, after much negative publicity .
The idea of the ‘public square’
In any case, and whatever the real reasons for these attempts to moderate content, Musk has publicly taken issue with these platform tools.
It has even gone so far as to label the platform as “a de facto public square”. A naive statement, to say the least. Microsoft communications expert Tarleton Gillespie already warned : to think that social networks can function as true open spaces is a fantasy, since they must control the content at the same time that they claim not to.
Gillespie even suggests that platforms should be required to moderate, to protect users from their dialectical enemies, and remove offensive, toxic or illegal content. It would be the only way to present your best face to new users, advertisers, partners and the general public. What is difficult, he argues , is having the critical capacity necessary to know “exactly when, how and why to intervene.”
Platforms like Twitter cannot stand as public squares, especially since only a small part of the public uses them.
In addition, public squares are implicitly and explicitly regulated through the behaviors that regulate our social interactions in public , and are supported by the possibility of resorting to an authority to restore order if disorder arises. In the case of a private business like Twitter, the final decision rests with one person: Musk.
But even if Musk were to implement his particular ideal of a public square, it would possibly be a personal and free version of this concept.
Giving users more leeway in what they can say could create further polarization and further harden discourse on the platform. This in turn will probably discourage advertisers. Without a doubt, a problem in the current economic model of Twitter ( 90% of its income comes from advertising ).
Freedom of expression: for everyone?
Twitter is much smaller than other social networks. However, research shows that it has a disproportionate influence as the tweets are especially fast and viral, and are reproduced in traditional media .
Tweets that stand out for each user are the result of an algorithm that seeks to maximize exposure and clicks, and are not intended to enrich the user’s life with interesting or respectful insights .
Musk has also suggested that he will open up access to the algorithms used by Twitter. An improvement in transparency. But once Twitter is a private company, how much transparency it wants to maintain will depend solely on what it decides.
Ironically, Musk has accused Meta (formerly Facebook) CEO Mark Zuckerberg of having too much control over the public debate.
And yet Musk himself has tried in the past to stifle the views of those who have been critical of him .
There is little evidence on which to believe that he really intends to create a free and inclusive space on Twitter, and even less to think that the changes he makes are in the common interest.