PROVIDENCE, RI — Tesla CEO Elon Musk has laid out some bold, if still vague, plans for transforming Twitter into a place of “ultimate entertainment” after he buys the social media platform for $44 billion and takes it private. .
But implementing what at the moment is little more than a hodgepodge of vague principles and technical details could be far more complicated than he suggests.
Here’s what might happen if Musk follows through on his ideas for free speech, fighting spam, and opening the “black box” of artificial intelligence tools that amplify social media trends.
FREE SPEECH TOWN SQUARE
Musk’s strongest priority — but also the one with the vaguest roadmap — is to make Twitter a “politically neutral” digital town square for global discourse that allows as much free speech as each country’s laws allow.
He has acknowledged that his plans to reshape Twitter may anger the political left and mostly please the right. It has not specified exactly what it will do about former President Donald Trump’s permanently banned account or other right-wing leaders whose tweets have run afoul of the company’s restrictions against language. hate speech, violent threats or harmful misinformation.
If Musk goes this route, it could mean the return of not only Trump, but “many, many others who were taken down as a result of the QAnon conspiracies, the targeted harassment of journalists and activists, and of course all the accounts that were taken down after Jan. 6,” said Joan Donovan, who studies disinformation at Harvard University. “These could potentially be hundreds of thousands of people.”
Musk hasn’t ruled out suspending some accounts, but says such bans should be temporary. His latest criticism has centered around what he described as Twitter’s “grossly inappropriate” blocking in 2020 of a New York Post article on Hunter Biden, which the company has said was an error and corrected internally. 24 hours.
OPEN SOURCE ALGORITHMS
Musk’s long-standing interest in AI is reflected in one of the more specific propositions he outlined in his merger announcement — the promise to “open source algorithms to increase trust.” He’s talking about systems that rank content to decide what appears in users’ feeds.
Partly fueling the mistrust, at least for Musk’s supporters, is awareness among American political conservatives of the “shadow ban” on social media. This is a supposedly invisible feature for reducing the reach of misbehaving users without disabling their accounts. There has been no evidence that the Twitter platform is biased against conservatives; Studies have found the opposite when it comes to conservative media in particular.
Musk has called for the underlying computer code that powers Twitter’s news feed to be posted for public inspection on the GitHub coders’ hangout. But a “code-level transparency” gives users little insight into how Twitter is working for them without the data the algorithms are processing, said Nick Diakopoulos, a Northwestern University computer scientist.
Diakopoulos said there are good intentions in Musk’s broader goal of helping people discover why their tweets are promoted or demoted and whether human moderators or automated systems are making those choices. But this is not an easy task. Too much transparency about how individual tweets are ranked, for example, could make it easier for “disingenuous people” to game the system and manipulate an algorithm to get maximum exposure for their cause, Diakopoulos said. .
‘THE SPAM BOT CUP’
Spam bots impersonating real people have been a personal concern for Musk, whose popularity on Twitter has inspired countless impersonator accounts that use his image and name — often to promote cryptocurrency scams that appear to come from the CEO. of Tesla.
Of course, Twitter users, including Musk, “don’t want spam,” said David Greene, director of civil liberties at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. But who determines what counts as a spam bot?
“Are all the bots going to say like, you know, if I follow a bot on Twitter that just puts out historical photos of fruit? I choose to follow him. Is this not allowed to exist?” he said.
There are also many spam-filled Twitter accounts, at least partially run by real people, that run the gamut from those that distribute products to those that promote polarizing political content to meddling in other countries’ elections.
‘AUTHENTICATE ALL PEOPLE’
Musk has repeatedly said he wants Twitter to “authenticate all people,” a vague proposal that may be related to his desire to rid the website of spammy accounts.
Increasing common identity checks — such as two-factor authentication or pop-ups asking which of six photos shows a school bus — could discourage anyone from trying to amass an army of fake accounts.
Musk may also be considering offering more people a “blue check” — the verification mark placed on popular Twitter accounts — like Musk’s — to show they are who they say they are. Musk has suggested that users could purchase control tokens as part of a premium service.
But some digital rights campaigners are concerned that the measures could lead to a “real name” policy similar to Facebook’s approach of forcing people to verify their full names and use them on profiles Theirs. That would seem to run counter to Musk’s free speech focus, silencing anonymous whistleblowers or people living under authoritarian regimes, where it can be dangerous if a dissident message is attributed to a particular person.
TWITTER WITHOUT ADS?
Musk has floated the idea of an ad-free Twitter, though it wasn’t one of the priorities outlined in the official merger announcement. That could be because disrupting the company’s main way of making money would be a tall order, even for the richest person in the world.
Ads accounted for more than 92% of Twitter’s revenue in the January-March fiscal quarter. The company last year launched a premium subscription service — known as Twitter Blue — but it doesn’t seem to have made much progress in getting people to pay for it.
Musk has made it clear that he favors a stronger subscription-based model for Twitter that gives more people an ad-free option. It would also fit in with his push to ease Twitter’s content restrictions — which brands largely favor because they don’t want their ads surrounded by offensive and hate-filled tweets.
WHAT ELSE?
Musk has tweeted and voiced so many proposals for Twitter that it can be hard to know which ones he takes seriously. He has joined the popular call for an “edit button” – which Twitter says is already in the works – that would allow people to edit a tweet immediately after it is posted. A less serious proposal from Musk suggested turning Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters into a homeless shelter “since nobody shows up anyway” — a comment taken more as a dig at Twitter’s pandemic-era workforce. it than an altruistic vision for the building.
Musk did not return an emailed request to clarify his plans.
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AP Technology Writer Barbara Ortutay contributed to this report.
