By BARBARA ORTUTAY and TOM KRISHER, Associated Press
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — An excellent app called X? A bot-free free speech haven? These are a few of Elon Musk’s mysterious plans for Twitter, now that he could also be moving toward buying the corporate in spite of everything.
After months of squabbling over the fate of their bombshell $44 billion deal, the billionaire and the bird app are essentially back to square one — if a bit worse for wear as trust and goodwill has looked as if it would erode on either side.
Musk, the CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX and Twitter’s most prolific user since former President Donald Trump was booted from it, has shared few concrete details about his plans for the social media platform. While he’s touted free speech and derided spam bots since agreeing to purchase the corporate in April, what he actually desires to do about either is shrouded in mystery.
He could potentially own certainly one of the world’s strongest communications platforms with a every day population of 237 million in a matter of weeks, though the deal shouldn’t be final. The dearth of clear plans for the platform are raising concern amongst Twitter’s constituencies, who range from users in conflict regions where it offers an information lifeline to the corporate’s own employees.
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“Each users and advertisers are — understandably — anxious about whether the move will fundamentally change the culture of the platform,” said Brooke Erin Duffy, a professor at Cornell University who studies social media. “And so, Musk will need to come to a decision whether he desires to quash their concerns by retaining core features (the content moderation system, for example) and keeping the corporate public — or whether he’ll undertake a full-scale overhaul.”
Muddling things further, on Tuesday Musk tweeted that “Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the every little thing app,” without further explanation.
Although Musk’s tweets and statements have been cryptic, technology analysts have speculated that Musk desires to re-create a version of China’s WeChat app that may do video chats, messaging, streaming, scan bar codes and make payments.
He gave a bit of more detail during Tesla’s annual shareholder meeting in August, telling the gang at a factory near Austin, Texas, that he uses Twitter ceaselessly and knows the product well. “I feel I’ve got an excellent sense of where to point the engineering team with Twitter to make it radically higher,” he said.
Handling payments for goods could possibly be a key a part of the app. Musk said he has a “grander vision” for what X.com, a web based bank he began early in his profession that eventually became a part of PayPal, might have been.
“Obviously that could possibly be began from scratch, but I feel Twitter would help speed up that by three-to-five years,” Musk said on the August meeting. “So it’s form of something that I believed could be quite useful for a very long time. I do know what to do.”
For now, Twitter has immediate and pressing problems Musk might want to take care of if he takes ownership of the corporate. Its social media rivals are combating declining stock prices and a few, like Snap, even announced layoffs. Government regulation and attracting younger users amid competition from TikTok are also challenges. And Musk’s vision of a free speech haven has social media and content moderation experts, in addition to digital and human rights advocates, concerned.
“When this all began within the spring, we had indicators and a powerful sense of what Musk might do with the platform,” said Angelo Carusone of Media Matters, a watchdog group that opposes the takeover. “Due to the lawsuit, we all know who has been talking to, what he’s been saying and the forms of far-right ideological decision makers he desires to put in place. To place it bluntly, the worst fears have been confirmed.”
Twitter employees, under former CEO Jack Dorsey and his predecessors, have spent years working to tame the platform once called the “free-speech wing of the free-speech party” where hate and harassment abound into something where all are welcome and protected. While it’s miles from perfect, critics worry Musk’s ownership will mean turning back the clock on years of this work.
“Musk made it clear that he would roll back Twitter’s community standards and safety guidelines, reinstate Donald Trump together with scores of other accounts suspended for violence and abuse, and open the floodgates of disinformation,” Carusone said.
The corporate, for example, was an early adopter of the “report abuse” button in 2013, after U.K. member of parliament Stella Creasy received a barrage of rape and death threats on the platform, echoing the experiences of other women through the years.
In subsequent years, Twitter continued to craft rules and invested in staff and technology that detect violent threats, harassment and misinformation that violates its policies. After evidence emerged that Russia used their platforms to attempt to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election, social media corporations also stepped up their efforts against political misinformation.
The massive query now’s how far Musk, who describes himself as a “free-speech absolutist,” desires to ratchet back these systems — and whether users and advertisers will stick around if he does.
Aiming to tamp down such worries, Musk said in May he wants Twitter to be “as broadly inclusive as possible ” where ideally, most of America is on it and talking — a far cry from the far-right playground his critics are warning against.
And while Musk has hinted he’d consider reinstating Trump’s account, it isn’t clear the previous president, who has since launched his own social media platform, would return.
Then there’s the matter of Twitter’s employees, who’ve been living with uncertainty, high- (and low-) profile departures and a possible owner who’s publicly derided them on their very own platform. Musk has also targeted Twitter’s work-from home policy, having once called for the corporate’s headquarters to be changed into a “homeless shelter” because, he said, so few employees actually worked there.
As a hyper-frequent Twitter user with over 100 million followers, Musk does know find out how to use the platform. During an all-hands staff meeting Musk attended in June, he said his goal was to make it “so compelling which you can’t live without it.” If he’s able to understand this, it could, finally, put Twitter in the large leagues of social media, with TikTok and Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, where users are counted within the billions, not mere tens of millions.
After all, Musk also well-known for predictions which can be delayed or may not come true, corresponding to colonizing Mars or deploying a fleet of autonomous robotaxis.
“This shouldn’t be a automobile manufacturer where, adequate, all you’ve got to do is beat General Motors. Sorry, that isn’t really that onerous,” said David Kirsch, a professor of strategy and entrepreneurship on the University of Maryland who’s studied Twitter bots’ effect on Tesla’s stock price. “You might be dealing here with all of those other corporations even have very sophisticated AI programs, very sophisticated PhD programmers…everyone seems to be attempting to crack this nut.”
Krisher reported from Detroit.
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