4 WAYS TWITTER COULD CHANGE UNDER MUSK

Elon Musk can be inscrutable, and his politics are elusive, which has made it somewhat difficult to determine exactly what the billionaire would do as the owner of Twitter. But over recent weeks, Musk has given more hints about what he would change about Twitter — in interviews, regulatory filings and on his personal Twitter account. Here are the main areas Musk could seek to address:

Content moderation

Musk has frequently expressed concern that Twitter’s content moderators go too far and intervene too much on the platform, which he sees as the internet’s “de facto town square.”

The Trump question

Musk has not commented publicly on how he would handle former President Donald Trump’s banned Twitter account. But his free speech comments have stoked speculation that Twitter under his ownership might reinstate Trump, who was barred from the platform last year. After the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by a pro-trump mob, Twitter said Trump had violated its policies by inciting violence among his supporters. Facebook also banned Trump for the same reason.

The algorithm

At a TED conference this month, Musk elaborated on his plans to make the company’s algorithm an open-source model, which would allow users to see the code showing how certain posts came up in their timelines. He said the open-source method would be better than “having tweets sort of be mysteriously promoted and demoted with no insight into what’s going on.”

Who uses the platform and how

Before Musk offered to buy Twitter, he expressed concern about the relevance of the platform.

When an account posted a list of the 10 most followed Twitter accounts, including former President Barack Obama and pop stars Justin Bieber and Katy Perry, Musk responded and wrote: “Most of these ‘top’ accounts tweet rarely and post very little content. Is Twitter dying?”

More recently, the Tesla CEO promised in a tweet Thursday that he would “defeat the spam bots or die trying!”

C.2022 THE NEW YORK TIMES