We still don’t know what a Twitter run by Musk will look like. But the Tesla CEO has dropped a few hints on what he wants to see. Let’s take a closer look.
Twitter accepted Elon Musk’s bid to but the social media giant on Monday, and we’re still waiting to see two things: If the deal will hold and, more importantly, what a Musk-helmed Twitter will look like after the smoke clears. While no concrete plans have materialized yet for what new features await us in the “new Twitter,” Musk has dropped a few hints over the last few weeks about the kinds of changes he’d like to make to everyone’s favorite social media hellhole. So let’s take a closer look at those hints. Here are four features we might see in a Musk-helmed Twitter. While not quite an app feature, reduced content moderation is still a substantial change to the way users will experience Twitter. And it’s a change Musk has tweeted quite a bit about. In fact, some of his tweets indicate an inclination toward relaxing Twitter’s current content moderation policies in favor of his interpretation of free speech. If Musk does decide to pare down Twitter’s current content moderation policies, then that may result in an increase in more of the content those policies sought to reduce such as harassment, misinformation, and what Twitter refers to as “hateful conduct.” If he establishes that what he considers free speech is beyond Twitter’s existing policies, he may very well create a new Twitter. But it may be one in which users may not feel free at all to voice their opinions lest they be stuck with unchecked harassment from other users. Another obstacle he faces in implementing this change if he chooses to, and one that was brought up by other Twitter users, was that having a policy that adheres to the laws of the U.S. when it comes to free speech,does not necessarily mean that Twitter will be in compliance with other countries’ laws. And Twitter is a global social networking platform.
