But enacting what at the moment are little more than a mix
of vague principles and technical details could be considerably more
complicated than he suggests.
Here’s what might happen if Musk follows through on his
ideas about free speech, fighting spam and opening up the “black box” of
artificial intelligence tools that amplify social media trends.
FREE SPEECH TOWN SQUARE
Musk’s feistiest priority — but also the one with the
vaguest roadmap — is to make Twitter a “politically neutral” digital town
square for the world’s discourse that allows as much free speech as each
country’s laws allow.
He’s acknowledged that his plans to reshape Twitter could
anger the political left and mostly please the right. He hasn’t specified
exactly what he’ll 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 hate speech, violent threats or harmful
misinformation.
Should Musk go this direction, it could mean bringing back
not only Trump, but “many, many others that were removed as a result of QAnon
conspiracies, targeted harassment of journalists and activists, and of course
all of the accounts that were removed after Jan. 6,” said Joan Donovan, who
studies misinformation at Harvard University. “That 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 “incredibly inappropriate” 2020 blocking of a New York
Post article on Hunter Biden, which the company has said was a mistake and
corrected within 24 hours.
OPEN-SOURCED ALGORITHMS
Musk’s longstanding interest in AI is reflected in one of
the most specific proposals he outlined in his merger announcement — the
promise of “making the algorithms open source to increase trust.” He’s talking
about the systems that rank content to decide what shows up on users’ feeds.
Partly driving the distrust, at least for Musk supporters,
is lore among U.S. political conservatives about “shadow banning” on social
media. This is a supposed invisible feature for reducing the reach of badly
behaving users without disabling their accounts. There has been no evidence
that Twitter’s platform is biased against conservatives; studies have found the
opposite when it comes to conservative media in particular.
Musk has called for posting the underlying computer code
powering Twitter’s news feed for public inspection on the coder hangout GitHub.
But such “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 to help people find out why their tweets get promoted or demoted and
whether human moderators or automated systems are making those choices. But
that’s no easy task. Too much transparency about how individual tweets are
ranked, for instance, can make it easier for “disingenuous people” to game the
system and manipulate an algorithm to get maximum exposure for their cause,
Diakopoulos said.
‘DEFEATING THE SPAM BOTS’
“Spam bots” that mimic real people have been a personal
nuisance to Musk, whose popularity on Twitter has inspired countless
impersonator accounts that use his image and name — often to promote
cryptocurrency scams that look as if they’re coming from the Tesla CEO.
Sure, Twitter users, among them Musk, “don’t want spam,”
said David Greene, civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier
Foundation. But who defines what counts as a spam bot?
“Do you mean all bots like, you know, if I follow a Twitter
bot that just pulls up historic photos of fruits? I choose to follow that. Is
that not allowed to exist?” he said.
There are also plenty of spam-filled Twitter accounts at
least partially run by real people that run the gamut from ones that hawk
products to those promoting polarizing political content to meddle in other
countries’ elections.
‘AUTHENTICATE ALL HUMANS’
Musk has repeatedly said he wants Twitter to “authenticate
all humans,” an ambiguous proposal that could be related to his desire to rid
the website of spam accounts.
Ramping up mundane identity checks — such as two-factor
authentication or popups that ask which of six photos shows a school bus —
could discourage anyone from trying to amass an army of bogus accounts.
Musk might also be considering offering more people a “blue
check” — the verification checkmark sported on notable Twitter accounts — like
Musk’s — to show they’re who they say they are. Musk has suggested users could
buy the checkmarks as part of a premium service.
But some digital rights activists are concerned these
measures could lead to a “real-name” policy resembling Facebook’s approach of
forcing people to validate their full names and use them in their profiles.
That would seem to contradict Musk’s free speech focus by muzzling anonymous
whistleblowers or people living under authoritarian regimes where it can be
dangerous if a dissident message is attributable to a particular person.
AD-FREE TWITTER?
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
may be because cutting off the company’s chief way of making money would be a
tall order, even for the world’s richest person.
Advertisements accounted for more than 92% of Twitter’s
revenue in the January-March fiscal quarter. The company did last year launch a
premium subscription service — known as Twitter Blue — but doesn’t appear to
have made much headway in getting people to pay for it.
Musk has made clear he favors a stronger subscription-based
model for Twitter that gives more people an ad-free option. That would also fit
into his push to relax 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’s joined the
popular call for an “edit button” — which Twitter says it’s already working on
— that would enable people to fix a tweet shortly after posting it. A less
serious proposal from Musk suggested converting Twitter’s downtown San
Francisco headquarters to a homeless shelter “since no one shows up anyway” — a
comment taken more as a dig on Twitter’s pandemic-era workforce than an
altruistic vision for the building.
Musk didn’t return an emailed request to clarify his plans. -AP