Twitter is trending on its own platform after the company was sold to Elon Musk for $44 billion. Musk plans to take the site private and “protect free speech online,” he said.
Users are buzzing about what possible changes this could spark on the popular social media site. They’re also wondering how this could affect the kind of content they see and post.
In a Monday (April 25) tweet, Musk said that, “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square.”
🚀💫♥️ Yesss!!! ♥️💫🚀 pic.twitter.com/0T9HzUHuh6
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 25, 2022
Musk is already infamous for his own trail of controversial and offensive tweets.
While he promises to add “new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots and authenticating all humans,” many wonder if he’ll bring back users who have been banned, including former President Donald Trump.
This will be the third big job for Musk, who is currently CEO of Tesla and SpaceX.
“If you look at this success stories, it’s PayPal, it’s Tesla, SpaceX -- technology companies,” said Dan Ives, the managing director of equity research for Wedbush Securities.
Some critics are concerned that Musk’s pursuit of free speech will collide with growing safety problems on Twitter, especially for women and minorities.
“I don’t trust Elon Musk to make Twitter better for women, at all,” said Brianna Wu, executive director of Rebellion PAC. “I just absolutely don’t. If you’re asking yourself if this is someone who is going to go to bat for people that are underrepresented, I just don’t think that’s going to be the case, unfortunately.”
Musk hasn’t responded to concerns about him potentially bringing back banned users. Trump said he is not going back to Twitter and will stick with the platform he recently launched.
If approved by regulators, Twitter will go private and shareholders will reap a 38% profit on their stock, as of April 1.
