PROVIDENCE, RI (AP) – Tesla CEO Elon Musk has outlined some bold, albeit still vague, plans to turn Twitter into a “maximum entertainment” site after buying the $ 44 billion social media platform and taking it private.
But introducing what is currently little more than a mixture of vague principles and technical details can be significantly more complicated than he suggests.
Here’s what can happen if Musk follows his ideas on free speech, the fight against spam, and the opening of the “black box” of artificial intelligence tools that are fueling social media trends.
CITY SQUARE OF FREEDOM
Musk’s boldest priority – but also the one with the most obscure roadmap – is to turn Twitter into a “politically neutral” digital city square for world discourse, allowing as much freedom of speech as any country’s laws allow.
He admits that his plans to change Twitter could anger the political left and, above all, make the right happy. He did not specify what he would do with the permanently banned account of former President Donald Trump or other right-wing leaders whose tweets violated the company’s restrictions on hate speech, violent threats or harmful misinformation.
If Musk moves in that direction, it could mean a return not only to Trump, but also to “many, many others who were removed as a result of the QAnon conspiracies, deliberate harassment of journalists and activists, and of course all the accounts that were removed after Jan. 6, “said Joan Donovan, who is studying disinformation at Harvard University. “It could potentially be hundreds of thousands of people.
Musk does not rule out the suspension of some accounts, but says such bans should be temporary. His latest criticism has focused on what he described as an “incredibly inappropriate” blocking by Twitter in 2020 of an article in the New York Post about Hunter Biden, which the company said was a mistake and corrected within 24 hours.
OPEN CODE ALGORITHMS
Musk’s longstanding interest in AI is reflected in one of the most concrete proposals he outlined in his announcement of the merger – the promise to “make open source algorithms to increase trust”. He talks about systems that rank content to decide what is displayed in users’ feeds.
Part of the distrust, at least for Musk’s supporters, is the belief among American political conservatives about a “shadow ban” on social media. This is a supposed invisible feature to reduce the reach of badly behaved users without deactivating their accounts. There is no evidence that the Twitter platform is biased against conservatives; studies have found the opposite, especially with regard to conservative media.
Musk has called for the publication of the main computer code that feeds the Twitter news feed for public scrutiny in the GitHub encryption field. But such “code-level transparency” gives users little idea of how Twitter works for them without the data the algorithms process, said Nick Diakopoulos, a computer scientist at Northwestern University.
Diakopoulos said he has good intentions in Musk’s broader goal of helping people understand why their tweets are being raised or lowered and whether human moderators or automated systems are making that choice. But this is not an easy task. Too much transparency about how individual tweets rank, for example, can make it easier for “insincere people” to play with the system and manipulate an algorithm to get the most out of their cause, Diakopoulos said.
“WINNING SPAM BOTS”
Spam bots that mimic real people have been a personal inconvenience for Musk, whose Twitter popularity has inspired countless impersonator accounts that use his image and name – often to promote cryptocurrency scams that seem to come from the mainstream. CEO of Tesla.
Of course, Twitter users, including Musk, “don’t want spam,” said David Green, director of civil liberties at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. But who determines what is considered a spam bot?
“You mean all bots like, you know, if I follow a bot on Twitter that just displays historical photos of fruits?” I choose to follow this. Isn’t that allowed to exist? “He said.
There are also many spam-filled Twitter accounts, at least partially run by real people who run the range from those who sell products to those who promote polarizing political content to interfere in elections in other countries.
“CERTIFICATION OF ALL PEOPLE”
Musk has repeatedly said he wants Twitter to “authenticate everyone,” an ambiguous proposal that may be related to his desire to rid the website of spam accounts.
Increasing simple identity checks – such as two-factor authentication or pop-ups asking which of the six photos shows a school bus – may discourage anyone from trying to amass an army of fake accounts.
Musk may also consider offering more people a “blue mark” – a check mark placed on notable Twitter accounts – such as Musk’s – to show that they are who they say they are. Musk suggested consumers buy bookmarks as part of a first-class service.
But some digital rights activists are concerned that these measures could lead to a “real name” policy that mimics Facebook’s approach to forcing people to validate their full names and use them in their profiles. This seems to contradict Musk’s focus on free speech by silencing anonymous whistleblowers or people living under authoritarian regimes, where it can be dangerous if a dissident message is attributed to a particular person.
TWITTER WITHOUT ADS?
Musk proposed the idea of Twitter without ads, although this was not one of the priorities outlined in the official announcement of the merger. This may be due to the fact that ending the company’s main way of making money would be difficult even for the richest person in the world.
Ads accounted for more than 92% of Twitter’s revenue in the January-March fiscal quarter. The company launched a first-class subscription service last year – known as Twitter Blue – but it doesn’t seem to have made much progress in getting people to pay for it.
Musk has indicated that he prefers a stronger Twitter subscription model that gives more people an ad-free option. This would also be in line with his efforts to ease restrictions on Twitter content – which brands largely prefer because they don’t want their ads to be surrounded by offensive and hateful tweets.
WHAT ELSE?
Musk tweeted and made so many suggestions on Twitter that it can be difficult to figure out which ones he takes seriously. He joined the popular call for an “edit button” – which Twitter says is already working – that would allow people to tweete shortly after it was published. A less serious proposal from Musk suggested that Twitter’s headquarters in downtown San Francisco be turned into a homeless shelter, “because no one shows up anyway,” a comment seen more as a dig in Twitter’s workforce. the pandemic than as an altruistic vision of the building.
Musk did not return an email request to clarify his plans.
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AP Technology writer Barbara Ortutai contributed to this report.
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