Although my Lushington Brady persona was banned from Twitter long ago, I do keep a strictly non-political presence on the platform, under another nom-de-plume. It’s remarkable, actually, what a pleasant place Twitter is without politics: there’s probably a lesson in there.
Anyway, being on Twitter has allowed me to lurk and watch with pleasure the growing meltdown in reaction to the news that Elon Musk has bought the company. It’s like watching the night Hillary lost the election all over again, only with even more blue checkmarks. I’m gonna need a bigger bowl of popcorn, the longer this goes on.
So, what exactly are the Twats so afraid of? Well, Musk has indicated that he wants to make major changes to the company. The first is the one that’s really got the blue checkmark brigade’s knickers in their biggest twist since 2016.
Mr. Musk reiterated his push to soften Twitter’s stance on content moderation. “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” Mr. Musk said in a news release announcing the deal […]
Mr Musk, a self-described “free speech absolutist,” said in an interview during a TED conference last week that Twitter is the “de facto town square,” and that “it’s very important for there to be an inclusive arena for free speech.”
He said Twitter should be more cautious when deciding whether to take down tweets or permanently ban users.
Time-outs are better, he added.
The platform should also follow the laws of the countries it provides services in, Mr Musk said.
And when Twitter does make changes to amplify or reduce a tweet’s reach, it should give users insight into what happened, he said.
Musk is also mulling expanding the character limit. Twitter started with a 140-character limit, later doubled it to 280 — and stopped. Twitter fans claim that its brevity is a virtue, pointing to TikTok as opposed to YouTube, which encourages its users to post content at least 10 minutes long. The only problem with that is that it has led to a notable proliferation of waffle, as creators try and pad out their runtime with obvious filler.
But other Musk plans are no-brainers. Twitter users have been agitating for years to introduce an edit function.
Earlier this month, Mr Musk polled Twitter users on whether they wanted one.
More than four million accounts voted, and more than 70 per cent said yes […]
Mr Musk said in a regulatory filing he wants to take Twitter private.
This is another biggie. Musk knows he is up against an entrenched culture of insane wokeism in the company. No doubt he was only half-joking when he mused about turning the company’s San Francisco headquarters into a homeless shelter. After all, he said, most of the employees work from home. Besides, surely their progressive politics would see them greet the homeless with open arms?
Taking Twitter off the public stock exchange would likely make it easier for Mr Musk to implement his desired changes to the company, since much of the shareholder pressure would dissolve.
To that end, Musk is also planning to wean the company off advertising revenue and move to a subscriber model, at least for premium features. This is a wise move: as many independent media sites like The BFD have discovered, having a solid subscriber base makes them cancel-proof. Advertisers can be spooked into walking away by just a handful of activists: subscribers are there because they want to be. Sure, the company will still have to work to keep subscribers, but at least that’s an honest living.
In the TED interview, Mr Musk suggested making Twitter’s algorithm open source, meaning others outside the company would be able to view and recommend fixes and changes.
One way to do that, he said, is to put the code on GitHub, a site that is used for storing software projects.
Subscriptions might be a hard sell to many users, but another of Musk’s priorities would be a winner all round.
Mr Musk said a top priority for him would be eliminating “bot armies” on Twitter, which spam accounts and run scams.
“If I had a dogecoin for every crypto scam I saw,” he said during the TED interview.
Wall Street Journal
But if the blue checkmarks are screaming helplessly at the sky, there’s at least one other person who ought to be worried.
Mr Musk buying Twitter is “Mark Zuckerberg’s worst nightmare come to life”, according to Sabri Suby, the founder of digital agency King Kong.
Mr Musk had proved himself as the world’s most successful tech entrepreneur, he said, and engineers would likely jump ship for an opportunity to work with the enigmatic executive.
The Australian
Another tech CEO noted that “Essentially, having a business that is run by the person that owns it, which Twitter currently lacks, can only be a good thing”.
Especially an owner with such a proven track record of success, not least turning the traditionally loss-making, government-run space sector into a surging, profitable private enterprise. Musk has already made NASA look like the fossilised dinosaur it is — now, it’s Meta’s turn.