Elon Musk acquires Twitter: Live Updates

Elon Musk can be unfathomable at times, and his policies are evasive, which has made it a little difficult to determine exactly what the billionaire would do if he succeeded in acquiring Twitter. But over the past few weeks and months, Mr. Musk has given several hints about what he wanted to change on Twitter – in interviews, regulatory registrations and, of course, on his personal Twitter account.

Here are the main areas Mr. Musk can seek to address:

Free speech and content moderators. Musk has often expressed concern that Twitter’s content moderators go too far and interfere too much with the platform, which he views as the Internet’s. “De facto torget.”

In the regulatory archive where he announced his bid to buy Twitter, he wrote: “I invested in Twitter because I believe in its potential to be the platform for freedom of expression worldwide, and I believe freedom of expression is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy.”

He added that he did not trust that the company’s current management would make the changes he saw necessary and prioritize his ideas on freedom of expression on the platform. “Since I invested, I now realize that the company will neither thrive nor serve this societal imperative in its current form,” he wrote.

In a chirping On Monday, Mr. Musk said he hoped even his “worst critics” continued to use the platform “because that’s what free speech means.”

The Trump question. Mr. Musk has not publicly commented on how he would handle former President Donald Trump’s banned Twitter account. But his freedom of speech comments have created speculation that Twitter under his ownership could reinstate Mr. Trump, who was banned from the platform last year. After the uprising at the Capitol on January 6, Twitter said that Trump had broken the guidelines by calling for violence among his supporters. Facebook also banned Mr. Trump for the same reason.

The former president, who was known for tweets criticizing opponents and sometimes announcing policy changes, is also trying to start his own social media site. His start-up, Truth Social, has struggled to attract users, and the problem may get worse now that Mr Musk has proposed changing the rules for content moderation on Twitter. Mr. Trump said in a recent interview that he would probably not join Twitter again if he could.

Algorithms. At a TED conference this month, he elaborated on his plans to make the company’s algorithm an open source model, which would allow users to see the code that shows how certain posts came up in their timelines.

He said the open source method would be better than “having tweets mysteriously promoted and degraded without insight into what’s going on.”

Mr. Musk has also pointed to the politicization of the platform before, and tweeted recently that any social media platform’s guidelines “are good if the most extreme 10 percent on the left and right are equally unhappy.”

Who uses the platform and how. Before Mr. Musk offered to buy Twitter this month, he expressed concern about the platform’s relevance.

When an account posted a list of the 10 most followed Twitter accounts, including former President Barack Obama and pop stars Justin Bieber and Katy Perry, Mr. Musk answered and wrote: ‘Most of these’ top ‘accounts rarely tweet and post very little content. Is Twitter dying? “

More recently, Tesla’s CEO promised in a tweet Thursday that he would “fight the spambots or die from trying!”