After spending months Tesla founder Elon Musk now owns Twitter and is trying to undo the deal he struck. While official confirmation is still pending, Musk has reportedly wasted no time making any major changes. Yesterday, the Washington Post reported that the chief executive of the company, Parag Agarwal; financial director Ned Segal; General Counsel Sean Edgett and Vijaya Gadde, the head of legal policy, trust and security, have all been fired. At the time of writing, neither the executives nor Twitter had made a public statement about their departure.
Such drastic changes are unlikely to be a one-off. In April, when Twitter announced it had agreed to the sale, Musk said he wanted to “make Twitter better than ever by improving the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeat and authenticate all people”. .”
The entrepreneur’s tweets and public statements since then — along with private text messages released via Twitter’s lawsuit to enforce the deal — detail detailed but sometimes conflicting ambitions for the company. Many have raised the concern of people who use Twitter, study or work that the world may lose an imperfect but uniquely open online space. If Musk is even partial to his ideas, Twitter users could see major and confusing shifts in the platform’s features and social dynamics.
Musk’s most consistently expressed ambition for his version of Twitter is that it should function as a “digital city square” that provides a forum for free speech where everyone is welcome. That may sound commendable to many, but while Twitter, like other major social platforms, is currently trying to remove harassment and other objectionable content, Musk has said he will oppose any “censorship that goes way beyond the law“and want to fix Twitters”strong left bias.”
In the US, this would translate into an ethos of just about anything goes. In late April, after Twitter accepted Musk’s offer, botwatchers saw a flood of new right-wing accounts and warned that people who left Twitter after their posts or accounts were consistently deleted by moderators were returning to the site in anticipation of the Musk regime. .
All of this has led to online moderation experts — including some on Twitter’s online security advisory board — fearing Musk will usher in a new era of trolling on the platform. “A Musk-owned Twitter could be disastrous for women and marginalized communities already experiencing abuse and targeted harassment on the platform,” said Christopher Bouzy of Bot Sentinel, a popular bot-detection system.
Musk said to a Financial times event in May that he would reverse the ban that Donald Trump kicked off Twitter after the January 6 uprising, calling the decision “morally wrong and downright stupid.” But in a private text message, he also claimed that “Twitter clearly won’t be turned into a right-wing lunatic” and said he “will strive to be as broadly inclusive as possible.”
