By Ryan Bologna
It hasn’t been smooth sailing since Elon Musk acquired Twitter. You have probably heard the uproar regarding the ability for users to pay $8 to verify their accounts. Musk sent out an email to employees demanding staff to commit to long hours or leave. By observing Musk’s actions since acquiring the platform, it is clear that Musk wants to implement change. What should people expect? We have some ideas.
At the forefront of Musk’s ideas for change is loosening the restrictions on speech. He even promised to restore accounts that have previously been banned. If you think there are a lot of crazy trolls on Twitter as it is right now, that probably isn’t going to change.
Over the last few years, Twitter has been banning accounts that are said to be promoting abuse and spam, and also labels Tweets that supposedly promote misleading information. With Musk at the helm there will likely be a lot more debate when it comes to who gets banned and who doesn’t, especially considering this quote, “If in doubt, let the speech exist,” Musk said. “If it’s a gray area, I would say, let the tweet exist. But obviously in the case where there’s perhaps a lot of controversy, you would not necessarily want to promote that tweet.”
Musk indicates that users aren’t going to be able to say just anything without consequences on the platform. After all, he said he doesn’t plan on turning Twitter in to a “free-all hells cape,” but the loosened restrictions could cause the platform to change significantly.
As far as unbanning accounts goes, that should be happening soon. The way that Musk came to this decision shows that there is an element of unpredictability to how the platform will look under his direction.
That’s right, he ran a Twitter poll to come to this decision. The fact that he came to this decision simply by running a poll on the platform shows that there might be other outside-of-the-box ideas that emerge as well. We have seen Musk implement a paid component of the app, with the option to get a checkmark for $8, and we might see that in other areas.
For instance, in a text chain with his brother that was revealed in court documents, the idea of having users pay for each Tweet they post with a small portion of the cryptocurrency called DogeCoin.
Obviously, we haven’t seen that implemented yet and there is no sign of that coming any time soon. However, the conversation itself proves that Musk will leave no stone unturned. There might be some unorthodox features that he experiments with. Given the fact that Musk ran a poll to make a decision as significant as that one, one might think he doesn’t know exactly what he is going to do with everything yet.
Some were concerned enough to think that Twitter would shut down, but it doesn’t seem that is happening. Musk isn’t going to give up on the platform after spending a fortune to acquire it in the first place. The only thing that is clear is that there will be significant experimentation on the platform.
Photo Credit: Sergei Elagin
