Live updates: Twitter agrees to sell itself to Elon Musk

Some billionaires purchase newspapers, magazines and sports activities groups. Elon Musk is attempting to purchase a social community that he himself admits may trigger a lot of the world to hate him.

Sounds promising. So why precisely does the world’s richest man — who’s already operating a number of firms with formidable targets like taking people to Mars — need to purchase Twitter, a social media platform which, for all its advantages, is dealing with scrutiny for content material points like hate speech and misinformation, and in addition preventing to reignite consumer development?

Musk has repeatedly pressured in latest days that his aim is to bolster free speech on the platform and work to “unlock” Twitter’s “extraordinary potential.” Others have prompt that Musk — who has 83 million followers on Twitter and has lengthy used it to bolster his private model — could also be extra curious about boosting consideration for himself.

To listen to Musk inform it, the aim of his Twitter provide is nothing lower than defending civilization as we all know it. “My robust intuitive sense is that having a public platform that’s maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extraordinarily vital to the way forward for civilization,” Musk stated on the TED convention.

Amongst Musk’s plans for the platform are making its algorithm open supply and making it extra clear to customers when, for instance, a tweet has been emphasised or demoted of their feed. He additionally stated he would need to have extra lenient content material moderation insurance policies. “I believe we need to be very reluctant to delete issues and simply be very cautious with everlasting bans; timeouts are higher,” Musk stated.

Nonetheless, it isn’t clear that his plans are all that a lot completely different from Twitter’s current technique. Though Twitter’s algorithm just isn’t presently open supply — a time period that describes code that’s publicly out there for anybody to see — leaders at Twitter have expressed assist for transferring in that path, and the corporate usually makes clear when it’s demoting sure tweets or kinds of content material. Twitter has additionally erred on the aspect of labeling, reasonably than outright eradicating, a lot of the content material usually thought-about problematic, together with some kinds of misinformation. And it affords a number of brief suspensions to customers who violate its guidelines earlier than eradicating them.

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