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On Monday, Twitter chief executive Parag Agrawal told his staff he had no idea what would happen once Elon Musk took over.
“We don’t know which direction the platform will go,” Reuters reported him saying.
He’s not alone. Neither does anyone else – possibly including Mr Musk himself.
His statements about his plans up to this point have been brief, gnomic and occasionally contradictory.
Take, for instance, his declarations celebrating his purchase, when he promised to “defeat the spam bots” and “make the algorithm open source”.
Elon Musk is the most brilliant entrepreneur of his generation, with a capacity to solve the most intractable conundrums, but for those of us bound by conventional assumptions about what is possible, this has all the air of nonsense.
If you want to stop spam, whether from robots or humans, you can’t start by telling the spammers exactly how your platform works. That’s like buying a bank, vowing to eliminate bank robbers, then publishing the floor plans of your vault.
For some, this kind of inconsistency suggests that Mr Musk is buying a toy with little idea what to do with it, beyond a vague devotion to a libertarian concept of free speech, which may be much harder to put into practice than he imagines.
In a letter announcing his bid for Twitter, he said he believed in the social network’s capacity “to be the platform for free speech around the globe”.
But many countries around the globe, including most of Europe, do not subscribe to an American idea of unfettered free speech, and many of Twitter’s actual users want more moderation rather than less.
Mr Musk complained recently that some of the biggest names on Twitter, like Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber, hardly ever used the service.
Does he imagine that they want their followers to have even more ability to abuse them? Or are they…
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Source : skynews
