After long months of twists and turns, Elon Musk finally took over Twitter on October 27. The head of Tesla and SpaceX will also become the head of the platform, after having already fired the main executives of the platform, starting with his CEO. Since last spring, multiple statements by Elon Musk have allowed us to paint a portrait of the future Twitter, as he imagines it.
Freedom of expression (in theory)
This is one of the main promises of Elon Musk: to impose the return of what he considers to be freedom of expression. As proof, his first tweet from him as the owner of Twitter: “the bird has been released.” A promise, however, regularly tempered by the businessman himself, well aware that he will be forced to respect the laws of the countries in which Twitter is established.
If Elon Musk is unlikely to insist on developing moderation tools or hiring human moderators, Twitter will have to apply French law in France, which prohibits hate speech, threats, or even denial comments (authorized in the U.S). ).
The return of Donald Trump (if you so wish)
As he has explained on several occasions, Elon Musk wants to return to the definitive exile of users. He has already ruled on the definitive exclusion of Donald Trump after the invasion of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, believing that it was a mistake.
Under the Musk era, the former US president is likely free to return to Twitter, at least if he expresses the wish, to find his estimated 90 million subscribers.
Other equally sensitive cases could arise for Elon Musk, starting with Kanye West’s recent anti-Semitic tweets that earned the American rapper a Twitter ban.
New features (a la WeChat)
Elon Musk regularly returned to his desire to develop new possibilities for Twitter. If the social network teams have already given in to the arrival of an edit button for their tweets, Musk shared his desire to make the platform a “super app”, fulfilling other functions in addition to simple public exchanges.
On October 5, he mentioned taking over Twitter as “an accelerator” to create an “all-purpose app” called X. This statement echoes Elon Musk’s admiration for Chinese giant WeChat, whose app is one of the most popular from the country. .
WeChat offers, in particular, messaging functions, such as WhatsApp, but also the possibility of exchanging money, as allowed by applications such as Lydia or PayPal, of which Elon Musk is one of the historical co-founders.
The end of spam (if possible)
Among the arguments put forward by Elon Musk to cancel the takeover bid at the beginning of the summer, the presence of many false accounts on the platform stands out. Elon Musk has repeatedly returned to the issue of spam and scams on Twitter, sometimes even using his image.
To achieve his goals, Elon Musk will have to find the solution that the Twitter teams have not found so far, without imposing too restrictive measures on users, such as systematic identity verification.
Source: BFM TV
