What will Elon Musk do with Twitter?

Elon Musk’s $44bn Twitter takeover has sparked just the sort of explosive, polarised debate the platform is famous for.

Parts of the liberal left are – ironically, perhaps – aghast at Musk’s pledge to defend free speech, warts and all, while many conservatives are thrilled, believing that Twitter’s current moderation policies rig the game against them.

For those unfamiliar with the extraordinary world of Twitter, it’s many things at once – a cesspit of hot and not-so-hot takes, anonymised mud-slinging and roving Russian bots that also gives millions of people a voice and access to a 24/7 deluge of news, often the raw, unfiltered kind.

The takeover is a reminder, if one were needed, that despite Twitter’s role as digital “town square”, it’s not a public utility. Twitter is Big Business, although it’s only turned a profit twice in the last 10 years. 

But Musk, the serial entrepreneur behind Paypal, Tesla and SpaceX, isn’t in it for the money. He’s got plenty of that. What he wants, he admits, is influence. The sale means the world’s richest person can dictate what 200m users see, and what they’re allowed to say.

While it’s hard to predict what his weird brand of sci-fi flavoured anarcho-capitalism will mean for the platform, he’s hinted at a pretty hefty rewiring. He says he wants to “make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans”.

He also wants to see less moderation on the platform. But his claim to be a “free speech absolutist” shouldn’t be taken literally. It’s hard to see how it would survive contact with reality. As Vivian Schiller, Twitter’s former head of global news, says: “Everybody believes in free speech, but what do you do when you’re talking about inciting violence, hate speech, and other forms of troubling content that Twitter rightly feels a responsibility not to allow on its platform.”

Regulators around the world are cracking down on social media giants in an attempt to hold them responsible for the content they host. Legal restrictions should, in theory, go some way to limit just how wild a Wild West like Twitter can become.  

Intriguingly, Musk says he wants to steer the company towards a subscription model rather than ads. It sounds radical – we’ve become hard-wired to expect not to pay for online content. And the idea might be doomed to fail when other social media sites don’t have paywalls.

But the free-to-use model has a lot to answer for. Users may not pay with cash, but they do pay with their data. Algorithms geared towards ads tend to favour extreme content because it keeps eyeballs glued to screens for longer than the more nuanced variety.

His plan will take shape in the coming weeks and months, but one thing’s certain – love him or loathe him, Elon Musk has put a rocket up Big Tech.