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Elon Musk's big plans for Twitter: This is what is known so far

Elon Musk
Posted at 11:56 AM, May 01, 2022
and last updated 2022-05-01 11:56:42-04

Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who is buying Twitter for $44 billion to take it private, has outlined a mix of vague principles and technical details as he looks to make the platform "maximum fun!" But what's in store if he follows through?

Turns out that some of his bigger ideas about free speech, fighting spam and opening up the "black box" of artificial intelligence tools that amplify social media trends are still more intentions than actual plans. And implementing them is likely to be more complicated than he suggests.

Open-sourced algorithms

Musk brought up the idea of “making the algorithms open source to increase trust.” He is referring to the systems ranking content which decide what will show up on user feeds.

Battling "spam bots"

"Spam bots" mimic real Twitter users, and have been considered a nuisance.

David Greene, civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation said, “Do you mean all bots like, you know, if I follow a Twitter bot that just pulls up historic photos of fruits? I choose to follow that. Is that not allowed to exist?” he said.

The need to authenticate "all humans"

Musk said he wants Twitter to “authenticate all humans,” as part of his desire to rid the platform of spam accounts, it is thought.

Some digital rights activists are concerned these measures could lead to a “real-name” policy resembling Facebook’s approach of forcing people to validate their full names and use them in their profiles, the Associated Press reported.