Elon Musk Reveals Changes He's Planning for Twitter after Takeover
Billionaire announces two changes he plans to make to social media platform
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Tech billionaire Elon Musk has revealed some of the changes he is planning for Twitter if he succeeds in his bid to buy the social media platform.
The announcement from Musk came after he submitted a new Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing confirming his plan to soon buy the company outright.
The Thursday filing revealed that he has now secured $46.5 billion from three sources to buy the company.
The fund includes $13 billion from Morgan Stanley, $12.5 billion from other banks, and $21 billion from himself.
The offer is a significant increase from his initial $43B offer.
Following the news regarding the SEC filing, Musk tweeted, “If our twitter bid succeeds, we will defeat the spam bots or die trying!”
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After praise for his first idea, Musk then followed up with a second idea that wasn't received quite so well.
“And authenticate all real humans,” Musk added a short time later.
And authenticate all real humans
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 21, 2022
Musk said during a TED Talk earlier this month that Twitter needed to make its algorithm open sourced and that any action the company takes against tweets need to be thoroughly explained to the public to stop “behind the scenes manipulation” on the platform by the company.
According to Musk, Twitter’s secret algorithms, which he said promote some tweets while not promoting others, can be “quite dangerous.”
Musk said when it comes to judging whether tweets should be taken down due to the nature of the content in the tweet, the policy should be: if in doubt, let the tweet exist.
Musk has also floated the idea of having an edit button added for users.
Musk sparked some controversy on Tuesday with a pair of tweets, one offering a “good” metric for determining if a social media company’s policies were effective and another asking who is behind “shadowy” censorship and de-platforming on the internet.
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Musk first replied to a tweet from tech entrepreneur Marc Andreessen, who wrote:
“I predict essentially identical censorship/deplatforming policies across all layers of the legacy Internet stack.
"Client-side & server-side ISPs, cloud platforms, CDNs, payment networks, client OSs, browsers, email clients.
"With only rare exceptions.
"The pressure is intense.”
“Extremely concerning,” Musk responded.
“Who is pushing this censorship/deplatforming? Very shadowy.”
Less than an hour later, Musk said that a social media company’s policies would be “good” if the policies equally made extremes on both sides “unhappy.”
“A social media platform’s policies are good if the most extreme 10% on left and right are equally unhappy,” Musk tweeted.
