Since being accepted for a takeover of Twitter, Elon Musk has looked like he’s having a good time on his network, but many experts are warning that the reality check – running a high-profile but unprofitable network – risks to be brutal.
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The boss of Tesla and SpaceX wants to own the tweeting network with the stated aim of making it a bastion of freedom of expression, essential to democracy.
He also mentioned the end of spam and advertising, “open source” algorithms and the diversification of sources of income.
But these ideas launched on the fly do not constitute a coherent plan, even contradict each other, point out the observers.
Content moderation, first. “He’s going to have a terrible shock when he finds out what it really looks like,” tweeted Benedict Evans, an independent analyst specializing in Silicon Valley.
“In the 1990s, a lot of internet pioneers had this libertarian ethos. They thought that all opinions should be able to be debated in public forums,” says Chris Bail, professor of sociology at Duke University. “It’s much more complex.”
Balancing
To define the limits, Elon Musk wants to stick to the law. Problem: Twitter has to contend with many different laws.
Spam, under American law, can thus be considered to fall within the scope of freedom of expression, notes Chris Bail.
In Europe, on the other hand, senior officials immediately recalled that all platforms will have to better fight against illegal content, under a new regulation.
And in practice, opening the door to misinformation and certain forms of harassment can scare away many users and advertisers. The social networks of the American right, whose watchword is freedom of expression, are also not successful.
Facebook and the others have tried to define common rules, without convincing, accused of laxity by the left and censorship by the right, as by Elon Musk.
“Twitter is not a community, it’s a lot of communities that don’t agree at all with each other,” says Casey Fiesler, professor of digital ethics at the University of Colorado Boulder.
A joke for some is an incitement to violence for others.
Internal kitchen
Elon Musk also advocates more transparency on the algorithms that organize the tweets, giving priority to some rather than others, according to each profile.
This proposal to make the programs accessible (“open source”) arouses a certain enthusiasm on the part of users wishing to “see” the algorithms.
“I don’t know what they are thinking. There are no instructions, it’s not like a peanut butter sandwich recipe!” comments Casey Fiesler.
“It’s a ‘machine learning’ system, which depends heavily on the data collected,” she continues. Opening it may therefore pose confidentiality problems.
“It’s a noble idea, driven by the desire to give everyone more control,” admits Chris Bail.
But it risks making it easier for trolls and other harmful actors to push their messages to the top of the pile.
As for users, “they could choose to see only the content that suits them, and lock themselves even more in their sounding board,” he adds.
In contradiction with the vision of “public place” of the multi-billionaire.
Cash
Some of Elon Musk’s suggestions also risk harming the platform’s economic model, which is based on advertising. He disapproves of this source of income, which in any case requires combating toxic content.
“It’s not clear if he wants to create value or stick to a philosophical-social objective,” remarks Gustavo Schwed, professor of finance at NYU University.
But even if he is the richest man in the world, the entrepreneur is going to have to ensure that Twitter generates more profits.
Its bank loans contracted for the operation are indeed backed by its Tesla shares, but also by the profits generated by Twitter … which ended 2020 and 2021 in the red.
According to his tweets, Elon Musk would like to boost paid subscriptions, monetize the distribution of very popular tweets or even pay content creators.
“He was very successful as a businessman and in engineering. But there, it is not a question of teaching a car to drive itself, it is a human product”, underlines Chris Bail.
“Predicting the behavior of a single human is complicated. And the challenge, at Twitter, is to predict that of huge groups of people.