The board of Twitter have accepted the bid from Elon Musk to acquire Twitter for $44 billion. How is he going to finance this? Apart from being the richest person in the world, probably by borrowing against his shareholdings in Tesla.
But users of Twitter will be concerned about his plans for the platform. This is what Elon said (in a tweet of course): “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated. I also want 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. Twitter has tremendous potential -I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it.”
As an active twitter user I find these commitments to be positive. Authenticating all users should be done by all social media platforms to deter the abusive comments that are all too common. Twitter also needs to cease the political bias which is all too evident in its selection of who and what to suppress.
There are some simple changes to Twitter that might help. For example, allowing you to “dislike” tweets as well as “like” them, and allowing edits of tweets to enable one to correct the typos that creep in when using a mobile phone. There is also too much repetitive advertising on Twitter of late, often irrelevant to you.
Now would it not be good if we could get Elon Musk to take over the BBC and remove the left wing, woke bias from that also!
Roger Lawson (Twitter: https://twitter.com/RogerWLawson )
You can “follow” this blog by entering your email address below. You will then receive an email alerting you to new posts as they are added.
Musk for DG of the BBC – Absolutely!