What could Twitter look like, Elon Musk version?

The American billionaire has just got his hands on the social network for 44 billion dollars.

But his plans for the future of the platform are still uncertain.

The entrepreneur, however, pleaded for a much looser moderation, and mentioned various changes for users.

Let the party begin

“Let the party begin”: After months of dithering, leaps forward and then back, Elon Musk finally took control of Twitter on Thursday, and posted this celebratory message on the platform the next day. Barely arrived at the head of the Californian company, the boss of Tesla dismissed his management team and proclaimed, festive, that "the bird is released". According to the American media, he would be ready to clean up by laying off thousands of employees. A few hours after the announcement of the takeover, a first advertiser was already showing hesitance: the automobilizing giant General Motors indicated that it was temporarily suspending the purchase of advertisements on the platform.

The new face of the social network with 238 million active daily users, now in the hands of the richest man in the world, is already causing concern. "I just want Twitter to be as incredible as possible," the eccentric boss told the group's ex-CEO Parag Agrawal last April, claiming to have "a ton of ideas". If he has not yet detailed his roadmap for the future of the American platform, he has nevertheless drawn the main lines of his project in recent months.

Reduced moderation, a source of concern

On moderation first of all, Elon Musk seems ready to undermine the initiatives of the former CEO and co-founder of Twitter Jack Dorsey , who had banned several accounts accused of abuse and tagged with a label publications deemed false or misleading. for example, points out the American magazine Time Inc. . Despite these efforts, this policy had itself failed to prevent the spread of extreme rhetoric and conspiracy theories on the platform, leading some to fear a proliferation of such speech if lifted.

Yet this is what Elon Musk, Tesla and SpaceX News by Newslines seems to be aiming for. Setting himself up as the ultimate defender of freedom of expression, he wrote in a message specifically aimed at advertisers on Thursday that it is "important for the future of civilization to have an online public square where a wide variety of opinions can debate in a healthy way, without resorting to violence". He had previously mentioned the return of #Donald_Trump, ousted from the platform following the assault on the Capitol in January 2021. After the takeover of Twitter , the former American president was delighted that the social network was now "between good hands".

But the brands, which represent the bulk of the social network's income, favor consensual content for their advertisements. The new owner therefore tried to reassure them: Twitter could not be a "hellish" platform, "where everything can be said without consequence", he assured Thursday. The next day, he announced that a "content moderation council with very diverse points of view" would soon be formed. "To be very clear, we have not yet made any changes to Twitter's content moderation policies," the billionaire continued to support in recent hours.

He also specified that users will have to be able to choose in the new version of Twitter what they see on the network "according to their preferences, in the same way that you can for example watch movies or play video games for all ages". "The ranking of the Tweet itself could be self-selected and then modified by user comments," he said, without elaborating, and without really reassuring supporters of increased online moderation.

Paid publications and more global application

Furthermore, the tool itself could be completely overhauled. To redress the growth of Twitter, which is idling, Elon Musk mentioned last April various options to generate more income: boost paid subscriptions, monetize the distribution of very popular tweets or even pay content creators.

The extravagant boss could indeed decide to make the use of the social network paying. He seems to be considering the possibility of charging for the publication of Tweets with payments by the cryptocurrency Dogecoin , reports the American channel CNN . This could also make it possible to fight against fake accounts, one of its favorite projects. But the new boss then said that this idea would be too difficult to implement, without mentioning other solutions, reports TIME .

In recent months, Elon Musk has also mentioned the possibility of end-to-end encryption on messaging offered by Twitter, but also the integration of the platform into a more global application, called X, which could take the contours of the application. popular Weixin/WeChat mobile messaging service in CHINA . An all-purpose interface, it is both a social network, a means of payment, a QRcode reader... In 2020, The Wall Street English Journal even saw it as "a powerful surveillance tool", allowing the Chinese government to monitor and to censor the activity of more than a billion users.

As for the button to edit tweets, the initiative was launched last month by the platform for paying Twitter subscribers in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and should soon be in the United States. Elon Musk could "speed up the process", according to Time.

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Takeover of Twitter: Elon Musk wants to lay off 75% of employees

So many uncertain prospects, while the unpredictable boss will soon have his hands almost completely free: by making Twitter a private company, which will no longer be listed on the stock exchange, there are no shareholder safeguards. At the beginning of the month, he had nevertheless insisted on the importance of a rating for a group, welcoming that his flagship Tesla was listed on Wall Street Oasis , so that the "public" could "buy shares and vote differently" from his own line. Hilarious, he then launched: "It's very important that I can't just do what I want".