1. OK, I was wrong: I really thought Musk was bullshitting. But he is, as tech analyst Benedict Evans puts it, “a bullshitter who delivers”. He doesn’t care if things are true when he says them, but sometimes makes them true anyway.
2. We can file “I’m going to buy Twitter for $54.20” alongside “I’ll sell a flamethrower”, “I’ll start a tunnelling business called the Boring Company”, and “I’ll call my baby X Æ A-12” as things that didn’t sound sincere but apparently were.
3. What next for Twitter, though? I think it’s still the case that the model for Musk is “billionaire buying a sports team” rather than “billionaire investing in a high-yielding asset” – but his bankers will be demanding a return.
4. That means limited scope to make fundamental changes. For all he discussed in now-deleted tweets about removing adverts and improving the subscription offering, those things cost money, and he needs to boost Twitter’s profit, not shrink it.
5. So the changes we should expect fall into two camps: minor tweaks demanded by a notorious power user – and shifts in matters of principle, which are free to make and only likely to affect the bottom line in diffuse ways.
6. On the former, Twitter has already built an edit button that it could enable at the flick of a switch. He’s also talked of “authenticating all humans”, likely by offering the “verified” label to anyone who wants to send in proof of ID.
7. As for the matters of principle, Musk has been clear: “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.”
8. There are obvious high profile changes he could order – chief among them demanding the reinstatement of Donald Trump’s account (though the former president has said he doesn’t want to come back).
9. Musk could also fiddle with Twitter’s terms of service. Perhaps a man who famously called the Covid panic “dumb”, sued to avoid lockdowns and said he wouldn’t get vaccinated might oppose bans on Covid misinformation, for instance.
10. But most free speech controversies happen at the coal face of a moderation queue, where a part-time owner (remember, Musk still owns and runs SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, and the Boring Company) is unlikely to spend much time.
11. So expect the free-speech push to largely happen at the level of extravagant public interventions over high-profile cases. If you’re famous enough that your Twitter ban catches Musk’s attention, you might have a good shot at a reversal.
12. Musk has also suggested that “the twitter algorithm” needs to be made open source. This might happen quickly, but I don’t think it’s likely to affect much: random chunks of computer code being published that refer to other bits of code that haven’t been published tells us … nothing?
13. And while he wants Twitter to be a free-speech platform, the direction of travel is against him, especially overseas. What is he going to do when Twitter’s lawyers tell him about the UK’s Online Safety Act, which requires all sorts of content moderation? Or Germany’s NetzDG?
14. Or, for that matter, China. As the Wall Street Journal’s Mike Forsythe points out, Twitter is now owned by someone with major manufacturing and sales dependencies in the PRC. What happens if Musk is quietly told to dox a Chinese dissident or see Teslas banned from sale?
15. And so people are leaving Twitter. Not in their millions, yet, but certainly in their thousands. As a very unscientific datapoint: I’ve lost 30 followers since the acquisition was confirmed. Even scaled up to the whole platform, that’s not enough to worry Twitter, yet, but it’s telling.
16. The question is, where does a Twitter power user go? The popular answer seems to be Mastodon, a decentralised, “federated” clone of Twitter that is spread over thousands of volunteer-run instances, each of which can interact with each other, or not, as they see fit.
17. “Since August 2018 I have run a social network site called Friend Camp for about 50 of my friends,” writes Darius Kazemi, the creator of one such Mastodon instance. “I think Friend Camp is a really nice place … and I’d like to see more places like Friend Camp on the internet.”
18. Personally, I like Mastodon in theory, but in practice, I fear fragmenting a Twitter-style social network over untold instances feels a bit too much like responding to Microsoft putting adverts in Windows by recommending Linux on the desktop.
19. Others have mooted Tumblr, which is darkly humorous because a huge chunk of Tumblr’s power users moved over to Twitter in 2017 after an unpopular acquisition led to changes in moderation that were disliked by some of the site’s loudest communities. Turn the volume up, Elton John.
20. I don’t think it’s possible for a site to be both a replacement for Twitter, and a healthy social network, because I no longer think it’s possible for a healthy social network to exist that connects the world.
21. “A lot of the internet is 10,000 people bullying someone who deserves to be bullied by maybe 1 to 3 people” has become a foundational piece of social network analysis for me, and it’s not clear how Musk owning Twitter makes that worse, nor how decentralised replacements fix that.
22. But back to Musk. What should we look out for in the weeks to come? First is a staff exodus at Twitter. Not (just) because he’s as hated as he is loved, but because going private changes, and likely reduces, the compensation for people who used to get paid in part in stock options.
23. Second is a gentle tap on the brakes of some of the site’s more controversial moderation decisions. Some high-profile bans will be rescinded, some phrases will disappear from Twitter’s terms of service, but the day-to-day experience will take much longer to shift.
24. In the mid-to-long term, I wonder if there’s cause for optimism. The story of Twitter over the last decade has been of a site stuck in a fundamental disconnect between its incredible socio-cultural importance, and the underperforming business that owns and runs it.
25. For the first time, Twitter is owned by someone who thinks the most important part of the site is the conversation, not the adverts that are delivered in between. Maybe he’ll ruin everything, but at least he’s focusing on the right thing.
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