After six months of exchanging offers and demands, Elon Musk has already taken over Twitter. But now he faces the hardest part: fixing the social network he enjoys so much.
Twitter is the place where everything that happens is discussed. It’s not the most used app or the most profitable, but it’s the most influential. It is a means by which celebrities and politicians can communicate directly, without their words being distorted by intermediaries. The press usually repeats what the personalities say there. However, since entering the stock exchange, the company has not managed to grow significantly like its competitors.
privatize the company was the only opportunity to reach its potential, limited by a directive alien to the interests of its users, or having the courage to bet on big changes, as founder Jack Dorsey repeatedly hinted at. Now a new Caesar who didn’t hesitate to name himself “Tweet Boss” in his biography, he will have to take care of everything that had to be done to fix the social network and that no one could and did not want to do.
Each promise brings with it various problems and delicate decisions that must be made to please the majority of users. Perhaps philosophical dilemmas, but also technological ones.. Let’s go in parts.
1. About freedom of speech
This premise is the most delicate and controversial point. Musk wants Twitter to be a global and open platform where every citizen can freely express their thoughts without censorship within the limits set by the laws of each country. The businessman never said that you can say what you want, but what is not illegal should not be censored on ideological grounds or according to the criteria of a few, and not be subject to the decision of the judges.
This point is very delicate as it is not illegal to offend, insult or express certain opinions about certain individuals and groups. The ability to offend a politician is one of the foundations of democracy. Politician or your neighbor. But it would be frustrating for a user to frequently find offensive, offensive, or degrading content. Having thousands of people laugh at your appearance is legal but inappropriate. That’s why Musk will have to take care of filtering, not censoring.
The key is to turn the ethical issue into an engineering one. Every citizen has the right to express his opinion, but others have the right to ignore it. Twitter may have AI-based filters to hide offensive content from people you don’t follow by default, or even filter categories of tweets you don’t like. You can protect the right of other users to talk about football, even if you don’t like it, and use a filter so that you don’t have to read anything about it.
This will also work for images of explicit sex or nudity. These filters can be enabled by default, and a user who wants to view this type of content can simply deactivate them. The same for vulgar and obscene language, or for information that has not yet been verified. It may be better to warn the reader that information pertaining to a hot topic may be personal opinion or unverified fact, rather than proactively censoring it, as was the case with Biden’s laptop.
The dilemma can be solved by engineers who will also make it possible for a tweet to appear or not in certain markets, as is currently the case with Russian media that are censored in Europe but not worldwide. However, when executed effectively, it remains to be seen whether users are concerned about finding content they don’t like, or whether they are concerned about having the freedom to do so.
2. Tip of the Twitter Moderators
the musk is gone softening his position, like any politician when he comes to power. And after confirming the purchase, he said via his twitter that advertisers would have a safe investment space and that all moderation decisions would end up being made by a team of people with a “very strong point of view.” Until such a group is formed, no decision will be made or the mode of moderation on the platform will be changed, which will remain as it has been until now.
The presence of an ideologically diverse team of moderators indicates that illegal content will not only be removed, but will also act in the interests of all users. Only in difficult situations? At the moment we can only guess. The key, Musk said, is that the decisions aren’t limited to a specific demographic, as Republicans have pointed out in recent years, due to some controversial decisions to censor or block popular accounts that didn’t engage in any activity that was against the network’s rules. , Social
Musk will soon discover that moderation is not easy because, unlike a car or a rocket, human behavior cannot be accurately predicted by mathematical formulas. It doesn’t matter what decision is made. Someone will always be upset.
3. End spam and bots
Less compromised and problematic is the problem of the social network with bots and spam. It’s hard not to find hundreds of false accounts promoting cryptocurrencies in every Elon Musk tweet. It’s even harder not to get dozens of private messages every day from zero-follower accounts announcing NFTs. How is it possible that Twitter doesn’t know how to tell which users are robots and which aren’t? Or at least know if the post is organic or promotional.
For someone who sends rockets into space and returns them back, detecting social media bots shouldn’t be as difficult as Twitter engineers have imagined over the past few years.
4. Find the right talent for Twitter
On Thursday, Musk walked into Twitter headquarters and began firing people from the board. First, CEO Parag Agrawal; and then to the Head of Law, Politics and Trust, Vijay Gadda, who was the one who decides to indefinitely suspend Donald Trump’s account. On Friday evening, accompanied by Tesla employees and the investors who helped him buy Twitter, he took a look at the work of the engineers, asking them to show the code they’ve written over the past 30 days to evaluate their work within the company.
Several people took advantage of the situation to pose as recently fired engineers and mislead the press. A few hours later, Musk responded that they were one of the “best trolls ever.”
He will have to reform the team and bring in engineers who can innovate and carry out many of the changes he promised. In addition, they will have to work from the office for long hours, as is done at Tesla and SpaceX, their other companies. Something that still clashes with Twitter’s remote and agile culture. Employees who do not intend to leave may resign due to this change in conditions.
5. How to make Twitter profitable
For Twitter to be profitable, advertisers need to feel secure. Coca-Cola, Disney, or Apple will not want to pay for ads that may even be remotely associated with offensive, racist, sexist, or homophobic content, even if it’s legal. Again, filters and demographics are selected using machine learning algorithms.
By solving this problem, Twitter could increase its revenue by attracting more users and increasing the amount of time users spend on the app. Young people learn what’s going on in the world from the opinions their favorite content creators might have on TikTok, Twitch or YouTube, instead of reading politicians and journalists on Twitter. This is an important demographic that is difficult to seduce without making changes to the platform.
Messaging can be improved by building a better client that is as close as possible to WhatsApp or Signal, displaying multimedia content can mimic that used by TikTok, and creators can be offered a way to post articles, long videos or podcasts on the platform. And do it right because there were ideas on Twitter but the execution was always wrong. The social network needs rapid change. Surprisingly, adding the edit button took longer than Elon Musk sent dozens of rockets into space.
6. Propel X, the app for everything
Musk said the ultimate goal is to create a global and free app that serves as a place to connect and share knowledge to promote human progress. This laudable and grandiose goal is as far from being realized as his other adventures: end poverty with the help of robots, create self-driving cars or reach Mars. But it is possible. And if anyone can, it’s Mr. Musk; the only one with ideas and money to do it. To do this, it must conglomerate more services in the application, as does WeChat in China. However, in China, almost everyone has already used this application for communication. Something similar to what is happening with WhatsApp in Spain; but Twitter is relatively underused.
Musk faces perhaps the biggest challenge of his career: trying to solve with software something as subject to belief and human nature as lies, resentment, pride, and narcissism.
Source: Hiper Textual
