Good or bad news? Hard to say
Some guy bought something. So what? That’s not news.
But when ‘some guy’ is the world’s richest man, known for being both visionary and reckless, and when ‘something’ is one of the planet’s most influential media platforms, then it is world news.
I didn’t expect Twitter would actually fall into the hands of Elon Musk. But it looks like soon it will. He will turn the company private and do with it as he likes.
At first I wasn’t terribly excited about this move. I’m all for free speech, but I don’t think every idiot should be given a megaphone with enough volume to reach every corner of the Earth. Trump may not return to Twitter, but there are enough other lunatics out there who won’t have a positive influence.
But is Musk buying Twitter really bad news? The story of the farmer whose horse ran away came to mind, and I realized: we don’t know how this change will turn out.
Maybe he’ll introduce an Edit-button, causing chaos as tweets are edited after they have already been widely shared. Or crooks use it to wipe out their tracks. Maybe the UX will become as confusing as Tesla’s car interface. Bad news indeed.
Or maybe he’ll make it impossible for anonymous trolls to be on Twitter, because all human users will have to be verified. Maybe the moderation algorithms will be greatly improved because they will be open source. Maybe sanity returns to Twitter. Good news.
But maybe these changes won’t work and Twitter will turn from the world’s ‘town square’ into an ugly, filthy swamp with even more nasty people spreading even more toxic nastiness. Bad news.
Or maybe it will have the desired effect after all: maybe Twitter becomes such a nasty place, that all sane people leave the platform, start their own websites and RSS once again becomes the standard for sharing updates online. And one the world’s most important platforms is no longer owned by a single person, and the internet becomes more democratized, as was once the dream. Good news.
Is Musk buying Twitter good or bad? Hard to say.