Good evening and happy #TrendingTuesday! I am sure lots of you have seen the recent news that Elon Musk bought Twitter on Monday for roughly $44 billion. And, you guessed it, its trending
Let’s get to it! – and let me, again, preface that these #TrendingTuesday articles are a combination of multiple news articles from multiple platforms (each of which will have a link provided for you to read further, if you wish), as well as my own opinion. The paragraphs of my opinions will be made known to you, and by no means am I expecting you to agree with me. Actually, I encourage healthy debate!
Twitter was founded in 2006 in San Francisco by New York University student, Jack Dorsey, as a new communication idea where users could send short messages to a group of people, similar to a text message. The popularity of the site grew and, by 2008, was seeing 300,000 tweets per day. This number grew to 50 million tweets a day by early 2010, according to penningtoncreative.com.
The website has remained publicly owned since its creation, allowing anyone to buy, trade and sell stock (TWTR) of the company. Musk, however, will now manage the site as a private entity. Buying out the public company for $54.20 per share.
"The Twitter Board conducted a thoughtful and comprehensive process to assess Elon's proposal with a deliberate focus on value, certainty, and financing. The proposed transaction will deliver a substantial cash premium, and we believe it is the best path forward for Twitter's stockholders,” Bret Taylor, Twitter's Independent Board Chair, said.
The transaction was approved by all members of the Twitter Board of Directors, each in agreement, and is expected to close this year subject to the approval of Twitter stockholders—each will receive cash for their shares of the company.
So, people are worked up and others are saying they are #leavingTwitter because they feel Elon Musk being the private owner of the company will give a new definition to freedom of speech, one they are not a fan of.
Musk has not fully come out with statements detailing exact changes he hopes to make on the platform, but has been known for firmly believing in the “freedom of speech” and has expressed distaste in the removing or banning of Tweets.
"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," Musk said. "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.”
While, sure, this sounds nice. What I fear is we will, again, find ourselves in the never-ending debate of what free speech actually means, and who gets to define it.
With Twitter being privately owned, users are subject to the terms and conditions selected by the billionaire as well as any changes, logistically, made to the site.
Today, Twitter has pages upon pages of rules prohibiting content such as material that promotes child sexual exploitation, coordinated government propaganda, offers of counterfeit goods and tweets “wishing for someone to fall victim to a serious accident,” according to the New York Times.
Some of you may remember the months-long riots that eventually led to the storming of the U.S. Capitol in January, 2021. This was the first time we, as the American people, saw our president’s Tweets get flagged for misinformation and, later, banned from the site all together.
Situations like these, which were geared toward providing clarity to Twitter users while avoiding hate-speech and ‘glorification of violence’ regulations—an attempt to keep Twitter factual and safe. Such terms are subject to re-discussion and potential changes to the terms and conditions on the matter.
It is no shock that this matter gets ~political~ because, what doesn’t anymore?
Certain people you speak to about the situation will surely bring up that Musk supports the right-winged, conservative side of democracy. Others will mention his involvement with Tesla and SpaceX and how the site may change to encourage further technological advances.
The truth is, though, we cannot know how the site will change until it actually does.
For those of you caught in the middle—do I support this, or do I not? I recommend not being too quick to deactivate your account based off a few comments. Let’s wait this one out, see what changes, and if there is pushback on any of them—we have our voices for a reason, and if Musk believes so firmly in the power of free speech, we must first stand witness to how he goes about navigating his new, daunting responsibility.
