After waffling back and forth for months, Elon Musk has officially bought Twitter. His first order of business? Firing Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, and Head of Legal Policy, Trust, and Safety Vijaya Gadde. This isn’t a surprising move considering how rocky the road to this acquisition has been.
Musk initially agreed to buy the company in April, but spent months trying to get out of the deal. Mostly citing concerns about “the number of bots” on the platform. He also alleged Twitter was not being “fully transparent with him” about various aspects of the business. This went on for so long that Musk and Twitter were set to go to trial earlier this month over the issue. But, his $44 billion deal should save them that particular day in court. We are sure there will be plenty more.
On October 26th, Musk shared a video of him carrying a sink. On October 27th, he tweeted “the bird is freed,” referencing the deal being finalized. He also changed his Twitter description to read “Chief Twit.” Indeed.
The next thing he did was file with the FCC to remove Twitter as a publicly traded company. This would mean the current oversights on the company would go away.
“The reason I acquired Twitter is because it is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence,” in a message,” Musk said about his reasoning for purchasing the social media giant. “There is currently great danger that social media will splinter into far right wing and far left wing echo chambers that generate more hate and divide our society.”
But Musk also ‘assured’ advertisers Twitter would not be “a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences!” With this in mind, there may be some changes to policies on things like “shadow banning,” and limiting the audience for specific commenters. There are also rumblings of Musk allowing certain accounts that were banned from the platform for continually violating rules to come back. Most notably, former US President Donald Trump, who’s multiple accounts repeatedly violated TOS policies.
Within hours of the new CEO taking power, a truly baffling number of troll accounts spewing absolutely abhorrent hate speech launched disgusting hashtags.
Only time will really tell how this goes but given Elon Musk’s management style, we expect more layoffs. As of this morning, he tweeted “let the good times roll,” with a spoiler warning hashtag search embedded into it. You know, for the lolz.
