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So it looks like Elon Musk officially owns all of Twitter now, and he's already fired the CEO, CFO, and policy chief. I don't have any strong opinions on this, but does anyone want to stake some predictions?
Musk presents himself as a free speech absolutist, which is encouraging to me, but I'd be concerned about the conflict of interest. I anticipate there will be some accusations of throttling unfavorable opinions about either him or his companies (RIP rogue driverless Tesla videos). I think the tension between unrestricted speech and a quality user experience will continue to be a problem, as I can't identify an obvious solution. Blue checkmarks are making hilariously cataclysmic remarks but I predict Twitter will remain a favored haven for the journalist class.
I think there's a nontrivial chance (say, 15%?) that Twitter ends up banned from various app stores like other 'free speech' twitter clones have. Lets say within one year.
If NOT, then that will create a tremendous precedent that these other sites should be allowed on the app stores.
I'm guessing 50% chance that Trump gets reinstated before the year is out.
An idea that I think would be neat to implement would be a "Political Speech" or "Electoral Speech" section of twitter that is subject to more stringent moderation than Twitter at large. The goal would be to allow existing politicians or candidates and their constituents to have a 'clear' channel for communicating with each other. This would imply that only 'verified' users get to tweet at the politicians, but said politicians would also be unable to block them.
Indeed, it should be doable to Geolock things such that only actual constituents of a given politician (as determined by their physical location) are allowed to tweet at their official account for their office. And this seems like the ideal situation. A special area where trolls are kept out, politicians are able to reach their constituents and tweet at each other and the level of discourse is (theoretically) kept higher than usual so the signal/noise ratio is improved.
The rest of twitter can be anarchic as can be legally achieved.
I think this makes sense because even if we use the "Twitter as Town Square" analogy, I don't think it requires us tolerate someone who brings an airhorn into said square and keeps blaring it every time an opposing politician attempts to speak to the audience.
It'd be hilarious if it happened, and then Musk invested serious money into some alt-appstore for Android. And maybe somehow broke iPhones to allow alternate app stores there too. Tho EU is already solving that particular problem apparently.
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