Twitter, the social media platform the world opines on, has new owners. While certainly not the biggest social media platform, Twitter is arguably one of the most influential when it comes to shaping public opinions. Global leaders in politics, business, media and other industries and organizations are all on Twitter. The world’s latest thought processes, opinions, ideologies, debates, and views, all get expressed on Twitter. Anyone can comment on anyone, share and reshare tweets, or tag any user. Anyone can be praised, supported, criticized, made fun of, shamed and abused. You can block someone bothering you, making them invisible to you, but you cannot delete their tweet or stop them from tweeting more. Ask anyone who has been on Twitter for a while, and they will tell you amount of vile toxicity on the platform. It’s almost like if you tweet ‘I like blue color,’ someone will attack you saying ‘but what’s your problem with red?’
Sure, there are some checks in place. Users do get suspended or even thrown off the platform by Twitter itself, if they violate community guidelines. A notable event was the lifetime ban on President Donald Trump (for reasons related to potential incitement of violence.) These controversial checks and suspensions have been criticized. Accusations range from current Twitter being too arbitrary to being plain biased towards left-wingers. Hence, Twitter, where the world’s verbal punches are thrown, itself has become a punching bag for being biased and unaccountable. Given profits weren’t growing as well as expected meant the company wasn’t exactly the darling of investors either.
And then everything changed. Elon Musk, the world’s richest person and biggest entrepreneur now owns Twitter, and has taken the company private. This came after a six-month long drama, consisting of several takeover attempts, poison pills, lawsuits and well, more verbal battles on Twitter itself (between Elon Musk and the existing management.) Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, SpaceX and several other companies is larger than life. He has visions of establishing human colonies on Mars and changing humanity for the better. He sees Twitter as a digital town square, which is necessary for exchange of ideas to take humanity forward. Well, right now, it’s highly questionable if Twitter is taking humanity forward.
Maybe it wasn’t intentional in design, but Twitter is the most polarizing platform on earth. Intense pitched verbal battles are fought day in and day out, frequently turning into abuse, mud-slinging, personal attacks and people pitted against each other like sworn enemies simply because they have different viewpoints. At present, twitter is bringing out the worst in humanity and dividing it.
If it were any billionaire other than Musk, it would be highly disturbing that the world’s largest public expression forum is owned by the world’s richest person. However, since it is Musk, and from what we know of him, he isn’t really interested in running an evil empire. He genuinely wants to fix Twitter – to make it more positive, fair and of course, more profitable. Here are some suggestions on what the new Twitter could be.
- Free Speech, barring very specific exceptions – Twitter is a free speech platform, and should remain so. There are caveats to free speech, in real life, and hence also on Twitter. These include hate speech, incitement and deliberate misinformation. It does get tricky to find these exceptions, but whatever critieria are applied should a) be made public through sharing the algorithm openly and b) should be decided by a panel that is not politically leaning towards one side. A company owning a platform should not have political leanings. Wokeness, no matter how fashionable it is, is a slippery slope. Unless there are rare exceptions, free speech must be allowed and criteria to find those exceptions must be public.
- Politeness – While it is not illegal to be rude, rudeness is huge turnoff for many. This keeps a lot of excellent, intelligent, creative and innovative people off Twitter. People assuming the worst about you, mocking you, bullying you, ganging up in troll gangs on you – all this creates an unpleasant experience where only the rudest and the thickest-skinned survive and their opinions dominate. It’s going to be a tough to figure out rudeness using an algorithm, and tougher still to make rude tweeters stop being rude. However, twitter can implement something that can flag a user to be marked as rude or causing unpleasantness. If a user has been blocked by many accounts for instance, or been reported for being rude multiple times, they can be highlighted as a troublesome account. Some disincentives to prevent being rude must be added in the system. No village town square would work if in the name of free speech, hecklers, abusers and bullies take over. Some rules of conduct must be applied to conduct proper debates.
- Profits – While Twitter is a private company, Elon Musk and his group of investors have put serious money in twitter ($44b). This money must be recovered and earn a return. Twitter will need new features than just being a messaging only platform. Twitter shopping, subscription-based privileges, paid longer form content publishing are all options to ensure the platform remains sustainable.
The above reforms will go a long way in making Twitter a better place for and giving a positive digital town square that humanity needs and deserves quite badly.