Elon Musk and Twitter revolution

It seems likely that the richest man in the world, who has built a reputation as one of the most heterodox business leaders of our time, will unleash changes to the platform that go far beyond revising its content policies. Let’s see what we know so far.

First of all, there are signs that the tech-minded Musk is considering structural changes for Twitter with its $ 44 billion acquisition, which could have significant and sometimes contradictory impacts. Among these: his statement that Twitter should make the algorithm that determines what users see open source and therefore more transparent. These changes could reach deep into Twitter’s core infrastructure as well as its self-governance policies. If they work, they could increase Twitter’s reach, or if not, decrease it.

In shaping the future of Twitter, Musk has a number of possibilities to consider. An alternative was incubated by Twitter itself: a project called Bluesky. It is an independent company that Twitter launched in 2019 and funded with the aim of developing standards and protocols for social media services to communicate with each other and ultimately to separate the display of social media content from the data that contain, giving users more flexibility in what they see and who they interact with.

Further afield, there is the open-source Twitter alternative Mastodon, first released in 2016, which allows anyone to create their own social network, the ActivityPub web standard and various attempts to create new controlled and user-owned social networks using blockchain technology, such as DeSo.