Musk buys Twitter

Stuff reports:

Billionaire Elon Musk tweeted “Yesss!!!” after Twitter’s board approved his US$44 billion (NZ$66 billion) acquisition of the social media company, and has said he will revitalise the world’s “digital town square”.

Musk says he intends to make Twitter “better than ever”, while saying the platform has “tremendous potential”.

He intends to enhance the product with new features, including making the algorithms open source, defeating the spam bots and authenticating all humans.

This is potentially very exciting, especially the publishing of the algorithm. It will allow us to see exactly how Twitter works.

The outspoken Tesla CEO, the world’s wealthiest person, has said he wanted to buy Twitter because he thinks it’s not living up to its potential as a platform for “free speech.” He says it needs to be transformed as a private company in order to build trust with users and do better at serving what he calls the “societal imperative” of free speech.

This basically came about because Twitter suspended the satirical Babylon Bee from Twitter because of their satirical story announcing Rachel Levine as Man of the Year. So because some employee at Twitter decided to suspend the Babylon Bee, Musk purchased the entire company!

Musk has described himself as a “free-speech absolutist” but is also known for blocking or disparaging other Twitter users who question or disagree with him.

There is no contradiction there. Sad the journalist thinks there is.