Well, it finally happened. Elon Musk completed his purchase of Twitter, after months of lawsuits and attempts to back out of the deal. Musk bought twitter for $44 million after starting the deal in April.
Many twitter users are worried to see what changes are to come. One change made to the platform after Musk’s takeover was the introduction of a subscription service, which gives users a verified checkmark for $7.99 a month. The service did not last long as users created fake accounts pretending to be popular brands and sending out misleading tweets.
The New York stock exchange filed to delist twitter’s stock, ending its 9 year run as a public company. Twitter will now be a private company subjected to fewer rules and to be more tightly controlled by the owner.
One of Musk’s reasons for buying the platform is because he wanted “civilization to have a common digital town square” and said he planned to clean up spam accounts and preserve the platform as a venue for free speech.
As free speech is a main goal, Musk also said he would reverse the permanent ban on former President Donald Trump. At the time, Twitter said there was a risk Trump would incite further violence, but Musk has described the ban as “foolish.”
Sophomore economy major Donald Frank has mixed emotions about Musk running twitter. Frank said, “On the one hand, I whole-heartedly believe in the values of free speech and Twitter allows everyone to have a platform to express themselves. However, you also have to acknowledge that there are an overwhelming amount of toxic people on this platform who use it to troll people.”
Frank goes on to say his experience of what he has been seeing on Twitter, “For example, I saw someone Tweet the n-word 40 times in response to Musk’s decision. Personally, I can’t think of a clear solution. If they were to ban hate speech once again, we’d fall into the same argument of what exactly constitutes hate speech, and we’d most likely end up banning people once again for expressing their constitutional rights, albeit in a very disgusting and disrespectful way.”
On Nov. 17, Musk gave staff an ultimatum to either commit to an extremely hardcore culture at the company that involves longs hours at high intensity or leave with severance. The top leaders were fired shortly after Elon Musk closed the deal which included Parag Agrawal, Twitter’s chief executive, Ned Segal, the chief financial officer, Vijaya Gadde, the top legal and policy executive and Sean Edgett, the general counsel.
Gina Baleria, a communications professor, perceives that time will tell on how this new change will affect everyone. Baleria said, “The choices Musk has made in the past couple of weeks indicate that he is not prioritizing healthy discussion. What I mean is that he has fired many of those responsible for curating, dealing with threatening and hateful content, and otherwise moderating the Twittersphere… which to me indicates that these activities are not among his priorities.”
Many students and staff don’t know how to feel or don’t even know that this takeover is happening. Ysabella Pepe, a chemistry major, said, “I just personally think Elon has enough unnecessary ‘power’ and this is just a weird situation overall. I definitely think if Trump is going to continue to go the way he is then he probably has no right to be let back on.”
Chloe Hartley, a senior communications major, feels the same as other students that Musk has too much power. Hartley said, “I think that Twitter is a dangerous place with zero censorship. Elon has taken over Twitter because he has the power to do so. I think that free speech should be allowed but only to an extent. I think that messages should still be censored on twitter because then it gets to a point where people are fighting online and it creates a huge problem across the board.”
As many feel like twitter is a place with no censorship, only time will tell how twitter will change for the “better.”
