Perhaps one of the biggest stirs in 2022 was the recent purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk. However, will this change anything? And if so, for good or bad?

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Last week began with the announcement of the purchase of this social network by Tesla's CEO, the richest man in the world, who has offered a total of 44 billion dollars.

The operation has caused a great stir inside and outside Twitter, with investors who use Futures Bot commenting each step. What does the acquisition imply? Is the freedom of the network at risk? Was it before?

Twitter's Successes and Failures

Twitter is a social network that was launched in March 2006 as a simple, real-time diary, with SMS-like messages (hence the initial 140-character limit). 

A microblogging service that revolutionized the way we communicate, which further simplified the generation of content by anyone by making the word the link: a mention, a hashtag or a link to a website automatically became something 'clickable'.

Another feature that contributed to the success of this social network was the opening of its API: an entry point for anyone to build their own applications by accessing the public data of its users. 

That meant a boom in clients and tools for analyzing user behavior on the network. However, in recent years, Twitter has become a battleground for disinformation, spam, and bots, through which even electoral processes have been manipulated.

A Convulsive Takeover Operation

On April 1, Elon Musk acquired a 9 % stake in Twitter and a few days later made an offer for the entire company. 

It was an eventful few weeks, during which Twitter went so far as to activate the so-called poison pill: a sanction mechanism to prevent the sale of large volumes of shares without the consent of the board. 

But finally, on April 25, Twitter announced that it accepted Elon Musk's offer of $44 billion for all of the company's shares, making it the sole owner. 

Elon Musk's Vision for Twitter's Future

Among the reasons put forward by the tycoon are manipulation, misinformation, the censorship that certain messages received, or the anonymity behind which many of these behaviors hide. 

Musk's vision of the new Twitter is based on a series of characteristics that he has been unveiling in recent days:

• Freedom of Speech: The network should be a place where people can speak freely about any topic, always with respect. It is rumored that it is considering reopening some of the suspended accounts. Account cancellation has always been a controversial issue, as it is a double-edged sword. There are mechanisms for account validation without losing anonymity, such as pseudonymization or validation by trusted third parties, called enhanced pseudonymity.
• Spamming Bots & Automatic Validation of Human Users: While bot farms are a problem because of the sheer volume of tweets these accounts can generate, there are often fake accounts run by people who are just as, if not more, harmful than bots and are difficult to detect. Either way, it is a good initiative.
• Open Source: It is relevant only in the case of not having active tweets in chronological order. If an algorithm decides what to show us and what to hide from us, the criteria it uses when prioritizing certain content should be made public. Some people are skeptical, as Musk also promised that the Tesla software was going to be open source in 2018, after the experience with SpaceX, but no movement has been made in this regard.

Encrypted Direct Messages (DM): As Signal does (this is the example used in a tweet by Elon Musk himself) and other instant messaging platforms. Undoubtedly, a strong point to improve privacy.