Tech mogul Elon Musk has revealed some of the changes he’s planning to make to Twitter once he succeeds in his bid to take over the company.
The announcement from Musk came after he submitted a new Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing confirming his plan to soon buy the company outright.
The Thursday filing revealed that he has now secured $46.5 billion from three sources to buy the company.
The fund includes $13 billion from Morgan Stanley, $12.5 billion from other banks, and $21 billion from himself.
The offer is a significant increase from his initial $43B offer and should see him take control of the company in a matter of days.
Following the news regarding the SEC filing, Musk suggested that he may allow any real user to apply for a “blue check.”
“If our twitter bid succeeds, we will defeat the spam bots or die trying!” he tweeted.
After announcing his plan to eradicate spam bots, Musk revealed that he wants to “authenticate” all real users.
“And authenticate all real humans,” Musk added a short time later.
And authenticate all real humans
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 21, 2022
Musk has been hinting that he plans to open up the “blue check” feature to regular users, rather than just limit the feature to celebrities and notable figures.
Musk said during a TED Talk earlier this month that Twitter needed to make its algorithm open sourced and that any action the company takes against tweets needs to be thoroughly explained to the public to stop “behind the scenes manipulation” on the platform by the company.
According to Musk, Twitter’s secret algorithms, which he said promote some tweets while not promoting others, can be “quite dangerous.”
Musk said when it comes to judging whether tweets should be taken down due to the nature of the content in the tweet, the policy should be: if in doubt, let the tweet exist.
Musk has also floated the idea of having an edit button added for users.
Musk sparked some controversy on Tuesday with a pair of tweets, one offering a “good” metric for determining if a social media company’s policies were effective and another asking who is behind “shadowy” censorship and de-platforming on the internet.
Musk first replied to a tweet from tech entrepreneur Marc Andreessen, who wrote:
“I predict essentially identical censorship/deplatforming policies across all layers of the legacy Internet stack.
“Client-side & server-side ISPs, cloud platforms, CDNs, payment networks, client OSs, browsers, email clients.
“With only rare exceptions.
“The pressure is intense.”
“Extremely concerning,” Musk responded.
“Who is pushing this censorship/deplatforming? Very shadowy.”
Less than an hour later, Musk said that a social media company’s policies would be “good” if the policies equally made extremes on both sides “unhappy.”
“A social media platform’s policies are good if the most extreme 10% on left and right are equally unhappy,” Musk tweeted.
