Ever since Elon Musk has taken over Twitter, he has been tweeting out ideas that he would like to see on the social media platform and after he toyed with the idea of free speech on Twitter, Musk on Thursday wrote Twitter DMS should have end-to-end encryption like Signal so that the messages can not be hacked. Direct messages that one Twitter user can send to another are now not encrypted.
While this was a technical idea he put forward, the other was more idealistic. Musk thinks for Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral, which “effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally,” he explained.
Musk engaged with Twitter users over the idea of political neutrality and said his goal is to “maximise area under the curve of total human happiness, which means the ~80% of people in the middle” and to do so, he has to upset both the rightwingers and the Left. “Attacks are coming thick and fast, primarily from the left, which is no surprise, however I should be clear that the right will probably be a little unhappy too,” he wrote.
Elon Musk also believed the news of his acquiring Twitter has helped the social media platform gain a “massive influx of new users”.
Twitter has agreed to sell itself to Elon Musk and a $44 billion agreement has been moved. According to teh agreement, Elon Musk is not allowed to disparage Twitter but can post announcements regarding the deal.
While Elon Musk can’t stop tweeting, he is now posting mostly about things he would like to see on Twitter and his idea of free speech has already run into troubled waters as many apprehend that hate speech might get encouraged in the garb of free speech.
To this, he has clarified that by free speech, he meant one that matches with the law. “if people want less free speech, they will ask the government to pass laws to that effect,” he said.
