[imagesource: Steve Jurvetson / Flickr]

If Twitter wasn’t a hellscape, it wouldn’t really be Twitter.

Elon Musk completed his long-awaited purchase of the social media site last week, which came with the customary meme-sharing from the world’s richest person.

He brought a sink to Twitter HQ in San Francisco (“let that sink in” – get it? Right?) but news of the takeover was also greeted with some serious content.

In particular, he shared an open letter (how very South African of him) to Twitter advertisers:

Dear Twitter Advertisers pic.twitter.com/GMwHmInPAS

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 27, 2022

We don’t expect you to get out the magnifying glass to read that so here’s Entrepreneur with the general gist:

“It is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence,” Musk wrote. “There is currently great danger that social media will splinter into far right wing and far left wing echo chambers that generate more hate and divide our society.”

Musk went on to try to assure advertisers that Twitter won’t turn into a “free-for-all hellscape” — there will still be consequences for violating the terms, he said, and users will still have to adhere to the “laws of the land.”

Musk said he didn’t buy Twitter to make money (which is a good thing, because he likely won’t) but rather to “help humanity, whom I love”, and recognises that “failure in pursuing this goal, despite our best efforts, is a very real possibility”.

Colonising Mars is a lofty aim. Helping humanity might be beyond even the most ambitious minds.

Those in favour of Musk buying Twitter are hopeful that he will champion absolute and total free speech. That is at odds with the “laws of the land” and obviously a degree of content moderation is necessary.

Twitter will be forming a content moderation council with widely diverse viewpoints.

No major content decisions or account reinstatements will happen before that council convenes.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 28, 2022

FT points out that in the wake of his takeover, some major brands have adopted a wait-and-see policy:

General Motors said it had “temporarily paused” paid advertising on the platform “as is normal course of business with a significant change in a media platform”, though it would continue to use the site to interact with customers.

I wonder how those advertisers feel about Musk sharing fake news regarding the attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband to his more than 112 million followers.

All of the above is pretty bland and doesn’t actually cut to the core of what lies ahead for Musk and Twitter.

For that, we head to The Verge and an excellent examination of how the Tesla founder is all but guaranteed to damage his reputation.

You cannot please everyone all of the time and nowhere does that ring more true than when it comes to content moderation and advertisers:

…the problems with Twitter are not engineering problems. They are political problems. Twitter, the company, makes very little interesting technology; the tech stack is not the valuable asset. The asset is the user base…

The problem when the asset is people is that people are intensely complicated, and trying to regulate how people behave is historically a miserable experience, especially when that authority is vested in a single powerful individual.

Settle in because here comes the kicker:

…you can write as many polite letters to advertisers as you want, but you cannot reasonably expect to collect any meaningful advertising revenue if you do not promise those advertisers “brand safety.” That means you have to ban racism, sexism, transphobia, and all kinds of other speech that is totally legal in the United States but reveals people to be total assholes. So you can make all the promises about “free speech” you want, but the dull reality is that you still have to ban a bunch of legal speech if you want to make money. And when you start doing that, your creepy new right-wing fanboys are going to viciously turn on you, just like they turn on every other social network that realizes the same essential truth.

When Musk catches inevitable heat for making these calls – they’ll be decided by content moderation teams but he’ll be held accountable as “Chief Twit” (his Twitter bio) – people will become less enamoured with his other companies, too.

What if he pisses off China by allowing certain content on Twitter and that government finds a way to harm Tesla’s bottom line?

Read that article in full here – it’s tough to see how Musk emerges from this unscathed in the long run but best of luck to you, old buddy.

[sources:entrepreneur&ft&verge]