What is freedom of speech?

It has been interesting to see the reaction to the news that Elon Musk has purchased Twitter and plans to take it private. It seems like many believe that Elon's belief that Twitter is the world's public square and that he believes in the freedom of speech to mean that Twitter will allow any and every kind of speech moving forward. I am resisting any sort of kneejerk reaction one way or the other and instead am focused on a few things that Elon has said are in his plans for the platform.

This one sentence from Elon's official release on the purchase intrigues me as a Software Systems Engineer:

“I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans.”

The first question becomes what new features could bubble up to the top of the priority list for the "Open under new management" Twitter? I know plenty of people are hoping for an edit feature. Elon talked about the trickiness of an edit feature and perhaps needing to limit it to tweets that have yet to be retweeted or responded to. I also wonder if you could see users being able to turn on a delayed send feature so that people have a bigger window to edit. I am sure plenty of users who race to get their takes out there wouldn't turn on something like that. But, for users that would really use the edit button a lot, a one minute delay on publishing tweets might not be a bad idea. Kind of like the 5 second delay to allow for the use of a dump button for live radio and TV.

The publishing of the Twitter algorithms to GitHub for public review is the one feature I see having the most potential for good and for bad. Opening up the algorithm for feedback would likely be a net good thing. But, there will be people that will take advantage of the access to learn how to game Twitter. But, I think this would have the potential to be the biggest gamechanger when it comes to social media platforms in general as I could see Twitter being used as an example to get companies like Meta and Snap to open up their algorithms for review. I could also see those other companies doubling down on keeping their code private.

I will lump defeating spam bots and authenticating all humans into one bucket. These are the things that I believe have the most potential for good on Twitter. I also believe that this has the most potential to disappoint the people that are celebrating Elon buying Twitter. When the bot farms who are designed to cause in-fighting amongst people go quiet, people may be surprised to find out what sources they trusted have been silenced. I will also laugh at the people that will be upset by the silencing of the bot farms. People will really be telling on themselves when that happens.

Personally, I will stay on Twitter because I have crafted the way I use it in such a way that it is a net positive for me and I really doubt that Elon buying it will change my experience in any meaningful way.

Unless all the people that are freaking out about Twitter moving to a subscription service are correct...