What’s next for Twitter after Elon Musk’s takeover?

Elon Musk’s route to taking over Twitter has been long and winding. Three weeks ago, he was its largest shareholder with a seat on the board. Then he was off the board, with Twitter chief exec Parag Agrawal saying it was “for the best”. Now the entire company will be handed to the Tesla billionaire for £35bn.

Reaction has been swift among users of Twitter, which Musk has described as the world’s “digital town square”.

But he will not take over for months yet as the deal is examined by financiers, as well by regulators in the US and Europe – neither of which are expected to hold up the proceedings.

Twitter’s shareholders will then need to vote on the deal, which is expected to close this year; while no other timetable has been set, the company has an annual meeting in May.

The question on everyone’s lips is: what is going to happen to Twitter? The unsatisfying answer is that nobody knows. There is a term in the computer industry called vapourware, which is a piece of hardware or software that has been announced to the public but may never actually be made. In 2020, TikTok was definitely going to be purchased by Microsoft, then by Walmart, then by Oracle, at the behest of President Trump. Eventually, no one bought it. Stranger things have happened.

In practical terms, Musk’s current wishlist – an edit button, eliminating cryptocurrency scams, authenticating users, and making the site’s algorithm open-source – is impossible to evaluate until it becomes more tangible.

Technology experts have pointed out that letting people see how Twitter’s algorithm works is likely to increase the proficiency of scammers rather than reduce it, as well as encouraging legislators, pundits, and trolls to post random screenshots of code to reverse-engineer the Twitter feed like a soothsayer reading tea leaves. Others say that eliminating bots is antithetical to the “free speech absolutism” to which Musk claims to subscribe.

A decade ago, one Twitter executive described the platform as the “free speech wing of the free speech party” but over the years found that such a position was untenable, and that curation was necessary. Even so, Twitter censors less than bigger platforms such as Facebook or Instagram – it allows pornography, for example – and is still nicknamed “the hellsite” by exasperated users. It’s hard to see how having fewer filters will improve that.

Many users will no doubt follow Jameela Jamil and quit the platform over Musk’s takeover. Others might join. Twitter has around 200 million global users, compared to Snapchat’s 300 million, while TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook number in billions, so there is room for it to grow.

Twitter’s nature as a newsroom – a digital space where world events happen – is what distinguishes it from other platforms, but its sale will put it under the control of a single billionaire elite just like Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook and Evan Spiegel’s Snapchat. It will also put Musk in the firing line of governments still tackling issues of moderation, misinformation, and other online harms, and it is unclear whether someone dedicated to colonising Mars will have time for what he might see as the trivialities of his big ideals.

The best advice for predicting what lies ahead is to do the opposite of what Twitter, home of the hot take, encourages every user to do: wait and see.