Musk “Frees the Bird”

Story by Marcellus Peters-Jackson. Photo courtesy of Adweek.

Everyone with access to the internet has at least heard of Elon Musk’s most recent stunt of buying Twitter in its entirety. This bold move raises some concerns, as he wants to buy the company to promote “free speech” by removing the barriers of hate speech that Twitter has been trying so hard to enforce (such as banning Donald Trump from Twitter, who under Elon Musk could come back). 

So what? What does Musk want to do with his new company? Well, Twitter is apparently getting changed in multiple ways. Along with the removal of the hate speech filter, Twitter will also have an edit button to edit tweets that might be deleted otherwise. Musk also wants to open Twitter’s code to the public. While this is a good achievement for transparency, this is also a double edged sword, as hackers could get this code and use it against Twitter.

On April 27th, Twitter leaders held a company wide meeting to discuss what would happen to the former publicly traded company that is now a billionaire owned private entity. Multiple of Twitter’s employees asked questions about their day to day work life, layoffs, pay increases and more. However the Twitter board didn’t know, their answers really just resulted in “we have to ask Elon about that now.” 

This raises the question, is it really alright for one person to own this entire 44 billion dollar website? Especially someone like Elon Musk, who is infamous for trolling online? Only time will tell. 

Marcellus Peters-Jackson is a 7th grade scholar at Friendship Woodridge International School.