Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk added Twitter to his stable of companies on Monday, purchasing the social media platform for $44 billion dollars. Whether he made this purchase to finally realize his aspirations as a "free speech absolutist" or just did it to put an end to his nemesis, @ElonJet, once and for all remains to be seen, but changes are abound for the internet's third-favorite hellsite. Engadget's reporters have some thoughts on what those might be.

There are only two predictions I feel confident making: Twitter will get an edit button, and employees are going to head for the door. Even under the best of circumstances, big acquisitions tend to result in a fair amount of employee turnover and executive shakeup. And for many tweeps, Musk taking over is very far from the best of circumstances. Musk rankled the Twitter rank and file before the deal was even official, with tweets about whether Twitter was “dying” and whether the company's HQ should be converted into a homeless shelter.

But now they have much more to worry about than his usual trolling. Musk’s bid has already negatively impacted recruiting efforts, according toThe New York Times. And current employees still don’t have clear answers on how Musk’s acquisition will affect their stock packages, a significant portion of their total compensation. There are also real, existential questions about how Musk’s questionable views on content moderation will affect the company and the direction of the service. As CEO Parag Agrawal reportedly told employees following the news, "once the deal closes, we don't know what direction the platform will go."

- Karissa Bell, Senior Reporter

It can't get much worse, right?

While I'm sure Twitter's moderation policy will get watered down, it's hard to imagine the doomsday scenarios where it turns into some kind of 4Chan/Stormfront cesspool.

Twitter is an international company, with international advertisers and international users. It's broadly bound to ensure its content is in line with the laws of the countries in which it operates, which severely limits the ability to create the "free speech" oasis of Musk's dreams, at least if he also would like it to be a functional, broadly breakeven company at the same time. The company's moderation of its platform is already terrible, and people either make do by going private/blocking people, or (hi) give up on the whole tweeting thing altogether. So I'm expecting more of the same, which is to say, I'm expecting it to be mostly awful.

- Aaron Souppouris, Executive Editor

I’ve covered Elon Musk in his roles as both head of Tesla and SpaceX for a few years now, witnessing his sneering contempt for journalism, transparency, basic ethics and accountability up close and in person. I’ve sat through his easily-disproved boasts, his myriad empty promises and publicity stunts. This is a man who belittles society’s most vulnerable members to gain the panting adoration of 4Chan trolls, who demonizes the helpers to boost his own fragile ego, a man who would declare himself God-Emperor of Mars before paying his income taxes. Is this your king?

I dread the effects this sale will have, not just for Twitter itself, but the internet writ large. The destabilizing effects social media amplification has on societal and democratic norms have been well studied since the 2016 elections. What is not yet fully understood is what happens when we hand control over that mechanism to the world's wealthiest contrarian. As such, my advice to you are the same wise words Samuel L Jackson had for us in Jurassic Park: Hold onto your butts.

- Andrew Tarantola, Senior Reporter

I think the biggest challenge about trying to predict an Elon Musk-led Twitter is separating the guy's online persona from his business practices. Musk catches a lot of flak (often deservedly) for dumb or insensitive tweets, something most other CEOs know or have been trained to avoid. But at the same time, Elon is a rather shrewd businessman, separately helming what has become the world's biggest EV carmaker alongside the most successful private space aerospace company.

With Tesla and SpaceX there's a clear pattern of high-risk, high-reward behavior, which, due to a combination of luck and smarts, has worked out so far. Musk gives the impression of being a move fast and break stuff type, and his latest disruption looks to be bringing free speech (or his version of it) to Twitter, regardless of how that might impact others. This potentially greenlights every tweet that's not explicitly inciting violence or distributing sensitive info (like the plans for a nuclear bomb or whatever).

In the short term, Must will look to help boost Twitter's bottom line, which the company desperately needs after losing more than $200 million in 2021. Engagement (both good and bad) sells, and turning Twitter into an even bigger battleground would almost certainly result in a quick spike in users. Musk might even do something silly like raise the limit on tweets to 420 characters. Down the line, Musk’s plan to authenticate all humans sounds a lot like a different flavor of Sam Altman’s troubled Worldcoin endeavor, and I‘d bet there’s way more crypto integration coming to the platform in general.

The big concern is that some of Twitter's issues regarding harassment and abuse will continue to go unaddressed. Though that actually might be a feature. Moderation costs money, and by pushing Twitter down the free speech path, Elon conveniently might be able to absolve the company of having to protect its users while simultaneously reducing operating costs. Sure, there’s a chance that eliminating anonymity and linking every tweet to a specific person could stop people from spouting nonsense they wouldn’t dare say in real life. But I wouldn’t count on it. So unless better safeguards are coming too, Twitter could devolve into the most chaotic social media platform around.

- Sam Rutherford, Senior Reporter

Yes, Musk is divisive, a puerile troll that at age 50 seems to have finished his emotional growth decades prior; a loudmouth who is almost constantly spouting off easily disprovable nonsense. His ideas on a "free speech" haven are an echo of the wrong-headed thinking that was a north star for social media founders a decade or more ago, and which they have spent the time since regretfully paddling away from. Musk is also, by accounts, a capricious and vindictive boss whose alleged love of free speech is forever subservient to his hatred of dissent.

And all of this is, more than some outward-facing exodus of users, likely to lead Twitter employees to rethink if it's all worth the agita. Who wants to develop for product categories (moderation in particular) that have effectively been marked for death? Who wants to go to a job that feels more like the What Did My Boss Fuck Up Today sitcom?

But that this sale went through at all is indication enough that, whether led by Musk or literally anyone else, Twitter probably is headed for the great dustbin of history. The people whose job it is to do nothing but turn money into more money ran the numbers and determined no one was or would ever bring a better offer, nor was the company — which almost always posts a loss— was ever going to stabilize into a recurring source of profit.

Musk, the PT Barnum of techno-magic bullshit solutions, would probably gleefully categorize himself as an accelerationist: Accelerating the accumulation of space junk; the eventual drowning of pedestrians in underground tunnels; the mass adoption of combusting non-combustion cars. And in this instance my sense is he will accelerate the demise of Twitter by a few degrees too, but don't give him too much credit, it was headed that way anyhow.

– Bryan Menegus, Senior News Editor

Reality often sits in between our greatest hopes and worst fears, and I'd expect the same for Twitter under Elon Musk. It's easy to see his laissez-faire content moderation leading to the revival of some hate speech and harassment that Twitter previously removed. At the same time, I don't think a Musk-era Twitter will be a full-fledged calamity. Not everyone who was banned will be eager to come back, and Musk may have to rethink his stance if there are any truly toxic elements that resurface.

I say there's a one-in-three chance that Twitter goes sideways within two years of the deal closing — that is, the content moderation and the company's overall direction lead to serious trouble. Those are very distinct possibilities, but they aren't guaranteed and may take years to unfold. They may hinge as much on users' desires as they do on Musk's decisions. I'd expect many of Twitter's anti-toxicity tools to survive, such as downvoting replies.

With that said, I'm fully prepared to be wrong. Musk is legendary for heading in unexpected directions. This is the man who launched a tunnel company after complaining about LA traffic, after all. I just don't see Twitter facing imminent disaster, and it won't be surprising if the company reins in some of Musk's impulses.

- Jon Fingas, Reporter

Twitter might soon take a page from Instagram's defunct Threads app — not to mention other messaging apps you used in the past two decades. As The Vergereports, code sleuth Jane Manchun Wong has discovered that Twitter is developing a "Vibe" feature that would let you set status updates akin to Threads and the many, many IM clients at the turn of the century. You could set status at the profile level, but you could also attach them to specific tweets to indicate what you were doing at a specific moment.

Wong's examples only showed generic presets like eating, listening to music and shopping. It's not clear if you have the option of writing your own updates, or if third-party apps could hook into the feature (say, for music and videos).

The concept of a Twitter status update isn't completely new, either. The social network was testing another form of status update back in 2018, although it didn't work the same way and never reached everyday users.

We've asked Twitter for comment. There are no guarantees Vibe will reach the broader public or even enter testing. We wouldn't be surprised if it does, however. Twitter has long had messaging features that could benefit from status updates (such as letting others know you're busy), and it's increasingly relying on live features like Spaces audio sessions where you might want to share what you're doing.

Even since Twitter confirmed it was working on an edit button, there have been questions about how the company would limit potential abuse of the feature. And we may now have an answer. In a tweet spotted by The Verge, developer Jane Manchun Wong, who’s known for reverse engineering apps to find new features, suggests the forthcoming tool could create a new tweet whenever someone tweaks something they wrote.

“Looks like Twitter’s approach to Edit Tweet is immutable, as in, instead of mutating the Tweet text within the same tweet (same ID), it re-creates a new Tweet with the amended content, along with the list of the old Tweets prior to that edit,” Manchun Wong said.

What that list looks like is unclear at the moment.

In a separate series of tweets, a handful of other developers, including Alessandro Paluzzi, were able to enable the functionality before its official rollout. In screenshots and GIFs shared by those individuals, the edit option is accessible through the three-dots menu.

Tapping that button leads to an interface that looks similar to the platform’s existing composition window – the one major difference being that button you press to post the tweaked message says “Update,” instead of “Tweet.” Notably, the screenshots circulating online don’t show a tweet’s edit history, though that could be because Twitter has yet to implement that part of the feature.

Whatever form Twitter’s edit functionality takes could be ultimately decided by the outcome of Elon Musk’s bid to buy the company. After purchasing a 9.2 percent stake in the social media giant and deciding not to join its board of directors, the Tesla and SpaceX executive offered to buy Twitter for $43 billion. On Friday, the board unanimously approved a poison pill strategy in an attempt to ward off the bid.

Elon Musk, who until the last week or so, was known on Twitter mainly for trolling and incurring the wrath of the SEC, has now set his sights on taking over the platform. Speaking at a TED conference on Thursday, the Tesla CEO positioned his $43 billion hostile takeover bid not as something he wants to do, but as something he feels is “important to the function of democracy.”

“It's important to the function of the United States as a free country and many other countries,” he said. “Civilizational risk is decreased, the more we can increase the trust of Twitter as a public platform.”

That may sound like a lofty goal — and it’s not that different from how Jack Dorsey and other Twitter leaders have talked about the platform — but Musk’s actual ideas for making Twitter more “trustworthy” are bizarre and sometimes contradictory. It suggests he has little understanding of how Twitter works, much less how to run the company.

During the interview, Musk repeatedly stated he believed speech on Twitter should only be constrained by what’s legal. Twitter, he said, should “err on the side of, if in doubt, let the speech exist.” He said that permanent bans should be used sparingly. “A good sign as to whether there's free speech is, [if] someone you don't like is allowed to say something you don't like, and if that is the case, then we have free speech.”

Besides being a somewhat narrow view of free speech, Musk’s own track record would appear to be at odds with this statement. While he has zero experience running a social media company, his actions as Tesla’s CEO suggest there are many scenarios in which he is notably less committed to absolute free speech.

As Quartzpoints out, Musk has reportedly fired numerous Tesla workers who disagree with him. Recently, one employee was shown the door for posting videos to his personal YouTube channel that depicted flaws in Tesla’s self-driving software running on his own vehicle. Musk also reportedly tried to force a law firm, hired by Tesla and SpaceX, to fire an associate who had previously worked for his arch-nemesis the SEC, in an apparent retaliation for the lawyer’s involvement with the agency’s investigation of Musk. Incidentally, Tesla has faced allegations of discrimination and is currently contending with a lawsuit from the state of California over its treatment of Black employees.

Trust and safety experts were also quick to point out that a lack of content moderation actually has a chilling effect on free speech. “Effective moderation is not inherently in conflict with free speech,” Samidh Chakrabarti, Facebook’s former head of civic integrity tweeted. “It is required for people to feel free to speak.”

This is more than just theoretical. Just ask former CEO Dick Costolo who famously presided over one of the most toxic eras in Twitter history thanks to a hands-off approach to content moderation. It was under his tenure as CEO that Gamergate and other targeted harassment campaigns were able to drive scores of users off the platform. Costolo later admitted that his failure to deal with trolls was a huge mistake.

Others pointed out that less moderation would quickly result in Twitter being overrun with spam and other shady — yet entirely legal — content. Even Musk seemed to contradict himself on this point, saying that a “top priority” would be to rid Twitter of the “spam and scam bots and bot armies” that frequently impersonate him.

Away from the culture war battles over "free speech," Twitter is facing significant challenges of its own. The company is still in the middle of a big shift, changing many of its core features in an effort to find new sources of revenue. It still has aggressive growth targets for users and revenue that would prove challenging even for seasoned Twitter insiders — which Musk is not.

And Musk doesn’t even seem to know what he actually wants. He acknowledged that he was unsure of if he would be able to pull off actually buying Twitter (other shareholders seem to agree on that point) and claimed to be unconcerned with making money from his investment. He claimed to have a “plan B,” but didn’t share details. He also admitted that his tweets are little more than a “stream of consciousness” he sometimes composes while on the toilet.

As with so much else he does, it’s impossible to tell if he really wants to fully control Twitter or if all this is yet another elaborate troll. It could be both.

“I do think this will be somewhat painful,” he mused. On that, at least, he’s spot on.

If Elon Musk is indeed able to buy Twitter, the platform could look a lot different. In his first public, non-tweeted comments since the saga began, Musk addressed why he wants to buy the company, and changes he would want to bring about.

“Twitter has become kind of the de-facto town square,” he said. “It's just really important that people have both the reality and the perception that they're able to speak freely within the bounds of the law.”

In terms of specific changes, Musk said Twitter should open-source its algorithms and minimize the interventions it takes in policing content. “Any changes to people's tweets — if they're emphasized or de-emphasized — that action should be made apparent,” he said. “So anyone can see that that action has been taken so there's no sort of behind-the-scenes manipulation, either algorithmically or manually.”

He added that the underlying code behind the algorithm should be available on GitHub, so that users could inspect it themselves.

Musk also spoke about his philosophy on content moderation, namely that there should be very little of it. “I think we would want to err on the side of, if in doubt, let the speech exist,” he said. “I'm not saying that I have all the answers here.” He repeated several times that his preference would be to allow all speech that is legal, and that he dislikes measures like permanent bans. “I do think that we want to be just very reluctant to delete things and be very cautious with permanent bans,” he said. “You know, timeouts I think are better than sort of permanent bans.”

Those comments are not likely to be well-received among Twitter employees, some of whom were reportedly extremely worried by the prospect of him joining the board.

Musk’s appearance at TED comes just hours after the Tesla CEO made a $43 billion offer to buy Twitter. That offer was the culmination of a chaotic few days for Musk and Twitter, during which he revealed that he had become Twitter’s largest shareholder, was offered a seat on the company’s board of directors, declined to join and was subsequently sued by Twitter shareholders over his delay in reporting his investment to the SEC.

Whether Musk will actually succeed in taking over the company is unclear. Twitter’s board has so far only said that it will “review” the offer. “I'm not sure that I will actually be able to acquire it,” he said. When asked if he had a "plan B," if Twitter's board were to decline his offer, he said that he did but declined to elaborate. 

As for his own Twitter feed, Musk confirmed what many may have long suspected. “I'm tweeting more or less stream of consciousness,” he said. “It's not like, ‘let me think about some grand plan about my Twitter’ or whatever. I'm like, literally, on the toilet like, ‘oh, this is funny,’ and then tweet that out, you know?”

WhatsApp will start experimenting with Communities, an update that represents a “major evolution” for the messaging app, according to Mark Zuckerberg. An unreleased version of the feature was first spotted last year, but the company hadn’t confirmed its existence until now.

Communities will allow people to combine separate group chats “under one umbrella with a structure that works for them,” WhatsApp wrote in a blog post. “That way people can receive updates sent to the entire Community and easily organize smaller discussion groups on what matters to them.”

The company hasn’t shared details around exactly how these groups will be formed, but a spokesperson said the idea is to give “close-knit groups” more ways to communicate beyond the chat features currently offered by WhatsApp. The company will start testing the feature later this year in “select countries,” but will eventually make it available globally.

In a post on Facebook, Zuckerberg said that Communities would be a major shift for WhatsApp and Meta, one that emphasizes “feeds” and traditional social networking features less than “community messaging.”

“In the same way that social feeds took the basic technology behind the internet and made it so anyone could find people and content online, I think community messaging will take the basic protocols behind one-to-one messaging and extend them so you can communicate more easily with groups of people to get things done together,” he wrote. He added that Meta was working on similar features for Messenger, WhatsApp and Facebook as well.

It’s also a playbook Meta has used in the past. In 2017, Zuckerberg tried to reorient Facebook around Groups and “meaningful communities.” The company started building new feature for Groups and encouraging users to join as part of its new mission to "bring the world closer together.” Zuckerberg seems to be following the same strategy now with WhatsApp, which is far more popular than Facebook in much of the world. 

Making WhatsApp more like Groups on Facebook also comes with some risks, though.Facebook’s earlier pivot to Groups may have resulted in increased polarization on the platform, and Groups have also been pegged as major sources of misinformation on the platform. And WhatsApp, which due to its encryption lacks many of the moderation tools available to Facebook, has already struggled with misinformation and other problematic content. Making it even easier to connect disparate group threads into one place could potentially exacerbate these issues.

A spokesperson said the company is “building a number of updates” focused on safety, and pointed to new controls that allow admins to delete messages and existing limits on message forwarding.

TikTok is testing a way for users to “dislike” comments in an effort to help people “feel more in control” over what they are seeing. The company revealed the experiment in a blog post about its most recent community guidelines enforcement report, which tracks how TikTok is enforcing its safety policies.

For now, TikTok hasn’t provided many details about exactly how the feature will work or what it looks like. Some users who appear to be part of the test have shared screenshots on Twitter of a thumbs down button appearing next to the heart in videos’ comment sections. The company did specify that individual users will have no way of knowing if their comment has been disliked, so it seems that dislike counts will not be viewable in the same way that likes are. (The screenshots show no numbers next to the thumbs down.)

“We've started testing a way to let individuals identify comments they believe to be irrelevant or inappropriate,” the company explained. “This community feedback will add to the range of factors we already use to help keep the comment section consistently relevant and a place for genuine engagement. To avoid creating ill-feeling between community members or demoralize creators, only the person who registered a dislike on a comment will be able to see that they have done so.”

The subject of “dislikes” on social media has been somewhat of a controversial topic. YouTube, which had public dislikes for years, recently made dislike counts private saying that the feature was contributing to targeted harassment on the platform. Though some creators welcomed the move, it’s proved so controversial that even one of YouTube’s co-founders has protested the change.

In TikTok’s case, it sounds like dislikes will be much more limited than how YouTube has used them, at least for now. The company has so far suggested the feature is meant to help inform how it ranks comments and give creators a way to control which ones are most visible.

Twitter has temporarily walked back a controversial change that made it difficult for people to preserve deleted tweets. On Wednesday, writer Kevin Marks pointed out that the company had recently tweaked its embedded javascript so that the text of deleted tweets was no longer visible in embeds on third-party websites.

By late Friday evening, however, one Twitter user noticed the company had reverted the change, with Twitter confirming the move one day later. “After considering the feedback we heard, we’re rolling back this change for now while we explore different options,” a spokesperson for the company told The Verge. “We appreciate those who shared their points of view — your feedback helps us make Twitter better.”

When the initial change was first spotted, Twitter product manager Eleanor Harding said the company made the tweak to “better respect” people who decide to delete their tweets. Part of what made the move problematic for many was that it simply left a blank space where the embed of a deleted tweet had been previously. Harding said Twitter was planning to roll out additional messaging that would explain why a tweet was no longer visible.

Twitter didn’t elaborate on the “different options” it was exploring following its reversal. For many, the decision to change how embeds work was a strange one. When Twitter first introduced embedding in 2011, it said it intentionally wanted to maintain the text of deleted tweets. And for many years afterward, company executives, including former CEO Jack Dorsey, stressed the role of the platform as a kind of “public record.”

Twitter might not have an edit button just yet, but it's still delivering at least one useful feature this week. The social network is now rolling out a previously hinted-at "Unmention" feature that lets you remove yourself from a conversation. The experimental offering is limited to the web for now, but you just have to choose "leave this conversation" from a tweet's options to avoid constant notifications for a chat you never wanted to join.

Unmentioning is available for some people today, Twitter says. It's not clear if or when the feature might be widely available, or when it might reach mobile apps. In its current form, the text for the mention remains — it just doesn't send an alert.

The company has tested or deployed numerous features to keep mentions civil, including an anti-harassment Safety Mode that automatically blocks mean-spirited users. This, however, might be one of the most practical. Twitter users often deal with unwanted mentions from friends, spammers and others. This gives you more control over your participation and lets you focus on the chats you care about.

Twitter might finally be delivering an edit button, but the company appears to have quietly altered a key way deleted tweets can be preserved. As writer Kevin Marks first pointed out, the company changed its embedded javascript so that the text of deleted tweets is no longer visible in embeds on outside websites.

Previously, the text of a deleted tweet was still visible on web pages on which it had been embedded, but now Twitter is using javascript to render the tweet as a blank white box. Overall, it might not seem like a major change on Twitter’s part, but it’s one that has significant implications. Tweets from public officials, celebrities and the general public are frequently embedded into news stories. Even if those tweets were later deleted, there was a clear record of what had been said.

Now, there are untold numbers of old articles where instead of a tweet there’s just a blank box without context. For example, tweets from former President Donald Trump were routinely cited by media organizations. Even after his account was permanently suspended, the text of those missives was still viewable on the sites where it had been embedded. Now, that’s no longer the case.

In Trump's case, there are extensive archives of those tweets. But that’s not the case for the majority of Twitter users, or even many public officials. And while it’s still technically possible to view the text by disabling javascript in your browser, it’s not the kind of step most people would know how to do even if they knew the option existed.

Twitter product manager Eleanor Harding told Marks the change was made “to better respect when people have chosen to delete their Tweets.” A spokesperson for Twitter declined to comment further on the change. 

Still, it’s a curious move because, as Marks points out in his post, Twitter’s original choice to maintain the text of deleted tweets was an intentional choice on the part of Twitter engineers. “If it's deleted, or 1000 years in the future, the text remains,” former Twitter engineer Ben Ward wrote in 2011 when embedding tweets was first announced.

That’s in line with statements from other twitter executives over the years about the importance of Twitter as a kind of “public record.” For example, former CEO Jack Dorsey said in 2018 he was hesitant to build an edit button because it could erode Twitter’s ability to function as a public record. “It’s really critical that we preserve that,” he said at the time.