In late April, entrepreneur Elon Musk announced his plans to completely buy Twitter and make it privately traded, along with other changes he had in mind. The company announced its plan to be fully acquired by the tech mogul for $54.20 per share in a transaction of approximately $44 billion.

Elon Musk, who is the CEO of large companies such as Tesla and SpaceX, has been known for his Twitter history. Whether he is accidentally sending the value of a niche cryptocurrency through the roof by merely mentioning it on a tweet, or creating a frenzy by announcing that his newborn son would be named X Æ A-Xii, he usually garners strong reactions from the public.

The news of Musk’s acquisition of Twitter may be relevant to students at Lake Stevens High school, as the social media app is popular among them, and changes made to the platform will directly affect the experience on the app.

“I know lots of people who use Twitter often. It’s pretty important to them, just as a way of expressing random ideas and looking at what others are saying about things going on,” junior Shane Racine said.

Musk has talked about a plethora of ideas for improving the platform, some being quite vague. These changes and upgrades include making the software’s code open source in order to increase transparency, charging a small fee for commercial users, and making Twitter less ‘niche’ by being more inclusive. As the deal gets hashed out, some of Musk’s plans have not been made clear in terms of what they will look like or how they will be accomplished.

A pitch deck was presented to investors on May 13, 2022, which outlined Musk’s goals for Twitter. The main goals were to quintuple revenue by 2028, cut Twitter’s reliance on advertising to less than 50 percent of revenue, go from 290 million to 931 million users by 2028, and hire 3,600 employees.

But the most polarizing of his plans is the decision to un-ban former president Donald Trump from the platform. His reasoning is that banning Trump was a failure to adhere to free speech principles, which undermine democracy in what he calls the digital ”public town square”.

The core of his wishes is to make the administration and content moderation of the platform “politically neutral,” stating that “Twitter obv has a strong left wing bias”. Musk has somewhat exemplified his vision by saying that “A social media platform’s policies are good if the most extreme 10% on left and right are equally unhappy”. Still, he has not made it clear how exactly he will accomplish or what it will look like, aside from loosening up on content moderation in an attempt to uphold free speech like in the example with Donald Trump’s account. Although he did mention that with his strategy, “the right would probably be a little unhappy too”.

The way Musk talks about a plan for a more lightly-governed platform has come off as naive to people, and combined with some of his past actions, many are left feeling untrustworthy of him and his ability to re-vamp Twitter.

“Is this really who we want running our so-called digital town square?” senior Jack Baylor said.

Other tech executives and insiders are skeptical as well about Musk’s dream of a mostly unmoderated site with loose censorship, as it could make the site unsafe. Former Facebook Public Policy Director Katie Harbath said that without moderation, “just those who bully and harass will be left as they will drive others away.”

The strong focus Musk has on making changes to uphold freedom of speech has caused concern by some Twitter users.

“I’m worried that Elon will let people with extremist views to come onto Twitter and possibly spread misinformation or hate speech… there is quite a bit of that stuff on Twitter already, and I feel like it would just get even worse,” senior Evan Dang said.

There are still many unknowns in the process of the acquisition, with it being unclear if it will happen at all. On May 17, 2022, Musk announced that he would not go through with the deal unless Twitter shows proof of claims that less than 5% of users on the platform are bots. He said that a more accurate estimate is 20% and that Twitter only used a sample size of 100 to get their value. Musk claimed that Twitter complained to him about violating a non-disclosure agreement by exposing their method of data collection, which if true, makes it more uncertain whether the deal will work out.