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OPINION:
Younger readers might find this hard to believe, but there was a time when Twitter had as much buzz as TikTok has today.
You couldn't walk into an event without encountering a Twitter wall.
But part-time CEO Jack Dorsey got distracted by other projects (how about that shiny crypto?). Product development was neglected, and many users drifted away.
Now billionaire Elon Musk has reached an agreement to acquire Twitter for approximately US$44 billion ($66.4b), or a 20 per cent premium on its share price before he began his ownership push.
That's chump change next to Facebook (market cap: US$520b) or TikTok (private equity value: around US$425b).
Through his tweets, Musk (followers: 84m) has already outlined several changes to boost Twitter. Here are the top moves that are likely on the way - and some possible fish-hooks with each.
Musk has made this one his priority.
Donald Trump must be rubbing his hands together - and more so given that the platform he created after being exiled from Twitter, "Truth Social", has been widely ignored.
The billionaire reiterated this stance as the deal was announced, tweeting, "One that [sic] must have a certain I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means".
It's a noble sentiment, but there are two issues. Musk describes himself as a "free speech absolutist", but Twitter still has to follow the laws of every country it operates. Those include the laws of the US, where Musk was hit by US$20 million in penalties in 2018 after the US Securities and Exchange Commission alleged he had misled investors with a series of tweets saying he planned to take Tesla private.
The other is that, in practice, Musk's stance on free speech has been far from absolutist.
In July last year, Bloomberg reported that Tesla had asked the Chinese government to censor social media posts that it saw as unwarranted attacks on the company. Tesla declined to comment on the accusation.
And the LA Times noted this month that "when it comes to the speech of others, particularly his employees and critics, his commitment has been anything but absolute. Far from defending their right to speak up, he has sought to stifle them with legal muzzles or responded with firings, lawsuits or even the hiring of private detectives."
Twitter raised its character limit from 140 characters (mimicking a restriction on text messages in ye olden times) to 280 in 2017.
Musk wants longer-form tweets.
Bad move.
Forcing people to be pithy was a big part of Twitter's initial success (and TikTok's: its to-the-point how-to videos are a breath of fresh air after YouTube and Facebook's engagement algorithms that reward people who dawdle to the point).
Critics of the big social media platforms have long called on them to publish their algorithms - or the secret software formulas that decide what you see in your newsfeed, and control that "rabbit hole" process where you see more and more posts that echo your own views - often in more and more extreme fashion - to encourage more and more engagement.
Musk says he'll make Twitter's algorithms transparent, and publish all of the social media platform's code on Github, making it open source.
That will annoy some on Twitter's development team, but for everyone else it will be a brilliant move. The only cause for pause is that an open-source move at another of Musk's company's Tesla, came with several heavy-duty legal qualifiers - so this is a case of waiting to see the fine print.
"If our twitter bid succeeds, we will defeat the spam bots or die trying!," Musk tweeted this month.
Again, it's hard to argue with this one. While the flood of spam bots is nowhere near as bad as in Twitter's earlier days, these days the fake accounts can be more menacing - because the people behind them are often fraudsters or political manipulators.
It will be quite a bracing engineering challenge, but that's one of Musk's strengths.
Facebook users can clean up typos after editing a post.
Twitter introduced a pretend version of an edit button with its premium Twitter Blue service (which gives you 30 seconds to review a post before it goes live).
Now Musk can introduce the real thing.
It's an out-and-out win, and will be a symbol for positive change.
There are some other big issues that Musk has yet to weigh in on, such as invasive ad-tracking - an area where Apple has cleaned social media's clock with its push for Facebook, Twitter and other apps to make tracking disclosures.
But one way or another, it looks like the platform is about to receive a much-needed kick in the pants.
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