Right now, Twitter is in a bit of a weird spot because it is now privately owned by one of the richest men on the planet. So far, he has been running Twitter (some would say he’s running it into the ground). The eccentric billionaire posted a poll to Twitter recently asking if people wanted him to step down as CEO of Twitter. The results were in favor of him leaving. However, it doesn’t seem that he will be stepping down anytime soon.
Twitter will implement mute and block signals.
This is the next and a long list of features that people are not quite on board with. As a disclaimer, Elon Musk did not officially state that this will be a credit score per se. This new feature has been likened to that, however. The main reason that people are down for this feature is a bit more political. Elon posted a tweet saying that Twitter will use block and mute signals. Basically, this will act as a “credit score” for your Twitter account. When you interact with people, they have the ability to react to you either positively or negatively. Liking a person’s post will most likely count as a positive interaction. However, if an account is muted or blocked by another account, that counts as a negative interaction. These interactions will actually count as downvotes. Those positive or negative interactions will be implemented into a neural network model for that tweet and the account. The more positive interactions you have, the easier it will be for people to discover your content. The more negative interactions you have, the harder it will be. This seems to make sense until you think about things. Obviously, a newer account won’t get as many likes as a popular account. This means that it’ll be extremely hard for it to get ahead in the algorithm. However, a celebrity, company, or influencer account can easily rack up hundreds of thousands of likes and one day.
What is the political aspect of this?
In replying to Elon’s tweet, a lot of people compared this new concept to the social credit score model developed in China. This basically means that the Chinese government can throttle companies in several ways that it deems less worthwhile. It’s a highly complex model, but that’s the gist of it. People are all wondering if this is the direction that Elon wants to take Twitter in. If so, then that will be bad for all involved. However, Elon did not state that, so we’ll have to wait until further developments to say so.
