Elon Musk

There's more than one way to sink a social network. By Charlie Warzel. Photo illustration of Elon Musk pointing his fingers like a gun toward the ...

Those with trust-and-safety experience at the platform told me that a big percentage of the job is dealing with the messy edge cases that are difficult for a computer to decipher. If Twitter is struggling with this now, imagine the impact if Musk does decide to turn the platform into a maximalist speech Thunderdome. “And if what online speech governance does is manage the harms of how people communicate, it has to be constantly working and changing. “There’s often a supposition that sites like Twitter must work like a car; maybe they need some routine maintenance every year, but under the hood they mostly just work,” Goldman, the former Twitter VP, told me. Blanton said that cuts to his team led to a skeleton crew of moderators, who had to rely on imprecise AI tools to get rid of bots and spam—which led to many legitimate human accounts getting banned as well. Because of the massive layoffs and org-chart chaos, Twitter is unable to adequately address the attacks, causing catastrophic breaches, loss of personal information, or extended outages. “A lot of things humans say and do are only easily interpretable/decoded by other humans,” he continued. “Without even factoring in nefarious intent, it is easy to imagine scenarios where big mistakes happen because of the kind of disruption Twitter is about to endure. Platforms and networks rise and fall and even die out naturally—just look at MySpace—but there’s not much precedent for what’s happening with Twitter: A culturally resonant and politically influential platform could, quite suddenly, flame out as the result of new ownership. That institutional knowledge would be useful in a crisis—the kind that social-media companies have all the time, such as when high-profile users go It seems foolish to try to predict what a mercurial person like Musk—who loves to troll and to float ridiculous ideas in public—will actually do to the platform. [declaring Twitter dead](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/04/a-eulogy-for-twitter/361339/) for nearly a decade.