Here’s what a former Twitter engineering head thinks about Elon Musk’s plan

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Barring a messy, last-minute divorce, Elon Musk is on track to own Twitter (and yes, mea culpa). The mercurial, brilliant entrepreneur offloaded around $8.5 billion of Tesla stock this week as he prepared to pay for his $44 billion side project. And soon, he’ll be free to change the service as he pleases.

Musk hasn’t yet presented a comprehensive plan for Twitter — he may never — but he’s proposed several significant changes worth evaluating. Musk’s ideas include lengthening character limits, open sourcing the algorithm, and effectively putting an end to content moderation. A debate is raging about the latter, but all have tradeoffs.

Alex Roetter, Twitter’s former head of engineering, joined Big Technology Podcast this week to discuss Musk’s proposals, examining both their feasibility and advisability. Here’s a look at the most significant potential changes, along with his commentary:

Upon announcing the deal, Musk said he wanted to “authenticate all humans.” Twitter has long weighed this idea internally, wondering whether making people confirm their email or phone number could help reduce harassment and spam. The company never acted, perhaps because authentication could drop its user numbers and anger Wall Street. But it should’ve.

Musk hates the spambots. “We will defeat the spam bots or die trying!” he said last week.

Roetter likes this idea, but it’s not that simple. To defeat the spambots, he said, you’d build a classifier that looks for characteristics of bots and then bans them. You’d then tune the classifier to either be really aggressive, where you’d eliminate bots but also ban a bunch of human “false positives,” or be less aggressive, where you’d let some bots slide and ban fewer humans.

“I think you should do it,’ Roetter said. “But everyone should be prepared, there is no perfect spam bot classifier.”

This idea is feasible, though not perfect, and advisable. 

Allowing for free speech is core to Musk’s Twitter takeover. “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square,” he said.

There may be technical challenges to Musk’s vision, including how that victory against spambots could ensnare human speech as well, said Roetter. “I really don’t think there’s an answer that’s going to make everybody happy,” he said. Still, Musk could relax the current moderation rules and see how things play out.

This move is somewhat feasible and its advisability is TBD. 

Musk is interested in Twitter’s subscription product and could expand it. Making people pay for Twitter — or certain premium features — could help reduce spam and create a revenue stream if Twitter’s advertisers bail over its new speech rules.