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Soumendu Mukherji

The “Musk-style” takeover, roll out of Downvote button- What is the future of Twitter?


Twitter has witnessed a tectonic shift in ownership since its inception. It is now officially owned by the richest technocrat "Elon Musk" in the world. The same was achieved through a complex financial deal in the history of acquisitions followed by the “Twitter vs Musk” debate.


Just after taking control over Twitter, Musk fired top executives including the CEO, setting a benchmark of brutal efficiency and re-aligning the management.. With the vision to expand Twitter to its infinite possibilities, Musk tweeted "The bird is freed," after he successfully completed a $44 billion acquisition.


With the change of leadership , Twitter has a different path set for it. Musk believes that Twitter should be a platform for healthy conversations, basically a troll-free Twitter. He will be posing as the proponent of free speech and the laws and guidelines will be stricter.


Amidst these changes, Twitter rolls out the “downvote” button for more users which has been in the testing phase since July. The “downvote” button acts like a dislike button, where if users don’t like a reply on their tweet or conversation, they can downvote it. Twitter explains the feature of downvoting through a pop-up notification. Downvotes are not public and it will flag the content the users don’t want to see. This gave Twitter an understanding of what type of content people want to look at.


According to Twitter, downvoting can help keep conversations clean and healthy. However on the flip side this feature can also be misused to mute and suppress the voice and opinions which in turn can manipulate political discourse.


With Twitter charting a new course , what remains to be seen is how the user experiences will change and how users react to it.


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