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This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at Holy Cross chapter.

By: Paige Thompson

In late May through early April of 2022, Elon Musk had openly confessed that he was seriously considering purchasing Twitter from its current owners and shareholders. Musk had previously been buying shares in the social media company until he became one of the biggest shareholders, and began to threaten the CEOs to let him buy twitter for billions of dollars or he would remove all of his shares in the company. This caused a large outrage on social media because people were worried about what Musk would do to the platform after its change of ownership. Musk eventually did follow through with his plans, successfully purchasing Twitter for $44 billion dollars.

While many people were worried about Musk’s takeover, many people believed that he wouldn’t change anything substantial in the app or the algorithm, so the new ownership would not change much. Further, Musk didn’t make any substantial changes immediately after the platform’s acquisition, but recently all of that has changed.

Recently, Elon Musk has begun to add changes to how Twitter functions and as well as the algorithm, which have upset a lot of people. One of the changes that Musk has followed through with is changing the system for becoming verified on Twitter. Previously, it was a difficult process for influencers, celebrities, political figures and any other individuals to become verified on Twitter. There was an application process as well as a recommended number of followers an account had to have, but Twitter under Musk does not apply to the same standards. Now, all one needs to do to become verified is pay $8 dollars a month to Musk and you can be verified! Musk has claimed that he changed this in order to more accurately filter out and suppress bots and trolls, because unverified accounts will not be recommended as much as verified ones.

The reason why so many people have such a large issue with this is because many believe that this format is an act of suppressing freedom of speech on the platform. Most people are not willing to pay for twitter just for their tweets to be noticed, and may not even have sufficient funds to pay the monthly fee. Further, Musk described this system as beneficial to suppressing bots, but there will still be many real people suppressed by the algorithm rather than the ‘bots’ Musk is talking about. Additionally, this new system Musk proposes has made it much easier for scammers to try and impersonate individuals, especially celebrities or influencers. Previously a scammer would have to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to somewhat successfully be able to impersonate a verified user, but now they only have to pay $8 a month.

Overall, the changes that Elon Musk is making to Twitter is overall a poor decision for the platform, the people on it, and freedom of speech as a whole.