In case you missed it, Elon Musk just bought Twitter for $44 billion.

The deal isn’t done, and Elon can walk away from this for a cool $1 billion, but everyone and their mother is speculating what is next for Twitter. The question remains to be: what changes will come once Musk takes the helm?

Depending on which side of the aisle you are on — assuming you care about Twitter — you’re either excited about the return of “free speech” to Twitter or you’re worried that Twitter will become a cesspit; that it will be full of trolls, right-wing conspiracists, and fascists.

If there’s one thing that you will see scarce online it’s someone between these two extremes. With that in mind, I present to you my hopes and fears regarding Elon buying Twitter.

My Hopes

• Twitter continues its work on its decentralized sector of the company, which recently said is unaffected by Elon’s acquisition.
• Twitter removes all spam bots from the site
• Moderation is still within the platform where those who continually break Twitter guidelines get banned.
• Twitter turns away from ad revenue and instead moves to subscription revenue. I will happily pay for Twitter if it’s a subscription service.

My Fears

• Twitter axes all moderation, which would allow for any and all hate speech on the platform.
• Twitter’s API is closed off and forces users to migrate to the official Twitter app (I use the official app, but I find many 3rd party Twitter clients both beautiful and necessary).
• Ads are ramped up within the app and become required in 3rd party apps

I feel that in 8-9 months we will see what happens and whether I was worried for nothing or my fears have come to fruition.

“Hey Siri, set a reminder…”