Elon Musk’s new leadership at Twitter has been strongly criticized by Microsoft co-founder and co-chairman of the world’s largest private philanthropic organization, Bill Gates. Although they had already risen up against Musk’s ‘hardcore’ policies, his own employees, until now no public figure from the world of technology had dared to challenge the owner of Tesla.
Gates has come out strongly against policies that he says are only making “digital polarization” worse to such an extent that it could have a “catastrophic” effect on the market. Although he added in his statements that he cannot give a clear answer either because the circumstance is even “more confusing now than a year ago.”
In addition, he has demanded that Musk be more transparent, clear and serious with his decisions, since for Gates, ‘instead of a set of objective measurements carried out by a wide group of people, what we see is decision making by intuition ‘.
Ask Musk to act sensibly
Since Musk bought Twitter and became its owner, the social network has begun a process of transformation, although it is not yet clear what Musk intends to achieve with these changes. His policy has not only affected the social network, but there have also been changes in the structure behind it.
From demanding that its workers adopt worse working conditions than those they had before its acquisition, to layoffs and the massive exodus of personnel. All direct consequence of the model change from the relaxed boss to the eccentric and strict Musk.
Regarding the technical changes of the social network, users have not agreed with the unlocking of accounts that had been suspended to promote a global circle of peaceful exchange of ideas. Gates said social media platforms should discourage the spread of accounts that “incite riots or lead to huge misconceptions about the safety of vaccines or masks, or that kind of thing.”
Twitter under Musk’s command: a global risk
An annual letter was published yesterday in which Gates named political polarization in the United States as one of the factors holding back progress on global health challenges, from polio to malaria, along with the pandemic, the invasion of Russia to Ukraine, inflation and climate change.
Gates has applauded the collaboration of the EU to face these challenges; However, he fears that given the future scenario that Twitter becomes a social network without law and order, it would increase the traffic of ‘fake news’, the volume of people who follow conspiracy theories would grow and it would also represent a step backwards in human rights, with the permission to say any comment that advocates extremist ideologies.
