WHAT do I think of Elon Musk taking over Twitter? Well in one sense it is like a cosmic joke. This bastion of bien pensant liberal thinking, home to #FBPE tribes, Terf warriors and the pope of the left, Owen Jones, is to be taken over by a barking libertarian billionaire who thinks we are all going to decant to Mars.

Will he be any different to the barking billionaires who owned it before? Or the billionaires who own the rest of social media? Who knows. Internet journalism has become a game of pick your plutocrat: Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, George Soros, Pierre Omidyar.

Musk’s “free speech absolutism” sounds good but not if it just means unleashing Donald Trump. Twitter made Trump by handing him the perfect platform for his brainless populism. It then expelled him, the President of the United States, while allowing Vladimir Putin and the Taliban to keep calm and carry on. That crazy logic sums Twitter up.

With a bit of luck Musk may kill the platform stone dead. I have fantasies of my blue tick journalist colleagues finally deserting the platform en masse. Going back to writing about real life instead of Twitter spats. But I’m not holding my breath. It is a narcissist medium and journalists love to see themselves reflected in Twitter’s distorting glass.

However, if I am required to be objective for a moment, there are three potential positives to the Muskover of Twitter. First, he says he will reduce advertising, which is always a good thing. But I’ll believe that when I see it.

More importantly he says he will end Twitter anonymity by requiring users to authenticate their identities. If he means it, this could go a long way to civilising this toxic platform. Most of the abuse on Twitter arises from its cult of anonymity.

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If you create a platform where any creep with a laptop can abuse women, black people and celebrities, safe in the knowledge that no one will be able to identify them, then of course it is going to be a sewer of foaming hate. I’m only surprised it isn’t worse than it is.

Footballers like Marcus Rashford suffered Twitter’s racist abuse for years. That’s why the Kick It Out campaign made ending anonymity their number one demand after Twitter promoted violent racist content during the 2021 Euros.

Twitter defenders insist that anonymity allows whistleblowers to blow without being identified by their bosses. That is true up to a point. But since no one believes the dreck on Twitter it is of limited use as a conduit for truth.

There are better ways of blowing the whistle – like getting newspaper journalists to do it for you. They are sworn to protect the identities of their sources, as we saw recently when the courts upheld journalist Chris Mullin’s right to withhold the identity of his sources in the Birmingham pub bombing story.

However, I don’t hold out much hope of Musk actually ending anonymity. He needs traffic and therefore dollars to justify his investment. Anger and emotion is what drives engagement on Twitter. It is an anger machine – and it does it very well. It has monetised hate.

The third potential positive is that Musk has said he will make the insidious Twitter algorithms open source so that everyone can see how they work. This is long overdue. Algorithmic pre-selection of content is the platform’s secret sauce. It decides what tweets appear on every person’s unique Twitter feed.

This should have been demanded long ago by regulators. Twitter is a major source of news and comment, so we need to know how it is curated. Twitter is a publication but it is edited by machine intelligence. We know how AI can go badly wrong. Twitter is confirming the dystopian fears of science fiction writers.

Algorithmic pre-selection is what finally killed Twitter for me. About five years in, I began to realise that it was filling my feed with ever more extreme versions of my own political prejudices. The same Nat-Left rants against the “Yoons” and “Tory ****s”. The LGBT and Green trolls attacking feminists. Nationalist “economists” promising that, after independence, everyone will be given a basic income so they don’t have to work. Nonsense about how hairstyles are racist and Nato is the cause of all war.

The only way to kill it off, I found, was to start retweeting posts from Andrew Neil and the Daily Telegraph. Most Tories on Twitter are quite reasonable. That eventually silenced the demented chorus. Not that I find the libertarian Twitter right any more congenial. The anti-vaxxers, lockdown sceptics and Brexiters are tiresome, but at least there aren’t so many of them.

Read more: Why I'm giving up Twitter in 2020

US conservatives are jubilant at Musk’s takeover because they think that the algorithms are cunningly programmed to exclude right-wing views. There are endless conspiracy theories about how Twitter is supposed to promote “woke” content and suppress people like JK Rowling.

Twitter needs to be more open, certainly, and less prone to capture by narrow-minded activists. However, I don’t think that it is suddenly going to be awash with conservative and gender-critical voices.

The reality is that Twitter is dominated by young, university-educated activists, mostly from Labour, Green Party and the far left. They colonised the site in its early years and it has been largely a reflection of them ever since.

If Twitter often sounds like a shouty convention of student politicians that’s because that is largely what it is. Anyone who has been to a Labour Party conference fringe meeting will find it instantly recognisable. Bearded men with badges and slogans who simply have to be the angriest person in the room.

Musk is a shock to the system. But he’s unlikely to address the real problem, which is the “like” and “retweet” buttons. These devilishly simple tools are what has turned it into a cross between a school playground and the French Revolution. But his buy-out might at least make some of the Twitter addicts in the media realise that this insidious platform is a not a place for rational discourse. It is a place to avoid.

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