With a simple tweet, the bird is freed — that's how Elon Musk announced he had captured Twitter, the social media platform he has long been pursuing.
The "freed" part is now being seen by many as a signal that the platform will reduce restrictions on what can be posted there.
"I think there is a chance that that one of the first things he'd like to do is bring back everybody that was banned or bring back everybody that was controversial. Certainly that's part of his main objective, and that could happen with or without Elon Musk," said Omar Akhtar, a research director at Altimeter.
Musk has long complained about restrictions on Twitter, but has also promised it won't become what he calls a "hellscape." On the platform itself Musk tweeted Friday morning, saying "let the good times roll" — an idea celebrated and challenged by some of Twitter's 238 million users.
Within hours of Musk's announcement, some users began posting racist, homophobic and transphobic comments and calling for suspended accounts to be restored.
Republican representative Lauren Boebert tweeted "The bird is free, now free the greatest of all time @realdonaldtrump."
While it's unclear what plans Musk has in store, in Europe, one E.U. official reminded him that under their rules, tech companies must have content moderation systems. The European Commissioner for Internal Market, Theirry Breton, tweeted "In Europe, the bird will fly by our rules," with an emoji of the European Union flag.
"So it's very unclear what will actually happen. Right. So he wants to build a super app. He wants to add payments. He wants to do more video. I don't think, you know, the crystal ball on this is still very, very shiny. Right. I don't know where we're going to be six months from now," said Claire Diaz-Ortiz, a venture capitalist and former Twitter employee.
