Hey there, today I wanna talk about Twitter’s recent changes that were happening under Elon Musk’s control. First I wanna talk about how the future of media is changing and the fact that Elon Musk has made it so that people can talk freely. Without the influence of a checkmark of people of status being able to only talk about certain issues with us is huge and I feel as though it is a good thing because the checkmark has always been shown as a person that is of high status and when a lot of us listen it is to the people of those statuses. When anyone can pay for a check mark we know that anyone can have an opinion whether it is from Beyonce or William in his living room trying to get a point across about his opinion. 

Some of the drawbacks of these “Public squares”include: Issues with data privacy, potential harassment and hate, and algorithmic influence. All of these can be considered drawbacks if you allow it to influence your opinion greatly especially with algorithmic influence. I noticed that when I am on any other social media platform, not only Twitter, my ideas and opinions are shown to me that I like. I am not easily influenced by the ideas though as a whole but more entertained by the ideas that are coming to me. 

Now for Elon Musk and his changes whether we like them or not, he has not changed the site drastically in my opinion. The only thing he has done is give more free speech in my opinion. He has lifted bans on people from the site that have broken terms and guidelines to the site but the fact that this is a platform to be speaking on freely and giving your ideas to a platform. By banning individuals of high status which was happening a lot because of high status and possible influence is not ok even if they are of high status. The only reason someone should be banned from a social platform is if they are directly inciting violence is ok or making something happen with your influence creating violence. When this has never occurred.  

For the idea that we could have the government controlling what we are reading or having some sort of control over the media would be an overstep. We are the people and we deserve to voice our opinion even if people disagree with it. People can disagree with all they want to about things but the platform is there so people can have a voice of their own and talk about what they want to talk about. Giving the government power over what we can speak about on a site where we deserve freedom of speech on the voice ourselves would be a complete violation of our rights if you ask me. 
Overall I think we owe what we say to each other because it is coming from our account and we are the ones saying what we feel we want to say. The company twitter or reddit do not own what we say and it shouldn’t be their obligation to take or change what we are saying by taking it down or deleting our account or making changes to a platform because of it. It should not be a platform’s fault for leaving certain comments up that are wanted to be taken down. Platforms are in charge and can do what they want but by keeping a more freely open forum to an extent is what we need as the people. Diversity of viewpoints is key to having a successful platform in the media as it is important that we are able to say what we want to say to each other.