Twitter has been focused on ‘healthy conversations.’ Elon Musk could

“If in doubt, let the speech exist,” Musk said in an on-stage interview at the TED conference earlier this month. “If it’s a gray area, I would say, let the tweet exist. But obviously in the case where there’s perhaps a lot of controversy, you would not necessarily want to promote that tweet.”

Under his ownership, Twitter could unwind steps taken in recent years to make the platform more palatable for its most vulnerable users, typically women, the LGBTQ community and people of color, according to safety experts.

Beyond potentially alienating employees who have worked on or support efforts to improve content moderation on the platform, undoing Twitter’s progress on “healthy conversations” also risks losing users at a time when the company has been fighting to reverse sluggish growth. It could also turn off advertisers wary of having their ads run next to harmful content. While Musk has said his bid for Twitter is “not a way to make money,” it is still a business and advertising remains its central revenue driver.

Though smaller than some rival platforms, Twitter also has an outsized influence in the online (and offline) world because it is popular among influential figures in media, politics and entertainment, and because it has often acted as a model for other platforms on how to address thorny harmful content issues. Thus, changes to Twitter’s policies could have broader ripple effects on politics and society.

Twitter has certainly not been perfect on content moderation issues, but as Kirsten Martin, professor of technology ethics at Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business, put it: “Twitter has consistently strived to be a responsible social media company through not only their content moderation but also their hires in the area of machine learning ethics.”

“I would be worried as to how this would change Twitter’s values,” Martin added.

Twitter and Musk did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

A billionaire with a history of trolling

Musk has a mixed reputation in the tech industry. He is undoubtedly one of the most ambitious and successful innovators and entrepreneurs of this era, but he is also someone who has courted controversy, often from his own Twitter profile, where he has 83 million followers.