Elon Musk has put an end to weeks of speculation with the announcement that Twitter has accepted his offer to buy the platform for $54.20 per share, valuing the social media platform at about $44 billion.
While Musk’s drawn-out pursuit of Twitter has come to an end, for him at least, the next chapter of Twitter’s history and its hundreds of millions of users is just beginning.
The deal drew immediate fears that Musk, a self-styled “free speech absolutist,” could turn back the dials on content moderation, potentially unraveling years of work that curbed the unfettered spread of hate speech and misinformation. But experts have been just as quick to warn of the potential privacy implications of the $44 billion buyout to take Twitter private, at a time that even employees are unclear about the company’s future.
Per Musk’s short 78-word statement, one of his many proposed plans for Twitter raising eyebrows in the industry is the open-sourcing of the platform’s algorithmic code to make it publicly available. Musk claims this change — which Twitter has been mulling for some time — will help boost trust in the platform, which has for years faced an onslaught of false news and security incidents breaches, including one that saw hackers hijack high-profile Twitter profiles — including Musk’s — to promote a cryptocurrency scam.
But cybersecurity experts fear that Musk’s open source vision for Twitter could make the platform more susceptible to attackers.
“The decision to open source this code likely means that it will be adopted by other social platforms, advertisers and others who are looking to hone their user targeting,” Jamie Moles, senior technical manager at security firm ExtraHop, told TechCrunch. “Of course, as with any widely adopted open source code, there are significant security implications. As we’ve seen with Log4Shell and Spring4Shell, vulnerabilities in widely used open source applications are exponentially more valuable. Making its code open source may increase transparency for Twitter users, but it may also make Twitter a much bigger target for attackers.”
