Opinion | Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter will prove to be platform's saving grace

The 44 billion-dollar transaction ensures that real users will be the priority of the app's leadership.

Since its inception in 2006, Twitter has served as a cornerstone for the marketplace of ideas and freedom of speech. It built itself up on the core principle of real people having real conversations with real substance. But then, technology grew and got smarter — and even dumber, in some cases.

Enter bots. Users across the platform for nearly a decade now have noticed the first-slow-but-now-rampant increase in computer algorithms distorting the good side of Twitter and blurring the line between what was once the sharpest place for interweb discussion and your typical Facebook comment section (sorry, Mark). Tweets that push certain ideological beliefs are now ‘spawning with likes’ and are getting pushed to the top of users’ timelines without any frequent human engagement. This all while a ‘Twitter Team’ hand-selects what content gets promoted or filtered out.

As of September, it’s estimated that roughly 22 to 29 percent of all Twitter content in the United States is produced by bots. And whether you’re a conservative or liberal, Chiefs fan or Raiders fan, we all can agree on one thing: Twitter is a mess.

Enter Elon Musk.

Admittedly, the founder of PayPal and CEO of Tesla has a lot to figure out. This week, he’s already made splashes in the news cycle for his plans for the app — including an eight-dollar monthly subscription to have a verification checkmark next to your username — following the finalization of his 44 billion-dollar (yes, you read that correctly) transaction to acquire one of the most used and still fastest-growing social media platforms on the planet.

But regardless of the inevitable learning curve, there’s one thing Musk already is, and it’s what Twitter has been desperately missing: a business-driven leader that thrives off consumer satisfaction. Musk understands the daunting task in front of him of, for all intents and purposes, cleansing Twitter of its algorithm-driven manipulation that has catered to the groupthink epidemic. He has his pulse on the core of Twitter that is original content creators — including journalists, community leaders and organizers, and business experts. And, most importantly, he understands that the goal should be to amplify this core and put it at the forefront of the user experience.

This is an invaluable shift in thinking for Twitter. For far too long, the platform’s designers focused too hard on (as ironic as it sounds) the big-picture appearance of the app. They focused too hard on the raw numbers of users and tweets per second. They focused too hard on link clicks and profile visits. They focused too hard on the follower counts of the big-name celebrities.

Now, with Musk having already terminated a considerable amount of said designers with more to come, Twitter is set to get back to the basics and return to what it was made to do, which is serve the public’s God-given right to freedom of speech. How he gets there will undoubtedly be rocky — I’ll admit that I’d be foolish to think otherwise — but there’s plenty of reason to believe his track record proves he’ll get there.

And if that means I need to pay eight dollars per month to ensure it gets there, then so be it.