Elon Musk Explains Why He Wants to Buy Twitter
If Elon Musk takes over Twitter, he plans on making the social media platform open to all kinds of speech, so long as the content is legal.
“I’m not saying I have all the answers here,” Musk said on Thursday. “I do think that we want to be, just very reluctant to delete things. Just very cautious with permanent bans. You know, time-outs would be better than some permanent bans.”
Musk revealed his plans for Twitter during a TED talk hours after he announced a $41 billion offer to buy the social media platform.
“I think it’s important for there to be an arena for free speech,” Musk said when asked why he’s trying to buy the company. “Twitter has become the kind of de facto town square. It’s just really important that people have the reality and the perception that they are able to speak freely within the bounds of the law.”
One of his main plans include open-sourcing the algorithms that run Twitter. This would allow anyone to look at the computer code and understand if they’ve been “emphasized [or] de-emphasized” from the platform.
“So there’s no sort of behind-the-scenes manipulation either algorithmically or manually,” he said, later adding: “My strong intuitive sense is that having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization. I don’t care about the economics at all.”
In terms of content moderation, Musk said his plan is to operate Twitter’s policies within a country’s laws. “But going beyond that, and having it be unclear who’s making what changes to who and to where, having tweets sort of mysteriously be promoted and demoted with no insight into what’s going on, having a blackbox algorithm on some things and not for other things, I think this
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