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 can be quite dangerous,” he said.
But when it comes to tweets that straddle the line between criticism and hate speech or calls for violence, Musk said: “If in doubt, let the speech exist. If it’s a gray area, I would say let the tweet exist. But obviously in a case where there’s a lot of controversy, you would not necessarily promote that tweet.
“A good sign as to whether there is free speech is [when] someone you don’t like is allowed to say something you don’t like,” he added. “And if that is the case, then we have free speech.”
His other plans for Twitter include adding an edit button and cracking down on bots that promote scams. However, Musk is well aware running a social media platform is far from easy. “I think there will be quite a few errors,” he said. “I’m going to hope it’s not too miserable.”
It’s also possible Twitter will refuse his offer to buy the company. According to The Wall Street JournalThe Wall Street Journal, Twitter is thinking about using a poison pill that would stop Musk from buying an even larger chunk of the company. During the TED talk, though, Musk said he had a “Plan B,” although he refrained from sharing the details for now.