Tesla CEO Elon Musso defended freedom of speech online, and answered questions from Twitter employees according to a leaky video call.
“You can communicate with millions of people on Twitter. That’s just an incredibly important thing,” MuskAccording to Twitter employees during an all-employee meeting on June 16. “I think it’s essential to have free speech and to be able to communicate freely.”
Investigative journalism outfit Project Veritas leaked Musk’s meeting with Twitter’s staff, adding more fuel to the political firestorm. “I think people should be allowed to say, you know, pretty outrageous things that are within the bounds of the law,” assuming that kind of speech “doesn’t get amplified and doesn’t get, you know, a ton of reach.”
Twitter Chief Marketing Officer Leslie Berland asked Musk about “content moderation,” a leftist euphemism for censorship, during the call.
“The standard is much more than not offending people,” he added. “The standard is — should be — that [Twitter users] are very entertained and informed.”
Musk spoke also against media. “How many media have it wrong?” Musk stated, “I would estimate almost never.” Musk said, “Not ever, but almost always.”
Twitter is great because people can communicate directly with one another and “not through a negative lens.”
Musk claimed that his political opinions were moderate after being asked about them. “Let’s say the far left ten percent and far right 10 percent were equally upset on Twitter, then that will probably be a good outcome,” he said.
Musk also trumpeted the value of business transparency “in order for people to have trust in Twitter.” He advocated for an “open source” algorithm to help identify bias and added that the platform can be better at “informing people about serious issues.”
“I think an important goal for Twitter would be to try to include much of the country, as much of the world, as possible,” Musk said. He said that the company still has a lot of potential growth. “I think the potential is there for Twitter to be accessible to an order of magnitude of more people.”
Musk stated that free speech doesn’t mean speech without consequences.
“There’s freedom of speech or freedom of reach,” he said. ”Freedom of speech is one thing. You can say whatever you want in the middle of Times Square. It’s as easy as walking into Times Square to deny the Holocaust. Okay? You can’t stop them. They’ll just do it. But that doesn’t mean you have to, that needs to be promoted to millions of people.”
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