Musk seeks to reassure advertisers, promises rapid changes to Twitter

The billionaire owner answered questions on hate speech, verification and advertiser concerns during a publicly-broadcast meeting on Twitter Spaces

Elon Musk laid out more of his plans for Twitter in a publicly-broadcast meeting Wednesday, assuring advertisers he had noted their concerns about hate speech and misinformation on the site while saying the platform would continue changing rapidly and that some of its new features would fail.

Musk took questions over the course of roughly an hour from two of his executives and a representative of the advertising industry during a Twitter Spaces meeting, which was broadcast live on the site midday. Over 100,000 people listened live.

He repeated that the company hasn’t made any changes to its content moderation policies — which attempt to keep rule-breaking content off the site — but said he believes requiring more people to pay to use Twitter through a new $8 verification program would lower the amount of hate speech overall.

The billionaire said the company’s progress would be much more freewheeling than in the past, with new ideas rapidly becoming features and then being cut quickly if they didn’t work out. Mistakes will be made.

“If nothing else I am a technologist and I can make technology go fast,” Musk said. “If we do not try bold moves, how will we make great improvements?”

The Twitter Spaces event came just days after Musk — who acquired Twitter in a $44 billion deal last month — threatened a “thermonuclear name & shame” campaign against advertisers that leave the site out of concern for his approach to content moderation.

Last week the new Twitter owner said the site was facing a “massive drop in revenue” as advertisers paused campaigns. A coterie of large advertisers and marketing agencies have said they will slow down or pause spending on the site out of concern that Musk laying off half the company’s workforce will hurt its ability to police hate speech and sexually explicit content, which they do not want their ads showing up next to.

Musk has been scrambling to shore up the company’s revenue streams, cut costs by laying people off and find new ways to make money as he faces the reality of having to pay around $1 billion a year in interest on the debt he accrued buying Twitter. The vast majority of Twitter’s revenue comes from advertising. A potential recession and rising inflation has already deeply cut into ad budgets, making now a particularly hard time for the entire digital ad industry.

It makes sense that advertisers don’t want their ads next to sexually explicit or hateful content, Musk said on Wednesday. “I don’t think having hate speech next to an ad is great.”

Musk said on the Spaces that Twitter should honor freedom of speech, but that it didn’t need to boost everyone’s opinions through its recommendation algorithms.

“We have to be tolerant of views we don’t agree with but those views don’t need to be amplified,” he said.

He previously tweeted that the company planned to instate a content moderation council of outside advisers to make decisions regarding what users should be banned or restored to the site, something that could affect notable accounts including former president Donald Trump’s.

He said that would take a few months to assemble — and wouldn’t have the power to restrict certain types of content.

“At the end of the day I am the Chief Twit here so the responsibility is mine,” he said. “If I make decisions that people don’t like then advertisers will leave the system, users will leave the system and we will fail.”

He added: “Forgiveness is just a very important principle.”

Musk has shaken advertisers’ faith that he would maintain rules against misinformation and hate speech in the nearly two weeks he’s owned the company. The day before he closed the deal Musk tweeted a statement committing to keeping the site from becoming a “free for all hellscape.”

But soon after, he himself boosted a conspiracy theory about the attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband.

NAACP President Derrick Johnson called on businesses last week to drop their advertisements on Twitter “until actions are taken to make Twitter a safe space.” Musk, a self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist,” accused businesses that participate in the boycott of “trying to destroy free speech in America.”

Automakers Ford, General Motors and Volkswagen have all pulled their Twitter ads, along with cereal and snack companies General Mills and Mondelez, the corporation behind Oreo cookies, Ritz crackers and Sour Patch Kids candy. International ad and consulting firm Interpublic Group, which represents American Express, Coca-Cola, Fitbit, Spotify and dozens of other major corporations, has also advised its clients to suspend Twitter ad buys for now.

“A thermonuclear name & shame is exactly what will happen if this continues,” Musk tweeted Friday as more companies began their advertising exits, threatening to unleash his rowdy online fans on businesses and executives that desert the platform.

Musk’s biggest change so far is an idea to charge people $8 per month for a blue verification check mark — opening the program that is supposed to indicate trusted sources of information to the broader public. Critics are worried the change will create havoc on a platform that already struggles with the proliferation of disinformation, bots and scammers.

Musk defended the approach Wednesday, saying it would make the site more reliable and help eliminate or demote fake accounts.

He also stopped a new rollout that started Wednesday morning giving already officially-verified accounts a new badge to denote they’ve been confirmed to be who they say they are. Musk tweeted he had “killed it” and a Twitter executive clarified later that the company was focusing on using them for “government and commercial entities” instead of individuals.

“Apart from it being an aesthetic nightmare when looking at the Twitter feed it is simply another way of creating a two class system,” he said during the Twitter Spaces. “It wasn’t addressing the core problem of there are too many entities that would be considered official or have legacy blue check marks.”

Musk also floated the idea Wednesday of incorporating banking into Twitter, though it was clear the idea was at a very early stage. He described how users might attach an authenticated bank account to their Twitter handle, move cash into Twitter and even use debit cards tied to the site. Twitter, he said, could be the site of “an extremely compelling money-market account.”

Any move into banking would likely subject Twitter to regulatory scrutiny.

At the end of the meeting Wednesday, Musk said that he will measure success in his ownership of Twitter through more users signing up and more people using Twitter. He also wants to make sure no one regrets spending their time on the platform, and that it serves “the greater good of civilization.”

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