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THE DIGITAL TOWN SQUARE'S TOWN SQUARE

Here's What We Learned From Elon Musk's Q&A On Twitter Spaces

Molly Bradley
Molly Bradley
Here's What We Learned From Elon Musk's Q&A On Twitter Spaces
Elon Musk hosted a Q&A in Twitter Spaces, open to the public. Here are some of the takeaways and reactions.
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On November 9, Elon Musk hosted a Q&A in Twitter Spaces, open to the public. The session was hosted by Twitter’s Client Solutions Leader Robin Wheeler, who was joined by Musk, Twitter’s Trust & Safety Head Yoel Roth and International Advertising Bureau CEO David Cohen.



Journalists and listeners on Twitter reported that the session was fairly unstructured, meandering between the big topics Musk has been talking about since he started working to purchase the platform: his desire for Twitter to be “a force for good for civilization,” his ideas about monetization and user verification.

A few takeaways, transcribed in Tech Crunch’s coverage and from Twitter:


On his goals for the platform

We really want to be, as I’ve mentioned before publicly, sort of the digital town square, where that is as inclusive as possible… Like, can we get 80% of humanity on Twitter, and talking, and maybe, ideally, in a positive way? Can we exchange… instead of having violence, have words, and maybe once in a while people change their minds? The overarching goal here is like, how can we make Twitter a force for good for civilization?

On verification

Someone has to have phone, a credit card and $8 a month. That’s the bar.


On controlling spam, trolls and fake accounts

The issue is that creating a fake account is extremely cheap, it maybe is a tenth of a penny,” he said. “By charging $8 a month, it raises the cost of a bot or troll by somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000.

Wouldn’t a state actor have $8 million a day to create a million fake accounts? Well, yes, they’ve got the budget. But here’s the problem. They don’t have a million credit cards, and they don’t have a million phones. That’s the actual kicker. There’s no way to overcome that. And we will be vigorously pursuing any impersonation.


On the reach of different users’ tweets

Over time, maybe not that long of time, when you look at mentions and replies and what not, the default will be to look at verified. You can still look at unverified, just as in your gmail or whatever, you can still look at the probable spam folder,” Musk said. “You can still look at all the others, but it will be defaulted to the highly, highly relevant category, which will be verified.



Reactions to what Musk said ranged from the optimistic to the critical. In terms of positive reactions, people seemed to appreciate that the meeting was held in an open forum, and that Musk seemed genuinely interested in answering questions and thinking things through aloud.



On the flip side, other people found the talk unfocused and Musk’s ideas concerning. People are doubtful of one particular claim that Musk seems very confident about: that if people have to pay to use Twitter, they’ll behave better on it.



Musk has yet to make a decision about charging users for Twitter accounts, and it’s unclear how he’ll fulfill his goal of making Twitter a place for free speech while simultaneously suspending accounts making jokes about him. We’ll wait with bated breath for the next Twitter Spaces session.

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