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"Elon's Twitter" Partial Transcript:
David Bozell: Alright, Elon, Elon Musk, who I did not know is the richest guy in the world. I don't know when he passed Bezos, but I guess that he is the world's richest man. And apparently, I saw somewhere where his purchase of the 9.2% share of the company amounted to, I guess that is like 1% of his net worth. So, a drop in the bucket for Mr. Musk, the space man, the electric car man.
And look, there's a lot of, a lot of conservatives out there thinking that maybe he might be a hero here when it comes to free speech on Twitter. And he might, I mean, he is certainly going to make the shareholder meetings a hell of a lot more interesting, that's for sure. And the board meetings, I mean, they basically had to...he basically forced himself onto the board with that purchase.
Rachel Bovard, who's one of my favorite writers. She's just absolutely brilliant when it comes to tech policy. Works over at Conservative Partnership Institute. So, she came out with a six-item, a list of six recommendations for Elon Musk, when it comes to Twitter....
Rachel has got a list of recommendations for Elon to take into these board meetings and I'll go through some of them.
There's a lot of which I agree with, obviously, the number one, let Trump back on Twitter. That's a no brainer. Former president of the United States, needs to be done.
Number two, stop shadow banning and deplatforming misinformation. Totally agree....
Number three, move Twitter offices out of Silicon Valley. That's creative. Sure why the hell not. Anywhere, other than San Francisco would be an improvement. You could say that about the federal government too. Department of Transportation should probably be in Detroit. Interior should be in an interior state. Department of Agriculture should be in an ag state. So yeah, sure. Get Twitter out of Silicon Valley, improve your employee base for sure.
Number four, enforce the First Amendment. Okay, sure. I get it.
Number five, give users power over their own content. She's right. She says, let third parties develop newsfeed and moderation algorithms that sort content around hobbies, viewpoints, and/or content that's on Twitter, but that the user does not want to see. I mean, I think that stuff's there. You could sort it by topic, if you'd like. It's kind of hard to do. So, certainly, some improvements can be made there. But yeah, yeah, just the improvements need to be made in terms of giving a user an ability to view what type of content that they want to see.
Number six, give a blue check mark to anyone who verifies his identity. Okay, I don't really care about that one. I don't care about blue checks and verified people, et cetera, et cetera.
Listen, the best advice I can give Elon Musk and this is how I'm going to rate his acquisition of Twitter as a major shareholder. The biggest, biggest criticism of Twitter beyond the Trump episode and beyond its censorship of conservatism is Twitter does not accurately reflect real life.
The biggest sort of throw, not throwaway, but tossed out there line about Twitter is that Twitter is not real life. And the best thing Elon could do, whether it's from a technical side, technological side, or from a content moderation side, the best thing he could do for Twitter is to make the content that you see more accurately reflective of what's going on in the real world....
But if Elon can make Twitter more accurately reflective of the world around us, his acquisition will have been successful, left, right, or indifferent. That's my advice to Mr. Musk. Not that he needs it. He's the billionaire. I'm not. But if I could pick his brain and have a beer with him, and the guy smokes joints too. I mean, shoot, if I had to do that just to get this idea in front of him, I might. But if I had one suggestion - make Twitter accurately reflect what's going on in real life.
Alright, take it easy.
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