When fellow billionaire Elon Musk completes his acquisition of Twitter, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates warns that the free-speech champion may make disinformation more popular by failing to properly control speech on the social media network. In a Wall Street Journal interview on Wednesday, Gates said of Musk, “He genuinely might make things worse.” Musk, he said, has a “mind-blowing” track record of developing great firms at Tesla and SpaceX by being “truly showing them up” and being braver than rivals.
“I’m not sure it will happen this time,” Gates remarked, “but we should have an open mind and never underestimate Elon.” “What is his objective?” How does he feel about things like vaccinations killing people or Bill Gates monitoring people when he speaks about openness? Is that something he believes should be spread? As a result, it’s still… What he’s going to do isn’t quite obvious.”
Governments and social media corporations, according to Gates, failed to effectively suppress erroneous information about the Covid-19 epidemic. “It’s really hard for platforms to act against that when you don’t have trustworthy leaders speaking out against vaccinations,” he added. “I believe we have a leadership issue as well as a platform one.”
Last week, Musk secured an agreement with Twitter to purchase the firm for $44 billion. He has promised to restore the platform’s freedom of expression, raising concerns from the White House to Silicon Valley that Twitter would no longer block opinions labeled “misinformation” by establishment voices. Just two days after Twitter’s board of directors decided to accept Musk’s offer, President Joe Biden’s administration announced plans to establish a Disinformation Governance Board.
Determining whether or not speech is untrue, on the other hand, is often in the eye of the beholder. Some early-pandemic commentary, for example, was suppressed, but eventually became common, such as a hypothesis that the virus originated in a Chinese lab. Nina Jankowicz, the woman selected to lead the Disinformation Governance Board, has a history of spreading unfounded conspiracy theories, including dismissing the Hunter Biden laptop controversy as a “Russian influence job.”
“Free expression is the basis of a functional democracy,” Musk claims. “The excessive antibody response from people who fear free expression tells it all,” he taunted those who attacked his Twitter contract.
The interview with the Wall Street Journal occurred only one day after Gates told NBC News that rules “that strike a better balance of free speech against conspiracy theories confusing people” should be considered. He previously believed that “human judgment” would be powerful enough to stop the spread of wildly incorrect statements, but he changed his mind on Wednesday.
“That hasn’t prevented the weird things from coming out and sort of connecting with people so far, at least under the stress of the epidemic,” Gates said.
The vaccination and climate-change campaigner said that he is unsure if Musk would improve or degrade Twitter. “The fact that he didn’t purchase Twitter for-profit implies that if there’s anything fantastic that can be done if all you need is money and smart engineers, he’s probably as good as anybody.”
Are his intentions for what it becomes compatible with the concept of less severe lies spreading so rapidly — strange conspiracy theories? Is he on board with that aim or not?
Musk accused Gates of short-selling Tesla stock only days before striking an agreement with Twitter, basically wagering on the electric car maker’s price to plummet.
After learning that Gates was shorting Tesla, he declined a meeting to discuss climate-change philanthropy with him, reportedly saying, “Sorry, I cannot take your philanthropy on climate change seriously when you have a massive short position against Tesla, the company doing the most to solve climate change.” “It’s conceivable that the price went down and whoever shorted the stock gained money, I don’t know,” Gates remarked on Wednesday when asked whether he had shorted Tesla shares. I don’t believe that being a short or long Tesla says anything about how concerned you are about climate change.”