Conservative actor James Woods wasted no time giving two powerful suggestions for Elon Musk after the Tesla CEO tweeted that he was “looking forward” to “make significant improvements to Twitter in coming months!”
“Dear @elonmusk, welcome to Twitter. I join millions of users in hoping your presence will restore integrity to this once valuable forum. Two thoughts: Remove all politically motivated algorithms from the site. Make people have to use their real identities to end abuse,” James Woods tweeted.
Dear @elonmusk, welcome to Twitter. I join millions of users in hoping your presence will restore integrity to this once valuable forum.
Two thoughts:
Remove all politically motivated algorithms from the site.
Make people have to use their real identities to end abuse.
— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) April 5, 2022
News had broken in the previous day and a half that Elon Musk was now Twitter’s largest shareholder and he had subsequently been appointed to the board of the company.
On Tuesday, April 5th, after Monday’s news that Musk had become Twitter’s largest shareholder, taking a 9.2% stake in the social media platform, Twitter’s CEO Parag Agrawal announced that the company would appoint Musk to its board of directors.
Musk, who on March 25th had asked his followers to vote in a poll about free speech and Twitter’s adherence to it, replied to Agrawal that he was “looking forward” to working with him to “make significant improvements to Twitter in coming months!”
Agrawal’s tweet read: “I’m excited to share that we’re appointing @elonmusk to our board! Through conversations with Elon in recent weeks, it became clear to us that he would bring great value to our Board.”
“He’s both a passionate believer and intense critic of the service which is exactly what we need on @Twitter, and in the boardroom, to make us stronger in the long-term. Welcome Elon!” he added.
He’s both a passionate believer and intense critic of the service which is exactly what we need on @Twitter, and in the boardroom, to make us stronger in the long-term. Welcome Elon!
— Parag Agrawal (@paraga) April 5, 2022
“Looking forward to working with Parag & Twitter board to make significant improvements to Twitter in coming months!” Musk replied.
Looking forward to working with Parag & Twitter board to make significant improvements to Twitter in coming months!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 5, 2022
In March, Musk asked in a Twitter poll: “Free speech is essential to a functioning democracy. Do you believe Twitter rigorously adheres to this principle? The consequences of this poll will be important. Please vote carefully.”
In an interview in 2020, when he served as Twitter’s Chief Technology officer, Agrawal was asked, “You’re caught in a bit of a hard place as somebody in the audience is also pointing out, that you’re trying to combat misinformation, you also want to protect free speech as a core value, and also in the U.S. as the first amendment. How do you balance those two?”
His answer shocked many people. He said:
Our role is not to be bound by the First Amendment, but our role is to serve a healthy public conversation and our moves are reflective of things that we believe lead to a healthier public conversation. The kinds of things that we do about this is, focus less on thinking about free speech, but thinking about how the times have changed. One of the changes today that we see is speech is easy on the internet. Most people can speak. Where our role is particularly emphasized is who can be heard. The scarce commodity today is attention. There’s a lot of content out there. A lot of tweets out there, not all of it gets attention, some subset of it gets attention. And so increasingly our role is moving towards how we recommend content and that sort of, is, is, a struggle that we’re working through in terms of how we make sure these recommendation systems that we’re building, how we direct people’s attention is leading to a healthy public conversation that is most participatory.
