Free speech is the bedrock of democracy, and X is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated.[177]
Importance of Free Speech
There is a lot of wisdom in our Constitution's amendments.[158] Even in many developed countries similar to the United States, the speech laws are draconian.[50]
A lot of freedoms we take for granted in the United States don't exist in Canada. There is no constitutional right to freedom of speech in Canada.[158]
The reason for the First Amendment (freedom of speech) is people who immigrated to the U.S. came from places where they could not speak freely. If they said certain things, they got imprisoned or killed. They thought, ‘Remember that time when they tried to kill us back in the other country just for saying we didn't like a political candidate? We don't want that here. We must make that the first constitutional right.’
The First Amendment is critical. We want the perception and reality that speech is as free as reasonably possible. A good sign of free speech is when someone you don't like can say something you don't like. It's annoying, but that's a sign of a healthy, functioning free speech environment.[15]
When you live in a place where people you hate can say things you hate – that means someone else can’t stop you from saying what you want to say.[155] As soon as you concede to censorship, it is only a matter of time before someone censors you.[158]
Free speech only matters when it's someone you don't like saying something you don’t like. Other types of speech are easy to accept.[50]
I can't emphasize this enough: We must protect free speech.[50]
A mind virus is a concept that infects people's minds. We need to be concerned about mind viruses: memes that travel quickly through social media.[2] It’s how a wrong-headed idea goes viral. Most people don’t understand that their minds can be taken over by a virus, just like a computer virus takes over your computer.[64]
The globalization of the memesphere on social media makes this danger more acute. There's not enough isolation between countries or regions. If there's a mind virus, it can infect too much of the world too quickly. I sympathize slightly with the anti-globalization view because we don't ever want everywhere to be the same. We need some mind-viral immunity.[2]
In particular, the woke mind virus is a civilizational threat.[154]
Free speech used to be a left or liberal value, and yet we see from the “left” a desire to censor. That seems crazy. I think we should be extremely concerned about anything that undermines the First Amendment.[50]
We need to be cautious about anything anti-meritocratic and anything that results in the suppression of free speech. Those are the two most dangerous aspects of the “woke mind virus.” It's often anti-meritocratic in that you can't question things. Even the questioning is considered bad. It is not good for civilization when even discussing a topic is ‘not allowed.’[50]
We want to encourage a healthy dialogue. There are people who want to shut down one side of a debate. We should resist that.[157]
The Woke Mind Virus is communism rebranded.[154]
Why I bought Twitter
Q: What was the problem with Twitter?
Old Twitter was basically an arm of the government, though this was not fully understood by the public. It was basically a state publication. Anything or anyone the government didn't like, they had social media platforms censor. They called it “deamplify.”[155]
Old Twitter was propagating the mind virus and suppressing any opposing viewpoints. (For the virus to propagate, it must suppress opposing viewpoints.)[155]
How many far-left people were suspended or banned from Twitter? Zero. Republicans were oppressed at 10x the rate of Democrats. There was oppression of views that would even be considered moderate because Old Twitter was completely controlled by the far left.
The government itself is not allowed to censor speech. But in my view, the government censored speech by proxy, and the case should at least be heard by the public. If the government severely coerces a platform or the press, then that should be a First Amendment violation. There should be repercussions.
I was worried it was having a corrosive effect on civilization.
I believe being located in downtown San Francisco contributed to this problem. San Francisco/Berkeley is a niche far-left ideology. From their standpoint, everything is to the right, including moderates. They naturally oppressed anything that didn't agree with their views. Twitter accidentally became a far-left information weapon.[155]
Silicon Valley attracts the smartest engineers in the world. These technologists and programmers built this information weapon which was then harnessed by the far left, who could not have created it themselves, but happened to be located where the weapon was created.
Normally the negative effects of a far-left ideology would be geographically limited to a 10-mile radius. But when you have a technological megaphone like Twitter, suddenly the far-left is handed a megaphone to Earth. It propagated that far-left philosophy, not just to America, but everywhere on Earth.
I thought civilizational risk decreased the more we could increase trust in Twitter as a public platform.[15]
It was important to have at least one social media outlet that wasn't canceling people.[155]
Q: And you thought you could buy Twitter and restore trust?
I knew it would be painful. But I thought it was important to the function of democracy. Twitter is important to the freedom of the United States and other countries around the world.[15]
Buying Twitter was not a way to make money. The intent was to retain as many shareholders as allowed by the law in a private company. It was not from the standpoint of me trying to monopolize or maximize my ownership of Twitter.[15]
My strong intuitive sense is that having a maximally trusted and broadly inclusive public platform is extremely important to the future of civilization. I don't care about the economics at all.[15]
Q: It was expensive. What do you think it was actually worth?
Everything.[155]
X
My aspiration for the X platform is to be the best source of truth – or the least inaccurate source of truth.[64]
We're trying to create the shared consciousness of humanity. If each person is a neuron contributing to the collective brain of Earth, we want to minimize the noise and maximize the signal of every neuron connected to the X Network.[172]
The aspiration for X is to be the global town square. If you were to walk in a real city, do you occasionally hear people saying crazy things?[158] Of course. There will be views there you don’t like or disagree with. But that's humanity. Are you going to exclude them or not?[155]
The joke I used to make about Old Twitter was, it was like giving everyone in the psych ward a megaphone. Political discourse moved back toward the center. But from the perspective of the far-left, it moved to the right. Everything's relative.[155]
X’s goal is to be as even-handed and fair as possible. We're trying to be inclusive for the United States and for other countries too, so there's a diversity of viewpoints.[154]
We want the leaders of all countries on social media. We want to hear what they have to say – even (or perhaps especially) if what they say is terrible.[155]
The only media that does not have crazy censorship is X. Everything else is censored.[155]
There are people who want to manipulate information. We have to fight that. We have to try and be the most accurate marketplace, where people can propose ideas and debate them.[172]
History used to be written by The Victors. These days if the loser is still alive and has time on their hands to edit Wikipedia, then history is not just written by the winners. The reason history was written by The Victors in the old days is because the losers were dead. Now they're very much alive and have time on their hands.[173]
Wikipedia is hierarchical, whereas Community Notes is not. I can't change a Community Note if you put a gun to my head. With Community Notes, all the data and code are one hundred percent open-source. You can completely trace and recreate any note in the system independently. If there was any interference, you'd notice immediately.[154]
The best source of truth tends to be where there is publicly disseminated information. That's X. Now people may say, ‘There's this piece of misinformation.’ I say, ‘Yes but look at the replies, the replies correct that misinformation.’
No system will be perfect, but the batting average of Community Notes is incredibly good. I've yet to see an incorrect note survive for more than a few hours.[154] It's the best fact-checking system on the internet.[172]
For a Community Note to be shown, people who have historically disagreed on a subject must agree. That's the magic of it. It makes sense that if people who in the past have disagreed, agree about something, it's probably true.[154]
Community Notes is fantastic at correcting falsehoods by adding context. We make a point of not removing anything but only adding context. Now, that context could include, ‘This is completely false and here's why.’ No one is immune to this. I'm not immune to it and neither are advertisers.
At one point Uber ran an ad that said, ‘Earn like a boss.’ It was community noted, ‘If by boss you mean $11.77 an hour.’ This caused a temporary suspension of advertising from Uber.[158]
Honesty is the best policy and the truth will win over time.[158]