Elon Musk Outlines His Vision for Twitter at Morgan Stanley Tech Conference

So what’s Elon Musk’s long run imaginative and prescient for Twitter, and the way does he plan to transform the app right into a billion-user, money-making machine, as he’s repeatedly stated in interviews?

Immediately, we bought a take a look at Elon’s broader strategic considering across the app, together with some new updates on how Twitter 2.0 is progressing on numerous parts.

Musk made a brand new presentation on Twitter, and his different companies, to the Morgan Stanley Tech, Media and Telecommunications Conference in San Francisco, the place Musk provided perception into a number of key points, together with their work on mitigating hate speech, the expansion in utilization of the app, and the grander imaginative and prescient to transform Twitter right into a key funds and commerce app.

First off, Musk outlined his basic imaginative and prescient for Twitter, and making it the ‘global town square’ as soon as once more.

Twitter has at all times had this as a defining objective, of types, although it moved away from the ‘town square’ framing within the latter years below former CEO Jack Dorsey, who grew to become disillusioned with the inevitable calls that needed to be made by Twitter administration on what might and couldn’t be shared within the app.

That’s been a defining component of Musk’s push to reform Twitter’s strategy, by permitting extra free and open speech, and ideally, letting the customers resolve what needs to be allowed, with Neighborhood Notes set to play an even bigger position in enabling Twitter customers themselves to police misinformation and untruths by including contextual explainers to particular person tweets.

Musk additionally laid out Twitter 2.0’s core rules, which he hopes will ultimately make Twitter a supply of fact, by empowering enter from all individuals.

As per Musk:

“So the goal is to have Twitter be the best source of truth, the most timely and accurate source of truth, even if the truth is something we don’t want to hear or unpleasant or whatever, but have it be timely and accurate and where you can really understand what’s going on.”

Musk additional defined that the media is at the moment in a position to management key narratives by selecting what to cowl, and what will get prime precedence. However Twitter allows all individuals to resolve what’s related sooner, by facilitating extra inputs. Which is why, in Musk’s view, it’s vital that Twitter permits free and open speech, as a lot as potential.

“The bedrock of a functioning democracy has to be free speech and a level playing field. That’s why it’s the first amendment. It was the first thing they did, like we’ve got to ensure freedom of speech. And why did they do that? Because where they came from there wasn’t freedom of speech, and once you lose freedom of speech, you don’t get it back. So that’s why we must protect it at all costs.”

This has been a key component of Musk’s broader push on the app, which he’s bolstered along with his personal tweets on numerous controversial subjects.

Which then results in issues round what individuals may truly say within the app, and the way that would result in hurt and destructive behaviors. On this entrance, Musk additionally outlined Twitter’s progress in addressing hate speech, which Musk says is now down 50% from when he took over on the app.

Some consultants have questioned Twitter’s metrics on this, and we don’t have entry to precisely what this information means – however based mostly on the important thing parts that the Twitter 2.0 workforce is measuring, it’s working to deal with probably dangerous parts, which ought to result in an improved consumer expertise.

In fact, letting tens of thousands of previously banned users again on the app appears to work counter to this objective, however once more, based mostly on the metrics that Musk and his workforce are monitoring, it’s seemingly seeing enchancment.

The identical can be stated for little one exploitation content material.

Musk has repeatedly claimed, as this graph reveals, that Twitter is doing extra to deal with CSE content material than Twitter has ever completed up to now. Specialists have refuted these figures as nicely, however Twitter is seemingly, by at the very least some measures, taking extra motion to deal with this component, which Musk says will at all times be precedence primary on the app.

Although bigger modifications stay problematic. As we noticed earlier this week, Twitter does appear to be turning into more and more unstable, resulting in bigger outages and impacts, seemingly as a result of decreased oversight on account of workers cuts.

Musk admitted that this can be a drawback, noting that the present code base is liable to failure when making even the slightest change.

However nonetheless, even with elevated error charges, Musk says that Twitter utilization is at an all-time excessive, with greater than 250 million every day energetic customers.

It’s value noting that this chart measures as much as This fall, and experiences have prompt that Twitter utilization has declined significantly since then. Besides, Twitter’s reputation has elevated below Musk – to not the degrees that Musk would clearly like (with regard to that billion-user goal), however it’s on monitor to see enchancment, if it may get all of its parts into line.

On that entrance, Musk briefly mentioned his plans to enhance Twitter’s advert relevance, and drive higher efficiency via numerous concentrating on measures.

A few of this revolved round easy measures, like key phrase concentrating on, which Twitter has beforehand moved away from as a result of decreased advertiser efficiency. Elon is now trying to implement extra direct concentrating on choices like this, with advertisers in a position to spotlight their content material inside associated discussions within the app.

Lastly, Musk mentioned his longer-term imaginative and prescient for Twitter, and making it into the ‘everything app’, which largely revolves round integrating funds.

“I think it’s possible to create a very powerful finance experience. Basically, PayPal is kind of like a halfway version of what I think could be done in payments and finance. So, let’s say you want to be able to send money easily from one account on Twitter to another account effortlessly, with one click, you want to be able to earn interest on that money, you want to be able to have debt, so you can let your interest can go negative. Basically, I think it’s possible to become the biggest financial institution in the world, just by providing people with convenient payment options. We don’t have the time to go into it in detail here, but if we just make the app more and more useful, people will use it more and it’ll be great.”

The imaginative and prescient is that, ultimately, by enabling funds through tweet, Twitter will have the ability to facilitate extra kinds of transactions, which is able to make it a extra helpful app, for all completely different functions, just like how Chinese language messaging apps like WeChat have grow to be important utilities in that area.

In fact, Meta’s additionally making an attempt to facilitate the identical factor, and only in the near past bought approval to expand WhatsApp payments usage in Brazil, whereas it’s additionally gaining traction with WhatsApp funds in India, seemingly the important thing marketplace for such a shift.

However success on this space won’t come straightforward, particularly amid ongoing regulatory scrutiny, and given Musk’s defiant angle to different regulatory teams, just like the SEC, it’s onerous to see Twitter ever gaining the approval required to facilitate such.

Nonetheless, that’s the longer-term imaginative and prescient, that Twitter will grow to be a key supply of fact in journalism, and a key utility in facilitating extra kinds of funds, which is able to then make it a vital app for a lot of extra individuals. It’s an optimistic technique, which requires many issues to go proper, however Musk says that, after huge cost-cutting, the app is, probably, on monitor to be money constructive by the top of this 12 months.

That, as a minimum, offers him firmer footing to construct from, and possibly, Elon’s imaginative and prescient is past what others can but see for the app.

You’ll be able to take a look at Elon’s full presentation to the Morgan Stanley TMT Conference here.