Elon Musk addressed Twitter employees in an all-hands Q&A meeting Thursday, providing some details about his plans for the social platform.
When Musk first announced his intention to buy Twitter for $44 billion, one of his biggest gripes was with the platform's bots and fake accounts. He proposed “authenticating all humans” on Twitter to combat the problem.
In Thursday's call, however, he clarified that he doesn’t think human authentication should be a requirement to use Twitter. He added that anonymity, through which people might more freely express their political views, is a priority for him. The billionaire told the staff he believed users should be allowed to say "pretty outrageous things" on the site as long as the content is not illegal.
Twitter’s current guidelines ban attacking or threatening people based on race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, disability, etc. Musk's impending takeover has been met with concern among the company's employees, some of whom have worried Musk would ease the rules. A tweet by a user named Lydia Leitermann contained video of Musk's statement regarding free speech on Twitter that was leaked by Project Veritas.
Musk, who is Tesla's chief executive and CEO of SpaceX, also told the Twitter staff he wants to raise the platform's userbase from 229 million to at least a billion.
He didn't offer any updates on the deal's closing.