Facebook exec shot down after offering to help Elon Musk fix Twitter

‘Facebook gives me the willies,’ Twitter’s new majority stakeholder says

Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth tried to offer Elon Musk some advice as the new majority stakeholder of Twitter (Andrew Bosworth/ Twitter)

Elon Musk has told a senior executive at Facebook that the social network gives him “the willies” after the tech exec offered some unsolicited advice on how to improve Twitter.

The technology billionaire made the comments to Andrew Bosworth, the chief technology officer (CTO) of Facebook’s parent company Meta, after becoming Twitter’s majority shareholder.

Mr Musk paid nearly $3 billion for a 9.2 per cent stake in Twitter, an SEC filing revealed on Monday, leading to speculation that he would begin implementing changes to the platform.

Shortly after his acquisition was disclosed, Mr Musk posted a poll on Twitter asking if users would like an edit button feature.

Nearly three quarters of the 3 million respondents said they would like to see an edit button, which would allow people to change the content of a post after it has been published.

One of the possible issues of introducing an edit button is the potential for misuse, with people retweeting a post that is then changed to say something completely different by its author.

“We solved this on Facebook a long time ago,” Mr Bosworth wrote on Twitter in response to concerns about the edit feature being used in this way.

“You just include an indicator that it has been edited along with a change log. If you are really worried about embeds they can point to a specific revision in that history but with a link to the latest edit. Not a real issue.”

Mr Musk responded to Mr Bosworth’s suggestion: “Facebook gives me the willies.”

It is not the first time the head of SpaceX and Tesla has criticised Facebook, having removed both of these companies’ Facebook pages in 2018 amid a viral #DeleteFacebook campaign that began amid concerns over how the social media giant was using people’s data.

Mr Bosworth, who has been with Facebook since 2006, caused controversy in 2018 after an internal memo from 2016 was leaked.

In it he reportedly wrote that that the company’s growth was justified even if it cost someone their life.

“So we connect more people,” he wrote in the memo, titled ‘The Ugly’. “That can be bad if they make it negative. Maybe it costs a life by exposing someone to bullies. Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools.

“And still we connect people. The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is *de facto* good.”

The comments forced CEO Mark Zuckerberg to state that he “disagreed strongly” with the comments, adding, “we’ve never believed the ends justify the means”.