Elon Musk has attempted to win back advertisers to his social media platform X with his appearance at the Cannes Lions advertising conference held in France.
During the session “Exploring the New Frontiers of Innovation,” Musk was questioned over why he told off advertisers at a New York conference last November.
Musk had told advertisers to “Go f**k yourself” after companies including Apple, Disney and IBM began boycotting X over incidents of antisemitism and other hate speech on the platform, which saw X's advertising income plunge.
On Wednesday, Musk stated that his comment “wasn’t to advertisers as a whole” but was “in respect to freedom of speech.”
“It is important to have a global free speech platform where people with a wide range of opinions can voice their views. In some cases, there were advertisers who were insisting on censorship.”
He added: “Of course, advertisers have a right to appear next to content they find compatible with their brands. What is not cool is insisting that there can be no content that they disagree with on the platforms.”
He also told attendees that X is a better news source than newspapers.
“You have tens of millions of posts. Far more than you can find in a newspaper is gathered in posts,” he said. “On the X system, although people have said it’s incorrect, it’s very quickly corrected. The internet is aggregating the wisdom in the field. Experts in the field know more than reporters.”
The conversation also covered AI, with Musk predicting that the chance of an AI-related disaster is between 10% to 20%.
“I tend to agree with Geoff Hinton – one of the godfathers of AI – and he thinks there’s a 10% to 20% probability of something terrible happening,” he said.