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The world loves a tragic love story. Romeo and Juliet, Jack and Rose, Elon and Twitter. This one started with infatuation.
I think he had an adrenaline rush, almost like he was playing video games. He would stay up late at night and compulsively and impulsively tweet things. And that started back 10 years ago, almost. Certainly in 2018, when he was going through a mental meltdown and Tesla was about to go under and Amber Heard had broken up with him. That's Musk's biographer, Walter Isaacson, who spent two years shadowing him.
Long before the world's richest man owned Twitter, he was obsessed with Twitter. And saying pretty bad things on it, calling a cave diver from England a pedophile or saying he was going to take Tesla private and he had funding secured.
And at one point, one of his friends, when they were traveling, said, "Let me take your phone. I'm going to put it in the hotel room safe and punch a code in so you can't get it and tweet at night." But at 3:00 a.m., he called hotel security and made them open the safe. But Twitter wasn't just an addiction for Musk. For a long time, it seemed like it might have actually been good for him. Twitter was the source of his persona and popularity. It's what got him a hosting gig on Saturday Night Live.
Look, I know I sometimes say or post strange things, but that's just how my brain works. To anyone I've offended, I just want to say I reinvented electric cars and I'm sending people to Mars in a rocket ship. Did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?
In January 2022, he had a following of more than 70 million people on Twitter. And they didn't just follow him, some of them built a cult around him. So much so that if Musk announced he was buying Bitcoin or he's buying Dogecoin, those prices would skyrocket. And Musk thought his Twitter fame was helping him sell Teslas. Tesla famously didn't spend any money on advertising. It had Musk and his Twitter account. And that seemed to be working really well.
Elon Musk is currently the world's richest person and he has no problem bragging about it. By the start of 2022, Tesla was worth a trillion dollars. But he doesn't like it when things are going well. He loves a storm. He loves drama. He loves what he calls surges.
Tesla was worth more than Toyota, Daimler, General Motors, Ford and Volkswagen combined. And Musk was bored. He said, "Okay, I got to push my chips back on the table and do something new." And he said, "What product do I particularly like?" His favorite toy. Musk wanted to buy shares of Twitter. And within the first few months of 2022, he'd snapped up 9% of the company, enough to make him the biggest shareholder.
News that Musk owned a chunk of Twitter made Twitter shares go up, too. The people who ran the company weren't entirely sure what to do about that. But they didn't think they wanted Musk to end up buying the whole thing. They had offered him a board seat on Twitter. In return, he had to stop buying stock at a certain limit, so he couldn't take control. Musk was the inspiration for Robert Downey Jr.'s portrayal of Tony Stark, also known as Iron Man in the Marvel movies. Very cool.
But that's a superhero movie. In reality, Musk is probably not someone you want running your company. He's erratic and impulsive, a chaos agent.
At first, Musk agreed to the board seat. He went off to Hawaii to visit a woman he was dating at the time, the actress Natasha Bassett, borrowed Larry Ellison's house. Larry Ellison is a tech mogul who is also one of the world's richest men. As we're recording this, he's number four on Forbes' billionaires list, three spots behind Musk. He owns almost all of the island of Lanai. But for Musk,
Hanging out with his girlfriend on a Hawaiian estate wasn't enough to keep him occupied. Then he started texting and emailing Parag Agarwal, who was the CEO, and making suggestions. And Elon Musk is sort of a controlling type person. And when he makes suggestions, he hates it when they get totally ignored.
And of course, he was still tweeting. Now Musk was tweeting about Twitter. Tweets like, "Is Twitter dying?" Which is not normally what board members say about their companies. He spent almost two nights in these text battles with Barag and other members of the Twitter management and finally decided he was going to go hostile.
He went up to Vancouver, where he was speaking at a TED conference, and he was so worked up, he stayed up till 5:30 in the morning trying to get to the top level of the game Elden Ring, which he did. And at around 5:30, he sends out a message, "I made an offer."
Musk sent that message on April 14th, 2022, and he made the deal a couple weeks later. Then he tried to back out of the deal, and he was taken to court, and then he eventually bought Twitter for real in October. Now here we are, after a little more than a year, living in Elon Musk's Twitter fantasy. This is Land of the Giants. I'm Peter Kofkin. ♪
When Elon Musk bought Twitter, he tweeted a video of himself showing up at Twitter HQ carrying an actual sink. Quote, let that sink in. And that's been the vibe ever since. We are not going to do a play-by-play of Musk's first year at Twitter on this podcast, partly because it would be exhausting, and also because you know a lot of it. But as a reminder, here are some of the big ones. He fired 80% of the staff.
He reinstated Donald Trump's account, along with thousands of others who'd been tossed out by previous management. People like Jordan Peterson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Andrew Tate. He took away the verified blue check previously handed out to celebrities, government officials, and journalists, and he replaced that with a pay-to-play scheme selling the checks to literally anyone who would pay $8 a month. He renamed the site X, which is his right, but I am not going to call it that here.
Before he bought Twitter, Musk said he didn't care how the company fared financially. I'm not sure that's true, but he's acting like it's true. He paid $44 billion for Twitter. A year later, he told employees it was worth $19 billion. And even that may be generous.
What does Elon Musk care about? That's a tricky one. The man is the definition of an unreliable narrator. Sometimes he means what he says. Sometimes he's joking. Sometimes he means it and changes his mind. But one thing he has said a lot is that he cares about a quote, woke mind virus. To him, that's a synonym for the far left. Musk thinks it's a virus that has infected the world and Twitter and buying Twitter is a way for him to fight that.
Here he is on Joe Rogan in October 2023. When you have basically a technological megaphone, which was Twitter and social media in general, suddenly the far left are handed a megaphone to Earth. This is going to sound somewhat melodramatic, but I was worried about that it was having a corrosive effect on civilization.
Look, Musk is complicated and impulsive. So if you boil all this down to Musk paid $44 billion for Twitter so he could free humanity from the woke mind virus, you're getting it wrong. But this is the story that he tells now. It's the lens he wants you to use to view his actions. So in this episode, we are going to kind of take him at his word and follow his actions. What happens when the world's richest man buys the global town square and announces that they're doing it all wrong?
Elon Musk had a very long to-do list when he bought Twitter. He still found time to ping Matt Taibbi. Officially, I'm supposed to say that sources at Twitter reached out to me? Taibbi is a journalist known for his contrarian reporting. He'd been a longtime writer at Rolling Stone. During the Trump years, he'd become increasingly critical of the way mainstream media covered allegations of Russian election interference. He thought they'd overblown the whole thing.
I got a communication out of the blue and was invited to go out to San Francisco and talked with the management, talked with Elon about it. The whole thing kind of came together pretty quickly. The whole thing was this. Musk wanted Taibbi and a few other journalists to comb through all of the communications between Twitter's previous leaders and dig up dirt. He'd give them unprecedented access to the company's files.
Taibbi says Musk didn't really care what the dirt was, but he had some ideas. It was very open-ended. I mean, I asked what Elon's thinking was. His concerns were that he wanted to restore some credibility in the platform, was the way he phrased it, by disclosing to the users what had been going on with content moderation. In the run-up to actually buying Twitter, Musk floated a bunch of different reasons he thought Twitter was failing.
Too many bots, not enough new products, famous people have stopped using it. But one recurring reason was this. He thought Twitter had been run by a regime that had been censoring people and ideas. He wanted to reverse that, and he wanted Taibbi to prove he was right. From his point of view, it probably didn't matter what I came up with. It was more about releasing anything, and that would probably assuage the public's demand.
demand for some transparency or something like that. The only requirement was that whatever Tybee published had to get published on Twitter in tweet form. And you very rarely get the golden ticket where Mr. Wonka himself calls you up and invites you to run through the factory wild, but that's kind of what this was. I mean, of course you're always worried that there's a catch. I mean, nothing in life is for free.
The other journalist who dug into the Twitter files at first was Barry Weiss, formerly of the New York Times. Like Taibbi, she had carved out a reputation as someone who delighted in undermining the official narrative. Weiss looked into the story behind Twitter booting Donald Trump off the platform. Taibbi looked into the time that Twitter took down links to the New York Post story about Hunter Biden's laptop. We talked about that on the last episode.
We had a period where we were just searching with a couple of laptops open-endedly through Slack, and there wasn't any kind of filtering. But we got a ton of material. Musk hyped the stories he'd commissioned.
They weren't just going to blow people's minds. They were important. That's why he was tweeting stuff like this. Quote, this is a battle for the future of civilization. If free speech is lost, even in America, tyranny is all that lies ahead. But what Weiss and Taibbi produced was anticlimactic. Taibbi's theory was that he'd find evidence proving the FBI told Twitter to censor the Biden laptop story. By his own admission, he didn't find that.
Instead, Taibbi and Weiss's stories primarily showed a lot of evidence of Twitter employees debating each other, debating what to do about the laptop stories and what to do about Trump. Interesting if you want to peek inside how this stuff works, but not the smoking gun Musk was hoping for.
And days after the first set of Twitter files ran, Weiss and Musk were on the outs. Musk was mad at Weiss because she complained that Musk ran the platform on, quote, whims and biases. This was after he'd booted several established reporters off Twitter for linking to a site that tracked his private jet.
This is Musk defending his decision to a group of journalists on Twitter Spaces. There is not going to be any distinction in the future between journalists and regular people. Everyone's going to be treated the same. They're not special because you're a journalist. You're a citizen. So no special treatment. You dox, you get suspended. End of story.
And that was that for Weiss and the Twitter files. But Taibbi kept at it for a few more months, with stories that focused primarily on government agencies reaching out to Twitter. Taibbi framed this as an attempt to censor ideas and voices that the government didn't like.
I think it makes a lot of sense for governments to say, hey, you've got a real situation here. You need to look at that. But the problem, the thing that we discovered is that they weren't doing that. They were using very, very loose interpretations of what they thought a violation of terms of service was or what they thought was threatening or what they thought was dangerous or harmful. And those categories kept expanding as time went on.
In many cases, Twitter rejected or ignored government requests. But Taibbi still thinks he was cataloging a disturbing coziness between Twitter and the government. He's disappointed the stories he wrote didn't register with traditional media outlets, and he says he would still be writing them. Except he's not working with Elon Musk anymore either.
In April 2023, for reasons we won't bore you with, Musk went after Substack, the platform Taibbi was using to publish his newsletter. Taibbi told Musk publicly that choking off Substack meant choking off Taibbi. We had a very brief exchange after that in which I said, what would you have me do as a Substack contributor? He said, move to Twitter Notes or Twitter Subs and essentially change my arrangement. And I said, the problem...
The problem with that was that if we had any kind of financial relationship, all the Twitter files reports would be impugned on that basis. Then the stories Taibbi wrote mysteriously and briefly disappeared from Twitter. They're back now. So five months after he personally recruited Taibbi and Weiss and told them they were doing important work, Musk was over it. Here he is on Twitter spaces a few days after he broke up with Taibbi.
At some point we need to move on from the Twitter files, but I think there's a few things left. There's not a lot that I'm aware of that's left. It's mostly just like, you know, let's just move on to the future. So now I'm massively shadow banned like all kinds of other people on Twitter. I probably get 20 or 30 times less traffic than I used to now. Even if you follow me on Twitter, you probably don't see my tweets or you only see them occasionally.
If I was writing a novel or a screenplay and I had the character who came in because he wanted to help uncover manipulation on a platform from the new owner who wanted that story told and then ends up getting essentially pushed off the platform, some might say that's a little too on the nose.
Did you imagine this scenario playing out like this? I mean, clearly it became obvious over time that he had a very fickle relationship to his understanding of what free speech was and what his responsibilities were. So, yeah, I did think that that could happen. Looking back, it's worth it. I'll end up losing money on this story, but I don't care. I think it was a great story. It's a story, for sure. For the record, we reached out to Twitter multiple times for this episode, and it did not respond with any comment.
I think the Twitter Files tells you a story about Elon Musk, that he showed up at Twitter determined to embarrass the previous managers and to prove out his woke mind infects everything around me theory. And then he got bored with it and fought with the people he brought in to do it. And that in the end, his ideologies, no matter how important he says they are, are always going to clash with his impulses.
But how did he come to this ideology in the first place? Because it wasn't evident for a while. When Elon Musk was getting into his Tony Stark phase, part of his appeal, at least for some people, was that he combined rich nerd guy with at least a hand wave towards liberalishness.
He raised money for Barack Obama. He supported Democrats, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden. But for the past three years, he's been shifting more to the right, especially the populist, pugnacious right. Here's Walter Isaacson. Part of it was COVID lockdowns were too strong. He also had his eldest child who had transitioned
and become a daughter, Jenna. And he got his head around the transitioning, but she became such a progressive,
anti-capitalist, that she rejected him and rejected his name and wouldn't speak to him because he was a billionaire capitalist. And then thirdly, Democrats from Elizabeth Warren to California Assemblywomen were attacking him from the left and saying he didn't pay enough taxes when he in fact had just paid more taxes than any person in history had ever paid to any entity. So he shifted to the right
And he self-described it as a reaction to wokeness or the woke mind virus. For Musk, being anti-woke meant being for free speech. And being for free speech on a place like Twitter seemed easy. It just meant that anyone could say anything as long as it wasn't against the law.
I don't think he thought through deeply the issue of content moderation before he bought the platform. And I remember being at the Texas Tesla factory just as it was opening, and some of his friends, like Ken Howery, who were libertarian and believed very much in free speech, questioning him almost Socratically and saying, well, does that mean that anything anybody says can be amplified on the platform?
How do you deal with Kanye West, or Ye, as he called himself? How do you deal with a Donald Trump? And I could watch Musk start to process the fact that content moderation was more complicated. But in the end, he became Elon Musk and decided he was just going to be the impulsive sole arbiter
Musk may be the sole arbiter on Twitter, but his ideas, even if impulsive, don't exist in a vacuum. There's an increasingly loud narrative from parts of Silicon Valley which had always had a libertarian streak that tech platforms like Twitter had become too compromised by soft-headed liberals and too willing to censor speech.
The most prominent voice is investor Marc Andreessen, who sunk $400 million into Musk's version of Twitter. As soon as Musk announced he was going to buy the company, Andreessen messaged Musk and told him he'd put money in with, quote, no additional work. Andreessen has been railing about this stuff for years, and he's getting louder. He recently wrote an essay that describes trust and safety, the people charged with moderating platforms like Twitter as, quote, enemies.
Here he is on the Lex Friedman podcast in June 2023. People in positions of power have become very, very certain that they're in a position to determine the truth for the entire population. It's like some bubble that has formed around that idea, and it flies completely in the face of everything I was ever trained about science and about reason. It strikes me as, like, you know, deeply offensive and incorrect.
I'm going to be ageist here, which I can do because I am the same age. Musk and Andreessen are 50-somethings who came up in the very first era of the internet, when it seemed obvious to everyone who thought about this stuff that connecting the world online would be a very good thing, and that even if connecting people also generated some bad effects, it was still worth it in the end.
Since then, the thinking about technology and its unintended consequences, particularly when it comes to social media, has gotten a lot more complicated and critical. But when you hear Musk and Andreessen talk about it, they're confident that things would get way better if they were way simpler. Let anyone say anything they want, with a minimum of rules, and let people sort it out for themselves.
There are lots of people in and around tech that are interested in these ideas. Some of them were in Musk's phone cheering him on. Here's a text from Joe Rogan sent when Musk was first buying up Twitter shares. Quote, "Are you gonna liberate Twitter from the censorship-happy mob?"
So you're hearing this guy say it, he is going to be your boss, may be your boss. Is there a consensus view within Trust and Safety about, oh, what does this mean for us? The view within the company was that he was saying these things about, we're just going to follow the law where we operate and that's it, because he didn't really know what Trust and Safety looked like in practice or why that's a pretty naive perspective on content moderation and global regulation.
That's Yoel Roth, who was running Trust and Safety when Musk took over Twitter. You heard from him in our last episode.
I think there was a belief within the company that we could disabuse him of that naivete if we had a chance to talk with him. He's a smart person. We're smart. Once he gets here, we can talk him through this. Yeah. I mean, and the message that trust and safety staff got from executives was, look, he's a caricature online. Like, he tweets all of this crazy shit, but like, actually, he's not such a dummy if you talk to him one-on-one, and we will have an opportunity to persuade him.
And at first, that was actually Roth's experience. In one of my earliest conversations with him talking about internal security measures, he actually expressed a really cogent and clear perspective on the potential risks of violence following elections in Brazil.
Brazil had held presidential elections in October 2022, and the incumbent, Jair Bolsonaro, had been making Trump-like accusations of voting fraud. After he lost, his supporters tried storming government buildings, a January 6th repeat. And he encouraged me and the Trust and Safety team to redouble our efforts to stop electoral violence in Brazil from emerging after the elections. And so I was like, oh, like, he gets it. He understands the stakes for Trust and Safety.
There was another incident a couple of days later where a 4chan-driven trolling campaign started posting a lot of racist language on Twitter. And again, he came to me and said, get rid of this right now. Like, this doesn't belong here. This is awful. And again, I was like, oh, he understands. Musk clicked with Roth, too. After some of Musk's followers attacked Roth online, Musk defended him. I want to be clear that I support Yoel, he tweeted.
My sense is that he has high integrity. It was a quick honeymoon. Two weeks after Musk took over, Roth resigned.
It's not clear what the breaking point was for Roth. He said he left because even with those early conversations, he'd concluded that Musk didn't really want rules. He'd make it up on the go, a dictatorial edict in Roth's words, which he told Kara Swisher a few weeks after resigning. We had a system of governance. It was rules-based. We enforced our rules as written. We changed our rules in writing. We did it transparently. And
And when that system of governance went away, you don't need a head of trust and safety anymore. Roth's departure got to Musk. Within weeks, Musk was suggesting to his fans that Roth, an openly gay man, might be a pedophile. Roth said he had to sell his house after a swarm of violent threats. In October 2023, Musk tweeted that he has, quote, "...rarely seen evil in as pure a form as Yoel Roth."
Roth left Twitter willingly, but plenty of his former colleagues did not. As we already noted, Musk gutted Twitter's staff, and his cuts included almost all of the trust and safety team. So, let's take stock. Elon Musk bought Twitter, got rid of almost all of its policies about content moderation, and the people who put them into place, and replaced them with himself. And he runs on impulse plus some slippery ideology.
It's probably not a good long-term plan. But in the meantime, what all this means is Musk's Twitter is a grand experiment in what it actually looks and feels like to remove most of the guardrails from social media. Guardrails the industry has spent years carefully building up. After the break, what the consequences look like.
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Ever since Elon Musk bought Twitter, social media experts have worried about the way the site, operating under his make-it-up-as-you-go rules, would work during a full-blown crisis. Now there is one. The war between Israel and Hamas. Since the start of the war, videos, news stories, and firsthand accounts have been circulating on the platform. And Twitter has failed at moderating that flow of information, says Giancarlo Fiorella.
Fiorella runs research for Bellingcat, a nonprofit group that works to crowdsource investigations. They're most often about violence in parts of the world where it's hard to get reliable information. As an open source researcher, Twitter was my life in a certain sense. I don't know if open source research, the field of open source research would be the same today if Twitter hadn't been around.
Fiorella used to rely on Twitter, but not anymore. I would go to Twitter first for a breaking news event and I had a pretty good sense of who was reliable and I wasn't likely to see lots of disinformation on a daily basis.
You know, that's not the case anymore. I haven't been using Twitter to cover this particular conflict because I think that the changes that have taken place at Twitter over the last year have created a really unhealthy information environment. In part, it's because Musk's Twitter has essentially encouraged users to post bad stuff. That's because of a new incentive system Musk has set up. Earlier this year, he announced he'd share revenue with his new Blue Check subscribers based on engagement their tweets generate.
And now we have a stress test of that system. So now, you know, if you're an account holder and you have tweets that are going viral, you get some portion of that money.
I think that's just a recipe for a race to the bottom. Fiorella and other misinformation researchers studied the site during the Israel-Hamas conflict, and they say that Musk's new verified users are more likely to post false or misleading information about the war. Not necessarily because they're supporting one side or the other, but because that stuff is more popular.
then you get a sort of a perfect storm. So it's that model, the monetization model, combined with the fact that anybody can buy a blue checkmark, combined with all the cuts in the moderation at Twitter. So now you have more people pretending to be authorities, driving up engagement by sharing, you know, emotional content, not necessarily worrying about accuracy. You have a smaller team at Twitter checking that people are not engaging in disinformation and misinformation. So combined, all of those factors make...
what is the objective reality at Twitter today, which is that it's not a very helpful place to get reliable information about breaking news events. This was a scenario plenty of outsiders predicted as soon as Musk rolled out his revenue sharing plan. If you spent any time at all thinking about social media, you know what happens when you give users rewards of any kind. They game the system.
Now, belatedly, Musk says he's figured it out and is making a slight change to his program to, quote, maximize the incentive for accuracy over sensationalism. If someone's posts get corrected by community notes, it won't be able to make any money.
Wait, what's a community note? It's pretty interesting, actually. It's one of the only things from the pre-Musk Twitter that Musk has kept. This is a program that used to be called Birdwatch, and it's an attempt to turn users into content moderators. People who take social media seriously think it could be a great idea, in theory.
Pre-Musk, actually, Twitter was just incredibly transparent in certain facets of its moderation decisions and was on track to becoming more transparent with others. So community notes, I thought, had real potential. Rene DiResta is the technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory.
Think of community notes as Wikipedia, the Twitter version. You volunteer to become a community noter, and then you can weigh in on posts that have some degree of controversy and argue whether it's correct or not. Your notes get recorded, the whole process is transparent, and if enough people think a post is wrong, it will be labeled with some kind of correction.
You can see how this would appeal to Musk, who claims to be worried that the woke mind virus people were censoring speech. Presto, now no single person is making decisions about this. Twitter users are doing it themselves. And you can see versions of moderation by users working elsewhere. Reddit, for example, used to be a site that was infamous for incidents of harassment and hate speech. Now the site uses volunteer moderators and bare-bones rules. For instance, Nazis are bad.
And that seems to have helped it balance speech and safety. One of the big problems with the social web is not misinformation per se, it's decontextualized information where, again, you have that grain of truth, but the context in which the person said the thing or the 30 seconds that came before or after the video clip are stripped out and a false impression is created. So that's where I think community notes really shines as far as adding that context back in
But it's not necessarily a good tool for fact-checking objective, emerging, breaking stories. Which is what we are seeing right now. For instance, days after the October 7th attacks in Israel, NBC News looked at two bogus stories that were spreading on Twitter. It found that only a fraction of the posts about them had been fact-checked by community notes. So, not a surprise, there is no one-size-fits-all solution to content moderation.
You can shrug about this and say we were always naive to expect a social media platform to be a reliable source for crucial information. You can also point out that Twitter isn't the only platform in town. In much of the world outside the U.S., for instance, the messaging app Telegram is way more important when you want to find out what's happening in real time. That's what Bellingcat's Giancarlo Fiorella uses to track what's happening in Gaza.
On the other hand, we spent a lot of the series talking about how people use Twitter to make community and make sense of the world. And even if Twitter's importance to the world has been exaggerated, and even if it's in a diminished state now, it's still here, and it still matters. It's also very possible that Twitter matters beyond what happens on Twitter. Yoel Roth thinks the changes Musk has made to the platform are reverberating throughout the industry.
I think the pendulum of the tech industry's investment in trust and safety is swinging away from moderation and away from investment in this space. Elon Musk's actions and the response to it, or I guess lack of a response to it, has in some ways legitimized other companies making cutbacks in this space. No one who runs a big platform has stood up and said, I stand with Elon. But it's not always about what platforms say. It's about what they do.
And over the past year, there are signs that some of Musk's peers may at least be rethinking some of their moderation moves. YouTube, for instance, has rolled back a policy on posts that claimed the 2020 election was stolen. And Meta, which laid off tens of thousands of employees in the last year, also cut back on some of its moderation efforts.
The lesson that many companies seem to be taking from Twitter is you can lay off 80% of the company and, you know, the tweets still more or less work. Shouldn't we cut our staff too?
Maybe the answer should be yes. If companies are seeing that they've spent billions of dollars investing in trust and safety and have not gotten a good ROI on that, people still criticize them, regulators still yell at them, cumbersome regulations keep getting passed in country after country, a somewhat rational perspective is to say, you know what, fuck this, why would we spend all this money for zero return on it?
And the obvious retort is, you spend the money on it because the alternative is incredible harm and danger and the erosion of democracy and civility online.
On the other hand, you know what does make money for social platforms? Advertising. And advertisers don't like anything goes places. They like clean, well-lit spaces. Attention is the thing that platforms sell. We are the product. They sell our attention to advertisers.
That's Laura Edelson. She's a professor of computer science at Northeastern University studying social networks. So if you've built your entire system to recommend extreme content, and the thing that you've banked on is that the way that this isn't
wildly unsafe and wildly recommending content that is truly illegal is that will remove that really bad stuff that goes over the line, well, you've painted yourself in a box. This isn't a theoretical argument. Advertisers fled Twitter as soon as Musk took over, in part anticipating a flood of wildly unsafe content, and in part because of Musk's own not-safe-for-work personality.
A couple weeks into his ownership, Musk got on a call with some of them and told them to relax. Brands should tweet more. Executives should tweet more. I would encourage people just to be more adventurous. Like, that's certainly what I've done on Twitter with Tesla and myself and SpaceX, and it's worked out quite well. That pitch has not paid off. Earlier this year, Musk said ad sales had dropped by 60%.
So, advertisers are a group that could slow the pendulum shift Roth is worried about. Rene DiResta also thinks you may see platforms making other changes in the way they police themselves. But that's because of lessons they've learned on their own, not from Musk. Take Mark Zuckerberg, who tried to buy Twitter, then tried to compete with Twitter, then ignored Twitter. Now he's trying to clone Twitter with threads, but not an exact clone.
Most of the platforms that were trying to moderate content during COVID in particular are doing a major reevaluation of how well that worked or didn't work. I think you saw this on Facebook, not necessarily following Twitter's lead, right? We have Threads, which is its emergent competitor. And one of the C-suite at Facebook noted that one of the value propositions that they were offering with Threads was, I believe it was a direct quote, sanely run. Yeah.
Kind of, you know, there is a moderation rubric in place at Threads. One version of sanity? Simply removing stuff that could cause controversy, whether or not it's true. Just skip it altogether. Threads, for example, has chosen to largely not return results for COVID-19 or COVID-19 vaccines. It says go get information from the government. It says go get information from the CDC or your doctor.
We don't know what's going to happen at Threads. We definitely don't know what's going to happen at Twitter. Except that Twitter isn't going away, for real, anytime soon. What does the end of Twitter look like? That's the million-dollar question. What does the end of Twitter look like?
Whenever my colleague Lauren Good and I interviewed someone for this series, we asked about their relationship to Elon Musk's version of Twitter, and if they're going to stick around. People like Jason Parham, the writer for Wire, who wrote an oral history of Black Twitter. Twitter has dead mall energy right now, but I think I'm also of that mind as well, where I don't exactly want to give it up just yet, even though it feels more chaotic day by day.
There's a decent chance that you, the person who listened to four podcast episodes about Twitter, may still be there from time to time. And if you are, you may have noticed that a lot of people have left. Maybe you're seeing less interesting stuff. Maybe your awesome tweets aren't getting the faves or retweets they used to get. And/or maybe you just don't feel great about hanging out in a place run by a guy whose online persona seems alternately paranoid and grandiose.
Someone who fights with the Anti-Defamation League one day and rants about trans people the next. A series of reports and surveys suggest that Twitter has indeed lost users since Musk took over, despite the company's claims to the contrary. What is your relationship with Twitter these days? You know, it's sort of like someone I used to be friends with in college who kind of never stopped drinking. Bess Kalb is the TV writer who got her big professional break from Twitter.
And I'm thrilled that it has sort of drifted off on an ice float. I think Twitter's death comes at a time when I'm thrilled it died. I'm a parent now. I've learned how to read again. I've gone outside a few times. It's nice. But like we said, there's more than one Twitter. And on versions of Twitter you may not hang out on, things are still chugging along. I know folks who spend a lot of time on video game Twitter, for instance, and they say things are pretty much the same there.
Sports Twitter is still a place to be, though maybe a little bit quieter.
Once Elon took over and the elegies started to just consume Twitter, I feel like a lot of Black Twitter users were just like, I'm not going anywhere. You know, like, this isn't the first time someone has come in, taken over a neighborhood, decided to develop it, decided to deprioritize all the people that contribute to the site. Like, this is actually what happens in real life all the time.
And I'm here till the end. That's Jay Wortham, who podcasts and writes for The New York Times. We heard a similar take from Jason Parham. I actually don't think Black Twitter has changed that much under Elon Musk. I think it's the one community that has decided that we're going down with the ship. Like, I know shit is bad, but like, all platforms are kind of bad and run by terrible people. And this is just the one that I've invested so much time and love into, and I don't want to give it up.
Neither does artist Rael El Nasa Crockett.
As a Black person, I don't necessarily have the luxury of disengaging from everything that's made by someone that hates me or things that I am or things that I believe. People have had their lives threatened. People have had racist slurs hurled at them. Things have absolutely increased under Musk, but they weren't a cakewalk under Jack either. It's just that Jack wasn't an open white supremacist, you know what I mean?
Also, where would you go exactly? Anna Gifty, a Poku Ajiman who loves econ Twitter, has tried. The reality is like there's no place like Twitter, you know, like I tried Macedon. Macedon was dry. So the academics, you know, migrated there. And I'm like, guys, this is whack. I couldn't figure out how to use it. I could not figure out how to get onto it.
So yeah, I think for the most part, like the different parts of Twitter that I was a part of, many people have just adapted as humans do. Like Twitter is where a lot of like the biggest part of my community sits on this site. And so a lot of them haven't left. I'm still here.
It's hard to fully encapsulate how important the service is and also kind of how unimportant it's been, too. Did something replace Twitter for you? No. No, it didn't. But I think in terms of the bouquet of other social media services that are out there, I mean, there's enough that kind of picks up the slack. But I don't think that Twitter can be recreated. I don't think that the heyday of Twitter can be replicated. And I don't think that...
Maybe even it should? I actually don't think there is a replacement for Twitter. I think it came up at a time that called for it. You know, I think the social internet is different in every generation and what it calls for. And I think the one that we were a part of, Twitter, was the perfect application for that. For our type of socializing during these pivotal social justice movements, during these pivotal moments on TV, these pivotal moments in our lives.
Being on Twitter has changed me a lot. Even though we complain about it so much, we call it a hellscape. We say, you know, the apocalypse is coming. But it really is a place where I think people are able to come together and find community, find news, talk about what's happening in their world. It gives people agency in a way that I think a lot of other platforms don't. It would fucking suck if we lost it, but I mean, it's inevitable. It's the internet. It's the social internet. It's
Things are here and then they're gone. I disagree with Parm about that last part. Yes, the internet moves fast and new things spring up all the time. But some people also have online inertia. They find a place and they stay till the lights go out. And the world's richest man is also very stubborn. He can keep the lights on for a very long time. But the Twitter many of us were most excited about, that one is done.
I think of Twitter as a cool party. It happened a long time ago. You had to be there. I'm sorry if you weren't. And the thing is, as much as we've been talking about the fight for the future of Twitter, it never was going to work. It was never going to have much of a future, even before Elon Musk bought it. Because since the beginning, different people have had competing ideas for what Twitter should be. And the company has tried to be all those things. And that was an impossible task. We know that now. We know too much.
The Twitter fantasy is over.
And thanks to our colleagues from across Vox Media who've helped bring you this season. Liam Brooks, Caitlin Berlow, Lauren Katz, Brian LaBombard, Marty Moe, Darian Mucha, Jillian Robbins, Brandon Santos, and Ode White. Land of the Giants: The Twitter Fantasy is a production of Vox and the Vox Media Podcast Network. You can only make a show like this if you work with great people. Here they are. Oluwakemi Alladesui produced this episode.
Matt Frasica is our lead producer. Megan Cunane is our editor. Charlotte Silver is our fact checker. Brandon McFarlane composed the show's theme. Matthew Billy engineered this episode. Art Chung is our showrunner. Nishat Kerwa is our executive producer. I'm Peter Kafka. If you liked this episode, as always, please share it. And follow us on your podcast app to get the next season of Land of the Giants.
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