And he has spent a lot of time since he took over Twitter doing just that. You know, I would not be surprised if we saw hearings about this in the House of Representatives next year, right? So all these things are just sort of, you know, Elon being a good conservative and riling up that base. And this is essentially red meat for the Republican base. He shared them with a couple of other journalists, who have been posting about them on Twitter. Is something that Elon Musk clearly believes, and he has now been releasing a bunch of internal documents. Well, fast forward to today, and now a lot of Republicans believe that the platforms themselves interfered in the election by not allowing that story to spread quite as rapidly as it might have otherwise. And they worried that somebody might be interfering with the election. Twitter and Facebook intervened to temporarily restrict the distribution of that story because it looked like it was part of a sort of hack-and-leak-propaganda operation, which they were on high alert for. The Twitter files had to do with a New York Post story from the 2020 election about Hunter Biden's laptop. And I think that's sort of very much in keeping with this conservative world view, that it should not be up to platforms to decide who can participate or sort of set the terms by which they might participate.Īnother way that we've seen Elon Musk's more conservative views manifest is he has lately been having a lot of fun with what he's calling the Twitter files. So, you know, one of his first moves was to restore more than 60,000 accounts of people who had been banned from Twitter for breaking its rules. You know, he has adopted a lot of the views that have become mainstream among Republicans such as that social networks are censoring too much content, that free speech is at risk, that there are sort of too much deference shown to people who say that they're experiencing harassment or abuse or hate speech. NEWTON: Well, I think that in a lot of ways, he is a fairly conventional conservative. GROSS: Do you think Twitter is starting to reflect Elon Musk's politics? And what are his politics? And more than anything else, I think he's given the impression that rather than operating according to some set plan, he's really managing Twitter more by whims and what seems to him to be a good idea in the moment. He has implemented a bunch of ideas and then quickly reversed himself. He has now eliminated close to three-quarters of the staff. And yet from the moment that he stepped into that job, that seems to be exactly what he decided to do. And while it clearly needed to evolve, there was sort of no pressing need to blow it up and start over. It made about $5 billion last year, has hundreds of millions of active users. And the Twitter that he inherited, while it had its challenges, was not a company in crisis. I had not paid a lot of attention to what Musk was doing at Tesla and SpaceX, but as you note, he was having a lot of success with those companies. Are you surprised by what kind of leader he's turned out to be as the owner of Twitter?ĬASEY NEWTON: You know, I really am. He's making decisions that are driving away Twitter users. Twitter is losing money and advertisers under his leadership. Twitter is showing a different side of him - indecisive, making decisions then retracting them. SpaceX and Tesla have been considered such big success stories, and credit has gone to Elon Musk. We recorded our interview yesterday.Ĭasey Newton, welcome back to FRESH AIR. From 2013 until 2020, when Newton started Platformer, he reported on tech for The Verge. He also co-hosts the tech podcast "Hard Fork" with New York Times tech journalist Kevin Roose. Newton is an independent tech journalist who covers the intersection of technology and democracy for his newsletter, Platformer, which is hosted by Substack. My guest, Casey Newton, says Musk has been remaking Twitter in his own image. Some of the responders may have been bots. Musk offered to reinstate Trump on Twitter after polling Twitter users about whether to do it. The number of content moderators has been slashed. But those ideas were met with widespread opposition. He's floated ideas for subscription services and for charging a fee to verify that your account is really yours. He's fired executives, cut the number of full-time employees in half, and then realized maybe he'd gone too far and tried to hire back some people he just terminated. Musk has made and then withdrawn decisions including trying to retract his offer to buy Twitter. Ever since Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, bought Twitter for $44 billion in late April, Twitter has been in chaos.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |