00:00:23.080and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them.
00:00:28.600I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are The Survivor Files.
00:00:32.200Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable, abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced.
00:00:39.740These are stories about what it takes to make it out alive.
00:00:43.580Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:00:51.200If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.
00:00:56.920Pro Society is a weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.
00:01:05.580Each week, we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and pop culture with your favorite writers, book talk creators, and plenty of overthought opinions.
00:01:49.000Hi, Bridget. Thanks for having me back. Always a pleasure.
00:01:50.980So this might come as a surprise to you. I try pretty hard not to talk about Elon Musk too much on the podcast. From being in meetings and calls and stuff with you to make the show, that's probably surprising to you because I know that you know I have a lot of feelings and thoughts and opinions about Elon Musk.
00:02:12.400Yeah, he's pretty hard to avoid these days.
00:02:16.620It's true. And I guess I feel, you know, when making the show, the reason why I try to limit how much I talk about him is because I just don't think it's really helpful to report on or respond to every little thing that someone who clearly wants attention says or does.
00:02:33.620I feel like I learned this the hard way back when Musk was first talking about buying Twitter.
00:02:37.760You and I rushed to put out an emergency episode. We stopped what we were doing. It was like a stop the press moment.
00:02:44.220And, you know, after that episode ran, I think it was like months and months and months and months and months until he actually bought Twitter. And during that time, it would be like he would say, oh, the deal is off. And everybody would rush to report on it and respond. And then he would be like, oh, the deal's back on. And everyone would rush to report on that and respond.
00:03:02.260And I think it's a strategy that people like Musk employ that allows for them to set the tone.
00:03:09.260And I just I don't think that being reactive, always reacting to the things that they say, every little move they make, is the most helpful mode to be in.
00:03:17.340Because I think ultimately it really serves them in setting the agenda and capturing attention, which is clearly something they want.
00:03:24.880Yeah, I think it's a useful strategy for people like him and like Trump.
00:03:29.640And I think also it's a useful strategy that just happens to align with their own personal needs to constantly be the center of attention, you know, and to constantly control the narrative and have people, you know, jumping and reacting to what they say to fill that void where other people feel love.0.64
00:03:50.700yikes just coming at the gate with a a one-two punch on musk's inability to feel love okay wow
00:04:00.420damn we're we're off to a good start off to the races sorry that wasn't my intention but it's
00:04:05.640just it's it's been a real evolution for me the last couple weeks about him but that's that's not0.96
00:04:10.280what this episode is about i don't mean to distract i mean it might be a little bit right
00:04:14.620And so, again, I try really hard to avoid just reacting to his little stunts because people who pull stunts, they want you to react, they want you to respond.
00:04:24.980But this past weekend, something happened that really felt like a direct hit to my work and a direct kind of, I feel like, you know, if you watch Housewives, when Kenya Moore says, don't come for me unless I send for you, I feel sent for, as Kenya Moore would say.
00:04:43.600And he brought up something that I actually have quite a bit of personal experience on and felt kind of compelled to talk about on this podcast.
00:04:52.000Yeah, I know you do have a lot of experience in this area and you don't talk about it on the show much.
00:04:57.140And so the fact that you, I think, felt so compelled to say something about it really speaks to that feeling of being called.
00:05:06.720So, you know, speak it. Let's hear it.
00:05:11.700Well, this past weekend, Elon Musk tweeted that he'd given internal Twitter documents to journalist Matt Taibbi, calling it the Twitter files.
00:05:20.980To be clear, that's what Elon Musk is like branding it as.
00:05:24.440I'm not going to be calling it that because I'm not going to be just, you know, doing his work for him and running with this little branded thing that he's trying to make happen for him.
00:05:40.540He was teasing it all weekend. He tweeted, what really happened with the Hunter Biden story suppression by Twitter will be published on Twitter at 5 p.m.
00:05:49.300This will be awesome. Popcorn emoji. Right. And so this is someone who is really drumming up excitement about something they think is going to be big.
00:05:58.720He finally got the opportunity to come up with his own nickname. And he's so excited for everybody to hear about it.
00:06:05.540You can just tell how excited this dude is to be trying to make this happen.
00:06:10.740Like, he's trying to make Fetch happen.
00:06:15.540So to talk about what's in this report, let's back up a little bit.
00:06:18.880The reports appear to show internal debate at Twitter about how the platform should handle the contents of a report on the laptop that was alleged to belong to President Biden's son, Hunter Biden, that was reported initially by the New York Post.
00:06:34.080You probably recall this story if you were in the United States and paying attention to domestic politics in the presidential election.
00:06:41.280Hunter Biden has dealt with addiction issues, and this laptop purported to show evidence of all this unseemly behavior on the part of President Biden's son, Hunter.
00:06:52.900I should say it is not clear to me how this laptop was obtained, if it was actually Hunter Biden's laptop.
00:06:59.760And thus, there was a lot of confusion around how folks could, you know, responsibly report on it or talk about it.
00:07:06.340Yeah, that's I remember that, obviously.
00:07:08.900And I feel compelled to remind everybody that the reason we know about this Hunter Biden laptop story, which, you know, maybe it was his laptop, maybe not.
00:07:18.760We don't really know. You know, I did some research ahead of this show. And like, it's basically unverifiable. But the reason that we know about it is because a concerned citizen brought it to Rudy Giuliani. Right. And I think that says a lot.
00:07:34.940If you think about the source of the information being Rudy Giuliani, earlier this morning he was at a hearing here in D.C. before the bar facing possible disbarment for his frivolous, ridiculous actions in the 2020 – contesting the 2020 election.
00:07:54.180And his defense there was that he didn't have the time to verify that what he was filing to court was accurate.
00:08:05.900And so if he doesn't have the time to verify his legal briefings, what are we to make of his – everything else in his life?
00:08:18.820I don't know. I'll just leave it there.
00:08:20.020I don't mean to make the story about that, but anything even connected to Rudy Giuliani, let alone originating with Rudy Giuliani, I feel needs to be taken with a pretty big grain of salt.
00:08:32.120Are you trying to suggest that when Rudy Giuliani is in the mix on something, that it's not on the up and up?
00:08:38.340If he's in the mix, God help everyone.
00:08:40.140So you can sort of get an idea as to, like, why there was a lot of skepticism and confusion early on around this Hunter Biden laptop story.
00:08:51.240And that confusion very much extended to social media platforms like Twitter.
00:08:55.540Twitter staff independently decided to block posts about the Hunter Biden laptop story and prevented people from sharing the New York Post story in DMs, citing that the content fell under its hacked materials policy.
00:09:06.880because at the time, the thinking was that the contents of the laptop had been obtained through hacking.
00:09:11.860This decision was made after a lot of internal debate at Twitter.
00:09:15.440Taibbi's report shows a lot of back and forth internally at Twitter
00:09:18.760about how to moderate tweets about this Hunter Biden laptop story.
00:09:22.580Trenton Kennedy, a Twitter communications official, wrote in an email,
00:09:26.140I'm struggling to understand the policy basis for marking this as unsafe.
00:09:30.020Kennedy advised that the company should say that it is waiting to understand
00:09:33.300whether the New York Post story was the result of hacked material.
00:09:36.880I have to say, Twitter, it sounds like they really erred on the side of caution here.
00:09:40.980You might remember that White House spokesperson Kayleigh McKinney, her Twitter account was locked for sharing a tweet with the laptop story in it.
00:09:48.260Twitter took a lot of heat about this with conservatives who said that this was evidence that Twitter and big tech in general was biased against them as conservatives.
00:09:58.560Then Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey spoke about the backlash publicly, saying,
00:10:02.580we made a quick interpretation using no other evidence that the material in the article were
00:10:07.520obtained through hacking, and according to our policy, we blocked them from being spread.
00:10:11.700Upon further consideration, we admitted this action was wrong and corrected it within 24 hours.
00:10:16.680And so, again, you really see the sort of messy, nitty-gritty of this company having to decide
00:10:22.620in real time how they were going to moderate this story that they could not verify and didn't know
00:10:27.720its origins. And at a time when everybody was felt the same way, like they were not alone in
00:10:33.140that thinking. So I guess the question might be like, was this the right call? I honestly could
00:10:39.600not tell you this is like way above my pay grade. But I do think that reasonable people could and do
00:10:46.240disagree with whether or not Twitter should have allowed that report about the laptop to be on the
00:10:51.120platform. But I will say that it seems like fairly new ground for a platform to have to sort out
00:10:57.420you know, this kind of situation that is so potentially sensitive, right? So I can understand
00:11:04.220why there was some debate about it. I can understand why folks internally disagreed,
00:11:08.820why folks externally disagreed. It's really kind of new territory for a platform to have to sort
00:11:15.280out. And the emails really reflect that, that there was a lot of what seems like healthy
00:11:20.160discourse about how they should best proceed. Right. So there's two different things, right?
00:11:25.280You can disagree with the conclusion that they came to to moderate the content, which maybe that was the right decision, maybe not, depending on your point of view.
00:11:33.700But to take some time and, like, have a discussion about whether it should be moderated, like, there can be absolutely nothing wrong with that, right?
00:18:27.320It is totally a normal, commonplace thing.
00:18:30.500You know, I have done that work professionally, both from the platform side and the advocacy side. When I worked at the social media platform Medium, I was essentially the person on the political team whose job it was to make inroads and connections with political leaders and activists and thought leaders on the left. You know, they could reach out to me with issues and questions, etc.
00:18:50.240There was also a counterpart to this work on the right who did the same thing as me, but within the Republican Party. It was actually like a very fulfilling and interesting job. We had lots of like spirited discussions and debates about content on our team that actually remind me quite a bit of like the internal emails that we saw from this reporting.
00:19:10.160It's also a fun fact why I attended the 2016 Republican National Convention and got to watch Trump officially accept the nomination for president in person, which is a story for another day.
00:19:23.300But part of the advocacy work that I do now involves communicating with platforms to hopefully help influence their content moderation decision making to be less hostile toward marginalized people.
00:19:35.400A lot of the time, that work looks like the same thing that the Biden campaign was doing to the Twitter folks, you know, flagging content that we think needs to be removed.
00:19:44.960A lot of times it's like faked, demeaning, misogynistic images of women of color elected officials like AOC for removal being like, oh, actually, this image that purports to show a misogynistic, crude drawing of AOC, we think this might violate your guidelines.
00:20:24.820I don't actually bring it up a ton on the podcast, mostly because it's just not that exciting.
00:20:30.780Like, it's fairly mundane work. And it's just, yeah, it's just not exciting. You know, completely normal and commonplace for folks in these positions to have a direct line with folks at platforms. You know, I have flagged things for them that they do not take down.
00:20:47.360You know, so it's not like when you reach out and say, hey, this is problematic or hey, we believe this violates your community guidelines. It's not a guarantee they're going to take it down. But it's like that tedious work of relationship building for a particular goal.
00:21:01.580And Musk trying to reframe that work that so many people do that is totally commonplace across platforms, him trying to reframe that as somehow nefarious or somehow a threat to our democracy is completely wild, completely wild.
00:21:20.200Yeah, it really is, especially when you think about the role of advocacy in a democracy and advocacy groups making the case for their constituencies about issues that they care about to policymakers trying to get policies put in place.
00:21:35.120And you can tell from those emails that the Twitter team was talking about their policies and how did this fit within their policies that had been crafted to describe the situations in which they would take action to moderate.
00:21:47.540And even as I'm saying these words, it sounds so boring, but it's so crucial because without that, you end up with a situation that we have right now where everything is just, you know, whatever Elon Musk decides about it, right?
00:22:03.080It's not clear what is and is not allowed on Twitter these days.
00:22:07.860It's just by executive fiat, and also all those fiats bring more attention and news attention to him, which is a win-win for him.
00:22:20.820I'm so glad that you said that because a few weeks ago, I think it was Sam Harris asked Elon on Twitter about whether or not he was going to reinstate Alex Jones.
00:22:30.540And Alex Jones famously lies about babies who were tragically shot and killed in Sandy Hook and lies about their parents.
00:22:38.700And Elon Musk replied, I will never allow him back on the platform because I had a baby who died and I held that baby in my hands and I know the heartbreak of a grieving parent.
00:22:48.120And I actually think that that actually was one of very few genuine statements about how Elon Musk is planning on moderating Twitter.
00:22:57.140If he can personally identify with the group that he is making a moderation decision around or based on, I think that you will get one thing.
00:23:09.860If he cannot identify with them, if he cannot put himself in their shoes or see their experience in his own experience, I don't think it's going to be real to him.
00:23:19.760And so I think that to me was the first honest assessment of how he plans to moderate the platform.
00:23:24.960It's just based on what he personally likes or doesn't like, what he personally can understand or can identify with or see himself in or not.
00:23:35.000And so, you know, he is a white, straight, cis billionaire.
00:23:39.400I don't know that he would be able to really see himself in the experience of a trans person or a person of color or a queer person or someone who's not a billionaire and wants to start a union at their car factory.
00:23:50.720Right. And so I think that really was a pretty clear indication of exactly what you're saying. It's just whatever Elon feels, that's how we will be moderating. And I don't think it's a great system. Right. Like he is someone who is going on and on about the need to build transparency into moderation to restore trust. Let's start with a little transparency around how he is going to make moderation decisions.
00:24:13.880Yeah. And it's also a little bit like a high school student quoting Voltaire about free speech when he's talking about transparency. I think he still thinks or at least as a couple of months ago, he thought that transparency meant making all of Twitter's internal decisions and algorithms like open source so anybody could read it, which is a terrible idea because that just is like a blueprint for anyone who wants to abuse it.
00:24:43.040and so it's this this spot of like reality where there's like he has the high-minded ideals of
00:24:53.020transparency and free speech which are virtuous and good things but to actually like implement
00:25:00.040them in the real world one needs to have a thoughtful approach and he lacks that second
00:25:08.080part it's like how all of his tweets with polls about what he should do for twitter moderation
00:25:13.760were all accompanied by latin but then like getting the latin phrases wrong it's like you
00:25:19.620you kind yes you're kind of you almost have it like you oh you're oh you almost have it
00:25:23.800you almost had it you you found the latin quote and you got the gist sort of and so speaking of
00:25:32.480the kind of disingenuous nods to what they're calling free speech.
00:25:39.660Musk really tried to frame this report as a bombshell that showed that Twitter is suppressing
00:25:47.160the free speech of conservatives on the platform.
00:25:49.920But Taibbi's own reporting shows that the Trump administration, while Trump was president,
00:25:55.760made the very same kind of requests as the Biden campaign did.
00:25:59.520And at least some of those requests were honored, right?
00:26:02.360And so there's not, there's no, Taibbi includes that information. There isn't any more transparency or any emails around what those requests would be. The public is still just like left to wonder what a sitting president was successfully able to get removed from Twitter. Not worth scrutiny, not worth this transparency that Elon Musk says he wants to bring to moderation on the platform.
00:26:25.800Musk said, quote, Twitter acting by itself to suppress free speech is not a First Amendment
00:26:30.940violation, but acting under orders from the government to suppress free speech with no
00:26:35.420judicial review is. But then again, Taibbi himself said, quote, there's no evidence that I have seen
00:26:42.060of any government involvement in the laptop story. So truly, which is it? Like, both of these things
00:26:47.240can't be correct. It can't be that, as Elon Musk says, that Twitter was acting under orders from
00:26:53.020the government. And Taibbi saying, actually, after reviewing this, I saw no government involvement
00:26:58.220in the suppression of this story. It doesn't, it doesn't like something's not adding up. The
00:27:01.560math is not mapping. Yeah. It's almost like it's all just a big stunt and the substance doesn't
00:27:06.560matter. Almost. And I think like, this is why, I mean, I personally, this is just my opinion,
00:27:13.480but I think it's really, really irresponsible to release communications that folks have had
00:27:19.200with Twitter over the years in this way.
00:29:37.540Like anybody who has ever worked in social media is aware of that. That's not a bombshell. So if they're not actually reporting anything new, how can you tweet about it in such a bombastic way that like, oh, we are going to blow the lid off of this thing?
00:29:53.600You know, I saw people reporting about it like Jack Prasibik said, we will all remember where we were when this was reported.
00:30:00.160Like the breathlessness that people talked about this for something that wasn't even any new information, I think is really, I'm going to say, irresponsible.
00:30:09.720Yeah, it's an excellent point because the only thing that's new here is sort of the salaciousness of the illusion of leaks, right?
00:30:19.680Like, ooh, there's some sort of secret emails that they didn't want us to see, but that's obviously not the case for, like, multiple reasons.
00:30:27.640One, like, the emails were released by Twitter, right?
00:30:31.640There are emails by Twitter employees that Twitter is releasing, so that's, like, not a leak.
00:30:36.400And in the content of the emails that the people wrote, it's clear that they expect these emails or maybe they don't expect the emails themselves to become public, but they clearly expect – they are aware that there is intense scrutiny about how they are moderating this issue and they expect to be called to account for it.
00:31:00.160And like you said, everything, you know, all of the decisions they made are already public record and not because of some sort of deep investigative journalism, but because Twitter like put out a press release about it and like said all the same thing.
00:31:14.700So the only thing new here is just the framing as a leak that something inappropriate happened.
00:31:20.700But the actual facts are completely unchanged. You know, like you said, like, what's the big reveal that that the Biden campaign didn't want the candidate's son's like naked photos published without his consent like that?
00:31:37.540Yeah, they didn't want a crime, a literal sex crime to occur. But news at 11.
00:31:42.640Yeah, that's the only thing new here. Just the illusion and framing of salaciousness.
00:31:48.200And I think that Elon is doing this because he is speaking to people who I think already feel aggrieved. Right. And so he knows, even if this isn't really anything, nothing really new is being talked about or reported, that people that feel aggrieved are going to be like, oh, my God, mind blown.
00:32:07.520This is huge. Oh, my God, this this confirms my persecution complex that I have been censored on Twitter.
00:32:15.140And I think that's exactly why he is doing this, because he knows that all of this sycophants and hangers on are going to amplify that claim and be like, oh, my God, huge reporting, even though nothing new is being reported.
00:32:27.420Here's how Representative James Comer from Tennessee.
00:32:32.640story is just beginning jason because we're going to have every single person at twitter that was
00:32:37.680involved in this in front of the house oversight committee as soon as possible so he's talking
00:32:42.640about like investigating and hauling people in before a committee i think that it really is a
00:32:50.480state a testament to the fact that we are not like anybody can say anything and the substance of what
00:32:56.140is actually being said doesn't matter because people who are already predisposed to feel
00:33:01.420aggrieved and be on the side of like, oh, yeah, we're being censored, are going to circle the
00:33:05.640wagons to make sure that that claim is amplified and like treated with seriousness.
00:33:11.140Yeah, like truth doesn't exist. It's all just framing and, you know, winning the narrative.
00:33:18.880And right now, if you Google or take to Twitter to search her name, there are people talking about
00:33:23.780how Vijaya God, who was Twitter's former head of legal policy and trust at Twitter,
00:33:28.360The person who made kind of moderation decisions and was the head of, you know, combating things like misinformation and hate speech, how she should be arrested for her role in moderating content around the Hunter Biden laptop story and, quote, rigging the 2020 election for Biden.
00:33:44.480So it's interesting how all of this, I think it's savvy on Elon's part because it feeds into this like big lie that somehow, somewhere, the 2020 election was rigged for Biden against Trump.
00:33:58.360Yeah. And, you know, isn't it convenient that they finally found a woman of color to be the like poster child of this invented scandal?
00:34:08.740You know, obviously it's a woman of color. And the other idea in here is that this one singular event is what rigged the election for Joe Biden.
00:34:20.520Right. Like everybody still knew about the Hunter Biden laptop. We're still talking about it years later.
00:34:26.360You know, it's not like Twitter's decision to not show those photos somehow killed the story and nobody ever heard about it again.
00:34:38.080Right. So it's like even the part that they're aggrieved about is just completely fabricated.
00:35:55.940If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.
00:36:01.880This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters,
00:36:08.300pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.
00:36:14.340I'm Eli Rallo, and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having.
00:36:21.440I'm going to have to look up this story. I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed.
00:36:24.960From best-selling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments, nothing is off the table.
00:36:30.980It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters, then that is a Trojan horse.
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00:36:48.060Listen to Pro Society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:37:02.940It is not surprising to me that a woman of color, a brown girl, is at the center of this story.
00:37:10.660There are memes on Twitter right now. It says, Twitter head of legal policy, I knowingly subverted your election process.
00:37:18.360I did it with the intent to throw the election. That makes me guilty of treason under Article 3, Section 3 of the United States Constitution.
00:37:26.860It's not surprising to me that like earlier today, I saw a picture that had that was a explicit image of Hunter Biden where they had doctored her head on the body of another woman and they were involved in a sex act.
00:37:40.640It's not surprising to me. I think that when you talk about this kind of thing, and I know I beat this drum a lot, misogyny and racism is all linked.
00:37:50.740And when you talk about this kind of thing, it is not surprising to me that, you know, the fallout is not measured discourse.
00:37:59.180The fallout is talking about arresting this woman and making crude memes of her that are sexually explicit.
00:38:06.640it yeah it's so sad and just like the same old story of like once again it's just racism and
00:38:16.180misogyny finding new stories to turn into memes to feed that same narrative exactly and it has to
00:38:26.720be said i mean i i didn't want to bring him up in this episode but here i am in response to this
00:38:32.120reporting, Trump took to Truth Social to advocate for throwing out the Constitution and throwing out
00:38:39.980the 2020 election results. And so, you know, if this whole thing was meant to be a crusade
00:38:45.640around free speech and it led to Trump, who is the presumptive Republican presidential nominee,
00:38:53.420being like, oh, I'm coming out in favor of throwing out the Constitution, the First Amendment is part
00:38:58.860of the Constitution. So like where where are all these like free speech crusaders who are like
00:39:04.040trying to protect the free free speech of the First Amendment when the presumptive Republican
00:39:09.460presidential nominee comes out against just throwing the whole thing out because of their
00:39:13.920reporting? It's a great question. It's almost like, you know, something it's like selectively
00:39:19.540applies here, but not there. You know, today they care about the Constitution. Tomorrow,
00:39:25.840Let's cancel it. I mean, I guess to Republicans credit, not many people like rallied around Trump's cry to cancel the Constitution, whatever that would mean.
00:39:36.080I wonder if part of this whole thing is just like Elon really being desperate to try to like get in Trump's good graces.
00:39:42.580You think? I mean, some of those images he was tweeting a couple of weeks back about him and Trump were definitely an appeal to get into Trump's good graces, I'll say. I'll just keep it at that. We can move on.
00:40:00.000I feel like Good Graces is the title of a movie here.
00:40:05.200So, yeah, I think it's really scary how commonplace communications are being reframed as indicative of, like, nefarious, inappropriate behavior.
00:40:18.260And I also think that it's confirmation bias at work.
00:40:20.980Some people on the right, which at this point I think includes Elon Musk, already believe that they are being censored on social media platforms.
00:40:28.760A really interesting 2020 study by the Pew Research Center found that 90 percent of Republicans believe that their views are being censored.
00:40:36.200And 69 percent of Republicans or people who lent Republican believe that social media companies generally support the views of liberals over conservatives.
00:40:45.460And so I think that, you know, it's this confirmation bias at work where anything, even something that is like not anything, can be used to confirm this previously held opinion that they have.
00:40:58.760And Elon Musk repeatedly parrots this claim that Twitter has previously had an anti-right-wing bias and thus, quote, the Twitter files is just another part of that, you know.
00:41:11.120But there are entire bodies of academic research that disprove this time and time again.
00:41:17.860There are studies from NYU, MIT that debunk this claim that there is anti-conservative bias on social media platforms.
00:41:26.620And so there was also a study done internally at Twitter. In the pre-Elon Musk days after Trump was banned from Twitter, the team was facing a lot of criticism saying that they were censoring the right. So they looked into it.
00:41:38.960The internal research team at Twitter found that folks on the right are actually amplified on Twitter, both within the United States and globally.
00:41:47.300Our results reveal a remarkably consistent trend.
00:41:50.140In six out of the seven countries studied, the mainstream political right enjoys higher algorithmic amplification than the mainstream political left.
00:42:01.100And so here's my thing. Either Elon Musk is woefully uninformed about the realities of, quote, right wing bias at Twitter, or he's just lying to get attention from right wing extremists. And that's really kind of what bums me out. You know, there are entire bodies of work and studies and school of thought dedicated to answering all of these thorny, complicated questions that are raised by social media and how it is moderated. Right.
00:42:27.780But Elon Musk is demonstrating time and time again that he does not care about any of that because he thinks that he knows better, despite never having done this work before.
00:42:38.640And I feel like everything in our culture is really coalescing around confirming that he has some kind of special, super special, innate genius ability to understand this stuff as a novice more than people who have been working on it for years and years.
00:42:54.740You know, in his last few weeks, he came into Twitter and immediately blew up verification only to realize like, oh, wait, verification is actually important.
00:43:03.760And then walked back those plans to blow up verification.
00:43:06.960He said, oh, we don't need moderation.
00:43:09.780And then Kanye West starts tweeting swastikas.
00:43:13.100And he's like, wait, actually, we do need some moderation.
00:43:17.480he is learning the very same lessons that every other social media platform even the ones like
00:43:23.960truth social and parlor that started by being these fringe platforms that wanted to you know
00:43:30.120be free speech zones or whatever he is learning what every single social media platform including
00:43:35.460those french platforms has learned only he's getting to the game years and years late yeah
00:43:42.200Yeah, I think you're right. He's just like pretty uninformed about these things. And, you know, I think a generous interpretation of his actions here is that he's bringing like a move fast and break things kind of attitude to the way that Twitter should do moderation.
00:44:01.540And I think that sort of approach can work great for little scrappy startups trying to fight for a piece of market share to sell widgets.
00:44:11.800But when you are making decisions about a cornerstone of society, right, like Twitter is or at least was how people share information.
00:44:25.200And it's just like it's a really important thing.
00:44:28.560And for him to just be making these huge decisions and then days later be like, oops, my bad.
00:44:36.380It's just so reckless and irresponsible.
00:44:41.840He should be ashamed, but he certainly is not.
00:44:47.080Yeah, that's my thing is like he should be embarrassed.
00:44:51.120I don't know that that is an emotion that he feels the way that you or I might feel.
00:44:56.880A friend of mine, Justin Hendricks, who is brilliant, he runs a great organization called Tech Policy Press, which is they also have a podcast.
00:45:04.640But he works with students, you know, teaching them about social media.
00:45:09.680And whenever the students are given like a thought experiment about how they should run platforms, they always at first are like, we're going to have no moderation.
00:45:17.380It's going to be whatever people want to do and they can self-moderate.
00:45:19.900And then immediately they're like, oh, wait, that doesn't work.
00:45:22.380So it's like starting at the one, like the thing that like a 101 student would suggest, that's where Elon Musk is starting. But I don't feel like he's self-aware enough to be like, oh, wait, I'm actually starting at the ideas that a 101 student at this would actually come to the table with.
00:45:40.480Yeah, I think that is exactly right with him. I think he thinks that he is this genius, but he's just not. He just doesn't know about these things. These things are complicated. And I'm not an expert in moderation, but I know that there are experts out there who spend a lot of time and ink on it and to just wade in and just make up rules. It's just so reckless.
00:46:08.400Yeah, it is reckless. And I have worked in this space for a long time, for years. And I come to the table with people who are way smarter than me, who have worked in this space, who are content moderation experts. And even in those spaces, there is not consensus of how to do it right. It is an ongoing, complex, complicated body of work.
00:46:30.860And people who have been doing it for years at the highest levels don't have consensus of how to do it right. And I really take umbrage with this idea that Elon Musk, someone who has never done this, has no background in it, no experience with it, is just uniquely a genius at it somehow.
00:46:53.520And I reject that. And I honestly think that Elon Musk's tenure at Twitter, I think I'm seeing a little bit of the tides turning. I think being someone who works in tech spaces, we're so willing to give wealthy white dudes the benefit of the doubt that if they say they're a genius at something, then they're a genius at something.
00:47:16.040If they say that they know how to do it, even if they've never done it before, give them millions of dollars of funding because they're going to figure it out. And if they don't, then, you know, they had to learn by failing. And I've just, I know how this story ends. You know, I've seen this story a lot. I have had to smile through this story being told to my face, even though I am screaming inside.
00:47:37.980And I think we're all starting to peel back that curtain a little bit and say, well, wait, are you actually a genius? Is it possible that maybe you're not playing chestnut checkers? Maybe you're not even playing checkers. Maybe you're like eating the pieces and throwing the board on the floor.
00:47:53.980Yeah, you totally nailed it. And you talked about how content moderation is like difficult and nuanced. And I think those sorts of things are like really difficult to talk about. And like you said earlier, they're kind of boring. They're not really exciting.
00:48:09.480You know, there's certainly if you were to try to pack all of it into a single tweet, that tweet would probably not get a lot of engagement. Right. Because you'd need to write like a lot of them about it.
00:48:19.300and i think uh you know when we think about some of those studies that find that right-wing
00:48:26.580social media posts tend to get amplified more than uh posts written by people on the left
00:48:33.640i think that's part of it that like on the left there is often a recognition of like
00:48:40.680nuance and things are complicated and wanting to qualify things and provide caveats whereas uh
00:48:49.300I mean, there's certainly thoughtful people on the right, but there's also a lot of people who are not interested in the thoughtful nuance and are just interested in, like, getting those likes, you know, getting those retweets.
00:49:00.820Totally. And this is actually one of the reasons why, as you know, I was hesitant to even make this episode because content moderation is messy.
00:49:10.720It's complicated and it's mundane. It's a lot of stuff not working and being like, oh, well, here's why this didn't work or here's what I thought about this.
00:49:17.560Like it's never the the reality of the work that people like myself do is never going to be as flashy and exciting as the pithy but incorrect Elon Musk tweet about it.
00:49:32.500Right. Like it's like we're at a disadvantage.
00:49:36.760You know, the truth is actually, the thoughtful, complex truth is so much less exciting than the sexy bombshell with the popcorn emoji.
00:49:47.380And I don't know, I struggled, like, when we were talking about how I wanted to respond to this, you were like, oh, maybe an op-ed.
00:49:54.900And I was like, yeah, I know the reality.
00:49:57.000And even I would still like to believe the Elon Musk version of things, that there are some files in Twitter that reveal the smoking gun, that the 2020 election was rigged and blah, blah, blah, and Soylent Green is people and all of that.
00:50:12.380And even I would be more entertained to believe this complete fiction that he is selling people.
00:50:18.340But that fiction is always going to travel faster than the mundane, boring truth.
00:50:23.380So that probably means that people listening to this were like, oh, glad I tuned in for 45 minutes of mundane accuracy.
00:50:31.500Yeah, I think you got it right with it's more entertaining, right?
00:50:36.300That popcorn emoji, we haven't really talked about that, but I think it says so much about Elon's approach to his shiny new toy that he bought for $44 billion, right?
00:50:47.440Like it's he's he's the guy in charge. He's making all these decisions, but also he's like cool and detached and just like doing it for lols, y'all.
00:50:58.100Oh, my God. Totally. And I think it's like so you don't I don't know if you know this.
00:51:06.000Deep thinks about emoji choices are my like like that's my QAnon.
00:51:11.040I'm like, I'm like, I gotta, I gotta like follow all the threads. But a popcorn emoji is inviting
00:51:17.560us to watch the show, right? Like he knows it's a stunt. He wants us to watch. And I think that
00:51:24.380he is betting, this is just my opinion. He is betting on turning Twitter into a drama machine
00:51:31.260that people will pay a subscription to watch go down. And I think that popcorn, I think that
00:52:01.980and locked into what's going to happen next.
00:52:04.260It's the same way how he kept tweeting about how, oh, the daily average users has never been higher.
00:52:12.220And somebody was like, yeah, that's like setting your house on fire and then being like, wow, I've never had more visitors on my lawn than when my house was on fire.
00:52:19.400Yeah, I am so curious to see where this goes and like what Twitter looks like six months from now, who's using it, how many people are using it.
00:52:29.120You know, what are they talking about on there?
00:52:31.520But that's probably a story for another show.
00:52:35.700So all of this is to say, I don't want to make it seem like pre-Elon Musk Twitter days were the best.
00:52:42.320Certainly, if you listen to this show, you know that that's not how I feel, but I just want to say it explicitly.
00:52:47.840And I do want to say, like, there are so many good questions to be asked about the way that Twitter moderates content.
00:52:57.040And I think that more transparency around those conversations would be awesome.
00:53:02.540But unfortunately, that's not what we're getting.
00:53:05.400And it is so clear to me that Elon Musk is only interested in cherry picking instances
00:53:09.300to blow up and exaggerate that tap into this right wing fantasy about being censored on