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It was the kind of absurd fiction that only someone with a warped mind—radicalized by hours spent online every day in their own filter bubble—would believe.
Musk, apparently, was one of the easily misled conspiracists he had studied in his work.
“I’m resigning today. I was feeling excited about the takeover, but I was really disappointed by your Paul Pelosi tweet. It’s really such obvious partisan misinformation and it makes me worry about you and what kind of friends you’re getting information from. It’s only really like the tenth percentile of the adult population who’d be gullible enough to fall for this.”
It is not for nothing that Twitter’s most loyal users referred to it as a “hellsite,” a corner of the internet where something—or someone—was always burning. People walked away from a session scrolling through their timelines feeling angry, frustrated, disgusted—and yet they couldn’t wait to log back on.
Twitter was already ruined. Musk only managed to make it even worse.
What was once called the digital town square is becoming Musk’s mirror.
For the early days of the social web, Dorsey was a prolific poster. And while his personality came out more in his LiveJournal posts, he felt like he needed something more. On both platforms, a user needed so much intention to post—drafting sentences and paragraphs of a blog or uploading and editing images from their digital cameras—before publishing. There needed to be something quicker, more stream-of-consciousness, where someone could post and share effortlessly and instantly without much thought.
God forbid people have to think a little before they post something to the Internet. Twitter was a cancer from its first conception.
Almost simultaneously, the Gamergate campaign spread like brushfire. If Ferguson highlighted the power of placing the tools of communication directly in the hands of participants, Gamergate illustrated how that power could be abused. Thousands of Twitter users—often using anonymous accounts—launched frenzied attacks against prominent women, posting their private information to contribute to further abuse and death threats.
She also studied harassment and found that vitriolic threats from a handful of accounts were enough to drive users off the platform, even if their overall experiences were positive—powerful data that she used to convince Twitter executives that good speech wouldn’t naturally drown out the bad.
“Freedom of expression means little as our underlying philosophy if we continue to allow voices to be silenced because they are afraid to speak up,” Gadde wrote in a 2015 op-ed for The Washington Post.
Democrats blamed the company for enabling Trump and profiting from his inflammatory statements, while Trump credited Twitter for carrying him into the White House.
Birchall set out on his assignment to prove Unsworth was a creep. He paid $52,000 to someone he thought was a private investigator. But that man, who faked his credentials, turned out to be a former convict and fed Birchall and Musk false information about Unsworth.
By 2017, Musk’s Twitter habit had become an addiction. That year, he tweeted 1,162 times,
In practice, however, finding the balance between free expression and safety became the crux of Twitter’s problem.
They called the project Bluesky. The name was intended as a symbol of freedom for Twitter’s bird logo, referencing the open firmament where the bird would someday fly.
In the pantheon of American business deals, a $44 billion acquisition does not even crack the top ten.
Still, $44 billion was objectively a shit ton of money.
That one man could accumulate such a fortune, much less be willing to spend it on a company for ideological or personal reasons, was a testament to the world’s widening wealth inequality. This simply wasn’t what the elite did with their money. To buy and operate a global corporation for one’s own pleasure was unheard of. Musk was breaking the rules of what it meant to be rich.
The billionaire had no respect for Twitter’s deliberative and meandering governance. Twitter executives, perhaps naively, thought that if they just explained the years of reasoning behind their decisions, the billionaire would understand. But few could reason with Musk once he had made up his mind.
It quickly became apparent to the execs that Musk lacked basic knowledge of the merger agreement he had signed.
It was clear. Musk had not bought Twitter to be a responsible steward and guide one of the world’s most heavily used websites and forums for human communication. He had bought it as an object of personal obsession and was going to shape it to his whims. Musk had come to love Twitter, and he believed that the people who had run it had led it astray. He was going to make them pay.
His new employees were rapidly learning that Musk hated excuses and explanations but loved to be admired. He got keen satisfaction from telling jokes—which meant that everyone around him had to be ready to laugh.
Elon’s view is that Twitter’s rules should closely follow what’s allowed in the U.S. Constitution, he said. To illustrate his point, he noted that people should expect to see speech they didn’t like, and cited the fact that even Nazis had the right to assemble and demonstrate in public spaces.
Some members of the call, who were Jewish, were taken aback. Sure, the Constitution afforded rights to citizens that couldn’t be infringed upon by the government, but Twitter was a private company. It had no obligation to give Nazis a platform, and no brand would want their ads appearing next to Nazi content.
“We have the greatest, greatest product and engineering innovator of all time working at the helm of this company, and I’m so excited about what that means for our product road map,” Wheeler said. Later, she claimed Musk’s ownership had already caused Twitter to attract its highest-ever number of daily active users—like a homeowner watching her house burn down, marveling at how many neighbors were rubbernecking.
Musk was the platform’s main character, whose every decision was scrutinized and pilloried by the site’s users. Twitter was worth far less than Tesla and SpaceX, but it was a center of culture, current events, and news, and there were few subjects people on Twitter liked discussing more than Twitter itself.
The longer the Blue team worked under Musk’s direction, the more they realized his decision-making was driven solely by gut instinct. Musk’s unparalleled success in building two world-changing companies had given him—and his allies—the belief that he was the alpha when it came to product decisions. No one was better or more qualified, and he made that readily known.
She and other employees began to understand that Musk’s expertise in other areas didn’t necessarily translate into running or understanding Twitter. At its core, SpaceX was a physics problem. Tesla was a manufacturing challenge. But Twitter was a social and psychological problem.
It became clear that Musk struggled to understand how anyone else used the platform.
Musk had gone off the rails, connecting a bunch of seemingly unrelated events into a larger plot of subterfuge. He grew extremely dark, telling those around him that perhaps he made a mistake in buying Twitter.
Minutes later, he ordered Twitter’s engineers to close all Spaces, and later tweeted that the company was “fixing a Legacy bug.” There were limits to free speech after all.
The terms were bold, if not preposterous, as they sought to raise up to $3 billion. Musk had spent the last month and a half destroying the company’s advertising revenue streams and firing employees. His chaotic approach, combined with the churning global financial markets, led some banks, which had provided $13 billion in debt financing, to try and sell debt at steep discounts.
“Should I step down as head of Twitter?” he tweeted at 1:20 a.m. in Doha. “I will abide by the results of this poll.”
By the time he touched down in London, 57.5 percent of the more than 17.5 million accounts that had voted were calling for him to resign. It was a shock to Musk’s system.
Musk convinced himself that he was not the problem.
By then, Musk had become openly conservative. He regularly replied to right-wing accounts and personalities including @Catturd2, the trolling alter ego of a Trump-supporting Florida man, and Jack Posobiec, an activist who promoted Pizzagate, offering to personally look into their complaints about Twitter. He also gave a tour of the office to Dave Rubin, a conservative podcast host, allowing him to spend two days at Twitter headquarters asking employees questions about why his own account had been limited in its reach.
In practice, however, people began seeing the amplification of right-wing voices. While Musk had espoused the idea of “freedom of speech, not freedom of reach,” Twitter’s recommendation algorithms began pushing conservative accounts and posts into people’s timelines. Users setting up new accounts were given recommendations to follow the likes of Republican Florida governor Ron DeSantis; Texas senator Ted Cruz; and Posobiec.
the Anti-Defamation League, found that slurs against Black Americans had tripled, while antisemitic speech was up more than 60 percent since the change in ownership. Accounts showing terrorist affiliations with groups such as the Islamic State (IS) also surged in the wake of the takeover.
Twitter’s old leaders had put the measures in place to limit the propaganda from state-controlled accounts, but as
Musk declared, “All news is to some degree propaganda. Let people decide for themselves.”
It became apparent that if she was meant to be the adult in the room to watch the manchild, she would have little control over his impulses.
Musk’s audible had alienated them all and left Yaccarino without anyone overseeing content moderation at a company where ad sales were already down almost 60 percent in the U.S.
