The Bulwark Podcast XX
[0] Welcome to the bulwark podcast.
[1] I'm Charlie Sykes.
[2] How many days has it been since Elon Musk became the supreme leader of Twitter?
[3] How is it going so far?
[4] We are joined today by Charlie Worsell, contributing writer at the Atlantic, who writes the invaluable newsletter, Galaxy Brain about technology, media, and big ideas, also co -author of the book, Out of Office.
[5] So, Charlie, welcome back to the podcast.
[6] Thank you for having me. So does Elon Musk have any idea what he's gotten himself into?
[7] Short answer, no. The short answer is no because it seems that, you know, I don't want to take away from the fact that Elon Musk has built several successful companies and seems to understand how to, you know, come up with a large concept idea and hire people who, you know, are actual rocket scientists or car engineers.
[8] and put those things into the world.
[9] Totally get that.
[10] Content moderation, which is the sort of supreme thing that you do when you're the owner of a big social platform that kind of controls a lot of the levers of politics and culture in America and other places.
[11] Content moderation is extremely tricky.
[12] And the past, let's say, 15 years of social media is a series of, it's always done, dudes, dudes deciding that they have a really great idea to connect people and to sort of promote discourse in a new and interesting way.
[13] And they create a platform.
[14] And then people use these platforms in all kinds of ways.
[15] Some are great.
[16] Some are absolutely nightmarish.
[17] And then these guys say, whoa, whoa, this isn't what we thought.
[18] And they struggle with this sort of eternal question of not just the internet, but like discourse in general, which is how do you balance free and open debate with maximum allowable speech?
[19] And the truth is that it's extremely difficult.
[20] And then you throw in a business in the center of that.
[21] So, you know, advertisers need for revenue.
[22] And it gets even more complicated.
[23] And Elon Musk has sort of stumbled into this.
[24] I think he seems to think Twitter is a super fun thing that is kind of a, it's a nice business card to have, right?
[25] And it's kind of fun.
[26] And he can be troll and chief now.
[27] Exactly.
[28] Chief Twit, I believe, is what he likes to say.
[29] And he gets to make all these kinds of jokes and, you know, he gets to correspond with everyone this morning.
[30] He's, you know, tweeting back and forth with Stephen King.
[31] It's very clear he loves the platform.
[32] Like, he is one of the power users of the platform.
[33] So we can't, you know, claim that he's ignorant about what he bought.
[34] But he is very ignorant based off of everything that I have read of his, everything I've heard of him talk about when it comes to the moderation job, the sort of that balancing of those two, you know, open debate and maximum allowable speech categories.
[35] He doesn't really understand not only how to go about doing that in a responsible way, but also he doesn't understand what Twitter has tried in the past to do this and what they've succeeded at and what they failed at.
[36] So he's in way over his head.
[37] He's in way over his head.
[38] He obviously thinks of himself as a great deep thinker.
[39] It feels like he spent about five minutes thinking about these very complicated issues.
[40] And now he's at they just throw shit up against the wall stage of all of this.
[41] So let's talk about his disastrous weekend.
[42] He's only been in charge for what?
[43] Four days.
[44] and you have a great piece up in the Atlantic, the disastrous weekend.
[45] So what made it so incredibly shambolic, which is the nicest word I can use here because I'm trying to avoid using words like cluster fuck, so shambolic.
[46] It's a family podcast.
[47] No, so let's see.
[48] What made it so disastrous or shambolic is that it was watching somebody who just very clearly isn't good at this, try to figure everything out in real time.
[49] I think the way that myself and my colleague, David Barris, put it in the piece, was that it was like a guy waking up in a new house in the first night and just sort of stumbling around in the dark trying to find the light switch because it's a new place.
[50] And that's how it felt.
[51] And there were so many inconsistencies, right?
[52] So he, right before the deal closes, he writes this really like bloodless, executive speak letter to advertisers that's like, listen, I - make this a hellscape.
[53] Exactly.
[54] I don't want to make this hellscape under my watch.
[55] And also, you know, he did the very classic thing that like every tech executive has ever done where they say, you know, the advertising can be, we can elevate the advertising so that it's actually as good as the content, which is, you know, always pretty much a lie.
[56] But anyway, it was this very like, oh, is he going to be this like kind of buttoned up executive once he has his, you know, fingers on the reins or whatever.
[57] And then it turns out absolutely not.
[58] He's not going to be at all.
[59] He's going to be his usual trollish self.
[60] He tweeted on Friday that he was going to do this content moderation council where he's going to have a wide variety of viewpoints and that, you know, no decisions would be made without, you know, the entire council.
[61] Of course, there's no, I think he's making this up as he goes along.
[62] He doesn't know who that's going to be.
[63] That sounded like just a punt.
[64] It's sort of like when a politician has no idea what they're going to do, they name a blue ribbon task force.
[65] this was like, yeah, I don't have anything, so I'm just going to throw that stuff against the law.
[66] I think that's what he genuinely wants, right?
[67] He does want this like council of elders, these people making these decisions.
[68] I think in his mind, he's like, well, you know, if we get like, like, you know, Candice Owens and Alexandria Ocasio -Cortez somehow to sit in a room together, you know, they're going to battle it out in the, you know, thunderdome of ideas and we will, you know, come up with a content moderation policy.
[69] Of course, that, A, will never happen.
[70] B, it would be a disaster.
[71] I do think that's what he wants.
[72] But anyway, like, literally three hours later, he tweets to the Daily Wires, Jordan Peterson, that all people who have been banned for, like, minor infractions are going to be reinstated under him immediately.
[73] And it was just this very classic, no decisions will be made until the council approves them.
[74] And then three hours later, actually, it's not really a democracy.
[75] I'm going to reinstate.
[76] some people, you know, as soon as I can.
[77] So there's this total inconsistency, right?
[78] And then, obviously, like, let's fast forward to Sunday, which is the big day in the Elon Musk weekend, which is where he is replying to a tweet from Hillary Clinton with a conspiracy theory around the Pelosi home invasion and attack.
[79] I'm not even going to talk about what the conspiracy theory was but it was ridiculous from a website that has trafficked in total fake news before and it's this idea that musk says on thursday i don't want this to become a hellscape i want you know free and open debate i want this to be a tool where people can use to learn about the world and knowledge is power etc etc and then he's like trollishly sharing fake news links it's so inconsistent right i mean it is it is the the dante's inferno of hellscapes by Sunday, right?
[80] I mean, it's, you have to peel the onion of awfulness here because he's tweeting a conspiracy theory about, and I'm sorry, but that's homosexual, you know, homophobic meme that was pushed out there.
[81] And then he links to a site that is, is like in the Hall of Fame for bullshit conspiracy sites.
[82] I mean, this is a site that's so bizarre that in 2016, it was reporting that Hillary Clinton had been killed on 9 -11 and that it was a UFO body double that, you was campaigning for president.
[83] I mean, so, you know, with all the debate, after all these years of debating, what do we do about misinformation and trolls and, you know, false stories?
[84] Here you have the guy in his first 72 hours tweeting out the worst, most, you know, just toxic crap that was immediately, obviously, debunked.
[85] And it's so inconsistent, too, even from Sunday morning.
[86] Like, you don't even have to go back to the, I don't want Twitter to be a health letter.
[87] On Sunday morning, Elon Musk replies to a tweet from LeBron James.
[88] LeBron James on Saturday night tweeted that he was really worried about this uptick in accounts using racial slurs, you know, this sort of idea that Elon Musk took control of Twitter and all these racists and neo -Nazis are flooding the platform and they're really activated and energized, right?
[89] And he tweets that, he tweets that, you know, he shares some information from some engineers at Twitter that, you know, this isn't actually as big a deal as as we think.
[90] This is a small targeted network of accounts.
[91] We're working on it.
[92] And the, the, you know, inference behind that tweet is he doesn't want LeBron James, a very powerful cultural person and also someone with a lot of followers on Twitter.
[93] He doesn't want him or other people to think that Elon Musk is the cause of the degradation of this network into a bunch of, you know, abuse and misinformation.
[94] And then, like, two hours later, he's out there sharing just like the lowest bottom of the barrel viral garbage that you can have.
[95] And so what we wrote in the piece was essentially Elon Musk has tasked himself with basically trying to solve these historical, multigenerational issues of free speech on the internet.
[96] It's a nearly impossible task.
[97] And people who have tried before him and either failed or, you know, not been able to, you know, perfect the balance have been reasoned.
[98] They've been smart.
[99] They've had restraint in how they are running their businesses.
[100] Elon Musk is not any of that, right?
[101] And he's trying to do it on the fly.
[102] Exactly.
[103] Sort of making it up as he goes along.
[104] And when you think about, you know, how difficult the task is in front of him and you think about the way that he is behaving, there's just no way.
[105] I mean, I really don't want to be overly pessimistic.
[106] It's not great.
[107] in my line of work to predict that Elon Musk will absolutely 100 % fail, and I don't know the future.
[108] But when you look at what is required to try to restore some of the integrity of these types of platforms to really balance these difficult issues, this is not the person you task to do this, right?
[109] This is not the person who is going to solve these issues.
[110] This is a man who is essentially just he's a troll, right?
[111] And that doesn't mean he might not be able to build rockets or cars or do whatever, you know, he can.
[112] But I do not think that he and his friends who he is tasking and, you know, giving names like chief meme officer.
[113] I mean, this is a game to them.
[114] And Twitter is not a game.
[115] It is very much where, unfortunately, we are conducting a lot of our politics and commentary and where a lot of that culture derives from.
[116] So it's fun to laugh at and kind of roll your eyes at Elon and think of him as a Bond super villain or whatever you want to do.
[117] But at the end of the day, to me, it's extremely depressing because we've given the keys to this important lever of communications over to someone who is one of the more shallow thinkers on the topic.
[118] And reckless.
[119] So as you point out the tweet about Paul Pelosi he eventually deleted, which actually angered some of the users like Gynonna's cat turd, who apparently Elon Musk is very concerned about what cat turd thing.
[120] So, I mean, Trump used to retweet cat turd.
[121] And so cat turd thought that Musk had caved into the liberal mob.
[122] So here's the problem for Elon Musk that you want to have general motors continue to advertise on your site.
[123] You're concerned that LeBron James not think that you are a toxic swamp, but then you also need to cater to cat turd.
[124] it's not going to end well.
[125] Yeah, it's, there's the classic line of, you know, I never thought the leopards would eat my face.
[126] And, and it, yeah, it's this, you know, he has this hilarious for us to watch, probably very difficult for him, balance to strike, right?
[127] He has all these people that he wants to appease, he wants to be seen.
[128] I mean, I genuinely think that he really does love to, be liked, try not to do too much psychoanalysis, but it does seem like, you know, he really, he loves activating these, you know, groups of people.
[129] He wants to be seen as sort of a savior of Twitter on the free speech end, but he's just going to piss those people off because those people want anarchy.
[130] Like, they just want absolute chaos.
[131] And of course, absolute chaos does not jive with the advertising business or any, you know, any of the economics of the platform, which he really has to worry about.
[132] You can see right now his whole have users pay for verification fiasco.
[133] He's on Twitter talking to Stephen King this morning about the fact that, well, I know it's not great, but we need to raise money because we have to pay for the website.
[134] So he's got real economic incentives to make money.
[135] And, you know, it's not going to cut it if he's just courting neo -Nazis.
[136] Well, this is also going to be taking up a larger and larger portion of his brain if he has to answer every single celebrity that tweets at him.
[137] So one more thing is I want to get to this whole, you know, charging for the blue check in a moment.
[138] You know, clearly he's also really adopted this sort of maga like persona of never apologizing, always trolling.
[139] So the New York Times runs a story after this fiasco over the weekend saying Musk shared link from site known to publish false news.
[140] And then Musk troll tweets back that he had not shared a link from the New York Times, like, huh, okay, get it, you know.
[141] So he's clearly not apologetic.
[142] He's going to continue to be a troll, and he's not ever going to apologize.
[143] So let's just talk about this, this charging for the blue check mark.
[144] Now, you tweeted out that you're not going to pay for it.
[145] I'm not going to pay for it.
[146] I actually think that it becomes kind of this reverse filter that anyone that actually still has it after 90 days is like a sucker.
[147] Elon Musk.
[148] So, again, this is a guy that paid $44 billion for this business.
[149] And in the first 72 hours, he's coming up with ideas that seemed barely half -baked.
[150] Yeah, it's, I think that the verification thing, I mean, it's supposedly going to be $20 a month.
[151] That's considerable.
[152] Yeah.
[153] You do get some things when you are verified on Twitter.
[154] You get, you know, better controls to deal with spam and abuse.
[155] which, as someone who's been on Twitter with a blue checkmark for a while, I won't deny that that's a great thing.
[156] Am I going to pay like double what I pay for like Netflix and Hulu a month just for that?
[157] I will not.
[158] Also, I do think you're right.
[159] I think it sort of runs the risk of the people who will be verified will be either seen as, you know, extremely uncool or, you know, Elon Musk fanboys.
[160] and there's a whole sort of cultural thing about that.
[161] But when I look at this, right, this is something that's like, he's clearly at Twitter headquarters all weekend, trying to come up with different ideas to raise revenue with himself and his little council of advisors and Tesla people who he's brought into, for some reason, evaluate the code of Twitter engineers, which is interesting, to say the least.
[162] But it's very clear that he's just, as you say, doing this on the fly, right?
[163] Because this trial balloon is floated, but what we don't know is, well, our government accounts going to have to pay, is the United States government going to have Elon Musk's to have, you know, White House at Twitter .com or, you know, whatever, White House at, verified, right?
[164] Our news organizations, are journalists in war zones going to have to pay Elon Musk and Twitter money in order to be verified to deliver information about, you know, things that are happening on the front line in Ukraine?
[165] The whole point of owning and operating a social network is that the big, broad strokes are actually somewhat easy.
[166] The very difficult thing is having 250 plus million people and all of the edge cases, right?
[167] All of those little things that pop up, right?
[168] You know, a big part of running Twitter is dealing with law enforcement requests trying to unmask anonymous dissidents in foreign countries, right?
[169] I don't believe that Elon Musk has thought for 45 seconds about that, right?
[170] And it's the same thing.
[171] Like, okay, this is a, in theory, this is a small little revenue generating thing.
[172] It's certainly going to make a lot of news because, you know, the blue check has kind of become this, you know, cultural elite signifier.
[173] In a way, he's almost kind of trolling, you know, all the journalists on Twitter and saying, you know, you got to pay me if you want to, you know, keep your cultural elite status.
[174] There's all those like sort of broad strokes things that are interesting or funny or possibly sound like good ideas.
[175] And then there's all the actual logistics of it, right?
[176] How is this going to be implemented?
[177] And it seems like he, it's really trite to make the Trump comparison.
[178] But it's very similar to the way that, you know, Donald Trump would announce an infrastructure week style thing, right?
[179] I'm going to do this.
[180] And, you know, it's clear his staff hasn't been briefed, right?
[181] He's just tweeting from the residents about this.
[182] stuff.
[183] It's a very similar thing.
[184] And we're all kind of just, especially in the, in the tech media, people like myself, we're just kind of stuck in this reactive crouch, responding to these things that may or may not be true and may just be pseudo events and feeling kind of dumb the entire time that we're forced to care.
[185] But because of the position he's put himself in, we do have to care.
[186] So you write in your piece that the bottom line is that that.
[187] that this weekend it was a disaster and it's only going to get worse.
[188] You talk to Twitter employees who are saying that staffers are packing their bags and they're expecting bedlam in the coming days.
[189] So what is going on in the Twitter headquarters this week?
[190] Who wants to stick around is what I'm getting at?
[191] Well, I've spent over a decade reporting on the company and I've had quite a few disagreements with the way that the product is run.
[192] I will say there's two things about Twitter that are worth mentioning.
[193] One is that in the aftermath of all the total abuse of the platform during the 26th election, Twitter committed to really trying to help its users out, right?
[194] It didn't try to do some sort of truth commission.
[195] What it did is it tried to give people tools to make sure that they could moderate their own experience, right?
[196] If people were harassing them, they could better blocking tools, better quality control filters, better abuse reporting functions.
[197] They did a really good job calling bots and a lot of different awful things off the platform to help people.
[198] So that's one thing that's important.
[199] And one of the reasons why that happened is because, too, there are a lot of people at Twitter who really believe in the product, who really care quite a bit about it.
[200] Not all of them are power users, but who really truly believe in the fundamental mission and see it as sort of this for good or bad cornerstone of our discourse and want to make it as helpful and net positive to all that.
[201] And that's why some of these people are staying around because they actually care about the product.
[202] They really believe in it.
[203] And I think that that is meaningful.
[204] Some of them are also staying because their stock hasn't quite vested yet, right?
[205] There's very practical concerns there.
[206] They put in their time.
[207] They would like to get their money.
[208] has been firing people before the vesting dates, which is just kind of a shitty thing to do.
[209] But what you can see is from these first couple days, I almost said weeks, but it's just days, is that he's really a terrible manager.
[210] He might be, you know, again, a visionary, whatever.
[211] I'm not going to go into that part of it.
[212] But from a, how do you run a workplace to make your employees feel taking care of safe.
[213] Well, one thing you don't do is just like have the specter of mass terminations just hovering over people for a week plus.
[214] That's not a great way to engender loyalty in your workforce.
[215] And that's exactly what Elon Musk is doing.
[216] He's, you know, he's doing this whole thing where he is governing Twitter by, you know, a series of public tweets.
[217] So we know as much about what's going on inside sometimes as the people who are building the product.
[218] With this whole verification thing, he reportedly told the team you have seven days to roll it out or we're going to start firing people.
[219] It's a bad way to run a business and what I think he's going to learn is as devoted as the Twitter staff might be.
[220] Silicon Valley is a very competitive job market.
[221] These people with these engineering and coding skills, they can go out and get jobs elsewhere.
[222] at companies where they're not being threatened with terminations every, you know, seven days.
[223] Well, as one employee told you and your co -author that even if you ideologically agree with him, unless you love being a replaceable cog who has to dance on command, this is not a workplace to be in.
[224] As for users, you should already be seeing the influx of hate speech.
[225] Porn was already taking over and it will get worse.
[226] And apparently porn is the highest growing topic of interest, according to Reuters.
[227] alongside cryptocurrency.
[228] That's going to be great.
[229] And again, as you point out, most of the company expects to be fired sometimes this week.
[230] So you kind of wonder what the level of productivity is.
[231] So let's go back to the issue of content moderation.
[232] To the degree that he has spent more than 45 seconds thinking about it, he is unequivocal on the point of preserving broad speech protections for even the most odious users.
[233] obviously good news for, you know, Marjorie Taylor Green, Jim Jordan, people like that.
[234] So what do you think?
[235] Does he bring back Alex Jones?
[236] Does he bring back Nick Fuentes?
[237] Does he bring back the misogynist British American kickboxer who talks about beating up women?
[238] What do you think is going to do?
[239] He's got to have to make a decision sooner or later, right?
[240] Well, this is one of the reasons why I'm very curious about the quote -unquote moderation Council of Elders.
[241] It may be a way for him to kind of deflect blame on that decision, right?
[242] I think with some of these people, I don't know if he does necessarily want to bring back.
[243] You know, let's say like Nick Fuentes, right?
[244] I mean, even Alex Jones is like he could, you know, Alex Jones has an entertainment factor to him, right?
[245] Like the gay frogs, you know, lines and stuff like that.
[246] So he might be able to, you know, pass that off with a wink and a nod and a, ha, ha, oh, he's so funny sometimes.
[247] I think the Sandy Hook stuff has probably tainted that legacy too much, but this council might be a way for him to, you know, kind of pawn those decisions off on other people, those really consequential ones.
[248] I mean, I just, I have no idea.
[249] Yeah, and yet he's freelancing.
[250] So, you know, you have this guy, Mark Fincham, who's the conspiracy not running for Secretary of State in Arizona, had been briefly suspended from Twitter on Monday and then was reactivated after he got done.
[251] Jenna Ellis to tag Musk and then Musk personally intervene and put him back on.
[252] I mean, so is it going to be like that?
[253] I mean, it's going to be that if you can get his attention in some way.
[254] So, I mean, so much for the council.
[255] I mean, that's kind of bullshit, obviously, right?
[256] I mean, this is the way that Twitter actually used to work back in 2015, 2016, right?
[257] There weren't real processes to get reinstated or to help someone out with an abusive account what people would do is tag journalists like myself and say, hey, I'm a woman.
[258] Look at all these death and rape threats that I'm getting.
[259] And then someone like myself would email Twitter and say, hey, doesn't this violate the rules?
[260] And poof, that account would be gone, right?
[261] The harassing account.
[262] That's the way that things got done.
[263] It was extremely ad hoc.
[264] People had no autonomy over their own experience and were miserable as a result.
[265] So I've always said that I think the most likely scenario for what Twitter looks like in, now let's just say, 2023, right, in a couple of months into his reign is that I think it's going to look a lot like Twitter in, you know, let's say October 2016, which is just a bit of a free -for -all.
[266] There will be, you know, I think there will be awful accounts that will be removed.
[267] Like, I sort of don't think that truly like harassing neo -Nazis who are like targeting people with you know horrible horrible hate speech i don't think those people are going to be allowed to stay on because i think he has to respond to these advertising incentives but i do think that a lot of the people who in the sort of trumpian way in the alex jonesian way are kind of always you know walking right up to the line and sticking a toe over it and testing and poking and prodding the you know the rules and moderation i think those are going to be the people who he will either reinstate or keep on because he'll say, oh, it wasn't that bad, right?
[268] I think the true odious examples are still going to be, you know, cold.
[269] But all that stuff that's, you know, a toe over the line, it all adds up to an experience that feels toxic.
[270] Your prediction, which I think is probably right, that it's going to be like Twitter back in 2016, which was pretty ugly place, as you point out, you know, was pretty ugly, especially if you were a woman Jewish, a person of color, a member of any minority group.
[271] You know, you mentioned when certain people, including me, you mentioned Ben Shapiro, but I also had this, regularly photoshopped into a gas chamber by accounts with SS avatars.
[272] It was a honeypot for assholes back then.
[273] So let's say we return to that moment.
[274] I have to say, though, that in the six years since 2016, everything has gotten worse.
[275] Everything is more toxic.
[276] It does seem like you just can't dial back.
[277] In many ways, it was a kinder, gentle, or more innocent era because we thought that those were outliers, and it has become this surging volcano.
[278] So if you had the openness in 2023 that you had in 2016, it's going to be pretty ugly, isn't it?
[279] I mean, we live in a different world than we lived in 2016.
[280] True?
[281] Disagree?
[282] I mean, I think so.
[283] I think all of this stuff has just matured.
[284] right all of these people who would have used but no i mean i matured i mean in the sense of like they've gotten more evolved in their tactics right everyone has sort of learned everyone's figured out their their camps there was a lot of as i think you said like throwing shit against the wall right there was this idea of like well you know what can we do to make candidate donald trump memed in office quote unquote i think now all these sort of tactics have hardened right The lines are very well drawn.
[285] And yeah, I mean, this is why I'm so frustrated by Musk's takeover of a platform that is so central to our political discourse, which is that we need adults at the helm, right?
[286] We need, like, something here.
[287] We need people who I don't really care about their politics so much.
[288] I really don't.
[289] I don't really even care about the shit posting.
[290] I just care about someone who takes this challenge very seriously.
[291] someone who's willing to be transparent about it, who's willing to act in a responsible manner, who sees the integrity and the reach and importance and healthy conversations on the platform as paramount to their own ego.
[292] And with Elon Musk, you're never going to put anything in front of his ego, in front of his sort of ability to create spectacle and generate attention.
[293] And that's what's so depressing to me, because as you state, We're going into these midterms, and then we're going to have, the way that I've kind of put is, like, the American Interregnum is, like, over, right?
[294] Like, we're about to head into something that's going to probably feel like 2016 or 2020 for the next two years.
[295] It's going to be chaotic and pretty toxic and awful.
[296] And, like, we need to have in all of our realms, like, adults, you know, holding onto the wheel and trying to steer some of these big platforms towards, you know, helping us come out of it, not worse than we were when we started.
[297] And I don't believe that's going to happen.
[298] So going back to the beginning, if Elon Musk really has no idea what he's getting into and he's going to get caught up in all of these tangles of these irresolvable problems and he's going to get hit from everybody from Cat Turd to, you know, the New York Times, et cetera, how does it end?
[299] How long does this hold Elon Musk's attention?
[300] Does he get bored?
[301] Does he just walk away from it?
[302] Does he just say, screw it?
[303] What do you think happens?
[304] I want to say that he's going to get bored.
[305] It does seem in some, you know, when you're gaming it out in your head, it does seem like one of the most likely outcomes, right?
[306] This, again, these issues are not fun to deal with.
[307] Like being the head of Twitter sounds like a great job.
[308] It's a great business card.
[309] In practice, it's just everyone is mad at you all the time.
[310] Right.
[311] Right.
[312] You just cannot appease anyone and also decisions that you're making have the ability to cause these ripple effects throughout culture and politics, right?
[313] You could you can endanger people just by a decision that you've made.
[314] And I think that that's going to wear on him.
[315] I mean, the thing that you teased is like here's a man who's running some of these really large publicly traded companies that are trying to do things like, you know, change the way we use fossil fuels and drive.
[316] And now he's spending almost all of his time, you know, dealing with content moderation issues on a social media platform.
[317] So are these other projects going to, you know, draw him into a different place?
[318] Is he going to make so many decisions that he just feels like he's hated?
[319] And then so he decides to, you know, just kind of back up.
[320] Another big part of it is the economics of it, the financing of Twitter.
[321] Like Morgan Stanley is taken on $13 billion worth of debt.
[322] And at some point, they're going to have to call in their receipts.
[323] on that or give it off to a, you know, distressed debt fund that doesn't care at all about Musk.
[324] He's paying over a billion dollars in interest on the loans every year.
[325] You know, those incentives are going to catch up to him.
[326] I really don't know where it goes.
[327] I think ultimately there's a high likelihood that he will say, oh, this was this was not worth the effort.
[328] But I think we just can't predict it.
[329] This is going to be a lot less fun than he thinks it's going to be.
[330] And it may turn out to be a lot less fun than his other businesses where he can actually do things, accomplish things, solve problems.
[331] Whereas this job, you know, it's like every single day you're scraping more dog shit off your shoes.
[332] And it's just endless.
[333] And there's, wherever you go, you're going to step in more.
[334] And so there's a frustration.
[335] So let me ask you this question.
[336] This is a complete hypothetical.
[337] Because I know you speculated, you know, the ways in which he can kill Twitter.
[338] Well, let's just leave aside whether he's going to kill it or whether it's just going to return.
[339] Let's say that he did, that it becomes just this toxic dump and that nobody wants to be there.
[340] So where do we go by we, I mean, people like you and me, people, blue checks, people who want to engage in debates about the news, about politics and everything, where do we go?
[341] I mean, the right figure, well, we'll create parlor, we'll create gab, we will do, you know, a truth social and hasn't really worked out for them.
[342] So what is the plan B for us, America, if he did totally crater Twitter?
[343] Where'd we go?
[344] Facebook?
[345] What?
[346] I don't know because it's a really interesting question because of the fact that there's not really a network that exists like Twitter.
[347] Everything about Twitter that is maddening, that is awful, that is toxic is exactly the thing that makes it so wonderful, right?
[348] It's this idea that there's this sort of public faces.
[349] layer to it, right?
[350] Like, I can say whatever I want to say, and I have my audience and my audience will, you know, likely see that.
[351] But then you can take it and you can amplify that message with your own commentary and sort of shift it into the context of your own space.
[352] Now, a lot of times that can be so great.
[353] It's the way that, like, you know, you meet new people.
[354] It's the way that you end up having a weird, you know, back and forth conversation with like a celebrity or, you know, some kind of public -facing person that you would never have met or talk to you, for it's also the way that like a troll or a trollish politician or someone can quote tweet you and send you into a spiral of abuse there's not a thing that that really works like that and that that has that kind of public town square vibe to it and i don't know what happens if we lose that because i do think like i i use ticot a lot and ticot has elements of that right there's a lot of people on TikTok who spend their time commenting on tweets like big viral tweets like there there are lots of overlaps in some of these networks but none of them do exactly what twitter does which has that sort of like we're all you know sort of sitting around in the amphitheater and different people get to come up and you know talk and we all get to talk about them talking and it's so i do think that there's something really at stake here if it's a loss because i don't know where people go.
[355] Now, I think that the nature of social media and the nature of all media, right, is that it just generally evolves.
[356] And everyone has sort of the different medium that they grew up with.
[357] And you don't have to be young to have grown up with it, right?
[358] Like you and I are products in social media of Twitter.
[359] That's sort of our thing with us and a lot of journalists.
[360] And I think that for people who are just coming out of college now, that's going to be something like TikTok or maybe parts of Instagram or Snapchat.
[361] And so I just think there are these...
[362] Yeah, I do.
[363] And I think that we have to be in some ways okay with that.
[364] And, you know, Twitter is not going to exist forever in the way that we've known it in the importance that we've known it.
[365] And that could be a good thing.
[366] But in terms of where we go in that process, if for some reason it is sort of destroyed beyond repair, that's a really interesting question.
[367] And I think anyone who says they have any idea is lying to you.
[368] So, I mean, it could be a few years from now.
[369] It would be Tom Nichols and I and, you know, a bunch of old people just tweeting like, like sort of MySpace or something.
[370] It's just going to be you guys and the porn and the crypto scams.
[371] Something like that.
[372] So what is the average age of a Twitter user?
[373] Do you have any idea?
[374] I actually, I don't know.
[375] I don't know offhand.
[376] Obviously, it's a completely different demographic group than, say, TikTok or.
[377] Snapchat.
[378] It is.
[379] It's also just, it's more niche.
[380] It really does court and favor people who have not only a love of news and things like that, but also who are, have a love of text, right?
[381] It is a really text heavy platform.
[382] To be good at Twitter, you have to be able to write in these, you know, short, brief, you know, quippy ways.
[383] Which has become its own art form.
[384] Yeah.
[385] It really has.
[386] I don't mean that in the snarky way at all.
[387] No, it definitely has.
[388] I talked to this a couple weeks ago, this political science professor at Penn State, his name's Kevin Munger, and he has this really interesting, broader theory of really just the decline of text in general, in its importance.
[389] Like, it is obviously the cornerstone, you know, cultural medium and technology of, you know, the last whatever, you know, many hundreds of years in its importance.
[390] But the way that the Internet is, is evolving now, has really deprioritized that.
[391] You know, like people, people who are great at making, you know, very quick, short form video clips are actually able to reach more people and influence more people than you and I ever could with a really, really good tweet.
[392] And so I think there's just this really interesting way in which, you know, the internet sends everything into like a hyper -speed evolution, right?
[393] Things that took hundreds of years or dozens of years now take weeks, months, or just one year.
[394] And I think that we're seeing that a little bit with, you know, the different kind of broadcast mediums.
[395] We're seeing it really shift to short form video.
[396] And I think there's a way to be really alarmist and scared about that.
[397] But I also think there's a way to just see this as somewhat of a natural evolution.
[398] And it's possible that, you know, Musk being able to be in the position to buy Twitter, Twitter being, you know, willing to accept the offer, it all speaks to the fact that Twitter is no longer an ascendant social media platform.
[399] Is it dying?
[400] I don't know.
[401] This morning I published a newsletter and I called Twitter geriatric social media because it's just in that sort of - I felt seen.
[402] It's in that, you know, that age right now.
[403] It's certainly, I think to call it dying is an overstatement, but it's no longer ascendant.
[404] And we have to, see what's going to happen as a result of that.
[405] I think it's honestly kind of a fascinating time, but for people like us who have really relied on this for our jobs, for our ability to meet people and sources and talk through ideas and find experts, it's definitely like there's a bittersweet quality to it, for sure.
[406] Well, there is, but also, at least for me, I didn't grow up with this and I did not see this coming.
[407] And so you do wonder, what's the next thing that I don't coming that could actually open, you know, different sorts of, you know, opportunities.
[408] So, Charlie, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast.
[409] Charlie Worsell is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, and you should definitely subscribe to his newsletter, Galaxy Brain.
[410] Charlie, thanks for coming back on the podcast.
[411] Thanks, as always.
[412] The Bullwark podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio production by Jonathan Siri.
[413] I'm Charlie Sykes.
[414] Thank you for listening to today's Bullwark podcast, and we'll be back tomorrow and do this all over again.
[415] You know,