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RUBY:

From Schwartz Media I’m Ruby Jones - this is 7am.

Elon Musk says he plans to turn Twitter into his ideal version of a public square, and use it to advance the evolution of how we communicate.

But his vision of that public square also involves people paying money to be prominent – and the public are not allowed to parody Musk, unless they clearly state they’re making a joke.

So what does Elon’s first week in charge at Twitter tell us about his ideas around free speech… and how far he’ll go to influence the way we communicate?

Today, author Elle Hardy, on Elon Musk’s attempt to engineer the truth.

It’s Thursday, November 10.

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RUBY:

Elle, about a week ago now, Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, bought the social media platform, Twitter. And since that moment, things on Twitter seem to have become fairly chaotic fairly quickly. So can you run me through what's happened since the sale?

ELLE:

So, Elon bought Twitter on the 27th of October and immediately made himself CEO and fired a lot of the existing executive leadership team. He also walked into the building with a kitchen sink and tweeted out the line that he wanted his new leadership to sink in.

So kind of still highlighting from the beginning that this was almost an irony purchase, a $44 billion irony purchase, and that I think he still thinks of this as something of a joke or a bit of fun. And look, maybe it is, I don't have $44 billion to spend on a joke.

Archival tape – MSNBC:

“Big changes are expected at Twitter. The social media platforms employees are due to find any minute now whether they still have a job.”

ELLE:

Then last Friday, he really began the major changes. He fired 50 per cent of Twitter's staff.

Archival tape – NBC:

“Meanwhile, Twitter employees are waking up to company emails telling them whether they still have their job after Elon Musk took over the company.”

ELLE:

And it was really an arbitrary thing. He got people to suck up how much code they'd written recently, and as people that worked in coding pointed out, writing a lot of code doesn't mean that you're writing good code. And it was so arbitrary that a lot of the teams like the safety, the human rights, and the misinformation teams were fired.

Archival tape – BBC:

“According to sources inside the company, the layoffs hit teams that filter out hate speech, add context, and study how algorithms can make misinformation worse.”

ELLE:

Musk has been updating daily, hourly almost on Twitter his plans. And instead of thinking out loud, which is quite a curious thing to witness in real time.

Archival tape – ABC News:

“He tweeted to say that he was forced to make the cuts because Twitter was losing nearly $4 million a day. Mr. Musk also attempted to allay concerns about the spread of hate speech.”

ELLE:

He's also talked about reinstating banned accounts and quite controversially, a new verification policy and basically opening up the verification system to anyone. So it's not a prominent person. It's just anyone who's willing to hand over their money to Elon.

Archival tape – BBC:

“Twitter said those who sign up now for $7.99 a month can receive the blue checkmark next to their usernames. Quote, ‘just like the celebrities, companies and politicians you already follow’.”

ELLE:

So he's really just flying by the seat of his pants. It doesn't seem like he's given a lot of thought to the overall issues that face a communications platform. This is about communication and moderation.

This isn't just a series of numbers on a spreadsheet. And I think he's going to encounter a lot more difficulties.

RUBY:

Okay, and so as far as Elon Musk himself - he’s the billionaire PayPal founder who has gone on to run Tesla and SpaceX.. So can you tell me more about how he’s run those companies - and what the decisions that he’s made in the past can tell us about how he is likely to approach Twitter?

ELLE:

Musk grew up in apartheid-era South Africa. His father owns an emerald mine in Zambia. So, he was a rich kid. He's not just some plucky startup guy, which is often the tale that these Silicon Valley founders like to tell about themselves.

He went to college in America and started a computer sales business from his dorm room with his brother and seemed to make a fair bit of money out of that. He then started a payments company that merged with what became PayPal, and he was seen as sort of a co-founder of the PayPal business with early Facebook investor Peter Thiel. And together, they became seen as sort of the vanguard of the internet, as real visionaries who understood what people wanted before they wanted it. He cashed out on that with several hundred million dollars from his shares and started using that money to fund Tesla, an electric car business, and SpaceX, which is, you know, firing reusable rockets. And the StarLink programme, which is a satellite internet communications in space, which is notably been used by a lot of Ukrainians in the war at the moment.

But the thing with Elon is that he never really went into these companies and founded them. He obviously had some visions for himself, but Tesla already existed. He was an investor in Tesla, there were a lot of early failures. There was a power struggle. He took control as CEO and created something of a viable product and was granted sort of retroactive founder status.

Archival tape – CNN:

“The car of the future under fire this morning. The electric carmaker Tesla, recalling nearly 30,000 of its chargers because of a potential fire hazard. But Tesla CEO Elon Musk is taking issue with the government's terminology, he says:"

Archival tape – Elon Musk:

“They can drive the car safely. There's no problem. Then there's no need to bring the car in anywhere. The over the air software update took place place last month.”

ELLE:

But there's long been a lot of problems with Tesla, and I think that that points to perhaps how Twitter's going to be run. The cars have had a lot of questions about their reliability and their features.

Archival tape – News Reporter:

“US regulators posting that the electric car maker's rolling stop function in full self-driving mode may cause cars to run stop signs at up to 5.6 miles per hour.”

ELLE:

Musk operates very much in that Silicon Valley mode. So everything's everything's, you know, a software platform. So, he might roll out new software features with some bugs in it.

Archival tape – News Reporter:

“Tesla is recalling almost half a million electric cars to address rear view camera and trunk issues that increase the risk of crashing.”

ELLE:

The problem is that this isn't a change to the interface on Facebook. These are machines that can kill people. And there have been all sorts of problems with Tesla cars not not opening in the event of accidents. Real issues with the autopilot system. Just some really bizarre stuff.

Archival tape – News Reporter:

“During the one minute clip, the Tesla veers into the wrong lane of traffic.”

Archival tape – Driver:

“Oh, no. Look at that!”

Archival tape – News Reporter:

“And almost hits a delivery van.”

Archival tape – Driver:

“...what is it doing?”

ELLE:

Musk also has a long history of dodgy business practices. He's, you know, very big on union busting… and particularly when it comes to Tesla, he has a very cosy relationship with the Chinese Government. It's where he manufactures his Teslas.

And he's, you know, this guy who's bought Twitter saying that he's a free speech warrior and wants to deliver free speech back to the people, has worked with the Chinese government to censor criticism of his company in China.

RUBY:

Mmm and so when it comes to Twitter then - should we expect the same kind of thing? The kind of cavalier attitude - combined with this sense that he will work with anyone, if it’s in his business interests?

ELLE:

I think what's really interesting is that he's really operating on this Silicon Valley idea that it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission. And so he's sort of bulldozing through regulations that are already in place in places like Australia and Germany that are saying that these platforms are publishers and they have to effectively moderate.

When he got rid of a lot of his staff. We're already seeing moderation issues. A footballer in the UK was called the N-word by someone. This was previously, you know, something that’d be deleted and cracked down on pretty quickly. It was reported to Twitter and said that it was fine under the new moderation policies.

So I think he's already running into a fair bit of trouble. And there's there's talk that they're trying to rehire some of the staff that they already fired.

RUBY:

We’ll be back after this.

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Archival tape – Elon Musk:

“The net effect will be over time that the verified users will pretty much always be at the top of comments and search. You’ll have to scroll far to see the unverified users, which will be the bots and trolls and whatnot. And this is sort of analogous to a Google search… I mean, the joke is like, what's the best place to hide? A dead body would be the second page of Google search results. Because nobody ever goes there.”

RUBY:

So Elle, we’ve been talking about this new era of Twitter under Elon Musk. And while we are talking basically about posts on a social media site – we’ve seen instances where the information that’s spread on the platform has had some very real-world effects. So what are the implications of the approach Musk is touting?

ELLE:

A lot of media and public facing organisations have become really reliant on Twitter as a way to get messages out. So there are real questions about if verification for people who pay is going to be prioritised over organisations like this who use it for public safety, or use it for getting important information out.

Activists, you know, in places like Russia and Saudi Arabia who are getting information out that is censored by governments. Twitter is a public square and Musk is right about that. It has been used for a long time in this manner. You know, it really came to prominence in the Arab Spring when it was the only way for activists to be able to speak to each other and to also get their message out of what was happening in very authoritarian and repressive states. And it's certainly a real concern when people have become reliant on this way of getting information and may speak to some laziness on the part of the media. But this has just become an accepted way that people communicate about these things.
I think the real risk continues to be here that Musk has kind of made this purchase as a bit of a joke and and said these grand statements about what he wants to do but doesn't really seem to have thought about the consequences, and the people who have come to rely on this site for better and for worse, those consequences are very real.

RUBY:

And it’s very early to see what effect Elon Musk’s new policies will have – but I think what we are starting to see, I suppose, is the way Elon Musk’s personal politics are changing the conversation on Twitter.

I mean, he’s the first ever owner of a social media platform to endorse a political party, isn’t he?

Archival tape – Elon Musk:

“Our goal with Twitter is how do we get 80 per cent of America, maybe not the far-left and the far-right, maybe we don't want them necessarily, but how do we get 80 per cent of the public to join a digital town square to exchange ideas and maybe once and a while change their mind?”

ELLE:

On the eve of the mid-term elections in the United States, he tweeted, endorsing the Republican Party.

Archival tape – NBC:

“On this election eve, Twitter owner Elon Musk seemed to contradict his own tweet from last April that Twitter should be politically neutral. Today, encouraging independent minded voters to vote Republicans into Congress.”

ELLE:

He responded to Hillary Clinton's tweet about Paul Pelosi, the Speaker of the House’s husband, being attacked by a man wielding a hammer in his own home.

Archival tape – FOX 2 SF:

“In a now deleted tweet, Elon Musk wrote, There might be more than meets the eye to this story and attached a link to an unfounded conspiracy theory opinion piece. From an outlet known to espouse such material.”

ELLE:

It seems that his idea of objective reality is very, very far from yours and mine.

Archival tape – CBS LA:

“Musk, along with top executives, well, they're insisting the cuts will not prevent them from policing hate speech. But tech experts say they're already seeing some troubling signs and worry it could get worse.”

ELLE:

There's a real sense that that conspiracy accounts, very far-right accounts, that they do believe in absolute free speech of, you know, saying hate speech to people online. There's certainly evidence that they're interested in returning to the platform. I think a lot of people really are waiting to see about the reinstallation of Donald Trump's account. First of all, if he'll come back.

I mean, that would sort of give a bit of a carte blanche, I think, to people to return. And for a lot of people who share his very conspiratorial world view. In that event, I think that would be very interesting because there may be something of an exodus or, you know, we'd finally start to see what it really looks like, what Musk's vision for the platform really looks like in practice.

RUBY:

Mmm, and as we start to consider how this might play out for Elon Musk, one thing that we have already seen is regulators and governments reminding Musk that he doesn't actually write the laws around speech or defamation or privacy, that that's what governments of various countries do. And we've seen other social media owners, people like Mark Zuckerberg, he's been hauled in front of Congress before.

So, I mean, is Elon Musk now open to presumably that same level of scrutiny? And if he is, what do you think we're going to see if Governments try to go after the world's richest man in this context?

ELLE:

Again, because Musk has that real perspective that you've got to it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission. He's been fairly cavalier. You know, he taunts lawmakers. He does think that this is a little bit of a joke, that he can get away with anything because he tends to get away with a lot of things. But it does feel like there's going to be a ceiling on this.
You know, if you are taunting lawmakers or saying that you're going to disregard, you know, that the laws in places like Germany and Australia, which are known for having fairly strict regulations on these things, it's going to present problems because, you know, moderation is really the business that he's gotten himself into. And we're already seeing brands start to say, I don't want to have my Adidas ad next to, you know, someone spewing hate filled conspiracy theories. So advertisers have already started to say that they're not really happy about this. And a lot of big advertising firms have stepped back and are waiting to see what the platform looks like.

In many regards they might have more of an effect on Musk's thinking than Governments.

RUBY:

Right - and just finally Elle, do we have a sense of what Elon Musk actually believes or thinks is needed to counter the effects of threats, hate speech and misinformation?

ELLE:

So he sees everything as an engineering problem that can be solved. You know, there's a tweet from 2008 where he said he wanted to start a site where all journalists would be given a truth ranking. And it's really this idea that there is some objective truth. He has a committee now that is going to rank publications and journalists on the truth of their articles. And then it's like, you know, in an Excel spreadsheet and you can just order it. And that will solve the problem of truth.
You know, a problem that, you know, philosophers have been thinking about for centuries and Elon can just come in and suddenly fix that. There's just an issue coming from his perspective about what? Is there some sort of objective truth? I think that's going to be the interesting, and troubling thing, that he's looking at here.

And what's going to be interesting is how much he continues to promote that, because that's going to create a real problem for his business. And both in terms of advertisers and governments looking at this and saying, you know, this, we don't want this happening to the public square.

RUBY:

Mm. Elle, thank you so much for your time.

ELLE:

Thanks for having me.

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RUBY:

Also in the news today…

Elon Musk sold $3.95 billion dollars worth of his stock in Tesla, yesterday.

The sale comes as Musk admitted that he was, quote: “obviously overpaying for Twitter right now”.

It is believed he must pay $1 billion dollars a year just to service the loans that funded the purchase.

And,

The United States has elected the first member of congress who is from Gen-Z, during the midterm elections.

Maxwell Frost, 25, ran on an agenda of gun-control, healthcare-for-all, and climate action in the state of Florida.

Frost rose to national prominence as a gun-control campaigner in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook school shooting in 2012.

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