Front Burner - Elon Musk’s Twitter culture war

Episode Date: December 15, 2022

On Sunday, Twitter owner Elon Musk joined comedian Dave Chappelle on stage and was roundly booed. Musk responded on Twitter saying, “Technically, it was 90% cheers,” and that “It’s almost as if I’ve offended SF’s unhinged leftists … but nahhh.” Musk has said that he’s politically a centrist, but the tweet is just one recent example of how he’s adopted partisan language in a social media culture war. Musk has distributed Twitter records that are supposed to reveal biased censorship, indulged in far-right talking points about COVID-19 and unbanned white nationalist accounts. Today, a discussion with the Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel about how and why Musk is aligning himself with different factions of the right. Warzel writes the Galaxy Brain newsletter about tech, media and politics.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson. Elon. Hey, Dave. Hey, Dave. When Elon Musk appeared with comedian Dave Chappelle at his show in San Francisco on Sunday,

it became immediately clear that the scorn for the billionaire Twitter owner isn't just online. It sounds like some of the people you fired are in the audience. The next day, in a since-deleted tweet, Musk claimed he actually received 90% cheers. And quote, it's almost as if I've offended SF's unhinged leftists. But nah. Musk maintains he's politically independent and a centrist. But since buying Twitter in October, that tweet is just one example of how he's taking sides in a social media culture war. He's handing out internal records that are supposed to reveal biased censorship. And he's indulged in far-right talking points about COVID-19 and unbanned white nationalist accounts.

To discuss how and why Musk is aligning himself with different factions of the right. I'm joined today by Charlie Warzel. He's a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he just wrote the piece, Elon Musk is a far-right activist. And he's the author of the very excellent Galaxy Brain newsletter about tech, media, and politics. Hi, Charlie. Thank you so much for coming on to FrontBurner.

Thank you for having me. I hope you don't mind me saying this. Your partner, Helen Peterson, has been on the show a couple of times, and she is very cool and fun, so no pressure. All good. I have a lot to live up to in my own house. So do I. So do I. Okay, so before we get into the politics of what Musk has done with Twitter, let's talk about what his political leadings are in his own words. How

does Musk argue he's really a centrist? Yeah, Elon Musk sort of follows a rich tradition of people who like to say that they have had pretty static politics the entire time. Right. They are someone who's more moderate in their opinions and the world kind of goes crazy around them. Right. And so the way he describes his positions are that he he may appear to people to be more right leaning than he actually is because the left has gone so far to the left that it's made him look more extreme by comparison. This is like a pretty standard talking point for a lot of people who identify as liberals without a country, so to speak.

And this is, you know, a real, a hallmark of the intellectual dark web, the sort of movement of dangerous free thinkers, so to speak. But, you know, it has a long history of, especially in American politics, of being a thing that conservative or right-leaning people say and do. The neoconservative movement in America grew out of leftists who are sort of frustrated with the Vietnam protests and things like that. So it has this kind of rich tradition of people who kind of move to the right, but say that they haven't moved at all. Oh, that's interesting. I hadn't heard anyone put it in a historical context like that before.

But despite this, you have called him a far right activist and flesh that out for me. Like, what do you mean by that? I think, you know, when we published the story, there are a lot of people who sort of read it as me having a real emotional opinion around stuff that Elon Musk has done. And it's actually I wrote it the exact opposite way, really. I tried to be as clinical as possible with the analysis of this. clinical as possible with the analysis of this. And the thesis of the piece is essentially that if you look at what Elon Musk's decisions, especially since he has purchased Twitter, if you look at what he has done, the people who he has elevated, the people he has reinstated,

the people he has suspended, and just generally what his actions have promoted, suspended, and just generally what his actions have promoted. He is furthering the far right wing of American politics. He's furthering that project. He's helping boost that. And so just by that fact alone, I argue that he's acting in this capacity as a far right activist. Now, his politics, his personal beliefs may or may not be that. I'm not inside Elon Musk's head, so I'm not going to be able to tell you exactly what he believes. But just by his actions, what he more detail, pull them apart a bit. Perhaps we could start with the Twitter files. So he's been hyping this up on Twitter. this up on Twitter, essentially he's giving internal documents detailing Twitter's past communications and decision making to a few writers of his choosing, I should mention,

and they're making these long tweet threads with the revelations. And according to Musk and these journalists, what are they saying that these documents reveal? Yeah, so the Twitter files is very interesting. And my reason for finding them so interesting is that I've been writing about Twitter and sort of online content moderation issues for almost a decade. And what the Twitter files show are some primary documents from inside the company, like the screenshots of internal emails or the screenshots of Twitter's actual, you know, back-end moderation systems.

The central focus of the Twitter files is that Republicans were unfairly targeted. That is something Twitter has long denied. But Republicans are not convinced, particularly after Twitter initially suppressed the 2020 New York Post Hunter Biden laptop story, believing it could have been Russian disinformation. The new records will expose the erosions of standards in the company before the Capitol riot, along with other topics, including talking about the former President Donald Trump being kicked off Twitter. Those on their own are fascinating documents. Those are things that if I had gotten them as a reporter, I would probably publish. But I would also work to wrap those in as much good faith context as I could to show what these documents actually mean in the broader landscape of Twitter and what it says publicly and what it does privately.

what it says publicly and what it does privately. The Twitter files, because they were released to a select group of independent journalists who all share Musk's sort of pet political sensibilities to some degree, they're extremely misleading. So what the Twitter files essentially purport to show via the threads that got made by these journalists is that Twitter has been shadow banning, so to speak, or sort of keeping far right or right wing or just, you know, sort of reactionary content. It's been it's been silencing those accounts. Right. It's been limiting their reach. And this is something that Twitter has actually said very publicly for years. There are numerous internal posts that have been shared with the public about how Twitter amplifies or de-amplifies certain voices based off of whether or not they're violating Twitter's rules, whether they are sharing things that have been deemed to be divisive, etc. The presentation of these files sort of ignores that entire context. So it makes

these decisions by Twitter look extremely nefarious when, in fact, they're concerning, right? I mean, the broader picture of this is that everyone, liberals or Republicans, everyone is worried about the power of these social networks, right? We have sort of outsourced our political conversation to these privately owned platforms for viral advertising. And there's a problem with that. Everyone is uncomfortable with that. wrapped in so much misleading context that I think it ultimately does a disservice to our understanding, the broader public's understanding of content moderation. Give me an example of something that popped up in the Twitter files that you feel like, for lack of a better word, like torqued or had sort of misleading context around it. actual backend moderation system. So this is like what employees can access. And it's a dashboard that looks similar to your actual Twitter profile, right? Except no one can see it, but people with

internal access. And it shows different settings. It'll say, this person is a verified account. This person has two strikes on their account, which means two violations of the rules in which their account has been notified. And there are certain things that I don't have the exact language in front of me, but a search restriction, right? So this account isn't going to show up high. If you search for that person's name, you're going to have to do some work to find that. Or I think there was one that said trends blacklist, which means, you know, if they tweet something that gets a lot of pickup, it's not going to show up in Twitter's right side trending topics bar. And that is because ostensibly these accounts have been violating either the rules or the spirit of the rules multiple times. These screenshots from the Twitter file showed that in practice.

And that's actually a very interesting thing to see. Right. It's interesting to see what Twitter's internal systems look like, how they phrase this. This was framed by the Twitter files as a true like a show that Twitter is suppressing conservative voices. Right. They had a number of accounts, including the Turning Points USA activist Charlie Kirk. And they showed these back end screenshots. Now you see actual verified documents where my Twitter account was labeled as do not amplify NSFW, which I could only infer means not safe for work. Other like threat tags. They're treating my Twitter account with more scrutiny and censorship than the prime minister of Iran, than Hamas. But if you go and you look at the broader context, in May, I believe, of 2018, Twitter released a blog post that spoke about exactly this policy. It said, we are working towards building healthier conversations on Twitter. And what we are going to do is we are going to de-amplify certain accounts if they violate our rules or the spirit of the platform. But the Twitter files, you know, it presented it

in such a way that it made it seem like this was something that Twitter wasn't telling people it was doing. So, you know, I think a big reason for all the consternation entire project by Musk and his journalist cohort, it left a lot of people with this feeling like Elon Musk has helped to expose the excesses of Silicon Valley content moderation. And you have people calling for congressional intervention. And what's kind of interesting about all of this is Elon Musk owns Twitter now. Like he's in charge and he's fired all the people, you know, responsible for this. He's purged the company in that sense, but he's also kind of terrorizing them with his tweets. One of his former trust and safety employees has had to flee his home in the past couple of days because Musk has sort of insinuated

that he may have hampered Twitter's ability to censor child exploitation content and was sort of, you know, in a QAnon adjacent way, you know, insinuating that there might be some untoward things happening there. Right. Yeah. This is also a big time right wing dog whistle. When you bring up child porn and the exploitation of children, you're getting into like pizza gate stuff here. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it's, you know, it's it's red meat for the the true base. And so essentially what you have in this world is this idea that, you know, every nefarious plot that they really believed was happening on the part of big tech has come true. And in the sort of more traditional media ecosystem, there's people like myself saying, yes, these companies have a lot of moderation power. Yes, we should be having these conversations about this. But you're ignoring all the history of all of this. And you're really sort of, you know, massaging and manipulating a narrative to make it fit

into a very, a very sort of small little hole. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people, and I have some startling numbers to share with you. 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo. 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast,

Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. The argument that you're making that he's acting like a far-right activist, let's also talk about how he might be aiding the right or far-right with his own tweets, right? Where he's adopted some of their talking points. For example, what Musk did tweet about U.S. Chief Medical Advisor Anthony Fauci on Sunday, there was so much wrapped up in this tweet, it was kind of wild. Yeah, it's a five-word tweet, so a real economy of words to convey quite a lot of stuff. The tweet reads, my pronouns are prosecute slash Fauci. And for those who aren't, you know, sort of terminally online and can't decipher that, first of all, good for

you. I wish that was me. But basically, Musk is mocking transgender and binary people and the whole idea of, you know, pronoun inclusivity and the solidarity movement that is popular among left leaning communities to include your pronouns in your bio or things like that. But then also, you know, he's buying into this far right prosecuting, locking up Dr. Fauci, who's, as you said, Biden's chief medical advisor and kind of became the government's face of the pandemic. And this is this whole idea of prosecuting Fauci is what they believe is government overreach in public health policy throughout the pandemic. Dr. Anthony Fauci responding tonight to Elon Musk after Musk tweeted, and I quote, my pronouns are prosecute Fauci. I don't respond to him. I don't pay any attention to him because that's

merely a distraction. And if he get drawn into that, and I have to be honest, that cesspool of interaction, there's no value added to that, David. It doesn't help anything. Fauci has said if there was ever an investigation in anything, would cooperate he has nothing to hide he has been a willing punching bag for the right uh ever since the lockdown protests of april and may 2020 but this is like this tweet is just straight red meat to um you know a right-wing audience he's kind of playing all the hits here giving them exactly what they want And it's kind of a as far as you know far-right humor goes. It's kind of like a dad level humor You know, it's like kind of he's trying very hard to you know, appease the kids here You know if you actually talk to real kind of far-right trolls, they find this embarrassing honestly

This is worth noting i think his memes are really awful right and like uh not cool i can't imagine that they like a lot of what he's doing on my he's a he's a big um meme stealer which again this sounds really and it is honestly a little bit inconsequential but it does speak to sort of a broader thing, right? Like he, he's kind of doing the bare minimum of trying to be like a jester in this space. And I think it speaks a lot to, you know, you mentioned at the outset of this, his, his appearing on stage with Dave Chappelle, kind of being cringy and getting booed. And it's kind of a follows a very similar trajectory for Musk, where he seems like he's trying extremely hard to be witty and funny and edgy in this way. But I also write things like 69 days after 420, again, haha.

I don't know. I thought it was funny. That's why I wrote ha-ha at the end. And it's, again, it feels very forced, even among people on the right who want all the things that he's giving them. So I think, you know, you mentioned before that he's unbanned accounts from both the right and fringe groups. And he's also engaged with prominent right-wing figures on the platform as well, which I think is probably worth mentioning. But why is he doing so many things that align with the right?

I mean, obviously, an easy hypothesis would be that he actually does lean to the right himself, but what do you think his actions with Twitter really tell us about his personal beliefs? So, I argue that Musk's personal

political beliefs are going to be a lot harder to understand simply because like, they're his own, right? And we can't get inside his mind. But I really loved this, this piece in the website, The Verge by Liz Lopato, who talks about Musk and other sort of reactionary billionaires and the idea that their personal politics are often self preservational. Right. It is about keeping what they have and what they have been able to build and their status sort of at the top of both the social and political and economical hierarchies in the world. And for Musk, you know, part of this is the protection of his status as a revolutionary entrepreneur, a sort of Thomas Edison-like figure. Up until very recently, he was sort of almost universally seen as this kind of ingenious space billionaire building Tesla and sort of revolutionizing the EV market. And I think that as far as his personal political beliefs go, I think that it isn't aligned so much with a political party as much

as it's aligned with protecting those interests. And now that he's made all these controversial decisions with Twitter, and he's turned a lot of of people off and he's kind of bumbled his way through the finances of Twitter, kind of plunging it into debt and alienating advertisers. He's lost some of that luster, quite a bit of that luster, I'd say. He's also lost his status as the world's richest man really recently. Yeah, yeah. It's really incredible how much money he's lost. Yeah. And so I think,

you know, one of the things that a lot of these reactionary Silicon Valley CEOs and founders I think are motivated by recently is this idea that they used to be revered

in these ways and sort of given carte blanche to do whatever they wanted because people would assume they can see the future, they can see things that the rest of us mere mortals can't. And now they're sort of under real scrutiny and a lot of criticism. The far right is the only group that's really giving him the time of day, that's shock jocks and playing all the hits for them and really trying to appease them because they're the only people right now that sort of see him the way he wants to be seen. You know, there's a term that's called audience capture that happens

online, right? When you build a big following and then you sort of conduct all your affairs in your life in order to be the person your followers want you to be. And often that leads you down some pretty extreme and often grim paths. And I think what we're seeing right now is Elon Musk has been audience captured by the far right. Very unnerving considering how much power the platform that he owns has on our discourse. Charlie, this was fantastic. Thank you so much for making the time today. Yeah, thanks for having me. All right, that's all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening,

and we'll talk to you tomorrow.