Plain English with Derek Thompson - Instant Reaction Pod! Elon Musk Buys Twitter. So, What Happens Next?

Episode Date: April 26, 2022

Charlie Warzel, author of the Galaxy Brain newsletter at The Atlantic, joins to talk about what Elon Musk will do to Twitter and how his acquisition could change media, tech, and politics. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Charlie Warzel Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, it's Sean Fennessey. We've got something special cooking on the Prestige TV podcast. I'll be recapping one of my favorite shows, HBO's Barry, every Sunday night with the writer-director star of the show, The Great Bill Hater. We'll talk about the show's wild twists and turns, its special brand of dark comedy, and how it all came together. So on Sunday nights, immediately after a new episode airs, you can hear Bill and I break it all down on the Prestige TV pod. Subscribe on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Today's episode is an instant reaction episode. And you know what the news is. Elon Musk has bought Twitter.

Elon Musk has bought Twitter for $44 billion, and this is one of the weirdest tech acquisitions. I can recall. To be honest, I still can't believe that this even happened. For a few days, it looked like it wasn't going to happen. It looked like Twitter was going to successfully fight off the acquisition. But this morning, Monday morning, it seemed relatively inevitable that Elon Musk would acquire the company,

thus becoming the chief executive of not only Tesla, the most valuable car company in the world, not only SpaceX, the most advanced space and rocket company in the world, but also now Twitter. Twitter is, you know, I think it's important to say an incredibly important product. It is the straw that stirs the drink of news discourse. It's also not a very good business. This is a company that has lost in the history of its being a publicly traded company, $860 million. It's lost almost a billion dollars in its history.

of being a publicly traded company. In 33 earnings calls, it has only reported a profit in 14 of them. Again, amazing influential product, not a very good business, which raises the question, what is Elon Musk doing? What does he want to do with Twitter

and why would he acquire it? Wall Street Journal has a wonderful rundown of all the things, the substantial changes he wants to make to Twitter, he wants to soften its stance on content moderation. Musk is a free speech absolutist. That's how he describes himself. He sees Twitter as a de facto town square, and he wants to broaden the birth of public expression

so that more speech, more speech can be had on Twitter that could lead to all sorts of, you know, lovely things, a broadening of speech on its own doesn't sound so bad, could also lead to more abuse and harassment and far right, far left extremism. He wants to create an edit feature for tweets that doesn't sound so bad. He wants to open Twitter's algorithm, which could, I think, lead to some pretty useful innovation. I think Twitter's innovation has probably been a little bit static for power users like me. He wants to give users who pay for Twitter Blue authentication checkmarks. He wants to rely less in advertising. This is particularly interesting. Twitter is an advertising business. Advertising

is more than 90% of its revenue, but Elon doesn't seem to see advertising is the future of Twitter's business. And he also wants to stop spam and scam bots. It's very important to Elon Musk that Twitter be a space for authenticated people to express themselves freely, not a place for spam and scam bots to presume or imitate free speech. So those are the reasons. Now, what happens next?

I have no idea. I think the only smart way that you can possibly tease out what happens next is to look at multiple timelines. And that's why I was really gratified to see that my colleague, Charlie Warzel, the author of the Galaxy Brain Newsletter at The Atlantic, wrote a wonderful article. the worst case scenario for Elon Musk's Twitter

that goes through the best, medium, best, and worst case scenario for what happens to the social media company. He is my guest for today's episode and we talk about why Musk did this, what comes next for Twitter, how this news could change tech and how it could change the news, political and information landscape

of the United States and the world. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Charlie Worsell, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me. So my head is like completely spinning right now. I honestly like I did not think this was going to happen. When he announced the bid, I thought I was in Crazyville when it seemed like he might actually go through with the purchase.

I thought things were getting even crazier. And when he actually announced or when it was actually announced that Twitter accepted the bid, I was just astonished. what has been your sort of emotional roller coaster ride like for the last few weeks just sort of watching the Elon Musk News as a user of Twitter and as a commentator on all things tech? Yeah, exhaustion, I guess, is one of them.

I feel like the way that things play out with Musk is actually very similar to the way that things will play out with Donald Trump, which is that you're sort of like that he's constantly creating these pseudo events where it's these, sort of mass attentional events, like some outlandish claim or some kind of like trollish,

winky type of thing. And the ultimate reaction is, is this real? Can he do this? What should my level of alarm be versus my level of like, I'm getting out over my skis here? And what should my level of like credulity be?

Like when most people say, I'm going to buy a company or I'm going to take my company private, they mean it 100% of the time. But with Musk, it's basically like a coin flip probability. Like, I'm going to take Tesla private. No, he didn't.

I'm going to buy Twitter. Yes, he actually did. It's very, very difficult to know when to take him seriously. So one thing I want to do, you wrote a really fantastic newsletter. Your newsletter is Galaxy Brain that looks at three potential timelines for a Musk-owned Twitter. And I think one good way to sort of emergency podcast our way through this morass of confusion is to do what you did. break down our possible futures into optimistic, less optimistic, and mildly dystopian.

Is that a fair representation of the valence of your three timelines, optimistic, semi-optimistic, and mildly dystopian? Yeah, I think so. I mean, I would say optimistic is probably like less happens than we think and then going all the way to. It's basically like how much control he exercises over the platform to some degree. And it goes sort of dystopian, the higher you get that. Right.

All right. Well, let's start with the most optimistic timeline here. What does this look like? What does it look like if Elon Musk becomes the leader, the CEO of Twitter, on top of being the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, and things turn out sort of okay? So I think this one is where essentially he gets very excited at the beginning to make some, you know, broad changes. and sort of enact his view on it. But what ends up being this sort of new shiny toy ends up being kind of a boring

and logistical nightmare for him. And then he ultimately offloads that, you know, onto his underlings and then, you know, diverts his attention to the things that do interest him. And in this version, you know, I think he starts off with some, you know, maybe some big splashy things,

trying to reinstate some accounts that he thinks, you know, were either unfairly banned or, you know, sort of trying to give a free speech maximalist approach. So like, you know, Donald Trump could be one of those, right? But it could be any number of accounts. And maybe it's just a whole bunch of, you know, smaller accounts from people who've been kicked off for what he views is, you know, tiki-tack misinformation, you know, infractions.

And so it kind of kicks off this, you know, this media cycle. And we all complain about it. But it's not necessarily clear whether the platform is worse off or not. and then after that, all the things he wants to do are going to be a lot harder, right? A lot of these content moderation rules, when it comes down to implementing them are just like they're exhausting. You know, you have to sort of war game out all these different strategies. Like, does he really want to deal with child exploitation content and, you know, trying to find ways around, like, hashing to make sure that child porn doesn't circulate on the platform?

Like, there is these thorny content moderation issues that people, have been debating and arguing about. And Twitter and every other social media platform has been, you know, agonizing over since their inception, essentially. And no one's found, you know, wonderful strategies for these. So, you know, I see, I see him kind of getting disinterested there and kind of going by the wayside. But some of the, you know, some of the things he might have implemented, adding, reinstating some accounts and or, you know, maybe rolling back some of the trust and safety requirements, you know,

maybe changing the TOS, the terms of service, so certain things aren't, you know, as big of violations or, you know, adding more strikes for people. With that, I think, would do. So this, this scenario I'm describing, I think would sort of take Twitter back to like, let's just say like 2016 Twitter, right, which is a place where there was more harassment, fewer bans, fewer people being kicked off the platform. It was sort of, you know, easier to, you know, poke the bear and not, and not get burned. Right. It was more chaos.

It was a little bit more abuse. It was a little bit more harassment. This is before, essentially, the Wild West that is Twitter, it mounted a police force to actually sort of, you know, monitor the city and enforce laws. I think the picture that you're painting is pretty plausible. You know, one way that I thought about it as I was reading your piece is it's like, he's going to, Elon is going to take over.

He's going to fix the easy things quickly. and he might get bored of the hard problems, right? And I do think it's important to say that there are some easy things that a Twitter lover could change if they became in charge of Twitter. Like, it's important to say that, like, as an, I'm starting at the most optimistic level here

and we're going to get to more pessimistic in a second. But, like, there are things about Twitter that are bad and obviously bad. You've written about the trending topics box, which is just like an absolutely embarrassing piece of real estate. Like, it will not stop telling me, about Machine Gun Kelly and Zendaya's new red carpet looks.

I don't care about Machine Gun Kelly. I don't need to see what Zendaya wore in her last red carpet. And yet I keep seeing them. So someone who actually uses Twitter, like Elon Musk, could actually look at that and say, this is not an essential part or a positive part of my experience on the platform. So I'm going to fix it. He could do that maybe with DM as well.

I think there's a lot of ways that DMs could be fixed, that DMs could be more searchable, that Twitter itself could be more searchable, that we could maybe download everything that we've written on Twitter, take it offline, and then search through it. There might just be ways to make Twitter more useful to a power user like Elon Musk, and only a power user like Elon Musk can solve those problems.

The board of directors of Twitter don't use Twitter. Like, you look at them, you go right through them. They do not use the service that they are the board of directors of. It's a very bizarre situation. So I'm optimistic that some of these easy problems, can be fixed. But eventually, you drill your way down to the hard problems. And Elon Musk, I think, is a technical genius. I think he's an engineering genius. I think PayPal and Tesla and SpaceX are extraordinary achievements. But this isn't money, this isn't cars, this isn't rockets.

This is human nature. And human nature bites back. Human nature is dirty as F. And Twitter is unrangleable. This is not something that can be solved by engineering prowess. The This is dirty, rotten, disgusting human nature. And that I think it's essentially going to be the hard problem that he's going to bore his way into, realize it's too hard, and say, you know what? Ironically, I'm making more progress going to Mars and refocus his attention there.

Anything there that you disagree with? No, I mean, I think that that's true. And I think a little bit of that, like, Twitter is unrangleable is what I mean, too, when I talk about, like, 2016 Twitter in terms of, like, the leadership. Like, 2016 is a period of time. where a lot of the people who were promoting like a free speech maximalism,

you know, version of this, like just kind of, like you said, there's no cops in this city. We're just going to like let it go. It's the moment where I think a lot of those people finally kind of gave up on that and said, you know, it's true that like if we want communal spaces, if we want conversations that feel healthy, that feel generative, if we want this service

to not completely continue to devolve, we are going to need to change. some things, and that's okay. And I think that, you know, a lot of the founders walking that back is saying that, like, we kind of did get it wrong. We approached this problem in a naive way. We built this service without knowing it was going to scale up to what it is, that it was going to have this kind of prevalence in the cultural conversation. And so, you know, they have all in one way or another, even Jack Dorsey, who seems to be in line with the Musk takeover, have admitted this. And so I think the real rollback is I think Musk is kind of entering this now with a very similar ethos to, you know, what you saw from the founders.

This is very sort of like, these are problems that we can solve. We can get this done. It's actually not as complicated if we just, you know, put the right sort of engineering mindset to it. And that is what I think I mean by, you know, we're kind of Twitter's, you know, future looks like its recent past, essentially. Right. Let's move on to your second timeline, which you call the weird chaotic timeline. What does this second path forward look like under Musk? I think this is where Elon doesn't get bored, right? This is where he fixes some of those small things. And then he decides the easy things, the DMs, the whatever, the power user stuff.

And then he says, all right, I'm going to try anything and everything, right? Twitter is a laboratory, and I get to go and experiment with it. And so, you know, I think there's been talk about, I mean, one of, one of his main ones that he's touting as recently as this afternoon is authenticating all humans on the platform, which is something like, you know, I guess blue check verification for the masses. There's a way in which this is like a really, you know, potentially exciting thing to, you know, make it so that, you know, there's this sort of new level of understanding. of who you're interacting with on a social network.

Maybe that can push some boundaries. It could be some weird innovative approach. But also we've seen Facebook has tried to do this. They had a real names policy that ended up being just a massive logistical headache for people who, you know, like people who transitioned, people who, you know, changed their identities in numerous ways, people who wanted to identify in certain ways. And it just got super thorny. and it became like, you know, trying to extend, like,

it's almost like you have to create a government-like service, right? Like a DMV for Twitter. Like, nobody wants- I was literally thinking about like a DMV for Twitter. Like, here's your social security card. And I mean, it's an interesting idea. It's just important to also point out that there's lots of people whose identities are verified

who have been kicked off the platform because they were verified, but they were also dicks, right? Like, this is what happened to Donald Trump. We know that Donald Trump was kicked off the platform because Donald Trump was verified as Donald Trump and then was kicked off for misinformation. So you're not representing, and maybe even Elon Musk wouldn't represent this idea

as being some kind of panacea to abuse. But it would, I mean, just if you're inside the mind of Elon Musk, what's the best argument for why this tweak would be so beneficial to the informational culture of Twitter? So one thing that I think he seems to be really obsessed with is this idea that there's like, a lot of fakery on the platform. Like, he's really obsessed with the idea of how much spam there is.

And there is a lot of spam. There's a lot of spam on every network, also including email. Spam is just a problem of the internet. It's also just a problem of, like, mail. It's a communication, basically. People will find a way to spam it. But he's kind of obsessed with this. So one of his, again, part of this sort of secondary scenario is he wants to, you know,

think about making all of Twitter's black box algorithms open source, right, to make them public, allow people to look into them, allow them to copy them. And again, this is really interesting in theory. Although, you know, when you come down to the main level, there's lots of experts who are saying, like, the reason why a lot of platform algorithms are so, you know, protected, is because they're trying to keep them away from people

like spammers who want to abuse them. And so it's very, you know, it's one of these ways in which some of his thinking on this stuff seems to be very sort of shallow, very rudimentary, that it's kind of like he is, he's looking at Twitter through the lens of a very unique power user, someone who has 80 million followers and, you know, is constantly embroiled in culture war controversies all the time

and, you know, potential SEC violations. Like, that's the way that Elon Musk's thinking about it and not thinking about it in the sense of like, you know, what are the unintended consequences of pulling, you know, ex-leaver inside this massive machine that already exists. Yeah, that's really interesting. I mean, I see both sides of this. I understand the Elon Musk sort of right-adjacent, left-adjacent, libertarian take that the way

that liberalism works, the way that progress works, is that you allow a wide, wide variety of speech that competes in some kind of, I don't want to say marketplace, because that's such a hoary cliche, but that competes for attention, that competes for the votes of eyeballs and ears, and that it is healthy for a public discourse to have this really, really wide birth of conversation. That ultimately is the best way to lead us toward the truth. I get that. I also think you are really perceptive to see that there is something in Elon's philosophy of free speech that thinks the problem is insincerity.

the problem is that we don't know people's identities, the problem is bots, the problem is Russian disinformation. What that overlooks is that sincere people participating in the marketplace of attention can be awful. They can be abusive. They can be harassy. They can say things that are horrifically untrue and that we might not want to distribute with the same virality that we would something else.

And those decisions are just so, so difficult. And it goes back to one of the first things I said. which is that I think Elon Musk is really an engineering genius, but when you get into the nitty-gritty work of content moderation, you are essentially deciding whether, A, you're going to have no police force at all, like, all of the weeds can grow, or if you are going to have a police force, you have to decide what the laws are. You have to decide, like, what is the truth that will allow, what is the unknowns that will allow, the uncertainties that will allow. That is so hard. Like, the guy trying to go to Mars is also going to be spending hours of his day trying to do the sort of like epistemic pruning of like what level of lie is too far to allow on the site.

There's a part of me that's just like, I don't want you working on these problems. I think Twitter is like a fundamentally broken thing. I don't want you working on this. I want you building the car of the future and I want you building rockets. I don't believe that you can fundamentally solve this. It's a terrible job to be the, I don't know if he wants to be the CEO. but like the owner of Twitter, like whatever it is. Like I had a hard time.

I said like Twitter's keeper is like what I'm calling him. But like I don't. I, it's a bad job. It is a job where a, just like everyone's going to yell at you, which it seems he likes. Like he kind of likes to be that guy, which is cool.

But, you know, I also think partly, and this is like the cynical part of me, and I think it's relatively warranted with someone like him, is that I think like what he really wants is the top. title so that the things that he does, the actions he takes, both in his other, like, you know, other parts of his life and career, but also just like his ideological leanings,

his musings about speech or whatever, it comes from, like, Elon Musk, comma, CEO of Twitter or whatever, right? That it sort of gives a level of, it almost gives like a stamp of approval, like it makes some of his ideologies, Twitter's ideologies, to some degree again. And I think that there's also like a delightful amount of chaos for him that comes with that, right? Like he can say and rattle whatever cages he wants to. And it means it has a different weight to it, right? Because a guy who makes rockets has opinions about politics and whatever. It's like, okay, that's important.

He's the wealthiest man in the world. But guy who owns massive platform, you know, where our politics and speech. Arguably the most important, most influential platform for speech in the world. Not to say it's the most well attended or the most subscribed to. But, you know, Ben Thompson, a shratercary newsletter author was on a previous podcast. And he basically said this is the Twitter is the straw that stirs the drink of news discourse. That when you look at all sorts of phenomena, whether it's the George Floyd protests or the Trump phenomenon, you can walk, you know, you follow that, that river north through all of its tributaries. And you see, oh, the source of this of this gusher was Twitter.

Like, this happens all the time. It really is an unbelievably significant platform for our understanding of the world. And I understand, to a certain extent, wanting to be like the impresario over it. You're the richest man in the world. You think that free speech is important. Here's the most important organ in the world for free speech. I want to be the king of that mountain. I agree with you that it's really important, I think, to juxtapose that that ambition

with the fact that it's like the problems of that mountain are like unfixable. Like they are just, they are rooted in just dark human nature, and I don't think that any, any amount of engineering skill is going to fix it. One more point I wanted to ask you about before I moved to your dystopian possible narrative is how this changes Musk's relationship with Donald Trump. So first order level is that a lot of people assume that Elon Musk will invite Donald Trump back on Twitter. now that's a really interesting thing because Trump might say yes and it could work out fantastically for him because he would get back into the public conversation in a way that he's been semi absent for the last 18 months or Trump could come back and people could be reminded how terrible Trump is how odious he is, how disgusting and it could remind moderates how much

they hate like Trump and it could maybe nudge them a little bit back toward the Democratic Party That might be just a little bit too much opium. But here's another alternative in the Trump world. What if Trump is invited back to Twitter but refuses? Because Trump has a media spec, truth social, that is a competitor of Twitter. And now Elon Musk has made himself Trump's business enemy. He might have created essentially a new rivalry, Trump's media spec versus Elon Musk's Twitter,

such that if Elon Musk does continue, to be the CEO of Twitter, and Trump does continue to be the head of True Social and even becomes president, that you could have this showdown between Elon Musk and the White House, which is something that someone who relies on federal subsidies and relationships with NASA does not want. So I laid out a bunch of scenarios, but my fundamental question is this. Like, do you wonder if Musk might be soliciting a little bit too much political attention for making himself the head of Twitter, which is a company that people, across the political spectrum like to pay quite a lot of attention to?

I think this is, it's very, like, just, just the question of what Donald Trump would do with a, with an offer like that, I think that is, it's incredibly fascinating because I can see him using that as a way to sort of leverage more power, right, to say, I don't, I don't need this network. I don't need, I don't need any of this. In fact, it doesn't really matter, and it hasn't matter since I left, you know, et cetera. I think that that is really fascinating. I think there's also, like, you're sort of dealing with two people who are incredible, like, attention gatherers and, you know, spectacle creators and trolls in their own right,

who sort of, like, I think both of them for, for, I would argue, worse for all of us, like, are kind of gaming all this stuff out in their heads a little bit, like, and it's really important that neither gets played or is seen to be getting played. or deferential to the other, you know, want to be the alpha in the situation. I can see a scenario where Elon Musk actually does like a very kind of open-ended thing that's like, if you've been banned,

you can like petition your case to get back on and we will, you know, open it and hear it. And that way he doesn't have to sort of extend the olive branch, but it's kind of like puts the ball in other people's courts to say, you know, this is something you could do if you want to and then we'll kind of like legislate that. it's a little less of like an attention spectacle, but it makes him a little less of like Trump's lackey, right?

He can sort of, you know, leave it up to him so Trump doesn't have to, you know, sort of reject him, so to speak. So I think that's fascinating. Yeah, but there's a little bit of a Spider-Man pointing at Spider-Man situation going on with two people that are just extraordinary masters of gathering attention, potentially squaring off to see who could be the attention master.

It sort of reminds me a little bit, I don't know if they, if they overlapped in terms of their peaks or necessarily had any famous moments of interaction. But like Thomas Edison versus P.T. Barnum, like Thomas Edison, the inventor who is also an incredible impresario, versus P.T. Barnum, who is like, I'm all impresario. It's all surface level.

It's all tricks. There's no engineering genius behind the curtain. But that's essentially what it could represent, except in this case, P.T. Barnum is running for potentially returning to the White House. returning to speaking of your final timeline what i called the dystopian uh timeline you have a different term for it oh no you just call it the dark timeline what's the what's the darkest timeline here that we're looking at the the darkest timeline is the one in which musk like really decides to like use this as the plaything for like a particularly vicious you know kind of ideology and

some of that can be political right some of that can be sort of you know i think I think he's described sort of like left leftists as suffering from like a brain disease or something. It's some kind of moniker. It's very clear he has like animus towards the sort of the social justice left. So there is a way in which he could sort of use this power in position to like actively punish that, right? Or to elevate, you know, the most kind of chaotic, you know, parts of the platform. Like, you know, inviting Marjorie Taylor Green to have sort of like an outsized. presence on Twitter, not only inviting these people back, but sort of like, you know, really

kind of trying to use those purchase to extinguish things. I see that as not really like the most plausible thing. I also think he could sort of run this sort of like vengeful, you know, quote unquote vengeful strategy towards, with an eye towards like business, right? He could just be using this in ways to manipulate markets. He could, you know, really try to go all in and kind of, you know, take, take further aim at the SEC. I consider this to be a scenario that is not incredibly plausible because I think that like, a scenario where he runs this being like as a pet project to sort of, you know, like crush certain democratic tendencies.

I think you'd have massive pushback from employees at Twitter, right? And the public at large. But I think, like, one issue is, like, inside these large companies, the chief executive is obviously the person, you know, and the owner who has a lot of control, but it's also a very large company with a lot of people who build products and who have a say. And at the end of the day, you do need engineering talent.

And at the end of the day, there are lots of people who have sort of a kind of, I think aggressive libertarian sort of anti-social justice mindset, but I'm not sure how many, if there's enough of them to like staff the engineering of a major technology platform, right? Yeah. I don't buy the,

I don't buy the darkest version of the darkest timeline, which is that, and I'm saying you're putting it out there as just a sort of, you know, it's a low percentage probability. I don't buy the darkest version of the darkest timeline, which is essentially that Elon Musk reveals himself to be the Joker and runs Twitter as if it's Joker CEO, But I do think that there is a dark timeline where a lot of radicals,

especially, I suppose, on the right, who had been kicked off Twitter, are welcomed on with a lot of fanfare. So even if he's not putting his thumb on the scale for Marjorie Taylor Green or putting his thumb on the scale for Donald Trump, their return is celebrated in some way, right? He welcomes them back with a tweet. He tries to make it a big new story about how Musk's story. Twitter is different from pre-musk Twitter. I think that is, I think that's conceivable. Like, my pessimistic outlook for Twitter basically comes down to, to this. Like, I don't know what his plans

for light touch content moderation will look like. But like, he's essentially going to be running a social media site that's like tending to a garden the size of Australia with alien weeds that are growing like one foot per second everywhere you look and they're wrapping around as you walk around. as you walk around, like, the site just becomes disastrous. It becomes sort of disastrous to use and mildly abusive. And even if it doesn't become like 2x, 3x more abusive, I think an interesting thing to look out for is the fact that, like, a lot of people are now very sensitive to the possibility

that extremism and abuse will increase in the platform. And as a result, I wonder if even if the level of extremity and abuse doesn't increase, will hear more complaints about it because concerns will be made more salient by Musk's taking over the platform. And that, too, is going to, like, raise our awareness of the darkest sides of Twitter, the same way that certain scandals about Facebook often, like make us focus in the darker sides of Facebook. So I just see, like, the sort of the darker timeline being that the site becomes more chaotic, more abusive, a little bit more harassy, the certain voices that,

I don't know, left moderate like me doesn't want to be surrounded by become unignorable. And voices that I do follow pay such close attention to ongoing abuse and harassment that those phenomena

made a more sort of constant part of my daily life. That's sort of what it looks like. And I think, too, there's a way in which, like, a reversion, right? So, like, I think back to they're, like, around again, say, 2016, and the time, like, the leading up, like, the months right before the 2016 election,

when the harassment was kind of, like, we think harassment's bad on Twitter now, and it obviously is for certain people at different times. But, like, when we look, like, I remember some of these, like, anonymous trolls, like, on the right, like, this guy, Ricky Vaughn, who I think has been outed as someone, but I can't remember who. But, like, this guy was, like, a serial, like, on his 200th Twitter account, like high volume harasser, like just like, you know, photoshopping people into gas chambers,

you know, like just like horrible, horrible stuff. And it kind of just like going unchecked, right? Like they would kick him off and then he'd just start a new one. Like they wouldn't, they didn't try any sort of advanced, you know, things about that.

When Twitter did kind of really make strides to try to get some of these like serial abusers off the platform. form and in doing so made it a slightly healthier place that that like i know means something to a lot of people and to sort of have that regress i think there's a way in which some people like it will feel really bad like if you can if you watch this thing truly degrade in a way that's not just like oh man i'm seeing more opinions i quote unquote don't like i'm talking about seeing like a high presence of not yes you know on the platform stuff like that i think

think that that there's a it's hard to come back from that like that is when people actually start to say okay i don't need like i don't need to spend my time here and then it is dominated by the loudest worst most obnoxious voices and the people who are trapped like the and then as you said the stuff you start to see you know you feel i think you just start to see more of the worst stuff and less of the you know the joyful the insightful interesting stuff even though it'll still be there and so I think that there's a way that that would be incredibly dispiriting to people in ways that they might not even realize

now. It will just feel like this full term kind of regression. That's really interesting. So it's like, as a matter of summing up, I'm thinking about what you're saying, and I'm thinking about the piece that I just filed for the Atlantic. I'm going to make a prediction, and I'm just interested to know what you think about this prediction. I think that if you and I do a podcast

exactly one year from now, April 2023, and we reflect on our evaluation of the first year of Musk's tenure as keeper of Twitter, if that's your term. I think the first line summary will be there was more of just about everything. There were more voices. There was more hate. There was a little bit more abuse and more harassment. There was a little bit more diversity. There was also more features. There were more features that were useful to power users. There was also just more news about Twitter. It was impossible to stop thinking about it

because the world's richest man was the keeper of the castle. And that the outcome will be to some, definitely dystopian, to others a little bit better as a product. And to many, just like a chaotic cluster ship, there's just more of everything. How do you vaguely feel about that prediction? I, so I'll tell you what I like about that prediction.

What I like about that prediction is that the more is exactly the end goal of what he wants, right? The more of all of that, and including him being at the center of it. And I really think that that is like, there's a good bet on that, right? Because it means it's playing to his ego. It means he's like active in it. It means he's, you know, further investing himself in our conversation, everything. So I think that that part is right. I'm, you know, I'm hesitant to say that there's going to be lots of changes.

Like, I think there's going to be way more attention. I just think that all of this stuff, like all this stuff's going to be on a long timeline, right? Like, it's going to take time for the deal to, you know, to settle and to get, you know, fully approved and everything. I think I saw somewhere I could be totally wrong on this that it was like on the order of like six months or something before maybe he even takes hold. It's going to be several months, yeah. Yeah. And at that point, like, he's not probably going to weigh.

in on what he's going to do for that period of time. So it's going to be this long period of being coy. And then I think, too, like, I do think aside of, you know, maybe he'll throw out an edit button really quickly, right? Maybe he will do this reinstatement of certain accounts. But I think beyond that, like, if he's actually serious about this stuff, then it's going to, it's going to be a while before we see the changes. So I think, like, the actual experience of Twitter.com, the website is not going to change all that much. I think you're totally right that there's going to be, more. The stakes of this entire conversation, the stakes of our sort of, you know, political conversation, our cultural conversation, the whole town square vibe, speech issues as the

intersect of all that. The stakes have been raised by this for sure. And so, and he has, you know, put himself in the center of that universe. And I think that's, I think the more part of that is, is dead on. Charlie Wazell, thank you very much. Thanks for having me. And that's all from us for this instant reaction emergency podcast. We'll be back tomorrow with our usual episode. Talk to you then.