The Chaser Report - Elon Musk Charges $8 for Free Speech

Episode Date: November 7, 2022

Twitter and Elon Musk are simultaneously destroying each other like two black holes trapped in each other's event horizon, and Charles and Dom are here to enjoy the spectacle. For a social media platform that isn't currently dying (because it died ages ago) check out chaser.com.au. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gatigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to The Chaser Report. I'm Charles Firth and with me today is at Dom Knight at Twitter. Yes, for now anyway. I've just got the tick. Got the tick? You lost your job.

You got the tick. Did you pay $8 for your tick? I did pay $8 for the ability to undo my tweets. No, not for it. I don't think that's happened yet. What are you giving money to Twitter? I signed up to the old Twitter blue because I wanted to be able to view threads

and I want to be able to undo because I often tweet something and realise it's a bad idea and want to edit it. Yes. So I pay for that, but paying for the tick, no, of course I would not pay for that.

So the big news today is of course that Twitter's imploding. It's over. And as part of that, we changed the chaser, which of course has a blue tick because we're a very important media organisation. We changed our name on Friday to Elon Musk.

And have you been restricted yet? Yeah, so we've been suspended and we've got to change our name back to the Chaser. To get back our 270,000 followers on Twitter, now you've got to realise that Twitter is actually probably our predominant form of broadcasting, especially at this time of year, right? But every tweet that we make that goes out about, say, a whole lot of avocados that we've got to sell or our annual or our live show spins off thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars worth of ticket sales and merchandise sales, right? The fact that we're suspended now and we're going to stay suspended on a point of principle is a stupid idea. I think we should just rewind it and try and I don't know what to do.

I just looked at it. I just looked at, I just looked up Chaser on Twitter and it didn't come up. The Chaser's account did not come up in the first things that came up. It was like Craig and stuff. And then eventually I just, I clicked on a link to At Chaser and it says there's been some unusual, it was a warning. It's been some unusual activity from this account. Do you still want to view it? And I clicked yes and it got to Elon Musk, not Elon Musk.

And then the Twitter account still there, but they're certainly warning against it. But, I mean, is it still a tick? It's still got a tick. I would warn against. Yeah, I'd warn against. Jay's a Twitter account any day of the week, really. It's an automatic thing. But no, a lot of people who've criticized Elon Musk have actually had been restricted.

I mean, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, the congresswoman from the Bronx, who's one of the leading kind of leftist congresswoman, she lost her whole account for several hours. She couldn't do anything. Basically, it's free speech unless you have anything negative to say. about Elon Musk. I mean, what a shock that a radical free speech activist is more interested about their free speech and other people.

It's almost as if he's not pro-free speech. No, no, but let me tell you the tale, though, of why he's actually genuinely imploding, and it may actually lead to the complete destruction of Elon Musk as a billionaire. Really? Yes. Which is. And because I don't think many people understand exactly what's going on, which is, just as he was taking over Twitter. In the same week that Elon Musk took over Twitter, the social media companies,

all of them like Facebook, you know, meta, you know, Instagram, all that stuff, but also TikTok and Twitter all had to do a thing called New Fronts, right, which is every year television stations announce their slate of television programs for the next year, and they're called Upfronts, right? And they pre-sell about 20% of all their ads to the big advertisers. And so, you know, soap companies and Unilever and all the Coca-Cola buys, you know, tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars worth of ads for the next year. And so Twitter had the new fronts in the same week that Elon Musk was taking over. Now, in the week leading up to Elon Musk taking over,

just as he'd done that sink gag, the N-word had increased 500% on the Twitter platform. and Elon Musk had just announced that he was going to sack 75% of the staff, including at least half of all the moderators, right? And he'd sacked the head of brand safety, which is the person who the advertisers trust to make sure that their brand is not going to be showcased amongst a whole lot of Nazi, you know, hellscape, dystopian fuckwits, right? Anyway, the day before there's going to be this big presentation

where advertisers are already a bit cautious, just a bit wary about Twitter. The guy who was actually going to do the presentation out of the New Fronts for Twitter, he also quit. Oh, wow. So that meant that Elon Musk had to turn up and do the presentation himself.

Did he really? Why haven't I read about this? I know, this is the great story. Because he's famously bad at presenting because he's, let's just say, his ability to relate to ordinary human beings is a bit limited. So he turns out, most of the people are on a call. Like, it's a big conference.

was like a Zoom call. And they're, you know, they're all representing people who, you know, buy $30 million here, $40 million here. Normally, Twitter would expect to make about $8 or $900 million out of that New Front's presentation, right? Getting booking from all the big advertisers, you know, Audi might book, you know, $10 million. For them, for Audi and Unilever, Twitter is just, it's like a pack of gum. It's like, you know, it's something that you pick up as you're doing the rest of your media buying.

You know, you're mostly giving it to TV stations and, yeah, it's a little bit, you know, a lot to Facebook, most of TV stations and, oh, yeah, we'll get some Twitter as well. So they don't really care. They just want assurances that their brand is not going to be surrounded by these horrible neo-Nazis and completely unmoderated content. So they say to Elon Musk, the first question was, what is the plan, Elon? And the thing is, he didn't have a plan. He didn't have a single plan because he couldn't say, oh, well, well, there'll be more moderation

because he was sacking half of his moderating stuff, right? Yes. So the whole, the whole presentation was apparently, because several people have now published accounts of that phone call, people started canceling their entire ad buy on Twitter during the phone call. By the end of the phone call, like half the audience had actually just dropped off going this guy's just bullshitting us

like there's one big media boy who just went nah this is all just bullshit not going to engage that's fascinating because I'm comparing this with his tweets Charles because he's been getting so angry about working advertisers and he had a poll about whether advertisers should care more about free speech or kind of woke principles and of course free speech won but unfortunately, Twitter polls are not binding on his advertisers. Yes, so that is what happened. All those tweets were in the wake of... Oh, now it makes sense.

Because the previous Friday, he'd done this disastrous presentation and completely stuffed it up. And guess how much money they raised on Elon Musk's presentation? And normally it would be $8 or $900 million. Guess how much got pre-sold that day? Three. Ah, it was $15 million. I was going to actually get $20 million.

So he's just paid $44 billion. kind of largely personally got money from the Saudis who of course love free speech and content moderation and he's taking it himself that is fascinating because the thing about Elon is brilliant so Twitter doesn't have any income next year no and that's the content moderators in Australia I mean the Australian office is already downsized there's no one pulling offensive stuff so how will they get advertisers back given the advertisers if he knew anything about the industry at all he would have tried to It's just fascinating.

When you look at what Zuckerberg's had to do, apparently his kind of counsel that makes – he's got an independent council that makes content decisions that banned on Trump that's at arm's length. Apparently it cost him $250 million to set that whole thing up properly so that it was arm's length and no one could ask him is Trump allowed back on the platform. And Elon sacked all the people he had rather than hiring this.

Because he thought, you don't need that. That's silly. All you need is engineers. His view was Twitter only need have engineers and it will become a wonderful playground. Has he never been on a message board? Like any unmoderated message board becomes a honeypot for Nazis and pedos in five minutes.

It happened to the Chaser message board back in the day that I used to run. So, but Dom, I sense a perfect opportunity for the Chasingie here. Are you thinking what I'm thinking? Oh, I don't know. What are you thinking? Let's buy Twitter. What? No, no, no, no, no.

We're not going down that hillside. No, no, no. We don't need to buy Twitter, Dom, because Twitter doesn't have any advertisers anymore. I reckon what we should do is we should offer to take over all the advertising inventory from Elon for like, I don't know, 10 bucks or something. What a good idea. Because he's got like $900 million worth of advertising inventory just sitting there. Oh, so we can run. And that's how we sell our Christmas merchandise, which you can buy at chaser shop.com.

Are you worried, though, Charles, about ads for the chaser appearing alongside neo-Nazi pro-elon tweets? Well, it's not going to make our reputation any worse, is it? Yeah, in this world, you've got to make sacrifices, Dom. You've got to say, you know, do the ins, justify the means. That's certainly what Nazis would say. I know you've got a lot of inflated-flaccato toys that you need to sell. Is it really worth being the main funder of, you know, Nazi gathering.com? I don't know.

I mean, it's... I can see the argument. It's sort of like, what would Volkswagen have done? What would Gerbys have done? What would Gerbils have done? That's sensible, it's just, it's such a new irony. I feel like we're bordering on tastelessness. Let's be very clear.

The Chases dance is anti-Nazi, if that needs to be. Well, no, and anyway, our account has been. suspender. Oh, yes. Well, actually, that would be a good way to get an unsuspend the account. Yeah.

Buying ads. They buy their entire, buy all the ads. But I reckon the one thing that we should do is all go across to Mastodon because that's been the trendy thing to do. So on the weekend, I set up Charles at Oz. Social,

which is the Australian Mastodon instance, is what it's called. Are we calling it Mastod or Mastod? Was it Mastodon? Mastodon sounds a little bit like a circle jerk, which, to be fair, is like my social media. Well, apparently, when you get a really long debate on Mastodon, it's called a Mestabate. Oh, there you go. Perfect.

Well, I signed up years ago. I can't remember why. Something happened where a lot of people sign up to Mastodon. And so I'm Domneyed at Mastodon. Dot social, but it's not quite, it's not going to be as good, is it? I mean, it can't possibly be as good. Well, if we all go across and hang out, this is the amazing thing. So Mastodon, I think, has had something like, uh,

quarter of a million new users in the last 24 hours. So literally about 40% of my interesting feed on MasterDon is people who were on Twitter last week. Yeah. And you're just going, if this actually continues, like within a few weeks, it will be as interesting as Twitter. And the entire use of Twitter will be gone. Well, and then we can buy it. I want to do it. I think that would be fantastic.

See, this is what we should have done, because Tumblr. ended up being sold for a million dollars. Like after it was bought by Yahoo for a billion, they then sold it for a million dollars. And I remember Cam and I at the time, the Taser editor Cam, and I said, oh, if only we had a million dollars, that would have been a good purchase, right? And I think it's the same thing. Like, Twitter's going

to have cost $60 billion, but it'll, you know, he'll end up selling it for a million dollars. We'll buy it. We'll buy it. We'll buy it. And look, if nothing else, you'll be able to sell your alacados on it. Yeah. To Nat. To Nazi. That's our business model from now on. Anyway, you can join me on my new TikTok account. It's at Charles Firth.

And let's just say I've got the whole dancing bear meme working well. The great thing about TikTok is there's no chance of Nazis on TikTok. I mean, he will be owned by the communist government. But it's Nazi free. Aggies from Rogue, we're part of the ACAST, Creator Network. We'll catch you tomorrow. Thank you.