The Daily Signal - Elon Musk Makes Moves on Twitter. What Comes Next?

Episode Date: April 8, 2022

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has acquired a 9.2% share of Twitter stock and joined the social media company’s board of directors. The internet buzzed with the possibility of a free speech advocate like Musk having an internal position with the tech giant. But what does all of this really mean? To Annie Butler, a research associate at the The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Technology Policy, Musk’s taking a more active role at Twitter is a step in the right direction toward encouraging free speech on the platform. Butler joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss the implications of Musk’s move, and how some popular tech companies focused on free speech are doing. We also cover these stories: The Senate votes 53-47 to confirm Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, with three Republicans joining the majority. A group of Senate Democrats announce they will join Republican colleagues to introduce a bill to block the Biden administration’s plan to end use of the public heath policy at the southern border known as Title 42. Congress passes two bills designed to punish Russia further for its invasion of Ukraine. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Friday, April 8th. I'm Maggie Haranjug. And I'm Doug Blair. Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently acquired a 9.2% share of Twitter stock and joined the company's board of directors. The internet buzzed with the possibility of a free speech advocate like Musk having an internal position on the tech giant staff. But what does that all really mean? Annie Butler, a research associate at the Center for Technology Policy at the Heritage Foundation,

joins the show to discuss the implication of Musk's move. and how some popular free speech alternatives are doing right now. But before we get to Doug's conversation with Annie Butler, let's hit our top stories of the day. The Senate voted to confirm Judge Katanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court on Thursday in a narrow 53-47 vote. All 48 Democratic senators voted to approve Jackson, along with two independents,

Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Angus King of Maine, and three Republicans, Lisa McCauce of Alaska, Mitt Romney of Utah, and Susan Collins of Maine. Before the vote, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York said it was a wonderful day, a joyous day, an inspiring day. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said, today the far left will get the Supreme Court justice they wanted.

Jackson, who will become the 116th Supreme Court Justice, will be sworn in after Justice Stephen Breyer retires this coming summer. There is bipartisan pushback to President Biden's decision to revoke the Title IV. public health policy at the southern border. On Thursday, a group of Democratic senators announced that they would join the Republican colleagues to introduce a bill aimed at temporarily blocking the Biden administration's plan to end the policy. The Public Health and Border Security Act was introduced by Senator Kristen Sinema, a Democrat from Arizona, along with Senator James Langford, Republican from Oklahoma.

Cinema said, it just doesn't seem at all workable that this, that whatever plan they're working on right now, can be ready to implement in a way that is both safe for our border communities and respects the humanitarian crisis that is coming. Along with Cinema, Democratic senators Mark Kelly, Maggie Hassan, Joe Manchin, and John Tester have added their names as co-sponsors. Title 42 allows U.S. border officials to immediately deport migrants over public health concerns. Last week, the CDC announced it would stop authorizing such deportations on May 23rd.

Congress passed two bills Thursday to punish Russia further for its invasion of Ukraine. The first bill would formally strip Russia of its trade status as a most favored nation, allowing the U.S. to impose harsher sanctions. Congress also voted to ban Russia oil imports, which account for about 8 percent of all U.S. oil imports, in an attempt to inflict further economic costs on Moscow. Both bills had passed the House in March, but were stalled in the Senate. Once the Senate revised and unanimously passed the bills, they were sent back to the House, which passed them by an overwhelming majority. The bills now go to President Biden, who is expected to sign both into law.

Washington's power players are testing positive once again for COVID-19. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced Thursday that she had tested positive for the virus, though she was currently asymptomatic. On Twitter, Pelosi spokesman Drew Hamill said, The Speaker is fully vaccinated and boosted and is thankful for the robust protection the vaccine has provided. The speaker will quarantine consistent with CDC guidance and encourages everyone to get vaccinated, boosted, and test regularly. Pelosi is the latest in each string of government officials who have tested positive for COVID-19 in the past few days.

Attorney General Merrick Garland, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, and Congressman Adam Schiff and Joaquin Castro all announced Wednesday that they had tested positive for the virus. Now stay tuned for my conversation with Heritage Foundation Tech Research Associate, Annie Butler, as we discuss Elon Musk and Twitter. As conservatives, sometimes it feels like we're constantly on defense against bad ideas. Bad philosophy, revisionist history, junk science, and divisive politics. But here's something I've come to understand. When faced with bad ideas, it's not enough to just defend. If we want to save this country, then it's time to go on offense. Conservative principles are ideas that work.

Individual responsibility, strong local communities, and belief in the American dream. As a former college professor and current president of the Heritage Foundation, my life's mission is to learn, educate, and take action. My podcast, The Kevin Roberts Show, is my opportunity to share that journey with you. I'll be diving into the critical issues that plague our nation, having deep conversations with high-profile guests, some of whom may surprise you, and I want to ensure freedom for the next generation. Find the Kevin Roberts Show wherever you get your podcast.

My guest today is Annie Butler, a research associate at the Center for Technology Policy here at the Heritage Foundation. Annie, welcome to the show. Hi, Doug. Thanks for having me. Of course. Yeah. Well, big news in the Twitter sphere recently.

We heard that Elon Musk had bought a 9.2% share of Twitter stock. So practically, now that we have this information, what does this mean for the platform? Yeah. So we don't actually know specifically what's going on inside his head. But we can only hope that this means really good things for free speech, bringing the platform closer to working along the sides of the First Amendment and, you know, just actually acting on being the de facto public town square. So in his tweet, which was I think March 25th, this is the one that we are really interested to see if actually comes true and he holds Twitter too. He said

free speech is essential to a functioning democracy. Do you believe Twitter rigorously adheres to the principal, and it was a poll to the public and his Twitter followers, 70.4% said no. No, that they don't believe that Twitter respects free speech. Correct. So to him, I followed that up the next day and tweeted out, given that Twitter serves as a de facto public town square, failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy, what should be done, question mark, and he left it open-ended to his followers. And so obviously now we know that he had at the time had purchased, you know, that amount of shares of the company.

So we're hoping to see those ideas of holding Twitter to the account of actually being a public town square and operating along the lines of the First Amendment. We hope that he actually can get that done. Sure. So we keep hearing this word public town square. Are we saying that these big tech companies like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, are a new form of public town squares like you might have seen in the medieval period where you go out and you have the town crier standing in the middle of the town and that's like public space? Yes, yeah. So, I mean, they operate as private companies, but they're such a mainstream use of the exchange of thoughts and ideas you would think. They pride themselves on being a free exchange of thoughts and ideas, quote.

but when you're seeing all these instances of suppression and censorship, especially of one side of the aisle, that isn't actually a freedom of exchange of ideas in a public town square. So we're hoping that he can bring it kind of reel them in and bring it back to that. So Twitter recently had a kind of a change in leadership where Jack Dorsey, who was the former CEO, gave the reins over to Parag Agarwal, who is the current CEO. Musk is known for having this very kind of precise vision of free speech. How does his vision of free speech jive with Twitter's vision under Jack Dorsey and then how does it jive now with this new CEO?

That's a good question. So you might have noticed on Twitter both the new CEO and the old CEO both addressed Elon publicly saying we're happy to have you on the team and we can't wait to work with you. and I think our opinion here is that, you know, that's a great show to the public that you're going to work well together with this new guy that owns a huge portion of your company in comparison. And so that's all great and fun, but we don't see that they're going to love having him there at board meetings in actuality. So as for working with the new CEO, I think that obviously we hope that they can, you know, have great conversation and really hear each other out and take these physical ideas of, you know, Elon throws out the idea of an edit button. But, you know, how do you make sure that someone doesn't edit some tweet from two years ago and, you know, kind of change the narrative of history with that. So I think that having a free exchange of these ideas, you know, how could something like an edit button work in actuality? And, you know, I think hearing each other out, hopefully they can do that.

And it's not just the CEO of Twitter trying to edge Elon out. Right. So we are seeing that there is a bit of pushback from, is this from the CEO or is this from the rank and file? Where is this pushback coming from? So I think I've personally seen a lot of pushback from people online. Even the Washington Post, I think, they released an article that said that this is like, Elon, you know, having this stake in Twitter is going to be an issue for free speech, which I think on Twitter, Elon Musk just had like a laughing emoji to it because it doesn't make sense that he's going to be an issue for free speech. So I think it's making a lot of people sweat, not only just the Washington Post, but a lot of people are like scared. Right.

And I think, obviously, from his previous standpoints on the platform, I think they're rightfully scared. I think he is going to really put his thoughts into action. Now, there was rumor that he was either going to try and buy Twitter outright or that he was maybe going to use his experience here with Twitter to form another platform. I mean, obviously, we can't read his mind, but do we have any idea where this type of behavior might lead. Yeah, so it's a good question. I mean, we're huge advocates of build your own. I'm sure you've heard of that quote before building your own platforms, which I think we might get into later. But

I think that there's also another approach of not only just building your own and going elsewhere, but because Twitter and Facebook and all these big tech companies are where most people go, just naturally out of what they know, their peers do, their family members do, you want to stay connected with those people. So there is another tactic which Elon is doing, which is to kind of take over the top rankings of these companies. And so with the two different tactics, obviously there's pros and cons of building your own versus kind of taking over the C-suite level of these companies.

So we'll just have to see what he does. I can say that this is a huge portion of Twitter, so he does have a significant voice on the board. Okay. So I guess that kind of leads to my next question then is we are in favor as conservatives of us using the free market, creating these new platforms. With Musk's influence, does it make sense for him

to create a new platform? Or does it make more sense for her to sort of infiltrate from within? Yeah, I think it kind of goes. back to what you were saying before. I think it's an experiment. If he can make changes at Twitter and, you know, it still stays as a mainstream platform and people are still using it. And it actually turns into free speech along the lines of the First Amendment. I think that that would be obviously a great first win. If for some reason he gets squeezed out or they don't allow these changes to happen that he's kind of edging towards, I think that obviously building his own

platform would be a great alternative. So we're going to obviously continue to watch this situation with Twitter Develop. It's going to be very interesting. But let's discuss some of the alternatives that currently exist. We've got things like Getter and Rumble that advertise themselves as free speech-focused alternatives to these big tech platforms. How are we seeing that they're doing right now? Yeah, so actually both Rumble and Getter have been doing really well over the past, I want to say over the past year, honestly, they've both had record members joining and content absorbed by, you know, the nature of the view count rising. So, yeah, I mean, they're great. And we're seeing it through the trends here that we're tracking. we'll look at someone who has both a YouTube and a Rumble account, for instance. Rumble is the comparison to YouTube, the exchange of videos.

And you'll see that someone who's been on YouTube, for example, a congress member, someone who's been on YouTube for 10 years, let's say, and they have a certain amount of followers. You look at their account on Rumble, and it's a very, you know, it's a very, betted account, you know, they have the checkmark. I think it's a green checkmark on Rumble. And they've only had the account for, let's say, eight months. Right. And their subscriber account is exponentially growing.

And in most cases, they have even higher subscriber account on Rumble when they've only been on Rumble for eight months versus 10 years. So we've seen a lot of the data points really showing that this method that Rumble and getter use, which is. is not preferencing, which obviously we know YouTube and Twitter use preferencing and suggested algorithms. You know, when you have this non-alorithmed method of placing videos on Rumble, you're getting a lot more views and a lot more access to people because it's randomized. Now, one of the things that seems to be an issue with a lot of these platforms is they don't attract a large enough contingent of people who are on Twitter or on YouTube to their platform. So, for example, you know, you can go and see a Marjorie Taylor Green on Rumble, but you won't be seeing a, you know, moderate Democrat or a even left of center Democrat.

It's mostly just conservatives on there. Is that going to be a problem as these platforms try to gain more market space that it seems like it's really. really only a certain contingent of the population that's going there. Yeah, that's a great question. I think that it's hard because the people that leave mainstream platforms to go to these alternatives are the people that are being censored. So it's hard. Leftists and people that are even just moderate and, you know, a little bit to the left,

they aren't getting censored at the same rate as these people on the right and in the conservative spaces are. So there's really no incentive for these people to leave big platforms like Twitter and YouTube if they're not getting censored. So we'll see how that goes down the road. Right now, obviously, both alternative companies and alternative companies in general are doing a great, great job. They'll have people leave publicly. influencers like Joe Rogan or Kevin McCarthy recently created, he's exclusively on Rumble. So when big people make the switch, it does bring their followers over with them.

But like you said, there's only so many big people that can exclusively move. So yeah, I think that's an issue we might run into a couple of years down the road. Now, it does seem like we constantly hear about a lot of these alternatives to the big tech platforms that get a lot of press, get a lot of attention, and then kind of don't go anywhere. So my thought process is Gab and Parlor, which were sort of touted as these alternatives that got a lot of attention, and then I haven't heard about them, I think, since 2021, 2020. Why does that seem to keep happening? Yeah, so, I mean, for the Parlor example, and I don't know if you want me to get into it,

here, but in the parlor example, they obviously were deplatformed from the cloud service. So it's important for Rumble, getter, other alternatives when they're building their company to build with the full tech stack in mind. So it's not just creating the landing page where all the videos are. It's about building your own cloud service, building your own content delivery networks. We've seen with the digital payment platforms, PayPal, and others censoring for just owning a bank account. And so that, and then domains, and then internet service providers. So the whole stack needs to be completely built on your own so that you don't get censored from any of those levels.

So we really do encourage people who are building their own to build. with the full stack in mind because there are so many choke points for the left to get us. And so if you're not careful and you don't build around those choke points, they will shut you down because that's their end goal is to delete all of the alternatives. That's a great point because when we talk about these big tech alternatives, it does seem to be the front facing angle. It's always the Twitter alternative. It's not the Amazon Cloud Services alternative.

Exactly. Are there conservative options for that, and are we seeing them having some success? Yes, yes. So, for example, with Rumble, they have this coming soon cloud service level of the stack, which is called Rumble Cloud Solutions. So it's a neutral place for your business to be free in the cloud. So that's going to be used for their service. Same thing with the CDN level. They use parallel economy, which was created by Dan.

Bonjino, which is the alternative to PayPal or, you know, an online payment platform. So the creators on Rumble can get their money from their subscribers through the parallel economy, which was created by a conservative because of this problem. The choke points are, there's so many ways for the left to cut us off. So that's just one example. So we very much encourage people who are building their own to keep that in mind. Can we see a successful parallel economy exist within the next couple of years where it is a conservative financial system backed by conservative web services on a conservative platform where you would watch your videos? Is that a feasible thing in the next couple of years?

Yeah, definitely. And some of these alternative platforms are already doing it after watching Parlor be taken down. They've kind of been like, okay, we're going to learn our lesson from that. and we're not going to let that happen to us. So we're going to build with the full stack in mind and make sure that the left cannot cancel us from any of the levels. So I really do think that it's possible. Obviously, we've seen that it's possible. I think it can become definitely a little bit more mainstream

as long as all these alternatives are joining them and keeping them in mind and not just succumbing to, you know, having their services hosted on, you know, a mainstream cloud service. Now, it does seem like there is debate over in the interim period before those types of things become more mainstream, whether or not prominent conservatives or even your sort of everyday conservatives should remain on these platforms like Facebook and Twitter or if they should just start saying, you know what, I'm done, even if I'm not reaching the same amount of people, I'm going to go to one of these other platforms.

What do you recommend? Yeah, so one thing before I directly answer that is on Getter, they just released the ability to cross-tweet with the getter. It's not a Getter tweet, but a getter, you know, text box. So now you can share a getter, like, text on Twitter. So you can still, even if you don't have a Twitter account, you have only a Getter account, you can still reach an audience from Twitter. So that is an interesting intersect where you're not explicitly supporting Twitter,

but you are still reaching the like Twitter audience, which is a huge audience. So as for whether to have both or leave the big tech, the thing that we don't want to do as conservatives is to leave the Twitters, the Facebooks, the YouTube's to just the left. You know, if we all just take all of our content and our thoughts and ideas and run, then there is no, you know, to bring it back to the beginning, de facto public town square, because it's just the complete stratification and separation of the left and the right based on platforms.

So I do think, you know, we can't have everyone leaving the big tech companies, but also being able to attack from the executive standpoint the way Elon is is a way to be able to keep more conservative and right-leaning voices on these big tech platforms without getting censored as they have been so often. As a final question, as Elon Musk continues to maybe push for more free speech on Twitter, it seems as if there's going to be concerns about the needs to keep a safe platform, obviously to remove explicitly illegal content and to prevent people from just being censored for political opinions. Where does that balance lie? Yeah. So, I mean, obviously it's an important one.

We see violence, exploitation, and all of that on platforms. And I think it really comes down to the definition of, quote, harmful content, which has been blurred in. testimonies on the Hill and in terms of service on all of these platforms, honestly. So I think it really comes down to explicitly defining what is this harmful content and obviously keeping viewpoints that are on the right and not having to do with violence or porn or exploitation of children. Obviously, that would be included in that definition. but, you know, just opinions that are people on the right that don't have to do with any of those

horrible things should not be included in the definition of, quote, harmful content. So I think it comes down to just a rewriting of that definition and of the rules in general. Okay. That was Annie Butler, a research associate at the Center for Technology Policy here at the Heritage Foundation. Annie, thank you so much for your time. Thank you. And that'll do it for today's episode. Thanks so much for listening to The Daily Signal Podcast.

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