The Daily Signal - INTERVIEW | Jake Denton on Elon Musk and What May Change at Twitter Under His Leadership

Episode Date: November 2, 2022

It finally happened. After months of "maybe, maybe not," Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion. Now the question is, what happens next?  In the past, Musk said he thought Twitter should follow the same free speech laws that exist within America’s public square, says Jake Denton, a research associate with The Heritage Foundation’s Tech Policy Center. The indication from Musk is that “he will stick to that,” Denton says. Denton, who is currently locked out of his own Twitter account, joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to explain why he is cautiously optimistic about Musk’s takeover of Twitter and to describe the changes that might be coming to the social media platform.  Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

He's going to do things different. He's going to be the corky, kind of nerdy boss that everyone kind of expected him to be. So, you know, the unorthodox approach, kind of the loud, obnoxious approach is what we should probably expect from Elon's Twitter. This is the Daily Signal podcast for Wednesday, November 2nd. I'm Virginia Allen. And that was Jake Denton, a research associate in the Heritage Foundation's Center for Tech Policy. Twitter is under new management. Elon Musk closed his deal with Twitter last week. and already we're seeing signs that things are getting shaken up at the social media platform. Jake joins me on the show today to explain what must purchase of Twitter means for users. Stay tuned for our conversation after this.

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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 podcasts. Well, it finally happened after months of maybe, maybe not, Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion. And now the question is, what happens next? Jake Denton is a research associate in the Heritage Foundation's Tech Policy Center. And he joins us now to answer that question.

Jake, thanks for being here. Absolutely. Thanks for having me on. So, Jake, you know, for so long we were hearing that Musk was maybe going to buy Twitter. Nothing at all seemed certain. There was one point where he said he was going to pull out of the deal because Twitter wouldn't disclose the number of bots that they had on the platform. What happened that caused this deal to finally go through? Yeah, so it was a long, long process.

You know, Musk submitted an official offer, then withdrew the offer. Twitter sues and says you have to keep the offer because, you know, the shareholder implications. and it was really just a big tug of war. I feel like, you know, we can probably attribute most of it to the disclosures from the trial that actually resulted in him taking over the company. But it's tough to say what really pushed the, you know, the settlement to actually go through. He really didn't get a lot of clarity on the bot issue. There's still a lot of unknowns.

It's why you saw the Tesla engineers come in and start auditing the code at Twitter, you know, day one of him taking the helm. It's just all these outstanding questions that the trial didn't answer. Well, and he had a pretty colorful entrance into Twitter's headquarters last week. He walked in carrying a kitchen sink as the new owner of Twitter, excuse me, not a kitchen sink, but just a sink. Why? Yeah, I think, you know, it's largely linked to the kind of internet lore and kind of the internet lingo of, you know, people always reply, let that sink in, you know, oh my God, you know, Elon buys Twitter, let that sink in. And, you know, Elon let the sink in.

But I think it's kind of a testament to he's going to do things different. He's going to be the corky kind of nerdy boss that everyone kind of expected him to be. So, you know, the unorthodox approach, kind of the loud, obnoxious approach is what we should probably expect from Elon's Twitter. Well, it's certainly entertaining to say hell least. So let's talk a little bit about the changes that we might see at Twitter moving forward. You know, as conservatives, obviously we're hopeful that we maybe are going to see some accounts stop being paid. pulled off, you know, that people will actually be able to say things that maybe, you know, masks don't work, they won't be shut down for that, or Rachel Levin is a man and they won't be,

their account won't be stripped away from, you know, all posting privileges for that. Do you know what must plan is for free speech on the platform? Does he plan to have fact checkers? So in the early days when this sale seemed kind of unlikely and he was just kind of almost giving his philosophy on, you know, what the platform should look like. He made an argument that Twitter should just abide by the speech laws of the United States. And so if you're allowed to say it in a public square, you're allowed to say it on Twitter. And it's really the idea of like the public square is digitized.

You know, that is what Twitter is. And so there's all indication is that he will stick to that. There is some concerning news that he's kind of forming his own governance board. And I really don't like the idea of kind of bringing in more academics, just like meta did. you know, the Facebook Oversight Board has been a total disaster. They're just a bunch of woke academics. And so if Elon can, you know, bring over people from conservative circles and actually have a real voice for these people who already platform like President Trump and all the countless

other influencers, I think that could be a value ad maybe, gives some legitimacy to speech policies. But a lot of unknowns in terms of what the speech guidelines will be on the platform. Yeah, that's going to be interesting to see play out because he did. that he would be forming a content moderation council, but like you say, it's going to be curious to see what exactly that means, what does that look like, who's going to sit on that council? Yeah, council oversight board. All of these words are things that should make your skin crawl.

It never ends well for conservatives. There's not a single institution in which, you know, conservatives are representative by this like elite class of, you know, academics, the decision makers. It's just an excuse, essentially. they give some PhD the authority, and you just listen to them because they're a PhD. But ordinary Americans just get de-platformed left and right, and there's no course of action. Well, and you are one of those Americans that got de-platformed. Your own personal account on Twitter was recently taken down.

What happened? Yeah, and the dead of night on Saturday, you know, it's the Halloween weekend. I'm with some friends, and I get a scary email. Your Twitter's been permanently banned, and you're sitting there like, I haven't tweeted in a week. You know, like how could this have possibly happened? And you start poking around and you see, you know, oh, I was banned for ban evasion. Well, that's strange. I don't have another account.

So how would I be evading a ban? And, you know, what I came to find out is this is essentially a thing called a network ban. And Twitter will kind of highlight three accounts, four accounts, that if, you know, a user follows them and, you know, they follow some of these other concerning accounts. You're above like a 60% threshold of following bad people. You're just out. And they don't do any manual review. It's like algorithmic and they just purge. So it's not because you tweeted something bad.

It's just because you follow people that Twitter has said, these are people we don't like that we don't like what they tweet. Exactly. And you're a threat because you follow them. So we're going to take you down. Oh, so it's like you're adjacent to troublemakers, right? So you have, whether it be misinformation, hate speech or any other buzzword, they just label accounts, you know, these bad actors.

And if you follow them, and I think there is some level of like if you follow them at the earlier date of when they created the account. They just assume, you know, you know them in real life. Because how else would you know this anonymous account was just made an account, right? And so if you follow them, you're just out. And there's, you can submit an appeal and they hide behind the veil of, oh, the AI did it. Or, oh, like, it was a computer, like a human will review it. The humans don't review the appeals either.

It's all just digitize, computer. And there's no, it's like going to the DMV and trying to get something resolved. No one's going to help you. So all signs point to me, like remaining off the platform until Elon gets this thing sorted out. Do we know that he is going to be reinstating users like yourself who have been pulled off the platform? So he's definitely hinted at, you know, people like President Trump coming back. I mean, a little bit of hinting towards like maybe a Steve Bannon, which kind of gives you hope that just a broader kind of jailbreak, if you will, will occur where all these folks that were just wrong. thrown off the platform could potentially return, most of these cases were just mass bans.

There's no real behavior kind of issue. You didn't tweet profane words. You didn't threaten a life. You just happen to exist within a circle that Twitter as a company does not like. And so what you find is this HR culture is so pervasive that it floods every department and whether it be the content moderation team, the misinformation board, whatever it is, They just use that kind of HR culture, HR ideology, to enforce kind of speech laws and just broader regulatory kind of guidelines upon average users and just results in Americans being taken offline. So let's be optimistic for a second and say that Elon Musk comes in.

You know, he reinstates people that were wrongfully banned. We get the Babylon B back on there. And, you know, he really starts to clean up some of these issues that we see. with Twitter regarding free speech policies. Do you think that that would have any implications on other social media platforms like Facebook or YouTube? I think there will be like similar to how we've spun up truth and parlor and these kind of like conservative alternatives.

I think someone will come along, whether it be Facebook or some other platform and be like we're going to be like the left-leaning platform, which is ironic because they all already are that way. But you know, they'll really stick to their current, the status quo of the platform. They're not going to switch any of their rules. If anything, they make them stricter.

and give the left their platform. I don't see a world in which META and Mark Zuckerberg come out and are like, you know, thank God Elon saved the Internet. We're going to do it too. If anything, they're going to be bashing heads over, you know, regulate speech versus free speech. And this kind of like two worldviews colliding almost within the social media sphere.

Mm-hmm. Now, we do have to talk about the conversation internationally because the Washington Post, they report that about 75% of Twitter's users are outside the U.S. And there are concerns that Musk is a little too friendly towards countries like China or Russia. Should we be concerned about Elon Musk's approach towards China and some of these other totalitarian nations? Yeah, I mean, it's no secret.

Tesla and all these other corporations that Musk is involved with operate in China and they have factories in Germany. And he's an international businessman. And so his ties really aren't confined to the U.S. And it's something we see across the tech sector in particular. They claim to be American companies, but they're international companies. If anything, you could call them a multinational entity, right? Like, they're really not even a company.

They could almost govern an entire country. And so Tesla, Twitter now, all these things under Musk's umbrella will not be free of Chinese influence, Saudi Arabian influence. I mean, the ownership group is under criticism. Elon wasn't the sole purchaser. He got other investors to come in with them. there's Saudi foreign wealth embedded in that purchasing group. And so to sit here and, you know, talk about Twitter and, you know, it's going to abide by American laws is a little bit far-fetched.

I think there will be a great deal of foreign influence and how the new foundation of the platform will be laid. So then, you know, I think that puts things in perspectives. We've got to take rose-collar glasses off. There's still lots of issues here. What role does Congress have or does Congress have a role in making sure that, you know, whether it be Twitter or other social media platforms, you know, are abiding by constitutional standards, essentially.

Yeah, I mean, the bare minimum right now for Congress is to take action against TikTok. Everybody knows Chinese are stealing our data. We just had the Forbes article that, you know, highlights that China is literally targeting specific Americans, surveilling their geolocation, tracking their keystrokes. We know that it's happening. and yet there's been not a single move to regulate them since Trump tried to pass it early in his administration. And so to sit here and think that maybe Twitter gets some form of regulatory burden on them, I think it's kind of crazy because the easiest target right now is TikTok and we were just paralyzed. No one will do anything.

So we have a long ways to go in terms of informing members about the dangers of foreign influence on these platforms, what it means to have one of the most popular applications be able to. propaganda vehicle for a foreign entity. It's predominant audience as children. What does that mean? When this generation is 20, 30 years old, how are they voting? How are they, you know, raising their family? When all of these, you know, pieces of content were coming from China, Russia, wherever they're coming from, we can't act like it's not going to influence their future behaviors.

So for you and your team at the Heritage Foundation, as you all work on on tech policy, at this moment in time, in 2022, and with these changes, with Elon Musk taking over Twitter, what are you all prioritizing and what do we as the American people need to be aware of? Yeah, well, I mean, aside from, you know, the slow pace on the legislative side, a lot is happening. You know, it's chaos, whether you have acquisitions from one company acquiring another and, you know, there's now monopoly implications, you have a great deal of privacy violations, you have corporations like Apple, Facebook, stealing health care data, and no one's saying anything, right? And so it's like we're putting out fires across the board. We're trying to shine a light on all sorts of abuses that are

occurring. I'd say on the top of the list is obviously the speech issue because nothing else can happen if you're not allowed to talk about it, right? How are we going to alert the public that their data is being stolen if we're banned on Twitter? I can't tweet my article that's coming out on Thursday about TikTok and all of the surveillance implications because I'm not allowed on the platform. And so you look at that at scale, and it's like that has to be the first thing you go after. After that, I mean, data privacy, huge deal. And that has a lot of foreign components to it, national security issues. And then, you know, just kind of you follow on from there and antitrust and kind of fixing out market issues. But I mean, nothing can happen without speech being resolved,

really. Yeah, critical. Jake Denton from the Heritage Foundation. We so appreciate your time. We really appreciate you breaking this down as we're going to continue. to see what happens with Elon at Twitter. Thanks for having me. And that'll do it for today's episode. Thanks so much for listening to The Daily Signal Podcast. If you have not had the chance already, be sure to check out our evening show right here in your podcast feed, where we bring you the top news of the day. Also, make sure you subscribe to the Daily Signal Podcasts wherever you get your podcast and help us reach even more listeners by leaving us a five-star rating and review. We love hearing your feedback. Thank you again for listening. Have a great day, and we'll see you right back

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