There Are No Girls on the Internet - Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files” is a whole lot of nothing.

Episode Date: December 7, 2022

Elon Musk is trying to make fetch happen with the “Twitter Files.”  He’s releasing internal Twitter emails about content moderation decisions on the platform before he took over as CEO. But here’s why it’s not be the bombshell he says it is.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. There Are No Girls on the Internet is a production of IHeart Radio and Unbossed Creative. I'm Bridget Todd, and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet. So it has been a wild couple of weeks at Twitter since Elon Musk took over. And to talk through all of it, I'm joined with my producer, Michael Amato. Mike, thanks for being here. Hi, Bridget.

Thanks for having me back. Always a pleasure. So this might come as a surprise to you. I try pretty hard not to talk about Elon Musk too much on the podcast. From being in meetings and calls and stuff with you to make the show, that's probably surprising to you because I know that you know I have a lot of feeling. and thoughts and opinions about Elon Musk. Yeah, he's pretty hard to avoid these days. It's true. And I guess I feel, you know, when making the show,

the reason why I try to limit how much I talk about him is because I just don't think it's really helpful to report on or respond to every little thing that someone who clearly wants attention says or does. I feel like I learned this the hard way back when Musk was first talking about buying Twitter. you and I rushed to put out an emergency episode. We stopped what we were doing. It was like a stop the press moment. And, you know, after that episode ran,

I think it was like months and months and months and months until we actually bought Twitter. And during that time, it would be like he would say, oh, the deal is off. And everybody would rush to report on it and respond. And then it would be like, oh, the deal's back on. And everyone would rush to report on that and respond. And I think it's a strategy that people like Musk employ that allows for them to set the tone. And I just, I don't think that being reactive, always reacting to the things that they say,

every little move they make is the most helpful mode to be in because I think ultimately it really serves them in setting the agenda and capturing attention, which is clearly something they want. Yeah, I think it's a useful strategy for people like him and like Trump. And I think also it's a useful strategy that just happens to align with their own personal needs to constantly be the center of attention, you know, and to constantly control the narrative and have people, you know, jumping and reacting to what they say to fill that void where other people feel love.

Yikes. Just coming at the gate with a one-two punch on Musk's inability to feel love. Okay, wow, damn, we're off to a good start, off to the races. Sorry, that wasn't my intention, but it's just, it's. It's been a real evolution for me the last couple weeks about him. But that's not what this episode is about. I don't mean to distract. I mean, it might be a little bit, right?

And so, again, I try really hard to avoid just reacting to things that, to his little stunts because people who pull stunts, they want you to react, they want you to respond. But this past weekend, something happened that really felt like a direct hit to my work and a direct kind of, I feel like, you know, if you want to, Watch Housewives when Kenya Moore says, don't come from me unless I send for you, I feel sent for, as Kenya Moore would say. And he brought up something that I actually have quite a bit of personal experience on and felt kind of compelled to talk about on this podcast. Yeah, I know you do have a lot of experience in this area and you don't talk about it on the show much. And so the fact that you, I think, felt so compelled to say something about it really speaks to that feeling of being called. So, you know, speak it. Let's hear. So what's going on?

Well, this past weekend, Elon Musk tweeted that he'd given internal Twitter documents to journalist Matt Taibi, calling it the Twitter files. To be clear, that's what Elon Musk is like branding it as. I'm not going to be calling it that because I'm not going to be just, you know, doing his work for him and running with this little branded thing that he's trying to make happen for him. but that's what he is calling it. He was very excited about this. He was teasing it all weekend. He tweeted, what really happened with the Hunter Biden story suppression by Twitter

will be published on Twitter at 5 p.m. This will be awesome. Popcorn emoji, right? And so this is someone who is really drumming up excitement about something they think is going to be big. He finally got the opportunity to come up with his own nickname and he's so excited for everybody to hear about it. You can just tell how excited this dude is to be trying to make this happen.

Like, he's trying to make fetch happen. He is all in. This is his thing. So to talk about what's in this report, let's back up a little bit. The reports appear to show internal debate at Twitter about how the platform should handle the contents of a report on the laptop that was alleged to belong to President Biden's son, Hunter Biden, that was reported initially by the New York Post. You probably recall this story if you were in the United States and paying attention to domestic politics on the presidential election.

Hunter Biden has dealt with addiction issues and this laptop purported to show evidence of all this unseemly behavior on the part of President Biden's son Hunter. I should say it is not clear to me how this laptop was obtained if it was actually Hunter Biden's laptop. and thus there was a lot of confusion around how folks could, you know, responsibly report on it or talk about it. Yeah, that's, I remember that, obviously. And I feel compelled to remind everybody that the reason we know about this Hunter Biden laptop story, which, you know, maybe it was his laptop, maybe not, we don't really know. You know, I did some research ahead of this show.

And like, it's basically unverifiable. But the reason that we know about it is because a concern, citizen brought it to Rudy Giuliani, right? And I think that says a lot, if you think about the source of the information being Rudy Giuliani. Earlier this morning, he was at a hearing here in D.C. before the bar facing possible disbarment for his frivolous, ridiculous actions in the 2020 contesting the 2020 election. And his defense there was that he didn't have the time. to verify that what he was filing to court was accurate. And so if he's not going to, if he doesn't have the time to verify his legal briefings,

what are we to make of his everything else in his life? I don't know. I'll just leave it there. I don't mean to make the story about that. But anything even connected to Rudy Giuliani, let alone originating with Rudy Giuliani, I feel needs to be taken with a pretty big, great assault. Are you trying to suggest that when Rudy Giuliani is in the mix on something, that it's not on the up and up?

If he's in the mix, God help everyone. So you can sort of get an idea as to like why there was a lot of skepticism and confusion early on around this Hunter Biden laptop story. And that confusion very much extended to social media platforms like Twitter. Twitter staff independently decided to block post. about the Hunter Biden laptop story and prevented people from sharing the New York Post story in DMs, citing that the content fell under its hacked materials policy, because at the time, the thinking was that the contents of the laptop had been obtained through hacking. This decision was made after a lot of

internal debate at Twitter. Taibi's report shows a lot of back and forth internally at Twitter about how to moderate tweets about this Hunter Biden laptop story. Trenton Kennedy, a Twitter communications official, wrote an email, I'm struggling to understand the policy basis for me. make for remarking this as unsafe. Kennedy advised that the company should say that it is waiting to understand whether the New York Post story was the result of hacked material. I have to say Twitter, it sounds like they really erred on the side of caution here. You might remember that White House spokesperson Kaylee McKinney, her Twitter account was locked for sharing a tweet with the laptop story in it. Twitter took a lot of heat about this with conservatives who said that this was

evidence that Twitter and big tech in general was biased against them as conservatives. Then Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey spoke about the backlash publicly saying, we made a quick interpretation using no other evidence that the material in the article were obtained through hacking. And according to our policy, we blocked them from being spread. Upon further consideration, we admitted this action was wrong and corrected it within 24 hours. And so, again, you really see the sort of messy, nitty-gritty of this company having to decide in real time how they were going to moderate this story that they could not verify and didn't know it's or. origins and at a time when everybody was felt the same way, like they were not alone in that thinking. So I guess a question might be like, was this the right call? I honestly could not tell

you this is like way above my pay grade. But I do think that reasonable people could and do disagree with whether or not Twitter should have allowed that report about the laptop to be on the platform. But I will say that it seems like fairly new ground for a platform to have to sort out, you know, this kind of situation that is so potentially sensitive, right? So I can understand why there was some debate about it. I can understand why folks internally disagreed, why folks externally disagreed. It's really kind of new territory for a platform to have to sort out. And the emails really reflect that, that there was a lot of what seems like healthy discourse about how they should best proceed. Right. So there's two different things, right? You can disagree with the

conclusion that they came to to moderate the content, which maybe that was the right decision, maybe not, depending on your point of view. But to take some time and like have a discussion about whether it should be moderated, like there can be absolutely nothing wrong with that, right? Like they had a discussion about it. Just the act of discussing it is not in itself anything nefarious. And to suggest that it is is really disingenuous. Well, enter the big Elon Musk bombshell that he dropped. It's going to change everything. It's going to change everything. Nothing will ever be the same. So get this. So get this. If you're driving, pull over because it's going to be, it's going to blow your mind. I don't want, I want you to be safe. Before Joe Biden was elected,

his campaign staff flagged tweets containing sexually explicit images of Hunter Biden for the Twitter staff. and those tweets were removed. I know. I know. Cancel the Constitution. That's it. It's it. America is over. So in an email from a Twitter employee from 2020, it included six links to tweets and the line,

more to review from the Biden team, the employee wrote. Another Twitter worker replied, handled these. Interestingly enough, Taibi's reporting did not show the Biden team contacting Twitter over the initial reporting about the laptop. It was the tweets containing sexually explicit photos that they were raising an objection over. So when the first New York Post story dropped with a laptop, Biden's team did not reach out. It was the images with Hunter Biden, you know, nude that they were objecting to.

Taibi shared five tweets that the Biden campaign flagged. Four of those still have archives available online and they did include nude images of Hunter Biden. So these images were already pretty clearly in violation of Twitter's rules around non-consensual explicit images, which specifically prohibit sharing images or video that are taken in an intimate setting and not intended for public distribution. Not to mention state law in California, where Twitter is based, also outlaws sharing non-consensual explicit images. So essentially, this huge bombshell that Elon Musk has presented us is that, Twitter was following their pretty clear guidelines about removal of non-consensual nude images and like complying with California state law.

Yeah. And the breathless tweet revealing that, you know, did not include any of that context. You know, it's just like, here's links to four tweets that were removed. Of course. Like smoke and mirrors suggesting that something more nefarious was going on. Exactly. So Elon Musk, after this bomb. Shell revelation was dropped. He tweeted, if this isn't a violation of the Constitution's

First Amendment, what is? Now, first of all, Biden was not a government official at the time. He was still campaigning, right? And so it's not really clear to me how that would be a violation of the First Amendment, which we know regulates how governments control speech. But, you know, whatever. Honestly, who at this point expects Elon Musk to be either getting or making these kinds of distinctions at this point, right? And so Musk and Taibi say that, this was evidence that Twitter was in the bag for the Democratic Party and the left. They did not provide any evidence of this, but Taibi says, quote, this system wasn't balanced. And if you're wondering why he thinks that, well, it's because he says the majority of Twitter's employees are Democrats.

How do you know? Because Twitter's team has greater campaign contributions to Democrats over Republicans. So as someone who has done this work for the majority of my adult life, This is an absolutely wild conclusion to jump to for many, many reasons that I want to talk about after this quick break. Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel, help an acapella band with their between songs banter.

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The laughs, the drama, the triumphs, the moments that never make the highlight real. From viral moments to historic games, from buzzer beaters to controversial calls, we break it down, give you context and ask the questions everybody wants answered. Sports Slice brings you closer to the action with stories told by the people who live them. Listen to Sports Slice on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more, follow Timbo Slicelife Life 12 and the TikTok podcast network on TikTok. And we're back. We were talking about Elon Musk and Matt Taibi dropping this bombless bombshell about what they say is

evidence of Twitter and Big Tech being in the bag for the Democratic Party and the left. And I have to say, as someone who has done this work, it's just a really out there conclusion to jump to. First of all, social media platforms having a direct. line of communication with political leaders is 100% normal, and that is the case for all major social media platforms. Facebook has them, Instagram has them, Snapchat has them. It is totally a normal commonplace thing. You know, I have done that work professionally, both from the platform side and the advocacy side. When I worked at the social media platform medium, I was essentially the person on the

political team whose job it was to make inroads and connections with political leaders and activists and thought leaders on the left. You know, they could reach out to me with issues and questions, et cetera. There was also a counterpart to this work on the right who did the same thing as me, but within the Republican Party. It was actually like a very fulfilling and interesting job. We had lots of like spirited discussions and debates about content on our team that actually remind me quite a bit of like the internal emails that we saw from this reporting. It's also fun fact, why I attended the 2016 Republican National Convention and got to watch Trump officially accept the nomination for president in person, which is a story for another day.

But part of the advocacy work that I do now involves communicating with platforms to hopefully help influence their content moderation decision making to be less hostile toward marginalized people. A lot of the time, that work looks like flat, like the same thing that the Biden campaign, campaign was doing to the Twitter folks, you know, flagging content that we think needs to be removed. A lot of times it's like faked, demeaning, misogynistic images of women of color elected officials like AOC for removal being like, oh, actually this image that purports to show a misogynistic crude drawing of AOC, we think this might violate your guidelines. Can you please remove it? But we also have had some like really good wins doing this work.

you know, earlier this year, TikTok agreed to add dead naming and misgendering to their community guidelines. We got YouTube to agree to remove inaccurate information about abortion from their platform. So it's like fulfilling work. I don't actually bring it up a ton on the podcast, mostly because it's just not that exciting. Like, it's fairly mundane work. And it's just, yeah, it's just not exciting, you know, completely normal and commonplace for folks in these positions to, to have a direct line with folks at platforms. You know, I have flagged things for them that they do not take down. You know, so it's not like when you reach out and say, hey, this is problematic or, hey,

we believe this violates your community guidelines. It's not a guarantee they're going to take it down. But it's like that tedious work of relationship building for a particular goal. And Musk trying to reframe that work that so many people do that is totally commonplace across platforms, him trying to reframe that as somehow nefarious or somehow a threat to our democracy is completely wild. Completely wild. Yeah, it really is, especially when you think about the role of advocacy in a democracy and advocacy groups, you know, making the case for their constituencies about issues that they care about, to policymakers, trying to get policies put in

place. And you can tell from those emails that the Twitter team was talking about, their policies and how did this fit within their policies that have been crafted to describe the situations in which they would take action to moderate. And even as I'm saying these words, it sounds so boring. But it's so crucial because without that, you end up with a situation that we have right now where everything is just, you know, whatever Elon Musk decides about it, right? It's not clear what is and is not allowed on Twitter these days. It's just by, executive fiat, and also all those fiats bring more attention and news attention to him, which is a win-win for him.

I'm so glad that you said that because a few weeks ago, I think it was Sam Harris asked Elon on Twitter about whether or not he was going to reinstate Alex Jones. And Alex Jones famously lies about babies who were tragically shot and killed in Sandy Hook and lies about their parents. And Elon Musk replied, I will never allow him back on the platform because I had a baby who died and I held that baby in my hands and I know the heartbreak of a grieving parent. And I actually think that that actually was one of very few genuine statements about how Elon Musk is planning on moderating Twitter. If he can personally identify with the group that he is making a moderation decision around or based on,

I think that you will get one thing. If he cannot identify with them, if he cannot put himself in their shoes or see their experience in his own experience, I don't think it's going to be real to him. And so I think that to me was the first honest assessment of how he plans to moderate the platform. It's just based on what he personally likes or doesn't like,

what he personally can understand or can identify with or see himself in or not. And so, you know, he is a white, straight cis billionaire, I don't know that he would be able to really see himself in the experience of a trans person or a person of color or a queer person or someone who's not a billionaire and wants to start a union at their car factory, right? And so I think that really was a pretty clear indication of exactly what you're saying. It's just whatever Elon feels, that's how we will be moderating. And I don't think it's a great system, right? Like, he is someone who is going on and on about

the need to build transparency into moderation to restore trust. Let's start with a little transparency around how he is going to make moderation decisions. Yeah, and it's also a little bit like a high school student quoting Voltaire about free speech when he's talking about transparency. I think he still thinks, or at least as like a couple months ago, he thought that transparency meant making all of Twitter's internal decisions and algorithms like open source. so anybody could read it, which is a terrible idea because that just is like a blueprint for anyone who wants to abuse it. And so it's this spot of like reality

where there's like he has the high-minded ideals of transparency and free speech, which are virtuous and good things. But to actually like implement them in the real world, one needs to have a thoughtful approach and he lacks that second part. It's like how all of his tweets with polls about what he should do

for Twitter moderation were all accompanied by Latin but then like getting the Latin phrases wrong. It's like you kind of, you almost have it. Like you almost have it. You almost had it. You found the Latin quote and you got the gist sort of. And so speaking of the kind of disingenuous nods to what they're calling free speech,

Musk really tried to frame this report as a bombshell that showed that Twitter is suppressing the free speech of conservatives on the platform. But Taibi's own reporting shows that the Trump administration, while Trump was president, made the very same kind of requests as the Biden campaign did, and at least some of those requests were honored, right? And so there's no, Taibi includes that information. There isn't any more transparency or any emails around what those requests would be.

The public is still just like left to wonder what a sitting president was successfully able to get removed from Twitter. Not worth scrutiny, not worth this transparency that Elon Musk says he wants to bring to moderation on the platform. Musk said, quote, Twitter acting by itself to suppress free speech is not a First Amendment violation, but acting under orders from the government to suppress

free speech with no judicial review is. But then again, Taibi himself said, quote, there's no evidence that I have seen of any government involvement in the laptop story. So truly, which is it? Like both of these things can't be correct. It can't be that, as Elon Musk says, that Twitter was acting under orders from the government. And Taibi saying, actually, after reviewing this, I saw no government involvement in the suppression of this story. It doesn't, like something's not adding up. The math is not mapping. Yeah, it's almost like it's all just a big stunt

and the substance doesn't matter. Almost. And I think, like, this is why, I mean, I personally, this is just my opinion, but I think it's really, really irresponsible to release communications that folks have had with Twitter over the years in this way. You know, in doing this,

Elon Musk also released the personal email addresses of former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and an elected official in this release. Not redacted, just tweeted them out. He did later say on a spaces that he regretted this, but I think it really shows what we're dealing with here. And so, you know, I spent part of the weekend being like, well, geez, is I've had communications with Twitter officials.

Like, are they going to, I don't want my information released. I just know what can happen when you have someone who is addicted to attention and stunts and sensitive information, it's concerning to me. And, you know, I'm not concerned because I've ever had communications with Twitter that I would regret or that I wouldn't want, you know, out there. But unfortunately, I think that we are past the point of the substance of what is being released being important at all. And I think, I mean, I might say that the first time that I really saw this happening for real was around Hillary Clinton's email. where it didn't really matter, the substance of the emails didn't really matter. Just the reporting around them seemed to suggest, you know, nefarious behavior just like by design, right?

And so it was reported as a bombshell, a smoking gun, all of that. When really, if you look at it, you're like, well, what are you, what actually is like newsworthy here? What actually is the big bombshell here? And I think that we're in this place where people particularly online can really drum up a lot of fanfare around something and be like, this is going to blow your fucking mind. And then it doesn't really matter what's in it. Because if you look at the reporting that Taibi and Elon Musk did, nothing in there is really new, right? Like the whole internal debate around how Twitter should moderate the Hunter Biden laptop story, eventually they talked about it in public. Like that quote that I read from Jack Dorsey was a public quote.

This is part of the public record already. So is the bombshell reporting just that this presidential campaign had direct communication with someone at Twitter? That's also common knowledge. Like anybody who has ever worked in social media is aware of that. That's not a bombshell. So if they're not actually reporting anything new, how can you tweet about it in such a bombastic way that like, oh, we are going to blow the lid off of this thing? You know, I saw people reporting about it like Jack Procybeek said, we will all remember where we were when this was reported.

Like the breathlessness that people talked about this for something that wasn't even any new information, I think is really, I'm going to say, irresponsible. Yeah, it's an excellent point because the only thing that's new here is sort of the salaciousness of the illusion of leaks, right? Like, ooh, there's some sort of secret emails that they didn't want us to see. but that's obviously not the case for like multiple reasons. One, like the emails were released by Twitter, right? There are emails by Twitter employees that Twitter is releasing.

So that's like not a leak. And in the content of the emails that the people wrote, it's clear that they expect these emails, or maybe they don't expect the emails themselves to become public, but they clearly expect they are aware that there is intense scrutiny about how they are moderating this issue, and they expect to be called to account for it. And like you said, everything, you know,

all of the decisions they made are already public record and not because of some sort of deep investigative journalism, but because Twitter, like, put out a press release about it and, like, said all the same thing. So the only thing new here is just the framing as a leak that something inappropriate happened. but the actual facts are completely unchanged. You know, like you said, like what's the big reveal that the Biden campaign didn't want the candidate's son's, like, naked photos published without his consent?

Like that. Yeah, they didn't want a crime, a literal sex crime to occur. But news at 11. Yeah, that's the only thing new here. Just the illusion and framing of salaciousness. And I think that Elon is doing. this because he is speaking to people who I think already feel aggrieved, right? And so they, he knows, even if this isn't really anything, nothing really new is being, you know, talked about or reported,

that people that feel aggrieved are going to be like, oh my God, mind blown, this is huge. Oh my God. This confirms my persecution complex that I have been censored on Twitter. And I think that's exactly why he is doing this because he knows that all of this sycophants and hang on are going to amplify that claim and be like, oh, my God, huge reporting, even though nothing new is being reported. Here's how Representative James Comer from Tennessee, here's what he had to say about this. Stories just beginning, Jason, because we're going to have every single person at Twitter that was involved in this in front of the House Oversight Committee as soon as possible.

So he's talking about, like, investigating and hauling people in before a committee. I think that it really is a testament to the fact that we are no, like, anybody can say anything and the substance of what is actually being said doesn't matter because people who are already predisposed to feel aggrieved and be on the side of like, oh yeah, we're being censored, are going to circle the wagons to make sure that that claim is amplified and like treated with seriousness. Yeah, like truth doesn't exist. It's all just framing and, you know,

winning the narrative. And right now, if you Google or take to Twitter to search her name, there are people talking about how the Jaya God, who was Twitter's former head of legal policy and trust at Twitter, the person who made kind of moderation decisions and was the head of, you know, combating things like misinformation and hate speech, how she should be arrested for her role in moderating content around the Hunter Biden laptop story and, quote,

rigging the 2020 election for Biden. So it's interesting how all of this, I think it's, it's, it's, savvy on Elon's part because it feeds into this like big lie that somehow, somewhere the 2020 election was rigged for Biden against Trump. Yeah. And, you know, isn't it convenient that they finally found a woman of color to be the like poster child of this invented scandal?

You know, obviously it's a woman of color. And the other idea in here is that this one singular event is what rakey, the election for Joe Biden, right? Like, everybody still knew about the Hunter Biden laptop. We're still talking about it years later. You know, it's not like Twitter's decision to not show those photos somehow killed the story and nobody ever heard about it again, right? So it's like even the part that they're aggrieved about is just completely fabricated.

More after a quick break. Another podcast from some SNL, late night comedy. guy not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, S&L's Mikey Day and headwriter, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ads supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think IHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Call 844-4-4-I-Hart to get started. That's 844-844-I-Hart. Last night, a blown call changed a game. This morning, the internet lost its mind. Highlights are trending, opinions are flying, and nobody's telling you exactly what happened. That's where Sports Slice comes in. I'm Timbo. Every episode, we're cutting through the noise, breaking down the plays, the controversies, and the stories behind the headlines. We go straight to the source, the athlete themselves, their locker room stories, their reactions, the stuff nobody gets to hear. The laughs, the drama, the triumphs, the moments that never make the highlight real. From viral historic games, from buzzer beaters to controversial calls, we break it down, give you context,

and ask the questions everybody wants answered. SportsSlice brings you closer to the action with stories told by the people who live them. Listen to SportsSlice on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more, follow Timbo Slicelive 12 and the TikTok podcast network on TikTok. Let's get right back into it. It is not surprising to me that a woman of color, a brown girl, is at the of this story. There are memes on Twitter right now. It says Twitter head of legal policy, I knowingly subverted your election process. I did it with the intent to throw the election that

makes that makes me guilty of treason under Article 3, Section 3 of the United States Constitution. It's not surprising to me that like earlier today I saw a picture that had that was a explicit image of Hunter Biden where they had doctored her head on the body of another woman and they were involved in a sex act. It's not surprising to me. I think that when you talk about this kind of thing, and I know I beat this drum a lot, misogyny and racism is all linked. And when you talk about this kind of thing, it is not surprising to me that, you know, the fallout is not measured discourse. The fallout is talking about arresting this woman and making crude memes of her that are sexually explicit. Yeah, it's so sad and just like the same old story of like once again, it's just

racism and misogyny, finding new stories to turn into memes to feed that same narrative. Exactly. And it has to be said, I mean, I didn't want to bring them up in this episode, but here I am. In response to this reporting, Trump took to truth social to advocate for throwing out the Constitution and throwing out the 2020 election results. And so, you know, if this whole thing was meant to be a crusade around free speech and it led to Trump, who is the presumptive Republican presidential nominee being like, oh, I'm coming out in favor of throwing out the Constitution, the First Amendment is part of the Constitution. So, like, where are all these, like, free speech crusaders who are, like, trying to protect the

free free speech of the First Amendment, when the presumptive Republican presidential nominee comes out against just throwing the whole thing out because of their reporting. It's a great question. It's almost like, you know, something it's like selectively applies here, but not there. You know, today they care about the Constitution. Tomorrow, let's cancel it. I mean, I guess to Republicans credit, not many people like rallied around Trump's cry to cancel the Constitution, whatever.

that would mean. I wonder if part of this whole thing is just like, Elon really being desperate to try to, like, get in Trump's good graces? You think? I mean, some of those images he was tweeting a couple weeks back about him and Trump were definitely an appeal to get into Trump's good graces, I'll say. I'll just keep it at that. We can move on.

They were some... Like, good graces is the title of a movie here. So, yeah, I think it's really scary how commonplace communications are being reframed as indicative of, like, nefarious, inappropriate behavior. And I also think that it's confirmation bias at work. Some people on the right, which at this point, I think includes Elon Musk, already believe that they are being censored on social media platforms. A really interesting 2020 study by the Pew Research Center found that 90% of Republicans believe that their views are being censored. And 69% of Republicans or people who lent Republican believe that social media companies generally support the views of liberals over conservatives. And so I think that, you know, it's this confirmation bias at work where anything, even something that is like not anything can be used to confirm this previously held opinion that they have. And Elon Musk repeatedly parrots this claim that Twitter has previously had an anti-right-wing bias and thus, quote, the Twitter files is just another part of that, you know.

But there are entire bodies of academic research that disprove this time and time again. There are studies from NYU, MIT that debunk this claim that there is anti-conservative bias on social media platforms. It's just not a thing, right? And so there was also a study done internally at Twitter. In the pre-Elon Musk days after Trump was banned from Twitter, the team was facing a lot of criticisms saying that they were censoring the right. So they looked into it. The internal research team at Twitter found that folks on the right are actually amplified on Twitter,

both within the United States and globally. Our results reveal a remarkably consistent trend. In six out of the seven countries studied, the mainstream political right enjoys higher algorithmic amplification than the mainstream political left. They released a whole 27-page report. It is fascinating. So here's my thing. Either Elon Musk is woefully uninformed about the realities of, quote, right-wing bias at Twitter, or he's just lying to get attention from right-wing extremists. And that's really kind of what bums me out. You know, their entire bodies of work and studies and school of thought

dedicated to answering all of these thorny, complicated questions that are raised by social media and how it is moderated, right? But Elon Musk is demonstrating time and time again that he does not care about any of that because he thinks that he knows better, despite never having done this work before. And I feel like everything in our culture is really coalescing around confirming that he has some kind of special, super special innate genius ability to understand this stuff as a novice more than people who have been working on it for years and years. You know, in his last few weeks, he came into Twitter and immediately blew up verification, only to realize, like, oh, wait, verification is actually important and then walked back those

plans to blow up verification. He said, oh, we don't need moderation. And then Kanye West starts tweeting swastikas, and he's like, wait, actually, we do need some moderation. Just kidding, guys, let's bring in some moderation. He is learning the very very. He is learning the very same lessons that every other social media platform, even the ones like Truth Social and Parlor, that started by being these fringe platforms that wanted to, you know, be free speech zones or whatever, he is learning what every single social media platform, including those French platforms, has learned only he's getting to the game years and years late. Yeah, I think you're right. He's just like pretty uninformed about these things. And, you know, I think a,

a generous interpretation of his actions here is that he's bringing like a move fast and break things kind of attitude to the way that Twitter should do moderation. And I think that sort of approach can work great for little scrappy startups trying to fight for a piece of market share to sell widgets. But when you are making decisions about a cornerstone of society, right? Like Twitter is, or at least was how people share information. And it's just like, it's a really important thing. And for him to just be making these huge decisions and then days later be like,

oops, my bad, guess that was wrong. It's just so reckless and irresponsible. It's, it's, he should be ashamed, but he certainly is not. Yeah, that's my thing. thing is like he should be embarrassed. I don't know that that is an emotion that he feels the way that you or I might feel. A friend of mine, Justin Hendricks, who is brilliant. He runs a great organization called Tech Policy Press, which is they also have a podcast. You should definitely listen to it. But he works with students, you know, teaching them about social media. And whenever the students

are given like a thought experiment about how they should run platforms, they always at first are like, we're going to have no moderation. It's going to be whatever people want to do and they can self-moderate. And then immediately they're like, oh, wait, that doesn't work. So it's like starting at the one, like the thing that like a 101 student would suggest, that's where Elon Musk is starting.

But I don't feel like he's self-aware enough to be like, oh, wait, I'm actually starting at the ideas that a 101 student at this would actually come to the table with. Yeah, I think that is exactly right with him. I think he thinks that he is, this genius, but he's just not. He just like doesn't know about these things. These things are complicated.

And I'm not an expert in moderation, but I know that there are experts out there who spend a lot of time and ink on it and to just like wade in and just like make up rules. It's just so reckless. Yeah, it is reckless. And I have worked in this space for a long time for years. and I come to the table with people who are way smarter than me, who have worked in the space, who are content moderation experts. And even in those spaces, there is not consensus of how to do it right.

It is an ongoing, complex, complicated body of work. And people who have been doing it for years at the highest levels don't have consensus of how to do it right. And I really take umbrage with this idea that, on Musk, someone who has never done this, has no background in it, no experience with it, is just uniquely a genius at it somehow. And I reject that.

And I honestly think that Elon Musk's tenure at Twitter, I think I'm seeing a little bit of the tides turning. I think being someone who works in tech spaces, we're so willing to give wealthy white dudes the benefit of the doubt that if they say they're a genius at something, then they're a genius at something. If they say that they know how to do it, even if they've never done it before, give them millions of dollars of funding because they're going to figure it out. And if they don't, then, you know, they had to learn by failing. And I've just, I know how this story ends. You know,

I've seen this story a lot. I've had to smile through this story being told to my face, even though I'm screaming inside. And I think we're all starting to peel back that curtain a little bit and say, well, wait, are you actually a genius? Is it possible that maybe you're not playing chestnut checkers? Maybe you're not even playing checkers. Maybe you're like eating the pieces and throwing the board on the floor. Yeah, you totally know it. And you talked about how content moderation is like difficult and nuanced.

And I think those sorts of things are like really difficult to talk about. And like you said earlier, they're kind of boring. They're not really exciting. You know, there's certainly, if you were to, to try to pack all of it into a single tweet, that tweet would probably not get a lot of engagement, right? Because you'd need to write, like, a lot of them about it. And I think, you know, when we think about some of those studies that find that right-wing social media posts tend to get amplified more than posts written by people on the left, I think that's part of it that, like, on the left, there is often a recognition of, like, nuance and things.

are complicated and wanting to qualify things and provide caveats. Whereas, I mean, there's certainly thoughtful people on the right, but there's also a lot of people who are not interested in the thoughtful nuance and are just interested in like getting those likes, you know, getting those retweets. Totally. And this is actually one of the reasons why, as you know, I was hesitant to even make this episode because content moderation is messy. It's complicated.

and it's mundane. It's a lot of stuff not working and being like, oh, well, here's why this didn't work or here's what I thought about this. And like, it's never, the reality of the work that people like myself do

is never going to be as flashy and exciting as the pithy but incorrect Elon Musk tweet about it, right? Like, it ends like, we're at a disadvantage, you know, the truth is actually the thoughtful complex truth is so much less exciting than the sexy bombshell with the popcorn emoji. And I don't know,

I struggled. Like, when we were talking about how I wanted to respond to this, you were like, oh, maybe an op-ed. And I was like, yeah, I know the reality. And even I would still like to believe the Elon Musk version of things that there are some files in Twitter that revealed a smoking gun that the 2020 election was rigged and blah, blah, blah, blah, and Soylent Green is people and all of that. Like, I know the truth, and even I would be more entertained to believe this complete fiction that he is selling people. But that fiction is always going to travel faster than the mundane, boring truth. So that probably means that people listening to this were like, oh, glad I tuned in for 45 minutes of mundane accuracy. Yeah, I think you got it right with it's more entertaining, right?

That popcorn emoji, we haven't really talked about that. think it says so much about Elon's approach to his shiny new toy that he bought for $44 billion, right? Like, it's, he's, he's the guy in charge. He's making all these decisions. But also, he's, like, cool and detached and just, like, doing it for lulls, y'all. Oh, my God. Totally.

And I think it's like, so you don't, I don't know if you know this. Deep thinks about emoji choices are my, like, like, that's a lot. my Q and on. I'm like, I'm like, I got to like follow all the threads. But a popcorn emoji is inviting us to watch the show, right? Like, he knows it's a stunt. He wants us to watch. And I think that he is betting, this is just my opinion, he is betting on turning Twitter into a drama machine that people will pay a subscription to watch go down. And I think that popcorn, I think that you're totally spot on. That popcorn emoji is,

I know it's a stunt. Step right up, folks. Watch the show. It reminds me of something else that he tweeted. I think it was the first week that he bought Twitter and things really felt like they were on fire. And he tweeted, well, at least you know, the last days of Twitter won't be boring.

And I think that's really what he is counting on. Us, our attention, our eyeballs, really being glued to him and locked in to what's going to happen next. It's the same way how he can, kept tweeting about how, oh, the daily average users has ever been higher. And somebody was like, yeah, that's like setting your house on fire. And then being like, wow, I've never had more visitors on my lawn than when my house was on fire. Yeah, I am so curious to see where this goes and like what Twitter looks like six months from now.

Who's using it? How many people are using it? You know, what are they talking about on there? But that's probably a story for another show. So all of this is to say, I don't want to make it seem like pre-Eelon-Musk Twitter days were the best. Certainly, if you listen to this show, you know that that's not how I feel, but I just want to say it explicitly. And I do want to say, like, there are so many good questions to be asked about the way that Twitter moderates content. And I think that more transparency around those conversations would be awesome.

But unfortunately, that's not what we're doing. getting. And it is so clear to me that Elon Musk is only interested in cherry-picking instances to blow up and exaggerate that tap into this right-wing fantasy about being censored on social media platforms. And so I would absolutely welcome and love and applaud more transparency about how moderation decisions are made. But this is not it. You know, cherry-picking these examples, exploding them up and hyping them up as this big bombshell and then flinging them to a group of people that you know is going to already be predisposed to being like, yes, this is so true. This totally confirms my worldview about me being persecuted. That is not the way that you achieve true transparency

about social media platforms and how they are moderated. And you know what? The way that social media platforms work and on our run in 2022, it can shape elections. It can shape democracy. It can shape what the world looks like. And so we deserve true transparency as the people that fuel these platforms. But what Elon Musk is selling us is not that it is a stunt. We deserve so much better than these little popcorn emoji stunts. Yeah, absolutely. It's a stunt. Transparency is great. This is not it. Well, that's it for me. Michael, do you have anything else to add? No, nothing else. Thanks for having me, Bridget. I always love talking with you here. Thanks for being here. I'll see you on Mastodon.

See you there. Got a story about an interesting thing in tech or just want to say hi? You can reach us at hello at tangoody.com. You can also find transcripts for today's episode at tangoity. There are no girls on the internet was created by me, Bridget Todd. It's a production of IHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative. Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer. Tari Harrison is our producer and sound engineer.

Michael Amato is our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Todd. If you want to help us grow, write and review us on Apple Podcasts. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, check out the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guy, not quite.

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