Today, Explained - Elon’s Twitter hell

Episode Date: November 3, 2022

Twitter is about to suck for you. But it’s going to suck for self-proclaimed “Chief Twit” Elon Musk too. Recode’s Shirin Ghaffary and The Verge’s Nilay Patel explain. This episode was produced by Amanda Lewellyn and Miles Bryan, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Paul Robert Mounsey, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained   Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Elon owns Twitter And users feel bitter Except for some who don't Most want moderation but some weirdos don't And now Elon might fire half the staff And Elon says let it sink in for a laugh. Elon will come to hell, says Virgis and Eli Patel.

And if Twitter just feels like a bunch of noise, you ain't seen nothing yet, says Chief Twit with all the toys. But we're here to ease the pain. Coming up, Elon Explained. All right. BetMGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA,

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please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. I'm, you know, tweeting more or less stream of consciousness, you know. It's not like, let me think about some grand plan about my Twitter or whatever, you know, I'm like, literally on the toilet or something like, oh, this is funny. And then tweet that out, you know, that's that's that's like most of them. It's been one week since Elon Musk took over Twitter and Shereen Ghaffari is here from Recode to tell us how it's going. It's Today Explained. It has been chaotic, to say the least.

Elon started off on day one walking into Twitter's headquarters with a sink in his hand to make a pun. Let it sink in that he's now the owner of Twitter. He made the rounds with employees, chatted with them in the coffee room. And while it may look kind of collegiate and pictures and funny, it's actually really not to all the Twitter employees who are sitting there waiting in fear to see if they'll be fired or laid off. Elon Musk holding his first town hall with Twitter employees since agreeing to acquire the company for $44 billion.

The good question layoffs, which Musk didn't rule out. He says, quote, Right now, Twitter's costs exceed the revenue. So that's not a great situation to be in. But anyone who's obviously like a significant contributor should have nothing to worry about. Dissolving the board was just one of the changes that Musk has made since acquiring that social media platform. Musk already fired some of the company's top execs including the CEO, CFO and head of legal policy. Last week Musk fired four top Twitter executives for a cause which means the company can avoid paying severance and unvested stock awards to those executives.

One source described it as an information vacuum that Twitter employees are looking to news reports, are looking to Vox and the New York Times to find out what's actually going on at the company. They're just sitting there with no updates. And there's also people trying to prove to Elon that their team or their job is worth it. So you see people spitting out and pitching new ideas

and products. And Elon's also ordering some folks to sit there and deliver on these intense deadlines to do things like, for example, bring back Vine, reportedly the old Twitter short form video app. Officer, I got one question for you. I'm hearing about employees working 12 hour shifts over the weekend, sleeping in conference rooms to basically make sure that they can keep their job. And then we hear on Wednesday night from a Bloomberg exclusive report that Musk is indeed planning to lay off half the staff. That's something like 3,700 to 3,800 employees on Friday in one big swoop. This would probably be one of the most dramatic changes in the history of this company. Definitely the biggest personnel change that we've ever seen.

And it would really risk Twitter being able to run the way we expect it to day to day. Hundreds of millions of people use Twitter. If they don't have enough engineers to make sure that they can fix bugs in the code or keep the servers running, that means that Twitter could just shut down. I think that's like the worst case scenario. You know, if Elon makes sure that he has enough people to keep that going, there's also this issue around, well, what's going to happen to all the content moderation that happens day to day on Twitter, especially because we know that's a place where Elon has said he wants to cut back. You know, he came into Twitter saying that he wants to cut back on it and make sure everyone

can say anything they want so long as it isn't illegal. Twitter has become kind of the de facto town square. So it's just really important that people have both the reality and the perception that they're able to speak freely within the bounds of the law. Now he's walked that back a little and is saying he will do some content moderation. He does take hate speech seriously. Today, Musk tweeted, Twitter will be forming a content moderation council with widely diverse viewpoints. No major content decisions or

account reinstatements will happen before that council convenes. But at the end of the day, it's very important to be looking at these cuts. Is he actually going to eliminate the roles that deal with this stuff that are the front line in taking down something like a racial slur or making sure a teenager isn't being bullied? Because if there's no one there to do that job, that's the kind of content that's just going to run rampant. And we've already seen a surge in racial slurs since Elon took over. There was a report saying that the N-word surged something like 500% in the 12 hours after Elon did the deal. Twitter says that they're trying to combat this, but it's going to be a massive game of whack-a-mole, and they'll be poorly

understaffed if Elon guts that department. Which it sounds like he will. We don't know for sure yet, but that would be in line with his plans, would be to drastically reduce their yes. And this is why some people, especially liberal types, are now leaving Twitter. That's right. You know, I think we've seen, you know, everyone from Shonda Rhimes to LeBron voice concern about this. We're seeing some liberal politicians as well say that they're concerned and may leave Twitter. I think we haven't honestly yet seen like a mass

exodus. Joe Biden's still on there. There is some evidence to show that a lot of liberal or left-leaning accounts are losing followers and that right-wing accounts are gaining some followers. And that data comes from a company called Social Blade. But that's actually a continuation of a trend that we've been seeing for months. There was a report on this back when Elon first started this deal in April. So I think it's important to remember too that Twitter has been a dying platform in a way now for years and that it's smaller than all its other big competitors like Facebook or TikTok and that it's actually there's evidence that it's losing some of its most prolific users internally. According to internal Twitter research, the number of tweeters has been

going down since the pandemic began. Heavy tweeters account for less than 10% of monthly overall users but generate 90% of all tweets and half of the company's revenue. So Twitter was already kind of a broken platform and it had this problem of users leaving. And I think Elon can either fix that best case scenario or what a lot of people are really concerned about, just make it even worse by turning Twitter into a more toxic place. Where are people going? Back to Facebook? Yeah, I think there's a bunch of different reasons why these users are leaving. But definitely one

of them is that a lot of celebrities complain that Twitter feels like a negative place. And it has been that way for a while. And so they want to go to platforms that feel more fun or entertaining, like TikTok. There's something called Mastodon, which is popular with some people looking for something different. Isn't that like a metal band? It really sounds like that.

No, it's like an open source, you know, kind of community oriented service similar to Twitter. There's also Discord, which you may know about, originally really popular with gamers. But it's kind of like Slack for social media. You can post your updates there. But again, I think there's a lot of really powerful people on Twitter on the left and right. And we'll see in the coming weeks if there's enough of like a mass migration to one particular platform where it will take Twitter's place definitively. So he's pretty successful with electric cars, also surprisingly successful with space, sort of a mixed bag with his boring company.

Do you think he met his match in social media? I think so. I think social media is a totally different beast than building an electric car or a rocket, as complicated as that may be. There are a lot of really thorny political, social, diplomatic problems, and it's not really clear if Elon Musk is the person to solve them. That was Recode's Shireen Ghaffari. More on those really thorny political, social, diplomatic problems in a minute on Today Explained. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Aura believes that sharing pictures is a great way to keep up with family, and Aura says it's never been easier thanks to their digital picture frames. They were named the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter. Aura frames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your

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Terms and conditions do apply. If I acquire Twitter and something goes wrong, it's my fault, 100%. Today Explained, we're back with Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge and host of The Decoder podcast. Nilay, you wrote a piece after Elon confirmed his purchase of Twitter. Remind me what the headline was. Welcome to hell, Elon. And remind me why. I think that people are very naive about what it means to run a social network in America and the world. I think people think it's easy and I think it's actually going to be hell. And what about it will be so hellish? So fundamentally, all tech executives think that the problems with society are engineering challenges. You can just build a better product.

You can build a better car, an electric car. People will buy it. You'll save the world. You can launch a rocket and land it again. You can get yourself to the moon and expand humanity's horizons. To some extent, they're right. Like, that's true of many things in technology. It is absolutely not true of social networks. The problems of social networks are inherently

political and cultural problems. It is managing enormous groups of people and trying to get them to behave the way that you want them to behave. And on Twitter, it's trying to get them to do what you want them to do for mostly free, or in Elon's case now, for them to pay you to do what you want them to do, which is totally backwards. And Elon, I don't think, has the social skills to recognize that he is now the world's most famous politician. And he has to appease all these constituencies of people at cross purposes while not breaking the promises he has publicly made about free speech. Let's talk specifically about what he's going to have to do. I think a big part of this question is about advertising.

Is that right? That's one of his biggest constituencies. So Twitter makes around a billion dollars a quarter, four billion dollars a year. All of that money is advertising money. So if you want to run Twitter without destroying it in the short term, you have to keep the advertisers happy. You have to keep them on the platform buying your ads. Advertisers are pretty picky. They don't want to be around racism. They don't want to be around sexism. They don't want to be around racism. They don't want to be

around sexism. They don't want to be around transphobia. Just look at ads. Look at how advertisers message their products. They want to be in a bubble of what they call brand safety. And if you just talk to advertisers or CMOs, brand safety comes up in two seconds. How do we participate on the internet in a way that is safe for our brand that doesn't put us next to horrible content? You might remember YouTube had something called the adpocalypse. Google and Disney are ending business relationships with YouTube superstar Felix Schellberg, better known as PewDiePie, after he posted multiple videos that featured anti-Semitism and Nazi imagery on his YouTube channel. This was a bunch of content on YouTube got out of control. YouTube moderation was out of control. In a video from January 11th, he paid two men to hold up an anti-Semitic sign.

In another video, he paid a man to dress like Jesus and talk in support of Hitler. Advertisers left en masse for a couple weeks. They just walked away from YouTube. And this is YouTube, which does not have storming leaders who are constantly tweeting, right? They're very calm. Sundar Pichai is a very relaxed individual. He's very thoughtful. So Twitter immediately, because of Elon and his public demeanor and his persona and his statements, is facing advertisers saying, we're going to wait and see. IPG, one of the biggest holding agencies in the world, said, we're going to advise our clients to pause their spend.

GM, which is a competitor of Tesla, paused its spend on Twitter. So just from the jump, if you want to operate a social network that's supported by advertising, you have to meet the demands of the money. And the demands of the money are content moderation, like really aggressive content moderation. So their advertising is in a brand safe environment. So Elon needs to figure out this advertiser's question. Has he addressed it thus far? So he published an open letter to Twitter advertisers. It's on his Twitter. You can read it. And he said, we don't want Twitter to become a hellscape.

We want it to be one of the best advertising platforms in the world. So that's his public statement. He has been retweeting his policy people saying, to be clear, the rules haven't changed. He has a handful of advisors who are taking meetings with advertisers that we have heard about, and they are saying to those advertisers, the rules haven't changed. I think the problem is the advertisers don't believe it. I think fundamentally a lot of them think you can't tell us it's business as usual when it is obviously not business as usual. Like we can see the chaos. We are aware of it. You can't tell us everything's the same, especially because all these people just got fired. I mean, you're talking about a billion a quarter, four billion a year. You're also talking about a

guy who just bought Twitter for 40 something billion dollars and who happens to be arguably the richest man on earth, right? What does a billion a quarter mean to him? Well, so what's really interesting about that billion a quarter in revenue is that he has to pay a billion a year in interest on the debt he took on to buy Twitter. So that interest payment is hanging over his head. Just the interest on the loans that he took out to buy Twitter, he could pay that interest. He has a lot of money. All that money is tied up in Tesla stock. So if he wants to fund Twitter indefinitely, which I don't think he wants to do, he has to continually diminish his position in Tesla, which is a huge risk for Tesla, the

company. If Elon starts selling off more and more Tesla stock, that has a huge implication for the value of Tesla stock. And it means that Elon has less and less control over Tesla, which he really does not want to have less and less control over. Is there any way that he just says, to hell with advertisers, I'm smarter than this game. I'm going to find another way to monetize. Yeah, I mean, he's trying to do that now. So, you know, his big plan is to charge people $8 for Twitter Blue and give the check marks to everybody who pays to verify people. $8 is not a lot. It's like a one-time flat fee.

It's $8 a month. $8 a month. Yeah, so there's like 400,000 people who are verified on Twitter. You charge them $8 a month. You're making less than $100 million a year, right? If you get lots more people, maybe you're making a billion dollars a year, right? You still haven't really moved the needle on what you need to do to get rid of advertising on the platform. No matter what, if the revenue source is advertising, the revenue source is subscription,

the thing he needs to do is get lots and lots more people using Twitter. And I don't think that he has understood this. I think his brain is poisoned by how addicted he is to Twitter. Elon Musk thinks Twitter is important. That's true. It's just obviously true. That's why he spent 44 billion dollars buying this thing a bunch of reporters think that Twitter

is important a handful of celebrities think Twitter is important no one else does Twitter has 200 million some users in the world right like less than the population of the United States Facebook has two billion users

there's a reason people think facebook is a monopoly there isn't a person in the world with a cell phone that hasn't landed on youtube right youtube is like effectively utility for video distribution on the internet tiktok is growing massively all these things dwarf twitter by orders of magnitude. By the way, even the number we have, Elon himself has very publicly and very controversially said is fake. Because it's all bots. So even if you accept Twitter's number, which is like two or three hundred million people, Elon is out there being like, this is a lie. It's all bots.

My top priority I have is eliminating the spam and scam bots and the bot armies that are in twitter and so when elon has these ideas he's acting as though twitter has this base of people that want to participate that want to pay and he's actually like talking to six people and he's like hooped like he's never going to make it through unless he makes Twitter more pleasant to use to get the billion people he needs to run at Facebook or YouTube style margins. And the only way to do that is to make Twitter nicer so more people are happy about it. And even if he gets there,

which sounds like the tallest of hills to climb, he's got to deal with this whole other headache, which is regulation. Yeah. So you just see politicians are obsessed with Twitter. In our country, politicians hold hearings and they get Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai and other social network CEOs to testify. And they end up asking Mark Zuckerberg about Twitter. Congressman, well, first, to be clear, I think what you might be referring to happened on Twitter, so it's hard for me to speak to that. But I can talk to our policies about this. Because they don't really care about Facebook. They care about Twitter. It's bizarre. And that's

our country, which has a First Amendment, which politicians are, quite frankly, getting sick of. They can't regulate internet companies because the First Amendment should prohibit them from regulating speech. And all these internet companies do is manage the speech of their users. So if you are a congressperson or a state senator or a governor and you're like, I want to put my finger on the scale of what YouTube allows. You have to write a speech regulation. The First Amendment says you shouldn't do that.

But Texas and Florida have passed speech regulations that purport to govern how content will be moderated. A Florida law intended to punish social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter for allegedly discriminating against conservative thought is ruled unconstitutional. Congress is wildly interested in speech regulations. They say what they're trying to do is tweak this law called Section 230, but what they are actively trying to do is write regulations that can skirt around the boundary of the First Amendment. Days after Twitter started fact-checking him, President Trump just signed an executive order to reduce legal protections for social media platforms. That's just in this country, which has a First Amendment. You go to India or Germany or China, there is no First Amendment. Those countries have aggressive speech regulations.

Some of them are good, right? Some of them people in this country think that we should have as well. Germany has hate speech laws. It's illegal to do hate speech in Germany. We don't have those laws. Hate speech is legal in the United States. Is Elon going to say hate speech is allowed on Twitter, but it's not allowed in Germany? How is he going to write that rule?

That's an engineering challenge. That's a political challenge. The Indian government demands that tweets get blocked, that accounts get restricted. And in order to make you comply with those demands, they require that you have people locally in the country that they can put in jail. That's just a hostage negotiation. That's not an engineering challenge. That's just the Modi government saying, if you don't provide us potential hostages so we can make sure that you block and restrict the reach of certain tweets, you're not allowed to operate in India.

Elon wants to sell Teslas in India. There's just like all these points of leverage. So I'm not describing engineering challenges. You can't fire 50 engineers and a bunch of AI at the Modi government in India. You have to go there and convince them to let you do what you want. And they're not going to back down. Why did he pick up this nightmare? Hubris.

I think fundamentally this is a project of hubris. I don't deny that he's a smart guy. He is an extraordinarily talented manager of engineers. That much is blindingly clear. That is amazing. Like, no doubt. He's able to shoot the rockets into space and land two of them at the same time. Amazing. That's engineering management, right? He's got great engineers that want to work on hard problems. He gives them money and resources

and cover to do it. He didn't write the code that lands the rockets, right? He hired engineers to do it. He has people at those companies who have the freedom to spend money on extraordinarily hard engineering problems. Great. What I just keep coming back to is that Twitter is not an engineering problem. It is not even a product problem. It is a political problem.

And I think the height of hubris is to think you can reduce political problems to first principles and try to solve them the way that you could solve an engineering problem. Elon has a lot of fanboys and a lot of people read and shared your essay, Nili. Did you get a lot of pushback on Welcome to Hell, Elon? Yeah, the Elon fans came for me. I don't know that they read it. A lot of them just called me a liberal. Some people said some very anti-Semitic things to me, which seems mistargeted. Do you think Elon read your essay?

I know he read my essay because he changed the location in his Twitter bio to hell. I love it. It's pretty good. I laughed. I was like, that's pretty smart of him to do.

Nilay Patel is the editor-in-chief at The Verge. You can read Welcome editor-in-chief at The Verge. You can read Welcome to Hell, Elon, at TheVerge.com. They recently redid their website, and you'll love what they've done with the place. Our show today was produced by Amanda Llewellyn and Miles Bryan. Lots of help from Laura Bullard, Matthew Collette, and Paul Robert Mounsey. I'm Sean Ramos for them. This is Today Explained.