I will admit, I sit a little on the fence when it comes to Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter. I recently watched Return to Space on Netflix and I’m in awe of his achievements. But…as you’ll read below in the WSJ article, there’s just something not quite right with the way he’s going about this whole takeover.
I write not as an investor or someone who stands to benefit financially in any way from the goings-on between the world’s richest man and the social media platform. I write only as someone who has used the platform extensively for over a decade as a tool of the trade.
As you’ll see from the tweet below – which was one of my very first – I’ve been on Twitter since January 2011, banging out this pearler of a swipe at then President Jacob Zuma on the 10th of February 2011. He delivered his State of the Nation Address that evening.
___STEADY_PAYWALL___
Going back over his speech I stumbled upon this line from his message to the masses: “We have a Parliament that is vibrant and holds the executive accountable. We have an independent judiciary which is a trusted final arbiter in all disputes in our society.”
Oh how poorly that portion of his speech has aged. It’s a little more than a decade on since those words were spoken and they’ve proved utterly hollow. Parliament never did hold him to account and he now uses every opportunity to malign the judiciary and the Constitution.
It appears I didn’t like the man much then (when I authored the tweet) and even less so now that the man’s true colours are on display for all to see.
But back to Twitter as a platform. I’ve used it to track people down, see what they’ve said, look at the pictures they’ve posted, and relay to the public the work I was up to. It has been a fantastic forum on which to publicise news packages and articles. It was initially a place where feedback, constructive or not, could be given directly to the person writing an article. That, of course, gave the public direct access to journalists like never before.
All of a sudden you could live tweet court cases and press conferences. Someone holed up in an office with no access to a television or radio could read blow-by-blow accounts of what was unfolding at an event. It soon became a non-negotiable for journalists to be on Twitter. The public could ask pertinent questions of politicians or request clarity on an aspect of law in 140-character chunks. Those journalists with more followers were held in higher regard than their colleagues – unfortunately so.
More often than not people were respectful when engaging with each other. There was a level of decorum. Then, and I’m not sure exactly when this happened, it became a nasty toxic place. I know several journalists who faced or face abuse on a daily basis. Female colleagues were sexualised and body shamed and investigative journalists would get death threats. It wasn’t an equal playing field in the slightest. People could create accounts under fake names with nondescript profile pictures and harass and intimidate their targets with impunity.
It stopped being a useful tool or platform with which to put out stories or engage with viewers or readers. The hatred, racism, sexism, and toxicity had rendered it nothing more than an echo chamber of nameless and faceless troglodytes intent on heaping as much scorn as possible on a person.
Musk calls himself a “free speech absolutist” and pines for a day when Twitter will return to being the digital town square of debate and discussion. He abhors censorship of any kind and has stated he wants to upset the far-right and far-left equally. He put out a tweet, prior to the board accepting his $44bn offer to buy the company, that said, “If our bid bid succeeds, we will defeat the spam bots or die trying! And authenticate all real humans.”
I don’t know what the future holds for Twitter and whether or not it’s a place I want to focus too much of my mental energy on going forward. But I like that “real humans” will be the focus. I will be watching from a distance though…on Twitter.
More for you to read today:
- U.S. GDP Falls 1.4% as Economy Shrinks for First Time Since Early in Pandemic. Supply disruptions weighed on the economy, but consumers and businesses continue to spend.
- Not the stuff of dental journalism. Andrew Donaldson writes on the M&G’s brief foray into Zweli apologism.
- PANDA pens an open letter to post-Twitter Elon Musk. The pride of many South Africans could not help but swell this week when Elon Musk, the SA-born entrepreneur and richest person on the planet, acquired Twitter.
- Ukrainian Refugees Turned Back at Border in Mexico as U.S. Changes Policy. Asylum seekers say they were surprised by halt to processing at U.S.-Mexico border crossings; petitions under new policy may take about seven days.
* For those community members who are interested, the Global Portfolio webinar will be taking place on Tuesday, 3 May at midday. For anyone looking to register, please follow this link: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/3720314562820776973
Elon Musk Criticizes Twitter Executive, Drawing Employee Backlash
Twitter’s prospective owner used the platform to mock the company’s top legal boss over the company’s alleged political bias
By Deepa Seetharaman and Georgia Wells
Elon Musk, whose takeover bid for Twitter Inc. was accepted two days ago, continued to use the site to criticize executives there, culminating in a meme Wednesday that mocked the top legal boss’s response to accusations of the company’s political bias.
The tweets from Mr. Musk, who has an outsize presence on Twitter, with more than 80 million followers, prompted online attacks toward Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s longtime head of legal, policy and safety. Mr. Musk’s critique escalated despite an agreement as part of the takeover deal not to disparage the company or the people who work there.
On Wednesday, Mr. Musk tweeted an image of Ms. Gadde, overlaid with text that repeated allegations that Twitter has a left-wing political bias. Mr. Musk’s followers and others on Twitter soon retweeted his message more than 20,000 times, and some added racist and sexist messages directed at Ms. Gadde, including that she should be fired and should go back to India.
Twitter didn’t respond to requests for comment. Mr. Musk and Ms. Gadde didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
The episode delineates the tension underlying Mr. Musk’s imminent ownership of one of the world’s most influential social-media networks. Mr. Musk often directs his combative style on Twitter at people he disagrees with, which can lead to pile-ons by his fans. Twitter executives have argued that minimizing harassment and abuse is the best possible way to ensure as many users as possible can speak freely on the site.
Mr. Musk has said those efforts have gone too far, and that he would prefer to allow any speech that isn’t expressly illegal. Mr. Musk’s posts also highlight the difficulties facing Twitter’s board and executives, who are operating according to policies and practices that the company’s future owner disagrees with. It wasn’t immediately clear whether Mr. Musk’s tweets pose a risk to the takeover agreement.
On Wednesday morning, Twitter employees asked in internal Slack discussions whether Mr. Musk’s activity on Twitter this week breached the terms of the acquisition, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The people said employees also questioned the silence of former chief executive, co-founder and board member Jack Dorsey, who relied on Ms. Gadde’s judgment to navigate thorny content-moderation questions.
On Monday evening, hours after Mr. Musk’s $44 billion deal to take the company private was announced, Mr. Dorsey endorsed him in a series of tweets, saying among other things that “Elon is the singular solution I trust.”
Mr. Dorsey didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
After Mr. Musk tweeted criticism of a past decision by Twitter to suspend a news publication’s account, a decision that would have fallen under Ms. Gadde’s purview, she faced renewed scrutiny online this week. Colleagues rushed to support Ms. Gadde and urged the company to make a public statement responding to the tweets, according to employees.
Ms. Gadde internally thanked employees Wednesday for their support but said she would rather the news cycle pass than have the company respond publicly, according to people familiar with the matter. “Letting this cycle pass and focusing on the important work we do everyday is the best path forward,” Ms. Gadde wrote on an internal Slack channel to employees that was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
About half an hour after her internal message, Mr. Musk posted the meme using Ms. Gadde’s face.
Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal posted what appeared to be a response to Mr. Musk’s tweets without mentioning them specifically: “I took this job to change Twitter for the better, course correct where we need to, and strengthen the service,” he tweeted Wednesday afternoon. “Proud of our people who continue to do the work with focus and urgency despite the noise.”
Mr. Musk’s comments drew outrage from former Twitter executives. “What’s going on? You’re making an executive at the company you just bought the target of harassment and threats,” tweeted Dick Costolo, who was Twitter’s CEO from 2010 to 2015.
In a separate tweet, Mr. Costolo wrote: “Bullying is not leadership.”
In Twitter’s early years, the company tried to take a more hands-off approach to removing content from its platform. “We’re the free speech wing of the free speech party,” Mr. Costolo said at a conference in 2011, a phrase echoed by other Twitter executives at the time.
This changed in 2018, following the harassment of several celebrities on the platform, when Twitter executives began to fear that toxic content was deterring new people from joining and alienating potential advertisers.
Mr. Dorsey publicly committed to reducing abuse and harassment on the platform.
“We have witnessed abuse, harassment, troll armies, manipulation through bots and human-coordination, misinformation campaigns, and increasingly divisive echo chambers,” Mr. Dorsey said in a post to Twitter in 2018. “We aren’t proud of how people have taken advantage of our service, or our inability to address it fast enough.”
The work to write the policies that dictated what would be allowed on Twitter, and to figure out how to enforce them, largely fell to Ms. Gadde and her team. In her 10 years at the company, she and other Twitter executives received blowback and death threats from terrorist organizations, including Islamic State, that prompted Twitter to provide armed guards at times, according to people familiar with the matter.
Current and former Twitter employees said Mr. Dorsey’s lack of public comment Wednesday shocked them because they expected him to take responsibility for the biggest and most controversial decisions that occurred during his tenure as CEO.
The most recent episode began Tuesday, when Saagar Enjeti, a right-wing political podcast host, tweeted a screenshot of a Politico article that reported Ms. Gadde cried as she sought to reassure Twitter employees about Mr. Musk’s acquisition of the company. Mr. Enjeti described Ms. Gadde as “the top censorship advocate at Twitter.”
An hour and a half later, Mr. Musk responded to that tweet: “Suspending the Twitter account of a major news organization for publishing a truthful story was obviously incredibly inappropriate.”
Mr. Musk was referring to Twitter’s decision to suspend the New York Post’s Twitter account after the newspaper published articles it said were based on documents obtained from the laptop of Hunter Biden, President Biden’s son. Twitter cited its policy against posting material that contains personal material obtained through hacking. Mr. Dorsey later called that move a mistake and Twitter lifted the suspension.
Tweets mentioning Ms. Gadde alongside hateful comments followed Mr. Musk’s reply, with some calling her evil and saying she should be fired.
Rebecca Elliott contributed to this article.
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