Musk Made Twitter A Right-Wing Propaganda Platform

The following is part of a post by Robert Reich:

Twitter started to become a right-wing media hot spot when Elon lifted bans on thousands of accounts that had spread disinformation about the pandemic and the 2020 elections.

More recently, Tucker Carlson has said he would revive his show on Twitter after losing his Fox News slot (Musk has denied that Twitter has signed a deal with Carlson). It’s also been reported that The Daily Wire, a right-wing, anti-democracy media outlet, will make Twitter the home for all its podcasts.

Unquestionably, Twitter is benefiting from the dissatisfaction of the anti-democracy movement with Fox News. Elon can claim to be outside the mainstream media world of Rupert Murdoch.

But Elon wants to be a force on the right because he wants total control. That’s been his business MO since the start, and it’s now his political MO. 

Not content to be the (or among the) richest on the planet, not satisfied with taking over one of the biggest media machines in the world, Elon wants to impose his will on America and the world directly. Like … the former guy.

Elon said Tuesday he isn’t formally backing any Republican candidate. But his eye is focused on Trump. Right now, Elon wants to send Trump the message that he — Elon — has the power to make life difficult for Trump if Trump so much as hints at making life difficult for Elon. 

Elon knows that the best way to deal with a bully is to bully him — show unremitting force and ally with other opposing forces. Which is why Elon is helping DeSantis. And why, earlier this week, Elon retweeted a campaign kickoff video for Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina. 

Elon is only 51. He’s barred from becoming president (he was born in Pretoria, South Africa), but otherwise there’s no end to the power he can wield over America and the world during the next decades. And make no mistake: He plans to wield it. 

What should be done? 

Start with what America did at the turn of the last century to the robber barons of the Gilded Age: We enforced the antitrust laws. We busted up the giant railroads and oil companies. Now we should bust up media monopolies like Twitter. 

But don’t stop there. Musk is a walking illustration of the damage exorbitant wealth can do. We need a wealth tax on billionaires.

Elon Musk's Biggest Mistake After Buying Twitter

The following is from Robert Reich:

When Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion, he clearly didn’t know that the key assets he was buying lay in Twitter’s 7,500 workers’ heads.

On corporate balance sheets, the assets of a corporation are its factories, equipment, patents, and brand name.

Workers aren’t considered assets. They appear as costs. In fact, payrolls are typically two-thirds of a corporation’s total costs. Which is why companies often cut payrolls to increase profits. 

 

The reason for this is simple. Corporations have traditionally been viewed as production systems. Assets are things that corporations own, which turn inputs — labor, raw materials, and components — into marketable products.

Reduce the costs of these inputs, and — presto — each product generates more profit. Or that’s been the traditional view.

Yet today, increasingly, corporations aren’t just production systems. They’re systems for directing the know-how, know-what, know-where, and know-why of the people who work within them. 

 

A large and growing part of the value of a corporation now lies in the heads of its workers — heads that know how to innovate, know what needs improvement, know where the company’s strengths and vulnerabilities are found, and know why the corporation succeeds (or doesn’t).

These human assets are becoming the key assets of today’s corporations. But they can’t be owned, as are factories, equipment, patents, and brands. They must be motivated. 

  

When Musk fired half of Twitter’s workforce, then threatened to fire any remaining dissenters and demanded that the rest pledge to accept “long hours at high intensity” — leading to the resignations last week of an estimated 1,200 more Twitter employees — he began to destroy what he bought.

Now he’s panicking. Last week he tried to hire back some of the people he fired. On Friday he sent emails to Twitter employees asking that “anyone who actually writes software” report in, and stating that he wanted to learn about Twitter’s “tech stack” (its software and related systems).

But even if Musk gets this information, he probably won’t be able to save Twitter.

Most of Twitter’s employees are now gone, which means most of its know-how to prevent outages and failures during high-traffic events is also gone, most of its know-what is necessary to maintain and enhance computing architecture is gone, most of its know-where to guard against cyberattacks is gone, and most of its know-why hate speech (and other awful stuff advertisers want to avoid) is getting through its filters and what to do about it, is also now gone.

 

Without this knowledge and talent, Twitter is a shell — an office building, some patents, and a brand — without the capacity to improve or even sustain its service.

Twitter is unlikely to fail all at once. But bugs and glitches will mount, the quality of what’s offered will deteriorate, hateful tweets will burgeon, and customers and advertisers will flee.

As Richard Forno, assistant director of the Center for Cybersecurity at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County told the New York Times, “it’s like putting a car on the road, hitting the accelerator, and then the driver jumps out. How far is it going to go before it crashes?”

Not even Donald Trump seems particularly eager to take up Musk’s offer to have him back on the platform.

Safe to say, Twitter is no longer worth the nearly $44 billion Musk paid for it. It’s now probably worth only a fraction of that sum — a fact that should be of no small concern to the bankers who lent Musk $30 billion to purchase Twitter on condition he pay $1 billion a year in interest.

Two lessons here.

First, corporations that regard employees only as costs to be cut rather than as assets to be nourished can make humongous mistakes. Elon Musk is Exhibit #1.

Second, where corporations view employees as costs, the traditional way for employees to flex their muscle is to strike, thereby temporarily closing factories and stopping the machines.

But where employees are a corporation’s key assets, workers’ greater power comes in threatening to — or actually — walking out the door. Elon Musk is Exhibit #2. 

Trust & Favorability Of Twitter Has Dropped - Except GOP

 From the Morning Consult Poll.

Musk Is Making Twitter A Bastion Of Hate - Don't Participate

Cartoon image is by Michael deAdder.

The following op-ed is by Jennifer Rubin in The Washington Post:

For a time, many democracy defenders and civil rights groups thought the worst thing about Elon Musk’s $44 billion takeover of Twitter was the potential re-platforming of former president Donald Trump, disseminator of endless insults and right-wing conspiracies. It turns out Trump might not return, but Musk might be no better.

Musk got off to an inauspicious start. He took issue with Hillary Clinton’s observation that the suspect in the break-in at Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s home was linked to right-wingers. “There is a tiny possibility there might be more to the story than meets the eye,” he tweeted, linking to a right-wing outlet that posted utter falsehoods about the attack. Musk deleted the post, then denied he had.

He wasn’t done. Word leaked out that Musk planned to charge $20 per month to widely known Twitter posters to keep their “blue check,” a tool to prevent copycat accounts. To that, the blue-check universe resoundingly responded: You must be joking.

Meanwhile, the incidence of hate speech went up dramatically after he took ownership. General Motors has “paused” advertising on the platform, and speculation is rampant that other major companies will follow suit, fearing their brands might be associated with a cesspool of hate speech, incitement and right-wing provocation.

None of this should be surprising. When the sale concluded, the Anti-Defamation League expressed concern that Musk would re-platform provocateurs, refuse to crack down on election disinformation and embolden people to post hateful content. And, lo and behold, much of that is already happening.

The New York Times reported: “A coordinated campaign to spread antisemitic memes and images on Twitter resulted in more than 1,200 tweets and retweets featuring the offensive content, according to an analysis by the Anti-Defamation League. The tweets identified by the A.D.L. added to a flurry of racist, transphobic and rule-breaking content that coursed through Twitter on Friday after Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, had officially taken control of the platform.”

What is Musk trying to accomplish here? Is he trying to chase away sane and respectful users, turning the platform into a giant Parler? Is he trying to become the next Trump, the darling of the MAGA mob?

The explanation might be far simpler: An electric car mogul might simply know little about what it takes to run a broad-based social network. In fact, the qualities that afflict many billionaires — utter lack of self-awareness and out-of-touchness — might make him uniquely unfit to turn his purchase into a moneymaking operation.

It is true that Musk can do whatever he pleases with Twitter. He can apply whatever rules and post any garbage he likes. But if he’s not careful, he risks setting the company on a death spiral.

Consider what might occur: More major advertisers might leave Twitter. The blue-check posters with the largest followings might decamp for other platforms. (Maybe he should pay them to stay.) Experiments such as Bluesky and subscription platforms such as Substack might pick up steam.

And while Musk remains a darling of the right wing in America, European regulators are watching closely. NPR reports that “The European Union’s competition czar has a message for Twitter’s new boss Elon Musk: We are watching you.” The report quotes Margrethe Vestager, the European Commission’s executive vice president overseeing digital policy, who warned: “There is a European rulebook, and you should live by it. Otherwise, we have the penalties. We have the fines. We have all the assessments and all the decisions that will come to haunt you.” She doesn’t sound like someone Musk wants to mess with.

MAGA Republicans in the United States might be celebrating Musk’s takeover as a triumph of “one of their own,” but Democrats might be in power in the years to come. They might be tempted to repeal Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the federal provision that protects social media platforms from liability for content published on their sites. (Even eliminating such protections for the owners of the platform could bring the curtain down on the Musk show.)

So while Twitter might become as horrible as you feared, the good news is that Musk is severely limited by the operation of the free market and government regulators. (And if he drives the company into the ground, think of the hours that heavy users will get back in their lives!) Musk can trash his sandbox, but the rest of us don’t have to play in it.

Twitter (And Other Social Media) Need Guardrails

The following is part of a post by Robert Reich about social media needing guardrails. I think he is right.

Now that Elon has total control over one of the major ways Americans find out what’s happening (I know, I know -- Twitter is vapid and filled with smears and jeers, but it has a hugely important role in shaping the news), what can be done to establish guardrails against dangerous lies? It seems likely that Musk will take down the few guardrails that remain on Twitter — but some guardrails are surely needed to prevent malicious harassment or dangerous instigation of violence. Twitter (like Zuckerberg’s Facebook and Instagram) is more like a public utility than a private company. It has public functions and no direct competitors. 

What to do?

Much of the answer boils down to making Twitter (and Facebook and Instagram) more responsible for what users say on its platform – just as any other publisher is responsible. In every other dimension of public life, tort laws allow people who are defamed, harassed, or otherwise injured by malicious or hateful speech to sue. There’s a high bar: plaintiffs must establish that the publisher knew or had reason to know that the published material was false and injurious. But the mere possibility of being sued causes publishers to take at least a modicum of responsibility.

In 1996, Congress enacted Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — shielding website owners from liability by decreeing that they shouldn’t be treated as a “publisher.” But back then Congress could not possibly have foreseen what would happen over the next quarter century: giant firms like Twitter and Facebook making huge amounts of money by posting incendiary content that attracts lots of eyeballs and gives them mountains of user data that they then monetize — even if the content encourages political violence, riots, or gang shootings.

I’ve been talking for some time about the various ways the rich and powerful in our society shield themselves from accountability. I’m well aware of arguments on the other side of this issue (and will share them with you), but I’ve come to the conclusion that Congress should repeal Section 230. Doing so would be one step toward restoring accountability.

Trump's Power Greatly Diminished After His Twitter Ban

Hasn't the silence been nice? I'm talking about the silence of Donald Trump. Since Twitter banned him, he has been remarkably mute.

He didn't have to be silent. He could have done as other presidents, and held news conferences. But that would have exposed him to the press -- who would have asked him hard questions, and maybe even called him out on his lies.

Trump was a Twitter maniac because he didn't want to face the press. Twitter had allowed him to hide in the White House and spread lies without being questioned. Without it, he doesn't seem to know what to do. He's virtually powerless -- and it will be even worse once he leaves office!

Here's some of what Paul Waldman had to say about this in The Washington Post:

The silence is remarkable. 

For all that’s happening — President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration, the threat of right-wing violence, the coronavirus death toll approaching 400,000 — the loudest voice in American life for the past five years has been reduced to a whisper. President Trump is not on Twitter.

On Jan. 8, Twitter’s leadership finally decided that it had had enough of Trump using the platform to spread lies and incite violence and barred him from the service. According to a new Post/ABC News poll, 58 percent of the public supported the move (though that includes 91 percent of Democrats and only 16 percent of Republicans).

But the magnitude of that decision still hasn’t been fully appreciated. The fact that this one social media company decided to shut down this one account might have completely reshaped American politics for the coming few years.

Until 10 days ago, nearly everyone assumed that Trump would be in a unique place for a defeated ex-president, retaining a hold on his party’s base that would make him the axis around which the Republican world revolved.

His opinions would shape the party’s approach to Biden’s presidency. He would make or break Republican officeholders, depending on their loyalty to him. Everyone within the party — especially those who want to run for president themselves in 2024 — would have to grovel before him, just as they have for so long. The GOP would still be Trump’s party, in nearly every sense.

But not anymore.

As much as we’ve talked about Trump’s tweets for all these years, if anything we might have underestimated how central Twitter was to his power. Without it — especially as an ex-president — he’ll be like Samson without his hair, all his strength taken from him. . . .

As much as we’ve talked about Trump’s tweets for all these years, if anything we might have underestimated how central Twitter was to his power. Without it — especially as an ex-president — he’ll be like Samson without his hair, all his strength taken from him.

He could go to some upstart conservative social media platform, like Gab or Parler (if it gets restored). But those don’t have the mainstream legitimacy he craves, and reporters aren’t on them, so their reach is much more limited.

That means that when new events occur, Trump won’t be able to make himself the core of the story. He won’t be able to constantly remind Republicans that they need to fear him. While many of his supporters will remain loyal, others will drift away, not turning against him but just no longer thinking about him every day. . . .

Trump will still play a role in his party and in our politics; we won’t shake off this horrific presidency so easily. But that blissful quiet, as we no longer have him shouting in our ears every day? We could get used to that.

Trump Has Tweeted Over 11,300 Times In Office

Donald Trump doesn't communicate with the American people like other presidents. He only gives the press sporadic access to him when he has something to brag or complain about -- and his press secretary doesn't hold press briefings at all anymore.

Trump's mode of communication is Twitter. That way he can say what he wants without being questioned by the press (or anyone else).

Since taking office, he has tweeted over 11,300 times, and there is very little truth in any of those tweets.

The New York Times has reread all of those tweets -- and those designated to do that should receive hazardous duty pay (for the incredible amount of ignorance and lying they were subjected to).

The chart to the right shows what Trump has tweeted about. Most of the tweets were attacks on people or organizations that made him mad.

Note the tweets at the bottom of the chart. 16 times he has tweeted that he is everyone's favorite president. That shows that he lives in his own bubble of alternate reality. No respectable poll has shown at any time since he was sworn in that a majority liked him as a person, thought he was doing a good job, or considered him to be honest and trustworthy.

The truth is that Trump is a very unpopular person, and he has been unpopular since he was sworn into office. He is the least favorite president -- and 11,300 tweets could not change that.

For you masochists, you can go here for an in-depth look at Trump's tweeting.

Public Thinks Trump's Twitter Use Hurts Him More Than Helps

The charts above reflect the results of a new Politico / Morning Consult Poll -- done on April 28th and 29th of a national sample of 1,995 registered voters, with a 2 point margin of error.

The public doesn't like the way Trump uses Twitter, and they think it hurts him far more than it helps him.

Schmidt Blasts Trump/GOP Congress Over G-7 Disaster

(This photo of Steve Schmidt, from Wikipedia, is by David Shankbone.)

Steve Schmidt is a life-long Republican, and has worked for many Republican candidates -- including being in charge of the daily campaign moves of John McCain during his 2008 run for the presidency.

But Schmidt is also a loyal American, and he is horrified by the damage Donald Trump is doing to his party, and to the United States of America.

After Trump's disastrous appearance at the G-7 conference in Canada, where he attacked our allies (especially Canada) and withdrew from the summit agreement after telling our allies he agreed, Schmidt took to Twitter to express his displeasure with Trump and the congressional Republicans (who failed to speak out).

Here are his tweets: