TOM GROSS: THE MEDIA’S TAKE ON ELON MUSK AND TWITTER
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https://wp.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/ The takeover of Twitter yesterday by free speech advocate Elon Musk may herald a significant change in global political debate, and provide a major platform for views challenging “woke” opinion. Predictably many in the liberal establishment – who has enjoyed a near monopoly on mainstream media opinion – are outraged. The Washington Post – owned by the super-rich Jeff Bezos – was so alarmed that Twitter now may become more balanced that the paper called for Biden to move against Musk in order “to prevent rich people from controlling our channels of communication.”
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Below are four articles on Musk’s buyout, from The Wall Street Journal, New York Post and two from The New York Times. As the Wall Street Journal notes: Current management is correct that most regular social-media users don’t want a daily bath of Russian bots, jihadist propaganda, noxious harassment and so forth. Ditto for advertisers, who represent about 90% of the company’s revenue. Yet Silicon Valley’s tech lords have decided they want to be arbiters of speech on political topics like climate change and the origins of Covid. Kyle Smith writes in The New York Post: This whole thing apparently got started because Musk was willing to spend $44 billion to keep reading the Babylon Bee. It was five days after the right-leaning Bee got suspended from twitter for making a joke about the transgender (male-to-female) individual Rachel Levine, who is the assistant secretary for health and human services, that Musk sent his famous tweet asking, “Do you believe Twitter rigorously adheres to” the principle that “free speech is essential to a functioning democracy?” In a followup post, he noted, with uncharacteristic earnestness, “The consequences of this poll will be important. Please vote carefully.” You could argue the Bee’s joke about Levine was nasty. So freaking what? The best comedy is nasty. Jokes are supposed to say the unsayable. If your idea of comedy is people saying the sayable, watch Stephen Colbert. Neither Colbert nor anyone else ever gets banned from anything for calling Republicans Nazis, by the way. Would you rather be called a Nazi, or . . . a man? |
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THE TRUMP QUESTIONIn recent years Twitter has banned or suspended thousands of accounts by conservatives, libertarians, or Republicans, the most prominent of which was President Donald Trump. Trump said yesterday that he would stick with posting on his own social network, Truth Social. “I am not going on Twitter,” he said, but added that he hoped “Elon buys Twitter, because he’ll make improvements to it.” Twitter also suspended newspapers whose political exposes it didn’t like such as The New York Post. The New York Post was suspended by Twitter in 2019 for its pre-election expose about Biden family corruption. Many months after Biden’s election to the presidency, the New York Times confirmed that the New York Post story had been accurate. |
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MIGHT THE NEW YORK TIMES AND CNN SHIFT MORE TO THE CENTER TOO?In a separate development, The Guardian predicts that both the New York Times (under its new editor) and CNN may soon shift away from leftist advocacy into more objective journalism. The Guardian: Less advocacy, more journalism. Changes at CNN and New York Times may signal push to the centre |
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ARTICLES ELON MUSK, TWITTER AND FREE SPEECHElon Musk, Twitter and Free Speech With his typical enthusiasm for viral high-jinks, Elon Musk once formally titled himself Tesla’s “Technoking,” and now perhaps he will take a similar role at Twitter. After a speedy love-hate business courtship that lasted two weeks, the social-media website agreed Monday to accept Mr. Musk’s buyout offer of $44 billion. What a gamble for Mr. Musk, who argues he can unlock value in Twitter that its current leadership can’t. According to the Journal, the financing proposal he announced last week includes $21 billion in personal equity. That amounts to roughly 10% of his net worth, going by the Forbes estimate. As collateral on debt, Mr. Musk would also pledge about a third of his Tesla stake. It isn’t every day the world’s richest man makes a bet like this. “The proposed transaction will deliver a substantial cash premium, and we believe it is the best path forward for Twitter’s stockholders,” the company’s chairman said. Mr. Musk offered $54.20 a share. Before his stake became public, Twitter was trading near $39. The company’s board at first seemed poised to reject the deal, and it adopted a poison pill. Then Mr. Musk announced financing and began calling big shareholders to make his pitch. If Mr. Musk can strike a more satisfying balance on content moderation, maybe he’s right about Twitter’s hidden value. Current management is correct that most regular social-media users don’t want a daily bath of Russian bots, jihadist propaganda, noxious harassment and so forth. Ditto for advertisers, who represent about 90% of the company’s revenue. Yet Silicon Valley’s tech lords have decided they want to be arbiters of speech on political topics like climate change and the origins of Covid. Nudging the moderation dial back several notches might promote broader engagement, though expect progressives to scream. One start might be to break what looks like a monoculture at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters. Maybe Mr. Musk will move the company to Texas, as he did with Tesla. How many Twitter coders have ever been to a rodeo? Mr. Musk might have functional changes in mind, too, such as longer tweets. On Monday he mentioned “enhancing the product with new features,” as well as “authenticating all humans.” The hyperbole surrounding Mr. Musk’s Twitter foray has been curious, hilarious, and sometimes both. Mr. Musk “is increasingly behaving like a movie supervillain,” an Axios writer said. A former CEO of the social site Reddit called for government regulation “to prevent rich people from controlling our channels of communication.” That line was published in an op-ed at the Washington Post, which is owned by the noted pauper Jeff Bezos. “I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter,” Mr. Musk tweeted Monday, “because that is what free speech means.” How supervillainous of him. Mr. Musk at a conference this month seemed to muse about permitting any tweet that’s legal. Last week he sounded more modest. “A social media platform’s policies are good,” he tweeted, “if the most extreme 10% on left and right are equally unhappy.” What does that mean in practice? Does Mr. Musk realize he’s walking into a hornet’s nest? Will his vision work? Who knows. But it will be fascinating to watch Mr. Musk try to break Silicon Valley’s culture of progressive conformity. |
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4 WAYS TWITTER COULD CHANGE UNDER ELON MUSK4 ways Twitter could change under Elon Musk https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/25/business/elon-musk-twitter-trump-return.html Elon Musk has said he doesn’t trust Twitter’s current leadership to make necessary changes to promote free speech on the platform. Elon Musk can at times be inscrutable, and his politics are elusive, which has made it somewhat difficult to determine exactly what the billionaire would do if he successfully acquired Twitter. But over the past weeks and months, as he neared Monday’s deal with the company, Mr. Musk has given more hints about what he would change about Twitter — in interviews, regulatory filings and, of course, on his Twitter account. Here are the main areas Mr. Musk could seek to address: Free speech and content moderators. Mr. Musk has frequently expressed concern that Twitter’s content moderators go too far and intervene too much on the platform, which he sees as the internet’s “de facto town square.” He brought up those concerns once again in the release announcing the agreement: “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” Mr. Musk said. “I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans” he added. “Twitter has tremendous potential — I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it.” In a tweet on Monday, ahead of the announcement of his agreement with Twitter, Mr. Musk said he hoped even his “worst critics” continued to use the platform “because that is what free speech means.” The Trump question. Mr. Musk has not commented publicly on how he would handle the former President Donald Trump’s banned Twitter account. But his free speech comments have stoked speculation that Twitter under his ownership might reinstate Mr. Trump, who was barred from the platform last year. After the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, Twitter said Mr. Trump had violated its policies by inciting violence among his supporters. Facebook also banned Mr. Trump for the same reason. The former president, who was known for tweets that criticized opponents and sometimes announced policy changes, is also trying to get his own social media site off the ground. His start-up, Truth Social, has struggled to attract users, and the problem could get worse now that Mr. Musk has suggested changing content moderation rules on Twitter. Mr. Trump said in a recent interview that he probably wouldn’t rejoin Twitter. The algorithm. At a TED conference this month, he elaborated on his plans to make the company’s algorithm an open-source model, which would allow users to see the code showing how certain posts came up in their timelines. He said the open-source method would be better than “having tweets sort of be mysteriously promoted and demoted with no insight into what’s going on.” Mr. Musk has also pointed to the politicization of the platform before, and recently tweeted that any social media platform’s policies “are good if the most extreme 10 percent on left and right are equally unhappy.” Who uses the platform and how. Before Mr. Musk offered to buy Twitter this month, he expressed concern about the relevance of the platform. When an account posted a list of the 10 most followed Twitter accounts, including former President Barack Obama and the pop stars Justin Bieber and Katy Perry, Mr. Musk responded and wrote: “Most of these ‘top’ accounts tweet rarely and post very little content. Is Twitter dying?” More recently, the Tesla chief executive promised in a tweet Thursday that he would “defeat the spam bots or die trying!” |
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ELON MUSK CAN SAVE TWITTER DESPITE WHAT LIBERAL LOONS SAY — AND HERE’S HOWElon Musk can save Twitter despite what liberal loons say — and here’s how It’s all over for Twitter, Twitter’s heaviest lefties are telling us. The shrieking is at cat-tail-slammed-in-door levels. When Elon Musk takes over, they warn, Twitter will become a flaming toxic radioactive cesspool . . . of politically incorrect jokes and links to accurate reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop. On the right, many people I respect such as Charles C.W. Cooke of National Review and Megan McArdle of the Washington Post think Twitter is beyond saving. As McArdle points out, Musk can hardly run Twitter himself, and young, brainwashed zombies from the Cult of Woke ultimately make the uncomfortable decisions about, you know, which presidents to ban. Musk can’t possibly clean house and bring in reasonable centrists who love free speech to staff every moderating job; as is true of the media, the pool of potential employees in Silicon Valley is as blue as San Francisco. And these eager young censors grew up this century — the era of trigger warnings and safe spaces. Many of them, I’ll wager, have never had a substantial conversation with a conservative in their entire lives. But I still think Musk can save Twitter: How about trying clear, fair, nonpartisan rules and telling content moderators to err on the side of letting people rhetorically slug it out? For those whose tweets get barred, there should be a clear and transparent appeals process. And nobody should be banned just for being a jerk. Threats? No. Doxing? Not allowed. Porn? Go elsewhere for that. But Donald Trump should be let back on. Whether something is “disinformation” or “a threat to democracy” ought not concern Twitter’s moderators, because what’s accurate will drive out the inaccurate over time. Oh, and in our glorious Muskian future, people will be free to joke again. This whole thing apparently got started because Musk was willing to spend $44 billion to keep reading the Babylon Bee. It was five days after the right-leaning Bee got suspended for making a joke about the transgender (male-to-female) individual Rachel Levine, who is the assistant secretary for health and human services, that Musk sent his famous tweet asking, “Do you believe Twitter rigorously adheres to” the principle that “free speech is essential to a functioning democracy?” In a followup post, he noted, with uncharacteristic earnestness, “The consequences of this poll will be important. Please vote carefully.” You could argue the Bee’s joke about Levine was nasty. So freaking what? The best comedy is nasty. Jokes are supposed to say the unsayable. If your idea of comedy is people saying the sayable, watch Stephen Colbert. Neither Colbert nor anyone else ever gets banned from anything for calling Republicans Nazis, by the way. Would you rather be called a Nazi, or . . . a man? A few years ago, Howard Stern used to do interviews with a pathetic doofus who was an avowed officer of the Ku Klux Klan. Stern was on broadcast radio at the time, and no one thought he should be booted off the airwaves for “platforming” evil. The Klansman was so awful and ridiculous that interviewing him amounted to a public-service announcement: this is your brain on white supremacy. You could almost hear the Klan shriveling up and dissolving every time this redneck spoke. Musk understands that we need more, not less, engagement with disagreeable ideas. Remember when everyone agreed sunlight is the best disinfectant? Adherents of the world’s worst idea (communism) are allowed on Twitter. A great start! So should those who vouch for every other idiotic ideology. Twitter should be like a soapbox: it’s there for anyone to stand on and shout from. If you don’t like something, the mute button’s right there, folks. Vehement disputation is the American way. Apparently we need a South African to make that the Twitter way. |
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WITH DEAL FOR TWITTER, MUSK LANDS A PRIZE AND PLEDGES FEWER LIMITSThe world’s richest man succeeded in a bid to acquire the influential social networking service, which he has said he wants to take private. Elon Musk, with more than 83 million followers on Twitter, has said he wants to “transform” the platform by taking it private. By Mike Issac https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/25/technology/musk-twitter-sale.html Elon Musk struck a deal on Monday to buy Twitter for roughly $44 billion, in a victory by the world’s richest man to take over the influential social network frequented by world leaders, celebrities and cultural trendsetters. Twitter agreed to sell itself to Mr. Musk for $54.20 a share, a 38 percent premium over the company’s share price this month before he revealed he was the firm’s single largest shareholder. It would be the biggest deal to take a company private — something Mr. Musk has said he will do with Twitter — in at least two decades, according to data compiled by Dealogic. “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” Mr. Musk said in a statement announcing the deal. “Twitter has tremendous potential — I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it.” The blockbuster agreement caps what seemed an improbable attempt by the famously mercurial Mr. Musk, 50, to buy Twitter — and immediately raises questions about what he will do with the platform and how his actions will affect online speech globally. The billionaire, who has more than 83 million followers on Twitter and has romped across the service hurling gibes and memes, has repeatedly said he wants to “transform” the platform by promoting more free speech and giving users more control over what they see on it. By taking the company private, Mr. Musk could work on the service out of sight of the prying eyes of investors, regulators and others. Yet scrutiny is likely to be intense. Twitter is not the biggest social platform — it has more than 217 million daily users, compared with billions for Facebook and Instagram — but it has had an outsize role in shaping narratives around the world. Political leaders have made it a megaphone, while companies, celebrities and others have used it to hone images and build brands. In recent years, Twitter has also become a target of criticism, as some users spread misinformation and other toxic content on the service. Former President Donald J. Trump frequently turned to Twitter to insult and inflame, until it barred him after the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol last year. The company has repeatedly created policies on the fly to deal with unexpected situations. Mr. Musk himself has had a rocky relationship with online speech. This year, he tried to quash a Twitter account that tracked his private jet, citing personal and safety reasons. And he has gotten into trouble with regulators over his tweets. On Monday, he tweeted that he hoped his worst critics would remain on Twitter, because “that is what free speech means.” He added in his statement that he hoped to increase trust by making Twitter’s technology more transparent, defeating the bots that spam people on the platform and “authenticating all humans.” Bridget Todd, a director at UltraViolet, a women’s rights organization, said Mr. Musk’s deal could be treacherous for online speech because he might not be in favor of Twitter’s community standards and barring users who violated those standards. “This is a massively slippery slope,” she said. In Washington, Republicans, who have long accused Twitter of censoring their views, cheered Mr. Musk’s deal. “I am hopeful that Elon Musk will help rein in Big Tech’s history of censoring users that have a different viewpoint,” Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee said in a tweet. Mr. Trump told Fox News on Monday that he would stick with posting on his own social network, Truth Social. “I am not going on Twitter,” he said, but added that he hoped “Elon buys Twitter, because he’ll make improvements to it.” Democrats were restrained on the deal. Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, declined to comment on Twitter’s sale specifically but said that President Biden “has long been concerned about the power of large social media platforms” and that they should be “held accountable for the harms that they cause.” She said Mr. Biden supported changes to online-speech and antitrust laws. Beyond speech issues, Twitter faces questions about its business. For years, the company has struggled to gain new users and keep others returning. Its advertising business, which is the main way Twitter makes revenue, has been inconsistent. Twitter has not turned a profit for eight of the last 10 years. Last year, the company lost $493 million on revenue of $5.57 billion. In contrast, Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, had profits of $39 billion and revenue of $118 billion last year. Twitter, which went public in 2013, has also had a tumultuous corporate history. It has repeatedly dealt with board dysfunction and drama with its founders, and was courted by other interested buyers in the past, including Disney and Salesforce. In 2020, the activist investment firm Elliott Management took a stake in Twitter and called for Jack Dorsey, one of its founders, to resign as chief executive. Mr. Dorsey stepped down last year. “This company is very much undermonetized, especially compared to other platforms and competitors like Facebook,” said Pinar Yildirim, a professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School of Business. “If you look at it from a point of pure business value, there’s definitely room for improvement.” In a statement, Bret Taylor, Twitter’s chairman, said that the board had “conducted a thoughtful and comprehensive process” on Mr. Musk’s bid and that the deal would “deliver a substantial cash premium” for shareholders. Regulators are unlikely to seriously challenge the transaction, former antitrust officials said, since the government most commonly intervenes to stop a deal when a company is buying a competitor. The deal came together in a matter of weeks. Mr. Musk, who also leads the electric carmaker Tesla and the rocket maker SpaceX, began buying shares of Twitter in January and disclosed this month that he had amassed a stake of more than 9 percent. That immediately set off a guessing game over what Mr. Musk planned to do with the platform. Twitter’s executives initially welcomed him to the board of directors, but he reversed course within days and instead began a bid to buy the company outright. Any agreement initially appeared unlikely because the entrepreneur did not say how he would finance the deal. Twitter’s executives appeared skeptical, too, given that it was difficult to discern how much Mr. Musk might be jesting. In 2018, for example, he tweeted that he planned to take Tesla private and inaccurately claimed that he had “funding secured” for such a deal. Twitter responded to Mr. Musk’s offer by putting a “poison pill” in place, a defensive maneuver that prevented the billionaire from accumulating more than 15 percent of the company’s shares. The skepticism began dissipating last week when Mr. Musk revealed in a securities filing that he had obtained commitments worth $46.5 billion to finance his offer for Twitter. Morgan Stanley and a group of other lenders offered $13 billion in debt financing and another $12.5 billion in loans against Mr. Musk’s stock in Tesla. He was expected to add about $21 billion in equity financing. Twitter did not provide details of the equity financing on Monday. It also set no conditions for Mr. Musk’s financing that would prevent him from closing the deal. The financing commitments forced Twitter to weigh Mr. Musk’s bid seriously, people with knowledge of the situation have said, particularly as he threatened to take the offer directly to shareholders in a hostile bid. Over the weekend, in a series of calls and video meetings, Twitter’s board and the billionaire’s deal makers hashed out terms for the purchase. The teams worked late Sunday and into Monday on the final details. Twitter’s financial advisers were Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Allen & Company, while Morgan Stanley was the lead financial adviser to Mr. Musk. How hands-on Mr. Musk plans to be at Twitter is unclear. Among the unanswered issues are whom he might pick to lead the company and how involved he would be in running the service. In addition to leading Tesla and SpaceX, Mr. Musk has other companies, such as Neuralink, which aims to build a computer interface for the human brain, and the Boring Company, which makes tunnels. Twitter’s current chief executive, Parag Agrawal, took over in November. Mr. Agrawal has been working toward “decentralizing” the social network so that Twitter would make fewer content moderation decisions and users would have more control over their social feeds. He is expected to remain in charge at least until the deal closes. How many of Twitter’s employees want to pursue Mr. Musk’s vision is also uncertain. Some have been frustrated by the lack of communication over the takeover fight. In a meeting with employees on Monday afternoon, Mr. Agrawal and Mr. Taylor, the chairman, nodded to the emotions of the day and how workers were most likely processing the news of a sale. “It’s important to acknowledge that all of you have many different feelings about what is happening,” Mr. Agrawal said in the meeting, which The New York Times listened to. He said it might take three to six months for the deal’s completion, so “in this moment, we operate Twitter as we always have.” The deal, which has been approved by Twitter’s board, is expected to close this year, subject to a shareholder vote and certain regulatory approvals. In the employee meeting, Mr. Agrawal acknowledged the uncertainty ahead. “Once the deal closes, we don’t know what direction this company will go in,” he said. |
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