Twitter to the Rescue: The Case for a Bullsh*t Artist: A Response to Musk’s Twitter Letter of Indiscretion

“Are you going to liberate Twitter from the censorship happy mob?” On the day Musk revealed his stake, Joe Rogan wrote to him. “I will give advice, which they choose not to follow,” Musk said.

“I do think it was not correct to ban Donald Trump; I think that was a mistake,” Musk said at a conference in May, pledging to reverse the ban were he to become the company’s owner.

The relationship between the pair has deteriorated since, with the men trading words over the summer. After Trump called Musk a “bullsh*t artist” at a rally in July, Musk responded by tweet, writing, “I don’t hate the man, but it’s time for Trump to hang up his hat & sail into the sunset.”

Musk had been trying to wriggle out of the deal to acquire the social media site, but now says he intends to complete it. In a letter to Twitter, filed with the SEC today, Musk said he would honor his deal to buy the company for the originally agreed price of $54.20 per share. The social networking company said it intended to close the deal.

Robert Miller, chair of corporate finance and law at the University ofIowa College of Law, says that Musk had to contend with a lot of obstacles in his attempt to escape the agreement he had signed. For this argument to have worked, he says, the company would have to have committed a huge amount of fraud for which no evidence has surfaced.

Twitter sued him to follow through with the agreement, alleging that Musk was using the bot argument as a pretense to get out of a deal for which he had developed buyer’s remorse. In the weeks after the deal was announced, much of the stock market, including social media companies, declined amid concerns about rising inflation and a looming recession. Musk’s personal net worth was affected by the downturn.

The material that was revealed prior to the trial taking place in Delaware did not lend support to that argument. Miller says there is nothing that looks like a fraud here, despite the fact that he knows his best claim is fraud. “They’ve run out of cards to play.”

The trial might have had an effect on Musk’s decision to fold. The internet chewed over a large amount of his text messages with major figures in Silicon Valley last week. Miller says it would have been a very embarrassing deposition for him this week.

The Skinner Box on Twitter: A Keyhole View of What Twitter Under Musk Will Be ‘Losing’ or ‘Causing Violence’

But more than professional utility ties me to the site. Twitter hooks people in much the same way slot machines do, with what experts call an “intermittent reinforcement schedule.” It’s repetitive and uninteresting most of the time, but occasionally, at random intervals, it will have something compelling to say. Unpredictable rewards, as the behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner found with his research on rats and pigeons, are particularly good at generating compulsive behavior.

“I don’t know that Twitter engineers ever sat around and said, ‘We are creating a Skinner box,’” said Natasha Dow Schüll, a cultural anthropologist at New York University and author of a book about gambling machine design. That is essentially what they have built, she said. It is one reason that people should know better if they self-destruct on the site frequently.

It’s a theme he reiterated both in public, telling Twitter employees at an all-staff meeting that the platform should allow all legal speech, and in private, texting investor Antonio Gracias that “Free speech matters most when it’s someone you hate spouting what you think is bull****.”

Such a move could have ripples across the social media landscape. Twitter, although smaller than many of its social media rivals, has sometimes acted as a model for how the industry handles problematic content, including when it was the first to ban then-President Trump following the January 6 Capitol riot.

For a “keyhole view of what Twitter under Musk will look like,” just look at alternative platforms such as Parler, Gab and Truth Social that promise fewer restrictions on speech, said Angelo Carusone, president of the liberal nonprofit watchdog group Media Matters for America.

He said the feature is the bug on those sites, where it is possible to say and do things that are not allowed on other social media platforms. They are cauldrons of misinformation and abuse.

“Would be great to unwind permanent bans, except for spam accounts and those that explicitly advocate violence,” he texted Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal shortly after agreeing to join the company’s board (a decision he soon backtracked).

That could mean lifting bans on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who was kicked off for abusive behavior in 2018; Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., whose account was suspended in January for tweeting misleading and false claims about COVID-19 vaccines; and 2020 election deniers like Michael Flynn, Sidney Powell and Mike Lindell, who were all banned in early 2021.

Musk should hire someone who has a savvy cultural/ political view to lead enforcement, suggested the person. Masters is the Republican Senate candidate in Arizona who was endorsed by President Trump and shared the same false claim about the 2020 presidential election.

Twitter isn’t the same as China: Musk’s rebukening after Facebook’s ban on the late billionaire Agrawal

When Facebook’s ban on the former president is up in a few years, it could set a precedent for other social networks to do the same.

Musk’s texts reveal that an initially cautiously friendly relationship between the two men when Musk first invested quickly soured after Agrawal told Musk that his tweets criticizing the platform were “not helping me make Twitter better.”

Whoever is in charge of day-to-day operations will likely be faced with a smaller workforce. Hundreds of employees have reportedly left in the months since the Musk saga began, with many inside Twitter disheartened by Musk’s plans to overhaul the company.

That is likely welcome news to the billionaire, who has complained that Twitter’s costs outstrip revenues and has implied the company is overstaffed for its size.

On the earnings conference call last week, he stated that the long-term potential for Twitter was greater than its current value.

He may have little choice other than to find alternate sources of revenue besides advertising, given the weak state of the digital ad market and the changes he wants to make to content moderation.

“Advertisers want to know that their ads are not going to appear alongside extremists, that they’re not going to be subsidizing or associating with the types of things that would turn off potential customers,” Carusone said.

Everyone’s guess is what he meant. Musk told staff that the company needed to follow in the footsteps of Chinese “super-app” WeChat, which combines social networking, messaging, payments, shopping and ride-sharing.

American tech companies have tried this, but Chinese-style super-apps aren’t catching on in the United States.

The Role of Free Speech in Digital Politics: Public Opinions Concerning Women and Social Media, and The Case of Yeezus

Editor’s Note: Kara Alaimo, an associate professor in the Lawrence Herbert School of Communication at Hofstra University, writes about issues affecting women and social media. She was spokeswoman for international affairs in the Treasury Department during the Obama administration. The opinions expressed in this commentary are her own. View more opinion on CNN.

A conservative social media company called Parler announced on Monday that it is being purchased by the musician and television personality, Yeezus. A statement from the company announcing the deal said that West had gone into the free speech media space and would never have to fear being removed from social media again.

In a world where conservative opinions are viewed as controversial, West said that we have to make sure we have the right to express ourselves.

Think about how these owners post, with Musk suggesting China control Taiwan and Russia keep part of Ukraine, and West releasing a video showing a fake Pete Davidson being kidnapped and buried. If this is a glimpse of what social networks will look like in the future, we should all be very scared.

Musk said in the letter posted to TWTR he does not want the platform to become a free-for-all-hellscape where anything can be said with no consequences.

When women become victims of online hate, they often “shut down their blogs, avoid websites they formerly frequented, take down social networking profiles, (and) refrain from engaging in online political commentary,” according to University of Miami law professor Mary Anne Franks.

In practice, what these so-called free speech policies really boil down to is an ugly form of censorship that scares away the voices of people who are attacked by users of these platforms.

Parler is described by West as a place where conservatives can flourish, and non conservatives are not likely to flock to Truth Social, given its association with Trump. If women, people of color and others start fleeing Twitter, that could leave it as a platform for conservatives as well. The views of those who are still more zealous will likely be made even more so.

The rise of far-right views on social media: How the billionaire Musk is going to take over Trump’s account of the Wall Street Journal after he sells Twitter

“When like-minded people get together, they often end up thinking a more extreme version of what they thought before they started to talk to one another,” Harvard University law professor Cass Sunstein writes in “On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, and What Can Be Done.” Sunstein says this happens because their exchanges heighten their preexisting beliefs and make them more confident.

So, when conservatives get together on social media, we can expect them to become more far right. The far right views nurtured on these social networks could have a large impact on our politics, just as Rush Limbaugh and other conservative talk show hosts did in the 1990s. It isn’t hard to imagine that the people who commune on these sites could band together to support and elect political candidates who share their worldviews.

Even when they are sexist, misogynistic, racist or otherwise terrible, we can expect the male owners to use their platforms to amplify their own views.

Yildirim said that, unlike Facebook, Twitter has not been good at targeting advertising to what users want to see. Musk’s message suggests he wants to fix that, she said.

Twitter’s Chief Customer Officer Sarah Personette responded to Musk’s Thursday tweet saying that she had a “great discussion” with Musk on Wednesday. Personette said that their continued commitment to brand safety remained unchanged. “Looking forward to the future!”

The Wall Street Journal on Thursday reported that one ad buying agency had already received requests from about a dozen clients to pause their advertisements on Twitter if Musk restores Trump’s account, and other were considering doing the same.

In his first big move earlier on Thursday, Musk tried to soothe leery Twitter advertisers saying that he is buying the platform to help humanity and doesn’t want it to become a “free-for-all hellscape.”

The acquisition also promises to extend Musk’s influence. The billionaire already owns, oversees or has significant stakes in companies that are developing cars, rockets, and robots as well as more experimental ventures like brain implants. He controls a social media platform that affects how hundreds of millions of people communicate and get their news.

Musk also pledged to “defeat the spam bots or die trying,” referring to the fake and scam accounts that are often especially active in the replies to his tweets and those of others with large followings on the platform.

Why did Musk and Personette Become the CEO of Twitter? A critical look at how Twitter took over the micro-blogging site Agrawal, Segal and Gadde

The departures come just hours before a deadline set by a Delaware judge to finalize the deal on Friday. She said that if no agreement was reached, she would schedule a trial.

The execs received handsome payouts for their trouble, Insider reports: Agrawal got $38.7 million, Segal got $25.4 million, Gadde got $12.5 million, and Personette, who tweeted yesterday about how excited she was for Musk’s takeover, got $11.2 million.

Six months of wrangling has ended with the fact that billionaire Musk owns the micro-blogging site. How did that happen? Read on — we’ll lay out every step of how it happened and how the billionaire is now in control of Twitter, with several former execs abruptly escorted out of the building and Twitter employees awaiting the first updates from their new “Chief Twit.”

The major personnel moves came quickly, and although they were expected, they will be the beginning of many changes the CEO will make.

About the same time, he used Twitter to criticize Gadde, the company’s top lawyer. There was a wave of harassment from other accounts when he wrote about it. For Gadde, an 11-year Twitter employee who also heads public policy and safety, the harassment included racist and misogynistic attacks, in addition to calls for Musk to fire her. After she was fired there was a lot of abuse on that account.

The note is a shift from Musk’s position that Twitter is unfairly infringing on free speech rights by blocking misinformation or graphic content, said Pinar Yildirim, associate professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

It’s a realization that no content moderation is good for business, with the potential for losing advertisers and subscribers.

Yildirim said consumers do not want a place where they are bombarded with things they don’t want to hear about and the platform takes no responsibility.

Twitter, the CEO, and Wall Street: Musk’s response to a publicly outgoing tweet about Silicon Valley $Delta$

But Musk has been signaling that the deal is going through. He walked into the company’s headquarters in San Francisco carrying a porcelain sink, and then changed his profile to “Chief Thilt” on the social networking website.

The New York Stock Exchange notified investors that it will suspend trading in shares of Twitter before the opening bell on Friday because of the possibility that the company will go private.

The building should have been turned into a homeless shelter because few employees actually worked there, according to Musk’s earlier suggestions.

A note to advertisers Thursday shows a newfound emphasis on advertising revenue and a need for Tweets to provide more “relevant ads” that use users’ personal information.