How Elon Musk Ruined the News
The platform formerly known as Twitter is now almost worthless for following current events - and it will get worse
As a commentator on current affairs, there’s one topic this week that people are going to be expecting me to talk about. And, as a comedy writer, that’s going to be a real tough order, chief.
Thankfully, I have this big wheel that contains all of my regular talking points, so let’s give it a spin and see what I can cobble together!
For those of you who are still on Twitter, which is a vanishingly small percentage of my readership at this point, you’ve spent the past week enduring the biggest garbage fire in the short history of what I still refuse to call X, and probably the history of Twitter also.
I’m not just talking about the maddening discourse around competing war crimes. We’re talking about the inevitable information collapse that resulted from the first big test of how the new unmoderated Free Speech Twitter would hold up against a major humanitarian catastrophe. The answer is, extremely poorly! Or alternatively: spectacularly well, if you imagine Elon Musk as the villain from that James Bond movie with the billionaire media magnate who manipulated world events for ratings.
This has been a long time coming and it was engineered from the beginning. Where Twitter was once praised for its ability to deliver real-time news to the people during humanitarian disasters and conflicts, by the people experiencing it, Elon Musk’s rule by autocratic fiat has turned an unfolding tragedy into an impossible to follow blur of gore and misinformation that Musk can, with a reprehensible glee, laud as a ratings bonanza he can wave in front of whatever advertisers are Faustian enough to venture willingly back into his hellsite.
Instead of journalists and citizens on the ground, whose ability to be heard he unceremoniously ripped away with his absurd “hierarchy of speech, no freedom of reach” policy, the information firehose has been handed over to weird random sycophant weirdos like Ian Miles Cheong and white supremacist Bitcoin dipshits like Matt Wallace who compete ruthlessly with each other to see which of them can make up the most bullshit lies.
As a result of just this past few days of the world being driven to madness with old videos, doctored footage, photoshopped documents, invented quotes, and even scenes from video games being misrepresented as live action from the ground in Gaza, Musk has managed to draw the ire of the European fucking Union who have warned him to cut the shit.
So how did one man’s dumbfuckery ruin the utility of an entire technological infrastructure? Let’s wind back the clock just a few months.
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If you’re just joining us: Elon Musk has a massive hate-on for journalism as it’s traditionally understood. That is, the production and distribution of news and commentary to the masses, a process which is generally—not always—facilitated by professionals known as journalists.
The problem for Musk is that these journalists are a rogue element in his runaway obsession with control. He is himself the result of what happens when you take a control freak and ply him with enough resources that his mania is completely open-ended—most people are forced to acquiesce when they strike some sort of limit on their conceivable ability, but Musk is so absurdly wealthy and is allowed to personally command enough of the utilities people rely upon that there are very few limits on what he theoretically can have.
People up to and including actual governments can bitch and moan about Musk’s visceral disdain for laws and ethical obligations but nobody’s actually going to do anything, let’s be real. It sounds completely ridiculous to accuse him of wanting to take over the world but, honestly, can you imagine him not taking the job of World Emperor if it was legitimately offered to him? It might not be his conscious ambition but the man has no brakes, much like a Tesla at a crosswalk in a school zone.
Over time, through a long process of carefully refining the people he allows to be near him down to those who exclusively and explicitly agree with everything he says, Musk has become convinced that he is alone magically gifted with the power of being right about everything, all of the time. Inevitably, this means that people who disagree with him, about literally anything in the entire universe, are Wrong. The only people in the world he trusts are sycophants, which is why we’re living in the absurd timeline in which the richest man in the world regularly banters and colludes with one random unemployed Malaysian guy who praises Hitler and reconciles his white supremacy with the admittedly-kinda-clever witticism that he’s like a banana: Yellow on the outside, white on the inside.
Keep in mind also that Elon Musk is also one of the pettiest and most vengeful people on the planet. If Elon Musk thought the sky was Prince-jacket-purple and someone told him it was blue, he would fly into a week long tantrum and then try to financially obliterate the Bureau of Meteorology by buying it, drowning it in frivolous lawsuits, and/or defaming every weatherman in the country as a pedophile.
That’s where journalists are a problem. Because journalists, Musk has noted, often don’t agree with his weird anti-democratic techno-feudalist turbo-racism. This means that they are Wrong, and by virtue of their profession they are teaching lots of other people to be Wrong. Left to its own devices, Musk assumes, public opinion would just kind of even out and settle into its default position of being correct and reasonable and agreeing with him.
It's actually really difficult to get a handle on what Musk’s epistemological theory of truth is. It certainly doesn’t involve weighing evidence. He’s gone on record to say that fact-checkers are evil and has gone so far as to say that he has never seen anything as evil as Yoel Roth, the former Twitter employee whose job involved trying to limit the spread of deliberate and malicious misinformation, which is a huge claim to make for someone who literally grew up in Apartheid.
I’m almost certain Musk has some kind of radical solipsism thing going on where he thinks truth and facts themselves emerge from human consciousness somehow, and his consciousness most of all, so you can simply poll the population and compare the average opinion against what he’s already come to believe.
Truth, therefore, can be determined, in a very real sense, by virality. Either truth just has a greater survivability than lies through some kind of quasi-Darwinian process or—a more terrifying thing to believe—what is more entertaining is more true by definition. He’s indicated on more than one occasion that he believes something idiotic like this.
Elon Musk’s vision of the future of news is fast, fast, fast reporting. As he’s repeatedly opined, mainstream media lags way behind Twitter when it comes to prompt reporting. To his credit, he has also talked repeatedly about accuracy of reporting, but as I’ve just shown, we don’t really know what he means by that and by all measures it seems like fact means the same thing as opinion.
So his multi-tiered approach toward this goal, after removing the ability of professional journalists to reach their audience, is first to call everyone journalists. He even called himself a journalist when he personally visited the southern border to “report” on scary non-whites breaking into America, a credential he tried to prove by putting on an “I’m just like you” cowboy hat which the sycophants around him were too frightened to tell him he was wearing backwards.
The next brilliant ideas were to give people algorithmic priority depending on how much money they paid to use the platform, and establish a revenue share program that pays people based on how viral their tweets become.
Journalism on Twitter, instantly, is no longer a discipline that requires accuracy or quality. It now prioritizes speed and outrage far, far above both of these things. Accuracy and quality, in fact, are now considerable detriments to the dispersal of news on the platform not only because these both slow down the news, but also because fact is often less outrageous than lies. Anybody using Twitter to report “news” is drastically incentivised to make shit up simply because it pays more.
Factual reporting on Twitter is now rapidly buried in bullshit. It’s buried much faster than it can be corrected, resulting in a situation where absolutely nobody has any metric with which to judge whether anything they’re reading or watching is in the same accuracy galaxy as what’s really going on.
Why does this matter besides the fact that we used to have a really nifty tool for raising worldwide social awareness?
It’s a blow to us because it gives back the ability for powerful people to hide their atrocities again.
In the coming days and weeks the situation in and around Gaza is likely to only get more intense and heartbreaking. If this disaster had broken out just a couple of years ago then we would have an easier time following the news where it happens, as it happens, and hopefully a fighting chance of helping to keep both sides of this horrible thing accountable.
Instead, all of that is going to get drowned out by Matt Wallace spamming clips he edited out of Roland Emmerich movies and screaming that it’s footage of Palestinians setting off cluster nukes in downtown Tel Aviv. If anyone wants to do some legitimate war crimes, now is a great time—while everyone is confused about what’s real.
All because of one guy who doesn’t believe facts exist outside of his personal lived reality and never learned how to wear a hat.
What's ironic is that had Musk just erred on the side of accuracy, and mostly kept things like they were while streamlining operations, this moment, right now, would probably be the one where the highest usage of the platform would have been reached.
Instead, the moment would demonstrate how the platform is ruined, and every last person still on the fence about this will move out. From what I can observe, the eXodus is happening, and it accelerating.