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Elon Musk’s Takeover of Twitter Has Happened. Not Even Musk Knows What’s Next

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The Twitter bird logo, with an 'X' over its eye, turned up, on the ground. A week ago, Elon Musk took over Twitter. The end times had come. Or perhaps it’s time for Twitter’s rebirth? It depends on who you ask. Elon Musk has said in the past that Twitter would become a “free speech” network, the same promise as such illustrious platforms as Parler, Gab, and Truth Social. None of which are truly free, and all of which would be great ways to get harassed for being a bit different than the majority.

Obviously, women, LGBTQ+ people, non-white people, and even advertisers on Twitter have been nervous about the Republican billionaire’s takeover of the platform. Over the years, Twitter had gotten better for women and minorities, with slight improvements to moderation. They even finally banned Trump after his violent coup! But Musk promised to change all of that. He’d bring Trump back—something he’s now not sure about—and reduce moderation to allow people to be free to say whatever they want. As Musk had been chastised by liberals for his transphobic tweets, it seemed to be an excuse to bring transphobia back to Twitter. Not that it ever truly left.

But on the eve of his takeover last week, Musk seemed to flip-flop. Perhaps after realizing that advertising accounts for nearly 90% of Twitter’s revenue, Musk had a change of heart. He promised that Twitter would not “become a free-for-all hellscape.” This runs contrary to his previous plans to remove permanent bans and allow hate speech back on the platform. It also runs contrary to what has happened since he took over.

Not even Musk seems to know what Twitter’s going to do, and he’s running the show now. The “Chief Twit” (hey, his label) doesn’t seem to have a solid direction. Not that he has to worry about investors anymore, as he’s the sole owner of the “town square.”

How will he control speech on his private property?

Musk’s Takeover

Elon Musk ended up going through with his deal to buy Twitter for $44 billion, $54.20 per share. He’s now the sole owner of Twitter, and can do whatever he wants with the company. Turns out, step one was “fire a lot of people.” Musk fired the former CEO, Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, policy chief Vijaya Gaddle, chairman Brett Taylor, and general council Sean Edgett. Gaddele was in charge of Twitter’s admittedly surprisingly lax policies, which Musk still found too strict. Notably, he blamed her for Trump’s ban, which directed his followers to harass her. Now he’s fired her, and, as the sole owner, basically has her job.

Musk reportedly fired the executives “with cause,” meaning he won’t have to owe them anywhere between $20 and $60 million in severance. That could be a sign of things to come for the rest of Twitter’s employees. Rumor had stated Elon Musk planned to fire 75% of Twitter’s staff. He now says he doesn’t know where that number came from. However, Twitter employees have reported that Musk was asking them to print out code they’ve written for review. The directive apparently changed, and code reviews won’t be on printed paper… because that would be ridiculous. Besides, in an unfortunate bit of irony, the more senior you become, the less code you regularly write. It’s ridiculous to try to measure engineers’ contributions through their lines of code, or even code reviews without context. It could be a sign of how micromanaged Twitter could become under Musk.

Musk’s Twitter

Screenshot of a tweet. It reads: Joel Berry @JoelWBerry - 18h Rachel Levine is a man. • 491 17 1,948 © 12.4K

This tweet is still available on Twitter, now a few days old. It’s a clear violation of Twitter’s rules, which are not being enforced.

To test the new limits of Elon Musk’s Twitter, noted transphobe and editor of The Babylon Bee, a hate-filled “Christian” satire website, posted, “Rachel Levine is a man.” Dr. Rachel Levine is a trans woman. This kind of hate speech got Babylon Bee banned from Twitter before. However, now, over a week after the hate speech was posted to Twitter, the post remains, with over 18,000 likes.

Musk’s Twitter is fine with hate speech. In fact, while the above tweet violates Twitter’s rules now, Musk is trying to quickly change that. Hate’s free on Twitter once more.

Whether or not this will extend past trans people is anyone’s guess. Ye (née Kanye West) has been unsuspended, as a result of deleting his offensive antisemitic tweets. Will he be allowed to stay this time if he does it again? Will Trump be allowed back despite his violent coup attempt killing five and undermining American democracy? Musk said he believed banning Trump was “morally wrong and flat out stupid.” Where will Musk draw the hate speech line? He’s estranged from his transgender daughter, does he simply hold a grudge against trans people? Where does his tolerance for hate speech end?

Only a day after Musk owned Twitter, and we started to get an idea of what “free speech absolutist” Elon Musk thinks Twitter should be.

Musk doesn’t even understand the company he now owns. He has wrongly stated that Twitter has a left-wing bias. However, one of Twitter’s own studies showed it actually has a right-wing bias in every country they surveyed with the exception of Germany. Germany, due to a certain political party and world war, has strict laws against the kind of hate speech that lead to the Holocaust. Since Germany bans Nazi-like speech, there’s a drop in suggested content from conservative voices. Everywhere else, that same speech just gets boosted more. A Twitter without artificially boosting conservative voices might actually be more leftist, which seems to not be what Elon wants.

Musk has said he plans to set up a “moderation council,” with “wildly diverse viewpoints.” This doesn’t tell people much though. He could stack it up with people like Ye, spouting antisemitism, and normal people, leaving the “middle ground” they’d find on policy decisions placed well on the far-right. What Musk needs is a panel of marginalized groups, who can empathize with those facing harassment on his platform. “People deserve to be harassed for who they are” is not a “diverse viewpoint.”

Musk in a since-deleted tweet linking a conspiracy website from a far-right network in a response to Hillary Clinton's condemnation of political violence

Musk’s story came from a far-right source, and is an unproven conspiracy theory. He deleted the tweet after mockery.

Elon Musk himself shared a far-right disinformation post about Paul Pelosi, Nancy Pelosi’s husband. Mr. Pelosi had been attacked by an assailant motivated by the far-right. However, the far right has spread a homophobic rumor that the man who attacked him was actually his gay lover. Musk responded to a tweet from Hillary Clinton, linking to one of those far-right blogs to perpetuate the homophobic myth.

Revenue

Elon Musk doesn’t seem to want a “free-for-all,” or so he says. In a plea to keep advertisers on the platform, he has stated it wouldn’t become… well, what Twitter has become over the past week. In fact, in a statement that sounded like an alien stepfather trying to appeal to their estranged earth children, Musk stated he bought Twitter because, “I did it to try to help humanity, whom I love.” Since then, many people trying to protect their humanity from hate speech and harassment have left the platform, as have others who didn’t want to be associated with Musk’s hateful network. That will likely include brands who won’t place ads on the platform anymore.

Musk wants to reduce reliance on ads. Right now, nearly 90% of Twitter’s revenue comes from ads. That means Musk needs a social network with some social responsibility. If the place becomes a madhouse that no business wants to be a part of, it’ll quickly fail. So far, that’s what we’ve seen. Musk wants to cut ad revenue down to 50%, replacing the rest of Twitter’s revenue with paid services. One idea he flouted was a $20/month payment to keep your verified account. The blue checkmark on Twitter is supposed to help users know when an account is legitimate. Musk wants it to just be for the people (likely bots) willing to shell out $240/year for a checkmark on their Twitter account.

Already Falling Apart

“A Musk-owned Twitter would be disastrous for women and marginalized communities already facing abuse and targeted harassment on the platform.”

– Christopher Bouzy of Bott Sentinel, a bot-detection system

The N-word trended on Twitter after Musk took control. In fact, N-word usage spiked 500% after Twitter became the private property of Elon Musk. Ye (née Kanye West), is now back on Twitter. He was only suspended, but has a more indefinite ban on other social networks for his rampant and hateful antisemitism. Trans users have reported they faced an immediate jump in hate speech, likely driven by the hate speech Twitter has already allowed to thrive on its platform. One of the groups of people Elon has specifically spoken out against is trans people, so it was always likely that any rules made to protect them would be out the window immediately. Actor and pottery aficionado Seth Rogen shared some of the antisemitism he found on the platform in a since-deleted tweet. Perhaps he found it pointless to try to fight back against a new “feature” of Twitter: hate speech.

Advertisers Beware

A sponsored post from Bloomberg Quicktake features an Amazon ad over a video. It's right between posts with the "StandWithISIS" hashtag, asking for Twitter to allow ISIS on the platform

GM and Ford, America’s two largest car manufacturers, have already stated that they won’t run ads on Twitter until they can be sure the website won’t become a toxic waste site. With users seeing transphobic hate speech that Twitter now seemingly permits, ads falling right next to posts advocating for ISIS’s return to Twitter in the name of free speech, and rampant antisemitic hate speech, perhaps now isn’t the time to associate your brand with Twitter. After all, as the (hopefully satirical) trending hashtag #StandWithISIS points out, if dangerous hate speech against Jewish people, trans people, other LGBTQ+people, and non-white people is allowed because violent hate speech is supposedly not dangerous, why is ISIS banned? What’s the logic behind “this identity-based violence is okay, but this isn’t?”

Twitter now lacks “brand safety.” Companies don’t know if their brand image will be tarnished by its presence on Twitter. They could end up next to a tweet advocating genocide or killing trans kids. All it takes is one screenshot of that spreading around, and your brand is toast. Do you think Burger King wants people seeing a meme and later asking, “Oh, Burger King? Didn’t they run an ad about Holocaust denial or something?”

Twitter’s increased brand participation in the last few years was thanks to the moderation policies that kept hate speech to a lower level. You can’t have snappy tweets from Wendy’s if Wendy might be accused of advertising on the N-word hashtag. If Twitter’s going to survive, it has to make money. To do that, they’re going to have to keep advertisers happy. That means banning hate speech and violence.

People Don’t Want Musk’s Vision

“Twitter, the company, makes very little interesting technology; the tech stack is not the valuable asset. The asset is the user base: hopelessly addicted politicians, reporters, celebrities, and other people who should know better but keep posting anyway.”

– Nilay Patel, The Verge

Forget the brands. They’re not what’s important on Twitter. The quips, the memes, the news, the news alongside the quips and memes, that’s what Twitter is. It’s clever little jokes in the town square where you can hear from both the New York Times and someone overlaying fart noises on weather reports every time the meteorologist mentions wind gusts. Twitter works because it’s not just “the town square,” but it’s the town square with security making sure people don’t hurt others.

Most people don’t want to be on Parler, Truth Social, Gab, Stormfront, 4chan, or other hate-filled websites. They want a safe place to post and share ideas. That’s what free speech is. Free speech isn’t the ability to say horrible things, it’s the ability to safely contribute your opinions. You can’t have free speech in a place that allows hate speech, because marginalized groups will always have to stay silent for their safety. If you’re silencing some groups, you haven’t introduced “free speech,” you just gave the microphone to those who would use it to do harm.

Hate speech silences marginalized groups as well as everyone who doesn’t want to be associated with hate. There are plenty of people who would never use Parler or some other alt-right network not because they’re a persecuted minority, but because they don’t want to be associated with the alt-right. Meanwhile, Musk’s vision creates a place where women, non-white people, Jewish people, LGBTQ+ people, and just anyone who doesn’t want to be known as “one of those Twitter users” won’t feel free to speak. Musk is silencing far more people, just to elevate hate speech. He says he doesn’t want to create “echo chambers,” but all he’s doing is making sure there’s only one echo chamber: his.

And if he wants to sit alone in the dark and listen to echoes of the N-word, antisemitism, and transphobia, he could have saved $44 billion and just sat alone in a Tesla, shouting his thoughts to himself.

Author’s Note

While I deleted my personal Twitter account, Leaf and Core is still up on Twitter. You won’t find this article there for a while though, I’m going to hold off until anything anti-Musk doesn’t instantly engage his trolls, if that ever happens. Instead, head over to Tumblr or Facebook, and follow there. Tumblr even has some new guidelines that may revitalize the platform! You can even subscribe to Leaf and Core through RSS!

Twitter isn’t a place that will be safe to post anything in short order. Best to avoid it.

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