Charlie Warzel: Elon’s Disastrous Weekend

Welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I’m Shirley Sykes. So how many days has it been since Elon Musk became the supreme leader of Twitter How is it going so far? We are joined today by Charlie Warzel contributing redder to the Atlantic. Who writes the invaluable newsletter in Galaxy Brain about technology media and big ideas also, co author of the book out of office.

So, Charlie, welcome back to the podcast. Thank you for having me. So does Elon Musk have any idea what he’s gotten himself into?

Short answer, no. The short answer is no because it seems that, you know, I I don’t wanna take away from the fact that Elon Musk has built several successful companies and seems to understand how to, you know, come up with a large concept idea and hire people who, you know, are actual rocket scientists. Store car engineers and and put those things into the world. Totally get that. Content moderation.

Which is the sort of supreme thing that you do when you’re the owner of of a big social platform that kind of controls a lot of the levers of politics and and culture in America and other places. Content moderation is extremely tricky. And the past, let’s say, fifteen years of social media is a series of it’s always dudes. Dudes deciding that they have a really great idea to connect people and to sort of promote discourse. In a new and interesting way, and they create a platform.

And then people use these platforms in all kinds of ways. Some are great. Some are absolutely nightmarish. And then these guys say, whoa. Whoa.

Whoa. This is what we thought. And they struggle with this sort of eternal question of not just the Internet, but like discourse in general, which is how do you balance free and open debate? With maximum allowable speech. And the truth is that it’s extremely difficult.

And then you throw in a business in the center of that So, you know, ad advertisers need for revenue, and it gets even more complicated. And Elon Musk has sort of stumbled into this. I think he seems to think Twitter is a super fun thing that is kind of it’s a it’s a nice, you know, business card to have. Right? And it’s kinda fun.

And and he can be trolling chief now. Exactly. Cheah Twit. I believe — Yeah. — is choose what he likes to say.

And he gets to make all these kinds of jokes and, you know, he gets to correspond with everyone this morning. He’s you know, tweeting back and forth with Stephen King. It it’s it’s very clear he loves the platform. Like, he is he is one of the power users of the platform. So we can’t, you know, claim that he’s ignorant about what he bought.

But he is very ignorant based off of everything that I have read of his, everything I’ve heard of him talk about when it comes to the moderation job, the sort of that balancing of those two, you know, open debate and and maximum allowable speech categories. He he doesn’t really understand not only how to go about doing that in a responsible way, but also he doesn’t understand what Twitter has tried in the past to do this and and what they’ve succeeded at and what they failed at. So he’s in way over his head. He’s in way over his head. You know, he

obviously, he thinks of himself as a great deep thinker feels like he spent about five minutes thinking about these very complicated issues. And now he’s at they just throw shit up against the wall stage of all of this. So So let’s talk about his disastrous weekend. He’s he’s on charge for what? Four days.

And you have a great piece of the Atlantic. The disastrous weekend. So what made it so incredibly shambolic? Which is the nicest word I can use here. Because I’m I’m I’m trying to avoid using words like ClusterFux.

So she’s jumbo.

It’s a it’s a family podcast. Oh, no. So let’s see. What made it? So disastrous or shambolic, is that it was watching somebody who just very clearly isn’t good at this.

Try to figure everything out in in real time. I think the way that that my myself and my colleague, David Barris, put it in the piece was that it was like a guy waking up in a new house in the first night and just sort of stumbling around in the dark trying to find the light switch because it’s a, you know, it’s a new place. And that’s how it felt. And there were so many inconsistencies. Right?

So he right before the deal closes, he writes this really, like, bloodless executive speech letter to advertisers that’s, like

Listen, that is a hellscape. It’s not being I don’t wanna make it under my watch. Yeah.

And also, you know, he did the very classic thing that, like, every tech executive has ever done where they say, you know, the advertising can be we can elevate the advertising so that it it’s actually as good as the content, which is, you know, always pretty much a lie. But anyway, it was this very, like, oh, is he gonna be? This, like, kind of buttoned up? Executive once he has his, you know, fingers on the reins or whatever. And then it turns out absolutely not.

He’s not going to be at all. Gonna be his his usual trollish self. He tweeted on Friday that he was going to do this content moderation council where he’s gonna have a wide variety of viewpoints and that, you know, no decisions would be made without, you know, the entire council. Of course, there’s no think he’s making this up as he goes along, you know,

who that’s gonna be. That sounded like just a punt. It’s sort of like when a politician has no idea what it’s gonna do, they name a blue ribbon cast force. This was like, yeah, I I don’t have anything, so I’m just gonna throw that stuff against the wall. I

think that’s what the what he genuinely wants. Right? He does want this, like, council of elders, these people making these decisions. I think in his mind, he’s like, well, you know, if we get like like, you know, Candice Owens and Alexandria caused your Cortez somehow to sit in a room together. You know, they’re gonna battle it out in the, you know, thunderdome of ideas and we will who’s come up with a content moderation policy.

Of course, that a will never happen. B, it would be a disaster. I do think that’s what he wants. But anyway, like, literally three hours later, he tweets to the DailyWire’s Jordan Peterson that all people who have been banned for, like, minor infractions are going to be reinstated under him immediately. And it was just this very classic no decisions will be made until the council approves them and then three hours later.

Actually, I’m I it’s not really a democracy. I’m gonna reinstate some people, you know, as soon as I can. So there’s this this total inconsistency. Right? And then, obviously, like, let’s fast forward to Sunday, which is the big day.

In the Elon Musk weekend, which is where he is replying to a tweet from Hillary Clinton with a conspiracy theory around the Pelosi home invasion and attack. I’m not even gonna talk about what the conspiracy theory was, but it was ridiculous from a website that has traffic in total fake news before. And It’s this idea that Musk says on Thursday, I don’t want this to become a hellscape. I want, you know, free and open debate. I want this to be a tool where people can use to learn about the world and knowledge is power, etcetera, etcetera.

And then he’s, like, trollishly sharing fake news links. It’s so inconsistent. Right? I mean, it is it is the the the Dante’s inferno

of hellscapes by Sunday. Right? I mean, You have to peel the onion of lawfulness here because he’s tweeting a conspiracy theory about and I’m sorry. It was a bit that’s homosexual, you know, homophobic meme that was pushed out there. And then he links to a site that is is, like, in the hall of fame for bullshit conspiracy sites.

I mean, this is a site that’s so bizarre that in twenty sixteen, it was reporting that Hillary Clinton had been killed on nine eleven and that it was a UFO body double that was campaigning for president. I mean, so, you know, with all the debate after all these years of debating, what do we do misinformation controls and, you know, false stories. Here you have the guy in his first seventy two hours tweeting out the worst, you know, just toxic crap that was immediately, obviously, debunked. And it’s so

inconsistent too, even from Sunday morning. Like, you don’t even have to go back to the I don’t want Twitter to be a Healthscope letter. On Sunday morning, Elon Musk replies to a tweet from LeBron James. LeBron James on sun on Saturday night tweeted that he was really worried about this uptick in accounts using racial slurs. You know, this sort of idea that Elon Musk took control of Twitter and all these racists and neo Nazis are flooding the plot form and they’re really activated and energized.

Right?

Which

And he tweets that he tweets that, you know, he shares some information from some engineers Twitter that, you know, this isn’t actually as big a deal as as as we think. This is a small targeted network of accounts. We’re working on it. And the the, you know, inference behind that tweet is He doesn’t want LeBron James, a very powerful cultural person, and also someone with a lot of followers on Twitter. He doesn’t want him or other people to think that Elon Musk is the cause of the degradation of this network into a bunch of, you know, abuse and misinformation.

And then, like, two hours later, he’s out there sharing just, like, the lowest bottom of the barrel viral garbage that that you can have. And so what we wrote in the piece was essentially Elon Musk has tasked himself with basically trying to solve these historical multi generational issues of free speech on the Internet. It’s a nearly impossible task. And people who have tried before him and either failed or, you know, not been able to, you know, perfect the balance. Have been reasoned.

They’ve been smart. They’ve had restraint in how they are running their businesses. Elon Musk is not any of that. Right? And he’s trying to do

it on the fly. Exactly. Making it up as he goes along. And when

you think about, you know, how difficult the task is in front of him, and you think about the way that he is behaving, there’s just no way. I mean, I really don’t want to be overly pessimistic. It’s not great in my line of work. To predict that Elon Musk will absolutely one hundred percent fail, and I don’t know the future. But when you look at what is required to try to restore some of the integrity of these types of platforms to really balance these difficult issues.

This is not the person you task to do this. Right? This is not the person who is going to solve these issues. This is a man who is essentially just he’s a troll. Right?

And that doesn’t mean he might not be able to build rockets or cars or do whatever, you know, he can. But I do not think that he and his friends who he is tasking and, you know, giving names like chief meme officer. I mean, this is a game to them. And Twitter is not a game. It is very much where, unfortunately, we are conducting a lot of our politics and commentary and and where a lot of that culture derives from.

So it’s fun to laugh at and kind of roll your eyes at Elon and think of him as a bond supervillain or whatever you wanna do. But at the end of the day, to me, it’s extremely depressing because we’ve given the keys to this important lever of communications over to someone who is

one of the more shallow thinkers on the topic and reckless. So as as you point out, the tweet about Paul Pelosi, he eventually deleted which actually angered some of the users like Gynona’s cast heard who apparently Elon Musk was very concerned about what catured things. So, I

mean, Trump

used to retweet catured. And so, catured thought that Musk had caved into the liberal mob. So, here’s the problem for Elon Musk that you you wanna have general motors continue to advertise on your site. You’re concerned that LeBron James not think that you are a toxic swamp, but then you also need to cater to catchered. It’s not going to end well.

Yeah. It’s there’s the classic line of, you know, I never thought the leopards would eat my face. Exactly. And and it yeah. It it’s this you know, he has this hilarious for us to watch, probably very difficult for him, balanced a strike.

Right? He he has all these people that he wants to appease he wants to be seen. I mean, I I genuinely think that he really does love to be liked try not to do too much psychoanalysis, but it does seem like, you know, he really he loves activating these you know, groups of people he wants to be seen as sort of a savior of Twitter on the free speech end, but he’s just going to piss those people off

because

those two people want anarchy. Like, they just want absolute chaos. And, of course, absolute chaos does not jive with the advertising business or any, you know, any of the economics of the platform, which he really has to worry about. You can see right now his whole have users pay for verification. I

wanna get

to that. And I’m in fiasco. He’s on Twitter talking to Steven King this morning. About the fact that, well, I I know it’s not great, but we need to raise money because we have to pay for the website. So he’s got real economic incentives to make money.

And, you know, it’s not gonna cut it if he’s just courting neo Nazis. Well,

this is also gonna be taking up a larger and larger portion of his brain if if he has to answer every single celebrity that tweets at him. So one one more thing because I wanna I wanna get to this whole, you know, charging the through the blue check-in in a moment. You know, clearly, he’s also really adopted this this sort of manga like persona of never apologizing, always trolling. So The New York Times, runs a story after this fiasco over the weekend saying Musk shared link from site known to publish false news, and then Musk Troll Tweets back that he had not shared a link from The New York Times, like, okay. Get it.

You know? So he’s he’s clearly not a pop apologetic. He’s gonna continue to be a troll and he’s not ever going to apologize. So let’s just talk about this. There’s charging for the blue check mark.

Now you you tweeted out that you’re not gonna pay for it. I’m not gonna pay for it. I actually think that it becomes kind of this reverse filter that that anyone that actually still has it after ninety days is like a sucker named Elon Musk. So Again, this is a guy that paid forty four billion dollars for this business. And in the first seventy two hours, he’s coming up with ideas that seemed barely half baked.

Yeah. It’s I think that the the verification thing. I mean, it’s it’s supposedly going to be twenty dollars a month. That’s considerable. Yeah.

You do get some things when you are verified. On Twitter, you get you know, better controls to deal with spam and abuse, which as someone who’s been on Twitter with a blue check mark for a while, I I won’t deny that that’s that’s a great thing. Am I going to pay, like, double what I pay for, like, Netflix and Hulu a month just for that seems I will not. Yeah. Also, I do think you’re right.

I think it it sort of runs the risk of the people who will be verified will be either seen as, you know, extremely uncool or or, you know, Elon Musk fanboys and there’s a whole sort cultural thing about that. But but when when I when I look at this, right, he this is something that’s like he’s clearly at headquarters all weekend, trying to come up with different ideas to raise revenue with, you know, himself and his little council of advisors and Tesla people. Who he’s brought into, for some reason, evaluate the code of Twitter engineers, which is interesting, to say the least. But it’s very clear that he’s just, as you say, doing this on the fly. Right?

Because this trial balloon has floated. But what we don’t know is, well, our government accounts going to have to pay? Or is the United States government gonna have to pay Elon Musk’s to have, you know, white house at Twitter dot com or, you know, whatever White House at verified. Right? Our news organizations, our journalists in war zones going to have to pay Elon Musk and Twitter money in order to be verified to deliver information about, you know, things that are happening on the front line in Ukraine.

The whole point of owning and operating a social network is that the big broad strokes are actually somewhat easy The very difficult thing is having two hundred fifty plus million people and all of the edge cases. Right? All of those little things that pop up. Right?

You know,

a big part of running Twitter is dealing with law enforcement requests trying to unmask anonymous dissidents in foreign countries. Right? I don’t believe that Elon Musk has thought for forty five seconds about that. Right? And it’s the same thing, like, okay, this is a in theory, this is a small little revenue generating thing.

It’s certainly going to make a lot of news because because, you know, the blue check has kind of become this, you know, cultural elite signifier in a way he’s almost kind of trolling you know, all the journalists on Twitter and saying, you know, you gotta pay me if you wanna, you know, keep your cultural elite status. There’s

all those,

like, sort of broad strokes things that are interesting or funny or possibly sound like good ideas. And then there’s all of the actual logistics of it. Right? How is this gonna be implemented? And it seems like he it’s really trite to make the Trump comparison.

But it’s very similar to the way that, you know, Donald Trump would announce an infrastructure week style thing. Right? I’m gonna do this and, you know, it’s clear his staff hasn’t been briefed. Right? He’s just tweeting from the residents about this stuff.

It’s a very similar thing. And we’re all kind of just especially in the in the tech media, people like myself, we’re just kinda stuck in this reactive crouch responding to these things that may or may not be true and may just be pseudo events and feeling kinda dumb the entire time that we’re forced to care. But because of the position he’s put himself in, we do have to care. A good

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So you write in your piece that the bottom line is that this weekend it was a disaster and it’s only gonna get worse. You talked to employees who are saying that staffers are packing their bags and they’re expecting bedlam in the coming days. So what is going on in the Twitter headquarters this week? Who wants to stick around? Is it gonna be what I’m getting at?

Well, I’ve spent over a decade reporting on the company and I’ve had quite a few disagreements with the way that the product is run. I will say though there’s there’s two things about Twitter that are worth mentioning. One is that in the aftermath of all the the total abuse of the platform during the twenty sixteen election, Twitter committed to really trying to help its users out. Right? It didn’t try to do some sort of truth commission.

What it did is it tried to give people tools to make sure that they could moderate their own experience. Right? If people were harassing them, they could better blocking tools, better quality control filters, better abuse reporting functions. They did a really good job, you know, calling bots in a in a lot of different awful things off the platform to help people. So that’s one thing that’s important.

And one of the reasons why that happened is because two, there are a lot of people at Twitter who really believe in the product, who really care quite a bit about it, you know, not all of them are power users, but but who really truly believe in in the fundamental mission and see it as sort of this for good or bad cornerstone of our discourse and want to, you know, make it as helpful and, you know, net positive to

all that. And

that’s why some of these people are staying around because they actually care about the product. They they really, they believe in it. And I think that that is meaningful. You know, some of them are also staying because their their stock hasn’t quite vested yet. Right?

There’s, you know, there’s very practical concerns there. They put in their time they would like to, you know, to get get their money. Elon has been firing people before the vest sting dates, which is just, you know, kind of a shitty thing to do. But, you know, what you can see is from these first couple days, almost said weeks, but it’s just days, is that he’s he’s really a terrible manager. He might be, you know, again, a visionary, whatever.

I’m not gonna go into that part of it. But from a, how do you run a workplace to you know, make your employees feel taken care of safe. Well, one thing you don’t do is just, like, have the specter of mass terminations, just hovering over people for a week plus. That’s not a great way to engender loyalty in your workforce. And that’s exactly what Elon Musk is doing.

He’s, you know, he’s doing this whole thing where he is governing Twitter by, you know, a series of of public tweets. So we know as much about what’s going on inside sometimes as the people you know, who are building the product. But this whole verification thing he he reportedly told the team you have seven days to roll it out or we’re gonna start firing people. It’s a bad way to run a business and what I think he’s going to learn is as devoted as the Twitter staff might be, Silicon Valley is a very competitive job market. These people with these engineering and coding skills, they can go out and get jobs elsewhere at companies where they’re not being threatened with terminations every you know, seven days.

Well,

as as one employee told you in your co author that even if you ideologically agree with him unless you love being a replaceable TOG who has to dance on command. This is not a workplace to be in. As for users, you should already be seeing the influx of hate speech porn was already taking over, and it will get worse. And apparently, porn is the highest growing topic of interest according to Reuters. Alongside cryptocurrency.

That’s that’s going to be great. And, again, as you point out, most of the company expects to be fired sometime this week. So you kind of wonder what the level of productivity is. So let’s go back to the issue of of content moderation. To the degree that he has, you know, spent more than forty five thinking about it.

He he is unequivocal on the point of preserving broad speech protections for even the most odious users basically good news for, you know, Marjorie Taylor Green, Jim Jordan, people like that. So what do you think? Does he bring back Alex Jones? Does he bring back Nick Fuentes? Does he bring back massage in his British American kickboxer who talks about beating up women.

What do you think he’s gonna do? He’s gonna have to make a decision sooner or later. Right? Well, this is this is one of the reasons why I’m very curious about

the quote unquote moderation council of elders. It may be a way for him to kind of deflect blame on that decision. Right? Yeah. I think with some of these people, like, I I don’t know if he does necessarily want to bring back, you know, let’s say like Nick Fuentes.

Right? Yeah. I mean, even Alex Jones is, like,

he could

you know, Alex Jones is is has has an entertainment factor to him. Right? Like the frog the gay frogs, you know, lines and stuff like that. So he might be able to, you know, pass that off with a with a wink and a nod and a always so funny sometimes. Mhmm.

I I think the Sandy Hook stuff has probably tainted that legacy too much, but this council might be a way for him to, you know, kind of pawn those decisions off on other people, those really consequential

ones. I mean, I just I I have no idea. Yeah. And yet he’s freelancing. So, you know, you you have this guy Mark Finchham, who’s the conspiracy not running for secretary of state in Arizona.

Had been briefly suspended from Twitter on Monday and then was reactivated after he got Janet Ellis to tag Musk and then Musk personally intervened and put him back on. I mean, so is it gonna be like that? I mean, it’s gonna be that if you can get his attention in some way so, I mean, so much for the council. And that’s kinda bullshit, obviously.

Right?

I mean, this is the way that Twitter actually used to work back in in twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen. Right? There there weren’t real processes to get reinstated or to help someone out with an abusive account. What people would do is tag journalists like myself and say, hey, you know, I’m a woman, look at all these you know, death and rape threats that I’m getting. And then someone like myself would email Twitter and say, hey, doesn’t this violate the rules and poof that account would be gone.

Right? The harassing account. That’s the way the things got done. It was extremely ad hoc. People had, you know, no autonomy over their own experience and were miserable as a result.

So I’ve always said that I think the most likely scenario for what Twitter looks like in let’s now let’s just say twenty twenty three, right, in a couple months into his reign, is that I think it’s gonna look a lot like Twitter in, you know, let’s say, October twenty sixteen, which is just a bit of a free for all. There will be, you know, I think there will be awful accounts that will be removed. Like, I I sort of don’t think that truly, like, harassing neo Nazis who are, like, targeting people with, you know, horrible, horrible hate speech. I don’t think those people are going to be allowed to stay on because I think he has to respond to these advertising incentives. But I do think that a lot of the people who in the sort of trumpian way, in the Alex Jonesian way, are kind of always, you know, walking right up to the line and sticking a toe over it and testing and poking and prodding the, you know, the rules and moderation.

I think those are gonna gonna be the people who he will either reinstate or keep on because he’ll say, oh, it wasn’t

that

bad. Right? I think the the true odious examples are still going to be, you know, cold. But all that stuff that’s, you know, a toe over the line it all adds up to an experience

that feels toxic. Your your prediction, which I think is probably right, that it’s going to be like Twitter back in twenty sixteen, which was pretty ugly place, as you point out, you know, was pretty ugly, especially if you were a woman, Jewish, a person of color, a member of any minority group. You mentioned when certain people including me, you mentioned Ben Shapiro, but I also had this regularly photoshopped into a gas chamber by accounts with SS Avatar. It was a honeypot for assholes back back then. So let let’s say we returned to that moment.

I have to say though that in the six years since twenty sixteen, everything has gotten worse. Everything is more toxic. It does seem like you just can’t dial back. In many ways, we it was a it was a kind of gentle or more innocent era because we thought that those were outliers. And it has become this surging volcano.

So if you had the openness in twenty twenty three that you had in twenty sixteen, it’s gonna be pretty ugly, isn’t it? I mean, we live in a different world than we lived in twenty sixteen. True? Disagree. I mean, I think so.

I think all of this stuff has

just matured. Right? All of these people? The word I would have used, but No. I mean, I matured I mean, in a sense of, like, they’ve gotten more involved in their tactics.

Right? Everyone has sort of learned. Everyone’s figured out their their camps. There was a lot of as I think you said, like, throwing shit against the wall. Right?

There was this idea of, like, well, you know, what can we do to make candidate Donald Trump memes in the office quote unquote. I think now all these sort of tactics have hardened. Right? The lines are very well drawn. And yeah, I mean, this is why I’m so frustrated by Musk’s takeover of a platform that is so central to our political discourse, which is that we need adults at the home.

Right? We need like something here. We need people who I don’t really care about their politics. So much. I really don’t.

I don’t really even care about the shit posting. I just care about someone who takes this challenge very seriously. Someone who’s willing to be transparent about it who’s willing to act in a responsible manner who who sees, you know, the integrity and the reach and importance and healthy conversations on the platform as paramount to their own ego. And with Elon Musk, you’re never going to put anything in front of his ego in front of his sort of ability to create spectacle and generate attention. And that’s what so depressing to me because as you state, we’re going into these midterms, and then we’re going to have the way that I’ve kind of put it is, like, the American interrectum is like over.

Right? Like, we’re about to head into something that’s going to probably feel like twenty sixteen or twenty twenty for the next two years. It’s gonna be chaotic and pretty toxic and awful. And, like, we need to have in all of our realms, like, adults, you know, holding onto the wheel and trying to steer some of these big platforms towards, you know, helping us come out of it, not

worse than

we were when we started, and I don’t believe that’s gonna happen.

So going

back to the beginning, if Elon Musk really has no idea what he’s getting into and he’s gonna get caught up in all of these tangles of these irresolvable problems, and he’s gonna get hit from everybody, from Cat Turd, to, you know, the New York Times,

etcetera. How

does it end? How long does this hold Elon Musk’s attention? Does he get bored? Does he just walk away from it? Does he just say screw it?

What do you think happens? I

want to say that he’s going to get bored. It does seem in some, you know, when you’re gaming it out in your head. It does seem like one of the most likely outcomes. Right? This again, these issues are are not fun to deal with.

Like, being the head of Twitter sounds like a great job. It’s a great business card. In practice, it’s just everyone is mad at you all the time. Right. Right?

You just cannot appease anyone and and also decisions that you’re making have the ability to cause these ripple effects throughout culture and politics. Right? You could you can endanger people just by a decision that you’ve made. And I think that that’s going to wear on him. I mean, the thing that you teased is like here’s a man who’s running some of these really large publicly traded companies that are trying to do things like, you know, change the way we use fossil

fuels

and and drive. And now he’s spending almost all of his time, you know, dealing with content moderation issues on a on a social media form. So are these other projects gonna, you know, draw him into a different place? Is he going to make so many decisions that he just feels like he’s hated? And then so he decides to just kind of back up.

Another big part of it is is the economics of it. The the financing of Twitter, like Morgan Stanley, taken on thirteen billion dollars worth of debt. And at some point, they’re going to have to call in their receipts on that or or give it off to you know, distressed debt fund that doesn’t care at all about Musk. He’s paying over a billion dollars in interest on the loans every year. You know, those incentives are gonna catch up to him.

I really don’t know where it goes. I think ultimately there’s a high likelihood that he will say, oh, this was this was not worth the effort, but I think we just can’t predict it. This is

gonna be a lot less fun than he thinks it’s going to be, and it may turn out to be a lot less fun than his other businesses where he can actually do things, accomplish things, solve problems. Whereas this job, you know, it’s like every single day, you’re scripting more dog shit off your shoes, and it’s just endless, and there seems to wherever you go, you’re gonna step in more. And so there’s a frustration. So let me ask you this question. This is a complete hypothetical.

Because I know you speculated, you know, the ways in which he can kill Twitter. Well, let’s just leave aside whether he’s gonna kill it or whether he’s just gonna return. Let’s say that he did. That it becomes just this toxic dump and that nobody wants to be there. So where do we go?

By we, I mean, people like you and me, people blue checks, people who want to engage in debates about the news about politics and everything. Where where

do we

go? I mean, the the right figure, well, We’ll create parallel. We’ll create GAAP. We will do, you know, a true social. Yeah.

It hasn’t really worked out for them. So what is the plan b for us America, if he did totally crater

Twitter. Where’d we go? Facebook? What? I don’t know because It’s a really interesting question because of the fact that there’s not really a network that exists like Twitter.

Everything about Twitter that is maddening. That is awful, that is toxic, is exactly the thing that makes it so wonderful. Right? It’s this idea that there’s this sort of public facing layer to it. Right?

Like, I can say whatever I wanna say and I have my audience and my audience will, you know, likely see that. But then you can take it and you can amplify that message with your own commentary and sort of shift it into the context of your own space. Now a lot of times that can be so great. It’s the way that, like, you know, you meet new people. It’s the way that you end up having a weird, you know, back and forth conversation with, like, a celebrity or, you know, some kind of public facing person that you would never have met or talked to before.

It’s also the way that, like, a troll or trollish politician or someone can, quote, tweet you and send you into a spiral of abuse. Mhmm. There’s not a thing that that really works like and that that has that kind of public town square vibe to it. And I don’t know what happened. If we lose that.

Because I do think, like, I I use TikTok a lot, and TikTok has elements of that. Right? There’s a lot of people on TikTok who spend their time commenting on tweets. Like like big viral tweets. Like, there there are lots of overlaps in some of these networks.

But none of them do exactly what Twitter does, which has that sort of, like, we’re all, you know, sort of sitting around in the amphitheater and different people get to come and, you know, talk and we all get to talk about them talking. And it’s so I do think that there’s something really

at stake

here if if it’s a loss because I don’t know where people go. Now I think that the nature of social media and the nature of all media, right, is that it just gen generally evolves. And everyone has sort of the the different medium that they grew up with and and you don’t have to be young to have grown up with it. Right? Like, you and I are products of in social media of Twitter.

That’s sort of our thing. With us and a lot of journalists. And I think that for people who are just coming out of college now, that’s going to be something like TikTok or maybe parts of Instagram or Snapchat. And so I just think there is a doubt. Yeah.

I do. And I think that we have to be in some ways okay with that. And, you know, Twitter is not going to exist forever in the way that we know we’ve known it in the in the importance that we’ve known it. And that could be a good thing. But in terms of where we go in that process, if for some reason it is sort of destroyed beyond repair, that’s a really interesting question.

And I think anyone who says they have any ideas lying to you? So, I

mean, it could be a few years from now. It’d be Tom Nichols and I and, you know, a bunch of old people just tweeting like like like sort of my space or something. I

it’s just gonna be you guys and the and the porn and the crypto scam. Something like that. So

what is the average age of a of a Twitter user? Do you have any idea? I actually

I don’t know. I don’t know offhand. Obviously, it’s a completely different

demographic a group than say TikTok or Snapchat? It is.

It’s also just it’s more niche. It really does court and favor people who have not only a love of news and things like that, but also who are have a love of text Right? It is a it is a really text heavy platform. To be good at

Twitter,

you have to be able to write in these, you know, short brief, you know, quippy ways, which has become its own art form. Yeah. It really it really has. I

don’t mean nothing to argue at all. No, it

definitely has. I talked to this a couple weeks ago, this political science professor at Penn State, his name is Kevin Munger. And he has this really interesting broader theory of really just the decline of text in general. In its importance. Like, it is obviously the cornerstone, you know, cultural medium and technology of, you know, the last whatever, you know, many hundreds of years in its importance.

But the way that the Internet is is is evolving now, has really deprioritized that. You know, like, people people who are great at making, you know, very quick short form video clips are actually able to reach more people and influence more people than you and I ever could with a really, really good tweet. And so I think there’s just this this really interesting way in which you know, the Internet sends everything into like a hyper speed evolution. Right? Things that took hundreds of years or dozens of years now take weeks months or just one year.

And I think that we’re seeing that a little bit with, you know, the different kind of broadcast media. We’re seeing it really shift to short form video. And I think there’s a way to be really alarmist and scared about that, but I also think there’s a way to just see this as somewhat of a natural evolution. And it’s possible that, you know, Musk being able to be in the position to buy Twitter Twitter being, you know, willing to accept the offer. It all speaks to the fact that Twitter is no longer an Ascendant social media platform.

Is it dying? I don’t know. I this this morning, I published a newsletter and I called Twitter geriatric social media. Because it’s just in that I’ve sort of felt I felt seen. I see.

It’s

in that, you know, that age

right now. It’s certainly I think to call it dying is an overstatement, but it’s no longer a cendant, and we have to see what’s going to happen as a result of I think I think it’s honestly kind of a fascinating time. It is. But for people like us who have really relied on this for our jobs, for our ability to meet people and sources, and talk their ideas, and find experts. It’s it’s definitely, like, there’s a bittersweet quality to it for sure.

Well, there is. But

also, at least for me, I didn’t grow up with this, and I did not see this coming. And so you do wonder what’s the next thing that I don’t see coming that could actually open, you know, different sorts of, you know, opportunities. So, Charlie, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast. Charlie Warzel is contributing a writer at the Atlantic, and you should definitely subscribe to his newsletter, Galaxy Brain. Charlie, thanks for coming back on the podcast.

Thanks as always. The

Bowler podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio production by Jonathan Seary. I’m Charlie Sykes. Thank you for listening to today’s Bulwark podcast. We’ll be back tomorrow and do this all over again.

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