Our Reporting at Twitter

> As far as Musk sees things, “birth rates are plummeting, the thought police are gaining power, and even having an opinion is enough to be shunned. We are trending in a bad direction.”

> He says he wants to transform Twitter from a social media platform distrusted and despised by at least half the country into one widely trusted by most Americans. To have it fulfill its highest mission: that of a digital town square where all ideas can be heard, and the best will win out.

Talk about unfortunate timing. This grandiose PR fluff piece lands the same day Musk wields the ban hammer and removes a bunch of journalists and competitors from the platform, giving up all pretense of objectivity and "free speech absolutism".

> At one point I asked Musk what he makes of this criticism—that just as the old guard at Twitter had too much power, so does he.

> “I’m open to ideas,” he said.

I would argue that's highly debatable. He reacts to criticism by making wild pedo-guy accusations and he is remorseless in ignoring fundamentals like labour laws or alternate choices in tech. He's as open to ideas as any single minded autodidact. Which is to say he's only receptive to ideas he is primed to want to believe.

He's not very open to the ideas he might be too powerful, biased or wrong.

Couple of thoughts. She quotes Musk’s supposed rationale for buying Twitter uncritically for like 6 straight paragraphs. The fact that these stories came prepackaged with a catchy, marketable name isn’t particularly confidence inspiring as far how serious a journalistic endeavor this was.

I’m to believe Musk gave these people years’ worth of unfiltered access to previous communications within Twitter and each story that came of that was remarkably similar. Twitter controls what’s being said on their platform far more than what they’ve previously claimed, and it’s had the effect of promoting leftward political speech far more than any other viewpoint. Really? Nobody found any other interesting things worth reporting on from all of that? Weird.