By Leah Feiger
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Makena Kelly: Hello.
By Joseph Cox
By Marah Eakin
Leah Feiger: I can’t wait to hear about all of that. But let’s start with Elon Musk. If I was to trace back the end of Twitter, it would obviously start with him. David, why did Musk buy Twitter? Take us back to that time.
[Archival audio clip]: Then you changed your mind again and decided to buy it. Did you do that-
Elon Musk [Archival audio clip]: Well, I kind of had to.
[Archival audio clip]: Right. Did you do that because you thought that a court would make you do that?
Leah Feiger: I always forget that. I always forget that and I love it so much.
Makena Kelly: If you look at that time, it’s around the same time that regulators, even just the news, there’s more skepticism about what it is that Elon Musk is doing. He’s not this messiah character who’s going to carry us into some beautiful progressive world where we all drive autonomous vehicles and have solar panels on our houses. People were starting to be a lot more critical of him. Twitter is a space where you have news makers, taste makers, very important people on this platform who are using it every day and that’s where you can really drive a lot of conversation. I feel like Elon Musk, even if it wasn’t front-of-mind, I think he at least knew subconsciously that having some kind of power over this platform would be helpful to him and his brand.
By Matt Burgess
By Matt Burgess
Leah Feiger: Like you guys have said, it was such a political space at the time, when he got into it. Journalists, celebrities, politicians, everyone was engaging in endless conversation, political scandals aplenty. But it was very political and it seemed like Must wanted in on that. After he bought Twitter, he did a ton of things right away. Talk us through some of the changes he made in the company.
[Archival audio clip]: Thousands of Twitter employees were laid off today and the news of the termination came in an email.
David Gilbert: One employee famously posted a picture of herself sleeping under her desk because she was working throughout the night at Twitter at the time. Another major step he took is that he got rid of the verified blue check marks that people had been given across politics, journalism, the media. People who were well known and had their identities verified on the platform had been given these blue marks so you could trust that those people were who they said they were. Musk felt that it was a two-tiered system. Instead, he implemented a new system where you could pay for one of those blue check marks, paying him for the premium subscription, and you get a whole load of other benefits I guess, along with that, including the fact that you can monetize your content. Instead of posting content that was verified, and truthful, and interesting, and that people genuinely thought others would be interested in, people began posting content solely to feed the algorithm. And began posting content quickly, instantly after major incidents happened. It just turned Twitter upside down overnight because it meant that no longer were trusted accounts at the top of your feed. Instead, you were getting these people who were paying $8 a month to have a blue check mark next to their name and their content was being promoted higher in your feed, whether or not it was truthful. More often than not, it was disinformation or misinformation that was being promoted.
Makena Kelly: It wasn’t really even just changing the policy on this, and changing all the blue checks and stuff. He also was inviting back people who had previously been cast off.
By Joseph Cox
Makena Kelly: Has he done what he wanted to do? I think kind of and kind of not. The internet was already on this path towards breaking up and splintering off into dozens of different sites where it’s very difficult to basically create a monoculture. There is no monoculture anymore. I think Twitter and a lot of these social platforms were the reason why a lot of big trends and stuff happened in the 2010s.
Leah Feiger: Like you said, just having white supremacists and Nazis back on the platform, this is an entirely different space now.
Leah Feiger: They blamed Ukraine, which was wild, within minutes. That was wild to watch happen.
By Marah Eakin
Leah Feiger: Right.
David Gilbert: Without checking anything, without doing any due diligence. I think it was John Scott Railton who summed it up quite well. He’s a researcher for Citizen Lab and he looks at Twitter quite a lot. He just said, “It’s become a useless morass of disinformation around the Robert Fico shooting. Try searching for his name, almost certainly the top results I get are contradictory conspiracy theories. Good luck even surfacing fact checked, substantiated information.”
Leah Feiger: Of course not.
Makena Kelly: These narratives get pushed so fast and they go so viral without any way to fact check them or counteract them because of all the changes that Musk has made.
Makena Kelly: Sure. We have of course seen Biden on TikTok. We have seen Trump doing whatever he’s doing with inviting influencers over to go see him. But I think the big thing happening right now is relational organizing. Back in 2021, 2022, the Ossoff campaign and the Warnock campaigns in Georgia were some of the first to really experiment with relational organizing at scale. When I talk about relational organizing, what I’m talking about is when voters post memes, they host events, they have group chats. They just talk to their people at church and they tell them everything about voting. But it is supported with the tools and the information, and the other stuff coming from political groups. They had the information and they had the materials they need to have these conversations. That has definitely grown a lot recently. The Biden campaign of course is experimenting with its own. There was a Washington Post story last year about how, when the Tailor Swift album was getting ready to come out … This would have actually only been a couple months ago. Some of these relational organizers were throwing events at schools, creating the beaded bracelets that we so are accustomed.
By Joseph Cox
By Matt Burgess
By Matt Burgess
By Marah Eakin
Leah Feiger: In the New York Times article, reporters found that Musk vocally supporting India’s Narendra Modi on X may have actually led to Musk getting lower import tariffs for Tesla. Or in Brazil, support for Bolsonaro may have led to Musk getting a new market for Starlink. Those are very specific connections to make. This has become his own little business marketplace that used to be very different.
By Matt Burgess
By Matt Burgess
Makena Kelly: Yeah. I think it just becomes increasingly more vulcanized like we’ve been seeing because there is no one platform where people congregate online. Of course, there never really was.
Leah Feiger: Right.
David Gilbert: I was speaking to the researcher, Renee DiResta recently, she’s got a new book coming out called Invisible Rulers. She speaks about bespoke realities, where pretty much every single person has a different reality online because of the choices they make in terms of the platforms they use or the services that they interact with. You could be living next door to someone and their view of the world based on what they see online could be absolutely entirely different from you. Even someone who’s living in the same house as you, if they are consuming content either online or via TV, or even on the radio, that is markedly different from yours, which is much, much easier to do now because everyone has carved out these areas online for themselves where they know what their worldview is and they can get that fed back to them by the people they’re listening to.
Leah Feiger: Speaking of different worlds, I can’t wait to talk more about the New York-Dublin portal. We’re going to take a quick break, and then when we’re back, we’re going to go through the portal, a remnant of global connectivity. Before we take a break, we want to give a big shout-out and thank you to our friends at Amazon Music naming WIRED Politics Lab one of the best podcasts this week. Welcome to the new listeners of the show. We’re so excited to give you even more of the reporting and conversations you’re looking for. Welcome back. A portal has been opened between New York City and Dublin. Obviously, not a real portal, you can’t transport from one place to the other, but you can see the cities through a live video screen. While the original idea was to connect people across borders, the portal quickly became a bit of a mess.
By Joseph Cox
By Matt Burgess
By Marah Eakin
David Gilbert: Yeah, I was. It was great. We waved at each other from 3000 miles away.
David Gilbert: Sure. It’s a 3.4 meter tall circular installation, art installation is how they describe it. In the middle of it, it’s got a circular screen and just above the screen is a camera. There’s one in New York, there’s one in Dublin. They are connected in real time so that someone who’s standing in New York can wave and someone in Dublin. The idea is that it’s this digital bridge that brings people together. The plan is to have them effectively all over the world. There are two already in Eastern Europe and there’s plans for the next one I think in Brazil. It’s this idea by the artist that he wants to bring people together in a way that’s unique and different than connecting online digitally via social media.
David Gilbert: They just put their hands up. They saw what was happening in Poland and Lithuania, where the initial two portals were connected. They got in touch with the artist and they said, “We want to do something similar.” They found local organizations who were willing to help host the portal and they got it together. Finally, earlier this month, the portals finally opened.
David Gilbert: In Dublin, it’s Dublin City Council and the Tourist Board. It’s very much, in Dublin, a tourist-centric location. It’s just off O’Connell Street near the GPO, which is a very historic building in Ireland where the Irish Freedom Fighters came in 1916. In New York, it’s a local community organization, it’s in the Flatiron District in New York. They just want to bring people together in some way. It’s really interesting, given how connected we are in 2024.
Leah Feiger: It got shut down last week and then reopened. What happened there?
David Gilbert: It opened on May 8th and it was running 24/7. I think in the New York side, there was some security but in Dublin there was no security. It started off initially quite nicely. There was grandmothers and grandsons seeing each other through the portal. A woman in Dublin proposed to her boyfriend, who’s in New York and he said yes. It was really nice. But quickly, there was news stories coming out and video clips being shared online which showed, I think one of the initial problems was that people in Dublin were going up to the camera, holding up their phones and showing footage from 9/11 on the phones.
By Matt Burgess
By Matt Burgess
By Marah Eakin
David Gilbert: Yeah. The response from New York, which I found funny as an Irishman, was they began holding up potatoes. Some people got upset about that. It was like come on, I don’t understand people getting upset about that. Then there was a woman in Dublin who was seen grinding up against the portal and she was escorted away by the police. Again, not something I think is terribly awful, but anyway. Then the final straw I think was when an OnlyFans influencer from New York went in front of the New York portal and flashed the people in Dublin.
Leah Feiger: Definitely not.
David Gilbert: I just found it really heartwarming. It just felt as if people were there just solely, not necessarily to see anyone in particular. Obviously there were people who were there to see specific people and they had arranged to meet up. But most people were just there to wave at random strangers walking to work in New York.
Makena Kelly: Inspiring.
Leah Feiger: Let’s bring this back to the rest of the episode. What does this all have to do with politics? What does this really say about how we communicate with each other online or in public spaces like this?
By Matt Burgess
Leah Feiger: Oh, that would be so wonderful.
David Gilbert: I agree with you completely. I think it would be great. But you would have to purposely seek it out. Trying to find that kind of content is really difficult now because of the way the internet is set up these days.
Leah Feiger: Listeners, we’re going to be right back with Conspiracy of the Week. But in the meantime, we would love to hear about how your experiences of the internet have changed over the last five years. Write to us at [email protected]. That’s [email protected].
David Gilbert: It’s kind of a callback conspiracy from a few years ago that you may have heard of, but it’s been reactivated recently. I don’t know if you remember a term called luciferase. This is something that was going around during the Covid pandemic. It’s an enzyme that was used in some of the testing before Covid vaccines were created. It wasn’t in any of the Covid vaccines. But that didn’t stop the conspiracy theorists at the time claiming that luciferase was in the actual vaccines themselves. Obviously, because it’s called luciferase, that implies that it has something to do with Satan, or satanism, or satanic cults.
By Marah Eakin
Leah Feiger: Oh, no! A Red Lobster conspiracy? I missed this.
Leah Feiger: Oh, man. I never actually made it in for Endless Shrimp, and I felt such a pang of FOMO the minute that that got released. Very, very sad. OK, I loved the intricacies of David’s conspiracies, and I always want to talk about Red Lobster, so I think I’m going to have to declare this week a tie. No one’s a winner, but thank you so much for joining us this week.
David Gilbert: You’re welcome. It was fun.
Makena Kelly: Yeah. Bye!
Leah Feiger: Thanks for listening to WIRED Politics Lab. If you like what you heard today, make sure to follow the show and rate it on your podcast app of choice. We also have a newsletter which Makena writes each week. The link to the newsletter and the WIRED reporting we mentioned today are in the show notes. If you’d like to get in touch with us with any questions, comments or show suggestions, please write to [email protected]. That’s [email protected]. We’re excited to hear from you. WIRED Politics Lab is produced by Jake Harper. Jake Lummus is our studio engineer. Greg Obis at Macro Sound mixed this episode. Stephanie Kariuki is our executive producer. Jordan Bell is EP of development and Chris Bannon is global head of audio at Condé Nast. I’m your host, Leah Feiger. We’ll be back in your feeds with a new episode next week.
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