Smell that? The removal, return and removal of Ye (Kanye West) in 2022, the increase in hate speech, overworked employees and posturing? Whatever particular bouquet of scent-bearing compounds these carry into your nostrils – I imagine a kind of feral funk – the soon-to-be-not ‘Chief Twit’ leaves a distinct pong hanging over Twitter.
“If anyone is foolish enough” to take his job, the Twitter CEO hopes to step down by the end of this year. Musk bought Twitter for $44bn on October 27th 2022. At 11.20pm on December 18th 2022 over 17,000,000 of his followers voted in a poll that he released, asking whether he should step down or not. 57.5% voted ‘yes’.
What he didn’t tell his followers before this, though, is that he will not step down until he finds what he deems to be a “suitable” successor. Also, he omits that he was receiving pressure from his investors due to his poor leadership of the company. There is certainly a whiff of manipulation here in not wanting his public image to be one of incompetency.
In his first tweet after buying the company, Musk hailed “free speech as the bedrock of a functioning democracy” and hailed Twitter as “the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated”. Musk went on to clarify that by “free speech” he meant “that which matches the law”.
Just before Musk bought Twitter Ye was removed, on October 10th, for a tweet which appeared to be a threat directed at Jewish people. On November 21st , Musk sanctioned the return of the artist formerly known as Kanye West to his “digital town square”.
Antisemitism, as a form of racism, is not something which falls under the bracket of “free (unpunishable) speech.” On December 1st 2022 Ye appeared on the Infowars podcast with host Alex Jones, the far-right conspiracy theorist, praising Adolf Hitler. Soon after he posted an image of swastikas inside a star of David on Twitter.
The next day ‘Chief Twit’ bans @kanyewest. All Musk has to say is “I tried my best”, referencing “incitement to violence” as his reasoning. A sniff of incompetence anyone? Anyway, Ye recently seems to have left antisemitism behind with an Instagram post stating “watching Jonah Hill in 21 Jump street made me like Jewish people again”. Jonah Hill must be thrilled and, perhaps, Mr. Musk will enable Ye to fill our noses with prejudicial scents once again.
Musk’s general negligence towards tackling hate speech, or an approach he might summarise as ‘giving people the benefit of the doubt’, was exposed by a report carried out by the Center for Countering Digital Hate.
Since he bought Twitter, the report cites an increase in the number of tweets using slurs against transgender people of 62 percent; tweets including slurs against black people increased from a daily average of 1,282 to 3,876 (and in the week Musk sent out a tweet claiming “hate speech impressions” were down, this number went up to 4,650).
Musk described these findings as “utterly false”, but they are surely a result of his firing half the workforce; especially the trust and safety teams that look after moderation.
The guff of Elon’s ‘musk’ hits different here. With the Ye situation it is more of reactive oozing to a situation, akin to a whimpering stink bug. In trying to streamline Twitter’s workforce, on the other hand, his active incompetence engulfs our olfactory receptors like the spray of an aggressively defensive skunk.
For those that remain at Twitter, however, at least Musk has shown a modicum of respect. They can wash his ‘musk’ off with the sink he brought with him on his first day. Or was that to throw the proverbial kitchen sink at Twitter’s business structure? – Hard to say.
I like to think that we can adapt the kitchen sink proverb, ‘throw the kitchen sink at it’, to ‘throw the brick at it’ in Musk’s case. When revealing the Cybertruck, described by Musk as a “futuristic battle tank” (nice one), he engaged his audience by inviting them to watch him throw a brick at one of its “bulletproof” windows. If we replace the kitchen sink he threw at Twitter with this brick, the social media platform is now comparable to a smashed Cybertruck window.
I digress; back to smells. The Twitter CEO’s feral funk enshrouds a company with its reputation hanging in the balance. His attempts at reinstituting “free speech” to the platform and leadership decisions have left him searching for a successor. What makes them “suitable” in his eyes remains a mystery, but I am sure that they will need a biohazard suit, delirious quantities of bleach and a sick bag to remove the lingering ‘musk’ of Elon.