When Elon Musk bought Twitter, one of the world’s most influential platforms for news and politics, he cast himself as a champion for free speech — a principle he believed had become imperiled under the social media company’s leadership at the time.
But Musk has since made seemingly contradictory decisions about how to manage speech on X, formerly Twitter, as he’s confronted the complex task of content moderation, a new FRONTLINE documentary reports.
One such series of decisions unfolds in the above excerpt from Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover, a two-hour special premiering Oct. 10 on PBS and online. The investigation probes the billionaire’s journey from one of the platform’s most provocative users to its owner, and examines the far-reaching impact Musk’s decisions have had on U.S. politics, speech and culture in the year since his takeover.
In the documentary, former Twitter employees, including Yoel Roth, former head of trust and safety at Twitter, share firsthand accounts of Musk’s consequential and at times discrepant choices on issues including free speech and hate speech. Roth tells FRONTLINE that in the early days of Musk’s tenure at the social media company, he was initially instructed to stop all content moderation on the platform.
“I explained that that wouldn’t be a viable approach because there’s lots of types of moderation that are simply non-negotiable — around combating terrorism, around protecting children,” Roth says in the above excerpt from Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover. “I suggested that we not shut down those lines of work, and he agreed.”
Musk would soon be tested.
“There was a trolling campaign that was supposedly testing the waters of the new Twitter,” Roth says in the excerpt. “The idea was that trolls should come to the platform and post racist content as proof that Elon was now allowing racism in a way that the previous administration didn’t. And so, there was a surge in racism.”
Faced with calls for major advertisers to pause their ad spending on the platform, Musk then changed course, pushing the team to take a more aggressive approach to content moderation than under Twitter’s previous owners, Roth tells FRONTLINE.
“My directions from Elon directly were: shut it down. Get rid of all of it,” Roth says. “He actually even wanted us to go further than we had previously and said, it’s not just about targeted hateful conduct, attacks on somebody. He’s like, just take all of this stuff down. Get rid of the slurs. Get rid of all of it. And he pushed us to take a more aggressive position, shutting down free speech. He was doing it out of a recognition that advertisers objected to this content and were judging him and the new Twitter by our ability to effectively moderate it.”
As the documentary recounts, though, when advertisers continued to stay away and revenue plummeted, Musk began pushing back: “Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation and we did everything we could to appease the activists,” Musk tweeted at the time. “Extremely messed up! They’re trying to destroy free speech in America.”
That’s when, the documentary recounts, Musk made a choice that seemed antithetical to his stated position as a free speech absolutist: Inside Twitter, he asked Roth and his team to block posts supporting the advertising pause.
It was a “very hypocritical” decision, according to Musk biographer Walter Isaacson.
“You had people urging boycotts because they thought Twitter was allowing too much hate speech, and Musk decided he wanted to shut down some of these people who were advocating a boycott,” Isaacson, author of Elon Musk, says in the excerpt. “Well, that goes against free speech principles. That’s pure political speech.”
Roth pushed back, Isaacson says; Twitter ultimately did not block the posts. But Roth says he found himself “spending more and more of my time each day dealing with impulsive and erratic questions and decisions.”
“I managed to push back on some of Elon’s requests to ban users outside of our policies, but I was sort of left wondering, at what point does that not work anymore? At what point does he not listen to me? At what point do I get fired for this?” Roth tells FRONTLINE. “And I realized that pushing back on individual bad decisions wasn’t going to be enough. And so, I quit.”
For the full story on Musk’s ongoing choices and their consequences, watch Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover. With the 2024 U.S. presidential election campaign underway and the debate about online free speech ongoing, the documentary is a profound investigation of how Musk has now remade X in his own image, and the implications for America and the world.
Through extraordinary, in-depth interviews with Roth and other former Twitter employees, as well as journalists, authors and academics, the documentary traces two parallel stories — Musk’s shift in politics during the COVID pandemic and Twitter’s struggle to deal with misinformation both before and after Musk’s takeover.
From James Jacoby and Anya Bourg — the award-winning team behind Amazon Empire and The Facebook Dilemma — the documentary also explores Twitter’s relationship with the U.S. government, a Congressional investigation into the platform’s treatment of conservative voices pre-Musk, and allegations of Musk’s use of the platform to target his perceived enemies (Roth would later on be singled out on X by Musk, and harassment and death threats followed).
Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover will be available to watch in full at pbs.org/frontline and in the PBS App starting Oct. 10, 2023, at 7/6c. It will premiere on PBS stations (check local listings) and on FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel at 9/8c.
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