Destination Digital’s Managing Director, Debbie Porter, was invited to talk on BBC Radio Derby about Elon Musk earlier in the year when he first made a bid for the social media giant. There have been many pages turned in the resulting saga that led on from that moment, and finally on 28 October 2022, the deal was sealed. Moreover, it is a £38billion deal, which even by Elon Musk’s standards is not pocket change. He has secured a $13billion loan to fund the acquisition, and so payback will be needed in order to pay off that debt.
Debbie was back again on radio to share her thoughts on the deal, and what she thought the future could hold for Twitter with Elon Musk at the helm. Appearing on Capital FM, Smooth Radio and BBC Radio Derby on 28 October 2022, here’s what she had to say to her interviewers.
On the face of it, Debbie believes that one of Musk’s proposed immediate changes would be welcomed by many people on the platform who have been subjected to trolling, abuse and IRL threats to their personal security.
Editorial moderation has regularly come under fire in high profile cases where the platform wasn’t quick enough to act to control events. Most high profile of ejectees from the platform would be Donald Trump, after the storming of Capitol Hill led to violence towards government never seen before. On this side of the water, public figures like Katie Hopkins who regularly provoked huge swathes of the population with her polarising views also found themselves kicked off the platform once ‘freedom of speech’ went too far.
Debbie has joined BBC Radio Derby a few times over the last couple of years on this subject to talk about Wiley and his anti-Semitic tweets that saw him kicked off the platform, racism in sport and racist abuse levelled at black players in the England team following their memorable loss in the final of the Euros in 2021. It’s an issue that has troubled the platform for many years.
“Musk hasn’t been shy bout orating his plans, including introducing verification of users. This is ostensibly to combat the fears of repeat offending trolls and bots on the platform who can, at present, just keep popping up with another account as soon as one gets shut down.
“The way this happens on the Facebook platform is to tie your account to a mobile phone that has to be distinct and unique and not related to another account. Alternatively on Facebook you upload something like your driver’s licence or passport. All this data presents a great deal of knowledge, and knowledge is power.
“The more social platforms know about you and your identity, which they can then couple with info they get from your ‘checkins’ and your physical location picked up from your mobile devices, the more they have to ‘sell’ to interested parties. This is the basis of advertising on the platforms, and what got Mark Zuckerberg hauled up in front of the Senate in October 2021 to investigate abuses of that data collection.”
Musk has spoken repeatedly about a ‘super app’, which he has dubbed “X” and to which many are drawing comparisons with the way WeChat in China is structured. A super app would have the ability to have a number of sub-apps fed into it.
Apps that live within apps help users access things like business reviews, maps, marketplaces and messaging platforms. Think of Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp for instance that are Meta apps, used within Facebook itself, but also can be used independently. Twitter as an ‘uber-catch-all app’ would curate many smaller apps that could be developed in a similar way to the Facebook/Meta development roadmap. With Elon Musk’s strategic eye drawing comparison with the way Zuckerberg has led Meta, and the way the notoriously secretive country of China curate their citizens’ abilities to access the internet, it’s not the best set of stablemates to stand shoulder to shoulder with.
In response to this question, Debbie redirected the focus. Although Musk has made some bold moves immediately following confirmation of his acquisition of the platform by firing the top executives and the general counsel that were responsible for the banning of Donald Trump, Debbie feels that this, ultimately, conceals a deeper issue.
“Everyone is talking about their horror at ‘freedom of speech for the far right’ being reintroduced through laxer attitudes to moderation and banning of accounts, but this is a red herring. Far more important a commodity is to own tech that everyone keeps in their back pockets. With his promise to combat repeat offenders on the platform by introducing user verification, knowing who everyone is and literally where they are located at any given point will be gifted to Elon Musk as part of the deal.
“He may have sacked the general counsel that led to Twitter feeling it was legally justified in kicking Trump off the platform but it doesn’t alter the laws behind choosing to reinstate him.”
In short, Musk will either reinstate Trump’s account, or he won’t. Either way there is huge press speculation about this, and huge press attention is good for business.
“Without sounding alarmist, I think he wants to take over the world! I think he’s potentially what could be caricatured into an original Bond-villain!”
Debbie went on to explain that although Elon Musk might not have nefarious intentions, his vision was leading him down the route of creating a data monopoly, which in the wrong hands, is a very powerful tool. Musk has referred to his intentions behind the acquisition of Twitter to be ‘not a money making venture’, but to ‘help humanity’. He has described his vision for Twitter as being a central digital town square that everyone can share. Referring to the platform in this way is an indication of his interests in creating a borderless country in the digital space, which as Debbie remarked, “whether you are in Botswana or New York, or in the middle of the English countryside, you are all ‘neighbours’ in a digital town square.”
“With SpaceX, he has control over the skies from outer-space with over 2,300 functioning Starlink satelites. With Tesla, there are huge data-centres that quite literally map the world to enable the cars to be self-driving. So with this he already has huge amounts of data available to him on the surface of the earth too.
“He contributed to the Russian-Ukrainian conflict for instance by commandeering his satellites to the benefit of Ukraine for connectivity. Although he was not a villain in that example, it shows how he can flex his power over world politics. Had the beneficiaries of the Starlink tech been donated to the advantage of the Russians, we’d all be talking about this as a huge scandal.”
“Without sounding alarmist, I think he wants to take over the world! I think he’s potentially what could be caricatured into an original Bond-villain!”
Debbie went on to explain that although Elon Musk might not have nefarious intentions, his vision was leading him down the route of creating a data monopoly, which in the wrong hands, is a very powerful tool. Musk has referred to his intentions behind the acquisition of Twitter to be ‘not a money making venture’, but to ‘help humanity’. He has described his vision for Twitter as being a central digital town square that everyone can share. Referring to the platform in this way is an indication of his interests in creating a borderless country in the digital space, which as Debbie remarked, “whether you are in Botswana or New York, or in the middle of the English countryside, you are all ‘neighbours’ in a digital town square.”
“With SpaceX, he has control over the skies from outer-space with over 2,300 functioning Starlink satelites. With Tesla, there are huge data-centres that quite literally map the world to enable the cars to be self-driving. So with this he already has huge amounts of data available to him on the surface of the earth too.
“He contributed to the Russian-Ukrainian conflict for instance by commandeering his satelites to the benefit of the Ukraine for connectivity. Although he was not a villain in that example, it shows how he can flex his power over world politics. Had the beneficiaries of the Starlink tech been donated to the advantage of the Russians, we’d all be talking about this as a huge scandal.”
👀 A Derbyshire-based digital marketing expert says she thinks @elonmusk‘s Twitter takeover isn’t really about freedom of speech. @essentialnm from @destination_www is warning we could be looking at a new kind of “data monopoly” #CapitalReports pic.twitter.com/YcVrvI5jEx
— Capital Midlands News (@CapitalMidsNews) October 28, 2022
A clip from the Capital FM/Smooth Radio interview
How does Twitter contribute to this data monopoly you might ask? Well, Twitter is an app that is used on mobile phones. To make best use out of location based services, you utilise a phone’s unique ability to geographically locate you somewhere. So this offers another layer of data capture, which, if tied to user verification Musk would have so much information at the most granular of levels.
Immediately, there will be ideological thinkers who will leave as a result of this sale. Media Matters and a coalition of human rights groups have published a letter asking Twitter advertisers to boycott the platform if Musk’s acquisition leads to more lax policies on unchecked abuse and hate speech.
Others will flock back – notably people who claimed to have left when Trump was suspended for instance, and these people are already becoming vocal again. We shall see how this one plays out over the coming weeks once Musk has assembled his ‘Content Moderation Council’ to discuss any reinstatements of accounts that were banned.
Having Musk already announce a delay to this ‘headline feature’ of the speculation around his leadership of the platform means that he is at least looking at how making decisions like this could impact the monetary stability of advertiser revenue. He has wiped billions off his own companies’ values through some off-the-cuff tweets in the past, most notably a $175billion valuation drop in 2021 after he remarked the share prices for Tesla were ‘too high’. So a more moderate approach will enable him to protect the value of his own investment.
As Debbie remarked on this subject, “I saw a poll earlier today asking people what they feel about the confirmation of the sale. The most upvoted response was the ‘shrug shoulders emoji’. I think that perfectly encapsulates how we should be feeling about this.
“No matter what the multi-billionaire megalomaniac who just bought Twitter decides to do, and no matter what his plans are, the human beings on this earth are still gifted with independent thought and can vote with their app deletions.”
So, on that note – 🤷🏽♀️
For the full BBC Radio Derby interview, available until 26 November 2022, click here and fast forward to 3:05:25 to listen in: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0d3s6z3
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