April 27, 2022 - Epoch Times
15:44
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| Good evening, and right before we dive into the topic of Twitter, I would like to mention that right now, there is a former U.S. Green Beret who has been sitting in jail for the past seven months as a January 6th prisoner. | |
| However, somehow this man was able to write a letter in his own hand, and we here at the Epoch Times were able to get it. | |
| However, unlike Twitter, which has the potential to not censor public discourse, here on YouTube it's not possible to go through the contents of that unbelievable document. | |
| And so today, I posted an exclusive episode over on Epoch TV where we go through this letter, something that I believe really should be kept for the history books. | |
| It's a first-hand account of a January 6th prisoner that might very well light the brush fires of liberty within the souls of men. | |
| If you'd like to check out that episode, the link will be down in the description box below. | |
| And now, let's indeed talk about Twitter and the fact that, well, it finally happened. | |
| Yesterday afternoon, the board of directors over at Twitter, they announced that they are accepting Elon Musk's bid to purchase the company in its entirety. | |
| Specifically, yesterday was the culmination of three months' worth of strategic jockeying on the part of Elon Musk to successfully purchase one of the most popular social media companies in the entire world. | |
| And arguably, the one that's most relevant to shaping public opinion. | |
| Now, the way that this all played out was rather fascinating. | |
| Because as you're likely aware, back in late March, so just about a month and a half ago, Elon Musk began toying with the idea of purchasing Twitter by setting up different surveys for his followers, asking things like, Should Twitter's algorithm be open source? | |
| And do you believe that Twitter rigorously adheres to the principle of free speech? | |
| And below that second poll, Elon wrote, And indeed, the man was not kidding. | |
| Because shortly afterwards, he purchased over 9% of the publicly available shares of the company. | |
| And then, after a little back and forth, Elon Musk issued an official offer to the board of directors to purchase Twitter in its entirety for approximately $44 billion. | |
| And here's where things, at least in my opinion, got very interesting. | |
| Because the board of directors, they have a fiduciary obligation to maximize profits for the shareholders. | |
| And Elon Musk was offering a 38% premium over what Twitter was currently valued at. | |
| And so, they were a little bit stuck. | |
| because on the surface, it did not seem like the board of directors wanted to sell. | |
| However, Twitter was slated to release its first quarter earnings on Thursday of this week, and very likely, those earnings were not looking too good. | |
| And so the board of directors, they likely saw a pretty dire situation, similar to what happened to Netflix, who lost about 40% of their stock price last week when they reported their earnings. | |
| And so, given the fact that Twitter only had a few days before Thursday, before they had to unveil their earnings reports, if the board of directors refused to take Elon Musk's offer, if they did not make their expected earnings, and then as a result, the stock price wound up tanking, well, the board of directors would likely be fired and or they would be sued by the shareholders. | |
| And therefore, given this general situation, what happened was that yesterday, the Twitter board of directors accepted Elon Musk's offer to buy the company at $54.20 a share, which when you do the math, it works itself out to be around $44 billion in total, which is about a 38% premium over Twitter's stock price on April 1st. | |
| Now, Mr. | |
| Parag Agrawal, Twitter's CEO, he released a short statement saying simply that he believes this particular deal is, quote, the best path forward for Twitter's stockholders. | |
| And by the way, just for your reference, even though the announcements have been made and a lot of fanfare has been made out of this decision, in terms of finalizing the actual deal, all of the legal requirements will still take a few months to sort themselves out. | |
| Regardless, though, unless you've been living under Iraq... | |
| Well, then you likely know that at this very moment, there are two wildly different reactions to Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter. | |
| Because on the one hand, well, you have advocates of free speech who see this as phenomenal news, given the fact that they believe Twitter's policies and their algorithms have morphed themselves over time into something like an authoritarian state. | |
| And as just one example of that, about three days ago, Twitter announced that they would no longer allow any advertisements on their platform that contradict the quote-unquote scientific consensus on climate change. | |
| And within that announcement, Twitter said that their new approach was going to be guided by, quote, authoritative sources. | |
| However, when you actually dug into their statement, the only source that Twitter actually cited was the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, otherwise known as the IPCC, which is part of the United Nations. | |
| It's like the old adage goes, 10 out of 10 scientists agree when you censor all those who don't. | |
| And that is, of course, just one out of quite literally thousands of examples of Twitter's censorious policies. | |
| Regardless, though, the people who are in favor of Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, well, they generally believe that he will be able to untangle the mess that it has become. | |
| And interestingly enough, the former CEO of Twitter, Mr. | |
| Jack Dorsey, he falls into this camp. | |
| That's because in a statement that he posted on Twitter, well, Jack said that taking the platform back from Wall Street was a correct first step, and then he added this. | |
| In principle, I don't believe anyone should own or run Twitter. | |
| It wants to be a public good at a protocol level, not a company. | |
| Solving for the problem of it being a company, however, Elon is the singular solution I trust. | |
| I trust his mission to extend the light of consciousness. | |
| On the flip side, however, well, there has been a meltdown across the different news networks, among many of Twitter's users, as well as among even the lawmakers over in Washington. | |
| Their position is essentially that this could mean the death of Twitter, given their belief that Elon Musk will change it so dramatically in support of free speech that it will turn into a cesspool of racism and hate. | |
| Some even say, unironically, that it could be used to alter the election results. | |
| Here are just a few hot takes from the legacy news outlets. | |
| out. | |
| You own all of Twitter or Facebook or what have you. | |
| You don't have to explain yourself. | |
| You don't even have to be transparent. | |
| You could secretly ban one party's candidate or all of its candidates, all of its nominees. | |
| Or you could just secretly turn down the reach of their stuff and turn up the reach of something else. | |
| And the rest of us might not even find out about it till after the election. | |
| And Elon Musk is Is the fox coming into the henhouse. | |
| And it is shameful that Twitter, which has a fiduciary obligation, I would think, to protect people who actually use it. | |
| The millions of people who actually use it. | |
| Did they ask a single woman? | |
| A single woman? | |
| Was a single woman consulted? | |
| It was a single person of color who just uses Twitter, who made the mistake of using Twitter and needs it for their job. | |
| So when Elon Musk says, wow, this is about free speech, it seems to me that it's about free speech of straight white men. | |
| And so let them have it. | |
| And also, if you'd like to see what has become of journalism within the past nine years, here are two different headlines from Business Insider. | |
| The first one, from 2013, says, And compare that to their headline from just a week ago, which says, And that is, of course, just one example of quite literally a plethora of such headlines coming out of the legacy news outlets. | |
| However, let's examine whether these individuals' concerns are actually warranted. | |
| And let's do so by taking a look at the direction that Elon Musk will likely take the company into now that he is the owner. | |
| Because Elon Musk, as a self-described independent, claims to be an ardent proponent of free speech. | |
| Just not in China, but that's a whole other story. | |
| Regardless, here was a short statement he made one day prior to the finalization of his takeover. | |
| However, the next logical question is what does this actually mean in practice? | |
| How will Twitter actually change under the leadership of Elon Musk? | |
| Well, just yesterday, shortly after the news broke of Twitter's acceptance of the terms of the deal, Musk posted this statement, which, for your reference, was actually a version of the statement he gave to the SEC. Here's what it says, quote, I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans. | |
| Twitter has tremendous potential. | |
| I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it. | |
| And so, based on this statement, as well as several other statements, there are in total five changes that we can expect to come down the pipe shortly. | |
| First of all, Twitter will be delisted from the NASDAQ and taken private. | |
| This would mean that it would no longer be subject to the whims of Wall Street and the constant need to grow their user base and their revenue every single month, regardless of anything else. | |
| Secondly, very likely, Twitter will add an edit button so that users can adjust their tweets after posting. | |
| Thirdly, Twitter will reduce its reliance on advertising, although at the moment it's not exactly clear what their new business model will be. | |
| However, at least on one occasion, Elon Musk said that he is more interested in the principle of an open town square rather than the economics of Twitter. | |
| Here's in fact what he said in a short clip just about a few days ago. | |
| Strong, intuitive sense is that having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive And then fourthly, | |
| Elon Musk claims that he will open the algorithm to allow people to see why specific tweets are either flagged or removed, meaning that he will make the algorithm open source, which is frankly a very big deal because at this moment this is one of the biggest criticisms of Twitter, the black box nature of the algorithm. | |
| Here's in fact what Elon Musk said recently during a TED talk over in Vancouver on this exact point. | |
| And then furthermore, by opening up the algorithm, this will allow people to see what has been happening behind the scenes. | |
| It'll essentially allow people to look under the hood of the Twitter machine, which, among several other things, will be very interesting to see whether the statements made under oath by Twitter's leadership when they were testifying in front of Congress were in fact true or not when they were saying that they don't censor people. | |
| And then lastly, the fifth point, is that Elon stated that he will defeat the spam bots or die trying. | |
| Or conversely, he said that he will authenticate the real humans on the platform. | |
| And the reason that this is so vital, which is likely fairly clear to you if you have been on Twitter any time within the past few years, is because these Twitter bots dominate many of the real conversations regarding all manner of topics. | |
| And they make it seem like there is a popular consensus when actually there's not. | |
| It makes people feel like they are in the minority, like their opinions are fringe, when actually they might be the mainstream. | |
| And these Twitter spam bots, they are ubiquitous. | |
| They are not only targeting discussions of national security or national politics, but they are targeting quite literally everything. | |
| In fact, a recent analysis, it found that even with the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard trial that's currently ongoing, nearly 11% of the Twitter accounts participating in that discussion are fake. | |
| And so, these are the five changes that we can expect shortly coming down the pipe after Twitter bought the company. | |
| Although, frankly, if you've been following Elon Musk's career in regards to PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, the boring company, Neuralink, and so on, well, it is safe to say that we might really not even know what to expect next for Twitter, because he seems to be a man who thinks outside the box. | |
| Regardless, though, with this new change in ownership, I myself will be posting more on Twitter, because until now, I essentially wrote Twitter off as a waste of time, given the fact that I truly believe that no matter how much I work to develop my Twitter account, I will be banned in the near future. | |
| So, frankly, I didn't devote any time to it, which is why I have only about 3,000 followers. | |
| But if you have an account, consider following us at Facts Matter RB. We'll be posting there a lot more. | |
| Now, furthermore, if you'd like to read any of the source material for today's episode, I'll throw all that into the description box below this video for you to check out. | |
| And all I ask in return is that you take a quick moment to smash, smash, smash that like button for the use of algorithm. | |
| And now, as I... Sorry. | |
| What's this? | |
| Roman, it's me. | |
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| Now, as I mentioned at the start of today's episode, we here at the Epoch Times recently received an exclusive letter from a January 6th prisoner, specifically from a Green Beret who has been locked up for the past seven months. | |
| However, due to the censorious nature here on YouTube, I do not, frankly, feel comfortable posting that content on this platform, given the fact I actually thought about posting it here because I want as many eyeballs as possible to read that letter. | |
| However, in my pre-research, what I did is I went over to the YouTube search tab and I searched for the word January 6th prisoner because I wanted to see what type of news will pop up as well as what type of thumbnails work best. | |
| However, wouldn't you believe it? | |
| At the very top is one of those fact checks that you see on things like climate change and the vaccine and COVID. | |
| And it says, quote, Jail defendants in January 6th attacks are not political prisoners. | |
| They are charged with real crimes. | |
| Rating mostly false. | |
| Meaning that according to YouTube, because the people who are sitting in jail for, let's say, seven months on a misdemeanor trespassing charge, because they're not labeled as a political prisoner, and because they are charged with technically a real crime, despite the fact that they have literally been sitting in a jail cell for seven months on a misdemeanor charge, well, they are not political prisoners, and therefore, any content that either labels them or such, or even... | |
| Reads a letter from the person themselves saying that, hey, I consider myself a political prisoner. | |
| Well, that is likely to be banned and our channel could receive a strike for publishing such fake news content. | |
| Regardless, though, over on Epic TV, we do not have that problem. | |
| Here's, in fact, a trailer for the episode that I released earlier today regarding that letter. | |
| Right now, a man by the name of Jeremy Brown, who has served this country for the past 20 years as a decorated military veteran, as a U.S. Army Green Beret, well, he has for the past seven months now been locked up in jail as a January 6th prisoner. | |
| His alleged crime? | |
| One misdemeanor count of allegedly trespassing on U.S. Capitol grounds. | |
| However... | |
| Thanks to a serendipitous chain of events, we here at the Epoch Times obtained a letter written by Jeremy's own hand from behind bars. | |
| I want to read this letter together with you, because this is a first-hand account that I believe all Americans should have access to, something that should be kept for the history books, a first-hand account of a January 6th prisoner that might very well light the brush fires of liberty in the souls of men. | |
| If you want to check out that episode, it'll be exclusively over on Epic TV. Again, that link will be right there at the very top of the description box. | |
| I hope you click on it. | |
| I hope you check it out. | |
| And I hope that after you watch that episode, you share it with your friends and family because I believe that this is frankly something that really should be known by everyone. | |
| It's a historical account of a January 6th prisoner. | |
| Again, that link will be down in the description box below. | |
| And then until next time, I'm your host, Roman from the Epic Times. |
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