Episode 241: There Is No Twitter, Only X feat. Ryan Broderick
Social media is in flux. The disruption started when Elon Musk acquired Twitter, purged most of the staff, turned the blue checkmark verification system into a pay for play system, and welcomed previously banned extremists and QAnon followers back onto the platform. To add to the chaos, last week Elon announced that Twitter is rebranding as “X.” His stated goal is to turn X into an “everything app,” an all-in-one platform for messaging, voice and video calls, social media posts, payment services, and more. This rebrand included erecting a giant metal flashing X on top of the former Twitter building, much to the discomfort of the building’s neighbors in San Francisco.
On today’s episode we discuss how emboldened conspiracists are using their paid checkmarks to build clout and spread disinformation. This includes a newcomer to disinformation game named Dom Lucre, who was suspended for posting child abuse material before Elon personally restored his account. And General Michael Flynn and former 8kun administrator Ron Watkins working to revive pizzagate ahead of the coming election season.
We also chat with tech journalist Ryan Broderick in an attempt to figure out why Elon Musk is doing all this.
Subscribe for $5 a month to get an extra episode of QAA every week + access to ongoing series like 'Manclan,' 'Trickle Down,' and 'The Spectral Voyager': http://www.patreon.com/QAnonAnonymous
QAA's Website: https://qanonanonymous.com
Music by Pontus Berghe. Editing by Corey Klotz.
Garbage Day Newsletter
https://www.garbageday.email/
Christopher Beale’s Link Tree
https://linktr.ee/realchrisjbeale
REFERENCES
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/07/27/twitter-csam-dom-lucre-elon-musk/
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/14/opinion/facebook-far-right.html
https://twitter.com/MattBinder/status/1684670401027145728
What's up everybody? It's Julian here to promote my friend Jake who never gets a break.
You know, he tries to skate again, he hurts his shin.
You know, there's just so much badness happening to him in the world, but it would do him...
Think of it as a make-a-wish.
And his wish is for you to listen to The Spectral Voyager, his new miniseries with Brad Abrahams.
And you can do that by subscribing to our Patreon at patreon.com/qanonanonymous.
The first episode is out on the public feed, so you can go check that out to make sure that the drugs are good before
you buy a bag from us.
But go get it. Go get that Spectral Voyager dust.
Yeah, it's gonna be good.
It's gonna be a lot of fun.
You know, it's me and Brad doing the kinds of episodes that we've done in the past for this show, but more of them and with a, you know, larger focus on source material and really getting into the folklore and storytelling of these sort of, maybe some lesser-known and some more well-known sort of historic paranormal phenomenon.
So, yeah, I hope you'll join us.
True tales from the outer edge of reality.
The Spectral Voyager.
The Spectral Voyager.
Okay, back to the main episode.
What's up QAA listeners?
The fun games have begun.
I found a way to connect to the internet.
I'm sorry boy.
Welcome, listener, to Chapter 241 of the QAnon Anonymous Podcast, the There Is No Twitter, Only X episode, or There Is No Twitter, Only X episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokitansky, Julian Fields, and Travis View.
Social media is in flux.
The disruption started when Elon Musk acquired Twitter, purged most of its staff, turned the blue checkmarks into a pay-for-play system, and welcomed previously banned extremists and QAnon followers back onto the platform.
To add to the chaos, last week, Elon announced that Twitter is rebranding as X. His stated goal is to turn X into an everything app, an all-in-one platform for messaging, voice and video calls, social media posts, payment services, and more.
This rebrand included erecting a giant metal flashing X on top of the former Twitter building, much to the discomfort of the building's neighbors in San Francisco.
On today's episode, we'll discuss how emboldened conspiracists are using their paid checkmarks to build clout and spread disinformation.
This includes a newcomer to the disinformation game named Dom Luker, who was suspended for posting child abuse material before Elon personally restored his account.
Plus, our problematic faves General Michael Flynn and former 8kun administrator Ron Watkins, who've been working to revive Pizzagate ahead of the coming election season.
We'll also chat with tech journalist Ryan Broderick in an attempt to figure out why Elon Musk is doing all of this stuff.
Fun.
Yeah.
It's, um, it's like 2016 all over again, but worse somehow.
Well, the internet works less well, so that's good.
That's what you want.
Yeah.
And I don't, I don't know how successful turning Twitter into, you know, the everything app where you're messaging and you're calling because like, Nobody I know follows any of their real-life friends on Twitter.
It's like, no, no, no.
That world is separate.
That's in your WhatsApp, maybe.
On Twitter, it's just acquaintances and online friends.
And you don't want to be calling them, and you don't want to be video chatting them.
So, I don't know.
I think Elon maybe just doesn't really understand what Twitter is for.
I mean, perhaps he's just an immense dumbass.
Hehehe.
So yeah, all of this has been pretty crazy.
Especially since, you know, once upon a time, I thought like the, you know, the people who had quasi-monopolies in social media were just going to stick around forever.
You know, because of network effects, it's normally near impossible for new social media platforms to challenge the dominant ones.
You know, you may not like the people who run the platform, but no one's really willing to abandon their online friends to try something new and get less and worse content.
Yes, but what if everyone on that network's brains just literally run out of their nose, just splattering all over their keyboard?
You didn't count on that, did you, Travis?
I didn't.
I didn't.
But also, I mean, this has led to new opportunities, you know, because of the chaos at Twitter, which this has included limiting the amount of tweets people can see in a day.
It's left openings for competing microblogging platforms.
There's the Open Source Mastodon.
I like that conceptually.
I have an account, but it's just, I don't know, it's a little clunky for me, I gotta say.
There's also Blue Sky.
This is a project that's actually spun out of Twitter and happens to have former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey on this board.
Now, I've been using that one most often.
That one has the most old Twitter-like feel.
It's just sort of like fun and jokey and not as many extremists and Nazis and QAnon followers are on that one quite yet.
Have you ever heard of Magnum 45?
Uh, yes.
What about it?
It's a type of social network, and you point it at your head, you just want one bullet in the chamber, one in... No.
And I'm not finished!
No.
I am certainly not finished, but I guess I'm being censored, once again.
I couldn't imagine, it's like I reluctantly got on Twitter in the first place basically to promote this podcast and talk about disinformation and I couldn't even do that!
I had to resort to talking about video games and movies and music I like because the former just made my brain bad.
So the idea of migrating to a new piece of shit place You know, that's a little bit better than the current one.
It's just totally overwhelming to me.
So I'll stay until, you know, until I get kicked off or I delete the app permanently.
I'm one of the two.
I joined it to create disinformation and also review movies, much to the anger and horror of everyone else on Twitter.
I was shocked that I did not think Oppenheimer was a masterpiece.
You know what?
You're not the first person that I've heard say that.
I have a very good friend whose opinion that I trust and, you know, he thought that Oppenheimer was kind of boring.
You know what?
I trust you, Jake.
I'd like to hear your review seeing that you haven't seen the movie at all.
I think that you're probably even more equipped than usual to review it.
I think so, too, but I think we should probably continue with the episode.
Yeah.
All right.
So more recently, the big boy has got involved in the microblogging game.
That's Meta.
On July 5th, they launched the Twitter competitor Threads, and within a day of its launch, Threads garnered 30 million users, making it the fastest growing platform in
history, a record previously held by chat GPT. Of course, I mean that meta had the advantage of
already having a massive user base on like Facebook and Instagram, but they just kind of like,
you know, shifted over the threads.
So threads is cool because it's like, you can tell that the more threads there are,
the closer we get to the master platform he's building called Noose.
So all of this competition could not have come at a worse time for Elon Musk.
So, Twitter has become a money pit.
Not just because of the heavy debt load he assumed to buy the platform for $44 billion, but also because, according to Musk himself, the social media company's advertising revenue has plunged roughly 50%.
Musk keeps claiming that traffic on the site has never been higher, but according to data from the independent SimilarWeb, that's not the case.
They say that overall traffic on the platform has declined steadily since January, falling 5.8% as of June.
Oh, those are rookie numbers!
Come on, folks, we need to get off this platform!
I have been spending so much less time!
Come on, join me, folks!
The thing is, you're incentivizing, like, the guys who would normally be on, you know, perhaps an anonymous message board, but you're also not allowing them to post the kind of stuff that they could post there.
And, you know, it's not anonymous, so, like, I don't know who this is for.
I don't know who it's for anymore.
Is it just sort of like the middle-of-the-road, like, wannabe channers that still want to feel official and have an email address and phone number tied to their account?
I don't know, but it's not fun, and the logo is dumb, and it looks bad, and the site works less well, and it was never great to begin with, so... Yes!
People are forgetting that before Elon, Twitter already was a net negative in anyone's life who uses it.
Yeah.
I can't tell you how many times a day I just instinctively open, and I've hidden the app in like the bowels of my Android operating system so that it's a pain in the ass to find, and I still find my way thumbing through my little icons just to tap on that dumb looking X. I open it, I read three tweets, I start to get angry, and I go, why am I doing this?
This happens at least like three or four times a day.
I mean, yeah, it's true.
It's like my use of Twitter, especially on my phone, is driven mostly by habit and addiction.
I just, you know, I just press that button and just sort of like reading feeds.
stop doing this shit. Why am I doing this shit to myself?
I mean, yeah, it's true. It's like my use of Twitter, especially on my phone, is driven
mostly by habit and addiction. I just, you know, I just press that button and just sort
of like reading feeds. And usually that gives me a good dopamine kick. But in recent months,
that dopamine kick has been tainted by this feeling of like ugliness and darkness and
like, you know, dread.
There's like, there's this gross feeling that's sort of like mixed in with like the new post I see.
And it's like, it's actually made it easy.
I've been tweeting a lot less than I have just because of that, because I, you know, I guess I'm just just a helpless slave to whatever's giving me, you know,
good, feel-good chemicals at the time.
But like, yeah, I've been using it a lot less because I don't like the feeling I get when I use Twitter a lot.
Yeah, I mean, I would recommend just doing what everyone else who's having fun on the platform does,
which is to collect and post child pornography.
Oh boy.
So Elon Musk has another ace up his sleeve, at least so he believes.
Namely, he's rebranded Twitter to X. So, bizarre.
This is apparently a longtime dream of Elon's ever since the 90s.
In 1999, Musk started an online finance company called X.com.
He imagined X as a full-service online bank, but it never really got there and instead merged with Peter Thiel's PayPal just before the dot-com bust.
Journalist Max Chafkin, who we've had on the podcast before to discuss Peter Thiel, in his book, The Contrarian, Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power, has an interesting anecdote about how Elon Musk was ousted as PayPal CEO, partly because he fixated so much on this X rebranding for PayPal.
It was better than his original idea, Musk Space.
This kind of idea is like a very green writer or young entrepreneur who wants to do everything.
You know, I remember I was working as an assistant for this guy a long time ago, and he was like an advertising guy.
And he said, you know, what do you want to do with your life?
Like, what do you want to, you know, what do you want to be?
And I was like, well, I was like, I wanna write the movie and I wanna act in it
and I wanna, you know, do the score and I wanna do all of this stuff.
And he looked at me like, you can't do all of that.
Like, it's just, it's, you know, there are very few people and it takes, you know, years and years and years over a
long career to be trusted by an industry with that kind of freedom.
When you spread your focus is too thin, everything just ends up kind of mediocre and shitty.
As opposed to concentrating on one thing and doing that one thing really, really well and being known for that.
And it surprises me a little bit that Elon has been around this long and still has this like, almost like childlike
dream of being like, it's the everything app.
You can order your food on it and then you could call a liberal a snowflake and then you can call your mom and then
you can, you know, write a review for the auto body shop you just went to.
It's like, no!
Because there are other sites where you can do all of those things much better than you will be able to on this platform.
Also, no one wants to trust him with an everything app.
With everything?
Even if we're going to have an everything app, let me tell you the last person I want in charge of it is this moron.
No, if we had like an everything app, I would trust...
Who would I trust?
I don't trust any human being to control all of my social and financial interactions with the world.
I don't want a single middleman for my entire life.
That sounds dystopian.
You know who I would trust?
Keanu Reeves This is from Max Schaefgen's book.
Since Musk had always seen X as much more than a payment company, he asked the company's marketing department to rework the PayPal logo to include X, renaming the service XPayPal, and beginning to phase out the PayPal name altogether.
To the group Teal had hired, this was insanity.
Sellers on eBay were already routinely saying things like, PayPal me the money, using the company's name as a verb.
A linguist's nightmare, but a landmark achievement for any startup.
Meanwhile, X had conducted a series of focus groups showing that customers disliked the brand name because it reminded them of porn.
Musk was unmoved, possibly, employees gossiped, because of sunk costs.
He'd paid at least $1 million to acquire the X.com domain name.
Legend within the company had it.
Nothing would convince him, said Martin, the PayPal marketer.
I mean, it is amazing that like, I mean, his fixation with X is partly why like, Peter Thiel was like, all right, this guy can't be CEO anymore.
We're just gonna like, we're just gonna oust him.
And then he's still he's still obsessed with it all this time.
And so before he had someone who was at least evil and smart to wrangle him in, Totally.
And like, there's way too many already famous things that I think of when I think of, when I see the letter X, that it's never going to be synonymous with this app.
You know, you've got three X's in pornography.
You've got DMX, a late great rapper.
and with no friction at all.
Totally.
And like, there's way too many already famous things that I think of when I think of,
when I see the letter X, that it's never gonna be synonymous with this app.
You can go, you've got three Xs in pornography.
You've got DMX, a late great rapper.
You've got XXX, X Tentacion, who also people refer to as X.
Also, rest in peace, great rapper.
Yeah, X-Men, the X-Ray.
X-Ray, yes.
So yeah, is a, as a, I guess as a brand, X is saturated.
You can't really, you know, have people have a new idea of what X is anymore.
Yeah, Elon Musk is basically just trying to entertain himself, but his brain is less good at writing, like, dystopian sci-fi than, like, chat GPT.
And you can't call it everything, because, like, the guy, Grand Theft Auto guy, has a game coming out that's, like, the everything game already, and... Well, yeah, like, God, like, there's so many other things it could have been.
I wonder why he's so fixated on this letter.
It's fascinating to me.
What did he call his kid again?
Doesn't his kid also have the X in his name?
Yes, his kid has a bizarre name, but they go by X for short.
Yeah, I mean, this man literally wants to transform the entire world into what a dumbass uses as a signature.
Dude, this guy grew up watching Family Feud, and he was the dude that was cheering every time the big red X came onto the screen.
It just burned itself into his brain, and he can't think of anything else.
So with the rebranding comes more ambitious goals.
Here's how Elon explained it on Twitter or X or wherever the fuck it is now.
Twitter was acquired by X Corp both to ensure freedom of speech and as accelerant for X, the everything app.
This is not simply a company renaming itself, but doing the same thing.
The Twitter name made sense when it was just 140 character messages going back and forth like birds tweeting, but now you can post almost anything, including several hours of video.
In the months to come, we will add comprehensive communications and the ability to conduct your entire financial world.
The Twitter name does not make sense in that context, so we must bid adieu to the bird.
He is genuinely... It's like, listen man, if you're reverse engineering this just to please yourself, at least just fucking admit it.
And I love that one of the selling points is like, yeah, now you can post several hours of video like a bad cam rip of the latest Mission Impossible or child porn.
In a recent interview, Musk even absurdly claimed that he envisions that X could consist of half of the financial system.
Essentially, if done right, X would serve people's financial needs to such a degree that over time it would become, I don't know, maybe half of the global financial system.
Or some big number.
I'm not sure what the number is, but pretty big.
Some big number!
So it would be by far the biggest financial institution.
But like I said, not really in the way that people are used to thinking about banks.
Just the most efficient database for the thing that is money.
The thing that is money.
Most efficient database for the thing that is money.
Half or some big number.
Something.
So it's, there's some big number.
It's like, it's so bad.
It's like, even I do it.
I think it's like, surely you can't get into the position that Elon Musk has without having some degree of shrewdness and intelligence.
And I don't think you should, you can judge a person's intelligence by how eloquent they are.
I mean, I stumble over my words sometimes.
I sometimes, you know, do silly things when I talk, but it's just baffling to me.
Like, he sounds so dumb.
Yeah I mean I think he has been getting dumber like the culture wars I'm sure have not made him smarter but also he's getting to that age where his like what got him here which is sounding like a smart young kind of foreign guy to like boomers with money, it's no longer working, you know? And
he's courting a wider audience than just idiots who are about to be parted
with their money because someone like basically jangled keys in front
of them, you know?
And I think that's what he always was. He was, you know, he kind of had money and
he became quite good at jangling keys. Yeah, key jangling!
And he also had like these ideas of like, well, what if we got a rocket from the Russians and privatized space travel?
And then people were willing to let him do that, and now he's just trying to apply that to just about everything.
And usually he can just get away with lying, but there's a kind of diminishing return on, like, lying about, like, oh, we're gonna have a full robot or, like, oh, we're gonna have, like, the brain implants and we're all gonna be cool, like, cyber punks.
You know?
Like, he's lied for too long.
Yeah, instead he's regressing to like, what if I told you that we could put an entire moon inside planet Earth?
Yeah, I think he's probably doing all the drugs that people have told him to do.
Don't underestimate that he wanted to be cool so he started doing a bunch of drugs.
Like, you know, he's probably melted his brain quite a bit.
He's getting a bit older.
He's probably doing all the, like, live longer drugs that are also lies.
Like, so, I think his main mistake is that he's starting to believe other people's lies, you know?
Like, they're all selling him, like, the latest HGH or whatever.
And, you know, he's done hair plugs, and they, like, push the holes in a little too far, and so they're, like, kind of stuck into his brain.
Not good.
Yeah.
Yeah, the old hair in the brain.
Yeah, he's getting a hairy brain.
I got every brain!
So sure enough, shortly after this rebranding announcement, the mobile apps for Twitter and the web client all changed and they removed the iconic bird logo and replaced them all with a white X on a black background.
Twitter also replaced the tweet button with a button that just says the more generic post.
Now, I'm not a business genius, but I do know that Twitter has managed to build such a recognizable brand that the word tweet is now in the dictionary.
I mean, that's an incredible feat to get your unique little name for your company into the language.
And he's just throwing that away.
Part of this rebranding involved, on Friday, July 28th, erecting a giant illuminated X on top of what was the Twitter building.
It was put up without a permit and appeared to be secured with just sandbags.
This led to 24 complaints with San Francisco's Department of Building Inspections.
One of these complaints said that its flashing lights made it hard for residents to sleep.
The sign was hastily taken down on the following Monday.
Yeah, it does seem like it was designed to bother people with epilepsy.
I don't know.
We'll talk about this later.
But it also seemed like it caused to create a noisy distraction from other things that were going on with the platform.
So one person who was disturbed by the flashing sign is Christopher Beale.
He's a radio journalist and his living room was lit up by that giant flashing X. He made a viral tweet, which included a video of the sign and the caption, This is my life now.
So I hit him up on Monday, the day that the sign was taken down, to learn exactly what he went through.
Christopher, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with us today.
Sure.
Glad to be here.
Thanks for having me.
Now, first of all, how long have you been living across from the Twitter building?
Um, I've lived in the neighborhood for two years, and I've lived in the building I live in now since around Christmas time.
Oh, okay.
So, I mean, when, like, in that time, has it been disruptive at all?
I mean, like, before the recent incident?
It's been entertaining.
When Elon first took over at Twitter, there was a lot of, like, protest activity on the streets.
And of course a lot of news crews out in the area.
But things really started getting interesting when Elon first tried to alter the Twitter sign.
I don't know if you remember a while back he made it say Titter for a while, which is awesome.
That's deep sarcasm by the way.
And so it's been sort of just these visual things that have been happening.
But the giant flashing LED X has definitely been the most bold look at me statement that the Twitter building has made in a while.
Yeah, when when did you first notice that?
I mean, was it constructed?
It was being constructed the day before it started flashing?
I mean, do you know this before the lights were turned on?
I noticed Friday morning that there were crews assembling something on the roof and the X building or Twitter building has this big roof deck outside that I guess at one time was used by a lot of employees.
I overlook it and don't see a lot of people out there very regularly anymore, but they had this big beautiful roof deck and there was a crew assembling something and it took As the day went on, it started becoming more clear what exactly they were building, because they were doing it in pieces, but they were assembling this large X out of, I guess, steel girders and trusses, and I don't know the technical terms, but you could see that it was slowly the new X logo coming into shape, and then they started putting LED lights on the outside of it and turning them on one by one by one by one, and as the day slowly went on and the evening slowly went on, it got brighter and brighter and brighter, and then after sundown,
It was just alarmingly bright.
Like rave levels of brightness coming off of that roof aimed at like three very busy apartment buildings.
So I must have been the only person that stepped outside and got a video of it and I threw it up on Twitter as sort of an afterthought the next morning and replied to somebody else's quick video and before you knew it it exploded everywhere and this has been my entire life for the last four days.
Yeah, wrong place, wrong time, I suppose.
But yeah, the I mean, it seems like deliberately obnoxious in the sense of like being a publicity stunt.
I mean, there's a way to like, you know, sort of make your new rebrand known in a kind of ostentatious way that's less obnoxious than this, but it seems as though Elon and company decide to go with the downright almost dangerous level of brightness and flashing lights.
Yeah, it's... I could imagine if someone had epilepsy, it would be a problem.
For me, it was just an annoyance.
Like, honestly, I was just trying to watch a movie in my living room and couldn't do it.
I had to go to the other side of the apartment.
But, like, the irony in all of it is the intention behind it, which I'm just seeing come out in the last 24 hours.
But the idea... There was a drone flying around it, and the idea was they were trying to put together a promotional video about how much they love San Francisco and how they're staying in San Francisco.
But, like...
Do you do that by angering an entire neighborhood? I don't know. I mean, the sentiment is great. It's
cool to know that they want to stay in San Francisco, but also like, hmm, the way they
chose to do it. Interesting choice. Yeah, the way they chose to do it is to, you know, violate city
regulations about these kinds of nuisances. Now, I I went to the other side of the house around midnight to escape it and it was still on.
every single night since that original night?
No, in fact, so it was on Friday night until very, very late.
I went to the other side of the house around midnight to escape it, and it was still on.
Saturday night, it wasn't on at all.
In fact, nobody touched it all day Saturday.
And then Sunday, around sundown, it popped back on and was on until, I don't know,
until maybe 10 or 10.30.
I got home from dinner at 10.30 and it was off, so I'm not sure exactly what time they shut it down,
but it was definitely on last night.
And then the latest, as of Monday morning, when I left to come to work,
there is a crew on the roof of the building taking it down.
Oh, yeah, I gotcha.
Well, that is, I guess, surprising.
I mean, it sounds like, you know, he's been pretty defiant about, you know, following regulations before, but, uh, but in this case, it seems like it was perhaps too much.
Well, glad that you got, um, uh, you know, your, you can look outside your living room at night without being blinded now, at least.
Yeah.
I mean, honestly, the one thing that I am a little concerned about is that, like, I wonder if it's a test case for a new signage for the building.
And so I wonder what's coming next.
Because I don't think it's just going to go away and we're going to get a conservative little sign with an X on it.
My personal observations of Elon Musk, I don't think we've seen the last of this X.
Probably not.
Now, your tweet went really, really viral.
I think tens of thousands of retweets, or whatever the hell they're calling it now.
Re-exes.
Rexes, if you will.
Yeah, rexes.
I mean, we're doing branding for them already.
But did you get any responses from, say, Elon Musk fans asking about your viral tweet?
You know, I've been a little... I don't want to say I'm surprised, because nothing surprises me on Twitter.
X anymore. But yeah, a lot of a lot of the response to what is simply I walked out on
my patio and recorded a 15 second video and hit send on Twitter. It wasn't that serious,
right? But a lot of the responses I've been getting have been very vitriolic and and sort
of aimed at me as a human. And I'm brushing it off because it says, you know, to hate
on somebody you don't know on Twitter says more about you than it does me.
But that's been the most alarming part of it.
The great part about it is that I am a journalist and about half of my time I'm working on independent projects that I self fund and, you know, do because I feel they need to be done.
I'm sure you can relate to that as an independent podcaster.
And so, like, honestly, I'm grateful for the publicity, like if If Elon's ex-stunt can get a few more ears on some things that I'm making that are really important to me, then maybe this chaotic weekend will be worth it.
You said wrong place at the wrong time at the beginning of this interview, but honestly, it feels like right place at the right time, at least now.
We'll see how I feel in a few weeks.
Sure, well, let's see if we can salvage your ruined view.
So what projects are you working on right now?
Where can people go to learn about the audio content that you're working on?
I work on so much stuff that when people meet me at a party and they ask me what I do, it's sort of like, okay, I either need to pick one or...
Or I need to sit them down.
So what I've done is I've just put everything on my website.
It's a linktree.
ChristopherJBiel.com.
B-E-A-L-E.
ChristopherJBiel.com.
That has the list of my plethora of gigs and shows that I contribute to.
And it also has a lot of my content, including my podcast, Stereotypes, my podcast, Unpacked, my podcast, Theme Park Pulse, and all the other content I create.
I write for newspapers.
I do a lot.
I'm just constantly creating stuff.
So come check me out if you don't mind.
Sounds cool.
We'll put that link tree in the show notes.
Thanks for coming on our show and sort of explaining your unusual experiences.
Sure, happy to be here.
Thanks for having me, Travis.
Wow.
They already have disassembled it.
I love that it's the deserted communal space atop the Twitter building that he set this X on, like the ruins of the company that he destroyed.
Yeah, almost poetic.
Exactly, like an alien marking its territory after it's like blown up the White House.
He's gonna use it as an X to like call in a satellite bombing.
Yeah, I was trying to think of a funny bat signal joke, but who would you summon?
What, does Exhibit show up and, you know, pimp Elon's ride?
I mean, who do you call when the X signal goes up?
Uh, pedophiles.
Well, speaking of pedophiles...
In addition to all that, on the platform X, Pizzagate is finding new life.
This is partly due to the fact that previously banned Pizzagate promoters like Liz Kroken are now very active on the platform, but it also got a boost from former 8coon administrator Ron Watkins and our very own General Michael Flynn.
And they're trying to revive Pizzagate with assistance from a real recent case of a network news producer who sexually abused children.
That is the case of James Meek, a former ABC News senior producer who recently pleaded guilty to possessing and transmitting child pornography.
And these guilty pleas were done to avoid a trial.
I'm guessing that this is a legally strategic move on Meek's part because based on investigations and Meek's own really depraved comments that were published, there's damning evidence that he personally groomed and abused children.
So he is a genuinely depraved sicko who deserves much worse than whatever's coming to him.
The facts of the matter are damning enough, but conspiracists have a tendency to take what is true and then add a little spice to suit their narrative.
In this case, the spice is the false claim that James Meek boasted of debunking Pizzagate.
I searched far and wide, including all of the links from the people who are promoting this claim, I couldn't find any veracity of this.
But of course, even if James Meek claimed that he debunked Pizzagate, that would look bad, but it wouldn't actually be relevant in determining the veracity of any particular conspiracy theory.
But this case was seized upon by some in an attempt to revive, you know, that classic 2016 conspiracy theory.
Most notably, this was done by Ron Watkins, who is, you know, almost certainly one of the people who was behind QAnon while Q was posting on 8chan and 8coon.
So Watkins has been a lot more active on Twitter in recent weeks, mostly to attack Trump's opponents in the Republican primary, like Ron DeSantis.
So Ron has changed his Twitter bio to say this.
As a seasoned digital warfare strategist, I bring a profound understanding of the cyber battlefield to every endeavor.
Digital warfare strategist.
Yeah, he's going on full, not just digital soldier, he's really acting more like a digital general.
He's commanding the troops.
A profound understanding, this man says.
Cyber battlefield, this man says.
Ron Watkins made a really long tweet, because now if you subscribe to the, what was Twitter
Blue, I don't know what they're calling it nowadays, but if you pay Elon the eight
bucks a month, you can do long tweets.
And so Ron made a long tweet, which described James Meek as a self-proclaimed debunker of
Pizzagate and says that before his downfall, Meek proudly presented himself as a fierce
opponent of Trump supporters and so-called conspiracy theories like Pizzagate.
Watkins further says that, "With the revelation of Meek's true nature, it's no wonder he
exhibited such passion while debunking theories like Pizzagate."
So this tweet received over 1,800 retweets, but the implication is pretty clear.
So he's basically trying to imply that people who debunk conspiracy theories like Pizzagate do so not out of a genuine attempt to separate fact from fiction, but to cover up or distract from their own child abuse.
And he's also trying to imply that debunks of Pizzagate aren't credible because the debunkers themselves are corrupt perverts.
I understand why you would get triggered by this, Travis.
Yeah, first they came for the skeptics.
Well, no, not first, but eventually they got to the skeptics, so.
Ron Watkins' attempt to revive PC-Gate was picked up by none other than General Michael Flynn.
In a tweet on July 30th, Flynn called for PC-Gate to be investigated and even gave a shout out to Ron Watkins by tagging his handle CodeMonkeyZ.
So here's what the General wrote.
The hashtag Pizzagate fiasco should be reopened and investigated.
This grotesque and inhumane abuse of children must end.
At Code Monkey Z, your missive is spot on.
There are those elites who are also involved in this despicable behavior, and that is why they fight so hard to keep these stories out of the news, as well as try to outright ban anything that further exposes their sick behavior, such as Sound of Freedom.
Yeah, people are trying to ban that for sure.
Are you kidding me?
Well, really horrified to hear your Florida Flynn voice again, because he's back.
He's gearing up.
He's gearing up for the digital war.
Mm-hmm.
Yes, sir.
This is very foreboding for me, because it seems to be part of an attempt to breathe new life into the PCGate conspiracy theory ahead of election season.
My theory is that these disinformation super-spreaders convinced themselves that PC-Gate-related claims on social media in 2016 helped sink Hillary's campaign and pushed Trump into the White House.
So now that, on Elon's Twitter, they've gotten rid of all the busybody censors, they have free reign, they've got an ally who owns the platform, they're going to go Full bore to try and make 2016 happen again to just spread the most horrifying, vile conspiracy theories, which again, led to an act of violence that caused Edgar Welch to serve years in prison.
And yeah, so to bring all that back.
So it should be real horrifying next year and a half or so on social media.
I mean, one thing that I want to mention here is like, Pizzagate, the whole point was that they were using these pizza code words and stuff.
Is there any sign that this awful human being, uh, and, uh, pedophile, Meek, did this?
That there's any code words involved or?
No, no, no.
It's just, it's just like, oh, we found a pedophile that exists in the public sphere or is in the media in some way.
Let's focus on it.
That's basically it.
So there was a really sick, horrifying child abuser who happened to have a pretty senior position in network mainstream media.
And therefore, but yeah, the other part about Pizzagate where they're using code words wasn't wasn't true, or at least in this case.
Well, fuck the media and, you know, fuck ABC or whatever.
I don't I don't care about any of that.
But it's like, let's let's try to.
Couldn't we just call it Pedogate?
I mean, you know, come on.
They do sometimes they do sometimes call it Pedogate, but Pizzagate, again, here's the thing.
I think Ron Watkins and Jennifer Aniston have a better appreciation of branding than Elon Musk.
They've got a brand.
It's sticking in people's minds.
They don't want to deviate from that.
And they're like singer-songwriters.
They put out an EP, and then they put out their first sort of studio album, and they get popular.
And then when they do their second studio album, they're reusing songs from the EP that nobody ever heard of because they weren't popular then.
And like Travis was saying, now that they know that Twitter is favoring and boosting accounts that are more aligned with people who might believe in this kind of stuff, they're like, oh, we could just bring it out again because now we actually have a better reach.
Now people are going to be seeing the content.
I mean, we can't waste all this great Pizzagate content.
Promoting Pizzagate in 2023 is not the most horrifying and bizarre incident to take place on the social media platform X. I would argue that the most bizarre incident relates to the popular conspiracist influencer who goes by the name Dom Luker.
His real name is Dominic McGree, and as of this recording, Dom Luker has more than 600,000 followers on the platform.
I looked a little bit into what his deal is.
So Dom is an army veteran, music producer and entrepreneur.
He says that he enlisted in 2013 and was stationed at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, which happens to be the same place that General Michael Flynn was stationed for several years of his career.
Not all, but many years of his career.
Is that a coincidence that two people who served in the army happened to be stationed at a major army base on the East Coast?
No.
In 2014, Dom became Vice President of IVOS Records, and in 2016 he was discharged from the Army, which allowed him to focus more of his time on his music.
In October of 2017, Dom founded a financial advising and credit restoration company called Credit Kadabra.
Bad name.
Yeah.
I don't like this.
A 2021 profile of Dom Luker and other election denial personalities in the New York Times has some interesting details about his rise.
Prior to the 2020 election, his social media presence was pretty innocuous.
It consisted of promotion of his businesses and motivational posts like this one from Facebook in 2019.
Replacing why is this happening to me with what is this trying to teach me is a better way of thinking.
Positivity only.
You know what?
Fully agree.
So true, bro.
Yeah, you take life's obstacles, you learn from them, you grow stronger.
But, um, this got him only a handful of likes and comments.
But all of those good vibes changed after Trump lost the election.
He joined the Stop the Steal movement and started posting content like this.
Americans have always viewed the media as an enemy of the people until President Trump was elected.
We have allowed the media to earn our trust in this nation because the masses would accept anyone who wouldn't accept Trump.
Hashtag stop this deal.
Now suddenly with content like this he was getting hundreds of likes and comments.
Much more popular.
He started a Facebook group called Win the Win with the goal of overturning the election results.
He also seemed to make nods to QAnon.
One of the posts he made in this group said that a storm was coming.
On January 6th, he drove from his home in Tennessee to attend the protests in D.C.
He later told the New York Times this about his use of social media.
Everyone has some type of thing that gave them a spark.
Facebook just so happened to be mine.
Bad news.
So over the past year or so, he's taken his act to Twitter where he adopted the persona of the Breaker of Narratives.
So this is based on the concept that the, you know, the left, the liberals, the Democrats, which are all treated as kind of the same thing, promote beliefs that are nothing but flimsy, artificial narratives, and he's going to destroy them.
Hey, I'm with you on part of that.
All right.
He'll do things like post-thread proof that Donald Trump is a pedophile that worked with Jeffrey Epstein, and then he'll proceed to do a thread on actually how Donald Trump is a great guy.
Oh, that's a funny bait-and-switch.
Yeah, he does all these funny little bait-and-switch things, and some of them are kind of silly.
For example, he'll do a tweet that starts with, "...thread.
Proof that Obama is the greatest president of all time and helped black people more than Donald Trump."
And then he'll do a thread attempting to present evidence that Obama is secretly gay.
Oh man, got him.
Definitely not the other president I love who talks about fucking musicals and Diet Coke all day.
Now, he'll sometimes claim that he, like, debunks QAnon and Pizzagate, but his feed is full of Pizzagate and QAnon narratives.
Like, even the last few months, he has reposted videos from, for example, the late and troubled actor and QAnon promoter Isaac Cappy, and he baselessly accused Tom Hanks of being a pedophile.
This is, again, gross accusation.
Now, the worst you could say about Tom Hanks is that he's a CIA asset of some kind.
Nice.
I mean, I don't usually like making those kinds of accusations flippantly, but like, a few months ago, I happened to watch Charlie Wilson's war.
I was like, this is weird.
This is just trying to sell me on the idea that like, secret CIA, you know, black ops warfare is awesome and good, and the people who do it should be celebrated.
That's just odd.
So, Dom Luker has also tweeted, Adrenochrome is real and I can prove it.
So, regardless of what he might say otherwise, Dom Luker has managed to amass his following on the back of conspiracist narratives and twisted versions of history in the style of Dinesh D'Souza.
Recently, Dom Luker crossed a very bad line.
He posted a still image from a notorious child abuse film, was suspended from Twitter as a consequence, but then had his account unsuspended, seemingly by Elon himself.
So, apparently what happened was that on July 22nd, Dom Luker posted an image from a film that was distributed by an Australian man who was sentenced to life in prison in 2018 for sexually abusing children in the Philippines.
This image stayed up until July 26.
And then, of course, many people saw it in the days in between.
And let's not forget, he watermarked it with his Twitter handle, which he loves to do with stuff he's reposting.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So he put his Twitter handle on an image from content that's illegal to possess and very illegal to distribute.
Just sickening.
Psychotic.
I mean, just moralless.
I can't have the words to describe the ways in which this kind of clout-seeking ignores any speck of humanity.
Genuinely sick stuff.
So on July 26, the account was suddenly suspended, which of course led to many right wing accounts, including Kerry Lake, asking to bring back Dom Luker.
So of course, Elon Musk obeyed because he just seems to do whatever the right wants him to do.
Elon Musk explained why the account was suspended and then unsuspended in response to Ed Krasinstein.
Now he's fucking back in the mix, whatever.
But this is what Elon said in a tweet.
I'm told that this account was suspended for posting child exploitation pictures associated with the criminal conviction of an Australian man in the Philippines.
Only people on our CSE team have seen those pictures.
For now, we will delete those posts and reinstate the account.
So, the claim that only people on, like, Twitter's internal team saw the pictures is a lie.
A really bold-faced lie.
An incredibly easy-to-debunk lie.
In fact, the image in question had drawn more than 3 million views and 8,000 retweets, according to Twitter statistics, on a cached version of the tweet.
Weird!
Like, why would he do such a horrible thing?
So, Dom said that he did it to draw attention to child sex trafficking.
Now, I feel like this is the logical endpoint of believing that problems can be solved entirely with exposure, in raising awareness, in posting.
Eventually, you convince yourself that you can fight child abuse by posting an image of child rape and torture.
Yeah, we need to- I mean, guys, let's get these hard drives.
Like, what the fuck's going on with this guy?
Yeah, seriously.
Who the fuck sent you this?
Because they need to be contacted by law enforcement.
Now, I should point out that Dom Luker also posted the same image to Instagram, which was eventually deleted.
But he still has an Instagram account, so I'm not letting Meta off the hook, too.
So, like, both these companies should ban him.
Any sensible platform would ban them.
Like, I'm not exaggerating when I say that, like, 4chan has more stringent moderation policies than Twitter.
This is how Elon is going to behave.
I know, and then to, like, personally, like, escort the guy back into the Twitter nightclub, like, yourself after he posted this is so bizarre.
Like, to brag, like, and I have reinstated the account personally.
It's like, what the fuck?
Ah, what a mess.
What a bad, what a bad place.
Yeah.
Nasty stuff.
By the way, one of the people who celebrated the return of Dom Luker's account was Roger Stone, who in a tweet referred to Dom as his protégé, which sent chills up my spine, because the last thing this world needs is protégés of Roger Stone, the man who has absolutely fucked American politics for the last, like, five decades.
Well, fitting.
It's fitting that this guy's first rise to fame is for posting explicit violence and abuse against children.
Good job, Roger.
You did it again.
You're gonna be great.
He's gonna be great.
He's gonna be president.
I know.
Apparently, Twitter, slash, Axis, whatever, handling of child abuse material is so negligent that the subreddit r slash law, which has over 220,000 subscribers, announced that it would ban links to Twitter moving forward.
This was that announcement on the subreddit.
Since Musk took control of Twitter, he mostly eliminated the trust and safety group and stopped paying the vendor that scans for CSAM.
As a result, CSAM, child sexual abuse material, has apparently been circulating on Twitter recently.
Musk also recently reinstated the account of someone who posted CSAM content.
As a result, we'll be removing any content here that leads to Twitter, or as he now calls it, X. Whether it's an embed link or a direct link to a tweet, don't care what outlet is doing it.
If you're a reporter or editor, stop embedding links to Twitter in any of your content.
Which is seems like a sensible policy.
Like I said, I do feel a kind of sickness every time I, you know, habitually use the platform.
But you know, I keep doing it because maybe I'm sick in my own way.
We need we needed intervention.
I'm going to gather your family.
Good.
Right.
Will you gather mine too?
Yes.
Can we do a double?
Yes, we're going to put them all in the X building.
Now, the whole episode is very horrific, but it's especially puzzling because in December of last year, Musk called addressing child abuse content on Twitter priority number one.
Well, he didn't say how he would address it.
Yeah, I suppose so.
He didn't clarify, you know, he might be like, address it kindly, like, hello.
Yeah, because he didn't just personally restore the account of someone who posted this.
He's actually paying Dom Luker because his account is monetized as part of Elon's new revenue sharing program.
Cool.
Like, I don't want to be part of this.
This is really awful.
enough that one of the Krasenstein brothers, you know, took to Twitter with a picture of
like a $25,000 check.
Can you imagine?
Like oh my lord, oh my lord, talk about giving, you know, talk about giving the worst people,
you know, a free ride, like yikes.
Monetizing your social media presence?
No, no, Jake, I could never imagine doing that.
We wouldn't do that.
We would never.
We would never.
We haven't.
In addition to that, I just also want to point out that like Elon Musk in the recent past, he's been very quick to ban his critics and other and like left-wing accounts.
He banned Elon Jet for tracking flights from Elon Musk's private jet.
He banned like anti-fascist accounts like those belonging to Chad Loder and the anti-fascist collective like It's Going Down.
Seemingly at the request of Andy Ngo.
So, last December, Twitter even temporarily suspended the accounts of 10 mainstream journalists, including a few who have been on this podcast, like CNN's Dhoni O'Sullivan.
So, it's like, it doesn't really mean anything to point out that, like, Elon Musk is a hypocrite, or that he's just creating these, you know, these dumb, silly, obviously transparent pretexts for just doing what he wants to do.
But it seems as though like he's really more interested in creating, you know, a little kingdom for himself in which he pays off people who spread conspiracy theories, even if they post illegal content and then banning anyone that he thinks are, you know, too critical or threatening of him.
A better future under X!
To further discuss the developments at Twitter slash X, we are joined by journalist Ryan Broderick.
He runs the newsletter Garbage Day, and his most recent entry about Twitter is headlined, Elon Musk Thought He Was Buying the Whole Internet.
Ryan, thank you so much for talking to us today.
Thanks for having me.
Excited to talk about my best friend, Elon Musk.
Yeah, so according to Musk, his ambitions for X is to make something in the style of WeChat in China.
Now, I can't say I've ever used WeChat, not that familiar with it.
So what exactly is that?
And why are all these American tech Yeah, they are completely obsessed with WeChat.
So I used it very briefly.
I went to Beijing in December 2019 and took a train from Beijing to Hong Kong.
And if you want to do anything in China, you have to have WeChat.
It integrates with every app that you need to function in daily life.
It is a Fundamental part of the Communist Chinese Party's surveillance apparatus.
You use it at stores.
You use it to buy tickets for trains.
It also integrates the apps that manage your social credit scores.
It's the full suite.
It also is a pretty good messaging service and it has rudimentary public feeds.
You can look at what other people are posting publicly on WeChat and It was also a major vector, its public feed was a major vector for citizen journalism during the very beginnings of the COVID outbreak.
So people were posting videos from their homes, their towns, their apartment complexes of the lockdowns when they were first starting in like late December, early January.
The reason American tech guys are so obsessed with that is because they're like, well, what if I was China?
What if I owned the main app that everyone used for everything?
And it's very naked that that's what Elon Musk wants.
He wants the everything app because he wants to own it.
You know, I gotta say, having some billionaire in Silicon Valley just be the single middleman for everything I want to do in life in terms of social media and contacting people and payments and banking doesn't seem like an upgrade for having this app controlled by a single party government.
It sounds kind of dystopian.
It's the same.
It's the same.
I mean, it's the same.
Well, okay, so I do think it's interesting that this idea is very much in the ether of Silicon Valley at the moment.
There are all of these guys that are completely hooked on concepts like rationalism and effective altruism, right? All of these guys are really
obsessed with the concept of techno nation-state stuff. In fact, I went to Miami Bitcoin a
couple years ago and I sat through all these panels with all these guys talking about how they
could turn their Boca Raton condominium complex into a nation-state with the power of
Bitcoin. And I don't think it's an accident that Elon Musk, who is very much in that world, is
effectively trying to do the same thing with Twitter and
And my theory is that he's picked Twitter because he liked Twitter.
And that's as deep as it goes.
Musk's recent actions have like, really invites the question, like, what the fuck is he doing?
Especially with the rebrand, because Twitter is one of the most recognizable brands in the world.
It's part of the reason why, you know, the entire company is worth $44 billion, because that company has spent Years building up this brand to be in the minds of social media users, while X is just a single letter.
So what possibly could possess him to throw away all that brand value?
It's because X's are cool, man.
X is cool as hell.
I would say it's the second coolest letter other than Z, which is super cool, you know?
I think you're forgetting Q. Oh, right.
I forgot what show I was on for a second.
That's right.
I'm sorry.
Q is pretty cool.
You can clip that, by the way.
Q is pretty cool.
Okay, hold on though.
Let's really talk about this because X is historically a negative letter.
You know, X, it's like, don't go here.
X, you're wrong.
You know, X, you're crossing out.
Cancel.
Like, what about the letter X?
You're mixing up a cross with X.
That is so awesome.
What are you talking about?
You think crossing something out is just the letter X?
Yeah, dude, but visually it's the same thing.
That's a good point.
And it's like, don't go here.
That is a great point.
Wrong way.
You know what I mean?
No, you're right.
He couldn't have picked a more inviting, you know, to me, X is the least inviting letter.
I don't know what a better one would be.
I mean, let's run through this, right?
Let's, let's run, let's run through all the letters.
Let's go through the entire alphabet right now.
Let's spend 25 minutes.
You can't do K, because that's Kmart, right?
And you can't do... Right, right, can't do K. What about A for Apple?
A, it's the beginning of the alphabet.
So many good things start with A. Apple, um, alphabet.
I mean, this is how you know that Elon Musk has, like, never been good at technology, because he bought, from what I've read, he's been obsessed with renaming something X for almost 20 years.
He, like, bought the domain for a million dollars back when that was, like, an absurd thing to do.
Right.
But he did it at a time where everyone was like, you know what?
Like, all companies should start with, like, A or B or C, because people are going to just be typing in letters in that order.
I guess that was, like, everyone wanted to be, like, even even early Twitter days, everyone wanted to be like @A, @AA,
@, you know, but he's always been bad at this.
He's like, "No, I want to do X."
And he knows what porn is, right?
Like he must, like I know, he's tweeted about hentai before with Grimes.
Like he is aware of what porn is.
So it's, it is confounding to me that he, he's obsessed with X this much.
Yeah.
It's, yeah, it sounds like it's just something that like got stuck in his mind.
And like we discussed earlier in the episode, apparently his obsession with this was part of the reason why he was ousted as the CEO of PayPal, and why this ousting was led by Peter Thiel, who was unhappy with this performance.
So it sounds like he's just for decades he's been obsessed with this letter and thought it was just the coolest thing ever and like it's just now he doesn't have a Peter Thiel to tell him that's a terrible idea and he's just running with it.
Yeah, I thought capitalism was a meritocracy.
Could it be that we are raising to the top the biggest morons?
No.
I mean, I think he's been one of the biggest morons at the top for so long that he's, like, effectively not a human being anymore.
That's the only logical explanation.
Yeah, he's been an idiot for so long and suffered zero consequences.
In fact, only got more press and more companies and a bigger profile.
that he has, yeah, he has turned this idiocy into like his own superpower
and will become unstoppable, you know, in the coming decades.
Although I have to give it to him, he has figured out that none of this means anything, right?
Like he has become insanely nihilistic earlier than the other billionaires,
which makes me think maybe he's actually ahead of the curve, but just in like the stages of grief
over this entire system.
It is fascinating how he lives a life.
So publicly devoid of meaning or art or like human emotion.
And it seems to be like very cool about that.
Like he's just recycling Reddit memes that get sent to him and he's like not talking to his children and he's like blowing up spaceships near small towns in Texas and like killing all the animals there.
Like he just doesn't really care in a way that is almost admirable.
If you if you follow the nihilism all the way, you know, it's like, okay, that's you're really committed to the bit.
I mean, he is kind of like a Trumpian billionaire in the sense that usually, you know, the people at the top of the financial system are aware that obviously, like, the rules that the rest of us are governed by don't apply to them, but they try to be a little bit more discreet about it.
Whereas Elon Musk, he does not give a fuck.
He will flout every rule.
He won't pay rent.
He'll ignore, you know, local regulations.
He doesn't care about laws, even employment laws.
Like, it doesn't matter to him.
And he doesn't care who else, you know, turns their head and realizes, like, hey, this guy's not playing by the rules.
Because, like, come on.
Grow up.
Grow up.
The rules don't apply to someone like me.
Grow up?
What do you mean?
He's funny, man.
He posted the t-shirt, I love Canada, and he obscured part of it, and it says, I love anal.
Yeah, he's an epic memester.
I don't like the way you're talking about this epic memester.
He knows all the best rage comics from 2007, and he's going to post them.
You watch.
In your newsletter, you kind of, you have this, I thought it was really interesting theory about what Elon Musk thought he was buying when he got Twitter.
And it rung true to me because I sometimes, you know, get tunnel vision when I use Twitter too long.
And I think that, you know, I have somehow have this sort of like understanding of the world just because I've seen a lot of tweets, but I'm not a billionaire capable of buying the entire platform.
And he is.
Yeah, I like to play this game where I like to take, like, anything we're talking about when it comes to Twitter and replace it with, like, any other website.
So it's like, oh, Elon Musk has bought Neopets and he's gonna turn into X the Everything app, or Elon Musk is turning something awful into his, like, Starship bridge, or whatever it is, because, you know, at the end of the day, Twitter is just a website. And the
reason we put so much importance on it is like, yeah, partly due to who's on there. So yeah, I
guess if like presidential candidates were running their campaign on Pinterest, we would all be
talking about Pinterest this way.
But that is sort of the heart of it, right? Like any website could have risen to the level
of Twitter, but there are some addicting characteristics of it that I think have really
warped people's brains.
And yeah, my theory is that Elon Musk just spent most of the pandemic using Twitter and talking about Twitter while at, like, you know, anti-lockdown dinner parties and taking ayahuasca or whatever the hell he does, and just convinced himself that this is the pulse of reality.
Yeah, it's like, you know, sometimes when I use Twitter, I go like, ah, fuck, like this thing won't work.
Or I'm like, ah, like, I can't see the reply that I put to, like, why do I have to refresh this?
I don't know.
But if you're Elon Musk and you're like sitting around with like, you know, all your, you know, homies laughing and joking, and you're all using Twitter together in the same room, you start talking like, I should just buy it.
Yeah.
I should just buy it and then it would be mine and I could have it and then I could make it the way that I want it to be like it is it feels like an idea that was birthed out of a joke because I don't think he actually really wants to make the platform better or become a hero to go because he could have done that so easily all he would have had to do is buy Twitter expose I don't know anybody you know like in a real way not like you know glad hand it to like some weird journalist and have them cherry pick Uh, emails and shit, but like, yeah, expose, like, whatever kind of bias was happening, and then introduce a Twitter blue subscription, but you can only buy it with Dogecoin.
He would have made a ton of, you know, a ton of crypto bros millionaires overnight.
Everybody would have loved him, and it would have been case closed, but it hasn't been that at all.
It's, it's been one sort of, like, I don't know, misstep after another, and sort of janky introduction, and rolling something out, only to roll it back silently, you know, 24 hours later.
I really just don't understand, like, what he thinks he's doing, and I don't know, there's no way for it not to just come off as, like, pure incompetence.
Yeah, I always hesitate to, like, compare stuff to, like, I don't know, Trump or the insurrection, but I do think that, I mean, do you remember the text messages that kind of surfaced during his purchasing of Twitter of, like, all of those, like, weird sad men in Silicon Valley being like, oh, dude, like, once you get this, like, you can, like, what you just said, like, you can, like, make it run on Dogecoin and, like, all that stuff?
To me that that is just like the insurrection of like the lowest common denominator Silicon Valley guy being like this thing that is used by minority groups and activists and the media like we can hijack it and just take a giant shit on it and we can remake it in our own image and those text messages to me are the exact same force that you see with all the protesters on January 6th so they're like we're gonna get in there and we're just gonna take a big fucking dump right in the middle of this thing that matters for people Because we're so entitled that we think that our version will be better once it's done.
But they clearly didn't have any idea what they were doing.
So none of it has gone smoothly.
And they've just, I don't know, I half buy the conspiracy theories that like, he was, he was paid to do this.
But also, he's invested so much of his own money that like, that doesn't make any sense either.
So I think incompetence is the only explanation at a certain point.
I do love the idea of all of these like kind of like loser tech bros like you know with tons of money to play around
They all have like a vested interest in this and they're just like whispering into his ear like
"Hey man, yeah you should let people tweet like 12 paragraphs at once"
Or like "Man you should let somebody put like a four hour video up like that's what would be really awes-"
And he's just got all of these ideas and he's trying to satisfy everybody at you know everybody in his text
messages at once And looking at what Twitter is now that actually makes
sense to me because that's what it feels like Is that there are a hundred different people in his ear and
he's trying to sort of like find some kind of compromise So that everybody is like not totally pissed off at him
Yeah, they're like "Oh man, wouldn't it be cool if Medium was also YouTube?"
And he's like, Yeah, that's great.
That's a great idea.
I'm gonna do that for some fucking reason.
He has 280 characters historically.
That sounds great.
I'm really interested in your take in one of the most horrifying recent events.
And then, apparently, Elon Musk intervened personally to restore his account but just delete the offending post.
posted child abuse material, a still from a notorious illegal video, and stayed up for
days but then he was suspended afterwards.
And then, apparently, Elon Musk intervened personally to restore his account but just
delete the offending post.
Now, this was really absurd, especially since Elon Musk, despite his claims of being a free
speech absolutist, hasn't been shy about banning some of his critics.
Like the Elon Jed account, he suspended a bunch of journalists back in December, but
this account who literally posted child abuse material, he's willing to not just restore
his account but also include Dom Luker as part of his creator payments program.
So, I mean, what do you make of like what this says about Elon Musk's social media platform?
Yeah, this story's bad.
And it's interesting how it has played out compared to previous examples of this sort of thing happening.
So I think the most well-known version of this would probably be the outrage over Reddit's R jailbait about 10 years ago.
But this also played out various, which for people who don't know, basically people discovered this subreddit, which was collecting that material and Reddit was eventually forced to shut it down.
And there was a whole hoopla over like how not-safe-for-work subreddits worked.
This also sort of is similar to stuff that happened on 4chan at the end of the 2000s, where there was a heavy presence of illicit sexual material on the site.
They could never figure out how to moderate it.
They instituted the janitor program, which was their moderation thing, and CSAM was kind of the last line for 4chan for a long time.
It would get taken down almost immediately.
Even they were pretty strict about it.
Yeah, and this is the other thing that I actually don't know the answer to.
So with Section 230, a lot of the moderation conversations I've had regarding sort of the regulation of illegal material on social networks, when I've talked to moderators, moderation teams about this, like the general rule is you moderate it without ever acknowledging that it's there, because if you were to do so, you're sort of opening a regulatory can of worms.
Deal with the problem if you acknowledge it, but if you have automation, you know, it's like, oh, the automation missed it, like, whoopsie daisy, you know, and that's kind of Facebook's modus operandi.
And that's kind of how a lot of these sites work.
So for Elon Musk to publicly admit that this material was on the site, publicly admit that he is aware of the user that posted it, bring the user back, give them moderation tools.
I mean, the whole thing to me is just like one giant advertisement for the FBI to raid the office.
Yeah, and that user that posted it, like, if he hasn't had a meeting with law enforcement, I'd be very surprised if it doesn't happen, you know, shortly.
Like, this stuff isn't like a philosophical debate.
This is like the closest you can get to regulations of internet content in America.
And the fact that it's gone down the way it's gone down makes me feel genuinely psychotic.
Because everyone's just acting like this wasn't viewed by millions of people for like a week, which is just, I don't know, that's crazy to me.
That's completely crazy to me.
Now, when it comes to Elon Musk, I think it really is a fool's errand to predict what's going to happen in the future.
But I was wondering, where do you think this is going, both for Twitter and the broader social media landscape?
It's the $44 billion question, right?
Yeah.
My impulse, my hunch, is that Twitter just shrinks.
It just continues to shrink.
It doesn't die.
I don't see, unless Elon Musk just doesn't pay the bills to a point where the servers get unplugged or something, I don't see this going that way.
I think in many ways it'll feel like MySpace.
I don't know if any of you were on MySpace in 2009, but it was a bad place.
It was like, it was like metalcore bands, and juggalos, and like porn bots.
And that was kind of it.
And I sort of suspect X, Twitter, whatever it's called going forward, will feel that way.
I suspect Blue Sky will emerge as kind of like the Tumblr to its Reddit, like the place where everyone's like, no, we're normal over here.
And we're definitely not constantly fighting each other over petty bullshit.
And we're definitely bigger, but they're not.
I mean, the biggest user on Blue Sky is like got 70,000 followers.
So it's still a drop in the bucket.
Threads, from what I've seen, is over already.
Like, I think it's lost half its users in three weeks.
It could always bounce back.
But I just sort of think that the days of a public feed are going away, and I think a lot of people are retreating to group chats, discords.
I think even the use of chat GPT is part of this trend, where it's like, instead of using this public repository of stuff, you want like a private chat.
I think that's the future, at least in the near future.
And I don't know how long it'll take for a public feed to come back, because even TikTok doesn't really feel public.
It feels siloed and insulated.
And so I sort of think that's our near future, which is just going to cause so much havoc on people's understanding of stuff, I think.
Yeah it's that it really is a double-edged sword because on the one hand I'm like good I don't need to hear you know a billion people's opinions all at once but yes the moment everybody gets siloed into their own discords or group chats or whatever then just like you said then they are going to be consuming you know essentially like one side of information or or what have you Yeah, like, and it's not like those, like the public feeds will disappear or die.
It'll, it'll kind of be like when there was like Reddit and Tumblr and Something Awful and all these sort of like smaller siloed communities like cracking jokes about the wider internet in that weird three years before Facebook like really turned on.
And I think like, if you want to kind of feel what that's going to feel like, you could look at like the discourse around Pinkie Doll, that like TikTok streamer that pretends to be a video game character.
Or like some of the viral discourse style drama over the last couple weeks where it's like amorphous and it doesn't feel like it matters but everyone's pissed about it and you don't know why and you have to like decide like am I gonna waste an afternoon digging to the bottom of this thing?
I think that's kind of the future and what I've been trying to figure out is like what that means for like a presidential election which is on the horizon.
What does a group chat broken feed look like you know deciding political discourse and I don't know the answer to be honest.
Well, thanks for coming on, Ryan.
This is this is I mean, a very difficult thing to pick apart.
And we're all in this wild ride together.
And I guess we'll we'll see where it crashes.
So where can people follow your work?
You can check me out at garbageday.email, where I have my newsletter, which is increasingly the last part of the internet that I think I use because I'm not very active anywhere else.
You can also just email me, ryan at garbage day dot email, because that is not rate limited.
So I have unlimited opportunities to answer you, unlike Twitter DMs.
But I am also on Twitter and Blue Sky and all the rest.
Thanks, Ryan.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for listening to another episode of the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
You can go to patreon.com/QAnonAnonymous and subscribe for 5 bucks a month to get a whole second episode every week.
Plus access to our entire archive of premium episodes.
That includes Jake and Brad's mini-series they just launched called The Spectral Voyager.
And of course the episodes of Trickle Down and Man Clan.
For everything else we've got a website, QAnonAnonymous.com.
Listener, until next week, may the X bless you and keep you.
It's not a conspiracy, it's a fact.
And now, today's AutoQQ.
The possibility of Twitter becoming kind of a super app with payments included, perhaps even Doge or something.
This seems to me, based on your work with David at PayPal, a pretty brilliant idea.
What's the vision there in terms of if you were able to buy it, you know, perhaps at the right price?
What would it look like if, you know, I could add Jason to add Elon Musk, you know, 10 bucks or something if, you know, we were splitting a check or something?
Sure.
Well, for those that have used WeChat, I think that's, WeChat's actually a good model.
If you're in China, it's basically, you kind of live on WeChat.
It does everything.
It's sort of like Twitter plus PayPal plus a whole bunch of other things and all rolled
into one with actually a great interface.
And it's really an excellent app.
And we don't have anything like that outside of China.
So I think such an app would be really useful.
And just like the utility of it, of sort of a spam-free thing where you can make comments,
you can post videos, you can...
I think it's important for content creators to have a revenue share.
This does not need to be done on Twitter.
It could be done from something that's created from scratch.
It could be something new.
But I think this thing needs to exist, whether it is converting Twitter to be the all-encompassing
app that, like I said, everything from digital to town square where important ideas are debated,
maximally trusted and inclusive, and at a point where you have a high-trust situation,
then payments, whether it's crypto or fiat, can make a lot of sense.
You just want something that's incredibly useful and that people love using.
So it's either convert Twitter to that or start something new.
