 Time to drop Twitter. Maybe it's time to drop Twitter. I'm Jay Fidel. This is ThinkTech, and the tagline of our show is Elon Musk is wrecking the Twitter platform. What do we do now? And our guest today is none other than our senior engineer, Eric Colander. You may have heard of him. He's already famous, and he's going to talk about this from a ThinkTech point of view and a technical point of view and a platform point of view. Because in fact, we're on eight social media platforms. We're all over town. And one of them has been Twitter. And in fact, Eric has been managing Twitter account. But not too long ago, we decided that it was much too problematic for us to continue that. And so now we're off Twitter, like so many responsible corporations around the country. Welcome to the show, Eric. Hey, Jay. Good to be here. Good to be on this side of the camera. You do well at that. So let's talk about our experience with Twitter. You were managing it for some time under our impact program funded by the Atherton Family Foundation. And I wonder what it was like in the beginning and how it changed, and then how it changed with Elon Musk. So Twitter, as you know, is probably one of the most popular social medias out there. They got 250 million some-on users or so. And it's just the biggest wave that people gather news these days. And so we started going on there, started tweeting, not to a big impact, but as soon as they made the announcement with Elon, we nixed that. Yeah. Let's look at a commentary that we made, one of our other staff members made, about our decision process over that. A commentary about leaving Twitter. Okay, let's look at that now. Aloha. Thank you for your consideration of the views expressed in this ThinkTech commentary. Up until now, Twitter has been going in the right direction compared to other social media platforms in regards to regulating hate speech, particularly when it barred Donald Trump. But Elon Musk's frenetic purchase of Twitter and what he has done since then has changed all that. Musk has permitted outrageous lies and conspiracy theories on Twitter, pulled moderation systems, and has himself tweeted hateful lies, appalling conspiracy theories and calls for violence, most recently spreading misinformation about the attack on Paul Pelosi. On the same day that Musk closed his deal, researchers from Montclair State University found that the platform has become a much more hostile environment. Hate speech increased 4.7 times higher than the seven-day average. Twitter is becoming an appalling and destructive force in social media and the public conversation, even more than before, dangerous to them, to us and the country. We hope it fails, and we hope that its failure will show other social media platforms that they should not follow Musk's example. We hope other social media platforms will learn to respect the trust reposed in them by the public and that they will better moderate their content. We cannot succeed in anything as a nation of fools. Our democracy depends on demanding truth and rejecting lies from all media, and to act constructively and with purpose to achieve truth and reliable information about our community, our country and the world around us. Lies and hate destroy democracy, and that should be clear from history. We can only hope there will be a more rational change in ownership and a sweeping and profound change in policy at Twitter. Or for a new, better platform in the future. Thanks so much for considering the views expressed in this ThinkTech commentary. Aloha. Awful. Important. So can you tell us a little about Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter? He's been in the paper every day on all the other media and the print press, of course. They cover him in everything he does, because they say he's the richest man on earth, what with his Tesla and his SpaceX. And now this is his newest quote, play toy, end quote. That's an expression by some other billionaire discussing it. So what was it like for him to spend his 44 billion? Did I say 44 billion? Yeah, I said 44 billion. What was that like? I mean, the commentary center was frenetic. Do you agree? Absolutely, yeah. He obviously just bought Twitter was a two weeks ago now. And the reason he wanted to buy Twitter is because he thinks that there's some political favoring for liberals on Twitter, as well as the other reason is the abundance of bots on Twitter. And he wanted to kind of bring that to an end. And I don't think he's going to really be able to do that very successfully. I think he's jumping into something he doesn't really know that much about. Yeah. Yeah, that's an interesting point that he hasn't been in this before, but he's a very smart guy. And he's done Tesla. That's not easy. He's managed it right down to rolling up his sleeves on the assembly line. And SpaceX, which I'm sure he didn't have any experience at all in that. So maybe he'll learn about it. But the first thing. He's a smart guy. So there's nothing saying he's stupid. He's a very, very smart individual. Yeah. So now the first thing he does is he fires all his executive cadre. And what was all that about? He just trying to get rid of that out with the old and in with the new, I think is his kitchen sink is the term. I think he's just completely upending the corporate structure there to kind of control things in the way he wants to do it without any of that. As he calls woke, wokeness that surrounds Twitter. And he's kind of, I don't get the why people are against being woke. It's just being educated. It's not, it's been kind of turned into this political, it's been politicized, but it's really not anything more than being educated. Yeah. And he did it. You know, I had a, I had a client one time who fired all the staff in his company, its company by email from its headquarters on the mainland. And boy, were they who you wake up in a Monday morning and you're fired. It's, you know, it sounds like Trump, doesn't it? There's a certain gratification and firing like shot and fro to take joy in shattering people's employment lives. What do you think about that? What effect did it have on the, those executives? And I, there, it's a broad range of executives. And what effect do you think it had on the rest of the people? And there's quite a few people who have worked for Twitter. Yeah. They said there was about 7,500 employees, not including the executives. And he acts, I think half of them right on October 27th or 28th, whatever the day was where he bought it, along with the top three executives. The three executives will be fine. I'm sure they'll, they'll land on their feet. But the other people, they, they, I think there's, they brought a number of lawsuits against Twitter. And so we'll see how that goes. But I guess I just saw a report that he's even trying to hire some of the guys that he fired originally. So it kind of looks like he might not know what he's doing with that. I don't know. Well, two, two thoughts on that. You know, number one, what I last saw was it was actually a class action by a number of, I mean, a great number of Twitter executives that he he fired. And, you know, the other is that some of them who have been offered their jobs back again have said, hell no, right, we wouldn't work for you. But the other part of that is what kind of effect does that have on morale in the company in general? Not much. I'd be, I'd be pretty afraid to speak out too much against what Elon's trying to do there for fear of losing your job, which I don't think anybody should have to work in those conditions. Talking about a hostile work environment, you know, fired on a Monday morning by email. Not a good start to the week, that's for sure. And, you know, then I think he was obligated arguably to pay them some kind of severance, and he didn't do that. He just fired them. So now there's an issue over that too. Well, then of course, he gets in there and he wants to make the turn the company more republican, I guess. That's just a perfect time to do that. I mean, the whole thing seems planned to be big news just before the midterms. A lot of people have said that. What do you think? And yeah, he brands it as making it more fair and equal. One of his biggest arguments is that there is a very high liberal bias on Twitter, despite studies and reports saying the exact opposite. There was a study. I can't quite remember where who did it off the top of my head, but they concluded that the average Twitter user would be more inclined to see much more right-leaning tweets and profiles than left-leaning. So there really isn't that liberal bias that Elon is talking about. Well, he closed that in the notion of free speech, and he calls it first amendment. So anybody can say anything. This is a really interesting policy question. And a lot of the people who he fired were actually moderators. They were content moderators using moderation software in order to exclude hate speech and violent speech and all that. So he's moved into a different frame of reference now. It's the first amendment on steroids. It's anything you want to say about anything at all, even if it's hate speech and even if it's completely obviously untrue. Where does that take Twitter? Is that the Twitter we used to know, or is that something else? Well, Twitter has always had a, they've always been, I think they delete millions of accounts, fake accounts every month based off if they're bots and they're putting out malicious information or fake information. So yeah, so free speech on Twitter has always been obviously a big thing. But that doesn't mean you can go and say whatever you want. Twitter has deleted accounts consistently based on whatever metrics they have. They don't want hate speech on there. And a lot of conservatives mostly are saying that that's unfair towards them with hate speech or with regarding lies about the election. That's the big one that people are getting silenced for. Very interesting. So the staff that he fired was largely involved in moderating hate speech, that is in keeping it off and permitting accounts that were hate speech accounts. And when he, my reading is when he fired them, the hate speech software they were running stopped working. In other words, the whole enterprise of keeping hate speech off Twitter stopped. And so there are some stats now. You're familiar with the stats only in the last few days about dramatic increases in hate speech. Yeah. And so the video that we just played a little bit ago referenced a study from Moncler State University. And their study was within the first 12 hours of Elon's takeover. And they studied a variety of hate speech terms, which on a basic weekly average was about 84 times a day. The 12 o'clock midnight to 12 o'clock PM, first 12 hours of the first day, those numbers rose up to about almost 300 an hour. And that's 12 a.m. to 12 p.m. These are not peak Twitter hours. This is the dead of the night mostly. And yet those numbers skyrocketed. Well, you know, it's global. So the dead of the night here may not be the dead of the night somewhere else, you know. So he himself, Elon Musk himself, is an active Twitterer. And in fact, he calls him Chief, he calls himself Chief He quit, I think. That's his title, his corporate title in Twitter now. That's the owner and the chief executive. And he has made no bones about his own views, which are kind of right wing. And he has, he has also made tweets that are conspiracy theories, that are lies, and that are hate. How does that play in all of this? You know, it seems to me that the advertisers wouldn't like it too much if the chief quit, you know, did that. But he's doing it or he had, I'm not sure if he's still doing it, but he got a lot of pushback. He definitely has favored some of the right-leaning conspiracy theories and the big one, obviously, with the election. I don't know if he's come out and said that he believes Trump won, but he's definitely leaves it, I think, more open to interpretation. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And then it's pretty famous when he did some kind of ridiculous conspiracy theory tweet over Paul Pelosi, Nancy Pelosi's husband, who was attacked just a week ago. What happened there? Well, the attack we all heard is some crazy guy came in and attacked, wanted to get Nancy, but only Paul was home. And thankfully, you know, he's all right after the surgery. But yeah, I think Elon was trying to come up with, there's been a lot of conspiracies that this guy was Antifa, and he's actually liberal. And I don't get how you could believe much of that. He clearly wanted to go and hurt Nancy and her husband. And I think that's the end of it right there. He was a crazy, crazy guy. One of the conspiracy theories was that he had a prior relationship with the person who attacked him. I did not hear that. Yeah. I think that might have been involved in Elon Musk's tweet, which is really a lie, not true. And it's just provocative. But that whole thing about lying on Twitter is so interesting because so many people, many tens of millions, even hundreds of millions, believe it. They believe it and they retweet it. And then before you know it, you have half the country. Half the country is involved in Twitter somehow, directly or indirectly. And they believe it and they think it's the news. I mean, some people have said that Twitter is the biggest news media in the country. Beyond all the others, that is really scary considering its lack of responsibility, its lack of accountability, and the amount of conspiracy theories and hate speech that winds up on its platform. Right. And for most people, when they see a tweet, that's the beginning and the end of their news update, is reading this one tweet. Most people aren't going into research things or finding different takes on it. Whatever tweet they read, that's there. That's fact now to them, regardless of how true or untrue it might be. Yeah. So if Twitter doesn't moderate the content and if it allows all that on there, it has a huge reach. And we never saw this before in our lives where a lie could reach so many people and affect public sensibilities, public opinion, and votes. So this is all directly related to the midterms. What's interesting too, you probably have seen this, is that Twitter moves very quickly. So if I put a tweet up, if I am, for example, Donald Trump, he's not a good example, but if I put a tweet up on Twitter, it can be, somehow, you'll have to explain to me how this works because I don't understand it. It's not like a newspaper where you may get a copy, an email copy of an article days later. No, no, no. This is minutes later, even seconds. How does that work? So retweeting is one of the features of Twitter that everyone's, I'm sure, is familiar with. If I was going to retweet UJ, people would say your tweet, but it would be on my timeline. And yeah, those things can spread like wildfire, thanks to a lot because of bots. And bots work, it's just a program that can send out thousands of tweets, thousands of retweets every day. And that's what is a big problem with Twitter because people listen to those bots, people who are following those bots, not knowing that they are bots. And they're putting out this sometimes hate speech, misinformation, lies, and people eat it up, they buy it, they believe it as fact because that's their news source. There are two things that have been very disturbing over the past day in the media. One is the report that Vladimir Putin has activated his social media internet research agency in Moscow to get on the bandwagon and make tweets in favor of the Republican DOP, MAGA group. That's a great concern. The other piece I noticed was that the Republicans are doing, I mean, it's really like real time. The Republicans are doing this now all of a sudden in anticipation of election day. And so what you have is this huge swarm of tweets and retweets going on to try to change votes as of election day. You think that Twitter will change votes? I mean, the dark side of this, the Republicans, and for that matter, Vladimir Putin, who has always wanted Trump and the MAGA Republicans to win elections, are actively trying to change votes right now, either to change votes affirmatively or to confuse people about voting. Do you think it'll work? To a degree, yeah. They do have an effect on whatever Rush has been doing. But also, I think that in today's elections and stuff, everyone's kind of already in their own silos. I don't know how many people are going back and forth so much, but more that people are getting cemented into their own beliefs more and more. You make it even harder and harder to see the other side's viewpoints. Again, coming back to the election, everyone knows that obviously there was a fair election that Donald Trump lost. But to so many people, they just fundamentally don't believe that. And if you don't fundamentally don't believe that, there's on the way you can do, you can't convince them. Yeah. Well, we're going to see, aren't we? We're going to see how that works. But you're the one thing that disturbed me when all this started, that it was either just before or just after Musk closed on his acquisition of Twitter, was the suggestion that he would allow Donald Trump back on. After January 6, Twitter threw Trump off. They blamed as most right-thinking people did the insurrection on Trump because Trump called for it in public on television. So they threw him off. And he's been off ever since early 2021 until now. But Elon Musk said he was going to let him back on again. You think he will let him back on again? It seems consistent with your perception of this. And if he gets back on, what effect? I think it's going to depend on if and when he announces his campaign, which it's looking like he is going to. And I think the argument will be, well, if all the other candidates can app Twitter, why can't this candidate? And he's a very special case because no other candidate has tried to incite an insurrection. So it's a little bit different for him. But I do believe that he will be eventually allowed back on. And he's going to go right back to his old games. He's going to spew those lies again. He's going to spew moralize. He's going to do everything he can to fake the election again. And thus our democracy and thus our country. So this is really important. What happens with Elon Musk? He controls the largest platform, platform people regard as news. He controls and he believes that he needs to quote, open it up and quote, but really favoring the conservatives and the extreme conservatives. And if you let Trump back on, that's going to have a significant effect. This is a pretty, oh, and this is the preferred platforms for people who want to spread the big lie and spread conspiracy theories and so forth. And you know what? This may have an effect on Facebook. I saw an article also there that Facebook was going, in the process of terminating a very substantial percentage of its staff also. Trump claims, rather Musk claims that he terminated staff because he was losing money. Facebook might make the same argument. We don't know if that would be true or not. And then terminate a lot of staff there too. And what that's called, it sounds like to me, for terminating the moderators, terminating the content moderators and shrinking down the moderation systems and doing what Trump and doing what Musk is doing with Twitter. So this may be a virus here among other social media platforms. That's also pretty scary. It is. Yeah, because you don't want to see this stuff travel to the other social medias because then that's that much more reach on social media. So hopefully, they don't go the way of Twitter. Yeah. Well, you know, we have been trying to put think tech content out on various social media platforms, all together eight of them, plus a level community television. And what what kind of effect does this have a significant effect on our efforts to develop impact, either in Hawaii or on a national basis, that we are jumping ship on Twitter. There's a lot of, there's a lot of corporations, very responsible national and multinational corporations that have, in fact, don't dip on Twitter saying they can't tolerate what what Musk is doing. And they could not tolerate having lies and conspiracy theories and crazy perversions of the truth back on again. And they're jumping ship. How is this going to affect Twitter? Do you think Twitter will lose more money? Do you think that Elon Musk will be able to make that up with his $8 blue check system? Do you think that Twitter will survive? I think Twitter will survive because it's at any point could be bankrolled by its the richest man in the world. But they are going to lose money. Twitter has never really been a profitable company. They're consistently in the red. And so the only revenue they have really is advertisers. And yeah, like you mentioned, dozen and a half major advertisers, major companies have pulled all their advertisements from Twitter, which is Elon's all talking about he's complaining about it. But in fairness to Elon, he has not made any content changes yet. But these are the pulling of the advertisements is kind of making a statement to you on like, don't you better not make these changes otherwise we'll never come back. That's an interesting question. I wanted to ask you about that. So they leave in protest of many things which we have talked about here. But they always say we might come back if he cleans his act up. So and for that reason, he may clean his act up or not. If he's really a good businessman, he will clean his act up. And that's what he is. He's a businessman. He's if something's not making money, I don't think he's going to stick around for too long or he's going to change his practices pretty quickly. And Twitter could be very profitable or I don't know that the answers to why it has never been profitable. Other social media sites are Twitter just has not been able to despite being one of the most popular and big news source for so many people. I wonder how much his popularity I should just the wrong word is his his appearance in the news these days every every minute of every day. You could look at the Washington Post in the New York Times and on an average day see two or three articles or op-ed pieces about it. So he's getting his name, you know, he's getting his name out there. He's becoming a very famous person. And that has got to have an effect on people not so much leaving Twitter, but joining Twitter. They want to see what all the hubbub is about. They want to follow the action. What do you think? Will that help them being a negative celebrity this way? It will gain popularity with those people for sure, but it's not going to make him popular with his avid advertisers. And that's again what he needs to run the company. But it will definitely he'll get some you'll get more supporters and more support from his current supporters. So some of them have said they've reserved the possibility that they'll come back. If he if he cleans his act up on these things, that they'll come back. Do you think this will happen? And is it should this affect the way we think tech feel about it? Might we come back? I think we could definitely go back because again, Twitter is such a valuable source for a company like Things Tech Hawaii to reach its viewers to display its content. So it's definitely valuable. But if they're going to be out there with an unmoderated hate speech and why it's not a place that you might want to be. Okay, here's a hard question for you, Eric. Are you ready? Are you sitting down for a hard question? We'll find out. What does this tell us about the future of social media in general? It seems to me that Elon Musk and Twitter have created an inflection point. And as I mentioned, Facebook is also firing people in large numbers. And I don't know what effect that has on the moderation of content there. It's always been an issue on Facebook and others. Are we going to have more or less hate content in general on these social media sites? Are we going to see a governmental regulation of the moderation of hate speech and content on these sites? How is social media going to change in the context of this inflection point? I don't see social media, especially Twitter, going very much farther forward without some sort of government regulation. It's too tight into politics and news that you can't just let it free roam as it has been. Because what happens is lies spread like wildfire. And despite them being objectively false and no basis, so many people believe them. And it might take government regulation to fix that, which I think that's a way that most social media companies will have to go. What that regulation is, I don't know. What you're really saying is that we may have to take another look at the First Amendment because they live in the protection of the First Amendment. And query whether this means that the First Amendment also has to change. Well, the First Amendment is of course very important. It's an inherent right that Americans have. But the famous exception, you can't yell fire in a movie theater. There's got to be more exceptions, but one of those, a new exception needs to be you can't incite an insurrection. If you're going out there and speaking to the masses, you can't allow that because look what happened. Yeah, the other part of it is you can't have a country that runs on lies. You can't have a democracy that runs on lies, especially when 300 candidates who are seeking election in the midterm deny the 2020 presidential election, 300 of them. So if you have a lot of lies like that, you can't have a democracy. And if you don't have a democracy, boy, it's going to be different. And so really the question is whether it's too late already. It may be too late to actually moderate the content on social media and to get back to respect for the truth in a functioning democracy. Any thoughts? I don't think it's too late for Twitter or social media to go that way. But I think it is definitely too late for a lot of these election deniers. For someone, there's no convincing with any amount of facts that what's fact is fiction. Yeah, one thing is clear, though, that the whole issue with Elon Musk and Twitter and possibly other social media sites is inextricably intertwined with public sensibility, with voting and with the future of our democracy and thus our country. We thought for a time that social media was kids' play or even a play toy of a guy like Elon Musk. Now we see that it is inextricably intertwined with our future, all of us. Thank you, Eric. Eric Collander is a deep engineer of Think Tech Hawaii, sharing his thoughts on Elon Musk's acquisition and management of Twitter. Thank you so much, Eric. Thank you, Jay. Aloha. Mahalo.