 Welcome back. I'm Jay Fidel. This is TinkTek. We're talking about community matters because the Twitter community, which is a global community, is nevertheless a community. We have for this discussion a senior engineer at TinkTek, Eric Calander, and he's going to help us do that. So it's Will, Twitter, Recover. The machinations continue, and now we're going to discuss that. Yeah, welcome to the show, Eric Calander. It's nice to see you smile and face. Hello. Good to be here. So I guess the operative question is Will, Twitter, can continue and recover. You know, when you hear all the press and you see all these people leaving and advertisers leaving and, you know, and you don't trust them anymore. I don't. So, querie, are they going to continue or is somebody going to eat their lunch? Well, ultimately, Twitter's not going to go anywhere. It's too big of a social media platform, way too many users for it to just disappear, I think. But it's people are losing faith in it because, you know, Anderson's Musk took over. He had the rise in hate speech, misinformation, violent speech, and people just are going to, some people will tune out, but ultimately, Twitter will stick around. You know, the politicians are going to need it. You know, businesses are still going to need it. Trump is probably going to need it if he decides to come back and continue it as a 2024 campaign. He hasn't done that yet, though. That's really a cliffhead, isn't it? You know, Musk offered him that possibility and he still is doing it. I guess he's waiting for what he thinks, Trump is waiting for what he thinks is the opportunity moment. But let me ask you. Well, he's also got, well, he's also got Truth Social. He has to worry about a move to Twitter would mean it would decrease the value of Truth Social. You know, what's special about Truth Social is the exclusivity of Trump's tweets or truths or whatever you want to call them. So if he goes to Twitter, what does that make Truth Social? Oh, it's the end of Truth Social, I think, if he moves. Maybe it's just a matter of old fashioned dollars for him. He cares about that. So when he is trying to make it public, he's trying to merge Truth Social into a, I don't have the name of the other company, but he is trying to merge it to get it publicly traded. And if he's got those plans in it, I don't see how a move to Twitter would help that out. Yeah. You get a trading card when you join? That's a joke. Maybe we should make those. $99 trading card. Yeah, we should have think tech trading cards, I think. Absolutely. If I have, let's say somebody comes around and says, you know, enough with this Twitter, Jay, here's $20 million. I want you to develop another word, another social media that's like Twitter. I mean, there's a lot of things in social media platforms that are really not protectable. You know, the copyright trademark protection, you can develop a new one. Patent protection, you can develop a new one, maybe a better one. So I come up with another word, say, flitter, for the lack of anything else, comes to mind. And I make a flitter type platform. And I make it smarter and better, because you know this, you know this, there's always the possibility of innovating something better than what you're doing now. And what the other guy's doing, you know, you integrate all the ideas, you know, and make something that's completely innovative. And now you got another one. Why doesn't that happen? Wouldn't that happen with somebody who has got his head screwed on right, not like Elon Musk? Somebody, you know, who will, you know, keep bad content out and so forth and not do the kinds of bizarre things he's been doing. So if I get, if I take my, say my $20 million and I create flitter, then I could have a platform that is similar in functionality. And I could advertise it really well. And I could make it very appealing. And I could take all these steps to make it very engaging for people, for my market, if you will. Why can't I beat Elon Musk at his own game? It's just a matter of, you know, all these companies, all these social media platforms came up from nowhere in no time. They were all almost immediate. What makes Twitter a long-term play at this point? Well, when Twitter came out, there was nothing else like it. So no competition, they, same with Facebook, they had no competition. So they soared to popularity. And the problem, if you had $20 million to make your own Twitter account or flitter, as you call it, the problem is you're not going to have users. And that's what Twitter has. And you do see, there is a company called Mastodon, which is trying to do exactly what you're talking about, and making a competitor to Twitter. And they're getting more traction. I don't have the numbers, but they're getting more and more users, but it still just pales in comparison to what Twitter has. There's a kind of boundary there. It's like, if I hear the name Mastodon 10 times in a week, if I see ads and I get email and people send me messages from Mastodon, all of a sudden I'm going to pass, I'm going to pass a certain point, the Rubicon, if you will. I'm going to be really interested and I'm going to join. I might subscribe and maybe they're going to offer me benefits discounts and other products. Who knows what? Some smart stuff, right? Smarter than Twitter ever did. And in better faith, once you find a software company is not dealing in good faith, you really shouldn't hang around. We've learned that, haven't we? And so if this was clearly in good faith, doing the right thing for you as a subscriber and a customer, then at some point you're going to say, this is the successor. They have crossed a boundary. They are in the same space. They may not have all the hundreds of millions of installs that Twitter does, but they have, say, 50 million or 100 million and they're on the way and I like them and everybody tells me about them and it's in the network. It's in the mesh, the social mesh, if you will. And so I'm going to take Mastodon and I'm going to drop off Twitter. I think it's possible, but you're right. It's a long way to go. And the question is whether he can ever recover in terms of getting a CEO who really understands what we're talking about here and appealing to people in a way to hold them. Just right now I think his fringe membership is probably dropping off pretty quickly because the word is out on him. And I think that's always the case. It's not only Twitter. Somebody could do a job on Facebook too. They just have to find new innovations. Think about Facebook. Think about all of them is that they're trying to innovate too. They're trying to change and the question is who changes best. Facebook is always dynamic, always coming up with new stuff. I suggest that social media is a platform for change. It's all about change. That's what it should be. Absolutely. That's where you should start seeing change. It's how you get your messages out to the entire world. So that's what you'd like to see. But to go on with the new Flitter or Macedon thing, hopefully that Macedon or whatever, Jack Dorsey has been rumored that he's going to come up with a new Twitter, but hopefully that whatever new social media would be successful. But we could just stick with Twitter if Musk brings back those policies, brings back those employees who checked for hate speech and violent speech and misinformation. We have the tools and the audience in Twitter already. Just bring it back to how it was. One of the things that fascinates me is spam. I get tons of it. It's wasted my time and sometimes it's really destructive and malicious and all that. My mission in life is to keep it out of my system. And until now, I haven't been able to really do that. I looked at the rules, functionality in the Apple Mail and didn't do anything. And if you unsubscribe, they don't care. They do not care if you unsubscribe. It's like asking for more trouble to unsubscribe. But I did talk to somebody. Actually, it was in Apple and he pointed out that all the mail goes through Google, all the mail. So whatever Apple is sending you, it's going through Google. That's a little scary. That Google has the servers and Apple signs up for those servers and that's how you get the mail. And Google also has filters. So you can say, I don't want to get any mail from Joe Blow. And you can put that in a filter and you will never get any mail on any system, including Apple or Google Mail or anything, because you filtered it out. So the reason I'm telling you this long-winded story, Eric, is that if you don't like misinformation, if you don't like hate speech, if you don't like those things that Elon Musk has allowed to come back in, you will call it mastodon, call it whatever you want. It could create filters, sort of the way Google has created filters on email. And you could lay the filter on top of Twitter and say, filter out all these kinds of bad things. And then you could have Twitter without the bad things. Is there a future in that? I think there could be. I mean, the technology definitely exists there to do exactly what you're talking about. Will Musk want to do something like that? Probably not. His whole thing has been, he's trying to protect free speech and all that. He's being very adamant about that stuff. But it goes to the screaming fire in a movie theater. What is allowed under free speech? What are the limits of free speech? And I think hate speech and violent speech are just blatant misinformation. What good does that do to have people doing that all the time? I don't see a benefit to it. You know, the artificial intelligence at this point becomes relevant because I could create a filter using artificial intelligence and I could be really smart about excluding things by way of a filter. And I could put rules in that are much more complex than the rules available under Apple or Microsoft or even Google. And I can exclude, you know, it's always better to exclude too much than too little. That's my view of it, because I don't want to get trash either on email or on Twitter. And so I could have my other company, Mastodon, or the other name that I came up with, whatever it was, Flitter, at work as an overlay. And it could have the artificial intelligence. And I could pay for that because I want to have a greater level of confidence. You know, the artificial intelligence, since it first came up in, I guess it came up after 9-11, essentially. It was a network social analysis. I think they called it originally. And it would look through large volumes of email, for example, and it would pick up the names of terrorists, for example, who were at the same meetings. And then the intelligence agencies would be able to connect the dots on those people. Social networking analysis, it was called. And it started in the corporate world and it wound up in the government. So the question is, using AI, I might be able to create either A, a much better Twitter, or B, a filter that wrote on top of Twitter and helped me get, you know, a more curated subset, if you will, of what Twitter is offering. You think that's in the future? Yeah, I don't see why. Again, it's up to debate if Twitter or Musk is going to use any technology like that, or AI like that. But I think it definitely, you know, you see a lot more automation, AI stuff, and everywhere, not just social media. So I can't see social media being any different. Yeah. So what about Musk? I mean, we have learned a lot about him. You know, it's almost like Trump, you know, the psychologists get on cable news and tell you what kind of diagnosis you should consider for Elon Musk. So how does he look right now? What kind of a person is he, according to all the news that comes out about him? He's still popular among his ardent supporters, but he's not looking very good as a social media weird. You know, he just hasn't been doing well. And meanwhile, his Tesla company, now they're down 65%, I think this year lost like $20 billion, the first person to ever lose such a sum of money. He's not doing so well. So it's about time he picks a new CEO, he does it. There's been a few rumors, as far as Jack Dorsey and also our good friend Jared Kushner. He's been rumored as a possible head. But whoever he does it, Twitter poll or selecting someone, he should probably do it soon. Did you say Kushner? Well, he had. So to be fair, Musk and Twitter, yeah, he hasn't been named at all. This was just a rumor that was out there. Oh my God, I would turn my back on that whole operation. I would never utter the word again. But yeah, I remember that first he said, you guys don't like me as a CEO, and we're going to have a vote. And if the vote turns out against me, I'm going to get another CEO and I'm going to quit. And they voted him out. They voted him out. But then he said, I was only kidding. Jokes on you, right? I was only kidding. But then I think he was under a lot of pressure for only kidding. And then he said, I'll look, I'll look for another CEO, which is ain't easy. No, it's not easy. I can't imagine it being a very, I don't see a lot of people wanting that job. It's going to be a hard job to do. Twitter was never really that financially successful back when Jack was running it. So it's kind of looking like a job where you're going to be set up to fail. People are already, it's very unpopular in a lot of people's minds. You got to listen to Musk and pretty much do whatever Musk tells you. I can see it being not a very popular job. Yeah. Yeah, he's the kind of micro manager type of guy. And he's not going to let you just do your thing. You're going to tell you step by step what to do. But what is it, though, to be the CEO of a big social media platform? What kind of a job is it? Because you have to keep off the misinformation, disinformation out. You have to keep the hate speech. I think that can be either mechanized or you hire a ton of people to look at everything. What else is the challenge if you're the CEO of Twitter? I should ask Jack Dorsey. He happened to do a pretty decent job with at least the content on Twitter. So it goes back to like what I was saying, with the policies that they had. They already had these policies in place. The Twitter was being run fine before Musk came in. I just don't see why he can't just go back to what it was. Why? I really don't know the answer to this. Why did he make all those changes? It doesn't sound like it was a good idea. I think he's trying to find any way to come up with money. Again, Twitter is not very financially successful. How do you save money? You cut half of your employee, half of your workforce, which he did. Now we're seeing the ramifications of that. There's these issues about how you have to rebuild your workforce. If you want to rebuild the functionality that you had before. But the people who left and the people who read up on the people who left, they're not going to be too excited about coming in. You were saying that it's hard to find another CEO. It's probably hard to find a lot of people who got fired summarily by Musk. Why in the world would you work for a company where you can get summarily terminated? He's still going to be the de facto CEO anyway. Why in the world would you do that? I wouldn't do that. Furthermore, I wouldn't want to be associated with a company with a reputation that he has created for it. Yes, I totally agree with that. Totally agree. Let's extend this out. If he can't find a CEO with some real kutzpa, who can come up with new ideas and innovate into a new, more profitable zone. If he can't find people who will replace all of those information vetting employees in Twitter that he fired, what happens? What's the ghost of Christmas future on this? Where do you extend that? How does that wind up? They can see Twitter is becoming more of a free-for-all out there without any moderation. He's got the whole blue check mark thing. It's hard to tell who is a real journalist or not. So it would be really kind of the wild west. I think that's what he wants with a complete free speech on any amount of paid speech, whatever you want to say. That's I think what he's going for. You think it'll work? Let's assume he gets there. You think it'll work? I do. Because again, I don't think Twitter is going to go anywhere. It's too big of a presence in everyone's lives nowadays. So I don't think Twitter is actually going to go anywhere, but I think its credibility will go. It might not be used as such a serious news resource. Does that change the complexion, the demography of the members, of the people who look at it and read it? It sounds like from what you said it does, that over time, if he makes a complete free-for-all out of it, it'll be a different group, a different community. Especially if news sources and purporators go to something like Mastodon or something like that where you can expect it to be reliable and real information. Yeah, people are going to leave Twitter for that reason. As a news source, I can still see Twitter being around as just a fun social media kind of thing or attempted coups. But I think most news sources could go another way. So how does that affect the advertisers? Because he can't make this work. He'll never get to profitability or the profitability that he wants to have without advertisers. Already, he's lost a lot of advertisers. And I'm sure in terms of opportunity cost, there's a lot of potential advertisers out there that wouldn't touch them. So this is a two-part question. Will the advertisers come back, do you think, in a free-for-all? And will the members who quit him come back in a free-for-all? Well, they could. It just must cast a, now, bring those policies back. Moderate Twitter. Moderate the content on Twitter. Do what people do with the users. The majority of the users want Mastodon with the platform. It seems like he's just kind of doing whatever he wants to do. And that's pleasing some people out there. But overall, he's going to have a lot of unhappy users. Yeah. Somehow, I feel we're at an inflection point. And I know in many ways, it's too big to fail. But whenever something is too big to fail, I personally would like to see it fail. Just as a lesson, a lesson to the people who think it's too big to fail. I mean, the CEO, the owner. So what's the time frame, do you think, Eric, by which we'll see this work out one way or the other? We'll see in this election cycle. We'll see. There's going to be a lot of big moves that happen between now and November 2024. And Twitter is going to be right in the middle of it. Yeah. We're going to see a lot of Twitter. We're going to see a lot of the big changes coming up. That's a really interesting way of looking at it. Between now and 2024, that's what, less than two years. And that means in the middle of the election cycle means, may I say, political ads, which are very lucrative. Maybe that's what you are talking about here. If he wants to earn a lot of money, and now in the election cycle, and he's got all these people who may not be all that akamai about what's true on Twitter and what's not true on Twitter, but they'll stay with it and well enough to continue as members. And therefore, even if his commercial advertisers don't return, his political advertisers will pay him big bucks. Maybe that's the plan. Absolutely. Maybe that's the plan. You'll always have the audience is still there. And the tweets, if you're running for president, and you have to tweet something out, it'll be covered on the news. So the political benefits will still be there. And they have the money too. So Musk knows that. Why am I kind of sad about this? It makes me despondent to think of a guy coming in and wrecking the truth. He's working against the truth. That's what he's doing. And through his efforts and through this company, he is misinforming the American, the global the global public. It isn't just the U.S. He's letting them be misinformed. Yeah. Well, yeah. And he knows that it's misinformation. So my final area of discussion with you, Eric, is regulation. We wouldn't have touched the First Amendment with a 10-foot pole five years ago. Now here we are, wondering how much damage Elon Musk can do to the truth in our country and our world. It begs for regulation. What kind of regulation could we do? I mean, we have the First Amendment. This is going to be a problem in terms of any content regulation from the government. But what can we do with an ideal approach, an ideal world? How can we clean it up through government? Well, it's hard with bringing government into it because then people are going to say, okay, well, now is that the government's message? Or are they letting people be saying their own opinions? And I think a lot of people would say, oh, this is just the government trying to get their whatever message they have out. I mean, maybe the answer is nothing, not a thing. On the other hand, a part of that question assumes that somebody has to do something because this has a big effect on public opinion, on a well-informed electorate here and elsewhere. It's not just the US. And I suppose the first part of that question is, can we in this country and other countries that have Twitter followings, can we afford to have Twitter who are free for all on political issues and for our discussion a minute ago on political ads? Can we afford to do that? Or is that creating a kind of hole in the democratic vote? Well, now, yeah, we need some sort of regulation. I don't know if it needs to be a government regulation or just having the resources and teams at Twitter to handle it, which is what they did before. But look at Brazil right now with the attempted coup the other day from Bolsonaro's supporters. People down, researchers down there are linking a significant part of that is because they got rid of the moderation for violent speech down there. And so they're seeing a lot of the messages. A lot of the reason why that coup attempt happened was from Twitter. And so that's the second time in two years we've seen something like this. And I just hope it doesn't spread to any other countries. I didn't know that. Which it could. That's really scary. And what it suggests is that if you want to organize a conspiracy and an insurrection and a coup, Twitter is your baby. You can communicate with people. You can lie to them. You can do incendiary things with them for them. It's quite the mechanism. Yeah. So, wow, that is a huge affront to democratic government. And it goes back to the question I raised earlier. And that is, can we afford to allow him to continue this way? If Twitter was free for all in Brazil, and the Brazil insurrection was a result of that, then we have a kind of a proof of the correlation of the relationship between the one and the other. And it could happen again. You know, I maintain that the insurrection we had on January 6 did not end on January 6 that the conspirators are still out there. And the wish to conspire, the benefits of conspiring are still out there. Not only in this country, but obviously in others like Brazil. So we need, let me pose this as a, we need to have regulation not only on a national basis, but on an international basis because Twitter and companies like Twitter are international. And again, these teams and policies were already in place, not just for the United States, but Brazil had their own team. And, you know, the popular countries probably had all their own teams to do this kind of thing. So it's not like a mystery of how do we do this. It's the answer we had it already. One last thing before we run. And that is this, you know, one troubling thing about the internet is that it's anonymous. You can have a Twitter handle. And it's really hard to find out who you are. I mean, by somebody watching or receiving your messages. Could we, would we be better off if we required validation of who you are when you send that email or send that message or make that Twitter post. So we know that it's you and that if you are being irresponsible, if you are talking conspiracy and insurrection and all that, we know and we can prove it up. They should do that. That's how Facebook is pretty much set up now. You can't go and make a fake Facebook account. You got to verify who you are and there's several steps to make sure that the person who makes an account is who they are. And so Twitter could easily do that. But it's again, it's not, it's not a mystery of how to do it. They could easily do it. But who knows if they will. Well, he won't. I don't think every, every thing he says and does suggests that he won't. And I guess one other thing, and I'm really not familiar with this, but, you know, YouTube has an extraordinary following now. And we'll have another show on this later this week about how YouTube is innovating so many things and it's becoming so popular and competitive with TV and cable. But Twitter can also deliver video. So Twitter could get more heavily involved in video just like YouTube, couldn't it? They could, but I think, I think YouTube has that, has that section of the internet pretty locked down. Twitter could, and there are videos on there, but I don't see it going the way that how YouTube is set up. And what about, you know, the marginal platforms? You know, I was looking at my own list of platforms that I signed up for at one time or another. And a number of them aren't there anymore. They come, they go. They're all done. And so what you have is a kind of evolution that at a certain point, if their subscriptions, you know, drop past a certain level, they fold. And they don't write you an email and say, Eric, we just fold it. They just fold. No courtesy. No. There's not a whole lot of courtesy on social media or on email for that matter. We're on the net in general. I mean, a company could go out of business and the website goes away. That's the end of that. But, you know, I really, I really wonder, it's sort of like, sort of like the big banks in this country in Canada, where at the end of the day, they all consolidate. And they're all, they're all too big to fail. Facebook, arguably too big to fail. And you have a smaller and smaller group, all the ones that were marginal have dropped off. And now you have these huge behemoths of social media. Is that where this is going to go? I mean, time will tell. I don't see, I don't know how friendly Facebook and Twitter are. I don't see a merger happening anytime soon. But maybe that's, maybe that's the failsafe musk as, you know, someone, someone like Facebook can go and buy them and turn it around for the good. Yeah. Well, it just doesn't seem to be this, this Facebook and its subsidiary Instagram has linked in, I suppose, new business social media programs are coming online, but they're nowhere near as big as Facebook or Twitter. And so you could probably name all the meaningful social media platforms now on one or two hands max, right? Yeah. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and now TikTok. Yeah. So you've actually done it on one hand. You've actually done it on one hand. And that makes each one of them all the more powerful. And you're right to raise the question about, suppose Facebook and Twitter get together and have a beer one day and decide they're going to merge, you know, and during the Trump years, there was not a lot of antitrust at the Department of Justice where they stopped mergers just didn't happen very much, although the law would presumably allow them to stop the merger. But suppose they got into a deal where they were going to merge and it's sort of like Instagram, right? You can still see them separately, but they were together. Sort of like those conservative radio stations in the Midwest, they're all owned by Sinclair, you know, hundreds of radio stations and they will have the same news, the same editorial policy. So if those two had a beer and decided they were going to merge and decided they were going to have the same editorial policy, news sources, whatever, content management or non-management, what would that mean to us? I'm not sure, Jay. It would probably, I don't think I have an answer for you, Jay. That's, I'm not sure. Yeah, well, you could, you could consolidate it right into one pyramid and then we'd all be subject to the same information all day, this would be, and if it was all- And all come from the same place. Misinformation, I wouldn't want that to happen. Okay, last one, last question to you. Twitter is blemished. Twitter, the press has reported so many things about Twitter that it makes you wonder about A, their truth and B, their internal organization, you know, how they filter things and C, their future because of the, you know, disenchantment of advertisers. Advertisers, yeah. So right now today, let's make you 18 years old, just out of high school. Would you become a member of Twitter? Yeah, probably. That's just, if I was an 18-year-old going into college, I would have a Twitter account probably. I wouldn't be using it for, you know, paid speech or politics or news or anything. I'd be using it for, you know, fun. But as I got older, I would probably distance myself, which is pretty similar to what my real life experience with Twitter. You know, I did it for a little bit, and I've kind of backed away, and now I don't have any interest in going back. Okay, I'm sure there's going to be more. You know, there's $44 billion at stake here, and Elon Musk is not going to just try up and float away. He's going to do stuff. I don't know what. So we have to watch this, and I hope I can catch you again for an update on what's going on on our unfavorite social media platform, Twitter. Thank you, Eric. Thanks, Jay. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, and donate to us at thinktecawaii.com. Mahalo.