‎Decoder: How Donald Trump and Elon Musk Killed Twitter, with Marty Baron and Zoe Schiffer

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It's Kara Swisher.

Today we're bringing you a special episode of Decoder, all about the demise of Twitter.

Neil I Patel talks to Marty Barron, former executive editor of The Washington Post, and Zoe Schiffer, managing editor of Platformer and author of an upcoming book on Elon Musk and Twitter.

Zoe is going to join us on Pivot next month, so consider this a little preview.

Scott and I will be back on Friday with the latest headlines on business and tech.

Hello and welcome to Decoder.

I'm Neil Apatel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems.

Today, we're just going to talk about one very big problem, Twitter.

2023 will go down as the year that Elon Musk killed Twitter.

First, he did it in a big way by buying the company, firing most of the employees, and destabilizing the platform.

Then he did it in a small but important symbolic way by renaming the company X and trying to make a full break with what had come before.

So now that the story of the company named Twitter is officially over, it felt important to stop and ask, what was Twitter anyway?

And why were so many powerful people obsessed with it for so long?

Here at The Verge, we don't often look back.

We're a sight about the future after all.

But sometimes it's important to stop, mark a moment, and consider why a technology or a tool made us all feel a certain way.

And Twitter certainly demands that level of consideration.

The important thing to know about Twitter is that its leadership never truly understood the platform, especially not at first.

Twitter's users were where all of its best ideas came from, from hashtags to retweets.

The users were the ones who made Twitter a home for both absurdist humor and major social movements.

Twitter's users also turned it into the beating heart of the news industry, where news almost always broke first and fast, and where journalists and their blue check marks became part of a new social class that dominated the online conversation, for better and for worse.

Fittingly, it was Twitter's users who ultimately killed it.

The fundamental story of Twitter is defined by two of its most dedicated power users, Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

Both men were addicted to Twitter, defined Twitter, changed it, broke it, and then ultimately put it to rest.

What's left now and what comes next is still an open question.

To pull all this apart and make sense of it, I went and talked to two people with deep expertise in the media, Twitter, and how they interact.

Marty Baron is the former executive editor of The Washington Post.

He ran the paper during the Trump administration when two different challenges reached fever pitch.

First was President Trump's usage of Twitter to wage an almost daily information war.

And second, the battle between individual reporters building their brands on Twitter and the needs of the newspaper as an institution.

He's got a new book about that experience called Collision of Power, Trump, Bezos, and the Washington Post.

We wanted to talk to Marty about his experience, his thoughts on Twitter during and after the Trump era, and why all of this ultimately contributed to him leaving the Post.

So we have this idea that you can divide Twitter into several different before and after periods.

And those before and after periods are defined by, in particular, two power users of the platform, Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

There's a before Donald Trump on Twitter when reporters and politicians and athletes were all sort of talking to each other, but there appeared to be some norms governing how people would use the platform and what would happen there and how that would translate to what you might call real life.

What was your view of Twitter in that before Trump period?

Was it useful to you?

Was it a utility?

Did you see it as adding value to the newsream?

Well, it was.

I mean, after Twitter was founded, we started to use Twitter.

I was at the Boston Globe at the time as its top editor, and we saw it as an advantage for us, a way for the public to connect more directly with our reporters, to understand that they were human beings, that they had personalities.

Reporters could use it to offer greater insights into stories.

We also obviously used it as a way of disseminating our coverage to a wider population.

And so it was considered to be quite useful at that point.

But I think things did evolve.

I think your analysis of this seems to be pretty spot on.

I can't say that I thought of that myself, but I think that Trump did change the character of Twitter in a major way.

Zoe Schiffer is the managing editor of Platformer, a former star Verge reporter, and the author of the upcoming book, Extremely Hardcore, Inside Elon Musk's Twitter.

She's been chronicling the company in depth for the past year.

Zoe and I talked about the company that Twitter was in the early 2010s, how it shifted under Trump, and how it ultimately found itself vulnerable enough to be snatched up by Elon.

Twitter has has gone through a number of periods, and I think there's a handful of moments you can point to as before and after moments.

One of them is the candidacy and election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States.

What was Twitter like before that?

It seems like it was very idealistic, that it had a sense of what role it would play in a news ecosystem, that it was a force for good, maybe even outside of the Silicon Valley sense of what it means to do good in the world, that it was actually a force for good.

What was Twitter like before the Trump era?

I think you hit the nail on the head with Twitter was a force for good.

I mean, that's really how the company saw itself.

It really stood in opposition to companies like Meta that were moving fast and breaking things.

Twitter moved incredibly slow and felt like it could have a positive impact, not just on the world, but on the globe.

And it had been through

these widespread social movements where it had played a very crucial role.

Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring were these examples of Twitter as a force for good.

And when you walked into Twitter's offices during those eras, the front lobby coffee tables would have newspapers spread out, fanned out that had, you know, Twitter powers, Arab Spring headlines all over them.

And it was a way that the company was able to recruit talent in Silicon Valley.

It didn't pay as much as Meta, Amazon, Netflix, but it was like, if you want to make money, make good money, and

do good, then this is the place to be.

So it was shaky.

It wasn't profitable.

It was making some money.

There was a moment when it felt like Twitter was a real competitor to Facebook.

And Facebook was really reactive to Twitter because of how seemingly important Twitter was to the news ecosystem.

Was that reflected inside of Twitter, that it was important in this way, that it was playing a moment, not just in culture, but in politics?

Yeah, I mean, you know, taken separately, each like individual tweet was kind of random and mundane, like perhaps not that interesting.

But when you took them all together, the collective impact of those tweets was kind of this feeling that you had access to the like beating heart of the internet every day.

Twitter really had deep penetration.

The most important people in sports, media, and politics were talking there.

And that was incredibly important.

It really did pioneer this one-way social graph where it prioritized follows over friends.

And that was a very unique thing that Facebook was not able to replicate.

Did Twitter have a sense internally of why that was special?

One of the things that really always jumps out to me is Twitter seemed to be run by people who didn't use the platform.

And the users of Twitter seemed to drive the company more than its own executives.

Did Twitter have any sense of why it was being used this way?

No, it really felt like the founders were continually surprised with what Twitter was and what it would become.

Like all of the features that we think of as core Twitter features, the hashtag, the retweet, the at symbol, all of those things were features that users basically created because they were going on and saying like, this is a cacophony of noise.

There's no way to organize conversations.

So we'll just organize ourselves.

And in fact, when they pitched Twitter on adopting the hashtag as like an actual feature codified in the product, Twitter was like, no, that's very technical and complicated, and no one's going to like that or use that.

And they pushed back on it for like months.

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Journalists had become a core part of Twitter's user base in these years.

Twitter wasn't just changing how news was distributed to the public, it was changing how the news was made.

Journalists were building audiences on a platform, creating personal brands, and doing an awful lot of journalism on Twitter itself.

The common view at the time was that Twitter was the beating heart of the news.

It was the place to break big stories, cultivate sources, and endlessly debate headlines and other contentious topics.

It felt like you had to be on Twitter if you were a journalist.

It was where the news happened first and where it spread the fastest, especially amongst your peers in the media.

That narrative became even more pervasive when Donald Trump, one of the site's loudest users, announced his presidential candidacy in 2015.

Trump understood Twitter.

He used it to launch and carry out his campaign, and later he ran his presidency on it.

He also began to expose the cracks in Twitter.

Under all that pressure, the company's indecisive management, lackluster moderation, and flat-footed product development began to buckle.

And the image of Twitter as a force for good began to diminish.

Trump fundamentally changed Twitter as a company, creating the conditions that would ultimately break it entirely.

He also changed the relationship between the news media and Twitter by turning the platform and the U.S.

presidency into one giant reality show.

with Trump using his Twitter-powered megaphone to rile up his base, attack his critics, many of whom were in the media, and even announce policy.

Sometimes he did all of that in a single tweet.

Marty Barron was the executive editor of The Washington Post during the Trump administration, during which time Amazon founder Jeff Bezos bought the paper and feuded with Trump directly.

I want to talk to you about how Trump used Twitter and then how reporters used Twitter or perhaps misused it.

It's just woven into the journalism that was made during the Trump administration.

Do you have the same view that Twitter was an animating force of the Trump administration?

It was a way for him, of course, to speak to his followers, to speak to the country, really, actually, to speak to members of his own cabinet and other members of his government.

He announced policies through Twitter before he actually told his staff that he wanted to pursue those policies.

They learned what his intentions were from Twitter.

It was tricky for us and the press, of course, because he didn't want to pay attention to everything he said, because not everything was worth paying attention to, but a lot was.

And Twitter really was a window into his own mind.

And a lot of what he said on Twitter actually ended up being official government policy.

So it played a huge role, I think, in his administration.

I think a very common criticism of the entire media industry, including The Verge, was that we would wake up every day, Trump would tweet something bananas, and then we would all react to it and treat it as though it was deadly serious.

And then the next day we would do it again about something else completely bananas.

Did you find any ways to build buffers against this, or were you just sort of captured by it?

I'm not sure we had a formal buffer, but I think that people learned to distinguish between what was for him just sort of blowing off steam or just, you know, waking up angry or going to sleep angry.

He always seemed to be perpetually angry at something or other or someone or the other.

So, you know, we had to distinguish what was really just normal Twitter activity on Trump's part versus what really signaled a significant policy position.

He ran his government in a very chaotic way, and it was hard for us to deal with.

That wasn't something that we were accustomed to.

I think it was something that people were just trying to adjust to and not sure how to deal with that because we hadn't dealt with that before.

News could be made at all hours of the day or night.

You know, if you woke up in the middle of the night and started tweeting, somehow we needed to be aware of that and make an assessment of it.

I don't think there's any science involved in any of this.

It's totally subjective.

But at some point, somebody will go back and look at this and maybe do some content analysis to see whether we we made wise judgments or didn't make wise judgments.

I, on the whole, think that we did.

I'm sure there are instances where we paid too much attention to something and then it just never amounted to anything.

The Trump years made Twitter famous for being an outrage machine in basically every direction.

Trump rage tweeted constantly.

Everyone else rage tweeted about Trump's rage tweets.

And when you have angry users spouting off at volume, you are going to have to do some serious content moderation.

This placed Twitter in a very difficult position.

In 2012, one Twitter executive infamously referred to the platform as the free speech wing of the free speech party.

But there's a huge inherent tension in that.

On the one hand, you have Twitter providing a voice to the Arab Spring and Black Lives Matter.

And on the other hand, the President of the United States is using the platform to say horrible things about Muslims or to promote violence.

That tension had to boil over eventually.

There was no option for it not to.

And Twitter's leadership did not seem up to the task or the scrutiny.

What was your view of how Twitter was being run during this time?

I think before it was being run very idealistically, and then during the Trump administration, it was stressed.

How did you think the company was being run during that period of stress?

My sense is they were struggling with how to deal with Trump in the same way that we in the press were struggling with how to deal with Trump and how the public overall was struggling to process Trump.

I mean, look, he was a candidate unlike any we'd ever seen before.

He was a president unlike any we'd ever seen before.

He was breaking all the norms.

We had no precedent to look at in terms of how to deal with somebody like that.

And neither did Twitter, which was actually, of course, a much younger institution founded in the mid-2000s, right?

I mean, they were just sort of winging it in the same way that I think a lot of people were winging it.

So they would make a lot of mistakes.

They would overreach or they would underreach at the Washington Post.

We tried to focus on those things that were actually significant as opposed to those things that weren't significant.

A lot of readers said we were paying too much attention to his comments on Twitter.

And then if he said something outrageous and we didn't cover it, other readers would say, well, why didn't you cover this?

This was so outrageous.

And it wasn't just readers.

I think a lot of journalists were reacting in many ways to Trump through their activities on Twitter.

And they became certainly more opinionated, more reactive to Trump, more outraged.

Of course, we had a media environment that provoked outrage, that fed off outrage, where really polarization is pretty much the business model for a lot of media.

People were responsive to that.

And I think they sort of fell into that environment really in the same way that, you know, guys in a locker room would start using, you know, locker room language just because everybody else is.

And so, yeah, I think Trump did have a significant effect on the way that reporters, other journalists use Twitter.

This is a turn, right?

This is like a really big turn where you have a younger generation of journalists that has come up online using the platforms, is communicating fully with audiences in ways native to the platforms, and that is at odds with the institution and how the institution wants to be viewed.

Has that gotten better over time?

Was that amplified by Trump?

Was it amplified by the nature of Twitter at that time?

Or is that a purely generational conflict?

Well, I think it's partially generational.

People grew up with social media.

They were accustomed to doing that, accustomed to expressing themselves in a certain way, to sort of sharing their opinions.

I also think people grew up sort of wanting to establish their own sort of brands or identities or images on social media in a way that my generation of journalists did not.

I also think it was heavily influenced by Trump's presence in the White House.

He was engaged in an assault on so many of the values that we hold dear, including myself, you know, a free press, free expression, democracy, civil discourse, tolerance for all people, respect for the facts, you name it.

It seemed like he was engaged in assault on so many of the values that are central to, I think, quality journalism.

And so I understand where that was coming from, and I understand why people felt, you know, aggrieved by all of that.

I just don't think that it was helpful to us in terms of if I were to define the purpose of journalism, it's to give the public the information it needs and deserves to know in order to govern themselves.

Twitter didn't really have any mechanisms in place to try and curb Trump's behavior or repair the platform's culture.

In turn, the discourse started to spiral.

Twitter became a decidedly grim place to be, especially when it became clear inside the company that the company's leadership had no desire to take action on Trump's account.

Jack Dorsey was very resistant to limiting Trump's reach in any meaningful way.

He did not want to ban the nominee.

If, you know, there was action that needed to be taken on one of Trump's tweets, he always pushed people to take the minimum action first.

And you can debate whether that's positive or negative.

But the moment that Trump was elected, there was a loud call internally for the company to ban Trump, to stop treating him basically like a regular user.

There was this feeling that, look, we're applying the same rules to him that we are to everyone else, but he is not like everyone else.

We need rules specifically for public figures.

We need to take these threats seriously.

We need to regulate incitements to violence, not just like literal threats on the platform.

I had a conversation with a very high-ranking executive at the time who said, we became a symbol of the platform.

We weren't listening to each other.

We were fighting all of the time.

We were blaming each other.

The same polarization that was playing out on Twitter was playing out inside Twitter, too.

Nobody quite knew exactly what you were supposed to do in an environment like that.

That was fertile ground for somebody like Trump who could take advantage of the chaos that he himself was creating.

And I think Twitter was just struggling with like, what is our role in an environment like this?

How do we respond to a president like this in the same way that many of us in the media were saying well how do we cover somebody like this what is exactly the right way to do that there was no history of this kind of president in this kind of media environment in this kind of social media environment

that tension fully boiled over when covet hit everyone wanted to sort out fact from fiction to learn what officials were saying and to hear what the evidence said.

Everyone in the country, in the world, needed trusted information.

And instead, what we got was Twitter.

In the heart of the pandemic, Twitter became a cacophony of people arguing, of venture capitalists becoming armchair epidemiologists with no credentials whatsoever, of hate mobs forming against scientists.

The Trump administration was so unprepared for the pandemic that it became essentially unhelpful.

People sat cooped up in their homes, trying to figure out what was going on.

The platform was not ready for that moment, for that shotgun blast of noise.

Twitter itself seemed paralyzed.

It definitely definitely was a turning point.

I would tie in QAnon and like anti-vax specifically with that and then say the combination of all of those things were a turning point.

The company was utterly unprepared for the pandemic in the same way that we all were, except that the consequences were obviously a lot greater.

But I mean, the mechanism that Twitter has to fact check news are basically what are credible news sources saying and what are like official communications saying.

And when those are kind of part of the misinformation sphere, like it's hard even going to those sites to figure out what is true and what's not in a situation where the facts are changing all the time.

Like the company was just totally unprepared to keep up with the pace of news and the pace of misinformation.

COVID is when the post is an institution or the news as an institution ran into the buzzsaw of social media and Twitter, maybe most directly, right?

There's too much information and everyone's just going to trust whoever they trust instead of having any institutions that anyone trusts.

Do you think that that can be put back together?

That feels like when we talk about the end of trust in institutions, I can point to that as a breaking point.

And I actually don't know how to put the puzzle back together.

I'm not sure it can be put back together, frankly, without some sort of cataclysmic event.

I think we're in an environment now where people can find any information or so-called information that reaffirms their pre-existing point of view and tells them that what they're thinking is exactly right, whether it is right or not right.

That happens to be the world that we live in.

I think that does feed distrust.

It's not that all institutions are right all the time.

I mean, we should be skeptical, of course.

We just can't be cynical and we can't be dismissive.

We live in a time where so much is being dismissed and devalued.

All of the things that have been sort of central to our progress as a people, as societies, modern society, you know, we've dismissed education, we've dismissed expertise, we've dismissed experience, and we're dismissing evidence.

And when you do that, we run the risk of making some gigantic mistakes that are going to hurt us.

We're going to have more disease.

It's going to spread more rapidly.

We are not going to take seriously the medical advances that can be incredibly helpful to us.

And maybe we're going to have to have some sort of cataclysmic event like that to persuade people that these institutions that we've created, like public health institutions, are really working diligently on their behalf and have as their best interest public health and safety.

And maybe then people's trust will be restored.

So, for a long time, it kind of is paralyzed, and very little action is taken.

And then, at a certain point, when we're looking at QAnon in particular, it starts to feel like the pace of conspiracy theories on the platform is so great that it needs to take very swift action.

And so, what it does is ban, I think, 70,000 accounts that were associated with the QAnon conspiracy theory in some way.

And it's a moment where you really see Twitter kind of breaking internally because you have people saying, okay, thank God.

Look, we took action.

We took them off.

I'm sure we got some people who shouldn't have been banned, but like we needed to do something.

And it's better to do something and have.

innocence swept up in that something than do nothing at all.

But then you had the flip side, which is a lot of people both internally and externally saying, you went way too far.

You banned way too many people and a lot of those people shouldn't be banned.

And of course, on Twitter, once that action is taken, users have very few mechanisms to try and like come back and rebuild their followings.

That moment, right, where we ban a lot of users, this is when a Jack Dorsey can say, look, this is my platform and I don't want these things on here.

And he has many opportunities to say this to Congress.

Like, this is my company.

I run it.

It's a private company.

You can't tell me what to do.

You can start your own.

And he just never takes that shot.

Is there an idealism there or is there cowardice there?

I mean, I'm hesitant to speculate about what goes on in Jack Dorsey's mind, but it's fair to say that employees were literally begging him to take stronger action against people spreading misinformation about the pandemic and against Trump in particular during this time period.

And Jack Dorsey was absolutely refusing to do so.

I think one interesting tension inside the company is that employees don't see being a digital town square and banning prominent people who are spreading lies that could lead to real world violence as being an opposition really at all.

They see themselves as the digital town square and they think they should have a strong say in what goes on in that town square.

Jack Dorsey, of course, does think those things are in direct conflict, but he's so weak as a leader that he won't get up and just say those things.

He kind of mealy mouth, makes excuses, apologizes, but refuses, except in conversations with his own employees, to really say, I'm against bams.

I always wonder if Jack Torsey has ever been to a real town square.

You just can't do anything you want in a real town square.

It's just like a very literal set of prohibitions in actual town squares.

This, I think, does bring us to the woke mind virus.

And in particular, a big moment in all of our history, which is January 6th, Twitter is instrumental in the events of January 6th.

Trump is tweeting throughout it.

He's tweeting in the lead up to it.

There's the speech.

January 6th, for those of us who are not in Washington, D.C., we all watch it on Twitter.

We all see what's going on on Twitter.

Eventually, Trump is gastigated, I suppose, into issuing his bizarre statement to stop the insurrection on Twitter.

What's happening inside of Twitter in this moment?

Because this feels like the last,

if there is any idealism left inside of Twitter, January 6th is a thing that should snuff it out yeah so leading up to the events of January 6th you had employees saying very clearly this is going to happen people are organizing on Twitter there's going to be an insurrection and we need to try and stop it and executives aren't taking very strong action which isn't to say nothing is happening because the trust and safety team is banning people left and right they're trying to like de-amplify certain posts but at the same time it's too little too late it's not enough obviously january 6th happens and finally, you see this open letter.

I think it's like 400 employees sign it.

And they say to Jack Dorsey very directly, we warned you this would happen.

It happened.

You need to ban the former president of the United States.

At first, Jack Dorsey doesn't want to do that.

Finally, he's convinced they need to do, I believe it's a three-day suspension or something at first.

So they suspend Donald Trump's account for the incitements to violence.

The days pass.

The suspension is lifted.

He gets back on and he starts glorifying the violence.

This is also breaking one of Twitter's rules.

The trust and safety team is on the phone with Jack Dorsey again and they're saying, look,

this isn't a situation where it's confusing what should happen.

We have these rules in place for this exact reason.

He has now broken these rules.

We either rip the band-aid off and we ban him or we don't.

And our rules are meaningless in that case.

And so Jack Dorsey, finally from French Polynesia on this private island, says, okay, we can ban the former president of the United States, and Donald Trump's account is taken down.

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In many ways, Trump, his presidency, and how it played out on Twitter became a ramp to the company's next major inflection point.

This inflection point was marked by another power user hopelessly addicted to the platform, with a track record of questionable tweets and a growing reactionary resentment towards what he perceived as a liberal takeover of both tech and culture.

So Dorsey finally acquiesces.

They ban Trump.

Several months later, Dorsey has had enough.

He steps down as CEO.

Prague Aguaral steps in.

And this is when Elon Musk starts buying shares and taking over the company.

Yeah, Trump's ban, in my mind, is a turning point for Elon Musk.

If you talk to Walter Isaacson, he'll kind of say, like, oh, it was kind of going on before.

But it really does seem like this moment where Elon Musk is starting to think this company is too powerful.

If this can happen to someone as prominent as Trump, what's going to happen to the rest of us?

And so he's kind of dissatisfied with the state of Twitter.

And he's saying this as a Twitter power user.

Jack Dorsey at the same time is pretty frustrated with the company as well.

He feels like he's being pulled in a bunch of different directions and he asks the board of directors to give Musk a seat.

The board of directors had already said no, that that was way too risky.

And so eventually he decides that he has what he says, no choice but to step down.

He appoints his CTO, Parag Agarwal, to take his place.

Perag comes in and you know, has a pretty clear-eyed idea of what needs to change at Twitter.

He's planning for layoffs in the spring because he thinks the company needs to tighten its belt.

But what he doesn't know is that starting in January of that year, Elon Musk is gobbling up Twitter shares as quickly as possible and becoming his largest shareholder.

We won't bore you with the minutiae of the takeover.

You know the whole story.

Elon proposes he buy Twitter for $44 billion.

He tries to back out.

He almost goes to court.

And eventually he caves and buys the whole thing.

But it's what happens after that that really defines Twitter's future and sentences it to death.

I mean, it's almost laughable now, but you see people in the days following the acquisition kind of doing what they'd done all along, talking on Slack about their opinions of what was playing out.

And a lot of those opinions were.

this guy seems nuts and this is going to be really bad.

And some of those opinions were like, no, this could be really good because Elon Musk is an amazing entrepreneur.

It didn't take long at all for him to begin firing people who'd spoken about him poorly in Slack and on Twitter.

You saw that while free speech was supposedly an important value for Elon, his definition of free speech was basically just his speech.

And that is true for the other value too, which is defend and respect the user's voice.

Suddenly, the only voice that matters at Twitter is Elon Musk's.

His experience of the platform is the thing that dictates product decisions.

If a high-profile user mentions a frustration they have on the platform, it takes minutes for that to become an engineering project that's like priority number one at the company.

And so you see more and more that the company is prioritizing the experience of one man.

What's shocking to me about all this is that it feels like that's the reason Twitter has had such a decline in cultural relevancy, that it used to actually be this town square.

And there was a deep ideological tension at the heart of it around letting everything go and, you know, moderating really deeply.

And that tension was itself exciting to experience on a daily basis.

And Elon took it over, he removed that tension.

Now it's just whatever he likes.

And that means it's the thing isn't exciting anymore.

And people are dropping off or they're not paying as much attention to it.

It certainly is not the place where it feels like the presidency will be run from anymore.

You cannot optimize Elon Musk's experience on the platform without detracting from the experience of everyone else, in particular because he's a power user and the things that he wants and experiences are very different from what regular users want and need.

The other thing that I will say, and this is coming from former employees and current actually, is that Twitter always had somewhat of a tortured relationship with creators.

It really optimized for kind of like regular users and it didn't have strong monetization tools and all these things.

But that was only amplified after Elon took over.

And it's ironic because he has had such a strong push for creator monetization and all these things.

At the same time, he has alienated a lot of the important people across these sectors, sports, media, politics, that made Twitter special, that made it what it was.

You know, if you're Fox News, I think you can say the pundits need Fox more than Fox needs the pundits.

We can replace that person if they become too problematic.

But that's really not true for Twitter.

It's so much of its relevance hinges on the people who are relevant on the platform.

And when you alienate them, your importance as a platform rapidly declines.

Another presidential election is rapidly approaching.

As I record this, 2024 is barely more than two weeks away.

And at this moment, pending some major Supreme Court decisions, Donald Trump seems all but certain to be the Republican candidate, facing off against Joe Biden once again.

Meanwhile, Elon seems intent on burning Twitter to the ground as quickly as possible.

Alex Jones has been unbanned, Twitter's election integrity team has been fired, and the platform's relationship with the advertisers that once paid its bills has hit rock bottom.

Next year's election seems like yet another pivotal moment in the relationship between the platform previously known as Twitter and the very state of our democracy.

I don't know if it's going to change the way the election is covered.

It's certainly changed the kind of information that's available to the public.

He's opened up Twitter to a ton of conspiracy theorists, most recent being Alex Jones, of course, who's spread some of the most hateful, harmful conspiracy theories that one can imagine.

And worst of all of this stuff being on Twitter is that Musk himself has sort of recommended that people follow these individuals.

And that's really troubling because Musk, of course, has an enormous following.

When he recommends that other individuals be followed, well, they get a huge audience well beyond what they would have obtained otherwise.

So I think it's a destructive, corrosive influence on American politics, whether it will change the way the election is covered by major media institutions.

I don't know yet.

Twitter still reaches a huge number of people, and now there's more freedom to circulate.

false information, crackpot conspiracy theories, malicious lies about individuals and institutions and all of that.

And so I think that it can have a tremendous influence on the overall political environment, the social environment.

And just because mainstream journalists are less active there doesn't necessarily mean that Twitter will have less influence over politics in this country.

One workable approach, again, is to just quit, right?

For news organizations to say, we don't want to provide value to this platform that is becoming a vector for misinformation.

My friend Casey Newton is adamant that we should all quit.

Do you think newsrooms should quit Twitter?

I don't know that I've come to a real conclusion about that.

I've largely quit it, and not that I've felt it active anyway.

Frankly, I find it to be sort of a sewer, and I'd rather not swim in the sewer.

I don't know why people want to swim in that sewer.

Elon has a CEO, Linda Yecarino, who we've all watched her interview at the Code Conference.

I don't know what she's doing.

He is on stage at conferences telling his advertising partners to go fuck themselves.

And then in the next breath, saying, this will kill the company.

It seems as though Elon wants to kill Twitter.

Like, the most dead-ahead reading of his actions are that he is trying to drive the company into bankruptcy.

Is that true?

Is that borne out in what employees are telling you?

Or is that just, I'm treating this all too simply?

I mean, he 100% wanted to kill Twitter.

That was the entire point.

From the very beginning, he saw this as his opportunity to rebuild X.com, his like vision from the 90s of a payments platform that had social components with it.

Does he want to kill X?

I don't know.

But,

you know, I think when we're thinking of why is he taking all of these actions that are taking an iconic brand and like grinding it into the dirt, it's like part of this was the plan all along.

And it's playing out exactly as he wants it to.

Do the employees think that there's a future for X?

It's split.

I mean, there are a lot of people who are still there who have bought into his vision.

And I think one kind of underappreciated part of this entire saga is that we have really seen two versions of reality coalesce.

Like, if you are an Elon Musk fan, then you can read a lot of things that have happened as like proof that he is a genius and things are going well.

And you could perhaps have data to back that up that he and Linda share.

They've launched features faster than Twitter previously did.

They've obviously reduced cash burn significantly.

On the flip side, you have like every other rational person who says,

one, the features that the company has launched were like.

almost all built on existing code that Twitter 1.0 had worked on and projects hadn't shipped for various reasons.

And then two, the like data that they're sharing is bogus.

But I think when you look at the makeup of employees, you have people who are split into similar camps.

You have the true believers who have bought into the mission completely.

And I would put Linda Yaccarino in this camp.

Like, I don't think she's a hostage.

I think she's absolutely a true believer and believes what she's saying and selling.

And then you have people who are trapped either because of healthcare or visas.

And they're just like, I'm in pain and this sucks, but I like don't have a better option right now.

So, just in a very general sense, it seems like the story of Twitter is an early period of startup founder drama that landed in a very idealistic company at the end.

And then, just two people, two power users that completely shaped and potentially have destroyed the company over time.

Yeah, 100%.

The story of this company is an idealistic Silicon Valley startup that was broken by two of its most prominent power users, Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

And I think in some ways, both of those men understood Twitter better than Twitter's own executives understood Twitter and were able to kind of leverage the worst parts of the platform and weaponize it against itself.

I think our highest purpose is holding powerful individuals and institutions to account.

And

among those, the highest priority has to be the president of the United States, who is, I think, by any measure, the most powerful person in the world.

So when I think through what is the best way for us to hold somebody accountable, I think it's through really solid, rigorous reporting, very energetic reporting.

And that's what I would like us to focus on rather than focus on our social media commentary.

Thanks again to Zoe Schiffer and Marty Barron for taking the time to be on Decoder.

You can buy Marty's book, Collision of Power, Trump, Bezos, and The Washington Post, anywhere books are sold.

And you can pre-order Zoe's book, Extremely Hardcore, Inside Elon Musk's Twitter, before it comes out on February 27th.

You probably noticed this wasn't your typical episode of Decoder.

That's because we're working on bringing you new episodes of the show in new formats that deliver more analysis, storytelling, and interviews.

Stay tuned, it's going to be a big year.

If you have thoughts about this episode and what you'd like to see more of, you can email us at decoder at the verge.com.

We really do read every email, as some of you have found out.

You can also hit me up directly on threads.

I'm at Reckless1280.

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It's a lot of fun.

It's at DecoderPod.

If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

If you really like the show, give us that five-star review.

Decoder is a production of The Verge, a part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today's episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Stat.

It was edited by Callie Wright.

Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Our executive producer is Eleanor Donovan.

We'll see you next time.

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