A massive battle is underway between Washington Post and Twitter. Apparently, bombshell stories and editorials about Elon Musk are a priority of the newspaper Washington Post.
Initially, there was the provoking headline voicing a blend of surprise and contempt: “Elon Musk reinvents Twitter for the benefit of a power user: Himself.” The lead line talked about how Musk had converted the company into the “billionaire’s personal sandbox.” It described how Musk acted berserk at Twitter’s main office laying off workers from anger because of the failure to ‘theatrically’ boost his own tweets in the system. It depicted employees trembling and recoiling from his fury and rustling to alter algorithms in order to intensify his tweets’ visibility.
Mighty Battle
In response, Musk highlighted a simple yet major point: there was no such spike or adjustment. He tweeted “Several major media sources incorrectly reported that my Tweets were boosted above normal levels earlier this week.
“A review of my Tweet likes & views over the past 6 months, especially as a ratio of followers, shows this to be false. We did have a bug that briefly caused replies to have the same prominence as primary Tweets, but that has now been fixed,” he said in this battle that is shaping up.
A piece written by Jonathan Turley discussed how Washington has gone to war with Twitter with a coalition of political, corporate, and media interests. That campaign, according to Turley, has been relentless and insistent which included a movement to get businesses to suspend or reduce advertising until censorship is restored. The media has kept a steady stream of hit pieces on Musk that often border on wartime propaganda.
The ‘why’ of this ‘war’
Musk has been heavy-handed over engineers to remove certain algorithms and combat bots to restore the company’s transparency and integrity.
However, bots and AI systems have a growing alliance in Washington, according to Turley.
For instance, Democratic leaders have called for a type of “enlightened algorithms” to frame what citizens access on the internet. In 2021, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) called for algorithms to be created to protect people from their own bad choices.
She was upset that people were not listening to the informed views of herself and leading experts. Instead, they were reading views of skeptics by searching Amazon and finding books by “prominent spreaders of misinformation.”
She denounced Amazon and declared that “this pattern and practice of misbehavior suggests that Amazon is either unwilling or unable to modify its business practices to prevent the spread of falsehoods or the sale of inappropriate products.” She gave the company 14 days to change its algorithms to throttle and obstruct efforts to read opposing views.
Ostensibly, the campaign against Musk echoes a degree of fear as the control of social media collapsed with his purchase of Twitter.