Under pressure and faced with a wave of criticism, Elon Musk increasingly turned to his favorite outlet: Twitter.
Since Saturday, Mr. Musk, the world’s richest man and the new owner of Twitter, has embarked on a tweet attack so massive that he has been attacked more than 750 times this month, or more than 25 times a day, according to an analysis. from the digital research agency Memetica. That would be about 13 times a day in April, when Mr. Musk first agreed to buy Twitter.
His recent tweets cover an increasingly wide range of topics. In the past four days, Mr Musk, 51, has poked comedian Kathy Griffin and attacked Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey on the platform. He joked about masturbation targeting a rival – and much smaller – social media platform. He posted and deleted a tweet with a quote from a white nationalist. And he defended his ownership of Twitter, including why he fired 50 percent of the company’s staff and why people weren’t allowed to impersonate others on the service.
All in all, Mr. Musk, who described himself in his Twitter profile as “Chief Twit” before later changing the description to “Twitter Complaint Hotline Operator,” has tweeted more than 105 times since Friday, mostly on Twitter, according to one count. by Memetica.
“Birds haven’t been real since 1986,” Mr. Musk tweeted on Sunday in a discussion thread on Twitter, including a meme from an absurdist conspiracy theory that states that birds are actually robot spies. He did not respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Musk is under huge scrutiny 11 days after completing his $44 billion deal for Twitter, which was the largest leveraged buyout of a tech company in history. On Friday, he fired about 3,700 of the company’s 7,500 employees, saying he had no choice because Twitter was losing. $4 million a day. At the same time, he has become embroiled in the same substantive debates that have plagued other social media companies, including how to give people a way to speak up without spreading misinformation and toxic speech.
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Mr. Musk has had to postpone the rollout of a subscription product that would have given people check marks on their Twitter profiles. Advertisers have paused their spending on Twitter for fear that Mr. Musk will relax content rules on the platform. And the midterm elections will be a test of how a leaner Twitter will perform in absorbing incendiary messages and misinformation about voting and election results.
In a report published Monday, researchers from the Fletcher School at Tufts University said the early signs of Mr. Musk’s Twitter “show the platform is heading in the wrong direction under his leadership — at a particularly inopportune time for the American democracy.”
The investigators said they followed stories of civil war, electoral fraud, civilian policing in voting, and accusations of pedophilia and grooming on Twitter from July to October. “After the Musk acquisition, the quality of the conversation has deteriorated,” as more extremists and misinformation sellers have tested the platform’s limits, the researchers wrote.
Amid the uproar, Mr Musk’s behavior on Twitter suggests he plans to just post through it. And while he’s always been a prolific tweeter, he’s been upping the ante in recent days.
On Friday, Mr. Musk, who has more than 114 million followers on Twitter, issued a “thermonuclear name and shame” campaign against brands that had stopped advertising on the platform. He said he’d done everything he could to appease advertisers, but activists had worked against him to get brands to stop spending on Twitter.
At the same time, the billionaire was embroiled in a battle over his plan to charge Twitter users $8 a month for a subscription service, Twitter Blue, that would tick off anyone who paid. The check had been free to notable people whose identities had been verified by the company, including celebrities, politicians and journalists, as a way to protect themselves from impersonation.
Critics were dissatisfied with Mr Musk’s plans to monetize the tick, saying it could lead to the spread of misinformation and fraud on the platform. In protest, some Twitter accounts with checkmarks changed their display names and photos to match Mr. Musk’s account over the weekend, a move meant to illustrate why it would be confusing if someone could buy a checkmark.
On Sunday, Mr. Musk announced that he… suspend permanently each account “engages in impersonation without clearly specifying ‘parody’.” The billionaire, who had previously criticized Twitter for permanently blocking users, then blocked Ms. Griffin, posing as him on the service.
Mr. Musk, who has called himself a “free speech absolutist,” is learning the basic expectations of content moderation for popular social networks, said Daphne Keller, director of the Program on Platform Regulation at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center.
“His ideas have been incoherent for a while,” she said.
On Sunday evening, Mr. Musk responded to a tweet with a quote from a white nationalist, before deleting the post and continuing to bicker with Mr. Dorsey about Birdwatch, a feature that allows community members to add context to tweets they believe are misleading. Mr. Musk, who previously praised the feature, suggested renaming the feature to “Community Notes.”
“Community notes are the dullest Facebook name ever,” replied Mr. Dorsey, who has a $1 billion stake in Mr. Musk’s Twitter.
Then on Monday, Mr. Musk suggested he could sue civil society groups and activists who pushed for boycotts of Twitter advertisers, when he replied to a right-wing commentator that “we dohave grounds for legal action. Legal experts said holding boycotts for social and political causes is protected by the First Amendment.
Mr. Musk also tweeted that people should vote Republican in Tuesday’s midterm elections. “Shared power curbs the worst excesses of both parties, so I recommend voting for a Republican Congress as the presidency is democratic,” he tweeted. He later posted that he was an independent with a “full Democrat voting history until this year”.
He soon moved on. Mr. Musk’s attention was drawn to Mastodon, a Twitter competitor that has been gaining popularity over the past 10 days. He played off Mastodon’s name and made several gross jokes about masturbation — then deleted those posts an hour later.
Tiffany Hsu reporting contributed.
