As Musk Speedruns The Content Moderation Curve, Some Of His Biggest Fans Are Getting Mad At Him

Yesterday, we gave Elon Musk a cheat sheet for speedrunning the content moderation learning curve that any website doing any kind of content moderation learns over time. As we noted earlier this year, it appeared that he did not understand the issues at all and was setting his fans up to be extremely disappointed once they realized that Twitter, like all other social media websites, was going to have to do some level of moderation. It’s the same lesson Parler, Gettr, and Truth Social all had to learn as well.

And, now Musk.

As Nilay Patel noted in his “welcome to hell” article, his biggest fans were obviously going to turn on him once he started to understand the realities that they refused to understand. And it seems like it may already be happening, as it looks like Musk is somewhere in the middle of the learning curve.

On Tuesday evening Musk tweeted that he had met with a variety of civil society folks in DC to talk about “how Twitter will continue to combat hate and harassment and enforce its election integrity policies.” Somewhat oddly, he posted this as a reply tweet to a tweet from Twitter’s current head of safety & integrity, rather than starting a new tweet directly. That somewhat diminished the visibility of the tweet (you wouldn’t see it if you just looked at Elon’s page, unless you clicked on “tweets and replies” because it defaults to just tweets, but not replies).

I had noted on Twitter how the responses from Musk’s fans split into two camps — both hilarious. One group insisted that this was the most brilliant thing ever, and it was so great that Elon was going to save Twitter… even though all he was talking about was continuing the existing programs that had pissed off so many people in the first place. This was the kneejerk response from Musk stans who hang on his every word as if he were sent from heaven above to save mankind and can do no wrong.

But, the much funnier group were… exactly as everyone predicted… the rabid Trumpist crew (I still don’t think they should be called “conservatives” as they’re not even remotely conservative), who seem to be collectively losing their shit that Musk might… continue the policies that any website has to have to stay in business. Rolling Stone covered this totally expected turn of events:

“Why is it in anyway part of Twitter’s goal to ‘combat hate’? Or have anything to do with election integrity?” tweeted right wing Youtuber Lauren Chen. “This is not sounding like a triumph for free speech,” she added. 

Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec expressed outrage, as well, tweeting at Musk that “every member of this group of ‘divergent views’ called for Trump to be censored while he was the sitting President of the United States.” Other reactionary conservatives like Mike Cernovich, Tom Fitton, and Sean Davis criticized Musk’s decision to speak to members of civil rights organizations, also taking issue with their ideological standpoints of the people Musk was consulting. Turning Point USA’s Benny Johnson advised Musk to fire Yoel Roth to “restore trust” in the platform. 

The Daily Beast saw something similar:

Even though Elon Musk spent his first official day as “Chief Twit” pledging to look into why Catturd was supposedly “ghostbanned” on Twitter, the notorious MAGA troll account has seemingly turned their back on the new Twitter boss. “I admit when I’m wrong and I was 100% wrong about @elonmusk changing Twitter,” the anonymous user behind @catturd2 tweeted on Wednesday.

Reality’s a real bitch, huh?

Of course, if Elon had listened to basically any of us back in March when he first floated this idea, he might have avoided this massive mess-with-killer-interest-payments he’s now in, where the people he thought he was helping out are already turning on him.

Musk’s response is similar to one he’d said back in May when he talked about how moderation efforts should upset both sides equally, claiming that when “being attacked by both right & left simultaneously is a good sign.”

Except, that is (again) missing the point. This isn’t a left or right issue (and lots of people don’t really fall into that spectrum. Even claiming that you’re being “attacked by both right and left” implies that they’re mad for partisan political reasons.

Elon needs to get it through his head that almost nothing about this is actually partisan, even as a bunch of grifters have convinced him otherwise.

Again, actual studies (things that someone doing due diligence, rather than taking advice from “catturd2” might do) showed that Twitter’s policies were not biased against conservatives. The study found that the policies were pretty clearly balanced against things that actually cause harm, and that when taken out of a partisan context, people across the political spectrum pretty much agreed that stopping harm was a reasonable goal.

Continuing to present it as partisan in any form (even claiming both sides are upset) only makes the issue worse because it leads both sides to think that the point of moderation is to stifle the speech of those on the other side. It’s not. It’s about safety. Or, as Twitter used to call it “trust & safety.”

Musk seems to be learning a very expensive lesson in how this all works.