Read on Twitter
For all of you who think Musk is some agent of Saudi investors or other nefarious actors who you think want to destroy Twitter, consider this: They're probably wincing right now. States with agendas want a strong and authoritative Twitter, not a joke site. Bear with me. /1
If your goal is to spread your agenda, you want the venue to be respected, full of dependable sources, so that your influence operations can be one more among those sources. If you're putting out bullshit, you want it on the same rack as the NYT and WaPo, not tabloids. /2
You also want to use your influence with the owner so that when you slip pollution into the info stream, it doesn't get lost. There are things regimes want to communicate. You want to create sources that *look* dependable and real. /3
Now, I get it that there's a theory that what you really want is to create a shitstorm so chaotic that no one knows what's what, but that's not nearly as a useful and you're not gonna spend billions just to let a child troll everyone. /4
My point is that what you're seeing right now doesn't help bad regimes. Musk is now giving gold badges to established media, but the rest of the site (where influence ops would need some stability and reliability) is now much less useful. /5
For the people who read tabloids and believe anything anyway, nothing here will make a difference. But the ability to impact a reasonable number of reasonable people is reduced when everything is a "look at me" pants-drop from Musk. /6
So, as usual, I'm suggesting that all this is not a plot, but merely that Musk has no idea what he's doing, and this is a lot of panic and chaos because he can't figure out (1) why people won't do what he's ordering them to do and (s) why he can't make money out of this site. /7x
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