Elon Musk's X: Trust, Safety, and Political Controversies

David Papadopoulos explores the erosion of trust on X under Elon Musk's leadership, raising concerns about real-world consequences.

### The Evolution of Trust and Safety in Social Media: A Critical Discussion on X under Elon Musk
* 🎙 David Papadopoulos, host of Bloomberg's E-learning podcast, introduces the panel at the Bloomberg Tech Summit in London, featuring Max Chaffin and Devika Shanker, to discuss the theme of **trust** in relation to **Elon Musk's management of X**.
* 🔍 Devika explains that the trust and safety teams at social media platforms are responsible for **defining and enforcing acceptable online behavior**, **ensuring user safety**, and **complying with regulations**, but Musk's significant layoffs of these teams pose **real-world risks**.
* ⚖ The discussion highlights how the absence of a **robust trust and safety team** on X has led to an **increase in harmful content** and a **deterioration of discourse**, particularly in **non-English speaking countries**.
* 📊 Max contrasts Musk's casual decision-making style with Facebook's more formal processes, emphasizing the **importance of objective and consistent decision-making** in maintaining user trust.
* 🌍 The conversation shifts to the real-world implications of social media influence, particularly in the context of recent riots in the UK, raising questions about whether such events would occur without social media's role in **mobilizing individuals**.
* 📉 Devika points out that the lack of oversight on platforms like X allows for the **spread of disinformation**, particularly from **state-sponsored media**, which can have **severe consequences** in politically volatile regions.
* 📅 As the discussion wraps up, the panel anticipates potential regulatory actions against Musk and X in Europe, stressing the **need for accountability in maintaining safety standards** on social media platforms.
* ⚠ The panel concludes with a warning that without consequences for neglecting trust and safety, the message sent to other platforms could **undermine efforts to create safer online environments**.

Hello, everyone. I'm David Papadopoulos, host of E-learning, Bloomberg's weekly podcast, and all things Elon Musk. It's great to be here in London for the Bloomberg Tech Summit, and we have a great show ahead for you. I'm joined on stage by my man, Max Chaffin, senior writer at Businessweek, and not only a regular on this show, but now the host of another Elon Pod. You're going to be all evened out very soon, a mini-series on his political awakening called Citizen Elon that debuts today. Hello, Max. Hey. Also with us is Devika Shanker, Grumpier tech risk expert. Now, Devika spent over a decade working at large social media platforms like TikTok and Meta. Welcome, Devika. Thank you for having me, David. Okay. So, given that the theme for today's event is Trust, we're going to dive into the controversial evolution of X under

Elan and how this move into politics is drawing ever greater scrutiny of the platform and its broader global empire. By the way, we're recording here. So, you know, try to, you know, at some point in time, you know, yuk it up, laugh it up like, like, like pretend you're into it. And this being Elan Inc and all, there will be a little quiz at the end for our panel and for all of you in the audience. Time permitting, Devika, we're going to start with you. It's funny, you know, the words trust and safety get thrown around a lot. Even at the university you teach at in Greece, those words figure prominently in the name of one of your winter semester courses. So at places like Med tic tac X, what are those terms actually mean and what are those? What are those teams do there? Essentially, trust and safety are the people who keep the Internet safe.

So they do broadly three things. Number one, define the rules of acceptable behavior online and then enforce those rules in a consistent, objective, reproducible manner. And number three, come up with innovative ways to make sure that people can have a safe experience. And of late, also work with regulators and close partnerships to meet with all of the compliance requirements. So those three or four things sort of boil down to what we broadly mean by trust and safety in tech. Okay. And now when Musk took over Twitter, now ex, you know, he famously gutted a huge part of the trust and safety team, something like 80% of it. As part of that, you know, massive, chaotic layoffs that he did when he first got there. What are the risks of doing that and how are we seeing them play out now? So the impact of gutting your trust and safety team is simply.

Real-world consequences. So if you get rid of 80% of the people who are responsible for keeping your platform safe, all of us here who use X can see and feel for ourselves. The level and type of discourse, the endless stream of crypto offers, the OnlyFans ads. We see all of that in English. Now, if we take those risks that we can feel tangibly and magnify that by 100x, I think we can begin to have a vague understanding of what the risks look like in non-English speaking countries. So do we see these problems proliferating more on X now than we would on other platforms? The problems have felt more acutely on X on account of not having teams that are responsible for making sure that the platform is safe in those languages and countries. I mean, when Elon Musk brought back former President Trump to his platform, right, he did it via a poll and it was like he just said like, should I bring

President Trump back? Yes or no? Vox populi, vox dei, you know, basically like, hey, whatever you think is cool. And it's such an interesting contrast, like Facebook, which was so the decision to ban Trump and then like what to do with him was so fraught that they created this entire like Supreme Court like called the oversight board, literally. And they and they wrote this like lengthy, brief sort of discussing, you know, the and and musk, of course, is just shooting from the hip, I think partly because that's just how he runs his companies. And he's just decided, you know, hey, how hard could it be to run a social media site, which of course overlooks a lot of the problems that Devika is bringing up. And then, you know, and then also has like these political reasons to do so. But there can be there can be too much intervention from these teams, can there?

not match? I mean, I think there's like a philosophical question of like how like how open should social media companies be like. Like people talking about free speech and and like, should it be unlimited free speech? So there's there's that there's that question and like and then like what that does to trust as far as people who use the platform because you want people use the platform to feel like it's not an arbitrary, it's not just like whatever the owner wants in that particular moment. I mean, the key thing that you want to have as any platform that like cares about its users and has a core principle is really you want to make sure that the decisions that you make out objective, reproducible and testable, like doing a poll on who should come back to your platform, are not, I think maybe fails all three of those key things. And if you take the position it won the

poll overwhelmingly that Trump should come back. I mean, I would. I think the problem with that is if you decide, hypothetically speaking, that you're going to have a digital platform where you make all decisions based on referendums. Right. Let's make up this world where that's the case. Right. You still need to have some sort of guardrails around how often you're going to do the polls. Who are the people who are going to vote on these polls? What results are good? Is 80% good? 70% good? So that you can apply those in a uniform and firm way. And to add on to what Max said, I think Musk went from it's free speech. I like free speech to I like free speech. As long as it's legal to allow free speech, as long as it's legal. But I'm still uncomfortable about people who track midgets or people who use dance like cisgender to.

I like free speech as long as it's legal. But if a country like Brazil says that it's illegal, then I'm kind of not okay with it. You can go through those, right? You know, those huge changes in your position in a very short period of time. I think that's it's also weird because Musk right now feels like he's falling into many of the same pitfalls that he, like, criticized the, you know, the prior regime, like Musk's critique of Twitter was that they were too captured by Biden and by Democratic politicians. And now you have Musk himself, you know, sort of acting as a surrogate, you know, campaigning with the former president. And and also and, of course, you know, along the way, having to make all these, like very difficult decisions. And that kind of erodes trust as well. Very much so. And we will get back to that issue in a second. I just want to ask you to be clear,

though. I hear what you're saying on some of those things. And that evolution that's taken part in terms of his, you know, how he's viewed how to treat these issues. But I still I guess I wonder if you were to sell your soul, not that you would do such a thing, but if you were to sell your soul and go over to the dark side, Vladimir Putin said, here, here's a half a million dollars a month to help me spread disinformation. What would you tell? Do you just simply say, just go to X, do it all there. First of all, I don't think you need half million. I think that's I think he's overpaying. But obviously that's. No, no, you I'm offering that. I mean, so I think I would probably say yeah, go to X because if you don't, X doesn't label any

any of the official Russian propaganda state media, there's no labels on any of them. So people interact with content from Russian state-sponsored points of view without really knowing that that's what they're interacting with. I mean, the odds of getting anything, you know, banned or removed are pretty low. No? Yes, they don't. At least according to the latest transparency report. There's no mention of what they're doing around covert influence operations or specifically disinformation. I think it's, again, ties back to the original thing around. Like if you don't have anyone looking at the problem or measuring the problem, then I suppose you can take the view that there is no problem. You would sell your soul, by the way, easily in a second, but you would you also sending text or do you have some other grand plan to spread disinformation? Well, I mean, I think what's so interesting about X is that it's a relatively small plot.

I mean, like, you know, Facebook, Instagram has a lot more. TikTok has more users. The reach has shrunk. Now, I do think, and there was, there's been all this talk around how Elon Musk changed actually. You know, he famously, as you said, laid off all these people and did all these things that sent a lot of users, including a lot of prominent users, including celebrities and journalists and so on, you know, essentially running from the hills or, you know, defecting to Instagram and threads, which is the, you know, Instagram-like, you know, Twitter version. But on the other hand, I think it still remains culturally relevant. And like, especially in the U.S. and especially in terms of like conservative politics, it is like where that political conversation still seems to be happening. And therefore, yes, if I were part of the, you know, half a million dollars of media, you know, and I have no other

choice, right. Like it does seem like a pretty effective way around to, like, reach a politically engaged audience. And I think, like I mean, that's obviously bad from a you know, or not obviously bad. It it it might be bad from a societal point of view, but it is in some sense to you almost credit because it's still relevant. Yes, it has. Despite the fact that it's I mean, shrunken. Yeah, I think the relevance piece, Right. I think. Regulators around the world are like waking up and realising. Like what? What is. What do we want to signal here? And exactly. Add that political conversation in the U.S. that's everyone feels that. But like, if we just move. Just zoom out a bit, right? Currently, that is an ongoing conflict standoff, diplomatic standoff between India and Canada around the alleged assault and murder of a Sikh activist.

If you go and next for understanding or if you just want to see what's happening on this specific topic, all of the top cited, algorithmically amplified sources of information are state media points of view. And why that is, especially media from Russia in India. So that's Sputnik, India after India, these are your top sources and this is why this is interesting is because. The content that Russian state media is creating in a country like India is extremely localized. It's means it's entertaining. And if you see their point, they see their point of view. So effectively in local languages that it gets picked up by journalists in India who still use X for a variety of reasons. And then that's part of the mainstream. Composition and reception. And then it's hard to say whether it's that, hard to say where it starts, but it does get the people worked up. I want to talk a little bit about the riots that broke out here in

the UK this summer in the wake of the mass stabbing in Southport. It reminded me of a cover story I read in The Atlantic years ago, and the gist of it basically was James Madison, one of the founding fathers of the U.S., was terrified of mob rule, feared that it could do to the Young Republic in the Americas what it did to Athenian democracy centuries earlier. Turns out in the U.S., for a long time it was basically fine, a vast geography of a lot of mountains and stuff. And you could only keep a mob together amassed for so long. When you fast forward to today. So posits the piece. And we are now both in the U.S. and arguably the U.K. and across much of the rest of the world. We are living under constant mob rule, the mob being I don't have my phone with me here, but the virtual mob in our hands are our social media networks, where we hang out in our tribal circles,

working ourselves up into frenzies day and night. We are, quote, living in a Madisonian nightmare. The piece said, And Max, I wonder if the right, I should say before I wonder one more thing on this. The riots here were a concrete case of a virtual mob turning into an actual mob in the streets. Much of that virtual mob congregating on X, egged on by Musk, who was predicting civil war here. This is what I was wondering, Max. I was going to get to that. So the counterfactual is hard to map out and prove, but do the riots take place if there was no such thing as social media? I mean, there were riots and this is what you if you ask, like a social media company, like an executive here, like they would say, well, there were riots before the you know, race riots existed in the world before social media, unfortunately.

And yet, on the other hand, I don't know. I mean, it's really tempting to see this as a case where, like the influence of these platforms and of our kind of just completely broken information ecosystems that are very entertaining, you know, are spilling out of the real world. And then it creates this additional problem when you're like, Hey, social media companies, can you perhaps rein this in a little bit? You know, maybe you could try to help us, like figure out how to deal with this, you know, crisis? And the CEO of one of them, Elon Musk, is just like, Hey, sorry, I'm busy posting my own memes about race riot, which is what was going on. I mean, he was not only ignoring British lawmakers, he was just sort of like, you know, pouring extra gasoline on the fire.

Yeah, I think the fire gasoline-like sort of contribution to the problem and the real-world consequences. Again, it's another one of those things where you like look at the entire globe and you see there are parts of the world where what's on the Internet leads. That is a direct link between what happens in the real world. I can give you an example. Since the unfortunate topic of riots just a couple of months ago, Bangladesh had gone through this huge period of political turmoil. The prime minister fled the country at extremely short notice. And there was a claim that one of the beloved cricketers follows cricket. Our house was torched as part of communal violence in Bangladesh, and this was a claim that originated on X, and this was the time Internet was shut down in Bangladesh as a response to like what? What can you do to control the risks and the spread of information? Right. So this claim was fact-checked by

multiple fact-checkers within, I want to say, 5 to 6 hours. But the context that this is misleading and this was false was not anywhere to be seen on the platform. And it kind of took on a life of its own and it spread to the neighboring countries. Who then started to make lists of people who belong to minority groups within their local communities. And they did that on X in languages which are non-English, and you can still probably find a lot of them under the algorithmically amplified section of X for Bangladesh. So the actual contribution to a crisis will. Right, still happen. Yes, But what is the contribution to that real-world consequence because of technology in different parts of the world? I think it's quite varied. In some places, it's extremely high, like Myanmar or Bangladesh or India, and in some places, it's more muted and where it's more around. Derek We are running out of time. I was going to ask you one last

question. We're actually going to we've run out of time for the quiz, which is a little I'm sure for everyone here is a little explain. Maybe we'll do it outside afterwards. Vox populi style. But my final question for you is there was a sense that Musk was going to be called or some of the leaders of X were going to be called to the UK and held to account and forced to ask questions, answer questions that never happened. At the same time, there do seem like there are some forces building here in UK and broader Europe where they have a slightly more dim or harsh view towards social media than is the case in the U.S.. Are we going to see actions taken potentially in the future? Is Musk on a collision course with regulators here in Europe? I think yes, There's the short answer. He's on a collision course. Definitely. I think the slightly longer answer would be and I'm sure this is a discussion

that is happening at Ofcom and multiple regulators and the European Commission around what is the message we want to send. With regards to compliance, to regulation of social media. So based on where they land on that spectrum. I think it's unlikely that it would be as extreme as Telegram for You, who was arrested in France. But it is now up to the regulators to send the right message, I think, because if there is no consequence for cutting right. Your team that is responsible for keeping your digital platform safe, if there's no consequence, then what is that? What message does that send to other platforms? What message does that send to startups who might be creating new platforms that were important to safety to them and their design? So I think it's definitely on a collision course, but maybe not as extreme as the US. Telegram, which is on the other end. All right, very good. We're out of time. We need to end it there.

But the VK Max, thank you very much. Thank.

How much political influence does Elon Musk have?

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Bloomberg Technology

The Controversial Evolution of X under Elon Musk

Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, now X, involved gutting 80% of the trust and safety team, leading to real-world consequences and a noticeable increase in problematic content on the platform.

The lack of a strong team to enforce safety measures has resulted in a proliferation of issues, particularly in non-English speaking countries.

Musk's decision to bring back former President Trump to the platform via a poll further highlights the chaotic approach to governance on X.

The Controversy of Trump's Return to Social Media

The decision to ban and potentially reinstate Trump on social media has sparked debate, with contrasting approaches from Facebook and Musk.

The philosophical question of how open social media companies should be and the role of free speech adds to the complexity.

Musk's shifting position on free speech and his involvement in political campaigning raise concerns about consistency and trust in decision-making.

X is seen as a key platform for spreading disinformation, with no labels on Russian state-sponsored content and a low chance of removal.

Despite its shrinking user base, X remains culturally relevant, particularly in U.

The platform's ongoing influence has drawn attention from regulators worldwide, amidst a larger diplomatic conflict between India and Canada.

The Influence of State Media and Social Media on Riots

State media, particularly from Russia, is a top source of information in India, using localized content to entertain and influence.

The virtual mob created by social media networks is now a powerful force, leading to real-life riots, as seen in the UK.

The role of social media in inciting these riots raises questions about its impact on real-world events.

The Impact of Social Media on Real-World Events

Social media platforms are criticized for their role in exacerbating real-world crises, with leaders like Elon Musk seemingly ignoring the issue.

The spread of misleading information on these platforms has had dire consequences, such as political turmoil and communal violence in Bangladesh.

The impact of technology on real-world events varies, being more pronounced in countries like Myanmar, Bangladesh, and India.

Musk's Potential Collision Course with European Regulators

Musk and X's leadership were expected to be held accountable in the UK, but that never happened.

There is a growing movement in the UK and Europe for stricter regulation of social media.

The regulators' actions will be crucial in sending a message about compliance and safety, potentially leading to a collision course with Musk and X.