Elon Musk And The Twitter Trolls
Americast
BBC
4.3 • 3.1K Ratings
🗓️ 9 March 2023
⏱️ 42 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Twitter insiders have told the BBC that the company is now much less able to protect users from trolling, state-co-ordinated disinformation and child sexual exploitation. Marianna takes the rest of the Americast team though her BBC Panorama investigation into how one of the world’s most influential social media platforms is being transformed by Elon Musk. And she describes how the Twitter CEO has responded to her online.
Tech journalist and host of the ON podcast, Kara Swisher, also joins Americast to talk about how social media companies could be regulated in the future.
And in the week of International Women’s Day, one of America’s best-known feminist lawyers, Gloria Allred, discusses how far she thinks women’s rights in the US have come in the decades that she has been practicing law.
Americast is presented by North America editor Sarah Smith, Today host Justin Webb, the BBC's social media and disinformation correspondent Marianna Spring, and North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher.
Find out more about our award winning "undercover voters" here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-63530374.
Email Americast@bbc.co.uk with your questions and comments and send us a message or voice note via WhatsApp, to +44 3301239480.
This episode was made by Rufus Gray and Alix Pickles. The studio director was Mike Regaard. The assistant editor was Simon Watts. The senior news editor was Sam Bonham.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:04.8 | So big news this week, Maryanna, you finally got an answer from Elon Musk. |
| 0:09.3 | Yeah, my panorama investigation came out on Monday, |
| 0:12.8 | and suddenly my phone is getting loads and loads of messages |
| 0:15.7 | because Elon Musk has replied via tweet. |
| 0:19.0 | Just wait there, Maryanna, because we've got the America |
| 0:21.6 | star Rob in Sutton Colfield, |
| 0:23.4 | who you remember always voices up our Elon Musk tweets for us. |
| 0:26.4 | He's going to read out that tweet. |
| 0:27.8 | At Maryanna Spring, |
| 0:30.2 | sorry for turning Twitter from nurturing paradise |
| 0:33.5 | into place that has trolls. |
| 0:36.3 | Ooh, quite something, Maryanna, rather pointed. |
| 0:39.5 | Quite something indeed, and there was a troll emoji |
| 0:42.1 | at the end of that sentence as well. |
| 0:43.9 | The whole panorama is about hearing from people on the inside of Twitter, |
| 0:48.3 | still there, who've just left, |
| 0:49.9 | and their concerns backed up by user testimony and data. |
| 0:53.8 | The Twitter can't protect people, not just from trolls, |
| 0:56.4 | but also from state sponsored disinformation |
| 0:59.0 | and really nasty stuff like child sexual exploitation. |
| 1:01.9 | So for a lot of the people I interviewed, |
... |
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