The Twitter Fantasy

Land of the Giants

Vox Media Podcast Network

Technology, Society & Culture, Business

4.6 • 2.3K Ratings

🗓️ 17 October 2023

⏱️ 3 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

A year ago, in what was essentially the world’s most expensive impulse purchase, Elon Musk bought Twitter. That made him Twitter’s most important user. But he’s certainly not the only one to fall for its spell - a spell that promises attention, connection, and power. This season will explore why Twitter’s cultural and political influence far exceeds its size, and how its biggest users shaped it, for better and worse. Hosted by Vox senior correspondent Peter Kafka. Episodes drop every Wednesday beginning October 25th. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	From the moment Twitter was founded, no one knew what it was supposed to be exactly,
0:05.0	which was kind of great.
0:07.0	Some people would look at it and say,
0:09.0	this is the future of communications.
0:11.0	Others would look at it and say, this is the public square.
0:14.0	Sometimes, you know, it'd just be a bunch of people shooting a shit
0:17.0	and like a random semi-famous person would chime in.
0:20.0	Twitter didn't actually state what they were
0:23.0	and so they could be many things to many different people.
0:27.0	It felt like you never knew what was going to happen.
0:30.0	Eventually, it became not so great.
0:34.0	We all imagined that there was going to be a public square.
0:37.0	What we didn't foresee was that everybody having a voice
0:42.0	might produce a global, peracious mob
0:48.0	and there was only one place that that was happening and it was Twitter.
0:51.0	I never felt more uncomfortable, sad, hurt
0:56.0	than when I had thousands of people bullying me through an app.
1:05.0	And the people in charge of Twitter, they weren't sure what deal about any of this
1:09.0	or whether they were really in charge.
1:12.0	All at once, we're dealing with deep fakes and manipulated media.
1:16.0	We're dealing with COVID-19 misinformation
1:19.0	and we're dealing with election misinformation
	...

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