In the wake of billionaire Elon Musk’s on again, off again purchase of Twitter, a Project Veritas investigation has revealed that the giant social media platform never intended to be a forum for “free speech.”
In an undercover Project Veritas investigation released on Monday, May 16, Siru Murugesan, a senior engineer at Twitter, reacted to Elon Musk’s intended Twitter take over. He revealed his colleagues hate the idea of Musk purchasing Twitter.
“Twitter does not believe in free speech,” said Murugesan. “Elon believes in free speech.”
The Twitter engineer voiced how his coworkers did everything they could to disrupt Musk’s purchase. He described Twitter’s workplace culture as “socialist” after seeing coworkers get away with taking a month off of work at a time.
“In Twitter, it’s like mental health is everything,” Murugesan stated. “If you are not feeling it, you can take some time off; people have taken months off.”
Murugesan claimed both liberals and conservatives could not co-exist on Twitter but ultimately admitted that Musk makes good points at times. The Tesla CEO has stated that work ethic expectations at Twitter will be extreme but not less than what he demands of himself.
Murugesan is not the first tech expert to raise alarms about Musk’s potential take over of Twitter. A former Harvard professor recently told The Washington Post that having one person in control of the social platform “is a disaster” for user privacy.
The former professor and author of “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” Shoshana Zuboff, said huge ad revenue and unregulated data collection about user behavior have changed the social-media industry, which now holds incredible sway over real-world events.
Because content on social media platforms can influence public opinion and lead to changed behaviors, she said, the people in control of the sites hold a tremendous amount of power.
Putting that much power in the hands of a single person, she said, would be “incompatible with democracy.”
“There are simply no checks and balances from any internal or external force,” Zuboff told The Washington Post.
Should Musk take ownership of Twitter, he would have near-complete control over an amount of user data “that cannot be compared to anything that has ever existed, and allows intervention into the integrity of individual behavior and also the integrity of collective behavior,” Zuboff said.
“This is a disaster, and it’s not only about Elon Musk, but he kind of puts it on steroids,” Zuboff told The Post.
On Tuesday a part 2 of the Project Veritas expose was released. This is potentially more damning than the first video.
The concerns being raised notwithstanding, as of this writing, it seems that Elon Musk no longer wants to buy Twitter Inc., at least not at the price he negotiated.
Musk’s bid for Twitter has become one of the most bizarre M&A sagas Silicon Valley has seen in a long time. Here’s a quick recap: Musk bought some Twitter stock, reached an agreement to serve on the board, rescinded that agreement, made a bid to buy the company and take it private, and that bid was ultimately accepted. However, as stock prices have plunged in an overall market downturn, Musk has suffered from apparent buyer’s remorse and is saying that the deal is “on hold.”
