In a fiery interview with Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson, billionaire Elon Musk revealed his astonishment at the extent of US government involvement and access to Twitter messages after acquiring the social media giant last year.
Musk stated that he was not aware of the full extent of government agencies’ access to Twitter when he purchased the company for $44 billion in October.
He was shocked to discover that the agencies had virtually unlimited access to all Twitter activities, including seemingly private direct conversations.
While Musk did not specify which agencies or techniques he criticized during the interview, he confirmed that the government had full access to “everything” on the platform.
Since then, it is unclear if anyone has taken any measures to limit government access to private conversations.
Twitter Censorship Policies
Since buying Twitter in October and taking over as CEO, Musk has been releasing regular batches of internal documents and communications in an attempt to shed light on the platform’s previously opaque censorship policies and ties with federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies, enlisting independent journalists to break each document dump.
Journalist Matt Taibbi, who first reported on the first batch of files in December, recently referred to the collusion between social media platforms, non-governmental organisations, and the US government to suppress information they did not like as the “censorship-industrial complex,” describing it as “a bureaucracy willing to sacrifice factual truth in service of broader narrative objectives,” and the polar opposite of the free press envisioned in the US Constitution.
Last month, the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government asked Taibbi and fellow Twitter Files writer Michael Shellenberger to appear before them.
Mr Musk also expressed concerns about AI in his interview with Carlson, claiming that the technology has the potential to destroy human civilization.
“AI is more dangerous than, say, mismanaged aircraft design or production maintenance, or bad car production in the sense that it has the potential – however small one may regard that probability, but it is non-trivial – for civilizational destruction,” he stated.
