Twitter: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

Our main story tonight concerns Twitter, or as it's been called since Elon Musk purchased it a few years ago, Twitter. It's a site with exactly one good account left, Gerald Stratford, a retired British man who delights followers with his giant vegetables. I've just cut this big cabbage. It's a PB for me. I haven't got any scales big enough to weigh it.

But, uh, I'm not worried about that.

It's a beautiful specimen.

Yeah, it is, Gerald! And I, for one, am glad that you cut that cabbage. To be honest, I haven't been this jazzed to see a cabbage broken in half since my wedding night." Twitter has clearly changed significantly in recent years. And you can pinpoint the moment that started, because it's the day in October 2022,

when Elon tweeted a video of himself carrying a sink into Twitter headquarters, writing, "'Let that sink in.' A joke so funny, I'm still laughing right now."

-'Let that sink in.' -'Let that sink in.'

And he quickly made it clear that the company was gonna be different. He changed Twitter's name to X, announced an extremely hardcore cultural reset, and by his count said he cut about 80% of Twitter's staff. And to hear Elon tell it, he did this to protect free speech and correct for what many conservatives considered a left-wing bias. In fact, as far as he was concerned,

nothing less than the fate of the world was at stake.

The reason for acquiring Twitter is because it was causing destruction at a civilizational level. You know, like Wormtongue from Lord of the Rings, where he would just sort of whisper these terrible things to the king, so the king would believe these things that weren't true. And they were pushing a nihilistic, anti-civilizational Mayan virus to the world.

Okay. For the record, Twitter's not a good analog for Wormtongue at all, and I'm guessing I don't need to explain why, given the Venn diagram between viewers of this show and people familiar with second-tier Lord of the Rings characters is, I'm pretty sure, a single circle,

as round, in fact, as the outermost wall of Minas Tirith.

-♪ ♪ -♪ ♪

But what Elon's embrace of so-called free speech has actually resulted in is much darker. One study found an approximately 50% increase in posts containing hate speech. And recently, you may have heard about the platform's struggles with Grok's image editing tool, which has allowed users

to create digitally altered, sexualized photos of real people, including minors. And look, no one is saying Twitter was perfect before Elon arrived. It helped platform a lot of ugliness, including, but not limited to, our first shit post to president.

But it is genuinely worse now. And you might think you already know how bad it is, or that it doesn't matter to you because you're no longer on it. But I promise, it's actually worse than you think, for reasons you may not know, and in ways that will unfortunately impact all of us.

So given that, tonight, let's talk about Twitter. Let's start with some of the most visible changes Elon's made. One of his first involved the site's verification system, which used to assign a blue check mark to anyone well-known enough that they might need

And that led to instant, albeit very funny, chaos.

All of a sudden, scrollers saw LeBron James asking for a trade.

and drug manufacturer Eli Lilly offering insulin for free.

its full-time content moderators by over 50 percent.

And that was just the beginning.

after Musk's Thanksgiving tweet that amnesty begins next week.

and was taken in Syria. was actually from a military simulation video game. conveniently titled Israel Mossad, when it first acquired a blue check in September 2023,

to more than 230,000. Currently, if you're a premium user,

meaning you pay for a blue check,

And that has served some users reply to, repost and like your content. And that has served some users pretty well like this guy who posted his freedom uncut online and was on Twitter a lot.

He says he spends up to 16 hours a day on X, sharing AI generated pictures like these and streaming. While some of these posts are obviously satirical, others are less fantastical. It's the more provocative content that gets views, he tells me.

It's kind of interesting because... ..the balance between free speech and saying stuff that you know is either untrue or you just say it in a very brash way to egg people on is an interesting era that we're in. I know people that are making the pay periods every two weeks, and I know people that are in the thousand-plus range.

Look, it is not the most important thing there, but it is genuinely incredible to me that people can make money posting Matrix memes of Trump that read, I can dodge bullets, not least because that's something, and not to be a fact bitch here, Trump didn't entirely do.

If we're just going to be sticklers about it. And look, over a thousand dollars every two weeks is clearly a good payday just for posting. Usually to make that kind of money online, you need to be running a crypto scam or selling feet pics, and that's...

Even that is only realistic for those of us who happen to be born with irresistible feet. I would show you, but honey, I don't do that for free. -♪ ♪ -♪ And some accounts, particularly on the far right, made more like the anonymous EndWokeness, which once tweeted, "'Wow, Elon Musk wasn't kidding.

with a screenshot showing earnings of over $10,000."

if, say, you live in another country And that may help explain

to see accounts' location information. The ex-account, Maga Nation, with nearly 400,000 followers, and America first, with post after post backing Trump.

should be barred from running for office. and what their incentives were. As for what's happened behind the scenes, involved secret tweaks to Twitter's algorithm. They just involved changing who could post and what their incentives were. As for what's happened behind the scenes, and three were neutral, designed to show no interest in politics.

by Twitter's algorithm, their findings were striking.

Remember our left-wing users. and more than 40% came from right-wing accounts.

Compare that to our right-wing users and look, they saw much less left-wing content and a lot of right-wing content. And then the neutral users, who we designed not to show any interest in politics. They saw twice as much right-wing content in the pink here than they did left-wing in

yellow.

And that clearly suggests that something is up, even if we don't know the exact algorithm changes that were made. It's like when a Redditor found that statistically, James Harden's poor performance during away games correlates with them happening in cities with highly rated strip clubs. Now, can we make

concrete statements about causality there? Of course we can't, but the data is making some loud suggestions. Now, I have to say, X has announced a new update to Twitter's algorithm, which they've dubbed as purely AI-led.

Although, given Elon has a history of trying to make his AI chatbot grok less woke, leading to it at one point calling itself Mecha-Hitler, I'm not sure how reassuring that is. Also, Elon's definitely shown a willingness to tweak Twitter's algorithm to drive

certain kinds of content, and sometimes for truly embarrassing reasons. There's a notorious incident involving him going to the Super Bowl in 2023 and having a problem with one of his tweets. And I'll let this reporter fill you in.

He tweets out basically a support for the Philadelphia Eagles. I think his tweet was something like, go Eagles with a few American flags on it. Biden, around the same time, posts a somewhat similar tweet. Fly, Eagles, fly.

And it's a video of his wife, Jill Biden, who's walking with an Eagles jersey on. The game goes on. Elon Musk checks his phone. Weird. It looks like Joe Biden,

who he's called a damp sock puppet in human form, is doing much better than he is in terms of engagement on this very similar tweet.

At 2.36 a.m., she says an urgent message went out

and roughly 80 engineers were pulled into work.

And they're tasked with fixing the issues

with the algorithm.

That's true. Elon's tweets got less engagement than Biden's did, so 80 engineers were called in at two in the morning and told, this is high urgency. And of course his tweet flopped. It was terrible. First, don't use American flags when eagle emojis exist,

but also, eagles?

and you'd have cracked a million likes instantly.

promotion of his tweets to the entire user base.

Which seems to be happening.

As basically, whatever Elon's tweeting about,

people will see in their feeds.

they set up a dozen different test accounts. And in approximately 90% of the sessions they conducted,

a post from Musk appeared at least once in the timeline, usually much more often. And even clicking, not interested in Elon Musk, didn't change things. In fact, after one test account clicked exactly that, posts from him more than doubled. At this point, it seems like there's only one option

if you never want to hear anything from Elon Musk, and that's to be his coolest child. And Twitter thumbing the scale toward Elon's interest is bad for multiple reasons, not limited to his god-awful jokes, his history of evoking extreme ideas like the anti-Semitic Great Replacement Theory,

and the fact he was apparently a driver of U.S. election misinformation in 2024. But perhaps the biggest cause for concern is the fact that our current government is troublingly dependent on Elon's platform. The Trump administration is painfully online,

and particularly on Twitter. J.D. Barnes has said that he's a Grok guy. Kash Patel's repeatedly fumbled FBI investigations by prematurely announcing suspects on Twitter. And this photo of the makeshift Situation Room during the U.S. military operation in Venezuela

showed a Twitter feed with Venezuela in the search bar. And I'm not sure anything can inspire less confidence than that other than the Google results for, -"Who is Venezuela?" -$Venezuela. And at best, the consequences of doing this

are that the government just ends up doing dumb stuff. Like when someone on Twitter seemed to convince Elon that the gold inside Fort Knox might be missing. The Washington Post traced it back to this tweet, suggesting he take a look to make sure it was still there. Musk replied, surely it's reviewed every year.

To which the account responded, it should be, it isn't. Just two days later, Musk tweeted, it would be cool to do a live video walkthrough of Fort Knox. And not long after that, this came out of the mouth of the President of the United States.

We're actually going to Fort Knox to see if the gold is there. Because maybe somebody stole the gold.

Tons of gold.

Okay.

-♪ ♪ -♪ ♪ Well, let us know, I guess. Honestly, I know it's probably not a great use of taxpayer money, but I think I'd be okay if he spent the rest of his presidency trying to solve low-stakes mysteries he found on Twitter. Visiting Fort Knox because someone said

the gold might be missing, or pouring around in the White House garden with a magnifying glass because Kourtney Kardashian once tweeted, -"Do ants have dicks?" -$25,000. It wouldn't be the worst use of his time. Anything that keeps him busy, really. But wild gold chases are the best-case scenario here,

because we've talked before about how misinformation on Twitter led to actual spending cuts during Elon's time at Doge, but it goes well beyond that. A nominee for a senior administration post recently told The New Yorker, if we have something that's popular

in right-wing Twitter, the White House is acting on it 90-plus percent of the time. And Trump appointees like Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, will sometimes openly brag about taking work cues from social media.

I have a big social media following who are the Nick Shirlleys and the Matt Taimys and some of these others who, right or left, they're the ones who are getting the leads and sharing the stories in real time. Those are the ones I pay attention to. And where we get our attention on something,

our libs of TikTok is also a great source for some of our issues involving schools ...issues involving schools or employment, we do open up investigations based on Internet leads, and I am proud of that.

Okay, first, bragging about your Twitter followers is just embarrassing, and it gets... even worse when you learn that last December, Dylan tweeted, I've been stuck at pretty much the same level of followers on this account since I started my government job.

What am I, chopped liver over here? What kind of content do my folks want to see more of to like and share?" To which I'd respond, I guess I'd love to see a resignation letter if you're taking requests.

But also, it's a little hard to hear her complain about a lack of followers, given she routinely pumps out duds like this recent one, on the road, On the Road, Timeline Cleanse Knitting, After a Day of Hard Work, Cash Me a Hat for a Man. And this one, also about a hat,

but in which he throws in the r-slur, For Good Measure. And what the fuck is that? That is a hard unfollow for me, for the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. But there are obvious issues

with the government taking cues from accounts that Dylan Justice described, because some are posting deeply irresponsible rage bait. Take a guy that she just mentioned there, Nick Shirley. He's the 23-year-old right-wing influencer behind a viral investigation of Minnesota daycares

posted in December. They were actually playing a clip of it during her interview there. Shirley posted it on YouTube first, but it quickly went viral on Twitter, where it's so far garnered over 140 million views. It's worth knowing just how flimsy it was.

For context, allegations of social services fraud in Minnesota, some of it by Somali-Americans, have been the subject of federal investigations and mainstream media coverage for years now. Dozens of people have already been convicted as a result, with some investigations still ongoing.

Still, Nick Shirley decided to do some investigating of his own by showing up at daycares, demanding to see proof kids went there, and in some instances, asking if he could enroll his non-existent child. When he wasn't able to do that,

he concluded the businesses were fronts. It was a truly ridiculous stunt, as he sort of acknowledged when pressed on it by an actual reporter.

But, Shirley, you don't think a daycare should just be unlocked. You shouldn't be able to just walk into a daycare.

It should be a reception.

It is a reception.

Every daycare is locked.

Their doors are locked.

And so, okay, you bring up a fair point, but why can't they actually give me information on how to enroll a child?

Okay, first, I love the slight pause there after Shirley was told daycares are not typically open to strangers with cameras. Just the slow realization that a locked door is one of the basic things every daycare should have, along with crayons, interlocking foam tiles,

tiny tables and chairs, and so many germs, every part of the insides will be coated with a phlegm for the next two years straight. That is what daycares are. But also, if you really want the latest right-wing rallying cry to be, daycare should have a guest reception for random men without children who just want to poke around and film some shit, I'd love to see how that turns out for you.

Now, you won't be surprised to learn that state investigators conducted compliance checks after Shirley's video went viral and found that the daycares she visited were operating as expected, and the kids were present at all sites except for one, and that is only because it wasn't yet open

for families for the day when inspectors arrived. But the thing is, it was already too late, because Elon absolutely loved that dumb video. He tweeted, retweeted, and engaged with a truly absurd number of posts about it, or the claims that it made in the days after the video went online. And unsurprisingly, the Trump administration took notice.

The day after it was posted, J.D. Vance tweeted about it, saying it was more useful journalism than any of the winners of the 2024 Pulitzer Prizes, which, given one of them focused on tactics authoritarian regimes used to repress dissent in the digital age feels a bit on the nose.

Two days after that, Christie Noem posted a clip of ICE agents apparently conducting a massive investigation into child care fraud in Minneapolis. And the next day, Trump's then-deputy secretary at HHS posted on Twitter, tagging Nick Shirley and including this video that was then retweeted by HHS.

Intrepid journalists have made shocking and credible allegations of extensive fraud in Minnesota's child care programs. We believe the state of Minnesota has allowed scammers and fake daycares to siphon millions of taxpayer dollars over the past decade.

Wow, look, I know it is distracting, because that man is hot as shit. -♪ ♪ -() But if you can listen to his words through the smoke show going on there... -()

...they're actually very worrying. In that post, they announced they'd frozen funding to Minnesota and then quickly tried expanding that to encompass five Democratic-run states. And within two weeks, the Trump administration sent thousands of federal agents to Minnesota

to crack down on illegal immigration. I don't think it's a stretch to say that a lot of the shit you saw in Minnesota was caused at least in part by this fucking tweet. The point here is, Twitter has become a sewer of misinformation with the power to bring about

troubling real-world impacts. And to be clear, this is not a problem that goes far beyond this administration or this country. Because you see, just how dangerous what Elon's built can be, we actually have to look at England.

In 2024, in a town called Southport, three young girls were killed in a knife attack. It was horrific. In the immediate aftermath, there was almost no public information available about the attacker. But nevertheless, a Twitter account called Europe Invasion,

known to publish anti-immigrant and Islamophobic content, baselessly suggested the suspect was a Muslim immigrant. By the time the killer was identified as a non-Muslim, British citizen, born to parents from Rwanda, it was already too late, as mobs were forming. And after a vigil for the victims, violence broke out near a local mosque,

with people throwing bricks, bottles, and other missiles at it. And the imam there still seemed stunned by the speed with which it all accelerated.

We start getting messages from friends and neighbors, and saying there is a lot of people accusing the attacker of being a Muslim. And then, moving from there, they said, he is coming to this mosque.

And then it moved from there very quickly. We're talking about within half an hour, it became that we coerced him into doing what he did.

Did you ever expect that it would end up... that hatred would end up outside your mosque?

Never.

That is terrible. And given the killer wasn't a member of that mosque, or indeed Muslim, of course you wouldn't expect a hate mob to show up. It makes literally as much sense as a mob showing up at a Taco Bell

to protest the results of an Orlando Magic game. Hey, guys, those two things are unrelated. You got some bad intel. Go home, you fucking idiots. But from there, the riots spread nationwide, with mobs targeting mosques and hotels, housing asylum seekers, and leading to what's been called

the worst unrest the UK has seen in more than a decade. And it was significantly fueled by Twitter. With false or unfounded claims about the Southport attacker, getting at least 155 million impressions in the days after the attack. And when the police there eventually made arrests

for inciting racial hatred, one of the men convicted happened to be earning 1,400 pounds a month from his activities on the site. And it is hard to deny Twitter's role as, at the very least, an accelerant. Two of the major voices spreading dangerous misinformation

were Andrew Tate and Tommy Robinson, who, remember, Elon reinstated to the platform. And Elon himself was acting as a sort of amplifier to the point that he replied to one post about the attacks with, -"Civil war is inevitable." -$$CHARGE And it's not like some of the key participants have denied how critical Twitter's role has been.

Robertson's far-right movement picked up significant steam in the wake of Southport, and here he is, not long after the riots, giving credit where he feels it's due.

Look what we've achieved in six months. We've gone from, poof, through the roof. Thanks to Elon Musk, built a cult movement, ready, inspired many, and we're ready.

Yeah, not great. And if that wasn't bad enough, Robinson actually hosted an anti-immigration Unite the Kingdom rally in London last year, and you'll never guess who he managed to get as a special guest.

The huge crowds in Westminster didn't turn out just for Tommy Robinson.

They were also chanting someone else's name.

-♪ Elon, Elon! ♪ -♪ Elon, Elon! ♪

Elon Musk joining in from America.

Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you.

You either fight back, or you die.

Okay, saying fight back or die to that crowd is so malevolent, I can barely wrap my head around it. And I've got to say, what he's doing there sure does seem like a strong case of, if I may quote Elon himself, someone whispering terrible things,

things that weren't true, and they're pushing a nihilistic, anti-civilizational mind virus to the world. It is worm-tongue coded, at least, is what I am saying here. And look, this is typically where I trot out my hit catchphrase, what can we do?

You know it, people go crazy when I say it. It's on T-shirts now, and I can't walk down the street without people begging me to say it to them. But right now, unfortunately, there's not much we can push for by way of solutions. The fact is, a massive media platform has been shaped in the image of its poisonous owner. And it doesn't seem like Elon's gonna see the error of his ways anytime soon,

seeing his brain seems to be thoroughly cooked by the garbage he consumes on his own site. To be honest, he still doesn't seem to have a coherent vision of exactly what Twitter should be. Because just watch this recent interview, where he offers a pretty grand vision for it, but then gets tripped up by the most basic follow-up question

imaginable, and I promise, this answer is so much worse than you are prepared for.

-...I just want to really have, um, a global platform that brings together... Like I said, like, it becomes as close to sort of a collective consciousness

of humanity as possible. And why is that important, Dino? Collective consciousness to have one platform.

I guess, yeah, why is that important?

Um.

Um.

Um.

Um. Um. Um. Um. Um. Um. I guess it's, you could also say like, why? You know, if you consider humans, like humans trillions of synapses in your mind. Um...

But...

But there's no... The why of it, I guess, is just so we can... increase... our understanding, our... Increase our... -..our understanding of the universe. -- LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE -.

You know, at first, I thought that was embarrassing.

What with the full ten seconds where Elon's brain seemed to buffer like it's loading a video on AOL in 1999. But then I saw the little drawing labelled 30 to 40 trillion cells and it all totally made sense. So it seems like the odds of Elon fixing this are pretty slim, meaning all we can really control

is how we each interact with Twitter. And I know that there are some out there who think it's important to stay on it, to be part of the town square. Although, given that town square now resembles, if anything, this, I'm not sure much good faith debate

is taking place there. My personal advice is not to post on it at all. I haven't done that in over a year, although I will be going back there tomorrow to post a link to this piece before going silent again and prioritizing my OnlyFans.

And look, I know people have their own reasons for staying on Twitter, though for what it's worth, a lot of what it does can be replicated elsewhere. If you want to stay in touch with friends or contacts, maybe try and connect with them somewhere else. If you spend most of your time sending your significant other

memes and funny posts, there are other sites where you can find those, but also, maybe put your phone down and take your wife out to dinner. It's been a long time since you went out without the kids. And if you just want to watch arguments, may I recommend the Real Housewives franchises, the Shakespeare of the modern age.

All I'll say is, there are certain areas, like news in particular, where Twitter is now worse than useless. In fact, for breaking news, it is an active liability, as people routinely push out false information in the wake of tragedies and crises, often for money, and there don't seem to be

many guardrails to stop them. All of which is really a long way of saying that the Twitter that we may have once relied on and the Twitter that was fun and occasionally useful is just well and truly gone. And collectively, while it might be sad,

it might be past time for all of us too, if I may borrow a truly poisoned phrase, let that... -...sink in. -- LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE That's our show. Thanks so much for watching. That's our show. Thanks so much for watching.

We'll see you next week. Good night.