Angelo Carusone: Elon Musk’s vision for Twitter sounds like “a sophomore in high school that just read Ayn Rand for the first time”
Carusone: “There are actual Nazis and white supremacists and really horrible, violent people that are very very excited about this”
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Angelo Carusone: Elon Musk’s vision for Twitter sounds like “a sophomore in high school that just read Ayn Rand for the first time”
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From the April 25, 2022, edition of SiriusXM's Tell Me Everything with John Fugelsang
JOHN FUGELSANG (HOST): For all the coverage that CNN+ tanking got, this is the — really the media story of the year so far.
ANGELO CARUSONE (PRESIDENT, MEDIA MATTERS FOR AMERICA): Oh yeah, no. This is a huge story. And it's a huge story, I think that it's a huge story in ways that I don't think that the current reactions actually reflect.
...
There are really, really bad people, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, strangely enough, amongst this group of people that are celebrating isn't even the worst.
Like, there are actual Nazis and white supremacists and like really horrible, violent people that are very very excited about this, about [Elon] Musk acquiring Twitter because they all think they're going to get their accounts back which is going to allow them to like, you know, do a whole bunch of stuff that got them banned in the first place, which was abusing people.
But I actually think — to me, the big thing here is that it's a pivot point. This is actually — and I see this in many ways as similar to what happened — and it's because, partly because of Musk, partly because the way that Twitter plays out. You know, it's — when Fox, sort of, was born, the idea behind it was that it was a counterbalance to the rest of the news media.
FUGELSANG: That's right.
CARUSONE: And in a lot of ways, Musk sees this as a counterbalance to a whole range of policies that were put in place on social media. And he's been talking about this for like two to three years, where he's teased the idea, you know, in conversations and on Twitter that he wants to buy a network or some kind of social media outlet because it's time to push back against this sort of woke culture.
And I think that he sees this as an opportunity to do — you know — it's not as ideologically pure as say what Ailes and Murdoch tried to do in the nineties, but he sees this through ideological terms, which is that this is an opportunity to demonstrate, in his mind, a sort of open environment very much the way that, like, a sophomore in high school that just read Ayn Rand for the first time would, like, regurgitate that stuff back to you and think they have some really profound thoughts.