West News Wire: Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of Twitter, said in an astonishing interview that when he bought and took full control of the social media giant last year, he was shocked to realize just how much the US government participated in and had access to Twitter conversations.
Musk told Fox News host Tucker Carlson that he “was not aware of that” until he paid $44 billion for Twitter last October. “The degree to which government agencies effectively had full access to everything that was going on Twitter blew my mind,” Musk added.
Despite a brief Sunday peek of the upcoming interview, Musk claimed that “everything” includes users’ ostensibly private direct communications. However, it was unclear from the preview whether Musk went on to criticize specific agencies or their methods. Also unknown is what, if anything has changed since then to limit the government’s access to private conversations.
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.
Taibbi was asked to appear before the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government last month, along with fellow Twitter Files writer Michael Shellenberger.
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.
