Elon Musk, the CEO of Twitter, recently invited journalist and Fox commentator Dave Rubin to have a “look inside” Twitter headquarters. After spending 48 hours at Twitter’s San Francisco offices, Rubin compared the situation inside the media company to a “flaming dumpster rolling down the street.”
Dave revealed his most recent trip to the Twitter office, where engineers from the company and Elon Musk showed the commentator how the platform had shadowbanned particular people and content.
With Twitter support, Rubin said he was working “behind the scenes” to determine why his audience engagement just ” seems to completely disappear.” Then, on last Tuesday, he received a call requesting his presence in person.
In a Twitter thread, Rubin said, “he thinks maybe the entire code must be torn down and start from scratch. “I gotta tell you,” Rubin said, “that after being in San Francisco for 48 hours, a ‘flaming dumpster rolling down the street’ was pretty much the exact right metaphor.”
According to Rubin, Twitter was initially designed to “suppress some voices and elevate others.”
“As he described it, it’s a fractal Rube Goldberg machine. If you remember the opening scene in Pee-Wee Herman, these crazy machines where, in essence, the more that they fix things, the more things break,” Rubin said. “He also described it as a giant Jenga, and you’re pulling out one thing, and you’re just hoping it doesn’t all collapse.”
The host acknowledged that Musk has managed to get hold of engineers and creative thinkers from Tesla and SpaceX to attempt to resolve what appears to be “a big job.”
“He does realize the gravity of the situation because without Twitter, our ability to communicate in this 2023 world, whether we like it or not, would be hampered severely,” Rubin said.
Additionally, Rubin cautioned that the fairly new CEO is still digging into current workers “that are perhaps doing bad things.”
“The way code works, as he described to me, I know not all your viewers are coders, nor am I, but you’re basically looking at a tiramisu layer cake. And as you fix one layer, and then you realize how many other problems are under it, and you may have screwed something up,” Rubin explained.
“So there’s a coordinated effort on the part of the government and Big Tech, and then there’s an uncoordinated, just sort of activists who are working at these companies layer,” he continued.
“And that’s why this is so messy.”