US gov. had ‘full access’ to Twitter private messages
Elon Musk claims the US government had “full access” to direct, private messages sent through Twitter — a revelation that he said “blew my mind.”
“The degree to which government agencies effectively had full access to everything that was going on on Twitter blew my mind,” Musk told Tucker Carlson of Fox News in an interview that will air in two separate segments Monday and Tuesday evening.
“I was not aware of that,” Musk told Carlson. A snippet of the interview was posted to Twitter.
“Would that include people’s DMs?” Carlson asked.
“Yes,” Musk replied without elaborating.
In a separate snippet, Musk warned of the dangers of artificial intelligence, saying that the new technology could potentially pose a threat to 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 — it has the potential for civilizational destruction,” Musk said.
Musk acquired Twitter for $44 billion last fall.
He then proceeded to lay off more than 70% of the company’s employees.
The Tesla mogul bought the social media site and vowed to allow nearly unfettered speech.
Musk also sought to expose the company’s previous management for its ties to government agencies, which demanded that certain content be flagged and even banned.
Several journalists said to have been sympathetic to Musk released a series of internal documents known as the “Twitter Files,” which revealed the extent to which the social media site’s prior regime suppressed the spread of content such as The Post’s reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop.
Matt Taibbi, the author and former Rolling Stone journalist, reported that the decision to censor The Post’s story on the laptop was made “at the highest levels of the company.”
Email and comments from former Twitter employees reviewed by the journalist showed that “everyone knew” the social media giant’s suppression of the story “was f–ked.”
Taibbi, who recently had a falling out with Musk over his ties to the newsletter subscription site Substack, also revealed how Twitter sought guidance from several government agencies before deciding to ban former President Donald Trump from the platform following the Capitol riot of Jan. 6, 2021.
In another bombshell report, Taibbi also revealed that the CIA had been involved in Twitter’s content moderation for years.
Bari Weiss, another journalist who was given access to the Twitter Files, reported that the site had secretly “shadow-banned” a number of far-right users.
Musk has also been vocal about the supposed dangers of the rapid advancement of AI in light of the emergence of ChatGPT and other AI-powered bots that have demonstrated human-like capabilities to formulate ideas and replicate language.
Last week, the Financial Times reported that Musk is putting together a team of engineers to create a generative AI project that would compete with ChatGPT and its creator, the Silicon Valley unicorn OpenAI.
Musk, who co-founded OpenAI but then left the firm after reportedly losing a power struggle, co-signed a letter last month with hundreds of other tech experts who jointly called for a halt in AI research and development.
The experts cited potential risks including the spread of “propaganda and untruth,” job losses, the development of “nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us,” and the risk of “loss of control of our civilization.”
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