Ben Collins v Elon Musk: On Disinformation
Step #1 to being a good disinformation reporter: maybe don't spread disinformation?
While this will be a pretty short post, there are two important points to make up top:
This story is indirectly about Elon Musk and Twitter/X. Reporting critically about Elon and how he’s run X is civically useful and good. Power should always be held to account. But crucially—and I’m embarrassed to even have to type this—critical reporting should also be accurate. Especially when the cost of getting it right is just like…reading for two minutes? Even those very against Musk and his approach should want reporting to meet this bar, at a very basic minimum.
I don’t typically call out journalists by name. I’m much more interested in structural reform than in trying to shame any individual—most of whom are just caught working in dynamics that inhibit their best instincts. But Collins has worked very hard to raise his own profile as a disinformation guy, and his take here is so shockingly illiterate and/or bad faith that this approach seems right. If newsrooms don’t rein in their worst offenders, offenses will abound.
(Also worth noting that, per Semafor, NBC had asked Collins to at least temporarily stop reporting on Musk and his companies last December in light of comments that were “not editorially appropriate”. Lesson not learned I guess?)
We reward corrections. See something wrong, misleading, or unfair? Use our anonymous Typeform or drop a comment in this post’s dispute doc.
What Happened
Ben Collins posted a two-minute video to X (along with a companion article on NBC News) yesterday in which he relayed his ongoing investigation into which mystery party texted Elon Musk a link to an anonymous article posted on Revolver last April.
Here’s how Collins characterizes it all (emphasis mine):
On the day that public records revealed that Elon Musk had become Twitter’s biggest shareholder, an unknown sender texted the billionaire and recommended an article imploring him to acquire the social network outright.
Musk’s purchase of Twitter, the 3,000-word anonymous article said, would amount to a “declaration of war against the Globalist American Empire.” The sender of the texts was offering Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO, a playbook for the takeover and transformation of Twitter. As the anniversary of Musk's purchase approaches, the identity of the sender remains unknown.
The three texts were sent on April 4, 2022. In the nearly 18 months since then, many of the decisions Musk made after he bought Twitter appear to have closely followed that road map, up to and including his ongoing attacks against the Anti-Defamation League, a nonprofit organization founded by Jewish Americans to counter discrimination.
The text messages described a series of actions Musk should take after he gained full control of the social media platform: “Step 1: Blame the platform for its users; Step 2: Coordinated pressure campaign; Step 3: Exodus of the Bluechecks; Step 4: Deplatforming.”
Right, so here’s the problem: this take has the Revolver article precisely backwards, which would be obvious to anyone who bothered to, you know, read it. The article covered a four-step playbook, yes, but one that opponents would use against Musk.1
(Interlude to make it clear that I am very much not endorsing said article’s political characerizations. Even so, we need to present it for the arguments it actually made, some of which did turn out to be a bit prescient.)
The gist of its arguments:
Musk should buy Twitter to save free speech.
Left-leaning ideological opponents would object and likely employ certain tactics against Musk and the new Twitter.
Musk should buy it anyway because the larger fight is worth it.
Again, setting aside the author’s political characterizations, much of their commentary on the second point turned out to be weirdly accurate. Opposition has indeed progressed along the lines they suggest. (This obviously doesn’t make all that opposition inherently illegitimate! But it does suggest a certain need for caution. Boy who cried wolf and all. If you say everything Musk does is bad whether or not it is, you poison people against celebrating his good acts and against taking his bad acts seriously.)
But then there’s also the bit about the ADL. Quoting now from Collins’s video (at 0:24):
“[the article] tells [Musk] to blame the ADL once advertisers start fleeing”
Yeah so I’d be happy to donate $500 USD to a charity of Collin’s choice if he can point me to where exactly the article says this, because it definitely doesn’t. (Collins repeated the same claim, even more dishonestly, in his subsequent Rachel Maddow interview at 0:52.)
Now, is the article critical of the ADL? Oh, sure! But the question a journalist should ask here—if they really wished to combat misinformation—is “well, did the ADL overstate their concerns about Twitter/X?” And if they didn’t, show that!2
What’s interesting about the piece is that it very well might have motivated Musk’s purchase and management. Much of what he’s said publicly does vibe with it. But if we think the arguments it advanced are bad/wrong, let’s show our work!
I have readers on both sides of the political spectrum. I have little interest in telling any of them what to think. My right-wing readers mostly adore Musk; my left-wing readers mostly abhor him. So it goes, to each their perception. But it does seem to matter an awful lot that we’re basing our perceptions on reality. Reporting on what he’s actually done? Great, good, let’s do lots of that. But this ain’t it.
The point of disinformation research as I understand it is that it’s more powerful than pure censorship. Don’t just bury bad ideas and claims; show them to be bad. I think lots of journalism sucks, but the cure is hardly to just censor journalists (including people like Collins!); it’s to carefully undermine bad arguments wherever they exist so that those with open minds will see them as bad and be more cautious in the future.
What makes Collins’s take more dishonest is that if you keep reading his NBC News piece he (kinda) switches over to the four-point plan being for the opposition. But this doesn’t come up until the 16th paragraph and is directly contradicted by earlier sections. Also, just to pre-empt any argument to the effect of “well it was really a playbook for what they’d do and how Musk should respond”, (1) the four steps quoted were explicitly about opponents, (2) the author offers zero advice on what Musk should do beyond buying Twitter and “transforming [it] back into a real free speech platform” in entirely vague language.
I’m very supportive of what groups like the ADL exist to do. But that’s distinct from the question of whether said groups always do their job well. We should raise alarms when bigotry is on the rise and point out productive ways to combat it—while also working to undermine the false beliefs driving said bigotry. A deep dive into the ADL’s specific claims here would be welcome. If they overstated, let’s show that conclusively and hope that helps them correct course. If they didn’t, let’s have something definitive to link to affirm their claims.
For a very long time, Musk was fighting many very rich entrenched interests that mostly were right aligned, like auto dealerships, oil and gas companies (Koch Bros), and government contractors in space exploration (ULA and their parent companies, Lockheed and Boeing). That extended to Wall Street and the disinformation campaigns were extensive, pervasive, and unrelenting in their distortion of reality and predictions of doom for Musk's companies. Quite a few folks on Wall Street placed bets against Tesla and were very vocal going on various business media outlets to promote their negative assessment.
However, just as Musk was achieving what Democrats have been touting about their climate change initiatives, that pushing the Green New Deal actually means economic prosperity and being at the forefront of change, they decided that Musk's wealth was a target, regardless of his fulfillment of their climate change initiatives. After all, many Democrat initiatives towards incentivizing clean energy production and electrification were to spur companies like Tesla towards what they wanted companies to accomplish. The root of this effort comes back to the UAW which started a smear campaign against Tesla right around when they were trying, unsuccessfully, to unionize Nissan's plant in Tennessee. And as Tesla grew and Musk's wealth grew, fulfilling the vision of some of the tenets of the Green New Deal, Senators Sanders, Warren, and other Democratic Party pundits like Robert Reich were pushing an anti-Tesla and anti-Musk agenda. They knew they were promoting half truths, distorting the difference between unrealized wealth gains and income. They wanted a wealth tax and for UAW to unionize Tesla, which may lead to the unionization of the rest of the auto plants in the US. Most folks don't realize that BMW and Volvo (South Carolina), Mercedes and Hyundai (Alabama), Kia (Georgia), Nissan (Tennessee), Honda, Toyota (many like Ohio, Kentucky, WV, etc), Lucid (Arizona), Rivian (southern Illinois), and others build at non-union plants in almost all red states.
Between the attacks from Democrats and the promotion of anti-work, Musk clearly thought that the left became much more a threat than the right. I don't believe he cares one way or another for any political party in the U.S.
What is most disturbing for me is the realization that many of those on the left are no better at discerning bias and reality in the media reporting than those on the right.
I also found the Collins article very dubious. I think Musk’s effect on Twitter has been terrible, but it seems like there are a couple of funny coincidences but mostly you have to really squint to tie each item in the “playbook” to something Musk did and stretch to actually like them up. The Collins article claims Musk directly followed the “playbook” and that seems not supported by the sources, just that two things look similar in a certain light. I agree it’s possible Musk saw it and that persuaded him to buy it, but the article goes way farther, in addition to mixing up “Musk should do this” with “opponents will do this.”