Finally, something we can all agree on.
Nods in Agreement
In what Fox News described on-air as a measure to ensure “transparency” regarding Twitter’s shadowbanning practices, new Twitter CEO Elon Musk invited conservative journalist and Fox commentator Dave Rubin to take a “look inside” Twitter headquarters.
And while it’s not clear how constructive or productive Rubin’s days-long tour really was, the two figures apparently agree on one big thing: that Twitter is, in Musk’s analysis, “a flaming dumpster rolling down the street.”
“He thinks maybe the entire code has to be torn down and start from scratch,” Rubin tweeted in an expansive Twitter thread, a sentiment that he reaffirmed on the television program Fox & Friends on Monday, “he said that the whole situation is ‘a flaming dumpster rolling down the street.'”
“I gotta tell you,” Rubin told the Fox & Friends hosts, “that after being in San Francisco for 48 hours, a ‘flaming dumpster rolling down the street’ was pretty much the exact right metaphor.”
Disagree to Agree
Rubin certainly doesn’t think that Musk is to blame for the platform’s flaming dumpster-esque woes. Rubin, like Musk, believes that the SpaceX founder purchased a free speech-suppressive platform that apparently has flawed “tiramisu” code. Or something.
“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,” said Rubin, at one point also comparing Twitter to Pee-wee Herman’s Rube Goldberg machine. “And as you fix one layer, and then you realize how many other problems are under it and you may have screwed something up.”
To be fair, Rubin did go a bit deeper into his post-HQ reflections on Twitter, saying that Twitter engineers had shown him that his account had been tagged with “‘secret'” shadowban-inducing “labels” like “‘recent abuse strike,’ ‘Recent misinformation strike,’ and “‘Recent suspension strike.'” But to Rubin’s complaint, he actively promotes election denialism, which is literally misinformation. (He also stopped in SF to make fun of struggling people on the street, so, you know, cool guy.)
Rubin also failed, on Twitter as well as Fox & Friends, to bring up the fact that Musk’s Twitter recently banned a number of Musk-critical journalists from the platform overnight. Maybe it just didn’t come up?
WATCH: Twitter was built to suppress certain voices: Dave Rubin [Fox News]
More on Musk bans: Free Speech Champion Elon Musk Is Mass Suspending Twitter Accounts of Journalists Who Criticized Him