Recently, a video emerged of Senior Engineer at Twitter Siru Murugesan confirming what everyone knew already: Twitter employees do not view Twitter as just a company. They see it as something far more powerful which has far more potential to be sinister.
Twitter employees thought they were “controlling the Simulation,” so to speak. And they were almost right.
Much of the video is simply confirmation of what we already knew to be the case. Twitter censors conservative voices, and does not censor liberal voices. This, Murugesan explains, is because the left would leave Twitter if conservative voices were not censored, while the right simply tolerates the left’s voice, and accepts the censorship. He also explains that Twitter is decidedly against free speech. We knew this already.
The interesting portion is when they start talking about Elon Musk. Murugesan says, “we weren’t really operating like capitalists, more like very socialist. Like we’re all like commie as f**k.”
On Elon’s attempted acquisition of Twitter, he says of employees, “They hate it. Oh my god.”
What is Twitter, really?
This video makes clear what I’ve suspected for a number of years: the people making the day-to-day moderation and operational decisions at Twitter do not view Twitter as a “company,” in the classic sense. They view Twitter as an entity that exists above governments, that controls what media companies think people want to see and hear, and even makes changes to the direction of the economy. They believed that Twitter quietly made decisions on what people believe is true, is important, or what even exists at all. They believed that this operational control of reality itself would filter down to the rest of society.
When Elon treated Twitter just like any other company, they panicked. They were led to believe that Elon got his thoughts downstream from Twitter, just like all media, many governments, and much of capitalism itself.
Misinformation
Remember the Hunter Biden laptop story? The New York Post broke the story on Hunter Biden’s incriminating laptop just before the 2020 election. Twitter banned the New York Post for this. Later, once the election was in the bag, they reversed the decision, and CNN finally reported the Hunter Biden laptop story. This pattern is not new; This is exactly the same way Twitter handled Covid-19: “If it’s good for the left, it will become the only acceptable reality on Twitter dot com.”
Controlling “the Simulation”
Twitter employees view Twitter, Inc. as an entity that transcends capitalism. They see themselves as being upstream from Western civilization itself. They have placed themselves above the economy, and astride the Republics of the West. Employees view Twitter as feeding the allowed opinions and actions of these entities, controlling what people believe is true, what people believe is important, and what people believe is necessary to care about, or take action on.
Twitter was trying to control “the Simulation,” if you will.
To employees, the fact that Elon Musk can treat Twitter, Inc. just like any other company is a massive step backward from their goals, and their preferred modus operandi. Twitter was supposed to be above the economy, above the Republic, and above the media, deciding the path of each. Twitter was supposed to be a sort of etherial thing that exists everywhere but is invisible, and steers the direction of governments and other things that people still believe to matter. Twitter’s goal was to allow people to believe that media, economies, and governments still mattered while the coastal urban communists at Twitter controlled them and steered their fate.
You can imagine the narcissistic rage that occurs when those who believed themselves to be quietly in control of the fate of the entire world get icy cold water in their face. They thought they controlled Elon, and what he believed was true and important.
The events of 2020 proved to Twitter employees that they can, quite simply, decide an American election and decide what people believe is true or important. Maybe we can go even further, they think.
What do you think that screaming inauguration girl would do with the power to decide what every media outlet, many governments, and whole chunks of the economy thought was important, or even what was real? Now, what would she do if she had that power threatened?
Welcome to Twitter.