“A-well-a everybody’s heard about the bird!
Bird bird bird, b-bird’s the word
A-well-a bird, bird, bird, bird is the word . . . ”—The Trashmen, 1963  

Photo illustration by Dado Ruvic/Reuters

What do you do if you’re the richest billionaire on the planet who has built the premier electric car company on the planet, and has invested billions in SpaceX to eventually go to the planets? What comes next?

You spend $44 billion on a popular social media platform that he thinks he can fix so that everyone can pretty much have access to free speech.

Things didn’t go exactly as planned.

After taking over social media behemoth, Twitter, “Musk fired CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal and policy head Vijaya Gadde, according to the two sources. Musk also fired Sean Edgett, Twitter’s general counsel, according to a source,” CNN reported.

After his initial offer to buy the company Musk said, “My strong intuitive sense is that having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization.” He also vowed to “defeat the spam bots or die trying,” scam accounts and the bots that create them are particularly active on Twitter.

What’s happened since then?

“The company’s head of moderation and safety, Yoel Roth,” The Washington Post reported, “who had become the public face of the company’s efforts to reassure users and advertisers that Twitter would not descend into a ‘free for all,’ quit after Musk held his first all-hands meeting. That followed the resignations of Chief Information Security Officer Lea Kissner, the company’s chief privacy officer and its chief compliance officer.

In the face of other safety staff resignations, Musk has brought down the wrath of the Federal Trade Commission, the government’s watchdog over Silicon Valley.

The FTC is “tracking the developments at Twitter with deep concern” and prepared to take action to ensure the company was complying with a settlement known as a consent order, which requires Twitter to comply with certain privacy and security requirements because of allegations of past data misuse. Three of the resignations Thursday were by members of a data governance committee established in the FTC deal, according to a former employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters,” The Post added.

What could go wrong?

Well, here’s a short list of Twitter’s golden oldies of mis and disinformation as reported by PolitiFact:

April 2, 2022: Pfizer paid “$2.8 million bribe payment” to the FDA for COVID-19 vaccine approval. (False)

September 13, 2022: “The Clintons killed Ken Starr.” (Pants on Fire)

May 26, 2022: Says Gov. Greg Abbott offered the uncle of a Uvalde shooting victim money to say “we don’t need stronger gun laws.” (Pants on Fire)

July 28, 2022: Pens provided by Maricopa County are part of a plot to rig the Arizona primary. (False)

April 5, 2022: “With the money Elon Musk spent to buy Twitter shares, he could have given every American family $100,000 and still had enough left over to cancel all student debt.” (Pants on Fire)

April 25, 2022: Elon Musk suspended Bill Gates from Twitter. (False . . . Well, maybe that’s about to become true.)

But that’s only an inconsequential tip of the iceberg. At a lecture last night by Ian Bremmer, the president of the Eurasia Group said that Twitter, with its billions of users, is “subversive.” And with the flamboyant, unpredictable billionaire at the helm, Twitter/Musk generates incredible influence over global affairs with unknown consequences absent any real accountability. “It’s one of the most important issues playing out on the geopolitical stage,” Bremmer said.

The message to all of us: The bird should not be the final word.