we were fed the lie for so long. - what was at the base of lance armstrong, just paralyzing narcissism. this lex luthor-like, otherworldly, villainous self-centeredness that he had. i'm glad that this guy didn't decide to become a politician. i'm glad that it was just biking. because if he would have really wanted to do some real damage, with that focus and that delusion, he could have been a lot more destructive. - lance is not the first athlete to think the rules don't apply to him. behind lance were organizations and brands that helped bolster his image and shield him by association. today, lance might not be untouchable, but the money and partnerships are bigger than ever. in 1999, when lance became a superstar, global sponsorship spending for athletes was around $20 billion. now it's more than $70 billion. so when the next corporation

has to face the reality of an athlete they sponsor ♪ ♪ [music] i see what you're doing here. i will not read that donald trump birtherism tweet. no. [twitter whistle] [producer] why not? i can't. dude, that's a rough one. tonight, for the first time, i am releasing my official birth video. no one has seen this footage in 50 years. not even me. ♪ nants ingonyama bagithi baba

it was a very nuanced takedown on the already debunked rumors that obama was not a u.s. citizen. it really motivated donald trump. i call it flooding the zone. you just throw enough stuff out there, something's going to stick, and once you find that, then you just do more of that, right? you turn that up to 11. [music] -so anybody here on twitter? -[audience cheering] -why are you on twitter? -twitter! [male reporter] among hipsters and high school kids, twittering is all the rage. do you twitter? [male reporter] it asks users one simple question-- "what are you doing?" the twitter guys made up a thing out of thin air. [twitter whistle] t-w-t-t-r-- twitter! jack, biz, ev, like, they made it up. [female reporter] why do so many people want so many other people to know everything about them? [kara] tell your story here. that's the whole point of twitter, isn't it?

every company is the dna of its founders, and its founders were neurotic. working at twitter isn't just a sweet job. it's a way of life. [obama] i am gonna make history as the first president to live tweet. [bell ringing] [cheers and applause] 30 billion, 40 billion, something like that. maybe more. i don't remember. a platform, in order to be a platform, has to be free. i think we need to hear every extreme. we didn't always know how to handle it. so, are we the bad guys? [music] [female reporter] it's official, if not surprising, jack dorsey is twitter's new permanent ceo. the man who helped co-found the social media website in 2006 had been widely tipped for the job. he faces a series of challenges in turning around twitter's fortunes, which includes attracting new users to the service. [rabble] i asked jack about it.

and i said, "why'd the board bring you back?" and he said, "i had showed them that i knew how to manage a large internet company." hey, how's everyone doing? wow, a full crowd. [rabble] "i had taken square into building real products "with good management and good scalability, and we had gone public." [ev] i was part of the board when we made him ceo again. i was on the ceo search committee, which was ironic, being part of the board that fired me as ceo. [applause] [ev] it felt like that was the right thing to do at the time. [applause] [twitter whistle] finally, we're an activist founder-led company. all the people who are, like, big apple fans, you know, are like, yes, founder-led company. and jack is going to be the person who takes us to these new heights.

[woman] there he is. he's walking in the door. he's right there. [women laughing] -hey, good morning. -[employees] good morning. [katie] i think there was a great deal of respect for jack across the employee base. he thinks about things deeply, on a steve jobs level. so there were some real changes that were palpable to the employees. really, he was going to be one of us. [music] [kurt] so, jack inherited a bunch of problems. the user growth issue was probably the biggest one, right? there was this feeling that maybe twitter was as big as it was ever going to get. jack had to make the tough decision in late 2015 to lay off 8% of the company. so hundreds of twitter employees lost their job. [female reporter] dorsey also needs to address other key problems.

revenues are growing, but losses are widening. and twitter shares are sagging. this year alone, its stock is down 25%. financially, it just stagnated. the stock just stagnated. and in this industry, if you stop growing, you die. there was this idea that in order to get people to start signing up for twitter again, you needed to revamp the product. you needed to reorient it within the tech world. you needed to redefine what is this thing for, why should you bother spending your time creating an account. [del] there were a number of attempts over the years to sort of define what twitter was. you'd hear, twitter is the town square. twitter is what's happening. and then twitter is live. [speaking japanese] good morning, good morning, good morning. is that it? ok, are we live? we got some really big decisions to make today. [kurt] jack started this whole campaign that, you know, twitter is what's happening.

like, twitter is what's going on in the world, whether that's the debate or the nba finals or, you know, a protest with black lives matter. [protestors] black lives matter! black lives matter! [del] it's about what's hot. it's what's happening now. trending topics. ♪ when you melt like this, then you never really die ♪ [katie] twitter is live. twitter is fast. twitter is exactly as you see it. where were you at? this is awesome! [del] what are these breakout topics? what are these new things, these hot things, these new ideas? ♪ the revolution will be live and vibrant ♪ live events, live news, live sports, live entertainment is our sweet spot. it's all about making that experience better, making the experience faster. ♪ i'm about to go live our focus is on live. twitter has always been the best place to see what's happening now, whether it's breaking news, entertainment, sports, or everyday topics. [man] live from cape canaveral. [jack] elon musk is one of my favorite examples of this.

he is constantly on twitter. he gets into conversation, and he geeks out on the platform. on the right there is a space station birthing mechanism ring. jack dorsey was an admirer of elon's, right? he would refer to him as his favorite tweeter. he thought that he used the platform in the way that he wanted everybody to use it, right? in that unfiltered stream of consciousness way, especially for someone who's rich and famous and powerful. well, elon used the platform like a real user. he really did. and jack loved that because he loved what he made. [twitter whistles] the focus on live was really like a branding thing, i think, right? the product itself maybe didn't change quite so dramatically. [kara] he made tweaks to the product , but it looks a lot the way it started, really. they added little things to it. they had the vine and periscope, but never big innovations.

you know, when they saw tiktok, they should have been like, we're gonna make this. but they couldn't do it. [male reporter] look at twitter. that company is suffering from zero user growth, okay? and it's down at 14 bucks a share. [kurt] it felt like a pretty lonely time at the end of 2016 for twitter. they had done company-wide layoffs in 2015. and so you get to the end of 2016, and not only is your company smaller, is the morale just in the toilet, the stock price is doing poorly, but then you had the u.s. election. i put out a tweet the other day. @realdonaldtrump. very hot. millions of people. we want trump! we want trump!

[cheers and applause] there's this idea that the goal of the twitter game is to never be the central character because that's the one everyone is hating on. [twitter whistles] [rabble] trump pushes himself into prominence by learning how to make himself the central villain of every day. [typing] the relevance that twitter had while trump was tweeting every day, dozens of times per day, it just simply put twitter at the forefront of a daily conversation that they otherwise would not have been part of. [twitter whistle] [typing] it was just like, oh, this guy understands how to capture media attention using the platform. [twitter whistle] [typing]

he knew how to, like, write a tweet, and, like, that's what people would report on. [female reporter] focusing on the debate tonight, the market could react if trump has a very good showing. one stock worth watching today, twitter. shares jumping more than 4% on friday. -[male reporter] wow! -[female reporter] yup. in the beginning, it was the quote-unquote "trump bump." advertisers were throwing a heck of a lot of dollars at twitter because the conversation was there, and the people were there. they are so dishonest, these reporters. they are the worst. they are... [lauren] i think it's safe to say that donald trump, you know, he often speaks in sound bites to begin with, sometimes, like, very simplistic sound bites. [twitter whistle] [lauren] it was sort of irreverent, you know, and we've known for a long time that there are people who will go on social media basically to share rage bait

or to troll people or just to share things to get a response, and the way that donald trump was tweeting was effective at that. it was basically to elicit responses. [crowd shouting] [kara] when you are running these places, the thing that creates traffic is anger and rage, and so one of the things i always say was enragement equals engagement. [twitter whistles] [sinister music] [leslie] he made it okay to wear your hate on your sleeve. and he did it in such a way that it made it harder for companies like twitter to moderate that type of content when you have 50 million accounts tweeting, retweeting, reposting hate speech. there was content coming out in 2016 where we were imploring jack to ban him. it's like, dude, you have got to get this guy off your platform. [sinister music] [leslie] this guy is a clear and present danger,

and you are letting him put people's lives at risk. [kurt] you have a service that has historically been used to abuse or harass or share misinformation, but never at the scale and never at the prominence that sort of trump brought to the picture. and so he's literally forcing twitter employees to, like, rethink the rulebook on the fly. that's how much he's sort of pushing the envelope. i would have dozens of conversations about how it was obvious we should kick off donald trump, and then, you know, like, that's the only morally, you know, correct thing to do. and then other people are like, that's insane. why would you ever do that? but it's a very nuanced, complicated set of issues. twitter was the perfect place for tons and tons of misinformation, including from donald trump. we don't know what we don't know, so who decides what should go up and what shouldn't? [lauren] there were a lot of issues that were brought directly to jack during this time.

people flagging tweets or harassment campaigns or really troubling misinformation on the platform and saying we need to do something about this. and he did not always take action. [rabble] it didn't matter how bad trump was. he always was using twitter to dominate the news cycle. and if he was removed, it would be damaging to shareholder value, and the board would remove the ceo. [male reporter] we're taking a look at the election that shocked the world. donald j. trump will soon be our 45th president. between facebook and twitter, and i guess instagram, i have 28 million people. it's a modern form of communication. there should be nothing you should be ashamed of. it's where it's at. [katie] when trump was elected, there was a little bit of a beat on have we enabled him to such an extent

that it put him into the white house? i remember hr offered the next day off for people who were emotionally overwhelmed. [jason] by that point, i'm at the white house as a chief digital officer. and so i have a different perspective on all these issues because of, you know, what i'm doing and where i'm working. i had a conversation with president obama in the oval office. and he said, "you know, "i got to tell you, i'm not too happy with how this election turned out." i was like, "no, i'm not too happy myself, mr. president." and he said, "oh, some of that is on you." [laughing] i was like, "okay." because of the role of social media. i was like, "dang, that's a lot to put on goldman." that's a lot to put on twitter, too. [male reporter] over 2,400. that's the number of postings from president trump's.

twitter account since he took office back in january. his most popular of the year? this one, retweeted almost 370,000 times. [kurt] i think employees really struggled because twitter was such an important part of trump's campaign, an important part of how he got his message out. they felt very conflicted, because they were saying, wow, this shows the power of twitter. it shows what we have built and that it matters and that it has real world impact. what the result of that has been has been elevating a person that we don't align with and that we certainly don't, you know, in a lot of cases, respect. it was a really dark time for people who worked there. "twitter suspends accounts for violating rules and abuse." our own president donald trump is someone who goes after people on twitter, who attacks people. is there any circumstance-- i mean, you hold a lot of power here, jack. is there any circumstance under which you'd suspend the president's account? you know, we want to make sure we hold all of our accounts to the same terms of service, but ultimately we want to make sure that we're guiding everyone towards better usage.

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it was not looking good. i was warned, "oh, you're coming back to twitter. you're going to be under a microscope." and i was like, "yeah, yeah, yeah, i know. i did it before. i know." there's a billion tweets a day. information has been weaponized. we need to do something about this. like, it's a whole different world. so we have to take some responsibility. jack was like, "i need you to work on morale. i need you to work on policy." from twitter sf. twitter san francisco. one of the things i wrote-- it took me a while, but i came up with-- "we serve the public conversation." now that was the new thing. and i was like, well, if we're going to, if we serve the public conversation, then the next thing that makes sense is that we are responsible for the health of the public conversation. now we have to get involved in figuring out how to, you know, really clean up a lot of the stuff that's going on in objectionable content land.

[del] the problem for twitter at the time was that, unfortunately, we did not invest a lot in trust and safety. you know, i can understand the allure of being like, what if we didn't have to make any of those terrible decisions? like, we could leave it up to the experts. who are these experts of which you speak? [music] [kurt] there was a trust and safety team at twitter that was responsible for not only writing the policies, but enforcing those policies. as the company started to notice more and more abuse and harassment on the service, they really started to invest in trust and safety, which meant, you know, growing the team. [anika] it was, like, 2018. i was in the middle of, like, a career transition.

and, you know, i had met del harvey, the head of trust and safety, a couple of times at a couple of different jobs. and so i reached out and was like, "looks like you all need some help. i'm available." [music] [anika] i had no idea, like, what i was getting myself into, right? and so when i joined the team, the team that i was on, the safety and policy team, was the most powerful team at twitter. and so when i got into this position, and i recognized, like, this is more power than i believe any single person should have, and yet, it's in my hands. [kurt] jack dorsey did not like to be the decision-maker on this stuff. he thought, well, we have a whole team of people who specialize in doing this. that's their job. that's their training, right, is to write policies and enforce them. i'm gonna let them do that thing. we had demonstrated that we were no longer taking a hands-off approach on this stuff,

that we did have these principled approaches to these policies, which may have been exactly against jack's preferences. so i think that in some ways, jack may have been struggling with the company that was going in a direction very different from the direction that he hoped for. [twitter whistle] [ethereal music] [del] it didn't feel like he was really talking to anybody at twitter. he really withdrew from people. like, he did a lot of meditation. he did these retreats. [rabble] there ended up being this weird cult of a personality around him. all these, like, lifestyle articles about what his diet is this week and what exercise he does. and, you know, he deeply loves fashion. and as a billionaire, you get to, like, engage in lots of fashion stuff and, like, engage in that world that becomes accessible to you.

sometimes he'd show up. sometimes he wouldn't. then he'd lay down a track and then he'd leave. like, that kind of thing. "genius. gotta go. i'm going to sri lanka to stare at a, you know, a finch." i don't know. whatever. he always on to something like that. [del] it felt as though there were a lot of performative aspects into how he was presenting himself. and then people wanted to believe. this was, like, here's somebody who was a founder, who they could believe in. and then things just got weirder. [woman] one, two, three. [employees] twitter singapore! they would just be this sort of exuberant, like, cult-like energy. ♪ love who you work with [del] one team was the whole team.

got together in one location for announcements as to where things were going. [jack] there we go. okay, okay. we got some sun. how's everyone feeling? [kurt] when one team came around, they really made jack's sort of health stuff, his personality, a key part of the programming. so jack would fast for, you know, days at a time. he would do ice baths and cold tubs and saunas. he walked to work. he, every day, would drink what he called salt juice. [del] there were, like, little salt juice packets under everybody's seats. it was like the weirdest oprah check-under-your-seat giveaway you can imagine. water, himalayan salt, and lemon juice. i did not drink the salt juice, i will admit. [anika] at one point, jack stood in front of 4,000 colleagues and said that he would be leading us in a 15-minute silent meditation.

[meditative tones] [anika] i do yoga. i meditate. i do, you know, breath work. but it wasn't for me. [del] there were elements of one team that were absolutely fine. and then there's also, like, sometimes, like, forced fun. why not dial in elon musk to one team, and then have the call not work properly? [cheering] [jack] what was that? what's up, elon? oh no, we can't hear you. there was so much stuff that was happening that i was like, why is this happening? like, what is going on right now? [jack] elon, i don't know if you can hear us or not. can you hear us? [elon] oh, i can. oh. he thought he was out of this world. i don't know. space exploration thing?

i guess? maybe? possibly too many silent meditations? i'm not sure. [laughter] wow. it's, like, prophetic. you know... what was his goal with this? nobody knew. salt juice and elon.

[male reporter] efforts to contain the fast-spreading coronavirus are being strained as infections and deaths rise rapidly worldwide. twitter saw this huge spike in users downloading the app and starting to use it to figure out what's happening. [twitter whistle] [del] we had so many concerns about the sort of medical recommendations that were being made of, like, you know, if you get covid, all you got to do is take a gallon of ivermectin and you'll be fine in the morning. i think it would have been irresponsible to just allow your platform to become this place

for unfettered misinformation when people's lives were at risk. the next thing you know, we have a misinformation policy. [twitter whistle] [twitter whistle] that same summer, the 2020 election is heating up. so they started to expand that policy from covid to include election-related misinformation. so in may of 2020, trump tweeted that in california, they were gonna mail a ballot to every single person in the state. which was not actually true. they were gonna mail ballots to registered voters in the state. twitter at that time decided, well, this is misinformation. it's, you know, potentially gonna change the way that people actually vote or think they're going to vote. and sort of, without warning, really, they sort of threw a label onto his account

for the very first time. and as you can imagine, president trump pretty much lost it. meantime, president trump responding after twitter flags two of his tweets on mail-in voting fraud. the president tweeting, quote, "twitter is completely stifling free speech and i, as president, will not allow it to happen." [kara] facts are problematic these days. like, whose facts? which facts? where are they from? i was like, this is gonna be a disaster. because they're not gonna check everything. they're gonna miss stuff. and i thought them doing it to donald trump was like waving a red flag in front of a bull. even then, we found it hard to make these hard choices about how do you limit speech and what speech is, and what is acceptable and what isn't acceptable. [kurt] twitter had a policy that said, we're not gonna allow people to distribute

hacked material on our platform. well, the new york post story that was negative about joe biden and his son hunter biden's laptop sort of looked like it fit the bill, right? like, where did this come from? is this a hack and leak operation? and so they stopped people from basically sharing and tweeting the link. well, very quickly after that, they realized that that was the wrong call. regardless of whether the intentions were pure or not, the optics were that they were trying to hurt trump's campaign. it was a real mistake. it was a real mistake to do that. and they admitted it immediately. [jason] it's not only because the decisions around those things are hard, but then it became a cause célèbre for the right to say, like, oh, these companies are run by a bunch of squishy liberals and they're using their tools to, like, oppress us.

and so we're gonna have a bunch of hearings. [female reporter] republicans went all in on accusations that anti-conservative bias has infected every aspect of twitter and facebook. we're simply linking to a broader conversation so that people have more information. no, you're not. you put up a page that says, quote, "voter fraud of any kind is exceedingly rare in the united states." that's not linking to a broader conversation. that's taking a disputed policy position. [kurt] weeks or a month later, they're kind of being cautious, right? because they know that every time they take down something that's viewed as sort of conservative speech or republican speech, that they're going to have to explain, why did you do this? [anika] because there was a fear we'll go too far, we'll piss donald trump off, like, indecision became the decision. [overlapping voices] proud boys, stand back and stand by. but i'll tell you what, i'll tell you what. we had a policy, about, like,

direct wishes of violence, right? but we didn't have anything for what we were seeing, which were these, like, dog whistles and coded language, right? the "stand back, stand by." or what we kept seeing a lot of, which was, "locked and loaded." right? and so my team and i started assessing, looking at the platform, and it is everywhere. [lauren] the hard thing with content moderation is that there are literal interpretations of words. when you sort of apply them to a graph of, is this harmful, is this inciting violence, there's not necessarily a direct match. so it's up to the people who are sort of at the top of these trust and safety teams to figure out the right context. joseph r. biden, jr. is elected the 46th president of the united states. it is announced that joe biden is the winner. and then the conversation is like, is donald trump gonna come on the platform and deny the election results, right?

because he was doing it verbally. he did. [twitter whistle] [trump] we were getting ready for a big celebration. we were winning everything, and all of a sudden, it was just called off. [twitter whistle] [kara] that to me was just obvious. if in january he decides to try to stop the election if he loses, and he gets people all ginned up on social media to do something about it, and it jumps into the real world, this is where this is going. it will happen. [man] i'm gonna call people out. we need to call people out.

i am not allowed to say what's going to happen today, because everyone's just gonna have to watch for themselves. but it's gonna happen. [shouting] i was literally on twitter, right? like, i was on twitter.com, scrolling, seeing what was going on, seeing what was happening. i had gotten called into a meeting when the capitol was breached. and i was given the instructions, "make the insurrection stop."

[man] mike pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our country and our constitution. twitter was his communications to his followers. and they didn't stop it. i cannot believe that mike pence tweet got out, and they hadn't stopped it before that. because i would have been on high alert to have a delay in his tweets, and i would never have let that tweet go out. [intensifying music] [anika] i'm confused now, because i've not been allowed to act for months. what are we allowed to do? we had been anticipating things happening for a while on the 6th. [shouting, yelling] [del] in the back of my mind, i had this like, well, when are the adults going to come and, like, fix it? like, you know, do the right th--uh oh. uh-oh, we're the adults. [twitter whistle] [tense music] [anika] in a couple of hours, we had new guidance

that was drafted specifically for january 6th that was saying, this is what we're seeing. this is what's going on. we're gonna start taking down this content. this is what we're gonna leave up. [twitter whistle] and using the new policy guidance, you know, we started taking down tweets, right? at this point, like, i'm watching the capitol be broken into. [twitter whistle] hashtag #executemikepence is trending. [trump] i know your pain. i know your hurt. we had an election that was stolen. there's never been a time like this where such a thing happened where they could take it away from all of us. from me, from you, from our country. this was a fraudulent election. [kurt] at this point, you know, twitter's policy teams, they're reviewing these tweets. they're determining, okay, you know, he's not only violating the rules here, but in fact, we think that he's encouraging this thing.

so they decided to suspend his account. we said, if there are any other violations of any kind, this account will be permanently suspended. [female reporter] d.c. capitol police confirming one officer died thursday after he was injured responding to the riots. if your product is being used to tell people, like, you know, come to the january 6th rally, it's gonna be wild... and then a insurrection breaks out, like, i think the company is gonna be obligated to take some action against that, even if it's against the sitting president of the united states. my only goal was to ensure the integrity of the vote. in so doing, i was... [anika] january 7th. ...defend american democracy. he is out of his time out. as soon as the first tweets are sent, we've got slack messages, emails, pings, like, he's back. is this a violation? you said y'all were going to kick him off. like, what do y'all think about this? [twitter whistles]

[del] and then you get the series of tweets that ends with him saying, and for those of you asking, i will not be attending the inauguration. the responses to that tweet were like, message heard loud and clear. we got it. we know what to do. [anika] so del was like, "go find me the tweets that say that this is being planned." and like, you know, because it's donald trump, goes up to jack dorsey. i literally had no idea what was gonna happen. [kurt] so the team calls jack dorsey, who happens to be on vacation in french polynesia, and, you know, asks him, do we suspend his account? [music] [del] i think it was difficult for jack for a few reasons. i think that he was very concerned about, are we biased in our enforcement? that was still the public perception,

and that was still something that he had to manage. this goes against so many things that he really passionately believed, but the degree to which people were taking this is a call to violence. i think that's why when we made the recommendation on the 8th, there was not pushback. and then we got a message from del that was like, "we have decided that we are going to move forward with the permanent suspension." and donald trump was kicked off of twitter.

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boasted a following of more than 88 million, making the unprecedented move to ban him permanently. [twitter whistle] [jason] i think the decision is clear in terms of what the guidelines are, but in terms of suffering the consequence of that and having to deal with the reality of, we don't think the president of the united states belongs on this platform, is pretty difficult. there is... everyone telling you that you're responsible for the ruin of politics around the world sucks. the trump, you know, situation was just devastating for him. and i think he looks around in 2021 and simply says,

like, this job's not fun anymore. [sirens wailing] [rabble] it sounds miserable. i mean, would you want that? [twitter whistle] [female reporter] the social media and business world was rocked today by the surprise resignation of jack dorsey as ceo of twitter. i think it stopped being fun for jack pretty soon after he got back as ceo. but there's also a question of whether it's supposed to be fun. at a certain point. [twitter whistle] [kurt] so even though jack stepped down as ceo, he was still on the board. and as a co-founder, i think he felt this responsibility to help steer twitter's future. [twitter whistle] [kurt] jack kept up this infatuation with elon. [twitter whistle] [kurt] by the time early 2022 rolls around and elon starts building a financial stake in twitter, i think for jack, you know, this feels like the ultimate dream.

[del] the company had become so vastly different from what jack had originally imagined. you know, really, he yearned for a protocol where there was no need to moderate. [unsettling music] [jason] jack's tweet about how elon was the singular solution in the light of consciousness that he would trust to lead twitter seemed like it was just gonna clearly be one of the worst tweets of all time. all right, interesting. breaking news. twitter has just accepted elon musk's offer of acquisition. were you guys listening? [del] it went from being something that we tried very hard to not have be a political tool, in a lot of ways, to a political tool. [female reporter] in what would be his first significant move if he acquires twitter, elon musk says he would reverse former president trump's ban on the social media platform,

musk calling the ban "morally wrong." i think that part of what has been so hard about what's happened has been the really sense of deep personal betrayal that a lot of employees have felt. i didn't think elon would destroy twitter or tear it apart the way he did. [kara] elon decimated the trust and safety team. he didn't care about it. he didn't care about trust or safety. he just wanted a freewheeling nazi porn bar. and anything that got in the way of that, he got rid of. [twitter whistle] [female reporter] elon musk is wasting no time putting his stamp on twitter. he fired a number of top executives just after buying the company for $44 billion and taking it private. [twitter whistle] [twitter whistle] [elon] here we are. at the merch thing, and there's an entire closet full of...

-[man] secret closet. -[elon] of hashtag #woke. [twitter whistle] [kurt] you know, he is shifting rightward. i could see it. he used to be somewhat funny, if juvenile, and then it started to curdle into real ugliness. [twitter whistle] [twitter whistle] [twitter whistle] [anika] there's this narrative of jack dorsey the benevolent and, like, elon musk the evil in this sort of wicked versus good, right? and i think it does us a disservice to make these, like, fairy tales out of this story. if the twitter of yesteryear was so perfect, how did it crumble so fast, right? clearly the foundation wasn't as good

as a lot of people thought that it was. [rabble] what all of us were doing was democratizing the means of communications. but the reality is that you can't have universal free speech because the speech of some silences the speech of others. and so there is no perfect solution. [male reporter] the social media site twitter is going through a radical rebrand. elon musk, who owns it, of course, says it's now called x. you know, i never liked that sign to begin with. that was not, um... i didn't like that it said "@twitter" 'cause i was like, "we're not called @twitter." so i wasn't sad about the sign going down. i suppose i'll learn to call it x. but if you type in "twitter," it still goes there, so... if you're old school and you wanna keep calling it twitter, you can. [jason] it's hard to be, like, very kind of pro the twitter legacy at this point. it's gonna be remembered for this long tale of

knock-on effects. um, people trying to advance right-wing authoritarianism and an explicitly anti-democratic agenda, both domestically, but also across the world. [ev] we built this thing that took on a life of its own. it has these bad elements and these good elements. and the battle is trying to have the good outweigh the bad. and that's what felt like maybe a losing battle over time. it was like, is it worth it? is this whole idea flawed? [laughs] ooh! [ev] is social media good? or is it just, like... was it a bad idea? was it just the wrong idea? should we just move on? should we say, hey, that was an interesting experiment. goofy things happened. -i'm biz stone. -[ev] we had some laughs. and let's move on. i don't know. [music]