'Elon Musk has created an absolute mess' at Twitter: Color of Change President

Rashad Robinson, Color of Change President, discusses issues with Big Tech ahead of President Biden's second State of the Union address.

You can watch the full interview here.

Key video highlights

00:00 On Musk's 'mess' at Twitter

00:26 On Robinson's meeting with Musk

00:45 On Musk's broken promises

01:20 On Musk not being serious about Twitter platform safety

01:45 On tech company rules, standards

Video Transcript

RASHAD ROBINSON: Well, Elon Musk has created an absolute mess. It's sort of like-- me and my friend sometimes like fantasy sports. And we of think of ourselves of what would we do if we got to manage that team?

But there's something very different from having the fantasy of managing something very complicated to actually having the job where you have to do it. He was an active user who had a lot of ideas about how the technology should work. But what became very clear in the meeting that I was in with him was that he actually didn't know what needed to be done. He made a set of promises that he actually tweeted out about what he would do to protect, to deal with protection election, protection of elections and content moderation. And then he immediately began firing and getting rid of the very people that would have kept those promises in place.

He talked about Twitter as a public square. But public squares can't be owned by private people. And just because something is a public square doesn't mean that it doesn't end up with all sorts of inequities and harms.

I mean, he is from South Africa. And now he's in the United States. We can look at how public squares in both South Africa and the United States have been places where deep levels of inequity, harm, and violence have happened to marginalized and attacked people. And so the fact of the matter is he's just simply not been serious about the work of actually ensuring that this platform is safe. And the problem is is that he's been able to do that because this industry is unregulated.

Now, our cars are not safe because of the benevolence of the car industry. They are safe because we have infrastructure, accountability, regulations, and rules when these companies violate it. And the reason why technology companies need to have the same rules that, whether it's our food industry, our auto industry, the way buildings are built, is that we need to have an environment where there are standards, where there's a floor and there's a ceiling. And our government has to step in and make sure that there's rules in place because these companies will always incentivize growth and profit over safety and integrity and security.