Earlier this week, Elon Musk caused a fit of the vapours inside Broadcasting House when his social media site labelled the BBC Twitter account as being ‘government funded media’. The Beeb insists it is ‘publicly funded’ – even though not paying the licence fee is a criminal offence backed by the state – and duly kicked off about the change.
As a result of the kerfuffle the BBC’s North America tech reporter, James Clayton, was granted a surprise interview with Musk yesterday, which took place at Twitter’s HQ in San Francisco and broadcast live on Twitter Spaces. Mr Steerpike wonders if the BBC might have regretted not being able to have editorial control over the interview though after the discussion was rather derailed by Musk.
In one memorable moment, after the BBC correspondent suggested that ‘hate speech’ had gotten out of control on the platform, Musk challenged him directly, and asked if he had seen more hate speech himself. Clayton duly responded that he had seen more ‘hateful content’ which included ‘slightly sexist’ remarks.
After dodging Musk’s follow-up question about whether he thought that meant Twitter should ban ‘slightly sexist’ Tweets, the BBC’s man in America then fell apart completely when asked if he could give a single example of hate speech he’d apparently seen on the platform. After failing to name a single example, the correspondent was forced to mutter that he no longer used the ‘For You’ Twitter feed which was apparently the source of the problem.
Listen to the full excruciating exchange here:
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