New Frontline Documentary Explores What Went Wrong With Elon Musk's Twitter Takeover

Partway through Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover, the new Frontline documentary from filmmakers James Jacoby and Anya Bourg (Amazon Empire: The Rise and Reign of Jeff Bezos), former Twitter employee Yoel Roth states, “No one should have that kind of power. But that power exists.”

Roth’s statement comes in response to Jacoby questioning Twitter’s 2021 decision to suspend the account of then-President Donald Trump after several of Trump’s tweets were flagged for inciting violence during the January 6th insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. According to the documentary, it also served as catalyst for Elon Musk’s decision to purchase the far-reaching social platform and remake it in his own image.

And therein lies the heart of Twitter’s current woes according to the documentary. Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover’s assembled subjects uniformly testify to the South African billionaire’s mercurial and contradictory nature, and how his signature grandiose claims of benevolent top-down leadership are belied by Musk’s vindictiveness, economic self-interest, and increasing embrace of far-right politics and conspiracy theories.

Founded in 2006, Twitter’s rise to global prominence as the self-proclaimed “global town square” brought with it mounting pressures to curb hate speech, harassment, and misinformation. In the doc, former Twitter moderators like Roth, Anika Collier Navaroli, and Rumman Chowdhury all trace the often harrowing process of determining the limits of speech on Twitter, especially once they were targeted by Musk and conservative news outlets, who labeled them as government-backed censors, and worse. (Roth, a gay man baselessly tarred with Musk’s go-to insult of pedophilia, calls the Twitter head “inhumane.”)

On one hand, the Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover presents Twitter’s moderation process as straightforward: users are aware of Twitter’s terms of service, and shouldn’t be surprised when violations of those terms result in suspensions. “You don’t get to join somebody else’s community and set your own rules,” Roth states unequivocally. On the other, Jacoby often presses the question of what authority Twitter had to determine what was in fact misinformation, especially concerning controversial topics such as the COVID pandemic and claims of the 2020 election being stolen.

The documentary ultimately presents the case that Twitter’s policies were far from perfect (co-founder Jack Dorsey admitted the company’s error in locking out the right-leaning New York Post over false suspicions of Russian hacking claims), while conceding that the company’s occasional missteps weren’t a concerted campaign to silence conservative voices (as conservative critics claimed) as much as an evolving response to a complex and proliferating issue.

And that’s where Musk enters the picture. An avid Twitter user, Musk has successfully used the platform to boost his business interests, ply his signature brand of visionary techno-futurism to his mostly young, male follower base, and take the occasional petty potshot. (As when he, again, baselessly accused a British diver of pedophilia because the leader of the ultimately successful cave rescue effort of a Thai boys soccer team turned down Musk’s offer of an impractical, Musk-owned mini-submarine.)

According to frequent documentary interviewee Walter Isaacson, author of a 2023 Musk autobiography, Musk is “a drama addict” whose need to see himself “in epic terms” often trumps his stated principles. (Isaacson, whose book has been criticized for falling prey to the outdated “great man” view of history, alternates between outright mockery of his subject’s outsized tendencies and enthusiastic appreciation of Musk as visionary.) Presenting himself as an agenda-less “free speech absolutist” when he bought Twitter in 2022 for $44 billion, Musk quickly set to work.

Almost immediately, as presented in testimony from now-former Twitter employees and Musk’s own very public actions, the admittedly imperfect safeguards surrounding Twitter’s moderation policy were swept away in deference to the whims of one man. It’s in this vein that Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover truly locks down its most damning evidence of the hollow core of Musk’s carefully crafted self-image.

In addition to reinstating Trump’s account as well as several others (including neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin) previously banned for blatantly flouting Twitter’s rules, Musk started banning accounts of journalists critical of him, like that of longtime Musk critic Linette Lopez. He banned an account that posted the already public information about the whereabouts of Musk’s private jet. The documentary states that Musk demanded the takedown of accounts recommending the alternative social networks like Mastodon that rose in popularity in response to Twitter’s increasing dysfunction. And, after his tweet supporting the eventual Super Bowl-losing Philadelphia Eagles received less engagement than a similar one from President Biden, the doc depicts Musk flying back to Twitter’s San Francisco HQ and calling in engineers in the middle of the night to rig Twitter’s algorithm in his favor.

When a coalition of groups called on companies to pause Twitter advertising in the wake of his takeover last year, Musk focused his ire on the Anti-Defamation League, inspiring a wave of hate speech against an organization dedicated to protesting hate speech. The doc’s contention that Musk’s ongoing anti-transgender standpoint (he’s whittled away at the company’s former hard stance against anti-trans rhetoric) stems from one of his 10 children denouncing him after coming out as trans is speculation, but the timeline of Musk’s all-out campaign against what he termed the “woke mind virus” is a matter of record.

Also worrying, according to the documentary, are Musk’s clear concessions to repressive governments, many of whom are central to his business interests. Musk personally acceded to the demands of the governments of Turkey and India to censor posts critical of both regimes at pivotal times while Tesla was pursuing expansion there. Musk’s release of the so-called “Twitter Files,” a report supposedly proving the previous Twitter regime’s bias against conservatives, crumbled under scrutiny when even his hand-picked journalists admitted that they were presented only one-sided information by Musk. (Interviewed throughout the doc, reporter Matt Taibbi steadfastly defends his participation, despite admitting “We were sloppy,” and confessing that he went into the matter deliberately choosing not to question Musk’s motivations.)

As documented in Isaacson’s book, Musk also retains close enough ties with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin that Musk ordered his U.S. government-contracted satellite company Starlink to refuse information to the Russian-invaded Ukraine. It’s a parallel, Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover suggests, that underscores the dangers of a billionaire with pretensions to political and financial influence being in sole charge of a worldwide communication platform that can affect the very systems he’s looking to exploit.

Nina Jankowicz, another target of Musk’s ire when she was appointed to the Biden Administration’s Disinformation Governance Board (quickly dubbed “The Ministry of Truth” by a fear-mongering Fox News), offers up a familiar warning late in the documentary. Doxxed and her family’s life threatened in the wake of Musk amplifying the claims of Tucker Carlson and others that she was the face of government censorship of conservatives, Jankowicz’s call for a “nuanced and nonpartisan” evaluation of Twitter’s role in public discourse clashes with the depiction of the social network as a megaphone for one erratic billionaire’s often incendiary impulses.

As Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover prepares to air (with revised cuts being sent to reviewers in the lead-up to Tuesday’s premiere), Musk’s capricious influence on Twitter (which he has rebranded as “X,” though the original name lingers) remains manifest. In response to the deadly Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7, Musk recommended his followers look to two Twitter accounts with histories of anti-Semitism and misinformation for insight on the ongoing events. And, as EU officials decry Twitter under Musk as one of the world’s worst purveyors of misinformation and Russian propaganda, a growing number of critics note that this once valuable source of on-the-ground information has become, under Musk's direction, essentially useless.

Meanwhile, Twitter continues to bleed money as Musk’s refusal to moderate hate speech and his decision to jettison meaningful user verification turn away wary advertisers. According to some sources (including Musk himself) Twitter (or X, if you will) may be worth as little as 10 percent of what Musk paid for it just a year ago. And with another assuredly heated presidential election looming, Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover presents a stark portrait of America’s political ecosystem being unduly influenced by someone the Frontline documentary presents as constitutionally unsuited to the job. As journalist and former Musk supporter Kara Swisher states late in the doc concerning self-proclaimed visionaries like Musk, “They think if they’re good at one thing, they’re good at everything.”

Elon Musk's Twitter Takeover premieres October 10 at 9:00 PM ET on PBS (check local listings) and PBS.org.

Dennis Perkins is a freelance entertainment writer with bylines at The A.V. Club, Paste, Ultimate Classic Rock, The Portland Press Herald, and elsewhere.