Speaking during an interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Twitter CEO Elon Musk said that the U.S. government had the ability to look at the private correspondences of any user on Twitter.
“The degree to which government agencies effectively had full access to everything that was going on on Twitter blew my mind,” Musk explained to Carlson in an interview aired Tuesday. “I was not aware of that.”
“Would that include people’s DMs?” Carlson asked.
The tech mogul simply replied, “Yes.”
Elon Musk tells Tucker Carlson that federal government agencies had access to people’s Twitter DMs.
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) April 16, 2023
Musk also spoke on his worries about the recent improvements seen with AI technology, stressing it is far more dangerous than other issues such as badly managed aircraft design or production maintenance or subpar car production.
“It has the potential — however small one may regard that probability, but it is non-trivial — it has the potential for civilizational destruction,” claimed Musk.
He argued that the speed at which AI is improving is “something that society should be paying close attention to,” adding that its pertinent regulations and guidelines are established in order to “prevent any catastrophic consequences.”
Also touched upon in Musk’s appearance was the dispute between Twitter and National Public Radio (NPR), a public broadcasting service that is funded by the U.S. taxpayer. Following Twitter’s decision to accurately deem NPR’s Twitter profile as “state-affiliated media” in the form of an account label, the government-funded outlet proclaimed it was ditching the platform for good. Musk later switched the title from “state-affiliated” to “government-funded.”
At the time, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre made it clear that the Biden administration supports NPR, reiterating its claims of being an “independent news organization.” She added that this is apparent to anybody who consumes its reports.
Musk additionally claimed that AI is being trained to lie, saying it is being led to “either comment on some things, not comment on other things, but not to say what the data actually demands that it say.” The tech mogul also charged that former Google CEO Larry Page does not care about safety surrounding AI.
Twitter’s CEO has recently created his own AI company, X.AI.
