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I've been a busy week for media strategists of powerful billionaires. Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Donald Trump have all said troubling, offensive and, on occasion, factually incorrect things this week. Then, hours later, tried to go back in time and change their statements, much like if you were a roaming Facebook post. All three outright denied having said what they had said, or attempted to revise their statements in a way that did not recognize that they had been uttered in the first place.
Some of the original statements were so far-fetched. they feel as if they arrived years ago. But a recap: Musk baselessly called Vernon Unsworth, one of the divers who helped rescue a group of boys from a cave in Thailand, a "pedo" on Twitter. Zuckerberg told an interviewer that Holocaust deniers were "not mistaken intentionally" and would not remove their messages from Facebook because these messages "do not try to organize the harm against someone." One, or attack someone ". Trump went against the clear conclusions of his own security agencies and said that he saw no reason why Russia would have interfered in the US elections.
Public figures sometimes claim to bend under the sustained pressure of a fiery investigator, but none of the original comments have been given under duress. Trump has come to his most-watched press conference since taking office, something he would have had months to prepare. Musk came in a series of tweets from his personal account. Only Zuckerberg was confronted with an interrogation supported by an interviewer, Kara Swisher, when she appeared on the podcast Recode Decode.
Yet even then, it was Zuckerberg, not Swisher, who raised the Holocaust. She had asked people who posted Sandy Hook's conspiracy theories on the site, to which Zuckerberg replied, "Get close to this … I'm Jewish, and there's a series of people who deny that Holocaust happened. I find this deeply shocking. But at the end of the day, I do not think our platform should shoot it down because I think there are things that different people are mistaken. I do not think that they are mistaken intentionally. "
Presumably then, the trio's sudden urge to clarify their statements was the result of a wave of condemnation that greeted them all. Trump was scolded by those of his own party. Zuckerberg was reprimanded by the Anti-Defamation League, Musk's comments have seen Tesla's share price fall and caused widespread condemnation, yet what followed was not traditional apology or U-turns, but an attempt to pretend that they had never said anything bad in the first place.
Trump's attempts to rewrite the past were the most cheeky.He initially asserted that he had misrepresented at the conference, saying that he had accidentally used "would" instead of "would not" for describe it he thought that Russian intelligence in In later elections, the White House tried the same thing again. When reporters asked him if he thought Russia was "still targeting the United States," he clearly said "no," in contradiction with the statements of Dan Coates, the director of national intelligence. Sarah Sanders later said Trump was really refusing to answer questions when he said "no". Thursday, Trump claimed to have been "very strong" on Putin and call the media the enemy of the people. CNN's teletypewriter gave up at one point, simply saying that "Trump clarifies his clarifications".
Zuckerberg was more tactful, but also used confusion rather than contrition to try to get out of the deal. In a letter to Recode, the organization that published the original interview, he said, "I enjoyed our conversation yesterday, but there is one thing I want to clear up. Personally, I find the denial of the Holocaust deeply shocking, and I had absolutely no intention of defending the intent of people who deny it. He then reiterated that people who lie on Facebook would not have to withdraw their messages, but defend the hatred or violence on the site. Yet, he has not recategorized the denial of the Holocaust as advocating hatred. He also did not reverse his position that posts that deny the Holocaust would not be removed by the moderators. He therefore clarifies nothing, merely repeating while adding that he does not intend to defend the Holocaust deniers. One of the excuses of non-excuses, that is the clarification of non-clarification.
Musk is excused for his comment on Twitter but only after publishing a very flattering article from a user on Quora who defended his actions, which he has described as a "well-written article", and claiming that his statement was equivocal to Unsworth's previous suggestion that Musk could "stick his submarine where it hurts". Musk said, "My words were spoken angrily after Mr. Unsworth said several untruths and suggested that I engage in a sexual act with the mini-submarine."
"Spoken in anger" does not quite reflect the context statements either. Posting on his own Twitter account, he dubbed his charge more than an hour later, when he responded to a report on the initial tweet "pedo" saying that he "would bet a dollar signed" c & # 39 was true. In his apology, Musk did not address his apparent certainty that Unsworth was a pedophile.
Many have questioned the effect that the ambivalence of this president on the truth and coherence would have on a broader discourse. This week, Zuckerberg and Musk were shooting from Trump's Playbook – after being unspeakably offensive, they continued to offer contradictory and confusing "clarifications" that masked an underlying stubbornness. By the end of the week, the three men had talked a lot but not much changed.
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