Twitter was a pivotal force in debates about information, disinformation, the media, celebrity, politics, and all sorts of other issues. Then along came Elon Musk, Tesla and SpaceX’s innovative magician and chief loudmouth. He said he wanted to buy Twitter, then he said he didn’t, then the courts made him reconsider, and then he bought it. His brief three-month tenure as Twitter’s owner and new CEO has been chock full of calamity: tragicomic mismanagement, mass layoffs, censorship, and personal histrionics. 

To dive into all of this, Crash Course had to talk to Kurt Wagner, a Bloomberg News reporter who’s spent years covering social media, especially Twitter – he has boatloads of knowledge on how the platform handles what gets poured into our eyes and ears. He’s also working on a book about Twitter.