Welcome to POLITICO’s West Wing Playbook, your guide to the people and power centers in the Biden administration. With help from Allie Bice and Daniel Lippman. Send tips | Subscribe here | Email Alex President JOE BIDEN and billionaire ELON MUSK aren’t fond of one another. They’ve feuded over Biden not promoting Tesla as much as some of its rivals in the electric vehicle space. And they’ve jabbed at each other in semi-personal terms, too. “Lots of luck on his trip to the moon," Biden quipped in June when asked about Musk’s criticism of the economy. Musk then tweeted in July that “whoever controls the teleprompter is the real President!” comparing Biden to Ron Burgundy in “Anchorman.” But when it comes to Musk’s recent purchase of Twitter, White House and administration officials told West Wing Playbook that they are curious about coming changes, but largely shrug at the drama surrounding the platform — at least for now. Among the few White House officials who have publicly alluded to the Musk takeover has been staff secretary NEERA TANDEN. A longtime user of the platform, Tanden wondered about a place where like-minded folks could decamp and mused that individuals are already leaving. Others in Biden world say that if they’ve discussed the topic at all, it’s been to make jokes about it. The White House declined to comment. But its public apathy to the Musk-ism of Twitter is of a different tune than the bemoaning by other Democrats, who have talked about leaving the platform and warned about the dangers of a less-moderated, more disinformation-heavy space. But in reality, a number of progressives who work on social media policy and platform building said there hasn’t been talk about building a new platform as a counterbalance to a Musk-run Twitter, as DONALD TRUMP and his allies did when Trump was booted from the platform following the Jan. 6 riots. “I know of no one trying to build a social media platform,” said one prominent Democratic donor adviser. “It’s just hard to do something from scratch, which Truth Social is experiencing.” There had been informal chatter about a collective resignation from Twitter as a form of protest, but that hasn’t materialized. Instead, there was a sense that the only real leverage point would be to pressure advertisers on the platform. “That’s the primary lever if things get too bad,” said JUDD LEGUM, author of Popular Information, an independent newsletter. “Twitter still gets more than 90 percent of revenue from advertising, so advertisers provide the counterbalance.” There are also other progressive media strategies underway. Among them, according to people familiar with the discussions, the creation of smaller social media ecosystems that could be easier to moderate, cross-connected, and geared around healthy public dialogue. One of the chief purveyors of this idea is ELI PARISER. A pioneer in online citizen engagement, he has tried to conceive and construct these digital spaces with a group of engineers, architects and entrepreneurs at his organization, New_Public. Pariser’s theory is that the digital town square that Musk has envisioned for Twitter should, in fact, be numerous town squares — the online “equivalents of parks and libraries.” The hurdle would be to guard against homogeneity in these spaces while still keeping it free and well-moderated. Another would be finding investment for it. In a piece for Wired , Pariser wrote that it would require “a significant amount of new philanthropic and public funding for this work.” But in a follow up chat with West Wing Playbook, he said he was optimistic. These smaller spaces, he argued, were “‘governable’ in a way that’s really hard at a scale of hundreds of millions or billions. It’s really hard to make decisions that work for thousands of communities at once, which is why none of these platforms have…. “Free-for-all spaces work for loud, opinionated people who are relatively secure in their status, but they don’t work for most people (which is why most people don’t participate in Twitter).” MESSAGE US — Are you Elon Musk? We want to hear from you! And we’ll keep you anonymous! Email us at westwingtips@politico.com .
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