Grimes blames Twitter for ‘public mental health’ issues amid takeover by her ex-partner Elon Musk

Musician Grimes called out Twitter’s “issues with public mental health” just days after her on-and-off again boyfriend Elon Musk announced he’d reached a deal to purchase the social media platform for $44bn.

Speaking on MIT researcher Lex Fridman’s podcast on Friday, the Canadian-born singer said despite her misgivings about some of the “issues” with the platform, she does continue to use it prolifically and even admitted to creating “fake Twitter accounts” in the past in order to debate with people on topics that she feels she couldn’t engage with on her blue-check verified account.

“I, like, go into different algorithmic bubbles to try and like, understand,” she told the computer scientist. “I’ll keep getting in fights with people and realise we’re not actually fighting.”

The “issue” that she seemed to take up with the platform seemed to stem from concerns over misunderstandings on the site getting blown out of proportion, comparing it at one point to people using different linguistic dialects.

“There are now becoming different dialects of English, like I am realising … there are people who are saying the exact same things but they’re using completely different verbiage and we’re, like punishing each other for not using the correct verbiage,” she said.

“I do think there are a lot of issues with Twitter in terms of the public mental health,” she continued while speaking with the artificial intelligence researcher, without going as far to outright slam the company her ex Musk had only just days earlier announced he’d be purchasing. “But due to my proximity to the current dramas, I honestly feel that I should not have opinions about this because, if Elon ends up getting Twitter, that is being the arbiter of truth or public discussion.”

The Vancouver-born musician, whose real name is Claire Boucher, was cautious about speaking too openly about Musk’s agreement to purchase the San Francisco-based tech company, noting that she didn’t want to “say something that might, like, dismantle democracy”.

“I do have a lot of thoughts on the matter. If my thoughts are wrong, this is one situation where the stakes are high,” she told Mr Fridman during a two-hour interview where the pair discussed everything from fame, technology, Twitter and even the future of the human species.

The 34-year-old artist, who shared a link for the interview with the caption, “Life imitates art / who should we be?”, publicly disclosed about her most recent break up from the SpaceX founder on the very platform she was critiquing during the Friday podcast last month.

“Me and E have broken up *again* since the writing of this article,” she wrote on 10 March, while linking out to an interview she’d given to Vanity Fair. “But he’s my best friend and the love of my life.”

Grimes and the 50-year-old Musk began dating in 2018 and welcomed their first son, X Æ A-12 Musk, to the world in 2020 and then in March it was revealed that they’d had a second child together, Exa Dark Sideræl Musk, via surrogate back in December.

Exa, who is nicknamed “Y”, has a name that provides a lot of symbolic importance to her parents. The Exa is reportedly short for exaFLOPS, which refers to the ability to perform 1 quintillion floating-point operations a second. The full name includes a nod to the Canadian musician’s favourite Lord of the Rings character, Galadriel, who she told Vanity Fair is special to her because she “chooses to abdicate the ring”.

Over the course of the interview with the computer scientist, who describes himself on his website as a researcher who focuses on autonomous vehicles, human-robot interaction, and machine learning at “MIT and beyond”, Grimes also turned the conversation inward and discussed some of the realities of living as a famous person, a side effect of her music career that she feels only intensified after partnering off with Musk.

“I know I kind of got in over my head in things. I’m just a random indie musician, but I just got dragged into geopolitical matters and financial, like the stock market s***,” she said, before adding that she feels “artificially more famous than I should be”.

Since Musk’s deal with Twitter was announced, there has been a disquiet growing behind the doors of the social media giant, with employees blasting executives during an emergency meeting held last Friday, saying that “the PR speak is not landing”.

During the company-wide town hall, concerned staffers also questioned whether their jobs would be safe once the Tesla entrepreneur takes control.

Musk, who is an outspoken advocate both on and off the platform for free speech, has also raised the spectre about whether accounts that had previously been banned for violating the company’s terms and conditions would be reinstated after he took control of the company.

“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” he wrote in a statement the day the deal was announced.