This gaslighting story out of a small African country makes me think that Elon Musk must now be their President.

Somali officials are denying that a member of the presidential office made calls to several media outlets ordering them to submit content for review.

VOA this week spoke with members of at least four news outlets who all said they had received such calls from a person who identified himself as Abdikadir Hussein Wehliye. The caller claimed to be from Villa Somalia, the presidential office.

“Firstly, there is nobody by the name of Abdikadir Hussein Wehilye that is employed with the President’s Communication Office and secondly there isn’t anyone with that name authorized to speak with the media on behalf of the President’s Communication Office or any other departments at Villa Somalia,” Abdikadir Dige, director of communications for Villa Somalia, said in an email to VOA on Friday evening.

Prank calls? Dumb ideas that have no accountability? Cracks in the lines of authority?

Lack of integrity in authorization channels can hilariously awful as trust is destroyed.

Who said what, where?

It looks very bad for Somalia (and easily fixable) but Twitter management has sounded far worse lately, to be honest.

Remember when Elon Musk proudly announced engineers had to submit code for review? And remember when he flipped back and forth repeatedly between censoring people and claiming he would never censor people?

Who here predicted that a chaos of authority within a destabilized devolving African state would still sound better than a giant American tech firm run by a South African?