I don't have an opinion over the consequences for politics over this, I'm just excited over the potential shakedown of the social media landscape that I grew to despise. Musk is an activist, can make it or break it.
He is absolutely right over its enormous potential, all the problems it has - as a business or ones it creates for the society - can be solved.
Free speech absolutism is possible and is beneficial once you ensure that someone is not gaming the system, i.e. someone pretending to be more than one person. Add some other social mechanisms that we organically use in our daily lives to combat bad actors, for example if someone is caught BS'ing degrade their reputation and amplify the defence of the victims(thus, solve the problem of sensational lie being viewed a million times and no one seeing the correction).
Filter bubbles? Doesn't have to be a thing, you have all the data to detect bubbles and pop them by introducing them to each other. "More from the same" algos are a choice, TikTok successfully serves you new content - doesn't think that just because you liked a cat you want cats and cats only.
Bootstrapping a network the size of Twitter is nothing like easy, and might even be impossible this late in the game. Gold rushes of new users tend to wear off as new areas calcify into established concepts.
(The same would be true for launching a modern day FriendFeed / Bebo / MySpace etc)
> Gold rushes of new users tend to wear off as new areas calcify into
established concepts.
I hear ya. It's the crowd he's buying. But to me Twitter has no
"established concept". Maybe I'm the stupidest person on the planet
right now, but what exactly is Twitter? Does Musk have a brilliant
solution looking for a problem. Or is this just playing games with
money and power for it's own sake?
It's like a watercooler around which a huge bunch of people with interesting takes and things to say on lots of different interesting things have gathered. It takes a while to find the information streams as they are not made obvious, but at least for me I got much better first hand information of both Covid and Ukrainian war from the people I follow before media.
Simultaneously, Twitter is an algorithmic echo chamber. I had the opposite experience: fear porn scaremongering throughout the pandemic with microchips in the vaccines, 5G nonsense, graphene in the vaccines, the evils of Bill Gates, and far more. My interest in Twitter has declined massively year-on-year. I used to use it as an IRC replacement with hashtags in TweetDeck in place of channels. Now all the fun stuff is happening on Matrix protocol in Matrix Spaces.
"fear porn scaremongering throughout the pandemic with microchips in the vaccines,"
Any of the algorithmic timelines are generally horrible, agreed.
I follow only people who tweet and retweet reasonable things. I use the timeline with content only from the people I choose to follow ("Latest"), and don't follow lunatics. This is a fairly nice experience, but needs a curated list of people to follow, building of which needs a while.
The only way I can stomach Twitter is using a browser extension that removes retweets and likes from others, and recommended stuff from Twitter. Also removed the Trending/News area, and the Explore tab. Added a chronological timeline back too, but really don't use it much, and feel a lot better for it.
I don't think it's even necessarily about who you follow, there's a lot of pushing celebrities who are into this rubbish.
It is a bit like coal mining.. even the default new account experience encourages subscribing to a bunch of spam, when what is needed is mining one seam in that mess containing just the desired content (people).
Finding a tight-knit specialist community goes against everything the Twitter UI encourages, but it's how most folk who are deeply loyal to the platform actually use it. When configured well, the timeline should be significantly comprised of conversations between known people talking about desirable topics.
Personally I think this is the core of the tool - free, open access to specialist communities with no membership requirements, and no need for upfront reputation. If some conversation between experts interests you and you have a question, you can just ask.
One approach is to start by following one account you really like, then mining their replies following the folk they actively engage with. Do this for a few iterations and the result will quickly become an extremely intimate, engaging, and topical timeline. It only takes a few meaningful questions and comments added to these conversations for the follows and inclusion to start flowing your way.
My conspiracy theory is that Musk foresees the decline of society and owning a massive platform of communication provides him with a lot of power. Why buy a newspaper when you can buy the communication of so-much-more?
I'd add that even if by doing this he ends up destroying twitter, it will still leave room for the growth of something new. Twitter has a lot of legacy baggage, and either it had to be shaken up dramatically or burned to the ground in order for this social media landscape to change. This could go either way.
Trump never posting on TruthSocial seems to be a pretty low commitment from him. Or maybe he sent a welcome/test message. Meanwhile, he doesn't even have someone crossload his blog entries.
The main draw for Truth Social is not posting on it. If he was "truthing" 50 times a day, they would be doing a lot better.
I suspect some negotiation is going on. The main content creator wants a bigger slice of the business.
Musk has had success with Paypal, Tesla and SpaceX. All of those are/were mostly engineering problems first and then marketing problems second. None of the major problems at Twitter these days are engineering problems, but rather they are all related to politics and human group psychology. I don't see what Elon could bring to the table that Twitter does not already have.
PayPal wasn't rally an engineering problem, at least not at the scale of Tesla and SpaceX.
I'm torn. I think he has some good ideas (more open, paid vs. ads, crack down on bots), and for sure the necessary leadership to focus resources on those topics. On the other hand, it's not good that rich people own more media.
For PayPal to succeed it had to viciously hammer on a huge number of users who it algorithmically suspected might maybe be scammers. Blocking a tremendous amount of free activity in the process, punishing many innocent in addition to the guilty. This was done to create something that felt safe enough to get mainstream use.
That sounds somewhat like the Twitter of today, and not much like a hypothetical super-free-ified twitter.
"he could easily build a much better rival with different values."
Steretypically of social media - I see Twitters greatest asset being it's current network of influencers, analysts, thinkers, artists and colleagues. All the people I want to follow are already on twitter. I don't care about the platform or the tech, I care about all of the interesting people posting there. I would claim that is the true power of the platform atm - it's network.
> Free speech absolutism is possible and is beneficial
How can Twitter possibly get even more liberal in terms of free speech? Just look at the trends occasionally, they are really, really stressing the boundaries of free speech and crossing into defamation territory without being censored in any way. You can't start a trend comparing a democratically elected politician to Hitler and expect no repercussions.
> You can't start a trend comparing a democratically elected politician to Hitler and
See, in my opinion, you should be absolutely fee to do that
> expect no repercussions.
The first "repercussion" that comes to mind is to block their account or something like that but I think this is the wrong course. When they do or say something stupid In real life, the repercussions are that they are judged as a stupid person and not simply silenced. I think, this must be the norm in social media too. Just make sure that whatever they say sticks to their identity and if later they change their mind, they can apologise and ask for forgiveness.
I have this idea where your identity can be secret to the society but known to the platform. I.e. the platform knows you as a real person, you have just one account but you have an option to post anonymously too. You use your anonymous account to engage with the community about stuff that you normally wouldn't dare(i.e. controversial political stance, your sexual orientation kind of stuff).
If you post something very bad with your anonymous account(i.e. call for violence, hate speech etc), you get your anonymous posting rights revoked and your posts deleted. You can override the deletion by de-anonimization of the posts. If whatever you said is something criminal(plans to attack this, kill that, sell dirty bomb etc), the law enforcement takes care of it and the platform stops acting as a police.
edit: Oh I missed the part where your identity is actually encrypted, not known to the platform in plain format. To challenge the platform censorship and put back your removed comments you decrypt your identity. If you are afraid of state actors coming after you, you simply move on and your identity stays secret.
The platform doesn't need to be solving all the problems if the world. For example, if you are Russian dissident in Russia you first need replace Putin IRL, then you can use it as a westerner, challenging the politicians.
So.. now the platform knows your name. And the Afghan/Saudi/Russian/China gov tell twitter to release the name of the user. Sounds like a great result for the LGBT users.
> So.. now the platform knows your name. And the Afghan/Saudi/Russian/China gov tell twitter to release the name of the user. Sounds like a great result for the LGBT users.
Oh I missed the part where your identity is actually encrypted, not known to the platform in plain format. To challenge the platform censorship and put back your removed comments you decrypt your identity. If you are afraid of state actors coming after you, you simply move on and your identity stays secret.
The platform doesn't need to be solving all the problems if the world. For example, if you are Russian dissident in Russia you first need replace Putin IRL, then you can use it as a westerner to engage in politics.
How many gov's in the West are trying to remove E2E encryption? I know the EU is attempting it for chat tools. We have to "save the children".
In Australia assisted Access means any encrypted data is not safe. (Because the gov could have required the introduction of a back door, without even telling the company in question.)
I think Canada has something like that in place too. So if you take part in a protest, (even on twitter) be prepared to have your bank frozen.
They banned the personal account of the president not the official account. The official account was tweeting until after the election. I would have loved to see if they would have banned the potus account if he tweeted from there but we'll never know.
The US president has just won the largest popularity contest in the world, and by nature of the role has a mandate to bring ideas into the political discourse for a couple of years. It isn't so much that there should be special protection. If Twitter's policy bans the president it is way out of line with actual as-measured community expectations.
The POTUS should be treated as just a person to Twitter. However, that person has the resources of the world’s most powerful government. POTUS doesn’t need Twitter to get a message out.
But look at it from the other direction. What about all the people who follow him, fans and haters alike, who now have to go elsewhere to see what their sitting president has to say. It's unfair to them to do things like that. And honestly it's pretty childish. Just like the struggle session they put you through if they've taken action against your account. They literally make you delete your own tweet. Which doesn't sound like much, but they had to build that functionality when they fully have the power to do it themselves. It's intentionally spiteful.
Trump was allowed to run rampant bringing "ideas into the political discourse" for his entire term. Also, it was his personal account that was banned. The official presidential account is still there.
And as the president, he had the entire American media apparatus at his disposal. The premise that somehow an American president can't effectively communicate policy without a Twitter account is absurd. Previous presidents have been able to manage just fine.
Let's not get hyperbolic; it's the largest political popularity contest in the US. In India, 600 Million people voted in the 2019 Indian General Election. Eurovision is also bigger than the US General Election, at least by viewership (I couldn't find televoting numbers).
Liberal ideals have no hold on Twitter. The liberal ideal is to let as many people as possible have a Twitter account.
Did you read their announcement when they banned him[0]? Banning the man representing, at minimum, a quarter of a country with such nakedly partisan logic is an embarrassment to anyone who wants to pretend Twitter cares about liberal political ideals. They were listening to voices in their head rather than reading what Trump wrote; voices which obviously won't tolerate anything outside a narrow, illiberal view.
Cool. What I'm saying is that you cannot pay lip service to liberal ideals while also suggesting that simply having a very large number of people vote for you is evidence that you shouldn't be removed from a service for policy violations.
The system has to be compatible with liberal ideals before its correct operation causes liberal outcomes.
A system that, based on their flimsy justifications, simply bans political opponents isn't liberal. The classic position a liberalist should take is that the service policy needs to be reformed to embody better values around free political speech.
Not that I'm too invested in the situation. Twitter will be on the way out soon enough if it doesn't pull its head in and tolerate serious dissent from the favoured narrative.
Implying that morality is just whatever is popular? Do you think Middle Eastern Twitter should allow people to talk about how they're going to exterminate the Jewish and gay people? And Russian Twitter should allow calling out locations of humanitarian corridors so the military and mine them? And Chinese Twitter should ban all discussion of faults of the CCP? Because those things are often community expectations.
The US is very, very divided. Trump won with basically 50% support, he lost re-election, and then lost even further support when he started making up lies about election fraud. Even if morality was derived from popularity (or just profitability, if that's what you think Twitter did it for), Trump no longer had close to a majority. Maybe his comments were in line with expectations of 60% of Republicans, but the other 70% of the country thought that was what was unacceptable.
> Surely the same standards should be applied to all users?
The standard under discussion seems to be free speech absolutism with the question "how much more liberal could twitter get". The ban of Trump just makes a good high profile example of Twitters current limitations on free speech.
He got banned as a citizen of the united states, welcome to people's sovereignity where the politicians have the same fundamental rights as the citizens they represent.
The problem is not if there is free speech on the platform but how it's perceived you will always have an extrem loud minority (no matter what political orientation) that will drown out the rest of the platform just by crying about censorship. It will be interesting to see what will happen to them when there is nothing to cry about anymore.
Not banning and suspending people or hiding tweets for alleged violations of vague and arbitrary standards would be great, to start with.
Go to any political tweet and you'll see countless hateful messages, why aren't they banned, yet others are? I've never seen any reason for it. Clearly they take a side or draw a line on some issues they consider important to control, but not others.
It seems to me it would be far better in my opinion for twitter to foster strength rather than fragility by empowering users to take responsibility for their own feelings and have the tools and maturity to not read things they can't cope with, rather than trying to police what people write centrally. It absolutely could be the modern town square and would be great if it supported real freedom of speech, in my opinion.
I don't see how a comparison with 4chan is any evidence for that. There are also heavily regulated forums which are not popular. So clearly that's not the reason for whether or not one is going to be popular.
The problem with Twitter - and any social medium - is that moderation is very hard to scale. And that's exactly the trade-off big platforms have made in order to grow their userbase. That's just one problem.
Centralization also generates other problems: authority and lack of partipation. These platforms lack proper affordances regarding discovery and curation. As a user, you're automatically gravitating towards the loudest voices, the biggest or most active communities.
For instance, on Reddit, there's a canonical /r/sports subreddit. It has 20 million fans, but it's mostly focussed on american / UK sports. Searching for "sports"doesn't yield anything comparable. Only a fraction of those 20 million fans is really active posting and commenting. There's an /r/worldsports subreddit but has a grand total of 350 redditors.
When it comes to Twitter, the net result is that only a fraction of users is responsible for the vast amount of tweets, while about 50% are basically lurkers. [1][2] In that regard, the "free speech" argument is only a real concern for a very small, yet extremely vocal fraction of Twitter users. The same applies to Reddit as well.
The worrying part isn't the "free speech" argument such as it is posited. It's that all of this results in a lack of participation in any debate. The userbases of social media might be more akin to the placid crowd on a market place listening to someone ranting of a soapbox, and less a salon where everyone actively engages and interacts with each other.
> You can't start a trend comparing a democratically elected politician to Hitler and expect no repercussions.
You realize that Hitler was literally democratically elected?
He and his party were democratically elected to the German parliament. They proposed to form a coalition government with some other parties, which was approved by the (separately democratically-elected) president. Then he proposed legislation which would give himself wide-ranged emergency powers, which was approved by the democratically-elected parliament. Everything he did was technically legal and constitutional.
So ask yourself: When would you have blocked literal Hitler from Twitter?
I think the take-away lesson from Nazi Germany is that we need to start fighting fascism and authoritarianism much earlier in the process.
> Then he proposed legislation which would give himself wide-ranged emergency powers, which was approved by the democratically-elected parliament
I'm German and graduate with polish-german history as honors class.
Where to even start.....
First of all, the only reason they took the political path was because Hitler's coup against the German government in 1923 failed.
The "democratic" approval you paint here happened while the SA, the NSDAP's personal thug squad, as well as the SS (no introduction necessary) had infiltrated the building and were "observing" the voting procedure. This was illegal, especially since they were uniformed for intimidation.
You are also ignoring the fact that this "technically constitutional" decision was only possible because they spontaneously (same day) changed the legal framework in a way that meant that non-present (intimidated) representatives count as present. Only this way they achieved the necessary votes.
What even legitimized this situation in the first place was an exploitation of the weak Weimar constitution (as in abuse of loopholes due to it's young nature of 20 years, same applies to the German democratic history as a whole, first time a democratic persistent government was in power was in 1918).
You are completely ignoring the Reichtagsbrandverordnung which eradicated the fundamental rights as well as the divison of powers (!) which should not have been able to be touched. This was a breach of the Weimar constitution by the way, so the Nazi rise to power was 100 % not constitutional.
And lastly you decontextualized the comparison since Hitler obviously did a lot more than just being a cheater in politics
I realize technical accuracy is important, but I don't think any of your points take away from the main point I was making: Hitler was a democratically-elected politician; so comparing other democratically-elected politicians to Hitler is not an automatic non-sequitir; and blocking democratically-elected politicians who exhibit fascist and authoritarian behavior is a reasonable choice.
> First of all, the only reason they took the political path was because Hitler's coup against the German government in 1923 failed.
Sure; I knew about that (and other illegal activities) and was trying to think of a way to make it clear I wasn't including that in "everything". It wasn't really possible without being awkward and taking away from the main point; so I relied on my readers to understand the implicit limitation of "everything".
As for the rest, I could have said "mostly constitutional with some bending" and it would have had the same point. Obviously digging into it, the fact that Germany at that time didn't have a tradition of democracy, and its constitution was problematic, is important to know. But most people in the US, at least, don't realize that Hitler took a mostly legal route to power at all. That's the main thing I want to get across to people.
Platforms like Twitter have become de facto utilities. They should be prevented from censoring anything that is not breaking the law, which means filtering tweets on a per country basis to comply with national laws, nothing less, nothing more.
It's legal to use the n word in the US as far as I know, but I think harassment probably isn't ('spamming' sounds like harassment), that's where the balancing act is. Now, it is not legal to throw the n word at someone in most European countries. Hence why I said that these platforms need to filter on a per country basis for all countries they want to operate in.
As I said, Twitter and other major platforms have become de facto utilities and it's no longer a valid argument to claim that as private businesses they are free to do as they please because they yield too much power.
You can do that on email, irl, with real letters, etc. It hasn’t been a problem. If someone is particularly harassing you then it becomes a legal issue.
What Twitter could do is just stop promoting and spreading content people don’t like. Rather than completely ban problem users like trump, just stop showing them in trending feeds and give people the option to block the users so you don’t see them.
Yes - a lot of people claim that shadow banning, downranking etc. are censorship. I disagree, they necessary to keep online places as civil as they are.
There's also content that is regarded by mental health experts as harmful in large quantities - downranking that is also important to not cause existential harm to people.
> Platforms like Twitter have become de facto utilities.
No, they have not.
I cannot live without water or electricity; perhaps also a general Internet connection (in the modern world). I live my life just fine without Twitter.
Twitter is an online service that some people find useful and others ignore completely. There is nothing utility-like about it.
Can political or civil society organisations exist without access to social media platforms these days? No. These platforms are utilities of the modern democratic and pluralistic society.
Because this is well established fact. You can research the topic for yourself if you wish. Just a quick Googling: [1]
Social media have been key to political campaigning in the last 10 years or so. This made headlines in relations to the Brexit referendum in the UK and it had made headlines after Obama's first presidential campaign which was a pioneer.
Lots of politicians have chosen to make Twitter their main method of communication. I am able to speak to my representatives via Twitter quite easily while they ignore my emails. They can choose (if they wish) to block me on Twitter and limit my ability to communicate with them or see important information they post there and not elsewhere. Either it’s a utility or our politicians need to be held to stricter rules re communication with their constituents.
If politicians choose to use Twitter, but could just as easily choose communication on the web by other means (like email, or another platform) then that makes Twitter merely convenient, not a "de facto utility".
Modern political campaigns are fought and won on social media. Politicians do not choose to use them, they have to use them to have a chance to get their message across.
Trump didn't win because he personally had social media accounts from which he spread his message - canvassing by his followers (until they kept going Nazi and getting banned) were what was effective. Trump's own social media use has been a net negative for him, he mostly just rants and shitposts. If he'd been banned from Twitter earlier, he might have gotten more accomplished.
Also, coverage of Trump by the mainstream media was likely far more effective than social media at getting him elected. If nothing else, it provided the material that got spread across social media.
Obama's victory was due in large part to social media as well, but not due to Obama's personal accounts.
Trump utilized newspapers, TV news networks, rallies, and word of mouth as well. He's banned from twitter right now but still tops the poll of who would win the next election
> Modern political campaigns are fought and won on social media.
For the current definition of "modern".
In the 1800s then-modern political campaigns were fought and won in newspapers and pamphlets.
Pre-WW2 then-modern political campaigns were fought and won on the radio.
Post-WW2 then-modern political campaigns were fought and won on television.
None of those were treated as public utilities AFAICT, so I'm not why the medium of communication now suddenly makes a difference (Marshal McLuhan notwithstanding).
I have a Twitter account but I've barely used it ever, and do okay for myself socially. I don't think it's a utility. I have plenty of options, and use the ones that interest me most.
So the governments would pay Twitter for moderation and for subsidizing the platform, if advertisers leave in response?
I think that the governments should treat social media platforms similarly to other addictive/harmful substances, such as junk food, sugary drinks or tobacco... with a focus on prevention and education.
And using these platforms for official communication (from elected officials and public services) should be either prohibited or heavily discouraged.
"Free speech absolutism is possible and is beneficial once you ensure that someone is not gaming the system, i.e. someone pretending to be more than one person."
This is probably the core motivation behind the $2/month blue checkmark fee proposed by him. You don't need to moderate social media if you can just send the cops credit card details of the person spam-posting swastikas, agitating for violence or breaking other established laws. I hope we all agree that laws against libel, glorification of crime, threatening people are not exactly censorship.
It’s not such a bad idea, and it was the initial intent of blue checks: proving that an account wasn’t impersonated. But they couldn’t roll out verification at scale, so they only verified high-ish profile accounts. As a result, over time, the blue check has come to be a sort of class signifier and lost its original purpose (I sometimes see verified anon accounts, what even was verified?)
Rolling it out at scale could improve the rampant spam/astroturfing problem, even if it would be imperfect.
Also, if there are people complaining of censorship you can always give them a '4-chan mode' and watch them come back asking how to switch it off after 5 min.
> Also, if there are people complaining of censorship you can always give them a '4-chan mode' and watch them come back asking how to switch it off after 5 min.
I'm not so sure what a four chan mode would look like. Can you please elaborate? Inspite of the constant mockery of the janitors, my understanding is they work practically around the clock for zero pay trying to keep the boards (not that I go to /b/ much) as clean as possible. It definitely is not a free for all and my understanding is most people gladly support heavy handed IP bans for example if someone posts commercial pornography on a "work safe" four channel board like technolo/g/y.
Moreover, some of the boards are very slow to the point that frequenters seem to get annoyed by a low quality post pushing down better posts by saying things like "thank you for your blog post" (I assume sarcasm, I don't know for sure) or "a thread died for this".
Also there are (from what I've read) filters available to filter out posts with certain keywords and people coming up with ways to have their posts show up for people with filters using different techniques.
I don't post anything on 4chan as I don't feel like a part of the in-crowd though and would genuinely like to know what a 4 Chan mode would look like.
> I don't post anything on 4chan as I don't feel like a part of the in-crowd though and would genuinely like to know what a 4 Chan mode would look like.
I don’t think there is a requirement for being part of the in crowd to post on 4chan. Then again, I’ve never posted there either.
I think the point is that 4chan mode would be the “absolute free speech” mode. And if that is where we are going, it will be quite a ride. I can’t imagine Twitter surviving it, but it will be interesting.
> I think the point is that 4chan mode would be the “absolute free speech” mode. And if that is where we are going, it will be quite a ride. I can’t imagine Twitter surviving it, but it will be interesting.
I think what I've learned from 4chan is that words like (redacted) shit general in /g/ or calling OP a (redacted) is ok on 4chan specifically. Except the name(redacted) and trip(redacted), we are all pseudonymous there so when someone says you are a (redacted), they don't mean to say you are of a specific ethnicity or gender. It means you are acting like an idiot or something they disapprove of?
I can imagine a 21+ social media network that has no explicit moderation but you would still need protection from spam, flooding, and other bad actors once you get to a certain size.
> he would be sued for enabling the NYC subway terrorist
The problem with that is that yesterday it was swastikas, today is the letter Z, tomorrow who knows what else we might have in store?
Also, putting in prison all the people who have displayed their swastika-love thingie online [1] would have meant Mariupol falling sooner to the Russians, a thing contrary to the beliefs of many who propose laws like that.
I think about Twitter occasionally and I'm always amazed that the company has thousands of employees.
If he charged $2 / month for an individual to get a blue check and $100 / month for a company to get verified then eliminated ads, could he get the staff count down to under 100 people?
I remember when Facebook bought Instagram. Instagram had something like 13 employees. Why does Twitter need two orders of magnitude more?
So to replace Twitter's current revenue at those rates, you'd need something like 170 million blue check marks or 3 million corporate accounts.
How many do you think is realistic? Reducing your revenue by an order of magnitude to reduce your headcount by an order of magnitude seems like a bad plan.
Revenue puts a ceiling on profit. You can't sell at a loss and make it up in volume, but you also can't make more profits than revenue.
Right now there are 360,000 blue check marks on Twitter. If I spot you the first million blue checkmarks and the first 100,000 business profiles, that's only $144M of revenue per year. Even if that is 90% profit, $130M / year profit on a $50B investment is not particularly brag-worthy.
I assume Musk needs Twitter to be profitable, but as somebody trying to sell cars, and satellites and big solar projects and space launches around the world, the platform can help him in other ways too.
> I remember when Facebook bought Instagram. Instagram had something like 13 employees. Why does Twitter need two orders of magnitude more?
Companies tend to hire more employees as long as the marginal benefit to doing so is greater than the marginal cost. Even minor improvements to a product like Twitter can boost revenue by millions. Reducing the headcount might not maximise their income.
There will be exceptions though. Valve does lot more than most video-game companies with far fewer employees.
A "video-game company" doesn't necessarily have to be a game developer, and being a distributer is enough. Consider how "music company" aptly applies to Spotify.
Which they can do, once you get over a very high bar indeed.
We have literally seen the Supreme Court protect speech advocating for violence against the Government.
>Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444 (1969), was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court interpreting the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Court held that the government cannot punish inflammatory speech unless that speech is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action".
Specifically, the Court struck down Ohio's criminal syndicalism statute, because that statute broadly prohibited the mere advocacy of violence.
Wait, just for clarification... do you believe a company should be allowed to censor speech on its own platform if it wants to do so? Or are you saying a business should not be allowed to remove any posts unless a court has given its approval?
The assumption that cops in the US actually care about someone posting swastikas is questionable. We already have lots of people posting about crimes on twitter accounts under their real names, and the cops very frequently don't do anything about it. A sizable number of the swastika posters are cops, too, as demonstrated by the periodic investigations into police departments that reveal those sorts of things.
P.S. Requiring someone to have a credit card doesn't feel like free speech absolutism to me. A pretty big number of people don't have the ability to make credit card payments. Do their voices not matter?
> What unrealized potential does Twitter have left after 16 years of existence?
How much potential communication was left in the human race have after the first 7,000 years since written script started appearing? The answer is, most potential was still unexplored.
Everything in modern civilisation is still young. Especially new communication platforms.
The potential value of a communications platform is always handwavy up to the point the revenue is realised. It is well-nigh impossible to forecast what the social media landscape will look like in the medium-long term; especially if someone cares about profit. Twitter has only been experimenting with making money since 2018.
Twitter had ample time before 2018 to experiment with making money, though. I'm not saying that Twitter should have known how to do that in 2006, but they probably should have by the time they IPO'ed 8 years later, in 2013.
And Glancing over their S-1, they're making money now with the same means that they were planning to in 2013.
It's popular but it's mostly garbage where people scream at each other, among the bots and scammers. You can improve the interaction modes, improve discoverability etc. thus improving its value per user instead of inflating total number of users.
And they're never GOING to use it, because Twitter isn't for them.
The Tiktok crowd is not the Twitter crowd. The Twitter crowd is not the Facebook crowd. The only platform that truly has cross-group viability is instagram, and that's only because it's a visual platform.
Twitter is a place where you make short, concise statements and people yell at you. Remove the character limit and it's just a feature-barren Facebook but with a bunch of people you don't even personally know. Everybody has been crying that it can "be more." It doesn't want to "be more." "Being more" is antithetical to the spirit of the enterprise and will kill it.
The consequences for politics are literally the only thing that matters here. Even if Musk doesn't intend to reinstate Trump's account (and certainly, nothing he's said indicates he wouldn't do that), the second he controls Twitter he will be under enormous pressure to do so. If he declines to do so, it will be damaging to his business with government. If he agrees to do so, there will be a huge amount of public discontent with Musk and his companies.
Worse, from that point on everything that happens as a result will be on Musk and his companies. There won't be any more repercussions for powerful politically-motivated speakers, even if they explicitly call for violence. This will motivate extreme behavior and extreme responses. Boycotts for Tesla and Starlink (whose customers almost certainly tip liberal) will absolutely be on the table.
Even if you personally love Musk, the success of his consumer-facing businesses depends on broad adoption by consumers. That's all at risk now. CEOs of this kind of business may have politics, but they traditionally avoid political firestorms because of these concerns. Musk is obviously rich enough that he doesn't care, but his shareholders probably should.
> If he declines to do so, it will be damaging to his business with government.
How would failing to reinstate Trump's account be damaging to his business with the government? Wouldn't it matter whether the Federal government is under a Democrat or Republican executive?
Republicans control a minority of Congress right now but will likely control a majority by 2022. Maybe both branches and the Presidency in 2024. Ordinarily we like to pretend that political action doesn't affect your business, but Trump made it pretty clear that he's willing to retaliate against political enemies using the power of the state [1]. This feeling may not be broadly shared, but currently Trump is the most influential person in the GOP and a leading candidate for 2024.
Yeah, I agree with you generally (I don't think Congress is that important in this context; it's more the Executive Branch), I just don't see how that supports the above poster, unless one assumes that a Republican is going to win in 2024.
If there are two parties and you think one party might abuse the Presidency to help/harm your business, and the other won't... which one are you going to spend time ingratiating yourself with?
I was recently looking at the payment options for a M3 RWD and have actually paused everything last week when the first Twitter news came out, because that's exactly where my mind went too.
If this whole move ends up with trump reinstated, I just cannot support any of his companies with my money, ever. And I'll do what I can to dissuade colleagues if their values align with mine.
I currently live in Germany, where German cars are very common, but yeah, I was trying NOT to give money to a German car manufacturer already before Ukraine got invaded, because they have immense influence on the local government and are to (co-)blame for the sad delay in adopting EV and government incentives (and when incentives come out, they try to structure them to exclude Tesla as much as possible). Plus the diesel scandals.
I guess I'll wait and see. But wanting an EV, not wanting something as small as a Zoe, or too expensive, and hating SUVs (I know, I know, too many conditions), it's hard to find an alternative. I may have to settle for an ID.3 or a Cupra if Tesla is no longer an option.
For the record, I currently do have a German car - bought it used, 12ish years.
This is quite interesting. Regardless of which way you vote when it comes election time, Trump would have a much better chance if he had social media access again. If Musk takes control of Twitter and gives Trump access again it could have an enormous impact on the outcome of that election and the future of America. It’s interesting (and terrifying) that someone could take Twitter private and exercise that level of power. I can’t imagine it would be long until the government regulated it at that point but given the US strong protections for free speech I’m not sure how much regulation can occur.
Literally the only people that care about any of that, are the ones deep lost in the Twitter funnel. Here's the truth: Whatever happens on Twitter, it's going to have zero effect on your personal life. All these 140 character blurps about politics, the virtue signaling, the constant anger, outrage and cancel culture, it has melted people brains. It's all just an echo chamber, tightly kept in within bounds, and people will sell their soul, define their inner being, say whatever it takes, for bogus dopamine hits. Nobody has morals or ideology on Twitter, they are all just optimizing for likes.
It's only "US-centric" if you include its vassal states in the definition, more correct to say "West-centric view" probably.
That's of course assuming these things aren't happening on Twitter in other spheres (which would be an interesting data point - it would indicate that it may not be something intrinsic to the format, but with current issues in Western culture).
How large is Twitters non-Western user base anyways, in percentages?
Surely it depends on what Trump does with his account, right? Does Chick-Fil-A suffer from it's decisions politically? If Trump incites insurrection with his account, why not just do what Twitter did? Everybody is unhappy with Twitter. Complaining about twitter is the engagement desired. It's not political, extremists on both sides are upset.
I suppose those who own stock are also upset, I just realized. I don't think liberals will boycott Tesla and Starlink unless they become associated with their political opponents, enough that the environmental aspect would become secondary. If that happens... well, that's a lot of sales regardless, right?
Free speech absolutism and "ensure that someone is not gaming the system" are opposites. Having multiple accounts isn't the only way to game the system. There are plenty of trolls out there and they are creative.
Once you are large enough to attract some trolls, if you don't have good moderation, comment quality goes to hell, and users care about that. Running a large social media site isn't kind to people who aren't willing to do what works for ideological reasons. You are fighting the trolls with a deliberate handicap and they will absolutely take advantage. So are you going to ban people who are disruptive or not?
TikTok is heavily moderated. That's why they became popular - the moderation was better than the competition.
Heavy moderation can potentially work. But it needs to try and be objective and politically neutral, not based on mobs of activists actively trying to get their opponents banned/silenced.
Concepts like "objective" and "politically neutral" are what Walter Bryce Gallie called "essentially contested concepts."
Even in a system where moderation was administered perfectly, there would be some percentage of people who fundamentally objected to the accuracy and even legitimacy of moderation based on its outcome. A "correctly" administered system would probably still be one in which disgruntled people dismissed "correct" choices as activism, biased motives, etc.
Getting rid of vaccine misinformation would lead to antivax cranks saying the pharmaceutical industry is using their financial power to influence moderating. Getting rid of 2020 election misinformation will lead to conservative narratives about "mainstream" media silencing their voices out of political bias. The liberal narrative on moderation decisions would say it excludes minority and disempowered voices. And all sides would invoke concepts like "objectivity."
The problem is that not that all sides do it, but the opposite, that there really is a real underlying truth out there, and it really will be the case that some people are going to be systematically wrong at every level at which they register objections to moderation, and the correct response is that their concerns are unfounded.
Of course that won't make people happy, but it shows that the limits of what is possible are limits relating to human nature that won't be uniformly satisfied by any system.
But this is nonsense -- what does "politically neutral" even mean in this context?
> not based on mobs of activists actively trying to get their opponents banned/silenced.
Moderation literally is silencing/banning someone.
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My (slightly uncharitable) take is that when "non-political" or "objective" gets brought up in this context it usually means anything that the poster already agrees with, and "political" or "subjective" means value judgements that the poster disagrees with.
But any moderation policy you bring up in a private space -- from banning alt-coin scams to blocking pornography to deciding what does and doesn't constitute harassment -- all of that is a balance between protecting communities and allowing people more space to speak, and making political decisions about what content does and doesn't belong in those categories.
All of these categories are socially constructed and based in part on group consensus about the types of content and people we would like to see banned/silenced.
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I'll also point out that using a word like "objective" can sometimes make free speech policies more strict. There have been multiple points in history where we believed something to be objective and settled truth that later turned out to be false.
So not only does this ignore the reality that moderation is inherently somewhat subjective and political and needs to be in order to protect communities, it also ignores the reality that moderation is inherently somewhat subjective and political and needs to be in order to avoid over-censorship.
What is and is not settled knowledge is often a contentious debate, and by treating it like it's not a contentious debate and like the decisions about what to ban are just fully impersonal and objective, we open the door both to people who want under-moderation and (surprisingly) also to people who want over-moderation or want to quell criticism of establishment ideas. By treating these moderation decisions like they're not decisions, we allow both over-aggressive and under-aggressive moderators to hide behind a veil of objectivity and to avoid responsibility for the choices they make about the content they allow.
> Free speech absolutism is possible and is beneficial once you ensure that someone is not gaming the system, i.e. someone pretending to be more than one person
You can have free speech absolutism or controls to stop gaming the system. Pick one.
After that it becomes a debate over which controls to have, and the argument that multiple accounts is worse than incitement to racial hatred or antivax nonsense isn't a clear cut one.
A lot of the "free speech" complaints about social media amount to complaints about social media platforms adding content warnings about [alleged] sensational lies or penalising their reputation anyway.
And, as is always the question, to what extent is this one-off example representative of the totality of Facebook's efforts to stop the spread of misinformation?
Are 50% of the "censored" posts regular reporting? 1%? 0.00001%? Shouldn't a detail like that matter?
If I could make the rules, my rule for conversations about one-off examples would be that you have to immediately follow up by talking about how representative that example is of the phenomenon you are using it to illustrate.
You realize NYPost are the ones who slutshame a NYC EMT for moonlighting on OnlyFans to make ends meet because their salary is criminally low? You know, they find the fact she's making some X-rated content more wrong than her salary being at the poverty level.
> I don't want my platform to say anything about this
You should have the freedom to start such a forum without being regulated out of existence and join such a forum without fear of isolation. You should not be able to force other privately owned forums to adopt your view.
If they ask Twitter or some other platform to derank your view and manage to convince the platform to do so, that’s an end result of free speech.
One of the main arguments for free speech is that you let everyone talk without government interference and let private actors decide what are good and bad ideas.
Everyone in this post who wants these public platforms to be forced to host all speech sound like what they really need is to have these platforms to be nationalized and run with government rules. What’s confusing to me is the majority of the people I see who want these platforms to host all speech are also in the same group that thinks everything should be done by companies and not the government
This is exactly what's going on. Twitter censors one type of opinion and elevates another. People with the opinions which are currently being elevated are terrified of the potential loss of social power.
For what it's worth, I think this fear is misplaced. Unless Elon can figure out how to run Twitter without ads, woke-bigotry is safe as long as advertisers are using woke politics to distract from their evils.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights should be a pretty good baseline.
> Art. 12: No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
>A lot of the "free speech" complaints about social media amount to complaints about social media platforms adding content warnings about [alleged] sensational lies or penalising their reputation anyway.
Exactly. And I would add, nobody who claims they are a "free speech absolutist" can stay consistent with that declaration after even one or two simple questions.
Does free speech absolutism mean unmoderated ISIS and Al-Qaeda posts are fine? Because we need to expose them to healthy debate for the benefit of societal progress? The answer typically is "well that's not speech, that's _____", and then it's a debate over why there's a special different word for the type of speech they want to prohibit.
You may do, but the self-proclaimed "free speech absolutist" trying to buy Twitter thinks that making certain claims and revealing certain information about his companies is not at all fine, hence all the litigation against critical former employees
Free speech absolutism is a choice that does not promote the open discussion of ideas. It is a choice that promotes the loudest and nastiest voices and pushes out everyone else.
The problem is that the alternative is way worse… You have to create some authority that decides what constitutes a nasty opinion and what doesn’t.
And the moral of the history is: in 2020 the COVID lab-leak hypothesis was considered a nasty idea, one that only uneducated, bitter conspiracy theorists could support. People have been banned from the effective monopolists of public discourse over this idea.
Then sometime around 2021 the same idea became acceptable.
Not surprisingly, this change in the public perception of this idea over social media followed the viewpoint of the major political party the owners of social media cheer for.
This is bad, bad, bad for political discourse and rational thinking!!
As far as I am concerned: long love the free market of ideas!
Assuming the factual premises of what you're saying are true, the problem with the lab-leak thing was that it was bandied about by Trump and his supporters as some kind of excuse for his poor handling of the pandemic (which began before the pandemic even started via his dismantling of certain government functions meant to deal with such outbreaks). They also were people who wanted to downplay the severity of the disease overall, act like everything could continue as normal (for largely selfish reasons), etc.
Don't get me wrong--I think the initial response to Covid was probably overzealous, and it has lasted way too long (once we had vax, everyone should have been done with it).
My point is simply that they wielded the info/idea in an ideological way, and this led to it being dismissed, whereas if the idea was discussed and established among experts first, it would have been taken more seriously. In other words, bare, unregulated, irresponsible free speech did harm in advancing this idea.
You are clearly differentiating between Trump's experts and current experts. You either believe in the infallibility of experts or you don't. There can't be "poor handling of the pandemic" unless you are willing to contradict the infallibility of experts.
Fields of expertise have their own internal ways of determining authority; the Trump side of things has tended on the whole to not go with the most authoritative of thought-out views of things.
That doesn’t follow. In an illiberal country they’ll just ban any large platform that allows anything. How would free speech absolutism on a platform or in some other country have any impact on a state like that?
Banning a platform outright isn't as easy. Some countries like Russia are absolutely willing to do that, but a lot of smaller illiberal countries still need to curry favours with their own population and banning a popular platform will cause some unrest.
For example, Turkey banned and unbanned Facebook several times.
The only way it works is if people have some skin in the game.
To go the "free speech" route everyone should have to use their real identity. I realise this excludes people under repressive governments where free speech has really been lost, and you can be thrown in jail or worse for a seemingly mundane opinion.
But for those living in a democracy make them use their real identity. Otherwise everyone is just trolling with zero consequences.
> Free speech absolutism is possible and is beneficial
The jury is out for me, how can we say it's automatically beneficial if it's not sacred and only a mean to an end for society/people, that end depending on your views (GDP, happiness, sustainability...)?
Also IMHO like any liberal absolutism, the forces will inevitably make who has the more money own and game the system, it's a proxy for Oligarchy. It can be good but only under certain philosophical positions and economic theories that not everyone agree on.
I'm not sure I really get the points you're making here. You've said "I don't have an opinion over the consequences for politics over this" but also "free speech absolutism is possible and is beneficial". And "Filter bubbles? Doesn't have to be a thing" but also "degrade [bad actors] reputation and amplify the defence of the victims".
I don't (apparently controversially) think that a lack of "free speech" is anywhere near top of the list of Twitter's problems. It's way more pressing that the amazing content on it has become completely drowned out by a cacophony of bad actors. It's not just the bot armies, but the legions of individual contributors posting and sharing obvious churnalism and outrage bait that it's _impossible_ to escape from.
I had to stop using Twitter regularly maybe a year or so ago for my own health. I could feel my blood pressure spiking every time I opened the app, and it wasn't because of algorithms or filter bubbles or censorship – if anything, the opposite. It was just increasingly not possible to use it for the things I had always loved about it—breaking news, shared conversations, interesting updates etc. from people and organisations I was interested in—without having to wade through buckets of deliberately rage-inducing shit.
Twitter itself might bear some responsibility for that. The obvious bot problem is out of control, and it was becoming increasingly user hostile to anyone who wanted to _avoid_ their attempts at "bubble popping". But maybe the bigger problem is that it's fundamentally hard to get people to behave respectfully in a a global public forum like that.
The only way I've dealt with this is, every couple of years, to unfollow everyone and carefully pick who I follow again in a niche community that is interesting to me at the time.
What the right calls "free speech" has been tried by several investor-backed social media startups. In every case it has turned into a sewer of racism, misogyny, death threats, and non-monetizable yuckkyiness.
Nobody has an answer to that problem, yet. If there is no answer, turning Twitter into a desolation for trolls will not help Twitter.
These trolls want to go back to Twitter to torment everyone who rejected them. Good luck creating shareholder value that way.
I guess the solution would be tying your identify to your account. If you do something illegal then you can be held accountable. The problem is, how many of twitters users would vanish if they suddenly needed to be identifiable?
> once you ensure that someone is not gaming the system, i.e. someone pretending to be more than one person
For this to work you would need a worldwide government identity check protocol implemented by all participating countries, something like OAuth so you could register only one account connected to that real identity, it could still be anonymous from other users perspective. Problem here is that even if that would make bot problem less significant it would not eliminate it. You would have farms of hacked identities and then in countries with really low income you could buy those identities (digital access) for a few dollars per piece.
> Free speech absolutism is possible and is beneficial
What?
As it stands, free speech absolutism is being weaponized by those with the money to manipulate the crap out of it. It has no benefit in a society that is driven by the highest bidder writes the rules _and now the news_.
"Free speech absolutism is possible and is beneficial [once ...]"
I hope you know what free speech absolutism entails. I don't think your statement is true at all.
Absolute (really, absolute and complete) free speech would allow companies to lie about the efficacy of medication, lie about the ingredients of products, permit lying under oath, allow libel, insults, threats of violence etc. I am not sure I want that. I prefer clear, written rules for that.
I think that's alright. They lie, get sued, pay fines. That's why we have regulations for food and drugs.
I don't advocate that speech shouldn't have consequences. I advocate that speech shouldn't be blocked. Twitter, or any platform, shouldn't be doing the police work. They should be indifferent to the speech like a telephone company is indifferent on what people speak on the phone and those who create problems should be dealt with appropriately through relevant channels.
If J&J claims that their talc powder is good for you, their false claim shouldn't be deleted by Twitter. Instead, the appropriate authority should take care of it and victims should collect damages. Their tweet should stay there as a relic.
> I don't advocate that speech shouldn't have consequences.
We already have free speech and consequences. Twitter and Musk have nothing to do with free speech issues.
You want absolute freedom of speech but then you want to limit a company and platform in what it says, which it does by allowing or disallowing certain content? And you would prefer a single person, who has a history of devious activity, having totalitarian control over said company and platform? It doesn’t make sense.
No we don't have it on the Internet. On the internet(including YC), the norm is that your speech is removed and/or you are blocked from further speech (as a consequence) if you say the wrong thing where "wrong" is defined by the platform operators.
Musk may choose to make Twitter an absolute free speech platform but he might choose to make it something else. I hope for the former. He might end up to turn it into something horrible or just leave it as is but I don't know why would you spend $50B to do just that.
Compelling companies to host stuff in its original context in perpetuity even if they want to remove it because it continues to harm people and whilst trying to resolve social media cesspits with more aggressive real world policing and punishments sounds like the worst of both worlds...
I don't know anything about compelling companies but speech by itself cannot harm anybody.
Stuff that Hitler said are benign within the context of knowing what happened in WW2, his words are merely a historic relic and no one start putting Jews in camps just by reading his words. His words are not a spell that makes people do things when you read them. Back then his words caused harm because they were said within the context of 1930s-1940s Europe.
The context doesn't disappear when you block speech. Let the speech exists and enable fair pushback for the opponents of the said speech is the way to handle it, IMHO.
For example, instead of pretending that racists don't exists by deleting their arguments and accounts, let them say the things they have to say and enable the opponents of it have the same reach.
The "by itself" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Sure, if you post someone's home address with an allegation that they're a paedophile, the instruction to attack them doesn't harm them, it's people following the instruction. And the bombardment of words sent to harassment victims isn't the sole factor in the emotional state of harassment victims, and it's the virus that kills not the antivax sentiment etc etc.
But they harm people rather more directly than Twitter having the freedom to delete those words if its management feels that would be the responsible thing to do does...
These things happen only in consequence free environments(deleting a comment or blocking an account is not a the kind of consequence I'm talking about).
No, there's no problem there. Speech freedom being absolute doesn't have anything to do with lying, scamming, giving orders to do illegal things etc.
Think of this having absolute freedom over how you spend your money. There's no direct mechanism preventing you from buying illegal stuff but you can still get in trouble if you buy illegal stuff. This is not a contradiction.
Suing and paying fines as a means of preventing abuse of free speech isn't working. Very rich individuals can pay fines without blinking, but the really pernicious one is the lawsuits - a large legal team can make it hell for any smaller actor, can delay and run the case down, can settle privately and completely bury the issue, etc.
I'd rather see us fix our enforcement mechanisms to work better before trying to take off the filters on dangerous and violent free speech.
I don't have a strong opinion on this. Maybe there should be a button to show you why exactly you get what you get. I definitely don't like the opaque nature of these content curation algos.
> I don't advocate that speech shouldn't have consequences.
By that definition the entire world is an absolute free speech paradise already.
You can say anything you want. Sure you might be canceled, jailed, fined, killed, tortured, or anything else -- depending on what you say, who you say it to and where you say it. But you're absolutely free to say it!
In traditional sense, the free speech is implied to be about your relationship with your government. If you get jailed, fined, killed etc... by your government you obviously don't have free speech.
On the internet platforms, admins can't do any of that but they can effectively silence you(IRL silencing you is very hard).
>Free speech absolutism is possible and is beneficial
I'm not sure why everyone is talking about this as though it's on the horizon? The article doesn't mention "free speech" as a goal, it mentions:
- selling account privileges
- making HQ a homeless shelter
- edit button
In other words, monetization and PR.
The major free speech issue on Twitter is not whether certain people are allowed to be on Twitter. It's whether Twitter enables its users in carrying out harassment campaigns against people whose speech they don't like. These campaigns often feature unethical and fraudulent behavior, e.g. fake anonymous Yelp reviews complaining about an employee, encouraging/performing vandalism of the business, phone calls in the middle of the night, borderline slanderous exaggerations sent through anonymous channels, etc. It's quite misleading to characterize these internet mobs as "people exercising their right to criticism", and they tend to rely on the ability of people to anonymously take action against someone who is not anonymous. Fixing it would require more controls on Twitter, not fewer.
> I'm not sure why everyone is talking about this as though it's on the horizon? The article doesn't mention "free speech"
Because if Musk said "I have no problem with Trump or Nazis on the platform and would unban them", he wouldn't have nearly the same support as he does now.
Instead people's reaction is "yay, edit button! Go Musk Daddy!"
>Because if Musk said "I have no problem with Trump or Nazis on the platform and would unban them", he wouldn't have nearly the same support as he does now.
This remains true after he acquires it. The claim that one of the most image-obsessed investors in the world is going to make changes that are obviously unpopular seems dubious and frankly paranoid.
> Free speech absolutism is possible and is beneficial once you ensure that someone is not gaming the system, i.e. someone pretending to be more than one person.
Regardless of whether or not it would be a good idea for Twitter to remove moderation, personally my feeling is that if someone says they're a free speech absolutist and they oppose burner accounts and anonymity, then they're not actually a free speech absolutist.
It's become more common in certain circles to say that free speech is fine as long as people have a persistent ID and reputation, and I do like reputation systems to a certain degree -- but I want to point out that "a persistent ID and a reputation system" is just "social consequences" with extra steps.
I sometimes suspect that the people who propose those systems are (unintentionally) arguing for a world with even more self-policing about what people say online, and I have over time come to suspect that a world with lots of communities that have strict moderation policies and that are occasionally closed off entirely, but that generally allow more anonymous accounts -- is probably a world with more free speech (and hopefully less free speech of a harmful kind) than a world where everybody gets one voice and it's tracked everywhere. Again that's a separate conversation, but the point is that if your definition of free speech absolutism is that anyone can say anything they want wherever they are without social or political consequences, then (regardless whether or not that's a good idea) persistent identifiers are a step backwards from that goal.
> Free speech absolutism is possible and is beneficial once you ensure that someone is not gaming the system, i.e. someone pretending to be more than one person.
And how is one supposed to do that, especially against nation-state actors such as Russia and China, both of which have been caught or implicated multiple times now, or against ordinary criminals?
> Filter bubbles? Doesn't have to be a thing, you have all the data to detect bubbles and pop them by introducing them to each other.
Great idea, expose LGBT people to Christian fundamentalists, it's not like harassment from these groups and their ideology isn't one of the leading causes of suicide of LGBT people.
"Filter bubbles" are the self-organized "social mechanisms that we organically use in our daily lives to combat bad actors" you were talking about.
Completely agree. People who think unmoderated online platforms are equivalent to a flourishing state of nature have not really thought one or two steps ahead.
No thought whatsoever about the fact that increasing automation makes astroturfing, propaganda, "coordinated inauthentic activity" possible in a way that was not easily practical before.
Additionally, no one thinks about what filter bubbles really are in practice, or models what they imagine to be the healthy exchange of ideas, or whether our present choices to be selective about information have broader array of functional purposes than are captured by an oversimplifying term like "filter bubble."
I feel like this is a conversation about free speech on the internet that is due to mature, and that as it matures there will be a new inventory of 101-level fallacies broadly understood by everybody. One fallacy would be the idea that bots, trolls, harassment campaigns, mob mentality and coordinated state-based campaigns are the same as a "free market of ideas" that leads to the optimal state of exchange of ideas. Another fallacy would be the notion that any act of preferentially selecting sources is comprehensively analyzed and understood by labeling it a "filter bubble."
Why do people use the word cult when it's someone popular who they dislike? It's inaccurate and a waste of connotation.
He's not a cult leader as he's not doing cult things. Musk isn't making a new religion, he just has fans. No less than Justin Bieber annoyingly had.
He's an activist as he's trying (and succeeding) at affecting change according to his beliefs. He's also certainly an opportunist as he's an entrepreneur. What point are you trying to make with "people's best interests"? He holds his interests to heart and that might happen to align with some people.
Look up the phrases "cult of personality" and "personality cult". These are not new or controversial terms, and it's certainly not a novel application to Elon Musk's mythos, one in which he actively participates in crafting and molding. You would be naive to think this is an inaccurate portrayal.
The ability for people to call a black Twitter user the N-word, a female user to "fuck off and get raped," a liberal/conservative user to eat a bullet, as well as spreading known falsehoods and toxic content (either as gospel or for the lulz) -- all without getting banned for having "alternative views."
Free speech absolutism means spam, child porn, revenge porn, death threats, sexual harassment and defamation are all allowed. You’re cool with all that?
So again, you’re down with people disseminating child porn and sexually harassing their coworkers? Unmoderated Viagra ads and phishing scams on social networks? Because those are direct consequences of free speech absolutism.
> Free speech absolutism is possible and is beneficial ..
We (the internet) tried that with 8chan. Things kept escalating to the point where a bunch of people got murdered in a synagogue. Condoning violent echo chambers will always ALWAYS lead to significant violence.
TikTok does have filter bubbles, they're just geographic rather than profile specific. eg you wouldn't find any content on the Ukraine invasion from a Russian IP.
I just despise Twitter for its double standard. It allows the tweet of Khamenei to call for “eradication” of Israel and its people, yet it blocks so many people in the name of “inciting violence”. It blocked people who called for wearing masks or SIP in early 2020, but later blocked people who cited Nature paper. If Twitter were in the middle ages, they would for sure ban Galileo, and if they were in 19th century, they would for sure ban Darwin — because one can’t be anti-science and science can’t be wrong, right?
Twitter is a disgrace to the modern society. Their hypocrisy goes to no end.
> Free speech absolutism is possible and is beneficial once you ensure that someone is not gaming the system
First and foremost gaming seems to be nigh on unavoidable.
Secondly and most importantly, "absolutism" is not a good thing. I know I'll get downvotes but it needs to be said: some speech is not healthy for society, primarily hate speech.
And we have that today in Fox News -- actively promoting hate speech and helping to widen the divide in the US.
edit: yes, much news is garbage (CNN et al), but my point remains that speech designed to foster hate of others is not healthy and welcome dialog in this regard.
That’s all very nice sounding, but there’s a kind of gritty assembly language that this all compiles down to: “I want the high-speed electronic dissemination of information shaped like this.”
It’s an open question whether or not it’s possible to avoid shaping the firehouse in a modern liberal democracy, but you could go your whole life and never meet a person truly disinterested in bending it towards their particular tribalism.
The whole time I was at FB I had two groups of people, each screaming in one ear, that we were not doing enough to suppress the “other” people.
How do you put shit on a global electronic network without “gaming the system”? Have no bias? You got that down we should make you king.
I doubt he will make it actually work, but at least it will be fun show to watch from outside. There will be some changes if he succeeds. And the effects of those should generate plenty of content to follow.
> The takeover is unlikely to be a drawn out process. “If the deal doesn’t work, given that I don’t have confidence in management nor do I believe I can drive the necessary change in the public market, I would need to reconsider my position as a shareholder,” said Musk.
Yeah, he's given a decent carrot to the current shareholders to sell, and an even bigger stick to beat them to do it as they will lose a lot if they don't sell.
Ultimately that's the case. But the board may decide to reject the offer without doing a shareholder vote. (That's probably what they will do). That's when the shareholders sue.
1. The chance that Musk would buy Twitter, non-zero before his purchase announcement and somewhat circulating as a market rumor and thus perhaps part of speculation upholding the stock, would go to zero.
2. Musk's departure could be read by some as a vote of no-confidence in management by a capable businessman, and that after some conversations with management about strategy.
Because we're in a deep recession. Twitter and other sp500s are going to slide down regardless of what Musk does. He is offering a choice: "I jump the ship and it sinks a bit faster, or I give you a generous evacuation plan and deal with the leaks myself."
More information. It takes the usually remote possibility of a generous takeover offer off the table. Musk turned down a position on the board, signaling he thinks the company would be better off private. It arguably shows questionable judgement of the board.
Aside from the other reasons mentioned, don't forget hundreds of algos programmed to automatically sell once the price reaches certain low levels - which is bound to happen once large blocks of stock get offloaded.
> 1. selling that much stock will dent investor confidence in twitter.
I don't understand this bit. It's just Elon selling his own shares that he just bought, why would that affect investor confidence? Nothing's changed about the company itself, so the price would just go back to where it was.
> It's just Elon selling his own shares that he just bought, why would that affect investor confidence?
It could be read by a layman as "He spent a bunch of money, got a look at the internals and realized it was a bad move". In fairness it could also be interpreted as "He just fickle".
Because he bought it with the assumption that his offer would be accepted and he could improve the company. Rejecting his offer opens the door to a world in which Twitter is worth less than what he paid for it: from both Musk's perspective, as well as that of others.
It depends on why the offer is rejected. You can say "we think its worth more than that" but if your stock is trading $30 down afterward your investors might have an interesting case about your fiduciary responsibility to them.
Activist investors almost never buy the entire company outright. The objective is to buy enough stock to have influence on the board, pressure them to make changes that they think would be beneficial and then sell. I think the last time twitter was targeted by actual activist investors, they never bought more than 5-6% of the stock but that was enough to force Dorsey to make changes.
one has to wonder why those dumb old economy guys have never taken twitter apart and tried to turn it around like Musk proposes? they are probably too dumb
Yeah, any other person or company unlike Tesla wouldn't be able to fuel the levels he does... I really don't understand that, but thankfully I don't have enough money to bet against him...
I see his number one publicly visible skill as being a great shill and a master marketer. I agree that not everyone can do this. but is it possible there are skills that people at activist hedge funds have that Musk and his team may not have in equal measure?
On the contrary. They were making investments. This is Musk’s version of buying a yacht, but one that amplifies his persona and increases his wealth. Matt Levine talks about this in detail in his most recent Money Stuff piece.
I don’t understand how [0] suggests Twitter is dying. Is a power law distribution of content production on a social network that strange? What % of HN comments come from the top N accounts? Is Twitter lying about growing user numbers?
PS: Note to Musk -> If you are looking to control a company
you don't need to buy 100% of shares. Just a majority
of shares or special rights shares if they exist. Save
your money and help the less lucky ones:
hostile takeover is a common way to describe the fact that you are taking over a company by buying back its public share. Nothing unusual if you read financial news.
Interesting if he manages to take over twitter. For me Twitter has become full of people marketing themselves with lists, tweets that don't make sense out of context, replies full of bile or inane comments and animated gifs.
But I'm not convinced Musk's opinions of what is good for twitter is aligned with other content creators and consumers. Paypal, Tesla, SpaceX, Boring Company have clear goals - twitter is quite different.
Yeah. I mostly left Twitter about 9 years ago (!) for the same reasons.
I wonder if a celebrity like Musk is overestimating how important Twitter really is. Because in my view, it's a cesspool of self-promoters, hate, corporate marketing and superficial populism. I believe correcting that course is impossible. It's been like that for 10 years with no change.
#1 make twitter efficient. firing 80-90% of the employees and replacing them with effective workers and management saves a ton of money.
#2. Mitigate the bots and trolls by requiring payment and identification.
#3. Open the feed algorithm and give people more control
#4. Reduce the silencing of users.
The last one is probably going to turn out to be harder than Elon expects. If Elon owned Youtube this week he would be sued for enabling the NYC subway terrorist. Same thing will happen on Twitter once he owns it.
Did you read the lawsuit? He isn't saying that Top Gear has no right to say negative things about Tesla. He is saying that when those negative things are lies and damage the business Top Gear should pay for damages.
But you're overall point is correct, Elon's definition of Free Speech is not universally agreed upon by everyone. However, it is impossible to draw a line between acceptable and unacceptable speech that everyone will agree with.
Tesla also fired a union organizer (while tweeting about how they are free to join a union) [0], banned a journalist from buying a Tesla[1], threatened to sue another journalist[2], and tried to destroy the life of a whistleblower[3].
> There's also the other possibility that Twitter, as a product, is limited to a more niche audience than something like Facebook.
You state that as if what twitter is as a product is set in stone and delivered as a commandment. It is defined by the product people, engineers, and the executives of the company who have been doing a terrible job at that. If they were competent and the way out was to be Facebook, they should’ve been Facebook by now. FWIW, Facebook was not Facebook either. It didn’t have news feed before it copied twitter. Ironic.
#1. Efficient at what? And how do you know the amount of chaff is 80-90%? And exactly how do you find "effective" workers. Like this bullet point alone is just so hand-wavy and vague. Might as well have just said "Make twitter more gooder".
#2. This kills the twitter. First of all, no one is going to pay to read Elon Musk's tweets. Not for more than a month or two.
#3. What would "open[ing] the feed algorithm" accomplish here? I assume you mean publish the source of the algorithm so we can see how it works. Why? So I can run my own twitter? And what do you mean by "more control"? Control of what?
#4. I assume you mean fewer bans and removal of tweets. And I assume by "reduce" you don't mean eliminate. And I assume you don't want elimination because you recognize that some bans and deletions are necessary. That's a sticky wicket. You don't disagree with the action so much as the degree and/or the conditions of the action. This comes down to the question of why should your standards be preferable to twitter's?
And ironically, it's actually probably one of the easier ones to do. As I don't think you have well-defined definitions for efficiency, effectiveness, or control. Which isn't an uncommon phenomenon. It's like having a really good idea for a story/movie/series/book/whatever. As long as you never actually have to make it, the idea gets to be as awesome as it could be. But execution is the bitch.
I feel like most people must use Twitter wrong. Despite how common a criticism it is, your description is not even remotely my experience.
I don’t know why. Maybe most users follow people who they like or respect or think are good people not people who share content they care about or write interesting original tweets? Maybe they think the only recourse to not liking what they see on their timeline is to complain and wish people were better rather than unfollow? Or maybe some whole major topics/spheres of interest are just entirely toxic to the core.
Twitter is incredibly valuable to me as a source of news, insight, and discussion on a wide range of topics (from programming to space to politics to skiing and more). It’s been nothing short of revolutionary for my consumption of news and information.
Twitter is actually better than RSS (though I do miss RSS being a thing) at what RSS was designed for, because curating your follows can give a better signal to noise ratio than taking everything from a given site, AND gives you a wider range of sources because you don't personally need to discover a source to see articles from it.
It also provides for some excellent debates, discussion, and interactions between really smart people.
I do agree with Elon though. The direction of the product is poor and there are many baffling decisions. It sometimes seems like Twitter themselves don’t even know why their product is valuable or what it’s potential really is.
I’d love to see some really radical changes. The kind that might not work and could be the end of Twitter if they fail. I’d love to see Twitter become really open, even open source, become a federated network, integrate privacy and anonymity tech, etc.
We don’t know his plans and I doubt it’ll happen, but Elon is one of the few people who has demonstrated willing to risk everything on an outcome he thinks is important. I hope this is one of this cases, and his instincts are at least reasonable.
Twitter (and Reddit, and Facebook) is like beans. Beans are a great nutritious tasty food of you know how to prepare them. But if you eat raw beans directly out of the package from the producer, you will get sick or die.
I'm always baffled about this as well. I keep the people I follow heavily curated, and I don't follow more than 90 - 120 people at a time. Unfollowing and Refollowing is easy, why should I amass a list of thousands of follows like some people do?
If I notice a negative pattern or drop in quality I simply unfollow, that's it. It's the big advantage over Facebook, the relationships are not bi-directional for me as an average user.
In short: I get a quality experience and lots of useful information from Twitter because I only follow people that tweet quality content and useful tweets.
However I do have to mention that the algorithmic timeline IS really bad, so I do feel like Twitter is constantly fighting me and trying to turn my feed into polarizing crap.
Agreed, if you can’t read enough of the temporally sorted timeline the answer right now is unfollows not the algo timeline.
I would totally use something to sort and filter my feed so I could proceed it quicker and follow more insightful people. It just needs to be external to Twitter, transparent, and under my control, and have financial incentives aligned with my goals.
I actually like the idea of a marketplace for both human curated and algorithmic “edit streams” (h/t Neal Stephenson) as views over Twitter and other social/internet data that are transparent about what they filtered out or boosted and why, and could be provided by FOSS and collaborative communities as well as companies with a variety of business models.
I'm similar but I keep a hard cap of 80 accounts I follow, if I'm at that it's one in and one out.
That way every new follow comes with a cost because I have to a) drop something I thought was following b) weigh up which is least valuable.
As a result all I follow on twitter is open source projects, companies I use products from (i.e. JetBrains) and people I actually like/have something interesting to say.
It makes twitter very useful to corral all that stuff into one place.
You can't read anything relevant until you have curated who you follow, which takes a long time.
Whatever you write goes into the void, until you have gained followers, for which you must keep posting into the void for hopes of getting followers...
In short, it only works for accounts from way back with enough circlejerk, or famous people.
I joined Twitter fairly recently and am mostly following journalists and thought leaders for subjects I'm interested in, and a few high quality creators. There's an odd gem but there's still a ton of noise per signal.
I don't think Dorsey has any idea what he's doing and I think even less of Musk. The value to society that can be derived from a platform like Twitter is completely separate from the value it can bring to investors.
> For me Twitter has become full of people marketing themselves with lists, tweets that don't make sense out of context, replies full of bile or inane comments and animated gifs.
I've found twitter's quality is a direct correlation to how discerning I am about who I follow. I don't really tweet or reply, so for me it is a read-only exercise. As such, the people I follow tend to be really high-quality (I am not typically following "regular" people like friends, etc.). Journalists, experts in specific domains, etc. And I try to make sure I am following people that have views different than mine along with those I do agree with. As a result, I've noticed I read pretty detailed information well before I see it break in major news organizations, and it is surprising balanced on the whole.
"Twitterized" - means you can no longer absorb anything but simple concepts that can be delivered in a few lines, due to too much time spent on Twitter. To quote some early 20th century propaganda monkey, "The essence of propaganda is to take a complex subject, reduce it to a simple concept that a small child can understand, and then repeat, repeat, repeat."
That's what Twitter is ideal for, and that's what political and media types use it for. Add in siloed echo chambers like Facebook groups and Reddit subreddits... I urge everyone to flush it all down the toilet.
He actually dismissed Twitter’s management so I am guessing they’re slated to be demoted or fired if he takes over. Should they sell? I mean it’s such a bizarrely undervalued company. It’s like buying a plot of land on fifth avenue that’s owned by a convenience store and the store owner wants to charge for a skyscraper market rate.
I have NEVER seen an ad on Snapchat because all I do is send pictures and chat. Twitter has a user base that is a lot more engaged and can easily be captured by ads.
Twitter is where people who are or will be powerful, influential, or impactful get their information, form their opinions, and often debate really important topics.
So I’d agree it’s undervalued in terms of utility if it’s not priced an order of magnitude or more higher than Snap.
Whether that value can or should be captured as profit or is a public good, implying Twitter should operate more like a utility or non-profit is another question…
I don’t believe I have ever once seen a “debate on really important topics” on Twitter. And that’s even including the unusually large number of professors I follow.
I can point you toward endless debate by the leaders in my field about topics that are really important in my field, but my field is not itself very important.
Someone else will have to point you to the debate on really important topics.
> Twitter is where people who are or will be powerful, influential, or impactful get their information, form their opinions, and often debate really important topics.
Anecdotal counter point: I'll be powerful and influential one day, and I'm not using Twitter at all.
On a more serious note, I haven't seen any evidence for the claim that powerful people form their opinions from information on Twitter.
Twitter is literally the news breaking platform across the world. How much do you think that’s worth? I think it’s worth more than $100B under competent management.
Around the world? I think you are overestimating Twitter by a large margin. My guess is that in the US Twitter has marketing deals with media outlets which make it a relevant platform to post and consume breaking news in the first place.
In other countries I haven't seen a lot of Twitter logos on TV.
TV has nothing to do with it. I've never seen a Twitter logo on TV in the US either, except when they're reporting on Twitter as a company. GP wasn't talking about a business relationship between TV networks and Twitter.
The GP means that the journalists at the TV stations are getting their leads on what to cover from Twitter; not that audiences are watching Twitter in place of breaking news.
They probably have a police scanner running too. Should the public have that running as well to listen to all the latest news? IMO there is place for that and most people don't really need up to the second information on things happening hundreds of miles from anywhere they regularly interact with.
Who said anything about the public? A "breaking news platform" being of relevance to journalists is valuable enough for it to be a large company; whether anyone from "the public" makes direct use of it, they still indirectly depend on its existence.
Nothing to do with TV, Twitter has been established as a news breaking platform since at least the Arab spring. And it is absolutely an international phenomenon.
who even watches the news? its worth nothing for people < 30, and the people > 30 already watch what they want to watch, so twitter or not doesnt matter.
It’s interesting to contextualize this with a regular persons life. This amount will present about 1/7 of his net worth.
However unlike a traditional purchase this will be n investment and depending on how it goes, he can get even more money.
If an average person had a max net worth of 3 million this would be like them deciding to buy a 400K investment property, or a laundry mat.
That aside, this is also a great example of how easy it is to become richer if you’re rich.
Musk buys at $39 pumps all month to $54. He can either sell and easily make billions profit or take over the entire company at what can only be described as a discount compared to potential.
Not to mention twitters stock hardly does well. He can just try again on the next dip if he likes.
That's not quite how it works if you make a formal takeover offer. It's basically telling existing shareholders that he'll buy their stock at $54. If enough of them don't want to sell (depending on how it's structured), the deal falls through. It's a one-off purchase at $54 if it does go through. He can't buy more stock in the interim (I think).
1. Go to above $54, in which case musk profits and he can try again later (headwinds are strong in tech generally right now)
2. Go between $39 and $54 in which musk profits
3. Drop under $39 in which musk can further solidify his stake, for much cheaper than his takeover offer.
There’s basically no scenario in which musk loses assuming he’s serious and is willing to play the long game. Musk will either make a lot of money, or own Twitter.
IIRC the regulations are such that if you make a takeover offer, you can't do that? Not sure though, my work is only M&A-adjacent, so I'm not an expert.
I think this is an offer to the board, proposing that it compel all shareholders to sell at $54/share. The board can decide on the proposal without consulting the shareholders.
In practice the board will do what management thinks best. The various directors probably have legal duties as fiduciaries and will want to act in a manner such that they can demonstrate they performed those duties in good faith, but they will have enormous latitude so long as they observe certain forms.
There are likely procedures by which someone can force a shareholder vote on a proposal, but Musk isn't using them here. These are probably structured by the company bylaws.
> Musk buys at $39 pumps all month to $54. He can either sell and easily make billions profit or take over the entire company at what can only be described as a discount compared to potential.
He can’t sell his whole stake for a profit. There’s nowhere near enough liquidity. The moment he tries to sell billions of dollars of stock it’d tank.
He'll have to do it the same way he bought his current stake: slowly, over weeks and months, a little bit every day. A totally standard thing to ask your investment bank to do.
He owns about 70 million shares. Before he announced his stake, the stock had a daily trading volume of about 20 million. I agree it's not super slow, but also not super fast. Probably a reasonable speed given the volume.
because the price itself only indicaes that there is someone wantin to buy shares at that price - it doesnt indicate the number of shares that would go would he accept that price.
He can't sell after a move like this, it would be illegal. He's announcing his plans to not just hold but also to control the company, specifically to unlock value - means making some top level choices that makes Twitter stock move valuable. Had he dumped immediately after purchase he'd be prosecuted for market manipulation (realities of liquidity notwithstanding).
Yes, the exact timing is up to the circumstances. But selling a significant amount within the next month would almost certainly be considered an obvious manipulation attempt
It's not an obvious good idea to buy Twitter though - and is especially risky if you're not wanting to just continue to run the business as is without potentially de-stabilizing it and destroying it in the process.
This seems like a massive waste of money.
Firstly, it will kill remaining trust in twitter and secondly the opportunity cost of spending that much money, like why not expand Telsa into India, or Asia in a big way.
Yeah, I get that, but for someone who talks a lot about his singular desire to do more space exploration, things like a tunneling company, a rocket company and an electric car company make sense. Twitter doesn't fit in that group too easily.
Elon's ventures are big enough now that they are a key thing in the politics game. I 'd wager one aspect of this is making sure his voice stands out (to be able to influence politicians 'bottom up').
What I missing about this is that is he actually going to take it private or fold it to some other company with massive over valuation like Tesla... In later case it will make money for him, because people are stupid... In first case it really seem expensive wasteful thing, billions buy lot of lobbying power...
I don't think on Twitter we should be 'free speech absolutists'. Its a private company, no need for lots of people.
What I would actually like is seriously shooting down these idiotic bots. Like seriously, they have the exact same name and picture as the main account. How the fuck do we not have machine learning, fuck a bunch of bash-scripts to figure this out?
It makes the platform borderline unusable how much crypto spam bots exist on it.
That said, not a fan of Musk waste his time with Twitter. SpaceX, Tesla are plenty.
The bots are necessary for the quarterly user counts to look good during the shareholder report.
Once they've finished pretending the bot accounts have ad-watching eyeballs, they follow up a couple months later with a token crackdown of some small amount of them.
Sometimes being reckless and a heretic helps society move forward.
I'm starting to become a fan of Musk. Guy is sitting on $256B in net worth. That's so rich it's like trying to picture the distance from the earth to the sun, your brain struggles.
I get the sense he's going to be the Howard Hughes of our time. Weird ideas and a ton of money make for some interesting moves. Not everything he does will be positive, but his imprint will be one for the history books.
Non-hostile version of a takeover requires a board approval at least. Depending on the jurisdiction and the company bylaws certain amount of the shareholders (say 75%+) has to vote for the takeover to actually happen.
Edit: Under normal circumstance, single entities cannot 'easily' obtain a large share of the stocks even if they actively buy.
A person “like” him? What does that even mean? You mean a successful entrepreneur? Or will we instead only focus on what you believe to be any negative characteristics? Do us a favour if you reply: list what is great about people like Elon Musk, and then list what is bad about people like him please.
- is known to have outbursts of rage during which he shouts and insults employees
- is known to publicly humiliate employees
- has been reported to physically assault an employee
- takes revenge against journalists, Twitter users or divers - the forms of revenge includes doxxing, personally asking the person's employer to get them fired, publicly accusing the victim of pedophilia
- is a narcissistic attention whore who has complained in leaked emails that the media don't talk about him enough
Ah ok so you deliberately choose to ignore listing all his positive attributes. I can’t take your criticisms seriously because it shows wilful bias. You realize half of what you wrote could be levelled against Steve Jobs as well?
He is more competent but also much more likely to use it as a political lever and to gather information and take revenge against people he doesn't like.
I personally think this is excellent, in the great scheme of things, maybe this will open a real discussion about the real oligarchic nature of the US political and societal life at the top.
I mean, with tech titan (and second wealthiest man on the planet) Bezos owning the WaPo, the moment the tech titan (and the wealthiest man on the planet) Musk will put his hands on Twitter hopefully will also be the moment of some "enlightenment" for the educated masses. Or maybe I'm just day-dreaming.
No, I think he is saying an oligarch that has a lot of focus on the rest of the oligarchically controlled media taking control of this piece of media already controlled by the haut bourgeois oligarchy will draw more public attention to the oligarchic control of the media without actually changing the fact of that control one bit.
Which is still, IMO, foolish, given, among other things, the degree to which large swathes of the public have parasocial relationships with the particular celebrity oligarch in question, but it's not saying that making the problem worse will draw attention.
search news.google.com for "oligarch" and see the pattern of how the media has propagandistically twisted this word to only mean a specific kind of person now, conveniently excluding those that control our (Western) societies.
'Oligarchs' historically have gained influence and fielty to a nationstate. We are at a new form of Oligarchy, where the business magnates are able to operate internationally on a scale never seen before.
Historically, taxation has been the most profitable form of revenue generation. But thats no longer the case. With globalism and multi-national product creation, a single person in a nation can be many times richer than any nationstate, with technology above and beyond any nationstate. What happens when musk has electric jets and fully-reusable ICBM's, has remade the world power grid in his image, is one of few entitys even able to get to mars let alone command and control the resources of the astroid belt.
My new personal pet peeve has been the torturing of the word oligarch. It’s now come to mean “rich person I don’t like.”
From my vantage point, it’s hard to see how Elon Musk is making any governmental policy decisions - and thus isn’t an oligarch. But maybe you have some examples?
Musk is extremely rich and can buy a lot of stuff. That’s entirely different than determining agricultural policy, or putting people in jail, or conducting the census, or maintaining the border, or doing anything else that a ruler does.
> That’s entirely different than determining agricultural policy, or putting people in jail, or conducting the census, or maintaining the border, or doing anything else that a ruler does
You’re making a mistake of your own by conflating oligarchy with tyranny. They often go hand in hand, with the former generally preceding the latter. So it’s probably better to cry oligarchy before it’s a given rather than afterwards.
The poorest 70–90% of Americans effectively have no representation – there is almost no correlation between their policy preferences and the voting record of their representatives.
On the other hand, enacted policy aligns quite well with the interests of large corporations, and I'm not aware of any causal explanation besides the obvious one.
If Elon steers Tesla and SpaceX, he is indirectly steering congress (or at least has his hand on the wheel).
Being a lawmaker in the current capitalist society doesn’t make you the ruler (see lobbying). I’d say the few that rule are those with large amount of capital and influence, so oligarch is well applied here
Edit: also one of the perks for rulers on the worse regimes (authoritarian regimes, monarchies) is that law is not the same for the few that tule than for the rest, law is definitely not the same from the point of view of this wealth maxers
The US economy flits around $22 trillion per year and the US budget last year was 30% of that. There isn’t a single trillionaire in the world. The US government has the historically unprecedented ability to project hard power around the globe within hours of deciding to do so. Musk has little more than influence, and congress doesn’t seem to like him very much.
While saying any nationstate might be hyperbole, it's fair to say they surpass all but the richest.
The most recent figures I can find for Amazon's operating budget list it at well over $500B, which puts it within an order of magnitude of the single richest country in the world; it would end up in the top 10 if it were itself a country[1]
Keep in mind also that a large part of the US's wealth is derived from having these nation-state-level corporations within its financial jurisdiction.
A media company having a legal obligation to maximize profits seems at least as bad for journalism as private ownership as there's zero room for any sort of integrity.
Speaking about enlightenment, isn't it strange that Elon Musk is into politics now? I mean he wants to go to Mars, his project was "Flyin' mother nature's silver seed to a new home in the sun", and now he goes right in the opposite direction. Did he have any major setbacks with his Starship?
I'm wondering if this whole 'buy twitter' idea is some sort of displacement activity from stressful problems in either spacex or tesla. I'm a fan of both companies but I know he drives them hard and takes lots of expansion risks/gambles with them (innovation is a gamble at the end of the day).
As much as I don’t like WaPo’s Opinion columns and Twitter’s double standards in content moderation, I don’t think the two companies are puppets of their owners. The staff there have their mostly left-leaning political view point and their own moral standard. I don’t necessarily agree with their view, but it’s their view and their voice nonetheless.
That’s because they only hire staff who have the opinions that the people who own the organization want them to have. There’s nothing left-leaning about corporate censorship, which Twitter embodies. It’s all neoconservative war propaganda.
What other reason could the billionaires possibly have for owning these companies? I doubt it's out of the goodness of their hearts and given the success of their other businesses probably isn't about making money.
This is just robber barons all over again and to believe otherwise one would have to be pretty ignorant of America's history. Chomsky's best insights are about how this kind of control actually works and it isn't really that journalists are censored by owners (though this does occasionally happen).
They probably own them for a lot of reasons: WaPo was failing and running a loss at the time that Bezos purchased it. Twitter is in the same boat due to poor management; it's losing money and headed towards failure. If Musk can turn it around he can A) Make a bunch of money, B) Save a useful tool for online communications and C) Promote his values when hiring leaders at the company.
I doubt Elon is going to be personally moderating every Tweet, however it is likely that their corporate values system might change.
Buying a media outlet is like buying the yacht and buying the plane. It's like just something of the "everyone in the club has one!" types of stuff you buy when you have enough capital to run your own private country.
To expand on this, billionaires never park any significant fraction of their positive net worth in cash. Inflation rates alone make that a losing proposition.
So they look for other things to own that will lose less value over time.
You completely missed the context of my comment. This was a discussion specifically about the acquisition of media companies unrelated to the businesses which create billionaires' wealth.
Elon Musk himself said explicitly in his interview yesterday that he "doesn't care about the economics at all" which supports my argument. For Musk owning Twitter is not about making money from it the way he does from Tesla.
I realized that "left-leaning" is an inaccurate characterization. To me being left means being liberal. To quote wikipedia, "Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed and equality before the law. " And I subscribe to liberalism.
Twitter and WaPo's staff, sometimes, are nothing but liberal. A liberal wouldn't call anyone who questioned Fauci nazi or anti-science. A liberal wouldn't want to lock someone up or doxx someone just because they criticize Biden government. A liberal wouldn't celebrate the illness of Justice Thomas just because he is a conservative. A liberal wouldn't call someone who criticizes Sharia a xenophobic yet thinks it's totally okay for Khamenei to call for "eradicating" an entire nation and its people. A liberal wouldn't blatantly call Asian parents racists just because they support standard tests and entrance exams by popular schools. A liberal wouldn't call a government Nazi who didn't even try to consolidate power in the pandemic but celebrate another government for consolidating lots of power in the name of handling the pandemic.
Those people do not appear to be liberals. They are radicals.
Historically, "liberal" encompassed markets. I.e., historically, "liberalism" encompassed capitalism (in the sense of being mostly free to trade one's labor for others' goods and services). "Left-leaning" thinking is generally very suspicious of, if not outright opposed to, capitalism, and in that sense "left-leaning" is very illiberal. The meanings of these terms have shifted somewhat over time, so to equate "left-leaning" and "liberal" isn't wrong at all.
One distinction I find helps is between "capitalism" and "capitalist". To me "capitalism" == "freedom to trade property, labor, goods, and services" (which, due to human nature, does lead to wealth accumulation), while "capitalist" doesn't mean "someone who believes in capitalism" so much as "oligarch" / "robber baron".
A colleague once put it to me like so: trust in capitalism, not capitalists.
Capitalists all too often rent-seek, and because they have accumulated enough capital to have outsize political power, they are a threat to their societies.
Capitalism, in so far as it produces capitalists, is dangerous, but if the alternative is less freedom for individuals lest some of them become tomorrow's capitalists -especially if it is significantly less freedom- then I'd rather stick to capitalism. Of course, this is a result of my definition of "capitalism", and you might well disagree, but forget what word we should use to name a system with such freedoms. The important thing is the idea that those freedoms are a good thing, and that not having them is a bad thing, and that the price to pay for them is the risk of oligarchs arising, and that we need mechanisms to deal with that problem that don't throw the baby out with the bath water!
Your definition of capitalism is actually compatible with left-libertarianism, in the original sense of the word not Rothbard's, market socialism and other forms of left-anarchism and socialism. The only difference compared to your definition are the views on capital, which could be generalized as saying that those who mix their labor with capital should have democratic decision making with regard to that capital.
This is quite a rant and quite a lumping of diverse and unrelated opinions. You have quite a chip on your shoulder.
Without researching or commenting on the bulk of your strawman army, I will posit this: Wishing for the death of a harmful actor with a lifetime appointment to political office is not immoral. If there were some avenue, some knowable end date of a terrible human's influence on a critical pillar of government, maybe it wouldn't be so. Alas, we have no term limits for this role.
So you are saying that it's a coincidence that WaPo, owned by Bezos, who was in a public fued with Bernie Sanders, ran 16 hit pieces on Sanders in less than a day?
Wow, I didn't know that. By the way, the first piece in the article is titled "Bernie Sanders Pledges the US Won’t Be No. 1 in Incarceration. He’ll Need to Release Lots of Criminals". This curiously contradicts to Dem's narrative in the past two years that our criminal laws are too harsh and too racist and we should drive more leniency.
This is a good point. Everyone that thought it was great twitter was centralized and saying "it's a private company, they can censor what they want" and "go make your own platform" will have to contend with their once convenient unprincipled position.
So should AT&T be allowed to cut phone service for customers who use their phone service to discuss political opinions the AT&T execs disagree with and therefore consider “misinformation” or “lacking context”? They’re a private company, right?
I do see it differently and disagree with that perspective, but moreover would point out that we as a society for several decades have agreed that private companies do not have the right to such practices, precisely because the effect on society is so harmful.
AT&T today, under the law, does not have that power and I would argue for good reason.
Isn’t lack of moderation an even more harmful thing for society?
We have all seen how 4chan and 8chan turned out. We are in one of the most heavily moderated forums of the internet and we keep each other accountable to the system.
Lack of accountability and moderation will cause discussions to regress and devolve onto pointless dog whistles and virtue signalling.
While protecting speech is important, not all speech is important nor worthwhile.
We have moderation under the law. If you discuss something or say something that crosses a line that we as a society have deemed to be a danger we have a fair system for that.
There’s a reason we have concepts like published laws, a jury of our peers, appeals processes, etc. Replacing that with hidden arbitrary rules that are interpreted differently from one day to the next, by faceless IT oligarchs that have no accountability, no observable appeal process, etc is dystopian. You have to ask yourself, if you’re no longer using the law to make the speech rules, who is making them?
If we had what we have now over the last 150 years, where any viewpoint that isn’t aligned with the establishment in power is banned, we wouldn’t have racial integration, women’s rights, gay rights, marijuana reform, all things the political establishment would have happily banned from discussion at one point.
We have multiple concrete examples where these IT companies have banned discussion of ideas that later turned out to be 100% legitimate. You were banned for discussing the lab leak theory, a year later Fauci comes out and says it’s very possible. The New York Post had its story about Hunter Biden’s laptop banned, possibly changing the results of the election, the NYT comes out later and says the laptop is real. Silicon Valley executives should not get to decide for society what is true and what is false and what we’re allowed to discuss.
The whole “private company” thing is fine when you’re not big enough to change the results of an election or steer the discourse of our entire society. Once you are big enough to do that, you need to be hands off, which is precisely why we have common carrier laws that legally ensure that outcome.
I mean by and large the success of first generation billions and the power they manage to control kinda show with enough money it doesn't matter that he is explicit not part of the "real oligarchic nature of the US political and societal life".
Complete speculation, but after seeing that and then the offer, i immediately thought “ok, they had some negotiation, Elon made demands, the board refused, he threatened to buy the company and fire them, the board refused… and now he is following through.”
I don’t think he’s an idiot though, so there must also be some other upside here. Certainly there’s value to unlock in Twitter. Does he need the cash?
> I don’t think he’s an idiot though, so there must also be some other upside here.
Maybe he's just petty? There wasn't an upside to calling that diver a "pedo guy", but Musk was nursing a vendetta due to perceived slights in the past.
Only if he intends to through with it. Without making any claims; it is in the realms of possibility that a pissed off billionaire would intentionally tank the stock price of a company whose board offended them and make a small profit, or small loss (relatively), depending on the spread of shares he'd already bought. Even if the stock price doesn't tank, they'd spin wheels for weeks, while mired in busywork.
I’ve been very unhappy with my Twitter use because it has an addiction pattern. I set a short screen time limit on my phone, but I keep breaking it. Yet browsing the feed generally makes me feel sad and anxious.
This news may be what I needed to delete my account.
It sounds like you should be unhappy with your own addictive tendencies and not necessarily Twitter. You may want to reach out to a specialist if you feel this is negatively impacting your life, as you'll likely start doing the same with some other app.
Can it be fixed though? The hate factory is the end-game of how the software was built (follows, retweets, etc) and how people use the software. What is the plan here? Re-program Twitter? Invent a new social network where the end-game is not a hate factory?
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 666 ms ] threadHe is absolutely right over its enormous potential, all the problems it has - as a business or ones it creates for the society - can be solved.
Free speech absolutism is possible and is beneficial once you ensure that someone is not gaming the system, i.e. someone pretending to be more than one person. Add some other social mechanisms that we organically use in our daily lives to combat bad actors, for example if someone is caught BS'ing degrade their reputation and amplify the defence of the victims(thus, solve the problem of sensational lie being viewed a million times and no one seeing the correction).
Filter bubbles? Doesn't have to be a thing, you have all the data to detect bubbles and pop them by introducing them to each other. "More from the same" algos are a choice, TikTok successfully serves you new content - doesn't think that just because you liked a cat you want cats and cats only.
This BBC article [1] posted a little earlier seems to indicate it's not NFT's that are slipping here so much as interest in Twitter.
He seems to be acquiring this for the wrong motives when he could easily build a much better rival with different values.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-61102759
Bootstrapping a network the size of Twitter is nothing like easy, and might even be impossible this late in the game. Gold rushes of new users tend to wear off as new areas calcify into established concepts.
(The same would be true for launching a modern day FriendFeed / Bebo / MySpace etc)
I hear ya. It's the crowd he's buying. But to me Twitter has no "established concept". Maybe I'm the stupidest person on the planet right now, but what exactly is Twitter? Does Musk have a brilliant solution looking for a problem. Or is this just playing games with money and power for it's own sake?
It's like a watercooler around which a huge bunch of people with interesting takes and things to say on lots of different interesting things have gathered. It takes a while to find the information streams as they are not made obvious, but at least for me I got much better first hand information of both Covid and Ukrainian war from the people I follow before media.
Any of the algorithmic timelines are generally horrible, agreed.
I follow only people who tweet and retweet reasonable things. I use the timeline with content only from the people I choose to follow ("Latest"), and don't follow lunatics. This is a fairly nice experience, but needs a curated list of people to follow, building of which needs a while.
I don't think it's even necessarily about who you follow, there's a lot of pushing celebrities who are into this rubbish.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble
Finding a tight-knit specialist community goes against everything the Twitter UI encourages, but it's how most folk who are deeply loyal to the platform actually use it. When configured well, the timeline should be significantly comprised of conversations between known people talking about desirable topics.
Personally I think this is the core of the tool - free, open access to specialist communities with no membership requirements, and no need for upfront reputation. If some conversation between experts interests you and you have a question, you can just ask.
One approach is to start by following one account you really like, then mining their replies following the folk they actively engage with. Do this for a few iterations and the result will quickly become an extremely intimate, engaging, and topical timeline. It only takes a few meaningful questions and comments added to these conversations for the follows and inclusion to start flowing your way.
Can’t be. This doesn’t sound like something Elon Musk would do.
I'm torn. I think he has some good ideas (more open, paid vs. ads, crack down on bots), and for sure the necessary leadership to focus resources on those topics. On the other hand, it's not good that rich people own more media.
That sounds somewhat like the Twitter of today, and not much like a hypothetical super-free-ified twitter.
Steretypically of social media - I see Twitters greatest asset being it's current network of influencers, analysts, thinkers, artists and colleagues. All the people I want to follow are already on twitter. I don't care about the platform or the tech, I care about all of the interesting people posting there. I would claim that is the true power of the platform atm - it's network.
That’s not how I read the article at all, and Google trends confirms that NFT interest has trended down whilst Twitter holds steady.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=Nft,Twitte...
If there isn't a good theory about why that is, reshaping Twitter to be more like those failed experiments is a not a likely path to success.
How can Twitter possibly get even more liberal in terms of free speech? Just look at the trends occasionally, they are really, really stressing the boundaries of free speech and crossing into defamation territory without being censored in any way. You can't start a trend comparing a democratically elected politician to Hitler and expect no repercussions.
See, in my opinion, you should be absolutely fee to do that
> expect no repercussions.
The first "repercussion" that comes to mind is to block their account or something like that but I think this is the wrong course. When they do or say something stupid In real life, the repercussions are that they are judged as a stupid person and not simply silenced. I think, this must be the norm in social media too. Just make sure that whatever they say sticks to their identity and if later they change their mind, they can apologise and ask for forgiveness.
I have this idea where your identity can be secret to the society but known to the platform. I.e. the platform knows you as a real person, you have just one account but you have an option to post anonymously too. You use your anonymous account to engage with the community about stuff that you normally wouldn't dare(i.e. controversial political stance, your sexual orientation kind of stuff).
If you post something very bad with your anonymous account(i.e. call for violence, hate speech etc), you get your anonymous posting rights revoked and your posts deleted. You can override the deletion by de-anonimization of the posts. If whatever you said is something criminal(plans to attack this, kill that, sell dirty bomb etc), the law enforcement takes care of it and the platform stops acting as a police.
edit: Oh I missed the part where your identity is actually encrypted, not known to the platform in plain format. To challenge the platform censorship and put back your removed comments you decrypt your identity. If you are afraid of state actors coming after you, you simply move on and your identity stays secret. The platform doesn't need to be solving all the problems if the world. For example, if you are Russian dissident in Russia you first need replace Putin IRL, then you can use it as a westerner, challenging the politicians.
Oh I missed the part where your identity is actually encrypted, not known to the platform in plain format. To challenge the platform censorship and put back your removed comments you decrypt your identity. If you are afraid of state actors coming after you, you simply move on and your identity stays secret.
The platform doesn't need to be solving all the problems if the world. For example, if you are Russian dissident in Russia you first need replace Putin IRL, then you can use it as a westerner to engage in politics.
In Australia assisted Access means any encrypted data is not safe. (Because the gov could have required the introduction of a back door, without even telling the company in question.)
I think Canada has something like that in place too. So if you take part in a protest, (even on twitter) be prepared to have your bank frozen.
Anon is the only way to go.
They literally banned the President of USA. Are you seriously asking this question?
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/struggle_session
And as the president, he had the entire American media apparatus at his disposal. The premise that somehow an American president can't effectively communicate policy without a Twitter account is absurd. Previous presidents have been able to manage just fine.
Did you read their announcement when they banned him[0]? Banning the man representing, at minimum, a quarter of a country with such nakedly partisan logic is an embarrassment to anyone who wants to pretend Twitter cares about liberal political ideals. They were listening to voices in their head rather than reading what Trump wrote; voices which obviously won't tolerate anything outside a narrow, illiberal view.
[0] https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio...
A system that, based on their flimsy justifications, simply bans political opponents isn't liberal. The classic position a liberalist should take is that the service policy needs to be reformed to embody better values around free political speech.
Not that I'm too invested in the situation. Twitter will be on the way out soon enough if it doesn't pull its head in and tolerate serious dissent from the favoured narrative.
The US is very, very divided. Trump won with basically 50% support, he lost re-election, and then lost even further support when he started making up lies about election fraud. Even if morality was derived from popularity (or just profitability, if that's what you think Twitter did it for), Trump no longer had close to a majority. Maybe his comments were in line with expectations of 60% of Republicans, but the other 70% of the country thought that was what was unacceptable.
The standard under discussion seems to be free speech absolutism with the question "how much more liberal could twitter get". The ban of Trump just makes a good high profile example of Twitters current limitations on free speech.
The governmental account is still active.
Go to any political tweet and you'll see countless hateful messages, why aren't they banned, yet others are? I've never seen any reason for it. Clearly they take a side or draw a line on some issues they consider important to control, but not others.
It seems to me it would be far better in my opinion for twitter to foster strength rather than fragility by empowering users to take responsibility for their own feelings and have the tools and maturity to not read things they can't cope with, rather than trying to police what people write centrally. It absolutely could be the modern town square and would be great if it supported real freedom of speech, in my opinion.
My claim is that (in the US) if a platform allowed everything that was legal it wouldn't be popular.
However your first comment says "far better in my opinion for twitter..."
Centralization also generates other problems: authority and lack of partipation. These platforms lack proper affordances regarding discovery and curation. As a user, you're automatically gravitating towards the loudest voices, the biggest or most active communities.
For instance, on Reddit, there's a canonical /r/sports subreddit. It has 20 million fans, but it's mostly focussed on american / UK sports. Searching for "sports"doesn't yield anything comparable. Only a fraction of those 20 million fans is really active posting and commenting. There's an /r/worldsports subreddit but has a grand total of 350 redditors.
When it comes to Twitter, the net result is that only a fraction of users is responsible for the vast amount of tweets, while about 50% are basically lurkers. [1][2] In that regard, the "free speech" argument is only a real concern for a very small, yet extremely vocal fraction of Twitter users. The same applies to Reddit as well.
The worrying part isn't the "free speech" argument such as it is posited. It's that all of this results in a lack of participation in any debate. The userbases of social media might be more akin to the placid crowd on a market place listening to someone ranting of a soapbox, and less a salon where everyone actively engages and interacts with each other.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/03/16/5-facts-abo... [2] https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/11/15/2-comparing-...
You realize that Hitler was literally democratically elected?
He and his party were democratically elected to the German parliament. They proposed to form a coalition government with some other parties, which was approved by the (separately democratically-elected) president. Then he proposed legislation which would give himself wide-ranged emergency powers, which was approved by the democratically-elected parliament. Everything he did was technically legal and constitutional.
So ask yourself: When would you have blocked literal Hitler from Twitter?
I think the take-away lesson from Nazi Germany is that we need to start fighting fascism and authoritarianism much earlier in the process.
I'm German and graduate with polish-german history as honors class.
Where to even start.....
First of all, the only reason they took the political path was because Hitler's coup against the German government in 1923 failed.
The "democratic" approval you paint here happened while the SA, the NSDAP's personal thug squad, as well as the SS (no introduction necessary) had infiltrated the building and were "observing" the voting procedure. This was illegal, especially since they were uniformed for intimidation.
You are also ignoring the fact that this "technically constitutional" decision was only possible because they spontaneously (same day) changed the legal framework in a way that meant that non-present (intimidated) representatives count as present. Only this way they achieved the necessary votes.
What even legitimized this situation in the first place was an exploitation of the weak Weimar constitution (as in abuse of loopholes due to it's young nature of 20 years, same applies to the German democratic history as a whole, first time a democratic persistent government was in power was in 1918).
You are completely ignoring the Reichtagsbrandverordnung which eradicated the fundamental rights as well as the divison of powers (!) which should not have been able to be touched. This was a breach of the Weimar constitution by the way, so the Nazi rise to power was 100 % not constitutional.
And lastly you decontextualized the comparison since Hitler obviously did a lot more than just being a cheater in politics
> First of all, the only reason they took the political path was because Hitler's coup against the German government in 1923 failed.
Sure; I knew about that (and other illegal activities) and was trying to think of a way to make it clear I wasn't including that in "everything". It wasn't really possible without being awkward and taking away from the main point; so I relied on my readers to understand the implicit limitation of "everything".
As for the rest, I could have said "mostly constitutional with some bending" and it would have had the same point. Obviously digging into it, the fact that Germany at that time didn't have a tradition of democracy, and its constitution was problematic, is important to know. But most people in the US, at least, don't realize that Hitler took a mostly legal route to power at all. That's the main thing I want to get across to people.
As I said, Twitter and other major platforms have become de facto utilities and it's no longer a valid argument to claim that as private businesses they are free to do as they please because they yield too much power.
The free speech advocates really confuse free speech (in the global sense not just the American amendment) with saying anything
Free speech isn’t freedom to plan a drug deal or anything or illegal
There are definitely unenforced laws regarding harassment but they fall into the illegal category
Where it’s interesting is silencing say a pro Russia person or an anti vax person
What Twitter could do is just stop promoting and spreading content people don’t like. Rather than completely ban problem users like trump, just stop showing them in trending feeds and give people the option to block the users so you don’t see them.
Isn't this censorship?
There's also content that is regarded by mental health experts as harmful in large quantities - downranking that is also important to not cause existential harm to people.
No, they have not.
I cannot live without water or electricity; perhaps also a general Internet connection (in the modern world). I live my life just fine without Twitter.
Twitter is an online service that some people find useful and others ignore completely. There is nothing utility-like about it.
Social media have been key to political campaigning in the last 10 years or so. This made headlines in relations to the Brexit referendum in the UK and it had made headlines after Obama's first presidential campaign which was a pioneer.
If you're not on social media you're toast.
[1] https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/how-social-media...
Also, coverage of Trump by the mainstream media was likely far more effective than social media at getting him elected. If nothing else, it provided the material that got spread across social media.
Obama's victory was due in large part to social media as well, but not due to Obama's personal accounts.
For the current definition of "modern".
In the 1800s then-modern political campaigns were fought and won in newspapers and pamphlets.
Pre-WW2 then-modern political campaigns were fought and won on the radio.
Post-WW2 then-modern political campaigns were fought and won on television.
None of those were treated as public utilities AFAICT, so I'm not why the medium of communication now suddenly makes a difference (Marshal McLuhan notwithstanding).
I think that the governments should treat social media platforms similarly to other addictive/harmful substances, such as junk food, sugary drinks or tobacco... with a focus on prevention and education.
And using these platforms for official communication (from elected officials and public services) should be either prohibited or heavily discouraged.
This is probably the core motivation behind the $2/month blue checkmark fee proposed by him. You don't need to moderate social media if you can just send the cops credit card details of the person spam-posting swastikas, agitating for violence or breaking other established laws. I hope we all agree that laws against libel, glorification of crime, threatening people are not exactly censorship.
Rolling it out at scale could improve the rampant spam/astroturfing problem, even if it would be imperfect.
I'm not so sure what a four chan mode would look like. Can you please elaborate? Inspite of the constant mockery of the janitors, my understanding is they work practically around the clock for zero pay trying to keep the boards (not that I go to /b/ much) as clean as possible. It definitely is not a free for all and my understanding is most people gladly support heavy handed IP bans for example if someone posts commercial pornography on a "work safe" four channel board like technolo/g/y.
Moreover, some of the boards are very slow to the point that frequenters seem to get annoyed by a low quality post pushing down better posts by saying things like "thank you for your blog post" (I assume sarcasm, I don't know for sure) or "a thread died for this".
Also there are (from what I've read) filters available to filter out posts with certain keywords and people coming up with ways to have their posts show up for people with filters using different techniques.
I don't post anything on 4chan as I don't feel like a part of the in-crowd though and would genuinely like to know what a 4 Chan mode would look like.
I don’t think there is a requirement for being part of the in crowd to post on 4chan. Then again, I’ve never posted there either.
I think the point is that 4chan mode would be the “absolute free speech” mode. And if that is where we are going, it will be quite a ride. I can’t imagine Twitter surviving it, but it will be interesting.
I think what I've learned from 4chan is that words like (redacted) shit general in /g/ or calling OP a (redacted) is ok on 4chan specifically. Except the name(redacted) and trip(redacted), we are all pseudonymous there so when someone says you are a (redacted), they don't mean to say you are of a specific ethnicity or gender. It means you are acting like an idiot or something they disapprove of?
I can imagine a 21+ social media network that has no explicit moderation but you would still need protection from spam, flooding, and other bad actors once you get to a certain size.
The problem with that is that yesterday it was swastikas, today is the letter Z, tomorrow who knows what else we might have in store?
Also, putting in prison all the people who have displayed their swastika-love thingie online [1] would have meant Mariupol falling sooner to the Russians, a thing contrary to the beliefs of many who propose laws like that.
[1] https://twitter.com/tyengeni1954/status/1503955204059938817
If he charged $2 / month for an individual to get a blue check and $100 / month for a company to get verified then eliminated ads, could he get the staff count down to under 100 people?
I remember when Facebook bought Instagram. Instagram had something like 13 employees. Why does Twitter need two orders of magnitude more?
• How many are engineers?
• How many work in customer service?
• How many are in compliance?
• How many are in marketing?
• How many are ICs and how many are managers?
• How many are in HR?
• How many are in finance?
How many do you think is realistic? Reducing your revenue by an order of magnitude to reduce your headcount by an order of magnitude seems like a bad plan.
Right now there are 360,000 blue check marks on Twitter. If I spot you the first million blue checkmarks and the first 100,000 business profiles, that's only $144M of revenue per year. Even if that is 90% profit, $130M / year profit on a $50B investment is not particularly brag-worthy.
Once a company gets big enough, 95% of an employees job is navigating the bureaucracy. So the head count goes way up.
Companies tend to hire more employees as long as the marginal benefit to doing so is greater than the marginal cost. Even minor improvements to a product like Twitter can boost revenue by millions. Reducing the headcount might not maximise their income.
There will be exceptions though. Valve does lot more than most video-game companies with far fewer employees.
Wait a minute when did Valve go back to being a video game company?
As far as I'm concerned, if you want to force a business to censor speech, get a court order.
Which they can do, once you get over a very high bar indeed.
We have literally seen the Supreme Court protect speech advocating for violence against the Government.
>Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444 (1969), was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court interpreting the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Court held that the government cannot punish inflammatory speech unless that speech is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action".
Specifically, the Court struck down Ohio's criminal syndicalism statute, because that statute broadly prohibited the mere advocacy of violence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio
I much prefer the rule of law to the rule of Twitter mob.
This runs into a problem because of the inherent inequality of "crime".
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges.
P.S. Requiring someone to have a credit card doesn't feel like free speech absolutism to me. A pretty big number of people don't have the ability to make credit card payments. Do their voices not matter?
No, this isn't free speech absolutism, and adding a paywall to any conversation on twitter would kill the site.
What unrealized potential does Twitter have left after 16 years of existence?
Twitter is incredibly popular, but as Docker already showed, being incredibly popular doesn't have to translate to financial success.
How much potential communication was left in the human race have after the first 7,000 years since written script started appearing? The answer is, most potential was still unexplored.
Everything in modern civilisation is still young. Especially new communication platforms.
Yes, global communication marches on, but that says nothing about specific platforms. Just look at MySpace.
And Glancing over their S-1, they're making money now with the same means that they were planning to in 2013.
I’m interested and a bit nervous in what changes Musk will usher in. But I definitely see the opportunity for him to make a lot of money.
The Tiktok crowd is not the Twitter crowd. The Twitter crowd is not the Facebook crowd. The only platform that truly has cross-group viability is instagram, and that's only because it's a visual platform.
Twitter is a place where you make short, concise statements and people yell at you. Remove the character limit and it's just a feature-barren Facebook but with a bunch of people you don't even personally know. Everybody has been crying that it can "be more." It doesn't want to "be more." "Being more" is antithetical to the spirit of the enterprise and will kill it.
If there is unrealized potential, the "free speech" sites, like Gettr, etc. have not found much of it.
Worse, from that point on everything that happens as a result will be on Musk and his companies. There won't be any more repercussions for powerful politically-motivated speakers, even if they explicitly call for violence. This will motivate extreme behavior and extreme responses. Boycotts for Tesla and Starlink (whose customers almost certainly tip liberal) will absolutely be on the table.
Even if you personally love Musk, the success of his consumer-facing businesses depends on broad adoption by consumers. That's all at risk now. CEOs of this kind of business may have politics, but they traditionally avoid political firestorms because of these concerns. Musk is obviously rich enough that he doesn't care, but his shareholders probably should.
How would failing to reinstate Trump's account be damaging to his business with the government? Wouldn't it matter whether the Federal government is under a Democrat or Republican executive?
[1] https://slate.com/business/2018/03/donald-trump-wants-to-get...
But at this point, who knows who will win?
edit: oh you are the above poster lol
If this whole move ends up with trump reinstated, I just cannot support any of his companies with my money, ever. And I'll do what I can to dissuade colleagues if their values align with mine.
I guess I'll wait and see. But wanting an EV, not wanting something as small as a Zoe, or too expensive, and hating SUVs (I know, I know, too many conditions), it's hard to find an alternative. I may have to settle for an ID.3 or a Cupra if Tesla is no longer an option.
For the record, I currently do have a German car - bought it used, 12ish years.
It's terrifying that a company has that power (and has already used it) regardless of who owns it.
Literally the only people that care about any of that, are the ones deep lost in the Twitter funnel. Here's the truth: Whatever happens on Twitter, it's going to have zero effect on your personal life. All these 140 character blurps about politics, the virtue signaling, the constant anger, outrage and cancel culture, it has melted people brains. It's all just an echo chamber, tightly kept in within bounds, and people will sell their soul, define their inner being, say whatever it takes, for bogus dopamine hits. Nobody has morals or ideology on Twitter, they are all just optimizing for likes.
That's of course assuming these things aren't happening on Twitter in other spheres (which would be an interesting data point - it would indicate that it may not be something intrinsic to the format, but with current issues in Western culture).
How large is Twitters non-Western user base anyways, in percentages?
Japan and India alone account for 14.0% and 5.6% of Twitter's users, which together are higher than the amount of users in the US at 18.4%.
I suppose those who own stock are also upset, I just realized. I don't think liberals will boycott Tesla and Starlink unless they become associated with their political opponents, enough that the environmental aspect would become secondary. If that happens... well, that's a lot of sales regardless, right?
Once you are large enough to attract some trolls, if you don't have good moderation, comment quality goes to hell, and users care about that. Running a large social media site isn't kind to people who aren't willing to do what works for ideological reasons. You are fighting the trolls with a deliberate handicap and they will absolutely take advantage. So are you going to ban people who are disruptive or not?
TikTok is heavily moderated. That's why they became popular - the moderation was better than the competition.
Even in a system where moderation was administered perfectly, there would be some percentage of people who fundamentally objected to the accuracy and even legitimacy of moderation based on its outcome. A "correctly" administered system would probably still be one in which disgruntled people dismissed "correct" choices as activism, biased motives, etc.
Getting rid of vaccine misinformation would lead to antivax cranks saying the pharmaceutical industry is using their financial power to influence moderating. Getting rid of 2020 election misinformation will lead to conservative narratives about "mainstream" media silencing their voices out of political bias. The liberal narrative on moderation decisions would say it excludes minority and disempowered voices. And all sides would invoke concepts like "objectivity."
The problem is that not that all sides do it, but the opposite, that there really is a real underlying truth out there, and it really will be the case that some people are going to be systematically wrong at every level at which they register objections to moderation, and the correct response is that their concerns are unfounded.
Of course that won't make people happy, but it shows that the limits of what is possible are limits relating to human nature that won't be uniformly satisfied by any system.
> not based on mobs of activists actively trying to get their opponents banned/silenced.
Moderation literally is silencing/banning someone.
----
My (slightly uncharitable) take is that when "non-political" or "objective" gets brought up in this context it usually means anything that the poster already agrees with, and "political" or "subjective" means value judgements that the poster disagrees with.
But any moderation policy you bring up in a private space -- from banning alt-coin scams to blocking pornography to deciding what does and doesn't constitute harassment -- all of that is a balance between protecting communities and allowing people more space to speak, and making political decisions about what content does and doesn't belong in those categories.
All of these categories are socially constructed and based in part on group consensus about the types of content and people we would like to see banned/silenced.
----
I'll also point out that using a word like "objective" can sometimes make free speech policies more strict. There have been multiple points in history where we believed something to be objective and settled truth that later turned out to be false.
So not only does this ignore the reality that moderation is inherently somewhat subjective and political and needs to be in order to protect communities, it also ignores the reality that moderation is inherently somewhat subjective and political and needs to be in order to avoid over-censorship.
What is and is not settled knowledge is often a contentious debate, and by treating it like it's not a contentious debate and like the decisions about what to ban are just fully impersonal and objective, we open the door both to people who want under-moderation and (surprisingly) also to people who want over-moderation or want to quell criticism of establishment ideas. By treating these moderation decisions like they're not decisions, we allow both over-aggressive and under-aggressive moderators to hide behind a veil of objectivity and to avoid responsibility for the choices they make about the content they allow.
You can have free speech absolutism or controls to stop gaming the system. Pick one.
After that it becomes a debate over which controls to have, and the argument that multiple accounts is worse than incitement to racial hatred or antivax nonsense isn't a clear cut one.
A lot of the "free speech" complaints about social media amount to complaints about social media platforms adding content warnings about [alleged] sensational lies or penalising their reputation anyway.
Are 50% of the "censored" posts regular reporting? 1%? 0.00001%? Shouldn't a detail like that matter?
If I could make the rules, my rule for conversations about one-off examples would be that you have to immediately follow up by talking about how representative that example is of the phenomenon you are using it to illustrate.
There is no "valid" content from that tabloid.
The platform you’re using to blast it, within the confines of their platform.
You should have the freedom to start such a forum without being regulated out of existence and join such a forum without fear of isolation. You should not be able to force other privately owned forums to adopt your view.
One of the main arguments for free speech is that you let everyone talk without government interference and let private actors decide what are good and bad ideas.
Everyone in this post who wants these public platforms to be forced to host all speech sound like what they really need is to have these platforms to be nationalized and run with government rules. What’s confusing to me is the majority of the people I see who want these platforms to host all speech are also in the same group that thinks everything should be done by companies and not the government
For what it's worth, I think this fear is misplaced. Unless Elon can figure out how to run Twitter without ads, woke-bigotry is safe as long as advertisers are using woke politics to distract from their evils.
> Art. 12: No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
Exactly. And I would add, nobody who claims they are a "free speech absolutist" can stay consistent with that declaration after even one or two simple questions.
Does free speech absolutism mean unmoderated ISIS and Al-Qaeda posts are fine? Because we need to expose them to healthy debate for the benefit of societal progress? The answer typically is "well that's not speech, that's _____", and then it's a debate over why there's a special different word for the type of speech they want to prohibit.
As a free speech absolutist, "yes".
That's literally literally what the word "absolutism" in "free speech absolutism" means.
Try me.
How would you prove that's happening?
And the moral of the history is: in 2020 the COVID lab-leak hypothesis was considered a nasty idea, one that only uneducated, bitter conspiracy theorists could support. People have been banned from the effective monopolists of public discourse over this idea.
Then sometime around 2021 the same idea became acceptable.
Not surprisingly, this change in the public perception of this idea over social media followed the viewpoint of the major political party the owners of social media cheer for.
This is bad, bad, bad for political discourse and rational thinking!!
As far as I am concerned: long love the free market of ideas!
Don't get me wrong--I think the initial response to Covid was probably overzealous, and it has lasted way too long (once we had vax, everyone should have been done with it).
My point is simply that they wielded the info/idea in an ideological way, and this led to it being dismissed, whereas if the idea was discussed and established among experts first, it would have been taken more seriously. In other words, bare, unregulated, irresponsible free speech did harm in advancing this idea.
Someone will ALWAYS try to game the system.
If anything, with a majority of the world population living in illiberal or semi-liberal regimes, we need free speech absolutism more than before.
For example, Turkey banned and unbanned Facebook several times.
To go the "free speech" route everyone should have to use their real identity. I realise this excludes people under repressive governments where free speech has really been lost, and you can be thrown in jail or worse for a seemingly mundane opinion.
But for those living in a democracy make them use their real identity. Otherwise everyone is just trolling with zero consequences.
The jury is out for me, how can we say it's automatically beneficial if it's not sacred and only a mean to an end for society/people, that end depending on your views (GDP, happiness, sustainability...)?
Also IMHO like any liberal absolutism, the forces will inevitably make who has the more money own and game the system, it's a proxy for Oligarchy. It can be good but only under certain philosophical positions and economic theories that not everyone agree on.
I don't (apparently controversially) think that a lack of "free speech" is anywhere near top of the list of Twitter's problems. It's way more pressing that the amazing content on it has become completely drowned out by a cacophony of bad actors. It's not just the bot armies, but the legions of individual contributors posting and sharing obvious churnalism and outrage bait that it's _impossible_ to escape from.
I had to stop using Twitter regularly maybe a year or so ago for my own health. I could feel my blood pressure spiking every time I opened the app, and it wasn't because of algorithms or filter bubbles or censorship – if anything, the opposite. It was just increasingly not possible to use it for the things I had always loved about it—breaking news, shared conversations, interesting updates etc. from people and organisations I was interested in—without having to wade through buckets of deliberately rage-inducing shit.
Twitter itself might bear some responsibility for that. The obvious bot problem is out of control, and it was becoming increasingly user hostile to anyone who wanted to _avoid_ their attempts at "bubble popping". But maybe the bigger problem is that it's fundamentally hard to get people to behave respectfully in a a global public forum like that.
I'm not sure I see much reason to share your optimism about this.
Nobody has an answer to that problem, yet. If there is no answer, turning Twitter into a desolation for trolls will not help Twitter.
These trolls want to go back to Twitter to torment everyone who rejected them. Good luck creating shareholder value that way.
For this to work you would need a worldwide government identity check protocol implemented by all participating countries, something like OAuth so you could register only one account connected to that real identity, it could still be anonymous from other users perspective. Problem here is that even if that would make bot problem less significant it would not eliminate it. You would have farms of hacked identities and then in countries with really low income you could buy those identities (digital access) for a few dollars per piece.
What?
As it stands, free speech absolutism is being weaponized by those with the money to manipulate the crap out of it. It has no benefit in a society that is driven by the highest bidder writes the rules _and now the news_.
I hope you know what free speech absolutism entails. I don't think your statement is true at all.
Absolute (really, absolute and complete) free speech would allow companies to lie about the efficacy of medication, lie about the ingredients of products, permit lying under oath, allow libel, insults, threats of violence etc. I am not sure I want that. I prefer clear, written rules for that.
I don't advocate that speech shouldn't have consequences. I advocate that speech shouldn't be blocked. Twitter, or any platform, shouldn't be doing the police work. They should be indifferent to the speech like a telephone company is indifferent on what people speak on the phone and those who create problems should be dealt with appropriately through relevant channels.
If J&J claims that their talc powder is good for you, their false claim shouldn't be deleted by Twitter. Instead, the appropriate authority should take care of it and victims should collect damages. Their tweet should stay there as a relic.
We already have free speech and consequences. Twitter and Musk have nothing to do with free speech issues.
You want absolute freedom of speech but then you want to limit a company and platform in what it says, which it does by allowing or disallowing certain content? And you would prefer a single person, who has a history of devious activity, having totalitarian control over said company and platform? It doesn’t make sense.
No we don't have it on the Internet. On the internet(including YC), the norm is that your speech is removed and/or you are blocked from further speech (as a consequence) if you say the wrong thing where "wrong" is defined by the platform operators.
Musk may choose to make Twitter an absolute free speech platform but he might choose to make it something else. I hope for the former. He might end up to turn it into something horrible or just leave it as is but I don't know why would you spend $50B to do just that.
Stuff that Hitler said are benign within the context of knowing what happened in WW2, his words are merely a historic relic and no one start putting Jews in camps just by reading his words. His words are not a spell that makes people do things when you read them. Back then his words caused harm because they were said within the context of 1930s-1940s Europe.
The context doesn't disappear when you block speech. Let the speech exists and enable fair pushback for the opponents of the said speech is the way to handle it, IMHO.
For example, instead of pretending that racists don't exists by deleting their arguments and accounts, let them say the things they have to say and enable the opponents of it have the same reach.
The "by itself" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Sure, if you post someone's home address with an allegation that they're a paedophile, the instruction to attack them doesn't harm them, it's people following the instruction. And the bombardment of words sent to harassment victims isn't the sole factor in the emotional state of harassment victims, and it's the virus that kills not the antivax sentiment etc etc.
But they harm people rather more directly than Twitter having the freedom to delete those words if its management feels that would be the responsible thing to do does...
That's why I advocate for platforms with structured identity secrecy. Here are some more details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31025271
See the problem here?
Think of this having absolute freedom over how you spend your money. There's no direct mechanism preventing you from buying illegal stuff but you can still get in trouble if you buy illegal stuff. This is not a contradiction.
I'd rather see us fix our enforcement mechanisms to work better before trying to take off the filters on dangerous and violent free speech.
So what is your view on content ranking algorithms? Should those be illegal, to ensure that the platform is indeed completely indifferent?
and if you disallow content ranking algos on twitter, then how do you search? Who or what gets to determine what is similar and/or relevant?
By that definition the entire world is an absolute free speech paradise already.
You can say anything you want. Sure you might be canceled, jailed, fined, killed, tortured, or anything else -- depending on what you say, who you say it to and where you say it. But you're absolutely free to say it!
On the internet platforms, admins can't do any of that but they can effectively silence you(IRL silencing you is very hard).
That sure stopped Purdue from telling everyone Oxycontin isn't addictive.
I'm not sure why everyone is talking about this as though it's on the horizon? The article doesn't mention "free speech" as a goal, it mentions:
- selling account privileges
- making HQ a homeless shelter
- edit button
In other words, monetization and PR.
The major free speech issue on Twitter is not whether certain people are allowed to be on Twitter. It's whether Twitter enables its users in carrying out harassment campaigns against people whose speech they don't like. These campaigns often feature unethical and fraudulent behavior, e.g. fake anonymous Yelp reviews complaining about an employee, encouraging/performing vandalism of the business, phone calls in the middle of the night, borderline slanderous exaggerations sent through anonymous channels, etc. It's quite misleading to characterize these internet mobs as "people exercising their right to criticism", and they tend to rely on the ability of people to anonymously take action against someone who is not anonymous. Fixing it would require more controls on Twitter, not fewer.
Because if Musk said "I have no problem with Trump or Nazis on the platform and would unban them", he wouldn't have nearly the same support as he does now.
Instead people's reaction is "yay, edit button! Go Musk Daddy!"
This remains true after he acquires it. The claim that one of the most image-obsessed investors in the world is going to make changes that are obviously unpopular seems dubious and frankly paranoid.
Regardless of whether or not it would be a good idea for Twitter to remove moderation, personally my feeling is that if someone says they're a free speech absolutist and they oppose burner accounts and anonymity, then they're not actually a free speech absolutist.
It's become more common in certain circles to say that free speech is fine as long as people have a persistent ID and reputation, and I do like reputation systems to a certain degree -- but I want to point out that "a persistent ID and a reputation system" is just "social consequences" with extra steps.
I sometimes suspect that the people who propose those systems are (unintentionally) arguing for a world with even more self-policing about what people say online, and I have over time come to suspect that a world with lots of communities that have strict moderation policies and that are occasionally closed off entirely, but that generally allow more anonymous accounts -- is probably a world with more free speech (and hopefully less free speech of a harmful kind) than a world where everybody gets one voice and it's tracked everywhere. Again that's a separate conversation, but the point is that if your definition of free speech absolutism is that anyone can say anything they want wherever they are without social or political consequences, then (regardless whether or not that's a good idea) persistent identifiers are a step backwards from that goal.
And how is one supposed to do that, especially against nation-state actors such as Russia and China, both of which have been caught or implicated multiple times now, or against ordinary criminals?
> Filter bubbles? Doesn't have to be a thing, you have all the data to detect bubbles and pop them by introducing them to each other.
Great idea, expose LGBT people to Christian fundamentalists, it's not like harassment from these groups and their ideology isn't one of the leading causes of suicide of LGBT people.
"Filter bubbles" are the self-organized "social mechanisms that we organically use in our daily lives to combat bad actors" you were talking about.
No thought whatsoever about the fact that increasing automation makes astroturfing, propaganda, "coordinated inauthentic activity" possible in a way that was not easily practical before.
Additionally, no one thinks about what filter bubbles really are in practice, or models what they imagine to be the healthy exchange of ideas, or whether our present choices to be selective about information have broader array of functional purposes than are captured by an oversimplifying term like "filter bubble."
I feel like this is a conversation about free speech on the internet that is due to mature, and that as it matures there will be a new inventory of 101-level fallacies broadly understood by everybody. One fallacy would be the idea that bots, trolls, harassment campaigns, mob mentality and coordinated state-based campaigns are the same as a "free market of ideas" that leads to the optimal state of exchange of ideas. Another fallacy would be the notion that any act of preferentially selecting sources is comprehensively analyzed and understood by labeling it a "filter bubble."
In contemporary society, it seems that the kind of free speech we have seems only to lead to greater stupidity by helping bad ideas propagate.
> People who think unmoderated online platforms are equivalent to a flourishing state of nature have not really thought one or two steps ahead.
They don't look two steps behind either. All their historical analogies, for example, are sophomoric crap.
He's not a cult leader as he's not doing cult things. Musk isn't making a new religion, he just has fans. No less than Justin Bieber annoyingly had.
He's an activist as he's trying (and succeeding) at affecting change according to his beliefs. He's also certainly an opportunist as he's an entrepreneur. What point are you trying to make with "people's best interests"? He holds his interests to heart and that might happen to align with some people.
This is unbelievably naive. It’s like saying “a perfectly lassie-faire economy is possible, if no one is greedy”.
Someone will ALWAYS be trying to game the system.
The ability for people to call a black Twitter user the N-word, a female user to "fuck off and get raped," a liberal/conservative user to eat a bullet, as well as spreading known falsehoods and toxic content (either as gospel or for the lulz) -- all without getting banned for having "alternative views."
We (the internet) tried that with 8chan. Things kept escalating to the point where a bunch of people got murdered in a synagogue. Condoning violent echo chambers will always ALWAYS lead to significant violence.
I agree with most of your comment - but tiktok might be a terrible example:
"One App – Two Worlds: This Is TikTok in Russia and Ukraine (nrk.no)"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30917474
Twitter is a disgrace to the modern society. Their hypocrisy goes to no end.
Musk's actions show he doesn't support that.
First and foremost gaming seems to be nigh on unavoidable.
Secondly and most importantly, "absolutism" is not a good thing. I know I'll get downvotes but it needs to be said: some speech is not healthy for society, primarily hate speech.
And we have that today in Fox News -- actively promoting hate speech and helping to widen the divide in the US.
edit: yes, much news is garbage (CNN et al), but my point remains that speech designed to foster hate of others is not healthy and welcome dialog in this regard.
Divide and conquer for the win.
It’s an open question whether or not it’s possible to avoid shaping the firehouse in a modern liberal democracy, but you could go your whole life and never meet a person truly disinterested in bending it towards their particular tribalism.
The whole time I was at FB I had two groups of people, each screaming in one ear, that we were not doing enough to suppress the “other” people.
How do you put shit on a global electronic network without “gaming the system”? Have no bias? You got that down we should make you king.
Is he holding his own existing shares as hostage?
2. Musk exiting twitter will again dent investor confidence.
tldr there will be a huge sell-off if Musk's offer is rejected and he follows-up with dumping the stock.
If they reject and the stock goes down to $20, there will be lawsuits.
2. Musk's departure could be read by some as a vote of no-confidence in management by a capable businessman, and that after some conversations with management about strategy.
I don't understand this bit. It's just Elon selling his own shares that he just bought, why would that affect investor confidence? Nothing's changed about the company itself, so the price would just go back to where it was.
It could be read by a layman as "He spent a bunch of money, got a look at the internals and realized it was a bad move". In fairness it could also be interpreted as "He just fickle".
On the contrary. They were making investments. This is Musk’s version of buying a yacht, but one that amplifies his persona and increases his wealth. Matt Levine talks about this in detail in his most recent Money Stuff piece.
Well done to Musk for doubling down.
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/11/15/2-comparing-...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30973239
1) Buy 9 % of shares
2) Announce intention to buy 100%
3) Look share price rise
4) Sell shares
5) Profit!
PS: Note to Musk -> If you are looking to control a company you don't need to buy 100% of shares. Just a majority of shares or special rights shares if they exist. Save your money and help the less lucky ones:
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/02/mackenzie-scott-jeff...
Yeah, because you're purchasing them.
When you attempt to buy a company without the board’s consent, it is considered a hostile takeover.
But I'm not convinced Musk's opinions of what is good for twitter is aligned with other content creators and consumers. Paypal, Tesla, SpaceX, Boring Company have clear goals - twitter is quite different.
I wonder if a celebrity like Musk is overestimating how important Twitter really is. Because in my view, it's a cesspool of self-promoters, hate, corporate marketing and superficial populism. I believe correcting that course is impossible. It's been like that for 10 years with no change.
Isn't this all social media?
#1 make twitter efficient. firing 80-90% of the employees and replacing them with effective workers and management saves a ton of money.
#2. Mitigate the bots and trolls by requiring payment and identification.
#3. Open the feed algorithm and give people more control
#4. Reduce the silencing of users.
The last one is probably going to turn out to be harder than Elon expects. If Elon owned Youtube this week he would be sued for enabling the NYC subway terrorist. Same thing will happen on Twitter once he owns it.
But you're overall point is correct, Elon's definition of Free Speech is not universally agreed upon by everyone. However, it is impossible to draw a line between acceptable and unacceptable speech that everyone will agree with.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-50695593
Twitter's current cancellation policies are an abomination, but we'll see whether it gets worse with a private Musk company.
According to the court no damages were done.
Are you suggesting he wouldn't have paid if the court awarded the pedo guy damages?
[0]https://labortribune.com/tesla-found-guilty-of-union-busting... [1]https://medium.com/@salsop/banned-by-tesla-8d1f3249b9fb [2]https://www.fastcompany.com/90208132/elon-musk-allegedly-sil... [3]https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-03-13/when-elon...
If the marketing team was effective, there would be more user growth.
If the sales team was effective, there would be more revenue.
If everyone was more effective, Twitter would be worth more.
It’s probably an over-simplification, but Twitter being stagnant is not exactly a minority opinion.
More revenue, growth, or stock price is not a given regardless of who's working there.
You state that as if what twitter is as a product is set in stone and delivered as a commandment. It is defined by the product people, engineers, and the executives of the company who have been doing a terrible job at that. If they were competent and the way out was to be Facebook, they should’ve been Facebook by now. FWIW, Facebook was not Facebook either. It didn’t have news feed before it copied twitter. Ironic.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/12/03/twitter...
Let's go over the list:
#1. Efficient at what? And how do you know the amount of chaff is 80-90%? And exactly how do you find "effective" workers. Like this bullet point alone is just so hand-wavy and vague. Might as well have just said "Make twitter more gooder".
#2. This kills the twitter. First of all, no one is going to pay to read Elon Musk's tweets. Not for more than a month or two.
#3. What would "open[ing] the feed algorithm" accomplish here? I assume you mean publish the source of the algorithm so we can see how it works. Why? So I can run my own twitter? And what do you mean by "more control"? Control of what?
#4. I assume you mean fewer bans and removal of tweets. And I assume by "reduce" you don't mean eliminate. And I assume you don't want elimination because you recognize that some bans and deletions are necessary. That's a sticky wicket. You don't disagree with the action so much as the degree and/or the conditions of the action. This comes down to the question of why should your standards be preferable to twitter's?
And ironically, it's actually probably one of the easier ones to do. As I don't think you have well-defined definitions for efficiency, effectiveness, or control. Which isn't an uncommon phenomenon. It's like having a really good idea for a story/movie/series/book/whatever. As long as you never actually have to make it, the idea gets to be as awesome as it could be. But execution is the bitch.
I don’t know why. Maybe most users follow people who they like or respect or think are good people not people who share content they care about or write interesting original tweets? Maybe they think the only recourse to not liking what they see on their timeline is to complain and wish people were better rather than unfollow? Or maybe some whole major topics/spheres of interest are just entirely toxic to the core.
Twitter is incredibly valuable to me as a source of news, insight, and discussion on a wide range of topics (from programming to space to politics to skiing and more). It’s been nothing short of revolutionary for my consumption of news and information.
Twitter is actually better than RSS (though I do miss RSS being a thing) at what RSS was designed for, because curating your follows can give a better signal to noise ratio than taking everything from a given site, AND gives you a wider range of sources because you don't personally need to discover a source to see articles from it.
It also provides for some excellent debates, discussion, and interactions between really smart people.
I do agree with Elon though. The direction of the product is poor and there are many baffling decisions. It sometimes seems like Twitter themselves don’t even know why their product is valuable or what it’s potential really is.
I’d love to see some really radical changes. The kind that might not work and could be the end of Twitter if they fail. I’d love to see Twitter become really open, even open source, become a federated network, integrate privacy and anonymity tech, etc.
We don’t know his plans and I doubt it’ll happen, but Elon is one of the few people who has demonstrated willing to risk everything on an outcome he thinks is important. I hope this is one of this cases, and his instincts are at least reasonable.
The analogy works!
If I notice a negative pattern or drop in quality I simply unfollow, that's it. It's the big advantage over Facebook, the relationships are not bi-directional for me as an average user.
In short: I get a quality experience and lots of useful information from Twitter because I only follow people that tweet quality content and useful tweets.
However I do have to mention that the algorithmic timeline IS really bad, so I do feel like Twitter is constantly fighting me and trying to turn my feed into polarizing crap.
I would totally use something to sort and filter my feed so I could proceed it quicker and follow more insightful people. It just needs to be external to Twitter, transparent, and under my control, and have financial incentives aligned with my goals.
I actually like the idea of a marketplace for both human curated and algorithmic “edit streams” (h/t Neal Stephenson) as views over Twitter and other social/internet data that are transparent about what they filtered out or boosted and why, and could be provided by FOSS and collaborative communities as well as companies with a variety of business models.
It wasn't even that long ago when we had at least some of those options via external clients.
That was until Twitter started to dismantle that possibility and limited external clients much more heavily.
That way every new follow comes with a cost because I have to a) drop something I thought was following b) weigh up which is least valuable.
As a result all I follow on twitter is open source projects, companies I use products from (i.e. JetBrains) and people I actually like/have something interesting to say.
It makes twitter very useful to corral all that stuff into one place.
Whatever you write goes into the void, until you have gained followers, for which you must keep posting into the void for hopes of getting followers...
In short, it only works for accounts from way back with enough circlejerk, or famous people.
I don't think Dorsey has any idea what he's doing and I think even less of Musk. The value to society that can be derived from a platform like Twitter is completely separate from the value it can bring to investors.
I've found twitter's quality is a direct correlation to how discerning I am about who I follow. I don't really tweet or reply, so for me it is a read-only exercise. As such, the people I follow tend to be really high-quality (I am not typically following "regular" people like friends, etc.). Journalists, experts in specific domains, etc. And I try to make sure I am following people that have views different than mine along with those I do agree with. As a result, I've noticed I read pretty detailed information well before I see it break in major news organizations, and it is surprising balanced on the whole.
That's what Twitter is ideal for, and that's what political and media types use it for. Add in siloed echo chambers like Facebook groups and Reddit subreddits... I urge everyone to flush it all down the toilet.
Is it, though? Snap's market cap is $56 billion right now, and they have more MAU than Twitter (~320 million vs ~220 million).
So I’d agree it’s undervalued in terms of utility if it’s not priced an order of magnitude or more higher than Snap.
Whether that value can or should be captured as profit or is a public good, implying Twitter should operate more like a utility or non-profit is another question…
Someone else will have to point you to the debate on really important topics.
Anecdotal counter point: I'll be powerful and influential one day, and I'm not using Twitter at all.
On a more serious note, I haven't seen any evidence for the claim that powerful people form their opinions from information on Twitter.
how would you know you won't be using twitter when you do become powerful?
In other countries I haven't seen a lot of Twitter logos on TV.
See also: Reuters / Associated Press / etc.
However unlike a traditional purchase this will be n investment and depending on how it goes, he can get even more money.
If an average person had a max net worth of 3 million this would be like them deciding to buy a 400K investment property, or a laundry mat.
That aside, this is also a great example of how easy it is to become richer if you’re rich.
Musk buys at $39 pumps all month to $54. He can either sell and easily make billions profit or take over the entire company at what can only be described as a discount compared to potential.
Not to mention twitters stock hardly does well. He can just try again on the next dip if he likes.
1. Go to above $54, in which case musk profits and he can try again later (headwinds are strong in tech generally right now)
2. Go between $39 and $54 in which musk profits
3. Drop under $39 in which musk can further solidify his stake, for much cheaper than his takeover offer.
There’s basically no scenario in which musk loses assuming he’s serious and is willing to play the long game. Musk will either make a lot of money, or own Twitter.
I mean maybe he still acquires Twitter but that could be in 20 years after it's been run into the ground.
This takeover is aimed at people that wouldn’t ordinarily sell their stock at this point in time.
In practice the board will do what management thinks best. The various directors probably have legal duties as fiduciaries and will want to act in a manner such that they can demonstrate they performed those duties in good faith, but they will have enormous latitude so long as they observe certain forms.
There are likely procedures by which someone can force a shareholder vote on a proposal, but Musk isn't using them here. These are probably structured by the company bylaws.
The board doesn't have that power. If a majority of shareholders do not want to sell, they'll just replace the board if it tried such a thing.
In this case, the top 10 shareholders are almost 50% of the shareholders all by themselves, so this really comes down to what they decide to do.
He can’t sell his whole stake for a profit. There’s nowhere near enough liquidity. The moment he tries to sell billions of dollars of stock it’d tank.
Hence the implied threat of doing so if they don't agree to his terms.
Machines alone are $1-3k each depending on how old and repaired they are.
That said, it would be interesting to see how Musk would destroy Twitter, instead of seeing Twitter continue to do it themselves.
Twitter is a dying social network - sounds like a pretty good deal.
What I would actually like is seriously shooting down these idiotic bots. Like seriously, they have the exact same name and picture as the main account. How the fuck do we not have machine learning, fuck a bunch of bash-scripts to figure this out?
It makes the platform borderline unusable how much crypto spam bots exist on it.
That said, not a fan of Musk waste his time with Twitter. SpaceX, Tesla are plenty.
Once they've finished pretending the bot accounts have ad-watching eyeballs, they follow up a couple months later with a token crackdown of some small amount of them.
I'm starting to become a fan of Musk. Guy is sitting on $256B in net worth. That's so rich it's like trying to picture the distance from the earth to the sun, your brain struggles.
I get the sense he's going to be the Howard Hughes of our time. Weird ideas and a ton of money make for some interesting moves. Not everything he does will be positive, but his imprint will be one for the history books.
Name one man who has done more for EV and by extension the environment?
Name one man who has done more for SelfDriving, and by extension road safety?
Space travel?
He might fail at half what he does, but yeah..
BTW why is this called hostile?
Edit: Under normal circumstance, single entities cannot 'easily' obtain a large share of the stocks even if they actively buy.
I wonder if there's a name for this sort of behaviour?
making a subsequent buy/takeover even more easier?
Don't let him do this to Twitter.
- is deeply dishonest
- manipulative
- narcissistic
- is known to have outbursts of rage during which he shouts and insults employees
- is known to publicly humiliate employees
- has been reported to physically assault an employee
- takes revenge against journalists, Twitter users or divers - the forms of revenge includes doxxing, personally asking the person's employer to get them fired, publicly accusing the victim of pedophilia
- is a narcissistic attention whore who has complained in leaked emails that the media don't talk about him enough
- has no empathy
I mean, with tech titan (and second wealthiest man on the planet) Bezos owning the WaPo, the moment the tech titan (and the wealthiest man on the planet) Musk will put his hands on Twitter hopefully will also be the moment of some "enlightenment" for the educated masses. Or maybe I'm just day-dreaming.
If musk makes this purchase it won’t centralize power any more, but it will draw attention to how centralized that power is. Which is a good thing
Which is still, IMO, foolish, given, among other things, the degree to which large swathes of the public have parasocial relationships with the particular celebrity oligarch in question, but it's not saying that making the problem worse will draw attention.
How can it make things worse when it has literally always been the case as long as there has been “mass communication”?
Historically, taxation has been the most profitable form of revenue generation. But thats no longer the case. With globalism and multi-national product creation, a single person in a nation can be many times richer than any nationstate, with technology above and beyond any nationstate. What happens when musk has electric jets and fully-reusable ICBM's, has remade the world power grid in his image, is one of few entitys even able to get to mars let alone command and control the resources of the astroid belt.
From my vantage point, it’s hard to see how Elon Musk is making any governmental policy decisions - and thus isn’t an oligarch. But maybe you have some examples?
Musk is extremely rich and can buy a lot of stuff. That’s entirely different than determining agricultural policy, or putting people in jail, or conducting the census, or maintaining the border, or doing anything else that a ruler does.
> That’s entirely different than determining agricultural policy, or putting people in jail, or conducting the census, or maintaining the border, or doing anything else that a ruler does
You’re making a mistake of your own by conflating oligarchy with tyranny. They often go hand in hand, with the former generally preceding the latter. So it’s probably better to cry oligarchy before it’s a given rather than afterwards.
On the other hand, enacted policy aligns quite well with the interests of large corporations, and I'm not aware of any causal explanation besides the obvious one.
If Elon steers Tesla and SpaceX, he is indirectly steering congress (or at least has his hand on the wheel).
Edit: also one of the perks for rulers on the worse regimes (authoritarian regimes, monarchies) is that law is not the same for the few that tule than for the rest, law is definitely not the same from the point of view of this wealth maxers
I’m still waiting for examples of how Musk has exercised his sovereign power.
The US economy flits around $22 trillion per year and the US budget last year was 30% of that. There isn’t a single trillionaire in the world. The US government has the historically unprecedented ability to project hard power around the globe within hours of deciding to do so. Musk has little more than influence, and congress doesn’t seem to like him very much.
You know there's a giant ball of platinum floating around just outside mars thats worth 1.7 Quintillian?
Today does not represent tomorrow.
The most recent figures I can find for Amazon's operating budget list it at well over $500B, which puts it within an order of magnitude of the single richest country in the world; it would end up in the top 10 if it were itself a country[1]
Keep in mind also that a large part of the US's wealth is derived from having these nation-state-level corporations within its financial jurisdiction.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_governmen...
Run that through alot of loops and eventually corporations aree biggeer than any nationstate Vec<Nationstate> by design of the system.
Dollars speak louder than words. Musk can say anything, anytime. What he does with his money demonstrates what he believes.
This is just robber barons all over again and to believe otherwise one would have to be pretty ignorant of America's history. Chomsky's best insights are about how this kind of control actually works and it isn't really that journalists are censored by owners (though this does occasionally happen).
I doubt Elon is going to be personally moderating every Tweet, however it is likely that their corporate values system might change.
"I doubt Elon is going to be personally moderating every Tweet"
why even post this?
Why do you think he's doing neuralink eh? Wake up sheeple!
Billionaires own companies. That's what they do.
So they look for other things to own that will lose less value over time.
Elon Musk himself said explicitly in his interview yesterday that he "doesn't care about the economics at all" which supports my argument. For Musk owning Twitter is not about making money from it the way he does from Tesla.
https://twitter.com/ElectionWiz/status/1514696106223022088?s...
Twitter and WaPo's staff, sometimes, are nothing but liberal. A liberal wouldn't call anyone who questioned Fauci nazi or anti-science. A liberal wouldn't want to lock someone up or doxx someone just because they criticize Biden government. A liberal wouldn't celebrate the illness of Justice Thomas just because he is a conservative. A liberal wouldn't call someone who criticizes Sharia a xenophobic yet thinks it's totally okay for Khamenei to call for "eradicating" an entire nation and its people. A liberal wouldn't blatantly call Asian parents racists just because they support standard tests and entrance exams by popular schools. A liberal wouldn't call a government Nazi who didn't even try to consolidate power in the pandemic but celebrate another government for consolidating lots of power in the name of handling the pandemic.
Those people do not appear to be liberals. They are radicals.
One distinction I find helps is between "capitalism" and "capitalist". To me "capitalism" == "freedom to trade property, labor, goods, and services" (which, due to human nature, does lead to wealth accumulation), while "capitalist" doesn't mean "someone who believes in capitalism" so much as "oligarch" / "robber baron".
A colleague once put it to me like so: trust in capitalism, not capitalists.
Capitalists all too often rent-seek, and because they have accumulated enough capital to have outsize political power, they are a threat to their societies.
Capitalism, in so far as it produces capitalists, is dangerous, but if the alternative is less freedom for individuals lest some of them become tomorrow's capitalists -especially if it is significantly less freedom- then I'd rather stick to capitalism. Of course, this is a result of my definition of "capitalism", and you might well disagree, but forget what word we should use to name a system with such freedoms. The important thing is the idea that those freedoms are a good thing, and that not having them is a bad thing, and that the price to pay for them is the risk of oligarchs arising, and that we need mechanisms to deal with that problem that don't throw the baby out with the bath water!
Without researching or commenting on the bulk of your strawman army, I will posit this: Wishing for the death of a harmful actor with a lifetime appointment to political office is not immoral. If there were some avenue, some knowable end date of a terrible human's influence on a critical pillar of government, maybe it wouldn't be so. Alas, we have no term limits for this role.
https://fair.org/home/washington-post-ran-16-negative-storie...
Boycotting (the so called cancel culture by those it affects) is a fundamental and irreducible component of any “free” market.
At the same time, anyone is allowed to not participate on twitter or whatever and roll their own social network.
AT&T today, under the law, does not have that power and I would argue for good reason.
We have all seen how 4chan and 8chan turned out. We are in one of the most heavily moderated forums of the internet and we keep each other accountable to the system.
Lack of accountability and moderation will cause discussions to regress and devolve onto pointless dog whistles and virtue signalling.
While protecting speech is important, not all speech is important nor worthwhile.
There’s a reason we have concepts like published laws, a jury of our peers, appeals processes, etc. Replacing that with hidden arbitrary rules that are interpreted differently from one day to the next, by faceless IT oligarchs that have no accountability, no observable appeal process, etc is dystopian. You have to ask yourself, if you’re no longer using the law to make the speech rules, who is making them?
If we had what we have now over the last 150 years, where any viewpoint that isn’t aligned with the establishment in power is banned, we wouldn’t have racial integration, women’s rights, gay rights, marijuana reform, all things the political establishment would have happily banned from discussion at one point.
We have multiple concrete examples where these IT companies have banned discussion of ideas that later turned out to be 100% legitimate. You were banned for discussing the lab leak theory, a year later Fauci comes out and says it’s very possible. The New York Post had its story about Hunter Biden’s laptop banned, possibly changing the results of the election, the NYT comes out later and says the laptop is real. Silicon Valley executives should not get to decide for society what is true and what is false and what we’re allowed to discuss.
The whole “private company” thing is fine when you’re not big enough to change the results of an election or steer the discourse of our entire society. Once you are big enough to do that, you need to be hands off, which is precisely why we have common carrier laws that legally ensure that outcome.
> "There will be distractions ahead ... let's tune out the noise and stay focused on the work and what we're building"
from the other day (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30984215) meant...
I don’t think he’s an idiot though, so there must also be some other upside here. Certainly there’s value to unlock in Twitter. Does he need the cash?
Maybe he's just petty? There wasn't an upside to calling that diver a "pedo guy", but Musk was nursing a vendetta due to perceived slights in the past.
This news may be what I needed to delete my account.