That is discussed in this thread, but it's not clear what's going on with that story (comments are saying it was a prank, and the originally submitted tweet has been deleted):
Not specific to Twitter but as I understand it. Generally a data engineering team will setup the pipelines and ETL processes to turn transactional data into aggregate data necessary to run analytics.
That sounds like the move of someone who wants specifically-selected very loyal people designing systems which would tell you what's actually happening on the platform.
Who knows if that rumor is true, but it would be another red flag with Elon's approach. I can understand clearing out the old leadership team on day 1, but how quickly could Musk possibly know that there is no one on this team that could provide value to Twitter with different management or in some other role? Shooting first and asking questions later is not a good approach to managing a billion-dollar company.
Typically a lot of investigations into products and teams already take place before close. This was a weird acquisition though, so who knows if that actually was possible beforehand.
Yes, but there is a difference between "I don't think what this team is currently working on provides value to the company" and "I don't think this team or anyone on it can provide value to the company". That second viewpoint is much more definitive and should require more time and evidence to reach.
Funny how we give advice on how to manage a billion dollar company to guy who owns 2 of these . I’m not sure how many do you own, but I unfortunately don’t have any.
The idea that only people who have done a job can criticize a person doing that job is silly. We all can criticize the President for example without having led a country. Isn't that principle supposedly the underlying reason Musk bought Twitter?
Maybe it was a prank but there is strong reason to believe that he'd want to use his Dojo AI engine to do heavy data engineering for twitter. that may mean some overlap & slightly different technical profile than existing team. Oh and um .. Loyalists!
All: please don't post low-information, high-indignation comments, such as flamebait or ideological battle. We want thoughtful, curious conversation on HN.
That, and he still knows how to keep his hand near the steering wheel when the Management Autopilot begins to stray. Geez now that I think about it, his fascination with FSD makes perfect sense.
I totally disagree. Context switching a million times a day is _hard_. I'm sure Elon isn't running every little thing day to day in his companies, but it's absolutely impressive what he's able to get done.
I don't like the guy, I don't like tsla, etc. But you have to appreciate what he's been able to do. He's clearly not a dumb guy.
That skill can also be delegated away, you just need to trust the person or team doing the hiring. Delegation is one of the most scalable processes precisely because it is recursive.
On the contrary - not telling other people to do things doesn't take that much time. Especially with SpaceX, if you have a team in place you trust, you don't have to even think about telling them what to do. They present a plan you can accept or push back on.
It doesn't take much time to be the front-man to several organizations. And Musk excels at it. Being the public face of an excelling team that you assembled is a rare skillset (at the level Musk operates).
1) They don't actually spend much time on any one thing per week, on average.
2) Many of the things that count as "work" for them, at their level, are more fun—and even recuperatory—than, say, wrangling spreadsheets at your desk and attending dull-ass compulsory meetings for no reason all day. (put another way: when you have enough money, everything you do is kinda an optional hobby and not something you have to do even if you hate it)
3) They can pay to not have to worry about 90+% of the non-work shit the peons have to. Laundry? Making appointments? Arguing with insurance? Making high-quality, tasty meals? Shopping for the ingredients for those meals? Driving yourself and others places? All strictly optional. That's 10-30 hours of soul-draining bullshit per week just gone (and you can keep any of the parts that you don't find soul-draining—cook, but never have to shop for ingredients, for instance)
It's not actually clear to me that free speech (in the constitutional sense) is Elon's driving factor here.
His calculus seems to be: 1. People will find a way to say what they think online. 2. If everyone splinters into their own little self reinforcing bubbles and we can't hear each other, that is quite dangerous in the long term.
That is to say, he arrives at a similar position, but it seems to be driven more by pragmatism than idealism.
Prediction: Brain drain at Twitter begins as Elon starts enacting unpopular policies. Valuation tanks. Morale becomes non-existent and Twitter slowly starts to fade from existence while competitors begin to fill the void. I give it 3-5 years before it's gone full husk.
With a strong vision for freedom of speech and actual value enforcement (edit: of the transparency value, not just start censoring the other side), it would attract the right people. We can argue the recent dilution of Twitter's values to meddle with U.S. politics was the actual brain drain.
They’re not, they come in opposition to each other so the more you value one aspect the weaker the other becomes.
I don’t know how people who describe themselves as free speech absolutists and claim no one will be censored are even given the time of day when they simultaneously discuss enforcement policies.
We already have and had multiple sites for absolute free speech short of actual government intervention on the internet. They are either small(the various chans) or go out of business(voat and the like) because no advertiser wants to associate with the content that is created, and free speech absolutists only appear to value free speech as long as someone else is covering the costs for propagating said speech.
Musk specifically has described himself as one several times. On a less public note, I run into people online describing themselves as such fairly frequently as well
I think the Venn Diagram of free speech absolutists and competent developers is a lot smaller than Elon and most people realize.
Twitter has never been nor propertied itself to be a bastion of free speech, so I always find this pearl-clutching at "meddling in X" funny. It's a private company, it can do as it please.
I think there are hardly any free speech absolutists these days. Who's standing up for free speech when it's free speech they detest? Instead it's a bunch of people loudly defending their free speech.
Read the article, can't argue with numbers. Twitter biases towards recommending right-wing sources. Your personal experience will differ because everyone is placed in their own echo chamber.
> According to a 27-page research document, Twitter found a “statistically significant difference favouring the political right wing” in all the countries except Germany. Under the research, a value of 0% meant tweets reached the same number of users on the algorithm-tailored timeline as on its chronological counterpart, whereas a value of 100% meant tweets achieved double the reach.
There are crazy left-wing sources that are also banned, are you going to use that as "proof" that Twitter is biased against the left? You're cherrypicking.
Alex Jones. Gavin McInnis. James O'Keefe. Breitbart, which is banned 2/3rds of the time.
Fox News is for your 65+ year old uncle. It's harmless, controlled opposition. Look at the Jan 6th coverage. It exists for the left to point at and say, "see, there it is! Right wing bias!" - for one example.
If you think the most popular singular news source, with all it's own personalities, funding, controlling executives, and consistent for decades opinions is "controlled opposition", I just don't know what to tell you anymore.
There are a few reasons technical people go to work.
1. Interesting challenges
2. Exchange labor for money
3. Good working environment
4. As a nice to bullet point on their resume
It would be a very naive thing to work for a for profit company owned by a billionaire to think that you have any other “mission” than to line the pockets of a reluctant owner.
And most people who “believe in their company’s mission” aren’t working for one. Mostly it’s naive employees with statistically worthless “equity” in a startup who believed the founders Ted Talk hype.
Even if the founder sincerely believes that, once he takes VC money it doesn’t matter what he believes.
Social media are free because they act as a lubricant for commerce, especially e-commerce, via advertising. The whole freedom of speech thing, the public square, section 230 they are a bunch of distractions.
At the end of the day you gotta do what media entrepreneurs have always done: shove stuff down people's throats in exchange for money. That's it. There is nothing tough, poetic or ideological about it.
Twitter has been trying to monetize its users but they had scarce success. That was without an ideologue at the helm. Or an ideologue-lite when Dorsey was in charge.
With an ideologue at the helm the bird will fly right into the ground. Twitter needed somebody who knows how attract the crowd which buys stuff online. Paradoxically Bezos was the right fit for the bird app.
I propose a new term for the "Free speech" to say whatever hateful, bad-faith, trolling and ignorant thing anyone wants to say on someone else's website: "Platform entitlement".
>With a strong vision for platform entitlement and actual value enforcement, it would attract the right people. We can argue the recent dilution of Twitter's values to meddle with U.S. politics was the actual brain drain.
After all, the ideological concept of "free speech" as is commonly used in the United States and regarding political freedom is the freedom from government persecution to say whatever you want. It is being transformed by propagandists and those who would see our democracy crumble to mean "being allowed to freeload off of dominant viral message boards to spread whatever misinformation is deemed beneficial to my worldview".
I respect the idea that the Internet is a prerequisite to effective political speech in the Western world for audiences larger than a small town. I believe that certain layers of the World Wide Web, namely DNS/TLS/Network/Hosting do have a "common carrier" obligation to some extent which should possibly be codified.
I do, however, take issue with the idea that individual websites currently have any obligation to be "neutral", though I do believe in being transparent in any potential bias. I also believe it's misleading to call taking down trolls and bad faith bots as "biased".
To be straight to the point, I honestly doubt the motive of anyone who actively criticizes about free speech issues on twitter, given the kinds of democracy-destroying people who have been largely affected by their moderation policies.
Very well put. It should go both ways, and the perception that the platform is fair to each respective stakeholder need not be symmetrical. It should be possible that one political demographic is "deplatformed" more, based purely on their promotion of values that are antisocial and immoral in a community setting. Fairness cannot be determined on a demographic basis alone.
Twitter clearly has a problem of technical competence somewhere. It may be withing the people he is planning to change, or it may be somewhere else and those people are the only reason it barely works.
But the one thing that is obvious is that everything there is not fine.
Prediction: Twitter becomes more efficient, focused and profitable than they ever have been. And it will return to the platform neutrality and free speech ideals it had prior to 2015ish.
What is this pre-2015 neutrality you speak of? Wikipedia mentions a 2015 campaign of trying to ban ISIS propaganda accounts. Are you talking about that?
"If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor"
Of course, it's not always clear what injustice is and reasonable people might disagree, but I think there are certain minimum standards, like "anti-semitism and blatant racism are bad".
"Consequences" are enacted by an authority. The thing that happens on Twitter is "mob justice". EDIT: I did not read carefully before commenting, this comment is irrelevant.
The 'authority' mentioned was an employer, who is free to hire and fire people at will in he US, in many cases. Turns out that employing, say, a nazi, is not popular at many companies.
This can certainly go to far, but it's kind of up to the employer, isn't it.
There's a lot of people on twitter who just want to say the n-word, want to say Kanye is right about Jewish people, want to say LGBT people are groomers, etc. I personally don't see the justice in letting people who want to cause material harm to others - people who'd put me in a camp if they had their way - like that have a platform, no-questions-asked
There's a philosophical thing here and people have different views. The ACLU used to defend the right for the KKK and neo-nazis to parade around in jewish neighborhoods doing holocaust denial, etc, and if I remember correctly many of their lawyers doing such work were Jewish. The view if those people are idiots, and they can say this if they want, and more decent people (who outnumber the bigots) will counter the bigoted speech with their own.
No one can credibly deny that some speech is harmful. We'd all like to suppress some speech that we don't like, but the reason free speech advocates take the position they take (generally) is that once speech is prohibited the status quo regime will ban legitimate criticisms. So the good has to be accepted with the bad.
It's a tough issue. If I'm honest I favor censorship of views that I believe are harmful, but would object strenuously if my point of view is censored. I also think being called slurs, etc, is an unpleasant user experience, to say the least, so from a business perspective if nothing else I get why that is censored. Still, the censorship has gone too far in my view. We need to figure out a way to circle this square.
Beyond all that, which is a tough issue, Twitter is also a company, and if people are freely throwing around the N word and crazy conspiracy garbage, normal people are going to leave. Advertisers are going to leave with them.
I guess Musk is going to put less emphasis on outright bans, and more on “quarantining”. He might not ban an account posting racial slurs all day long, but it won’t be recommended, it won’t come up in search unless you set some special flag, and non-followers who visit it will get some kind of warning interstitial “Many users have reported this content as highly offensive, are you sure you want to view it?” Ads will only be displayed if the advertiser explicitly opts in.
They still take these cases. (It is a bit complicated, individual ACLU chapters have a lot of autonomy, and they do not all agree with each other in all ways.)
So I see a substantial difference.
On one hand, you have lawyers from a nonprofit arguing in court that, while someone's views may be abhorrent, they are legal, and the principle matters more than the harm.
On the other, you have a for-profit entity tilting the landscape upon that speech rests, and as the raging debates about this stuff have shown, is difficult to distinguish profit from other motives.
Running a company with specific ideological priors looks a lot different to me than defending assholes for past speech on principle.
I suppose I have a biased view on this, as a holder of some beliefs that already get censored by normal society, but I really just see it as the cost of doing business. It isn't the end of me as an active agent in society who tries to spread my views, in the same way that blocking Nick Fuentes would end Nazism; just something you work with or around.
Following that logic, I support censoring/deplatforming fascists et al. because I want to hurt their ability to do fascism, not for some higher principle of striving towards a perfect, values-neutral marketplace of ideas. Speech is just another front on the plains of power.
I'd be curious to hear examples of views that people consider reasonable that are censored by normal society. Not implying that they don't exist, just that most of the views that are "censored by normal society" that I'm personally aware of are views that I have no interest in defending.
There's quite a difference between Twitter and public street demonstration permits. Allowing Nazis to get the same opportunity to gather on a public street as any other interest group is inherently limited. If they were gathering in front of every house of every Jewish person in the country 24/7/365, that would no longer be protected speech. It would be harassment.
Granting, of course, Twitter goes beyond this. They ban all hate speech at all, no matter how limited it is, but they're a private platform, which gets to the real heart of the issue. Everyone that cares deeply about this who is in agreement with Elon's side and isn't just being petulant about having personally been banned seems to equate Twitter with some kind of true public square or some necessary platform that handicaps a political movement if it can't access it. I just don't see this. The public streets, the government itself, I have no choice but to use and participate in. Everyone has to. But I have never had a Twitter account, never visit the site, and seem to have gotten along fine like that for over 40 years. Trump got banned and is still likely to win his party's presidential nomination in two years. It hasn't materially impacted his ability to get his message out and reach followers at all. Everything Kanye says is still going to be on every headline in every news service in the country the same day, and if he releases an album, his fans will still know. He doesn't need Twitter. I just don't see how that isn't definitive proof that Twitter is not this true common carrier people seem to think it is. You don't need access to one specific private platform to be heard. They're not like an electric utility with a local monopoly that is truly your only option to access a critical service. Trump and Kanye were both well known with hoards of followers before Twitter ever existed, and people would still hang on their words if Twitter completely disappeared tomorrow.
Hasn’t ISIS been allowed to be on Twitter? Who could possibly be worse than ISIS?
My neighbor Sam down the street likes to say the n-word sometimes and thinks offering hormones to kids is grooming. Still, I don’t think all the Sams in the US would ever be able to do as much material harm by having access to Twitter as ISIS does in one afternoon. Could be wrong.
I don’t think ISIS is currently on Twitter. They were some years back, but was that because Twitter had decided to allow them, or was that just tardiness in enforcement?
ISIS is a sanctioned entity. Knowingly allowing them, or anyone identified as a member, to post on Twitter, would likely be illegal under sanctions laws.
To the extent that Twitter’s approach to ISIS is not mandated by sanctions laws-I don’t see Musk changing Twitter’s corporate policies on ISIS-he has zero sympathy for them and no doubt views them as a threat to humanity’s future.
Musk is likely good news for Donald Trump, Babylon Bee, Jordan Peterson, Libs of TikTok, etc - but no change for ISIS.
The Taliban is somewhat of a different situation - they are the de facto government of Afghanistan, and are far less extreme than ISIS. While they have supported anti-Western terrorist attacks in the past, they claim to have changed, and it looks like their claim may be true.
I still wonder about the legalities of Twitter allowing them to use the site, given they are still under US sanctions. It is possible, however, that the US government has (quietly) asked Twitter to allow it, as a diplomatic/political calculation. Sanctions concerns disappear if the government is asking you to disregard them (they can give you a formal legal exemption from them - even secretly; even without a formal exemption, if the government asks you to do something, that is an estoppel against them taking legal action for acceding to your request.)
What is your point? I am not sure why I even have to mention this, because to me it is apparent, but statements and opinions that are already a part of the currently shared belief system do not need protections at all. It is the all the other stuff that is often ugly, which is why it DOES require protection ( precisely because people are scared of things that make them uncomfortable and will seek to restrict them as much as possible ).
<<people who'd put me in a camp if they had their way
Eh. This train is never late. Just wait until you find out that eventually all the out groups are thinned out and you are identified as the next one in line. That is the normal course of things. People are assholes. Freedom of speech is a basic safety valve.
I dislike that I even have to explain those. All this stuff should be covered in basic social studies.
I don't think views deserve protection just by dint of existing and being expressed. Someone calling me Jew, Jew, Jew isn't a brave or novel thought that lamestrain society is too square to stomach, it's just a pretense to murder.
If you want to talk about basic social studies, I'd suggest the paradox of tolerance.
It is not about being new or being novel ( edit1: or breaking new ground, or waking up squares, being hip or any of those labels ). It is about something a lot simpler than that and this goes to the crux of the matter.
Would you feel comfortable if your opinion that you just expressed above was being targeted for no other reason that it exists and someone somewhere finds it abhorrent. Do you not agree it is a rather bad standard just because, well, it is very general and can be applied to anything down the line?
Edit2:
Yes, I am invoking the "what if that was done to you".
edit3:
<<I'd suggest the paradox of tolerance.
There is no paradox. What you have is a conflict of values. From my perspective, things are either in balance or they are not. I personally would postulate that "escape from freedom" is a much more applicable here, where the pendulum swings from one extreme to the other.
Personally, I do find it mildly amusing that the groups that were persecuted not that long ago are embarking on their own witch hunts shortly thereafter. It is a fascinating insight into the human condition.
<<If you say yes, then...well there's no further discussion to have, and you scare me.
Heh. I too would love to live in such a binary word, where things are simply black or white and there are no shades of grey. I also love how you think this allows to bow out of the discussion. For the record, it does not and I challenge you to openly discuss it. Otherwise, and I am not using this phrase lightly here, you are an intellectual fraud pretending to engage in a good faith argument.
Now, the actual response to:
<< Should I be allowed to hold a rally and say "Someone needs to start lynching some $RACIAL_SLURs"?
Is that even a real question? Are you really drawing a line at name calling? This the hill you are willing to die on? I might be willing to accept some limits along the lines of the precedent that happens to include relatively conclusive standard of "immediate and present danger", but KKK members going through the streets shouting slogans using words you find offensive is absolutely something I am willing to defend, because I actually happen to believe in the founding document of this nation. Hell, I actually promised I will uphold it. I was not born into it and blessed with apathy. I voluntarily chose that path, because I happen to believe in ideals it espouses.
If you think I am the person to be scared of, I feel genuinely concerned for you. I would recommend less.. whatever it is that got you wound up.
Wait.
Are you arguing that "Someone needs to start lynching" equates to clear and present danger", because I am relatively certain a lot would depend on the context AND the resulting consequences? Like.. not to search very far, and to put things in perspective, to what extent did BLM protest rhetoric contributed to the resulting riots. Should we start locking them up?
I can give you that it is a close call, but nowhere near as clear you as you make it seem.
Either way, you may want to reconsider your argument a little. Those same rules are supposed to protect everyone. There is a reason for it.
Edit:
<< How far are you willing to take the notion of Freedom of Speech?
Notion. It is an idea enshrined in god damn law. It is a right. And it is one of the few things founders agreed upon. And it is the very first one.
You know what is a notion? Deconstructionism. There is a difference.
> I personally don't see the justice in letting people who want to cause material harm to others - people who'd put me in a camp if they had their way - like that have a platform
Should Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman, and Smith & Wesson be allowed to have Twitter accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers each?
Honestly, if you want to be really consistent, almost every world government should have its officials off Twitter. Any US politician who was in power between 2001 and 2020 did far more "material harm to others"[0] than any given teenager who wants to say racial slurs.
> Should Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman, and Smith & Wesson be allowed to have Twitter accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers each?
> Any US politician who was in power between 2001 and 2020 did far more "material harm to others"[0] than any given teenager who wants to say racial slurs.
That comparison is invalid because those companies don't commit their purported harm on Twitter. Same with government officials. Even Kim Jong Un has a Twitter account https://twitter.com/official_kju
The "teenager" (or billionaire influencer) dropping racial slurs and either targeted or broad threats uses social media as the method of the harm they inflict. Mainstream social media companies are concerned with their platforms being used for harm.
"Material harm"? As in physical harm via threats of violence or calls to violent behavior? Or emotional and damaging harm? I honestly think people should generally just be nicer, it's more productive.
Kayne saying "death", but he has since claimed he reversed "def" and "death", that tweet is understandably considered violence. I don't believe hate is violence. I believe this is a common misconception of people who haven't experienced actual violence or true personal danger. I in no way claim this should be some right of passage. Speach isn't deformative or physically damaging. The idea speach is a "frontier" or is the "catalyst" is misleading. Many organizations have direct calls to action for violence and are still posting today.
I think they should be free to say it. I don't think it should promoted by twitter. I'd like that tweets by people with followers over 1 million be subject to some sort of accuracy standards
In that case, it is impossible for Twitter to achieve neutrality (in that they can't control how viewers respond to a particular individual's odious tweets). If anything removing these sorts of tweets was a nice gift to bigots, covering their tracks for them.
As with many of the things Elon has tweeted or said, appearing to value free speech for Twitter was just him appealing to conservatives, upset with their perception of cancel culture.
Wait to see if Elon actually makes any TOS and policy changes in the next month, and debate then.
Because liberal used to mean "supporting liberty" (the classical definition). But it has come to mean "agreeing with a certain set of beliefs and policies", and (recently) trying to de-platform anyone who publicly disagrees. And, in our bipolar political spectrum, those who disagree with the "liberals" are the "conservatives", who are therefore the ones the "liberals" are trying to de-platform.
So the "conservatives" believe very strongly in free speech (at the moment) because it's their speech that is currently getting crimped. And, seeing the trends, they think it's likely to get worse in the future. (As, say, anything disagreeing with the current "liberal" position gets labeled "racist" or "transphobic" or something, designed to make it virtuous to censor.)
Liberalism is now conservative. Note that conservative and progressive as labels apply relative to the status quo - what was in your youth is not necessarily any longer.
free speech is a liberal value. The conservatives, however, have tried to hide behind 'free speech' in order to compel speech from private entities, and have tried to pretend that they don't have a hammerlock on the mainstream media, and have tried to pretend that 'big tech' is nebulously conspiring against them whenever it enacts basic decency community standards.
Conservatives have shown they have a blind spot for perceived persecution, at least from the perspective of moderates on the sidelines.
It leaves conservatives open to being conned by everything from Chinese electronics manufacturers [1] to bankrupt reality TV stars [2]. Misconstruing TOS agreement violations as censorship persecution makes it easy for billionaires to win conservative admiration without actually doing anything.
The classic definition was basically the freedom to criticize your government without repercussions.
Conservatives now define it as the permission to spread deliberate misinformation and overt racism and bigotry without consequences from either the government OR private entities.
The American constitution has done a uniquely good job of enumerating those limits. It seems like a stretch to paint a de facto adherence to free speech (as outlined by the law of the land in a given jurisdiction) as oppressive, when the status quo has been unilateral normative judgements of relevant political speech by an unrepresentative cabal of employee-activists.
It's tricky because these platforms are huge, and are a public square in many ways. But they are also companies. The local newspaper is not required to print some anti-semitic screed. A local bar can kick out nazis. People do have alternative ways of freely expressing themselves.
Due to the massive size of these platforms, it feels a bit different, though in that being removed from one could really alter your online presence.
I don't have all the answers. And I suspect that Elon Musk does not, either, but we will have to wait and see...
Sure, I agree Musk underestimates the scope of the challenge.
I'm personally of the belief that network effects have granted Twitter a relatively unassailable cultural position, or at least enough of a moat to greatly reduce competitive pressures, and so should be subjected to different standards than a local bar or paper -- and if the analogy is to a newspaper, then Twitter should be treated as a publisher with all the attendant regulatory baggage that carries. It's hard for them to argue they have a right, as a private company, to shape the conversation, and in the same breath claim they're shielded from legal responsibility for what takes place on their site.
It's definitely a tricky debate, but in my personal value stack I place individuals' freedom of speech much higher than a private company's right to refuse service, so that's where I fall.
The American constitution contains like ten words about free speech, zero of which provide any explanation for what free speech means. Maybe you could say that the particular legal interpretation of those words in the US has done a good job enumerating the limits of free speech - but the text of the constitution sure as hell hasn't.
Legal interpretation of the constitution has also very clearly found that a huge collection of actual literal Nazis marching around shouting "death to jews" at the top of their lungs is a-okay. Excuse me if I'm not super excited for that to be present on various social media platforms.
Sorry, I should have been clearer, I thought it'd be evident that I meant the legal understanding that emerged from the constitution, rather than the text itself.
Of course I despise the vitriol spewed on twitter as much as anyone else, but I'd sooner that idiocy be exposed and ridiculed than cede control over acceptable speech to ideologically motivated moderators in the inevitable instances where the ethical lines are blurrier. I realize that's a bit of an antiquated view, and the prevalent opinion is that these people can't be reasoned with and thus shouldn't be platformed, but I truly believe that that cynicism is a greater threat to our liberal institutions than the odd troll or bigot making racist remarks with 25 followers.
I think it is rather important. Because once you recognize that this is the legal understanding rather than the text itself a really critical thing emerges. Interpretation has not been the same throughout history. When was the time when our interpretation of the constitution produced optimal social media moderation policy? If it is now, what happens when in the future interpretation of speech rights changes? Or even right now? "Bong hits for Jesus"-kid was punished and that was upheld as consistent with the 1st amendment.
> but I'd sooner that idiocy be exposed and ridiculed than cede control over acceptable speech to ideologically motivated moderators in the inevitable instances where the ethical lines are blurrier.
Great. Will you also be willing to be the person who experiences a torrent of hate speech directed at them? This is not an abstract thing where somebody else can "expose and ridicule" proponents of hate. You need to be willing to have the Nazis literally protest at your home and your job every single day and not leave.
> the odd troll or bigot making racist remarks with 25 followers.
If you think this is an honest portrayal of the state of hate on social media when moderation is reduced to "everything that isn't illegal" then you are grossly mistaken.
The fact that legal interpretation has changed over time is a feature; the essential point is that it is within the democratic institution of the judicial system that the debate over and enforcement of acceptable speech should occur.
Yes, I am committed to backing up my philosophical attachment to free speech at the expense of personal inconvenience. I realize that's an empty statement without actually being subjected to that reality, but that's the best I can do.
If I'm wrong about the extent to which hate speech proliferates in unmoderated spaces (absent the adverse selection effect for sites like 4chan), then that's all the more reason to address that undercurrent of our societies. If anything, I'd argue pushing people off platforms where they might encounter dissenting views exacerbates radicalization.
I don't believe that it is the best you can do. What you can do is become an active ally, through your time or money, for the people who will suffer by having hate invade their spaces.
> Legal interpretation of the constitution has also very clearly found that a huge collection of actual literal Nazis marching around shouting "death to jews" at the top of their lungs is a-okay.
Not okay, but not illegal, and better than the alternative i.e. a society without freedom of speech (as the Reich was, or Weimar Germany).
2. I probably take the threats to your elections more seriously than you (I read whole of the the Antrim County computer forensics report, I'll never get that time back but I put in the effort).
3. To label ideological opponents with the label of a mental illness simply for disagreement is a poor show.
4. I take anyone being banned from anything for speech that should be free (which is almost all speech) very seriously.
5. "haha Nazis are shit" is below par for HN. Try not to waste my time and others with stuff you can safely spew out on Twitter and get likes for even though it's vapid.
> I probably take the threats to your elections more seriously than you (I read whole of the the Antrim County computer forensics report, I'll never get that time back but I put in the effort).
I don't think that's true, since you think that people being banned on social media is a greater threat to a fall to authoritarianism.
> To label ideological opponents with the label of a mental illness simply for disagreement is a poor show.
I did not do this. Nor is this just "simply for disagreement." Argument over the best way of funding retirement savings programs is distinct from arguments over whether or not to throw gay people in prison, for example.
> I take anyone being banned from anything for speech that should be free (which is almost all speech) very seriously.
I'm sure you do. I hope that you also donate your time and money to those who suffer at the hands of people spreading hate.
> haha Nazis are shit" is below par for HN. Try not to waste my time and others with stuff you can safely spew out on Twitter and get likes for even though it's vapid.
Nazis are shit. You are treating me like a child. You use this "you talk like you are on Twitter" move pretty often as a way of talking down to people.
> you think that people being banned on social media is a greater threat to a fall to authoritarianism.
That's a strange reading that seems to assume that free speech goes hand in hand with authoritarianism, a laughable notion. Free speech is the antithesis of authoritarianism. No authoritarian has ever allowed anything approaching freedom of speech within their jurisdiction and sometimes even enforce it far beyond. As such, what you think is wrong.
> > To label ideological opponents with the label of a mental illness simply for disagreement is a poor show.
> I did not do this.
A phobia is a mental illness, you call your ideological opponents transphobes, so you did do this. It's pathetic name calling.
> I hope that you also donate your time and money to those who suffer at the hands of people spreading hate.
I'm here right now spending my time doing just that because you quite clearly do hate your opponents.
> Nazis are shit. You are treating me like a child.
No one here has claimed that Nazis aren't shit but you're acting like a teenager high on self righteousness that thinks proclaiming that is some kind of insight for the rest of us. It is childish.
As I wrote, HN isn't the place, and one reason I bring it up far too often is because far too often of late I see people, like yourself, treating it as such. I make no apologies for wanting the standards to remain high.
Wow. You complain about the quality of discourse and then resort to arguing that transphobia means something completely different than its ordinary use (and obviously my intention) based entirely on definition-by-etymology. Of everything in this thread between you and me, this is the most clearly in bad faith.
Tell you what. I'll change all my words if it'll make you take me seriously. Substitute "bigots against trans people." It'll change none of my meaning.
It's ordinary use is the one I'm complaining about. It's a slur that implies irrational hatred, disgust and fear - that is a mental illness, hence why phobia is appended to the objects of fear.
There's a reason such a misnomer is used, and there's a reason why those using it such as yourself, seem to overlook its utterly mistaken connotations.
> Substitute "bigots against trans people." It'll change none of my meaning.
I know, but you're begging the question, while being an ironic hypocrite. How about you substitute a specific and accurate term for those you disagree with, or would it be too difficult for you to actually drop the ad hominem for even a moment out of fear of being shown up?
If twitter held itself to the same standard as the government regarding free speech everyone would leave within a year. Unmoderated platforms have never been successful.
> The American constitution has done a uniquely good job of enumerating those limits.
Assuming you're referring to constitutional law jurisprudence here and not the First Amendment's meager words here, I don't think I can agree with this statement. The short summary of the jurisprudence is that the government has no powers of censorship whatsoever, and the margins of where speech can become illegal are so far away that it's basically impossible to reach them (e.g., to reach the bar in Brandenburg, you more or less need to be at the head of a literal mob getting ready to lynch somebody). Unless you're a student.
As a guideline for moderation, it's absolute shit. There's ample evidence that absence of moderation will cause forums to degrade into cesspools, and the guideline of First Amendment jurisprudence is that the government is not permitted to be a moderator.
Yes, my guess is they piss off the least amount of people right now, Musk is likely to make it much worse. Still, I might get an edit button so I'll be happy about that!
In my experience with Twitter, and most situations, the who is the oppressor and who is the oppressed is largely subjective. There is very little objectivity. The old twitter way was; "any speech that makes me offended or uncomfortable is oppressive" ...which would ultimately lead to a shadow ban or permanent "suspension" of the account labelled as "oppressive."
A great example of this is the thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of accounts, which were permanently banned in October of 2021. Their own thought crime was posting revelations from Ashely Biden's diary and Hunter Biden's laptop. The excuse was " Russian disinformation" but news of late have proven Twitter's statement as clear disinformation in itself.
Musk had already said content that is illegal won't be permitted, and troublemakers will be dealt with, and that perma-ban will be final course, not the first & only.
Neutrality is neutrality. <---- that's a big period. Last time I went to Switzerland, didn't look like an oppressive place to me. Actually the rest of the world did.
Twitter is already biased towards right-wing sources, despite the right being the loudest at claiming persecution. [1] If Twitter actually became more platform neutral, then ironically we should see a shift towards the left.
> And it will return to the platform neutrality and free speech ideals it had prior to 2015ish.
I'm not sure that's possible. Even if you could magically roll back Twitter to pre-2015 (staff, code, rules, etc.), the world has changed and the average Twitter user has changed.
There are still a lot of smart people there that are working on hard at scale problems. Just because the stock is stagnant doesn't mean there aren't smart people there keeping it running.
For some reason, people seem to assume that people will like virtual reality. It all seems very forced to me, much like 3D TVs, and won't live up to the hype.
Have you tried it Oculus or similar tech? I found it to be a different level than 3D TV and 3D cinema, both of which were cool when you first saw them but quickly lost their novelty factor. To me, VR hasn't, and the immersive experience is still great.
I haven't tried the Metaverse and have no clue whether that'll take off, I'm more talking about the general technology. I have to admit, I'm still surprised it hasn't taken off stronger.
VR mini golf with my friends is the closest thing to hanging out in person without actually doing so. It’s a pretty dramatic difference over a phone call or other type of video game together.
It wasn't that early. YouTube was, and still is, full of vine compilations. It really blew up for a while just serving 6 second videos at a low/moderate resolution. It could have been TikTok easily.
That's a great point tbqh. Had vine lived I'm guessing they would have had to play catch up with that feature and who knows maybe they would have been too late.
The entire platform essentially died in 2015 and then was resurrected by Donald Trump being obsessed with it, which got a ton of political and finance people to join. None of their recent initiatives have moved the needle. Musk is going to lose a lot of money on this deal, but they'd probably be better off under him if not for the crushing debt load
Not going to lie, whoever owns it, I have an inner hatred for that hell site. The way I see it, it can go two ways...either Musk somehow manages to actually make the site tolerable, or it dies. Its going to be one or the other...nobody really knows which way yet. Either direction is a win in my eyes though. If it changes for the better: great! If it dies: even better! More social media sites will take its place.
Agreed. Although I do think following just a few hand curated accounts has a lot of value as a topical news feed. Or to get local news in near real-time. The rest of it is worthless to me.
Not the person you asked, I wouldn't say I have a visceral hatred for twitter but I do have a strong dislike.
One issue I find just generally with social media is that it incentivizes some inherent qualities in people that are detrimental to a functioning society. The nature of twitter encourages two behaviors that seem antithetical to constructive dialog.
Tweets are short. This makes it extremely difficult to have nuance in any conversation and makes it really easy for people to take a tweet that might be part of a larger thread or a series of replies out of context. There are lots of examples of a tweet blowing up someone's life and then you come to find out that the reality was, unsurprisingly, unable to be captured in 140 (or 280) characters.
Tweets are algorithmically promoted based on engagement. This really isn't just a Twitter thing, most social media works this way. The problem comes when you combine this with the first issue. "Hot takes" and things that outrage are pretty engaging and end up going far on the site.
So you take these two things together and what you end up with is a lot of content that takes complex topics and turns them into snappy hot takes. People then engage with those and our natural tribal tendencies take over and people fall into camps of either agreeing or disagreeing with the tweet. Now their agreement or disagreement might not be total, but in comes the format of twitter, it's hard in so few characters to express a nuanced opinion like "Well I agree with these parts of the tweet because of XYZ but I disagree with ABC and I think it totally misses the complexities of JKL."
In my experience a lot of twitter ends up devolving into a rabid sort of tribalism. But that's not universal, many people carefully curate who they follow and derive a great deal of value from the site. I think though when people have a strong negative reaction to it, they are probably considering what they (and I) perceive to be the majority case of people following popular twitter accounts (by definition they are popular because they have lots of followers) and taking part in the lower quality dialog trap I described above.
For one, the lack of any nuance. 240 characters is not enough to accurately articulate a persons thoughts, so people infer meaning from otherwise harmless statements. Places that allow for longer comments, like HackerNews, have better discussion because you can post what you actually think.
Second, I just don't like the site. You go to the site, click on the news ticker for any topic, and you see a million of the worst takes ever dreamed up by mankind. The format also encourages mob mentality which I find very disturbing.
This is my thought. One way or the other, Twitter is going to be less of a blight on society a year from now. I consider them far worse than Facebook, even though Facebook gets more criticism.
Tesla and SpaceX have hired a ton of hard-to-hire talent. I don't understand why people might want to work for those companies because as far as I know the working condition is horrible. But again, his companies hire really good people to work on their problems.
They also made a whole lot of progress on those big problems before Musk's public face-heel turn.
IMO Tesla -- we owe them a bit, for revitalizing electric cars. Now that the big brands have come around, I'm not sure Tesla has such a huge draw (?). Like if you are an engineer, you could work on the same problems at Ford, but with fewer CEO antics, your designs will probably be implemented with better build quality, and I bet your employment would be more stable.
From the software engineering side, it's still an opportunity to work on one of the highest traffic web sites on the internet. There's not a massive number of opportunities to do that.
They're given the opportunity to work on big, macro problems (efficient space travel, energy generation/storage/security, climate change, etc). What's not to get?
I doubt that will happen, I’m no Elon fanboy but he is a very capable business leader. He has clear plans to increase growth, and increase revenue. Both of those require policies that don’t push either users or advertisers away.
I suspect he will surprise us with some product decisions, but I wouldn’t bet against him.
I’m sure he will upset some users and some advertisers, but on the whole he understands that in order for his investment to make a return Twitter needs to be popular.
Elon may be notorious for his big statements, and he has certainly made a few around twitter, but I don’t believe he is doing anything other than investing in a business that he is personally interested in. That’s his MO, it’s about growth not ideology.
If you haven’t seen them take a look at the released email/text exchanges between Elon and the Twitter CEO and board from the lawsuit. They offer a good insight into what his thought process is.
You’re wrong, as a staunch advocate of free speech on the web and as a near victim of cancel culture I would gladly work at twitter as long as I were paid more than what I earn now, and I’m sure many people would feel the same. Twitter was already a crappy place to work before Elon with all its woke polítics, now though it may become more tolerable.
That’s very anecdotal. You’re not going to get the best engineers who could get a job anywhere giving up much better compensation because of “idealism”
"as long as I were paid more than what I earn now" is such a funny term to include. There's a lot of places I'd consider working if they offered me a raise!
Since I go to work exclusively to exchange labor for money, if, most other things being equal, I can find a job that allows me to exchange more money for the same amount of labor, who wouldn’t I be looking for another job anyway?
Working for Twitter in 2022 sounds about as exciting as working for Yahoo as it was going through the same type of turmoil.
>Ethically challenged software engineer working for a major tech company you know. Used to have close to 1000 karma, got destroyed over time by hackernews cancel culture and a change in downvote algorithms. But now that the algorithm has been changed back to classic style, I'm rising up again.
The doctors are indeed worried about his karma count. It's dropped a lot because he is ethically challenged. But it's sounds like the doctors are working hard to bring that karma count back up.
Brain drains usually happen due to low or uncompetitive pay, not because of corporate ideology. Otherwise Facebook/Meta would have had a brain drain years ago.
I know one insider at Meta that I could ask about this. I suspect they can't really retain talent like they used to.
The only other anecdote I have is an acquaintance who was early (i.e. the first web-dev) at YouTube. He _hated_ working for Google and left as soon as his shares vested. That was my first experience with someone simply rejecting a fat paycheck because _Google_ was to buttoned down for them.
People are strange (and software engineers are a whole different level of people).
> He _hated_ working for Google and left as soon as his shares vested. That was my first experience with someone simply rejecting a fat paycheck because _Google_ was to buttoned down for them.
It's easier to reject a fat paycheck after your shares vest, I imagine.
I think I will disagree here. Admittedly, I base this on anecdata only, but among my work colleagues, political affinity got weirdly important. To me it is odd, because I genuinely doubt that outside outliers like Ben and Jerry, companies care about anything other than their specific bottom line ( and policies supporting it ).
The companies might not care, but the perception of working for them might matter. I wonder if your colleagues would care if nobody knew who they worked for, when it's "do I want to work for this company", not "do I want my neighbors to know that I work for this company".
There are many people who support Elon and the policies he intends to enact. And if you don’t believe that’s the case, then I’d encourage you to have more conversations with people who don’t align with your views. I’m fairly confident he’ll have no shortage of talent willing
to help implement his vision.
They don't need to worry about valuation, they're just going to cut costs and extract revenue.
Politicians and sports media aren't going to abandon twitter any time soon, so I expect revenue will hold for quite some time.
It seems that many people abandoned FB already. If those same people abandon twitter, where will they go? I personally don't use twitter because I don't want to see updates from random people on the internet, but is there a replacement for that? I'm not sure.
It sure was. I’ve been on HN for more than 10 years with my real name.
I know it sounds silly that I’d use a throwaway to say I want to work for Twitter now.
But if I do end up working there I have a feeling some in my network may not be so happy about this. I’d have to come to terms with that and plan some things out.
Maybe I’m overreacting, maybe not. But it’s on my mind these days when I say I support free speech within the confines of existing US law.
This is a honest question. Why do people talk about "free speech" because there is no such thing outside of 1st Amendment which is to ensure that Govt. cannot do anything to an individual. For private businesses, where is this free speech coming from ? Twitter banning someone (whether you agree or disagree) is not a violation of free speech unless the definition has changed.
Yes, that’s fair. I’m using colloquial shorthand on mobile.
What I mean to say is that I support a company freely choosing to adopt a content moderation policy that aligns as closely as possible to the US 1st Amendment.
I think the US 1st Amendment is among (if not the) strongest free speech laws in the world, and it would be beneficial to society to have a major social media platform adopt that ideal as their North Star.
Right now presents an interesting and rather unique opportunity to convert a major social media platform from an ad-driven model with shareholders seeking endless growth to a sustainable, long-term business model with a revenue model that aligns closer to users. And sprinkle on top the idea of making the platform more inclusive to diverse groups and opinions with less echo-chamber. That interests me.
Freedom of speech is a principle. The US 1st Amendment is one specific implementation of that principle, but generally people asking for free speech are making a moral argument, not a legal one.
What valuation? Per the article, it's being delisted and taken private. Which, may attract talent who wants to build something for the long term rather than being pinned to quarterly reports.
My money would be on software developers with certain personality quirks being drawn to Musk's leadership while those who have been building Twitter's compliance and moderation infrastructure would be repulsed. But, I don't think we'll really ever know because - as a private company - I expect Twitter to not disclose that information in the future.
Maybe - they better make sure to negotiate a killer employee contract given they won't be getting stock which is fungible. BTW - all software developers have certain personality quirks:)
I have zero information on how X (i.e. Musk's holding company for Twitter) is structured but it's possible to issue stock in a private company. The difference is that you cannot sell that stock on the public markets and need to find a buyer through a secondary market. Your requirements for selling are also typically more restricted.
If this is a normal Silicon Valley deal, until Twitter relists or sells the valuation at vest of the already granted RSUs will be $54.20. So from an employee perspective the valuation will stay high.
I would be really surprised if this remains privately-held for very long. It's a LOT of capital (and a lot of it borrowed) so my guess would be that he has an eye on Zuckerberging it (issuing himself a class shares with all the votes, but marketing another class of shares without them).
For all of Musk's proponents' claims that this is a boon for "free speech", such free speech is anathema to corporate interests, particularly advertisers and corporate partners (we only need to look at the recent Ye + Adidas bustup).
Thus, it will likely devolve into "Free Speech (TM)", the my-way-or-the-highway speech policing that we see in places like /r/conservative where any criticism of Musk's preferred views is silenced. Again, we only need to take his own history towards criticism to see what Musk with a bullhorn is likely to do.
And, thus, we can only hope that it becomes such a cesspool of hatred such as Parler and other so-called liberterian free-speech platforms that it becomes toxic for investors and users, save for those who relish the echo-chamber.
The brain drain was well under way already. A bunch of people I know who used to work at Twitter started looking the moment the deal was announced, and have already landed elsewhere.
They aren't comparable in any meaningful way. They have quite different classes of problems, not to mention the scale of Twitter completely dwarfs that of Wikipedia.
In this age of remote work if they open positions remotely to anyone in the world on SF salaries they will have access to an infinite pool of competent engineers, taking into account that Twitter isn't rocket science, and also that Elon has his fans. Brain drain is not a risk.
Or Elon fixes San Francisco’s “use your platform” “inclusion by exclusion” culture as thousands of those kind of people disassociate and are replaced with a reversion to the mean of people that just want a paycheck
I think the thing to watch will be ads and other revenue streams. Most companies aren't going to want their ads next to 'free for all' content, so we'll see what happens.
I wasn't talking about Twitter specifically. Ads are a dominating revenue model: Youtube, Instagram, Facebook etc. I had an idea of people using crypto payments instead of likes. A platform would take a cut.
Yes. I feel that "liking" is a consumerist approach to conversation. Buy/no buy, swipe left/right. It's more nuanced in real world. We don't always agree or disagree with people, sometimes we just listen and exchange words. So yeah, there would be less "likes", but they would be more substantial.
Or maybe they wouldn't because it's just twitter and why would anyone pay to "like" something? seems more like the crypto fantasy for a world where everything is a financial transaction. I don't think its a realistic assessment of how people actually value money and speech.
you can see with youtube premium that the value of individual ad views is basically nothing, and getting users to pay a reasonable monthly fee ends up being much more profitable. nobody will do the 'pay per video' thing because its not as profitable as just getting a monthly sub.
I wouldn't pay for each video I watch now, but I could probably watch less. It's like eating junk food now: you can eat nonstop but it doesn't nourish.
I think there is a need for smaller existing community-based social networks. They can be paid for by certain people or crowdfunded once in a while like Wikipedia.
Which is probably why they deleted the tweet. They were probably getting ratio'ed to hell. So they decided to delete their shame rather than take their lumps.
That tweet doesn't seem to exist when I click the link. Unless I'm missing some context if you're saying Elon will run for president I don't think that can happen because he was born in South Africa.
Most people have concluded that the "natural born" clause doesn't mean "born in," otherwise Ted Cruz would never have bothered to run. Of course, it hasn't been tested by the Supreme Court yet.
His issue is that he wasn't born a US citizen, not that he was born in South Africa.
How about charging anyone with more than X followers? Or pay to be verified? or pay for support? Supported bot accounts or corporate accounts? There are many options they could pursue. Twitter was not helped having Jack as a part-time CEO for all of those years.
Verified accounts means it’s somebody well known outside of Twitter. So it’s beneficial to Twitter to have them.
I see today’s Twitter as a chat app where popular people promote their content to less popular. Maybe it would make sense to help populars sell stuff directly and get a cut.
Personal info harvesting is at the core of most ad based businesses. Like Google of FB. I’d help people sell things. Like be a platform to sell books, nudes, news etc.
Well, speaking in those terms, I think the thing to watch will in fact be censorship. Elon is extremely idealistic, so it will be fascinating to watch him melt down when confronted with the reality of how complex free speech and censorship issues really are. I predict that he will succeed in turning Twitter into the rightwing safehaven that "Truth" Social, Parlor, etc have all been trying to become.
He's making a deal with the devil to fund Twitter, and if that means selling out to guys like Peter Thiel and other conservative power brokers, then he will do it. Just in time for the 2024 presidential election media cycle too...What could possibly go wrong?
Oh that's what I mean - he will enforce his own definition of free speech and censorship. It will be usual "Rules for thee but not for me" kinda thing. It will be a constantly shitfing goalpost, and he will always have some bullshit justification for why whatever he decides is correct. It won't be free speech, it will be Elon speech. He is a petulant child with too much money, and not enough humility. His sink stunt tells you everything you need to know - this is all about Elon. God help us all.
I think the point is that while right now, 'unfair' things might happen, perhaps they will become even more uneven in the future, as he exerts more personal sway into what's ok and what's not, rather than attempting to stick to some guidelines.
> that's no different from Twitter and other platforms
Exactly -- and I think that's the source of most folks' pre-schadenfreude. A lot of us have been around long enough to have seen "free speech" platforms come and go and this feels no different, so far.
The simple (and inevitable) solution is for some accounts or tweets to be withheld in certain countries. No company can avoid complying with the law; but they can't be forced to take down a tweet worldwide either.
> No company can avoid complying with the law; but they can't be forced to take down a tweet worldwide either.
Sure they can. "You take down tweets we don't like, or Tesla loses China as a market, we arrest all the employees currently in China, and take your factories and other assets there".
Not saying it's necessarily a bad thing. It is that idealistic thinking that got us SpaceX and all that, so clearly the visionary aspect of his thinking is great, but it is a double edged sword. He thinks free speech is a problem he can solve solve, but I am saying that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. He is smart, but clumsy, and I seriously question his motives.
No one said his ideals are good, and his father's mine and government subsidies are completely unrelated to whether he had ideals. Maybe his ideals are for government investment.
> I predict that he will succeed in turning Twitter into the rightwing safehaven that "Truth" Social, Parlor, etc have all been trying to become.
I actually don't think so, I think this was bluster, or if they are safe haven it will be safe in the way that a subreddit is safe. You can freely talk amongst eachother but that content won't be promoted to people who don't want to see it.
My prediction is he ends up growing twitter into a fairly bland chat/communications app/social network, and the focus on global political and social debates slowly weans over time.
personally I think he's going to try to grow it, but if he's smart a competitor to youtube along with the social media portion would be a huge move that twitter is actually positioned well to pivot to.
My prediction is he ends up growing twitter into a fairly bland chat/communications app/social network, and the focus on global political and social debates slowly weans over time.
So far Musk's brought back a very high profile antisemite (Ye) and a bunch of others took the hint to return to Twitter. I'm pretty sure bland isn't the right word.
"Elon now controls twitter. Unleash the racial slurs. K---S AND N-----S," said
one account, using slurs for Jews and Black people. "I can freely express how
much I hate n-----s . . . now, thank you elon," another said.
…
Some of the Twitter influx was organized on other platforms, including the pro-Trump
forum TheDonald, where its top posts Friday morning showed tweets celebrating lies
about Trump's 2020 election loss and memes criticizing transgender people under the
headline "When you can't get banned on Twitter anymore."
My prediction is Musk flails about, burns a pile of money, and decimates any goodwill his associated companies (e.g. SpaceX, Tesla, Starlink) currently have.
Musk earlier today he didn’t bring Kanye back. I mean he’s certainly riling up the dregs of humanity and now not like a good person but I don’t think he’s going to burn 44 bil
> My prediction is Musk flails about, burns a pile of money, and decimates any goodwill his associated companies (e.g. SpaceX, Tesla, Starlink) currently have.
This morning NY Daily News was claiming Ye was allowed back. It'd be nice if that were wrong or has since been redacted, but I'm not going to hold my breath.
As for Musk, he's playing with other people's money. At that scale he can afford to tell the American banks to go fuck themselves. The foreign investors are probably cheering on this nonsense. The Saudis want pro-oil republicans, the Russians are going to relish the chaos, and at the very least the Chinese will cheer on the loss of a TikTok competitor. There aren't a lot of guardrails here.
Really the Ye thing doesn’t matter because I under minded my own argument :-) I think all those terrible things are coming but he’s going to thread the needle around discoverability to make it palatable. Too much chaos isn’t good for anyone even bad actors if the site becomes irrelevant, but we’ll see, I’m not super convinced youre wrong. Maybe Twitter has enough momentum to stay in the public eye in spite of itself.
Elon Musk has been talking about how awesome Gigafactory Shanghai is for the past year, thanks to Chinese workers who don't talk back to their boss and work harder than their American counterparts.
Dude loves his Chinese anti-speech factory. Or at least, he already is pretending to do that so that he gets his Chinese sales numbers up.
Musk makes the public statements he needs to do business. He has no morals outside of money as far as I can tell. Dude is 100% willing to spout off anti-American propaganda / stereotypes to serve his Chinese masters (at least, this year when his Chinese factory is opening up. We will see if he really believes those words or if he's just playing dumb or something...)
EDIT:
> I think there will be some very strong companies coming out of China. There’s just a lot of super talented and hardworking people in China that strongly believe in manufacturing. And they won’t just be burning the midnight oil. They’ll be burning the 3am oil. So they won’t even leave the factory type of thing. Whereas in America, people are trying to avoid going to work at all.
I view this as America needs to do better. Not sure why that's anti-American. You fan be good to somebody to tell them the truth and for them to apply themselves. Lie to them and speak American exceptionalism is not pro-America. Its brainwash
Elon Musk wouldn't comply with American COVID19 restrictions in his first factory.
But when China goes 100% lockdown for the past year, he turns a blind eye to it and calls them hard workers instead. His anti-American bias, at least when talking with the Chinese, is pretty darn obvious.
Of course, it all disappears when he flies back to the USA. My point is he's a two-faced double-talking political type. He says what he needs to say to get the money and prestige he needs to do what he wants. Expect more pro-Chinese sentiment from him. The Chinese factory is one of the most important elements of Tesla's strategy right now.
This is why I’ve gotten tired of him. He’s yet another thermometer just reading the temperature to figure out how to profit. No surprise that reading changes everywhere he goes.
He’s a politician/actor for business, and people love it. Everybody claims to hate politics, but it’s become yet another reality tv drama to which we’ve become addicted. Elon is a great actor and he’s paid very well for it. He knows the game he’s playing, and has no moral compass to hold him back.
Unfortunately, it’s the most real form of reality tv yet, where we all eventually bear the consequences. Personally, I have never and will never use or read Twitter. My concern for most social media platforms is whether or not they’re going to damage society.
It’s not like we have a choice anyway. So take a good look at your surroundings, and a year or two from now, ask yourself if we’re better or worse off than now.
I'm very skeptical of the idea that Twitter can become a place where people discuss things with civility. It seems like the mechanics of the conversation encourage outrage.
On top of that, historically internet forums have required fairly strict moderation to remain civil for any significant amount of time. Without that, one quickly ends up with an incredibly unpleasant space that repels more people than it attracts.
Maybe it would be even greater as a free speech paradise, where we could express opinions in the words and manner we choose.
Perhaps some kind of "HN gloves off" mode might work. Or HN After Dark. Then the traditional civil mode could be retained, while allowing the more wild tangents to run their course in a separate but related area or mode. I think this is inevitable for online discussion. Politicians have their formal, respectful discourse zones, but gloves come off in certain places and contexts where heated exchange is not only acceptable, but expected. And these are the people running things. So to deny the same for the general population, will never sit well.
For some people this is enough: but HackerNews is only great for discussion within the context of socially acceptable topics.
Want to have some open and honest discussions about programming languages, databases, APIs, careers, or math? There are few places where you can read more interesting and intelligent discussions on things like this.
Want to have some civil, but honest discussion about anything truly contentious: say race, religion, crime, homelessness, foreign affairs, IQ, sexuality, immigration, etc? Fully open and honest discussions on these sorts of topics are just not possible unless you have a very commonplace and milquetoast viewpoint.
If that were really their goal, theoretically they could be. For instance, this forum has features, like invisible vote counts, and exponential cool-down periods which encourage healthy conversations.
Whether that is compatible with their business goals is another question.
This forum also has an educated crowd of nerds at the heart of its community. Twitter used to have that too and was a much more civil but also less interesting space when I joined in 2008.
The moderation on HN helps retain civil community members as well. I've been thinking about moderation as a chicken-or-egg situation but maybe it's more of an equilibrium issue. I should go over my old slashdot comments and see if I remember what pushed me out.
Are you the davidw from reddit? Do you ever go on /r/portland? It's moderated to the max yet its still neither civil or engaging. Moderation matters but I think HN does a lot better due to the features that promote well thought out posts and don't really allow trolls to get much traction.
The mechanics of most social media platforms encourage outrage.
1. Most are optimizing to maximize user engagement, and it seems like most platforms have concluded that emotionally charged hot takes are the best way to keep the feed scrolling and the likes and shares flowing.
2. Most don't have the small communities or active moderation necessary to build a culture of civility. (HN is an outlier, though even here I think there are still some topics where the site becomes echo chamber-y.)
I think the fundamental limitation is that a small character limit removes the opportunity for nuance. It is a trade off though - not many people will spend time reading nuanced essays. I’d say this is a big part of the polarization - there’s only enough room to basically say left or right and maybe indicate some magnitude to your belief, so you naturally end up with two parties.
I'm stereotyping Musk here, but it wouldn't surprise me if he decided to solve it with AI (sentiment analysis specifically) so the algorithm promotes positive tweets and downranks negative ones. Might even work, since the field has made huge progress in recent years.
That breaks down with coded language. If groups use code words or emojis they can change their coding faster than sentiment analysis models can be updated. Even if those models can be updated quickly the coding by users can be changed arbitrarily. They can also trivially add trivial positive text alongside the codes to get amplified.
Just as an example take the insipid "let's go Brandon" slogan. Sentiment analysis would rate that as a positive statement unless it was specifically flagged. That's a trivial example. There's untold numbers of covert meanings for emojis, even for banal things.
AI moderation has spectacular faulure modes (as banned Twitter users know). Imagine a tweet like "The thought of $NAME being unalived brings a smile to my face" would be enough to get through the positivity filter[1].
The word "unalive" itself was coined and became popular to escape such basic filters that have no sense of meaning.
1. I just tried the following on the first online sentiment analysis tool I found, and scored 85% positive: You sound very 'smart'. I have warm and fuzzy feelings at the thought of you being unalived, with your genius
It depends on incentives. Right now histrionics and outrage get boosted and sober, nuanced analysis goes nowhere. Invert that boosting algorithm and maybe Twitter can become useful. I'm not sure what would mean for revenue though.
I think the tweet format is directly opposed to having thoughtful, or even civil, discourse. It's hard to express anything complicated in 280 character, and if you want to have a discussion you need that time to express yourself. Without the short tweet format, what is twitter?
Civil discussion requires decorum and rules, and Musk and other conservatives view those as "censorship".
It's the same reason none of the reddit clones have ever taken off, turns out most people don't want to participate in a virtual space free of censorship because it just turns into a cesspool
Respectfully, I have not found that to be true. No one side has a monopoly on the lunatics or the level headed.
It's unfortunate ad hominems, logical fallacies, and the "mic drop one liner" get so much traction and amplification.
When I find myself making snap judgments about an issue, I dive in to the opposition, doggedly seek out the underpinning ideas, from academic or level headed folks.
It's helped strengthen my personal convictions on some matters and moderated my pre held notions.
>Respectfully, I have not found that to be true. No one side has a monopoly on the lunatics or the level headed.
I really disagree. I think you have fringe folks on the left but outlandish ideas are mainstream amongst conservatives. For example, 70% of republicans believe Joe Biden did not legitimately win the 2020 election.
You just aren't going to find such strong belief in anything that absurd on the left.
>When I find myself making snap judgments about an issue, I dive in to the opposition, doggedly seek out the underpinning ideas, from academic or level headed folks.
I agree! Obviously some subjects like anti-vaxxers or election deniers don't have level-headed or academic folks who can support them.
That's really why you need intense moderation because quality content doesn't rise to the top. An 'anything goes' environment tends to promote the absolute worst ideas, as people like Gwyneth Paltrow and Joe Rogan have a far wider audience that actual scientists. If you allow them to lie about important issues, the lie is going to suffocate any academic or level-headed person who has something to say.
> You just aren't going to find such strong belief in anything that absurd on the left.
The 4 years of russian meddling? It genuinly seems to have been widespread to me.
And with the biden one, AFAICT it is not directly about stealing it, but rather enacting stuff that resulted in an unfair benefit to democrats, that seemed unlawful. (Mail in voting by default, for example)
So, no, I don't believe it's mostly one side. But rather that both sides have the loud, crazy, minority.
>The 4 years of russian meddling? It genuinly seems to have been widespread to me.
You mean the highly documented russian interference in our elections? Is that what you're talking about?
>And with the biden one, AFAICT it is not directly about stealing it, but rather enacting stuff that resulted in an unfair benefit to democrats, that seemed unlawful. (Mail in voting by default, for example)
I'm not going to delve too deep into the idiotic conspiracy theories behind the 'stop the steal', the reality is that there is zero evidence impropriety.
The idea that making it easier to vote by mail is a benefit to one party speaks volumes about what conservatives believe.
The fight against vote-by-mail has nothing to do with lawfullness. Conservatives focus on making it hard to vote/voter disenfranchisement because they know they are a minority party.
I'm pretty sure most of those Reddit clones get flooded with "undesirable" bots as a way of killing them off. The people who currently run bots on Reddit, have massive power over public opinion etc, they want to keep their victims centralised, and on familiar territory.
Or, the majority of people are fine with limiting hatefullness and so you end up with just the people who want to spread hate online, which in turn makes it a cesspool
None of the censorship people complain about on Twitter is to do with enforcing politeness or decorum, it's all censorship of specific information or opinions regardless of how politely phrased. And that lack of fixed rules is part of the problem. Trying to paint this as "conservatives hate politeness" is just dishonesty.
Can you give an example of what you're talking about? There are plenty of TERF and transphobic accounts on Twitter right now. You can express transphobic ideas on Twitter.
Yeah, they banned folks from lying about vaccines and the COVID-19 pandemic. You can be pro-covid or talk about how you don't want to get the vaccine. You just aren't allowed to spread conspiracy theories and lies.
It's a good sentiment, but he kind of has to say that right? He just spent $44B taking this company private, if advertisers flee and it starts running at a substantial loss, it could mean financial ruin for him
I would think that advertisers would eventually notice anyway. If lead quality decreases due to poor ad targeting or high-value users leaving the platform then they'll start pulling their advertising dollars back.
I have to wonder if there was already some pushback from larger advertisers that prompted Elon's tweet in the first place. Time will tell but we've already got 4chan and some users and advertisers would rather go to a "mall-like" experience to not have to deal with the "crap".
Advertising is an old boy's club. They spend money based on personal relationships, brand image, reputation, reliability, and trust.
The actual quality of the advertising product almost doesn't matter, it's not like any of the advertisers can reasonably independently validate the claims or performance, they're trusting them as given.
Elon has never been a member of the advertising club, he famously chooses to have his company refuse to even be a client, and he doesn't have a reputation for any of those values. Wouldn't at all be surprised if major clients put a hold on their Q4 spend with Twitter the moment they got news of the completed acquisition.
Google, Facebook, and Snap all had major advertising earning misses, the agencies would be pressuring for better deals regardless.
I can't see advertising being part of the long term plan here. He's a payments guy, and there is much more money in turning Twitter into an economy in of itself. This would be tricky if he needed to rely on banks etc, but more recently, he is also a crypto guy. It will be interesting to see how creative he gets in that area, but I would think that his dream would be to create a fluid online economy. I would expect him to first attempt reinventing the concepts of cash, and loose change, but in a digital platform, rather than one's pocket.
He only has $24 billion at risk. I mean, he has a lot of his reputation invested, but only $24 billion in actual dollars. The rest is from other investors and debt that the Twitter company itself (and not Musk) actually has.
I mean, if someone's talking about "financial ruin" because someone losing ~10% of their net worth, which would still leave them the richest person in the world, I think it's perfectly reasonable to say "it's only $24 billion"
I think you're broadly correct. I'm curious to see where it all ends up. Content moderation is not fun or easy, and I could see him getting thoroughly sick of all of it.
Firing the person who fought against government censorship and worked to establish a balanced content policy for almost a quarter billion people across the planet is not a great move if he wants anyone to believe that. The only people who even know who she is either know the good work she does or had it out for her over the reluctant and long-delayed ban of Trump. She just kind of quietly kept Twitter from turning into a complete snake pit while making sure the maximum number of people could speak. Evidence that keeping your head down and doing good work isn't enough if the people who decide these things don't know about it.
The weird thing is, I didn't think Tim Pool was completely wrong. I, too, prefer having removed speech available but contextualized. There have been times where I wanted to answer a "prove it!" but couldn't find the video/tweet/whatever because it was completely removed with no explanation.
I also understood Vijaya Gadde and pre-Musk Twitter's position better even if I still think their systems end up hitting marginalized people more than the people who want to marginalize them. The task is harder than Musk realizes, and he fired the person who's been working hardest on it for most of the last decade and understands the problem space best.
The problem with that person though was their obvious bias, as Pool pointed out. She needed someone to challenge her at work, not just on a podcast. Clearly, other Twitter employees were not going to do that as they agreed with those biases.
Ideological clone of Musk or Gadde? I'd imagine that if there's more freedom in what can be written then it doesn't matter, a censor that supports free speech is no censor at all.
Can you include this one person's name in your comment or reply so that people like me who are unfamiliar can evaluate such a glowing endorsement of "her" "good work."
I know this sounds like a cynical question, but without a name your comment seems a little bit fanatical.
My limited experience is that people with money can still influence companies, even if there aren't formal paths. Share owners still have influence.
And people who lend money typically have contracts and the ability to seize assets if they don't get paid. (I have no idea what the $13B of loans looked like, but can't imagine they were personal, non-recourse loans.)
Yes they do. Not the banks. The billionaires who came in as junior partners. Larry Ellison is supposed to be in for a billion. a16z and Andreessen personally are reported to have equity investments. One of the Binance founders, or Binance as a company is supposed to have hundreds of millions of equity. The very large Saudi investor (I don't know if it was an individual or the sovereign wealth fund) when Twitter was public is still involved.
There are a few publicly known partners, and a few who got turned away. They have equity.
Companies will want their content next to specific content which they will pick when placing bids based on a reputation value which will be computed by a secret algorithm. Whoever has a better reputation will attract more ads and get more cuts from the money twitter collects.
Like, I want to show my gun ads next to Trump's posts and want to show abortion clinics next to Biden's. Nothing wrong with this. Want to show public works ads next to Bernie's ads.
Then when you want to post wild things, anonymous mode will kick in and those posts will not be posted in an identifying fashion. They will be posted in an area that cannot lead to the post owner being "accurately" identified. That way nobody knows who posted it. That should reduce some legal issues. If the poster decides to post it as the owner and successfully gets past the Nazi filter, their reputation will be affected depending on the public reception of their post.
Just like in real life. You stay away from people who you don't like.
But we can see Twitter being supported by extreme right foundations.
I'm from Brazil and the extreme right is abusing all the communication platforms. it's a complete madness in what people believe right now. Our society is on the verge of crumbling.
the same could said about the far left in America. well i guess it could be said about the far right too. its up to the folks in the middle, the progreservatives (or consegressives depending on how you look at it), to end the madness but most of us are too busy living our own lives to care about how crazy the fringes of society are beyond the entertainment value of it all.
isn't it the far left that's all up in arms about musk buying Twitter in the first place? to me the average left leaning person could give two shits about who owns Twitter, yet a ton of Twitter employees vowed to quit if the deal went through. subjective as it is, those of which I'd consider far left.
So the far left wants to control twitter because there are people that want to leave twitter if musk runs it, and these people must be from the far left because...
...of the intolerant views that they subscribe to that have been covered time and time again during this saga over the last few months.. oh but wait, there is intolerant views on the right too? id wager a fair bit that any right leaning employees of Twitter, intolerant as they may be, are snug as a bug in a rug right now, as are the centrists
You don't have to view everything through such a political lens.
Musk constantly shits on the work those people did and says he's going to change it all. I bet they have some pride in what they built and it would feel insulting for some outsider to constantly criticize without knowing the reasons why they did what they did. I'd feel hurt too. Plus his companies have a reputation for chewing you up and spitting you out again. People might not like the cultural U-turn.
Please stop talking about the far left. It's just silly. It's like 12 people who share these extreme views and comparing them to the far right is really misleading. The far right are organised and training with weapons. The far left are arguing on Twitter with anime profile pics.
that could very well be the reason why some are leaving, but its not those people that are broadcasting their intentions. you could also say his organizations have a standard of excellence that many feel they can achieve, but few are capable of.
saying that the far left is in no way comparable to the far right is pretty silly. they both exist, they both have violent sects, both have anime fans, and there are most definitely more than 12 of them
Hunter Biden laptop that the FBI have confirmed real
Banning Andrew Tate when Pierce Morgan and many others think he is opinionated but should not be banned.
And hell they banned Jordan Peterson?
I don't know what kinda echo chamber you operate in to think the 'left' is not 'trying to influence communication platforms'
Media Matters and Vox publicly campaigned for a year to demonetize YouTube, by methodically threatening brands with publication of screenshots of ads next to niche controversial content. This happened via private emails to executives, followed by viral social media posts when the brands did not satisfy their demands in a timely manner. This culminated in the "adpocalypse", which consisted of those targeted Fortune 500 brands pulling out and disavowing YouTube. YouTube implemented sweeping policies that demonetized political channels on both sides and even LGBTQ+ channels. In the end, everyone lost.
Can you give me a source for that? I'm asking because where I live a company sprang up during that time, who employed the exact same tactic. Posted those sorts of screenshots, not of Youtube but of our company's display ads on platforms like Seekingalpha and other sites they deemed to be fake news or extremist, and when our digital marketing didn't respond to them, they sent the screenshots to executives within the company. This ultimately led to us having to buy their brand safety monitoring service because the CEO was scared of backlash.
There are many such examples. Look at the group "Stop Funding Hate" in the UK that constantly harasses companies who advertise in newspapers and news channels that aren't dominated by the left.
haha! perfect! without preservatives, the pros and cons would sour society in no time. sure, they may cause cancer in some, but overall they are a benefit to everyone.
there is no far left in the US. The 'left' here would be center/right in most other countries. The right/conservatives are the true evil who are responsible for basically every bad thing here and the real problem is that most of this country is conservative, and thinks this country is 'special'.
Far left in the US is the group that promotes things like:
- extreme intersectionality
- the original non-diluted Marxism-inspired version of CRT (e.g. punctuality and objectivism in academia are “white values”)
- literal dissolution of police (not just creating better social services)
and much more. So they are far left not in the classic sense. This term has been somewhat redefined in the context of culture war (similar to far right).
Right. At least you didn't call me a Nazi. You sound like one of the people who think CRT is "just history" without reading any of the actual books on CRT.
How do you define far left in the US? People who advocate for the redistribution of income and wealth and for a brotherhood of all workers?
Yeah, as a European whenever people say "the left in the US would be considered right-wing in Europe" I shake my head. When it comes to social issues, the extremes in the US are far more pronounced, both on the right and the left.
Probably because you seemed to have partisan worms in your brain. Twitter HAS been burdened by the "extreme right" abusing its platform. Its the entirety of the debate around what should be moderated on twitter. Insisting that this can't be true because "the left" hasn't had an exodus doesn't seem to make sense to me.
There is simply not many places to go. You can’t really keep running t from madness all the time since with social media platforms the destination must be at least somewhat inhabited, and also the exodus must be coordinated.
It’s more like moderate left left left, the extreme right were expelled, and extreme left stayed out of grit and also because Twitter was sort of left to them .
I guess we'll have to wait and see. The signals coming from the "liberal" side are certainly tipping the balance on the "non-liberals" being the more level-headed ones, at least that's what the recent nonsense written by The Verge editor [1] makes me believe.
The 'brand safety' super omnia argument isn't nearly as straightforward as it's made out to be. Twitter already has an enormous amount of content that is perfectly within the terms of service, yet that you wouldn't think most companies would want their ads next to. Hardcore pornography, for example. It more or less works out, because Twitter ads aren't associated with particular tweets in the same way that YouTube ads are associated with particular videos.
The argument only goes through when you look at the platform reputation as a whole. That's why platforms like Parler have trouble attracting ads. There are a lot – a lot – of people trying to hit Twitter's platform reputation right now, but their problem is that the best place to degrade companies' (and people's) reputations is Twitter.
he should make the platform $5/month to post and free to read. That would likely increase the quality of content and provide another source of revenue.
I don’t think $5/month would stop the biggest offenders: content farms. I have reported dozens of accounts that have posted tens of thousands of tweets in the last few years. Accounts that spam US politicians with things like “I am a democrat and I will not vote for Biden because he is neo-Nazi…” and so on and so forth. Accounts that ruin the discussion, waste attention. Accounts that are obviously not authentic users but are a part of a foreign propaganda campaign. These accounts can afford to pay $5/month.
Content farms use a lot of accounts , they have to - impersonate realistic users easy to shadow ban block otherwise that $5/user/month quickly adds up.
The reason this idea does not go far is because the people who pay usually do not necessarily post good quality content , that degrades the quality of UGC and view time therefore ad revenue loss
Paying for a million fake users would be peanuts to a state actor. Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, etc... These users post on average 2 tweets per hour (my personal observation, not a reliable data point). A million users tweeting twice every hour that's 1.5B tweets. Per month.
I agree that introducing paid accounts would make it harder for content farms to exist - primarily due to the fact that they would need a very large number of bank accounts and/or payment cards. However I don't think it's a real solution to this problem. Maybe as a part of some holistic anti-bot system? Yes, that could work.
I feel like this techcrunch article itself violates hacker news policies because it has numerous personal attacks and deriding commentary throughout the article. Including calling the purchase of twitter a "toy".
More so calling it "crowning himself CEO" as if that wouldn't be automatically required if you layoff the existing CEO. A temporary CEO would be required until a new CEO is found.
I think it's also important to consider the idiom "A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on"
>I feel like this techcrunch article itself violates hacker news policies because it has numerous personal attacks and deriding commentary throughout the article. Including calling the purchase of twitter a "toy".
HN is little different from big tech ideologically, and your comment is already fading out of existence. I expect it will be completely censored soon.
This site has a downvote button and an upvote button. The fact that people use that feature of the site (downvote), means the site is working as intended. It is not censorship.
Ironic considering Babylon Bee was just unbanned even though they violated TOS.
Also ironic that his goal was to promote free speech and painted moderation as evil.
—-
It is beyond me that I am downvoted for pointing the irony of the situation.
So many proponents of free speech have so few regards to give for TOS and have the audacity to demand service without abiding to it. It seems that HN is no longer a bastion of honest discussion and has been overrun by certain individuals.
It's certainly valuable to Twitter's largest customers. Think GM, Coca-Cola, et al. I suspect the industry won't look much different after Twitter has gone private and "new" policies have taken hold.
I'm not so sure. It's something like Christians vs Transvestites, then you ban one of the groups and that's valuable because otherwise the other one will attack Pepsi?
not sure if it was intentional but in case it wasn't, you probably shouldn't use the term transvestite as it's pretty outdated. depending on what you mean by it, transgender, cross-dresser, or genderfluid are some of the modern equivalents.
It likely just means trump and that gay conservative guy who would say things for the shock value. The Bee is satirical site and banning them for anything makes as much sense as banning the onion.
If the onion starts spouting off un-funny, non-satire, completely standard talking points and trying to hide behind "satire" when it isn't, I would absolutely want them banned too.
I’m not gonna get into the weeds with you about what is and isn’t funny. But I think you prove why Musk is facing an uphill battle, the issue with twitter isn’t technological or better moderation.
It’s cultural, we have many people (like you) who believe they’re the arbitrators of truth. They alone understand and know what is fact and what is fiction, even if that fact is a moving target that changes by the hour, the hypocrisy of that is totally lost on these folks (ie you).
Additionally, the fact-setters refuse to even entertain the idea that maybe their “facts” are not based on reality, and they label anyone who disagrees with them as evil. And everyone agrees that evil must be culled. They will often use extreme epithets (nazi, bigot, hitler, white supremacist) to get their point across, no matter how inappropriate, contradictory, or ahistorical that insult might be in context.
Until people can step out of their bubble and be willing to admit that the world is a million shades of grey we’re not gonna solve this problem.
We can call people who exhibit many of Umberto Eco’s characteristics of fascism as fascists when they act in such a manner.
Why should people tolerate the intolerant? Why should people tolerate those who can’t even follow basic TOS and behave as adults?
Why should the world tolerate people like that ex president who mocked a reporter with disabilities, who said he grabs women by their genitals, who has received multiple accusations of sexual assault, has been on Eipstein’s island and likely touched little girls?
Why should reasonable people be tolerant to dysfunctional adults who support such a president and share his dog-whistle soundbites? Why should the world tolerate people who are actively calling for their murder? Why should reasonable people give space to people like Pence who want to shove their Christianity down the throat of everyone else?
I will exercise my free speech and call fascists the fascists they are until they stop behaving like fascists. The intolerant deserve no tolerance.
Or The Bee went through the little Maoist Struggle Session that Twitter built to get themselves unbanned.
For those that aren't aware they were suspended but could get unsuspended by deleting their own tweet which includes an explicit admission that they're evil no good sinners as part of the process.
Which The Bee rightfully chose not to do at the time and let it lie for months.
> Twitter obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences! In addition to adhering to the laws of the land, our platform must be warm and welcoming to all, where you can choose your desired experience according to your preferences
He might be the majority shareholder, but there is a known syndicate of coinvestors so he does not own it all himself - much of this is public information.
Musk owns 80-90% of Twitter. A few high-profile investors own the other 10-20%. The group of bankers have a huge lien on the company ($13 billion) but assuming that they are paid on time have no equity.
The distinction between "having a lien" and "owning the company" is a false dichotomy. "Owning the company" and "controlling the company" are different, though.
What if the shareholders do not agree to sell their shares? How does he justify his current power over Twitter? Did he buy his 80-90% outside of the free float market?
> The distinction between "having a lien" and "owning the company" is a false dichotomy.
It's 100% not. It's secured debt, that's it. If Twitter becomes worth $17 billion, they get - $15 billion. If Twitter becomes worth $170 billion, they get - $15 billion.
To say nothing of if Musk misses a payment, are they really going to foreclose? Or would they renegotiate?
I think Twitter is owned by a holding company controlled by Musk. I think he had at least two holding companies, “X Holdings I” and “X Holdings II”, with the later a subsidiary of the former, and the acquisition was legally a merger between Twitter and the subsidiary. That’s a quite typical way to legally structure acquisitions.
I’m not sure exactly how the coinvestors fit in the picture, but I expect they (or more likely their own holding companies) own minority stakes in the parent holding company. The debt is probably the parent company’s also, although Musk may have personally guaranteed much of it.
Also, probably even the parent holding company is not directly owned by Musk. Probably owned by one or more trusts he controls.
Due to the loans Elon had to take out, Twitter now has to make interest payments of over one billion dollars a year. Expect more features that try to wring every cent out of the userbase.
...and then there are stories like this[1] where Tesla is refusing to release autopilot data to an owner who claims Tesla's autopilot caused his car to crash.
I would really like to hear how he's financing this deal. His net worth has dropped since he's made this play. Most of his money is tied up in equity. So who's funding this deal? The fact that this isn't well talked about and that the company is going private is raising a lot of red flags to my eyes
Assuming the same financing as prior to trying to cancel, it will be $13B from banks loaned to Twitter the company. ~$7B from friends of Elon. Then I think something like half of the remaining was supposed to be margin loans against TSLA stock, but since the stock has tanked recently the margin requirements were too high and Musk has indicated he plans to simply sell a bunch of TSLA stock (or otherwise directly from his personal assets).
Matt Levine at Bloomberg has been talking about it frequently as the deal evolved. You can read back through the articles that reference Musk or Twitter in the headline and get a good idea.
"The Wall Street banks involved, led by Morgan Stanley, are also ironing out the steps needed to finalize funding about $13 billion of debt commitments."
"Banks that committed to help finance Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter Inc. plan to hold all $13 billion of debt backing the deal rather than syndicate it out, according to people familiar with the matter, in another blow to a market that serves as a crucial source of corporate funding."
$13 billion in money from banks as a loan
~$4 billion in pre-owned Twitter stock (he doesn't have to pay himself)
~$7-8 billion in commitments from other investors (Ellison, a16z, the Bitnance CEO etc.)
~$8-10 billion in TSLA stock he sold in like May when he announced the purchase at $900-$1000/share when he said it was specifically to buy TWTR
~$1 billion in a major investor (I don't recall whether it was a specific Saudi businessman or the Saudi investment fund or the royal family directly) asking to keep his ownership of the company and trade out the shares for teh new compnay shares
That still leaves ~$9-11 billion unaccounted for in a very public fashion. At one point, Merrill had promised him a $12.5 billion margin loan backed by his Tesla shares. He claimed not to need it (and removed it from being a contingency on the deal a while ago). Or maybe he secretly used it. It's less than 5% of his net worth, so it seems reasonable to assume he can get or borrow it easily.
The entire point of buying twitter was to give Musk an excuse to sell some of his tesla stock. He did just that, and now combined with twitter leveraged buyout loan and the other investors he's brought in he only needs a few billion in loans against tesla shares to close the deal.
In the spirit of trying to be high-information and add value:
Where Musk is going, there are no maps. So it's very very hard to project. But we can predict likely developments.
At a very high level, it's going to involve: bringing back controversial personalities like Donald Trump; increasing Twitter's commitment to 'free speech'; assuaging skittish advertisers; retaining users who might be concerned, while bringing in new ones; managing the exodus of users (size:?) that will happen regardless; cutting a large amount of staff, while keeping Twitter's lights on; open sourcing the code, discussing the impending rearchitecture; and - long term - folding this into Elon's vision of America's WeChat, and ultimately expanding Twitter, under X.com.
That's a lot. But at a high level, I think that's correct.
I would expect Elon to take the fight to the media. Whether he's going to focus on neutrally spreading a message, going more on the attack on media outlets that would support him, or doing something in between, is unknown.
Musk has an unusually large amount of media power: that's his unique value add, in a way. I would expect this to be a 'bigger deal' as a story, as multiple stories, than I would for any other company undergoing a takeover. We'll be hearing a lot more about Twitter in the weeks to come, since the developments will keep piling up, and the press/public loves to read & discuss stories about Twitter & Musk.
Most people are focused on censorship/content issues, but I really think the X.com "mega app" vision is the most significant part of this. It'll be hard to gain a foothold in those markets, and there'll be antitrust challenges, but it really fits perfectly with the rest of Musk's vision:
X.com Maps could tie in with Teslas, X.com Carhailing could tie-in with (future) full self-driving; Twitter could be expanded to be more like Telegram + Instagram, with channels, better DMs, "Moments", and more.
There's no attempt to create a single, wide-ranging social media platform, with payments, video, shorts, DMs, and more. China's proven that it can be done. It would create a far bigger moat and network effects, and likely be as successful as Microsoft Teams & 365, a highly integrated solution, are for work.
>> There's no attempt to create a single, wide-ranging social media platform, with payments, video, shorts, DMs, and more
Umm.. Facebook? Just offering all those features doesn't mean much though, you really have to be dominant in each one, since there's much less moat to debundling consumer apps vs enterprise
Their platforms are siloed off. The point of a mega app is that it's not siloed off; the reels, videos, DMs and tweets would be part of the same experience, and rely on the same usernames, hence the moat.
Are you serious? Why would I ever use that app? I already don't use twitter and there are market leaders that would have much better service (given they aren't trying to do every single thing in the world) compared to X and also, most of those services pretty much stink, so I would never think that X, while trying to do everything in the world, would also be better.
Well, you wouldn't do it by choice. I guess Musk really wants to build the WeChat equivalent for America, where to get anything done you really have to go through his app. They don't need to be best - they just need to make it inconvenient to not use it. And yes, it's an awful vision of the world.
Because it would be incredibly convenient. Link a restaurent to your friends in a chat, talk about going there, all of them have the location and you can split the bill, all in the same app.
It might not have the best business index, or the best chat, or the best map, or the best payment manager, but it would be far, far superior to trying to coordinate all of those services through different apps.
And it's not that you need to want all of this, it's that if people around you use it you have enormous pressure to use it as well, because in the previous scenario if you are the guy who doesn't use such app then you have to be catered to specifically through and through, which is annoying for everyone.
I wonder how this jives with his stated plan to lay off a lot of people? If he wants to implement that he'll need a lot more engineers and related support staff.
I think this was mostly bluster, sure hell have to lay off a lot of people to change the company direction but his pitch to investors said the company would grow to like 12000 people.
Then he's in real trouble because he's taken on a whole lot more loans, and Twitter is not growing that quickly and liable to actually shrink now. The US market for it is saturated.
If expenditure (hiring) goes up and he's not finding revenue then that's the end sooner rather then later.
Yeah, he’s said a lot of conflicting things and put himself in a precarious position. I both wouldn’t be truly surprised if he grows twitter nor if he laid 75% of people off on Monday.
the everything-app thing would be significant if realized, the thing about that is it has to compete not just against all the tech giants, but also against all the smaller companies who are already mostly succeeding in those verticals. having to install another app isn't really an impediment to acquiring users.
it's an interesting vision to be sure, but i'm not sure how buying twitter actually helps it - twitter has already been struggling to expand outside their core product - none of the experiments like moments, spaces, fleets, etc have really taken off. it kind of seems like twitter users just want tweets and nothing else. so now he's taken on a whole bunch of debt to acquire a userbase who is hostile to the app expanding into any other markets? I don't really see a whole lot of evidence that twitter is a good launch platform for an everything-app.
There's a cluster of things around transport and then... also Twitter? I get that in the end you want to do everything but what makes microblogging a more important day 1 feature than food delivery or gaming or online dating. It's like if Amazon did just book delivery and online photo storage.
> managing the exodus of users (size:?) that will happen regardless;
This is probably the biggest risk in this acquisition. Twitter wasn't doing anything special, and it's easy to launch a clone of their business model. Elon's talking about taking an axe to the things that keep the lights on at Twitter: effective content moderation and talent.
> taking an axe to the things that keep the lights on at Twitter: effective content moderation and talent.
I have experienced the 'effectiveness' of Twitters moderation team on multiple occasions where they were very ineffective at upholding the very clear cut rules surrounding things like doxxing on their website. I had my personal information made public, and they ignored me. Multiple times. I even created a new account with no way for there to be any publicly available personal info; and yet I was still doxxed somehow, and they still ignored me.
So, in the spirit of HN's rules, I just want to say this, since end user experience should be allowable to share (I hope.).
Effective moderation at twitter is a myth as far as I see it, and their only talent is making it look like they have effective moderation when they care.
P.S. I also was doing nothing wrong in any case where this happened. It was all conversations which should have been considered civil (mostly) and one situation where it had nothing to do with politics or philosophy at all. Yet they did nothing.
I agree that Twitter's content moderation is mostly a vibe, and not really effective. Musk purchasing Twitter is already killing that feeling that content moderation works at Twitter, and I wouldn't be surprised if advertisers put a freeze on their plans the day the purchase went through (hence Musk's panicked-sounding tweet to advertisers).
Honestly, if what they though Twitter was before was fine to advertise on, despite the lack of actual coherent moderation; then we are all blessed by the lack of those advertisers.
And if that makes Elon panic, then we are blessed doubly in that way as well, because he might either actually do something useful to make it a nicer place to be; or he might burn it to the ground.
Not really, since the other poster was saying Elon would be axing things like moderation. I'm saying essentially it doesn't matter if he does or doesn't, because it barely exists at all anyways.
So axe away I guess, cause there is no wood to chop. The tree is hollow, from all the woodpeckers eating the grubs.
> Elon's talking about taking an axe to the things that keep the lights on at Twitter: effective content moderation and talent.
I don't think it's clear this is the case. It's just the network effect that keeps it in such a dominant position. Plenty of Twitter clones have been created, yet neither conservatives have migrated to Truth/Parler/Gab/whatever, nor have or will liberals/the anti-Musk contingent to Mastodon, or whatever the left-leaning equivalent Twitter clone coming in the next few weeks is.
Honestly, Twitter's biggest draw to most users is probably the lack of content moderation on something that gets buried beneath the politics and culture discussions: porno, porno, porno. Twitter is one of the few social media sites where porn is still allowed, for the most part. It's always funny to see a "viral" politics/culture war tweet that has "blown up" with 50k, 100k likes; any given lewd picture of Ganyu from Genshin Impact by a popular artist is going to run double those numbers.
> It's just the network effect that keeps it in such a dominant position.
Exactly. Just ask Friendster or MySpace or any of the other failed social networks how deep and wide the network effect moat is in the long run. I'd argue that for all the hype, Twitter was already in the 'long goodbye' phase before Musk bet the farm on it.
> Twitter is one of the few social media sites where porn is still allowed, for the most part.
And they're completely at the mercy of Google and Apple's policies here. Both of those app stores could put their feet down next week and this 'feature' of Twitter's suddenly becomes a liability.
Pretty sure that's 85% of the people who comment on this site. Only thinking about the purely technical side of things, never the issues and limitations that come from other people.
It was an eye opener to see official Taliban accounts.
As abhorrent as I may find their ideas, if they play the rules, I'd actually prefer to allow them on the platform.
The eye opener was seeing others cheer on the silencing of academics, politicians,and physicians who's ideas may be out of step with the zeitgeist (or the mob's interpretation of what's apprpos).
To a lesser extent, same thing with ISIS. When LiveLeak was gone, and their propaganda videos were pretty much scrubbed from the web, we lost a lot of actual history, as abhorrent as it all was. It's going to be easy for people to forget how bad all of that was, and more importantly for me- most of the countless videos of them using American supplied TOWS against Assad while also filming the mass genocide...all that is gone, and it's much harder to prove the connection was ever there.
Same thing with Libya and Gaddafi, gruesome stuff was done by western backed rebels, including a revival of the black African slave trade and just killing black immigrants in Libya, and all of that is nigh impossible to prove now.
Exactly. Regardless of how horrible war videos are, they are still directly true history, and their loss is seriously concerning. I knew people who, despite knowing very little of the war, were cheering on FSA attacks against civilians, because of "Assad support".
When a video of them throwing a teenage boy into the back of a pickup truck and sawing his head off started making the rounds, their opinion changed completely. Even if they were full of crackpots, these sites documented objectively just how terrible and extremely brutal these wars are.
> Twitter wasn't doing anything special, and it's easy to launch a clone of their business model.
And yet nobody has done it? People think social media is easy to start and succeed. FYI, its like catching lightning.
It wasn't strictly cash, it was an agreement to buy $150 million of stock as part of a Judge-approved settlement of a lawsuit which Apple was winning. The settlement was a win-win for both sides, because it meant Apple remained a healthy company and Microsoft got to avoid paying out BILLIONS to Apple. Instead they bought stock which they sold for a tidy profit ($550 million) a few years later.
(Fun fact: if Microsoft hadn't sold this $150 million investment in Apple stock, it would be worth $120 BILLION today and this shareholding would be Microsoft's single most profitable business unit.)
What you don’t know is how much worse MS itself would have been without the 550M for whatever they used it for. Unlikely 120B worse off but it would be something.
That might be true on the margins, but it's impossible to know. Maybe they would have not pursued the original Xbox and lost out on that enormous market. Or maybe they would not have pursued Windows Mobile/Windows Phone and saved a few billion dollars on a dead end...
One of the important parts of that deal was Microsoft promising to develop Office for the Mac. There were definitely competing products out there, but the Mac needed Office.
It's really impractical to second guess history, but I don't think Office was quite as necessary as people say. Its absence definitely would have hurt sales on the margins, but it certainly didn't affect the majority of Apple's customers. The reasons why people owned computers was exploding in the late 90s, with the advent of the internet and the home digital media revolution.
I feel we have a generic tendency of looking at downward trends and assuming that shocking radical change can’t make it worse. As history tells, it sure can.
The old Twitter was a lost cow looking for pasture and moving very little in fear of getting more lost. For better and worse it had stability. We can assume that stability is now gone through the window.
Isn't that kind of the story of Twitter thus far already? Certainly on the financial front they never seemed to have much of a plan, and on the product side things always seemed like a bit of a mess to me as well.
Some fresh leadership might not be a bad thing for Twitter. Whether Musk is the right person for that...
What these comparative analyses keep missing is that Musk Twitter is an LBO company with billions in loans on its books. It's private, which takes public shareholder pressure off, but it's also directly losing billions of dollars in debt service. The pressure to generate some kind of stable income, soon, is probably immense.
It's worth keeping in mind that despite the brave face, Musk didn't want to buy Twitter. In fact: he desperately didn't want to buy Twitter. He's been forced to do so by the Delaware courts.
I agree. We know they were meeting to discuss a lower price throughout the process, but no agreement was reached. Not surprising if Twitter felt they were very likely to win, why accept less? But they did discuss it.
It's more accurate to say Musk didn't want to buy Twitter for $44 billion. His timing on his bid really sucked. He might have saved half or more if he'd waited a few months.
What baffles me is that he would have just followed the tried and tested procedures of acquiring a company he would have paid less and would have had a chance to reconsider if he reaely wanted to during due diligence.
Instead he made a take-it-or-leave-it offer with a ludicrously tight schedule and locked himself into an unfavorable deal without any obvious reason.
I am certain there is a bad decision in there sometimes and I'm wondering what it it might be.
A small part of me thinks that maybe he was uncertain and scared that he would back out so he took that option off the table preemptively.
That would be more plausible if he hadn't savaged the company for months, degrading its value, prior to being forced to consummate. It's below the threshold for plausibility now.
It's probably more or less the case that for the next several years, it will be difficult for Musk to do any big-ticket M&A, despite having some of the biggest pockets in the business, without agreeing to exceptionally seller-friendly terms. All because of how he handled an acquisition of a flailing media company that it is very unclear that he wanted in the first place.
I don't think that's quite right, or rather you're presenting it incorrectly. When musk proposed the twitter deal he was already in the state where any acquisition that he proposed would necessarily be under exceptionally seller-friendly terms, that's why the twitter deal was such. If he already had had to present such terms at that time, what more terms could his proposals possibly provide now after this bullshit?
He had to buy Twitter under exceptionally seller-friendly terms, because Twitter didn't want to change hands or be taken over by Musk; that's the month of drama leading up to the M&A debacle.
What I'm saying is that he'll be getting exceptionally seller-friendly terms from everybody, for years to come, because in the course of this supposed "negotiation" he repeatedly breached the terms of the acquisition agreement, publicly slagged the target over and over again, reneged on the deal, and brought a horseshit case to the Delaware Chancery Court to try to avoid performance when the target held him to the deal he agreed to. Every other company is going to notice that (it's one of the most noticeable things to happen in business in 50 years!), and nobody is going to trust him.
I don't believe he did all of that as a negotiating ploy. If he wanted to get the price down, all he had to do was wait before agreeing to an ironclad, overpriced deal. In fact: "waiting" is what he ended up trying to make happen anyways!
You do that BEFORE legally committing to a purchase price, not after.
He thought he could get away with an "epic troll" for his acolytes to croon over, like the stock price manipulation Tweets. Turns out the Delaware courts have teeth.
No, he signed a contract to buy something with no contingencies at what everyone quickly came to realize was 2x to 3x what it was worth.
Twitter’s management, acting in the best interest of their shareholders, used the court to force him to hold to the contract when he tried to walk. Musk decided to buy the company for the agreed on price rather than have that imposed on him by court order after (more) embarrassing discovery.
Seeing Musk as a business genius in this deal requires ignoring nearly every event in the saga.
You are reading the terms of the deal incorrectly. He had the option to pay 1b only under the specific case that his financing fell through. That never happened, quite the opposite the banks backing this deal have been adamant that they were ready to go but Musk was dragging his feet.
Meanwhile, Musk was getting absolutely savaged in the Delaware chancery court and they were just in discovery. He was going to lose and that would be more embarrassing (somehow) than this outcome.
All because he went off half cocked and didn’t write bog standard contingencies into his offer.
He’s come off looking like an absolute simpleton in this and that’s the better outcome for him than if the court case had proceeded.
It wasn’t an “opt out”, the termination fee was only available under several specific circumstances, neither of which applied to the facts at hand. He was never permitted to walk for $1 billion.
There was a provision that Musk would be on the hook for $1B if a third party (e.g. regulators) blew up the deal in a couple enumerated ways. No such option was available to Musk himself.
> It's worth keeping in mind that despite the brave face, Musk didn't want to buy Twitter. In fact: he desperately didn't want to buy Twitter. He's been forced to do so by the Delaware courts.
I haven't had a lot of good things to say about Musk as of late but I think this might be an exception, this kind of fortitude is something we should all strive to have. When cornered, he at least didn't complain or cry too much, he actually bit the bullet and has a very convincingly brave face on indeed.
I honestly can't think of a worse example of fortitude than Elon Musk's handling of the Twitter deal, which he entered capriciously, repeatedly violated terms he agreed to, ultimately reneged on the deal, and had to be forced by a court to uphold.
I think that’s potentially charitable - arguably he pumped out some pro Russia tweets to try and get the deal flagged as against national interest to blow up his financing. He wanted pretty badly for this not to happen including trying a couple of 3D chess moves
That wasn't a general purpose "whoops, takesie backsies" clause, it was contingent on financing falling through for an otherwise best-effort deal.
Those sort of breakup fees are to give the company some compensation for non-bad-faith purchasers having external problems, because a failed acquisition is still an expensive thing for a company to have gone through in those situations. A cold-feet buyer throwing shit at the company in public even though he has the means to close the deal? Different story.
Looking at all musk has achieved so far - despite (or because of?) boards of experts adamant it couldn’t be done - I think it’s immensely clear a plan is something he clearly has and works very hard towards.
Obviously many people will disagree with his plan, though I’m 100% certain he has one, and will make it happen.
I'm 100% certain he is quite literally the biggest internet troll of all time. His words have caused volatility in crypto and stonk markets, and all as jokes to himself. He demanded his California workers continue working in large in-person groups despite a deadly virus pandemic without a vaccine at the time. His plan was to dangle a carrot in front of Twitter that he'd buy, then pull the rug out. He once again violated really commonsense ETF/FCC/whatever laws and once again got bit. He's a genius in many ways, and a playground bully in others.
Which ways is he a genius? I don't know much about him but as far as I can tell he's just an engineer who had a very rich father. Did he invent something that I'm not aware of? Genuinely asking, I would not be surprised to learn that I've missed something.
Lots of people have rich fathers. Almost none of them found multiple multi-billion dollar companies and become the wealthiest person in the world. Do you think there's not anything different?
If "having a rich father" is the only thing that matters, why isn't everyone with a rich father a billionaire?
> Almost none of them found multiple multi-billion dollar companies and become the wealthiest person in the world. Do you think there's not anything different?
Lots of stuff is different. I know lots of people with very very wealthy parents. They don't want to run businesses... so they don't. The number of people who have the will and means is probably quite a lot smaller than the people who have the means.
Anyway you've just dodged the question by implying "surely there must be something" but I'm asking what it is. To clarify further, I would consider the marks of a genius to be someone who is either a prodigy (ie: exhibits mastery of a subject at a very early age or with little experience) or who has made significant and particularly novel contributions to a field or multiple fields.
> exhibits mastery of a subject at a very early age or with little experience
He wrote and sold a computer game at 12 years old after teaching himself to program at 10.
> significant and particularly novel contributions to a field or multiple fields.
Made eletric cars a viable economic prospect, pioneered reusable rockets. Obviously not making every single technical contribution himself, but leading the process.
I don't know, I guess if you're just predisoposed to follow journalists who want to push him as nothing as a cringy nerd, you might not consider that significant, but clearly the market does.
> I don't know, I guess if you're just predisoposed to follow journalists who want to push him as nothing as a cringy nerd, you might not consider that significant, but clearly the market does.
I literally said I don't follow anything about him and was genuinely asking why people call him a genius. He's obviously a cringy nerd but that's not what I'm looking for.
Anyway I guess the game thing seems somewhat impressive, I'm not sure I'd qualify it as "genius" but that's something.
I mean, if you were actually curious you could have spent 5 minutes reading Wikipedia or any number of other sources for what people attribute to him. It's not like the information is hard to find. Like, the guy builds one company that literally becomes the most valuable in the world, and another company that builds rockets that a lot of people said were literally impossible and you just write that off as "oh he didn't do anything special, he just had a rich dad". I mean come on, it's hard to believe you're arguing in good faith.
I didn't expect a "why he's considered a genius" on the wikipedia page but I can check that out. I expected a pretty simple answer. I asked this about Kanye the other day and got a great response explaining how his music was novel.
Business accomplishments are impressive but I don't think they make someone a genius.
Why would business accomplishments not make someone a genius? Business requires creativity and intelligence just as much as any other field of human endeavor.
Tesla (the company) didn't invent electric cars, but they were the first to make electric cars that people actually wanted to buy.
They were expensive, small, underpowered, and had poor range. Musk took a weakness (expensive) and turned it into a strength (luxury status symbol) by just embracing that making a high-performance electric car was going to be really expensive and marketing it as a toy for rich people to show off how rich they are. Then, he used the profits from that to scale production and bring down the price for future models.
I don't know if he invented this business strategy, but it's a least a pretty brilliant application of it, along with the admirable goal of reducing fossil fuel emissions by putting more electric cars on the road. He also open-sourced all patents developed by Tesla, so other manufacturers could benefit from whatever they discovered along the way.
"Elon is brilliant. He’s involved in just about everything. He understands everything. If he asks you a question, you learn very quickly not to go give him a gut reaction.
He wants answers that get down to the fundamental laws of physics. One thing he understands really well is the physics of the rockets. He understands that like nobody else. The stuff I have seen him do in his head is crazy.
He can get in discussions about flying a satellite and whether we can make the right orbit and deliver Dragon at the same time and solve all these equations in real time. It’s amazing to watch the amount of knowledge he has accumulated over the years."
Kevin Watson - chief of avionics at Launcher
Elon is definitely an engineer. He is deeply involved with technical decisions at spacex and Tesla. He doesn’t write code or do CAD today, but he is perfectly capable of doing so.
John Carmack
When I met Elon it was apparent to me that although he had a scientific mind and he understood scientific principles, he did not know anything about rockets. Nothing. That was in 2001. By 2007 he knew everything about rockets - he really knew everything, in detail. You have to put some serious study in to know as much about rockets as he knows now. This doesn't come just from hanging out with people.
It’s not the only thing which matters but it’s important to remember because these guys get so much public praise for being visionary geniuses while there are a ton of people who are just as smart and hard working but didn’t have the resources and luck to hit a high-return jackpot. For example, Bill Gates has been the subject of so many business books which love to describe him as a genius but while he’s far from stupid he wasn’t noteworthy compared to his peers: MS BASIC & DOS worked but they weren’t better than the alternatives – but those competitors didn’t have parents on IBM’s board, either. Prior to the Meta debacle, Zuckerberg got tons of laudatory press which tended not to focus on how much his early success was due to leveraging the Harvard network, or the almost forgotten classmate who went around the country getting sororities (and thus fraternities) to use it, great boosting its reputation as a place to be.
That matters personally because you want to set realistic expectations: if you can’t afford to write off a couple of year’s work, launching a startup probably isn’t the best call for you compared to a more staid job which means you don’t need to worry about rent money or health insurance.
It also matters societally because these guys really want to influence our laws, educational system, tax code, etc. and that context is critical. If a billionaire says we should cut taxes on startups to help people climb the ladder, the first question should be how much of the money will go to rich kids from Ivy League schools versus the ones featured in the ad. Similarly, if they’re pushing kids to drop out of college for startups or turning public schools into coding camp, we should be asking how that’ll work out for everyone: the prospects for a kid with affluent high-status parents and a robust social network are quite different from kids who are poor, brown, in the wrong part of the country, etc. and such a policy might be especially dubious if it meant that they have lower negotiating power to get better jobs at the companies run by people making such suggestions.
I've only heard that in the “brilliant kid, what a waste” quote describing his reaction to learning that Gates had left academia to start a company, which is a little less dramatic sounding from a then relatively early career professor but, again, the point is not that Gates was stupid but rather than his intelligence was only part of the story.
If you look at software of that era, he wasn't doing something nobody else could do. They had a BASIC interpreter, but it wasn't the first or notably better. MS-DOS certainly worked, but it was at least heavily inspired by CP/M even if the plagiarism accusations were wrong. Being a capable programmer was necessary to his success but it was far from the reason: there were many others around, and they did well but the legendary wealth came to the person whose mother was on IBM's board when he made that company-defining sale. He subsequently executed well but again not uniquely so — anyone who used Microsoft software of that era could tell you that it wasn't the quality of that software which kept people using it. He executed well, and certainly wasn’t shy about an … aggressive … legal strategy but there was also a substantial portion of nepotism and luck.
The world has many people who were smart and hardworking but will never be close to that level of success because they didn’t have the family connections, startups capitol, friends they made at the right school, or the freedom to make a big gamble.
I think you're looking at this as though it were a merit-based system, and it's unfair that Gates did so well when his merit alone deserves a much less level of success.
If so, what you're missing is that Gates knew how to play "the game." He knew how to close sales, how to navigate the muddy waters of business, and how to leverage success into more success.
I think success takes a lot of hard work and little luck. Great success takes a little more hard work and a lot more luck.
I think Bill Gates, Elon Musk are all examples of great success. It doesn't mean they are vastly different from the similar hard working people in their fields. It just means that they did a "little" more combined with lots of other factors that put them where they are.
I guess the point is that the working 16 hours a day for years on something that might return billions but might also return nothing, is a lot more rational if you have a safety net that means you'll still have somewhere to live if it doesn't work out.
Check out Ashley Vance’s biography of Musk. One anecdote that sticks out in my memory is he was both scientifically knowledgeable enough and knee-deep enough in what SpaceX was doing to realize that they didn’t need to buy a certain hundred dollar (or something) existing part to use it for their rockets because they could make their own that did the specific thing they needed it to do for a few cents.
The "he had very rich parents" is often used to reduce one's achievements. A quick google search shows there are over 60 million "millionaires" in the world, yet less than 1% know how to turn it into a billion.
I think the Tesla's are cool, SpaceX is immpressive, I enjoy his online trolling but I don't think he is a genius. The rocket scientist he employs at SpaceX is a genius. I got caught up on the way you phrased your response-- I felt that it was written in bad faith with "he's just an engineer who had a very rich father, Did he invent something that I'm not aware of? ". However seing as you were responding to someone who elevated him to Genius I can see why.
There is some pretty good evidence that wealth accumulation accelerates. In particular if you go above a certain threshold things will only go up (and go up faster). If that is the case and if we add some noise to the system. Some percentage of people will always become billionaires just by luck alone (and importantly never loose that status). I'm not saying that Musk got there by just luck, but the existence of a billionaire does not proof he is a genius.
So the assumption to be a genius is that you must start from zero? I completely reject that assumption. It’s false for so many true geniuses, like von Neumann. His dad was well connected, the same is true for John Stuart Mill and a bunch of others I can’t think of now.
This idea that every genius must be formed in a vacuum and can only be considered a “true” one if they can bootstrap themselves from nothing is an absurd idea peddled by underachievers who somehow find solace in their own mediocrity by nullifying the accomplishments of others who don’t fulfil their arbitrary starting conditions.
One doesn't need to be able to point to a specific thing which they invented while alone in their garage with no help from anyone else in order to be a remarkable person. Elon is intimately involved in the minutae of SpaceX engineering and damn, if landing orbital rockets on a floating barge isn't impressive enough for you, I don't know what is.
> Looking at all musk has achieved so far - despite (or because of?) boards of experts adamant it couldn’t be done
This is where I think his detractors overlook the real benefits he brings. He is fearless and will willingly take long shot bets down roads where others don’t dare tread. His willingness to take the big risk has resulted in some transformative leaps. He’s either very lucky and not very good, or very good and not very lucky, but more likely has a lot of both going for him.
That's certainly possible. But which of the following would you think is most likely to succeed?
(a) a company trying to build electric cars at a time when there was zero consumer demand for them and the battery technology was nowhere near good enough
(b) a company trying to launch things into space when the vast majority of nations in the world were unable to do so and even NASA seemed like it had lost its way
(c) a popular social media app with 400M users and maybe some issues with product direction
You gotta look both at odds and also at returns...
You bet on (a) and (b) because nobody else has pulled it off so if you can do it, you can win big, and you aren't just one of many players in a crowded sea.
(c) is a rough bet since you're already huge but you still have a lot of competition and it's a crowded market and you haven't always made as much money per user as people would like...
How would Twitter be WeChat of America if WeChat is fundamentally for private messages and private transactions (unless it’s groups) but Twitter is for broadcasting yourself
The difficulty is that some of these objectives conflict with each other. Backing off on moderation is likely to drive advertisers away; bringing back banned people could in some cases cause legal problems in countries where publishing, say, pro-Nazi speech is against the law. Making major changes will require more people, but stopping the financial bleeding will require fewer people.
Twitter already has implementations for the Nazi stuff; e.g. images with Nazi flags are allowed in general but if you try to view them from an account with location set to Germany, it will give you a "this content is blocked in your country" error message.
I'd definitely be worried about driving advertisers away though. They forced YouTube's hand at least to some degree with the whole adpocalypse thing.
The whole "advertisers don't want their ads appearing next to xyz" has always felt contrived to me, like, I can use Gmail to receive all sorts of wrongthink and I'll still see ads on it, similarly Twitter should be a neutral tool not a magazine. It's up to the users what they see.
You'd need a lot of market share and confidence as Musk to actually say "this is silly" but it is silly nonetheless. The big players started down the road of "ok we'll ban the worst stuff" and once they blinked it's been "but what about" all the way down.
> The whole "advertisers don't want their ads appearing next to xyz" has always felt contrived to me, like, I can use Gmail to receive all sorts of wrongthink and I'll still see ads on it
Good point, but...
The advertiser mostly cares when "everyone" knows they advertise for Nazis. If it's just you who knows, no biggie. They don't want it to be common knowledge.
Can’t they just give the advertiser the ability to control what kind of content they want their ads to appear alongside? Actually, don’t they do that already?
> The advertiser mostly cares when “everyone” knows they advertise for Nazis.
There are likely some advertisers who would have no qualms about targeting Nazis for advertisements, and little or no qualms about anyone knowing that they do either: criminal lawyers, divorce lawyers, mental health treatment services, drug and alcohol treatment services, certain kinds of charities (such as extremism prevention or anti-racism), etc.
It’s not just what content they’re next to, brands don’t want to be associated with certain types of content in any way. Because to a lot of consumers a brand is a part of their identity, and most people don’t identify with Nazis.
YouTube/Reddit/Facebook/etc are full of all kinds of crazy unhinged content - they may ban Nazis, but there’s many other species of crazy they don’t ban. But “A allows people (who go looking for it) to find crazy unhinged content of kind B” and “Company C advertises on A” are just completely unrelated facts in my head - and I think that’s true for most people.
Eh, no it's about the publics interpretation of appearance. Your Gmail filters out a metric shitton of spam. If they stopped doing that and all you got was thousands of penis enlargement emails per day the number of advertisers would drop significantly because the tools utility would drop significantly.
The reason 'xyz' gets banned where xyz is negatively viewed is because it tends to end up everywhere and reduce the utility of the platform.
It is silly, except to the disingenuous opportunists of all political stripes and persuasions who hold companies (they likely rarely patronized) hostage.
It's reasonable to moderate content beyond the pale. But that's on the platforms.
Running to advertisers feels like defiantly going to the other parent when you don't receive the answer you want.
I've never drawn the conclusion Bark Box or Toyota stand firmly beyond some crackpot on YT because their ad played before some content.
The whole "advertisers don't want their ads appearing next to xyz" has always felt contrived to me,
lol
General Motors just suspended all advertising on Twitter. I've no idea how much their Twitter ad spend compares to that of other companies but certainly GM is not a small company. While I'd love to see it come out that GM doesn't want to be associated with high profile antisemites and conspiracy theorists like Ye, I'd bet it's much more straightforward: GM doesn't want its ad dollars to fund or otherwise be associated with a direct competitor (Tesla).
The problem with a Musk owned Twitter is that there is such a vast range of conflicts of interest. With Musk at the helm it's just that much harder for a company facing social/political pressure to justify doing business with Twitter.
>While I'd love to see it come out that GM doesn't want to be associated with high profile antisemites and conspiracy theorists like Ye
Any company trying to claim this now should justify why they had no problem advertising on Twitter while Iran and Al Qaeda had official Twitter accounts
> Twitter already has implementations for the Nazi stuff
Those implementations will be defeated by motivated adversaries and they will not have the expertise remaining to rebuild it. There will be many lessons learned again at great cost.
By implementations I mean the general infrastructure for enforcing country-specific laws locally, but not as a general rule of Twitter.
Non-motivated non-adversaries already defeat these systems by accident, which I assume are mostly based on user-reports. But apparently Germany's regulators are satisfied enough with Twitter's implementation, since I haven't heard about any issues with it.
Let's assume he makes Neuralink happen in the sense of really giving a locked-in person the ability to communicate in real words and sentences.
He now has the network to connect those people directly to the rest of the world, under his umbrella. Sure, he could have just used (old) Twitter's API, and that's what he'll be using, but it won't be "we (as in 'Neuralink') and Twitter made this happen", but "we (my companies)" made this happen.
I also wonder how useful Twitter's infrastructure could be for machine-to-machine communication, where he certainly could have some uses for it with Tesla and Starlink.
‘Ah yes. We can give your child with locked in syndrome a communications path with the rest of the world, but it can only be through the twitter API. Also his ventilator? Also needs twitter API. Yes, that’s right. His life support and all communication in and out relies on a flimsy message board. Connection outages? Well, it can’t happen. We’ve got starlink on the back of his wheelchair. Tunnels? Oh no, don’t go in tunnels’
We know one thing: half of the $44B was loans that will cost Twitter around $1B per year, so it has to make some kind of profit. Otherwise who will pay?
If they made $1B profit before counting the loan, they would spend that profit on the loan. Effectively the same concept: they need to revenue to clear operating expenses PLUS a $1B loan payment.
In 2020 twitter had a net loss of $1.14B. The loans will kill twitter.
It might be interesting to know the subtlety if it is in the Twitter context. Is it better to look at cash, loc, and cashflow to determine if they can pay the loan repayments?
Essentially, yes. The GAAP income statement is a very poor proxy for cash flow generation ability. That captures 80% of it.
There’s also operating leverage. This business should trend to 50-80% gross margins and 30-50% profit / free cash flow conversion, similar to Facebook, Google, or other similar businesses.
Further, there’s a bunch of pre- and post- transaction adjustments that hit the financial statements (for example stock based compensation will likely go away in a private company, thus raising profitability), so you can’t just take last years profit and tack on the new debt structure.
Last, the amortization on high yield isn’t necessarily linear. In the most extreme example (where the debt costs >12%) you could have pay-in-kind (PIK) interest where the interest payments accrue to the balance of the loan (like a credit card) and for amortization, it could be anywhere from straight line (1/x periods) to a “bullet” with no amortization at all until a end period where it all comes due at once (you typically refinance in that case).
All-in, it may be risky, but the bankers that committed billions of capital to the deal aren’t exactly brain dead and all have internal credit approval processes which require them to do all the work outlined above and a bunch more.
You didn't dispute my point that they still need another $1.2B/year. And even looking at their 10 past years (where 2020 was the highest income), it's still bleak.
I don't know why you dissed my response, then gave an answer that basically supports it.
Sigh. Sure. There’s 7 banks or so in the lending group, each with 5 to 12 FTEs touching or reviewing this deal before funding.
But sure, you’re smarter than them all combined, they’re wrong and underwrote a faulty deal and you’re right, particularly when having no info on the post transaction capital structure.
Do you try to save tax every year by “maximising your losses”? Or aka claiming as many expenses ad possible. This reduces your income! But even if you took 100k off your income aka “profit” this way you could still afford your mortgage, right… infact it makes it more affordable as you paid less tax!
> for example stock based compensation will likely go away in a private company, thus raising profitability
They're paying out vests on the sales price in cash, which was higher than the value of the company. Normally equity comp places the price fluctuation risk on the employee, but in this case, they're directly eating this cost.
If they don't offer salaries that are competitive with other companies total comp, they will bleed employees, and won't be able to hire talented engineers.
So, no, this really doesn't help, and if anything it increases their direct costs.
Saying it is some country’s WeChat is like a curse… as WeChat is notorious for its closed mindedness and probably hated by most of its users… and they won’t even have any other option because Tencent is actively striking down all potential competitors…
Yeah wtf would anyone touting freedom of speech bring up China in any way? Tencent, owner of WeChat, said they'd block NBA Houston Rockets games because one of the Rockets' managers tweeted "Fight for Freedom. Stand with Hong Kong." [0]. Granted, I got kicked off of twitter for "misinformation" for saying "some day we'll all die".
It's two different things: WeChat has a bunch of integrated apps, that's part of what Musk's vision is. The free speech issue is separate from the similarities to WeChat.
How could free speech possibly remain separate at WeChat levels of consolidation?
You spout wrongthink in a twitter DM, and now your bank, credit card, email, private messages, facebook, rail pass, amazon, uber, government ID, school accounts, craigslist and tinder are permabanned.
It's difficult to make a judgement on "some day we'll all die" without context. It might've been part of an insightful discussion about the potential of immortality or it could have been directed at the parent of a school-shooting victim.
This. As someone living in China and having used wechat for years I've always found it ultra cringey when American businessmen/influencers are like "omg have you guys seen what Chinese are doing with wechat! They have this all in one app where..."
First of all this idea of a superapp is nothing new. In fact iOS or Android is also a "superapp". Basically a software that has an ecosystem inside of it. Wechat has just created their own ecosystem within a ecosystem, because they want to control everything.
Second, when compared to most other Chinese apps I do have to admit that wechat is much more finished, but when compared to other global messaging apps like Telegram, Slack etc. I'd say wechat is about 10-15 years behind in everything and lacking the most fundamental features.
The social media aspect of wechat which is called "Wechat Moments" is also extremely limited: Basically like Instagram without you being able to see or follow people you don't know personally. If your friend posts a photo and his friend (who you don't know) makes a comment on it, you cannot see this comment but you can see your friends replies to him/her. Yes, super confusing. Also no images, videos, gifs in the comments etc.
Third, a lot of people like to mention that "you can do everything with wechat". You can do a lot of things, but I don't know anyone who only uses wechat. There are a lot of other apps that you need to live comfortably: Alipay (this is another superapp), Taobao (like ebay), Jingdong (like amazon), Dianping (like Yelp), Eleme/Meituan (like Uber eats), Baidu maps, banking apps etc. etc.
Wechat does have it's internal "miniprogram" system (alternative to native apps) where you can have some of these apps I previously mentioned, but there are severe app size, memory and performance limitations, proprietary API and the performance and functionality is from early 2010s internet. Laggy and slowly opening pages, collapsing and bouncy layouts etc. Also wechat does not support multitasking: When you are using for example Tim Horton's miniprogram to order coffee, you can't chat with your friends, you can't open a Starbucks/some_other_coffee_company miniprogram on the side and compare prices. You have to close and kill the current "app" and then open a new "app" for new action.
This is somewhat understandable due to the iOS/Android limitations of a single app (in regards to performance and memory), but it highlights why this kind of a "superapp" idea is fundamentally flawed.
So basically IMO "superapp" is a solution looking for a problem. We already have iOS, Android or web browser. We don't need another forced ecosystem but we need good apps for existing ones.
> If your friend posts a photo and his friend (who you don't know) makes a comment on it, you cannot see this comment but you can see your friends replies to him/her.
Is that a technical shortcoming or business logic? It doesn't sound entirely different from how Twitter handles private/blocked accounts.
I think that means WeChat in the sense that in China WeChat isn't just an communications app, it's an app through which many/most people do a great deal of transactions -- shopping, p2p payments, paying utility bills, customer support, ride hailing, banking, etc., It encompasses what about 10 apps in the US do. You cannot understate how pervasive its use is in ways that have little to do with social media. That's what Elon wants to turn Twitter into.
It sounds like Musk is going to tell advertisers to kick rocks and try to monetize the platform.
Where are people gonna go if not on Twitter? The left isn't gonna have better luck with their own truth social or parler. The network effect is too big with Twitter. It's not fun if you're not dunking on your enemies. That's the fun of Twitter.
I think you may be over-estimating how much most people "need" something like Twitter. For the vast majority of users, a news feed and private messaging (WhatsApp, iMessage, etc.) are good enough.
Based on what? Social media is addictive. For people to get off of it, they're going to need some help. We don't currently have facilities to help people kick the habit.
I appreciate your perspective. I used Twitter to follow industry news. But the people I cared about left and so did I. It’s so boring and pointless now. Absolutely no value to me anymore.
Facebook could allow for special profiles that are only comprised of statuses. That would be a Twitter clone in a nutshell that would already have high adoption.
That would require Facebook to make a shrewd business decision though so never mind.
It would also require people, who I am assuming lean left, to trust Zuck over Elon after the last 5 years of talking about how terrible Zuck and his platform are. I don't see that happening. Nobody wants grandma reading their tweets.
he bragged that he didn't care about making a profit in one of those public Q&A rountables this year. a lot of weird statements about a company that he seems to hate despite using it to pump his fortune
Maybe I've just been working for tech companies in the Bay Area too long. But I don't want to work for a company where I don't have equity that I can cash out.
And now all those engineers are working for a company where equity doesn't exist? An exception could be a Netflix model where you make a buttload of money. But Twitter isn't that.
SpaceX has no public equities and has no problem attracting talent.
You guys are really thinking Musk is some bozos that have never done anything in his life. Its quite incredible. Last week 4 astronauts went to ISS on his rocket and the first stage landed, again. Tesla is still growing at close to 40/50% top and bottomline when all car companies are contracting, even FAANG.
Twitter is yet to be seen. But its quite incredible the dismissiveness around here. Making Twitter work is peanuts comparing to trying to get a car company and a space company (both industries where successful examples are much harder to find than social media companies. Even if we point fingers as Meta and Snap, they are profitable and not bankrupt like most car and space companies in history) to survive through the 2008 Financial crisis.
> SpaceX has no public equities and has no problem attracting talent.
I'm no Musk hater and interested to see where he takes Twitter. That said, SpaceX is at the forefront of space travel, and they want to put man on Mars. Twitter sells advertisements on the internet, with the lofty goal of selling some more ads.
One of his challenges will be to pay $1.2B in interest payments every year while also making good on the principal. That's quite a bit of debt for a struggling financial situation. Cutting HC will help in the short term; it is unclear if those cuts will be well executed. HN opinion that twitter could run with 200 engineers is woefully naive for a massive company that is under FTC consent order - they probably have >200 privacy engineers (and associated legal staff) just to comply with regulations.
The consent decree requires that the company be 5x as large as it otherwise would. It really, really, really slows down development. For every engineer, there is also a corresponding engineer whose job is to slow them down.
IT IS ORDERED that respondent... establish and implement, and thereafter maintain, a comprehensive information security program that is reasonably designed to protect the security, privacy, confidentiality, and integrity of nonpublic consumer information.
Computer security 101 says that there should be one set of checks for the information (parsimony of mechanism), all access go through that mechanism (complete intermediation), and as few people/things have access to the data as possible (least privilege).
Making sure all private data goes in the vault and the vault is secure shouldn't take more than 1% of an organization the size of Twitter. Even if they're doing it poorly, it shouldn't be more than 10%.
If it really is 5x (> 80% of their engineering budget), I guarantee you they are in violation of the consent decree -- there is no way to vet that many engineers or audit their work!
5x may be hyperbole, but every change you make has to go through a privacy review. Sometimes even proposing to make a change can be met with great friction.
Any security architecture that requires every single engineer has to do everything exactly right 100% of the time is bound to fail. The order to put in reasonable privacy protections doesn't say "and do it in the most expensive, error prone fashion possible".
It’s actually pretty standard operating mode for many big tech adjacent, regulated industries. They don’t necessarily expect you to be 100% perfect, but they do expect you to build in such a way that their privacy tools can inspect things and you get urgent tasks filed if something doesn’t meet spec.
What they want is additional work, and technical implementation that the agreements are being enforced in code. It’s a fascinating area for a career, but the tools are not well developed and engineers not trained to code this way. Ends up being like a 40% tax on a lot of peoples work, plus the people who write and operate the verification systems.
It’s probably what the security field should have done years ago, but there were never as expensive of fines as for privacy violations.
He's really not. The banks are only involved so that he doesn't have to sell as much of his Tesla shares. And that's to say nothing of his private ownership of SpaceX, probably also worth a decent chunk.
The covenants on a low leverage transaction are likely highly limited: a)make interest payments, b) make principal payments, c) don’t make illegal dividends, d) don’t cross certain covenants such as EV/EBITDA, fixed charge coverage ratio, or similar, and e) get an audit every year and submit financials to the banks every 90 days.
Not exactly onerous since they were a public company before.
The bankers aren’t naive, they modeled this out. Sure it could go bad and I wonder if Elon PG’ed (personal guarantee) the debt, but you don’t underwrite your a default out of the gate. It’s one of the worst faux pas of debt capital markets.
Twitter’s already headed down the uncool social media curve like Facebook before it. There will be an exodus, but it would have happened either way.
Once the parents get on, it starts the decline. When the grandparents are there…
The “political” polarization is part of it. The older folks bring it with them. The majority flock to sites for information and escapism. The back and forth is just exhausting.
It’s clearer for geek sites. Slashdot died when it got corporate and the content went to crap. Digg was the same. Reddit’s in process except niches. It’ll be same here.
> Twitter’s already headed down the uncool social media curve like Facebook before it. There will be an exodus, but it would have happened either way.
Once the parents get on, it starts the decline. When the grandparents are there…
> The “political” polarization is part of it. The older folks bring it with them. The majority flock to sites for information and escapism. The back and forth is just exhausting.
> It’s clearer for geek sites. Slashdot died when it got corporate and the content went to crap. Digg was the same. Reddit’s in process except niches. It’ll be same here.
> For everything there is a season.
What you sound like:
Yes and there shall be an exodus from the Twitters.
The parents shall come in, then the grandparents shall follow. Once those generations arrive the decline shall start. Not before. Not long after. But right after the grandparents, whence they arrive.
The polarization shall induce the decline. This wrought on by the older generations. And this is when the majority shall flock to sites for information and escapism.
Just as Slashdot, and Digg, declined before it, so shall the Twitters decline as well.
For everything, there is a season.
---
With your prescience, you must be a billionaire. Why don't you just buy Twitter off of Elon?
But the parents are already there. Like, uh, me. And most of my Twitter friends are similarly aged. And some of their parents are there. My mute list grows every couple months. I don’t mind political content but get tired of being battered by angry repetitive posts. Most of the people I know who abandoned facebook did it for that reason.
The younger folks I know don’t have an account or care. I don’t even know what the cool thing is anymore. That’s probably the point.
It’s already in its decline, the user numbers maybe don’t reflect it yet. And it’s not prescient any more than watching any historical trend repeat itself is.
There’s more than a billion reasons I’m not a billionaire, including. I’m not brave, smart, or initially wealthy enough are a few.
If I were, I wouldn’t buy a social media site. I also wouldn’t buy a TCBY franchise. These are things that might be great short term, but risk increases over time. A 1-2 year old TCBY is packed with kids. A 5+ year old one looks like every near empty ice cream shop. They all have the same smell, it’s weird.
Anyway, I’m risk adverse… and that lack of bravery is partly why I’m not wealthy in any sense.
I might be wrong about all of this. Just applying what I’ve seen from the past to the present.
I am the older folks. My Twitter friends are the older folks. And my mute word list grows every election or scandal to cover the copy/paste rhetoric from “both” sides. Maybe 1/3 of my follows hit that.
It’s not a statement that all or even most older people do it. I anecdotally see it more from older demographics. I might be wrong. I probably am tiptoeing the line of “ist” there. Definitely don’t mean to say all or most older people, but I am generalizing on a demographic. I’ll have to think about that more.
I don’t think statements like that should be “disallowed” anywhere except places like employment, etc. And it’s never OK to say that a generalization applies to an individual because they are within a demographic.
I think if Musk pulls off what he’s trying to, it’ll be better than now. I block and mute Trump, Biden, etc. anyway. When I want to get politics I reach out for it in a format >280 characters.
I don’t idolize or demonize Musk. He’s just another person with talents and flaws like the rest of us. He does some smart stuff. He does some head scratching things. He likes attention, can be hilarious, clever, or, as my kids say, “cringey.” But I don’t want him to be anything other than he wants to. We need all of that in the world.
This is more a statement that Musk isn’t going to ruin Twitter. I think it will follow the same historical curve as all social media and it has 0 to do with him. And pre social media things as well, since at least WWII. “The kids” set trends. By the time the majority latches on, they’ve moved on. Heck, you can probably see that in slang’s impact on “proper” language much longer.
I’ll be happy if/when “epic” leaves slang. For some reason that one irritates my pedantry more than any other.
There was talk of him using crypto currency as a way of disincentivizing bots. Not sure how well thought out the ideas were, but there might well be some interesting integrations with crypto on the platform
I've been in companies where 1/5th of engineer was laid off. The state of company infra and the product dropped significantly and it took a long time to approach recovery, where they hired the same amount of staff back.
I can't imagine how dysfunctional twitter would be with %75 of staff gone, I don't even know if it will continue running as a business after that.
There is a lot of cruft without touching the engineering department. And there are always those two guys in every team that when they call sick - productivity of the team increases.
Even if that were true the problem with the approach he has taken is that by leaking that you are going to perform swinging cuts, everyone who can get another job immediately starts looking so by the time you actually get around to doing the layoff the team has self-selected and you only have “those two guys” left.
I doubt it because the whole vibe of Musk so far is that the axe will fall on the culture warriors and activists. I think the productive and less political engineers know they are safe.
And the zeitgeist seems to have changed lately - so jobs may not be so easier to come by, especially for employees that may be too political for the employer.
Will Musk actually cut 75%? Musk tends to do a lot of “thinking out loud” - so even if he really spoke that number, he won’t hold himself to it.
Whatever the actual figure is, it is unlikely to be the same figure across all departments - likely some departments will be cut much more than others. Probably engineering will experience significantly less cuts than marketing, PR, HR, government relations, business development, etc. Even in engineering, some cuts may be due to things like adjusting the manager:IC ratio.
Threatening to fire 75% of the staff might have been a last ditch attempt to turn public, shareholder, board and/or Parag’s opinion against the deal.
It didn’t work, and I doubt he’ll follow through on it. Otherwise, it’s sure to freeze almost all future initiatives and turn the team into caretakers instead of innovators and I’m not sure what the point of that would be.
Innovations? Initiatives? Like edit button and lengthening strings over 160 characters?
Just look at their Web UI, horribly slow and lagy.
Twitter is horribly bloated and unprofitable company. Several thousands people could be justified if there are sales and profits. 75% is not enough, current people must go, regardless of politics.
It cannot have been a threat to staff because it was never uttered by Elon to the staff. It cannot have been a way to influence public/shareholder sentiment because it was never said in public.
If he ever did say it, it was allegedly said to other investors in a private setting. More than likely it's a fabrication by someone who hates Elon (as unlikely as that sounds) laundered into the media as from an anonymous source.
Another slant, considering the (is this true btw) the rumor he asked engineers to print the last 30 days of code they submitted: he’s signaling “hey if you’re lazy, I’m going to fire you, so go ahead and leave on your own”. Which might just work.
Musk has media attention, but I'm not sure it's much of an advantage at this point.
I tried getting a solar system from Tesla, and it convinced me not to consider their cars. I know it is a different side of the company, but I ended up with a used electric BMW. I was resigned to dealing with the B-hole stigma around having a beamer, but whatever. It's a nice car, environmentally friendly, and was inexpensive.
That's not what happened. Instead, Tesla owners say things like "I got the Tesla before Musk went nutso roll eyes, and it's actually pretty good, but I'm not sure I'd buy another one..."
I'm surprised how quickly the Teslas went from being a status symbol to a faux pas around here. Maybe it's a different story in less liberal areas.
However, unless I'm missing something, social signaling / image management is way more important to the Twitteratti than people buying commuter cars / kid taxis.
(Again, whatever. It's a car, not a political statement, but I've seen more than one Tesla owner apologize for owning one.)
Absolutely. How many times have you heard this statement?
"Our next car will be electric... But not a Tesla."
I hear that all the time now. My wife, who recently turned 30, would be mortified for her friends to see her in a Tesla. They associate the brand with a creepy, slimy billionaire and a legion of tech bro sycophants.
There is not only personalities like Trump, peoples like Silvano Trotta, Christian Perronne, Astrid Stuckelberger, Christine Cotton, should also be unbanned if he do things right. All theses peoples have switched to Telegram, but they might come back on twitter if Musk is serious about free speech and unban them. With their followers...
I'm excited about the possibility of a more decentralized / open source WeChat coming out of this. Twitter has their BlueSky project for decentralized social media and is bringing on many pro-crypto people into management (e.g. https://twitter.com/sriramk). It would be a great story of USA freedom vs Chinese control that could be really good for the world and Twitter.
Elon Musk wants to set the bird free. But is the bird going to be free? Even free speech people don’t like speech that is critical of their beliefs, the pressure on Elon Musk to widen the definition of hate speech will be significant. The pressure from advertisers will force him to cave.
There will be pressure from platform owners like Apple and Google as well. If the moderation is weak Apple could decide to remove the Twitter app like they did to Parler.
Elon buying Twitter isn’t going to set the bird free, for sure it made the cage a little bigger.
"Pressure from advertisers" implies the advertisers are paying more than the marginal utility of the ads themselves in some kind of corporate-back-scratching model.
If the ads provide a ROI, then other advertisers will gladly jump on board.
100% this. Big advertisers don't stop spending because they have a moral objection to the content, they stop spending when the customers who disagree with the content boycott and make a lot of noise.
Also big advertisers can stop spending because the people who make decisions on ad money spend ideologically disagree with Musk moderation policy. The decision makers are not robots, they have biases too.
And where do the people make noise about these types of things? Twitter. If they just stop promoting that content and turning a few keyboard warriors into news items, then companies will be none the wiser, and will happily spend money.
But even in the case they decide to jump ship, other companies will fill the gap. Do you think all the NFL players are going to leave the platform? All the sports journalists? No amount of internet outrage is going to change them, they're too stuck on the platform.
That's not quite how pressure from advertisers work. Ads can't provide ROI if people aren't looking at them, and turning Twitter into a hellscape a la Truth Social/Parler/Gab/etc. is a surefire way to drive away users, which drives away advertisers. They also don't want their ads to be shown next to that kind of content, which will further pressure Musk to bolster content moderation.
Groups can force advertisers to leave the platform. YouTube doesn’t monetize content that is not palatable to advertisers. Similarly whole of Twitter can become unpalatable if problematic speech is not moderated.
E.g. Musk said in the past he will draw the line at legal speech. Assume that Ye (Kanye) posts his early morning rant next week, and it is critical of several groups of people based on religion or race. That speech is legal, but highly problematic, is Musk owning Twitter going to make a difference in the way Ye’s problematic speech is handled in the future, I think not.
> Even free speech people don’t like speech that is critical of their beliefs
Indeed. The fastest I've ever been banned anywhere on the Internet was forums that were ostensibly focused on "free speech." The term seems to be used ironically.
> Even free speech people don’t like speech that is critical of their beliefs
This is like saying people that like apple pie don't like apple pie. Yes, there are liars and hypocrites out there but those aren't the true believers.
That said, despite the challenges out there, that doesn't mean you just give up the fight for free speech. There will always be bias but the goal here is to even the playing field so we can return to a time where the rules are applied evenly to all players.
No, we don't. This is not an yes/no answer. This is the type of question that should be answered in terms of confidence intervals.
> right wing tweets actually got promoted more
In relation to what? What is a "right wing" tweet? What is a "left wing" tweet?
E.g, if the algorithm is focused on filtering out disparaging extreme messages, and it ends up filtering X amount of "non-extreme right wing content", 3X of "extreme right-wing content" and 5X of "extreme left-wing content", it satisfies the claim that "it promotes more right-wing content" while also silencing conservative voices.
This is not exclusive to Twitter, but here's a recent research papaer on the comparative advantage of "the right" in dissimination of information on social media.
Stating that humans are sexually dimorphic? That a man claiming to have transitioned to female is still a man? That got the Babylon Bee sanctioned, for satire.
I would also hope that's not a "conservative" view as it's simply a scientific fact.
It's easy to say that when you define conservative opinions as breaking the rules or harassment. So they get banned for hate and harassment instead of just being conservative or right leaning. Congrats you won on a technicality.
So both sides are right, and yet the conversation between the extremes moved backwards instead of finding common ground.
>It's easy to say that when you define conservative opinions as breaking the rules or harassment.
That's literally what they did. "misgendering someone" is hatespeech/harassment. When from a sane perspective outside the woke cult: Humans aren't clownfish and cannot change their gender.
>Humans aren't clownfish and cannot change their gender.
Hit the nail on the head here. Hence, the medical community's current response is to adjust the individual's body, appearance and treatment from others to match their gender as closely as possible.
> not targeting conservative voices solely based on ideology.
This literally does not happen, and is entirely made up in a form of projection. In fact, Twitter has been found to be biased towards recommending right-wing sources. [1]
But claims that right wing voices are being censored would come from... right wing sources, no? Are those valid but not the left wing sources? If so, why?
Claims that right wing voices are being censored are from my own observations. including the examples I cited in my comment. To be clear I do not think left voices should be censored, I am 100% opposed to all censorship, banning ect
In the 90's I was fighting conservatives that wanted to censor the much smaller and newer internet from things like violence (games) and porn.
Today it is the left that is attempting to censor the internet over much more nebulous and undefined terms like "misinformation" and "hate speech" all of which have very subjective definitions and seem to be a moving target.
What I'm hearing here is "my viewpoint is valid because I observed it, and the viewpoint that disagrees with me is biased". Your observations may happen to generalize and be correct, and the other viewpoint may be biased, but that doesn't mean the argument you made in the previous post was correctly reasoned.
If data or research can't support "right wing voices are being censored", while you're perfectly entitled to believe that based on seeing a couple specific voices get censored, it's a bit unreasonable to dismiss claims to the contrary as "left wing bias" when the data simply isn't there to support it.
I personally wouldn't be surprised if you end up with political bias in automated censorship and filtering algorithms, the training set is going to be full of bias and it will be hard to filter that out. But they also quite possibly managed to come up with something that isn't leaning in any particular direction.
Between the two possibilities "Twitter is suppressing <x> speech" and "Twitter is not suppressing <x> speech and a few people are crying censorship to try and get unbanned/get attention" I think occam's razor suggests the latter, personally, because we know it has been an effective tactic in the past and that sort of speculative claim gains traction regardless of whether you can prove it.
Lots of people claim to be shadowbanned when they're not, similarly.
>>If data or research can't support "right wing voices are being censored"
You seemed to have missed my primary assertion which has nothing to do with banning or shadowbanning or even the research into those topics
My primary assertion is the terms of service, the rules under which content moderation is governed is a left political bias in many area's include gender, what is considered "hate speech", what is "misinformation"
I do not need to point to any examples of banning to highlight this as it self evident for anyone that reads the terms of service.
I.e. Analyzing Twitter suspensions shows that users’ sharing of links to misinformation sites was as predictive of being suspended as was the users’ political orientation. "Conservative" accounts share more misinformation, and violate with greater frequency policy rules.
A study that although argues twitter has a bias, readily admits in it's data sampling that the banned/suspended accounts violate terms and conditions at a mich higher rate.
Reasons listed for banning these individuals in Hanania’s own data sheet include “violent threats,” “harassment,” “inciting violence,” “targeted abuse,” “doxxing,” “pro-Nazi tweets,” and “racist slurs.” Additionally, about a quarter of the accounts listed are still active and no longer suspended.
Kicking off a bunch of Nazis and trolls isn’t very compelling evidence that your average conservative is getting unfair treatment on Twitter. The majority of the “victims” here seem to have been engaged in abuse, and it’s reasonable for a private company like Twitter to kick off people who are undermining the quality of their platform by harassing or threatening other users.
" We then investigated potential political bias in suspension patterns and identified a set of 9,000 politically engaged Twitter users, half Democratic and half Republican, in October 2020, and followed them through the six months after the U.S. 2020 election. During that period, while only 7.7% of the Democratic users were suspended, 35.6% of the Republican users were suspended. The Republican users, however, shared substantially more news from misinformation sites – as judged by either fact-checkers or politically balanced crowds – than the Democratic users. Critically, we found that users’ misinformation sharing was as predictive of suspension as was their political orientation. Thus, the observation that Republicans were more likely to be suspended than Democrats provides no support for the claim that Twitter showed political bias in its suspension practices. Instead, the observed asymmetry could be explained entirely by the tendency of Republicans to share more misinformation."
“We were surprised,” says González-Bailón, an associate professor in Penn’s Annenberg School for Communication. “Previous work has documented that Twitter users tend to have a liberal bias. But we found that across the board, the news most often shared has a right-leaning bias. This increases the visibility of conservative voices, even in the context of protest mobilizations with liberal goals.”
>>. During that period, while only 7.7% of the Democratic users were suspended, 35.6% of the Republican users were suspended. The Republican users, however, shared substantially more news from misinformation sites –
The key flaw here was "misinformation" at that time included what is now considered "fact" about COVID Policies, and "science", including mask effectiveness, vaccine effectiveness, Lab leak theory, and a whole host of other things that were "misinformation" in 2020 but not in 2022. that is the entire problem with the "misinformation" narrative
Science after all is not "experts telling us what to think" but instead is in reality it the act of continual questioning of established narrative
Shutting down debate for "misinformation" is itself anti-science
Actually, you're wrong. Read the paper. And I quote:
"Reasons listed for banning these individuals in Hanania’s own data sheet include “violent threats,” “harassment,” “inciting violence,” “targeted abuse,” “doxxing,” “pro-Nazi tweets,” and “racist slurs.” Additionally, about a quarter of the accounts listed are still active and no longer suspended."
Twitters Covid misinformation policy didn't come into effect untill the end of Dec, 21. So 2020 is incorrect.
Why don't you read the actual policy instead of making stuff up?
That's a very selective reading of the article. Twitter boosts things that attract more views and shares. Outrage generates those views. But why would mainstream right-wing politicians and articles generate more outrage on Twitter than non-rightwing content?
That only makes sense if Twitter is predominantly anti-right wing, and people who are anti-rightwing get outraged by rightwing nonsense more than leftwing nonsense, and thus rage-click, share and comment on that content more.
There's another theory that fits the data: rightwing sources are more likely to share things that are enraging to rightwing readers. After all, rightwing sources are mostly followed by rightwing readers, same as with leftwing. Usually they just stay in their bubble. As to why rightwing sources would do this, I can think of a couple of reasons, but they are outside of the scope of my comment.
> In since-deleted tweets, the account specifically accused Chasten Buttigieg and The Trevor Project organization of grooming.[40][32][94]
And outright misinformation isn't really an "ideological difference."
> The account has been criticized for spreading hoaxes, including the litter boxes in schools hoax about bathrooms accommodations for students that identified as cats, and a false claim that students in a second-grade class in Austin, Texas were being taught about furries.[12][95][94]
Outright lies are destructive to "public square"-style communication, and Twitter definitely can't be seen, legally, facilitating libel.
Is it worse to be called a groomer or a Nazi? I guess, if you're twitter, it's worse to call a leftist a groomer than it is to call a conservative a Nazi. @NYCAntifa clearly gets away with the latter!
> The account has been criticized for spreading hoaxes, including the litter boxes in schools hoax about bathrooms accommodations for students that identified as cats, and a false claim that students in a second-grade class in Austin, Texas were being taught about furries.[12][95][94]
Libs of tik tok spread the misinformation, but they didn't create it. They cited someone else. If you don't think it's ok to cite someone else, later find out they lied, and then retract your statement, well, you probably have two standards, one for yourself and one for people you disagree with.
> Outright lies are destructive to "public square"-style communication, and Twitter definitely can't be seen, legally, facilitating libel.
>Is it worse to be called a groomer or a Nazi? I guess, if you're twitter, it's worse to call a leftist a groomer than it is to call a conservative a Nazi.
"Groomer" is a noun that describes someone's actions. "Nazi" is a noun that describes someone's political beliefs. It is absolutely worse to be called a "groomer" because that is a direct claim of immoral and often illegal behavior. "You are doing something bad" is a more serious accusation than "you believe something bad".
If your belief system allows you to support genocide, does that make you better than someone who is doing something bad now that doesn't support genocide? No, I don't think your moral compass is any less subjective than mine, here. People act on and are motivated by their beliefs, and, if you're a Nazi, you're going to do things that move the world in a particular direction.
>If your belief system allows you to support genocide, does that make you better than someone who is doing something bad now that doesn't support genocide?
Many people who use the term "groomers" as loosely as LibsOfTikTok already think of this "grooming" as equivalent to a genocide. That is my point. "Groomers" implies that the bad is already happening while "Nazi" implies the bad is a belief with undefined actions. It is the difference between being call a murderer and a psychopath. One says you already did something bad. The other says you might be capable of something bad.
False accusations of being a Nazi have on occasion led to successful libel claims, so I’m not sure it a whole lot less serious than a false accusation of child abuse (if that’s what groomer is supposed to mean).
To groom is to "prepare or train (someone) for a particular purpose or activity."
It also has a more specific definition: "the act of deliberately establishing an emotional connection with a child to prepare the child for child abuse".
Today, I think people are using the word to mean a hybrid of the above two definitions, namely, to train or indoctrinate a child into sexual deviancy, even if the person doing the grooming does not take part in it directly.
I think some uses today are also just synonyms for indoctrination, which fits only within the more general definition of grooming.
> Is it worse to be called a groomer or a Nazi? I guess, if you're twitter, it's worse to call a leftist a groomer than it is to call a conservative a Nazi. @NYCAntifa clearly gets away with the latter!
I can see why you are being downvoted, but I've been observing this trend lately too. Its popular on some social media sites to call half of the country nazis or at least nazi sympathizers.
Neither side has clean hands, but this vilification is extremely harmful.
This is not an accurate representation of what LibsofTiktok is and what content they post.
There are specifics about what false claims. All they do is repost TikTok’s insanity.
In some ways, LibsofTiktok has done world a whole lot of good, by exposing and immunizing against extreme left ideologies that even the most devout progressives reject.
We need more of this that exposed extremes of either ideology. Because clearly the media has totally failed to do this.
I do agree that the content that particular user finds and shows to me is very disturbing, especially given that it is often teachers taking care of very impressionable people(children) in a position of authority.
Are we looking at the same page? The majority of these are just a person frothing mad about a grand conspiracy of teachers who will stop at nothing until they have "trans"-ed all kids. They're completely unhinged
In order for something to be libel, you have to know it is false and intend for people to believe it is true. The litter box story for example was spread by a trolling organization with the intention of fooling people like LoTT and Tucker. It's not libel because they fell for it — it's stupid, but it's not libel. Likewise, the criticism of the The Trevor Project likely reflects a sincerely held belief that the known activities of TTP constitute "grooming", and not a measurable claim that TTP staff are actively engaging in activities conventionally understood as pedophilia. Also not libel.
Defamation (libel and slander) in the US is distinct depending on how well known the victim is. For a famous victim, yes you must essentially know the statement was false.
But if the victim is not a public individual, you need only act with negligence (e.g. violate the reasonable person standard). The litter box story, for example, doesn't involve famous people, it's like random local school districts, and no reasonable person would believe it to be true. The Trevor project likely does constitute a public organization, so the standard is higher, but only requires actual malice, which means "reckless disregard" for the truth of the statements. It's probably not met, because it is a high standard, but it doesn't actually require that they know themselves to be lying.
The entire interview with JRE Vijaya Gadde can be referenced. Like Tim Pool or not he clearly shows the bias, Jack is mostly silent on those instances.
Kanye West was not targeted "solely based on ideology."
> In one post on Twitter, Ye said he would soon go “death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE,” according to internet archive records, making an apparent reference to the U.S. defense readiness condition scale known as DEFCON.
"The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!"
and
"To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th."
Why was he banned? Someone at Twitter that day felt a duty to prevent the person who led his violent supporters to the capitol from continuing to speak through their platform. Are you saying this was a purely political decision?
If their intention was to reduce violence from his supporters, then why did they delete the video he uploaded at 4:16 that stated
“I know your pain. I know you’re hurt. We had an election that was stolen from us,” he said. “It was a landslide election, and everyone knows it, especially the other side. But you have to go home now. We have to have peace. We have to have law and order. We have to respect our great people in law and order. We don’t want anybody hurt.”
The president called it a “very tough period of time,” calling the election “fraudulent.”
“But we can’t play into the hands of these people,” Trump said. “We have to have peace. So go home. We love you. You’re very special. You’ve seen what happens, you see the way others are treated that are so bad and so evil. I know how you feel. But go home and go home in peace.”
> who led his violent supporters to the capitol
The capitol was breached while Trump was still speaking to the larger crowd several blocks away.
if twitter's goal was reduction of violence, then they would have amplified Trump's video calling for peaceful dispersion, not delete it.
Given that he claims that he won the election in that video, yeah it makes sense to delete it.
> We had an election that was stolen from us,” he said. “It was a landslide election, and everyone knows it, especially the other side.
Is not a call for the peaceful transition of power and for people to go home. Speaking out of both sides of your mouth is not a call for peace. Trump's tweet wasn't an effort to reduce violence, it was an effort to continue to stoke the flames while appearing to help, and people didn't fall for it.
The problem is that a lot of miscreants hide behind the label "conservative voice". Like people who spread hate, misinformation and conspiracy theories online. We need to differentiate between these fake "conservative voices" and real conservatives. Pretty sure people in the second category are not being targeted.
I implore you (all) to consider this angle when complaining about "left" boogeymen. Do the fixie-riding anarchists represent the left? Do the alt-right racist and misanthropic school shooters represent the right? What of each side encourages these extremities? Further, which ones do commit societal (psychological, economic, etc.) damage?
The label of "hate" very often does get slapped on real conservative voices. Supporting sex-segregated sports is considered hate speech by many, for instance. If your label of "hate" encompasses typical conservative view, then it's just a shallow attempt to deflect from the fact that conservative views are indeed being suppressed.
The entire Hunter Biden laptop saga isn’t enough for you?
Days before a national election they deliberately censored a story pertaining to corruption of one of the candidates, censored anyone that shared the story, and censored anyone that mentioned the censoring of the story.
What about the laptop suggested anything unethical done by Joe Biden?
Ultimately that's the reason the story was "censored", it was fake. Something vaguely suspicious sounding about Hunter used to try and malign his dad, and ethical news sites and journalists wanted nothing to do with it.
To this day, there's no evidence of any actual wrongdoing, and even Trump's own justice department failed to charge Hunter, or even continue the investigation, because it was so clearly nothing of note.
I'm not sure why GP was downvoted. There are many, many examples. You would probably see them if your primary news sources weren't the NYT, the Washington Post, CNN, or MSNBC. Twitter is the poster child for authoritarian leftist social media!
There is still, today, multiple years after the start of the pandemic, no strong evidence that masks did anything significant to slow the spread of COVID. I can provide many citations if you need them. In fact, much of what big tech censored turned out to be true or still plausible today, like: the lab leak theory, natural immunity being more effective than the vaccine (even Bill Gates admits this now!), and so on.
If you didn't only read conservative news maybe you'd know about canceled leftists. Actually you wouldn't know about canceled leftists since there is no left wing popular media. We have corporate media and equally powerful far right media. That's it.
I'll never understand how people can justify seeing the world in such binary terms. You don't honestly think someone is "bad" or "good" based on political ideology, do you?
It's easy to summarize the world in binary terms based on empirical evidence that comes from your own experiences. In my experience, conservatives are far more likely to back up their claims with evidence than those on the left. Is it always true? Of course not. But it certainly is a generalization I am convinced that is supported by reality.
You reference the dailywire so much when even your own source (mediabiasfactcheck) rates them just short of "extreme right" and rates their "Factual Reporting" as "MIXED"?
Why would anyone take the time to respond to each of your points any more than they would a random Facebook post?
This is part of what makes political discourse so challenging today. It's really easy to conjure up evidence in the form of poorly written articles with bad sources (or outright fabrications), but exponentially more difficult to go and fact check every one of these sources any time they are trotted out.
And, from your own wikipedia article: " A study published in Scientific Reports wrote: "While [Media Bias/Fact Check's] credibility is sometimes questioned, it has been regarded as accurate enough to be used as ground-truth." Thanks for the source! I love being given more material that backs my claims!
What does it mean to rigorously and objectively classify a news site as on the left or on the right? More importantly, what's your alternative classification system that is more objective and rigorous? It's so easy to criticize, and yet so hard to come up with something better. Again, you bring absolutely nothing to the conversation. How do you intend to convince anyone of anything?
>Thanks for the source! I love being given more material that backs my claims!
None of your dailywire claims have been backed up. You keep dodging that fact.
>Again, you bring absolutely nothing to the conversation.
All I'm trying to "bring to the conversation" is the fact that your "sources" are just links to a site nobody could possibly trust. But since that's clearly good enough for you to take as fact, you're exactly the kind of person they hope to rope in.
You're assuming the Daily wire is not a trustworthy source. I do not share that assumption. If you want to debunk them, do it yourself. Otherwise, they stand as solid supporting evidence!
>You're assuming the Daily wire is not a trustworthy source.
I'm not assuming anything, remember? That's according to the source you were crowing about.
>Thanks for the source! I love being given more material that backs my claims!
The folks at mediabiasfactcheck (which you've continuously defended) gave the Daily Wire a "Mixed" ranking for Factual Reporting. They couldn't even make it to "mostly factual" (which seems like a pretty low bar).
You're being very dishonest, and we both know it. If a news source is legitimately mixed in factual reporting, that would mean you can't assume what they are saying is false, because some of what they say is true by definition. But you just outright dismissed the entire site!
Anyways, you didn't actually catch me on anything. I knew long before that Daily Wire had a "mixed" rating on that site. I had also already clicked on all their examples of false reporting, and all of them were climate change-related articles from years ago where they found a scientist who disagreed with the reporting. So, uh, don't trust Daily wire for climate change articles?
From NPR: "The articles The Daily Wire publishes don’t normally include falsehoods (with some exceptions), and the site said it is committed to “truthful, accurate and ethical reporting.”"
Please come talk to me again when you're willing to have an honest discussion about a topic, and not when you're just trying, and failing, to score points.
Free rhetorical tip: stop using the word "leftist" if you want people to take you seriously. Just because people are opposed to the Republican Party doesn't mean they are leftists. Suggesting they are is to present a false dichotomy.
I appreciate the tip, but what word should I use instead? Progressive? I think just about everything being done on the left today is regressive. Liberal? I think the left in general today is about is illiberal as it gets. Non-conservative? I think it includes too many people, because I do believe there are moderates, independents, and people who could care less either way.
I agree that "leftist" can be divisive, but I haven't found a different word to use that doesn't also convey what I believe to be a falsehood. I also carefully use the word "conservative" instead of "Republican", because I don't think those two are the same thing either. It's also hard to use equivalent language because, while you can say "leftist", you can't really say "rightist".
Fundamentally, a conservative wants to preserve the status quo because they think proposed changes would make it worse. A progressive wants to change the status quo because they think they can improve it. But often when we use these words we are instead referring to a set of political ideals and beliefs supported by a group of people. There are lots of things conservatives would want to change today because they think we've gone in the wrong direction, and there are plenty of wins the left wants to preserve that are under assault by conservatives.
I think your approach is correct, but you landed on the wrong word. I'm not sure what the correct word is, but the asymmetry you mention goes deeper than word choice.
Say what you want about the integrity of mainstream journalism and big tech platforms, but their foibles are nothing compared to the state of Republican-leaning journalism in the United States. It hardly requires a "leftist" political ideology to acknowledge the moral and intellectual decline of the Republican Party and the respective decline of its media apparatus.
None of this excuses selective censorship, obviously, but the suggestion that right-wing journalism deserves equal time and consideration presupposes a credibility and seriousness that it's lacked for twenty years.
Thank you for your response. Unfortunately, you did not help me come up with a better word. I also don't agree with your reasoning for the word asymmetry. "Progressive" is the word that would be symmetric to "conservative". I purposely do not use that word, though, for reasons I've already explained. Also, I fail to see how the word "rightist" not being in use, as opposed to "leftist", is caused by, to paraphrase you, the Republican party being stupider than the Democrat party.
It's filled with people making their guesses and having very little evidence to back it up. My favorite is: "I’ve heard people on the political right called “rightists” before, but for some reason that doesn’t roll off the tongue as well as “leftist."
The definition they provide at the end is: "a person who believes that government should be active in supporting social and political change”. That sounds completely synonymous with "progressive," which is generally about using the force of government to cause change in the world. But that really has nothing to do with what liberal has meant in the past, or with the root of the word, or with related words like liberty.
As a side note, if you think the Republican party is intellectually inferior to the democrat party, then I think you have a serious bias problem. I regularly debate people on the left, and they tend to follow similar patterns:
* They make strong claims but never give any evidence to back them up or bother to cite any sources.
* They have major logical inconsistencies in their arguments.
* They very often rely on appeals to authority or credentials. They are right because their sources are always right, and you are wrong because your sources are always wrong.
* They very often rely on personal attacks, or quickly devolve to them.
* They don't seem to understand how scientific research is conducted, including its limitations.
And, finally, if we're going to get back on topic with respect to censorship, I provided multiple examples in other comments of conservatives being unfairly censored, and of leftists violating the rules worse than the conservatives and not getting censored. Nothing in this thread has done anything to change my opinion. Elon Musk, who has historically voted Democrat his entirely life, and who still leans left on many issues, spent 44 billion on twitter in part because he believes it unfairly censors conservatives. What is your evidence to the contrary?
That's a not-peer-reviewed study that the media went wild with that concluded, yes, conservatives are censored more, but it's just because they share more misinformation. If you dig into the paper, you quickly find they rely on "professional fact checkers" to do so. As someone who has read a lot of fact checks that themselves need to be fact-checked, I can attest that this approach is likely deeply flawed.
They actually rely on the "trustworthiness" of different news sites, but that is itself based on the opinions of fact checkers. To quote this insane stupidity that passed as research: "Nonetheless, we find that Republican users in our dataset shared news from domains that were on
average rated as much more...
The Babylon Bee has been suspended for this tweet.[1] Meghan Murphy was permanently banned for a tweet that simply said, "Men aren't women."[2] The majority of Americans agree with these banned views. In the latest Pew polls, 60% of US adults say that gender is determined by one's sex at birth and cannot be changed.[3] Whether that view is right or not, it's pretty silly to issue bans for saying something that most people believe.
I've seen accounts get banned for replacing "white" with "black" in popular hateful tweets. Apparently only one kind of racism is allowed on Twitter.[4]
If you read Twitter's reasoning for suspending Trump, you'll see it's based on two tweets, neither of which calls for violence.[5] Twitter had to use the excuse that some people might be emboldened to commit violence by his tweets. That's true for almost any politician. But the president of South Africa's Black First Land First party can threaten to kill white people and only get a seven day suspension.[6] Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran, still has a Twitter account[7] despite endorsing the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. Rushdie is now blind in one eye and has lost the use of an arm after an assassination attempt in August.
> In the latest Pew polls, 60% of US adults say that gender is determined by one's sex at birth and cannot be changed …
What is “gender” in the above sentence?
It’s a 1950s attitude that males are born masculine and females feminine - that was largely rejected from the 70s onward, people being held to be unique individuals and gender stereotyping deemed sexist and oppressively limiting.
I was under the impression that young people think gender identity is determined biologically independently of reproductive sex - hence (to them) “Trans women are women” because of their innate gender identity.
Which (if either) is right? - The issue appears to me to be very philosophically confused.
It’s a highly semantic issue. “Woman” historically denotes sex. Some people want to change that to make it denote gender. The people formerly known as women were generally not consulted about this change.
> I'd love to see some clear examples of conservative voices being targeted solely based on ideology, cause I don't think they exist.
Certain biases are baked into Twitter's content moderation policies. For instance, on COVID and gender. It just so happens that conservatives statistically disagree with the positions taken by those policies significantly more than liberals.
Is that an anti-conservative bias? Well, liberals often make the argument that the drug war was prejudicial against black people because the laws specifically targeted drugs that were more common in black communities. If you accept this argument, by parity of reasoning, you should also accept that Twitter's rules are prejudicial against conservative views.
For examples of prominent cancellations, there was Alex Berenson, Megan Murphy, Jordan Peterson, among others. These people aren't all strictly conservatives, but they were banned for views that conservatives mostly agree with.
What claims do you want data for? That conservatives had opinions COVID that often ran contrary to mainstream narratives? Or that conservatives have views favouring traditional gender roles and their identification with biological sex? Or that both of these sets of conservative views run afoul of Twitter's policies?
suppression of the hunter biden story was the clearest one. (let me know if you need details or citations on the NY Post article & account being banned by twitter before the election).
Also Alex Berenson's lawsuit with Twitter revealed that public officials leaned on twitter to suppress his voice. I think these emails are revealing on the 'coziness' between the current administration and twitter policy team.
https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/the-white-house-privatel...
Can you imagine if the Trump administration put pressure on twitter to suppress reporters they thought was 'epicenter of disinfo'?
>targeting conservative voices solely based on ideology.
Clearly happening, yet even here already we have four people so far claiming that it doesn't, and people flagging/downvoting you for telling the truth.
They banned a conservative satire publication ffs. The Babylon Bee.
"The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."
So why aren't there any sources demonstrating this "clear bias" you're so sure of? There are actual numbers demonstrating pro-right-wing bias, and yet your only response is "no there isn't! I saw a right wing person get banned the other day!" How is this supposed to be convincing?
The problem is that when leftists and centrist say "censored for conservative views" they think of lower taxes and deregulation, but when conservatives point to examples of which views get censored, it is always "Oh, you know the ones"[1].
The Babylon Bee was suspended for targeted harassment. Harassment is not a conservative view.
That's only "targeted harassment" when redefining words in an arbitrary and disingenuous fashion. The article is not even especially mean hearted, let alone "targeted harassment." And then factor in the fact that the subject is a high ranking and public political figure on top of all of this.
The article is saying that Levine's entire gender identity is a lie. You honestly don't see anything mean spirited about that?
Levine is a random bureaucrat that no one in the public would know the name of if she wasn't trans. By singling her out, conservative media and the Babylon Bee are encouraging people to harass her for no other reason than her transness.
I find it kind of shocking that Musk likes Twitter that much, but at the same time it makes sense. If you ignore the wealth differential, his behaviour is similar to the average Twitter user. He may be the perfect owner in that sense. I also think it will be a clusterfuck within 5 years like some of his "side project" companies.
musk makes it clear why he likes twitter - because it lets you talk to the public without any filter at all, easily. Musk himself is whimsical and trollish on twitter but its not clear how much of that is real vs public image
He bought it on the last possible day a court would allow, so I don't know how much he likes it really. He did try every possible move to get out of it.
The weirdest part to me about this saga is the extent to which Elon Musk is getting away with pretending he didn't spend the last six months trying very hard not to purchase Twitter.
More precisely, at one point and for an instant, he wanted to own Twitter. His subsequent behavior could be interpreted as not wanting it at that price, but his actions were to try and stop the sale - not negotiate a different price.
I think Elon has mental health / behavioral issues that drive this, but because he's a billionaire, we don't really care all that much. As long as he doesn't go full Kanye (which is a line he is scarily close to).
Many big companies have retention policies, where all messages are automatically deleted after X months unless specifically persisted / pinned. It's highly unlikely that Twitter has much internal emails from 2019-2020, let alone 2015-2016.
This could be true. The last 3 years had even more fake news though.
Google docs and etc. don't usually have retention policy.
Imagine a bigger problem: an employee comments in a doc about Russian propaganda/fake news, and execs decided not to invest in eliminating them. Now it's borderline national security issues.
I'm still surprised that Google didn't just clone or buy Twitter in the 2009 "Fail Whale" era. Seems like they had 95% of the work done already: a highly-scalabile real-time infrastructure that took Twitter years to catch up to.
(Yes, Google+ came later, but the UX of the boundaries, of where the network started and stopped on the web, felt too amorphous for most people as a social media destination)
Remember Google Buzz? Google tried to copy Twitter and automatically added it to the front page of every Gmail account, fucked up the launch by having everything be public by default, and finally declared it a failed product and abandoned it a year later.
In retrospect, the whole thing was a mini-Google+.
Remember when Google tried to make their own video website? It flopped hard and some company called "youtube" started doing it better, so Google bought them.
When is the last time Google started their own truly successful project, rather than buying it?
There’s no foundation for this premise, but sure, “they” found their own app. People can make infinity apps. Or maybe show that there’s more value in the previous censorship and buy it back.
Calling Twitter the "defacto online political forum" which the vast majority of US citizens do no use (myself included) seems a little over the top don't you think. Twitter could disappear and I wouldn't miss the incessant whining about the stupid crap people say on Twitter.
I think a company like Twitter probably have some sacred cows stopping them from profit. Any new owner might fix that. I deleted my Twitter account years ago because most of the content is spam. Instagram is about the same and I will remove that too soon if it does not improve.
1,889 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 418 ms ] threadhttps://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/28/departing-twitter-employees-...
Edit: this may have been a prank.
Departing Twitter employees say layoffs have started as Elon Musk takes over - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33374597 - Oct 2022 (108 comments)
https://twitter.com/wealthycfo/status/1586053744269340672
If you're going to comment, please make sure you're up to date on the site guidelines and are following them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I still don't get how he managed to be CEO of multiple high-complexity companies. It's already not easy to be CEO of just one.
One can assume he knows how to delegate.
I don't like the guy, I don't like tsla, etc. But you have to appreciate what he's been able to do. He's clearly not a dumb guy.
There’s lots of skill involved in finding effective people, developing trust, communicating goals clearly, evaluating outcomes, adjusting.
It doesn't take much time to be the front-man to several organizations. And Musk excels at it. Being the public face of an excelling team that you assembled is a rare skillset (at the level Musk operates).
1) They don't actually spend much time on any one thing per week, on average.
2) Many of the things that count as "work" for them, at their level, are more fun—and even recuperatory—than, say, wrangling spreadsheets at your desk and attending dull-ass compulsory meetings for no reason all day. (put another way: when you have enough money, everything you do is kinda an optional hobby and not something you have to do even if you hate it)
3) They can pay to not have to worry about 90+% of the non-work shit the peons have to. Laundry? Making appointments? Arguing with insurance? Making high-quality, tasty meals? Shopping for the ingredients for those meals? Driving yourself and others places? All strictly optional. That's 10-30 hours of soul-draining bullshit per week just gone (and you can keep any of the parts that you don't find soul-draining—cook, but never have to shop for ingredients, for instance)
[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1519036983137509376
His calculus seems to be: 1. People will find a way to say what they think online. 2. If everyone splinters into their own little self reinforcing bubbles and we can't hear each other, that is quite dangerous in the long term.
That is to say, he arrives at a similar position, but it seems to be driven more by pragmatism than idealism.
I don’t know how people who describe themselves as free speech absolutists and claim no one will be censored are even given the time of day when they simultaneously discuss enforcement policies.
We already have and had multiple sites for absolute free speech short of actual government intervention on the internet. They are either small(the various chans) or go out of business(voat and the like) because no advertiser wants to associate with the content that is created, and free speech absolutists only appear to value free speech as long as someone else is covering the costs for propagating said speech.
Are there actually people like that? Whenever I see this phrase it's used to vaguely describe some group that's obviously in the wrong.
Twitter has never been nor propertied itself to be a bastion of free speech, so I always find this pearl-clutching at "meddling in X" funny. It's a private company, it can do as it please.
"We are the free speech wing of the free speech party"[1]
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/mar/22/twitter-tony-w...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/22/twitter-a...
They can't be biased towards stuff they ban. They are biased towards controlled opposition, which makes people feel warm and fuzzy. Big difference.
All the right-wing sources I followed on twitter were banned. Therefore I didn't get ANY content sent to me.
How is that a bias FOR right-wing sources?
> According to a 27-page research document, Twitter found a “statistically significant difference favouring the political right wing” in all the countries except Germany. Under the research, a value of 0% meant tweets reached the same number of users on the algorithm-tailored timeline as on its chronological counterpart, whereas a value of 100% meant tweets achieved double the reach.
There are crazy left-wing sources that are also banned, are you going to use that as "proof" that Twitter is biased against the left? You're cherrypicking.
What do you consider an "actual right-wing source" if not Fox News?
Fox News is for your 65+ year old uncle. It's harmless, controlled opposition. Look at the Jan 6th coverage. It exists for the left to point at and say, "see, there it is! Right wing bias!" - for one example.
It'll be interesting to see if Twitter gives them a megaphone too.
If their "reporting" was so egregious that they got banned, I'd question how accurate their "news" was.
Maybe you're just wrong?
The social media company called Gab is the antithesis to that statement:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/03/rookie-coding-mistak...
1. Interesting challenges
2. Exchange labor for money
3. Good working environment
4. As a nice to bullet point on their resume
It would be a very naive thing to work for a for profit company owned by a billionaire to think that you have any other “mission” than to line the pockets of a reluctant owner.
5. For the greater good
Whether you think the 'reluctant billionaire owner' is in it for the greater good as well is not relevant.
Now, with regard to Twitter, I have little notion of what 'for the greater good' means. But I'm sure some people do.
Even if the founder sincerely believes that, once he takes VC money it doesn’t matter what he believes.
At the end of the day you gotta do what media entrepreneurs have always done: shove stuff down people's throats in exchange for money. That's it. There is nothing tough, poetic or ideological about it.
Twitter has been trying to monetize its users but they had scarce success. That was without an ideologue at the helm. Or an ideologue-lite when Dorsey was in charge.
With an ideologue at the helm the bird will fly right into the ground. Twitter needed somebody who knows how attract the crowd which buys stuff online. Paradoxically Bezos was the right fit for the bird app.
>With a strong vision for platform entitlement and actual value enforcement, it would attract the right people. We can argue the recent dilution of Twitter's values to meddle with U.S. politics was the actual brain drain.
After all, the ideological concept of "free speech" as is commonly used in the United States and regarding political freedom is the freedom from government persecution to say whatever you want. It is being transformed by propagandists and those who would see our democracy crumble to mean "being allowed to freeload off of dominant viral message boards to spread whatever misinformation is deemed beneficial to my worldview".
I respect the idea that the Internet is a prerequisite to effective political speech in the Western world for audiences larger than a small town. I believe that certain layers of the World Wide Web, namely DNS/TLS/Network/Hosting do have a "common carrier" obligation to some extent which should possibly be codified.
I do, however, take issue with the idea that individual websites currently have any obligation to be "neutral", though I do believe in being transparent in any potential bias. I also believe it's misleading to call taking down trolls and bad faith bots as "biased".
To be straight to the point, I honestly doubt the motive of anyone who actively criticizes about free speech issues on twitter, given the kinds of democracy-destroying people who have been largely affected by their moderation policies.
He could be right or wrong.
But the one thing that is obvious is that everything there is not fine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_2016_presidential...
My guess would be that parent commenter is talking about the time before Twitter was fighting back against the “alt right”.
"If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor"
Of course, it's not always clear what injustice is and reasonable people might disagree, but I think there are certain minimum standards, like "anti-semitism and blatant racism are bad".
Twitter as a company/platform never went after anyone's job.
Free speech does not mean that speech is without consequences.
This can certainly go to far, but it's kind of up to the employer, isn't it.
No one can credibly deny that some speech is harmful. We'd all like to suppress some speech that we don't like, but the reason free speech advocates take the position they take (generally) is that once speech is prohibited the status quo regime will ban legitimate criticisms. So the good has to be accepted with the bad.
It's a tough issue. If I'm honest I favor censorship of views that I believe are harmful, but would object strenuously if my point of view is censored. I also think being called slurs, etc, is an unpleasant user experience, to say the least, so from a business perspective if nothing else I get why that is censored. Still, the censorship has gone too far in my view. We need to figure out a way to circle this square.
See this bit of discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33375286
They still take these cases. (It is a bit complicated, individual ACLU chapters have a lot of autonomy, and they do not all agree with each other in all ways.)
So I see a substantial difference.
On one hand, you have lawyers from a nonprofit arguing in court that, while someone's views may be abhorrent, they are legal, and the principle matters more than the harm.
On the other, you have a for-profit entity tilting the landscape upon that speech rests, and as the raging debates about this stuff have shown, is difficult to distinguish profit from other motives.
Running a company with specific ideological priors looks a lot different to me than defending assholes for past speech on principle.
Following that logic, I support censoring/deplatforming fascists et al. because I want to hurt their ability to do fascism, not for some higher principle of striving towards a perfect, values-neutral marketplace of ideas. Speech is just another front on the plains of power.
Granting, of course, Twitter goes beyond this. They ban all hate speech at all, no matter how limited it is, but they're a private platform, which gets to the real heart of the issue. Everyone that cares deeply about this who is in agreement with Elon's side and isn't just being petulant about having personally been banned seems to equate Twitter with some kind of true public square or some necessary platform that handicaps a political movement if it can't access it. I just don't see this. The public streets, the government itself, I have no choice but to use and participate in. Everyone has to. But I have never had a Twitter account, never visit the site, and seem to have gotten along fine like that for over 40 years. Trump got banned and is still likely to win his party's presidential nomination in two years. It hasn't materially impacted his ability to get his message out and reach followers at all. Everything Kanye says is still going to be on every headline in every news service in the country the same day, and if he releases an album, his fans will still know. He doesn't need Twitter. I just don't see how that isn't definitive proof that Twitter is not this true common carrier people seem to think it is. You don't need access to one specific private platform to be heard. They're not like an electric utility with a local monopoly that is truly your only option to access a critical service. Trump and Kanye were both well known with hoards of followers before Twitter ever existed, and people would still hang on their words if Twitter completely disappeared tomorrow.
My neighbor Sam down the street likes to say the n-word sometimes and thinks offering hormones to kids is grooming. Still, I don’t think all the Sams in the US would ever be able to do as much material harm by having access to Twitter as ISIS does in one afternoon. Could be wrong.
ISIS is a sanctioned entity. Knowingly allowing them, or anyone identified as a member, to post on Twitter, would likely be illegal under sanctions laws.
To the extent that Twitter’s approach to ISIS is not mandated by sanctions laws-I don’t see Musk changing Twitter’s corporate policies on ISIS-he has zero sympathy for them and no doubt views them as a threat to humanity’s future.
Musk is likely good news for Donald Trump, Babylon Bee, Jordan Peterson, Libs of TikTok, etc - but no change for ISIS.
I still wonder about the legalities of Twitter allowing them to use the site, given they are still under US sanctions. It is possible, however, that the US government has (quietly) asked Twitter to allow it, as a diplomatic/political calculation. Sanctions concerns disappear if the government is asking you to disregard them (they can give you a formal legal exemption from them - even secretly; even without a formal exemption, if the government asks you to do something, that is an estoppel against them taking legal action for acceding to your request.)
<<people who'd put me in a camp if they had their way
Eh. This train is never late. Just wait until you find out that eventually all the out groups are thinned out and you are identified as the next one in line. That is the normal course of things. People are assholes. Freedom of speech is a basic safety valve.
I dislike that I even have to explain those. All this stuff should be covered in basic social studies.
If you want to talk about basic social studies, I'd suggest the paradox of tolerance.
Would you feel comfortable if your opinion that you just expressed above was being targeted for no other reason that it exists and someone somewhere finds it abhorrent. Do you not agree it is a rather bad standard just because, well, it is very general and can be applied to anything down the line?
Edit2:
Yes, I am invoking the "what if that was done to you".
edit3:
<<I'd suggest the paradox of tolerance.
There is no paradox. What you have is a conflict of values. From my perspective, things are either in balance or they are not. I personally would postulate that "escape from freedom" is a much more applicable here, where the pendulum swings from one extreme to the other.
Personally, I do find it mildly amusing that the groups that were persecuted not that long ago are embarking on their own witch hunts shortly thereafter. It is a fascinating insight into the human condition.
Should I be allowed to hold a rally and say "Someone needs to start lynching some $RACIAL_SLURs"?
If you say yes, then...well there's no further discussion to have, and you scare me.
If no, then it's clear you and I both agree that there SHOULD be SOME limits on speech, we just disagree where the line is.
Heh. I too would love to live in such a binary word, where things are simply black or white and there are no shades of grey. I also love how you think this allows to bow out of the discussion. For the record, it does not and I challenge you to openly discuss it. Otherwise, and I am not using this phrase lightly here, you are an intellectual fraud pretending to engage in a good faith argument.
Now, the actual response to:
<< Should I be allowed to hold a rally and say "Someone needs to start lynching some $RACIAL_SLURs"?
Is that even a real question? Are you really drawing a line at name calling? This the hill you are willing to die on? I might be willing to accept some limits along the lines of the precedent that happens to include relatively conclusive standard of "immediate and present danger", but KKK members going through the streets shouting slogans using words you find offensive is absolutely something I am willing to defend, because I actually happen to believe in the founding document of this nation. Hell, I actually promised I will uphold it. I was not born into it and blessed with apathy. I voluntarily chose that path, because I happen to believe in ideals it espouses.
If you think I am the person to be scared of, I feel genuinely concerned for you. I would recommend less.. whatever it is that got you wound up.
Wait.
Are you arguing that "Someone needs to start lynching" equates to clear and present danger", because I am relatively certain a lot would depend on the context AND the resulting consequences? Like.. not to search very far, and to put things in perspective, to what extent did BLM protest rhetoric contributed to the resulting riots. Should we start locking them up?
I can give you that it is a close call, but nowhere near as clear you as you make it seem.
Either way, you may want to reconsider your argument a little. Those same rules are supposed to protect everyone. There is a reason for it.
Edit:
<< How far are you willing to take the notion of Freedom of Speech?
Notion. It is an idea enshrined in god damn law. It is a right. And it is one of the few things founders agreed upon. And it is the very first one.
You know what is a notion? Deconstructionism. There is a difference.
Notion.
Should Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman, and Smith & Wesson be allowed to have Twitter accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers each?
Honestly, if you want to be really consistent, almost every world government should have its officials off Twitter. Any US politician who was in power between 2001 and 2020 did far more "material harm to others"[0] than any given teenager who wants to say racial slurs.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Afghanistan_(2001%E2%80...
> Any US politician who was in power between 2001 and 2020 did far more "material harm to others"[0] than any given teenager who wants to say racial slurs.
That comparison is invalid because those companies don't commit their purported harm on Twitter. Same with government officials. Even Kim Jong Un has a Twitter account https://twitter.com/official_kju
The "teenager" (or billionaire influencer) dropping racial slurs and either targeted or broad threats uses social media as the method of the harm they inflict. Mainstream social media companies are concerned with their platforms being used for harm.
I'll absolutely screenshot it and report it to your employer, should it be truly heinous behavior that would make your coworkers uncomfortable.
As with many of the things Elon has tweeted or said, appearing to value free speech for Twitter was just him appealing to conservatives, upset with their perception of cancel culture.
Wait to see if Elon actually makes any TOS and policy changes in the next month, and debate then.
The (absurd, imho) belief that such a right should preclude any sort of government regulation is a libertarian value.
So the "conservatives" believe very strongly in free speech (at the moment) because it's their speech that is currently getting crimped. And, seeing the trends, they think it's likely to get worse in the future. (As, say, anything disagreeing with the current "liberal" position gets labeled "racist" or "transphobic" or something, designed to make it virtuous to censor.)
Conservative and liberals have flip flipped on worker rights, corporate power and speech
It leaves conservatives open to being conned by everything from Chinese electronics manufacturers [1] to bankrupt reality TV stars [2]. Misconstruing TOS agreement violations as censorship persecution makes it easy for billionaires to win conservative admiration without actually doing anything.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/foxconn-sharply-scales-back...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/08/us/politics/trump-save-am...
Conservatives now define it as the permission to spread deliberate misinformation and overt racism and bigotry without consequences from either the government OR private entities.
Which, in a world where anything you don't like or agree with must be one of those things, is kind of unavodiable.
The American constitution has done a uniquely good job of enumerating those limits. It seems like a stretch to paint a de facto adherence to free speech (as outlined by the law of the land in a given jurisdiction) as oppressive, when the status quo has been unilateral normative judgements of relevant political speech by an unrepresentative cabal of employee-activists.
It's tricky because these platforms are huge, and are a public square in many ways. But they are also companies. The local newspaper is not required to print some anti-semitic screed. A local bar can kick out nazis. People do have alternative ways of freely expressing themselves.
Due to the massive size of these platforms, it feels a bit different, though in that being removed from one could really alter your online presence.
I don't have all the answers. And I suspect that Elon Musk does not, either, but we will have to wait and see...
I'm personally of the belief that network effects have granted Twitter a relatively unassailable cultural position, or at least enough of a moat to greatly reduce competitive pressures, and so should be subjected to different standards than a local bar or paper -- and if the analogy is to a newspaper, then Twitter should be treated as a publisher with all the attendant regulatory baggage that carries. It's hard for them to argue they have a right, as a private company, to shape the conversation, and in the same breath claim they're shielded from legal responsibility for what takes place on their site.
It's definitely a tricky debate, but in my personal value stack I place individuals' freedom of speech much higher than a private company's right to refuse service, so that's where I fall.
Hard to say... there are massive network effects, but switching costs are also pretty low. Facebook seemed pretty solid not so long ago.
Legal interpretation of the constitution has also very clearly found that a huge collection of actual literal Nazis marching around shouting "death to jews" at the top of their lungs is a-okay. Excuse me if I'm not super excited for that to be present on various social media platforms.
Of course I despise the vitriol spewed on twitter as much as anyone else, but I'd sooner that idiocy be exposed and ridiculed than cede control over acceptable speech to ideologically motivated moderators in the inevitable instances where the ethical lines are blurrier. I realize that's a bit of an antiquated view, and the prevalent opinion is that these people can't be reasoned with and thus shouldn't be platformed, but I truly believe that that cynicism is a greater threat to our liberal institutions than the odd troll or bigot making racist remarks with 25 followers.
> but I'd sooner that idiocy be exposed and ridiculed than cede control over acceptable speech to ideologically motivated moderators in the inevitable instances where the ethical lines are blurrier.
Great. Will you also be willing to be the person who experiences a torrent of hate speech directed at them? This is not an abstract thing where somebody else can "expose and ridicule" proponents of hate. You need to be willing to have the Nazis literally protest at your home and your job every single day and not leave.
> the odd troll or bigot making racist remarks with 25 followers.
If you think this is an honest portrayal of the state of hate on social media when moderation is reduced to "everything that isn't illegal" then you are grossly mistaken.
Yes, I am committed to backing up my philosophical attachment to free speech at the expense of personal inconvenience. I realize that's an empty statement without actually being subjected to that reality, but that's the best I can do.
If I'm wrong about the extent to which hate speech proliferates in unmoderated spaces (absent the adverse selection effect for sites like 4chan), then that's all the more reason to address that undercurrent of our societies. If anything, I'd argue pushing people off platforms where they might encounter dissenting views exacerbates radicalization.
Not okay, but not illegal, and better than the alternative i.e. a society without freedom of speech (as the Reich was, or Weimar Germany).
I do find the continued attempts to paint social media kicking transphobes off their platforms as equivalent to the actual Nazis hilarious, though.
2. I probably take the threats to your elections more seriously than you (I read whole of the the Antrim County computer forensics report, I'll never get that time back but I put in the effort).
3. To label ideological opponents with the label of a mental illness simply for disagreement is a poor show.
4. I take anyone being banned from anything for speech that should be free (which is almost all speech) very seriously.
5. "haha Nazis are shit" is below par for HN. Try not to waste my time and others with stuff you can safely spew out on Twitter and get likes for even though it's vapid.
I don't think that's true, since you think that people being banned on social media is a greater threat to a fall to authoritarianism.
> To label ideological opponents with the label of a mental illness simply for disagreement is a poor show.
I did not do this. Nor is this just "simply for disagreement." Argument over the best way of funding retirement savings programs is distinct from arguments over whether or not to throw gay people in prison, for example.
> I take anyone being banned from anything for speech that should be free (which is almost all speech) very seriously.
I'm sure you do. I hope that you also donate your time and money to those who suffer at the hands of people spreading hate.
> haha Nazis are shit" is below par for HN. Try not to waste my time and others with stuff you can safely spew out on Twitter and get likes for even though it's vapid.
Nazis are shit. You are treating me like a child. You use this "you talk like you are on Twitter" move pretty often as a way of talking down to people.
That's a strange reading that seems to assume that free speech goes hand in hand with authoritarianism, a laughable notion. Free speech is the antithesis of authoritarianism. No authoritarian has ever allowed anything approaching freedom of speech within their jurisdiction and sometimes even enforce it far beyond. As such, what you think is wrong.
> > To label ideological opponents with the label of a mental illness simply for disagreement is a poor show.
> I did not do this.
A phobia is a mental illness, you call your ideological opponents transphobes, so you did do this. It's pathetic name calling.
> I hope that you also donate your time and money to those who suffer at the hands of people spreading hate.
I'm here right now spending my time doing just that because you quite clearly do hate your opponents.
> Nazis are shit. You are treating me like a child.
No one here has claimed that Nazis aren't shit but you're acting like a teenager high on self righteousness that thinks proclaiming that is some kind of insight for the rest of us. It is childish.
As I wrote, HN isn't the place, and one reason I bring it up far too often is because far too often of late I see people, like yourself, treating it as such. I make no apologies for wanting the standards to remain high.
Tell you what. I'll change all my words if it'll make you take me seriously. Substitute "bigots against trans people." It'll change none of my meaning.
There's a reason such a misnomer is used, and there's a reason why those using it such as yourself, seem to overlook its utterly mistaken connotations.
> Substitute "bigots against trans people." It'll change none of my meaning.
I know, but you're begging the question, while being an ironic hypocrite. How about you substitute a specific and accurate term for those you disagree with, or would it be too difficult for you to actually drop the ad hominem for even a moment out of fear of being shown up?
Assuming you're referring to constitutional law jurisprudence here and not the First Amendment's meager words here, I don't think I can agree with this statement. The short summary of the jurisprudence is that the government has no powers of censorship whatsoever, and the margins of where speech can become illegal are so far away that it's basically impossible to reach them (e.g., to reach the bar in Brandenburg, you more or less need to be at the head of a literal mob getting ready to lynch somebody). Unless you're a student.
As a guideline for moderation, it's absolute shit. There's ample evidence that absence of moderation will cause forums to degrade into cesspools, and the guideline of First Amendment jurisprudence is that the government is not permitted to be a moderator.
A great example of this is the thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of accounts, which were permanently banned in October of 2021. Their own thought crime was posting revelations from Ashely Biden's diary and Hunter Biden's laptop. The excuse was " Russian disinformation" but news of late have proven Twitter's statement as clear disinformation in itself.
Musk had already said content that is illegal won't be permitted, and troublemakers will be dealt with, and that perma-ban will be final course, not the first & only.
Minimum western standards.
Anti-semitism is a “good” if you’re a Palestinian.
Racism similarly can be “good” for members of a minority fighting for literal survival.
Are you going to be correct all the time? Or even majority of the time?
If you believe in your capability to be correct all the time, might as well make billions in the market and help fight injustice everywhere.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/22/twitter-a...
The results are unsurprising.
I'm not sure that's possible. Even if you could magically roll back Twitter to pre-2015 (staff, code, rules, etc.), the world has changed and the average Twitter user has changed.
I haven't tried the Metaverse and have no clue whether that'll take off, I'm more talking about the general technology. I have to admit, I'm still surprised it hasn't taken off stronger.
VR mini golf with my friends is the closest thing to hanging out in person without actually doing so. It’s a pretty dramatic difference over a phone call or other type of video game together.
What do you hate about it?
I've never used it because it always seemed pretty shallow and vapid to me, but I don't have a visceral reaction against it. What am I missing?
One issue I find just generally with social media is that it incentivizes some inherent qualities in people that are detrimental to a functioning society. The nature of twitter encourages two behaviors that seem antithetical to constructive dialog.
Tweets are short. This makes it extremely difficult to have nuance in any conversation and makes it really easy for people to take a tweet that might be part of a larger thread or a series of replies out of context. There are lots of examples of a tweet blowing up someone's life and then you come to find out that the reality was, unsurprisingly, unable to be captured in 140 (or 280) characters.
Tweets are algorithmically promoted based on engagement. This really isn't just a Twitter thing, most social media works this way. The problem comes when you combine this with the first issue. "Hot takes" and things that outrage are pretty engaging and end up going far on the site.
So you take these two things together and what you end up with is a lot of content that takes complex topics and turns them into snappy hot takes. People then engage with those and our natural tribal tendencies take over and people fall into camps of either agreeing or disagreeing with the tweet. Now their agreement or disagreement might not be total, but in comes the format of twitter, it's hard in so few characters to express a nuanced opinion like "Well I agree with these parts of the tweet because of XYZ but I disagree with ABC and I think it totally misses the complexities of JKL."
In my experience a lot of twitter ends up devolving into a rabid sort of tribalism. But that's not universal, many people carefully curate who they follow and derive a great deal of value from the site. I think though when people have a strong negative reaction to it, they are probably considering what they (and I) perceive to be the majority case of people following popular twitter accounts (by definition they are popular because they have lots of followers) and taking part in the lower quality dialog trap I described above.
Second, I just don't like the site. You go to the site, click on the news ticker for any topic, and you see a million of the worst takes ever dreamed up by mankind. The format also encourages mob mentality which I find very disturbing.
IMO Tesla -- we owe them a bit, for revitalizing electric cars. Now that the big brands have come around, I'm not sure Tesla has such a huge draw (?). Like if you are an engineer, you could work on the same problems at Ford, but with fewer CEO antics, your designs will probably be implemented with better build quality, and I bet your employment would be more stable.
SpaceX is still pretty impressive though.
I suspect he will surprise us with some product decisions, but I wouldn’t bet against him.
I’m sure he will upset some users and some advertisers, but on the whole he understands that in order for his investment to make a return Twitter needs to be popular.
Elon may be notorious for his big statements, and he has certainly made a few around twitter, but I don’t believe he is doing anything other than investing in a business that he is personally interested in. That’s his MO, it’s about growth not ideology.
If you haven’t seen them take a look at the released email/text exchanges between Elon and the Twitter CEO and board from the lawsuit. They offer a good insight into what his thought process is.
Working for Twitter in 2022 sounds about as exciting as working for Yahoo as it was going through the same type of turmoil.
>Ethically challenged software engineer working for a major tech company you know. Used to have close to 1000 karma, got destroyed over time by hackernews cancel culture and a change in downvote algorithms. But now that the algorithm has been changed back to classic style, I'm rising up again.
The doctors are indeed worried about his karma count. It's dropped a lot because he is ethically challenged. But it's sounds like the doctors are working hard to bring that karma count back up.
Referring to yourself as "ethically challenged"? Complaining about cancel culture?
That profile just reeks of "WHY CAN'T I SAY THE N-WORD!?"
The only other anecdote I have is an acquaintance who was early (i.e. the first web-dev) at YouTube. He _hated_ working for Google and left as soon as his shares vested. That was my first experience with someone simply rejecting a fat paycheck because _Google_ was to buttoned down for them.
People are strange (and software engineers are a whole different level of people).
It's easier to reject a fat paycheck after your shares vest, I imagine.
Still, no real data to back that claim up though.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1586059953311137792
Or if I'm wrong and there is clear vision which these people support, can you please elaborate?
Politicians and sports media aren't going to abandon twitter any time soon, so I expect revenue will hold for quite some time.
It seems that many people abandoned FB already. If those same people abandon twitter, where will they go? I personally don't use twitter because I don't want to see updates from random people on the internet, but is there a replacement for that? I'm not sure.
I’d like to think I can provide a net positive to the org with 15 years experience as a developer, founder and CTO.
Maybe it’ll end up being a net zero brain swap.
I know it sounds silly that I’d use a throwaway to say I want to work for Twitter now.
But if I do end up working there I have a feeling some in my network may not be so happy about this. I’d have to come to terms with that and plan some things out.
Maybe I’m overreacting, maybe not. But it’s on my mind these days when I say I support free speech within the confines of existing US law.
What I mean to say is that I support a company freely choosing to adopt a content moderation policy that aligns as closely as possible to the US 1st Amendment.
I think the US 1st Amendment is among (if not the) strongest free speech laws in the world, and it would be beneficial to society to have a major social media platform adopt that ideal as their North Star.
Right now presents an interesting and rather unique opportunity to convert a major social media platform from an ad-driven model with shareholders seeking endless growth to a sustainable, long-term business model with a revenue model that aligns closer to users. And sprinkle on top the idea of making the platform more inclusive to diverse groups and opinions with less echo-chamber. That interests me.
My money would be on software developers with certain personality quirks being drawn to Musk's leadership while those who have been building Twitter's compliance and moderation infrastructure would be repulsed. But, I don't think we'll really ever know because - as a private company - I expect Twitter to not disclose that information in the future.
Starlink gives free twitter access for everyone in the world, without internet access required, basically what FB tried to do.
Elon starts loving ads xD
For all of Musk's proponents' claims that this is a boon for "free speech", such free speech is anathema to corporate interests, particularly advertisers and corporate partners (we only need to look at the recent Ye + Adidas bustup).
Thus, it will likely devolve into "Free Speech (TM)", the my-way-or-the-highway speech policing that we see in places like /r/conservative where any criticism of Musk's preferred views is silenced. Again, we only need to take his own history towards criticism to see what Musk with a bullhorn is likely to do.
And, thus, we can only hope that it becomes such a cesspool of hatred such as Parler and other so-called liberterian free-speech platforms that it becomes toxic for investors and users, save for those who relish the echo-chamber.
One can dream.
An actual stated policy that is followed by the company instead of some arbitrary internal morality police like the last lot.
https://twitter.com/danahull/status/1586060026866638850
It's a good thing he got through middle school before it became a meme.
Twitter, with roughly the same measly feature set it had 15 years ago, is operated by 7500 people.
Maybe some "brain drain" would not be a bad thing?
In what terms? Can you share some numbers maybe?
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2022/10/21/twitter-musk-wa...
It was clear she didn't do much of anything. Twitter could probably trim all the adult daycare shit.
the one thing I'm almost certain of is twitter will have better margins under musk.
It may not be worth the $44b though, he's starting at a $20b defecit.
Or government funded/controlled socials.
I think there is a need for smaller existing community-based social networks. They can be paid for by certain people or crowdfunded once in a while like Wikipedia.
https://twitter.com/ProfessorShaw/status/1586064942972575746
Also, I assume the point is a presidential run within the next cycle or three.
Elon Musk is not eligible to be President.
Implying that people are dunking on you for being wrong instead of amplifying what you said.
His issue is that he wasn't born a US citizen, not that he was born in South Africa.
Excellent idea, let's deplatform people by creating lots of bot accounts to follow them so that they have to pay for it!
I see today’s Twitter as a chat app where popular people promote their content to less popular. Maybe it would make sense to help populars sell stuff directly and get a cut.
What's your proposal for how Twitter makes money? Just double-down on the harvesting of personal information instead?
He's making a deal with the devil to fund Twitter, and if that means selling out to guys like Peter Thiel and other conservative power brokers, then he will do it. Just in time for the 2024 presidential election media cycle too...What could possibly go wrong?
I mean, that's no different from Twitter and other platforms currently operate in terms of how they define hate speech or who they cancel.
I think the point is that while right now, 'unfair' things might happen, perhaps they will become even more uneven in the future, as he exerts more personal sway into what's ok and what's not, rather than attempting to stick to some guidelines.
Exactly -- and I think that's the source of most folks' pre-schadenfreude. A lot of us have been around long enough to have seen "free speech" platforms come and go and this feels no different, so far.
Sure they can. "You take down tweets we don't like, or Tesla loses China as a market, we arrest all the employees currently in China, and take your factories and other assets there".
Can he say "fine"? Sure, technically.
I actually don't think so, I think this was bluster, or if they are safe haven it will be safe in the way that a subreddit is safe. You can freely talk amongst eachother but that content won't be promoted to people who don't want to see it.
I mean this was his latest tweet: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1586059953311137792?cxt=...
My prediction is he ends up growing twitter into a fairly bland chat/communications app/social network, and the focus on global political and social debates slowly weans over time.
Can't help but smile.
Here's the text of it in case others can't see it:
> Twitter will be forming a content moderation council with widely diverse viewpoints.
> No major content decisions or account reinstatements will happen before that council convenes.
I don't think they've ever had more than 2 9s of reliability.
https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Racist-tweets-quickl...
… My prediction is Musk flails about, burns a pile of money, and decimates any goodwill his associated companies (e.g. SpaceX, Tesla, Starlink) currently have.> My prediction is Musk flails about, burns a pile of money, and decimates any goodwill his associated companies (e.g. SpaceX, Tesla, Starlink) currently have.
I hope you’re right.
As for Musk, he's playing with other people's money. At that scale he can afford to tell the American banks to go fuck themselves. The foreign investors are probably cheering on this nonsense. The Saudis want pro-oil republicans, the Russians are going to relish the chaos, and at the very least the Chinese will cheer on the loss of a TikTok competitor. There aren't a lot of guardrails here.
https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Kanye-West-s-Twitter-acc...
Elon Musk has been talking about how awesome Gigafactory Shanghai is for the past year, thanks to Chinese workers who don't talk back to their boss and work harder than their American counterparts.
Dude loves his Chinese anti-speech factory. Or at least, he already is pretending to do that so that he gets his Chinese sales numbers up.
Musk makes the public statements he needs to do business. He has no morals outside of money as far as I can tell. Dude is 100% willing to spout off anti-American propaganda / stereotypes to serve his Chinese masters (at least, this year when his Chinese factory is opening up. We will see if he really believes those words or if he's just playing dumb or something...)
EDIT:
> I think there will be some very strong companies coming out of China. There’s just a lot of super talented and hardworking people in China that strongly believe in manufacturing. And they won’t just be burning the midnight oil. They’ll be burning the 3am oil. So they won’t even leave the factory type of thing. Whereas in America, people are trying to avoid going to work at all.
But when China goes 100% lockdown for the past year, he turns a blind eye to it and calls them hard workers instead. His anti-American bias, at least when talking with the Chinese, is pretty darn obvious.
Of course, it all disappears when he flies back to the USA. My point is he's a two-faced double-talking political type. He says what he needs to say to get the money and prestige he needs to do what he wants. Expect more pro-Chinese sentiment from him. The Chinese factory is one of the most important elements of Tesla's strategy right now.
He’s a politician/actor for business, and people love it. Everybody claims to hate politics, but it’s become yet another reality tv drama to which we’ve become addicted. Elon is a great actor and he’s paid very well for it. He knows the game he’s playing, and has no moral compass to hold him back.
Unfortunately, it’s the most real form of reality tv yet, where we all eventually bear the consequences. Personally, I have never and will never use or read Twitter. My concern for most social media platforms is whether or not they’re going to damage society.
It’s not like we have a choice anyway. So take a good look at your surroundings, and a year or two from now, ask yourself if we’re better or worse off than now.
Also, many are acting like Musk has free rein in running the company. Yes and no.
Beyond needing employees to actually run the thing, he also has loans to pay back ($13B!) and investors to maintain good relationships with. More on that here: https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/who-is-financing-elon-mus...
Perhaps some kind of "HN gloves off" mode might work. Or HN After Dark. Then the traditional civil mode could be retained, while allowing the more wild tangents to run their course in a separate but related area or mode. I think this is inevitable for online discussion. Politicians have their formal, respectful discourse zones, but gloves come off in certain places and contexts where heated exchange is not only acceptable, but expected. And these are the people running things. So to deny the same for the general population, will never sit well.
Want to have some open and honest discussions about programming languages, databases, APIs, careers, or math? There are few places where you can read more interesting and intelligent discussions on things like this.
Want to have some civil, but honest discussion about anything truly contentious: say race, religion, crime, homelessness, foreign affairs, IQ, sexuality, immigration, etc? Fully open and honest discussions on these sorts of topics are just not possible unless you have a very commonplace and milquetoast viewpoint.
Whether that is compatible with their business goals is another question.
1. Most are optimizing to maximize user engagement, and it seems like most platforms have concluded that emotionally charged hot takes are the best way to keep the feed scrolling and the likes and shares flowing.
2. Most don't have the small communities or active moderation necessary to build a culture of civility. (HN is an outlier, though even here I think there are still some topics where the site becomes echo chamber-y.)
Just as an example take the insipid "let's go Brandon" slogan. Sentiment analysis would rate that as a positive statement unless it was specifically flagged. That's a trivial example. There's untold numbers of covert meanings for emojis, even for banal things.
Isn't this Instagram thing - my impression at least - have not used longer than a day or two because it's basically fluff only.
Cutting out negative sentiment - whatever the definition - would make it boring IMO
Will have to prefix tweets with I positively hate...
The word "unalive" itself was coined and became popular to escape such basic filters that have no sense of meaning.
1. I just tried the following on the first online sentiment analysis tool I found, and scored 85% positive: You sound very 'smart'. I have warm and fuzzy feelings at the thought of you being unalived, with your genius
I think if you have a place with useful conversation and also the attention of people, you can make money.
Whether Musk will actually do that: dunno. But I don't think it's inconceivable that Twitter could become something much better than it is today.
It's the same reason none of the reddit clones have ever taken off, turns out most people don't want to participate in a virtual space free of censorship because it just turns into a cesspool
It's unfortunate ad hominems, logical fallacies, and the "mic drop one liner" get so much traction and amplification.
When I find myself making snap judgments about an issue, I dive in to the opposition, doggedly seek out the underpinning ideas, from academic or level headed folks.
It's helped strengthen my personal convictions on some matters and moderated my pre held notions.
I really disagree. I think you have fringe folks on the left but outlandish ideas are mainstream amongst conservatives. For example, 70% of republicans believe Joe Biden did not legitimately win the 2020 election.
https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2022/70-percent-republ...
You just aren't going to find such strong belief in anything that absurd on the left.
>When I find myself making snap judgments about an issue, I dive in to the opposition, doggedly seek out the underpinning ideas, from academic or level headed folks.
I agree! Obviously some subjects like anti-vaxxers or election deniers don't have level-headed or academic folks who can support them.
That's really why you need intense moderation because quality content doesn't rise to the top. An 'anything goes' environment tends to promote the absolute worst ideas, as people like Gwyneth Paltrow and Joe Rogan have a far wider audience that actual scientists. If you allow them to lie about important issues, the lie is going to suffocate any academic or level-headed person who has something to say.
The 4 years of russian meddling? It genuinly seems to have been widespread to me.
And with the biden one, AFAICT it is not directly about stealing it, but rather enacting stuff that resulted in an unfair benefit to democrats, that seemed unlawful. (Mail in voting by default, for example)
So, no, I don't believe it's mostly one side. But rather that both sides have the loud, crazy, minority.
You mean the highly documented russian interference in our elections? Is that what you're talking about?
>And with the biden one, AFAICT it is not directly about stealing it, but rather enacting stuff that resulted in an unfair benefit to democrats, that seemed unlawful. (Mail in voting by default, for example)
I'm not going to delve too deep into the idiotic conspiracy theories behind the 'stop the steal', the reality is that there is zero evidence impropriety.
The idea that making it easier to vote by mail is a benefit to one party speaks volumes about what conservatives believe.
The fight against vote-by-mail has nothing to do with lawfullness. Conservatives focus on making it hard to vote/voter disenfranchisement because they know they are a minority party.
It doesn't sound too complicated to me
I have to wonder if there was already some pushback from larger advertisers that prompted Elon's tweet in the first place. Time will tell but we've already got 4chan and some users and advertisers would rather go to a "mall-like" experience to not have to deal with the "crap".
The actual quality of the advertising product almost doesn't matter, it's not like any of the advertisers can reasonably independently validate the claims or performance, they're trusting them as given.
Elon has never been a member of the advertising club, he famously chooses to have his company refuse to even be a client, and he doesn't have a reputation for any of those values. Wouldn't at all be surprised if major clients put a hold on their Q4 spend with Twitter the moment they got news of the completed acquisition.
Google, Facebook, and Snap all had major advertising earning misses, the agencies would be pressuring for better deals regardless.
This isn't Bezos buying the Post outright and running it as a vanity project, Musk has stakeholders.
What you predict (financial ruin) will probably happen if he doesn't do that.
I also understood Vijaya Gadde and pre-Musk Twitter's position better even if I still think their systems end up hitting marginalized people more than the people who want to marginalize them. The task is harder than Musk realizes, and he fired the person who's been working hardest on it for most of the last decade and understands the problem space best.
I know this sounds like a cynical question, but without a name your comment seems a little bit fanatical.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/golden-parachutes-3-fired...
And people who lend money typically have contracts and the ability to seize assets if they don't get paid. (I have no idea what the $13B of loans looked like, but can't imagine they were personal, non-recourse loans.)
There are a few publicly known partners, and a few who got turned away. They have equity.
This is a misconception.
Outsiders don't know anything about ads.
Twitter needs to be more useful, especially to iOS users. It users outside of major US metros. It needs older users.
It will need better targeting and science.
Then it will increase ad revenue.
Like, I want to show my gun ads next to Trump's posts and want to show abortion clinics next to Biden's. Nothing wrong with this. Want to show public works ads next to Bernie's ads.
Then when you want to post wild things, anonymous mode will kick in and those posts will not be posted in an identifying fashion. They will be posted in an area that cannot lead to the post owner being "accurately" identified. That way nobody knows who posted it. That should reduce some legal issues. If the poster decides to post it as the owner and successfully gets past the Nazi filter, their reputation will be affected depending on the public reception of their post.
Just like in real life. You stay away from people who you don't like.
I'm from Brazil and the extreme right is abusing all the communication platforms. it's a complete madness in what people believe right now. Our society is on the verge of crumbling.
Musk constantly shits on the work those people did and says he's going to change it all. I bet they have some pride in what they built and it would feel insulting for some outsider to constantly criticize without knowing the reasons why they did what they did. I'd feel hurt too. Plus his companies have a reputation for chewing you up and spitting you out again. People might not like the cultural U-turn.
Please stop talking about the far left. It's just silly. It's like 12 people who share these extreme views and comparing them to the far right is really misleading. The far right are organised and training with weapons. The far left are arguing on Twitter with anime profile pics.
saying that the far left is in no way comparable to the far right is pretty silly. they both exist, they both have violent sects, both have anime fans, and there are most definitely more than 12 of them
And hell they banned Jordan Peterson?
I don't know what kinda echo chamber you operate in to think the 'left' is not 'trying to influence communication platforms'
Have you heard of reddit?
- extreme intersectionality
- the original non-diluted Marxism-inspired version of CRT (e.g. punctuality and objectivism in academia are “white values”)
- literal dissolution of police (not just creating better social services)
and much more. So they are far left not in the classic sense. This term has been somewhat redefined in the context of culture war (similar to far right).
How do you define far left in the US? People who advocate for the redistribution of income and wealth and for a brotherhood of all workers?
If it was, then we would have seen a left exodus years ago and not suddenly coming up now. This comment has me so confused.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/28/23428132/elon-musk-twitt...
The argument only goes through when you look at the platform reputation as a whole. That's why platforms like Parler have trouble attracting ads. There are a lot – a lot – of people trying to hit Twitter's platform reputation right now, but their problem is that the best place to degrade companies' (and people's) reputations is Twitter.
That's fine, I won't see any of their ads anyways and neither should any of you.
Now, can we please get over this era of _advertising companies_ deciding what is acceptable in the digital town square?
The reason this idea does not go far is because the people who pay usually do not necessarily post good quality content , that degrades the quality of UGC and view time therefore ad revenue loss
I agree that introducing paid accounts would make it harder for content farms to exist - primarily due to the fact that they would need a very large number of bank accounts and/or payment cards. However I don't think it's a real solution to this problem. Maybe as a part of some holistic anti-bot system? Yes, that could work.
More so calling it "crowning himself CEO" as if that wouldn't be automatically required if you layoff the existing CEO. A temporary CEO would be required until a new CEO is found.
I think it's also important to consider the idiom "A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on"
HN is little different from big tech ideologically, and your comment is already fading out of existence. I expect it will be completely censored soon.
"Twitter will be forming a content moderation council with widely diverse viewpoints.
No major content decisions or account reinstatements will happen before that council convenes."
Also ironic that his goal was to promote free speech and painted moderation as evil.
—-
It is beyond me that I am downvoted for pointing the irony of the situation.
So many proponents of free speech have so few regards to give for TOS and have the audacity to demand service without abiding to it. It seems that HN is no longer a bastion of honest discussion and has been overrun by certain individuals.
It’s cultural, we have many people (like you) who believe they’re the arbitrators of truth. They alone understand and know what is fact and what is fiction, even if that fact is a moving target that changes by the hour, the hypocrisy of that is totally lost on these folks (ie you).
Additionally, the fact-setters refuse to even entertain the idea that maybe their “facts” are not based on reality, and they label anyone who disagrees with them as evil. And everyone agrees that evil must be culled. They will often use extreme epithets (nazi, bigot, hitler, white supremacist) to get their point across, no matter how inappropriate, contradictory, or ahistorical that insult might be in context.
Until people can step out of their bubble and be willing to admit that the world is a million shades of grey we’re not gonna solve this problem.
Why should people tolerate the intolerant? Why should people tolerate those who can’t even follow basic TOS and behave as adults?
Why should the world tolerate people like that ex president who mocked a reporter with disabilities, who said he grabs women by their genitals, who has received multiple accusations of sexual assault, has been on Eipstein’s island and likely touched little girls?
Why should reasonable people be tolerant to dysfunctional adults who support such a president and share his dog-whistle soundbites? Why should the world tolerate people who are actively calling for their murder? Why should reasonable people give space to people like Pence who want to shove their Christianity down the throat of everyone else?
I will exercise my free speech and call fascists the fascists they are until they stop behaving like fascists. The intolerant deserve no tolerance.
For those that aren't aware they were suspended but could get unsuspended by deleting their own tweet which includes an explicit admission that they're evil no good sinners as part of the process.
Which The Bee rightfully chose not to do at the time and let it lie for months.
Get it from the horse's mouth:
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1519036983137509376?lang...
> Dear Twitter Advertisers (...)
> Twitter obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences! In addition to adhering to the laws of the land, our platform must be warm and welcoming to all, where you can choose your desired experience according to your preferences
He got rid of the last CEO and will presumably either take the position himself or put his own guy in the chair
That's not an option. They all have to sell their shares. It was a corporate decision.
In fact their was another vote that meant Musk couldn't accumulate more than 15% on the open market.
It's 100% not. It's secured debt, that's it. If Twitter becomes worth $17 billion, they get - $15 billion. If Twitter becomes worth $170 billion, they get - $15 billion.
To say nothing of if Musk misses a payment, are they really going to foreclose? Or would they renegotiate?
I’m not sure exactly how the coinvestors fit in the picture, but I expect they (or more likely their own holding companies) own minority stakes in the parent holding company. The debt is probably the parent company’s also, although Musk may have personally guaranteed much of it.
Also, probably even the parent holding company is not directly owned by Musk. Probably owned by one or more trusts he controls.
There's a lot of monetezation potential right there, as Earthlings tune in to follow every tweet from future Martians.
How open and dev friendly is Tesla?
https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you
That's not very open.
[1] - https://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/autos/2020/02/26/...
"The Wall Street banks involved, led by Morgan Stanley, are also ironing out the steps needed to finalize funding about $13 billion of debt commitments."
"Banks that committed to help finance Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter Inc. plan to hold all $13 billion of debt backing the deal rather than syndicate it out, according to people familiar with the matter, in another blow to a market that serves as a crucial source of corporate funding."
$13 billion in money from banks as a loan ~$4 billion in pre-owned Twitter stock (he doesn't have to pay himself) ~$7-8 billion in commitments from other investors (Ellison, a16z, the Bitnance CEO etc.) ~$8-10 billion in TSLA stock he sold in like May when he announced the purchase at $900-$1000/share when he said it was specifically to buy TWTR ~$1 billion in a major investor (I don't recall whether it was a specific Saudi businessman or the Saudi investment fund or the royal family directly) asking to keep his ownership of the company and trade out the shares for teh new compnay shares
That still leaves ~$9-11 billion unaccounted for in a very public fashion. At one point, Merrill had promised him a $12.5 billion margin loan backed by his Tesla shares. He claimed not to need it (and removed it from being a contingency on the deal a while ago). Or maybe he secretly used it. It's less than 5% of his net worth, so it seems reasonable to assume he can get or borrow it easily.
Where Musk is going, there are no maps. So it's very very hard to project. But we can predict likely developments.
At a very high level, it's going to involve: bringing back controversial personalities like Donald Trump; increasing Twitter's commitment to 'free speech'; assuaging skittish advertisers; retaining users who might be concerned, while bringing in new ones; managing the exodus of users (size:?) that will happen regardless; cutting a large amount of staff, while keeping Twitter's lights on; open sourcing the code, discussing the impending rearchitecture; and - long term - folding this into Elon's vision of America's WeChat, and ultimately expanding Twitter, under X.com.
That's a lot. But at a high level, I think that's correct.
I would expect Elon to take the fight to the media. Whether he's going to focus on neutrally spreading a message, going more on the attack on media outlets that would support him, or doing something in between, is unknown.
Musk has an unusually large amount of media power: that's his unique value add, in a way. I would expect this to be a 'bigger deal' as a story, as multiple stories, than I would for any other company undergoing a takeover. We'll be hearing a lot more about Twitter in the weeks to come, since the developments will keep piling up, and the press/public loves to read & discuss stories about Twitter & Musk.
We'll see how it goes.
X.com Maps could tie in with Teslas, X.com Carhailing could tie-in with (future) full self-driving; Twitter could be expanded to be more like Telegram + Instagram, with channels, better DMs, "Moments", and more.
There's no attempt to create a single, wide-ranging social media platform, with payments, video, shorts, DMs, and more. China's proven that it can be done. It would create a far bigger moat and network effects, and likely be as successful as Microsoft Teams & 365, a highly integrated solution, are for work.
Umm.. Facebook? Just offering all those features doesn't mean much though, you really have to be dominant in each one, since there's much less moat to debundling consumer apps vs enterprise
Because it would be incredibly convenient. Link a restaurent to your friends in a chat, talk about going there, all of them have the location and you can split the bill, all in the same app.
It might not have the best business index, or the best chat, or the best map, or the best payment manager, but it would be far, far superior to trying to coordinate all of those services through different apps.
And it's not that you need to want all of this, it's that if people around you use it you have enormous pressure to use it as well, because in the previous scenario if you are the guy who doesn't use such app then you have to be catered to specifically through and through, which is annoying for everyone.
If expenditure (hiring) goes up and he's not finding revenue then that's the end sooner rather then later.
it's an interesting vision to be sure, but i'm not sure how buying twitter actually helps it - twitter has already been struggling to expand outside their core product - none of the experiments like moments, spaces, fleets, etc have really taken off. it kind of seems like twitter users just want tweets and nothing else. so now he's taken on a whole bunch of debt to acquire a userbase who is hostile to the app expanding into any other markets? I don't really see a whole lot of evidence that twitter is a good launch platform for an everything-app.
This is probably the biggest risk in this acquisition. Twitter wasn't doing anything special, and it's easy to launch a clone of their business model. Elon's talking about taking an axe to the things that keep the lights on at Twitter: effective content moderation and talent.
I have experienced the 'effectiveness' of Twitters moderation team on multiple occasions where they were very ineffective at upholding the very clear cut rules surrounding things like doxxing on their website. I had my personal information made public, and they ignored me. Multiple times. I even created a new account with no way for there to be any publicly available personal info; and yet I was still doxxed somehow, and they still ignored me.
So, in the spirit of HN's rules, I just want to say this, since end user experience should be allowable to share (I hope.).
Effective moderation at twitter is a myth as far as I see it, and their only talent is making it look like they have effective moderation when they care.
P.S. I also was doing nothing wrong in any case where this happened. It was all conversations which should have been considered civil (mostly) and one situation where it had nothing to do with politics or philosophy at all. Yet they did nothing.
Nothing.
And if that makes Elon panic, then we are blessed doubly in that way as well, because he might either actually do something useful to make it a nicer place to be; or he might burn it to the ground.
Both are ideal in my personal opinion.
So axe away I guess, cause there is no wood to chop. The tree is hollow, from all the woodpeckers eating the grubs.
I don't think it's clear this is the case. It's just the network effect that keeps it in such a dominant position. Plenty of Twitter clones have been created, yet neither conservatives have migrated to Truth/Parler/Gab/whatever, nor have or will liberals/the anti-Musk contingent to Mastodon, or whatever the left-leaning equivalent Twitter clone coming in the next few weeks is.
Honestly, Twitter's biggest draw to most users is probably the lack of content moderation on something that gets buried beneath the politics and culture discussions: porno, porno, porno. Twitter is one of the few social media sites where porn is still allowed, for the most part. It's always funny to see a "viral" politics/culture war tweet that has "blown up" with 50k, 100k likes; any given lewd picture of Ganyu from Genshin Impact by a popular artist is going to run double those numbers.
Exactly. Just ask Friendster or MySpace or any of the other failed social networks how deep and wide the network effect moat is in the long run. I'd argue that for all the hype, Twitter was already in the 'long goodbye' phase before Musk bet the farm on it.
> Twitter is one of the few social media sites where porn is still allowed, for the most part.
And they're completely at the mercy of Google and Apple's policies here. Both of those app stores could put their feet down next week and this 'feature' of Twitter's suddenly becomes a liability.
That's very subjective. "Misinformation" is more moderated than child porn and literal terrorist organizations.
As abhorrent as I may find their ideas, if they play the rules, I'd actually prefer to allow them on the platform.
The eye opener was seeing others cheer on the silencing of academics, politicians,and physicians who's ideas may be out of step with the zeitgeist (or the mob's interpretation of what's apprpos).
Same thing with Libya and Gaddafi, gruesome stuff was done by western backed rebels, including a revival of the black African slave trade and just killing black immigrants in Libya, and all of that is nigh impossible to prove now.
When a video of them throwing a teenage boy into the back of a pickup truck and sawing his head off started making the rounds, their opinion changed completely. Even if they were full of crackpots, these sites documented objectively just how terrible and extremely brutal these wars are.
They were almost ready to fold, got a new iCEO, and completely turned around to become the world’s most valuable company two decades later.
(Fun fact: if Microsoft hadn't sold this $150 million investment in Apple stock, it would be worth $120 BILLION today and this shareholding would be Microsoft's single most profitable business unit.)
Twitter is the product though, there's not an underserved market that they can move into.
The old Twitter was a lost cow looking for pasture and moving very little in fear of getting more lost. For better and worse it had stability. We can assume that stability is now gone through the window.
Some fresh leadership might not be a bad thing for Twitter. Whether Musk is the right person for that...
It's worth keeping in mind that despite the brave face, Musk didn't want to buy Twitter. In fact: he desperately didn't want to buy Twitter. He's been forced to do so by the Delaware courts.
It's more accurate to say Musk didn't want to buy Twitter for $44 billion. His timing on his bid really sucked. He might have saved half or more if he'd waited a few months.
Instead he made a take-it-or-leave-it offer with a ludicrously tight schedule and locked himself into an unfavorable deal without any obvious reason.
I am certain there is a bad decision in there sometimes and I'm wondering what it it might be.
A small part of me thinks that maybe he was uncertain and scared that he would back out so he took that option off the table preemptively.
It's probably more or less the case that for the next several years, it will be difficult for Musk to do any big-ticket M&A, despite having some of the biggest pockets in the business, without agreeing to exceptionally seller-friendly terms. All because of how he handled an acquisition of a flailing media company that it is very unclear that he wanted in the first place.
What I'm saying is that he'll be getting exceptionally seller-friendly terms from everybody, for years to come, because in the course of this supposed "negotiation" he repeatedly breached the terms of the acquisition agreement, publicly slagged the target over and over again, reneged on the deal, and brought a horseshit case to the Delaware Chancery Court to try to avoid performance when the target held him to the deal he agreed to. Every other company is going to notice that (it's one of the most noticeable things to happen in business in 50 years!), and nobody is going to trust him.
I don't believe he did all of that as a negotiating ploy. If he wanted to get the price down, all he had to do was wait before agreeing to an ironclad, overpriced deal. In fact: "waiting" is what he ended up trying to make happen anyways!
This wasn't a negotiating strategy.
He thought he could get away with an "epic troll" for his acolytes to croon over, like the stock price manipulation Tweets. Turns out the Delaware courts have teeth.
Twitter’s management, acting in the best interest of their shareholders, used the court to force him to hold to the contract when he tried to walk. Musk decided to buy the company for the agreed on price rather than have that imposed on him by court order after (more) embarrassing discovery.
Seeing Musk as a business genius in this deal requires ignoring nearly every event in the saga.
anyone who actually think he was forced to pay 43bn when he could have paid 1bn. (even 2bn) are just not thinking correctly.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/8/23201004/twitter-to-sue-el...
Meanwhile, Musk was getting absolutely savaged in the Delaware chancery court and they were just in discovery. He was going to lose and that would be more embarrassing (somehow) than this outcome.
All because he went off half cocked and didn’t write bog standard contingencies into his offer.
He’s come off looking like an absolute simpleton in this and that’s the better outcome for him than if the court case had proceeded.
There was a provision that Musk would be on the hook for $1B if a third party (e.g. regulators) blew up the deal in a couple enumerated ways. No such option was available to Musk himself.
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2022/05/13/elon-musk-cant-just-walk...
It is embedded on this link https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/8/23201004/twitter-to-sue-el...
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/000119312522...
“Pay $2B and out” was not a choice available to him.
I haven't had a lot of good things to say about Musk as of late but I think this might be an exception, this kind of fortitude is something we should all strive to have. When cornered, he at least didn't complain or cry too much, he actually bit the bullet and has a very convincingly brave face on indeed.
He decided to buy because he feels its better to own it.
Those sort of breakup fees are to give the company some compensation for non-bad-faith purchasers having external problems, because a failed acquisition is still an expensive thing for a company to have gone through in those situations. A cold-feet buyer throwing shit at the company in public even though he has the means to close the deal? Different story.
He did but not for this price...
I think it's more precise to say he acted as if "he desperately didn't want to buy Twitter.".
If he's unsure about that, he can hire Zuck which might be free from contract soon if we look at how Meta stock is trading.
Obviously many people will disagree with his plan, though I’m 100% certain he has one, and will make it happen.
If "having a rich father" is the only thing that matters, why isn't everyone with a rich father a billionaire?
Lots of stuff is different. I know lots of people with very very wealthy parents. They don't want to run businesses... so they don't. The number of people who have the will and means is probably quite a lot smaller than the people who have the means.
Anyway you've just dodged the question by implying "surely there must be something" but I'm asking what it is. To clarify further, I would consider the marks of a genius to be someone who is either a prodigy (ie: exhibits mastery of a subject at a very early age or with little experience) or who has made significant and particularly novel contributions to a field or multiple fields.
Maybe that's Elon, I don't know.
He wrote and sold a computer game at 12 years old after teaching himself to program at 10.
> significant and particularly novel contributions to a field or multiple fields.
Made eletric cars a viable economic prospect, pioneered reusable rockets. Obviously not making every single technical contribution himself, but leading the process.
I don't know, I guess if you're just predisoposed to follow journalists who want to push him as nothing as a cringy nerd, you might not consider that significant, but clearly the market does.
I literally said I don't follow anything about him and was genuinely asking why people call him a genius. He's obviously a cringy nerd but that's not what I'm looking for.
Anyway I guess the game thing seems somewhat impressive, I'm not sure I'd qualify it as "genius" but that's something.
Business accomplishments are impressive but I don't think they make someone a genius.
Tesla (the company) didn't invent electric cars, but they were the first to make electric cars that people actually wanted to buy.
Pre-Tesla, the public perception of elecric cars was something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2HX5wsQVEA (this did not age well)
They were expensive, small, underpowered, and had poor range. Musk took a weakness (expensive) and turned it into a strength (luxury status symbol) by just embracing that making a high-performance electric car was going to be really expensive and marketing it as a toy for rich people to show off how rich they are. Then, he used the profits from that to scale production and bring down the price for future models.
I don't know if he invented this business strategy, but it's a least a pretty brilliant application of it, along with the admirable goal of reducing fossil fuel emissions by putting more electric cars on the road. He also open-sourced all patents developed by Tesla, so other manufacturers could benefit from whatever they discovered along the way.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...
"Elon is brilliant. He’s involved in just about everything. He understands everything. If he asks you a question, you learn very quickly not to go give him a gut reaction.
He wants answers that get down to the fundamental laws of physics. One thing he understands really well is the physics of the rockets. He understands that like nobody else. The stuff I have seen him do in his head is crazy.
He can get in discussions about flying a satellite and whether we can make the right orbit and deliver Dragon at the same time and solve all these equations in real time. It’s amazing to watch the amount of knowledge he has accumulated over the years."
Kevin Watson - chief of avionics at Launcher
Elon is definitely an engineer. He is deeply involved with technical decisions at spacex and Tesla. He doesn’t write code or do CAD today, but he is perfectly capable of doing so.
John Carmack
When I met Elon it was apparent to me that although he had a scientific mind and he understood scientific principles, he did not know anything about rockets. Nothing. That was in 2001. By 2007 he knew everything about rockets - he really knew everything, in detail. You have to put some serious study in to know as much about rockets as he knows now. This doesn't come just from hanging out with people.
Robert Zubrin - Aerospace engineer
That matters personally because you want to set realistic expectations: if you can’t afford to write off a couple of year’s work, launching a startup probably isn’t the best call for you compared to a more staid job which means you don’t need to worry about rent money or health insurance.
It also matters societally because these guys really want to influence our laws, educational system, tax code, etc. and that context is critical. If a billionaire says we should cut taxes on startups to help people climb the ladder, the first question should be how much of the money will go to rich kids from Ivy League schools versus the ones featured in the ad. Similarly, if they’re pushing kids to drop out of college for startups or turning public schools into coding camp, we should be asking how that’ll work out for everyone: the prospects for a kid with affluent high-status parents and a robust social network are quite different from kids who are poor, brown, in the wrong part of the country, etc. and such a policy might be especially dubious if it meant that they have lower negotiating power to get better jobs at the companies run by people making such suggestions.
If you look at software of that era, he wasn't doing something nobody else could do. They had a BASIC interpreter, but it wasn't the first or notably better. MS-DOS certainly worked, but it was at least heavily inspired by CP/M even if the plagiarism accusations were wrong. Being a capable programmer was necessary to his success but it was far from the reason: there were many others around, and they did well but the legendary wealth came to the person whose mother was on IBM's board when he made that company-defining sale. He subsequently executed well but again not uniquely so — anyone who used Microsoft software of that era could tell you that it wasn't the quality of that software which kept people using it. He executed well, and certainly wasn’t shy about an … aggressive … legal strategy but there was also a substantial portion of nepotism and luck.
The world has many people who were smart and hardworking but will never be close to that level of success because they didn’t have the family connections, startups capitol, friends they made at the right school, or the freedom to make a big gamble.
If so, what you're missing is that Gates knew how to play "the game." He knew how to close sales, how to navigate the muddy waters of business, and how to leverage success into more success.
> If "having a rich father" is the only thing that matters, why isn't everyone with a rich father a billionaire?
My position is that there are multiple factors and neither is sufficient on their own.
I think Bill Gates, Elon Musk are all examples of great success. It doesn't mean they are vastly different from the similar hard working people in their fields. It just means that they did a "little" more combined with lots of other factors that put them where they are.
This idea that every genius must be formed in a vacuum and can only be considered a “true” one if they can bootstrap themselves from nothing is an absurd idea peddled by underachievers who somehow find solace in their own mediocrity by nullifying the accomplishments of others who don’t fulfil their arbitrary starting conditions.
The meat of the claim is "just an engineer [...] Did he invent something that I'm not aware of?"
The money isn't mentioned to disqualify him, but to point out that money isn't enough.
What did he actually do that shows genius?
https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...
Elon Musk had no more support than the son of any upper middle class (doctor/pilot/lawyer) household in America would have.
Watching language evolve in real time is fascinating sometimes.
This is where I think his detractors overlook the real benefits he brings. He is fearless and will willingly take long shot bets down roads where others don’t dare tread. His willingness to take the big risk has resulted in some transformative leaps. He’s either very lucky and not very good, or very good and not very lucky, but more likely has a lot of both going for him.
(a) a company trying to build electric cars at a time when there was zero consumer demand for them and the battery technology was nowhere near good enough
(b) a company trying to launch things into space when the vast majority of nations in the world were unable to do so and even NASA seemed like it had lost its way
(c) a popular social media app with 400M users and maybe some issues with product direction
You bet on (a) and (b) because nobody else has pulled it off so if you can do it, you can win big, and you aren't just one of many players in a crowded sea.
(c) is a rough bet since you're already huge but you still have a lot of competition and it's a crowded market and you haven't always made as much money per user as people would like...
I'd definitely be worried about driving advertisers away though. They forced YouTube's hand at least to some degree with the whole adpocalypse thing.
You'd need a lot of market share and confidence as Musk to actually say "this is silly" but it is silly nonetheless. The big players started down the road of "ok we'll ban the worst stuff" and once they blinked it's been "but what about" all the way down.
Good point, but...
The advertiser mostly cares when "everyone" knows they advertise for Nazis. If it's just you who knows, no biggie. They don't want it to be common knowledge.
> The advertiser mostly cares when “everyone” knows they advertise for Nazis.
There are likely some advertisers who would have no qualms about targeting Nazis for advertisements, and little or no qualms about anyone knowing that they do either: criminal lawyers, divorce lawyers, mental health treatment services, drug and alcohol treatment services, certain kinds of charities (such as extremism prevention or anti-racism), etc.
The reason 'xyz' gets banned where xyz is negatively viewed is because it tends to end up everywhere and reduce the utility of the platform.
It's reasonable to moderate content beyond the pale. But that's on the platforms.
Running to advertisers feels like defiantly going to the other parent when you don't receive the answer you want.
I've never drawn the conclusion Bark Box or Toyota stand firmly beyond some crackpot on YT because their ad played before some content.
General Motors just suspended all advertising on Twitter. I've no idea how much their Twitter ad spend compares to that of other companies but certainly GM is not a small company. While I'd love to see it come out that GM doesn't want to be associated with high profile antisemites and conspiracy theorists like Ye, I'd bet it's much more straightforward: GM doesn't want its ad dollars to fund or otherwise be associated with a direct competitor (Tesla).
The problem with a Musk owned Twitter is that there is such a vast range of conflicts of interest. With Musk at the helm it's just that much harder for a company facing social/political pressure to justify doing business with Twitter.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-28/gm-tempor...
Any company trying to claim this now should justify why they had no problem advertising on Twitter while Iran and Al Qaeda had official Twitter accounts
Those implementations will be defeated by motivated adversaries and they will not have the expertise remaining to rebuild it. There will be many lessons learned again at great cost.
Non-motivated non-adversaries already defeat these systems by accident, which I assume are mostly based on user-reports. But apparently Germany's regulators are satisfied enough with Twitter's implementation, since I haven't heard about any issues with it.
He now has the network to connect those people directly to the rest of the world, under his umbrella. Sure, he could have just used (old) Twitter's API, and that's what he'll be using, but it won't be "we (as in 'Neuralink') and Twitter made this happen", but "we (my companies)" made this happen.
I also wonder how useful Twitter's infrastructure could be for machine-to-machine communication, where he certainly could have some uses for it with Tesla and Starlink.
Is that supposed to be an attempt at imagining the most horrible future possible?
Umbrella corporation anyone?
If I'd had made this acquisition, specially in the circumstances he did it, I'd probably get so depressed that I'd put and end to it all.
I'm not a fanboy, but I'm also not a hater.
In the same vein, the influx of new users who had avoided Twitter due to its censorious, hostile community norms.
>Search right now for any insulting, racist, negationist trope and you'll find tons of tweets.
Sounds like the hostile community I'm describing, which turns a lot of people off from Twitter!
In 2020 twitter had a net loss of $1.14B. The loans will kill twitter.
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/twitter-announces-f...
We could drill down further here but it’s not worth 3 paragraphs of nuance for this subtle point.
There’s also operating leverage. This business should trend to 50-80% gross margins and 30-50% profit / free cash flow conversion, similar to Facebook, Google, or other similar businesses.
Further, there’s a bunch of pre- and post- transaction adjustments that hit the financial statements (for example stock based compensation will likely go away in a private company, thus raising profitability), so you can’t just take last years profit and tack on the new debt structure.
Last, the amortization on high yield isn’t necessarily linear. In the most extreme example (where the debt costs >12%) you could have pay-in-kind (PIK) interest where the interest payments accrue to the balance of the loan (like a credit card) and for amortization, it could be anywhere from straight line (1/x periods) to a “bullet” with no amortization at all until a end period where it all comes due at once (you typically refinance in that case).
All-in, it may be risky, but the bankers that committed billions of capital to the deal aren’t exactly brain dead and all have internal credit approval processes which require them to do all the work outlined above and a bunch more.
I don't know why you dissed my response, then gave an answer that basically supports it.
But sure, you’re smarter than them all combined, they’re wrong and underwrote a faulty deal and you’re right, particularly when having no info on the post transaction capital structure.
They're paying out vests on the sales price in cash, which was higher than the value of the company. Normally equity comp places the price fluctuation risk on the employee, but in this case, they're directly eating this cost.
If they don't offer salaries that are competitive with other companies total comp, they will bleed employees, and won't be able to hire talented engineers.
So, no, this really doesn't help, and if anything it increases their direct costs.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2019/10/07/767805936/houston-rockets-gm-...
You spout wrongthink in a twitter DM, and now your bank, credit card, email, private messages, facebook, rail pass, amazon, uber, government ID, school accounts, craigslist and tinder are permabanned.
First of all this idea of a superapp is nothing new. In fact iOS or Android is also a "superapp". Basically a software that has an ecosystem inside of it. Wechat has just created their own ecosystem within a ecosystem, because they want to control everything.
Second, when compared to most other Chinese apps I do have to admit that wechat is much more finished, but when compared to other global messaging apps like Telegram, Slack etc. I'd say wechat is about 10-15 years behind in everything and lacking the most fundamental features. The social media aspect of wechat which is called "Wechat Moments" is also extremely limited: Basically like Instagram without you being able to see or follow people you don't know personally. If your friend posts a photo and his friend (who you don't know) makes a comment on it, you cannot see this comment but you can see your friends replies to him/her. Yes, super confusing. Also no images, videos, gifs in the comments etc.
Third, a lot of people like to mention that "you can do everything with wechat". You can do a lot of things, but I don't know anyone who only uses wechat. There are a lot of other apps that you need to live comfortably: Alipay (this is another superapp), Taobao (like ebay), Jingdong (like amazon), Dianping (like Yelp), Eleme/Meituan (like Uber eats), Baidu maps, banking apps etc. etc.
Wechat does have it's internal "miniprogram" system (alternative to native apps) where you can have some of these apps I previously mentioned, but there are severe app size, memory and performance limitations, proprietary API and the performance and functionality is from early 2010s internet. Laggy and slowly opening pages, collapsing and bouncy layouts etc. Also wechat does not support multitasking: When you are using for example Tim Horton's miniprogram to order coffee, you can't chat with your friends, you can't open a Starbucks/some_other_coffee_company miniprogram on the side and compare prices. You have to close and kill the current "app" and then open a new "app" for new action. This is somewhat understandable due to the iOS/Android limitations of a single app (in regards to performance and memory), but it highlights why this kind of a "superapp" idea is fundamentally flawed.
So basically IMO "superapp" is a solution looking for a problem. We already have iOS, Android or web browser. We don't need another forced ecosystem but we need good apps for existing ones.
Is that a technical shortcoming or business logic? It doesn't sound entirely different from how Twitter handles private/blocked accounts.
Where are people gonna go if not on Twitter? The left isn't gonna have better luck with their own truth social or parler. The network effect is too big with Twitter. It's not fun if you're not dunking on your enemies. That's the fun of Twitter.
I think you may be over-estimating how much most people "need" something like Twitter. For the vast majority of users, a news feed and private messaging (WhatsApp, iMessage, etc.) are good enough.
My guess is that the percent of people who use social media will decrease by half over the coming decade, at least in the US and Europe.
That would require Facebook to make a shrewd business decision though so never mind.
I wonder if he needs to do this.
Maybe I've just been working for tech companies in the Bay Area too long. But I don't want to work for a company where I don't have equity that I can cash out.
And now all those engineers are working for a company where equity doesn't exist? An exception could be a Netflix model where you make a buttload of money. But Twitter isn't that.
You guys are really thinking Musk is some bozos that have never done anything in his life. Its quite incredible. Last week 4 astronauts went to ISS on his rocket and the first stage landed, again. Tesla is still growing at close to 40/50% top and bottomline when all car companies are contracting, even FAANG.
Twitter is yet to be seen. But its quite incredible the dismissiveness around here. Making Twitter work is peanuts comparing to trying to get a car company and a space company (both industries where successful examples are much harder to find than social media companies. Even if we point fingers as Meta and Snap, they are profitable and not bankrupt like most car and space companies in history) to survive through the 2008 Financial crisis.
people arent going to take pay cuts to serve lists of shitposts and ads
I'm no Musk hater and interested to see where he takes Twitter. That said, SpaceX is at the forefront of space travel, and they want to put man on Mars. Twitter sells advertisements on the internet, with the lofty goal of selling some more ads.
Why? Elon is not the guy who gonna do it.
He wants freedom of speench under his control.
Tesla for instance is very much anti open source.
IT IS ORDERED that respondent... establish and implement, and thereafter maintain, a comprehensive information security program that is reasonably designed to protect the security, privacy, confidentiality, and integrity of nonpublic consumer information.
Making sure all private data goes in the vault and the vault is secure shouldn't take more than 1% of an organization the size of Twitter. Even if they're doing it poorly, it shouldn't be more than 10%.
If it really is 5x (> 80% of their engineering budget), I guarantee you they are in violation of the consent decree -- there is no way to vet that many engineers or audit their work!
Any security architecture that requires every single engineer has to do everything exactly right 100% of the time is bound to fail. The order to put in reasonable privacy protections doesn't say "and do it in the most expensive, error prone fashion possible".
What they want is additional work, and technical implementation that the agreements are being enforced in code. It’s a fascinating area for a career, but the tools are not well developed and engineers not trained to code this way. Ends up being like a 40% tax on a lot of peoples work, plus the people who write and operate the verification systems.
It’s probably what the security field should have done years ago, but there were never as expensive of fines as for privacy violations.
Not exactly onerous since they were a public company before.
If you owe the bank 200,000$ and can't pay it, you are in trouble.
If you owe the bank 1.2 billion dollars and can't pay it, THE BANK is in trouble.
This very very very much applies here.
Once the parents get on, it starts the decline. When the grandparents are there…
The “political” polarization is part of it. The older folks bring it with them. The majority flock to sites for information and escapism. The back and forth is just exhausting.
It’s clearer for geek sites. Slashdot died when it got corporate and the content went to crap. Digg was the same. Reddit’s in process except niches. It’ll be same here.
For everything there is a season.
> Twitter’s already headed down the uncool social media curve like Facebook before it. There will be an exodus, but it would have happened either way. Once the parents get on, it starts the decline. When the grandparents are there…
> The “political” polarization is part of it. The older folks bring it with them. The majority flock to sites for information and escapism. The back and forth is just exhausting.
> It’s clearer for geek sites. Slashdot died when it got corporate and the content went to crap. Digg was the same. Reddit’s in process except niches. It’ll be same here.
> For everything there is a season.
What you sound like:
Yes and there shall be an exodus from the Twitters.
The parents shall come in, then the grandparents shall follow. Once those generations arrive the decline shall start. Not before. Not long after. But right after the grandparents, whence they arrive.
The polarization shall induce the decline. This wrought on by the older generations. And this is when the majority shall flock to sites for information and escapism.
Just as Slashdot, and Digg, declined before it, so shall the Twitters decline as well.
For everything, there is a season.
---
With your prescience, you must be a billionaire. Why don't you just buy Twitter off of Elon?
But the parents are already there. Like, uh, me. And most of my Twitter friends are similarly aged. And some of their parents are there. My mute list grows every couple months. I don’t mind political content but get tired of being battered by angry repetitive posts. Most of the people I know who abandoned facebook did it for that reason.
The younger folks I know don’t have an account or care. I don’t even know what the cool thing is anymore. That’s probably the point.
It’s already in its decline, the user numbers maybe don’t reflect it yet. And it’s not prescient any more than watching any historical trend repeat itself is.
There’s more than a billion reasons I’m not a billionaire, including. I’m not brave, smart, or initially wealthy enough are a few.
If I were, I wouldn’t buy a social media site. I also wouldn’t buy a TCBY franchise. These are things that might be great short term, but risk increases over time. A 1-2 year old TCBY is packed with kids. A 5+ year old one looks like every near empty ice cream shop. They all have the same smell, it’s weird.
Anyway, I’m risk adverse… and that lack of bravery is partly why I’m not wealthy in any sense.
I might be wrong about all of this. Just applying what I’ve seen from the past to the present.
So, discriminatory, ageist, prejudicial comments are allowed on HN now? Or only if it's against "older folks", I see.
It’s not a statement that all or even most older people do it. I anecdotally see it more from older demographics. I might be wrong. I probably am tiptoeing the line of “ist” there. Definitely don’t mean to say all or most older people, but I am generalizing on a demographic. I’ll have to think about that more.
I don’t think statements like that should be “disallowed” anywhere except places like employment, etc. And it’s never OK to say that a generalization applies to an individual because they are within a demographic.
I think if Musk pulls off what he’s trying to, it’ll be better than now. I block and mute Trump, Biden, etc. anyway. When I want to get politics I reach out for it in a format >280 characters.
I don’t idolize or demonize Musk. He’s just another person with talents and flaws like the rest of us. He does some smart stuff. He does some head scratching things. He likes attention, can be hilarious, clever, or, as my kids say, “cringey.” But I don’t want him to be anything other than he wants to. We need all of that in the world.
This is more a statement that Musk isn’t going to ruin Twitter. I think it will follow the same historical curve as all social media and it has 0 to do with him. And pre social media things as well, since at least WWII. “The kids” set trends. By the time the majority latches on, they’ve moved on. Heck, you can probably see that in slang’s impact on “proper” language much longer.
I’ll be happy if/when “epic” leaves slang. For some reason that one irritates my pedantry more than any other.
I can't imagine how dysfunctional twitter would be with %75 of staff gone, I don't even know if it will continue running as a business after that.
And the zeitgeist seems to have changed lately - so jobs may not be so easier to come by, especially for employees that may be too political for the employer.
Whatever the actual figure is, it is unlikely to be the same figure across all departments - likely some departments will be cut much more than others. Probably engineering will experience significantly less cuts than marketing, PR, HR, government relations, business development, etc. Even in engineering, some cuts may be due to things like adjusting the manager:IC ratio.
It didn’t work, and I doubt he’ll follow through on it. Otherwise, it’s sure to freeze almost all future initiatives and turn the team into caretakers instead of innovators and I’m not sure what the point of that would be.
Just look at their Web UI, horribly slow and lagy.
Twitter is horribly bloated and unprofitable company. Several thousands people could be justified if there are sales and profits. 75% is not enough, current people must go, regardless of politics.
If he ever did say it, it was allegedly said to other investors in a private setting. More than likely it's a fabrication by someone who hates Elon (as unlikely as that sounds) laundered into the media as from an anonymous source.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1586108809772089345?s=46...
Edit: apparently this was “trauma / shock actors” (whatever that means) but it was still picked up by CNBC.
Twitter will function better with 75% of the staff gone.
I tried getting a solar system from Tesla, and it convinced me not to consider their cars. I know it is a different side of the company, but I ended up with a used electric BMW. I was resigned to dealing with the B-hole stigma around having a beamer, but whatever. It's a nice car, environmentally friendly, and was inexpensive.
That's not what happened. Instead, Tesla owners say things like "I got the Tesla before Musk went nutso roll eyes, and it's actually pretty good, but I'm not sure I'd buy another one..."
I'm surprised how quickly the Teslas went from being a status symbol to a faux pas around here. Maybe it's a different story in less liberal areas.
However, unless I'm missing something, social signaling / image management is way more important to the Twitteratti than people buying commuter cars / kid taxis.
(Again, whatever. It's a car, not a political statement, but I've seen more than one Tesla owner apologize for owning one.)
"Our next car will be electric... But not a Tesla."
I hear that all the time now. My wife, who recently turned 30, would be mortified for her friends to see her in a Tesla. They associate the brand with a creepy, slimy billionaire and a legion of tech bro sycophants.
There will be pressure from platform owners like Apple and Google as well. If the moderation is weak Apple could decide to remove the Twitter app like they did to Parler.
Elon buying Twitter isn’t going to set the bird free, for sure it made the cage a little bigger.
If the ads provide a ROI, then other advertisers will gladly jump on board.
But even in the case they decide to jump ship, other companies will fill the gap. Do you think all the NFL players are going to leave the platform? All the sports journalists? No amount of internet outrage is going to change them, they're too stuck on the platform.
E.g. Musk said in the past he will draw the line at legal speech. Assume that Ye (Kanye) posts his early morning rant next week, and it is critical of several groups of people based on religion or race. That speech is legal, but highly problematic, is Musk owning Twitter going to make a difference in the way Ye’s problematic speech is handled in the future, I think not.
Indeed. The fastest I've ever been banned anywhere on the Internet was forums that were ostensibly focused on "free speech." The term seems to be used ironically.
This is like saying people that like apple pie don't like apple pie. Yes, there are liars and hypocrites out there but those aren't the true believers.
That said, despite the challenges out there, that doesn't mean you just give up the fight for free speech. There will always be bias but the goal here is to even the playing field so we can return to a time where the rules are applied evenly to all players.
There is a huge difference between no moderation (anarchy), and not targeting conservative voices solely based on ideology.
its like if a policeman is accused of wrongdoing, he gets to investigate if he did that himself.
No, we don't. This is not an yes/no answer. This is the type of question that should be answered in terms of confidence intervals.
> right wing tweets actually got promoted more
In relation to what? What is a "right wing" tweet? What is a "left wing" tweet?
E.g, if the algorithm is focused on filtering out disparaging extreme messages, and it ends up filtering X amount of "non-extreme right wing content", 3X of "extreme right-wing content" and 5X of "extreme left-wing content", it satisfies the claim that "it promotes more right-wing content" while also silencing conservative voices.
The advantage of the right in social media news sharing: https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/1/3/pgac137/66516...
Upenn article summary: https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/Penn-research-Twitter-gives...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty,_and_doubt
"I was cancelled from Twitter for posting about my conservative views!"
"Oh no, you were cancelled for posting about restrained fiscal policy?"
"LOL no, not that."
"Free trade?"
"Not even close."
"Well... what conservative views are you talking about?"
"Oh, you know the ones" wink
I would also hope that's not a "conservative" view as it's simply a scientific fact.
So both sides are right, and yet the conversation between the extremes moved backwards instead of finding common ground.
That's literally what they did. "misgendering someone" is hatespeech/harassment. When from a sane perspective outside the woke cult: Humans aren't clownfish and cannot change their gender.
The emperor's new dress doesn't make him a woman.
Hit the nail on the head here. Hence, the medical community's current response is to adjust the individual's body, appearance and treatment from others to match their gender as closely as possible.
This literally does not happen, and is entirely made up in a form of projection. In fact, Twitter has been found to be biased towards recommending right-wing sources. [1]
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/22/twitter-a...
In the 90's I was fighting conservatives that wanted to censor the much smaller and newer internet from things like violence (games) and porn.
Today it is the left that is attempting to censor the internet over much more nebulous and undefined terms like "misinformation" and "hate speech" all of which have very subjective definitions and seem to be a moving target.
If data or research can't support "right wing voices are being censored", while you're perfectly entitled to believe that based on seeing a couple specific voices get censored, it's a bit unreasonable to dismiss claims to the contrary as "left wing bias" when the data simply isn't there to support it.
I personally wouldn't be surprised if you end up with political bias in automated censorship and filtering algorithms, the training set is going to be full of bias and it will be hard to filter that out. But they also quite possibly managed to come up with something that isn't leaning in any particular direction.
Between the two possibilities "Twitter is suppressing <x> speech" and "Twitter is not suppressing <x> speech and a few people are crying censorship to try and get unbanned/get attention" I think occam's razor suggests the latter, personally, because we know it has been an effective tactic in the past and that sort of speculative claim gains traction regardless of whether you can prove it.
Lots of people claim to be shadowbanned when they're not, similarly.
You seemed to have missed my primary assertion which has nothing to do with banning or shadowbanning or even the research into those topics
My primary assertion is the terms of service, the rules under which content moderation is governed is a left political bias in many area's include gender, what is considered "hate speech", what is "misinformation"
I do not need to point to any examples of banning to highlight this as it self evident for anyone that reads the terms of service.
Science: There is no liberal media bias in which news stories political journalists choose to cover
https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/sciadv.aay9344
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Trade-offs between reducing misinformation and politically- balanced enforcement on social media.
https://psyarxiv.com/ay9q5
I.e. Analyzing Twitter suspensions shows that users’ sharing of links to misinformation sites was as predictive of being suspended as was the users’ political orientation. "Conservative" accounts share more misinformation, and violate with greater frequency policy rules.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
And next, you might in response link this article:
https://quillette.com/2019/02/12/it-isnt-your-imagination-tw...
A study that although argues twitter has a bias, readily admits in it's data sampling that the banned/suspended accounts violate terms and conditions at a mich higher rate.
Reasons listed for banning these individuals in Hanania’s own data sheet include “violent threats,” “harassment,” “inciting violence,” “targeted abuse,” “doxxing,” “pro-Nazi tweets,” and “racist slurs.” Additionally, about a quarter of the accounts listed are still active and no longer suspended.
Kicking off a bunch of Nazis and trolls isn’t very compelling evidence that your average conservative is getting unfair treatment on Twitter. The majority of the “victims” here seem to have been engaged in abuse, and it’s reasonable for a private company like Twitter to kick off people who are undermining the quality of their platform by harassing or threatening other users.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Lastly:
" We then investigated potential political bias in suspension patterns and identified a set of 9,000 politically engaged Twitter users, half Democratic and half Republican, in October 2020, and followed them through the six months after the U.S. 2020 election. During that period, while only 7.7% of the Democratic users were suspended, 35.6% of the Republican users were suspended. The Republican users, however, shared substantially more news from misinformation sites – as judged by either fact-checkers or politically balanced crowds – than the Democratic users. Critically, we found that users’ misinformation sharing was as predictive of suspension as was their political orientation. Thus, the observation that Republicans were more likely to be suspended than Democrats provides no support for the claim that Twitter showed political bias in its suspension practices. Instead, the observed asymmetry could be explained entirely by the tendency of Republicans to share more misinformation."
https://www.benton.org/headlines/twitter-biased-against-cons...
------------------------------------------------------------
“We were surprised,” says González-Bailón, an associate professor in Penn’s Annenberg School for Communication. “Previous work has documented that Twitter users tend to have a liberal bias. But we found that across the board, the news most often shared has a right-leaning bias. This increases the visibility of conservative voices, even in the context of protest mobilizations with liberal goals.”
The key flaw here was "misinformation" at that time included what is now considered "fact" about COVID Policies, and "science", including mask effectiveness, vaccine effectiveness, Lab leak theory, and a whole host of other things that were "misinformation" in 2020 but not in 2022. that is the entire problem with the "misinformation" narrative
Science after all is not "experts telling us what to think" but instead is in reality it the act of continual questioning of established narrative
Shutting down debate for "misinformation" is itself anti-science
"Reasons listed for banning these individuals in Hanania’s own data sheet include “violent threats,” “harassment,” “inciting violence,” “targeted abuse,” “doxxing,” “pro-Nazi tweets,” and “racist slurs.” Additionally, about a quarter of the accounts listed are still active and no longer suspended."
Twitters Covid misinformation policy didn't come into effect untill the end of Dec, 21. So 2020 is incorrect.
Why don't you read the actual policy instead of making stuff up?
https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/medical-misin...
That only makes sense if Twitter is predominantly anti-right wing, and people who are anti-rightwing get outraged by rightwing nonsense more than leftwing nonsense, and thus rage-click, share and comment on that content more.
The replies so far seem to just confirm my point. Doesn't seem like any of them were banned "solely based on ideology" at all.
Come on y'all, show me one example where someone was banned for asking for lower taxes!
> In since-deleted tweets, the account specifically accused Chasten Buttigieg and The Trevor Project organization of grooming.[40][32][94]
And outright misinformation isn't really an "ideological difference."
> The account has been criticized for spreading hoaxes, including the litter boxes in schools hoax about bathrooms accommodations for students that identified as cats, and a false claim that students in a second-grade class in Austin, Texas were being taught about furries.[12][95][94]
Outright lies are destructive to "public square"-style communication, and Twitter definitely can't be seen, legally, facilitating libel.
Leftists accuse conservatives of far worse things than that without ever getting censored. Leftists can event threaten other peoples' lives without getting censored: https://www.dailywire.com/news/7-twitter-accounts-that-have-...
Is it worse to be called a groomer or a Nazi? I guess, if you're twitter, it's worse to call a leftist a groomer than it is to call a conservative a Nazi. @NYCAntifa clearly gets away with the latter!
> The account has been criticized for spreading hoaxes, including the litter boxes in schools hoax about bathrooms accommodations for students that identified as cats, and a false claim that students in a second-grade class in Austin, Texas were being taught about furries.[12][95][94]
Libs of tik tok spread the misinformation, but they didn't create it. They cited someone else. If you don't think it's ok to cite someone else, later find out they lied, and then retract your statement, well, you probably have two standards, one for yourself and one for people you disagree with.
> Outright lies are destructive to "public square"-style communication, and Twitter definitely can't be seen, legally, facilitating libel.
It's amazing how many lies come from the left and never see any twitter censorship: https://www.dailywire.com/news/numerous-leftists-on-twitter-...
"Groomer" is a noun that describes someone's actions. "Nazi" is a noun that describes someone's political beliefs. It is absolutely worse to be called a "groomer" because that is a direct claim of immoral and often illegal behavior. "You are doing something bad" is a more serious accusation than "you believe something bad".
And, here is an article talking about how the Trevor project "does" groom people: https://personandidentity.com/mother-of-trans-child-poses-as...
And another on the same story: https://pitt.substack.com/p/the-trevor-project-undercover-mo...
Are those going to get censored if I post them on twitter?
Many people who use the term "groomers" as loosely as LibsOfTikTok already think of this "grooming" as equivalent to a genocide. That is my point. "Groomers" implies that the bad is already happening while "Nazi" implies the bad is a belief with undefined actions. It is the difference between being call a murderer and a psychopath. One says you already did something bad. The other says you might be capable of something bad.
It also has a more specific definition: "the act of deliberately establishing an emotional connection with a child to prepare the child for child abuse".
Today, I think people are using the word to mean a hybrid of the above two definitions, namely, to train or indoctrinate a child into sexual deviancy, even if the person doing the grooming does not take part in it directly.
I think some uses today are also just synonyms for indoctrination, which fits only within the more general definition of grooming.
False accusations of child abuse have on occasion led to jail time for the false accuser.
I can see why you are being downvoted, but I've been observing this trend lately too. Its popular on some social media sites to call half of the country nazis or at least nazi sympathizers.
Neither side has clean hands, but this vilification is extremely harmful.
There are specifics about what false claims. All they do is repost TikTok’s insanity.
In some ways, LibsofTiktok has done world a whole lot of good, by exposing and immunizing against extreme left ideologies that even the most devout progressives reject.
We need more of this that exposed extremes of either ideology. Because clearly the media has totally failed to do this.
https://github.com/salcoast/deleted-tweets-archive/blob/main...
I do agree that the content that particular user finds and shows to me is very disturbing, especially given that it is often teachers taking care of very impressionable people(children) in a position of authority.
In order for something to be libel, you have to know it is false and intend for people to believe it is true. The litter box story for example was spread by a trolling organization with the intention of fooling people like LoTT and Tucker. It's not libel because they fell for it — it's stupid, but it's not libel. Likewise, the criticism of the The Trevor Project likely reflects a sincerely held belief that the known activities of TTP constitute "grooming", and not a measurable claim that TTP staff are actively engaging in activities conventionally understood as pedophilia. Also not libel.
Defamation (libel and slander) in the US is distinct depending on how well known the victim is. For a famous victim, yes you must essentially know the statement was false.
But if the victim is not a public individual, you need only act with negligence (e.g. violate the reasonable person standard). The litter box story, for example, doesn't involve famous people, it's like random local school districts, and no reasonable person would believe it to be true. The Trevor project likely does constitute a public organization, so the standard is higher, but only requires actual malice, which means "reckless disregard" for the truth of the statements. It's probably not met, because it is a high standard, but it doesn't actually require that they know themselves to be lying.
Silencing those who oppose: co-ed bathrooms, gender reassignment for tweens and teens or gay marriage. Can we jump to the covid blacklists yet
> In one post on Twitter, Ye said he would soon go “death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE,” according to internet archive records, making an apparent reference to the U.S. defense readiness condition scale known as DEFCON.
https://apnews.com/article/twitter-inc-entertainment-music-b...
That entirely reads as a threat against Jewish people.
When I saw that, my assumption was that it was a malapropism.
"The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!"
and
"To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th."
“I know your pain. I know you’re hurt. We had an election that was stolen from us,” he said. “It was a landslide election, and everyone knows it, especially the other side. But you have to go home now. We have to have peace. We have to have law and order. We have to respect our great people in law and order. We don’t want anybody hurt.”
The president called it a “very tough period of time,” calling the election “fraudulent.”
“But we can’t play into the hands of these people,” Trump said. “We have to have peace. So go home. We love you. You’re very special. You’ve seen what happens, you see the way others are treated that are so bad and so evil. I know how you feel. But go home and go home in peace.”
> who led his violent supporters to the capitol The capitol was breached while Trump was still speaking to the larger crowd several blocks away.
if twitter's goal was reduction of violence, then they would have amplified Trump's video calling for peaceful dispersion, not delete it.
> We had an election that was stolen from us,” he said. “It was a landslide election, and everyone knows it, especially the other side.
Is not a call for the peaceful transition of power and for people to go home. Speaking out of both sides of your mouth is not a call for peace. Trump's tweet wasn't an effort to reduce violence, it was an effort to continue to stoke the flames while appearing to help, and people didn't fall for it.
I implore you (all) to consider this angle when complaining about "left" boogeymen. Do the fixie-riding anarchists represent the left? Do the alt-right racist and misanthropic school shooters represent the right? What of each side encourages these extremities? Further, which ones do commit societal (psychological, economic, etc.) damage?
Days before a national election they deliberately censored a story pertaining to corruption of one of the candidates, censored anyone that shared the story, and censored anyone that mentioned the censoring of the story.
Ultimately that's the reason the story was "censored", it was fake. Something vaguely suspicious sounding about Hunter used to try and malign his dad, and ethical news sites and journalists wanted nothing to do with it.
To this day, there's no evidence of any actual wrongdoing, and even Trump's own justice department failed to charge Hunter, or even continue the investigation, because it was so clearly nothing of note.
But you'll find a reason for this example and any other to not to fit your criteria.
Another: Stefan Molyneux.
The easiest way to get censored for ideological beliefs was to state that biological sex is a reality: https://www.dailywire.com/news/twitter-censors-tucker-carlso...
Babylon Bee got banned for harmless satire: https://www.dailywire.com/news/babylon-bee-a-factor-in-musk-...
Libs of tiktok was banned for "hate speech." I'm not sure they ever even let the account owner know exactly what was said that deserved censorship: https://www.dailywire.com/news/twitter-censors-popular-accou...
A classic is when the NY Post got locked out for posting factual information that the left wanted to bury before the 2020 election: https://www.dailywire.com/news/nypost-remains-locked-out-of-...
Twitter censored health experts whenever what they said didn't fit the COVID narrative put forth by the CDC: https://www.dailywire.com/news/twitter-censors-white-house-h...
There is still, today, multiple years after the start of the pandemic, no strong evidence that masks did anything significant to slow the spread of COVID. I can provide many citations if you need them. In fact, much of what big tech censored turned out to be true or still plausible today, like: the lab leak theory, natural immunity being more effective than the vaccine (even Bill Gates admits this now!), and so on.
James Lindsay got locked out for saying "OK groomer". https://www.dailywire.com/news/author-james-lindsay-banned-f...
Leftists have said many, many more vile and hateful things than that without suffering a single consequence, including making threats on others' lives: https://www.foxnews.com/media/libs-of-tik-tok-creator-twitte...
Leftist: makes claims, can't be bothered to cite anything to support them.
If only this weren't a typical pattern!
No leftwing popular media? Are you joking? Even left-leaning "bias" sites show that the biggest names in news as being on the left: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/new-york-times/
https://www.allsides.com/news-source/new-york-times
And for AP: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/associated-press/
My only disagreement is to replace "left-center" with far-left.
You reference mediabiasfactcheck.com a hobby site by a creator who says "his methods are not rigorously objective." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Bias/Fact_Check#Methodol...
You reference the dailywire so much when even your own source (mediabiasfactcheck) rates them just short of "extreme right" and rates their "Factual Reporting" as "MIXED"?
Why would anyone take the time to respond to each of your points any more than they would a random Facebook post?
What does it mean to rigorously and objectively classify a news site as on the left or on the right? More importantly, what's your alternative classification system that is more objective and rigorous? It's so easy to criticize, and yet so hard to come up with something better. Again, you bring absolutely nothing to the conversation. How do you intend to convince anyone of anything?
None of your dailywire claims have been backed up. You keep dodging that fact.
>Again, you bring absolutely nothing to the conversation.
All I'm trying to "bring to the conversation" is the fact that your "sources" are just links to a site nobody could possibly trust. But since that's clearly good enough for you to take as fact, you're exactly the kind of person they hope to rope in.
I'm not assuming anything, remember? That's according to the source you were crowing about.
>Thanks for the source! I love being given more material that backs my claims!
The folks at mediabiasfactcheck (which you've continuously defended) gave the Daily Wire a "Mixed" ranking for Factual Reporting. They couldn't even make it to "mostly factual" (which seems like a pretty low bar).
Anyways, you didn't actually catch me on anything. I knew long before that Daily Wire had a "mixed" rating on that site. I had also already clicked on all their examples of false reporting, and all of them were climate change-related articles from years ago where they found a scientist who disagreed with the reporting. So, uh, don't trust Daily wire for climate change articles?
Anyways, even a recent hit piece from NPR admitted that daily wire's reporting is mostly factual: https://www.dailywire.com/news/npr-accuses-daily-wire-of-tri...
From NPR: "The articles The Daily Wire publishes don’t normally include falsehoods (with some exceptions), and the site said it is committed to “truthful, accurate and ethical reporting.”"
Please come talk to me again when you're willing to have an honest discussion about a topic, and not when you're just trying, and failing, to score points.
(link to original NPR hit piece here: https://www.npr.org/2021/07/19/1013793067/outrage-as-a-busin...)
(link to analysis of the hit piece from western journal: https://www.westernjournal.com/fact-check-npr-caught-blatant...)
I agree that "leftist" can be divisive, but I haven't found a different word to use that doesn't also convey what I believe to be a falsehood. I also carefully use the word "conservative" instead of "Republican", because I don't think those two are the same thing either. It's also hard to use equivalent language because, while you can say "leftist", you can't really say "rightist".
Fundamentally, a conservative wants to preserve the status quo because they think proposed changes would make it worse. A progressive wants to change the status quo because they think they can improve it. But often when we use these words we are instead referring to a set of political ideals and beliefs supported by a group of people. There are lots of things conservatives would want to change today because they think we've gone in the wrong direction, and there are plenty of wins the left wants to preserve that are under assault by conservatives.
Say what you want about the integrity of mainstream journalism and big tech platforms, but their foibles are nothing compared to the state of Republican-leaning journalism in the United States. It hardly requires a "leftist" political ideology to acknowledge the moral and intellectual decline of the Republican Party and the respective decline of its media apparatus.
None of this excuses selective censorship, obviously, but the suggestion that right-wing journalism deserves equal time and consideration presupposes a credibility and seriousness that it's lacked for twenty years.
Incidentally, there's a whole Quora thread on this topic: https://www.quora.com/Why-is-the-term-leftist-more-common-th...
It's filled with people making their guesses and having very little evidence to back it up. My favorite is: "I’ve heard people on the political right called “rightists” before, but for some reason that doesn’t roll off the tongue as well as “leftist."
That leaves "liberal" not having an opposite. I think that's the case partially because the word doesn't really mean anything or has too many meetings: https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/liberal-meanin...
The definition they provide at the end is: "a person who believes that government should be active in supporting social and political change”. That sounds completely synonymous with "progressive," which is generally about using the force of government to cause change in the world. But that really has nothing to do with what liberal has meant in the past, or with the root of the word, or with related words like liberty.
As a side note, if you think the Republican party is intellectually inferior to the democrat party, then I think you have a serious bias problem. I regularly debate people on the left, and they tend to follow similar patterns:
* They make strong claims but never give any evidence to back them up or bother to cite any sources.
* They have major logical inconsistencies in their arguments.
* They very often rely on appeals to authority or credentials. They are right because their sources are always right, and you are wrong because your sources are always wrong.
* They very often rely on personal attacks, or quickly devolve to them.
* They don't seem to understand how scientific research is conducted, including its limitations.
And, finally, if we're going to get back on topic with respect to censorship, I provided multiple examples in other comments of conservatives being unfairly censored, and of leftists violating the rules worse than the conservatives and not getting censored. Nothing in this thread has done anything to change my opinion. Elon Musk, who has historically voted Democrat his entirely life, and who still leans left on many issues, spent 44 billion on twitter in part because he believes it unfairly censors conservatives. What is your evidence to the contrary?
Edit: https://psyarxiv.com/ay9q5
That's a not-peer-reviewed study that the media went wild with that concluded, yes, conservatives are censored more, but it's just because they share more misinformation. If you dig into the paper, you quickly find they rely on "professional fact checkers" to do so. As someone who has read a lot of fact checks that themselves need to be fact-checked, I can attest that this approach is likely deeply flawed.
They actually rely on the "trustworthiness" of different news sites, but that is itself based on the opinions of fact checkers. To quote this insane stupidity that passed as research: "Nonetheless, we find that Republican users in our dataset shared news from domains that were on average rated as much more...
I've seen accounts get banned for replacing "white" with "black" in popular hateful tweets. Apparently only one kind of racism is allowed on Twitter.[4]
If you read Twitter's reasoning for suspending Trump, you'll see it's based on two tweets, neither of which calls for violence.[5] Twitter had to use the excuse that some people might be emboldened to commit violence by his tweets. That's true for almost any politician. But the president of South Africa's Black First Land First party can threaten to kill white people and only get a seven day suspension.[6] Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran, still has a Twitter account[7] despite endorsing the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. Rushdie is now blind in one eye and has lost the use of an arm after an assassination attempt in August.
The double standard could not be more obvious.
1. https://twitter.com/TheBabylonBee/status/1504155537008697352
2. https://web.archive.org/web/20190407204840/https://lawandcri...
3. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2022/06/28/america...
4. https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=55863
5. https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio...
6. https://web.archive.org/web/20181216163405/https://citizen.c...
7. https://twitter.com/khamenei_ir
What is “gender” in the above sentence?
It’s a 1950s attitude that males are born masculine and females feminine - that was largely rejected from the 70s onward, people being held to be unique individuals and gender stereotyping deemed sexist and oppressively limiting.
I was under the impression that young people think gender identity is determined biologically independently of reproductive sex - hence (to them) “Trans women are women” because of their innate gender identity.
Which (if either) is right? - The issue appears to me to be very philosophically confused.
Certain biases are baked into Twitter's content moderation policies. For instance, on COVID and gender. It just so happens that conservatives statistically disagree with the positions taken by those policies significantly more than liberals.
Is that an anti-conservative bias? Well, liberals often make the argument that the drug war was prejudicial against black people because the laws specifically targeted drugs that were more common in black communities. If you accept this argument, by parity of reasoning, you should also accept that Twitter's rules are prejudicial against conservative views.
For examples of prominent cancellations, there was Alex Berenson, Megan Murphy, Jordan Peterson, among others. These people aren't all strictly conservatives, but they were banned for views that conservatives mostly agree with.
Also Alex Berenson's lawsuit with Twitter revealed that public officials leaned on twitter to suppress his voice. I think these emails are revealing on the 'coziness' between the current administration and twitter policy team. https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/the-white-house-privatel...
Can you imagine if the Trump administration put pressure on twitter to suppress reporters they thought was 'epicenter of disinfo'?
Clearly happening, yet even here already we have four people so far claiming that it doesn't, and people flagging/downvoting you for telling the truth.
They banned a conservative satire publication ffs. The Babylon Bee.
"The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."
—George Orwell, 1984
The Bee was banned for violating the rules and promoting transphobia. Is that the "conservative voices... ideology" you're thinking of?
Nitpick: suspended until they deleted a tweet which they have refused to do.
The Babylon Bee was suspended for targeted harassment. Harassment is not a conservative view.
[1] - https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/105039166355267174...
That's only "targeted harassment" when redefining words in an arbitrary and disingenuous fashion. The article is not even especially mean hearted, let alone "targeted harassment." And then factor in the fact that the subject is a high ranking and public political figure on top of all of this.
The article is saying that Levine's entire gender identity is a lie. You honestly don't see anything mean spirited about that?
Levine is a random bureaucrat that no one in the public would know the name of if she wasn't trans. By singling her out, conservative media and the Babylon Bee are encouraging people to harass her for no other reason than her transness.
I think Elon has mental health / behavioral issues that drive this, but because he's a billionaire, we don't really care all that much. As long as he doesn't go full Kanye (which is a line he is scarily close to).
For one, he has access to every single politicians DMs on Twitter
For example, he has an evidence of which execs ignored the fake news concern raised by an employee.
It is 7000 people company. At least, one has pointed out about fake news that might help trump won election.
It is going to be fun if he goes after those execs.
Google docs and etc. don't usually have retention policy.
Imagine a bigger problem: an employee comments in a doc about Russian propaganda/fake news, and execs decided not to invest in eliminating them. Now it's borderline national security issues.
Of course he would try to back out. He couldn't predict the economic downturn, could he?
In retrospect, the whole thing was a mini-Google+.
But the issue is: you have to get a critical mass of users. Some dedicated groups and then it has to get to a scale which is relevant for Google ...
When is the last time Google started their own truly successful project, rather than buying it?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33371297
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33365948
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33366137
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33370270
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33371581
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33367063