And some 80% of that are retweets or replies, not original tweets.
Most people do not use Twitter at all. When they do use it, it is mostly read-only. When it's not read-only, it's most retweeting stuff.
You can't deny that Twitter has an outsized cultural influence, but the underlying reality is sobering. It's not a "speech" platform for the masses as no actual speech happens by the masses themselves. If the retweet button were to be removed, the platform would collapse.
It's not surprising that the masses don't post. You can't express yourself on Twitter due to the character limit, so all you can do is witty superficial takes. Threading and replies are a disaster making a structured discussion impossible. These two things alone make the platform useless for most speech purposes.
And let's not forget the sour atmosphere of extreme hostility, permanent outrage, bad faith discussions, smearing, doxxing, cancellations, the culture is terrible.
Back on point, I think Twitter has a far bigger problem than a free speech problem. There is very little speech and it excessively rewards the most unreasonable speech.
Those same stats are true for EVERY social media platform. Twitter is not the exception here. What percentage of Reddit users do you think comment on a post? What percentage of hacker news readers submit new posts or write comments? Instagram content consumers vs producers?
Most people are followers and that’s ok. You can get off your soap box now.
There's at least two key differences between something like Reddit or HN and Twitter. The Twitter platform is structured so that a large mass of people will "follow" a few influencers. It creates a really asymmetric power dynamic. On Reddit and HN, if you have interesting content, you can make the front page. On Twitter, your odds are much bigger if you're famous, and every comment a famous person makes is hugely amplified.
The second difference is that Reddit and HN are organized by topic. HN only has a single topic, but there's moderators to enforce that posts be somewhat on topic and retain a certain minimum of civility. Twitter is not organized like that. Even if you're just interested in programming, Twitter will try to get you to engage in political topics, and if you do engage, you might get responses from random people Twitter also pulled from other discussions who have very little context, and you'll get to exchange with this random set of people through responses that are limited in length. If a famous person happens to strongly disagree with you on Twitter, their hordes of fans will start to attack you.
So yes, all social media platforms have more active and influential users[0] , but no, these platforms are not all the same, and a lot of the difference is structural.
This is a big reason I can't stand the culture of twitter. When I interact with someone on Reddit, the two of us are on equal footing. There are many other strange Reddit specific cultural details to keep in mind when commenting, but the two of us are just two mostly equal users.
I once disagreed with someone on twitter that I didn't realize had a huge following and was easily upset. They retweeted my response and called on their tens of thousands of followers to back them up in our disagreement. I deleted twitter that day.
> This is a big reason I can't stand the culture of twitter. When I interact with someone on Reddit, the two of us are on equal footing. There are many other strange Reddit specific cultural details to keep in mind when commenting, but the two of us are just two mostly equal users.
This is far from true. If you interact with a user who is a mod and you piss them off they have every ability to ban you from subreddits they manage. It’s common enough on Reddit for a user to be mods of multiple subreddits or have friends who mod multiple subreddits.
Mods can also create scripts to specifically ban people who participates in specific subreddits.
Reddit’s block feature can make it so that when a user blocks you , you won’t be able to comment on the same sub thread. I don’t believe I don’t have to spell out the nefarious abuses this can wreak.
Reddit is one the last places I would say users are equal. The only difference is that Reddit opinions aren’t centralized like Twitter but it gives far more power to the worst person than Twitter gives to worst person on their platform.
That's right. Twitter has problems, but that's not one of them. What are the problems?
1. It has a free speech problem. The defacto public town square doesn't believe in free speech!
2. It has a political problem. Twitter bends the knee to the loudest activists and is sympathetic to a specific political party. The town square has been captured by a political party. It doesn't matter which one because being captured by any party is a problem. The town square must be neutral. Free and open debate is paramount for society to progress.
3. It has an anger problem. Twitter rewards anger and fear.
4. It has a transparency problem. How does the algo work? Who are they shadowbanning and downranking and why? What topics do they remove on trending? Which do they boost?
I’d add a minor item to the list: it is progressively raising garden walls. I do not have a twitter account, I will not give my mobile number to twitter to get one. Right now I can still follow the few accounts I find interesting with nitter and browser favorites. The twitter website itself has become unusable.
Before labeling "problems" I wish people would define what is the ideal social platform? What are the qualifications and rules everyone must follow for a "speech" to be free of unequal censorship?
> What are the qualifications and rules everyone must follow for a "speech" to be free of unequal censorship?
I'd say the first and only rule is that there aren't any rules that everyone must follow. There will be subpockets with different subcultures, with each one building and enforcing their own set of rules, but no single centralized style of enforcement.
No commercial network with a company backing it could ever offer a space like that, because they are liable to monitor and moderate the worst content that goes through their property, thus creating a single centralized culture based on the company's values.
> I'd say the first and only rule is that there aren't any rules that everyone must follow. There will be subpockets with different subcultures, with each one building and enforcing their own set of rules, but no single centralized style of enforcement.
That sounds like a free market. A government provides a minimal container and you’re free to create your own sub-pocket with your own rules inside of that structure. If you don’t like the rules of sub-pocket A (ex. Twitter), you can go create sub-pocket B (Truth Social). And they have no centralized style of rule enforcement because they are their own unique private enterprises.
Maybe the problem isn’t Twitter. Maybe the problem is expecting Twitter to act like an unbiased government when they’re not. They’re a for-profit sub-pocket with their own subculture. Just like Reddit, YT, FB, TikTok, etc. They’re all competing for eyeballs and ad dollars while independently enforcing their own rules.
A free society, yes. A free market no, because you are not setting prices for making transactions for exchanging limited products; the information distributed through the network can be indefinitely replicated and multiplied.
The different 'subpockets' will be competing for expansion as organisms in an evolutionary environment, but describing it was a market would be using the wrong model. The trend of simplifying every free organizations as markets is harmful to rational analysis, and I'd say it comes from over-reliance on a set of values that see it as the only valid tool for solving every problem - i.e. an irrational prejudice. We should do better in our analysis of the evolving world, since society is going through never-seen changes and applying old recipes will limit our understanding.
So basically like old reddit then.. Sadly we see how that turned out in the end. But yeah, I do agree that would be the best.. But even better would be to kill off SM entirely and return to dedicated sites/forums.
> The defacto public town square doesn't believe in free speech!
Twitter is not “the defacto (sic) town square”. The claim that it is is most typically deployed as an argument that it should be regulated. The rest of this comment continues apace. These are standard talking points in the (right wing) drumbeat to try and curtail free speech by regulating Twitter (and other social media companies).
Somehow you got it twisted that the right is the one controlling or attempting to control free speech. Clearly you’ve not been on HN long as it was nearly exactly on party lines, with the left wanting to stifle the speech of some, and the right wanting it completely open.
>>These are standard talking points in the (right wing) drumbeat to try and curtail free speech by regulating Twitter (and other social media companies).
Government mandating tech companies to censor information is supported by a far higher percentage of Democrat voters:
Well hey, in this case it seems that Elon musk has purchased 9% of Twitter and is likely going to use that influence to make Twitter's moderation promote open discourse more.
I hope you don't complain about this ever in the future and just accept that Elon is allowed to pressure Twitter to change it's moderation policy to support the principles of open discourse more.
Man, you should see how the same type of people are reacting on twitter right now and around the net.. The cries of "private exception" have suddenly become "NO NOT THAT WAY!" overnight. lol
1. Twitter has a terms of service, and advertisers don't want their adverts next to hate speech.
2. there are SO MANY right wing people on twitter, tweeting away merrily. They adhere to the Terms of Service.
3. Once again, I mostly see that coming from accounts with a certain political bent
4. Fair
The way most of these platforms work your ad is actually never “next to” anything anymore. Most people don’t associate online ads the same way as say a TV show. It is expected that you would get unrelated ads to your content when the content you consume is diverse, unlike TV ads which are very specifically on one topic. Then depending on if you view on mobile, ads again aren’t even part of the broader message. They take up the whole screen and aren’t associated with content again. Sponsorship, meaning your ad specifically supports the product, and online ads are different.
>Twitter has a terms of service, and advertisers don't want their adverts next to hate speech
Why? Does an ad get contaminated by association?
Or it's a minority who gets to call what's "hate speech" and what's not, and pushes advertisers to not want to risk this (who wouldn't give a fuck otherwise)?
People buying ads certainly think so. Or more specifically they think their brand or product denoted in the ad will be associated with the context in which it appears.
Shadowbanning is very real on many platforms. It is a method designed to ban a user without pushback from the user and minimize the ability of them to work around the ban. Explicitly lying to users like this, even the bad ones, should be something that is banned the by government. If you paid money for a service and they tricked you into not receiving the service without telling you this wouldn’t be allowed, but for some reason it’s okay to trample on the expectations of users when giving out free service.
No, it's that there is a healthy balance on the site, and the people who get banned have typically posted some REALLY unsavoury stuff - and plenty of left wing people have also been banned for posting unsavoury stuff.
I follow links onto twitter sometimes, though I dont use it. how does it have a "free speech problem?" what does this even mean in practical terms. I think that talking point is completely made up.
One cannot make a comment on the site that’s counter-narrative without having the mob of social activists bombarding you, and ultimately canceling you.
It actually doesn’t clearly say any at all. Like literally.
Random Joes that have no voice will not be banned. Make a name for yourself and start gaining followers and you most certainly will unless it’s too damaging to twitters reputation. Their sporadic treatment of these types of people are what allow you to hide behind this reasoning, they keep you guessing on their procedures.
Hm, #1 and #2 here just seems like a copy/paste of a conservative talking point.
You're literally in the middle of a discussion about how Twitter isn't the "de facto" public town square, because nearly nobody actually authors original tweets.
In any event, fuck the public town square. That's where slaves were sold, that's where gay men were stoned, that's where people were hanged for all manner of terrible reason that had nothing whatsoever to do with justice.
Twitter, as awful as it is, is many orders of magnitude better than the town square. May we never return to those times again.
Free speech is a core liberal value. I can't believe how many people are confused about this.
[Free speech and the open town square is how we got away from the atrocities you outline. There is no societal progress without free speech, which twitter is actively clamping down on. It's regressive and taking us back to when dominant ideas couldn't be challenged.]
Agreed, but what's actually unbelievable is that people seem to not realize that it goes both ways, and I'm just as free to shame and ridicule someone for their speech as they are to express their shitty little racist ideas.
[No, we got away from the practices I mentioned above through discussion that did not take place in a "public" town square.
Basically anywhere else, but certainly not the "public" town square. One reason, among many, is that a "town square" is not nearly as ubiquitous as you seem to believe, historically. Dominant ideas can easily and are frequently challenged on Twitter and in modern discourse generally, it's just not tolerant of the racist, awful ideas that some might want to discuss.
It's not going to lead to progress to continue to discuss how one race is superior to another, for example, and yet that's all some groups seem to want to talk about.]
Sure. No one is arguing you shouldn't be able to ridicule someone online (I guess it depends on who you're ridiculing right?). But I don't think you should get banned from the platform for doing so. That's the problem people have with Twitter. Especially since its very inconsistently applied and very out of touch with what the overwhelming majority of the country believes.
There's also a cultural aspect that can't really be solved by Twitter, like petitioning someone to be fired for making a gay joke ten years ago.
Don't the owners of twitter get some say? If you can't keep your argument with some nazi p.o.s. dialed down to an 8, why should they have to host either of you? I mean they own the platform, you and the nazi can take it to DMs on some other platform.
I guess that the "appeal" was ruled reasonable and zuby made it back? Of course Washington Examiner will never follow up on the matter as they're well known, like Fox, to print front page knee jerks and way-back-page retractions.
Or just disproving your statement. Depending on your mental capacity.
Or was your statement made such that only the right wing makes such headlines?
Or are you russian and just trying to sow division?
Which is it?
Also you still didn’t change what I said, just avoided it by trying to claim “whataboutism”. Fight it all you want, it’s not going to change the truth.
Your implication that only Fox spits out clickbait. You seem to be dead set on hiding behind whataboutism and ignoring the facts. You want to smear Fox’s name, but fight veraciously to defend CNN. That’s all anybody needs to know, and is clearly on display in your comments here.
>That's where slaves were sold, that's where gay men were stoned, that's where people were hanged for all manner of terrible reason that had nothing whatsoever to do with justice.
That's also how you get slaves fred, labour laws passed, and so on. Most revolutions started on public squares (and public cafes, and such). And further progress was created by open dialogue, in books and other discourse spaces. Which people thinking like the above wanted to stiffle.
And, no, the "public square" wasn't what brought slavery for example.
It was more the discussion in the "polite"/"good" upper echelons of society, for their own benefit. The same people who run and profited from that racket. And the same, good, rich and aspiration class people who wrote diatribes against gays, or intented scientific racism, eugenics, and other such novelties.
In other words, by the same kind of classes who today dictate what the unwashed masses should talk about and what not, now.
I would love to hear what you think would happen to you if you had openly discussed the equality of man irrespective of race in the "public" town square in a southern plantation town in the 1850s.
I would further love to hear what you think would happen if you did that while committing the "crime" of being black.
Getting made fun of on Twitter seems like a substantially less severe consequence than what would happen if you proposed radical ideas in the "public town square" throughout history.
>I would love to hear what you think would happen to you if you had openly discussed the equality of man irrespective of race in the "public" town square in a southern plantation town in the 1850s.
I would love to hear how you think the idea of giving up slavery was discussed and eventually won over in the North itself (who kept slavery well after the revolution).
I would also love to know why you think the public square means addressing everybody (like giving a lecture or declaring some platform), as opposed different people being able to discuss things with others in a public space.
>I would further love to hear what you think would happen if you did that while committing the "crime" of being black.
The same thing that would happen if you commited what is considered a crime against today's order on a modern public space.
>Getting made fun of on Twitter seems like a substantially less severe consequence than what would happen if you proposed radical ideas in the "public town square" throughout history.
That's only because 99.999% of it is of less consequence - compared to people discussing the abolition of slavery or setting up a revolution back then.
Try something that the current establishment considers threatening and equivalent to the above, and see how far you stay (a) on Twitter (b) in a job, (c) out of jail.
So you accept that the "public" town square was highly discriminatory, suppressed non-conformist thought, was consistently violent, and oppressive to people of minority racial groups?
...and you want more of that? Gotta start to question your motives here, friend. Not seeing any real upside to this, and I'm starting to wonder if the goal is maybe to take the voice away from the people who are, for the first time, finally getting a say in how the world is governed, because you don't like what's being said.
>So you accept that the "public" town square was highly discriminatory, suppressed non-conformist thought, was consistently violent, and oppressive to people of minority racial groups?
No, but nice strawman.
I only accept (rather, I know, don't have to "accept" or not "accept" as hand given) that the public square was at the main representative of the general sentiment, but also the space to discuss and break from it.
It hasn't been always and/or globaly "consistently violent, and oppressive to people of minority racial groups". Often it was more progressive than the elites towards those groups, who had more of a chance to discuss their ills and suggestions in the public square than in the "englightened" spaces of the rich, the government/powerful, and the upper-middle class, which peddled more in the conformist ideas of the time, were the ones who actually profitted from slavery - and of course the ones that owned plantations...
>Not seeing any real upside to this, and I'm starting to wonder if the goal is maybe to take the voice away from the people who are, for the first time, finally getting a say in how the world is governed, because you don't like what's being said.
You got it backwards. You don't like things being said. I don't like things not allowed to be said.
The "public" town square as you've described it has literally never existed. You're asking to return to a time that simply never happened. You talk about strawmen, but you've invented from whole cloth a concept from history that simply did not exist. In classic conservative fashion, you want to "go back" to some idealized era of history that didn't in any way look the way your rose colored glasses seem to tell you it did, and you completely throw out the outright racist, sexist attitudes that pervaded literally everything happening in prior centuries.
Just logistically, how did these "public" town squares function? Were they periodic meetings? Did people just walk to the center of town and start shouting? Who spent their time in these town squares, when they could be working/providing for their family? Since they didn't actually exist in history, there's nowhere I can look this up, and I'm curious about what you think happened historically.
Setting aside this made-up "town square" concept for a moment, you really seem to want to allow some speech, but to not allow other speech, and that is really the problem here.
If you want to allow all speech, then you necessarily must allow for speech that (successfully) calls for the "cancelling" of people who speak, as well.
In other words, either you support Twitter's ability to express itself through the banning some users for their speech (which it does exceedingly sparingly to begin with, people are not banned for ideas, but for specific expressions of those ideas), or you only selectively support free speech. You don't get to have it both ways.
Very well put. (all of it) It's astounding how many people can't look past the little things they don't like in order to see the ridiculous level of danger that comes from an anti-speech POV.. ESPECIALLY for minorities and other so-called marginalized groups. I mean we are at the point of critical thought where "all i need to do is stop people with the wrong opinions from talking" is seen as a sane, healthy and safe POV! What if YOU aren't the one making the decision though?
The position that Twitter can’t ban people is the anti-speech position.
Only one side of the argument wants people to say anything they want, once you realize association is a form of speech. The side that supports Twitter’s expression of speech is closer to “everyone gets a say” than the side forcing Twitter to publish content it doesn’t want to.
You still get to speak, just not on Twitter. You don’t get to trample on Twitter’s rights. That’s anti-speech.
> I would love to hear how you think the idea of giving up slavery was discussed and eventually won over in the North itself (who kept slavery well after the revolution).
Certainly not in public squares. If I think about it , Black freedom and black rights came from not from discussion but action. Forcing Everyone , everywhere to look at the issue it was by hitting the hearts and minds of Americans brought the newspaper and television that allowed Civil Rights movement to propagate that it did.
It was Media , not the public square that won our rights. Not white men who suddenly found a guilty conscience and talked about it. Hell the discussion had to forced.
I'll stay on my soap box for a little longer. The statistics are important for their implications.
We're talking about these platforms in relation to "free speech". This implies it's used by the masses for speech, but that isn't the case.
We also call it our "digital town square". It isn't. The square is empty and has a handful of people with a megaphone.
Politicians, media and businesses consider the narratives on social media to reflect actual culture and political views, but this couldn't be further from the truth.
This matters because Twitter has an outsized cultural and political influence, which is not the case for all the other networks you mentioned.
> The square is empty and has a handful of people with a megaphone.
Have you ever been to a real town square? Its a handful of people with Megaphones trying to rally a crowd - and a bunch of people having private conversations around it. Thats twitter + DMs.
I suspect even there that's true. I text very rarely, even with my closest friends. My wife texts people much more, and I have some friends who text constantly. There's clearly some sort of differential there, and I wouldn't be surprised if it roughly follows a similar sort of 80/20 rule.
I don't think that's true. On Facebook the majority of active users post some original content at least a few times per year. I've seen a lot of profiles for my own friends and various other users.
After the last few days I more and more strongly suspect that's because of a few events like r/place where it becomes incentivized to have many accounts per real user.
There is a widely-known Internet rule of thumb that 1% of users add content, and 99% lurk. There have been several studies that seek to validate that, several of which are outlined in the Wiki summary:
If you think other social media is toxic and stifles speech in the same way Twitter does, you are intentionally being dishonest, have your head in the sand, or simply have little understanding of how these platforms work (I'm going with the latter based on your characterization of reddit alone).
- Reddit has endless communities, and long text forum posts and comments. Most people lurk in the top subs, but almost everyone has a niche subreddit they have actively posted in, or has an alt just for that purpose
- I find it hard pressed to find someone who purposefully creates an Instagram account and does not, at the very minimum, share photos with friends and family. I use the app daily, and even the boomers that are finally coming onto the platform regularly post photos.
Most people are followers in the broad sense, but on a community level, especially with their friends, families, and communities, are sharers. That's the difference between twitter versus facebook, instagram, and reddit. You are making the fallacy of applying the influencer syndrome across the entire platform. The majority of users are not remaining on the platform because of influencers. These other platforms are primarily about individuals communities and friends. They start by joining the platform because of a friend, a family member, or to join a niche community of likeminded folk, and then they are gradually exposed to the platform-specific SEO junk food. Twitter on the other hand, is demonstrably, provably, about certain power users. It's about following the "right" people to get the most out of it. There is no community in the organic sense of the term on twitter, except by pure happenstance ("tech twitter", "black twitter", and so on, but even then it's at best, a loose association).
So before you tell someone to get off their soap box, maybe make sure you have a clearer understanding.
Endless communities yet the top ones are run by a tiny percentage of power-mods who have outsized influence (Six power mods control 118 of the top 500 subreddits [1])
You read my post and got out of it that I somehow cared about the top ones? Or are you just cherry picking something to attack? Let's have a good faith discussion.
Maybe you should understand what you're talking about before you start in on somebody else.
Reddit is VASTLY more hostile to the average user than twitter. On twitter, all I have to do to stay in good standing is abide by community guidelines. You might disagree with those guidelines, but they're there and are generally easy to follow.
On reddit? Not only does each user have to pay attention to the reddit guidelines, but each subreddit is its own fiefdom with an absolute monarch (head mod) who can ban you at any time, for any reason, without repercussion and there is no appeals process. I know because I've done it. There were people causing trouble in a sister sub to one I run, and I did not hesitate to permaban them when I saw what was going on. And from all the other subs I run. They cried, complained, bitche and moaned to reddit admins, and nothing happened. Mods don't owe users platforms.
Because on reddit, you are free to start your own subreddit. You are not free to just post whatever you want, and there have been many subs that have been banned for not abiding by the rules.
Reddit has slowly been censoring, banning and closing out "unwanted" people and views for a while now.. It's not uncommon for admins to ban people for the wrong opinions on even small subs at random. They allow an entire sub dedicated to nothing but attacking other subs they don't like and trying to get them banned. (they even go as far as posting CP with alts in order to report on their mains, trying to get the sub banned) And the Admins allow this. To say nothing of the subs, some major ones included, which use scripts to auto ban EVERYONE who posts or joins subs they don't like.. without exception. (something almost spelled out in the rules from day one as being against said rules.. but as long as it only targets the "wrong" people/side, nobody has ever been able to get even a comment from the admins about it in ~8 years)
Not an attempt to refute your points, but just some input. IG is the only social media platform I’m still on, and I don’t think anyone except meme accounts, influencers, brands are posting anymore.
1. My wife and I have been joking for a couple of years about the large number of old acquaintances & family members that follow us that haven’t posted in years. They still watch every story we post though!
2. IG just re-introduced the ability to sort your feed chronologically. When I first looked at my chronological feed, it was immediately clear that they took it away because there wasn’t enough new content anymore. I follow between 250-300 accounts and there is consistently less than 20 accounts posting a day (and those are mostly meme or ‘influencer’ accounts).
It is possible that I’m just following boring people though.
>Not an attempt to refute your points, but just some input. IG is the only social media platform I’m still on, and I don’t think anyone except meme accounts, influencers, brands are posting anymore.
Do... you not have friends or what? I'm even too old (35) to be in the IG niche generation but my IG is active and lively... no meme accounts, no brands followed whatsoever.
About Instagram, I've had an account there for eight years. It was created so I could follow my then-girlfriend, who posts occasionally, and is today my partner and mother of my child. It's use is basically to keep tabs on that account and, very rarely, check in on trending stuff (say Azealia Banks when she makes the news, since she was booted off Twitter). I've never used the account to post anything and it follows just that one account since 2014.
> So before you tell someone to get off their soap box, maybe make sure you have a clearer understanding.
The irony.
Reddit users lament quite often that there are subreddits that will ban you for saying things against the viewpoints of those subs (r/(white|black)peopletwitter, r/the_donald, r/latestagecapitalism, etc). Sure, one can just make their own sub, but Twitter users can follow different people too.
Instagram users (the Gen Z ones) often have zero posts and use it mainly for its group or individual chat features, as everyone in their friend group has an IG. It's often preferred to not share photos on there as it's more private for them than having anyone who follows them to see their photos.
Twitter is not special in its toxicity, all social media is the same.
25% is actually really really good. Its just above the 80/20 pareto principle. Prices law probably makes more sense here but the point is still the same, pretty much all platforms where you are publishing you'll see a similar distribution.
Pretty all the users except a few contribute little to nothing and a very few contribute the most highest value output and accumulate a lot of value (followers/influence).
Usage (consumption is what you are looking for).. like monthly active users..
> If the retweet button were to be removed, the platform would collapse.
I disagree. I was a twitter user before the retweet button appeared. We all got creative to effectively RT others without the need for a button. The button appeared because users organically developed the retweet and the button just made it more convenient.
Studies show 99%+ of TV, radio and newspaper consumers contribute less than 1% of the content.
What does that have to do with the impact such mediums have on the masses? Twitter is a read-heavy broadcasting platform. Just because the masses don't publish there, that doesn't mean they don't consume it and aren't impacted by it (embeds, story pick-ups, cultural influences, and on it goes). There's a reason nearly everyone that's anyone uses Twitter to broadcast to their public still to this day, despite Twitter being an aged platform at this point; that spans from famous musicians or athletes, to politicians.
The war in Ukraine? You can follow it on Twitter from official sources; in many cases better and faster than you can get it from any other mediums. Zelenskyy's Twitter account is one of the most important broadcast mediums that he has access to.
> If the retweet button were to be removed, the platform would collapse.
There's nothing interesting about that premise. If you removed the same feature from tumblr at the height of its popularity, it would have collapsed as well. If you remove integral features, it's usually bad for products.
Most people are mimics, not originators. There is no scenario where a platform is going to exist that is both massive in scale and is primarily original content produced by the masses. Most content on massive platforms will be cloned, copied, retweeted / reposted content. The sole exception is photo posting, in which the masses post photos from their lives (which are going to tend to be technically unique and generally require zero creativity to originate, point and shoot).
I'm sure there are more retweets than replies, but still. 10% of users (is that the math? probably not.) are actively posting original tweets, and even more are replying to them. That's alright I think.
25% is ~50 million people. Also just because 80% of tweets are retweets, that doesn't mean only 20% of them are tweeting original content, it's probably a mix. So realistically we're looking at tens of millions of people forming the core contributor community. Hardly a small elite.
The reason I stay on Twitter is that I can find experts in niche fields to follow. For example, since the start of the invasion of Ukraine, I have followed a number of credentialed military and Russia experts, and have consequently a better understanding of current events there.
>There is very little speech and it excessively rewards the most unreasonable speech.
never going to change--the most intolerant win as taleb has demonstrated formally. If anything is to change Twitter must go to the limit of constitutionally protected speech (dont @ me with `twitter is a private company`)
I probably do 100 replies for every 1 original tweet.
This is fine and "good actually"
Consider a traditional PHP forum. How much of the discussion is the "OP" post in a thread, and how much is all of the discussion afterwards? It's the same on twitter.
Twitter's value proposition isn't your ability to contribute, it's the fact that VIP you care about is there publicly contributing, and the flaws you describe are 100X worse on the only competitor that can boast similarly - Facebook.
Conversations on Twitter are bad, but Facebook's are so much worse. Just finding a reply in an FB thread is near-impossible. Even finding the same post on FB twice is challenging.
My local journos, politicians, favorite webcomic artists, bands, podcasters, city councilors, are all accessible and engaging on twitter. That's the value proposition. It's no coincidence that twitter was Trump's preferred platform - it just works well with that use-case.
Nobody cares about my tweets of "hey look at this cocktail I had at the bar". That's where FB or Insta are better.
It has some bad incentive issues that lead to outrage and dumb hostile retweets driving increased engagement/follower count, but it's also possible to just ignore and block all of that stuff.
You can find high quality accounts to follow and interact directly with interesting people doing interesting things. When used well and filtered properly it is the best source of high quality real time information available anywhere. There's just a lot of noise so filtering well can be tricky (and most people like the noise because it plays into tribal human nonsense).
The reason most people don't participate imo is because there's a lot of competition. It's hard to be interesting when competing on a truly global scale, it's a lot more competitive and the 'easy' ways to get attention are also often the worst. Most people would be tweeting into a void without anyone paying attention.
My issue with the speech thing is not Twitter's flawed moderation (which is an exercise of their speech), it's that we're trapped in a local maximum where massive centralized companies end up with a responsibility they shouldn't have that's effectively impossible for them to do well. The issue here runs deeper and isn't something we can escape without some serious changes to the computing stack we're operating in. Things can be tweaked and improved as they are, but can't be truly fixed with our current stack - it's a problem of incentives and capability.
Ideally it's not the responsibility of a CEO to moderate billions of people (or to establish teams to do so). The promise of the world wide web was a decentralized system of individuals controlling their own distribution. In that world speech is free, but people decide who they listen to absent incentive issues around engagement and platforms having to make decision about users they give service to.
My comment isn't about your personal experience on Twitter, rather the role it plays at a macro level. It is a platform that is politically impactful, and not in a good way. It rewards division, extremism, polarization, it brings out the worst in us.
That's on Twitter. They actively designed the product to do so.
> "You can't express yourself on Twitter due to the character limit, so all you can do is witty superficial takes. Threading and replies are a disaster making a structured discussion impossible. These two things alone make the platform useless for most speech purposes."
My reply was pushing back against this - it's too strongly positioned. I don't disagree with the issues that exist at the macro level, but people can and do express themselves in ways that make the service useful and valuable.
You can find interesting people saying things, but most of them will be appealing to their audience by complaining when their ingroup gets any negative commentary, and quote retweeting shade at their outgroup. It's like some weird version of British Parliament where the stakes are as low as which obscure philosopher is actually more like this philosopher than that one.
Ugh Yeah.. I am so so happy that I stayed away from unsocial media from the start.. Took one look at it in the early days and decided to nope out! Can't wait until SM collapses under it's own hate and the net, fandoms and discourse can go back to where it belongs. Small to medium sites and dedicated message forums.
> And some 80% of that are retweets or replies, not original tweets.
Somewhat related:
I recently found the feature where you can go through your contacts and ignore the retweets of them individually. I don't know how long this feature has been around but it's great!
We should expect Twitter’s read-only ratio to be smaller because of the low friction of just tweeting. But is there another platform or medium where the creator-to-passive consumer ratio is significantly better? I’d assume blogging was much more read than done, back in the day.
(public broadcast platforms, I mean — presumably e-mail has more parity in participation between consumers and creators)
I don't think Twitter has a problem, I think companies who use Twitter to plan their strategy have a problem. Companies who spend money to look good on Twitter, companies who pay ad companies who use Twitter to design their campaigns, etc etc.
Anyone who thinks Twitter is an accurate representation of the general population is building houses on a sand beach.
> Anyone who thinks Twitter is an accurate representation of the general population is building houses on a sand beach.
E.g. So called "cancel culture" works because companies routinely assume that Twitter outrage translates to real world outrage. Would be nice if companies could recalibrate their response.
It's part of the reason why I'm against companies, especially media ones and fandoms, from dealing with their "fans" through SM. Even in general, doing so means loss of differentiation between your fans and tens of millions of random people.. some of whom might have other reasons for giving input. But this is a whole other issue of its own.
> I think Twitter has a far bigger problem than a free speech problem.
Not Twitter has the problem, society has. Twitter is growing fine on its own, there is no end in sight. But the platform is more and more influencing the rest of the world, and usually it's more of the toxic than healthy kind of influence.
Largely correct, I mostly only use it as my news feed from mainstream (oh no!) news sources and some bloggers when they post a new blog; this is post giving up on RSS feeds. I think I only have one twitter post to date after 7 or 8 years.
>no actual speech happens by the masses themselves
Not true. Maybe most don't bother but anyone can. And it's kind of unique that I as Joe Public can tweet to @JoeBiden or whoever. I don't know any other platform like that.
Maybe no one will bother reading my tweet but it's a free world and that's their choice.
As someone who doesn't use twitter primarily because of this "everything is retweets" phenomenon, I wouldn't say that means no one uses it. Twitter is an idea propagation platform. It's not about everyone just sharing and consuming original content; what good is original content if only direct connections ever see it?
Twitter's most important aspect is watching ideas spread, even if it's misinformation, even if it's a cat video, even if it's a big game of telephone and the meaning gets corrupted in transit, you get to see what resonates with people. And that is very valuable.
Sure, but that's a separate thing. Lots of people don't use Twitter at all. Then, there is a smaller but huge group that uses it purely to read. Then, there is a smaller but large group that writes. Then, there is a tiny group that writes a lot.
Worth noting that the date of buying these shares is March 14th, and the date he started rather unsubtly tweeting about Twitter's approach to free speech is March 25th. So to be clear, anyone who thought that Musk's actions are the result of the twitter poll he ran has clearly been misled.
Interesting that he filed his >5% report on Schedule 13G rather than Schedule 13D, and has checked the box for the exemption in Rule 13d-1(c)[1]. This exemption requires that he "has not acquired the securities with any purpose, or with the effect, of changing or influencing the control of the issuer, or in connection with or as a participant in any transaction having that purpose or effect."
If he's indeed seeking to participate actively in changing things at Twitter, he may have opened yet another front in his antagonization of the SEC.
Background: the SEC requires purchasers of >5% of a U.S. public company to provide certain information about themselves and their intentions in making the purchase. Generally, you file Schedule 13D if you're seeking to conduct a takeover bid. The shorter Schedule 13G is supposed to be used only for "passive" investors.
Here, perhaps Musk would say he's not seeking a change in the "control" of the company (voting share ownership), just a change in governance practices not involving a change in control.
Update: some press coverage raising the same questions. The silly part about this is the filing deficiencies seem either inept or willful. Mr. Musk can certainly afford good securities lawyers to make the proper filings. A 13D is not that much more burdensome than a 13G, and some activists use the filing (which gets a lot of free attention) to make statements that to support their objective, whatever that may be.
His Twitter poll about selling 10% of Tesla was equally disingenuous.
He had pre-arranged those sales in mid-September according to regulatory filings. He also didn’t mention in the tweets that he has millions of stock options that must be exercised.
It makes me sad to see that his fan base turned into a cult for the most part. I used to admire him until the veil fell off, I still admire the technologies him and the smart people at Tesla and SpaceX have created, but my admiration doesn't extend to him anymore.
The guy knows how to hire smart people and keep them around, that in an of itself is rare these days and worth admiration.
I can't think of many living CEOs as effective as him in this regard.
I wouldn't say my admiration extends outside of areas he is an expert in though, usually when he starts talking about anything else he talks out of his ass.
Executives != smart people, some of them are but revolving door of executives speaks more to how hard it is to find good executives and just how cutthroat of an environment Tesla is performance wise.
I know for a fact the good engineers are sticking around because I know a bunch of them personally. I wouldn't say all of them are staying because of Elon alone but it generally factors into the calculation (along with massively appreciated stock options ofcourse...)
People stayed even with the stock was getting crapped on by Wall Street, he was clearly able to convince everyone that the company would succeed and opinions of the companies future would turn around.
Going to Tesla a few years ago was a hard choice, they paid below market (substantially) but offered pretty generous stock grants.
The stock hadn't really appreciated in-line with the companies growth because of the enormous risk of the Model 3 project. This represented massive risk overhang that until cleared didn't allow the stock to really take off.
2020 (over?) corrected for that however so now the employees that have put in the years are sitting on massive unrealized gains.
He's a good salesman in getting people to invest money or (in this case) time. But the discussion was talking about retention. And that's just because people are about to clear huge paydays.
Man but the bad 10% is so rough. The Thai diver situation wasn't some off the cuff rant, that was someone wealthy and influential in concerted effort to utterly destroy someone who had done some good in the world. Intellectual genius but moral void can still apparently be admirable?
I wouldn't call it a moral void. Heroes are better and worse than ordinary people, it's unfortunate that we've been raised on simplistic stories where if someone is worth being on a side with they can't have any significant flaws.
I fully recognize that people exist in shades of gray.
However, I also believe that there are actions that people can and do take that put them beyond what contrition could repair-- and Musk hasn't publicly apologized for this, even.
If I wrote off every genius who is also unstable or acts like an ass I would have to delete a lot of my music collection.
If you are idolizing someone, it's because the veil hasn't fallen off yet. Everyone is crazy. The question for me is: does the good outweigh the bad?
I'd say it does for Elon. Reusable rockets and helping push EVs over the adoption hump are far more important than trolling like a thirteen year old boy on Twitter or playing Dukes of Hazard with the SEC.
I don't think Elon was strategically necessary to get EVs over the adoption hump, in that the market was primed for _someone_ to do it. And retrspectively it's been a huge distraction from the change we really need, which is the improvement of public transportation in our largest cities.
But I can't comment on the reusable rockets thing, I suppose time will only tell.
I would estimate that Musk accelerated the transition to electric cars by 1-5 years. I believe he claims the same thing you do, that moving to electric is inevitable, and that his strategy has just been to nudge it along a little bit faster.
For a single person, this is still a significant contribution (if we presume that Tesla would not have survivied without him), which just happened to also make him wealthy.
Nah, it just doesn't work that way. Things don't happen until someone does them. Doesn't matter how easy the pitch is. Someone has to hit the ball.
In my experience most companies and governments are risk-averse and nobody wants to do anything until the mythical "someone else" does it. In the absence of a market equilibrium "defector" (game theory) it usually takes a government mandate or subsidy, and even that often fails if it results in "malicious compliance" like GM's EV1 debacle. (The EV1 was clearly sabotaged. It was intended to fail and when drivers actually liked it it was pulled, with GM even more or less confiscating and crushing them.)
The truth is that a significant proportion of the classical auto industry hated EVs. Some still do. The car industry is long wedded to the ICE and the good old fashioned "vroom vroom" as being essential to what makes a car a car, and everyone from unions to equipment makers to oil companies and petrostates had no interest in disruption.
There are still holdouts like Toyota that are just now being dragged into EVs and Koch Industries is still bankrolling anti-EV disinformation.
The reusable rockets thing was much worse than EVs. The space industry used to be smaller and was dominated by stolid mega-corporations with backgrounds in defense contracting that had absolutely zero incentive to change anything. The conventional wisdom in engineering was that current space launch tech was as good as it could get to the point that you had people authoring paper studies claiming that reusability actually wouldn't deliver much of a win (stop laughing!).
It took an utter lunatic to be willing to lose hundreds of millions to billions of dollars to disrupt space. As SpaceX worked on reusability they did so against a chorus of classical aerospace people and even NASA people claiming they would either fail or build a system that would be more expensive than disposable rockets.
I heard people continuing to make this claim even after F9 cores had been flown multiple times. They seemed to shut up when the video of those two Falcon Heavy cores landing in unison came out.
I think the Shuttle experience convinced everyone that reusability wasn't economically feasible. The whole industry had a bad case of learned helplessness combined with an addiction to cost plus contracts.
Edit: speaking of EVs:
I have this hypothesis that Elon's sort of kind of flirting with the alt-right and Trumpism was a ploy to ingratiate himself to Trump during the Trump era to possibly stop any attempt by Trump to kill either Tesla or SpaceX on behalf of his oil company and old school defense contractor allies. Elon may have decided that sucking up to Trump was the price of avoiding a backlash until Trump was out of office.
I have also wondered if his Texas move and appeals to "red America" aren't a marketing ploy to sell that demographic on EVs, since obviously the latte sipping liberal crowd are already on board with the EV revolution. Tesla is capped at blue state early adopters if they can't cross over into the mainstream and that means selling the non-techno-nerd and non-progressive part of car culture.
No clue, just speculation. Elon is first and foremost a marketer.
This is what happens when you gradually drive away the reasonable people from any group - what's left is a combination of natural cultists and formerly reasonable-ish people who got railroaded into a cult without realizing it.
Just like him I've got to a position where I can live very comfortably, but I would never ever give up my comfortable life and all my money for creating/buying startups that will most likely fail (of course I'm still investing).
I have all admiration for him that can't be taken away by any kind of fan base.
Is this a common belief? That he is taking "risks" others don't have the courage to? This is a new one to me and interesting cultural development for sure.
Edit: Just kind of seems in contradiction to the previous stories of him where it focused on his intelligence/de facto technocratic authority to save the world. It wasn't so much his courage, but his moral rectitude combined with capital resources -- "he is going to save the world! Take us to mars!"
His two main companies have apparently taken risks that established companies in those areas were not willing to do.
Could Boeing built a self-landing reusable rocket? Almost certainly. Would they have been willing to, considering it almost certainly involves failing in explosive ways multiple times? That may be a risk they aren't willing to take.
> Could Boeing built a self-landing reusable rocket? Almost certainly.
McDonnell Douglas is part of Boeing and (before they were part of Boeing) did the DC-X prototype.
One failure ended the program, but it was transfered from McDonnell to NASA at that point I think and funding was shifted towards the reusable VentureStar. But it did demonstrate reuse and went through a partial failure of a hydrogen explosion and recovery:
I would say it’s common. Both SpaceX and Tesla almost ran out of money with Musk maximally invested. Both moments were widely reported 5-10 years ago when they happened.
Sorry I was not clear, it was not the fan base that turned me away from him. It was the way he treated his workers during the start of the pandemic, forcing them to work. Along with other workplace controversies.
That's just my opinion, but I don't admire someone that prioritizes profit over human life.
You’re right, but actually the workers know what they are getting into in return for their options packages, it’s clear on Glassdoor. When I was looking for jobs in 2016, my slogan for myself was invest in Tesla, work at Google, not the other way around.
The only problem is that the stock price was growing more than the revenue, so I’m not sure how fast it can keep up growing, and what the current employees are expecting.
I believe OP is referring to Musk re-opening production against Alameda County's standing work-stop rules at the time.
This isn't necessarily the same as forcing people to work, but I have no idea if Tesla employees willing to return vs. those deciding to follow county rules saw any advantages or disadvantages at work as a result. Certainly forcing people to defy government rules to keep their jobs would be highly problematic to me as well, for example.
He could waste a lot of money on failed startups and never have any appreciable impact on his day to day life and standard of living other than his own satisfaction of seeing $BigMoneyNumber.
Even if you say that someone like him simply enjoys work, it seems clear that he's often working an uncomfortable amount, in order to achieve his two stated objectives, which at least in his perspective are altruistic (and are objectively not the best ways for him to get richer.)
I'm not sure you can argue that the richest man in the world got rich by accident while pursuing purely altruistic goals. He clearly knows what he's doing.
I say this while having an appreciation for the existence of Tesla and SpaceX, but let's not pretend he supresses unionisation at his factories because he cares too much.
not by accident, but getting rich clearly wasn't his goal when he dumped all his money into the start ups. why aren't we glad the richest man in the world got there by using his resources for futuristic ideas instead of something like oil and gas
I actually am glad of that - I think Elon is one of the less-bad billionaires. His views are stupid and most of his ideas are too, and billionaires shouldn't exist at all, but I am glad that he made his money building companies that are doing important things. Well, SpaceX and Tesla are - the Boring Company and Neuralink seem like boondoggles, to say nothing of Hyperloop.
SpaceX is interesting, but are they really doing anything important? Maybe if starlink goes global, but until then it doesn't seem to change anything in my or many peoples lives by not existing.
They are working on interesting problems though, far more interesting to me than most companies (including Tesla)
> SpaceX is interesting, but are they really doing anything important?
I'd say it's the most important company on the planet seeing as it's the only one that's truly carving a path for us to one day become a spacefaring civilization and doing so at a seemingly 10x faster pace than competitors
Spacefaring? Hopefully you mean Marsfaring (at best, if you can find a good reason to set up a colony there)
The average stellar density around our sun is about 0.004 per cubic light year, so definitely don't get your hopes up on some Star Trek scenario for the next few hundred years at least.
What is SpaceX's value again? P.S. Musk himself admits that SpaceX wouldn't be a thing if it hadn't been saved by a phone call from NASA. You know, the government, the same entity that Musk worshipers seem to dismiss as the lesser party when it comes to ingenuity and forward-progression.
I don't see that at all. We're never going to spacefare on chemical rockets, unless you mean maybe going as far as the asteroid belt.
Reusable rockets are about satellites and maybe the space station. But until we see something use the cheap launches to improve life on earth, it's meaningless.
That said, I'd invest in SpaceX for the Starlink potential if it was public.
SpaceX has drastically lowered cost/mass to put something in orbit with Falcon 9. If they are successful with Starship they will do so again. Already lowering cost to orbit is increasing access to space for companies, universities, and governments. This is huge. Their success has lead to a number of new companies trying to innovate in a similar way and even. altering how governments plan to run future space programs.
Lower cost to transportation is key for pretty much any economic growth. People and companies have significantly more plans than just a couple probes every few years. Exploration, mining, tourism, scientific research, manufacturing are a couple things that come to mind. There are probably many more ideas than what i can think of and that’s the point. Make it cheaper for people with ideas to make them a reality. When only the largest of governments can afford to put something into space then we won’t see much innovation/economic growth.
You should check your facts. Elon doesn’t own any houses, he lives in rentals. Also in 2008 when he didn’t even have money for that after putting all his PayPal money into the startups, he was living at his friends’ places.
But the main point is the side comment: I’m having fun coding whenever I want to, but I strictly do non-payed hobby projects, as I don’t want to get into commitments ever again.
Loads of wealthy people live in houses that they themselves don't directly own. Instead they'll form a real estate LLC that owns property, pays contractors to maintain the houses, and the people will then pay rent to their own LLC to live there to cover the maintenance costs and whatever mortgage/debt the LLC has.
The link you sent doesn’t confirm the comment that he owns lots of houses. Of course he won’t live in a bad place, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t stick to facts.
You mean the state with one of the lowest effective property tax rates in the country? Your property tax is pegged to 1% of the purchase price, and essentially never goes up ever again.
One of the only (if not the only) state where that happens.
The main reason not to own in CA is the insane purchase price, not the taxes.
Can't he both be a smart person and encouraging his fanbase to more cultish?
If one looked at life and fame as an engineer, having a rabid and large fanbase allows for new opportunities (financial and otherwise). So it'd be suboptimal not to encourage that.
Or as Matt Levine pontificated, if you're the kind of guy who can spike a cryptocurrency by writing something nice on Twitter, and you manage a public company, there's an argument that it's your fiduciary responsibility to do so in a buy-tweet-sell manner.
Matt Levine was, clearly, being snarky. Especially considering that such activity would be illegal.
As for "suboptimal", if you're trying to maximize financial or other gains regardless of societal impact or human suffering, maybe what you describe is correct, but it also requires the person to be a bit of a sociopathic asshole to choose that path.
It may take a long time for the ship to turn, but it has turned. John McAfee was indicted by the CFTC for doing this sort of pump & dump. I think anyone as high profile as a CEO would find themselves in the same boat.
Separately from that is the way Musk keeps Tesla in the public eye through various stunts etc., which is a little different than a pump & dump. How much of that is his personality, and how much of it is deliberate strategy? I don't know. I'd speculate that some of it started as personality, and when he saw the results he leaned into it hard and it became strategy. On that aspect of things, you have a point in that a CEO who can do that should probably take advantage of it, and I wouldn't necessarily attach sociopathic tendencies to that behavior as a requirement for acting that way: it doesn't seem to hurt anyone. At least I think it doesn't? Who suffers if TSLA is overvalued? And that would require a good way of determining if it actually is overvalued, something I don't think is straightforward. I guess short sellers suffer, but they could simply have been wrong about TSLA being over valued, and that's on them.
I don't think all CEOs should give it a try though. First because, well, most just don't have whatever quality is necessary to make it work. Second because if everyone tried it, it would just become so much noise, and probably drown out the efforts of those like Musk who can actually pull it off. In Levine-esque speculation, I wonder if Musk would have a legal case against those CEO's if they made his own antics worthless? Some type of tortious interference maybe?
Wasn't McAfee personally trading though? I'm not as up on his more recent insanity.
+1 agreed on the rest. It's an interesting thought problem. Capital was less formal during the late 19th century monopoly era in the US, but it makes me wonder if there were schemes where Morgan or Rockefeller publicly circulated market moves.
The poll is open to everyone on Twitter. Not just his fans. I bet many of his fans voted not to sell his Tesla stock. While people hate him are more likely to vote yes.
> people who hate him don't visit his Twitter or are you saying they would abstain from the poll on principle?
I would hope they wouldn't hate visit his twitter. But I didn't think it was a principle thing. I would imagine trust in a poll correlates with trust in the person putting on the poll. People who hated American Idol didn't hate call in options, even though they could have.
> It's usually some pedantic thing like a Twitter poll.
I think that's more because everyone here has a view of Elon that's mostly immutable. The minutia leads to interesting discussions (sometimes)
I enjoy my job, I also get paid to do it. If being a twitter troll is both a past time and road to riches for Elon I think it’s just win-win for somebody who seems to need attention and wealth.
There's only a limited amount of time one has. The private jet is to save time (convenience). In one of his interviews he talks about how he is always solving problems and his brain is running a million miles a minute. His brain is wired differently than most people. He has so many ideas running through his head. He doesn't have time to work on them all.
He doesn't have many expensive tastes. He doesn't live a life of luxury, he's not covered from head to toe in brand name clothes. He doesn't own a private island. He could care less about that stuff. Yes he has a huge ego but rightfully so. Look at all that he has accomplished against incredible odds (Tesla and SpaceX almost failing).
I do think he is genuinely trying to expand the realm of human consciousness and save the planet and create a backup plan for humans (colonizing Mars). Overall I think he is a net positive for mankind.
If anyone really thinks he is doing all this just to get rich needs to do some more research on him.
> He doesn't live a life of luxury, he's not covered from head to toe in brand name clothes. He doesn't own a private island. He could care less about that stuff.
Elon is extremely vain so he doesn't put on anything by accidents.
>If anyone really thinks he is doing all this just to get rich needs to do some more research on him.
It's incredibly obvious he's doing this to be rich. He has incredibly expensive taste that goes far beyond than things like fancy yachts or private islands. He cares about money because it affords him soft power, influence, public adoration and the ability to buy things like you know... *10% of Twitter*.
He is both very well accomplished and a textbook narcissist who ties his sense of self-identity with the world's perception of him. That's why he gets incredibly defensive against naysayers and he is always pushing to "one-up" others.
So yeah, he absolutely cares about being rich because to him it's a validation of his own ego and also allows him to continue to purchase influence and power and attention.
If he's doing it all for money and to live a life of luxury then why does he live in a 50k house in Texas? Yes he had a McLaren F1, so what? That was a long time ago when he was young. He drives a model S these days.
If he's doing it all for money then why start the companies he did? All of them are helping to solve a problem for mankind. He didn't become a drug dealer, sell things that are addicting, etc. He doesn't run a tobacco company.
There's a scale for it, we've quantified the lack of satire!
---
The celebrity-persona parasocial identification scale (CPI) is designed to measure how media consumers develop identification with celebrities or popular fictional characters. Identification is defined as a persuasion process that occurs when an individual adopts the behavior or attitudes of another individual or group based on a self-defining relationship (Kelman, 1961, p. 63). Identification is a psychological orientation through which individuals define themselves based on their group membership and derive "strength and a sense of identity" from the affiliation (Kelman, 1961). Identification is often confused or entangled with parasocial interaction. Although both parasocial interaction and identification are both forms of audience involvement, they are distinct processes (Brown, Basil, & Bocarnea, 2003b, Brown & Fraser, 2006). Parasocial interaction often predicts identification because people commonly seek to adopt the values, beliefs, and behaviors of celebrities and media persona whom they admire. However, there are examples of celebrities that fans have strong parasocial interaction with, and yet the fans do not want to be like that person (Matviuk, 2006). This brief chapter discusses various aspects of the CPI online survey and its use in these contexts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)
This is incorrect and he has denied it on a number of occassions. He does live in a relatively small cheap house (likely around $50k when he bought it), but it's in Boca Chica Village near Brownsville, and it's not a prefab.
> The consequences of this poll will be important. Please vote carefully.
Is pretty disingenuous when it turns out that he's launched the poll a week after he already decided to buy 10% of the stock. Do you seriously think Musk spent several billion dollars on twitter stock and then decided to check what people think?
I just don't think it's very likely that Elon Musk spend billions buying a stake in twitter before he knew what he wanted to do with the company, especially since his view on free speech is already well known and goes far beyond even vocal free speech advocates.
In what way is his view on free speech far beyond vocal free speech advocates? I think it’s pretty uncontroversial that Twitter is the de-facto public square on the internet, and so it is bad that they clearly have a political leaning when it comes to content moderation. I know they’re a private company. But it’s just naïve at this point to think Twitter is the same as any old private company.
Well on the "far beyond free speech advocates", the position that the SEC can't prevent market manipulation due to the first amendment is a position that basically no one sensible takes. Or that he's happy using "Free Speech" to slander people.
On the subject of Twitter being a public square, I think that's a pretty absurd assertion, it's one of a plethora of social media sites - Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, Whatsapp, Reddit, Tiktok, Telegram, Snapchat. And it's not even particularly large compared to that competition. It's not even like Twitter has grown to become some behemoth, it's share price is about flat over the last decade. This isn't some behemoth that needs regulating.
Smart move for a billionaire that wants to influence public opinion. The usual route is to buy a magazine or newspaper but in our new world, being a highly influential stock owner of a social media company is the way forward.
(I'd suspect Musk of wanting to run for office, except I don't think he'd accept a lesser office than President which he's ineligible for. Maybe a state governor like Arnie?)
Because those types of people want power, and even when you're the richest guy in the world, there are things you can't do unless you're head of a country.
What power do politicians have? I guess you can nudge bureaucratic legislation to favor one group of developers over another and get favorable investment deals, but that just gets you more money.
Or maybe you can elect a district attorney and go after an enemy of yours, but even that's not an easy win. And you can always buy influence for this sort of thing without going through the trouble and cost of running
You certainly can't wave a magic wand and garner favor and respect from people. People hate politicians in the US.
I don't know, I just don't see the "power". It's just an appeal to narcissism as people in the media would be obsessing over you and dissecting every word you say. But that's definitely not power.
The fewer politicians there are, the more power they have. In the US, levers of power are widely distributed compared to a typical autocratic country. If you want to avoid autocratic rule, split up the power into many hands. The end result may look like a top heavy lumbering bureaucracy, but if it's difficult to wrest control of someone's lever of power from them then you have a better defense against autocratic takeover.
It almost like it was intentional on the part of the founders of the US
Sadly we did not heed their wisdom and we have over the course of time consolidated power in the the hands of fewer people by putting more things into the hands of the federal government, allowed congress to shift their responsibility to the executive, and failing to increase the size of congress.
Trump vaporized Soleimani; you can't do that when you're just the host of a TV show.
Obama to this day loves to brag about how he sent SEAL Team 6 to deal with enemies of the US; you can't do that either when you're just a successful author.
Hollande (former French president) also bragged to journalists, many times, about assassinating ISIS leaders.
These are "normal" leaders elected in democracies; it's much worse of course with more authoritarian regimes.
Real power is the power to kill other human beings and not suffer any consequence for it. We don't usually talk about that when discussing politics, but this is what aspiring leaders really crave.
It's not like President Musk would have the authority to murder anyone. His murder powers would largely be limited to the Middle East and loosely defined enemies of the United States.
Musk has never shown a desire to murder random people and he has never shown particular hatred for those in the Middle East. Why would he want the power to murder people who are basically unrelated to him?
>Real power is the power to kill other human beings and not suffer any consequence for it. We don't usually talk about that when discussing politics, but this is what aspiring leaders really crave.
Well put. It makes sense in that context that Musk's fans think he has no interest in politics and his detractors think he must.
As insane as Musk's fanbase can be, I still find his detractors' view of the world less realistic. There's a metric to assess that opinion by. As a fan, I predict he won't run for political office on Earth.
> Trump vaporized Soleimani; you can't do that when you're just the host of a TV show.
True, but Musk has a fleet of absurdly huge rockets at his command. If he really wanted to, he could de-orbit something large on top of Tehran.
Given the rate at which he is progressing toward his stated goals, he’s not that far from being able to do that and get away with it - by moving to Mars.
Yeah, this post is mostly tongue-in-cheek, but there is some truth to it. SpaceX is a company with assets that could easily be weaponized far in excess of many country’s militaries. I’m now imagining a future where a crazed trillionaire executes a first strike against some country with kinetic energy weapons, flees to a different planet, and all the governments of the world are scrambling trying to figure out if they can retrieve him.
> I’m now imagining a future where a crazed trillionaire executes a first strike against some country with kinetic energy weapons, flees to a different planet, and all the governments of the world are scrambling trying to figure out if they can retrieve him.
I get what you're saying, and I would agree that the power of _most_ politicians is minimal compared to the absolute richest people in the world (so not just mere single-digit billionaires, unless their wealth is built on owning a platform, like Oprah).
However, read the book Charlie Wilson's War. Wilson had no money to speak of, but the book reveals the incredible power that he wielded, largely by sidling up to selective groups (like the Israeli lobby) and getting key committee appointments. And Wilson wasn't even a U.S. Senator! (Generally speaking Representatives have far less power than Senators)
I mean, it would be trivial for a president with a lot of stock in EV companies to reduce domestic oil drilling/pipelines, start a "police action" in the Middle East that combined with super harsh sanctions on Iran, Russia and Venezuela sends oil soaring.
Why would he run for president, when he could quite possibly own a planet if he keeps moving forward with his Mars goals.
If he establishes a base on mars, it is essentially his. Earth based countries are forbidden (in treaty at least) from claiming ownership of celestial bodies. What's to stop him declaring himself emperor of Mars. The person that controls the flow of supplies to an isolated world is pretty much all powerful.
> Why would he run for president, when he could quite possibly own a planet if he keeps moving forward with his Mars goals.
Countries have armies. Armies enforce international (and eventually planetary) rights. Countries also make laws. Laws that Musk must follow or risk consequences.
> If he establishes a base on mars, it is essentially his. Earth based countries are forbidden (in treaty at least) from claiming ownership of celestial bodies. What's to stop him declaring himself emperor of Mars.
He’d be a paper emperor. No method or means of enforcing his claimed dominion.
> The person that controls the flow of supplies to an isolated world is pretty much all powerful.
Countries control the right to launch those supplies. Musk is a few steps below that in the chain of power.
You realise he needs permission from the government to even develop rockets, much less launch them into space and all the other crap. Unless there's an autonomous community on Mars that can defend from the US Space force, no private entity will be emperor of anything unless they are controlling things on Earth.
He already has permission to launch his rockets. Or he can just move the company to another country. Once the colony is established and has reached a certain size its probably inevitable. At that point what is the US going to do? Nuke the colonies to prevent independence? Figure out a way to load 100's of marines onto rockets and send them to mars? Starve the colonies? I very much doubt any of those things happen. As soon as a colony is established I think the path to independence begins.
He does not even have to move an openly hostile country, better if he doesn't, Any country in south america or africa would bend over backwards to get his companies. Imagine the economic boom those countries would experience via trade with a space faring nation.
You might recall a certain movement asking for Obama's birth certificate to prove that he was born in the US, back when he ran for president.
It's not completely clear that you need to be born in the US - several presidents and presidential candidates weren't - but it's pretty clear that foreigners who become naturalized US citizens later in life are not eligible to run for president.
Yes - I don’t believe there is a requirement to be born inside US territory (Ted Cruz was born in Canada and clearly desperately wants to be president!) - just to be a US citizen at birth.
He was born in the British colony of Virginia. There's no point in history where you could describe that as "foreign" to the US, in the same way you wouldn't say Stalin was "foreign born" from the USSR.
Why would being largest shareholder of a company not give you any special privileges in a company? Also, it guarantees him at least one seat on the board, and probably enough clout to help dictate the future direction of the company.
If your largest shareholder says the current methodology used for content manipulation and account banning is bad for business, then there will be systemic changes as a result.
I'm not up on my billionaire gossip so I have no idea if Dorsey and Musk are friend or foe but I can certainly see where someone would regret building something powerful and then letting others (especially those with different views) control it.
Jack lost control of Twitter to activist employees, not the shareholders.
I could be very wrong but the impression I got from watching several interviews with Jack (like his appearance on Joe Rogan) he seemed to have been very very torn by the desire to be a more free speech platform while still being in a constant battle with his Activist CA based employee's
> The timing makes me wonder if Jack Dorsey knew this was happening yesterday?
He totally could have known, since the paperwork was filed a few weeks ago. Did he look into the paperwork? Maybe? - if I found a major biz, I'd keep my EDGAR alerts turned on.
If Dorsey was worried about letting others control it, he wouldn't have gone public with twtr nearly 10 years ago. Crazy how in 10 years, twtr's market cap hasn't budged while tesla's has grown to over 1 trillion dollars. If only I knew back then what I know now...
I’m calling it now. Elon will push Twitter to allow users to determine their algorithmic feeds. A market for algos to compete with what content to serve you will be unstoppable. Everyone gets what they want.
Doubt it. He's made it very clear his biggest concern about Twitter is the censorship. More likely Musk will simply demand looser moderation because he's been annoyed by the lack of Free Speech on Twitter, and as a result the platform will decay into 4chan.
Any platform that embraces free speech will gradually become /b/. If you treat signal and noise as equivalent value, the noise will overwhelm the signal.
>Any platform that embraces free speech will gradually become /b/
I don't like this absolutism, because from my POV, this assumes that the audience has zero culture. /b/ is what happens when the participants are embracing the wild-west nature of our cyberpunk-era, which is exactly the design concept of 4chan itself.
Good system design carefully examines the interfacing feedback-loops and focuses on the positive ones, not the negative ones. Free speech on its own is a positive loop, censorship is a negative loop. A system that embraces its nodes flourishes when the nodes also embrace the system, which includes the _design and intent of that system_. The sentiment of the design and intent behind 4chan is "do whatever you please". That's not free speech, that's laissez-faire-social-boogaloo. Those are not the same.
It should be entirely possible to design a platform with culture to it.
Negative feedback-loops are not a symptom of bad culture, but of the _absence_ of culture.
A cultivated audience can both express and consume any actual thought. Look no further than HN, I don't feel censored here at all (although I haven't given this example too much thought, maybe I'm overlooking something right now). And an audience can be cultivated through the design/intent of the platform itself, as perception and dataflow of humans is always relative to their context, their local space.
I never said that HN gets by without moderation. I said that I don't feel censored here, and made sure to annotate that I haven't given that specific part of my argument particularly much thought. HN was in no way the focus of my argument.
Maybe the fact that you call yourself an unrepentant trash-talker coincides with what I referred to as absence of culture (not claiming it does or judging, just relating your response to the point I tried to get across).
On the HN-thing: HN doesn't like flamewars or behaviour that is conductive to them - that doesn't mean we're not free to make our point. That's a different thing than behaving with a more or less absolute disregard for the space you're in though, which is probably the part that dang focusses on.
I have many times clicked "reply", typed in a long post, looked at it again and re-read it, and then closed the browser tab rather than post it. I probably do that more often than I actually post, nowadays. I do this not because I suddenly decide I don't believe in what I wrote, or that I think the post has no value or will start a flamewar. I do this because I'm pretty sure the downvoters (and possibly even mods) will come down on me like a ton of bricks for the content of the post. It just doesn't seem worth it to put a counter-narrative post out there that's just going to get buried into low-contrast purgatory pretty much immediately.
This seems to be "Working As Designed" given the rules here. I wouldn't call it censorship or even heavy moderation. It's something else--self moderation? groupthink? I don't know. But it's likely the reason the place hasn't devolved into a sewer.
I totally believe great-grandparent post's take: "Any platform that embraces free speech will gradually become /b/." I think this is pretty hard to refute. Look at what happens every time someone gets banned from Platform X and tries to create "The Free Speech Version Of Platform X." The new platform gets populated by the latest batch of Platform X's cast-offs, and eventually and inevitably turns into a toxic stew of antisemitism, conspiracies, and bigotry.
>Look at what happens every time someone gets banned from Platform X and tries to create "The Free Speech Version Of Platform X.
Ask yourself wether the audience drawn to the new platform has culture. I don’t think it has, they are usually the subset of platform Xs original users who are simply not able to get their point across without having the rest of Xs audience reacting emotionally negative (because the rest of the audience also has no culture). It’s a social problem, not a technical one. 80% of people seek identity and peer confirmation, _because they have no culture_.
In the case of US-audience, this effect gets accelerated because part of US-culture IS the “Wild West/I ignore anything that’s not my gut”-madness. If you view that as the default, sure, we wont get anywhere. I do not view this as the default.
The self censorship that you describe on HN in a way is, you probably guess what I’m about to write, culture. Culture includes to restrict yourself in order to fit your content and your expressions to the space you’re in. Whole heartedly: please don’t censor yourself. Please don’t care about downvotes. Cultivate your thought and formulate it adequately, and there should be no moderation-incentive. Just don’t shove strong opinions (which are categorically dull) down an audience that’s not interested in them. Instead be curious and get the point across as questions, etc. it’s all a matter of form. You can explain the problem of cancel culture even to the most stubborn filter bubble-stuck dim person, you just have to use wording that lets them see through your eyes. That’s hard, but culture HAS to be hard. The alternative will always converge on /b/, because the alternative always converges in the absence of culture.
you are much more censored here than twitter. I dont understand why all the free speech people are happy to complain here about it when the moderation is much more stringent here than twitter. go there and complain.
I think at least part of the rationale is that civility is more likely to lead to the truth.
Emotionally heated debates on the other hand induce multiple negative effects which can obscure truth:
1. Causes people to “dig in” in defense of their position, and become less open-minded and able to change their mind
2. Increases emotional investment in a position (pride, ego, etc), which induces bias and misjudgement (see Munger on the Psychology of Human Misjudgement)
3. Degrades into flamewars, kills the spirit of collaborative and mutually respectful search for truth
> Here's a much more salient example:[refusing to block Russian sites]
Starlink doesn't run their own DNS, so they're not going to block them there. And I would guess that such a simple site is hard to block by IP address - it's probably on shared hosting.
> Musk is clearly pro-Ukraine,
He is? He supported Ukraine giving a high profile plug to his project. If Kim Kardashian wanted to plug my product on her social media I'd do a ton to make it happen, but it doesn't make me a fan.
What could go wrong with the richest many in the world now owning an influencing stake in one of the main communication platforms in the world? He made his first billions on financial surveillance and then moved onto selling Iphones on wheels and satellite based surveillance technology. I will stay on HN and Mastodon.
I don't think there's much that Musk can do to increase Twitter's revenue, but at least the market seems to believe that he can hype this one beyond reasonable valuations, too.
If you don’t care about directly making money, you can treat the platform as a way to promote or reject whatever messaging you want to millions of users.
If it’s a public company, it’d be subject to the will of the shareholders and have other corporate responsibilities. If it’s private, it can do whatever he wants it.
A private corporation is bad because its owner can use it to promote their own personal views. OTOH, a publicly traded corporation is also bad because because, motivated solely by growth, it will eventually need to engage in anti-societal behavior (dangerous algorithms, dark patterns, lobbying, fines as cost-of-doing-business, union-busting, etc). [Is this late-stage capitalism?](butterfly_meme.jpg) Where do we even go from here?
> OTOH, a publicly traded corporation is also bad because because, motivated solely by growth,
There is nothing that says a public company must only be motivated by growth. Tesla's mission statement doesn't say anything of the sort and has done things that don't fulfill the idea of growth or profit at all costs.
Now you might argue that institutional investors don't care about that since there's an indirection between actual shareholders, but that's a related but different issue.
Haha. The outraged complaints by those who've been repeating that line for years claiming "Twitter is a private company, they can ban who they like" would be epic.
Also I bet they would call to regulate or even nationalize social media platforms as soon as companies like Twitter switch to a more balanced moderation approach and don't aid in amplifying certain politics.
Since we already have a media oligarchy we can't get rid of, maybe it'll help to inject some new blood into it. I don't think Musk has the right answers, but maybe we can hope he won't be copying from Murdoch's homework. Remains to be seen, I suppose.
I don’t think he cares about revenue. I think he is trying to build a majority share and then take the company private. It is the very fact that twitter is a public company to begin with, that is pushing it to extremes. Social media companies should be banned from the stock market.
"It's a private company" has been the excuse for the abusive censorship. Are you saying if someone has right wing leanings on free speech that politicians will now change their tune and threaten it?
Not at all (under the assumption that a possible Twitter under Elon Musk would continue to adhere to local laws).
But trying to shut down a platform which is considered (by some) "critical infrastructure" might find you in a position where regulations restrict what you can do.
It's not a certainty but a possibility that this might happen (regardless of who is in power at the time.) Many politicians of different leanings use Twitter for communication.
yes, but being a public company prevents it from doing anything that deliberately lowers revenues. As a private company they'd be less beholden to advertisers.
A public company needs (endless) growth, it's the only reason to own stock.
Growth in social media means attracting more users and/or increasing engagement of existing users. Civil and reasonable discourse is bad for engagement numbers, outrage and extremism do much better.
> Can you explain how being public pushes Twitter to extremes ?
Public companies and their leadership face much more pressure to show profit and growth every 3 months. This pushes them toward short-term thinking and easy ways to juice their numbers. For social media the easiest way to do this is the promote and encourage content that incites outrage, since this drives engagement, which in turn drives ad $$$
Which goes to show that none of these social media companies are built on inimitable technology dominance, there is no technology moat, only a network moat.
Source? While it was apparently over $20B at the peak of its value, according to https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/DWAC it seems to currently be bellow $2.5B
That’s just the float of the SPAC, the merger didn’t go through yet. The prospectus says that after the merger there will be 193.4 million shares outstanding so multiply 193m with the stock price to get a pro forma market cap of $11+B
He can buy enough to influence Twitter management. If he can accrue roughly 20%, I imagine he can easily influence their 30-something CEO. At the same time, Twitter will become another meme stock for the r/wsb crowd. Elon will exit at a healthy profit. TWTR has been an underperforming stock for such a long time, it’s ripe for something like this to completely remake the company.
That’s very fair. Most people, regardless of age, would listen to Elon Musk especially in SV. I actually like Parag so it wasn’t meant as a knock on him.
It’s not my impression that the media calls every foreign billionaire an oligarch. i’ve never heard george soros described that way for example. oligarch has a connotation of being highly connected to the government, but the US government often seems actively hostile to Tesla
> the US government often seems actively hostile to Tesla
Literally every company he runs depends heavily on the government for funding. I'm not saying that as an attack - Tesla, SpaceX, and posibly Boring (too soon to tell) provide good products that should be supported by government.
But with that context it's very hard to say that the US government is "hostile".
The more you know. I'd always heard that he was Hungarian, but not that he was Hungarian-American and lives in Katonah, New York. Pretty insane that he has a reputation on the right as a foreign meddler given those facts.
Hm. My dad is a US citizen, born in the US, but grew up in france before he came to live in the US and I think most people would consider him foreign. But I see your point.
Except that he isn't an oligarch, he's an entrepeneur.
I suppose you could argue that he got rich with some support by the government (without the NASA contract SpaceX would not have survived and without the tax credits Tesla would have a hard time, too).
An oligarch refers to the fact that Elon Musk is one of the handful of people in this country with a huge amount of power. Anyone in the top 10 of the Forbes 400 is an oligarch by virtue of being on there, regardless of if they got their money by curing cancer or stealing it from babies.
Another way: oligarch described his current state, not the method of getting there.
Correct, an oligarch is part of a reigning elite. In any capitalist society where 10 people control more than 1% of the wealth of a country of 360,000,000 , those people are oligarchs. Let's leave aside that the list I describe includes people who control the majority of ecommerce and the internet cloud backend (Bezos), internet discovery (Brin and Page) and frontend (Zuckerberg) and work machines (Gates and Ballmer). 20% of the list is running private space companies to race to take over Mars or at least own space. One is even doing it as a hobby on the side (or was until recently.)
Musk bought a 9.6% chunk of Twitter because people say mean things about him on the internet when he says crazy things. And he's doing it for less than 1% of his net worth. That's an oligarch.
What are you talking about? I started my post with the dictionary definition of an oligarch. A member of a small ruling elite. If you don't think Musks wealth puts him in that class who do you think is an "oligarch". Because Musk has, and had before the invasion, more global power than any Russian oligarch, had more power in almost any western country than a Russian oligarch.
Don't forget the tie-in with a military or political angle. Also "gain control" is rather too tame. You want something more aggressive. Also, must always end with a possible threat whether it makes sense or not.
For russia.
Powerful oligarch loyal to putin seizes control of propaganda platform. Start of propaganda war on american people?
For china.
Powerful tycoon loyal to CCP seizes control of propaganda platform. Greatest threat to american privacy?
I can see the idealism behind this question, but imagine just how hard this could backfire in practice. People discovering to what extent algorithmic ranking manipulates them, and feeds the outrage machine.
And that's what glues eyeballs and generates revenue, so changing the algorithm would work against revenue.
We shouldn't be transparent because there would be insane SEO if we were. Social media needs to be a black box or the only thing you'd see if propaganda and ads.
They could open source older versions. It would still allow people to see close to what the algorithm is without seeing what is currently in production.
this is a pretty dumb idea. Suppose it happens, that'll simply give power to the programmer community to shove their algorithm, whatever they come up with, down everyone's throat. The key issue isn't that the algorithm is close source but it's a single algorithm.
People should be able to customize the algorithm (aka make their own algorithm). As long as that is possible and the options are clear, no one cares if it's open source or not.
Guys, Musk is simply buying the best marketing platform available for his companies (he's just ensuring a good position online)
And, meanwhile, any competitor is gonna have to pay "to be there".
One interesting thing is that unlike Paul Graham, who thought it was possible to launch a Twitter competitor in a month, Elon understands it’s not that easy to compete with or build a new Twitter. It’s not a particularly expensive company for its outsized influence in the world. Having said that, boy is Elon the wrong person to own a platform that should respect free speech and be neutral (understanding Twitter hasn’t had a perfect record on either front).
> Elon the wrong person to own a platform that should respect free speech and be neutral (understanding Twitter hasn’t had a perfect record on either front).
You don't need a "right person", just not a "wrong person". The vast majority of people are less sociopathic and less revengeful than Elon Musk. He's very high on a number of negative personality traits.
Off the top of my head and solely? Mackenzie Scott (Bezos)? There are quite a few folks who could create structures for shared (vs. sole) ownership of Twitter as a public good.
What does Mackenzie Scott know about anything other than running Amazon? She’s a busybody who involves herself in stuff that’s none of her business. E.g. knee-jerk donating to anti-Asian front organizations like AAJC just because #stopaapihate was trending and they had “Asian” in the name: http://nwasianweekly.com/2020/08/mackenzie-scott-billionaire...
Musk is an infinitely better influence on something like Twitter.
Mackenzie Scott will leave running the platform to the people familiar with it. That's exactly why she's the best person to own Twitter and turn it into a public good vs. Elon, who also knows absolutely nothing about running Twitter, but will no doubt intervene.
Twitter is already a public company left to its own devices. But free speech wise, what Twitter needs is intervention. Scott is plainly in the same bubble as the existing Twitter employees and can’t provide that intervention.
Free speech is the guarantee the government won't censor you. Just because Twitter shares are tradable on public markets doesn't mean they're a public utility.
Musk made his comments in context of social networks. In a digitizing world where all conversation is centered into a handful of platforms, those platforms become the free speech carrier, no matter who owns them.
Yes, you're technically correct, but it's irrelevant from a pragmatic point of view. A legal definition of free speech is worthless if said free speech cannot be expressed in the places where most speech happens.
This is a thing many people believe, but it's not an axiom. The balancing of interests an "intervention" to resolve this would require come at their own cost of free association, and the lines you'd have to draw to make new restrictions on e.g. moderation workable are treacherous.
You can argue that major platforms like Twitter are essential to free speech, maybe even persuasively. What you can't do is make your case as if it were a self-evident fact. It is not.
Hey. I am sure you know a lot more about this than I do, but just to let you know, your comment comes off as sort of petty and ill-motivated.
I've never heard of AAJC. You linked a news article that proves her donation but doesn't make the organization seem sinister. I search AAJC and I get a bunch of results that do nothing to tell me anything sinister. I check Wikipedia and there are a handful of political stances, some of which are expected from political NGOs. I can't find any indication that anyone views this organization as anti-Asian. Based on what I've found, I assume what you mean is that this organization seems to support affirmative action in college admissions, a position that sets them apart from many other Asian groups, and which you could argue hurts Asian participation in colleges relative to a race-neutral admissions standard. Again, I had to do research to figure out that was what you were thinking of, I couldn't read your mind.
I'm not saying you're wrong in your belief, or that you can't make the argument you're making, I'm saying short-circuiting the entire argument and just declaring it so is both intellectually facile and unlikely to inform anyone about anything. I've seen the same argument before when people on the right baldly assert that the SPLC is a "hate group" -- when what they means is some nuanced take on a particular political stance SPLC takes being disagreeable to conservatives.
But then that's not the only leap you make. It's not just taken as obvious that AAJC is an anti-Asian organization, and everyone knows that, and no one could think differently: it's also taken as an obvious conclusion that anyone who donates to them in spite of this must be an idiot dilettante who doesn't even understand what they're giving money to. I don't think that's a reasonable conclusion to draw. I think a much more reasonable conclusion to draw would be that Mackenzie Scott supports affirmative action in college admissions, doesn't mind supporting an organization that supports affirmative action in college admissions, and knows exactly what she's supporting.
Again, not trying to change your mind about the organization or about Scott, trying to encourage you to express yourself in a more useful way so that readers actually know what it is you're trying to say.
> Hey. I am sure you know a lot more about this than I do, but just to let you know, your comment comes off as sort of petty and ill-motivated.
That's fair--I was trying to avoid a lengthy rant.
> But then that's not the only leap you make. It's not just taken as obvious that AAJC is an anti-Asian organization, and everyone knows that, and no one could think differently: it's also taken as an obvious conclusion that anyone who donates to them in spite of this must be an idiot dilettante who doesn't even understand what they're giving money to.
I'll get to AAJC in a moment, but I want to address this first. My conclusion that MacKenzie Scott is a dilettante is based on timing. She donated a bunch of bunch of money to random racial justice organizations just a couple of months after George Floyd was killed, and again shortly after the "AAPI Hate" news cycle after the Atlanta shootings. But she has no track record of involvement with Asian communities or Asian issues in the past. There is no reason to believe she has any understanding of the issues facing Asian Americans, what they want, or who really represents their interests. She just up and decided to donate to a bunch of organizations purporting to represent minorities. That's the opposite of Bill Gates-style "informed philanthropy."
Ordinarily, uninformed donations merely risk being wasteful. In the context of identity-based organizations, however, they can be severely prejudicial to minorities. Asians, Hispanics, etc., all have specific interests. There are myriad internal debates within those groups about everything from policing to welfare. But wealthy white donors like MacKenzie Scott can effectively be kingmakers--their donations can completely drown out grass-roots support. And they create an incentive structure where the most successful organizations end up being the ones that make themselves attractive to donors like Scott, not the ones that are most effective at advocating for Asians or Hispanics.
> Based on what I've found, I assume what you mean is that this organization seems to support affirmative action in college admissions, a position that sets them apart from many other Asian groups, and which you could argue hurts Asian participation in colleges relative to a race-neutral admissions standard.
It's undeniable that affirmative action and movements to end meritocratic admissions hurts Asians. If Ivy League student bodies perfectly reflected the country's composition, you'd eliminate about 60-70% of the Asians. In Silicon Valley it would be over 80%. As shown by the voting on Prop 16, Asian voters oppose such measures even in California. In Virginia, the end of meritocratic admissions at TJHSST resulted in Glenn Youngkin getting half the Asian vote--a remarkable result given that almost all Asians in the state live in heavily Biden-voting liberal Northern Virginia.
It doesn't matter whether you think it's the right thing to do on the whole. If you're an organization purporting to represent Asian interests, it's unconscionable to support policies that reduce Asian representation and are contrary to what Asians themselves want. But AAJC goes further than that. They sought to overturn a federal district court judgment in Virginia that found that changes to the admissions process of a public magnet high school were "racially motivated": https://cases.justia.com/federal/district-courts/virginia/va... (p. 16). In that case, one of the Board members behind the policy indicated in a text message that the policy changes seemed to have an “anti Asian” motivation.
Can you imagine the NAACP ever throwing its weight behind policies intended to reduce Black representation, where there was evidence of "anti Black" motivation? That would never happen.
Matt Yglesias has written at length about organizations that lend Asian identity and political capital to generic progressive causes funded primarily by white mega donors like MacKenzie Scott. See this excellent article from Matt Yglesias about the "Asian" organizations opposing Andrew Yang: https://www.slowboring.com/p/yang-gang?s=r ("However, I think a more important point about Yang versus the activists here is that it reveals — and not for the first time — that progressive identity-oriented activist organizations often have very little connection to the groups they purport to represent.")
There is a long tradition of this. These organizations purport to represent minority groups, but by necessity work to advance the ideological interests of their mostly white benefactors. Yglesias references an excellent paper by Devin Fernandes at Johns Hopkins that deconstructs this phenomenon in the context of Ford Foundation using its donations to overhaul the Mexican-American Legal Defense Fund: https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/bitstream/handle/1774.2....
As Yglesias writes about Fernandes: "Ford funds MALDEF because it wants to do Mexican-American political organizing — but it wants that organizing to reflect Ford’s vision, which means the group needs to be somewhat insulated from the views of actual Mexican-Americans."
AAJC is also skeptical of hate crime laws because of their purported impact on other groups: https://www.advancingjustice-aajc.org/press-release/groundbr.... They have also adopted the rhetoric of anti-Asian groups in calling Asian values regarding assimilation, work, and education, a "model minority myth.”
Scott's uneducated and irresponsible philanthropy contributes to the disenfranchisement of Asians in the political discourse. Her donations to organizations like AAJC not only drowns out the voice of organizations who don't make themselves so attractive to wealthy white people. They enable AAJC and others to actively campaign against the interests of the Asians they purport to represent.
Very well said. There is a similar dynamic going on in almost every Asian activist group or non-profit in San Francisco. They reflect the interests of their funders. Some are the clueless wealthy like Scott but it gets much, much worse.
Many are funded by government entities under political control. They end up supporting whatever agenda the powerful politicians are pushing or else they risk losing that funding. Almost invariably this is not the same as Asian interests.
Currently the top issues in the SF Asian community are crime and education (and inflation and small business hassles to a lesser degree). This what everyone talks about. Yet the local Asian orgs have been counterproductive on all of these fronts and are actively support the politicians widely blamed for exacerbating these problems.
Really disheartening to see almost every SF Asian leader co-opted by the rich or powerful. Similar dynamic in other racial and affinity groups. Anyone with influence eventually sells out the people they have influence over. These orgs just institutionalize that transaction.
This is all very interesting, and I'm familiar with and have internalized Yglesias (and Shor's) take on the donor-industrial complex. But I'm still going to point out the obvious gap here, which is that you're holding Scott to a standard you're not holding Musk.
It would be one thing if your point was that billionaires should keep their grubby hands off of Twitter, but that's not what I see you to be saying here. You seem to just object to Scott being involved.
That whole "pedo guy" episode really showed us that Elon is just a another narcissistic bully who only really cares about anything up to the point that its about him.
That guy was an asshole and they were both assholes to each other. I would say the other guy started the conflict. And both don't come out looking very good.
And the other guy was a guy that pushed himself into the media light and made headlines and also not deserving any.
"Pedo guy" is not defamation, just an insult barked back at someone who told him to stick a submarine where the sun doesn't shine.
Not the classiest response, but nothing to cry about.
Considering we're talking about someone who's footing the bill to make significant innovation in multiple sectors, I still view him favourably. I disagree with him politically on a few topics and agree on others.
I hope it's not going to be like DuckDuckGo, which started like a service against Google biased / curated results and ended up manually hiding what they deemed russian propaganda during the latest war, effectively doing what Google was doing.
He insulted that man because he cast a shadow on his own useless and clueless "efforts" to help. But Musk wasn't helping, just doing cheap PR; the insulted man was actually helping.
That's despicable. He's an evil narcissist and a dangerous person.
"He's an evil narcissist and a dangerous person. "
This absolutist and judgmental attitude is what makes social networks hell. I wonder what your worst moment was and whether it happened offline or online, and how would you like to be judged for it by others.
It was not just a "moment"; he could have said that he misspoke and that he was sorry. But he persisted, and put up a nonsensical defense where he said "pedo" was a kind of nice nickname in his home country in his youth (which nobody corroborated).
He showed that what he wants is eradicate opponents and will stop at nothing. That's probably what has brought him where he is. But we don't have to respect it.
There's a big difference between saying "This was a low moment for Elon and an example of immature and rude behavior nobody should be proud of" and "Elon is an evil narcissist who will stop at nothing to eradicate opponents."
Elon was mean on Twitter. It's not like he paid people in the Thai government to frame the guy or something - which would seem much more "stop at nothing" to me.
I think it's basically the same moral fault, though maybe a slight difference of degree, to accuse a person of being a pedophile on bad evidence as it is to accuse someone of being an evil narcissist out to eradicate on bad evidence.
Musk has 80.9 million followers on Twitter. I have none. He's the richest person in the world. I am not. He publicly accused someone of being a pedophile, who was doing an actually good and useful job, not on "bad" evidence, but in the absence of any evidence of any kind, just out of the meanness of his heart, and then he doubled down on it, while also pretending "pedo" doesn't mean "pedo" (adding cowardice to malevolence). And this was neither his first time or his last. He also didn't help in any manner, his proposed "solution" did not work and only added noise to a difficult situation.
Also the insult matters. "Pedophile" is currently, in the English speaking world, the worst label imaginable. This was not just any insult, the kind one says when they're annoyed at someone in traffic for example. This was intended to kill. It was extremely mean. I maintain it revealed his true character.
It's true that Elon is more famous than you are and that makes his actions, and faults, more consequential - but I don't think it changes anything regarding moral faults. If 90 million people came and read your hackernews comment would your moral fault in accusing Elon of being an evil narcissist be made worse? It would be more consequential, but if 90 million readers read it or 90, your actions, and your moral culpability for those actions would remain unchanged.
Regarding "evidence" Elon's reasoning, if I recall correctly, was that an adult man moving to Thailand was inherently suspicious for pedophilia. Thailand has some reputation for sex tourism, especially of the underage variety. This is, as I said, bad evidence. Likewise, your belief that Elon is an evil narcissist who will stop at nothing to eradicate opponents is based on bad evidence - the mean/bad tweets.
Finally, I don't think that you reveal your character. I don't judge people based on short comments - at least not comments such as these. Just like I don't think Elon's tweets were especially revealing or damaging to his character I don't think your comments are that meaningful for your character.
He wasn't just mean on Twitter, he also paid a private detective and emailed journalists making specific claims about the guy. And after emailing journalists that they should expose the pedophile he then claimed in court to not actually have meant that the guy is a pedophile... sure. "I lost my cool and said something stupid on Twitter" would've been one thing.
Do you have any examples of Twitter arresting or imprisoning people for speech, or acquiescing to government censorship? Perhaps you are instead to moderating their private platform and enforcing community guidelines? I understand the latter can be annoying, but it is a mistake to conflate the two, as free speech is something very special and important and in the US is in fact codified into the Bill of Rights.
TL;DR free speech is between you and the government, not between you and someone else or some other company.
Free speech in terms of the first amendment is about government censorship, but in todays society with only a handful of giant media and tech companies controlling the vast majority of information flow, then free speech takes on a the second meaning about corporate or private censorship. It may not be illegal, but that doesn't mean its ok. And for the record, I do no support completely unmoderated media - that would be a nightmare. Free speech in both forms are, and will always be, very tricky things to deal with.
> then free speech takes on a the second meaning about corporate or private censorship
Then the government should pass laws stating that these private corporations are no longer able to moderate their own platforms as they see fit. There is no "second meaning" without concrete legal precedent.
In effect, large corporations are like secondary governments in how their actions, policies, and decisions affect our lives. That's what the second meaning is about - its not a legal concept, but rather how things work and feel in practice.
Should it? Should free speech be extended beyond the bounds of government and if so doesn’t that contradict its original meaning by making the government restrict who should and shouldn’t provide uncensored free speech?
Free speech never began with governments. The 1st is a prohibition on government interfering with the freedom of speech. That's the problem with this whole debate, most people have everything backwards. Free speech is a concept, an ideal that underpins the entire concept of a healthy, free, fair and open society.
> What about slander and libel laws or laws about claims made in advertisements?
Yep — here we're getting into Prior Restraint. It's both against the law to restrain free speech such as lies, but as you rightly point out, this speech can have other legal consequences.
My position is that the moderation and content policies ("community guidelines") that private companies and individuals have is also a form of expression. For example, this explains the legality of op/ed pages of newspapers publishing the viewpoints which they choose to, and omitting others. You could sue Fox News or Twitter for censoring or omitting your viewpoint, but this case would not and, in my opinion, should not, be successful.
But how much, if at all, should a public company, without a single owner actually have. And if so, who should decide what the stances are? I mean the very people that now suddenly defend "private" property rights are generally the same who argue against personhood for corporations outright and in total.
When major corporations stop receiving billions of dollars of my taxes and special legislation and other carve outs and also don't openly court being agents of political parties then i can start treating the difference seriously.
(the term gets thrown around a lot, and has been devalued into meaninglessness by the Russian government, but it does have a legal meaning in Germany and France)
Yes, their "denazification of Ukraine" propaganda, expanding from the presence of some far-right militia activity in some places to justifying the mass murder of civilians.
That and its excessive use on social media renders "Nazi" mostly useless as a descriptor, outside of those groups that explicitly and deliberately reference Nazi symbology and ideology.
> expanding from the presence of some far-right militia activity in some places
Note: smaller than that of the same ideological but different geopolitical alignment that Russia has been sponsoring for years (Azov exists, but it's smaller than Sparta) in the same conflict.
I didn't mean the russian propaganda. I meant the western media that had branded anyone with the most milquetoast traditional views as nazis for the past 7 years. The fucking canadian truckers were branded as fascists, for fuck's sake. did NSDAP protest against COVID-19 vaccine mandates too?
>some far-right militia activity in some places
FYI, those guy with wolfsangel and black sun insignias and swastika tattoos are not a militia but a legitimate unit of Ukraine's national guard
They claim to be a platform, not publishers, so they shouldn't be able to invoke publisher rights and be the judge of what can or cannot be published. Let the government do this mediation. Twitter should let people ask a judge to issue content take downs based on the law and just comply with it.
"Twitter is _not allowed_ to remove porn, spam, doxxing, or death threats without a court order (of what jurisdiction?)" would immediately collapse into goatse chaos.
It's shocking how many otherwise smart people are naïve about this. Even those who have been around the Internet long enough to know full well what happens with any text box (or worse, image upload) offered.
That's up for debate. Modern communication is so monopolized by twitter/FB that the argument of "they are a private company" no longer holds.
We can bemoan Russian interference in the elections all we want. But the power Twitter/FB hold is far more impactful on domestic and international democracy than any russian agent every could be.
Imagine a scenario where Twitter and Facebook lose their ability to unconditionally moderate the content of their platforms. Presumably they would need to check with government censors first? Again, I understand how annoying moderation can be! I just don't understand the alternative and I do not see how this alternative is not a huge violation of the First Amendment — this would precisely be the government telling private companies what they can and cannot publish.
Well, one alternative would be that they have to decouple their front-end and back-end and provide open APIs to their backend (posts/tweets, friends lists, etc.).
Facebook/Twitter can moderate/censor whatever they want on their own front-ends, but they can't remove anything from the backend.
People/companies can build alternative front-end apps that access the fb/twitter graphs and censor in a different way - so that users have an alternative.
No, it's not. If you want corporations to be beholden to the first amendment then pass laws saying that private companies can no longer moderate their platforms, full stop.
Everybody knows that building a competitor is not the hard part.
Elon could build and own 100% a competitor to Twitter for much less than the 3 billion he spent to get 9% of twitter.
The problem is getting the competitor to have traction.
For that you need to have the idea for a differentiator that will hook people, and unlike engineering talent you can't buy this!
> Everybody knows that building a competitor is not the hard part.
Everybody knows this? Truth Social needs to be told. The app can barely launch, and got a head start forking Mastadon as far as we know. They have hundreds of millions (a few billion?) in capitalization.
Everyone knows people who haven’t actually tried tend to underestimate the difficulty in other’s work.
To be clear, nowhere did I say the engineering is the hardest part.
> For that you need to have the idea for a differentiator that will hook people, and unlike engineering talent you can't buy this!
I have an entire bookshelf of books about how to do this, but I’ve never been asked about it during a coding interview. I think it's less of "you can't buy it" and more of that no one values it.
That's hard to answer because there are so many different types of books. E.g. I like this one a lot, it's basically a summary of the most important academic papers about what makes online communities successful:
But I also like Seth Godin's books a lot, e.g. All Marketers Are Liars, Free Prize Inside, and Purple Cow.
A lot of my reading on web stuff has been vaguely in those categories though, in terms of either academic research, academic theory, digital ethnography stuff, psychology and sociology, marketing theory/praxis, plus whatever I've read on design and UX.
I would say the single book that founders in the tech industry would benefit from reading the most is probably Punished By Rewards by Alfie Kohn. I feel like every other startup puts themselves out of business by fucking up on the super basic things that book discusses. I end up having to explain it to people all the time.
Truth Social launched with a real differentiating message compared to Twitter that appeals to a lot of people, had massive media coverage and is fronted by one of the most prolific and famous Twitter users in history. Yet by all accounts it has effectively zero traction.
Hes very much pro free speech why would he be the wrong person? He doesn't have to become the CEO anything if he has enough influence trough his shares he can push twitter to be more open about how it make stuff trending and prevents other stuff from trending etc.
There is no doubt hes not happy with the current way Twitter restricts speech which is heavily biased and so he wants to change that.
Stuff like Reddit or Twitter should be public services or at least non-profits.
Edit: Why is this downvoted? How does it make any sense to have them as public, for profit, companies, when we all know what happens when their growth stops? How sleazy they all become? Heck, they're sleazy as-is. Who here likes where Reddit is headed, for example?
What does this mean or rather what does this look like? When I see these I never understand if it’s for or against governmental free speech. As I understand it , services under governmental control are under even more free speech restrictions than privateer services since they have a duty to crack down on whatever values a government is beholden to (anti-porn, anti-illegal activity, anti-Anonymization). What is the end goal here?
Ok, non profit then. Have some neutral org not chasing profits improve what it has instead of shoving dark design patterns and closing APIs in order to sell more ads.
What is “neutral”? As I see it your target 3 different things here.
To be honest interpolation is something that will be ripe for abuse by actors like 4Chan just because they can. I’m not seeing a way to ensure the banning of users while allowing interoperability that isn’t solved already by email.
If the solution to this is to not allow the banning of users, then how does one combat things such as child porn, revenge porn, etc.
I'm not for decentralized solutions since I don't think their UX can scale. Theoretically maybe they can, but in my eyes it's a P=NP hard problem right now.
I'm also not for absolute free speech, so yes, users should be banable in case of abuse.
The main thing I'm against is the fact we're taking for granted various methods of online communication (Twitter like broadcast, Reddit-like centralized forums, plus I'd actually put WhatsApp like instant messengers here). And they should just be dumb pipes.
They shouldn't try to add a ton of smart features they sell to <<other companies>>. Because their incentives are out of alignment with their direct user needs. They will serve whoever pays them instead of whoever uses them.
The classic enterprise software dilemma which in that case creates functionally horrible software. For online software it creates morally horrible software, instead.
interoperable protocols are arguably more important.
ActivityPub is a W3C specification at the Recommendation stage, which basically means it's ready for production.
This would allow groups like, oh, house.gov to run their own platform and assign every congress person their own interoperable user account (AOC@HOUSE.GOV for example) and it works pretty much the same way email works.
The problem is, companies know these and they subtly sabotage these standardization efforts.
Look at the web. Desktop UI toolkits have had solid components since the start. From the late 80s and early 90s. The web is maybe getting them universally in 2024.
I mean, it's great that we have standards, but can you really afford to wait 30-40 years? I'll be frank with you, if you're a professional in our field, 30-40 years is your entire career. Many people in IT actually retire even earlier or move up to management and basically out of regular IT, after 5-10-15 years.
And people can only care so much. Heck, many Open Source hackers move on after 5-10 years. Only a handful last 30 years.
Faster moving standards are a sort of utopia, it seems.
DeSo / Bitclout is a company that had rebuild Twitter on top of a blockchain and its just not that good. The whole Twitter UI paradigm is so 15 years ago.
Stating his aspirations and actually following through is something else entirely. If we went by what he aspires, we’d be on our second human mission to Mars with fully autonomous vehicles.
Elon has the emotional stability of my 13 year old cousin, and changes his mind as often.
Having goals that can not be reached in time doesn't mean his goals are fake or that he doesn't mean to achieve them.
There is zero sign that his support for free speech is a spontaneous idea that he will lose interest about in a few month. And there is also no way to achieve it but certainly there is plenty room to improve with Twitter.
That's quite a cynical take, and plainly incorrect.
He is still actively pursuing those goals, they are just very difficult projects. Objectively he has done more for promoting space travel than most any other individual today.
He has his flaws sure, but people generally admire his willingness to pursue bold aspirations with extreme tenacity.
He tweeted about it after he'd bought the stock but before that knowledge was public, which I think is further proof that Musk is somewhat disingenuous.
Lots of people have high hopes about this development. However, the funny thing about all this is how the center of power is somehow moving to big tech - meaning that the rich guys with the big yachts are kind of in charge of The Show. Does that remind anyone of those Russian oligarchs? I mean, i mean that there's some kind of pattern here: the oligarchs get to run the show, then there is some sort of crisis, the oligarchs pick some side kick from the province to fill in the vacancy of frigging dictator, however the dictator eventually manages to kick out all of the oligarchs... Happened in Germany, happened in Russia, will you get something like this in the States too? (the problem seems to be that ollies have a problem because they lack legitimacy, they therefore tend to delegate power to some dictator, who they think can be controlled on their part, however eventually this turns out to be a miscalculation)
Appreciating how funny it is that a buying a platform for emitting 140 char messages was the way to get short narrative.
It's a huge channel with a very poor and constrained platform under it, which I suspect is the opportunity. However, the only way to unlock it is with leadership who still want to grow for real, instead of keeping it leashed as a zero-sum political tool. If I were to speculate on what makes this a Musk super-play, Twitter seemed on the path to collapsing under the weight of all the fucks its managers and keepers have had to give, thus destroying the value of a historically unique channel. The best way to use that huge channel for real good and value is to open it up to users to build on and get out of the way. It's something he's almost uniquely capable of driving.
Twitter has an important use case for journalists, politicians, governments, announcements, etc.
There should be some way to preserve neutrality and not have one side find a "terms and conditions" clause to remove the opponent's viewpoint, cheered by the supporters of the opposite. It's silly politics, in the most abstract use of the word. It's like corporate politics.
It does seem like most of the hostility are in the replies to things. The one-liner quips, the arrogance, the condescending sarcasm, and the sometimes outright name-calling. It's amazing to watch how your fellow adults behave when there's no one physically in front of them.
> not have one side find a "terms and conditions" clause
Those are the rules of using the platform. Not sure why enforcing the rules would be considered a bad thing. If you don’t like it, advocate for changing the rules.
Seems far more inappropriate if Twitter were to selectively apply their T&C out of deference to some and not others.
Twitter doesn't even follow their own rules though. I don't know whether it's purposeful or just that their moderators aren't competent, lacking critical thinking, and lacking oversight; I have seen tweets that were cause of account suspensions that clearly didn't fit under the reason given for the suspension.
If no one in the hierarchy at Twitter cares about integrity of actually even following the rules, or isn't capable of making sure they're applied properly, then there will continue to be problems.
I really, really hope this is a sign of big changes. Board takeover, C-Suite cleaned out, Coinbase company culture installed, open algorithms, open moderation, removal of company bias. That would be incredible.
I'm amazed there's so much fervor around this move, and guesswork with regard to Elons strategy. This guy throws billions of $ around for the lulz. He probably doesn't have one.
He is probably trying to take down the flight-tracking bot (https://www.protocol.com/elon-musk-flight-tracker). Funny how he talks about Free speech on twitter while actively trying to take down a twitter account.
> He is probably trying to take down the flight-tracking bot
Anything is possible, but this doesn't make a whole lot of sense given that it would have cost him just $50K to do it rather than the price to purchase 9.2% of Twitter.
> Funny how he talks about Free speech on twitter while actively trying to take down a twitter account.
"Actively trying to take down a twitter account" is a hallucination at this time.
Either way he has consistently used heavy-handed tactics to silence the speech of those he disagrees with. From attempting to destroy the life of a whistle-blower [0] (seriously, take time to read this article) to cancelling the order of a blogger who made negative remarks about him [1] to firing anyone who disagrees with him [2], Musk is a man that repeatedly abuses his power to silence anyone's speech he dislikes.
buying a seat at the court of public opinion would certainly allow one to press for rosier dispositions, albeit 9% is far from the standing of grand arbiter.
Anyone who thinks he is doing it to remove the flight tracker is dumb. It is literally based on open-source data and anyone who can be a threat to Elon can likely access it without following that Twitter account.
Indeed, there is no stopping this in the current global aviation regime.
This might be a good opportunity to advertise ADS-B data collection: websites like flightradar24, flightaware, adsbexchange are powered by thousands of volunteers that collect and upload ADS-B radio transmissions broadcasted by aircraft. Most of the collection goes through an RTL-SDR dongle, so if you have a raspberry pi or some other machine that's up 24/7 - consider contributing! Minimal radio kit for signal reception (RTL-SDR+simple antenna) costs somewhere around USD50. It's also a good entry point for learning SDR and radio in general.
There is the new Privacy ICAO Address (PIA) program [1] from the FAA that somewhat adds a layer of privacy. It's not perfect by any means, and you can piece together the data to figure out the actual identity if you're so inclined. However, it does provide a little bit of a buffer.
> Q: I live in XYZ, can you use another feeder there? Where can I see if you need more coverage in my area? Etc.
> A: The answer is simple. If you live on planet earth, yes, ADSBexchange.com could use a feeder at your location. The map may look like you see aircraft in your area, but the truth is you can’t see what you can’t see. To detect aircraft with MLAT, we need a minimum of 4 feeders to receive data and the more receivers see it the better the MLAT accuracy. If an aircraft is low altitude, feeders may have to be within a few miles.
I would also add what each individual site will not say explicitly: with a little bit of Linux configuration skills it's easy to upload to multiple aggregators at once.
You need a radio that can receive the ACARS frequencies, VHF around 130 MHz in the aviation band. It's a simple FSK over AM, like an old-school modem, so you just pipe your radio's audio into a software decoder. There are direct SDR approaches these days too. e.g. ADSB Exchange has a ready-to-go SD card image for Raspberry Pi if you have an SDR which can receive the relevant frequencies. https://www.adsbexchange.com/how-to-feed/
ACARS is something else, it's like SMS for aircraft. Also interesting data.
But this thread is about location: ADS-B (dependent broadcast) and to a lesser degree MLAT (secondary radar interrogation response), both of which primarily operate on 1090MHz.
With an unmodified RTL-SDR you can receive both, not at the same time and you'll want to swap antennas since the ranges are so different, but still :).
PS. The RTL-SDRs used for ADS-B often feature a modification: an analog filter centered at 1090MHz, which removes all other data but makes the 1090MHz reception better. You shouldn't have the filter if you want to play around on other frequencies with the same device.
Even if your area has coverage, adding radios increases resilience and may help triangulate the position of aircraft in other radio modes. You can also check the data yourself instead of depending on commercial sites, e.g. with tar1090.
Going through airport security, on the other hand, sucks. When you fly on a private jet you just walk up and toss your bag to the pilot. If you're a billionaire, you likely don't even do that. No tickets, no security theater, no waiting to board, etc.
And you get to set your own schedule. Even business class, you can't do that. Even the most popular routes rarely have more than a flight once every 2 hours. So you might waste 1 hour 58 at the airport waiting for the next one.
When you’re a very fancy person, you have a separate area of the airport and a different way on board. You can still fly commercial and not have the usual airport experience.
Not surprised. Though we've seen senators going through security so I'm not sure what the lower threshold for 'fancy' is. Still can't escape the schedule or having to fly with commoners of course.
Fun anecdote: friend of mine's dad is a ~billionaire, and not only does he still fly commercial, he flies coach. And has family come pick him up from the airport. Epic tightwad. Never spends money unnecessarily. To his credit, he also works at the local soup kitchen once every week like clockwork. How he does that while maintaining a 90 hour a week schedule, I have no idea.
Senators probably don’t cross the threshold. You gotta have a lot of money and a lot of status with the airlines. Also likely not all airports will have/do this.
I also have a billionaire friend who only flies coach. Personally I think he’s a moron for doing so, but respect that he’s so cheap. You generally keep your wealth by being cheap, but realistically business versus coach won’t fundamentally change anything. It’s more the principal.
To catch you in a bit of pedantry, "Air Force 1" is the designation of any aircraft the president is on, so technically, yes? If the vice-president is flying I think it's called "Air Force 2".
Every aircraft carrying the President is Air Force One, every helicopter carrying him is Marine One. Even if it would be a US Airways flight from Baltimore to Chicago.
In practice, yes. Pedantically, any Air Force aircraft carrying the president is Air Force One, no matter how it flies. Any Marine Corps aircraft will be Marine One. And as you might expect, there would be an Army One and Navy One as well.
I do not believe you are correct on the designation for a commercial flight if the president were on board. There is 'Executive One' if he flies on a US civil aircraft, but that is still federally owned.
Very interesting... from the article, in case others were also wondering:
> On December 26, 1973, to "set an example for the rest of the nation during the current energy crisis" and to "demonstrate his confidence in the airlines", then-President Richard Nixon became the only sitting president to travel on a regularly scheduled commercial airline flight when he flew on a United Airlines DC-10 from Washington Dulles International Airport to Los Angeles International Airport.[2] A Nixon aide carried a suitcase-sized secure communication device on board the plane, so that the President could remain in contact with Washington in the event of an emergency.
If your bank account statement was publicly available would it be though? Because that's where they are getting the flight records they are rebroadcasting.
Elon’s flight records are public, but the account aggregated them and made them available to the public in a different form.
A better example would be: a Twitter account reports your position when you are in a public space every five minutes, including pictures of you at the bar, jogging, on a date at a restaurant, etc…
All of these are public informations, but the way they are aggregated amounts to stalking in my opinion.
No, free speech just means that the government does not restrict your speech, it has nothing to do with what a private corporation does. Twitter can censor anything it wants and it does not impede free speech at all.
Your are mixing up the first amendment with the broader idea of free speech.
The 1A (roughly speaking) limits the scope of the Government as not too limit free speech.
Twitter, as a private company, is not restricted by the first amendment. However, one can note that Twitter does not allow free speech.
This is quite important from a legal standpoint, because since Twitter practices censorship of ideas they don’t like, they are no longer considered a common carrier.
No, I am not mixing up anything. The broader idea of free speech is just an idea, it has no legal basis. The only legal basis is the first amendment. The only Justice that seems to think common carrier applies to twitter at all is Thomas and his neutrality appears to be very suspect at best. Twitter was never a common carrier, the Trumps Right wing simply wants to paint it as one. I think it appears you are misunderstanding what a common carrier is, if they are not a common carrier, they have no requirement to enforce free speech. Twitter is not and has never been one.
Free speech is a very well defined concept, as done by literally hundreds of political science scholars. The fact that the US Constitution applies it only to the Government does not mean it cannot be discussed in a different context. For instance I would like new regulations to extend free speech outside the scope of the First Amendment. This is an extremely well defined politica stance.
You seem to agree that Twitter is NOT a common carrier, and then it must be treated as an editor. This would imply that they are responsible for the tweet they decide to publish.
These are exactly the far-reaching legal ramifications of free speech (outside Government) that I was mentioning.
What you are discussing in regards to free speech is again, by your admission, just a concept, not a law. All that matters is the law. Until its made law it has no bearing on the actions of a company. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act means that whether you want to call them an editor or whatever, legally they are not responsible. The law is the law until it is changed, everything else is just an opinion.
I think we may have a failure to communicate. This entire thread is predicated on you stating that
"This is quite important from a legal standpoint, because since Twitter practices censorship of ideas they don’t like, they are no longer considered a common carrier. There are huge legal ramifications of this!" That's the entire central premise of the discussion. You are the one that brought up the legal aspect of it. Anyone can discuss anything in a conversation, it still does not change that its only a conversation, it does not affect the laws that govern how a company can be run.
Edit: Note - I am not blaming you for the communication breakdown, it seems that perhaps we were both coming at this from different sides and may have missed each others points. Either way, wish you all the best.
Yet clearly targeting a single aircraft with a single high profile user.
The fact that the information is public is not a perfect defense, by combining public information, clearly associating it to an individual, and publishing this to a large audience, you can create a sizable threat.
This idea that things break down at scale is an ongoing issue in society. People get up in arms over things like red light cameras and speed cameras, for instance, which I think points to serious systemic issues. If we as a society can't tolerate the uniform application of a law for example, maybe the law should be changed. If there are issues with this data being public, the rationale for the data being public in the first place should be challenged, not the downstream providers who utilize that data.
I generally agree, but this is really not the horse I’d hitch my wagon to. They’re publishing public information about the richest person in the world! He absolutely deserves far more scrutiny than you or me.
Scrutiny yes, stalking no and this is getting uncomfortably close to the latter.
I understand the argument that this could be used to show potentially dubious behaviour, but that could already be shown from the flight records if it occurred without publishing live details of every single flight. That's simply not necessary.
The flight tracking data is also partially a public good. Didn't it show him asking workers to come in against California sherrif's office order and then fleeing in plane so he couldn't be arrested in California (from early pandemic, might be remembering some details wrong), essentially asking his employees to face jail while dodging any chance of it for himself?
Conversely, don't become a public figure if you can't handle the costs. This kind of stuff comes with the territory. I don't advocate stalking public figures, but I have more sympathy for random private individuals being stalked than I do people who willingly choose the spotlight.
Yes, of course. And they made a choice willingly, knowing that there is a price. Can't have the upsides of being famous without the downsides, they are a package deal.
Would it be any different if they were tracking his car? Does tracking an object owned by a person somehow make it any better? What's next, Musk's TV viewing habits? Browsing history? These are just things and not the person, so it's ok, right? No, of course not.
The comment I responded to was about tracking the person. A person's viewing history is different from their automobile being reported in a public place. Steve Jobs disliked it so much that he would regularly lease cars to avoid having a permanent license plate that could be associated with him. [0] TV viewing habits and browsing history are not public activities occuring in plain view of everyone else.
Despite the overwhelming evidence of horrifying massacres done by Russian troops in Ukraine, Twitter is a sea of Russian accounts, showing alternative stories. How the killing and rape of 10 year old children discovered today, were done by Azov regiments and not by the retreating Russian troops.
If he is the majority shareholder, and still has apparently free time for another venture, maybe he probably should start there, instead of his own peeves with Twitter.
>Despite Elon saying his stake in Twitter will be "passive," he will actually wield huge power at the company now. Elliot Management managed to get two seats on the board, change the company's business priorities, and arguably push Dorsey out as CEO with just 4%
>Twitter doesn't have the dual share structure that gives founders ultimate control, like other tech companies of its generation do, so this is real power. Elon could end up not caring or being too distracted to actually change the company, but if he wants to he can
If his plans are to turn twitter into an untouchable free speech zone, then twitter's in a world of pain.
We've seen from the past 4 or so years with QAnon, anti-vaxers, flat-earthers etc, that free speech to the wrong listener can be weaponised. If you make twitter censor-proof, all you'll get is a bigger trash fire.
I was sad when I got kicked off Twitter, but it possibly ended up being the best thing for me. Damn twitter is a toxic place... and if Elon turns it into censor-proof cesspool, I give the platform 5 years tops before it becomes yet another social platform that nobody uses anymore.
Could not agree more. What conspiracies theories have taught us, and yes, I realize this is still an unpopular opinion, is that free speech is overrated.
Free speech, like everything else, needs regulations to work. This is hard, and maybe impossible to do well, but the alternative (no regulations) leads to chaos. Not just chaos of discussion: chaos of society.
Those "opinions" are heavily inflated by bots and other fake accounts. I've observed this behaviour around 2012 on Youtube comments, where the usual tinfoil nutjobs kept running several accounts at once and artificially upvoted their fantasies and downvoted any criticism. It happened on multiple videos on very specific topics from respectable sources. Usually moon landing, 9/11 and so on. It's pretty much the same now on Twitter. It's just the scale that's different, and apparently also the professionalism behind it.
That's the problem, yes. I fully agree with your point. Just wanted to add some observations. Every community needs some form of "censor", or as we called it back in the day: "moderator". Just to keep things civil.
The only way to stop bots, or at least lessen their impact, would be to make verification via ID (passport, drivers license, etc) mandatory. But that opens up a whole other can of worms.
Another thing i noticed is, that many people don't seem to know what "free speech" actually is. Maybe it's different in the US. I can only speak for the German version of it. It's to protect you from prosecution by the government. It is not a free ticket to attack others and it doesn't protect from criticism.
I'd be perfectly happy to put up with the rampant bot problem forever if it meant the censorship problem went away forever. And don't pretend censorship is actually even an effective solution: remember that today we have a bot problem and a censorship problem.
I think you have the wrong interpretation. Harmful narratives forming is not the failure here, that is an old "problem" with free speech. [0]
The problem Twitter emphasizes is that free speech and anonymity do not work at scale. Pre-internet, speech always had a degree of accountability because you know who's saying what. Now, you don't know if you're engaging with with an ad team, a bot-net, a trained cohort in another country, or just your dumb neighbor's political views.
The reasonable netizen has to assume the majority of what you see online is manipulated and fake. We can't fairly say the worst parts of twitter are purely a failure of free speech.
That being said, its an age old battle which system is better: one that is free, open, optional, and sometimes gets it wrong or one that is closed, managed, unavoidable, and can't be reviewed when it does get it wrong.
I think people should stop saying today's context is "Shouting fire in a crowded theater" and instead compare today's environment to "Everyone in the theater shouting fire every second throughout the whole movie while everyone smokes a cigarette"
the point is, there's a difference between "shouting fire in a theater" vs. "russian agents disguised as patrons shouting fire in a theater with the express purpose of causing chaos and harm"
Real "free speech" is hard and prohibitively expensive to maintain.
But if we can accept that there's not "right" without "wrong" or a coin's "tail" without a "head", we can sympathize with those we deem unworthy of "free speech".
What’s wrong with being anti-vax? Should we kick off the anti-GMO people as well? And QAnon is like the left wing boogie man. Anyone complaining about it sounds like a left wing Alex Jones. It’s silly.
It's factually incorrect and unhealthy. Plenty of science out there on the subject. Bans can cause backlash - it's better to just leave Twitter yourself so as not to be exposed to that particular "reality" which is not at all similar to the one that exists in meat space. Or, at least, to admit that you may be incapable of deciphering truth from fact with that much misinformation around and so many others happy to believe it without applying rigorous examination, vetting sources, etc.
Also, believe it or not but there actually are people who believe the Qanon nonsense. It's been widely reported on.
A very material number of people believe in that stuff.
More broadly - misinformation is very real.
It's 'silly' to believe that somehow the truth rises to the top. People believe the story that makes them 'feel' a certain way, and will deny the reality in their faces.
I'm on RT and watching Russian commenters indicate that all the 'dead bodies in Bucha' (near Kyiv) were Ukrainians killed by Ukrainians as a 'false flag'. Others say it they are not real. Other say actors. Others say it doesn't exist.
In 2022 you can just make up your own reality and spread it on Twitter, and that's dangerous.
QAnon is "real", or at least real enough that it keeps coming up in indictments of Jan 6 people. Whereas Alex Jones libels the parents of murdered children.
Imagine what he spent on "x.com" getting back from his founding paypal in 2017
I'm convinced over the years he is some kind of weird "man who fell to earth" trying to fund something weird. (now I need to go watch that movie again, the cool original version with Bowie)
Agrawal: "Our role is not to be bound by the First Amendment, but our role is to serve a healthy public conversation and our moves are reflective of things that we believe lead to a healthier public conversation,” [1]
Musk: "Sorry to be a free speech absolutist" [2]
Investopedia: "Large shareholder blocs can therefore vote to fire a member of the board and replace them with somebody else for perceived mismanagement, ineffectual governance, or malfeasance." [3] The Board hires the CEO.
There is a great amount of envy that drives many people’s opinions of Elon. Sorry, but that’s how it appears to normal people who don’t care or spend much time worrying about musk or trying to “take him down.” Pretty cringe tbh.
Maybe this will lead to twitter employees leaving. I think a total change of management is needed, and if employees don't like it, then they should quit. Twitter is harming society by silencing speech.
Good. Hopefully he fires the CEO, Parag Agrawal, who infamously doesn't care about free speech. I know this is a business, but Twitter is a virtual town square now, and I expect these tech giants to at least pay lip service to the ideals which built modern Western societies.
People seem to forget that the absolutist free speech approach is something we tried for about a decade and it hard absolutely terrible results. If Musk comes in and starts throwing around more of that it'll simply be a matter of letting Musk relearn the mistakes that industry already made (which to be fair, is something he's done in plenty of other industries - the failure of the solar roofs, the boring company etc)
Society is a collective problem, not an individual one. It's fine for me to turn off Twitter but if suddenly my neighbor starts electing neo-nazis because they've been radicalized by far-right fake content mills on Twitter then we've got a problem.
And this is especially a problem on social media, because everyone sees a different algorithmic feed - which means I might not even know that my neigbour is being slowly radicalized. It's one thing if Tucker Carlson starts praising Putin, we can have a conversation in public about what Carlson thinks and whether Russians committing genocide should be praised. It's out in the open for us to see and discuss. But if Alex Jones' clips are being drip fed into the newsfeed of people without ever facing the scrutiny of public discourse we have a problem. This was very well established by Youtube, and eventually addressed to some extent by youtube.
Do we think Musk is going to have thought this through, or are we going to see more "Move fast break things".
Unfortunately the real world doesn't work like that. If misinformation about COVID persuades large numbers to avoid the vaccine, and the hospitals get clogged, that invariably impacts me. If misinformation persuades the population to elect a populist, that invariable impacts me. If climate change misinformation persuades the population to block the transition to renewables, that impacts me. If hate speech galvanizes the population against my ethnic group, which causes a 300% spike in hate crimes against that ethnic group, that impacts me.
I am not talking about absolutes (at least I wasn't attempting to). The person talking about absolutes was the person I was responding to, not me.
I have no right to complete silence in my apartment block, but I do have a right to not have to listen to my neighbor's loud music at 3am in the morning.
I have no right to never breathe in second hand smoke, but I do have a right to not have to breath it in inside small enclosed rooms.
Our society and the law makes these kinds of trade-offs all the time.
Also, the issue isn't people having to read the speech, it is the speech negatively impacting people (sometimes severely if you are an Asian person that just got knifed on the street) in indirect ways. There is this false belief that speech can't be mortally harmful unless it's a direct call to violence, which I hope we can dispense with since the evidence doesn't line up with that narrative.
I agree that information can do harm. I wouldn't even consider that an opinion, rather an observable fact.
"Harm" is very fuzzy though. Twitter's extremophiles call reading something they don't like "genocide". So basically, anything is harm. Harm can be real, imagined, perceived, understated, overstated, direct, indirect, grasping at straws.
Further, any matter of importance or division has no clear-cut right or wrong. There's always a gray zone.
Yes I agree. The people who go overboard like this are dangerous in their own way, and I'd say are even more dangerous than the free speech absolutists who insist on constraining private companies in a way that is actually anti-1A.
What I advocate for is basically what we have now. Non-governmental, voluntary and minimal censorship of things that are likely to cause outsized harm in the real world. Also called moderation. I want these platforms to voluntarily remove ISIS propaganda, outright hate speech, election misinformation, and a few other categories, and otherwise allow open discourse. These are all slippery slopes (especially election misinformation removal), but that shouldn't resign us to simply throw up our hands and allow Kremlin propaganda to destabilize democracies.
But here's the thing: you aren't qualified to act as the arbiter of what constitutes 'misinformation'. No one is.
You may rail against this because asserting an (unearned) claim over objective reality - what is true and what is false - is advantageous in spreading narratives favor to your personal interest. But let's be clear: that's all it is, and that's all it will ever be.
The corrolarly of this absolutist perspective is to allow Twitter/Wikipedia/Arxiv/Facebook/HackerNews to become 8chan, which is a reductio ad absurdum of your position that all ideas are equally valid, objective facts can't be agreed upon (or perhaps don't even exist) and one can't possibly design a good moderation system. I reject this position on purely empirical grounds, simply contrast the tightly moderated HackerNews with the unmoderated sewer that is 8chan.
I was explaining why your worldview of non-violent speech having no negative impacts on others is misguided, but instead of engaging with that point you decided to withdraw into immaturity and sarcasm. Have a good day.
I cannot pretend that I understand his motives for any of his actions, be it buying a 9.2% of Twitter, or tweeting something strange. No more than I can understand the motives of my next door neighbor who mows her lawn twice a week in the summer.
I think the premises which many people hold about Musk are based on their own personal experiences, which are undoubtedly far different than those of Musk. Given that, I suspect the conclusion which they draw about him are likely incorrect.
But, I too enjoy the pastime of trying to imagine what Musk is up to. So far I work from these premises:
Some things I like to ask myself when his name inevitably comes up:
* Is he being stupid?
* Is he promoting something? If so, for who's gain?
* Is he lying?
* Did he let the wrong thought out of his head and piss people off?
Nobody in his position would be too thick-skulled to see that his biggest fans aren't the sharpest tools in the shed. Consider how he's treated his own employees, and ask if you think he's above poking and prodding his cult following to his own ends or entertainment.
If Elon gets them to become an actual free speech platform and drop all right wing censorship, he will be my hero, and I will become a Tesla SpaceX shill for the rest of my days
Elon Musk always said that he owned basically nothing other than the stock in his own companies. So was this the real reason for his recent TSLA sell off? He told everyone he was doing it to pay taxes. Which I'm sure he did. But I wonder now if that was a clever and expensive ruse to throw people off the scent!
There's a very dry official twitter called KremlinRussia_E, which posts his diary, pretty much. This is ~equiv to WhiteHouse, which Twitter obviously didn't nuke. They banned Trump's _personal_ account.
That account still spews misinformation, encourages continued invasions of Ukraine, and condones violence responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians. These are in direct violation of Twitter ToS but they only enforce that when its politically convenient.
For better or for worse (personally I think it's for worse, but I am not King of Twitter), Twitter has (formally) adopted a policy of extremely high tolerance to the twitter accounts of public bodies and government officials. Note that Trump lasted until there were legitimate questions over whether he was using it to encourage the violent occupation of a government building, rather than being evicted years ago like anyone normal would have for the sort of things he said on a daily basis.
You are going to leave a platform if a certain person is allowed the right to speak there? Have you tried Weibo or VKontakte? Those seem like the sort of sites you'd enjoy then.
I'm waiting for some Musk tweet, the requisite outrage from an impassioned subset of the populace, a quick-witted Musk response, followed by the new title:
??? Trump came within inches of putting enough pressure on politicians to throw the election for him. Were he to have more support, which is entirely elicited via platforms like Twitter, than the 30% of Americans who believe the election was rigged and 'Trump Won' - would be 55% and we'd have a constitutional crisis, it would be very, very bad.
It's oddly naive to fail to understand how this works because it seems pretty obvious.
Why does anyone think that the US, Japan, UK etc. could not fall into the same trap other nations are in?
Russians right now believe Ukraine is a giant country of Nazis, and that the hundreds of dead bodies showing up after their Army withdraws are people killed by Ukrainians as a false flag, or they're actors, or fake, or 'it doesn't exist'. If the lie is big enough, and you keep telling it, it can be real.
Reality matters as much as anything else.
We probably need a constitutional amendment on that frankly.
Exactly. Propaganda works. Not just social media but traditional media. Thirty years of nonsense anti-EU stories got the UK out of the EU. Arguably we already fell into that trap. Hungary have re-elected Orban.
> We probably need a constitutional amendment on that frankly.
Unfortunately you really cannot legislate for this, except in very specific cases like constitutional amendments against Holocaust denial. And even then there's plenty of ways to power that let it be changed or neutralized.
France, Ireland, the Netherlands voted against ratifying the treaty of Lisbon, which gave considerable sovereign to the EU. Sarkozy adopted it anyhow. EU leaders decided to forgo any form of referendum in the rest of Europe, because they knew they would lose.
It was one of the most blatant anti-democratic acts in all of history.
That's just the tip of the iceberg.
Paradoxically, the amount of Pro-EU propaganda and complete lack of both understanding and questioning of the institution is staggering.
It should be noted that at this very moment of crisis, the EU actually isn't providing leadership, rather individual EU nations are forging their own momentum: Baltic states + Poland are closing their borders, dumping Russian Oil, Macron is 'talking' to Putin (not Von Der Leyen), and from a military perspective the EU has no relevance it seems.
So no - that's the opposite of a good example and why we'd have to be careful about legislation.
CNN, Fox, MSNBC, are all full of propaganda and misrepresentation - the issue has fundamentally to do with material reality.
We can actually probably legislate against misinformation, that might be possible but probably not 'propaganda'.
For example: making unproven claims about medical technology - already there's health reasons for that, imagine how that would apply to vaccine misinformation? It might require skeptics to be very deliberate about their skepticism, which for example is fine, it's what we want. But they can't run around arbitrarily saying 'it causes cancer' etc..
For elections, if you want to make claims of 'stolen' you might have to provide evidence.
Perhaps if we treated drugs and election standing like individuals, who can be subject to slander and 'sue' their antagonists, there might be something there.
> I will leave Twitter forever[1] and it will be a pity.
Who cares and just leave.
Twitter is beyond repair and it will still just keep running to the ground regardless. Where it is currently going (unless Musk does something) it will never change and it will only get worse.
Also, who cares about Trump these days. He has his own platform anyway and even if he does get unbanned (which is highly unlikely) just block him and move on.
The Taliban, Khomeini, Putin and many other war criminals have Twitter accounts screeching on the platform and I don't see you complaining about leaving. (yet)
Better make that search for an alternative soon then.
Putin himself isn't on Twitter. The Kremlin has an account that's managed by a team. That's not comparable to Trump's Twitter account who had his personal account and @POTUS.
Putin's position is unaccountable to voters, he isn't losing the Kremlin's twitter account through an election, for all intents and purposes it is his personal twitter account, worse actually because it comes with the machinery of government behind it.
You’re not going to get in trouble on Twitter for stating a general fact. However, you will sometimes get in trouble if you’re using thinly veiled talking points that are intended to deny the claimed identity of millions of people. It’s mean spirited and hurts others. Hopefully this helps you understand why it’s a contentious thing to post.
I don't agree with you. For me , no longer feeling free to state the simple biological definitions that I assign to the words "man" and "woman" is absolutely the first thing I think of when someone mentions freedom of speech. On Twitter and off.
Unless you're personally trans or transphobic, what is it about those words that make them the most important thing to you when it comes to freedom of speech?
They're not remotely what comes into my head for that subject, and I can think of many things where freedom of speech is far more important to me than which words are used in which ways to define sex/gender/etc.
Is it possible that you too have allowed minority interest groups to convince you that trans people are the next big threat, just as gay people were decades ago, and that's why it's the first thing you think of? (Not a rhetorical question, I don't know anything about you and hopefully you're completely not transphobic! But many transphobic people don't consider that word to describe them yet do fall for and repeat explicitly transphobic agendas...)
You keep framing this issue as if it only affects trans people.
The biological definition of man and woman is a category that's pretty relevant to everyone. And pulling the rug out from under a biological concept, and then saying "Oh how strange that you all are thinking about this, it must only be because you are a transphobe, or a pervert" is an extremely disingenuous argument at best.
I asked a genuine question of why it matters so much to you (and explained that it was a genuine question because I dont feel it matters to me) and you haven't answered, instead you've just accused me of not caring about your view.
Please enlighten me if there's a non-transphobic reason to care what pronounces my next door neighbour uses.
And nobody is talking about pulling the rug from biological concepts - they're remaining the same regardless of what language we all use. "Male-born" and "penis-having" for example are (and I've no idea if these are the best / commonly accepted terms, this isn't an area I know much about) and I'm sure plenty of other related terms can still describe exact situations if you're wanting to think about someone's genitals while using their pronouns.
But unless you're a doctor about to operate on me or somebody I want to have sex with, I probably don't care if you know what genitals I have or don't have nor do I understand why you'd think it important to know.
It's not about genitals per se! Genitals are mentioned as a proxy for the concept of biological sex. I think you know that, but are pretending not to. So, by all means engage in debate with us about whether it's reasonable to use the words "man" and "women" to refer to the biological sex concepts; but please don't pretend the argument is about genitals: it's the concept of biologically-defined sex that's been attacked, not the concept of genitally-defined sex.
I'm not saying all this talk about genitals is a great idea; it's perhaps a bit inflammatory and juvenile. But that's not the point here.
Dear fellow HN users: please do not flag things simply because they are representing a stance that you disagree with; we should use down-voting for that if we have the karma. This post does not violate our guidelines:
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There are many good reasons why one might want to refer to a person's biological sex in conversation.
For example:
"Why is that man being allowed to compete in a women's sporting event?"
"Why is that man flashing his penis in the women-only area of the nude spa?"
"Why is that man calling himself a lesbian and haranguing actual lesbians for not being sexually interested in him?"
You repeatedly attempt to put words into people's mouths.
GP never said those words were "the most important thing to (them)". If anything, they seem more concerned that if they "state the simple biological definitions" will bring up people exactly like you, accusing them of the transphobia and potentially getting them banned (on a platform like Twitter).
You are not well-intentioned at all in this discussion: there was no reason to go on the banter to the extent you did.
I'd understand it if you said that we are at a time where we are challenging those definitions as they used to stand, as long as you recognize that "definitions", by definition, are prescriptive and need to be agreed between people to make them widely accepted. So I can define whatever terms I want the way I like them, it does not make them so unless I can get enough people to start using them that way, or ideally included in one of the well-known dictionaries of a language.
> what is it about those words that make them the most important thing to you when it comes to freedom of speech?
As ramblerman says, it's because it's a fundamental biological concept that's central to my existence as a member of Homo sapiens. It's absolutely unacceptable to me that I or anyone might not feel comfortable stating that we (surprise!) adhere to the traditional definitions of the words "man" and "woman". I don't really understand why you think something so fundamental doesn't matter.
When I said "freedom of speech" I'm not referring to legal rights. I'm referring to whether or not the nature of our society is such that holders of divergent views are not subject to shaming or ostracization by any substantial subgroup, as long as their views are politely and respectfully expressed.
That’s seems dumb to me. Now I question under this “freedom of speech” should I be allowed to make that first sentence ? For all intents and purposes I am “shaming” your view. Flagging would be arguably ostracizing.
Would the inability to do this mean my own freedom of speech to shame your views would be infringed? It seems like an unsustainable paradox to me that falls apart in various use cases that cannot function in society as we know. At least not if we seek to ban/prosecute things such as child pornography, revenge porn, libel, etc.
I've been thinking about this. To be honest, you're not the first person to tell me that my usage of "freedom of speech" is incoherent. I think, when I say "freedom of speech", what I really mean is perhaps more what you'd call "open mindedness". Specifically: I do not shun or disrespect the progressives with whom I work. I don't try to police the language that they use. I feel unwelcome on company chat channels because everybody is expressing progressive viewpoints, so it hardly seems like it's going to go well to say "Hi, nice to meet you. I'm a liberal but I'm, um, not actually on board with all this woke stuff". But I don't even hold that against them most of the time, I just try to forget that the people I'm working with might also be expressing intolerant woke views on the #general chat channel.
So what I'm looking for is for them to extend the same respect that I extend to them, to people like me who don't share their views. And they don't: they are so certain that theirs is the only correct viewpoint.
Not commenting on the particular issue that the GP used to illustrate their point about free speech but because Elon has definitely raised concerns about censorship on twitter before their comment is relevant. A sizeable stake in the company should presumably give him some influence in determining twitter's policies.
(Also, I think your comment breaks several of the 'In comments' guidelines)
You're right my comment does technically, but in my defence it wasn't responding to a good faith discussion about free speech, it was responding to a bad faith transphobic talking point. But yeah I could've made that point more politely.
It's not transphobic to point out material biological reality.
This accusation gets thrown around far too easily these days; it's really losing its power. A few years ago, if someone was accused of saying something transphobic, I'd think, wow they really must have said something horrible like a slur or an abusive remark.
Nowadays, I just assume that they mentioned a previously uncontroversial fact relating to biological sex.
This is already allowed on twitter, along with lots of other "cancelled opinions" (despite any stated rules to the contrary - they do not take action against such posts). One of the freedoms you have in many parts of the internet is being able to express regressive opinions like that without being banned or having your posts deleted.
You might wanna look up the The Babylon Bee (Satire) twitter incident.
"Allowed" doesn't mean anything on Twitter. People get punished for thing that do not break the rules including obvious satire.
Elon is completely right Twitter has lost common sense when in comes to enforcing their own rules.
> The science of basic human biology is now a “regressive opinion.” Stunning.
Your lack of medical knowledge is just as stunning.
Not only does intersex exist (yes, humans can indeed have both primary sexual organs, though it's rare), there's also a plethora of conditions that blur the line, from De la Chapelle-Syndrom to Swyer-Syndrom. There's chromosomal-, gonadal-, hormonal-, and anatomical variations that are part of "basic human biology" yet result in individuals that cannot easily be classified by vagina=woman and penis=man.
I've seen this argument a few times, but I don't think it holds up
The majority of trans people have/had functioning genitalia. Gender identity isn't restricted to the set of people outside the crudely simple vagina=woman penis=man classification
There's a spectrum of opinion which is easier to consider with hair color identity as opposed to gender identity
If there's blonds & brunettes, the existence of redheads doesn't mean blond vs brunette is moot. & don't even get started on dirty blonds. But if a blond dies their hair brunette, are they blond or brunette? Their roots still say blond. But they put much care into dying frequently enough that the roots aren't visible. So society accepts them as brunette. Meanwhile the more pro-identity group will argue that not only is the blond brunette, but has _always been_ brunette[1]
The latter argument is much harder to defend, & from what I can tell arguments tend to do one of two things:
1. both parties focus on arguing against the weakest arguments of their opposition, leading to two parties talking past each other
2. both parties shift the argument to the most debatable point either way, which can often shift the dividing line of for/against to be at some extreme as opposed to in the generally accepted gray area between the extreme & the counter
Full disclosure: I'm fine using people's preferred pronouns even if I believe in biological gender (ie I don't believe pronouns need to be tied to biological gender, because while I generally need pronouns for everyone I may refer to, I generally don't care about their genitals). That said, I mostly find gender roles a hassle; being a man who has enjoyed wearing a dress & putting on nail polish doesn't mean I identify as a woman
[1] out of politeness one may not want to make a point of randomly pointing out that a brunette haired person was actually born blond, even if they don't believe they were always brunette
Despite the messiness of biology it is, has always been, and always will be a reasonable statement to say that "boys have a penis and girls have a vagina". That really shouldn't need saying. Of course, the meaning of the statement depends on the meaning you assign to "boy", "girl", as well as "penis" and "vagina". But in the semantic/communication environment in which we operate, the statement is reasonable because most people define those words such that the statement evaluates to usually-true. And usually-true is what we work with in biology and language; it's not computer science, it's messy, so approximate language is appropriate.
Sounds like laying the groundwork for stock manipulation. There is a subtle threat there, that he might dump those shares if people vote that Twitter is not a free speech place.
Never gonna happen. Mostly because there's no freedom respecting, free-as-in-libre stock exchange that RMS would be okay with using. Not to mention I'm sure he doesn't like the idea of being a twitter shareholder.
The interesting question is whether said value is based on one of his insights/visions that most others seem to lack, or whether he is outright deluding himself because of his Twitter addiction.
Of course he sees value in Twitter. He may not like it, but he would be a moron to not see the value in it. Heck, half the reason he has so many fanboys is probably because of his twitter antics.
This again goes to show what a kleptocratic symbol American media platforms have become, and serves as an argument against those who think private entities such as Twitter and Facebook should be outside the scope of first amendment and amended of section 230. Billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Elon Mask, Bill Gates, Pierre Omidyar hold a large share of manny media platforms, it is hard to imagine how the same organizations can serve as a check against the powerful which is supposed to be their jobs.
And some 80% of that are retweets or replies, not original tweets.
Most people do not use Twitter at all. When they do use it, it is mostly read-only. When it's not read-only, it's most retweeting stuff.
You can't deny that Twitter has an outsized cultural influence, but the underlying reality is sobering. It's not a "speech" platform for the masses as no actual speech happens by the masses themselves. If the retweet button were to be removed, the platform would collapse.
It's not surprising that the masses don't post. You can't express yourself on Twitter due to the character limit, so all you can do is witty superficial takes. Threading and replies are a disaster making a structured discussion impossible. These two things alone make the platform useless for most speech purposes.
And let's not forget the sour atmosphere of extreme hostility, permanent outrage, bad faith discussions, smearing, doxxing, cancellations, the culture is terrible.
Back on point, I think Twitter has a far bigger problem than a free speech problem. There is very little speech and it excessively rewards the most unreasonable speech.