I have to admit this is a bit surprising from Musk. I was pretty firmly of the theory that his real motive re Twitter was basically narcissism, and I'm still not sure that's wrong. I note he's not agreeing strongly with Dorsey, with the strongest phrase being "I'd like to help if I can".
And I still think he would be better off using any money he might have spent buying Twitter on funding a handful of open source competitors instead. The most charitable reason I can think of for trying to salvage Twitter for this grand goal of fixing web communication is to keep the network effect of having everyone be there. Would that even be meaningful in a real transition to something with a totally different architecture?
>I was pretty firmly of the theory that his real motive re Twitter was basically narcissism, and I'm still not sure that's wrong.
Why is it so hard to believe that Musk genuinely believes in exactly the version of "freedom of speech" that everyone in his generation grew up with, that served as the impetus for much of the internet's creation, etc.?
Well personally I don't believe that because I watched his ted talk and it didn't seem like he had spent more than a few minutes thinking through the specifics of what his implementation of free speech would mean.
It seems like a lot of people (Rogan, the Thiel guys, Calcanis) are coming to him talking about free speech, and he kind of nods along, but I didn't really see anything that demonstrated his own passion for the topic. He seems primarily motivated by a belief that Twitter is poorly run as a business, and that it will be difficult or impossible to turn it around as a public company.
Because this viewpoint isn’t consistent with his actions; he has a long history of retaliating against anyone who criticizes him, including attacking journalists and threatening them with lawsuits as well as firing employees who raise issues within his companies.
Your comment is baffling. You ask, 'How is "retaliating against criticism" contradictory to free speech?', then spend the rest of your comment explaining why it's good to not retaliate against criticism.
Did you mean to ask and answer your own question? If that was your intent it sure wasn't clear. Do you not know what "retaliate" means, even with the context clue of threatening lawsuits against journalists? Is your first paragraph meant to be entirely causally disconnected from the rest? If so I kind of have to respect it, but it would sure help to give us some clues because that is not a conventional writing structure. What, in short, are you trying to say?
Retaliation with the intent to silence critics is acting to undermine free speech. He could, for example, welcome the criticism and respond with facts.
Which is full of honestly ridiculous examples like "he told an analyst to shut up and stop asking boneheaded questions." Or "he told his followers to edit his wikipedia page" ...?
The "best" examples are of workers are are currently in litigation.
Everything else, I see no reason why one couldn't support free speech on a social platform while also requiring beta testers to sign NDAs.
>welcome the criticism and respond with facts
Do you have examples of where/when this could have been done?
At the end of the day, I feel like a lot of this just comes from the fact that when one supports free speech, it comes with a *. It's easier to say "I support free speech" vs "I support the idea people should be able to post their opinions online without being banned (this doesn't mean anyone can post live execution videos or organize crime, etc)."
I feel like this response deliberately avoids the point I was making, in favor of kicking up confusion.
He grew up on the internet. At a time when everyone was turning their internet web pages black to protest censorship. At a time when "the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" was a slogan touted proudly by technologists and philosophers.
It's not Elon Musk that changed, it seems to me. It's the cultural values on the internet that have changed, and arguably not for the better - more control, more censorship, more centralization.
I don't know how much you remember about the transition from BBSes to the internet, but the heavy handed moderation of FidoNet is one of the exact reasons we all flooded into UseNet when it started to become available, and most likely a big part of why "FidoNet" is consigned to history's dustbin despite being, at one time, the most popular forum discussion system.
Because if that's his real motivation, it's more efficient to build a competitor. It would probably be even more efficient to put polish on existing competitors like Mastodon. Buying Twitter is one of the silliest possible approaches. Thus, skepticism.
It’s likely 99.9% of Twitter’s user base does not care about this issue. Would be hard to build a product that is compelling enough to overcome the extreme network effect of something that is arguably a utility.
network effects are overcome all the time. all the social networks are dying sooner or later. even facebook is panicking because they're losing the next generation and instagram is panically trying to emulate tiktok or whatever because they have _something_.
I agree that most social media networks have been cyclical, but Twitter seems to stand the test of time. Maybe not with the youngest generations, but Twitter definitely hasn’t seen the exodus that Facebook has.
Even if you require ID, the internet will always feel less personal.
This started because of anonymity, but it could very well be embedded into the culture by now. Just because we feel that 'things on the internet do not count'. That is caused by anonymity; but also obscurity of your actions; the impersonal connection; the fact that you are communicating to the entire world; the fact that your interlocutor is someone you barely know, a lot of 'bad' digital communication is the first and last time two people are talking at each-other; and the fact that a lot of communication on the internet is largely performative because it is public.
In summary, removing anonymity alone will probably not get close to fixing things.
Anonymity is a design choice of HTTP. What if there were a different protocol where the users are never anonymous. You never have to transmit ID in that case because sockets are only established between trusted end points
I don't think so at all. He's posting it here because it's one of the few places remaining on the internet free of advertising and outside bias (mostly)
Musk and his team put together a fundraising deck and were actively looking for investors. It was never vanity for Musk. The deck was pretty clear about what Musk thought Twitter could become.
And I still think he would be better off using any money he might have spent buying Twitter on funding a handful of open source competitors instead. The most charitable reason I can think of for trying to salvage Twitter for this grand goal of fixing web communication is to keep the network effect of having everyone be there. Would that even be meaningful in a real transition to something with a totally different architecture?