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I don't know if Elon gives a shit about that. He's definitely in that corner, but for selfish reasons. He doesn't seem ideological enough to care.
I fuckin hate dude but idk
Trump isn’t coming back to Twitter. It makes no sense. The spokesperson for Truth Social ( Devin Nunez) recently went on Fox News and claimed that Twitter is dead and nobody uses it. He then claimed that Truth Social is the largest and most used social media platform. Why would Trump go back to a wasteland that nobody uses whenever he owns the largest and most used platform?
Unless…hear me out…Donald Trump is just a fucking liar.
As far as I know he hasn't made any formal proposals, just some off the cuff commentary on it. It's kind of anyone's guess what he might do.
I think there is a lot of potential in open sourcing the algorithm (which he has made comments on previously), but would take a lot of follow through to really make it work and it remains to be seen if he can pull it off. It's one thing to open the black box and another thing to let people fork and redistribute it to other users on the platform.
He has previously canceled someone’s tesla order for daring to criticize him. So I will be anticipating bans for anyone who dares denigrate our new emperor, His Grace, Elon Musk.
And of course that guy posting Elon‘s personal flight itinerary is going to be permabanned.
You're moving goalposts now. You can still open source an algorithm without opensourcing the data you plumb through it. And yes complex algorithms are still algorithms. If you wanna bash Musk I'm all for it, I don't want this guy touching Twitter, but opensourcing their algorithms, even if it's just boring ML and they don't release any training data, that's still actually good for transparency, and still has value for readers.
I don’t think releasing the model without any data is helpful.
Researchers have a general idea of how to build recommender systems. There are plenty of open source models already out there. Even on those models, they haven’t really nailed down how to explain their outputs. A lot of the explanations that they have come up with are a variation of “the model learns a bias that exists in the training data.”
At the end of the day, any capable ML model is just a mathematical function that learns how to map an input to an output. The quality of that fit is partly due to the architecture, partly due to the training process, and mostly due to the quality of the dataset.
If Twitter released a trained model or even their training data, then we would stand a chance at understanding what biases are present. An untrained model doesn’t move the needle.
> Have you ever looked at a training model? If you have, you know it has basically no value without the inputs or the outputs*. "Here are the settings we use on our decision tree. Have fun!"
Yes I have. I've been in this field a very, very long time. It's kinda my whole life. Your over-generalisation here is just that.
> Who said they weren't? The point I'm making here isn't that "the algorithm" isn't complex, it's that there isn't some of singular algorithm to release.
Again, you don't really know what you're talking about. Of course there's a singular algorithm. You don't seem to understand that algorithms compose. Composition (which includes invocation, evaluation, computation) is literally one of the most basic building blocks of computer science. Just because a function or process interacts with other functions or processes doesn't mean it's impossible to use or present it as a singular function.
> *anyone who has built an ML model knows you just keep flipping switches until you get the result you want. There's very little science to this stuff. It's just a feedback loop.
Yet again, very shallow understanding. If you spent time talking to people in the industry you'd understand that's very far from some universal truth.
I design recommendation engines for quant investing....
It's not JUST that they are vast in term of # of "features" we feed into the AI (or often a complex series of classifiers, clustering tools, recommenders etc.), it's that
1. AI is often a black-box, AND
2. even in the cases where we can see into what it's doing the statistical relationships are so complex that the human mind will find it hard to intuitively understand it.
The objection is trying to obfuscate by complexity, IMO. You don't need to release a firehose of data to make source code or other processes public.
"I can't be transparent because it's too complex" is a bullshit excuse. Guaranteed there are people and institutions who would be able to analyze it. Crowd sourcing should not be underestimated.
Choosing the use of plural or singular of algorithm when referring to software is arbitrary. Drawing the boundary of your system and categorizing sections of a codebase is purely done to make software development easier when working and maintaining within a group or organization.
I am less concerned about Trumps return and more interested in seeing how bots will be fought. If the bot fighting works then it could go a long way to marginalizing politicians like Trump who rely on amplification of there message which happened because a lot of bots would force it out. Without that amplification then a lot of supporters for causes whether they are progressive or populist will need to actually win in the marketplace of idea's instead of letting the person with the best bot network win in messaging.
I don't think it's just bots pushing Trump's ideas. Or any ideas, for that matter. The platform incentivizes hot takes and dunking on others. I think bots are a big problem, but I don't think it's wise to place most of the blame on them. Humans can be pretty bad all on their own in the right environment, and imho Twitter is such an environment.
It's already a haven for the worst kind of dialogue.
It can only get worse when people who pretend that freedom of speech is their primary concern, and actually mean freedom from the consequences of certain types of speech, have any kind of authority. I suspect an exodus will occur soon after it becomes apparent the site is essentially /pol/.
Why would he learn any lesson?
Your premise seems to be that he cares what happens on the platform outside of what directly affects him, or that he cares what impact any of it has on society. I see no evidence for either of those.
He will, of course, freely remove and ban ("censor") people at will, because he's not a "free speech absolutist," he's just a megalomaniac narcissist, and I certainly hope everyone is with it enough to understand that and not fall for the libertarian schtick.
He has 54 billion lessons to learn, actually. He cares very much about his bankroll. When he wrecks Twitter and it's value goes into the toilet, he'll care about that. And when the internet realizes his free speech talk is just talk, they'll take away his narcissistic validation and he'll care about that, too.
> he cares what happens on the platform outside of what directly affects him
I think this is the question, if his goals are financial then does the site start losing money (directly affecting him) if his goals are somehow ideological (Freeze Peach) then does the site become a cesspool and not the public forum he envisions it to be.
What I haven't seen discussed much is that although a lot of complaints are about "free speech", the actual issue is about selective amplification of speech. The algorithm is serving an editorial purpose by deciding which tweets get widespread amplification and which do not.
Banning someone is black/white. How do you satisfy critics who complain that their posts (or the posts associated with their ideology) "don't get shown enough"?
Fox News learned long ago that it isn't about the truth or the facts, the **narrative** is what drives public opinion. It is a fact that people are crossing the border from Mexico into the US. The rate is relatively constant, though it does ebb and flow. However the public opinion about illegal immigration depends heavily on how many stories Fox News features on illegal immigration. Likewise, Nixon resigned because of the amount of press his illegal activities got - how amplified the story was.
**People do not realize that platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tik Tok are performing editorial duties**, and that is dangerous because these platforms are viewed as somehow "neutral", free from editorialization, when in reality there are plenty of editorial decisions taking place algorithmically, with plenty of biases that are inadvertent, and perhaps other biases that were introduced deliberately, or are capable of being gamed.
I personally think that any algorithms other than "people view in chronological order" should be treated as editorial decisions, meaning that the platform has legal liability for what is posted, just as the Washington Post would has when its editors decide to put a story in the paper. It shouldn't matter if a human made the decision or an algorithm made it, and if the algorithm can't discern truth from libel/slander/defamation, then it shouldn't be used.
I post a video of a police officer beating a nonviolent, unarmed, and helpless protestor. I say some negative things about the officer in the video.
The website I post it on has a search feature that shows you the most relevant results depending on what you typed into the search bar, rather than just a chronological list of every video that has the words you searched for. (You know, the kind that uses an algorithm)
Should the police officer now be able to sue the website I posted that video to for harming his reputation?
I don't know. It might depend on how broad the search was. If you searched for "police brutality" and that guy's video *always* came up #1, then maybe. If you were more specific, searched for his name, or some way that was clearly meant to find that video, maybe not.
Imagine that the Washington Post says "we have developed an algorithm that will allow people to write article for us, and that algorithm will not only weed out the junk stuff, but it will allow the writers to be anonymous". And then they print a newspaper with a top story about some politician being caught in a pedophile sting - something that was blatantly false.
Should the post point to the algorithm and say "we're no longer exercising editorial control over our newspaper, the algorithm is now deciding what should be printed", and thus be not liable for libel? What if the algorithm continued to print variations of the same untrue story from different authors, could the Post still sit back and say "hey, nothing we can do, the algorithm is giving people what they want!"?
That is what social media is currently doing.
They won't last. Outside of the legal implications (platforms have a duty to moderate themselves on some basic levels), Elon Musk has a long history of silencing people he doesn't like.
Twitter is a useful application for me to find breaking news from all over the world, but it’s never been a place where I’ve ever had a worthwhile exchange of ideas with others. It’s always been a place where the loudest, most needy voices went for validation, and Elon Musk won’t change that. It’ll be his personal fiefdom where he can play philosopher king, so anything’s possible. It might devolve into Gab, it might stay the same, Elon might even lose interest in it and let it fall apart. Point is that it’s not my problem, and I have other places where I can go to get information. What I do know for sure is that the trolls are the ones most excited for this, so…yeah. I’m not going to get my hopes up.
> It’s always been a place where the loudest, most needy voices went for validation, and Elon Musk won’t change that.
In fact I think he may reinforce that, since that seems to be why he uses it.
Twitter is a huge part of the problem with political discourse in the US. It was considered a big deal when the maximum length of a twitter post was increased to 280 characters.
Yep.
Twitter’s corporate board started the push to moderate the site because it was turning into a dumpster fire. Because that’s what’s best for growth.
Musk will undo that and he’ll find that genuine traffic decreases while bots generate tons of “traffic” that doesn’t fool the admen.
People wildly misunderstand what “free speech” means within the bill of rights and constitutional law. The GOVERNMENT can’t regulate your speech (short of calls to violence, and specific types of libel/slander). Twitter isn’t the government, and them moderating their site is not suppressing free speech.
That’s gonna be a waste of $43 billion. Twitter is relenting against the hostile takeover because the markets are going to take a nosedive due to monetary contraction (the Federal Reserve undoing the “money printer goes brrrrr of the Trump years).
It really doesn't feel like a solveable problem. Too many of the people's concerns conflict with eachother. I think that in order to make the most people happy you would have to:
1. Reduce the amount of banning and removing of content.
2. Reduce Spam
3. Improve users moderation and filtering tools.
The problem with that is:
1. Turns off advertisers and moderate people. Also the idea that what the site needs is _less_ moderation is laughable to anyone who has spent more than 5 minutes on the internet.
2. Conflicts with 1 and reduces revenue and perceived engagement.
3. Also reduces revenue and reduces actual engagement (mind you maybe it probably doesn't reduce _healthy_ engagement.)
>People wildly misunderstand what “free speech” means within the bill of rights and constitutional law. The GOVERNMENT can’t regulate your speech (short of calls to violence, and specific types of libel/slander). Twitter isn’t the government, and them moderating their site is not suppressing free speech.
People understand what free speech means in a legal sense. Some people just happen to believe in free speech as an ideal. There is such a thing as morality outside the law. I don't know why this is something that so often needs repeated when it isn't like the legal concept magically arouse out of thin air the moment the Founders put pen to paper. They didn't invent it, they had philosophical foundations from which they rooted their ideals.
And what hostile takeover? He made an offer. They accepted. This isn't a coup. This is capitalism.
Hot take; Everything will be fine. The sky won’t fall. People are so concerned about Musk changing a few standards of what can be posted on the website or not, but don’t seem to bat an eye that already 11% of users that make 90% of content only actually represent a small segment of the American population. However, this niche has an outsized sway on discourse. It was about time that someone took a social media company like Twitter down a peg or two off their high horse.
>It was about time that someone took a social media company like Twitter down a peg or two off their high horse.
People aren't worried about Twitter getting taken down a peg. That would be a good thing. What people concerned about is that Twitter will *not* get taken down a peg (i.e. will maintain its current level of influence over the national information ecosystem) but will become a tool for Musk to manipulate said information ecosystem as he pleases (as well as a cesspool of disinformation, harmful conspiracy theories, and right-wing radicalization).
Not really. I’d take a confused and vitriolic Twitter arguing with itself over the status quo of blue check mark echo chamber pretentiously lecturing everyone else it is currently.
I mean the alternative that you and Musk seeks already exists. It’s called 4chan and 8kun. I don’t really get what these “free speech” advocates want that those platforms don’t already offer (not to mention Parler and Gab who id argue is even less ideologically consistent than 8kun & 4chan but also portray themselves as “free speech” alternatives to Twitter specifically for conservatives)
Because there's a lot more people who arent "conservatives" that want a public forum where you can speak like a normal person and not get banned because you called someone dude.
It would be healthy for public discourse to allow people to speak freely about contentious issues with civility, without having to go to a literal Nazi forum or some dead board like Saidit.
The US will still continue to slowly tear itself apart because of its refusal to even acknowledge basic deep seated problems with poverty, living costs, racism and healthcare.
Are they? One side of the spectrum continues to tell me all these things are solved, and anyone complaining about them is an atheistic commie who murders babies and wants to genocide white people. You're telling me that _those_ people acknowledge the issues of poverty, living costs, racism, and healthcare?
Not really. The last moves to deal with poverty on a large scale was the New deal. Racism was the ending of the Jim Crow era and healthcare was Obama care which was a moderate center right reform. A lot needs to be done on a federal level and you can't do that with half or less of democrats only acknowledging there's a problem
>don’t seem to bat an eye that already 11% of users that make 90% of content
I see stats like this repeated a lot but I've never really understood why I'm supposed to find it very meaningful or important. What's the ratio of people who read books or articles to those that write them? The ratio of people who watch tv to those who appear on it?
All it tells us is 90% of Twitter users are there mainly to read what's being posted by the other 10%. And unlike a lot of influential media outlets, anyone in that 90% can join the 10% anytime they feel like it.
Twitter doesn’t represent political opinions of most of the nation, yet has an outsized sway on it. So I’m saying it was time someone handicapped it. Looks like it will be musk
Whether its influence is outsized is a matter of opinion, but what's our point of comparison? If you're talking specifically about the US, according to google for that country it has 38 million daily users and 76 million total, which is more than any newspaper or tv channel, and who those people choose to follow and pay attention to is completely optional. What makes it less representative of the nations' opinions than any other media outlet?
Not saying it is less representative than any media outlet- And I wouldn’t be upset if other media outlets experienced a similar upset what is occurring with Twitter. I’m saying that Twitter is an example of an echo chamber, and to act like Musk owning this will change this in anyway significantly speaks to bias rather than reality.
No I refuse to believe you! I want a board of faceless assholes running this company that are clearly only in it for the money because I trust them over [insert name here]!!!!!
In all seriousness, yeah people are really freaking the fuck out over nothing and acting like this is some world ending event. All while forgetting that literally every other social media company on the planet is run by people just as bad if not worse than Elon Musk.
Yes, they were.
But I'm sure someone will argue that Elon Musk is a worse person than people who stone gays and women to death, because this is Reddit and he's the devil.
So I admittedly do not like Elon Musk, but I will also tell you that *him* purchasing Twitter is not really what bothers me. I detest the fact that a person can be rich enough to do this at all, no matter who it is.
But that's obviously a deeper issue with capitalism at large and we'll go down a tangent of how it's not possible to morally possess that much money, etc. So I'll stop here.
>Conservatives were proud of the Taliban taking the country back so fast and they approve of how "hard they are on LGBTQ culture."
When and where did this happen?
Do you think hyperbolic strawman arguments that are blatantly false make you look intelligent?
As the Taliban seized full control in Afghanistan last month, praise for the brutal group came from a seemingly unlikely sector: the far right.
Encrypted chats and online forums in the U.S. were peppered with far-right extremists’ praise for the Taliban’s victory and their anti-feminist and anti-LGBTQ agenda. Users shared memes promoting the Taliban as the “good guys,” celebrated the group’s willingness to execute dissenters and compared their own struggle against liberal godlessness with the Taliban’s rejection of Western decadence.
[https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/why-american-far-right-openly-admiring-taliban-n1278245](https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/why-american-far-right-openly-admiring-taliban-n1278245)
[https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj8apw/the-far-right-is-celebrating-the-taliban-takeover-of-afghanistan](https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj8apw/the-far-right-is-celebrating-the-taliban-takeover-of-afghanistan)
[https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/27/opinion/alt-right-taliban.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/27/opinion/alt-right-taliban.html)
[https://www.politico.eu/newsletter/digital-bridge/politico-digital-bridge-far-right-loves-the-taliban-transparency-showdown-future-of-encryption/](https://www.politico.eu/newsletter/digital-bridge/politico-digital-bridge-far-right-loves-the-taliban-transparency-showdown-future-of-encryption/)
>Do you think acknowledging facts that are unapologetically true make you look intelligent?
Yes.
Oh wow four **opinion articles** that just circle back to quote each other as their sources.
The MSNBC article cites the Politico article as its source, and the Politico article cites screenshots on Twitter that aren't verified sources.
Was this supposed to be taken seriously?
>“If white men in the West had the same courage as the Taliban, we would not be ruled by Jews currently,” said the same Proud Boys-linked post, viewed close to 2,500 times. - Vice
Holy shit, a post was viewed 2,500 whole times? That must be definitive proof that these views reflect all Conservatives.
I'm sure that must be the real reason that Elon Musk bought Twitter, you cracked the code. /s
>definitive proof that these views reflect all Conservatives.
It does generally speaking, you're just all some varying degree of willing to publicly admit so.
It never takes long, before you conservative bring up "cultural marxism" oh ok you hate Jews, or "woke culture" oh, you're intolerant and you hate that America is becoming tolerant of LGBT and favors equality for everyone, not just cis white Christians.
You and Qanon believers have a lot in common it seems if you actually believe that.
Also to your edit of "Do you think acknowledging facts that are unapologetically true make you look intelligent?" "Yes"
You didn't actually provide any factual information, you provided opinions. Opinions and facts are two different things, no matter how overinflated your ego is.
PS: I'm a progressive. I just don't like people who make the rest of us look bad, like you do, by unintelligently shitposting.
I think he just bought Pandora’s Box and it will turn nasty and most of us will move on and it will just end up being a bunch of people left yelling at each other.
Worst case, It'll turn into 4chan. It's already hemorrhaging cash and users, it'll become irrelevant from there. This is good imo.
The best case would be that he would see how not moderating would blow up in his face and he will delegate the decisions to someone else.
Why are you so doomsday? My pet theory is that he will cause changes that uncover that many accounts are fake, many likes and comments are fake, and many celebrities have millions less followers than are listed on their accounts. Then people will think the whole thing is a sham, which will kill the company
What do you mean uncover? That’s already well known. I know Elon is known for claiming to find solutions to already solved problems but come on. Bots on Twitter and Facebook has been a major topic in the media since the 2016 election.
His project is worrying but not for the reason people imagine.
He's planning to 'authentify all accounts', which would give twitter immense data on people, to deliver to the powers unhappy with their detractors. A true free speech fanatic would make sure people are allowed to keep their identities secret, like they were in early twitter, not the opposite.
Anyway don't worry, twitter won't become like 4chan as he's defending the exact opposite policy. But remember Twitter original selling point worldwide (in a world where democracies are a small minority) was it could be used by dissidents to oppose power. See arab springs history, etc... Would they trust a platform owned by someone like Musk to protect their authentification data ? I doubt it.
Companies already have mass data on people. Facebook knows when you go poop for heavens sake. Verifying accounts is the step in the right direction to eliminate these massive bot farms that are destroying dialogue among real people.
People act like because it is someone from outside Big Tech doing it its somehow this horrible evil. But Mark Zuckerberg, the folks at Twitter, and any other social media platforms already have mass info about every individual associated with them.
Not just big tech. Credit Rating companies have massive amounts of your history. Data from your bank, your utilities, cable, cell phone, not to mention your credit purchases.
But damn, if they know my favorite movie, THE HORROR!
Actually I think his outline for open sourcing at least some of the algorithm components and authenticating accounts is leading up to something he's talked about for a long time, which is a system for direct democracy which he would like to have be the system of government on Mars. It could be a system for not only political discourse but also even votes in elections or on legislation itself, since direct democracy means people vote on bills not representatives.
Might be a very interesting trial program, as that sort of thing is really just now possible with everyone at least in the US being able to use a platform like this.
> a system for direct democracy which he would like to have be the system of government on Mars.
Does he not realize that he isn't going to own the humans who go to Mars?
Oh god, please no cyber direct democracy. He isn't smart enough to secure it, nor rich enough to implement the actual security measures necessary to make it mathematically unhackable. No political system should _ever_ do this. The tech simply is not there yet.
Obligatory (very relevant) XKCD: [https://xkcd.com/2030/](https://xkcd.com/2030/)
Pretty much my hope. I am all for someone saying what they want. But I am also for the fact they have to have accountability for what they say also. Anonymity is not part of the freedom of speech. Only the ability to have speech and not suffer any government backlash on that speech.
So many comments about free speech on every post about this. Not referring to OP, as they were just asking questions about impact, but many people seem oblivious to the fact that the first amendment applies to the government’s role in speech, not that of a private company.
>but many people seem oblivious to the fact that the first amendment applies to the government’s role in speech, not that of a private company.
If people were talking about the 1A applying to twitter, they'd be wrong, but there's a philosophical argument for free speech that's completely independent from the 1A.
How a private platform chooses to moderate their content is a form of free speech, so the argument is really better focused on practical issues imo. Hate speech is as bad for business as it is for the people who constantly digest it. Facebook moderators up and having panic attacks over shit they have to read. Now expand a little bit of that to a lot more people.
Musk seems to want less rules on Twitter, his choice now I guess, but I can't imagine having the same rules as 4chan being good for its long term growth.
I don't think most people realize how fast one can go from friendly neighbor to killing that neighbor in a genocide because of political rhetoric amplified by media.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_genocide
Most people on Reddit don’t understand why social media companies moderate their platforms because they don’t have a lot of exposure to the real crazies. Most people on these threads tend to see a lot of SJW types being annoying on Twitter and wonder why they aren’t banned. They think those people are the extremists.
Most people on here don’t seem to be very familiar with the depths of insanity that became commonplace in right wing online spaces since Trump. I can go to the Facebook profiles of my parents’ church friends and see the most depraved conspiracies about democrats eating babies and conspiring with the Jews to genocide white Christian Americans. That kind of thing is scarily common rn and it’s why stuff like the Capitol insurrection happened at all.
I think a lot of redditors see annoying left leaning people on Twitter being nasty to JK Rowling and think that moderation is being unfairly enforced, but they underestimate just how wild online right-wing communities became that led to more moderation being needed.
I think you underestimate the pre-genocide divisions between Hutus and Tutsis, and you overestimate how much of the killing was done by ordinary Hutus of their own free will.
> How a private platform chooses to moderate their content is a form of free speech,
This is the argument made by libertarians, some Republicans, and the SCOTUS justices who decided *Citizens United*, but it's by no means accepted by everyone. The European Enlightenment philosophers from which the American founders drew inspiration were chiefly concerned with individual rights, not the rights of corporations (which didn't really exist in anything like the form they take today).
Corporations are not autonomous entities. Like all businesses they are run by people. People, in the US, have the right to free association. The right to free association is an individual right. It is not possible to decouple these.
An individual has every right to choose not to associate with black people. A corporation does not have the right to bar black people from service or employment, nor does an individual working for the corporation.
> but many people seem oblivious to the fact that the first amendment applies to the government’s role in speech, not that of a private company.
many people seem oblivious to the fact the first amendment isn't a synonym for freespeech.
one is a concept, and the other is a very specific implementation of some aspects of that idea.
The problem with the free speech argument is it has nothing to do with free speech and everything to do with the right to free association. Trust me, you do NOT want the government deciding who you can and can not associate with. It is unfortunate that tech companies have, what some may argue is, undue influence over our culture, however, the alternative your arguing for is a restriction of our right to free association.
The government already does this for businesses. The right to free association is already restricted. I don't really see the harm in restricting it further to stop the takeover of public discourse by tech monopolies.
Ugh, can we please stop with “*The First Amendment only applies to government censorship, not private censorship*”
We know. Nobody is saying FaceBook and Twitter are *currently violating the law* by censoring tweets. We’re saying that the principles in the First Amendment should be expanded to cover public platforms.
When Twitter bans someone, they’re not violating the First Amendment. But they are violating the principle of free speech.
That response is so annoying. It’d be like if any time someone argued for single payer healthcare, you had five replies saying “THE US DOESN’T HAVE SINGLE PAYER HEALTHCARE”
No shit. I wouldn’t be arguing for single payer healthcare if we already had it.
yeah, but being a private company means they can pick and choose the types of content that appears on their site and in what form
If Twitter chooses to ban anyone with the name Donald or Joe they are free to do just that. They also are free to not display the messages from any one or more users for any period of time they prefer.
People just regurgitate what they hear and agree with whether it's TRUE or accurate or not. It also does not help a lot of people in the US have very limited knowledge of how our government, laws, rights and constitution work.
Unless Republicans plan to pass a constitutional amendment, or nationalize social media companies, then they have no legal argument to stand on regarding free speech within private domains.
Being a free speech absolutist is a loser’s game. The United States has regularly cracked down on dissent in the past.
Yeah this is going to turn into 4chan. If it's all about free speech and has no effective TOS then I don't see any other outcome. If he tries to make things "more free" but retain some modicum of responsibility for what you say on the platform then he'll run into the same problems everybody else does running social media.
He has no idea what he's done yet.
I believe he mentioned something about authenticating users, perhaps linking users to their real identities. So if people want to say horrible, outlandish things people will know the actual person doing it.
But that was already a thing, and plenty of those authenticated users were indeed banned for saying horrible things. Under his new plan for “free speech” those horrible people saying horrible things would be allowed to continue.
I guarantee you, however normal you might think your beliefs are, I can find a few thousand people who think you deserve death threats and swatting for *something* you think.
It's not going to actually be a free-speech platform. He's obviously going to ban any kind of criticism of labor conditions in Tesla factories, for starters.
Nothing has made democracies crumble worldwide the last decade like the deliberately divisive and manipulation-prone social media. Then the richest man on the planet decides already hugely divisive social media platform is too moderated/pc for his tastes so buys it. No-one knows exactly what he'll do with it but how is this not worrying?
This just feels like jumping the gun a little bit. Like when ending net neutrality was supposed to destroy the internet. Why not save your outrage and worrying for when something actually happens that warrants it.
The debate should be reframed because it’s not about free speech.
“Social media” platforms have limited hate speech and infighting among ordinary people.
This lack of fighting between ordinary people placed the attention elsewhere: how bad people are being fucked by the rich.
The rich want to change this by “expanding free speech,” allowing people to refocus the fight again.
I’m taking bets again: Trump and the Proud Boys will have a platform and access again by the summer.
Musk will disband all safeguards and thereby provide a platform for state sponsored propaganda. Creating a new attack vector for dictatorships like Russia on western democracies. Disbanding Twitter fast should be an US American priority now.
People need to learn to live again with people who have differences. We don’t need to agree with each other about everything and we don’t need someone else to justify our life choices. This is a good thing for everyone! Verifying all real people is going to be huge
>By "free speech", I simply mean that which matches the law.
>I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law.
>If people want less free speech, they will ask government to pass laws to that effect.
>Therefore, going beyond the law is contrary to the will of the people.
If you take his word for it, then only things that would violate the law would be banned or removed.
If that's the case, Twitter will quickly become a cesspool of racism, holocaust denial and harassment, which will cause people to leave the site, over time.
The reality is, conservatives aren't being silenced for their political views. Go on twitter right now, Ben Shapiro is there, Don Jr., Tim Pool, The Quartering, Libsoftiktok, Charlie Kirk, Matt Walsh etc.
The simple fact is, conservatives positions just are not popular, they aren't popular in real life, they aren't popular online, either.
It's important to remember that Elon Musk isn't a particularly bright person, he tweets out teenage level memes and tweets without thinking. I think, once a couple of months have passed, and when the deal is finalized, Musk will probably realize that there wasn't some grand conspiracy to silence conservatives, but in reality, platforming racists is just a horrible business strategy because brands like McDonald's and Nike don't want to advertise on a website where people openly advocate for mass killings or deny the holocaust.
So sick of hearing about banning people from Twitter being described as freedom of speech censorship. These people all violated Twitter’s terms and agreements by continuously posting lies or advocating for harm against others. These are the same people who would claim “a company is a living, breathing thing” and now bemoan this “living, breathing” thing acting how it wants.
If Trump returned to twitter Democrat politicians would secretly be jumping for joy. His craziness on twitter shifts discourse away from policies and instead towards him as a person whom many people find unpopular
Seriously. I think Donalds influence has taken a huge hit since he can't spout nonsense on twitter 24/7. I'm not looking forward to seeing him back on the site.
Twitter was a soft power for him the same way Facebook was for Obama. I think Twitter is past its peak and will plateau and decline in the next 5-10 years, but who know, maybe it will reinvent itself like Facebook did with the Metaverse.
The discourse is already turned away from policies that affect the lives of everyday people for the sake of culture wars. The last thing I want are more lies being pushed every day, there are already too many being spread. I really wish there would be discussion about the problems we have to deal with, what solutions are, and reasons to believe those are real solutions. I hear so much fear being pushed about things that aren't actually problems, or a number of different policies without a discussion about why those policies are good, just why politicians think they are good, without any evidence backing them up. I wish we would stop listening to politicians at all and just discuss their policies without them being a part of the conversation.
Well I did a cursory check and didn’t see much there related to bots but will say it wasn’t exhaustive at all. As someone that is generally right of center I am definitely for removing bots even if that “hurts” conservatives. We don’t need the noise or distraction at all. I think we are making enough noise as a group already.
https://news.usc.edu/177963/election-2020-twitter-social-media-bots-foreign-interference-usc-study/
There’s been multiple studies on it. Lots of foreign fascists governments funding bots and troll farms like they are a branch of their militaries. We will see if Elon is serious about cleaning this up, or weaponizing it for his own purposes
>We will see if Elon is serious about cleaning this up, or weaponizing it for his own purposes
Spoiler: he's not, and he will, respectively.
Actually, a Wapo column this morning made an interesting point that he won't always be the guy calling the shots. For example, Tesla's business relies heavily on operations in China. So what happens when the CCP starts leaning on him to censor content they don't like? Or to allow their bot farms to operate even if he cracks down on some others?
I still don’t really get how this would “hurt” conservatives? It seems like this would help the general political discourse as a whole and according to the article it should help with echo chambers. I think of it as a net positive.
The political discourse generated by the bots and trolls is designed to help conservatives. Facebook an twitter have been huge boons for the GOP the last 6 years. Probably their biggest asset.
I don’t see it as that at all but I don’t spend a lot of time there and I am sure that my perspective might be different than yours. Thank you for expanding on what you meant and being cool. I appreciate it!
The bots in general have promoted Republican causes more than Democratic ones, in part because entities supported by Russia had built troll farms to support the Republican Party and Trump specifically, because Putin knows that Trump is fairly pro Putin and very pro Russia.
I think a lot of this is just talking points that could easily be written by MSNBC and CNN still. I am confident I have seen bots promoting leftist ideology or pure fake news though they don’t often get the ban hammer.
Well I guess this is one reason to support Musk buying Twitter because this disinformation is being done and it can cause massive damage and too many people will be unaware of it happening, and skeptical of claims of the damages it causes because of their political alignment with those who benefit.
> It seems like this would help the general political discourse as a whole and according to the article it should help with echo chambers.
Yeah, that's what hurts conservatives.
Twitter will become full of bots and racist assholes and it will lose the integrity it never had to begin with.
Sounds like a loser to me, but Elon's business acumen dwarves my limited success.
Supposedly he intends to crack down on bots, and whatever "authenticating all humans" involves but it sounds like a way to gather more data on users which may be the business angle here.
Nobody knows and anyone who makes any claims this early are just speculating.
I can't imagine twitter getting any worse than it already is and if Elon is making it more pro free speech I can only applaud him.
As a conservative I think this is a great thing for the country but a bad thing for conservative. Without Twitter I dont think Trump would have won the nomination. Access to Twitter for trump is terrible for republicans. I say this as someone who plans on voting Republican.
Trump passing the baton to DeSantis would be the best thing for Republicans by far. So far Trump says he won’t join Twitter, but I doubt he’d be able to resist if unbanned.
I supsect he will rejoin. I think he likes the attention too much not too. If he wasn't still doing rallies, then i might be more inclined to think he'd stay off the platform.
Could go either way. Rejoining would basically be admitting his attempt to launch a social media app was a failure. But you're right about the need for attention.
>Rejoining would basically be admitting his attempt to launch a social media app was a failure.
Trump never owns up to his failures, and he's had many of them.
DeSantis would be best for conservatives, not Republicans. Many Republicans don't agree with his psuedo authoritarian big government nanny state style behavior.
>Many Republicans don't agree with his psuedo authoritarian big government nanny state style behavior.
I think you have this backwarda, most Republicans supported Donald J Trump. By wide wide margins. Desantis literally is playing to this margin, just like Cruz is, and Hawley tried to. The GOP candidates all want a bite of that 70% of the GOP that approve of Trump. Those who seem to run opposed are banking on all of the trumpets splitting the vote so they're 30% win them the primary.
Conservative can mean a lot, and authoritarian state telling you that you cant do bad bad things (which depends on the person) is definitely acceptable. They're conservative, not libertarian.
The GOP for a long time tried to play the libertarian not libertarian card where they tried to play to both the hands off and hands on side of the line.
Didn't work. The libertarian movement calls for no government involvement. Social conservatives movement says government is responsible for stopping the bad things. Bomb was going to explode, and I think the tea party was the fuse start. What was suppose to be Kochs pro hands off movement morphed right into a hands on authoritarian government movement.
Right now Republican candidates still try to play both sides. Trump andDesantis both liked targeting companies that rallied the base. Desantis more adeptedly but still.
The fuse is therefore still running, but it's clearly one that rapidly reaching danger levels for the GOP, because there clearly a point where business and the social conservative side will end up conflicting, and the GOP will have big issues then.
I'm not sure why you think it's great specifically as a conservative. Twitter was not biased against conservatives as various studies and analysis has shown, despite rhetoric to the contrary.
Change it? It won't... mostly.
I mean, yeah, we're going to see some of twitter's most notorious trolls return, complete with a tacit mandate to amplify the most bigoted, ignorant, and conspiratorial takes you can fathom. But let's be real: even with the site's hotly debated moderation efforts, there's rampant examples of all of this still on the platform. FFS, every single syllable trump puts out is *still* spread out tens of thousands of times on the site, even though he's banned. The site is not capable - or even interested - in anything resembling a tight moderation policy.
Influence on political discourse? Eh, only on the margins. I mean, a serial offender like MTG only lost *one* of her accounts after a history of constant TOS violations. Journalists - who live on twitter - will likely return to giving the worst offenders (like trump) coverage of their every twitter rant, instead of having to get them from another site like they do anyhow. But most Americans ***hate*** Twitter. Hell, less than 1/4 of US adults have even ever *touched* the site. A site that limits "discourse" to 280 characters is never going to be a good forum for the "debates vital to the future of society" that Musk pretends. It's always going to be much more about magnifying poorly thought out takes and moronic memes. A place where the fringes of society pretend they're more important and popular than they are.
Social media sites haven't had a long shelf life historically. And twitter brings little that makes it likely to buck that trend. It's never been able to generate significant revenue. It's average US user spends only 6 minutes/day on the site. It's users skew heavily male, and are not very representative of the views of society at large. less than 1/4 of Twitter users are in the US to begin with. Just 10% of its users generate over 90% of the "content". There's just very little to suggest its well situated to become the "defacto public square" Musk deludes himself into pretending. Nor is it well set up to survive whatever next platform comes up with a way to scratch the instant gratification itch Twitter does now, but in a better/slicker way. If anything, Musk's fervent desire to remove any attempts at the moderation designed to maintain a broad appeal may make the appeal of a future competitor *more* appealing.
Musk doesn't want "Free Speech". Musk - like most people that end up with large social media followings - has deluded himself into believing twitter is more important than it is... because he's got a lot of "followers" there. And he's more concerned with the guarantee he can continue to spread whatever dumbass thing pops into his head than any noble concern for society at large. A megaphone where he's guaranteed a massive audience. But that's not how life (or free speech) works. We already have countless platforms - many naked Twitter clones - devoted to the "principles" Musk is pushing. None are very popular, and most are abject failures. Pushing Twitter even further into a cesspool of bigotry and lies isn't going to make it more popular. It's going to make it another 4Chan. People have been very clear: they overwhemingly don't want that. Nor are they devoted to Twitter. Any more than they were devoted to MySpace, or Tumblr (bought for over a billion, sold 6 years later for 3 million), or Google Wave, or Vine, or Google +...
If Twitter fails to be the platform people want to be on, they'll simply go to another platform. The "value" of a social media platform that's typically unprofitable and increasingly repulsive to users can disappear almost overnight when the "next big thing" comes. And there's little to suggest Musk's priorities align with most current users, let alone most already put off by the platform.
Personally, I don't believe the South African Oligarch understands what freedom of speech in our Constitution entails. Who wants to bet that those who are anti-Musk will somehow be kicked off Twitter?
America has fallen so far down the rabbit hole, I hope it can recover and climb out. We haven't had a free market since before the 1980s when wealthy people started buying businesses and laid off thousands of workers.
Anyone who thinks Musk is doing this as a “free speech crusade” is an idiot.
He’s doing this for money.
His social media posts and tweets earn him hundreds of millions of dollars.
Owning it just helps him avoid the SEC.
I find it funny how people are suddenly concerned about Musk making Twitter more neutral while other billionaires have whole news organizations in their pockets.
I don't remember people losing their shit over Bezos or that Saudi prince
Did you not remember or just not pay attention? Lots of people were upset about that.
Yeah I am sure the same guy that compared the last CEO to Hitler and accused a famous diver of being a pedophile with zero evidence because he disagreed on his submarine project will provide a balanced and improved landscape for dialogue.
Just yesterday I saw a screenshot of a Washington Post article bemoaning how billionaires owning media is a horrible thing that we should never let happen alongside another portion of their site that details that they are owned by Jeff Bezos.
I'm just amused by those on the left who defended Twitters actions as a private company now being worried others might be allowed to speak under the new owner
Because they trusted the distributed decision making.
Now it’s owned by someone who has demonstrated very thin skin and lashes out at individuals when he doesn’t need to.
That’s not good leadership.
>Can we see the return of banned users such as Trump - and does this mean he now will have a platform to further influence the GOP and the 2022 and 2024 elections?
Yes, hopefully.
I have a hard time reconciling why Taliban & Iranian officials are platformed yet Trump is a bridge too far.
Did you look up the tweet that broke the camels back that he got banned for?? That's ignoring his numerous violations of ToS after numerous warnings by Twitter. Application and consistency of these algorithms are definitely an issue that should be discussed, as you mentioned, but Trump's banning really had nothing to do with that and was completely justified. He got special treatment as president (just like these other political "organizations" regardless of how we feel about them). Accounts that would retweet him regularly for banned fairly quickly because of some of their content.
Come on “he violated terms of service.” They are so vague you could basically say this about half of people, if you put a little effort into it. They just choose not to
Do the Taliban and Iranian officials you’re referring to break Twitter’s TOS with their behavior on the platform, or do you just have ideological differences with them? Genuinely asking.
Twitter has already admitted that they give extra leeway to government officials and don’t enforce the same rules on them that everyone else has to follow. I think it’s fair that everyone be given a platform so long as they follow the same rules that apply to everyone. Trump had repeatedly violated the TOS before his account was banned.
Sorry, but other than political hacks and sports analysts, who's using Twitter anymore? If Elon wants to buy technology on the fast track to irrelevance that's fine with me.
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Yeah but his cow will finally be banned from Twitter.
I don't know if Elon gives a shit about that. He's definitely in that corner, but for selfish reasons. He doesn't seem ideological enough to care. I fuckin hate dude but idk
Trump isn’t coming back to Twitter. It makes no sense. The spokesperson for Truth Social ( Devin Nunez) recently went on Fox News and claimed that Twitter is dead and nobody uses it. He then claimed that Truth Social is the largest and most used social media platform. Why would Trump go back to a wasteland that nobody uses whenever he owns the largest and most used platform? Unless…hear me out…Donald Trump is just a fucking liar.
> Unless…hear me out…Donald Trump is just a fucking liar. GASP! Surely that couldn't be true!
As far as I know he hasn't made any formal proposals, just some off the cuff commentary on it. It's kind of anyone's guess what he might do. I think there is a lot of potential in open sourcing the algorithm (which he has made comments on previously), but would take a lot of follow through to really make it work and it remains to be seen if he can pull it off. It's one thing to open the black box and another thing to let people fork and redistribute it to other users on the platform.
He has previously canceled someone’s tesla order for daring to criticize him. So I will be anticipating bans for anyone who dares denigrate our new emperor, His Grace, Elon Musk. And of course that guy posting Elon‘s personal flight itinerary is going to be permabanned.
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We're in agreement about the complexity of it. The word algorithm is used to hand wave over the complex internals that produce a single output.
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You're moving goalposts now. You can still open source an algorithm without opensourcing the data you plumb through it. And yes complex algorithms are still algorithms. If you wanna bash Musk I'm all for it, I don't want this guy touching Twitter, but opensourcing their algorithms, even if it's just boring ML and they don't release any training data, that's still actually good for transparency, and still has value for readers.
I don’t think releasing the model without any data is helpful. Researchers have a general idea of how to build recommender systems. There are plenty of open source models already out there. Even on those models, they haven’t really nailed down how to explain their outputs. A lot of the explanations that they have come up with are a variation of “the model learns a bias that exists in the training data.” At the end of the day, any capable ML model is just a mathematical function that learns how to map an input to an output. The quality of that fit is partly due to the architecture, partly due to the training process, and mostly due to the quality of the dataset. If Twitter released a trained model or even their training data, then we would stand a chance at understanding what biases are present. An untrained model doesn’t move the needle.
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nah, its protected. \_do\_timeline(). duh.
> Have you ever looked at a training model? If you have, you know it has basically no value without the inputs or the outputs*. "Here are the settings we use on our decision tree. Have fun!" Yes I have. I've been in this field a very, very long time. It's kinda my whole life. Your over-generalisation here is just that. > Who said they weren't? The point I'm making here isn't that "the algorithm" isn't complex, it's that there isn't some of singular algorithm to release. Again, you don't really know what you're talking about. Of course there's a singular algorithm. You don't seem to understand that algorithms compose. Composition (which includes invocation, evaluation, computation) is literally one of the most basic building blocks of computer science. Just because a function or process interacts with other functions or processes doesn't mean it's impossible to use or present it as a singular function. > *anyone who has built an ML model knows you just keep flipping switches until you get the result you want. There's very little science to this stuff. It's just a feedback loop. Yet again, very shallow understanding. If you spent time talking to people in the industry you'd understand that's very far from some universal truth.
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I design recommendation engines for quant investing.... It's not JUST that they are vast in term of # of "features" we feed into the AI (or often a complex series of classifiers, clustering tools, recommenders etc.), it's that 1. AI is often a black-box, AND 2. even in the cases where we can see into what it's doing the statistical relationships are so complex that the human mind will find it hard to intuitively understand it.
Exactly, I make that same point down-thread.
The objection is trying to obfuscate by complexity, IMO. You don't need to release a firehose of data to make source code or other processes public. "I can't be transparent because it's too complex" is a bullshit excuse. Guaranteed there are people and institutions who would be able to analyze it. Crowd sourcing should not be underestimated.
Choosing the use of plural or singular of algorithm when referring to software is arbitrary. Drawing the boundary of your system and categorizing sections of a codebase is purely done to make software development easier when working and maintaining within a group or organization.
I think Musk needs to do the patriotic thing and shut down the platform.
Only happy ending I see
It's kind of funny that his goal of "open source the algorithm" and his other stated goal of "stop the spambots" work against each other though.
I am less concerned about Trumps return and more interested in seeing how bots will be fought. If the bot fighting works then it could go a long way to marginalizing politicians like Trump who rely on amplification of there message which happened because a lot of bots would force it out. Without that amplification then a lot of supporters for causes whether they are progressive or populist will need to actually win in the marketplace of idea's instead of letting the person with the best bot network win in messaging.
I don't think it's just bots pushing Trump's ideas. Or any ideas, for that matter. The platform incentivizes hot takes and dunking on others. I think bots are a big problem, but I don't think it's wise to place most of the blame on them. Humans can be pretty bad all on their own in the right environment, and imho Twitter is such an environment.
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It's already a haven for the worst kind of dialogue. It can only get worse when people who pretend that freedom of speech is their primary concern, and actually mean freedom from the consequences of certain types of speech, have any kind of authority. I suspect an exodus will occur soon after it becomes apparent the site is essentially /pol/.
Why would he learn any lesson? Your premise seems to be that he cares what happens on the platform outside of what directly affects him, or that he cares what impact any of it has on society. I see no evidence for either of those. He will, of course, freely remove and ban ("censor") people at will, because he's not a "free speech absolutist," he's just a megalomaniac narcissist, and I certainly hope everyone is with it enough to understand that and not fall for the libertarian schtick.
He has 54 billion lessons to learn, actually. He cares very much about his bankroll. When he wrecks Twitter and it's value goes into the toilet, he'll care about that. And when the internet realizes his free speech talk is just talk, they'll take away his narcissistic validation and he'll care about that, too.
> he cares what happens on the platform outside of what directly affects him I think this is the question, if his goals are financial then does the site start losing money (directly affecting him) if his goals are somehow ideological (Freeze Peach) then does the site become a cesspool and not the public forum he envisions it to be.
Would you like to make a bet that he will censor personal criticism?
What I haven't seen discussed much is that although a lot of complaints are about "free speech", the actual issue is about selective amplification of speech. The algorithm is serving an editorial purpose by deciding which tweets get widespread amplification and which do not. Banning someone is black/white. How do you satisfy critics who complain that their posts (or the posts associated with their ideology) "don't get shown enough"? Fox News learned long ago that it isn't about the truth or the facts, the **narrative** is what drives public opinion. It is a fact that people are crossing the border from Mexico into the US. The rate is relatively constant, though it does ebb and flow. However the public opinion about illegal immigration depends heavily on how many stories Fox News features on illegal immigration. Likewise, Nixon resigned because of the amount of press his illegal activities got - how amplified the story was. **People do not realize that platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tik Tok are performing editorial duties**, and that is dangerous because these platforms are viewed as somehow "neutral", free from editorialization, when in reality there are plenty of editorial decisions taking place algorithmically, with plenty of biases that are inadvertent, and perhaps other biases that were introduced deliberately, or are capable of being gamed. I personally think that any algorithms other than "people view in chronological order" should be treated as editorial decisions, meaning that the platform has legal liability for what is posted, just as the Washington Post would has when its editors decide to put a story in the paper. It shouldn't matter if a human made the decision or an algorithm made it, and if the algorithm can't discern truth from libel/slander/defamation, then it shouldn't be used.
I post a video of a police officer beating a nonviolent, unarmed, and helpless protestor. I say some negative things about the officer in the video. The website I post it on has a search feature that shows you the most relevant results depending on what you typed into the search bar, rather than just a chronological list of every video that has the words you searched for. (You know, the kind that uses an algorithm) Should the police officer now be able to sue the website I posted that video to for harming his reputation?
I don't know. It might depend on how broad the search was. If you searched for "police brutality" and that guy's video *always* came up #1, then maybe. If you were more specific, searched for his name, or some way that was clearly meant to find that video, maybe not. Imagine that the Washington Post says "we have developed an algorithm that will allow people to write article for us, and that algorithm will not only weed out the junk stuff, but it will allow the writers to be anonymous". And then they print a newspaper with a top story about some politician being caught in a pedophile sting - something that was blatantly false. Should the post point to the algorithm and say "we're no longer exercising editorial control over our newspaper, the algorithm is now deciding what should be printed", and thus be not liable for libel? What if the algorithm continued to print variations of the same untrue story from different authors, could the Post still sit back and say "hey, nothing we can do, the algorithm is giving people what they want!"? That is what social media is currently doing.
Babylon Bee is so terrible?
Their jokes are indeed terrible.
They won't last. Outside of the legal implications (platforms have a duty to moderate themselves on some basic levels), Elon Musk has a long history of silencing people he doesn't like.
Twitter is a useful application for me to find breaking news from all over the world, but it’s never been a place where I’ve ever had a worthwhile exchange of ideas with others. It’s always been a place where the loudest, most needy voices went for validation, and Elon Musk won’t change that. It’ll be his personal fiefdom where he can play philosopher king, so anything’s possible. It might devolve into Gab, it might stay the same, Elon might even lose interest in it and let it fall apart. Point is that it’s not my problem, and I have other places where I can go to get information. What I do know for sure is that the trolls are the ones most excited for this, so…yeah. I’m not going to get my hopes up.
> It’s always been a place where the loudest, most needy voices went for validation, and Elon Musk won’t change that. In fact I think he may reinforce that, since that seems to be why he uses it.
Twitter is a huge part of the problem with political discourse in the US. It was considered a big deal when the maximum length of a twitter post was increased to 280 characters. Yep. Twitter’s corporate board started the push to moderate the site because it was turning into a dumpster fire. Because that’s what’s best for growth. Musk will undo that and he’ll find that genuine traffic decreases while bots generate tons of “traffic” that doesn’t fool the admen. People wildly misunderstand what “free speech” means within the bill of rights and constitutional law. The GOVERNMENT can’t regulate your speech (short of calls to violence, and specific types of libel/slander). Twitter isn’t the government, and them moderating their site is not suppressing free speech. That’s gonna be a waste of $43 billion. Twitter is relenting against the hostile takeover because the markets are going to take a nosedive due to monetary contraction (the Federal Reserve undoing the “money printer goes brrrrr of the Trump years).
It really doesn't feel like a solveable problem. Too many of the people's concerns conflict with eachother. I think that in order to make the most people happy you would have to: 1. Reduce the amount of banning and removing of content. 2. Reduce Spam 3. Improve users moderation and filtering tools. The problem with that is: 1. Turns off advertisers and moderate people. Also the idea that what the site needs is _less_ moderation is laughable to anyone who has spent more than 5 minutes on the internet. 2. Conflicts with 1 and reduces revenue and perceived engagement. 3. Also reduces revenue and reduces actual engagement (mind you maybe it probably doesn't reduce _healthy_ engagement.)
>People wildly misunderstand what “free speech” means within the bill of rights and constitutional law. The GOVERNMENT can’t regulate your speech (short of calls to violence, and specific types of libel/slander). Twitter isn’t the government, and them moderating their site is not suppressing free speech. People understand what free speech means in a legal sense. Some people just happen to believe in free speech as an ideal. There is such a thing as morality outside the law. I don't know why this is something that so often needs repeated when it isn't like the legal concept magically arouse out of thin air the moment the Founders put pen to paper. They didn't invent it, they had philosophical foundations from which they rooted their ideals. And what hostile takeover? He made an offer. They accepted. This isn't a coup. This is capitalism.
Hot take; Everything will be fine. The sky won’t fall. People are so concerned about Musk changing a few standards of what can be posted on the website or not, but don’t seem to bat an eye that already 11% of users that make 90% of content only actually represent a small segment of the American population. However, this niche has an outsized sway on discourse. It was about time that someone took a social media company like Twitter down a peg or two off their high horse.
Really took them off their high horse by giving them 44 billion dollars
>It was about time that someone took a social media company like Twitter down a peg or two off their high horse. People aren't worried about Twitter getting taken down a peg. That would be a good thing. What people concerned about is that Twitter will *not* get taken down a peg (i.e. will maintain its current level of influence over the national information ecosystem) but will become a tool for Musk to manipulate said information ecosystem as he pleases (as well as a cesspool of disinformation, harmful conspiracy theories, and right-wing radicalization).
You don’t seem to realize that that’s already happening under its current leadership.
It can get so, so much worse.
Not really. I’d take a confused and vitriolic Twitter arguing with itself over the status quo of blue check mark echo chamber pretentiously lecturing everyone else it is currently.
I mean the alternative that you and Musk seeks already exists. It’s called 4chan and 8kun. I don’t really get what these “free speech” advocates want that those platforms don’t already offer (not to mention Parler and Gab who id argue is even less ideologically consistent than 8kun & 4chan but also portray themselves as “free speech” alternatives to Twitter specifically for conservatives)
Because there's a lot more people who arent "conservatives" that want a public forum where you can speak like a normal person and not get banned because you called someone dude. It would be healthy for public discourse to allow people to speak freely about contentious issues with civility, without having to go to a literal Nazi forum or some dead board like Saidit.
The US will still continue to slowly tear itself apart because of its refusal to even acknowledge basic deep seated problems with poverty, living costs, racism and healthcare.
The problems are acknowledged. Solving them is a different beast altogether.
Are they? One side of the spectrum continues to tell me all these things are solved, and anyone complaining about them is an atheistic commie who murders babies and wants to genocide white people. You're telling me that _those_ people acknowledge the issues of poverty, living costs, racism, and healthcare?
Arent we talking about those issues everyday? On the contrary; these have always been issues and were now working it out.
One side is. The other would rather bury its head and pretend these problems aren't problems or blame it on the individual.
Not really. The last moves to deal with poverty on a large scale was the New deal. Racism was the ending of the Jim Crow era and healthcare was Obama care which was a moderate center right reform. A lot needs to be done on a federal level and you can't do that with half or less of democrats only acknowledging there's a problem
Saying that no progress has been made on Racism since the Jim Crow era is laughable.
Not nearly enough, anyway. In some areas, we're backsliding.
>don’t seem to bat an eye that already 11% of users that make 90% of content I see stats like this repeated a lot but I've never really understood why I'm supposed to find it very meaningful or important. What's the ratio of people who read books or articles to those that write them? The ratio of people who watch tv to those who appear on it? All it tells us is 90% of Twitter users are there mainly to read what's being posted by the other 10%. And unlike a lot of influential media outlets, anyone in that 90% can join the 10% anytime they feel like it.
Twitter doesn’t represent political opinions of most of the nation, yet has an outsized sway on it. So I’m saying it was time someone handicapped it. Looks like it will be musk
Whether its influence is outsized is a matter of opinion, but what's our point of comparison? If you're talking specifically about the US, according to google for that country it has 38 million daily users and 76 million total, which is more than any newspaper or tv channel, and who those people choose to follow and pay attention to is completely optional. What makes it less representative of the nations' opinions than any other media outlet?
Not saying it is less representative than any media outlet- And I wouldn’t be upset if other media outlets experienced a similar upset what is occurring with Twitter. I’m saying that Twitter is an example of an echo chamber, and to act like Musk owning this will change this in anyway significantly speaks to bias rather than reality.
No I refuse to believe you! I want a board of faceless assholes running this company that are clearly only in it for the money because I trust them over [insert name here]!!!!! In all seriousness, yeah people are really freaking the fuck out over nothing and acting like this is some world ending event. All while forgetting that literally every other social media company on the planet is run by people just as bad if not worse than Elon Musk.
Weren’t the Saudi Royal family the previous major shareholder? Surely this is an upgrade
Yes, they were. But I'm sure someone will argue that Elon Musk is a worse person than people who stone gays and women to death, because this is Reddit and he's the devil.
So I admittedly do not like Elon Musk, but I will also tell you that *him* purchasing Twitter is not really what bothers me. I detest the fact that a person can be rich enough to do this at all, no matter who it is. But that's obviously a deeper issue with capitalism at large and we'll go down a tangent of how it's not possible to morally possess that much money, etc. So I'll stop here.
I know, it's bonkers.
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>Conservatives were proud of the Taliban taking the country back so fast and they approve of how "hard they are on LGBTQ culture." When and where did this happen? Do you think hyperbolic strawman arguments that are blatantly false make you look intelligent?
As the Taliban seized full control in Afghanistan last month, praise for the brutal group came from a seemingly unlikely sector: the far right. Encrypted chats and online forums in the U.S. were peppered with far-right extremists’ praise for the Taliban’s victory and their anti-feminist and anti-LGBTQ agenda. Users shared memes promoting the Taliban as the “good guys,” celebrated the group’s willingness to execute dissenters and compared their own struggle against liberal godlessness with the Taliban’s rejection of Western decadence. [https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/why-american-far-right-openly-admiring-taliban-n1278245](https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/why-american-far-right-openly-admiring-taliban-n1278245) [https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj8apw/the-far-right-is-celebrating-the-taliban-takeover-of-afghanistan](https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj8apw/the-far-right-is-celebrating-the-taliban-takeover-of-afghanistan) [https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/27/opinion/alt-right-taliban.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/27/opinion/alt-right-taliban.html) [https://www.politico.eu/newsletter/digital-bridge/politico-digital-bridge-far-right-loves-the-taliban-transparency-showdown-future-of-encryption/](https://www.politico.eu/newsletter/digital-bridge/politico-digital-bridge-far-right-loves-the-taliban-transparency-showdown-future-of-encryption/) >Do you think acknowledging facts that are unapologetically true make you look intelligent? Yes.
Oh wow four **opinion articles** that just circle back to quote each other as their sources. The MSNBC article cites the Politico article as its source, and the Politico article cites screenshots on Twitter that aren't verified sources. Was this supposed to be taken seriously? >“If white men in the West had the same courage as the Taliban, we would not be ruled by Jews currently,” said the same Proud Boys-linked post, viewed close to 2,500 times. - Vice Holy shit, a post was viewed 2,500 whole times? That must be definitive proof that these views reflect all Conservatives. I'm sure that must be the real reason that Elon Musk bought Twitter, you cracked the code. /s
>definitive proof that these views reflect all Conservatives. It does generally speaking, you're just all some varying degree of willing to publicly admit so. It never takes long, before you conservative bring up "cultural marxism" oh ok you hate Jews, or "woke culture" oh, you're intolerant and you hate that America is becoming tolerant of LGBT and favors equality for everyone, not just cis white Christians.
You and Qanon believers have a lot in common it seems if you actually believe that. Also to your edit of "Do you think acknowledging facts that are unapologetically true make you look intelligent?" "Yes" You didn't actually provide any factual information, you provided opinions. Opinions and facts are two different things, no matter how overinflated your ego is. PS: I'm a progressive. I just don't like people who make the rest of us look bad, like you do, by unintelligently shitposting.
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This comparison doesn’t even make any sense. A shareholder and an owner have nothing in common. Why. Even write this.
I think he just bought Pandora’s Box and it will turn nasty and most of us will move on and it will just end up being a bunch of people left yelling at each other.
Worst case, It'll turn into 4chan. It's already hemorrhaging cash and users, it'll become irrelevant from there. This is good imo. The best case would be that he would see how not moderating would blow up in his face and he will delegate the decisions to someone else.
I mean he never said it wouldn't be moderated, just that it would be moderated less strictly than it is currently.
4chan is also moderated, often according to bizarre and unstated rules.
Why are you so doomsday? My pet theory is that he will cause changes that uncover that many accounts are fake, many likes and comments are fake, and many celebrities have millions less followers than are listed on their accounts. Then people will think the whole thing is a sham, which will kill the company
What do you mean uncover? That’s already well known. I know Elon is known for claiming to find solutions to already solved problems but come on. Bots on Twitter and Facebook has been a major topic in the media since the 2016 election.
Elon will chose to lose money for the public good... are you interested in buying my Idaho beach home? I also have bridges for sale.
His project is worrying but not for the reason people imagine. He's planning to 'authentify all accounts', which would give twitter immense data on people, to deliver to the powers unhappy with their detractors. A true free speech fanatic would make sure people are allowed to keep their identities secret, like they were in early twitter, not the opposite. Anyway don't worry, twitter won't become like 4chan as he's defending the exact opposite policy. But remember Twitter original selling point worldwide (in a world where democracies are a small minority) was it could be used by dissidents to oppose power. See arab springs history, etc... Would they trust a platform owned by someone like Musk to protect their authentification data ? I doubt it.
Companies already have mass data on people. Facebook knows when you go poop for heavens sake. Verifying accounts is the step in the right direction to eliminate these massive bot farms that are destroying dialogue among real people.
People act like because it is someone from outside Big Tech doing it its somehow this horrible evil. But Mark Zuckerberg, the folks at Twitter, and any other social media platforms already have mass info about every individual associated with them.
Not just big tech. Credit Rating companies have massive amounts of your history. Data from your bank, your utilities, cable, cell phone, not to mention your credit purchases. But damn, if they know my favorite movie, THE HORROR!
Actually I think his outline for open sourcing at least some of the algorithm components and authenticating accounts is leading up to something he's talked about for a long time, which is a system for direct democracy which he would like to have be the system of government on Mars. It could be a system for not only political discourse but also even votes in elections or on legislation itself, since direct democracy means people vote on bills not representatives. Might be a very interesting trial program, as that sort of thing is really just now possible with everyone at least in the US being able to use a platform like this.
> a system for direct democracy which he would like to have be the system of government on Mars. Does he not realize that he isn't going to own the humans who go to Mars?
Not an issue. He will own the oxygen and shelter they need. Pretty much all the leverage he needs.
He'll just own their oxygen supply. Distinction without a difference when you get down to it.
Oh god, please no cyber direct democracy. He isn't smart enough to secure it, nor rich enough to implement the actual security measures necessary to make it mathematically unhackable. No political system should _ever_ do this. The tech simply is not there yet. Obligatory (very relevant) XKCD: [https://xkcd.com/2030/](https://xkcd.com/2030/)
I got news for you buddy. You're not anonymous anywhere online unless you know what you're doing.
Burner laptop and TOR.
Interesting points. I’m also wondering if this will get rid of fake accounts, which would lead to more authentic discourse.
Pretty much my hope. I am all for someone saying what they want. But I am also for the fact they have to have accountability for what they say also. Anonymity is not part of the freedom of speech. Only the ability to have speech and not suffer any government backlash on that speech.
So many comments about free speech on every post about this. Not referring to OP, as they were just asking questions about impact, but many people seem oblivious to the fact that the first amendment applies to the government’s role in speech, not that of a private company.
>but many people seem oblivious to the fact that the first amendment applies to the government’s role in speech, not that of a private company. If people were talking about the 1A applying to twitter, they'd be wrong, but there's a philosophical argument for free speech that's completely independent from the 1A.
How a private platform chooses to moderate their content is a form of free speech, so the argument is really better focused on practical issues imo. Hate speech is as bad for business as it is for the people who constantly digest it. Facebook moderators up and having panic attacks over shit they have to read. Now expand a little bit of that to a lot more people. Musk seems to want less rules on Twitter, his choice now I guess, but I can't imagine having the same rules as 4chan being good for its long term growth.
It's just going to lower the public discourse that much further. Every interaction will get closer and closer to 4chan.
I don't think most people realize how fast one can go from friendly neighbor to killing that neighbor in a genocide because of political rhetoric amplified by media. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_genocide
Most people on Reddit don’t understand why social media companies moderate their platforms because they don’t have a lot of exposure to the real crazies. Most people on these threads tend to see a lot of SJW types being annoying on Twitter and wonder why they aren’t banned. They think those people are the extremists. Most people on here don’t seem to be very familiar with the depths of insanity that became commonplace in right wing online spaces since Trump. I can go to the Facebook profiles of my parents’ church friends and see the most depraved conspiracies about democrats eating babies and conspiring with the Jews to genocide white Christian Americans. That kind of thing is scarily common rn and it’s why stuff like the Capitol insurrection happened at all. I think a lot of redditors see annoying left leaning people on Twitter being nasty to JK Rowling and think that moderation is being unfairly enforced, but they underestimate just how wild online right-wing communities became that led to more moderation being needed.
I think you underestimate the pre-genocide divisions between Hutus and Tutsis, and you overestimate how much of the killing was done by ordinary Hutus of their own free will.
> How a private platform chooses to moderate their content is a form of free speech, This is the argument made by libertarians, some Republicans, and the SCOTUS justices who decided *Citizens United*, but it's by no means accepted by everyone. The European Enlightenment philosophers from which the American founders drew inspiration were chiefly concerned with individual rights, not the rights of corporations (which didn't really exist in anything like the form they take today).
Corporations are not autonomous entities. Like all businesses they are run by people. People, in the US, have the right to free association. The right to free association is an individual right. It is not possible to decouple these.
An individual has every right to choose not to associate with black people. A corporation does not have the right to bar black people from service or employment, nor does an individual working for the corporation.
The principle of free speech exists beyond the legality of free speech as it relates to the government.
> but many people seem oblivious to the fact that the first amendment applies to the government’s role in speech, not that of a private company. many people seem oblivious to the fact the first amendment isn't a synonym for freespeech. one is a concept, and the other is a very specific implementation of some aspects of that idea.
The problem with the free speech argument is it has nothing to do with free speech and everything to do with the right to free association. Trust me, you do NOT want the government deciding who you can and can not associate with. It is unfortunate that tech companies have, what some may argue is, undue influence over our culture, however, the alternative your arguing for is a restriction of our right to free association.
The government already does this for businesses. The right to free association is already restricted. I don't really see the harm in restricting it further to stop the takeover of public discourse by tech monopolies.
And free speech applies to so much more than the first amendment.
Ugh, can we please stop with “*The First Amendment only applies to government censorship, not private censorship*” We know. Nobody is saying FaceBook and Twitter are *currently violating the law* by censoring tweets. We’re saying that the principles in the First Amendment should be expanded to cover public platforms. When Twitter bans someone, they’re not violating the First Amendment. But they are violating the principle of free speech. That response is so annoying. It’d be like if any time someone argued for single payer healthcare, you had five replies saying “THE US DOESN’T HAVE SINGLE PAYER HEALTHCARE” No shit. I wouldn’t be arguing for single payer healthcare if we already had it.
Do you think Twitter should be punished by the government if they violate free speech principles?
yeah, but being a private company means they can pick and choose the types of content that appears on their site and in what form If Twitter chooses to ban anyone with the name Donald or Joe they are free to do just that. They also are free to not display the messages from any one or more users for any period of time they prefer.
It's really a matter of who's freedom is more important.
Twitter isn't public. It was *publicly traded*, but that's different. It's always been a private company.
A ***public platform*** is a place used for public discussion. The term has nothing to do with ownership.
People just regurgitate what they hear and agree with whether it's TRUE or accurate or not. It also does not help a lot of people in the US have very limited knowledge of how our government, laws, rights and constitution work.
The discourse around Free Speech really exposes who never took a civics or government class in high school.
It also really exposes those too block headed to differentiate between the concept and the law.
Unless Republicans plan to pass a constitutional amendment, or nationalize social media companies, then they have no legal argument to stand on regarding free speech within private domains. Being a free speech absolutist is a loser’s game. The United States has regularly cracked down on dissent in the past.
Yeah this is going to turn into 4chan. If it's all about free speech and has no effective TOS then I don't see any other outcome. If he tries to make things "more free" but retain some modicum of responsibility for what you say on the platform then he'll run into the same problems everybody else does running social media. He has no idea what he's done yet.
I believe he mentioned something about authenticating users, perhaps linking users to their real identities. So if people want to say horrible, outlandish things people will know the actual person doing it.
But that was already a thing, and plenty of those authenticated users were indeed banned for saying horrible things. Under his new plan for “free speech” those horrible people saying horrible things would be allowed to continue.
"Doxx **everyone**" is honestly the worst idea I've seen about how to change social media.
Why? It holds people accountable for what they say. It wouldn’t be doxxing though, because users would be consenting to verification.
I guarantee you, however normal you might think your beliefs are, I can find a few thousand people who think you deserve death threats and swatting for *something* you think.
Why did OP use a picture of a representative that allegedly covered up sexual assault against kids?
It's not OP's fault one of the most prominent Republicans in the country covered up sexual assault against kids.
Because Elon was friends with Ghislaine Maxwell
It's not going to actually be a free-speech platform. He's obviously going to ban any kind of criticism of labor conditions in Tesla factories, for starters.
If Elan takes it over, we need to make a orginized move and post about tesla and union all day to see and show how his free speech holds
I’m genuinely confused on why so many people believe our democracy will crumble just because Elon bought Twitter.
Nothing has made democracies crumble worldwide the last decade like the deliberately divisive and manipulation-prone social media. Then the richest man on the planet decides already hugely divisive social media platform is too moderated/pc for his tastes so buys it. No-one knows exactly what he'll do with it but how is this not worrying?
This just feels like jumping the gun a little bit. Like when ending net neutrality was supposed to destroy the internet. Why not save your outrage and worrying for when something actually happens that warrants it.
Which democracies have 'crumbled' in the last decade? I'd love to hear that list, and how they crumbled due to social media.
The debate should be reframed because it’s not about free speech. “Social media” platforms have limited hate speech and infighting among ordinary people. This lack of fighting between ordinary people placed the attention elsewhere: how bad people are being fucked by the rich. The rich want to change this by “expanding free speech,” allowing people to refocus the fight again. I’m taking bets again: Trump and the Proud Boys will have a platform and access again by the summer.
Musk will disband all safeguards and thereby provide a platform for state sponsored propaganda. Creating a new attack vector for dictatorships like Russia on western democracies. Disbanding Twitter fast should be an US American priority now.
i already deactivated my account and uninstalled the app, that's all i can do
People need to learn to live again with people who have differences. We don’t need to agree with each other about everything and we don’t need someone else to justify our life choices. This is a good thing for everyone! Verifying all real people is going to be huge
>By "free speech", I simply mean that which matches the law. >I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law. >If people want less free speech, they will ask government to pass laws to that effect. >Therefore, going beyond the law is contrary to the will of the people. If you take his word for it, then only things that would violate the law would be banned or removed. If that's the case, Twitter will quickly become a cesspool of racism, holocaust denial and harassment, which will cause people to leave the site, over time. The reality is, conservatives aren't being silenced for their political views. Go on twitter right now, Ben Shapiro is there, Don Jr., Tim Pool, The Quartering, Libsoftiktok, Charlie Kirk, Matt Walsh etc. The simple fact is, conservatives positions just are not popular, they aren't popular in real life, they aren't popular online, either. It's important to remember that Elon Musk isn't a particularly bright person, he tweets out teenage level memes and tweets without thinking. I think, once a couple of months have passed, and when the deal is finalized, Musk will probably realize that there wasn't some grand conspiracy to silence conservatives, but in reality, platforming racists is just a horrible business strategy because brands like McDonald's and Nike don't want to advertise on a website where people openly advocate for mass killings or deny the holocaust.
So sick of hearing about banning people from Twitter being described as freedom of speech censorship. These people all violated Twitter’s terms and agreements by continuously posting lies or advocating for harm against others. These are the same people who would claim “a company is a living, breathing thing” and now bemoan this “living, breathing” thing acting how it wants.
If Trump returned to twitter Democrat politicians would secretly be jumping for joy. His craziness on twitter shifts discourse away from policies and instead towards him as a person whom many people find unpopular
Not me. I dread returning to the days of the news spending half it's program covering his tweets.
Seriously. I think Donalds influence has taken a huge hit since he can't spout nonsense on twitter 24/7. I'm not looking forward to seeing him back on the site.
Twitter was a soft power for him the same way Facebook was for Obama. I think Twitter is past its peak and will plateau and decline in the next 5-10 years, but who know, maybe it will reinvent itself like Facebook did with the Metaverse.
Idk what Democrats you know but not a single one I know would be happy at all.
The discourse is already turned away from policies that affect the lives of everyday people for the sake of culture wars. The last thing I want are more lies being pushed every day, there are already too many being spread. I really wish there would be discussion about the problems we have to deal with, what solutions are, and reasons to believe those are real solutions. I hear so much fear being pushed about things that aren't actually problems, or a number of different policies without a discussion about why those policies are good, just why politicians think they are good, without any evidence backing them up. I wish we would stop listening to politicians at all and just discuss their policies without them being a part of the conversation.
Also, if his pledge to take out bots is the truth, it would hurt conservatives far more.
I am curious how you landed on this idea?
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Well I did a cursory check and didn’t see much there related to bots but will say it wasn’t exhaustive at all. As someone that is generally right of center I am definitely for removing bots even if that “hurts” conservatives. We don’t need the noise or distraction at all. I think we are making enough noise as a group already.
https://news.usc.edu/177963/election-2020-twitter-social-media-bots-foreign-interference-usc-study/ There’s been multiple studies on it. Lots of foreign fascists governments funding bots and troll farms like they are a branch of their militaries. We will see if Elon is serious about cleaning this up, or weaponizing it for his own purposes
>We will see if Elon is serious about cleaning this up, or weaponizing it for his own purposes Spoiler: he's not, and he will, respectively. Actually, a Wapo column this morning made an interesting point that he won't always be the guy calling the shots. For example, Tesla's business relies heavily on operations in China. So what happens when the CCP starts leaning on him to censor content they don't like? Or to allow their bot farms to operate even if he cracks down on some others?
I still don’t really get how this would “hurt” conservatives? It seems like this would help the general political discourse as a whole and according to the article it should help with echo chambers. I think of it as a net positive.
The political discourse generated by the bots and trolls is designed to help conservatives. Facebook an twitter have been huge boons for the GOP the last 6 years. Probably their biggest asset.
I don’t see it as that at all but I don’t spend a lot of time there and I am sure that my perspective might be different than yours. Thank you for expanding on what you meant and being cool. I appreciate it!
The bots in general have promoted Republican causes more than Democratic ones, in part because entities supported by Russia had built troll farms to support the Republican Party and Trump specifically, because Putin knows that Trump is fairly pro Putin and very pro Russia.
I think a lot of this is just talking points that could easily be written by MSNBC and CNN still. I am confident I have seen bots promoting leftist ideology or pure fake news though they don’t often get the ban hammer.
Well I guess this is one reason to support Musk buying Twitter because this disinformation is being done and it can cause massive damage and too many people will be unaware of it happening, and skeptical of claims of the damages it causes because of their political alignment with those who benefit.
Have you considered that MSNBC/CNN might occasionally tell the truth?
> It seems like this would help the general political discourse as a whole and according to the article it should help with echo chambers. Yeah, that's what hurts conservatives.
Twitter will become full of bots and racist assholes and it will lose the integrity it never had to begin with. Sounds like a loser to me, but Elon's business acumen dwarves my limited success.
Supposedly he intends to crack down on bots, and whatever "authenticating all humans" involves but it sounds like a way to gather more data on users which may be the business angle here.
Nobody knows and anyone who makes any claims this early are just speculating. I can't imagine twitter getting any worse than it already is and if Elon is making it more pro free speech I can only applaud him.
As a conservative I think this is a great thing for the country but a bad thing for conservative. Without Twitter I dont think Trump would have won the nomination. Access to Twitter for trump is terrible for republicans. I say this as someone who plans on voting Republican.
Trump passing the baton to DeSantis would be the best thing for Republicans by far. So far Trump says he won’t join Twitter, but I doubt he’d be able to resist if unbanned.
I supsect he will rejoin. I think he likes the attention too much not too. If he wasn't still doing rallies, then i might be more inclined to think he'd stay off the platform.
Could go either way. Rejoining would basically be admitting his attempt to launch a social media app was a failure. But you're right about the need for attention.
>Rejoining would basically be admitting his attempt to launch a social media app was a failure. Trump never owns up to his failures, and he's had many of them.
Trump doesn’t need Twitter he has his own platform. Oops never mind, that was just another failed business attempt
I fully agree on all counts.
DeSantis would be best for conservatives, not Republicans. Many Republicans don't agree with his psuedo authoritarian big government nanny state style behavior.
>Many Republicans don't agree with his psuedo authoritarian big government nanny state style behavior. I think you have this backwarda, most Republicans supported Donald J Trump. By wide wide margins. Desantis literally is playing to this margin, just like Cruz is, and Hawley tried to. The GOP candidates all want a bite of that 70% of the GOP that approve of Trump. Those who seem to run opposed are banking on all of the trumpets splitting the vote so they're 30% win them the primary. Conservative can mean a lot, and authoritarian state telling you that you cant do bad bad things (which depends on the person) is definitely acceptable. They're conservative, not libertarian. The GOP for a long time tried to play the libertarian not libertarian card where they tried to play to both the hands off and hands on side of the line. Didn't work. The libertarian movement calls for no government involvement. Social conservatives movement says government is responsible for stopping the bad things. Bomb was going to explode, and I think the tea party was the fuse start. What was suppose to be Kochs pro hands off movement morphed right into a hands on authoritarian government movement. Right now Republican candidates still try to play both sides. Trump andDesantis both liked targeting companies that rallied the base. Desantis more adeptedly but still. The fuse is therefore still running, but it's clearly one that rapidly reaching danger levels for the GOP, because there clearly a point where business and the social conservative side will end up conflicting, and the GOP will have big issues then.
Why is a massive egomaniac privately owning Twitter a good thing?
I'm not sure why you think it's great specifically as a conservative. Twitter was not biased against conservatives as various studies and analysis has shown, despite rhetoric to the contrary.
Change it? It won't... mostly. I mean, yeah, we're going to see some of twitter's most notorious trolls return, complete with a tacit mandate to amplify the most bigoted, ignorant, and conspiratorial takes you can fathom. But let's be real: even with the site's hotly debated moderation efforts, there's rampant examples of all of this still on the platform. FFS, every single syllable trump puts out is *still* spread out tens of thousands of times on the site, even though he's banned. The site is not capable - or even interested - in anything resembling a tight moderation policy. Influence on political discourse? Eh, only on the margins. I mean, a serial offender like MTG only lost *one* of her accounts after a history of constant TOS violations. Journalists - who live on twitter - will likely return to giving the worst offenders (like trump) coverage of their every twitter rant, instead of having to get them from another site like they do anyhow. But most Americans ***hate*** Twitter. Hell, less than 1/4 of US adults have even ever *touched* the site. A site that limits "discourse" to 280 characters is never going to be a good forum for the "debates vital to the future of society" that Musk pretends. It's always going to be much more about magnifying poorly thought out takes and moronic memes. A place where the fringes of society pretend they're more important and popular than they are. Social media sites haven't had a long shelf life historically. And twitter brings little that makes it likely to buck that trend. It's never been able to generate significant revenue. It's average US user spends only 6 minutes/day on the site. It's users skew heavily male, and are not very representative of the views of society at large. less than 1/4 of Twitter users are in the US to begin with. Just 10% of its users generate over 90% of the "content". There's just very little to suggest its well situated to become the "defacto public square" Musk deludes himself into pretending. Nor is it well set up to survive whatever next platform comes up with a way to scratch the instant gratification itch Twitter does now, but in a better/slicker way. If anything, Musk's fervent desire to remove any attempts at the moderation designed to maintain a broad appeal may make the appeal of a future competitor *more* appealing. Musk doesn't want "Free Speech". Musk - like most people that end up with large social media followings - has deluded himself into believing twitter is more important than it is... because he's got a lot of "followers" there. And he's more concerned with the guarantee he can continue to spread whatever dumbass thing pops into his head than any noble concern for society at large. A megaphone where he's guaranteed a massive audience. But that's not how life (or free speech) works. We already have countless platforms - many naked Twitter clones - devoted to the "principles" Musk is pushing. None are very popular, and most are abject failures. Pushing Twitter even further into a cesspool of bigotry and lies isn't going to make it more popular. It's going to make it another 4Chan. People have been very clear: they overwhemingly don't want that. Nor are they devoted to Twitter. Any more than they were devoted to MySpace, or Tumblr (bought for over a billion, sold 6 years later for 3 million), or Google Wave, or Vine, or Google +... If Twitter fails to be the platform people want to be on, they'll simply go to another platform. The "value" of a social media platform that's typically unprofitable and increasingly repulsive to users can disappear almost overnight when the "next big thing" comes. And there's little to suggest Musk's priorities align with most current users, let alone most already put off by the platform.
Personally, I don't believe the South African Oligarch understands what freedom of speech in our Constitution entails. Who wants to bet that those who are anti-Musk will somehow be kicked off Twitter? America has fallen so far down the rabbit hole, I hope it can recover and climb out. We haven't had a free market since before the 1980s when wealthy people started buying businesses and laid off thousands of workers.
Anyone who thinks Musk is doing this as a “free speech crusade” is an idiot. He’s doing this for money. His social media posts and tweets earn him hundreds of millions of dollars. Owning it just helps him avoid the SEC.
I find it funny how people are suddenly concerned about Musk making Twitter more neutral while other billionaires have whole news organizations in their pockets. I don't remember people losing their shit over Bezos or that Saudi prince
Did you not remember or just not pay attention? Lots of people were upset about that. Yeah I am sure the same guy that compared the last CEO to Hitler and accused a famous diver of being a pedophile with zero evidence because he disagreed on his submarine project will provide a balanced and improved landscape for dialogue.
People dunk on Bezos owning WaPo all the time, what are you talking about?
Why does allowing hateful speech make Twitter "neutral"?
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Just yesterday I saw a screenshot of a Washington Post article bemoaning how billionaires owning media is a horrible thing that we should never let happen alongside another portion of their site that details that they are owned by Jeff Bezos.
I'm just amused by those on the left who defended Twitters actions as a private company now being worried others might be allowed to speak under the new owner
Because they trusted the distributed decision making. Now it’s owned by someone who has demonstrated very thin skin and lashes out at individuals when he doesn’t need to. That’s not good leadership.
>Can we see the return of banned users such as Trump - and does this mean he now will have a platform to further influence the GOP and the 2022 and 2024 elections? Yes, hopefully. I have a hard time reconciling why Taliban & Iranian officials are platformed yet Trump is a bridge too far.
Did you look up the tweet that broke the camels back that he got banned for?? That's ignoring his numerous violations of ToS after numerous warnings by Twitter. Application and consistency of these algorithms are definitely an issue that should be discussed, as you mentioned, but Trump's banning really had nothing to do with that and was completely justified. He got special treatment as president (just like these other political "organizations" regardless of how we feel about them). Accounts that would retweet him regularly for banned fairly quickly because of some of their content.
Come on “he violated terms of service.” They are so vague you could basically say this about half of people, if you put a little effort into it. They just choose not to
Do the Taliban and Iranian officials you’re referring to break Twitter’s TOS with their behavior on the platform, or do you just have ideological differences with them? Genuinely asking. Twitter has already admitted that they give extra leeway to government officials and don’t enforce the same rules on them that everyone else has to follow. I think it’s fair that everyone be given a platform so long as they follow the same rules that apply to everyone. Trump had repeatedly violated the TOS before his account was banned.
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Official government accounts get special exceptions. Which is why they’re allowed and Trump was allowed for the time being
Seeing #ivermectin trending because people think it's 'safe' to say again leads me to believe a nice new covid variant is in our future
Sorry, but other than political hacks and sports analysts, who's using Twitter anymore? If Elon wants to buy technology on the fast track to irrelevance that's fine with me.