All: speech here isn't very free when the server can't stay up, and it's smoking right now, for obvious reasons.
I'm going to prune some of the top-heavy subthreads and possibly restrict the page size a bit. There are over 2500 comments in this thread, and if you want to read them all you're going to have to click "More" at the bottom of each page, or go like this:
...and so on. Sorry everyone! (Yes, fixes are coming, yes it's all very slow.)
Edit: also, if some of you would log out for the day, that would ease the load considerably. (I hate to ask that, but it's true. Make sure you haven't lost your password!)
So Twitter was at $70 per share a year ago. So what? Jack Dorsey was CEO a year ago, too. The share price was $33 less than a month ago.
But, despite an absolutely incredible roller-coaster news cycle, things have been definitely trending down at Twitter ($33/share last month), which was reflected in its share price. The current executive team (and Dorsey) had wasted time focusing on things that didn't matter instead of things that did matter.
Boards have several fiduciary duties to the shareholders. As an all-cash offer, this generates for the shareholders a substantial return with NO RISK, and so the board has a serious legal obligation to carefully review this offer and make a decision.
If the board elects to reject this offer, then their reasons for doing so need to be very clearly elucidated, because, as Twitter is a public company, they would have to see something in their crystal ball that the rest of the market does not.
Everyone currently holding $TWTR believes that the true value is greater than the current price.
To make a successful hostile bid, you need to pay not just "more than the current price", but "more than the holders of 50% of current shares believe the company to be worth". Usually bidders use analyst price targets to guess at the distribution of holders' internal price targets.
This is what makes it so difficult, and why this bid is very likely to be rejected.
(This is easier to explain with a white board, tbh.)
If the shareholders are rational and believe the true value is greater than current price, why aren't people buying until it asymptotically approaches that price?
Optimism and hopes for future gains aren't priced in because they are fantasy and not yet material.
I believe a lot of my long positions are worth more than their current price, doesn't mean I'm going to spend all my money buying them up to that price.
If I lock in a 20% gain today that's nice, but I might believe with high confidence that it'll rise 50% in the next year. Then Elon's bid doesn't move me that much.
If they believed this, they wouldn't be selling at the current spot, sellers would all be putting their asks ~46% above spot (discounting time value of money), and the market would move.
That risk and upside is already priced in if you believe in market efficiency.
> If they believed this, they wouldn't be selling at the current spot…
They’re not. You’re mixing up the market as a whole and the owners of a majority of shares.
The ask price is the lowest ask. If you buy a lot of something, you reach further into the order book and the price is going to be higher. If you want a 51% stake, then a lot higher.
Depends on the index fund and the rules / guidance they follow to balance.
Many of them are passive, and only adjust once a quarter or once a year. Additionally, big spikes by one stock match drops in other stocks, aka they're not likely to make a big sale because one stock (twitter) had a good day.
The market is large and has plenty of participants with different strategies. There are people selling at the going price, and there are people who are not. The trading price is a good reference price, but it's not the "right price" for everyone.
it is also the price of what is currently for sale, most shares of most companies are not actively for sale at their current price.
Every market participant has a buy price and a sell price for one share influenced by their personal opinions and the state of the whole market; each at a different level and trading price is only calculated on actual trades. So all the shareholders that are unwilling to sell for any of the current offers do not influence it.
Yet if you were to buy 100% of the shares then you would eventually have to climb up to their price.
This is an interesting point I never really thought about. There is a distribution of buy prices and another distribution of sell prices. But if we plot these on the price axis there will be NO overlap because all shares in that region have been traded. I wonder if there's a way to sample these distributions to get the bigger picture.
I don't anyone would find your squishy confidence it's worth 50% more than current value any more credible than shorters who think it's worth 50% less. Both seem like fringe opinions without much foundation.
> I don't anyone would find your squishy confidence it's worth 50% more than current value any more credible than shorters who think it's worth 50% less
It's not my opinion that TWTR is worth 50% more. Please don't understand it as such. It's an example of what someone long TWTR could be thinking when they simultaneously hold their position and want to reject the Musk takeover.
I don't think it's worth continuing this thread anymore though. Have a great day.
you may believe that your positions are worth more than their current price but the reality is that they aren't otherwise they would be selling at the higher price. the price of an asset is its true value
If you can buy 1 share at $1, that means that yes.
But a controlling interest in something almost always requires more than 1 share. It may require millions or billions of shares.
And once folks figure out that they’re the couple percent that will block that controlling interest, their own prices tend to change.
That volume of shares also means you can't just buy from the person who is happy to sell right now, you need to convince folks who don't plan to sell ever, or aren't in a hurry, or don't need money right now. Their prices tend to be different too.
And just like buying a tank of gas is different than buying an oil field, the value propositions and likely price discussions are different.
If you can buy an oil field of gas one tank at a time, more power to you - but you’ll likely quickly discover it doesn’t scale the way you want.
These guys are literally betting that it'll go up 100% to that mythical $77. If they actually believed HALF this amount was going to happen, they'd be buying until it reached $50-60. Instead, we see Goldman Sachs saying that $30 is their sell price.
A dollar in the hand is worth a LOT of imaginary gambling dollars.
This can only be described as political/ideological or a huge gamble that Musk would come back with an even bigger offer rather than walk away. Neither of these seem to be in the best interest of shareholders.
I don't think investors are totally rational, but here's a simplified example. If you think there's a 90% chance that a stock price will triple and a 10% chance that it will drop to zero, you could resist a takeover bid and still not want to put all of your money into it.
If you're gambling with your stock, under what circumstances would you not take a massive 20% ROI and turn it over into a new stock?
In my opinion, the real reason behind the board's decision is ideological. If Someone with their ideology made the same offer, I'd bet big that they'd be announcing their acceptance and talking about the bright future for the company.
Screwing your shareholders over for ideology would not sit well with a jury. I'd love for them to go to discovery over this and see what the board REALLY said.
The current shareholders, who vote on this, think that the current value is higher than what is being offered to them to sell. Those are the ones that Elon has to convince with his higher offer.
Well, along with if they don't sell to him it feels like he will become create a Twitter competitor with up a budget of up to $42 billion to spend - which based on his past successes he will efficiently spend.
>
The company had an income of $438 million, including a $101 million "positive impact" from the sale of Bitcoin, and $518 million from selling zero-emission regulatory credits to other automakers. That means Tesla continues to lose money making and selling vehicles.
Sorry you're so glum. Buy a Tesla. It'll put a smile on your face.
-Space access is leading the world. Satellites bring freedom, access, and peace.
-Cars are the safest, fastest, and smartest you can drive.
-Tunnels solve waaaay more problems than they create. Hyperloop isn't so much an 'active' project, see tunnels.
-Robots are extension of AI work for self driving.
-Brain project will help those with physical disabilities, and learning.
-Solar roof and battery at home is wicked cool and useful.
I'm leaving stuff out. Don't know if they take a loss on their cars, but if so that's very common for hardware manufacturers.
I'm not an Elon apologist by any stretch, but you have objectively bad takes here. I can only imagine you just don't like his personality.
Are his companies not leading in Space access? Clean energy? Transportation? Maximizing life? Fun.
The guy is a workhorse He innovates at every turn. He hires the best, and expects the best. He has done a marvelous job incentivizing great engineering, science, and research. Their goals are lofty. He thinks long-term. His teams are largely motivated for the right reasons, and he helps make many of his employees very wealthy.
His intentions are good. He's an environmentalist. He loves Earth. He loves people. He's positive and optimistic for the future. He can be abstract, artistic, and goofy.
From our perspective, he's rarely wrong, and when he is, he owns it. Is he perfect? Hell no. But he accepts responsibility. He engages with the public, and his fans.... and his haters.
One thing is for sure so far, people who bet on him win.
We'd be so lucky to have Elon lead a communication/social platform.
This is a little silly. I returned a Model 3 after they told me I'd have to wait months to get body defects repaired. These were defects that were apparent within 2 days of having it. They refused to simply swap the car out. For a little while it seemed unclear that they were going to repair it at all... just abysmal service.
> I'm not an Elon apologist by any stretch
I'm sorry, but you really really are (and that's fine, people like what they like). You're practically fawning over him in this comment.
> We'd be so lucky to have Elon lead a communication/social platform.
I think the opposite. He is in fact an excellent physicist. Like Nikola Tesla if Nikola Tesla both cared more about money, though he did a lot; and was better at getting money; and critically, if he had a predecessor who got fucked he could learn from (hence the name of the company, and why I say "Nikola Tesla" instead of "Tesla", because at this point the brand is bigger than its eponym). Only 99% sure about these statements, not absolute. And people remember Nikola Tesla because of the electricity, well he also designed the Tesla valve, a valve with no moving parts. Who knows what else.
So keep in mind while Elon Musk has a lot of monetary capital ie rich, and sure he's also still in the game of pushing the boundaries, he's not better than anyone. He's not better than you. So for there to be things he's that good at, to get to that level of success by the metrics most people are obsessed with, he has to be bad at other things. Well not exactly, it's not like skill points. In fact physics is highly analog, so that limits how good you can be at digital. They just naturally compete for neural resources.
So in fact, he's vulnerable to ML, he's been getting hacked by its promises for the longest time, Achilles heel. But you realize it cannot be any other way? You can't have an Iliad with no Achilles heel, it doesn't work as a story, like Superman without kryptonite, you can tell the story of Popeye without spinach but not Superman without kryptonite.
Like he sees demos and he's like "finally shit that actually works" and then it's like no, this is more shit that doesn't actually work, one-trick ponies, not even, one-trick PhD's disguised as ponies. Like he believes he needs PhDs because at some level he believes in credentials, when what he obviously needs are dropouts like him. Day one dropouts ideally. I mean if he wants inventors. If he wants to prove something is impossible, then yeah a PhD is the best. I don't know what the hell it is, maybe it's a recent thing, I believe in the idea of a PhD, I like people with PhDs.
I think it's because they're intelligent, they're not stupid enough to try to fly by flapping their arms. They don't do one single flap. No idea what happens if you flap your arms. Sounds stupid right? That's how aviation came into existence, guys would try flying off the Eiffel tower with a bird costume, splat. But then less stupid guys said, OK you can't use your arms, you need wings in a stronger structure, and that's why airplane wings are called wings. They're not actually wings, that's a really weird metaphor for birds' arms. And it was strictly necessary for guys to go splat for there to be gliders and all the rest.
People usually want to earn money, so it's a good idea to buy low and sell high. You don't want to buy close to the price you think it will reach. Not only because of the risk of it being wrong, but also because other options exists that is believed to make more money compared to the risk.
It would be stupid to buy a stock even if there was a 100 % guarantee for a stock to increase 2 % in 1 year as there are other basically risk free options available.
All shareholders may believe the true value is greater than the current price but still not buy or sell at the true value price because they don't know when the company will sell for the true value. You see this when a company makes a bid for another company but the deal hasn't gone through yet. It sometimes trades for a little more or a little less, and that's when a deal has been accepted. When it's a little less, that's because there is some legal risk that the deal won't go through. When it is a little more that is because someone thinks the deal will get held up and renegotiated (like another bidder might show up).
So it is possible and common for a stock to be lower then what people expect it to be worth. A really good example of this is when you have a powerful CEO or a person with more voting rights who might hold up a deal for their personal ambition. Think about Shari Redstone at Viacom. Most people think the company is worth more but difficult to sell because she wants to run it awhile to show she can.
Twitter is worth a lot but difficult to sell for all the reasons this deal is showing. Supposedly Disney thought about buying it but realized it would be very controversial. When it takes a long time for the right buyer to show up investors trade the stock at a discount. It happens all the time in media stocks. (Full disclosure: I have Twitter stock)
His point is, that at least half of the share holders are not happy selling for that price. Selling is a personal decision, and if at least half are not happy to be forced to sell, I don't see it being a good idea.
Even if the optimal price that's some supernatural being will suggest is lower than current price, it is still the decision of the share holders.
Optimism and hopes are worth a price, you are in ycombinator.com, a major buyer of optimism and hopes.
One can easily imagine how useful it's for such a country like Saudi Arabia to control the #1 worldwide media platform without being too exposed on the frontline (i.e. as a large, but not too much, shareholder).
>Everyone currently holding $TWTR believes that the true value is greater than the current price.
This is not exactly true. Everyone holding Twitter believes that it will outperform the next best available asset. This can mean that it will decline less than cash (i.e. inflation) and decline less than other stocks. In our current market, this means people believe that Twitter has a good forward looking IRR, but it does not mean that all holders believe that the stock price should be $70.
>To make a successful hostile bid, you need to pay not just "more than the current price", but "more than the holders of 50% of current shares believe the company to be worth".
Again, this comes back to IRR terms. Sure Twitter may be worth $100/share ten years from now, but most people would take $50 today than $100 then.
>This is what makes it so difficult, and why this bid is very likely to be rejected.
The bid is likely to be rejected b/c it's likely made in bad faith. Read the SEC release and count how many times it says ' non-binding'
How was Musk's offer - a public disclosure with few conditions or contingencies, made in bad faith? At face value, it does not violate basic standards of honesty or appear to deliberately mislead.
"Funding was indeed secured. I should say I do not have respect for the SEC in that situation. I don’t mean to blame everyone at the SEC, but certainly the San Francisco office. The SEC knew that funding was secured. They pursued an active public investigation, nonetheless. I was forced to concede to the SEC unlawfully."
> Mr. Musk called the bid his “best and final offer,” adding that if his proposal isn’t accepted “I would need to reconsider my position as a shareholder.” Mr. Musk earlier this year built a position of more than 9% in Twitter.
> This can mean that it will decline less than cash (i.e. inflation)
This is meaningless because stock price is denominated in dollars. Inflation expectation means that the stock price is going up; that is, be worth more in dollars. Anyone choosing to hold a stock prefers that stock more than the dollar price it would fetch. Otherwise they would sell.
Holding a volatile and risky asset implies that the holder thinks there is a significant win available to offset the costs of the risks. It's reasonable to assume that projected price is far above market.
the problem is that said "new platform" is doomed to fail, just as every free speech twitter competitor before it (gab, parler, truth, etc). this is an idea thats been attempted numerous times but doesnt succeed because no one wants a platform where they can be harassed. so im not inclined to believe that the share price of twitter will fall once he makes a competitor, because if free speech was truly a differentiator (versus decentralization / federation e.g. mastodon), then these other networks would have actually seen continuous use, but at the end of the day everyone still uses twitter
Even just him announcing a new platform would scare twitter investors. If successful it'd drive twitter even further down.
Paul Graham thinks he would be able to compete:
"It is obvious. It's also obvious that Elon could draw an initial set of users that was more than big enough to have sufficient network effects on day 1."
"You don't need to get everyone to switch right away. All you need, to start with, is a critical mass of users — enough so that people don't feel they're talking to a void. You'd very likely have that from the start. Then it grows."
I doubt Musk has the patience for building or owning a graph based technology business. The complexities of Twitter’s architecture are not trivial and a huge reason it’s not been successfully disrupted.
The other big reason is balancing the greater good vs unrestricted access, which has taken years to accommodate.
Musk is just an ego-centric billionaire with a lot of money and an unproven belief that Twitter could be better with his proposed changes. I’d bet he’s thoroughly aware that those changes could destroy the platform.
I believe the offer is rejected and the other top ten shareholders (all hedge funds) buy up anything he dumps and the price remains stable.
Twitter is complex. But not nearly as complex a building a mass produced EV, charging and servicing infrastructure and space company. You have a bug in twitter? Easy try something new. Bug in either of the others? People DIE. Twitter will barely be remembered next to MY___________ in a few years. It's blank for a reason.
I'd argue Twitter is just as complex, because Twitter's product is its users and the content they create, where the others are governed by the laws of physics and making a good car (i have one, they're good!). What you have is a bunch of engineers on twitter going "ah yes, its just a social network feed! I wrote that in CS244 as my class project. how hard could it be", forgetting that twitter is an international network with tens of thousands of hyper targeted communities that feed off each other, diplomats that negotiate with governments and communities, etc. Not to say that this is impossible for anyone else to make, but it's a lot harder than just launching a site with your hundred engineers. i'd recommend reading platformer.news for a good
This is laughable. Social graphs are not trivial. It may not be as complex as landing a rocket booster on a platform, but it’s definitely as complex as monitoring a car.
Twitter had 100M MAU after 3 years and it was still operated entirely by just 300 people. So it’s not that hard. Musk could easily recruit 300 engineers and cost will be peanuts to him. Additionally, early growth of Twitter was driven by various celebrities signing up and bringing their audience to the platform. Here Musk has unique advantage as he has huge celeb network which can be convinced to move over or at least cross post. He can count on enabling slew of features like edit button, more chars, easily verified accounts etc to lure many users. Musk can hang in for years and easily eat up the cost. Earlier competitions did not had these advantages.
It’s not been successfully disrupted because a disrupter came and went viral, and AWS literally deleted their servers as they were becoming the most downloaded app
It will tank the price because other people will sell if he does. I don't know if his threat is strictly illegal, but the feds have to reign in some of this behavior sooner or later or all of the Musk day-trader fanboys will think they too can get away with it. A few people can't, but the SEC can't deal with thousands of Musk's fanboys skirting the law.
> "It is obvious. It's also obvious that Elon could draw an initial set of users that was more than big enough to have sufficient network effects on day 1."
This would be "obvious" about Trump, too, no?
Perhaps your claim is that Musk would have a better chance of making something that scales and can accept all those users from day 1, but then that's also a much more expensive bet for Musk to make with higher up-front pre-launch cost.
Musk wouldn’t do such a blunder launching it. Truth Social with a sizeable war chest, took Mastadon (while [still] lying about it) with many months if not over a year to get it ready.
Being able to launch a product with more than enough resources is almost intertwined with drawing in users. Truth Social never had the bare minimum expectations. Something that is not given to most people since most aren’t abnormally focused on grifting and so on for such a big venture.
Another critical failure of Truth: Trump wasn't posting on it. Trump can't carry a platform he himself couldn't bother to use. Truth might've survived launch on that core difference alone, and an Elon-backed service might work if Elon himself actually uses it.
That is wildly baffling. Not only Trump not using it, but does that mean the dozens upon dozens of popular figures around him who his fans also like, are mostly not using it either?
The SPAC stock is still holding strong snd it self making no sense day to day. It went up 7%+ on news Fox joined two weeks ago. The next day when this was found to be false. It didn’t even drop 1-2%.
Truth will fail no doubt. However all the SPAC, other investing and political insiders and the Trump family themselves still have a realistic shot of cashing out pretty well. Nothing close to if it was competently rolled out, but tens of millions to hundreds of millions going to many diff insiders is still a ton. Trump’s cash out should still be huge and would probably give him his largest cash stock pile ever (before it goes to pay debts off)
Indeed, this will fall into the long history of Trump branded failures. The thing is it would be so difficult for him to avoid. The only "thing that doesn't scale" he'd have to do is talk on it for a while. How many of his followers would flock there if there was a non-zero chance to actually talk to him.
I'd argue Trump has more immediate, impressionable supporters than Elon and his twitter like platform is a complete bust. I'd also argue people don't switch, they add. Rarely is someone popular on a single media platform, they tend to use to all of the vertices to engage. There would have to be a value proposition, one that persuades users, the name Elon in my opinion isn't a large enough selling point on it's own.
I don't think Elon's fan base are any more capable or driven. I would argue Trump is vastly more popular on social media than Elon and that Trump supporters are at the very least motivated for reasons outside of billionaire worship and straight trolling.
Billionaire worship/trolling
vs
Blindly following regardless of the amt of double speak, hypocrisy, blindly rejecting things because they are not on your side and following things that go against your best interests + billionaire worship + allowing the amount of grifting that occurs...
The motivation may be different. Is it any better? Or change anything for the better in terms of social media success?
Trump’s popularity may be larger, but it’s also more isolated and siloed. The total possible user base for a social network of almost any billionaire will be larger than Trump’s. Not that most would ever get close to reaching that amount or getting numbers more than Trump. Just that the addressable market is bigger.
Trump was also kicked off of twitter while being excoriated in the media and then took, what, two years to launch something?
Musk is not nearly as trashed in the media and could leverage promoting an alternative while still on twitter. Obviously there does need to be something that is at least reasonably differentiating from twitter, and I think that is the real challenge as just saying it is twitter but more free is not as tangible.
I think Paul Graham overestimates Musk’s social media influence. He’s powerful on Twitter in large part due to Twitter. Same with Trump, btw. If it were so easy for Musk to recreate the network, why spend 43B on some infrastructure? Musk knows he’s muzzled outside of Twitter.
Would that not have been true about Truth Social? They would have had enough users on day 1 to get network effects, but it hasn't happened. You could blame technical issues, but as I understand, Trump isn't even on the platform and neither is Fox News. So why would a Musk Twitter clone work any better?
Clearly that's not the only reason or gmail would have been a flop too. I actually think that marketing choice was the only reason they got as much initial traction as they did, without it I think most of HN would never have heard of Clubhouse, rather than that it would have been more successful.
If the former president of the United States with a distortion field around his politics and the largest cable news network backing his every word couldn't succeed in launching a platform, I doubt Elon can. Unlike Elon, Trump has constantly blasted news networks and tech companies in the U.S. as being fake and run by lefties, to the point where his entire base believes it, and even that wasn't enough to migrate them off of twitter, because again, network effects. Twitter benefits by having everyone on it, and with no one to yell at Trump's audience is left to talk to themselves, which is boring.
Additionally, with all due respect to Paul, his logic here is absurd. "I'd be interested so that means everyone must be" is the wrong line of thinking for a product launch like this. Everyone is _interested_ in something the first day, but whether or not that's enough to build on is another matter. So many social networks had massive first day signups. I was "interested" in Byte on the first day. I signed up, posted a few bytes, and stopped using the app after a week. Parler, Gab, Truth, had "interest" too. The problem is that critical mass of users he describes are all just talking to themselves in their insular group (elon fans) just as the right-wing networks had their conspiracy theorists etc. It's enough to have users, but its not enough to promote long term growth. I know it's not something _i'd_ be interested in, which refutes his point because its purely anecdotal.
So, the only demographics that'd actually stick with an elon twitter competitor are: People who love elon musk and everything he creates, and people who are banned from twitter. If it shakes out to be anything like Gab and Parler, the later means the site is going to swarm with Nazis like every other free speech competitor to twitter, which as a jew is something i'm deeply uncomfortable with. There's not enough free speech in the world for me to put up with being harassed by people who share the views as the ones who murdered my great grandparents. And as much as people here enjoy grandstanding about free speech, its likely something you're uncomfortable with too, otherwise you'd be on those sites.
Basically, the product elon wants to make already exists and it has no users. If Trump (who had a significantly bigger following on twitter than Elon) wasnt enough, if big right wing stars like Milo werent enough, what's gonna be enough? Because copy pasting Truth and slapping Elon on the front... wont be.
Getting someone to onboard to a new platform is ultimately a sales job. Selling is about telling people who they want to be, not who they are.
A social media platform advertised as a politics-first/free-speech platform is the social media equivalent of a beer ad featuring a divorced balding man at last call in a dingy basement bar. No one aspires to bicker about politics with strangers on the internet, even though in reality that's the engagement that pays the bills.
It seems overly reductionist to ascribe the essence of 4chan to this one, singular idea. For example, m00t reports that 4chan was inspired by another image board he used to frequent. It is also hardly the first or only website to have light moderation.
The failure of those other platforms has nothing to do with free speech or lack there of. Twitter has a moat that you aren't going to be able to break by just trying to out Twitter them.
Every competitor has failed because it prioritized free speech above user experience. Almost all have had terrible UI's, terrible performance, lots of bugs.
BigTech owns the mindshare of how to build these platforms. Musk would actually have the resources to pay for the level of expertise and competence to build such a platform. However, it would be years in the making which might all become irrelevant with web3.
Or Musk could throw support behind web3 tech as ultimately free speech will only exist when controlled by no one including free speech advocates such as Musk.
I don't think the technical challenge is the blocker here. Lots of people on HN could build a really good version of Twitter in a month and be ready to tweak things as scale increases. (Nothing is an overnight success and you will have time. Twitter didn't even get it right for a couple years, remember the "fail whale"? The idea being right as much more important than choosing the right distributed database or whatever.) The reason people don't do that is because they don't know what they could do better than Twitter. People leave Twitter because nobody wants to read their tweets; you can't build a Twitter clone from people whose tweets nobody wants to read.
One idea that I have is that I noticed a lot of people went from blogging to making YouTube videos. I'm guessing YouTube is the sweet spot that balances monetization potential (they will find ads to put in your videos, and advertisers pay a lot for video ads) with a recommendation engine (that essentially forces people to watch your content; or more charitably, tells people that will like your content that they should take a look). Blogs didn't really have monetization or recommendation, and people were willing to switch media (text to video) just to get those two things! Now we have things like Substack bringing those to text, and people are taking advantage of that.
Maybe that's where the next Twitter wants to be? Paying smart people to write? That sounds a lot more appealing than "free speech" (which is great to have, but I don't really want to read anyone's free speech), which is all we've seen as the differentiation point for Twitter clones.
The next step is a social media company that is (1) private (2) membership based (3) no reliance on huge ad contracts, just promoted content (4) can tell the difference between political opinion and hate speech (5) gets out of the way of legal public discourse.
It doesn't need to be web3. It just needs to be somewhat transparent and minimally auditable. Web3 doesn't know what web3 is yet. Most is just garbage, sorry.
Dan olsen has a great video about this, something along the lines of "platforms are not your friends" with the specific case of some YouTube competitor.
The real problem with competing platforms is that they don't offer anything to the main people they need to attract.
The guy has launched more than 2 companies. Last I checked there aren't any super tunnel sleds under LA fixing traffic there yet, and my car was supposed to be able to autonomously drive itself a solid 4 years before I got it. It's very easy to be in the mindset that elon never fails if you think all his failures are just very long delays
It would be funny if he's already selling his shares for a tidy billion dollar plus profit and has no intention to buy even if the board accepts his non-binding offer. Not sure if this would be legal.
You explained it perfectly, no white board needed.
I can only add one minor point from a general and international perspective: 50% may not always be enough. At least in Sweden I think you need 90% to accept a bid before you can legally force the remaining 10% to sell their shares. Even if you accept that there will be minority shareholders you will need 67% before you can do some things, like e.g. issue new shares without giving minority owners right of first refusal.
I'm sure there's a lot of devils in the details all over the world, and I'd be surprised if there are none in the US.
>Everyone currently holding $TWTR believes that the true value is greater than the current price.
I don't see how this is relevant. All stockholders of any non-dividend paying company believe the price of the stock will go up. Takeovers with relatively low premiums happen all the time. That being said, Musk is definitely bargain hunting. I think the bid shows he isn't that serious and has no idea how to answer the fundamental monetization questions.
Funds vote the way the fund managers choose. And they tend to do backroom deals with other shareholders to vote a particular way, and such deals can be pretty profitable for their golfing career...
You'd have to be really damn sure that Twitter is worth more than what Musk is paying.
It's hard to see how an owner of Twitter stock could rationally reject an offer with a guaranteed +38% return. For any serious investor, even if they believe Twitter is worth twice what it is now, they must have several other stocks they believe are also worth twice what they are now. And if Elon bought all of them out at +38% returns, that would be a tremendous year investing.
What happened last week is irrelevant. If I can sell my shares on the market today for $46 and Elon is offering $54, that's a ~17% premium. It's better than nothing but not nearly enough to convince >50% of shareholders to vote in his favor. Several major ones have already said no to the offer (https://www.reuters.com/technology/saudi-prince-alwaleed-bin...).
If it was a serious offer the market would have already valued TWTR at ~$54, but it has actually gone down after Musk announced his bid.
Information about a potential takeover bid is absolutely relevant, and it's generally reasonable to calculate the premium from before that news first existed.
What happened last week was information about a potential takeover bid.
It is not at all irrelevant. I would be surprised if any reputable financial source would think of this as a 17% premium and not include last week.
gpm said the rest already as a reply.
As to the Saudi prince. Regardless of the topic. In any situation, it is hard to take the prince at face value knowing he pushed hard to successfully give the Kushners and co $2B[0]. If there’s more at play for the prince than short or medium term money, what he says is irrelevant then.
It was 30 when the price was at 33 and musk wasn't on the picture. Someone's buy nearly 10% on the open market then bidding for a significant chunk of the rest is new info.
Not really. The OP in this thread is very overblown. The business judgement rule is a cornerstone of corporate law in most western jurisdictions - Delaware's framework, if anything, enhances the value of the scope and level of deference offered by the rule.
I don't get how the logistics work in a move like this. If you're a shareholder and the board approves the sale are you forced to sell your shares to Elon at the stated price? What if you don't want to sell?
Edit: I also wonder how leveraged positions, especially shorts, get resolved.
Depends on the shareholder agreement and how the board fits into that.
By default it would be something like - if the board approved it goes to a shareholder vote, and if 75% or 90% of the shareholders approve the rest are dragged.
I doubt the board can force all shareholders to sell, that would be an insane power position for shareholders
This is informative, thank you. I wonder what portion of Twitter investors are index fund companies like like Vanguard and "institutional investors" like pension funds that are unlikely to object. And obviously Elon himself is a ~10% shareholder. Seems likely that this would pass a vote easily.
That's actually crazy to think about... so besides Elon, only 11.6% of shares are privately held? Meaning Elon holds about half of all privately held shares? Unless somehow he is in the 78.4% but I don't think so.
To my understanding, this at the moment is neither hostile nor a takeover, but a (rather direct/rude/aggressive; pick whatever adjective you want) question to the board to advise shareholders to accept Musk’s offer.
It could become any of the four options failed takeover, failed hostile takeover, takeover, or hostile takeover.
If the board says “good idea” and advises shareholders to accept the offer, it could or could not become a takeover, depending on whether enough shareholders (by share count) accept it (I don’t know how many is enough, but it’s almost certainly more than 50%, as an OK would force _all_ shareholders to sell. You can’t take a company private and keep shareholders around)
Technically, that wouldn’t be a hostile takeover, though, as it would be with agreement by the board.
If the board advises shareholders to reject the offer Musk could persevere. In the end, if enough shareholders sell their shares to him, the board’s opinion doesn’t matter. if enough shareholders do that, it would become a hostile takeover.
> To my understanding, this at the moment is neither hostile nor a takeover, but a (rather direct/rude/aggressive; pick whatever adjective you want) question to the board to advise shareholders to accept Musk’s offer.
Right, but a board is never going to say yes to this. If he was actually trying to get the board's agreement, the negotiations would have all happened in private and the announcement wouldn't have been made until it was basically a done deal.
I'd assume he wants to make the price shoot up and then when he gets rejected be the first to sell as previously proclaimed making big money in the process.
ie market manipulation.
No, this is not a hostile takeover. A hostile takeover is if Elon bought up more than 50% of the shares. Which he can do much more cheaply than buying outright at a 38% premium.
If they decline his offer plan B may be to buy up the cheap shares until he has 51%.
Plan B makes sense if Musk was actually serious/determined (I have no idea but I doubt it). Especially once the stock gets volatile while going down after he sells [part of] his stake before re-buying privately.
1. There's <100 billionaires with enough wealth to buy 51% of Twitter. And even for most of them, such an investment would represent a larger share of their wealth than it will for Musk, meaning greater risk.
2. Most just aren't interested. Unlike Musk, who shows a strong affinity for the platform.
Well yeah, he's never seen any real punishment from all the other times he's broken the law. So why would he stop?
He'll pump & dump again. Make a ton of money. Then after he's forced to pay a modest fine, he'll make it his mission in life to hunt down and destroy the careers of anyone involved in the investigation.
One risk may be that a lot of the blue hairs among the staff may choose to leave the company. Then again, that might be a positive thing for the company’s economic performance.
There is a very clear risk of transformating the social media titan that is Twitter into Truth Social, a sideshow of a forum that is dedicated to the worship of one man. That would plummet the stock price.
This is a fear based on nothing that I keep seeing peddled by people with no experience moderating anything in their entire life, and don't remember early Twitter. Other companies have actually censored theirselves into irrelevance (almost happed to OnlyFans, already happened to Tumblr, Yahoo, etc.) So a model with more fair and transparent moderation would likely be a business boon. Twitter is not at all transparent on why some things are allowed to stay while others are banned entirely.
Also the shareholders would get cash, they would no longer own the company at all and the future of the company would no longer be of their concern. Musk could shut it down and it wouldn't matter to investors, they'd already have their money.
I don't think you can really analogize much about Twitter from the examples of OnlyFans and Tumblr... the porn/adult-content situation is a whole different can of worms than the stuff people get mad at Twitter about.
There are a bunch of dead subreddits, forums, sites, etc due to over moderation. Facebook is kind of a dead platform itself, being carried along by other properties, in part because of moderation mismanagement (also in part due to a changing demo.) And their moderation has actually been better than Twitter's in terms of transparency. There is certainly a delicate balance, there's no denying that, but there has to be some level of transparency and accountability for the censors or it just doesn't work. You can't have the whims of a moderator determine the fate of accounts with no explanation or consistency. Twitter has been an utter failure in this regard, even Jack had no explanation for some content bans and inconsistencies. The current CEO is even more aloof, or just supports the lack of transparency outright.
A more fair moderation system doesn't mean Twitter is going to turn into 4Chan. Everyone seems to hint that is going to happen, but have 0 evidence to support their claim. It just seems like some people are afraid some speech they disagree with might once again be allowed, like during early Twitter...it's almost like a power thing.
Fair moderation is one thing. What people who say Twitter has a free speech problem have something else in mind. They want a platform where they can say whatever bigoted things they want then hide behind it because “hurr durr free speech”, that never works. Twitter is already toxic, can you imagine the things that would be said with no moderation
Thats a strawman. I hate right wing bigots as mich as you do, but I don't think Musk belongs to that crowd. Here is what he actually said: (a) censorship decisions should be made by courts not private companies (b) moderation should be transparent (c) priorisation algorithms should be open source.
I think this is a sane and principled stand that is very different from: "I want to enable bigots."
A platform should have the right to have whatever speech that they deem appropriate. A court deciding that literally contradicts your argument. 2. Moderation is up to each private organization, they can moderate, moderate lightly, heavily moderate, etc, it’s their company and their choice 3. “They should” aka it’s their choice. You don’t have a sound argument at all
allowing abusive people to remain on the platform until the abused somehow get court orders, definitely doesn't sound very sane to me
rather, it sounds like a way to turn twitter into another in a long line of mostly-empty "freedom"-touting social networks that prioritized tolerance of abuse over user experience
as a Twitter shareholder, I'd prefer ElMu not ruin it, or my investment, like that
You can’t moderate a free speech platform, that’s the thing. So I can realistically harass someone online and be well within my bounds of “free speech”. I can say the most vile things ever and be well within my bounds of free speech
What people say must still be legal and harassment is basically not legal. I have big problems to a) see where people see their free speech limited, i.e. examples and b) there are plenty of platforms with much more laissez-faire to no moderation. But the latter has its price, those communities tend to be quite repelling to most people.
To me it seems a theoretical discussion about the definition of free speech that is mixed up with a business discussion which makes no sense.
What qualifies as harassment on a social media platform? It’s quite easy to say you’re exercising your rights. Elon and alt right conservatives want a no moderation platform where they can say anything. If that’s what they want to do, go for it but it will die because the same things always happen, echo chamber that repels everyone except a niche group
From the point of view of the investors, there is no risk. If offer is accepted, they get their bags of cash and walk away with hopefully more than what they paid for those share. Musk could shut down the business to the ground on day 1 and they still get to keep their cash (I wish he would).
And to note, Musk is going against the trend. Ark, the tech permabull, reduced its Twitter position. Cathie Wood just said she started selling after @jack stepped down as CEO. Interesting times.
To be fair, Ark isn't doing so hot. So I wouldn't be concerned much about what Cathie "God wanted me to create an ETF and told me about it as a child" Wood thinks or does, when it comes to financial performance of tech companies.
Here is the yearly performance for every single fund that Ark is running. Keep in mind that some of them have existed for barely a year if that, but the point still stands.
ARKK (ARK Innovation ETF) - 54% down.
ARKW (ARK Next Generation Internet ETF) - 50% down.
ARKX (ARK Space Exploration & Innovation ETF) - 18% down.
I am not trying to attribute such performance exclusively to poor decisions, not at all. There is definitely a good amount of unforeseen circumstances that drove ARK ETFs down. But it is difficult to consider ARK's actions as a good source of predictions for tech companies they get involved with, given that 4 out of 6 of their funds are over 50% down in a year, and the rest are still down by a significant amount.
Cathy seems to eat up a lot of completely out there stuff like no tomorrow. Lesson I learn from Ark is that don’t trust tech ETFs by people who are not actually in tech. It’s like investing in VC who has never spent time building actual product as entrepreneur and engineer. It’s also fascinating to see their fall from the sky. Just couple of years ago, every finance guru invited Cathy on their shows and asked for her wisdom. Everyone thought she had managed to get that magic bullet.
Yes. Not only does he get $100M for a few tweets and talks with an accountant, he gets to hurt people he doesn't like, and he builds his reputation as one who plays hardball.
See Musk's net worth. It's entirely possible that whatever the loss is, it's an entertainment expense in his mind for a vanity project, a bit of spite, and perpetuating his reputation.
He's risked more for less in the past. Does Elon strike you as being acting purely from a place of logic and reason? If so you might be the only one to think so.
Seeing and hearing Jack, I think he is good and what he likes to be more like “spiritual” leader. He can makes bets and give guidance but he doesn’t want to manage, or get to the weeds. The way he set up Square is more like individual groups working independently and he just provides the aircover for things he believes in.
He pushed the Square Tidal acquisition because in a weird way it makes sense in his mind. He also pushed for bitcoin because he believes in it, instead of it being part of company strategy.
Twitter needs someone who could reset the current thinking and be the product visionary but also a person make people execute on the vision. Kind of someone like Elon. Unclear if Elon’s ideas are good but at least he doesn’t tolerate bad performance.
I do miss Steve Jobs, or mainly, his leadership style in tech. Every year with SJ was full of surprises and delightful visions coming true. In a way, people in the late 90s and early 2000s experienced the peak of the tech landscape. The smartphones revolution was just one of the visions that came true in that era.
In a way, Musk is like SJ, but greedier and cockier. SJ was about products centered around humans. Musk is about humans centered around technologies.
Greedier and cockier than Jobs? The same Jobs who wouldn't admit paternity for years? The same Jobs who wouldn't acknowledge certain teams that had worked on certain products at Apple? The same Jobs who tried to buy Dropbox by telling them they were an app, not a company? You've got to be kidding me. That is a colossally high bar for both those qualities.
Oh, I thought it was ungoogleable so I didn’t try.
> According to "Hatching Twitter," a new book dissecting the history of the short-messaging site by the New York Times' Nick Bilton, Facebook's founder once told close friends that "[Twitter is] such a mess, it’s as if they drove a clown car into a gold mine and fell in." Although the comment is not given a specific date, the book notes that Zuckerberg made it "within the last three years." The comment was highlighted by venture capitalist Paul Kedrosky on Bloomberg TV last week.
Zuckerberg took the reported jab at Twitter after he was frustrated by the startup not taking one of his acquisition offers. Al Gore had also whiffed on buying the hot startup, despite being emboldened by "copious amounts" of wine and Patron tequlia, and of course, his deep pockets.
Didn’t know Facebook wanted to buy twitter.
Or Al Gore for that matter.
Jack Dorsey: 'I'm partially to blame' for helping create a centralized internet. Censorship is the first thing that comes to my mind.
Source: https://twitter.com/jack/status/1510314535671922689
How has it improved now that Jack is gone?
It hasn't. Maybe a shake-up like this is overdue. We'll see!
It's literally impossible for a system run by a single company to not be centralized. Dorsey acknowledging that or not does not change that nor would having some other owner.
It's actually possible (although not easy by any stretch) for us to build a decentralized Twitter that would not be controlled by a company for profit and would be more censorship resistant. It probably will not happen because of ignorance and political manipulations rather than hard technical limitations.
If only there was some sort of "user network" which could just be some sort of distributed posting service where a rotating group of companies would host the posts (more than one host for both fault tolerance and avoiding a single point vulnerability). People could post to discussion groups about the news (or "newsgroups" for short). Perhaps it would be so attractive that ISPs would advertise access to portions of this posting service and provide support for its hosting.
Something like that seems like it would be simple enough we could have had it decades ago. If only someone had thought of it then...
If only someone had thought of a way to monetize it so that Google would not purchase it and later run roughshod over it before letting it fall into disuse.
Isn't that what Mastodon, or various projects using Mastodon, are trying to do anyway? It's not such a thing can't be built, it's just it's unlikely for such a project to gain mass adoption.
I'm talking about social media specifically here. Good luck with trying to get a blockchain-powered project up with mass adoption in that space. Maybe you can include a messenger feature running Matrix in it, too.
The problem is how to make money on Twitter without alienating users with too many ads or monetization of posting. I have zero desire to ever spend money on anything Twitter like, I enjoy the feed I've curated but if it starts costing me money I'll find another way to get it.
The company's laggard growth, and never issuing a dividend because he wasn't responsive to making the company profitable, and couldn't grow the user base for quite a while.
"Me-first capitalists who think you can separate society from business are going to be the first people lined up against the wall and shot in the revolution. I'll happily provide video commentary." — Dick Costolo
Truth of the matter is before Elon ever gets Twitter another tech giant will buy it without hesitation.
They should sell to him because all he is doing is either buying Twitter at fair value or doing pre-launch hype for a competitor which will include the accumulation of other platforms including Trump’s Truth social, shit like substack, which he can easily get for less than 10 billion, Mastadon, etc.
You can't buy mastodon, the software is licensed AGPL and the network is run by it's users. You could buy stewardship of the software and the trademark if it's registered, like google did with android, but you never own GPL licensed software, only the users do.
I think you still understand my point. This guy roughly says if there’s no electric car, build your own. If there is no reusable rocket, build your own. If big tech is stifling free speech …
All successful people continuously repeat what worked for them in the past.
I get your point, I just figured I'd point out your misunderstanding of mastodon specifically, to you so you can better understand it. It isn't a just a twitter alternative.
A company is not a bag of potatoes in the market to sell at the whims of the highest bidder.
Here is what would be looking after their fiduciary duties:
The company had a loss of 200 million dollars this year. Was only profitable 2 years out of its 16 years of existence. The board should state that Twitter in the hands of Elon Musk, could jeopardize its current unique and somewhat also precarious, place in social media.
The company should ask Elon Musk, to first explain to shareholders what he plans to do with the company, and how it would benefit them. Provide details on shape and form of how his plan would be implemented. Until then, rejecting the offer is looking after their fiduciary duties.
I think you have it backwards. Twitter has always struggled, usually losing money, and Musk is coming in with a cash offer. He doesn't need to change anything for this to be a financial relief to shareholders. Not to mention shareholders will no longer have an interest in the company, as it will become private. There really isn't any impetus to prove Twitter's future will be better (and better than what? bad?)
Say the board has a reason to believe that Twitter is going to double in value in the next two years. ie, they have a secret "Twitter Gold" product that they are certain will triple profits.
It would be a disservice to me, as an investor, if they sold the company at a value of $54/share knowing that it could easily be worth much more than that in the near future. As a shareholder, I hired this board specifically to make decisions with information that isn't public. I either trust them or I don't.
That is the whole point of my argument. As a director, I am rejecting the offer because my fiduciary duty, it to veil for the future of the company, not the bank account of the shareholders :-)
[1] "The court reviewed and affirmed the following principals:"
"...Directors do not, by virtue of their office, owe fiduciary duties to shareholders. Circumstances may arise in which duties are owed but only by way of exception. To achieve this, there here must be something unusual in the nature of the relationship. Special circumstances which “replicate the salient features of well-established categories of fiduciary relationships” must be present."
"...The mere fact that a director has access to the company’s affairs, or that their actions have potential to impact shareholders, does not, of itself, amount to “special circumstances“, or give rise to a special relationship. These are “inevitable” features of the relationship between directors and shareholders..."
"...The purchase of shares from a shareholder is not (on its own) sufficient to create a fiduciary duty. Even in a situation where a director is purchasing shares from a shareholder, the existence of such a duty depends on the existence of special circumstances..."
No. They choose to go public to finance based on the public funds instead of asking a bank loan. You go public and sell shares to get money from investors. Then you do what you think is best for the company, not the shareholders. If the company does well, hopefully the shareholders do also.
Amazon stock price went nowhere for years, no profit, but investors stick with the company. Sometimes the investors are VC's, sometimes they are the bank of Mom and Dad, and sometimes they are the stock market.
It will be rather difficult for the board to argue that it's satisfying it's fiduciary duty by rejecting an offer with such a high premium so the current shareholders can continue to own a company that's losing money.
> The board should state that Twitter in the hands of Elon Musk, could jeopardize its current unique and somewhat also precarious, place in social media.
But see, this point is irrelevant in this scenario. If they sell, every current shareholder gets bought out in full, they no longer have a stake in the company. He could shut it down the next day and it wouldn't affect the former shareholders, the company's future at that point is only Elon (and Twitter employees' and users') concern.
It's fiduciary duty to the shareholders, not the company itself, not the employees.
"Board of directors have a fiduciary duty to exercise due care in how they manage a corporation's affairs and also have the duty of loyalty and obedience to the corporation. A fiduciary duty means that both directors and officers handle their powers only for the collective benefit of the corporation AND (my emphasis) its stockholders."
You can have all 100% of the shares, and there are still things the law can punish you for, like running a company to the ground. You can't say: I owned 100% of the shares, so ordered the board to set fire to it as I though the flames would be beautiful and would give me a calming ego trip.
Shareholders can't order any type of action from directors, just because they might have votes to elect them.
Look at Facebook, and the CEO special shares. Do you think you are an owner of Facebook or a passenger along for the ride?
> Look at Facebook, and the CEO special shares. Do you think you are an owner of Facebook or a passenger along for the ride?
That's not a great example, because in Facebook's structure, Zuck has special class shares which give him 10x the voting power of regular shares, per share. So he actually does have the majority of the shareholder power, irrespective of any rationale of the responsibility of directors.
And why did he do that? Because he founded Facebook as Director/Owner and want's to drive the company the direction he wants. Once more, it's about the governance of the company the priority. He did not put first optimization of the shareholders profit. That hopefully will come.
Or to give another variation on my argument. Let's assume that with his decisions on governance, he embarks on a road that provides for a steady stream of profits, on a new domain of guaranteed margin and high entry barrier for competitors.
A business model that will provide steady, slow, stable, but minimal grow.
That will be good for the company on the long term, but not that good for shareholders returns. The lack of grow is unlikely to create a stock price increase.
You don’t seem to understand. If Elon buys 100% of shares, it will become a private company. It won’t be traded on a stock market any more, and won’t have a share price.
If he buys 100% of the shares the company can still be traded and shares will have a price. Shares can traded over the counter or via private deals. Just not through the Nasdaq.
The point here is that he does not own the company yet, and directors are the managers of the company and free to run it as they see fit.
You have a hilarious misunderstanding of the financial system, and using Financial Times is proof of it.
Like a lot of HN posters, you seem to have zero understanding of the rules behind the rules and think what's actually found codified in law somewhere sitting on a shelf is how things actually work. It isn't.
If it was, Hunter Biden would be in jail, the last 4 or 5 American presidents should be impeached and in prison for war crimes, most of the high level executives at large banks would in jail after 2008.
Shareholders can absolutely order directors to act on their whim, or guess what happens at the next shareholder meeting? That board director gets fired.
Being the FT, the article is written from a UK perspective but not entirely. Does not look like you read it, and I am only using it as an example of my rationale.
I will post here some partial quotes and you can read the rest if you are interested.
"...Shareholders own the corporation, and the duty of the directors to maximise shareholder value follows from that. I have lost count of the number of times I have been told “that is the law”. But it is not the law. Certainly not in America, as Lynn Stout, a professor at Cornell University Law School, has pointed out..."
"...Shareholders in England have more rights — but even there, the obligation
of a company director is to promote the success of the company for the benefit
of the members. The company comes first, the benefit to the members
follows from its success. And English shareholders are definitely not owners.
The Court of Appeal declared in 1948 that “shareholders are not,
in the eyes of the law, part owners of the company”. In 2003,
the House of Lords reaffirmed that ruling, in unequivocal terms..."
"...Ownership is not a simple concept..."
"...But shares give their holders no right of possession and no
right of use. If shareholders go to the company premises, they will
more likely than not be turned away..."
"...Shareholders do not have the right to manage the company in which they
hold an interest, and even their right to appoint the people who do is
largely theoretical. They are entitled only to such part of the income
as the directors declare as dividends, and have no right to the proceeds
of the sale of corporate assets — except in the event of the liquidation
of the entire company, in which case they will get what is left;
not much, as a rule..."
Deep state via its pension funds that have unlimited access to free cash from Fed in cases like this, will long Twitter. This bidding war cannot be won by Musk. He probably factored this in, and will take significant profit once he dumps his share as he promised. Hopefully that would go towards funding a Twitter alternative.
> Boards have a fiduciary duty to the shareholders. As an all-cash offer, this generates for the shareholders a substantial return with NO RISK, and so the board has a serious legal obligation to carefully review this offer and make a decision.
The fact that their primary concern has to be for their shareholders and not whether the sale will be good at all for the rest of humanity is a huge problem in my eyes.
If someone offers to purchase your home or other property, the decision to accept that offer lay with the property owner(s), not the municipality, county, or state who may or may not consider impact to humanity. In what utopia do you think we live?
You don't have 300 million people (including heads of state) outside your house (that you jointly own with millions of other people) standing on your lawn interacting with each other and the rest of the world.
You likely do have people or organizations on the loan to your house though, and they don't really get a say most of the time as long as they can be paid off.
What if instead of a house we were talking about a small business that serves people. Can that business not sell itself to someone else?
Property rights and the government stepping in to force changes don't interact well, and goes against a free market type system. The government does step in sometimes, but usually when they see what's being done as being anti-competitive and hurting people through reducing market effectiveness, not just because they've made some moral judgement. Personally I'm happy they're not doing the latter, I suspect quite a lot of people would not agree with the judgements they were making at any specific time, depending on the specific groups in power.
Property rights and the government stepping in to force changes don't interact well, and goes against a free market type system. The government does step in sometimes, but usually when they see what's being done as being anti-competitive and hurting people through reducing market effectiveness, not just because they've made some moral judgement.
Tobacco advertising, pollution, lead gasoline... Clearly we do make moral choices and, as a democracy, pass laws restricting some activities. The world is not encompassed by The Profit Motive.
I'm not quite sure that unrestricted hyper-optimised misery factories are the thing we should be shooting for.
> Tobacco advertising, pollution, lead gasoline... Clearly we do make moral choices and, as a democracy, pass laws restricting some activities.
We do, but I think it's rare, and much rarer than that list would imply. I see most of those as clear issues of public health. The one where that's a harder claim to make, advertising, it's about making the market function better. Free markets requires require widely distributed and accurate information to function correctly, and false information is extremely damaging to a free market.
> I'm not quite sure that unrestricted hyper-optimised misery factories are the thing we should be shooting for.
Neither am I. I'm not some free market only anti-regulation type. I think a completely unregulated market is trivially shown to be unworkable by our own history, so regulation is required to curtail blatant market manipulation. I even think more regulation restricting the size of large companies (or disincentivizing them) would be useful, but I think they need to be applied to foreign companies as well or we're just hurting ourselves without solving any problem.
There's probably a hundred ways that is infeasible and has problems, but it's obvious there are real problems to address with inequality and outsized companies with outsized influence, and something needs to change. I'm just hesitant to couch it in moral terms when it comes to what the government can and should do, because I think that's a slippery slope.
People claim that free markets, capitalism, and government noninterference lead to good outcomes.
Then when we look at examples of these things causing harm rather than leading to good outcomes, people shout and say "Hey you can't do that, its a free market!"
If people want to use the argument that free markets should be able to cause harm if they want then people need to stop using the argument that free markets are good because of all the good they consistently do.
I don't think that's an accurate assessment of my position or point. You can see my reply to your sibling comment for further explanation from me. In short I don't think a free market is a panacea or perfect, but I do think it's a tool that when used appropriately and kept in check to keep it's known deficiencies from making it a net negative, it's better than what else we have available.
You can criticize Twitter's leadership all you want, but I don't see how allowing Elon Musk to take ownership control of Twitter would better humanity.
and not allowing him to take control would better humanity? I wanted to eat dinner today but I don't see how that would better humanity. I don't see why humanity should be taken into considerating when it's irrelevant. Most people don't even use twitter.
Yes, I do hold some criticisms against Twitter leadership, true, but I'm also fascinated by your view. So I wonder, what if I'm wrong? And then it would be really helpful to see your argument, if you have one. I'm on the fence on a number of things, so this is really your chance to change my mind. And if you do, I might do stuff like investing in Twitter right now, instead of waiting for Musk to take over. Just an example. I'm not saying I will, but it would be a logical next thing to do if you convince me. If not, then I'll probably just wait like everyone else.
> Free speech is dangerous; without censorship, progressive ideas cannot propagate because people can then make them look as silly as they truly are.
By this definition, the US never would have abolished slavery. Those who praise conservative ideas always put those ideas in a vacuum where they can't be proven wrong. Fascinating, isn't it?
the statement asserted has nothing to do with any specific party at any specific point in period. This is an example of progress during an era of which, apparently, free speech was unquestioned. The past accomplishments of the Republican party much more closely mirror the current Democratic party due to the Southern Strategy, but again, not relevant to the point being made.
> Progress for progress's sake isn't always progress
then it's definitively not progressive, isn't it? Conservation is a reactive stance, not an active one.
Imagine someone sets fire to a masterpiece, art conservatives don't take a reactive stance and say "hey you shouldn't have done that", they take an active stance using safeguards to ensure that it doesn't happen in the first place because it can't be undone.
But isn't this demonstrably false? (Not even to mention that "progressive" in this context seems to mean something very different from the dictionary definition).
Which Twitter are you using? Pick up any conservative YouTube video talking about social media and you'll see plenty of examples.
One example that comes to mind is Hunter Biden's laptop (recently confirmed as true, even by left wing publications) being censured vs all the Trump's Russian allegations (which didn't go anywhere) which weren't.
Many of the silliest progressive ideas are being / have been normalized thanks to Big Tech and the establishment doing one or more of three things:
1) actively censoring people who speak out against them
2) preventing discussions from happening in the first place (comments disabled, dislikes hidden)
3) actively promoting the ideal progressive version of the idea to cut down on dissent
Take the pronouns thing. Every other Instagram account of a female has her official pronouns (which you may only choose from a list of officially allowed ones so as to cut down on dissent via things like “your majesty / his highness”) set to she/her. I’m sorry but we all know you’re a woman. Why are you putting your pronouns up? The idea is a preposterous one; don’t even get anyone started on the they/them abomination.
And yet dissent and mockery of this abject stupidity is largely censored. As a result it’s bleeding out into the real world.
I hang in very progressive social circles. Trust me when I tell you, you do not want this reality. Their lives are defined by their progressive causes and perceived slights and micro aggressions. Every introduction “must” involve your pronouns and if you “forget” them they will innocently ask you of them. As a result people are bumbling pronouns all the time, I cannot tell you how many times even the pronoun experts start to say “she” or “he” in casual conversation referring to someone but then panic and stutter and say “they” because they can’t quite remember what pronoun this particular person wants to go by today or if they’re a they/them who despises people who feel like they should be able to speak freely without knowing they’re very, very special and are too special to go by a binary pronoun.
Mockery is the best defense against stupidity. Which is why it’s under such a big threat. And it’s why Elon is taking over Twitter.
To normalize people being open and explicit about their gender identity so that people with non-obvious gender identities can feel less conspicuous sharing theirs.
> they/them
They and them have been neutral-gender pronouns forever.
> And yet dissent and mockery of this abject stupidity is largely censored.
Because most of it is thinly veiled transphobia. You can still disagree with the censorship but to act as if it's mostly good-faith arguments being censored is just naive.
>To normalize people being open and explicit about their gender identity so that people with non-obvious gender identities can feel less conspicuous sharing theirs.
This oft-repeated stance is a very naive way of thinking in my view, if you're different from 99% of the population, then you're going to stand out no matter how much other people try simulating your superficial markers (while being obviously baseline themselves). If you look like a duck and walk like a duck, no amount of people saying "Quack!" when introducing themselves will prevent me from noticing you're different in a fundamental way from all those people pretending to be like you, all those people are managing to do is a semi-mockery of what they supposedly support. There are deeper patterns than language, humans aren't GPT-3 to be fooled by simplistic imitation games of speech patterns.
It's usually immediately obvious if a She/Her or a They/Them is matching the traditional features of the declared pronouns, it's literally millennia upon millennia of pattern-matching processes deeply hardwired into my mammalian brain and always running in the background, I couldn't stop it if I wanted to. I suspect most people are the same. You don't change reality by changing words, conspicuous things are conspicuous.
Not to mention the whole flawed framework of "Normalizing" and "Validating" things as worthy moral goals in the first place, why do things have to be common in order to be accepted ? So nakedly hive minded.
>They and them have been neutral-gender pronouns forever.
Common misconception, they are not gender-neutral in the modern sense, they refer to those of unkown gender. The gender is still one of the perfectly defined binary we all know, it's just not known or relevant to the speaker. There is no quantum wave function of genders waiting to collapse behind 17th century uses of 'They'. This misunderstanding manifests itself as soon as you encounter monstrosities like "They is looking for a new car to buy".
>Because most of it is thinly veiled transphobia.
Ah yes, transphobia, the cardinal sin, the unspeakable horror, the one thing you're not supposed to say[1]. Let's ban all mention of this atrocity, let's shun and exile All Who Dare Transgress.
This surely won't backfire at all, supressing dissent has a very good track record of eliminating it entirely.
I'm positive you've put more thought into this pair of comments than I ever did in my life about this issue of pronouns. Don't you think it's at least a bit weird that you're so obsessed and irate about such a minor detail?
Also, it's very funny that you're so taken up in arms against the world-ending catastrophe of people writing "they/them" in their twitter bios, yet see no issue with a multi-hundred-billionaire dictating what is and isn't allowed on a major internet platform (by all means wealth inequality is one of the major problems of the modern age).
EDIT: About the singular "they" thing: that whole paragraph is hilarious (quantum what?) but it's a pet peeve of mine to correct those misconceptions. Your sentence is grammatically incorrect, even when the function is singular, the agreement in number is still plural, e.g. "someone wrote their name here" -> "they have written their name", not "they has written their name".
Plus, singular they has been attested since the 14th century. Plural they...? Since the 13th.
>I'm positive you've put more thought into this pair of comments than I ever did in my life about this issue of pronouns.
Eh, not really. I don't even live in a country where that's a common practice (thankfully), my comments naturally tend to be long whatever their subject are, you can verify this yourself by looking at my post history.
>it's very funny that you're so taken up in arms against the world-ending catastrophe of people writing "they/them" in their twitter bios
So, first off, I'm not 'up in arms', it's just that as a man with a certain propensity towards heresies, it's second nature for me to look at a social web and immediately notice the conformists, and I'm not a big fan of conformists. Secondly, I never implied those people are doing anything 'world-ending', although they are participating in their fair share of censorship-defense and general internet poisoning, but really they are just engaging in a pitiful and obvious illusion. I'm bringing that up, half-ridiculing it, and half-pointing-out it's counter-productive to what they actually want.
>yet see no issue with a multi-hundred-billionaire dictating what is and isn't allowed on a major internet platform
Where exactly did I mention that I support or even care about Musk's attempted takeover of Twitter :) ? and who do you think controls facebook, youtube or reddit, the progressive spaces who ban you when you look funnily in their general direction? or are billionaires only bad when they hold opinions you don't like ?
>Your sentence is grammatically incorrect
Congratulations on noticing the obvious, that's kinda the whole point of the example. 'They' doesn't make sense for a known person of a definite gender, your examples are all assuming the default usage of it as a placeholder for somebody of an unknown general gender, but the moment you start using it to refer to a specific person you start running into issues like whether to use "is" or "are".
>singular they has been attested since the 14th century
OK ? how is this relevant ? where did I express problems with the fact that 'they' can be used to refer to a single unknown person ?
what does your last point even mean? are you objecting to the idea that transphobia is bad? Nobody is suggesting not talking about transphobia. I didn't even say i agreed with censoring anything. I'm just pointing out that a lot of the stuff that does get censored is stuff that isn't adding anything meaningful to the conversation and is explicitly argued in bad faith.
>are you objecting to the idea that transphobia is bad?
Well, considering this word can be basically JIT-redefined to mean anything on the fly, I wouldn't say this question is necessarily meaningful without some shared state. What I can say is that I would never like or support making fun of people for things they can't change, if your meaning of 'transphobia' includes that, sure that's bad.
But you know what else is bad? religious authority. The existence of a vague and ill-defined sin that a select class of people can arbitarily expand and contract it's definition to include and exclude anything and anyone they like or dislike, and civil authorities and institutions bending over backward to please that class. Transphobia is the modern day heresy, it's something you can throw at someone without the slightest understanding what they have said and get a mob to descend on them if you get your timing right. Lgbt 'acceptance' groups are strikingly similar to the fanatically religous, down to the particular language used to redirect criticism and pretend they are open to dissent.
>Nobody is suggesting not talking about transphobia.
In order for this to be a real 'talk', and not just a one-directional sermon between identical replicas, you have to allow people who are hostile to the artificially-dominant stance. Those who think transphobia isn't a real problem, or those who think it's a real but exaggerated, and so on and so forth. I'm not seeing any of that on any trans conversation I have ever seen on social media, all I see is an incredibly aritifical and incredibly religious "As We All Know Tran Lives Matter, Much More Than The Rest Of Us Actually", it reminds me of when dictators invite themselves to staged talkshows and pretend that the conversations aren't scripted.
>I'm just pointing out that a lot of the stuff that does get censored is stuff that isn't adding anything meaningful to the conversation
Considering the amount of censoring and manipulation that happens on social media, I think that's not convincing argument for censorship. If you kill 90% of humans you're going to eradicate an aweful lot of diseases, if you imprison 70% of people you're going to catch a lot of criminals, etc... Any strategy where you do the same thing to a significant percentage of the population is going to work more or less like random guessing aka a 50% coin flip, unless you're really unlucky or the population is really skewed. You're better off measuring ratios of where it works and where it doesn't work.
Sorry, a person's gender identity just isn't that interesting, and the extra cognitive load of remembering pronouns isn't something I'm willing to bear.
I'm learning Japanese and they have dozens of pronouns, perhaps hundreds of them. Not only is someone's gender identity bound to their pronoun, but other important aspects are bound as well such as job and age. I don't see anything wrong with introducing a few more to the English language, we've been too restrictive for too long and the language is just getting downright creaky.
Some of the recent pronouns I've seen are barely pronounceable. Getting others to refer to you in an unwieldy way seems more like a power play to me.
We already have some titles that signal achievement, like Doctor. I'd be for introducing more of them. Maybe we can get rid of the hereditary ones, too.
It's easier to just think of it like someone's name. Even if someone's name is hard to pronounce, we generally make an effort *if* we want to socialize with them.
I won't disagree there's power plays going on. Lots of people glob onto any well-intentioned movement to push their own egos. But I'm more concerned with being kind to those in the margins than accidentally validating a narcissist. Idk. I get where you're coming from. But. A lot of these people are genuinely not "he" or "her" and it's just kind of degrading to force them into one of those buckets.
it not being interesting to you doesn't mean it isn't incredibly important to them. The fact that it is incredibly important to them is obvious, and the "cognitive load" you're talking about is completely trivial. If you're not willing to take even the tiniest effort to make the people around you feel welcome, you may be the one being narcissistic.
Count me as another long-time HN user who refuses on principle to play the My Pronouns game. Burn me at the proverbial stake if you will, or bring out the HR version of the portable guillotine—but I will never, ever knuckle under to the heresy hunters and virtue signallers.
>bring out the HR version of the portable guillotine
>I will never, ever knuckle under to the heresy hunters
My god you really need to take yourself way less seriously. Is this what happens when you've lived your life in first-world middle class comfort? You think you're a martyr for... being slightly impolite to people?
In my view (and actually the view of a lot of people, given the responses in this thread), it has almost nothing to do with politeness and everything to do with avoiding being manipulated by wokeists.
I don't quite get your stance. You're free not to use those words. It's not like it is against the law to not use those pronouns. It is a simple and nearly effortless courtesy, that you can ignore if you want, with the consequence that people may think you're a twat and treat you accordingly.
Like, you're not mandated by law to greet someone with "good morning" instead of saying "fuck you". Yet it is widely understood that if you do this and refuse to say good morning, people will be upset and become hostile towards you. It's a perfect analogous situation. I'm not really sure what you want.
It's no more coercive than any other social norm. If you act disrespectful to the people around you, they will treat you accordingly. Everyone everywhere accepts this in 99% of situations and it is interesting to see the specific exceptions they make.
Some relevant offtopic here. Long time ago I came across a book of occult nature that, among other things, outlined 6 soul types, one of them being a curiously accurate portait of what we call wokeness now:
...individualised by vanity were born into city populations, and life after life they tended to drift together by similarity of tastes and contempt for others, even though their dominating idiosyncrasy of vanity led to much quarrelling and often-repeated ruptures among themselves. Separateness became much intensified, their minds strengthening in an undesirable way, and becoming more and more of a shell, shutting out others. Their emotions, as they repressed animal passions, grew less powerful, for the animal passions were starved out by a hard and cold asceticism, instead of being transmuted into human emotions; sex-passion, for instance, was destroyed instead of being changed into love. The result was that they had less feeling, birth after birth, and physically tended towards sexlessness, and while they developed individualism to a high point, this very development led to constant quarrels and rioting. They formed communities, but these broke up again, because no one would obey; each wanted to rule. Any attempt to help or guide them, on the part of more highly developed people, led to an outburst of jealousy and resentment, it being taken as a plan to manage or belittle them. Pride grew stronger and stronger, and they became cold and calculating, without pity and without remorse.
I could also write up paragraphs of text filled with vague generalizations and prejudices about people living in the rural countryside, and paint up a picture that all the people who live there are abominations who uniquely suffer from the negative aspects of the human condition..
But I won't, because this and that are both mindless factionalist drivel.
> The fact that their primary concern has to be for their shareholders and not whether the sale will be good at all for the rest of humanity is a huge problem in my eyes.
I know very little about public trading or the laws regarding it - especially compared to many other HN users - but here's my novice response:
Think about why that's a rule. The board doesn't own the company; the shareholders do. The board's role is to make decisions on behalf of the shareholders. The rule exists to ensure they do exactly that.
A board deciding to financially harm the investors they represent for the "good of humanity" goes against the very concept of investment. A public company intentionally acting against the financial interests of its owners would see its stock value immediately collapse, causing immense damage to its shareholders, employees, and customers.
If you want a company to act "for the good of humanity", it has to either be privately owned or align with the financial interests of its investors.
> A board deciding to financially harm the investors they represent for the "good of humanity" goes against the very concept of investment.
It does not. It goes against a very specific concept of investment, which is that I should be able to buy a thing and make money with absolutely zero regard for anybody else. It is not a rule of the universe that owning something should allow me to harm others.
I agree that ownership of a company does not entitle you to harm others. There are many laws which exist to prevent companies from harming others and we probably need more of those.
But this isn't about what rights a company has. This is about the obligations a board has to act on behalf of its shareholders within legal limits.
Please don't confuse my comments for an approval of public companies choosing financial gain over the good of others. This is one of the primary reasons why I am very critical of companies going public. Going public essentially means a company sells its soul for investment money. The owners and investors may see a big payout, but the potential long-term good a company can do is handicapped as soon as it goes public.
The concept of shareholder value really got started in the 1970s, pushed by Milton Friedman and others. And value seems to be interpreted as nothing more than the stock price.
Hence the idea that anything is justified as long as it gooses the stock price, and that a corporation has no social obligations whatsoever.
It's really just a silly common misinterpretation of a vague legal concept, the stock market equivalent of "correlation doesn't imply causation", in that it's the only thing many people know about the subject and that they consider this very complicated information that needs to be mentioned at every possible opportunity.
In reality, there has been more or less exactly one successful invocation of the concept in history, against Craig Newmark, when he explicitly said he was going to do something that would harm shareholders.
In reality, you do whatever you want and if anybody complains you tell them it's good PR and will therefore benefit shareholders in the long run. You can be as wrong about that as you want as long as you manage to avoid explicitly stating that you know to be wrong.
That's all very well and good but aren't you arguing in a circle? You're essentially saying "since shareholders have absolute power over an enterprise, therefore they have absolute power over the enterprise". Sure, but we're arguing that it's not a good idea to have companies be immune to any public accountability or and democratic control. In fact we already do this: there are myriad laws that constrain the behaviour of companies: rules about financing, transparency, pollution, taxes, etc.
I read the comment as being a complaint specifically about the rule that board members should have to act in the financial interest of shareholders. If the intention was to criticize ownership rights of shareholders or to argue for legal limitations on the powers of a company's owners, then my response definitely doesn't address that.
Why is Twitter important enough to require democratic stewardship? Lots of people don't use Twitter; it's the least used platform among all the other social media companies. When you're thinking about stewarding capital democratically, think about where the lines are, and why. The critique I'm reading behind the lines here is that Twitter, despite being a private institution, has a large amount of impact on society and so should be subject to democratic oversight. I'm not sure that's the reality; Twitter is a failing business with a stagnant, albeit highly engaged, userbase. It's unclear to me why we should subject Twitter to democratic control for the good of its small userbase. If anything that critique would be more applicable to something like Facebook in the US or WhatsApp in other countries (HK, India, etc) which actually have come to take a sort of infrastructural role in communications. Twitter does not have this role. Should the government have stepped in during the Tumblr acquisition?
That's the tricky thing with making the case to steward corporations democratically. Just for example, my parents don't know anything about Twitter except its name. I think they would find the government regulating Twitter to be an overreach of democracy simply because it's not something they know or even care about.
Because...they own the company? They literally hold shares representing their ownership of the company and then vote on what to do with said company. That is democratic.
Legally, the Board can consider stakeholder goals and morality. I think if Musk announced a profitable-but-legal foray into genocide, you could urge shareholders to reject it, and no court will hold otherwise.
But at some point the shareholders can overrule you. And in those cases, we find management’s highest goal is usually preserving their own special salary, not the “interests of humanity.”
> The fact that their primary concern has to be for their shareholders and not whether the sale will be good at all for the rest of humanity is a huge problem in my eyes
Let's ignore personality and societal issues for a moment and look at the value proposition. The 'best and final offer' of $54.20 per share is just too low to be acceptable for major investors.
Just over year ago, Twitter shares traded at about $70 per share. Musk's offer is about 25% lower than last years peak. There's no reason to assume Twitter shares can't reach the same levels ever again, nothing much has changed fundamentally over a year.
Musk's offer is a cash only offer. $43 billion is a lot of cash. That's a lot of Tesla shares to sell, or massive loan. If Musk thinks Twitter is that valuable to take such risks, current major investors will probably want to unlock that value themselves.
I think the takeover offer is just as believable as last week's announcement that Musk was joining the Twitter board.
> There's no reason to assume Twitter shares can't reach the same levels ever again
but it depends on how far that "again" is.
If you bought at $33 a month ago, you'll be now getting a 60% return. You can put that in another less risky investment and still have a very healthy return over the next 5 years, say 5% , less than the historical sp500 rate, you'd get to ~$69.
So if Twitter gets back to $70 in five years Musk's offer is still an ok investment, but its growth has been almost zero for the last 8 years, it's not trivial that it would become a powerhouse in the next 5.
Think about it this way – if Twitter shares were to rise ~17% from where they are today, would >50% of investors immediately hit the sell button? If not, then why would the same number agree to this deal?
The difference is that one option is selling a declining company today for 17% bonus, the other option is selling a company that has shown 17% growth. Its not the same comparison
There's a selection bias you need to consider. Twitter investors probably wouldn't be Twitter investors if they thought it was on the decline without significant growth prospects.
> There's no reason to assume Twitter shares can't reach the same levels ever again, nothing much has changed fundamentally over a year.
The Fed's covid policies in terms of interest rates and money printing had a very high impact on the stock market and stocks. Why else would the market have increased to the degree it did during covid?
That is a fundamental reason why it may not see $70 again any time soon.
And yet, despite your belief that the majority of the investors should/are valuing the stock at >$70, it is trading at ~$45, which should at least provide some evidence that the majority of shareholders--today, not last year--value it at <$55; to me the next question is "exactly who is voting on this: the shareholders or the board members?", but even either way it doesn't seem insane to me that getting a guaranteed 10% increase in your purchase isn't in the best interest of the majority of the shareholders.
> which should at least provide some evidence that the majority of shareholders--today, not last year--value it at <$55
The price is only determined by who is buying and selling right now. Trading at $45 merely implies a nonzero number of shareholders value Twitter at $45.
The problem is we can use that to determine the belief of the zeitgeist: if you--or anyone else--truly believes Twitter is worth more than $45--and has any hope of getting to that value in the not-distant future (of course: time is also money)--you should go buy it, as there are apparently a number of suckers right now willing to accept a mere $45 for their shares. People trade because they think things, and if no one is trading right now it "should be" because they largely agree with the zeitgeist.
(This is also why we can use this price to indirectly learn something about how the market views the likelihood of Elon buying Twitter: if it were a "sure thing", the price of Twitter stock would be trading close to $55, as you'd be able to make a fast profit.)
It's not that binary though. Imagine you belief Twitter is worth 45.01USD but it's trading 45USD, would you throw your life savings at it (disregarding fees), no, of course not, way too risky!
The way I see it, people (and other entities!) don't think Twitter is worth X, they think there is a distribution of worth.
This means there is risk in their bet, so if I thought Twitter was worth (on average) 100USD, that wouldn't mean I would sink my life savings into it but would put in some, based on the risk and also what else I need capital for.
Also, how much one thinks Twitter is worth probably also depends on your time horizon: like the old adagium that the market can stay stupid for longer than you can stay solvent, e.g. when shorting a scam.
In short, the reason you wouldn’t buy it right now, despite believing its outlook is rosy, is because you think it’ll go lower in the short to medium term. Which is more or less what all the analysts are predicting about tech stocks broadly.
If a non-zero number of people thought it was a good idea to buy it at $60 a non-zero number of people would sell it at $60. The large number of actors each trying to outsmart each other acts as a dynamic value-setting strategy.
You’re worth your share price today. Not what your share price was last year. Not what you think your price should be.
> current major investors will probably want to unlock that value themselves.
This isn’t how risk or portfolio allocation works. Musk has offered current investors $43 billion as risk-free guaranteed cold hard cash. Depending on their portfolio and risk allocations they may prefer the $43 billion today instead of an uncertain chance at the future. And to take that cash and diversify in alternative endeavors.
That's dumb. My company IPO'ed at $20/share. Hit $50 in the first year. Second year went down to $18. Then dropped low. A few years later the company was bought out for $7 a share when we were trading at $3.
Twitter is a dying company. They would be dumb not to take that money.
> If Musk thinks Twitter is that valuable to take such risks, current major investors will probably want to unlock that value themselves.
Doesn't this depend on if you actually agree with Musk's thinking and valuation of Twitter in the first place? Given the share price has been all over the place, clearly the market is not on the same page.
your comment about the price being $70 a year ago seems off to me. that's not the value now so why should it be seen as such? if you were buying a house worth $400,000 and made an offer of $540,000 but were told no, this house was worth $700,000 a year ago the value of this fictional house now is still $400,000
Depends on your definition of “soon”. In a volatile market like the current one, tons of people sell stock in the short term despite believing the long term outlook is good. The simplest reason is to go into cash to avoid the worst of the downturn.
I do love reading about how unbelievable stuff elon does is. He should frame all the quotes. SpaceX had lots of these including from the heads of europe and russia space programs.
Does he have perhaps more of a vision for twitter than current mgmt?
Did his involvement increase / decrease the stock price?
If they turn him down could he build something for lets say $20B in spending?
Going to be some interesting times.
And by the way, twitter DID invite him to be on the board with the requirement he not get more stock.
>And by the way, twitter DID invite him to be on the board with the requirement he not get more stock.
this was a trap - both barring his ability to gain more shares, as well as putting him in a place where he can't talk about twitter publicly to the same extent as a hostile takeover.
Counterpoint: Twitter lost over half its value in the past year (share price from $70 to $33). Can the board justify that they’re on track to turn that around so quickly?
Frankly the board doesn’t seem capable of ‘unlocking Twitter’s value’ based on their recent performance.
It's hilarious why people care so much about the price of a financial instrument. Even Bitcoin. Do you care what wheat or copper or kerosene trades at? Why not take him at his word.
Plenty of Americans spend 5 to 10% of their worth on stuff. Who cares what your neighbor paid for his boat....maybe dude just likes to drink Coors light on the lake.
Another non trivial aspect is his offer price. No one seems to be pointing out the obvious half trolling nature of an offer that yet again includes the number 420. In that respect part of his motivation for doing this is self amusement.
I fully agree that part of his motivation is self amusement. It's one of the things I really like about Musk, is that he's clearly still connected to his inner child, and I think that's part of what keeps him dreaming.
I think the people most offended by it tend to be the people who have lost that joie de vivre and miss out on the fact that we're all just existing here and now. Sure, do the very serious things that need to be done for a person with his resources, but in the end, we can't even prove it's not all just a damn simulation can we.
Vanguard and Blackrock always votes with management and sadly lot of times with bad management. This is the hidden cost of passive investment. They don't do anything.
I personally think this is excellent, in the great scheme of things, maybe this will open a real discussion about the real oligarchic nature of the US political and societal life at the top.
I mean, with tech titan (and second wealthiest man on the planet) Bezos owning the WaPo, the moment the tech titan (and the wealthiest man on the planet) Musk will put his hands on Twitter hopefully will also be the moment of some "enlightenment" for the educated masses. Or maybe I'm just day-dreaming.
As much as I don’t like WaPo’s Opinion columns and Twitter’s double standards in content moderation, I don’t think the two companies are puppets of their owners. The staff there have their mostly left-leaning political view point and their own moral standard. I don’t necessarily agree with their view, but it’s their view and their voice nonetheless.
What other reason could the billionaires possibly have for owning these companies? I doubt it's out of the goodness of their hearts and given the success of their other businesses probably isn't about making money.
This is just robber barons all over again and to believe otherwise one would have to be pretty ignorant of America's history. Chomsky's best insights are about how this kind of control actually works and it isn't really that journalists are censored by owners (though this does occasionally happen).
They probably own them for a lot of reasons: WaPo was failing and running a loss at the time that Bezos purchased it. Twitter is in the same boat due to poor management; it's losing money and headed towards failure. If Musk can turn it around he can A) Make a bunch of money, B) Save a useful tool for online communications and C) Promote his values when hiring leaders at the company.
I doubt Elon is going to be personally moderating every Tweet, however it is likely that their corporate values system might change.
Buying a media outlet is like buying the yacht and buying the plane. It's like just something of the "everyone in the club has one!" types of stuff you buy when you have enough capital to run your own private country.
To expand on this, billionaires never park any significant fraction of their positive net worth in cash. Inflation rates alone make that a losing proposition.
So they look for other things to own that will lose less value over time.
You completely missed the context of my comment. This was a discussion specifically about the acquisition of media companies unrelated to the businesses which create billionaires' wealth.
Elon Musk himself said explicitly in his interview yesterday that he "doesn't care about the economics at all" which supports my argument. For Musk owning Twitter is not about making money from it the way he does from Tesla.
I realized that "left-leaning" is an inaccurate characterization. To me being left means being liberal. To quote wikipedia, "Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed and equality before the law. " And I subscribe to liberalism.
Twitter and WaPo's staff, sometimes, are nothing but liberal. A liberal wouldn't call anyone who questioned Fauci nazi or anti-science. A liberal wouldn't want to lock someone up or doxx someone just because they criticize Biden government. A liberal wouldn't celebrate the illness of Justice Thomas just because he is a conservative. A liberal wouldn't call someone who criticizes Sharia a xenophobic yet thinks it's totally okay for Khamenei to call for "eradicating" an entire nation and its people. A liberal wouldn't blatantly call Asian parents racists just because they support standard tests and entrance exams by popular schools. A liberal wouldn't call a government Nazi who didn't even try to consolidate power in the pandemic but celebrate another government for consolidating lots of power in the name of handling the pandemic.
Those people do not appear to be liberals. They are radicals.
This is quite a rant and quite a lumping of diverse and unrelated opinions. You have quite a chip on your shoulder.
Without researching or commenting on the bulk of your strawman army, I will posit this: Wishing for the death of a harmful actor with a lifetime appointment to political office is not immoral. If there were some avenue, some knowable end date of a terrible human's influence on a critical pillar of government, maybe it wouldn't be so. Alas, we have no term limits for this role.
Historically, "liberal" encompassed markets. I.e., historically, "liberalism" encompassed capitalism (in the sense of being mostly free to trade one's labor for others' goods and services). "Left-leaning" thinking is generally very suspicious of, if not outright opposed to, capitalism, and in that sense "left-leaning" is very illiberal. The meanings of these terms have shifted somewhat over time, so to equate "left-leaning" and "liberal" isn't wrong at all.
One distinction I find helps is between "capitalism" and "capitalist". To me "capitalism" == "freedom to trade property, labor, goods, and services" (which, due to human nature, does lead to wealth accumulation), while "capitalist" doesn't mean "someone who believes in capitalism" so much as "oligarch" / "robber baron".
A colleague once put it to me like so: trust in capitalism, not capitalists.
Capitalists all too often rent-seek, and because they have accumulated enough capital to have outsize political power, they are a threat to their societies.
Capitalism, in so far as it produces capitalists, is dangerous, but if the alternative is less freedom for individuals lest some of them become tomorrow's capitalists -especially if it is significantly less freedom- then I'd rather stick to capitalism. Of course, this is a result of my definition of "capitalism", and you might well disagree, but forget what word we should use to name a system with such freedoms. The important thing is the idea that those freedoms are a good thing, and that not having them is a bad thing, and that the price to pay for them is the risk of oligarchs arising, and that we need mechanisms to deal with that problem that don't throw the baby out with the bath water!
Your definition of capitalism is actually compatible with left-libertarianism, in the original sense of the word not Rothbard's, market socialism and other forms of left-anarchism and socialism. The only difference compared to your definition are the views on capital, which could be generalized as saying that those who mix their labor with capital should have democratic decision making with regard to that capital.
So you are saying that it's a coincidence that WaPo, owned by Bezos, who was in a public fued with Bernie Sanders, ran 16 hit pieces on Sanders in less than a day?
Wow, I didn't know that. By the way, the first piece in the article is titled "Bernie Sanders Pledges the US Won’t Be No. 1 in Incarceration. He’ll Need to Release Lots of Criminals". This curiously contradicts to Dem's narrative in the past two years that our criminal laws are too harsh and too racist and we should drive more leniency.
That’s because they only hire staff who have the opinions that the people who own the organization want them to have. There’s nothing left-leaning about corporate censorship, which Twitter embodies. It’s all neoconservative war propaganda.
This is a good point. Everyone that thought it was great twitter was centralized and saying "it's a private company, they can censor what they want" and "go make your own platform" will have to contend with their once convenient unprincipled position.
So should AT&T be allowed to cut phone service for customers who use their phone service to discuss political opinions the AT&T execs disagree with and therefore consider “misinformation” or “lacking context”? They’re a private company, right?
I do see it differently and disagree with that perspective, but moreover would point out that we as a society for several decades have agreed that private companies do not have the right to such practices, precisely because the effect on society is so harmful.
AT&T today, under the law, does not have that power and I would argue for good reason.
Isn’t lack of moderation an even more harmful thing for society?
We have all seen how 4chan and 8chan turned out. We are in one of the most heavily moderated forums of the internet and we keep each other accountable to the system.
Lack of accountability and moderation will cause discussions to regress and devolve onto pointless dog whistles and virtue signalling.
While protecting speech is important, not all speech is important nor worthwhile.
We have moderation under the law. If you discuss something or say something that crosses a line that we as a society have deemed to be a danger we have a fair system for that.
There’s a reason we have concepts like published laws, a jury of our peers, appeals processes, etc. Replacing that with hidden arbitrary rules that are interpreted differently from one day to the next, by faceless IT oligarchs that have no accountability, no observable appeal process, etc is dystopian. You have to ask yourself, if you’re no longer using the law to make the speech rules, who is making them?
If we had what we have now over the last 150 years, where any viewpoint that isn’t aligned with the establishment in power is banned, we wouldn’t have racial integration, women’s rights, gay rights, marijuana reform, all things the political establishment would have happily banned from discussion at one point.
We have multiple concrete examples where these IT companies have banned discussion of ideas that later turned out to be 100% legitimate. You were banned for discussing the lab leak theory, a year later Fauci comes out and says it’s very possible. The New York Post had its story about Hunter Biden’s laptop banned, possibly changing the results of the election, the NYT comes out later and says the laptop is real. Silicon Valley executives should not get to decide for society what is true and what is false and what we’re allowed to discuss.
The whole “private company” thing is fine when you’re not big enough to change the results of an election or steer the discourse of our entire society. Once you are big enough to do that, you need to be hands off, which is precisely why we have common carrier laws that legally ensure that outcome.
No, I think he is saying an oligarch that has a lot of focus on the rest of the oligarchically controlled media taking control of this piece of media already controlled by the haut bourgeois oligarchy will draw more public attention to the oligarchic control of the media without actually changing the fact of that control one bit.
Which is still, IMO, foolish, given, among other things, the degree to which large swathes of the public have parasocial relationships with the particular celebrity oligarch in question, but it's not saying that making the problem worse will draw attention.
search news.google.com for "oligarch" and see the pattern of how the media has propagandistically twisted this word to only mean a specific kind of person now, conveniently excluding those that control our (Western) societies.
'Oligarchs' historically have gained influence and fielty to a nationstate. We are at a new form of Oligarchy, where the business magnates are able to operate internationally on a scale never seen before.
Historically, taxation has been the most profitable form of revenue generation. But thats no longer the case. With globalism and multi-national product creation, a single person in a nation can be many times richer than any nationstate, with technology above and beyond any nationstate. What happens when musk has electric jets and fully-reusable ICBM's, has remade the world power grid in his image, is one of few entitys even able to get to mars let alone command and control the resources of the astroid belt.
The US economy flits around $22 trillion per year and the US budget last year was 30% of that. There isn’t a single trillionaire in the world. The US government has the historically unprecedented ability to project hard power around the globe within hours of deciding to do so. Musk has little more than influence, and congress doesn’t seem to like him very much.
While saying any nationstate might be hyperbole, it's fair to say they surpass all but the richest.
The most recent figures I can find for Amazon's operating budget list it at well over $500B, which puts it within an order of magnitude of the single richest country in the world; it would end up in the top 10 if it were itself a country[1]
Keep in mind also that a large part of the US's wealth is derived from having these nation-state-level corporations within its financial jurisdiction.
My new personal pet peeve has been the torturing of the word oligarch. It’s now come to mean “rich person I don’t like.”
From my vantage point, it’s hard to see how Elon Musk is making any governmental policy decisions - and thus isn’t an oligarch. But maybe you have some examples?
Musk is extremely rich and can buy a lot of stuff. That’s entirely different than determining agricultural policy, or putting people in jail, or conducting the census, or maintaining the border, or doing anything else that a ruler does.
> That’s entirely different than determining agricultural policy, or putting people in jail, or conducting the census, or maintaining the border, or doing anything else that a ruler does
You’re making a mistake of your own by conflating oligarchy with tyranny. They often go hand in hand, with the former generally preceding the latter. So it’s probably better to cry oligarchy before it’s a given rather than afterwards.
The poorest 70–90% of Americans effectively have no representation – there is almost no correlation between their policy preferences and the voting record of their representatives.
On the other hand, enacted policy aligns quite well with the interests of large corporations, and I'm not aware of any causal explanation besides the obvious one.
If Elon steers Tesla and SpaceX, he is indirectly steering congress (or at least has his hand on the wheel).
Being a lawmaker in the current capitalist society doesn’t make you the ruler (see lobbying). I’d say the few that rule are those with large amount of capital and influence, so oligarch is well applied here
Edit: also one of the perks for rulers on the worse regimes (authoritarian regimes, monarchies) is that law is not the same for the few that tule than for the rest, law is definitely not the same from the point of view of this wealth maxers
A media company having a legal obligation to maximize profits seems at least as bad for journalism as private ownership as there's zero room for any sort of integrity.
I mean by and large the success of first generation billions and the power they manage to control kinda show with enough money it doesn't matter that he is explicit not part of the "real oligarchic nature of the US political and societal life".
Speaking about enlightenment, isn't it strange that Elon Musk is into politics now? I mean he wants to go to Mars, his project was "Flyin' mother nature's silver seed to a new home in the sun", and now he goes right in the opposite direction. Did he have any major setbacks with his Starship?
I'm wondering if this whole 'buy twitter' idea is some sort of displacement activity from stressful problems in either spacex or tesla. I'm a fan of both companies but I know he drives them hard and takes lots of expansion risks/gambles with them (innovation is a gamble at the end of the day).
Chris Anderson of TED asked Elon a lot of the questions and concerns being discussed here. Check it out if you want to understand his perspective and goals with twitter.
“Having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization”
To that end, he committed to transparency. For example, changes to tweets or users would be made visible and apparent so there's no more behind the scenes manipulation. The algorithm itself would be open sourced. Anyone could view it on Github and suggest changes or point out issues.
I agree it would be nice but it would also be a boon for bad actors who want to manipulate the system. Reddit now closely guards its algorithms (it didn't used to) to make it more difficult to game the system. For every honest curious developer who wants to vet the system, there are plenty more people out to spread miss-information.
At some point this concern becomes invalid in my book: Take democratic elections — hiding the rules of how elections work, because you are afraid someone might game them would be absurd. Because the point of democratic elections is to get results that most people can accept and for this transparency and simplicity is crucial. If it would turn out someone is gaming the system it would be time to change the rules and/or how they are enforced.
Now you can't really equate Reddit with an democratic election, but places like those are the closest we have come to an public square in the online world and hiding the mechanisms which decide who gets how much visibility is not without effect (on the trust within the system).
The cost of actually administering fairness in elections (maintaining voter rosters, verifying identities, preventing double-voting and providing public auditability while ensuring voter anonymity, prosecuting fraudsters...) is quite high compared with what an ad-supported global platform can afford. Just look at how tough it's been for Twitter to kick out inauthentic actors, eg Russian troll farms or spam bots. Spending more resources on botfighting is difficult from Twitter's standpoint since it doesn't by itself drive revenue or engagement, and they are fighting determined permanent attackers, some even state-funded.
Speaking of, the primary revenue feed for Twitter is advertising, which directly competes with fairness and transparency goals: ad business is predicated on the idea that more $ = more speech, regardless of the intrinsic value of the speech; and since there is no practical way to know where the $ came from, it does an end run around transparency goals.
I know they will never do it. However I cannot help think having a twitter with only non anonymous verified identity would be nice. Personally I don't have special interest speaking with people that want to be anonymous when I use Twitter.
I also don't like anonymity, but some people might need to remain anonymous for safety reasons. Those living under repressive political regimes, for example. They'd need anonymity to get their message across.
There's no way for social platforms to tell apart which anonymous users are "good" or "bad"...
KYC wouldn't help against state actors, which are the offenders with potential to cause most damage. They're the issuers of their national IDs in the first place, it's useless to verify their ID.
you can easily verify who this account belongs to, you cannot verify easily that this is the only account I have.
which is the problem.
further complicated by irrational attitudes to official identity such as you see in america. have a fraud resistant national ID system? fuck no! we want to use an unsafe mechanism never built for this purpose and impossible to safe guard!
I think you have buried the lede, which is that these platforms are no longer about an acceptable good. Votes or in twitters case, engagement metrics, are just one part of the magic mixture that drives more engagement. It's not about fair outcomes, or social good, and it is hard to hide your engagement optimisations when everyone can see how you are tweaking the system to generate more ad revenue. A cynical take I know, but we are taking about billion dollar corporations, not cheeky startups.
Yeah. The issues is that in the environment they work in, there are no known secure recommendation algorithms that give good recommendations. So the only option is security by obscurity.
I agree. Is anyone? Full disclosure: I used to work at Reddit. I was just putting in my 2 cents why Elon's proposal might not be immediately actionable without a lot of hard thought about how to deal with bad actors without the obscurity layer.
if the algorithm is open source, bad actors can see it as well. it'll become remarkably easy to spam and game the system. this could drive users away, decrease revenue and leave Mr. Musk holding a $40B hot potato
Counter point, maybe it just accelerates the game of cat and mouse already played between bad actors and algorithm designers, possibly leading to faster iteration and improvement of their algorithm to find hard to fake signals.
Musk could start his own Mastodon right now and do what he wants, but if he wants to bring along his Twitter network (or make it easier for any Twitter user to switch), then perhaps hurrying up Bluesky is another way to get what he wants short of taking Twitter private.
It seems like the focus needs to be on what can fight back misinformation/spam better given the context: more speech or moderation. The need for human moderation will likely still exist, but if Musk wants to accelerate the process as you say, Bluesky seems like a good way to start.
If Twitter is making choices that increase their bottom line at the expense of community, then absolutely, more transparency and open source would help with that.
If Musk really cares about free speech, speech should be more important than user engagement and algorithms manipulate the visibility of speech. They should be the first thing to go.
And revenue will shrink accordingly. If that's his plan, he's right that it can only happen in a private company. Otherwise the resulting revenue deceleration will send Twitter into a stock price self-fulfilling tailspin as stockholders start seeing it as a doomed platform.
I just wish we would implement a system where users vouch for each other in order to use the platform. A sort of web-of-trust to stamp out (or at least temporarily punish) whole areas of the social graph that are being used for manipulation and abuse.
This is standard operating procedure for takeovers, but I think you're massively overestimating the amount of pressure someone selling 9% of the company places on the stock price. Someone buying 9% (with an expecation that they would buy more) moved the stock $10. The same person selling 9% stock (with no possibility that can sell more) is unlikely to move the stock more than that.
I think you should look at the historical volatility of TWTR before calling a 22% move "insane pressure".
It's also worth noting that the stock price is almost unchanged today as of this writing, which tells you that the market thinks he's not serious, or his lowball offer is going to be laughed out by the board, which significantly reduces the amount of "insane pressure" he's exerting.
What does historical volatility have to do with it? If Elon can basically manipulate his investment into a 22% return why on earth wouldn't he do that? A single person able to pressure a single commodity to the tune of 22% is bonkers.
I'm not debating whether that will happen, just contending your first statement.
He can't manipulate it into a 22% profit, for exactly the reason you articulated. His buying pushed the price up - his selling will push the price down. He might might make a small profit from the increase his buying news generated if he were to sell now, but his VWAP would be well below 22%.
Because the existing volatility sets the tone for the underlying risk tolerance that shareholders already deal with. It sucks, it’s not insignificant, but I do agree it’s not immensely significant as you are making it seem. It’s just the exposure a public company on the market can have have these days.
I agree it's bonkers that this is possible. I agree, in an environment where the SEC seems unable to stop him, Elon Musk might well consider 22% return worth doing. None of that is relevant to the point I'm making.
I'm contending the claim that the implicit (and completely pro forma!) threat in his SEC filing places "insane pressure" on the Twitter board. The the possibility of a 20+% stock price change will not play a large part in their calculations. It's just not a big deal in the context of such a volatile stock.
It’s a cascading effect though. 9% sell off. Ticker drops by some value. This then triggers stop losses, and another set of sell offs. It goes down the line until retail is left holding the bag.
I disagree. The fact that someone is willing to buy a stake in a company suggests the company has some potential. The fact that someone having bought a company is willing to dump their entire ownership so quickly suggests the company may be rotten from the inside. The latter would exert a much stronger downward pressure on the stock, in my opinion.
That makes sense if you assume Musk has learned something shocking about Twitter from the inside in the past couple of weeks. How likely is that?
It seems spectacularly unlikely to me that a demonstrably impatient person with a pre-existing thesis about Twitter would take the time to investigate and learn new things about its product/financials/culture/governance.
It also seems unlikely that a person with a known strong stomach for legal and ethical "flexibility" would be especially bothered by anything they did learn, assuming they took the trouble. But YMMV.
I do think something like twitter longterm could a big play at something like authenticity verification in the world of deep fakes, similar to what keybase was trying to do but they already have traction with public figures
> suggests the company may be rotten from the inside.
Even if there are 0 actual facts open to the public that prove this, the optics suggest that this narrative can be made. He moved the stock 30%+ in a few days by publically buying in. If he sells it, why wouldn't it give up all of the gains he brought (and maybe more)?
I don't know what he thinks he stands to gain by buying Twitter. Can a rocket scientist/electric car guru really get into tweets + advertising?
To strongman the case for him running twitter, he clearly has significant experience and success with running large engineering oriented companies - which is the primary job of twitter executives. Both Tesla and SpaceX have significant software organizations, and he also has experience in running a pure software company back when he was involved with paypall. As a heavy user of twitter, and the de-facto PR person for Tesla and SpaceX he also has a good understanding of the product, both from a normal users perspective and a marketers perspective.
That said, I don't think this is primarily about buying twitter being profitable, but that he is motivated by a mix of politics, fun, and funny. I also don't think he's likely to get that into the day to day of running twitter, just because he's already busy with Tesla and SpaceX.
I don't disagree. It's just that... what are his plans for Twitter? Add an edit button? Tweak the algorithm that delivers timelines? None of that is really complicated. Those could be 6 month roadmap projects.
> but that he is motivated by a mix of politics, fun, and funny
First, it’s more like 1/6 his net worth. But I don’t believe the proportion means anything at that level of personal wealth. He’d still have the other $210B, plus ownership of Twitter. Each of those other billions is worth a billion dollars. Almost everybody could make do with just one of them, and he’d have over 200 of them. Even luxury goods don’t scale up to that scale. All he can really do with that is buy companies anyway. And Twitter is what holds his interest right now.
It seems like Twitter's barely done anything new since going public over 8 years ago. Making a UI that was actually usable for following conversations would be a good place to start. What are all these product people doing? (I'm a small TWTR shareholder. It's one of my worst tech investments.)
Washington Post can control what is posted through journalists, etc. (digital or not)
Twitter is like... an aggregator of a bunch of people tweeting. The people tweeting aren't being paid by Twitter to tweet (like journalists are for Washington Post, even if it's like $75 for an opinion piece/basically blogspam)
Twitter likely decided to not allow him onboard just because of his constant shitposting about the company, his volatility, and really just wanting Twitter to be his sounding board for whatever offensive things he has to say, so they're trying to ensure he can't try and takeover as we speak.
The price moved from $33 to $40 as he bought the shares[1]. THEN it moved from $40 to $50 when he announced that he bought the shares on April 4th.
Hard to say what the stock would have done without the purchase, but Musk has both the threat of dumping his shares on the market AND the threat of him announcing that he's dropping his shares. A case could be made that he has at least $17 of influence on share price, but my guess is that the market frenzy will drag it lower if Musk backs out.
Note: Please correct me if I misunderstand the meaning of the filing. I read it as Musk began buying up shares March 14th, and finished near the end of March, then reported Friday/Monday April 1/4. I don't think he bought and announced the same day. Musk owns ~73M shares, and trading volume was ~15M on the 13th, then jumps to ~35M/day over the next few days before settling down at ~15M/day again. https://finance.yahoo.com/chart/TWTR#eyJpbnRlcnZhbCI6ImRheSI...
What we do know is that it's not a 1 to 1 mathematical if one buys 9% it moves 10$ if one then sells 9% if falls $10. This has historically proven over and over.
Seems like an amazing move by Elon. Buy a sizable portion of the business to hold hostage, and then make the company an offer that they essentially can’t refuse because of fiduciary responsibility. If they reject Elon’s offer the stock price will sink like a rock. They pretty much have to take it.
> "overwhelm or confound with sudden surprise or wonder," 1580s, back-formation from Middle English amased "stunned, dazed, bewildered," (late 14c.), earlier "stupefied, irrational, foolish" (c. 1200), from Old English amasod, from a- (1), probably used here as an intensive prefix, + *mæs (see maze). Related: Amazed; amazing.
"amazing" never meant "this is of surprisingly high quality and good"
>Did pointedly ignoring common usage add anything here?
Yes, there are plenty of words going though the natural process of dilution. Providing some backpressure is, I think, useful to the language to preserve the richness of meaning. I'm responding directly to a discussion about the meaning of a word not interjecting into another conversation with a "well, actually..."
When you're writing a dictionary, words mean what people use them to mean. I'm not writing a dictionary.
Except that your 'well actually' still exists because you ignored the much more common usage when you made your point and didn't mention anything about your valiant effort to preserve etymological treasures until questioned?
If you read the Lord of the Rings, you'll see quite a few usages of the word "amaze" not at all in the sense of "dude, that's amazing". It is not like reading that is some archaic text exclusive to english scholars.
I think it is good to be reminded of the higher quality meaning of words that are falling into bland generic meanings. Words do change and there's nothing wrong with that, but some changes are better than others and the degeneration of specific strong meanings to generic common place ones isn't something that should be celebrated.
Celebrated or don't celebrate. Language evolves, meanings change, recognize it when it happens or you become the pedantic boring person at a meeting or party trying to explain, "No, 'begging the question' does mean what you think it does. It's a type of fallacy, not some segue into asking an obvious question.
Then you misunderstand my point entirely. It's no longer wrong to use "beg the question" in this way. It is now part of everyday vernacular. It is now one of at least two correct ways of using the phrase. Language is weird that way, it's not set in stone, so if the "wrong" thing gets used enough and hits critical mass, it becomes a correct usage.
Look at the Great Vowel Shift, or how creoles, pidgins and patois develop and evolve. Language isn't static, and in the case of "amazing" its current vernacular usage has changed to almost always have a positive connotation.
One was trying to decide whether to call the first version of something. Revision 0, revision 1, or version 1 followed by revision 1. The users that we were making the application for didn't care one bit what we called it, but the programmers sure had a lively discussion with a lot of eye rolling in the room.
Not if the argument is essentially about dictionary definitions. FWIW, if I had to imagine someone saying something is amazing without any context my understanding would tend towards the “old” meaning.
You say, in response to somebody using it to mean something else.
There is a strange circular logic to saying words mean something new because they are commonly used in a new way and at the same time telling somebody how they're using a word is wrong because it doesn't match this new meaning.
That's not how it works, the board would look at the long term value of the company, not the current price or what it will be in the next few weeks if Elon sold.
For instance Twitter stock was $60 last october, if they didn't ask for at least that it would be shortchanging shareholders and also imply a declining company.
We will never see those prices again. They occurred during overvalued and speculative market conditions and we will not return to that for several years, if ever.
You don't need an implication of decline when the market has already explicitly indicated it believes Twitter is declining as evidenced by the falling stock price.
'Knowing' you will put an offer to buy a company is insider information. The assumption here is he has been acting on this information recently and it was part of his plan.
Unless you think he just woke up today and said: You know what, I'm going to buy Twitter! Which, I mean.. given Elon maybe that's what happened. But if it was premeditated then he has clearly been acting on insider information.
If you have no intention to actually follow through and it's a false promise, that's a pump-and-dump. It's securities fraud, but it's not insider trading.
If you have an intention to actually buy and make a good faith effort and fail, that's just business.
Duh, but they are not acting on the insider information.
Elon is. He bought shares, then put in an offer which drives his existing shares up. Perhaps you can argue until he sells them he isn't acting.. perhaps.. but if he sells them today, are you still telling me he isn't acting on insider information?
From the SEC website: Who is an insider? An “insider” is an officer, director, 10% stockholder and anyone who possesses inside information because of his or her relationship with the Company or with an officer, director or principal stockholder of the Company.
A principal shareholder is a person that directly or indirectly owns or controls more than 10% of any class of voting shares or securities of a company. The principal shareholder has the authority to vote using those voting shares.
Elon has less than 10% share (9.2%), so he's not an insider. Probably he stayed under 10% because of this law.
Hopefully your correct and Twitter tanks and maybe we can finally be rid of this crap
I don't hate Twitter like I hate Facebook (mainly for ideological reasons and their propensity for exploitation) but god damn is their interface and entire product model annoying.
That is a great question and I wonder the same thing.
"I am going to dump 1/10th of the company that I very publicly acquired if they don't do what I want them to do" feels like manipulation since he's controlling the value of such a large amount of it.
But is it illegal to be willing to lose money if a threat isn't met?
Furthermore, would it be illegal for him to dump his shares, allow the trajectory to tank the price further, then rebuy when it bottoms, rinse and repeat?
It’s not illegal to say “I want to buy more shares at what I believe to be a generous price. If the board won’t sell me these shares, I don’t trust the judgement of the board and will subsequently sell my existing shares.”
How? The laws absolutely allow for hostile takeovers. If Twitter gets to determine what to censor because it's a corporation, well, they get to get bought like one too.
>All I can see in this thread is 1) masquerading as 2).
Indeed. One would have hoped that Hacker News would be immune from Reddit/Twitter-style "Anything I don't like is illegal/unconstitutional", but apparently not.
"Someone buying up shares of a company before he announces a hostile takeover is inside information and thus illegal!" Good grief.
It will hit back at 40$ is as if the Elon pump never happened, is that so bad? However, it does create pressure from “activitists” to sell to Elon. The main thing is: Is Elon a good leader for Twitter. There is a lot of positives because Elon has already proven himself in multiple companies, plus he understands Twitter as much as anyone from his use of it
His absolutist "free speech" attitude would absolutely be horrible for Twitter. There would be literally nothing to stop bots and state-sponsored messmakers from completely gaming Twitter far beyond what they already do today. I think a lot of people do not realize the can of worms they are opening when they advocate for zero moderation on a platform as large as Twitter.
He's not a free speech absolutist (he even tried to get a particular account shutdown for tracking his private jet, albiet he was offering them money to stop), he more or less just wants a more transparent form of moderation with only moderation leaning in one direction. That's actually a -good- thing. I've seen accounts banned for mild jokes, while some accounts literally post death threats and skirt by. The Taliban, Russia, etc all have Twitter accounts at the very moment and you think this is some new thing of "state sponsored" whatever. I am pretty sure many people here with comments like this have rarely if ever used Twitter for anything.
I don't think he's campaigning for "zero moderation" -- he's spoken about plans to fight bots. I think he just wants zero moderation for accounts run by actual humans, which is still a can of worms, but a different can of worms.
He isn’t smart. Just like trump isn’t smart. How could such guys be so successful if they aren’t smart?? Well, they are just the right amount of stupid, careless and bold to succeed in today’s world of mindless masses.
Perhaps you're an example of how its censorship spreads misinformation. I'm not really passionate about the Biden laptop, but my understanding is that the NYT did recently admit* that it was real and they had some sort of policy to report on it as if it weren't. If you believe the laptop story was a fabrication by right-wingers, is it possible you have been deceived?
Disclaimer: I have no confidence either way to the veracity of the laptop. I don't know that much about it and whether it were true or not wouldn't change my political views much.
*I googled 'NYT biden laptop' and the most legitimate looking of the results was a WSJ article. I don't have a WSJ subscription to evaluate it, however.
It's crazy to me that people _still_ don't know that it's been confirmed by a "reliable" news source. The veracity of the NY Post story wasn't controversial, just the effect it would have on getting Biden into the White House. The corporate press ran cover for the Biden family to get the outcome they wanted in the 2020 elections.
It wasn’t given scrutiny. It was silenced. And, turns out it wasn’t misinformation either.
Thank God with Musk’s new Twitter we won’t have to have this sort of discussion anymore anyway, people won’t be able to just shout Russian disinformation at anything that makes the left look bad and have Big Tech scramble to do their bidding to help influence elections.
Since there would no longer be any public investors in Twitter after this, that does not actually matter as far as the present investors are concerned.
That's where the market manipulation comes into play. Acknowledging/threatening a possible pump and dump if he doesn't get his way could clear the SEC's bar of "Intentional or willful conduct designed to deceive or defraud investors by controlling or artificially affecting the price of securities, or ... designed to drive a stock’s price up or down"
Someone much smarter than I could likely argue that the "threat" of Elon possibly pulling out his investment in a company is affecting the stock price, and now suddenly Elon is in control of the direction of the stock, even though the underlying fundamentals have not been changed.
AFAICT, there's no deception or fraud in his behaviour; nor is there anything artificial - he's put real money down, and is offering real money. It's not like he's made a one-off tweet about it.
Not to get pedantic, but if you read their definition of market manipulation, there's another point that's unrelated to the deception/fraud clause (though those are loaded terms legally, and one again likely could argue they are)
"Intentional interference with the free forces of supply and
demand"
He put money down (a lot of money down!), but that doesn't give him the right to manipulate the stock price purely based on the fact he has a stake on it or not; in fact it gives him a duty not to do so, because he now has a motive/vested interest in profiting off of it. There's rules to follow and forms to file to protect against that, and he's already has one lawsuit against him in that vein: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/14/business/twitter-lawsuit-...
It sounds to me that you're interpreting that in such a broad way that you could argue that any stock purchases he makes would be in violation of this.
If the market decides the stock should go up or down after someone invests/divests (or files the applicable, standard form), that's one thing.
If he's prematurely saying what direction he's going to go one way or another, that's another thing. You don't see Vanguard tweeting "we're going to invest in this company if X happens and divest if not" to the general public, especially if they're trying to influence X to happen.
This essentially why he got in trouble with Tesla for tweeting he wanted to take it private at $420/share, immediately making the stock price jump up, even though he did not have "funding secured" and did not take it private. And he almost lost the ability to be a CEO or on a board of a public company for 10 years because of that!
> If he's prematurely saying what direction he's going to go one way or another, that's another thing. You don't see Vanguard tweeting "we're going to invest in this company if X happens and divest if not" to the general public, especially if they're trying to influence X to happen.
Because Vanguard is a passive fund. Activist funds do this all the time.
Him putting money down literally is a free market demand for that security, and his ability to freely publicly offer lots of money literally is the "free forces of supply and demand" that's not supposed to be interfered with.
This clause is explicitly not intended to do what you imply, it does not restrict this particular action by Musk at all.
Certainly someone out there agrees with you. Realistically, a lawsuit would certainly quell the interest in this and drag this issue into relative obscurity over the course of years. Timeless tactic.
It is almost certain that whatever happens, there will be a lawsuit. Suing twitter, the board, elon, maybe the SEC (possibly multiple in different directions). It happens with almost any large move where there is even a hint that something happened incorrectly.
More like it happens with any large move period, no hints needed, because the expected value payoff of a lawsuit in that case typically makes it a worthwhile exercise.
> is it not against the SEC's rules for market manipulation?
Maybe, but he's also being sued over a violation of market manipulation rules with regard to non-disclosure of his recent Twitter purchase, and that's not the first problem he’s had with those rules.
“Elon Musk” and “securities rules” don't really go together.
I know; But I can't help but feel the SEC is just waiting to build up an open-and-shut case to really make an example out of him, as they usually do to high profile people who openly challenge them. Of course the richest man in the world is going to put up a very strong fight in court, and the SEC will not risk its authority by losing, so there can't be much ambiguity in any evidence they present
On the other hand - the stock was flat over the time that he bought... So not in total agreement with you on the stock impact of his selling. It seems like the only impact is the headline risk - and not so much actual selling pressure.
If the stock was flat while Elon was buying almost 10% of the company, it probably would have declined quite a bit if he hadn't been buying, because the people who sold the shares Elon bought would have been looking for other buyers.
Someone can do a basic quantitative analysis. He started buying March 1 (?) I believe. This date is public in last filing. You can estimate the historical beta, and get TWTR return and market return in March.
My quick analysis was that in the absence of any other news, his buying really had no serious impact.
I think he started March 14th based on trading volume. Goes from ~15M/day to 35M/day for the next few days before settling down. (Made another comment elsewhere on this)
Ok so assuming march 14 to April 1. The market was up 8% over that time and TWTR was up 19%. Beta is 1.3 so with a beta adjustment the excess return from musk's buying is about 19-(8*1.3)=8.6%.
Is this a lot or a little impact for buying close to 10 percent of a large cap stock? It's hard to say. I'd say it's a bit lower than i would have expected. Nonetheless, it provides somewhat of a floor if musk decides to sell his stake.
Want to write a contract for where it'll be at close of market the first trading day after he announces he'll pull out? We can have break-even at Twitter being 19% down from now. You can appropriately hedge beta risk elsewhere and I'll put in $100 to induce participation. I'd prefer max $10k exposure for my side.
In the months before Musk started buying, Twitter stocked declined by about 40% while the S&P was up slightly. Is it reasonable to assume that TWTR would have followed the market from Jan 31 to April 1 without Musk?
Good observation. Market impact is notoriously hard to measure - especially over a 2-month period like this one. You have to build a more complex model - which includes fundamentals.
d. If the deal doesn’t work, given that I don’t have confidence in management nor do I believe I can drive the necessary change in the public market, I would need to reconsider my position as a shareholder.
i. This is not a threat, it's simply not a good investment without the changes that need to be made.
ii. And those changes won't happen without taking the company private.
Not a threat. If Musk can’t fix Tw, then the share value will further decrease, so it’s just rational for him to then sell. And good for him to be honest about it from the start.
That’s what every corporate raider hostile takeover attempt does. If the board won’t do what the pursuer thinks is best, why would they continue to hold the company?
The price is currently $46 and considering the stock market is down as a whole, the $54 price will easily be eclipsed in the near future imo. Granted Musk will sell his stock and that price will go down, but I would balk at this offer if I had any skin in the game.
If you're basing this on the stock market as a whole being down, surely you'd make more money by selling to Elon at $54 while it's still down, and re-investing your money in other stocks - letting you get the upside twice, once from Elon and once from the stock market going up.
He what? He does "business", not engineering. His engineering decisions are notoriously bad, see the LiDAR vs camera discussions. He has no real expertise, beside compulsory lying and coming up with bold bullshit statements.
Spacecraft are one thing, Mars another. By the evidence, he is satisfied with where SpaceX and Tesla have got to. And, renewable energy generation and storage development and deployment.
Or maybe he wants to turn Twitter into a bully pulpit, and drive government spending where he thinks it should go... That's the 4D chess argument.
>On June 12, 2014, Tesla announced that it will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use its technology. Tesla was created to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport, and this policy is intended to encourage the advancement of a common, rapidly-evolving platform for electric vehicles, thereby benefiting Tesla, other companies making electric vehicles, and the world. These guidelines provide further detail as to how we are implementing this policy.
You're right about politics. The SpaceX Mars mission is ultimately tied up in NASA funding/approvals. Twitter is the hangout spot for the journalist profession. So even a slight manipulation of the algorithm could result in incalculable benefits to the Mars mission.
On the other hand, it's possible Musk is just getting revenge for Twitter censoring his friends at the Babylon Bee...
Money is fungible. Every single dollar that goes for Twitter is exactly a dollar that does not go for what he used to say was important.
He might be heard to say those again, but dollars speak louder than words. Musk can say anything, anytime. What he does with his money demonstrates what he believes.
By that same logic the US should immediately stop giving foreign aid to developing countries or investing in other programs since we still have homeless people here. The reasons why entities spend money on specific things is not a univariate. Also, there is a whole meta discussion to be had about what sparks creativity and innovation, I have a pet theory about over abundance of resources creating stagnation and dulling people's motivation and creativity. Beyond a certain point, throwing money at a problem can be counter productive.
At the end of the day, results matter and SpaceX has shown results.
"does not go for" 0 nope all of his share holdings are just that, holdings. It's not until he liquidates any of those shares that the money be put to work. In that way it doesn't matter he he shifts billions into twitter, he can liquidate it just the same. Probably for more given his track record pumping the value of companies.
Like it or not, Twitter is extremely important. It sets discourse and gets politicians into office. Remember how much Trump's tweeting dominated the news cycle? Elon buying Twitter isn't him saying he thinks it should be important, just that it is.
I can’t see how his plan
isn’t about getting trump back on twitter. He will do a lot of smoke screen speech, telling contradictions and unclear bold statements. But in the end I bet all of this will end in removing trump ban. If I’m right, it’ll confirm that musk is just a fascist greedy sociopath disguised as a tech enthusiast.
While selling all his shares would make the price dip short-term, no one who knows his tactics will take that as a serious commentary on the viability of Twitter itself.
Yea people don't understand he has too much money to care about playing games and pumping/dumping shares. He basically can't take a breath without 'manipulating' the stock price of something.
That would mean that management effectively wins, the stock would go down but they wouldn't have to worry about the threat of Elon Musk looming over them and the crisis would be solved. It doesn't make any sense from a takeover perspective, if I was Parag that would make me feel more comfortable rejecting the offer.
What does it take for you to see someone as a threat ? A compulsive liar throwing 43000000000$ to take over one of the largest social network in the world, grossly pretending it’s for "free speech"? And people on HN are buying it? Hmmm.
You clearly have an axe to grind moreso than an actual point. In this community, if you declare someone as a liar, you generally have to provide some proof of that. This isn’t a « my feelings » community.
Twitter is literally ruining the world. Donald Trump was elected because of it. I’m sorry, but Twitter could not get any worse. I fully support the purchase. Anyone who’s actually watching what’s going on do, too. You’re just going to have to deal with it, albeit, while spewing fear mongering pretending to be concern. Reductive childlike reasoning might work on Hasan’s millionaire stream, but not in reality.
He could maybe maybe start a competitor, but I doubt it would work.
1) He doesn't have the energy for another serious project 2) It would end up being something else, which frankly might be welcome, but it won't replace twitter.
Journalists etc. around the world are not going to flock to a 'free speech' platform with little moderation.
They 10x will not do it if Trump is on it, and gaining traction, for example.
Trump himself has never even used the Truth platform. I never said the media "likes" Trump, but they profited from him greatly, he's actually great for business (and arguably great for Democrats.) If Trump were allowed back on Twitter, journalists would decry it for a while and then embrace their renewed social interaction numbers. Outrage is a big seller and when everyone is pissed about something it generates a lot of revenue/clicks/interactions for these media organizations.
Oh yea, I agree with that, I was just indicating that most of the industry is going to avoid him for now for reasons that arguably go against their own bottom line.
Just to verify that I understood the concept I looked up the definition of "hostile takeover" from various places, its common theme is taking over a company without approval of the board.
The actual offer states [0]:
>As a result, I am offering to buy 100% of Twitter for $54.20 per share in cash, a 54% premium over the day before I began investing in Twitter and a 38% premium over the day before my investment was publicly announced. My offer is my best and final offer and if it is not accepted, I would need to reconsider my position as a shareholder.
Which means he is asking for approval, which seems to contradict the headline and the quote from Mirabaud Equity Research which was used to make the headline more sensational as they were quoted saying “This becomes a hostile takeover offer which is going to cost a serious amount of cash”.
If the board disapproves of the offer and he acquires a larger stake of ownership, that would be more inline with what a hostile takeover is.
I think you're right, but you almost nailed it. Musk low-balled because he wants the offer to be rejected, so the stock price dips, so he can buy up enough stock at discount for a hostile takeover.
Is it brilliant, or is it standard operating procedure for stuff like this? I would assume most hostile takeovers follow some similar path and also try to manipulate the stock a bit in a way favorable to themselves with their actions prior to the actual final takeover attempt.
I think the brilliant part was where he got 1M+ responses to his polls about the problems with Twitter. The timing for that prior to rejecting the board seat was pre-meditated brilliancy.
Can anybody make a good argument as to why Twitter (in its current form) isn’t a major detriment to society?
If Twitter poofed out of existence today, it would be a major win for this planet. People talk about a frightening future with a human hostile AI that wants to destroy humanity. That exists, it’s twitter.
Elon buying it, even if he runs it into the ground is a good thing. Getting rid of some of the hostile AI is a good thing.
Only 23% of the US public uses Twitter, and of that 23%, 80% of the posts come from about 10% of those users. These are the numbers I point to when people want to call Twitter the "modern day public square". I don't buy it, and think that the only real significant problem with Twitter is how much credence folks that are on it (including media personalities) give it.
This is true and I bring this up as well BUT consider this: probably less than 23% of US citizens make 90% of the important decisions for this country (the power law still holds) and if all of those people are on Twitter then OP's point still stands. I deleted Twitter about 3 months ago and it's been great. I can just focus on life and talking to my friends still on the platform I realize just how much of a bubble it really is and how most of the issues everyone gets hysterical about is just irrelevant in my life. That being said it seems to hold an insane amount of influence in the minds of journalists, business leaders, and politicians and thus it is an incredibly powerful platform.
I suppose you could say it's like the public square in that only 3 of the 10 citizens in that mythical town actually go to the square and debate/decide anything, and the rest just stay home.
But I'm not convinced the folks on Twitter truly have that much power because they have those discussions on Twitter (and most would probably have that power whether Twitter exists or not and the discussions on Twitter from those in power seem to be mostly just an extension of their other media presences). It does make some folks more accessible, and their (curated) thoughts more public in some cases.
I've spent some time recently to curate who/what I follow on Twitter to be more relevant and less hysterical (it still creeps in tho), and that has actually made me more likely to actually engage there now, as it's often with things I'm actually interested in.
What if most readers think that writers somehow represent a majority of Twitter or even the whole society? That belief, true or false, would leverage the influence of writers.
Sounds like we need to do a better job of explaining why that isn't the case (at least, that is my belief, I believe the most extreme are those most likely to be prolific on Twitter, not those with the most representative beliefs).
They aren't going away. No matter who buys Twitter, you're still going to get called out for this shithead things you say on the platform. If you're honestly afraid of being cancelled, then you should support current Twitter moderation, as it's saving you from yourself.
You’re making big assumptions here. You assume I want to post shithead things. I’m actually afraid to simply speculate about the world in general. Countless people are being trained to think a certain way and take offense to free thinking. My concern is not only twitter moderation but confident (useful) idiots in general.
People have lost their jobs, gotten death threats, had personal information shared, been swatted, and so on when the mob didn't like what you said on Twitter (or Facebook or ...).
And this week a republican running for office put the faces of children who go to a non conventional school in an attack ad on "woke" that has led to them having slurs shouted at them, people trying to get into the school to film etc. etc. How do you prevent the flipside of your point?
There is no "flip side" to my point. My point was that mob behavior is ugly. Doesn't matter if it is a woke mob or a religious mob or a racist mob or any other kind of mob.
You can only pen your honest opinion under your own name if you agree with the heterodoxy of the authoritarian left. This is what passes for liberalism in America today.
IDK, that sounds like more participation (in speaking and listening) than I'd expect out of a literal public square, although not by a whole lot.
I remember coming across street preachers on the Santa Monica promenade. I want to say 10-20 people would stop to listen, where 1-2 people would be speaking (preacher and a possible commenter). I don't even know how to estimate how many people simply walked by, but the audience being less than 20% of that sounds very likely.
TL;DR Anecdotal experience in one actual public square, estimates less than 20% of the physically present public participating, and less than 10% of that speaking.
To me, the fact that petulant bullshit on Twitter and other platforms still makes its way into the real world is even more scary given your numbers. If it was insignificant, I probably wouldn't see people suddenly start burning churches or spray painting ACAB around the neighborhood (at least not so frequently or not so related to completely regionally irrelevant news), or fear that if I say the wrong thing to an overly sanctimonious person I'll get shamed on the internet. Granted, it's maybe not JUST Twitter, but it's a common element that's partially facilitated by Twitter.
I didn't think this was very controversial, but my guess is that people either feel this was irrelevant, they felt personally attacked, or they think I'm exaggerating. For anyone stopping by, all of these things have happened relatively recently, and no I don't necessarily blame Twitter specifically, but news has always been about trying to connect intense emotions with ad revenue, and social media platforms have figured out how to do this at a rate and intensity that's really dangerous.
I hate reading news in real time. Its never significant or relevant to what you are doing, but you couldn't tell that by the frantic tone and the sense that you must remain tuned into whatever is unfolding this time on the internet. Much better to get the complete picture after the dust actually settles and you know what pieces were truly important.
Pick any news story and a journalist (from an outlet like NYT, Politico, etc).
Watch the timeline of that journalist's original opinions (and their level of aggression/assertiveness) and then watch how that cascades to either more extremism—if the evolution of the story agrees with their chosen narrative—or, to absolute abandonment of/ignorance of the thing they so fervently held an opinion about a few hours earlier.
Once you start observing this behavior, you will see it happen for nearly all stories. It's like watching rats press a lever to release food pellets and then scattering off to a corner to digest.
I don't know of any good article on the subject, but I think the red/blue war in America is where you can see some of the most extreme examples of this. A simple illustrative example that comes to mind: A politician on the other side of the aisle makes a gaffe, a journalist amplifies the video/text of their statement, based on their followers' reaction a journalist decides if it's something their followers care about and either writes a piece about it with supporting information about just how wrong they are and takes on it from their followers/colleagues or just ignores it and moves on trying to find more red meat for the political partisans that read them.
I've seen this play out time and time again. An environment like Twitter only encourages echo chambers and actively promotes the blocking of content and opinions a person might find inconvenient. If the average Twitter user wants to build themselves a little fantasy land making themselves stupider everyday that's their perogative. But if they consider themselves a journalist it becomes a real problem. Good journalism should have some basis in reality and ideally should involve going out and talking to people. It shouldn't be a work of fiction made to order for a tiny (yet significantly over represented) subset of the population.
> Can anybody make a good argument as to why Twitter (in its current form) isn’t a major detriment to society?
Basically no one actually uses twitter. I only know one person in real life who uses twitter.
Twitter's problem is that 'media types' really like twitter, for one reason or another, and tend to blow everything that happens there out of proportion for off-platform engagement.
Personally, I really like twitter. I carefully curate my Twitter experience to follow people I'm interested in, mute people and words I don't care for (it's great never having to see "NFT" on twitter!), and block people who are actively harmful. I'm left with a pretty positive experience that has good community and funny jokes. That's how I use it.
The cat is entirely out of the bag. There are many competitors to Twitter (Facebook comes to mind, albeit somewhat different) and the concept of an open online discussion forum, with all its toxicity but also its potential for timely and impactful communication, is not going away. Users have clearly proven they want myriad large scale social media platforms, and Twitter provides a niche and UX that appeals to a lot of people.
You can argue that people are stupid and these platforms are detrimental to society. This is entirely subjective. I would argue that attempting to kill such platforms would be more detrimental, as it will push people to decentralized platforms that are even worse echo chambers. So this is a story of lesser of two evils.
Facebook is not a competitor to twitter. It is culturally just a dead space. Nothing interesting happens there, I can't think of the last time an interesting subculture or meme originated on facebook. It's this bizarre place where you're surrounded by old people but at the same time you're subjected to infantilizing speech restrictions that make you feel like you're in some kind of adult kindergarten or something. You can't make fun of journalists or do anything subversive or culturally alive, it's a place where there is no fun allowed.
> I would argue that attempting to kill such platforms would be more detrimental, as it will push people to decentralized platforms that are even worse echo chambers
I see how this argument would be true. Thank you, that's actually quite insightful.
In some parts of the world Twitter has been used to overthrow governments and bring democracy. Check the article on Wikipedia regarding the Arab Spring and how social media played a role. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Spring
I bet some of those who advocated "it's a private company, it can deplatform whoever it wants" are probably re-thinking their stance on deplatforming from a major social media.
Not really. When moderation goes away, platforms become rife with racism, spam, scams and less than desirable actors. We've seen this with Gab and Parler.
Eh that's a bit of a different mechanism. If you bootstrap a platform from 0 users with the core concept being a lack of moderation, then you're likely to attract those who have been banned, excluded, or otherwise ostracized from existing platforms. This happens because those who support lack of moderation but still have a choice to remain are likely to remain on the existing platforms due to network effects.
Whereas if you start with the popular platform and progressively remove moderation, you end up with different effects, because you still have the core, non-bad-actor population. That is, if your signal-to-noise ratio goes down, but the absolute amount of interaction with your platform increases, it may still be worth it.
> Whereas if you start with the popular platform and progressively remove moderation, you end up with different effects, because you still have the core, non-bad-actor population.
Pretty sure that will just let bad actors back in and drive the good faith users away. You could be underestimating the number of normal users a single bad actor can drive away.
Even when you remove the more centralized moderation, there still have to be some mechanism there to remove the bad actors.
All this theory is nice, but let's look at actuals. Of all the people I know who have been booted off of twitter (several dozen), none of them are bad actors (except maybe Alex Jones). They were booted off because their political opinion was not liked by left-leaning moderators, who made up laughably incorrect assessments of their tweets.
Twitter is being used as a political weapon in a political war.
Actual bad actors who spam, harass (which requires repeated unrelenting action, not just one-time nastiness), defame or incite violence... nobody cares if their posts get removed. Defending them is not what Musk or the political right is on about.
I think that's more of a product of displacement. Those people get pushed out of big sites into smaller free-speech absolutist platforms. Thus, the proportion of these actors in the latter is much higher. Loosening moderation on a big platform would not have this same displacement dynamic. Sure, previously excluded people might rejoin but the bulk of the user base will remain. So there's no drastic shift on proportions here.
Furthermore, there's a difference between totally doing away with moderation and pruning some of the more ideologically slanted moderation policies at twitter.
>... Sure, previously excluded people might rejoin but the bulk of the user base will remain. So there's no drastic shift on proportions here.
Advertisers will not want to see their ads featured next to a post calling for the genocidal extermination of a race. When you allow Gab/Voat/4-chan style moderation, you run-off advertisers which are the lifeblood of social media.
Those sponsored posts appear next to whatever appears in the user's feed. If a user follows a bunch of cat photos, then the sponsored post appears next to cat photos. If the user follows a bunch of NASCAR related accounts it appears next to NASCAR. The ad company has little agency over this.
I don't think advertising companies would really see this as an issue. It's not like an ad playing before a video where sponsorship can be directly tied to a piece of content. The content adjacent to ads is determined by users' viewing habits and follows.
Or - a user follows a public figure out of good-faith interest, one of their tweets sparks controversy, and the replies get bad-faith violent (happens all the time). Then the next post is an ad for toothpaste. Colgate's not going to be happy to associate their product with vitriol.
Ultimately, YouTube users have a higher degree of control over what they consume, because they self select each video on a drop-by-drop level; on Twitter the user only curates which hoses they get blasted by. And we know that YouTube still struggles with ad suitability.
I think you're still not getting it. Sponsored posts aren't part of a chronological feed. They're not associated with any specific content. It's probably not this simple, but it's essentially that every 20 posts a user sees a sponsored post. The posts adjacent to the sponsored post are determined entirely by who the user follows.
For users that don't follow this public figure, the Colgate ads are going to appear somewhere else. If someone takes a screenshot and sends it to Colgate, Twitter will say "hey, it was that user's decision to follow these toxic people."
I think "moderation going away" is a gross exaggeration of what Musk has said he wants.
Twitter has had spam and crypto scams in replies for years now. Every tweet by Elon Musk has had scammy fake giveaways that steal people's financial info, from accounts that copy his profile picture and name. Anyone would agree Twitter's response has not been adequately effective, and he has complained about this for a while, and even said during today's TED event that he wants to stop this sort of spam.
If anything, I think it's more likely we'll see hardcore engineering efforts - I'm not sure why Twitter hasn't looked into some sort of perceptual hashing database for profile pictures of popular accounts, and hide replies from anyone who uses a similar profile picture.
This is obviously different from the political censorship, such as Hunter Biden's laptop, where I think Musk strongly disagrees with current leadership.
Parler/Gab failed in having approximately zero engineering efforts to prevent spam.
How are the two congruent though? How can you say "this type of speech (spam) is not allowed" but also say "I want less censorship and more 'free speech'" (whatever that means). Those two view points seem incompatible.
The moment you confess that some types of speech are harmful to your platform, it just becomes about defining where that line is, and naturally people will have differing opinions on whether they agree with those moderation decisions.
What part of "I want less censorship and more 'free speech'" implies that censorship needs to go to 0 and free speech needs to go to 100? Drawing somewhat arbitrary lines between what is acceptable and what is unacceptable is not the impossibly difficult task that people who make this argument like to think it is. The US first amendment excludes certain types of speech and it hasn't been a problem.
Censorship (automated or human or both) is not the same as spam filtering.
There might be some edge cases where some non-spam content gets caught in a spam filter.
But these should be two separate systems under different teams and leadership. And if your tweet was removed, you should know if this was antispam or censorship in order to craft an appeal effectively.
While I'm not necessarily disagreeing with that assessment, I think those examples of Gab and Parlor are weak. Those platforms were essentially created and marketed specifically to individuals and groups who were kicked off of other platforms. That demographic will naturally include a much higher proportion of "less than desirable actors".
Many of the largest platforms featured much less moderation in their past - even when they were much larger than Gab or Parlor - while also enjoying a smaller proportion of "less than desirable actors". Of course, whether that level was acceptable is debatable. Free speech is a double-edge sword and moderation is an astoundingly complex problem.
Gab, Parler, Voat, et al are marketed as forums with lax moderation.
The flavors of prejudice that they attract are the direct result of their function. Platforms that start to grow large without controls against hate and other bad actors simply do not continue to grow.
Do we ever hear people talk about "free speech" without regards to someone being moderated off of a platform? The only reason we have talking points such as Facebook/Twitter = Utility/Town-Square is because right-wingers were being moderated off of digital platforms. Before recently, no one really cared unless it was something such as a child wearing an offensive t-shirt at school.
So create free market plugins to filter based on preferences.
Imagine: scam protection plugin. spam protection plugin. anti racism plugin.
Let users vote who gets ears. If users say they want to silence racists, by saying racists things a user ends up being blocked by all the people who want to silence all racists. Users then vote and racists know that algorithmically they cannot heard because they know the majority have silenced them. But they also aren't enraged that they are being silenced because they aren't. They're just blocked by the user base who doesn't think their words have value.
If twitter does not allow as much free speech as possible, that speech simply ends up moving to other platforms anyways. So much to all the pro censorship crowd's chagrin, their censorship isn't actually doing anything except protecting their ears from hearing what they don't want to hear, and in reality making the other side band together even more fiercely. Might as well keep all the speech and just allow people to choose their own protection.
You never have to listen to them if that's what you choose. Let people choose what gets silenced instead of letting some authority choose for you. Giving up that power has historically lead in only one direction, and I don't see why its any different in this case. Adults are not children. Let them discern what is right and what is wrong.
The only way forward is to keep free speech available, and we can keep it and have protections for those who want it, so why not?
Cause that's what I want to do with my free time... install plugins operated by... who knows... to filter out the blatant racism I don't even have to see if I just don't use the website.
But... I don't use social media, so maybe I'm not the one this would appeal to.
You wouldn't have to install them. They would be toggled on in the app by default with a modal or some notification ensuring you know what you're being protected from.
If you are okay with the default protections, closing that modal is one [x] away.
If for some reason you want spam, then toggle it back on.
We could go a step further and ban the bad actors entirely so they don’t pollute the pool. Just allowing them in the feed introduces all kinds of engineering headaches. How are retweets handled? Replies? Etc. it would be a huge distraction to support the bad actors instead of removing them.
> Just allowing them in the feed introduces all kinds of engineering headaches. How are retweets handled? Replies? Etc. it would be a huge distraction to support the bad actors instead of removing them.
HaHa, nice try Xi Jinping.
Retweets that originate from filtered tweets simply don't get included in the filtering person's feed. Same with replies.
Engineering wise, these features should be peanuts for the HN crowd.
I think it's interesting to note how differently people see this conversation!
> advocated "it's a private company, it can deplatform whoever it wants"
To me, this compresses several conversations into one:
- In the US, the first amendment applies to the government, not to private actors, so companies do not need to allow any particular person on their site (with the provision that it's illegal to ban people because they are part of a protected class).
- The idea of a "public square" is in flux and we are in the midst of trying to figure out what areas of our interactions we would like to consider public and what the advantages and disadvantages each approach are.
- The tactic of urging private companies to ban certain people for certain reasons as practiced by many groups (often with different justifications).
Different groups have different interests at each level and have different preferences as to how policy should change. In some sense, your statement of: "I bet some of those who..." will always be correct because of course *some of them* will! I have a guess about how you feel about the above issues (and other involved issues that I didn't break out), but I'd be interested to have you expand what you actually mean.
Why would you assume that? If Elon buys twitter and starts banning everyone with pronouns in their bio I think that would be bad and stupid but it wouldn't be a free speech issue. People would just go elsewhere. Everything would be fine.
It really hinges on what you mean by the phrase "free speech" when there is no clear context.
It is true that in the context of US lawmaking, the free speech rights specified in the 1st Amendment are in play.
But there is the concept of free speech outside that context also. For example the editors of a newspaper being inclusive of viewpoints in the "Letters to the Editor" section or a radio show being inclusive of viewpoints from callers or a website operator being inclusive of viewpoints in public comment sections.
I think there is value in advocating for inclusiveness in those (and other) contexts and labeling that idea "free speech" but I don't think it has to be "absolutely no moderation or restrictions". There is room for an editorial policy in those places and there is room to criticize any particular policy that some entity might put in place as not being supportive of "free speech" even when there is no 1st Amendment context in play.
Nah, the people who advocate that private platforms reserve the right to censor themselves tend to know what the 1st amendment means regarding government censorship.
I think they were referring to the fact that "it's a private company" is usually used in response to any moderation complaints or accusation of censorship. Yes, everyone know the first amendment only applies government to the government but it does not mean a private corporation cannot censor or is immune from complaints on it's moderation policy. But now that it's been used as a way to deflect criticism or excuse any excess on what's deemed acceptable by one side, it will be funny to figuratively see the leopoards eating their faces. At least I think that's what the parent comment meant.
>Not really. There's a certain political party who seems to want to redefine private companies as public commons, all because they don't like their hate speech being censored.
no, it's because it actually became the new public commons. That's where most gets their news, meet people, organise events, find jobs, etc. Politicians and organisations are now using it as their main mean of communication.
How do you think the 2020 election would have gone if twitter + facebook + reddit decided after 2016 that most anti-trump posts should be removed from the platforms for misinformation and instead they promoted anti-Biden content? I think they could easily have made him won by a landslide
This is extremely unlikely. Those platforms are incredibly far from having a monopoly on information in the west. People looking for the other side would have just gotten it from one of the many many other places it could be found.
The main gripe isn't that hate speech is being censored, although personally I don't think it should be. We complain about Twitter because anything to the right of Stalin is a potential censorship target, depending on Twitter's editorial marching orders for the day.
edit: I'm a little disappointed in myself for thoughtlessly going along with your framing. There's no such thing as "hate speech".
> 1st amendment means regarding government censorship
that's just a loophole from people who have no argument so they go with the [legal in the US = Moral]. Just because the modern "public space" is now private, it doesn't make it any less bad when the group in charge arbitrairely ban groups of people based on politics, opinion, etc.
whether you like it or not (I hate it personally), the vast majority of the news and opinions that people consume today comes directly or indirectly (eg. linking an NYT article on facebook) from a handful of social media companies. It's getting even worse now that organisations and politicians are using social media platforms as their official channel of communications
I think we have a similar problem with email accounts. Getting your gmail account banned can really fuck your life and sooner or later something will have to be donne to protect people (eg. force them to a have a proper appel system or to hand over all your data +forward your emails for a while after they kick you out).
People seem to believe that it's impossible to create a competing platform. That's built on the assumption that most people are generally happy with current offerings. If Musk does anything that a critical mass of users finds objectionable, they can and will leave or go to a competitor.
Part of me hopes he buys it just to test this hypothesis. My feeling is that we'll learn one way or another how important a given social media brand is.
It seems to me that you are implying that the people who previously defended twitter's decisions to ban certain public features may not fare so well under a regime managed by Elon Musk.
Everything that follows is based on that inference.
There are two major possibilities here. Either Musk lets twitter continue much in the same manner as it operates today. In which case, nothing really changes.
Musk operates twitter as his personal bullhorn, promoting beneficial tweets and removing tweets that are critical of him, his companies, his ideals, whatever. All of which would be his right to do. However, all actions have consequences.
Twitter isn't twitter because it was ordained from on high as the service to spit hot takes in 140 characters or less. Twitter is twitter because of everything twitter did. From the initial concept, to the pivoting to whatever the hell "micro-blogging" is, to letting people say mostly whatever, to the various standards they've implemented over the years. All of that makes twitter what it is.
If twitter just becomes "Elon Musk's dream platform where he can shit post all day and no one can say shit to him", that's entirely something else. Most of the people left on twitter would be Musk and people who want to follow him.
Like how the crowd shifted from Slashdot to Digg to reddit. From Friendster to MySpace to Facebook. Something will come along and supplant twitter.
So, I believe the people who "advocated "it's a private company, it can deplatform whoever it wants"" are going to be fine with their stance. Because if Musk changes twitter into a shithole, no one is going to want to stay regardless.
Someone noted this in a thread on Reddit. Will be very funny to see the political spectrum reflect on this; suddenly many crying first amendment will be taking the position you quoted while some of those there now will may perhaps argue for Twitter to become a subsidiary of PBS (joking).
Musk can ban whoever he wants if he buys Twitter. I assume he’ll want to do at least some of that given his past actions and the fact that there are critics of him and his companies on there.
Ideally, deplatforming is done in in illegal cases and the government/people decide what is grounds for deplatforming instead of some coked-out execs at Twitter.
I suppose I'm doing exactly what you want to avoid here (guessing GP's meaning), but I think their meaning is really quite obvious and isn't that hard to guess. GP can contradict me if they feel I'm talking out of my back.
American Social Media corps are pretty heavily progressive-dominated, which is typically called "The Left-Leaning Bias", but that's a shame, because American "Leftism" is really a laughable low-dimensional projection of what actual leftism looks like. So anyways, because of this, progressive social media denizens reciprocate this preferential treatment by being free (as in bear) and dependable apologists, always defending said corporations whenever they arbitarily ban, censor or otherwise unfairly treat those with the wrong opinons, often employing the well-known phrase that GP quoted.
GP is implying that those people are about to discover the brutal truth that suppression tactics are perfectly symmetric and care not who employs it against whom.
GP means that those resorting to "freedom of speech is not for companies" are hypocrites. They're defending the right of companies to supress opinions on their services, not because they believe that's fair --actually they're anti-business-- but because they can pressure the companies, threatening their advertisers, so only opinions approved by them will show.
If Twitter goes private and stops depending on ads, they won't be able to exert such pressure and will lose that advantage. Even if Musk is totally fair with moderation, they're going to complain he's not censoring enough.
I'm one of those people and I really don't see how this follows. Freedom of association for private entities is important, whether or not they are owned by Elon Musk.
> The takeover is unlikely to be a drawn out process. “If the deal doesn’t work, given that I don’t have confidence in management nor do I believe I can drive the necessary change in the public market, I would need to reconsider my position as a shareholder,” said Musk.
> 1. selling that much stock will dent investor confidence in twitter.
I don't understand this bit. It's just Elon selling his own shares that he just bought, why would that affect investor confidence? Nothing's changed about the company itself, so the price would just go back to where it was.
> It's just Elon selling his own shares that he just bought, why would that affect investor confidence?
It could be read by a layman as "He spent a bunch of money, got a look at the internals and realized it was a bad move". In fairness it could also be interpreted as "He just fickle".
Because he bought it with the assumption that his offer would be accepted and he could improve the company. Rejecting his offer opens the door to a world in which Twitter is worth less than what he paid for it: from both Musk's perspective, as well as that of others.
It depends on why the offer is rejected. You can say "we think its worth more than that" but if your stock is trading $30 down afterward your investors might have an interesting case about your fiduciary responsibility to them.
Yeah, he's given a decent carrot to the current shareholders to sell, and an even bigger stick to beat them to do it as they will lose a lot if they don't sell.
Ultimately that's the case. But the board may decide to reject the offer without doing a shareholder vote. (That's probably what they will do). That's when the shareholders sue.
1. The chance that Musk would buy Twitter, non-zero before his purchase announcement and somewhat circulating as a market rumor and thus perhaps part of speculation upholding the stock, would go to zero.
2. Musk's departure could be read by some as a vote of no-confidence in management by a capable businessman, and that after some conversations with management about strategy.
More information. It takes the usually remote possibility of a generous takeover offer off the table. Musk turned down a position on the board, signaling he thinks the company would be better off private. It arguably shows questionable judgement of the board.
Aside from the other reasons mentioned, don't forget hundreds of algos programmed to automatically sell once the price reaches certain low levels - which is bound to happen once large blocks of stock get offloaded.
Because we're in a deep recession. Twitter and other sp500s are going to slide down regardless of what Musk does. He is offering a choice: "I jump the ship and it sinks a bit faster, or I give you a generous evacuation plan and deal with the leaks myself."
It's hard to navigate comments, but I cannot find the important stuff being discussed. I mean: how the hell can he even remotely viably secure $43B in cash?! All this "$200B net worth" is pretty much bullshit — it's multiplying current stock price by the amount he holds. (Hugely overpriced stock, in his case.) Sure, he can borrow insane amounts of money using this stock as a leverage, but no way it can be even close to $40B! Right?
Overcollateralized loans are a real thing, & when used right offer substantial opportunities in risk hedging, leveraging, & limit sells. He'll need to post ~$55B in stocks to make it happen, but it's doable.
No, I am sure this happens, but at $50B, really? Maybe I don't understand something, but the absolute amount sound impossible to me. I mean, no matter how much collateral you are going to offer, to borrow the money, you need somebody, who can lend you that money. It's not like you can ask for $50B in a pawnshop. Sure, you are gonna split it between 10 banks, it's still a lot.
That is, it has to be an institution that can move so wast amounts of cash, that these billions Musk borrows are kind of insignificant in comparison. And the collateral Musk offers must look nice specifically to them.
Now, how are they going to price the collateral? I don't understand where you got $55B from, but all risks taken into account it still has to represent what they think the stock will cost after the deal. Surely Musk fanboys may believe TSLA is underpriced, but you are not gonna deal with them, you are gonna deal with the analysts of that financial institution. And no matter how much more optimistic than me you/they are, what do you think will happen to Tesla stock if Musk sells even 30% of what he owns? I'd think he may as well offer "$200B worth" Tesla stock, as per today's market price. It still can turn into rubble the moment after it becomes public knowledge and Musk fanboys start selling theirs.
I mean, it would be hard enough to buy $50B for gold. Harder still to buy gold for $50B. But to borrow $50B for Tesla & SpaceX stock? Really? Am I underestimating things? Do such crazy deals actually happen?
> No, I am sure this happens, but at $50B, really? Maybe I don't understand something, but the absolute amount sound impossible to me. I mean, no matter how much collateral you are going to offer, to borrow the money, you need somebody, who can lend you that money. It's not like you can ask for $50B in a pawnshop. Sure, you are gonna split it between 10 banks, it's still a lot.
If it needs to be done, the underwriting of a $50+B asset-backed security loan is possible, with TSLA stock put up as collateral. The undertaking would be massive, but it can be done.
> I don't understand where you got $55B from
I took the $43B and multiplied it by 1.25, and then rounded that up and added 1 to make the number hit 55.
Truthfully, an overcollateralization ratio of 55/43 ~= 1.279 is more than comfortable to underwrite such a loan under normal circumstances. If, however, the asset is too volatile, then the ratio can be cranked upwards to 1.3 or 1.5 for greater assurances, which would require more stock, but if it needs to be done, then it could be.
> Surely Musk fanboys may believe TSLA is underpriced, but you are not gonna deal with them, you are gonna deal with the analysts of that financial institution. And no matter how much more optimistic than me you/they are, what do you think will happen to Tesla stock if Musk sells even 30% of what he owns? I'd think he may as well offer "$200B worth" Tesla stock, as per today's market price. It still can turn into rubble the moment after it becomes public knowledge and Musk fanboys start selling theirs.
Oh, there's no doubt that the stock is in astro-hype levels of speculation right now, that's the case. Everyone knows this, but no one wants to be the spoilsport to ruin the party for everyone else.
> I mean, it would be hard enough to buy $50B for gold. Harder still to buy gold for $50B. But to borrow $50B for Tesla & SpaceX stock? Really? Am I underestimating things? Do such crazy deals actually happen?
Honestly, given the course of human history, I wouldn't be surprised if it does happen. People can do crazy things if they want to, from the aspirational moon landings, to the depraved war-mongerings & degenerative market speculations: It's part of the human package, both the good & bad parts of it.
Yea it's not complicated for a large financial institution to underwrite the offer. Plus he still plans to keep as many shareholders as he can still involved when it goes private so his final ownership percentage will be much lower.
I think social media is a real negative force in the world and welcome this as potentially a way to make it better, or at least destroy Twitter and remove one outlet.
I don’t think public companies can reform social media because it’s too profitable. As a private company it may be possible to reform it to still be profitable, but not in a way that harms people.
> As an all-cash offer, this generates for the shareholders a substantial return with NO RISK, and so the board has a serious legal obligation to carefully review this offer and make a decision.
What a gut check. I'm sure this is an obvious comment by now, but seeing the board's response to turning down something like this is going to be an olympic level display of mental gymnastics. Exciting times.
It’s pretty much a given that there will be legal action in situations like this.
The board has fiduciary duty to test is seriously - usually by forming a committee, getting external advice, trying to get a better price and a solid case if they decline the offer.
They will likely be advised that this will end up in court one way or the other, and making sure the process is solid is their way of avoiding liability.
He's just describing what a normal board would do.
No competent board would accept an offer lower than recent prices. Remember you only get one chance to sell the whole company.
Shareholders have had numerous opportunities to sell at this price and higher, so it makes no sense to recommend the sale at this price for all shareholders.
Right. Too many people are reading the offer literally.
Musk wants to exit his Twitter position, and is using this offer to pump the price before he dumps stock, under the justification of "they rejected my painfully, obviously low offer so now I need to exit".
TWTR closed at 45 today because the market called bullshit on Elon’s offer. If the market was convinced by his offer, it’d be within a few percent of $54/share.
There will be no exit liquidity, it’ll go sub-30 if anyone catches a whiff of Elon dumping his shares.
My general thought is that pump and dump schemes are small change to the richest person in the world. Making an extra few hundred million is appealing to anyone, but he'll make 100x that from TLSA by doing nothing at all.
I do see this as a way for him to save face. kind of "I bought $4B of stock on a whim and that was a bad idea, but if I pump it and come out ahead I'll feel better"
My thoughts exactly. If the board accepted, minutes before twittering "having perused the contract, Twitter violated one of the clauses and there I am ethically unable to buy the company", he'd dump and make himself another few gazillion dollars richer.
>Shareholders have had numerous opportunities to sell at this price and higher, so it makes no sense to recommend the sale at this price for all shareholders.
Plenty of shareholders have sold at the offer price or lower, which is why TWTR was ~$38 pre-Elon.
Not really? There’s also personal liability if they don’t accept Musk’s offer given that the market (prior to these movements) valued the company substantially below $43 billion.
Yahoo actually returned more than Microsoft for a while, up until about 2017, thanks to their huge stake in Alibaba. Twitter doesn't have that tho, they're entirely tied to their mediocre product.
> Killing Vine was the dumbest thing they ever did.
100% this. People are always confused why Facebook was allowed to buy Instagram, and this was, I think, a bit part of why.
Vine was completely destroyed by Twitter's incompetent management, and prevailing wisdom was that Facebook would do the same to Instagram. "Okay Facebook has filters now! Time to shut down Instagram!"
TikTok is the biggest app in the world, and in a lot of ways it was initially just the Chinese clone of Vine. Truly mind-blowing how they squandered that opportunity, they could be many multiples higher than 54.20
If nobody has noticed, Twitter aren’t very good at building software, it’s incredibly buggy what they’ve made, I regularly click on tweets that have a comments count but zero comments. It’s seriously glitchy from the notifications to even writing tweets (the MAX chars counter went crazy for me the other day). Don’t get me started on editing tweets their logic is terrible here that you can never design a UX that doesn’t stop people changing the meaning of their message after the event. Finally the spam is just totally next level and they still have people selling Bitcoin scams under every Elon tweet. Asleep at the wheel.
Correct. In internal Twitter jargon, some data is "perspectival" and some for performance reasons isn't. Actually viewing a tweet is calculated on the fly based on your personal perspective, as honoring privacy settings, blocks, etc, is crucial. But that's not true for counts, so those will be off.
People who find this a shocking and objectionable sign of bugs are generally people who have not build software at such large scales.
>People who find this a shocking and objectionable sign of bugs are generally people who have not build software at such large scales.
This leaves such a poor taste in my mouth. Perhaps the proper UX is to then _not display comment counts_ if your performance/cost tradeoff has determined that you can't display comment counts accurately. For higher comment counts it might be fine where a user isn't expected to read all 5000 replies(ignoring the edge case where its 5000 private/blocked accounts replying), but if a tweet has 2 replies then the user who clicks it expects to see those.
Other large platforms have been able to solve this issue either in UX or implementation, so "web scale" isn't a good excuse.
A tweet you can't see still exists. I think it's perfectly reasonable to display accurate counts even if it's based on information you don't have access to.
I understand the idea but it feels a little too online for my taste. I'm probably not the target audience. Just feels like someone decided the tea leaves falling a certain way MUST indicate something.
It's not always the case that a high reply/like ratio is someone being "owned", but it's obviously more concrete than tea leaves. Twitter's lack of a real downvote/dislike incentivizes people to reply to a bad post without leaving a like, and in my experience it's a pretty good metric. (The main exception is when a tweet is a prompt that intentionally asks for people to reply.)
Also I feel like I should add that "ratio" is a confusing term, because it can refer to the above example `reply-count / likes`, but can also be when a reply gets more likes than the tweet it's replying to: `reply-likes / OP-likes`.
Personally, I don't think "solving" minor inconsistency by eliminating a feature people like is the best approach. And from the way you talk about it, I gather you're not much of a Twitter user, so maybe you should give some deference to the people more familiar with the problem to decide whether this is a good choice or not?
If you have proof that other platforms have solved this problem at scale, I would be very interested to see it. Fundamentally, those totals are never going to be perfectly correct because a) people will be adding and removing tweets continuously, and b) even if continuously updating the numbers were worth the resources, people would hate having the numbers changing frequently.
I remember when Twitter worked like this as well. It doesn't any more. When I see a tweet with a dozen replies and only one is visible, even in a private tab, it's very unlikely that eleven out of twelve are from locked accounts. It's even less likely that there wouldn't be at least one visible reply to one of those replies. I see this sort of thing often enough that I have no doubt that twitter is futzing with the visibility both of certain posters and of interactions with certain posters.
No, this happens to me (less replies shown than exist) and it's definitely a caching issue and I am using the app logged in. I have to literally open twitter in my web browser to try and get those tweets to load unless I want to wait until later for whatever caches to be invalidated. I don't block anyone.
> Don’t get me started on editing tweets their logic is terrible here that you can never design a UX that doesn’t stop people changing the meaning of their message after the event.
What if everyone could see full edit history of each twitt?
Perhaps it was too early to be a competitor, but I always see TikTok as the real Vine replacement. Short silly videos you can scroll through. They could have done so well with Vine.
MS offered $44B for Yahoo inclusive of their almost 50% stake in then pre-ipo Alibaba. At the time, Yahoo's investment in Alibaba was valued at more than their entire market cap (negative valuation for Yahoo's domestic operations, or negative value taking into account tax implications of divestiture of these assets, etc).
Yahoo turned down MSFT's offer. Yahoo then spun off its entire company, keeping the name Yahoo with this spin-off subsidiary. The parent company, now named Altiba, retained ownership of the stake in Alibaba. This is where the ~50B valuation remained.
The spin-off company (valued in the negative by the market) was then sold for $4.5B to Verizon. Altiba retained its $56B market cap during this time.
Yahoo, inclusive of Altiba, out-performed MS's offer. It was a far better deal for shareholders to turn down MSFT. The net value to shareholders exceeded $60B.
There were a lot of poorly written articles at the time, which confused the sale of the subsidiary (YHOO) with the previous offer (for both YHOO and what became AABA) so your confusion is understandable. But this perspective is simply wrong.
You are thinking of the wrong era. We're talking about the 2008 offer to buy Yahoo. Alibaba was worth around $10b when Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo for $45b.
Alibaba was pre-ipo at the time and did not have a market valuation. The most effective way to estimate a market value for Alibaba at this time is the 2008 MSFT offer itself.
MSFT didn't offer $44B for Yahoo's internet business. The offer was in large part for the Alibaba stake.
Regardless, MSFT priced it all at around $44B, which is less than it eventually was valued at.
I amend my statement a little: They actually IPOed on the Hong Kong stock exchange in late 2007 before delisting in 2012. They IPOed at $10bn. They traded as high as $25bn the first day. But I have no other data.
Alibaba was delaying going public because they wanted to get back the 40% they had sold to Yahoo. Their expected market cap was $200B, so the 40% that Yahoo owned would eventually be worth $80B. Hence MSFT offered $44B, which was a lowball offer.
Eventually Marissa made amends with Jack Ma and Yahoo was allowed to keep 24% of their stake, and then BABA went public. But before Marissa came on board, there was Carol Bartz who was a total fuck up of the highest order; a potty-mouthed prick if there was one. She pissed Jack off when they first met, and Jack took Alipay from out of under her. I'm surprised more people don't blame Bartz for the screwups at Yahoo.
Reddit is infected with the same problem as Twitter and YouTube though. It use to be a place with free communities and free speech.
But now, if you dare to post anything that doesn't align with what the MSM agenda for the day is. Your comment, post or even your whole sub-reddit gets banned.
> if you dare to post anything that doesn't align with what the MSM agenda ...
i think that this notion has lost its teeth as the MSM has been converted into some boogeyman and/or strawman. MSM certainly caters to an audience, and people are drawn to likeminded people, sometimes deluding themselves into believing that participating in a near-homogenous echo chamber would be an ideal expression of peaceful living. once there, though, they realize that it's still not quite perfect. foxnews not "right" enough for me so let's create newsmax or oan. biden's not "left" enough and so we should have nominated warren or sanders. people are going to disagree and that's fundamentally a good thing. how we disagree is where things seem to have degenerated.
the whole "MSM agenda" seems like an incorrect and lazy narrative. they have agendas and they cater to the people who demand those agendas. i doubt, though, that newsmax employs people to troll my tweets disagreeing with desantis' signing of the florida abortion bill today, reporting them in an attempt to get me banned. the people trying to get me banned are the audience and they believe they're doing the correct thing to advance their cause by attempting to squelch me.
MSM pours fuel on the fire, but they don't start it. same for reddit - it's going to be the collective of people and their ability to tolerate differentiated thinking. they're not brainwashed zombies, they're collectives of similarly-minded people who give in to their predisposed biases as exploited by MSM/social media for profit.
Yeah, a powerful apparatus that is MSM, would never be used to influence opinions and install beliefs.
> they're not brainwashed zombies, they're collectives of similarly-minded people who give in to their predisposed biases as exploited by MSM/social media for profit.
you ever heard of the 50 cent army? do you think only China has that, doesn't exist in the US?
i'm not saying it doesnt exist, just that it's not as prevalent as people want it to be. i'd argue that even then, most of the time it's an exploitation of biases and not a new installation of foreign beliefs.
> But now, if you dare to post anything that doesn't align with what the MSM agenda for the day is. Your comment, post or even your whole sub-reddit gets banned.
Where on earth does this opinion come from? All sorts of vile stuff gets posted to both Reddit and Twitter, and they rarely-if-ever take any action against it. Certain subreddits will still moderate, but community moderators (users of some sort) generally control the moderation of those places, not Reddit or their staff directly.
And in cases where Twitter/Reddit directly take action, it certainly isn't based on an "MSM agenda", it mostly seems to only happen to limit their legal or financial liability.
a lot of subreddits are basically marketing departments of some corporates.
those have paid employee mods where only posts and comments favourable to corporate goals are allowed. not quite the MSM, but I'd guess corporates would want to remain within the prevailing politically correct Overton window.
WTF? I see a constant never ending stream of shit on reddit that goes against the "MSM agenda". And those are the types of places are very quick to ban posters.
yahoo was the goto place for new email accounts. It was the goto place for instant messaging too. It was also in top # for search and other features. And it still is...
They are probably going to desperately try to find a white knight, and fail because Twitter lost the mass market years ago and at this point is a platform for rich people to post incredibly vapid, narcissistic takes about politics and society that say nothing.
They could actually make a phenomenal amount off of subscription revenue tho off of that model, doesn't really make sense for any of the FAANG's strategies but I could see it making a lot of money with competent management. Twitter Blue is one of their best ideas in a long time, but should be more expensive and have more features.
There is so much untapped potential in Twitter. An ad-based business model was the only proven option in the late 2000s, but in the era of Patreon, Twitch, Substack, and Onlyfans, the landscape has resoundingly demonstrated that the old wisdom of "no one wants to pay for content on the internet" is no longer true.
Making something people want to pay for, of course, is the challenge, and Twitter Blue is a very limited start to that. But for the position Twitter has come to occupy in culture, a bold product vision could leverage that to incredible effect.
Twitter has two subscription models. In addition to Twitter Blue (which you mention), they also have "Super Follow", which is more analogous to Twitch/OF subscriptions, in that you pay a bit to a specific creator, so you get a bit of perks from them.
The fact that you don't know about it should say something about how enthusiastically the feature was received. Most creators are probably happier with their existing Patreon/OF platforms.
Do people really like having everything on one platform like that? Personally I kind of like having things separate and companies just do what they do well.
>at this point is a platform for rich people to post incredibly vapid, narcissistic takes about politics and society that say nothing.
It's clearly not, since it's still one of the largest social networks in the world.
I'm not a fan of twitter or social networks in general, but it's clear that they are used by a teeny hundreds of millions of people more than some celebrities.
There are very few companies that would want to buy Twitter and can afford it. And because of heightened antitrust scrutiny, none of them have any interest in trying when there's a very low chance of clearing such a merger with all the regulators in USA + EU + UK. (The last one even blocked Facebook's acquisition of Giphy. They'd have a field day with Twitter.)
Any data on how that does? My guess is not that we’ll unless the content is richer than just text… and effectively largely becomes Patreon / onlyfans. It’s kind of hard to pull that off fully when the rest of the platform is fully free.
It's a ridiculous idea because it doesn't have any cultural or product fit. It reads like they looked at Substack, thought "ooh, money, gimme some of that!", and rolled out the same thing for their own product – but a tweet is a couple of hundred characters and nobody is paying for that. (Short of the small percentage of pathetic creeps who probably also send money to female streamers just to feel noticed.)
Reddit gold is an example of how to nail something like this, because it was done with tremendous sensitivity to the culture of the site. It's quirky, slightly ironic, riffs on the obvious silliness of a 'gift' that goes 99% to Reddit's coffers, and it's perfectly pitched to the user at the point where they are already feeling the value of Reddit's product & the other user's content. Twitter's, by contrast, is an example of how not to do it, for the converse of all those reasons and more besides.
There are a lot of politicians, activists, fundraisers, etc who communicate primarily through Twitter but send people to Patreon or GoFundMe or somewhere else to donate. That's an existing culture of soliciting donations on Twitter, and Twitter might be able to become the payment processor for some of those donations, if they do it right.
Twitter is for building an audience. Patreon and other platforms are where you best monetize that audience.
Putting both together could be incredibly lucrative but also would be treated very cautiously because of potential deplatforming.
Musk actual commitment to minimal moderation (what my mental model is for his free speech bent) could thread that needle and at the very least be a fascinating experiment to watch from the sidelines.
> They are probably going to desperately try to find a white knight, and fail because Twitter lost the mass market years ago and at this point is a platform for rich people to post incredibly vapid, narcissistic takes about politics and society that say nothing.
Ironically, this suggests that people like Elon Musk are exactly the problem with Twitter.
Journalists and bluechecks seem to be particularly mad about this. I guess they don't like the prospect of having to follow rules that are transparently enforced rather than the current system of favoritism and opacity
Playing devil's advocate here (I like the idea). Won't that make it worst since people, having the blueprint, are going to game the system like how they try to do with SEO?
Sure, people will do that, but the algorithms of popular search engines are closed source, yet they are getting gamed all the time.
The more interesting aspect I find here is that in an open-source algorithm it is difficult to hide shady patterns that keep the user doom-scrolling.
So open-sourcing the algorithm would signal to me that a membership program is supposed to be a major contributor to Twitters revenue and ad revenue, which it currently most relies on, is going to be less important.
What he did today is thousand times better than shelling money behind the charity that many billionaires doing. Under Elon twitter can enable true "freedom of expression." Parag's one sided stand to enable woke culture, and board's support to that clearly showing how extreme right mindset they have when running this company. Today we can't hear the voice of other side on this platform, they are either shutdown or suspended even if you are former prez https://twitter.com/jack/status/651003891153108997
Freedom of expression does not mean tolerating outright lies and bigotry and harm on a non-government-owned/controlled platform. So Trump, since you decided to not say his name for some reason, was rightly kicked off the platform after being warned numerous times about his policy violations.
It's funny how people seem to think that such freedoms extend beyond the boundary of government and into the private sector (publicly-traded company or not). They do not. They never have. Twitter can set whatever rules they wish and the chips may fall where they will, despite what @jack may say. You are free to choose a different platform to support.
But don't sit there and think that the "other side" is somehow oppressed because you simply disagree with the policies of Twitter.
I believe this is not a hostile takeover. It's an unsolicited bid to purchase the company directly to the board. A hostile takeover would involve a tender or purchases directly to shareholders to purchase stocks ignoring the board or likely against the wishes of the board.
It's an unsolicited offer - so Musk can sell his shares, watch it depress the price, and then attempt the hostile take-over. Big stakeholders are signaling to the board not to accept the terms: https://twitter.com/Alwaleed_Talal/status/151461595698675712...
Yes that's what a hostile take-over is and twitter just adopted a poison pill:
> reduce the likelihood that any entity, person or group gains control of Twitter through open market accumulation without paying all shareholders an appropriate control premium or without providing the Board sufficient time to make informed judgments and take actions that are in the best interests of shareholders.
This is exactly why individuals should not be allowed to have tens (let alone hundreds!) of billions of dollars in wealth - they become all-powerful and too easily subvert the will of the people. They become their own ruling class, which is unacceptable in a functioning democracy.
Democracies are great, but they become weak when the majority crushes minority opinion and the chilling effects of a singular ideology makes it difficult for those without resources to speak their minds and openly engage in debate [1][2][3]. And this is even more true when there are few alternate centres of power outside of the state. Billionaires, along with NGOs, unions, etc, provide these alternative centres of power that are essential when a perspective or ideology becomes too hegemonic. This is even more obvious when the whole point of what Elon is doing is trying to do right now is to make twitter a more free, fun, and open platform for people who don't have the fuck you money that he has managed to earn.
Of course the other utility of billionaires is that when they've earned it themselves they have shown some skill at allocating capital, and can pursue important societal goals that government or existing corporations have proven incapable of, like space flight, electric cars, better urban mass transit, brain-computer interfaces, etc.. None of those achievements seem important to people who have decided that Elon == bad for whatever transgression they believe is more important.
Important to whom? The same power that lets a billionaire develop spaceflight can also be used to instigate an ecological disaster, roll back human rights, or unleash killer robots.
> In theory, but in practice when did a billionaire do these things you’re worried about outside of a Bond film?
Looking at fossil fuel oligarchs shepherding in global warming, international human rights setbacks, and Tesla's "self-driving" cars that regularly kill other road users... they're more or less doing those things now?
Twitter couldn't exist in its current form without billions from billionaires carrying it through years of not being able to fund itself. It would have had to grow slowly, probably in some decentralized form like Mastodon did with people and organizations funding their own instances and linking up through a common protocol. The world would have been better for it.
In a different universe, (for example) branches of governments run their own instances for politicians and candidates to speak on without having to worry about clashing with moderation policies that serve other use cases on other instances.
If you were our supreme leader, how would you prevent private individuals like Musk, Bezos, etc from acquiring their wealth, given it is tied up in the value of very useful companies they created ?
Also, your solution is now how risk/reward works. The employees starting at Tesla today are not entitled to large amounts of the company because they are coming in on a sure thing. The early employees did get a lot of stock. I personally know someone that worked for tesla in sales in 2008 who walked way from 200K shares because he thought they were worthless.
Not a Tesla employee, but I bought thousands of TSLA stocks since 2012. Why? Because I was already a spoiled child whereas my coworkers haven't inherited shit and had to pay for their education. I'm a multimillionaire, just from TSLA. Now, my wealth is mostly financial so my tax rate is coming down as I get richer because I earn far more from the stock market than from work. How stupid and unfair is this? We're always focusing on those who earn more their hard work but most people winning are just benefiting from unfair advantages. It's so obvious when this happens to you but I guess few admit that in order to keep some pride in their situation.
You picked the (probably?) single highest performing stock in the past 10 years. Call it luck, but it's not luck because you were born rich. What if you invested in any of the other hundreds of companies that have gone bankrupt or lost most of their value.
In any case being born rich is lucky for many reasons, but not for you investing in the huge gamble that was Tesla
I'd arguing that buying 1000s of shares of TSLA in 2012 was a very risky, bad idea. Congrats, it worked out for you. If you hate the system that made you so rich, give it all to charity and start over from scratch.
Risky? No, I did not risk anything but money I did not need. Help me find the charity that will change the system, please. I can't find one and I certainly don't expect money to change anything anyway (since the reasoning itself isn't enough to make people change course).
How is it stupid and unfair? You played a direct role in Tesla’s success - you supported them financially at a critical point, which helped get them through the bottleneck
How does buying shares support a company financially? My understanding of the stock market is that buying shares would only help a company during a time when they issue new shares to raise capital, like during an IPO. Are there other ways it helps them?
Buying (and holding) reduces the number of outstanding shares, which supports the share price. So when the business needs cash to invest in new car research, they can issue shares at the higher price. This is exactly what happened at Tesla and also Gamestop. Now, they have so much cash, they are pretty much guaranteed to not fail.
Even a single large, stable investor like Warren Buffett can be a huge help for a company for this reason.
It's stupid and unfair because only rich people could have a seat at the game table. Of course I did better than other rich capitalists would preferred to invest in a loosers, but is that really the point? For one guy earning millions, thousands are fighting to get a job that pays for food and a roof.
My point is that as inequality increases (since everything is being monetized, without no other consideration than gains and profits), we're making the system even worse by lowering tax rate on the rich. Note that I'm French and both candidates for the presidency intend to lower tax on the rich and privileged. It was already reduced a good deal by making marginal tax rate on capital gains from 45 to 30% (1/3 a drop!) and removing tax on high wealth (I would be over K€50 a year, otherwise). I'm paying far less taxes than I'd have under Sarkozy (whose was said to be more fiscal conservative than Macron… go figure).
Even in the Florence example which seems globally unique, unless you're a scion of one of these families and willing to share how they did it I see no reason to think they did it by more nefarious means than anyone else. Setting one's descendants up for greater prosperity and freedom for the next 600 years seems to me like an ideal to be imitated, and I see no good reason why anyone would feel differently. Perhaps you know of one?
No need to speculate. The US Dept. of Treasury has just created the Office of DEI and that's not an April 1st joke. Musk is simply going to get a low diversity score from that high office and prohibited, by a new statute, from owning more than 10% in a public company.
How is this argument relevant? What difference is it whether person A with billions of dollars or person B with billions of dollars of net worth owns Twitter?
Democracy? No one is forcing anyone to use Twitter. Current users are free to leave.
Zero to Tesla. It's not like he has hundreds of billions of dollars sitting in cash. Almost all of his wealth is in Tesla/SpaceX. He created value from basically zero.
Exactly. It's sickening to see a billionaire like Elon Musk push around the ordinary people who currently own Twitter! (The ordinary people are Morgan Stanley, BlackRock, and State Street Corp.)
I have pretty much zero problem with someone like Musk being a Billionare.
Most billionaires made their money in finance or via generational wealth. Seeing a scrappy immigrant (Even with a $200k business loan) go from practically nothing to the richest man in the world, while doing things that actually have a positive impact on society is pretty much the epitome of the American Dream.
"Scrappy immigrant" whose father was a half-owner of an emerald mine in Zambia. I can't think of a more on-the-nose example of the evils of generational wealth.
Probably less than 0,1 per cent of his net worth today. Possibly less than 0,01 per cent.
Multiplying your net worth by a factor of several thousand is fairly rare, regardless of the circumstances you start in. Most people can't do it, even if they start reasonably well off. For example, Musk's own brother Kimbal couldn't.
> Multiplying your net worth by a factor of several thousand is fairly rare, regardless of the circumstances you start in
lol. No it isn't, maybe if you are born wealthy, but plenty of people have a negative net worth at 20 (no savings yet and student/car loans) and are home owners by 40.
Fair enough. But you are basically agreeing with me that those with non-trivial positive net worth in their youth will find multiplying it by several thousand times harder.
And we should rule out massive inheritance to be fair, too. That can cause sudden large jumps in net worth.
A person having 10 000 USD in their youth (far from wealthy, just not poor) would need to aggregate something like 50 million USD in their fifties. Possible, but rare.
Your phrasing here is odd -- is it a moral wrong to have lots of money? Does having lots of money change the amount someone should be defended on arbitrary issues?
In the context of our society and with "lots" meaning billions - yes it is immoral. I'm sure we've all seen a number of graphics/chats/whatever trying to show wealth inequality, but this is the best one I've come across. Would recommend giving it a look and then asking yourself if having a lot of money isn't immoral.
Billionaires have far more rights than normal people. Their wealth affords those rights to them. "Rights" without ability to achieve actual results is just bullshit meant to placate the rabble.
What does it mean to talk about rights? Who cares if I have the “right” to buy twitter and change the way the entire world talks to each other when I have no earthly chance of ever doing it?
If you’re only allowed a single word to represent anything, I’m afraid much of your sentence is incomprehensible because o many of those words simply can’t exist.
Yea for sure, it's totally awesome when individuals hold absurd wealth because they never abuse it and we definitely don't have countless examples throughout history of this phenomenon causing harm to society.
And we definitely don’t have countless examples throughout history that shows the disastrous consequences of not allowing individual economic freedom and all it entails
Economic freedom is like free speech (and any other freedom, really). It can not be absolute unless everyone behaves in good faith, once you assume you have rogue players who exploit the good faith behavior of others you have to have rules.
So you will find literally no place where absolute freedom is practiced, and for good reasons.
Sadly, in case of economic freedom a rogue player who has billions can also have political power to lobby against inconvenient to them rules, and ah everyone wants to be on their good side.
I am not surprised that you are confused by my comment. Do you need me to provide the long list of times that the United States has gone to war with countries not participating in the global capitalist economic system?
Or maybe the number of ways that personal wealth is restricted throughout the world? Or how about the number of referendums around limiting personal wealth that have been submitted throughout history?
Or what about societies that successfully existed without what you would consider modern capitalism, whose ideas weren't necessarily proved wrong, but were victims of genocidal attacks by other capitalist countries?
Or should we discuss how the massive innovation and huge success of the United States, often attributed solely to capitalism, is actually (gasp) more complicated than a simple economic life hack?
I have neither the time nor the crayons for this, so I’ll leave you with this very simple thought:
Economic system A fought economic system B in a decades-long cold war. System A won, on every level, including the standard of living for poor people. System A, therefore, works better than B. QED.
Kindly provide a single example of an alternative to capitalism that was in any way "successful" by metrics vaguely comparable to capitalistic success. No, you cannot point at China, their success over the past 5 decades was entirely a result of privatization and allowing market forces in their country.
Japan did not adopt a form of modern capitalism until the 1800s. The Byzantine empire was never capitalist. Ethiopia did not adopt modern capitalism until it was invaded by the west. Ancient Egypt was never a capitalist society.
> by metrics vaguely comparable to capitalistic success
If you measure by quality of life I'd say it's a dramatic loser.
If you unlearn decades of propaganda and realize the technological revolution was not created by simply stealing the value of labor from the worker and siphoning that up to the ruling class, and then combine that with the understanding that global trade controlled by massive banks created the capacity to destroy alternative economic systems, you might start to reveal the truth.
> You can't hold an adult conversation with people until you figure that out.
It’s a disingenuous argument, that’s normally completely aside from whatever topic is going on at the moment, I doubt anyone using it is interesting in “adult conversation”.
It seems to me that you are actually the one who doesn't understand how extreme concentration of wealth has the potential to steer and disrupt societies.
He actually dismissed Twitter’s management so I am guessing they’re slated to be demoted or fired if he takes over. Should they sell? I mean it’s such a bizarrely undervalued company. It’s like buying a plot of land on fifth avenue that’s owned by a convenience store and the store owner wants to charge for a skyscraper market rate.
Twitter is where people who are or will be powerful, influential, or impactful get their information, form their opinions, and often debate really important topics.
So I’d agree it’s undervalued in terms of utility if it’s not priced an order of magnitude or more higher than Snap.
Whether that value can or should be captured as profit or is a public good, implying Twitter should operate more like a utility or non-profit is another question…
I don’t believe I have ever once seen a “debate on really important topics” on Twitter. And that’s even including the unusually large number of professors I follow.
I can point you toward endless debate by the leaders in my field about topics that are really important in my field, but my field is not itself very important.
Someone else will have to point you to the debate on really important topics.
> Twitter is where people who are or will be powerful, influential, or impactful get their information, form their opinions, and often debate really important topics.
Anecdotal counter point: I'll be powerful and influential one day, and I'm not using Twitter at all.
On a more serious note, I haven't seen any evidence for the claim that powerful people form their opinions from information on Twitter.
Twitter is literally the news breaking platform across the world. How much do you think that’s worth? I think it’s worth more than $100B under competent management.
Around the world? I think you are overestimating Twitter by a large margin. My guess is that in the US Twitter has marketing deals with media outlets which make it a relevant platform to post and consume breaking news in the first place.
In other countries I haven't seen a lot of Twitter logos on TV.
The GP means that the journalists at the TV stations are getting their leads on what to cover from Twitter; not that audiences are watching Twitter in place of breaking news.
They probably have a police scanner running too. Should the public have that running as well to listen to all the latest news? IMO there is place for that and most people don't really need up to the second information on things happening hundreds of miles from anywhere they regularly interact with.
Who said anything about the public? A "breaking news platform" being of relevance to journalists is valuable enough for it to be a large company; whether anyone from "the public" makes direct use of it, they still indirectly depend on its existence.
Nothing to do with TV, Twitter has been established as a news breaking platform since at least the Arab spring. And it is absolutely an international phenomenon.
TV has nothing to do with it. I've never seen a Twitter logo on TV in the US either, except when they're reporting on Twitter as a company. GP wasn't talking about a business relationship between TV networks and Twitter.
who even watches the news? its worth nothing for people < 30, and the people > 30 already watch what they want to watch, so twitter or not doesnt matter.
I have NEVER seen an ad on Snapchat because all I do is send pictures and chat. Twitter has a user base that is a lot more engaged and can easily be captured by ads.
Complete speculation, but after seeing that and then the offer, i immediately thought “ok, they had some negotiation, Elon made demands, the board refused, he threatened to buy the company and fire them, the board refused… and now he is following through.”
I don’t think he’s an idiot though, so there must also be some other upside here. Certainly there’s value to unlock in Twitter. Does he need the cash?
> I don’t think he’s an idiot though, so there must also be some other upside here.
Maybe he's just petty? There wasn't an upside to calling that diver a "pedo guy", but Musk was nursing a vendetta due to perceived slights in the past.
Only if he intends to through with it. Without making any claims; it is in the realms of possibility that a pissed off billionaire would intentionally tank the stock price of a company whose board offended them and make a small profit, or small loss (relatively), depending on the spread of shares he'd already bought. Even if the stock price doesn't tank, they'd spin wheels for weeks, while mired in busywork.
For $1B he could make an exact twitter clone, and he could probably do it for much less than that. You might say, yes, but he's paying for the brand, and no one would use his clone. He could pay for a flood of advertising and other promotions to get people to switch. He could pay 42,000,000 people $1000 each to switch to his twitter clone.
Frankly, Musk could pull this off and it might be his plan anyway. Twitter has a lot of tech and very talented people.. not to mention the existing user base. But Musk has the star appeal to draw in famous users and make it at least somewhat appealing to the masses who want to follow along.
The social media space is stagnant and looking for change, but as yet nobody can match Meta’s $55/user in ARPU. Maybe Musk can get there.
Lol the only people who would join Musk's social network are Tesla investors, crypto enthusiasts, and people who've already joined gettr, parler, truth social, etc..
Also having the head of a new social network be someone who is notorious for being a dick is not the best way to build a healthy community.
I think he can. I see twitter to be a much better platform than FB and based on my observation engagement in the platform is only getting better. With politics, tech, markets as hot topics as ever TWTR could be worth much more under Elon.
It's not the tech that makes Twitter interesting, it's the already established networking power. You can clone the tech but you can't clone the social part.
You don't pay for Twitter's infrastructure, you pay for it's >210M daily active users. What it cost, in dollars and years, to replicate that? Some $200 per Twitter DAU is not extravagant, 13 years of current average revenue per user, one which could (but doesn't have to) greatly appreciate by pressing on monetization, it's at like Facebook 2014 levels.
When Facebook paid 1 and 14 billion-s for Instagram and WhatsApp, it wasn't for the handful of employees and the codebases, but the userbases with snowballing network effects. They tried replicating TikTok with Lasso and Snapchat with Poke and Slingshot, but none of that went anywhere. It's not easy to build a large userbase, and as far as I can see from social media history, all the large ones were first to get some steam in whatever niche-s they occupy. Leveraging their 3 other networks Facebook's able to bolt-on competitors to steal some inertia from the snowballs (Stories which is a larger business then Snap by now, and Reels which is seemingly going somewhere), but building a standalone social media for competing with an existing incumbent is just bloody hard. They're displaceable, but there's always been something novel when social media market shares went to or grew into a new app.
Twitter's not quite snowballing at this point, but it has entrenched itself in some important roles and niches (namely of a town square and an official outlet) that are hard to displace. It would take time, effort and significant propositions to outgrow Twitter's significance. Alternatively, one can sell a quarter (or a third once Twitter's board or shareholders refuse and he bumps the offer) of it's Tesla shares - or borrow against the whole - and buy the existing network, go from there.
A network effect is one of many forms of licenses to print money which can't just be replaced. Like a brand, any decently sized game dev team can probably clone Call of Duty or EA Sports games, won't get them the licenses to print money that Activision (soon Microsoft) and EA hold. You can make the best perfumes, it doesn't buy you Coco Chanel's money printer.
I doubt he sees it as the best use of his time to build a new social media website up from scratch - I'd be pretty unconfident in such a project's likelihood to see great success, anyway.
The reason this bothers me in principle, is that whatever the side of politics you are, the "public" will have effectively zero control on affecting any board decisions at Twitter, moderation-wise or otherwise.
Its true that the public had little say in that regard till now but at least this buyout threat shows that it is "possible" to stand up to whatever decisions their board makes.
As an aside, I doubt people and governments would have the same confidence in Twitter were it a private company, which leaves me to believe that this whole buyoff thingy is just a power play by Musk to gain some power over the board without actually joining the board.
It's such a dichotomy. Twitter's main assets are its users. Twitter is valuable only because of its user base. And the users do have a say. If majority of the users decide against this takeover, they can boycott the platform. But a collective action at this scale is pretty difficult to orchestrate. It's quaint, users have the power to shut down Twitter, but still they can't do it.
Recent studies show that a very small percentage is responsible for some 97% of all tweets. And worse, 80% of those 97% of tweets are retweets.
There's almost no original content of any value on Twitter. You could now delete half of all Twitter users and absolutely nothing will happen.
Twitter is a bunch of celebrities/politicians saying things that fuel division and outrage, which generates the bulk of activity. They won't ban anything as because without Twitter richly rewarding them for idiotic takes, they are nothing.
> But a collective action at this scale is pretty difficult to orchestrate.
maybe, maybe not. Mastodon & the Fediverse has been around long enough to establish itself as a Twitter-like "alternative". it's crossed the scope at which it's hard to get concrete numbers about how many people actively use it, but lower bound's around 500k MAUs across 10k instances. we get waves of new users _every_ time something controversial happens around Twitter. the largest instance (which accounts for about 15% of all users) gained 12k new users in the past week [1], so figure 50-80k across the board; some of which leave after a week, some of which properly embed themselves.
no, these aren't big-tech-co numbers, but it's a large enough base to be accommodating to certain types of today's Twitter users. not _every_ Twitter user cares about having 300M peers v.s. 500k peers, and bridging between Twitter and ActivityPub works ok enough to ease that a bit, especially if you were primarily using Twitter as a glorified RSS feed.
This dichotomy is as old as the dictatorship. A king/emperor/tzar/<dictator variation #923>'s assets are the people he commands. All his value comes from taxation of the people or extraction of natural resources by the people. The people can decide to overthrow the king, but it is hard to orchestrate.
I don’t see any connection between ownership and moderation. Perhaps Elon does. But he can be called on by the Senate just as any board appointed CEO. Curious if someone can explain the connection.
Since Elon bought his 9% stake, the value of Twitter increased.
He mentions selling his shares if the takeover is not accepted.
That would make him a lot of money!
His offer is also on the high side, this might make people bullish about twitter.
On the other hand, I do think he is genuinely interested in buying twitter.
But can't help to feel this might also be lucrative for him if the deal doesn't go through.
It seems like Musk has a love hate relationship public companies... That's why SpaceX is still private.
He's not going to be able to sell his 9% stake at the current price without the market reacting negatively. The share price would drop because of the immense selling pressure it would cause. Unless there is another billionaire wanting to eat up all those shares, the supply would simply overwhelm the demand which in turn causes the price to drop until the market was able to meet the supply.
Another thing that makes this take over hostile. If it's rejected, Musk begins to sell his 9%, the stock price tumbles... and share-holders will sue the board.
I don't see how they don't have a fiduciary responsibility to sell here.
I would argue that SpaceX is private due to its susceptibility to share price crashes. It is an event driven firm. Balance sheets matter, but a SpaceX share price would be just as influenced by a rocket blowing up on live TV (if not more)
This exactly. When you sell stock it’s not to some magic black box. There needs to be a buyer. And no buyer is going to buy billions of dollars of Twitter stock once Elon starts his fire sale.
I don't know about the validity of the bid (fifty.. four twenty?) but man does Twitter need a kick in the ass. The product has been stagnant since birth but has so much potential, I'd be interested to see what reforms Elon would bring in.
What he certainly has produced already is a lot of attention, now, if he can't buy up this specific platform at his final bid maybe a dump and a 51% will follow ... whatever the case he got an extraordinary amount of people in and outside of TWTR discussing his intentions and captured hopefully some imaginations so in the end if nothing succeeds in terms of an acquisition he can at least effectively leverage this huge attention to jump start a new platform.
I'm not for obscenely wealthy single individuals i.e. 'oligarchs' sponsoring "open source free speech platforms" but I welcome the mainstream opportunity for stirring up the dead end (social dilemma) in which social platforms find themselves (from out-of-spiral censoring ("moderating") to basically uncontrolled anon image boards) I guess from an engineering perspective sensible new solutions are very much needed.
The Twitter exec team & board is between a rock and a hard place.
If they take the offer, half the exec team (or the entire exec team) will be axed (Musk already indicated he's not happy with management in the SEC letter [1]).
If they reject the offer, they will be drowning in lawsuits due to not filling their fiduciary duty (getting a good deal for their shareholders [2]).
They can hire bankers to try and find an investor who is 'management friendly'. Although, honestly, I can't see why any investor would really respect them given TWTR's performance.
This is the coolest mid-life crisis purchase I've ever seen. I hope he enjoys it and has some fun from the boring office work of rockets, tunnels, robots, AI, and of course bullet-proof trucks.
I'm shocked to see a fun and positive comment on HN and not sarcasm, irony, or the endless steam of 'what I think the world's must successful man should do'
I always enjoy calling out those excessively pedantic users. Their pedantry is just annoying, adds nothing to the conversation, and half the time is just outright incorrect.
Luckily, HN is not as infested with them as it used to be.
It can be easy for many on here (lots of lurkers too) to feel a sense of "HN imposter syndrome," believe it or not, so comments like this are really valuable in communicating that that sort of pedantry is not the norm!
Interesting if he manages to take over twitter. For me Twitter has become full of people marketing themselves with lists, tweets that don't make sense out of context, replies full of bile or inane comments and animated gifs.
But I'm not convinced Musk's opinions of what is good for twitter is aligned with other content creators and consumers. Paypal, Tesla, SpaceX, Boring Company have clear goals - twitter is quite different.
I feel like most people must use Twitter wrong. Despite how common a criticism it is, your description is not even remotely my experience.
I don’t know why. Maybe most users follow people who they like or respect or think are good people not people who share content they care about or write interesting original tweets? Maybe they think the only recourse to not liking what they see on their timeline is to complain and wish people were better rather than unfollow? Or maybe some whole major topics/spheres of interest are just entirely toxic to the core.
Twitter is incredibly valuable to me as a source of news, insight, and discussion on a wide range of topics (from programming to space to politics to skiing and more). It’s been nothing short of revolutionary for my consumption of news and information.
Twitter is actually better than RSS (though I do miss RSS being a thing) at what RSS was designed for, because curating your follows can give a better signal to noise ratio than taking everything from a given site, AND gives you a wider range of sources because you don't personally need to discover a source to see articles from it.
It also provides for some excellent debates, discussion, and interactions between really smart people.
I do agree with Elon though. The direction of the product is poor and there are many baffling decisions. It sometimes seems like Twitter themselves don’t even know why their product is valuable or what it’s potential really is.
I’d love to see some really radical changes. The kind that might not work and could be the end of Twitter if they fail. I’d love to see Twitter become really open, even open source, become a federated network, integrate privacy and anonymity tech, etc.
We don’t know his plans and I doubt it’ll happen, but Elon is one of the few people who has demonstrated willing to risk everything on an outcome he thinks is important. I hope this is one of this cases, and his instincts are at least reasonable.
I'm always baffled about this as well. I keep the people I follow heavily curated, and I don't follow more than 90 - 120 people at a time. Unfollowing and Refollowing is easy, why should I amass a list of thousands of follows like some people do?
If I notice a negative pattern or drop in quality I simply unfollow, that's it. It's the big advantage over Facebook, the relationships are not bi-directional for me as an average user.
In short: I get a quality experience and lots of useful information from Twitter because I only follow people that tweet quality content and useful tweets.
However I do have to mention that the algorithmic timeline IS really bad, so I do feel like Twitter is constantly fighting me and trying to turn my feed into polarizing crap.
Agreed, if you can’t read enough of the temporally sorted timeline the answer right now is unfollows not the algo timeline.
I would totally use something to sort and filter my feed so I could proceed it quicker and follow more insightful people. It just needs to be external to Twitter, transparent, and under my control, and have financial incentives aligned with my goals.
I actually like the idea of a marketplace for both human curated and algorithmic “edit streams” (h/t Neal Stephenson) as views over Twitter and other social/internet data that are transparent about what they filtered out or boosted and why, and could be provided by FOSS and collaborative communities as well as companies with a variety of business models.
I'm similar but I keep a hard cap of 80 accounts I follow, if I'm at that it's one in and one out.
That way every new follow comes with a cost because I have to a) drop something I thought was following b) weigh up which is least valuable.
As a result all I follow on twitter is open source projects, companies I use products from (i.e. JetBrains) and people I actually like/have something interesting to say.
It makes twitter very useful to corral all that stuff into one place.
I joined Twitter fairly recently and am mostly following journalists and thought leaders for subjects I'm interested in, and a few high quality creators. There's an odd gem but there's still a ton of noise per signal.
I don't think Dorsey has any idea what he's doing and I think even less of Musk. The value to society that can be derived from a platform like Twitter is completely separate from the value it can bring to investors.
You can't read anything relevant until you have curated who you follow, which takes a long time.
Whatever you write goes into the void, until you have gained followers, for which you must keep posting into the void for hopes of getting followers...
In short, it only works for accounts from way back with enough circlejerk, or famous people.
Twitter (and Reddit, and Facebook) is like beans. Beans are a great nutritious tasty food of you know how to prepare them. But if you eat raw beans directly out of the package from the producer, you will get sick or die.
> For me Twitter has become full of people marketing themselves with lists, tweets that don't make sense out of context, replies full of bile or inane comments and animated gifs.
I've found twitter's quality is a direct correlation to how discerning I am about who I follow. I don't really tweet or reply, so for me it is a read-only exercise. As such, the people I follow tend to be really high-quality (I am not typically following "regular" people like friends, etc.). Journalists, experts in specific domains, etc. And I try to make sure I am following people that have views different than mine along with those I do agree with. As a result, I've noticed I read pretty detailed information well before I see it break in major news organizations, and it is surprising balanced on the whole.
Yeah. I mostly left Twitter about 9 years ago (!) for the same reasons.
I wonder if a celebrity like Musk is overestimating how important Twitter really is. Because in my view, it's a cesspool of self-promoters, hate, corporate marketing and superficial populism. I believe correcting that course is impossible. It's been like that for 10 years with no change.
#1 make twitter efficient. firing 80-90% of the employees and replacing them with effective workers and management saves a ton of money.
#2. Mitigate the bots and trolls by requiring payment and identification.
#3. Open the feed algorithm and give people more control
#4. Reduce the silencing of users.
The last one is probably going to turn out to be harder than Elon expects. If Elon owned Youtube this week he would be sued for enabling the NYC subway terrorist. Same thing will happen on Twitter once he owns it.
Tesla also fired a union organizer (while tweeting about how they are free to join a union) [0], banned a journalist from buying a Tesla[1], threatened to sue another journalist[2], and tried to destroy the life of a whistleblower[3].
Did you read the lawsuit? He isn't saying that Top Gear has no right to say negative things about Tesla. He is saying that when those negative things are lies and damage the business Top Gear should pay for damages.
But you're overall point is correct, Elon's definition of Free Speech is not universally agreed upon by everyone. However, it is impossible to draw a line between acceptable and unacceptable speech that everyone will agree with.
> There's also the other possibility that Twitter, as a product, is limited to a more niche audience than something like Facebook.
You state that as if what twitter is as a product is set in stone and delivered as a commandment. It is defined by the product people, engineers, and the executives of the company who have been doing a terrible job at that. If they were competent and the way out was to be Facebook, they should’ve been Facebook by now. FWIW, Facebook was not Facebook either. It didn’t have news feed before it copied twitter. Ironic.
#1. Efficient at what? And how do you know the amount of chaff is 80-90%? And exactly how do you find "effective" workers. Like this bullet point alone is just so hand-wavy and vague. Might as well have just said "Make twitter more gooder".
#2. This kills the twitter. First of all, no one is going to pay to read Elon Musk's tweets. Not for more than a month or two.
#3. What would "open[ing] the feed algorithm" accomplish here? I assume you mean publish the source of the algorithm so we can see how it works. Why? So I can run my own twitter? And what do you mean by "more control"? Control of what?
#4. I assume you mean fewer bans and removal of tweets. And I assume by "reduce" you don't mean eliminate. And I assume you don't want elimination because you recognize that some bans and deletions are necessary. That's a sticky wicket. You don't disagree with the action so much as the degree and/or the conditions of the action. This comes down to the question of why should your standards be preferable to twitter's?
And ironically, it's actually probably one of the easier ones to do. As I don't think you have well-defined definitions for efficiency, effectiveness, or control. Which isn't an uncommon phenomenon. It's like having a really good idea for a story/movie/series/book/whatever. As long as you never actually have to make it, the idea gets to be as awesome as it could be. But execution is the bitch.
"Twitterized" - means you can no longer absorb anything but simple concepts that can be delivered in a few lines, due to too much time spent on Twitter. To quote some early 20th century propaganda monkey, "The essence of propaganda is to take a complex subject, reduce it to a simple concept that a small child can understand, and then repeat, repeat, repeat."
That's what Twitter is ideal for, and that's what political and media types use it for. Add in siloed echo chambers like Facebook groups and Reddit subreddits... I urge everyone to flush it all down the toilet.
Can it be fixed though? The hate factory is the end-game of how the software was built (follows, retweets, etc) and how people use the software. What is the plan here? Re-program Twitter? Invent a new social network where the end-game is not a hate factory?
I've always felt Twitter has been poorly run, it's almost like the people that work for the company don't actually use it often and are completely disconnected from the userbase. Remember when they completely screwed API users? Various Twitter third parties had to shut down entirely because of it. Twitter has some of the most valuable and useful realtime information in the world, but everyone there seems content on not using it for anything worth anything.
They even killed Vine, which is basically the exact same thing as Tiktok and Stories...years before both. Then tried to push their own version of stories, which was just awful. Jack and the current CEO seem(ed)s totally disconnected from any sort of reality going on with their own product.
Even Jack, while he was still in power, seemed confused by Twitter's own censorship/moderation rules at times. How is that possible? Moderation is also totally uneven with some accounts getting away with certain jokes (or outright threats) and others are completely immune to it. I personally love Twitter as a product, but it's so insane to me how the current CEO has his job, or how Jack was able to remain CEO for so long when he had clearly long abandoned it for Square.
For major news, no one talks about Facebook/Tiktok/Instagram...they talk about Twitter. It's so incredibly valuable, and it's shackled by sheer incompetent and complacency. If it's not Elon, someone needs to come in and restructure it and get rid of those holding it back.
>> "I've always felt Twitter has been poorly run, it's almost like the people that work for the company don't actually use it often and are completely disconnected from the userbase. Remember when they completely screwed API users? Various Twitter third parties had to shut down entirely because of it."
They did this to make sure people saw ads. It's why Twitter is profitable now. The vast majority of people on Twitter never knew Twitter had a vibrant developer ecosystem in the distant past.
That's not why Twitter is profitable, and the engineering team and Jack have expressed how badly they screwed up the API situation. Google has managed to offer the Maps API and others at a reasonable cost/to free and had no problems at all. Twitter on the other hand...completely botched it.
I'm not sure Musk knows what he's doing, this feels like a personal vendetta. I'm also not sure he has any likelihood of succeeding in the first place, I wouldn't necessarily assume anyone is going to take him up at that price. And (quite frankly) I don't think that Musk is a very good free speech activist. I think he's regularly hypocritical about free speech and regularly engages in his own forms of censorship; I don't think he has a particularly coherent philosophy about how to approach free speech.
All that being said, I don't really see the problem with him trying this, and I don't necessarily see a ton of downside to him succeeding or failing. I'm perfectly willing to grab the popcorn and just watch.
Twitter is not a great social network, and I don't think it's amazingly well managed. If it gets worse and Musk does a bunch of radical changes, maybe more people will start using Mastodon. If he fails, no harm done. If he joins on and does nothing and just monetizes it more aggressively, then :shrug:, Twitter is probably eventually headed in that direction anyway.
Go for it. I've got no confidence that Musk can actually innovate in this space, and little to no confidence that he'll actually even get the control he wants, and he might actually make things worse if he does succeed, but on a certain level who cares?
It really stinks for artists/communities on Twitter that might be hurt by that happening, but again, I don't really have a lot of confidence that Twitter isn't going to start hurting them anyway, so I don't know that this really matters all that much for them.
:shrug: Maybe 2 years from now I'll look back at this comment and think it's naive.
Every Billionaire who recently acquired a large media house[1] mentioned in the interviews as doing it for 'Upholding Journalism' or something of those lines which also implicitly meant 'Supporting right to free speech'.
But I'm bewildered about how this particular acquisition is only about 'Right to Free speech' vs 'No Right to Free Speech' and not really about hostile takeover of a business by a Ultra-Billionaire with impunity?
I guess that has something to do with how good Elon is at controlling the narrative, Even reputable news agencies start with 'Elon who claims himself as a free speech absolutist...'. And that was before he controlled Twitter.
Anyways, Two major social media firms seems to have consolidated with individuals who are supposed to run a social media firm.
I think he's dumb wasting so much money on this, but why on earth wouldn't shareholders want to sell out to him? If I held Twitter shares I'd be quite keen to get rid of them.
"The billionaire businessman who led the resurrection of the electric vehicle industry and the birth of the private spaceflight industry is an idiot." - internet commenter.
Musk has proven himself to be a very savvy investor. And his operational track record is nearly unmatched. Particularly because it straddles so many different industries: internet 1.0 (Zip2), banking and payments (PayPal), manufacturing and transportation (Tesla), aerospace engineering and spaceflight (SpaceX). If there is anyone in the world who could pull this off, my money would be on him.
SolarCity was a worthwhile cause at least. He often says that money isn't his motivator and I believe him about that. And something may yet come of it.
How did he "get" the stock of his own companies? Who allocated the capital within those companies? Is not Musk's time a considerably valuable investment unto itself?
Also, reminder, he didn't found Tesla. He was one of its initial investors.
We can split hairs and refine definitions until we exclude him from the category of successful investors, but, at a certain point, it's a little hard to believe.
In any event, it is quite clear that Musk has no intention of being a silent investor. Rather, he's going to be an operator. And in that regard, he is nearly unparalleled.
At some point I stopped investing in companies and started investing in people. There's a small group of businessmen out there that have the Midas touch.
I know you're being snarky, but success as a hyper-capitalist is less and less a good thing to many people, and not really a sign of great intelligence (more psychopathy, if anything). His behavior is very often so incredibly childlike that it's hard to excuse on his business success. Even this! A share price based on $4.20; Really?! Again with that? He is clearly trolling and it's working because here everyone is talking about it.
I don't agree with your claims, but they are beside the point.
His track record speaks for itself. I would certainly have far more confidence in Musk than the current leadership team.
Musk is at least competent in software engineering, aerospace engineering, and finance. It is hard not to see that as a strong indicator of an intelligence well above average. People bend over backwards to look past the glaring facts about Musk that contradict their biases.
Musk is hyper intelligent. Musk is one the most successful business people of all time.
It’s not a deification to recognize that the total upheaval and reinvention of three industries - automobiles and aerospace and finance - is something that very, very few people could do, even if they had luck and fortune going into it.
Aerospace sure, but automobiles and finance? Musk just bought Tesla, and he was fired from PayPal because he wanted to replace all of their Unix infrastructure with Windows.
I’m not saying he’s dumb, he’s clearly a smart guy, but I don’t think he’s anything special
That just is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. When Musk took over Tesla, it was a very small startup with 6 employees or so. All the subsequent growth into the behemoth that it is today has happened under his management.
If someone adopted a newborn and raised him to adulthood, would you dismiss them as not-a-real-parent of that kid?
Musk's role in Tesla is similar to Ray Kroc's in McDonald's. Not a founder either, but the person that took over a totally irrelevant small business and developed it into a world class superpower in its field.
To be dismissive of such an accomplishment is unwise at best.
I don’t know much beyond the surface w.r.t. PayPal, but it’s quite a distortion of history to claim that all Musk did was ‘just buy Tesla’.
Why I think he upended the auto industry:
- He bought Tesla within the first two years (IIRC) of it being founded; before there was even a working prototype
- He laid out the groundwork for the three-stage plan, and followed through
- Stage 1: Prototype -> Roadster
- Stage 2: Model S/X
- Stage 3: Model 3/Y
- He adopted high-tech in Teslas which make them compelling and ‘cool’ (for the general public), through Autopilot, games (Cuphead, Asteroids, etc), video (Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, etc), OTA software updates, and more
And, the most important piece:
- He led and developed the Supercharger network initiative, partially solving the problem of EVs as true ICE replacements
Each of those decisions could have, and likely would have, been handled differently by Random CEO. It was only through each of those decisions, and a lot of luck, that Tesla is a viable car company today.
I’m quick to criticize Musk, but what he did with Tesla is truly incredible and deserving of praise.
Zip2: Musk wrote the software for drawing vector maps & calculating point to point directions anywhere in US. Sold it for $300M.
PayPal: Musk founded X.com. X merged with PayPal. Through that merger, Musk became PayPal's largest shareholder. He was ousted as the company's CEO. He did attempt to move the company's tech onto Windows. None of this invalidates his accomplishment's at PayPal. To wit, he walked away with $100M.
Tesla: Musk did not buy Tesla. 8 months after Tesla was founded, he funded the majority of Tesla's series A at which time he became the chairman of its board. He then stepped into the CEO role and has maintained that role ever since.
SpaceX: Musk trained himself in rocket engineering and pioneered private spaceflight while pushing rocket tech far into the future. Self landing rockets. <- I don't even need a full sentence. Self. Landing. ROCKETS!!!!
Its very important to get the facts right before moving on to interpretation.
Of course, Musk didn't do all of this himself. He has again and again hired top notch engineers and scientists. But even in the most biased publications, his critics begrudgingly acknowledge his technical prowess and commercial acumen.
Again, just look at the list of accomplishments. He is a man, not a god. But in these domains, he is absolutely something special. Many sigma special.
He's an asshole but an effective one. I didn't take a job with him because I didn't like him, but I also don't think I would have made the same choice at a different phase of my life.
This is just opinion-me, but I think he might be undervaluing the shares in the long-term. It's hard for me to square the price he's offering with the promises he's making about Twitter's potential profitability.
I guess for cashing out though it doesn't matter, since the shareholders won't need to care about what Twitter's stock does in the future. So, maybe you're right.
Easy to verify, we'll just have to wait and see if he succeeds.
> It's hard for me to square the price he's offering with the promises he's making about Twitter's potential profitability.
Those promises are predicated on him owning it though.
I'm doubtful of Twitter's LTV whether he owns it or not, but then again I've never had an account and now that you pretty much can't read it without one, I basically don't use it at all. So I may not be a qualified observer, but to me Twitter seems to only get worse for years now.
If that price isn't reasonable for Twitter long-term then you must have someone other than the current management in mind to realise that value...
I do think that Twitter's been getting steadily worse, but I'm not convinced that means they'll be less valuable in the future.
I think if I were an investor, my thought might be that Musk might not be necessary to realize that growth (again, speaking in the long term, not that the current price is wrong). But I'm not an investor, I don't really know Twitter's numbers.
I guess the caveat I should give is that if I were an investor and I thought Twitter was falling and that Musk couldn't save it, this would be a particularly good opportunity to jump ship. So that could also be an angle I'm not thinking of.
Twitter is a natural monopoly - evidenced by it's not having any real competition. Will it be a regulated monopoly? In that case, it should be valued like a water company. Is it an unregulated monopoly? In that case the market will decide if it can turn that monopoly into profits. There are a lot of commercial Twitter users. Charge them all ten cents a tweet. That adds up to about $10m per day.
You’re kidding. It’s a monopoly if you define the market as “Twitter”. There is no shortage of social networks. Certainly nothing about Twitter is a natural monopoly. Nothing prevents starting up a competitor or even a clone. The issue of locked in networks can be solved with regulation to open the data. It isn’t required that a single company own microblogging.
Agree with everything you wrote except "maybe more people will start using Mastodon".
I didn't even know this existed until you said it, which doesn't bode well for mass adoption given that I'm someone who's on the internet daily.
Moreover, Mastodon.com is owned by a forestry machine business, and googling Mastodon gives a first result for a rock/metal band. I think "Mastodon.social" might be about as bad as a web address can get for mass appeal / catchiness.
> I don't think he has a particularly coherent philosophy about how to approach free speech.
The only people with coherent philosophies of free speech are for absolute freedom of speech or absolutely no freedom of speech.
It's by pusuring incoherence, by threading the needle between those extremes that we create an open, free speech culture where freedom is the norm and censorship occurs only in extreme situations.
I generally agree with the rest of your post ("who cares?"). I would add that if Elon buys twitter and deletes it, I would be fine with it.
> I would add that if Elon buys twitter and deletes it, I would be fine with it.
This is completely off topic and not at all your fault, but even though we are actively talking about Elon Musk and he should have been the primary person in my head, and even though the spelling is different -- for some reason my brain still interpreted "Elon" in the above sentence as Ellen DeGeneres, and I got really confused for about 10 seconds about why you felt the need to add that you would also be OK with her specifically buying Twitter.
Anything pushed to its logical extreme becomes its own opposite. Since society can't or won't reign in either corporate or social media, perhaps we should remove all restraints and let then destroy themselves, and hopefully each other.
Further, how could Musk possibly be any worse than @jack, Zuck & Sandberg, Murdochs, Theil, etc, etc.
He arguably didn't know what he was doing with Tesla or SpaceX, nor The Boring Company et al, though he seems quite good at solving for problems he deems worthy enough of his attention - or that draw his attention strongly enough.
Elon also doesn't need to innovate himself, he simply needs to be a signal, a beacon or lighthouse to others who know they are capable of innovating - and where they may now actually attempt to work for/at Twitter/with Elon because they may now believe they have a chance of implementing systems as they may believe Elon will be able to understand their design - and therefore getting approval.
SpaceX seems like a success. Starlink probably will be, too.
Tesla survived because of government subsidies and a neverending deluge of hype from Musk. Boring Company is utter nonsense and a huge failure.
That track record seems... pretty random. Maybe Musk was an important factor, maybe his engineering and marketing teams were, maybe luck was the most important thing.
Regarding tesla, lots of companies survive entirely because of Government Subsidies. Resource extraction from public lands, no bid cost + contracts for defense department projects, last mile monopolies for cable companies.
You going to then argue "but we'd have it all better if there were no meddling government!" ? There are plenty of places that have no government and they seem pretty miserable.
People (ideally) select other people every interval of time to make important decisions (aka "government"); sometimes those decisions adversely affect some people and help others disproportionately (your job is cutting down trees and 99% of the trees are gone? Well, you may lose your job before cutting down that last 1% because the trees have value as trees instead of lumber; sorry them's the breaks).
Life is hard and full of difficult choices. There are winners and losers. It's better for everyone to make decisions by discussion and consensus rather than violence.
But free speech is "will the government arrest/fine/murder you for what you say (or don't say)" not "do I have to listen to you blather on when I'd rather not".
There's tremendous nuance to "free speech". If I'm a cake maker and you ask me to make a cake saying "Fuck Jewish Space Lasers!" can I say no I'd rather not? I'm not sure. Maybe I've got terms of service already, maybe I'm just a harried cake maker trying to be civil and a good person and I'd rather not be an asshole even by proxy. You could probably switch the message to "Happy anniversary Steve and Paul!" and offend some other set of people.
We seem to live in a society where some set of people just want to be rude and uncivil and force us all to watch like we're in a clockwork orange needing programming. Please no, and while you're at it I'd rather you stop pouring garbage into my father in law.
I don't know where all of that came from. My point is just that there's no proof Musk is a better CEO/visionary than thousands of other business leaders. You seem to have constructed a lot of other points that I was not commenting on at all.
I agree that many of businesses survive only because of subsidies and that "free speech" does not mean that private entities cannot censor themselves.
No, we just don't attribute it to a single man with an incredibly inconsistent track record.
> Like I said, the objective of business is to make money. One guy made more money than anyone else.
Tesla is an unusually unsuccessful company when compared to other public companies that have existed for the same amount of time.
Musk is wealthy because of his incessant promises/lies about Tesla, not because the business is making so much money.
Arguably, his stubbornness against learning the lessons of 100 years of vehicle manufacturing is holding Tesla back.
> There's also a lot of luck in sports but the team with the most wins at the end of the season is the best team in the regular season.
This analogy is ridiculous. Sports teams compete in tightly-controlled environments. Even then, we attribute some success to coaching, ownership, luck of the schedule, etc.
But even if we accept the analogy, Musk's "team" has not scored the most points.
> Tesla is an unusually unsuccessful company when compared to other public companies that have existed for the same amount of time.
I think you're packing a lot into the definition of successful there. Tesla has been an excellent investment. The value of the company as determined by the market is high. Your definition of "success" is not dissuading investors. Investors believe in the future of Tesla.
> Musk is wealthy because of his incessant promises/lies about Tesla, not because the business is making so much money.
Lots of things that people consider unethical still make you money. That doesn't change the objective fact that he's made a ton of money through business ventures.
> But even if we accept the analogy, Musk's "team" has not scored the most points.
But Musk has.
You can attribute all you want to luck if you'd like but I think that makes you look like a fool when you consider that he didn't just do it once, he did it twice and changed both markets he entered drastically.
His businesses are worth a ton of money.
He is personally worth a ton of money.
Your earlier comment
> That track record seems... pretty random.
is absurd. Most people can't start one successful business. You think he got lucky twice? Three times if you count Starlink which likely gets spun out into it's own business eventually.
And those business aren't just successful in that they aren't out of business, they're massive successes and have made him the richest person in the world (minus some saudi's who probably hold more non-public wealth).
Yes... sorry to imply any particular viewpoint on your part.
Musk's particular talent, in my view, is his ability to manage exponential growth where there's an extremely narrow set of possibly successful outcomes given a set of constraints.
Maybe he sees a way to get twitter back to exponential growth? I don't.
Twitter only needs one change, and is as simple as this: make users confident that they will never be censored for saying something that goes against management's politics. Twitter has seriously violated this trust. That's why current management cannot save Twitter. Even if they say they will accept all speech from now on, nobody will believe them.
I think Musk believes that Twitter is the primary meeting place and seemingly unified-ish mouthpiece of anti-capitalists in the west and he's seeing that they are making dangerous progress. He's someone who is a capitalist and feels that $50B is a worthy investment to disrupt anti-capitalist momentum.
You say that, but the memes and quotes generated from twitter posts and threads spread far and wide. You'll see people who don't even use Twitter quoting things almost verbatim 3 months after it blew up. Same with 4chan and the fringe right sadly. The memes, like "OK Groomer" start out in some weird radical place but then catch elsewhere if they are viral enough.
First, I really do not think twitter is a anticapitalist forum and second, controlling twitter communication yields quite some power.
Single tweets made furor on the stock market.
It is probably way more about money, than anti activism, or pro free speech activism. (plus the personal vendetta of the twitter bot, who published Elons flights).
I think the one thing you're missing out is the true potential downside. Which is that over the last decade Silicon Valley social media companies have taken an extra-ordinarily long and painful path to understanding how they need to handle speech on their platforms. Musk's position is basically "Do what Mark Zuckerberg did in the early 2010s". There is a reason why facebook no longer acts like that, there's a reason facebook has changed it's name to disassociate from that. And Facebook didn't suffer from their actions there - the commonwealth did.
Potentially this is Musk bringing back systematic misinformation, troll farms, accidentallly enabling genocides etc. etc.
You're not necessarily wrong, but Twitter's moderation policy is already basically terrible and I have very little confidence that they'll be able to improve it significantly in the future with or without Musk. Most of the moderation policies that they are proposing are regularly co-opted to target oppressed or minority groups. They don't seem to be particularly consistent or great about catching abuse in the first place. The site's structure itself seems to encourage bad actors.
It's certainly the case that Musk could potentially make that worse, but I guess I have so little confidence in Twitter's ability to get better on that front that I'm not sure it matters all that much in the long run.
Better moderation on these platforms requires a large re-think in how we approach moderation in the first place, and it requires a more socially responsible perspective about the platform's purpose. I don't think that Musk being in charge or not will make that happen, and if he does turn Twitter into even more of a cesspool, then maybe that'll encourage alternatives.
I'm not an accelerationist when it comes to social media, but I think that Musk/Twitter's attitudes towards free speech online are often both naive and incompetent and the site continuing to worsen might be the only way to get people off of it; and I'm not sure what blocking Musk actually preserves about the site (other than possibly that Musk might push for more aggressive monetization). There are people right now who rely on it that would need to find other hosting, and that does genuinely stink. But... I mean, it's gonna get worse for them regardless.
> Silicon Valley social media companies have taken an extra-ordinarily long and painful path to understanding how they need to handle speech on their platforms
I don't want to be pessimistic, but I don't really feel like social media companies have learned how to handle speech or that they've become competent about doing moderation at scale. I don't think there ever was a point where they figured it out. If we've learned anything it's that moderation at a global scale is kind of unworkable, and that's why having smaller communities that pay more attention to the content they host is so important. I'm particularly pessimistic about the possibility of AI/algorithmic moderation (which many of these companies are leaning into more and more), mostly because I don't see a ton of evidence that it's good enough at scale to replace human moderation.
So I'm not worried about Musk bringing back systematic misinformation or troll farms or accidentally enabling genocide because as far as I can tell Twitter already has that problem; I don't think Musk can bring it back because I don't think it ever went away.
Musk does not hold any position in the government. My understanding is that the fight for free speech is about the government censoring individuals. The first amendment of the US already protects people from that. Any private platform can do whatever they want though.
While freedom from goverent censorship of speech is one battle that has been (mostly) won in the USA, some want to take the concept of free speech even further. Some want to see corporations choose to uphold the value of "free speech". This is seperate from any goveremt regulation of speech.
One could argue that Twitter is a de-facto public place. The Supreme Court opined:
“the more an owner, for his advantage, opens up his property for use by the public in general, the more do his rights become circumscribed by the statutory and constitutional rights of those who use it.” (Marsh v. Alabama, 326 U.S. 501, 506 (1946)
They have since narrowed their interpretation somewhat, but some states (including California) have ruled that de-facto public gathering places such as shopping malls are areas where free speech is protected, even though they are privately owned.
So generally, yes a private platform can do what they want, but if their primary focus is to be open to the public, they may be more bound to providing first amendment protections.
AFAIK no court has specifically ruled on whether online public spaces should be treated the same as physical public spaces.
It doesn't really matter though, because in California, the state constitution explicitly states that privately owned spaces open to the public (so twitter) must guarantee freedom of expression. The case law is pretty absolute and settled in this regard. Most famously... shopping malls in California have to allow union protests within the malls (with only mild regulation, mainly around safety / opening hours). Thus, by the Supreme Law of the state of California, as a private company, Twitter is legally obligated to -- at least for California residents -- not restrict their legally protected speech. Twitter frequently does this to california residents, thus violating California law. If the law was applied equally, they would be fined and censured as the malls were who tried to union bust.
A culture of free speech is just as important as a law prohibiting Congress from abridging it. It is true that private companies have their own free speech and private property interests they should safeguard, but that does not mean they cannot do more to raise a culture of free speech on their platforms, and they should!
What is worse, government censorship or digital censorship through big tech?
Remember when all these corporations banned Trump at the same time?
Imagine not being able to buy from Amazon when there is no retailer left.
Imagine not being able to listen to music or watch movies when all of it is only available through streaming.
What about having all your email deleted because a Google bot flagged your account.
Or being shadow banned in social media, having no impact on any discussion.
As somebody who is banned on Twitter for unclear reasons, I can unequivocally say that this is preferable to being thrown in jail or fined by the government
"The Reporting Person intends to review his investment in the Issuer on a continuing basis. Depending on the factors discussed herein, the Reporting Person may, from time to time, acquire additional shares of Common Stock and/or retain and/or sell all or a portion of the shares of Issuer common stock held by the Reporting Person in the open market or in privately negotiated transactions, and/or may distribute the Common Stock held by the Reporting Person to other entities." [1]
From observing various internet forums, including this one, I noticed that people from the "first world" countries don't know the value of free speech and often take it for granted. Sometimes even coming to such views as "free speech is dangerous" and that "we should limit free speech" (by blocking the views I don't like).
Understand this: limits on free speech are far more dangerous to society than allowing fringe extremists to spread their ideas. Coming from a country that had made a transition from a (rather messy) democracy to an authoritarian fascist police state in just 15 years, I tell you this: it all started with limits on the freedom of speech.
You are conflating the concept of free speech with "free reach."
At least in the US, you have always had the right to create your own web site and say whatever you want. That right should never be taken away. However, another privately-run website should never be forced to broadcast anyone's content to hundreds of millions of other people.
The problem with this narrow definition is that in it you don't have the right to create your own website, nobody is forced to sell you the IP, hostname or bandwidth, and to the extent that they are it's because letting private companies dictate public discourse is a bad idea.
There's a fine line between not amplifying someone and silencing them, and when the choices of very few privately run websites affect who gets heard and who not then we should be wary about them amplifying harmful speech and equally wary about them silencing speech harmfully.
I reject the notion that this is a narrow definition. In the US, it's the _standard_ definition that was widely accepted until the recent advent of the "but muh free speech" people on twitter and other social media.
I'm also quite skeptical of the "slippery slope"-style argument regarding IP connectivity. The number of available ISPs, web hosts, domain registrars, etc is pretty large. There are even web hosts that have an explicit policy of letting you host _any_ content you want as long as it's not against the law in their jurisdiction[0]. And they'll even host it on a subdomain of theirs, if for some reason you have trouble getting a hostname for your hateful or crazy (but legally protected from censorship by the government) blog. And if laws are ever made restricting what those web hosts can do, then we're getting into the realm of the government restricting free speech, which is a different conversation entirely.
Regarding your second paragraph, the right to "get heard" is not a right guaranteed to anyone, at least not in the US. If you are spewing garbage, no one should be forced to hear it.
(caveat: I'm in the US, so my opinions are US-centric)
> I'm also quite skeptical of the "slippery slope"-style argument regarding IP connectivity. The number of available ISPs, web hosts, domain registrars, etc is pretty large.
We've already seen the goalposts move when AWS and CDNs were dropping politically unpopular clients.
If it helps, we're already pretty close to the end of the slope. There's a very limited number of last-mile ISPs, so we're only one Twitter mob / protest away from Comcast / Verizon / Cox / AT&T holding press conferences about how they're blocking politically problematic domains and IP addresses. Then it'll only be tech-savvy users with VPNs that can access "free speech," at least until those become the target of the mob, too.
I disagree that we're close to the end of the slope, but I guess if you're right we'll find out soon enough.
I'm not a libertarian by any means but I do have some amount of faith that if what you're describing comes to pass, the free market will provide alternatives, if demand exists. VPNs are one such alternative.
I truly believe that it's harmful to society to guarantee free reach to everyone. It's kind of like the paradox of tolerance, if you've heard of that -- if private entities are barred from moderating content on their systems, the discourse will devolve more than it already has into conspiracy, hate, and other forms of unwanted content.
I don't think that the argument is that no platforms should be able to moderate. Moderation is a high value activity that is hard to do well.
The argument is that moderation should be done by publishing companies and who face liability for their content. It should not be done poorly, en-mass by platform companies who do it at scale using automation and don't face legal liability when they mess up.
The only exception I see to this is to allow community organized and run moderation for noncommercial communities.
> If publishing companies were liable for their content wouldn't they censor more?
They would - and and they are. That's why it's easier to publish fanfic on the internet than with an actual publisher. Tumblr is not on the hook for unauthorized titillating usage of copyrighted Disney characters, but HarperCollins would get sued to bankruptcy if they attempted the same. This is why the calls to repeal section 319 is idiotic - it will lead to more "censorship"
Publishing companies are already liable for their content.
The argument is that, instead, these other, non-publishing, major communication platforms should be treated how we run other major communication platforms in the past, such as the telephone network.
We have existing laws, that could be extend to cover other communication platforms.
Telephone companies have been required to do certain things for decades, and the world hasn't collapsed because of it.
> In the US, it's the _standard_ definition that was widely accepted
citation needed
> There are even web hosts that have an explicit policy of letting you host _any_ content you want as long as it's not against the law in their jurisdiction
perhaps, but how much pressure do you think they could take, if pressured to take down your content by other private individuals & corporations?
> the right to "get heard" is not a right guaranteed to anyone, at least not in the US. If you are spewing garbage, no one should be forced to hear it.
i don't think anyone is claiming that there is or should be a right to be heard. this is an issue of control over who can be heard, and the distinction is important.
for example, in a "free" twitter, i could post some racist tirade, and expect it to gain no traction/retweets from my followers & some random others. people might see it, but it is principally no different to making the same speech in the city center: i'm going to be heard, but no one is going to listen.
we're all talking in extremes here too, which really isn't helping. yes, moderated platforms can remove racism, abusive content, etc., but they can (and do) also remove regular speech: more realistically, above, i would have been more likely tweeting about the lab-leak hypothesis of covid, back in the time where any proposed cause other than the wet-market exposure hypothesis was being labeled as racist. do you think people that have been deplatformed/decried/cancelled for opinions like that were retroactively recognized as being legitimate? if so, where's the profit motivation in that?
Uh, the US constitution and a few centuries of case law?
> perhaps, but how much pressure do you think they could take, if pressured to take down your content by other private individuals & corporations?
The one example host I gave has been around 20 years. I trust that they have a good legal team and have faced mobs of angry people before, and that they'll continue to be around for a while longer.
One problem that I didn't bring up in my original post is that as soon as someone can be heard on twitter, their content is subject to algorithmic manipulation. So someone's fringe opinion could be broadcast to thousands or millions of eyeballs and made to seem like much more of a mainstream opinion like than it actually is.
In a perfect world, where no manipulation is possible, I do agree with you that making sure people can be heard is the correct solution. But until or unless we get there, my opinion is that letting the platform have leeway to moderate content is the best path forward. If people tweeting about covid lab leaks (which I'm still not sure would be considered a non-fringe opinion in 2022) get caught up in that, then that sucks for them, but the alternative is worse. They are still free to set up their own site to discuss their theories.
> Uh, the US constitution and a few centuries of case law?
i'm sorry, i interpreted your point to broadly be "free speech with limits", which i understand to be at-odds with the constitutional definition.
> The one example host I gave has been around 20 years.
no offense intended to them when i say i don't recall ever hearing about them in any setting, controversial or otherwise, which would lead me to believe they haven't experienced significant pressure to remove anything.
> [...] their content is subject to algorithmic manipulation
yes, i agree. "the algorithm" makes astroturfing much easier to perform and be effective.
> In a perfect world [...]
well then there's a bit of a bootstrapping problem here, no? principles like free-speech were idealized and create in order to make the perfect world (for some values of "perfect"). hell, in the "perfect" world, free-speech wouldn't even need protection. i don't think it's sensible to mandate a principle after the fact.
> which I'm still not sure would be considered a non-fringe opinion in 2022
there is no scientific consensus yet - surprise surprise - but we are at least now talking about it[1].
> i'm sorry, i interpreted your point to broadly be "free speech with limits", which i understand to be at-odds with the constitutional definition.
Ugh, my main point is that the concept of "free speech" in the US is not relevant at all to the question of whether a private entity can remove you from their platform for saying something they don't like.
You can claim that in the colloquial sense, the phrase is used more liberally to mean any censorship whatsoever, and that may be true. But in my opinion that is conflating two concepts, and those doing so are either 1) confused or 2) being deliberately dishonest by trying to smuggle some sense of constitutional/government mandate into the conversation.
> Ugh, my main point is that the concept of "free speech" in the US is not relevant at all to the question of whether a private entity can remove you from their platform for saying something they don't like.
and i'm saying that you appear to treat social media and digital identity as some superfluous luxury that can be revoked without consequence from an individual as punishment (or for more dubious reasons), much like how republicans view health care and social welfare: with the notable exception of the US and one or two others, every country recognizes that private corporations must provide health care (or the means to it - i'm talking about the equipment, education, etc. being provided largely by non-governmental institutions), and citizens must be allowed to access to it regardless of who they are and what they've said, or even done.
yes, you are correct that the constitution does not prevent private corporations from removing content that they do not like, that is the point here. there is no question over the legality of such removals, and i don't think anyone here has tried to raise one.
i'm not trying to smuggle constitutional/government mandate, i'm explicitly trying to discuss the notion of whether or not it should exist.
> the concept of "free speech" in the US is not relevant at all to the question of whether a private entity can remove you from their platform for saying something they don't like.
You seem to be confusing "free speech", the concept, with "free speech", the legal right.
Most codifications of the legal right limit themselves to protecting against certain types of government interference.
However, the concept itself is absolutely not limited to contexts where censorship is imposed by a government. To try to impose this limitation is 1984-style thought policing that tries to remove existing language to control what can be said.
I'm not talking about some colloquial meaning, but the core meaning of the concept of "freedom of speech".
I think we are actually saying the same thing, and my language was imprecise, so I apologize.
My point is that in the US, the narrower legal/constitutional concept of free speech is often implied, inadvertently or deliberately, when people are actually only referring to it in the broader sense that you describe. For example, a banned Twitter user might say things like "Twitter is a disgrace to democracy"[0] which confuses others into thinking there is some constitutional or legal harm being done when in fact there is none.
I have no problem with having a debate about whether the core concept of free speech is a universal right that should be guaranteed everywhere (surprise: I don't think it should be a universal right and I think it's downright dangerous to society to force all private entities to respect it). But I see the two meanings get confused so much that I felt a need to call it out.
> and I think it's downright dangerous to society to force all private entities to respect it.
I would whole heartdly agree with that, but only because you added "all".
I think just as there is a balance in placing limitations of corporate freedom of association just like placing limits on free speech.
I do think that free speech is valuable enough that we should carefully consider placing restrictions on how and why large, oligopolistic corporations can exercise their right to freedom of association.
I think a lot of this can be solved with a "user's bill of rights" that protects users from arbitrary and capricious enforcement of nebulous terms by service providers.
I think most of the rest of this would be ideally solved by narrowing or eliminating the types of moderation a corporation can engage in while maintaining liability protection under section 230. Possibly with language giving special exemptions to community run moderation.
> for example, in a "free" twitter, i could post some racist tirade, and expect it to gain no traction/retweets from my followers & some random others.
Nah, you'd get a whole bunch of followers who are happy to see someone say the quiet parts out loud and would retweet.
Without social media, overt racists have to meet in private and the effects are local. With social media, they get a microphone that reaches the world and it spreads worldwide.
Isn't it interesting that many otherwise intelligent people don't seem to understand this? I don't know _how_ we solve this problem, but the sheer amount of people who refuse to see this as _a_ problem (and who should know better) is frankly astonishing and scary.
Just as there are people that think that everything is racist, there are people that think that nothing is racist.
I saw an interview where even infamous neo-Nazi Richard Spencer claimed to not be a racist, he just doesn't think races should intermingle, and that white neighborhoods should stay white.
> for example, in a "free" twitter, i could post some racist tirade, and expect it to gain no traction/retweets from my followers & some random others. people might see it, but it is principally no different to making the same speech in the city center: i'm going to be heard, but no one is going to listen.
This is the biggest misconception many proponents of absolute free speech have. Many movements, both good and bad, have begun in social media (Twitter / Facebook, etc.). Everything from the Arab Spring, to BLM, to Unite the Right in Charlottesville and January 6th, were at least in part organized on social media. Just because _you_ don't think an idea is worth listening to, does NOT mean that there aren't hundreds or thousands of people who disagree and will listen. I don't know what the solution to this problem is, but to assume it's not real is just plain wrong.
I think they're saying that private companies aren't forced to actually rent you out a server, in which they aren't, but that's simply those companies' own free speech at work allowing them to choose who to associate with. The same freedom to not rent out servers to some racist/twitter canceled person gives them the freedom to not associate with people who want to host vile and disgusting porn on their servers.
No, you can not create your own website. Take this Parler debacle: booted off appstores, AWS, DNS providers, Cloudflare, etc.
Go build your own internet, we're in a free country? Not that I have sympathies for Parler folks, but I was horrified when people even here were cheering at Parler's demise. Don't you look somewhat ahead? Don't you see how many centralized gatekeepers are now everywhere? The potential of abuse to quash dissent is immense, and the possibility of all gatekeepers closely allying with the government is not alien to me. I have seen this happen right in front of me. When it will happen in your country, it'll be too late.
The reality is that some companies are so dominant in their respective fields, that it is in the interests of society they should not discriminate anyone if they don't like their views. Google and Apple should not be the ones to decide if the user can install the app on his device, even if this app is made by a militant far-right neo-nazi group. DNS providers should do their technical job and not engage in censoring websites spreading views they don't like.
Yes, in the US, you can. Giving me an example of one site that was booted off a small set of providers does not disprove that.
I do completely agree with you that having e.g. Apple be the sole gatekeeper of what users can install on their platform is problematic, but I view this as somewhat orthogonal to the Twitter censorship question. IMHO Apple should be required to allow users to install apps downloaded from alternative sources, however I still don't feel they should be compelled to host apps in their own store.
I'm not sure there's a great way to map the above opinion to Twitter -- maybe something like forcing twitter to become federated/decentralized would be the closest. But I am not convinced that Twitter is of the same size as Apple where we should mandate that. I don't regularly use twitter and I don't feel that we, as a society, are nearly as dependent on it as we are on phone manufacturers.
Wow, that is an amazing way to describe it. I've never heard that before. That is a great framing of the debate: free speech doesn't mean free reach. I don't know who made it up (kudos to you if you did) but having terms to describe each part of the issue is very helpful. TIL
It's a useful framing to to have, because "reach" is indeed the issue. Analogies to "guy yelling in the town square" aren't valid with Twitter because the town square doesn't have algorithms that moderate how often the town crier is audible to the public. And the town square also never had automated bots that parrot the criers' views (or contrary view) at zero marginal cost.
if Musk takes over Twitter, we'll be able to see how much 'freedom' he tolerates when the topics are things he has personal interests in.
So, what if all the publishers in one country just so happen to decide that Mr. Solzhenitsyn's book "Gulag Archipelago" is politically very uncomfortable to the ruling elite and all decline to publish it? This was Finlandized Finland in the 1970s. (To be clear, government didn't formally ban it. All publishing houses were privately owned companies. Yet somehow the decision was made.)
Maybe nobody is entitled to book publishers providing "free reach" of publishing your book, especially in thousands of copies. Yet something went wrong there. I don't have a catchy slogan for it, but sometimes the decisions to prevent reach are functionally antithetical to the purpose of free press.
it seems that the majority of people grossly underestimate corporation's level of involvement in our every day lives: if i were to become a persona non grata to google, apple, HN, social media, etc., how would i talk to anyone? how could i do anything? isolation will cause more harm than incarceration, yet i am not recognized a right to trial. not that it would matter anyway, the decision would likely be made algorithmically, without any one human knowing why it's happened.
what i'm saying is: corporations have come to own the infrastructure of our modern society. the protections that freedom of speech gave were (and still are) valuable in the context in which they were made. they don't address the reality that communication is fundamentally different to how it was in the 19th century.
> if i were to become a persona non grata to google, apple, HN, social media, etc., how would i talk to anyone? how could i do anything?
I honestly don't understand this argument at all.
To answer your question, you could:
- Use one of the thousands of other available email hosts/search engines/cloud providers/etc besides Google or Apple
- Pick up the phone and talk to people to get things done
- Leave your house to talk to people and do things
- Find something enjoyable to do with all of the free time you've gained now that you're off of social media and HN
But more importantly, you're saying that without those companies you somehow can't live your life? In that case I just flat-out disagree. I believe that most people make social media out to be more important than it is, and this feels like the extreme of that style of argument.
> Use one of the thousands of other available email hosts
when was the last time you sent (or received) an e-mail outside of the context of work, or to interact with a company?
> Pick up the phone
apple and google make the phones! my network provider is also a private company, too, they have no requirement to provide me a phone service.
> Leave your house to talk to people and do things
people no longer go to their friends front doors without calling ahead/planning first. millennials (my generation) aren't great at spontaneity in this regard. gen Z are even worse.
> Find something enjoyable to do with all of the free time you've gained now that you're off of social media and HN
i already don't use most social media. i don't go on facebook, twitter, tik tok, etc. i watch youtube videos and go on hacker news, and even then i rarely interact.
but if apple cut me off of icloud, facebook from whatsapp, etc. my life would be difficult enough. it would only take a couple of other companies to make it a nightmare. how many stories have landed on the HN front page about how a sudden dismissal from google has really screwed up someones online (and often real) life? and these are just the ones we here about..
private social media isn't the problem (although it is a problem). i'm saying that so much of our lives are very tightly embedded with a handful of private companies, and them having control over that isn't a great way to be.
> when was the last time you sent (or received) an e-mail outside of the context of work, or to interact with a company?
This morning, a few hours ago.
> apple and google make the phones! my network provider is also a private company, too, they have no requirement to provide me a phone service.
No, there are plenty of other phone manufacturers besides Apple and Google. Just as there are plenty of phone service providers, both mobile and VoIP. If they are all blocking/refusing you service, that would be quite a story, and I might change my opinion, but I've never heard of that happening.
> millennials (my generation) aren't great at spontaneity in this regard. gen Z are even worse.
I'm a older/early millenial (Xennial to some people). I agree with you but I don't see how you'd ever be completely blocked from using a phone.
> private social media isn't the problem (although it is a problem). i'm saying that so much of our lives are very tightly embedded with a handful of private companies, and them having control over that isn't a great way to be.
I agree with you 100%. The way to regain control is not to use the government to force them to provide a platform to racists, it's to ensure that you disentangle yourself from their systems as much as you can. Make sure you have a plan for what to do if your Whatsapp or iCloud account is banned by an algorithm with no recourse.
Are irreversible algorithmic bans the best way for companies to operate? Clearly not, it sucks. And maybe there's room for legal solutions to mandate open appeals processes, etc. But the alternative of forcing companies to give everyone a platform is way worse, IMHO.
surely you must recognize that you are likely in the minority of e-mail users?
> Just as there are plenty of phone service providers
two or three, really. and many areas in the US are limited to one or two.
> If they are all blocking/refusing you service, that would be quite a story, and I might change my opinion, but I've never heard of that happening.
didn't trump's twitter platform get banned from all the common cloud providers? is it that much more ridiculous to think that they would be unable to colo with anyone?
to be clear, i'm personally happy that it doesn't exist, and this isn't the same thing. but just because i don't agree with it... i know it's not the same thing as what we're talking about, but i don't think you don't need to squint too hard to see the parallel and the precedent.
> but I don't see how you'd ever be completely blocked from using a phone
indeed, i'd still be able to use my nokia 3310, and predictive text my way around social life, but it would be an incomplete existence (these days).
in any case, you don't need to be blocked from using a phone. you need only be blocked from using the various platforms that people use today.
> surely you must recognize that you are likely in the minority of e-mail users?
No, I don't recognize that. Citation needed.
> didn't trump's twitter platform get banned from all the common cloud providers? is it that much more ridiculous to think that they would be unable to colo with anyone?
I don't know, but as to your last question, yes, that's ridiculous, as there are thousands of datacenters out there.
Besides, Trump's twitter platform is not a person. It's a business with many more resources than the the vast majority of individuals have. It's dangerous to start from the principle that this organization should have the same rights as a natural person.
> two or three, really. and many areas in the US are limited to one or two.
You're talking about mobile providers. I specifically mentioned mobile and VoIP and you cut that part out. I'm done here as you don't seem to be willing to have an honest discussion.
fair enough. finding data wasn't easy. the best i could get that is somewhat related was this article from 2015 on teenage communication habits, which states that around 6% of teens use e-mail to communicate daily with their friends[1] (making it the least used form of communication). and this is pre-tiktok, so i'd expect this number to have decreased.
> Besides, Trump's twitter platform is not a person.
indeed, but the people using probably were. not that that's important: constitutionally, corporations have the same protections as people, indeed the US legal fiction of corporate personhood is practically a meme now. from [2]:
> Since the Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in 2010, upholding the rights of corporations to make unlimited political expenditures under the First Amendment [...]
so it appears the supreme court agrees that free-speech protections apply to corporations.
> yes, that's ridiculous, as there are thousands of datacenters out there.
well then, where is the site now?
> I specifically mentioned mobile and VoIP and you cut that part out.
apologies, i presumed you understood that the IP in VoIP indicates that an internet connection is required for the voice to go over, and that without a mobile service provider, that could be.. logistically challenging :)
> I'm done here as you don't seem to be willing to have an honest discussion.
But would this still extend to 'free reach'? ie. if I go on Twitter, and say horrible things, then everyone blocks me, is my free speech being impeded because Twitter allows these people to block me? What about the algorithm, if Instagram's stories feature tries to show new videos based on people's interests, can I sue them for not showing my videos to other people?
> is my free speech being impeded because Twitter allows these people to block me?
of course not. if you choose to block me, i am not prevented from communicating with others.
> What about the algorithm, if Instagram's stories feature tries to show new videos based on people's interests, can I sue them for not showing my videos to other people?
the algorithm is the problem: if you subscribe/follow, you should see all the content (this is how facebook used to be).
TikTok is only as big as it is because of its efficient and useful algorithm/'for you' page. It's a testament to the fact that even the small amount of friction introduced in signing up and managing a friends list is too much for most people.
These companies all spy on you on behalf of the government and have censored legitimate news stories in a coordinated fashion to manipulate an election. Their connections to intelligence agencies alone make them effectively public institutions in my view.
The thing that has historically made a company bound to free speech is whether or not the government requires them to specifically search for certain types of infringing content. Coincidentally, this is the current legal framework that makes reporting images of child abuse legal: companies can voluntarily choose to to either not scan for CSAM, or can choose to scan for CSAM and must report it to NCMEC if they find any, and Apple is a prime example of a company that doesn't scan for it[0].
If the government is asking a company to go searching for specific otherwise legal content, that would be pretty good evidence for a court case to be made.
0: "Of all of the companies identified by NCMEC, I only saw one that had an unexpected decrease in reporting: Apple. According to NMEC, Apple submitted 205 reports in 2019 (a third my my reporting volume). Apple increased a little, to 265 in 2020, but then dropped in 2021 to only 160 reports. That's nearly a 22% decrease over two years!" https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/955-NC...
Hunter Biden laptop story was legit & censoring it across all social media simultaneously was absurd. Considering his financial connections to Ukraine & current events it’s even more fucked up that it was censored.
It isn’t obviously, it serves the exact purpose of conducting censorship on behalf of the regime without any hard govt power being employed. The legality isn’t what I’m concerned with — if that were the problem we would be able to solve this through courts.
Well, that's my point - if people are that aligned with an ideology separate from any specific pressure, then their actions are their own and they're not spies nor are they connected with US intelligence agencies.
You claim to support private companies adopting whatever moderation policies you want and yet your examples of "hate/conspiracy bullshit" go against this. If you believe this absolutely then _what_ is being censored would be unimportant.
You are unwilling to confront the idea of Twitter censoring true things that you agree with but by your own principles you'd find this agreeable.
I'm sorry if "hate/conspiracy bullshit" was too inflammatory or specific here. I meant it as a stand in for "any content that most would find objectionable." I've edited my post to remove that language. You are correct that I do believe that what is being censored is unimportant.
Please don't presume what I am or am not willing to do.
I am perfectly willing to confront the idea that Twitter is censoring true things that I agree with: it's fine with me. I'm not sure if they're already doing that, but they have every right to, just as I have every right to use (or create) an alternative platform.
The ability to do this depends on the will of private hosting providers and ISPs. It’s the same problem. It’s infeasible to maintain a site that permits all legal speech. It’s a constant legal battle and you’d better know a great lawyer who believes in the cause enough to work pro bono.
For reference, Compuserve was an ISP that historically didn't moderate ony of its content on its forums, under the legal framework that not moderating anything meant Compuserve wasn't liable for any of its content, while another ISP Prodigy lost a defamation lawsuit because they did moderate their forum's content. This gave rise to the Communications Decency Act which allows these services to moderate some content without being civilly liable for all of the content on their service.
I propose that water companies don't have to promote your ability to speak either by selling you water. You can collect rainwater provided by nature just fine. Same with gas stations and transport: You're not owed free reach, people back in the day just walked where they wanted to get to. Cars, electricity and running water are just modern conveniences.
This is a poor metaphor. Water companies provide something essential for life and are de facto gov't entities. It's unclear if your objective was to change people's minds, or just to mock OP with a shallow dismissal, but either way it's a weak argument unless you establish why these comparisons are valid.
My city has a public square and a privately owned mall. Just short of being violent you are allowed to do and say as you wish in the public square. But most people prefer to go to the much cleaner, privately owned mall. Where our values and polite society are reaffirmed.
We choose moderation constantly in our lives, intentionally.
> My city has a public square and a privately owned mall
Interesting that you bring up that example, because private malls are absolutely required to follow certain public accommodations laws, depending on the jurisdiction.
So, just like private malls are forced to do certain things by the government, people are saying that a similar set of public accommodations, that we already force malls to do, should be extended to other platforms.
This rule is almost certainly applicable to California. Most mall protests that I've seen happen near the mall or in front of the mall, rarely inside the plaza. And usually with the agreement of the owners.
Do you ask the Chamber of Commerce which malls and stores to frequent whenever you want to shop? I think that would be a great way to avoid the bad areas with all the hobos and sketchy businesses that are probably fronts for drug dealers anyway.
You can "choose moderation" by not viewing Twitter accounts and conversations you don't care about and muting words you dislike.
> You can "choose moderation" by not viewing Twitter accounts and conversations you don't care about and muting words you dislike.
In that case however I would also like the possibility to turn off any algorithms that recommend stuff to me. I want to see only things i put on my whitelist, otherwise i will have to constantly moderate and it will take up loads of my time.
As long as that doesn't happen I am more than happy to let others do the moderation based on some frameworks that I agreed on (ToS in Twitters case).
If you think a ToS can capture every bigotry, propaganda technique, and misinformation campaign in perpetuity, I am impressed and hope for success in installing it on every centralized internet platform. Otherwise we would need individual humans at a corporation owned by rich men interpreting a vague set of principles about what "hate" and "misinfo" means, which is a different discussion...
Newspapers are an influential platform, but most people aren't reading them. It's not that big of a deal if the government decided to censor them, agreed?
On the contrary, the question I was asking is unclear: if, for a given platform, the only reason the wrong political speech shouldn’t be censored by rich and powerful men is because it’s too populous, what’s the difference if the government’s men decide what is too hateful/misinfo for Twitter and newspapers, versus the owners of those? This isn’t a rhetorical question either, I am curious for an answer!
I guess a common answer would be “you can move off Twitter, but you can’t leave your country” which is odd two ways: first, if you say you want hate and misinfo banned from Twitter (whatever those mean) shouldn’t you want that for all other big platforms? And it’s very possible to move abroad while not spreading hate and fake facts in the meantime, isn’t it?
I don't know why anyone would trust Musk to champion free speech.
He has no background with any org that works on protecting free speech. He hasn't done work with the ACLU.
Billionaires buying media companies has been great for broadcasting the billionaire perspective, but mixed at best on free speech.
A lot of people currently decrying moderation activities on US social media sites as being against free speech are the same people supporting bills, mostly in state governments, that limit free speech.
The WSJ, in that article, calls California's pandemic restrictions "The most sweeping restrictions on liberty ever seen", which is just an absurd assertion. Even if you scope it to the US or even California, where Japanese-American civilians, including children, were once relocated into internment camps.
This is why people tend to roll their eyes at the WSJ opinion section. (The journalism side, to be clear, is top-notch.)
> The WSJ, in that article, calls California's pandemic restrictions "The most sweeping restrictions on liberty ever seen", which is just an absurd assertion. Even if you scope it to the US or even California, where Japanese-American civilians, including children, were once relocated into internment camps.
Obviously the internment of Japanese folks during WWII was far more intrusive than the COVID restrictions. But that doesn't contradict the statement--they didn't say "the harshest restrictions" or "the most egregious restrictions", they said "the most sweeping restrictions". The word sweeping is an adjective meaning 'wide in range or effect'. It is simply a matter of fact that the COVID restrictions, which affected ~40 million people and resulted in the closure of 40,000 businesses, were a more sweeping restriction on liberty than the internment of 120,000 Japanese during the War.
If you wanna be that charitable towards the claim, you've still got to contend with the draft, wartime rationing, censorship during WWII, the Sedition Acts, and many others.
> You've still got to contend with the draft, wartime rationing, censorship during WWII, the Sedition Acts, and many others.
The only comparably broad measure you've listed is wartime rationing. But the fact that wartime rationing was as broad in scope as the COVID restrictions hardly renders the WSJ's claim absurd.
The draft permits the government to force any male citizen 17-45 into the military, where they lack significant Constitutional rights, can be sent to die in combat, and be summarily executed.
The Sedition Acts variably restricted the First Amendment rights to criticize the government of anyone in the country.
No. California's restrictions haven't been "The most sweeping restrictions on liberty ever seen" no matter how charitably you approach and scope the claim. I entirely stand by my opinion that it's absurd to state that.
There exists entirely plausible interpretations of "sweeping" that place the california restrictions above the examples you cited. The draft only targeted males of specific ages, the sedition act removes a much "smaller" set of rights...etc
To be clear, I think the WSG claim is hyperbole. However it is a claim that could be reasonably argued to be correct and is thus not literally "absurd". Thus I would class is as hyperbolic and your use of the word as figurative.
This is the weirdest criticism to me. That teenager had a very popular Twitter account shared in a couple major publications, whose sole purpose is to show the world Elon's live location.
This is especially odd coming from the privacy maximalists at HN. How long would it take you to report a Twitter account that Tweeted out your live location daily? Be honest.
And then you use the word 'silence' which is far more ominous than saying that he offered the kid $5000 for what was about 15 minutes of python.
I live in Charlottesville and the ACLU caught a lot of flak for supporting the KKK in a rally earlier that summer before the August 12 Unite the Right rally. When they backed down was the first time I started to pay attention that maybe some of the criticism against the left's assault on speech was legitimate.
(For the record, I am very far left, but from a time when true free speech was a sacred left value.)
That article is a discombobulated conservative rant that accuses all corporate America of being leftist (please), and contains zero verifiable details that support the title, as far as I can tell.
What, exactly, is it saying the ACLU did? What, exactly, is it referring to? The only sentence that even attempts to answer that question is: “an ACLU official said it was perfectly legitimate for his lawyers to decline to defend hate speech.”
That statement is a fact. Hate speech is explicitly exempt from U.S. Free Speech protections. If you’re going to defend Free Speech, please read a little about the limitations on Free Speech, and some of the history that brought about those limitations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech#Limitations
Limits on Free Speech is as much a conservative value as a liberal value. Framing this as a leftist takeover of “woke” values is a thinly veiled misinformation FUD campaign designed to confuse you about what U.S. values are and convince you liberals are attacking, while hypocritically doing all the attacking. Don’t let this junk work on you, stay curious and seek verifiable facts, not tribal opinion.
> Hate speech is explicitly exempt from U.S. Free Speech protections. If you’re going to defend Free Speech, please read a little about the limitations on Free Speech, and some of the history that brought about those limitations.
Your own link makes it clear that in the US, hate speech is protected speech.
"Hate speech is also protected by the First Amendment in the United States, as decided in R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul, (1992) in which the Supreme Court ruled that hate speech is permissible, except in the case of imminent violence"
That is not legally correct. Hate speech is not explicitly exempt from US free speech protections. There is no such law, you're just making things up. Unless it contains an explicit incitement to violence, hate speech is completely legal. The link you cited doesn't support your point.
The internal ACLU policy is apparently now to consider politics when deciding which speech to defend. As a private organization they're free to make those choices but it's disappointing to see them retreat from the values that I and other liberals hold dear.
And I am perfectly well aware of what real US values are. Condescending advice from someone ignorant about basic Constitutional law is not helpful or appreciated.
In an amicus brief filed with the Supreme Court, the ACLU and ACLU of Massachusetts argue that Boston’s denial of Camp Constitution’s request to display its flag violated the group’s free-speech rights
On March 2nd 2022. You made the claim the ACLU is dead , what evidence do you have to support that?
The former head of the ACLU from the 80s who famously defended the Nazis for free speech even though he is Jewish has been rallying against the current ACLU for precisely this reason.
Not in its current iteration, which relies on ground stations in or near those countries. You're not gonna get Starlink service in China or Iran, even if you can get a dish.
Ukraine is currently under martial law and has significant restrictions on speech; it's (justifiably) illegal, for example, to report on troop positions. Starlink isn't changing that; it just provides internet access, filtered through a local ground station subject to any local laws and filtering that are applicable. China has internet access, but not free speech. Same for Russia.
Bill Gates spends his ill-gotten monopoly profits on funding research and wide scale critical public health and education programs across the world and including America.
That's on an order of magnitude difference than the world's richest meme-sharer purchasing the software company that provides the meme-sharing infrastructure.
Mixed reviews. The Gates Foundation pushed an initiative to grade teachers based on student test scores, essentially. That only made problems in the education sector worse. Ask any teacher and they'll tell you what the problems are, and untalented teachers is pretty far down the list.
That wasn't their intention, the Gates Foundation has done massive amounts of good work, just because there are unintended consequences doesn't change the intent
They swooped into a field they were not experts in and caused problems. Intentions are beside the point. They thought they were the smartest ones in the room but they didn't understand the underlying issues.
That’s exactly right. I’ve posted here many times discussing what it was like to grow up under apartheid in South Africa. Elon grew up under that regime too. He’s the same age as me. He went to Pretoria boys high school. I went to Paarl boys high school. Similar tracks. Both highly conservative, pro apartheid and a clear demonstration of how limiting free speech enables awful regimes like the apartheid government. This is one of the strongest reasons he is a free speech absolutist.
It’s incredible how many smart people in the freest country in the world are asking to have their freedoms removed without considering who may inherit those rights.
I'm not really sure what you mean by free speech here.
Do you mean that, if I say "this war is bad!" I may be "arrested" and "tried" and then put in a jail for 15 years (or just vanish, or be dropped from a helicopter over the ocean).
Or do you mean if I tweet "I'll <wink wink> 2nd amendment those Hajis!" my tweet won't be seen by 12 million people rather than "promoted" by some algorithm?
Freedom of speech, as denoted in the United States Constitution, is a set of limits around the government behaviors. U.S. Government behaviors.
100%... I lived and worked in many countries around the world and the amount of free speech we enjoy here is not common. This is why people like my parents escaped their motherland. It's surreal to me, as an immigrant, that we are trying self-limit free speech here. If you don't like what others say, then tune out, you have no right to silence other even if you abhor their ideas.
“Free speech” tends to be used in two ways: free speech the compound phrase, and free speech as two words taken literally.
Certain subsets of population love to hijack discussions by forcing the latter meaning[0]—they break the phrase up into separate words and take them as absolutes. Yet the reality is that free speech in absolute sense doesn’t exist: a bit like free market, in a world where malicious actors exist at all, it has to be subject to limits (moreover, in any culture there are its own taboos defining additional unwritten constraints).
The first meaning is what “free speech” refers to in any meaningful political discussion about free speech. It is fundamentally vital in a democracy, and no sane person would qualify it as absolute.
Fine aspects of what conditional free speech actually implies could be a worthy topic. Off the top of my head, free speech is where you don’t need to censor yourself provided you are of sound mind and do not mean harm, but this is not very precise. How should we define the limits of free speech on a meta level? Is it their vagueness that causes distress? Once the terminological ambiguity is settled, meaningful debate becomes possible.
[0] I believe in most cases such individuals have their own agenda to push, and one would become equally opposed to absolute free speech as soon as their preferred agenda is implemented.
I understand what you’re saying. A problem is we have enemies weaponizing free speech as propaganda through social media. We have fascist wannabe dictators with a speaker in every citizens wallet. We have role models peddeling antiscientific junk to our kids.
This isn’t the free speech of the 1900’s. Social media is a game changer and a possible weapon of mass destruction - imo.
Free speech to me doesn’t mean you get to say everything everywere. Try standing up in a restaurant and shout political propaganda - you’re gonna get thrown out.
This is great evidence that most people know nothing about history. The same arguments have been made about TV, Radio, Magazines, Newspapers, Books, Philosophy and practically any other medium that people have used to convey ideas. This is exactly why you need to protect an individuals rights to free speech and expression from anyone with power because chances are that they'll have a biased streak a mile wide and won't be ashamed to impose their personal view of how the world should be on everyone around them no matter how much human suffering it produces. The only way to have a free society is to realize that everyone, the president, your hairdresser, doctors, factory workers, lawyers, farmers, journalists, grocery store clerks and you and me are all flawed, weak, limited human beings who are mostly trying to be good but are perfectly capable of evil at any turn and so we have to all agree to limit anyone's power over anyone else to the largest extent possible. If we misjudge and allow too much power to collect in any one office then we will inevitably be subjugated by it as it uses that power to accrue more and more influence over time and as we roll the dice with every new person that takes control of it. This has played out throughout all of human history and there's absolutely nothing about our time that guarantees it won't happen again.
And TV, Radio, Books, Magazines, newspapers were time and again weaponised against democracy, up to and including genocides. The Nazis, RTLM, Pravda, Facebook, Murdoch to name just a few examples.
Any tool can be a weapon. Those communication media have also spread democracy and toppled dictatorships as often as they have been perverted by them. Crippling those tools only favors the people in power and those people will be tyrants sooner or later.
Neither you nor the era in which you live are special enough to erode generations of protections for the ability to think freely, speak freely, and to do so without fear of repercussions.
Musk’s involvement in Twitter has absolutely nothing to do with free speech. Like many things he does, it’s a false narrative to push what he wants forwards. He has a clear history of trying to bully and shutdown those that disagree with him in any capacity.
Bingo. This is about Elon's speech if it's about speech at all. Remember the kid who was posting Elon's public jet movements? You think Elon lets him keep Tweeting? Elon is also known for blocking anyone who disagrees with him. So much for free speech absolutism.
Personally, I think he's just a troll with a ton of money. This is 'fun' for him.
It’s just unbelievable to me that people are talking about this free speech thing as if it’s a legitimate thing to actually be talked about. These are Trump and Putin tactics. Get people talking about idiotic claims as if they’re real, while you do what you want behind the noise.
Musk is the person who claimed that the SEC was violating his free speech rights for investigating him over market manipulation. I would argue the SEC was actually very light on Musk, and it’s clear here again Musk is manipulating the market. If Twitter denies his offer, he will sell after pumping the stock, and he already indicated that in his offer letter in order to soften claims of market manipulation. If Twitter accepts his offer, he gets massive control over his “free” speech.
The US is the only country with such weird views on free speech, there are many perfectly free (often with better freedom of speech/press scores actually) first world countries with different definition of free speech.
A member of a far-right nationalist party was condemned to a 800£ fine for teaching his pet to do the Nazi salute when he hears "Sieg Heil" and also react to the phrase "gas the Jews", and post it on YouTube.
The trial seems to have been over less than a month after it was opened, but "hellish" is subjective enough that it might still apply.
There are things that are off limits, and they are widely known. You can't dress up or play as a Nazi and pretend you didn't know there'd be consequences. All Nazi-related stuff bar for historical reasons like research, or art, is off limits. I prefer my country free of Nazis, and if that means they get sent to jail for "jokes", fine by me and pretty much the majority of the population.
The nazis preferred their country free of jews, and many, if not the absolute majority definitely the majority in power, were fine by that.
This is one case where an equivalence argument is actually valid. To be blunt: your view is dangerous and ought to be regarded as reprehensible by anyone who actually values a free society.
Paradox of tolerance, fellow human. If you allow Nazis, who are anti-tolerant, violently so ( and as you said, they'd remove all Jews), to do whatever they want out of tolerance, they won't respond in kind, they'll abuse that tolerance until they're in power and usher in their intolerance. You cannot be tolerant of the intolerant. Even Goebbels himself said it, they were going in the parliament as a wolf in sheep's clothing to destroy democracy from within with democracy's tools.
Furthermore, it's a bullshit false equivalency that a Nazi, who wants to at the very least discriminate people, is somehow equal to a random person who would get discriminated against. Or a racist and any random person. Those are not the same, and don't deserve the same protections.
Yes, yes. Popper always ends up trotted out by the people most interested in framing their censorious impulses as somehow above scrutiny.
Let's call this the paradox of rationalization: those quickest to engage in the behavior tend to be those whose motives for doing so are the least genuine and trustworthy. And anyone with access to the levers of censorship must earn a high degree of trust.
When did anyone suggest allowing Nazis "to do whatever they want"? Suggesting that people ought to be allowed to voice reprehensible opinions without fear of government locking them up isn't the same as suggesting they be allowed to do whatever they want.
It's not a bullshit false equivalency: every nazi is more or less just some random person with an opinion. Just like you and I are random persons expressing an opinion in this forum. At least, right up until they take action to commit violence--but that's a separate matter.
> This is one case where an equivalence argument is actually valid
Yes, absolutely, banning Nazism is 100% equivalent to killing Jews. Freedom of speech definitely depends on letting nazis spread their views. Declaring that nazis are bad for society is a dangerous view.
The constitution (including amendments) is almost unique in that it makes actual guarantees about your right to freely express yourself, even if you views are controversial and out of line with the views of the government. That doesn't make it divine, but it does make it special at the moment. Hopefully the rest of the world wakes up, but I see few signs of that happening (although Dominic Raab in the UK has indicated that freedom of expression will be the top priority when laying out the British Bill of Rights which has been promised since brexit).
American Civil Religion is a powerful drug. Funnily that and their deification of "The Founding Fathers" smell a lot like the absolutist models of Kings and their Divine rights, while being the opposite.
We recognize the Founders for having the courage to throw off the yoke of an oppressor, and succeed. We honor them for then in the same lifetime laying out a blueprint of government that has reasonably withstood the test of time and managed to remain flexible in spite of some serious adversity.
Is it showing it's age? Probably, Is it long overdue for a strong reaffirmation? Probably also. Does it instill in any one particular dude the absolute unquestionable right to rule over anyone else? No. No it doesn't.
The American Experiment, though the institutions of today hedge more on the side of "we'll be the judge of whether you can do that" was fundamentally a novel effort at it's time. It enumerated the Governments specific powers and limits, then dumped the rest of the power in the people to do with as they will.
I mean the first comment literally said "America is the only country with such views" so yes, that makes them special by definition? Or are you saying that the way America sees free speech is common, which would contradict the earlier claim that it isn't
The person in the US can find another job. The person in jail doesn't have such luxuries.
Also, when the woke people take over your government, there's no bright line rule that says, "You can't put people in jail for speech." Now you don't lose your job for disagreeing with the latest woke positions, you go to jail. In the US that bright line rule does exist, so they are limited to just trying to get you fired from your job.
It's obvious to me who has better freedom of speech.
Would you not eject someone from you property if they were harassing your other guests?
It's not an exact analogy, and there are features like mute and block that are less severe than removing someone from a platform, but people generally don't want to individually deal with every person who decides that being miserable to others is the best use for social media.
Moderation, either top-down curation or bottom-up mute/block, is not a solution. Either way, you're going to haphazardly create echo chambers, which aren't great at maintaining free speech.
You can trash talk all you want - though some outlets may not let you because they care about their other users.
In other words. If you get thrown out of hn, you can try reddit, but you may end up enjoing 4chan. If you go to jail, it will be because of something you did, not something you said.
In other words: It is all free speech, and we, the other people, have an equal right not to listen to you.
I think many of the people described aren't taking free speech for granted, they're reevaluating the idea in a new social dynamic. Technology has changed the societal impact on free speech drastically: reach, frequency, noise, targetability. In parallel, populations have grown drastically so the scale for ideas to reach critical mass and spread have changed. The dynamics are simply different now.
I think many understand the consequences of highly restricted speech and how much benefit free speech has, including how censorship and tight control on speech has lead to undesirable government regimes historically. What people are really doing is reevaluating the costs side in the new environment where there's no longer a town square, information has the potential to spread to masses quickly, information is more difficult to separate from noise, and those with harmful intent can speak with more anonymity.
I'm a huge fan of free speech but the increasing potential damaging effects can't be completepy ignored. It's better if we can defend against such issues, in my opinion, and protect free speech, not ignore them and go on as is.
I think you're wrong. The "increasing potential damaging effects" are only damaging to the current regime. The internet is just the latest iteration in a long succession of things that challenge the power of the elite and we're experiencing exactly the same blowback and propaganda that gets trotted out every time this happens. Even the whole "fake news" rhetoric isn't new but hundreds of years old. People with privileged positions, power and money are scrambling to widen their moats and shore up their positions against the rabble as they once again wrench the wool from their eyes.
People were censored for saying the Hunter Biden laptop was real in 2020. People were censored for covid "misinformation" that turned out to be true.
Twitter is very much an anti-free speech platform at the moment. He's a free speech absolutist. How is the purchase of a wildly biased and censorial platform by a free speech absolutist not conducive to free speech?
Well there is wide speculation that Elon could open up the rules of twitter a bit - perhaps allow Trump back on, widen what type of Covid-19 discourse can posted without repercussions, etc.
Fewer people think Elon has any predilection to locking down what can be said on Twitter.
(I don't know what will happen ultimately, but that's how it could be related.)
So we have an unelected multi-hundred-billionaire deciding the rules, which may or may not be less restrictive when it comes to certain types of discourse of his choosing.
I still fail to see where the "freedom" part enters into all this.
> Understand this: limits on free speech are far more dangerous to society than allowing fringe extremists to spread their ideas.
I just don't see the evidence to back this claim up.
Granted, if I really think about it, I am not directly harmed either way. The fact that this is one of our fiercer debates is probably a good sign of our decadence lol
I think a distinction should be made between restrictions (on speech) by government, and restrictions by private entities. The former is dangerous, the latter is necessary.
Societal attitudes towards free speech have changed a lot in recent times. I believe this is related to technological advancement and the rise of social media. The advent of social media has made it too easy to spread dangerous levels of hate and false information online. Malicious individuals and groups now have the power to reach hundreds of millions instantly, at no cost to themselves. It started off innocently enough, with cat videos uploaded to YouTube, but soon extremists were taking advantage of social media for radicalization purposes, adversarial nations were spreading fake news to influence who gets elected, and others were even live-streaming mass murders. This has caused an upheaval in attitudes towards free speech. Enough is enough! There needs to be limits. Communities started imposing limits to free speech. Society — as opposed to governments — have decided that some censorship is in order. This is a natural evolution of societal norms. This particular evolution was a reaction to the excesses and abuses seen in social media. Some censorship, by private parties such as Twitter, as opposed to absolute free speech, will be the new normal.
We live in a new world; the old norms no longer apply.
> a distinction should be made between restrictions (on speech) by government, and restrictions by private entities. The former is dangerous, the latter is necessary.
Both are both. There is no country (AFAIK) in the world where there are no restrictions on speech.
I think another distinction needs to be drawn: Moderation of communities that is organized and controlled by the community is structurally different from externally imposed rules and standards.
There are structural power issues with the latter that need to be acknowledged and which should lead to to try to limit it where feasible.
There's been limits on free speech in the US and other first world countries forever. Where we put those limits will always be up for debate, but I don't think it's realistic to ever expect no limits.
Private companies are not the arbiters of free speech, and they should not be compelled by the government or anyone else to distribute views they don't like. This especially goes for businesses whose revenue models are based around advertising, where the financial incentives do not line up with the social benefit of their users.
I believe the proper solution here is social networks that are open, distributed, and federated. It is not for government or advertisers to decide what speech must, or must not, be discussed in the open.
Yes this is why there are very few actual limits on free speech. Twitter isn't going to throw you in jail for saying something wrong on the platform. Your country didn't slide into a fascist state because a private company started limiting which kinds of posts are allowed on the platform it made and owns.
There isn't a black and white answer to this. It should be painfully obvious by now that unrestricted free speech also enables incredibly technologically amplified propagandists of various stripes to drive people's behavior to various extremes including threatening the existence of that same democracy.
Yes, there is certainly a limit on both sides. I think when social media platforms would ban hate speech and the like, most people were perfectly ok with it. Once they started banning political opinions that most people would consider not that inflammatory, or even interesting (think COVID discussion) people starting having a problem. The social media platforms themselves became a political tool rather than a tool to share ideas.
Why is Twitter really important? This is really the crux of it for me. Ever since mass communications, the news was the arbitrator of opinion. It was common for journalists of prominent newspapers (like the NYT) to declare themselves "kingmakers" in elections, even presidential ones. How they portrayed a candidate directly affected his or her outcome in a significant way. If journalists at the NYT thought a candidate wasn't a "serious candidate", they wouldn't get much coverage, or that coverage would be intentionally unflattering. Social media breaks that barrier down because now the politicians can circumvent the news as a middleman of information and we can now have discussions of ideas on a fairly large scale without requiring the news to deliver that information.
Once Twitter becomes just another arbitrator of information, then we've regressed as a society back to the times where all our information was filtered by "kingmakers." Instead of a new world with much more available contact with our political class, we digress to the way it was before, the only difference is we have new arbitrators.
Free speech is never 100% free, there are laws against libel, fraud, conspiracy, copyright, trademark, which create crimes that consist only of speech, or civil liability. Courts and parliaments have rules of procedure so it's not, whoever's loudest wins. And then there are social norms.
Slippery slope arguments are a slippery slope to never doing anything to improve anything.
It's always a balance between letting 20% of hateful crazy troll Nazis hijack all rational conversation, on the one hand, and blocking unpopular opinions on the other hand. Even HN moderates a lot.
Same applies to all the rights enumerated in the US Constitution, you have freedom of religion to the extent it doesn't infringe on the other important rights and provisions of the Constitution. Polygamy is banned. If your religion says servitude of women or Black people is God's will, you don't get to practice it. 2nd Amendment however broadly interpreted doesn't let you build a nuclear weapon in your backyard.
Also true, a lot of people want to block legitimate speech they don't want to hear and should be resisted. The first step toward fascism is indeed people not caring about free speech and thinking their personal discomfort is the most important thing, starting with the most powerful. Protesters get arrested and kettled, Colin Kaepernick loses his contracts. You're not going to stop the powerful from trying. It's never 'cancel culture' when state legislatures cancel women, minorities, gay or trans people, it's only 'cancel culture' when those people call out the powerful.
We need free speech, but letting liars and extremists run the public square and destroy all decency isn't the answer either. You need to protect free speech by having reasonable rules and norms.
"Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness." - George Washington
I'll worry the moment the state makes expression of ideas illegal.
When it comes to private vehicles for speech, the right to amplify or attenuate speech carried on these vehicles is itself a free speech right.
Newspapers can exercise editorial judgment. Forums can create policies. These policies can be regarding how discourse is conducted, they can even be topical. Your Math Professor can shut down your classmate's extemporaneous treatise about the gold standard taking up time in linear algebra class. Time, place, and manner matter.
Everyone has a right and a responsibility to curate conversation in a way that serves the discourse for their sphere of influence -- except the state itself.
Everyone also has the right and responsibility to create a new forum or sphere to discuss ideas they feel aren't being poorly served elsewhere. Or, if they wish, any ideas without limitation at all.
> Uh, we already do that. Fraud, defamation, uttering threats, false advertising, perjury, filing a false report, etc.
Sometimes I think "free speech" is a misnomer, and the common phrase should be "freedom of discourse."
Fraud, defamation, threats, perjury etc aren't really discourse. They don't serve ideas (and in fact, tend to do violence to ideas).
In any case, you're correct that 1st amendment and other free speech rights are not unlimited indulgences that excuse one from certain legal obligations to be truthful, or to not threaten. In spite of this, the US and most industrialized democracies remain remarkably supportive of freedom of discourse from a state perspective.
2) "Climate science is obviously very wrong, the Earth is changing on its own."
3) "Climate change is fake and it's a conspiracy"
4) "Climate change is fake because George Soros is trying to hurt America so his secret Jewish cabal can rule the world"
5) "Climate change is fake because George Soros is trying to hurt America so his secret Jewish cabal can rule the world and here are specific plans for the violence necessary to stop it"
---
We cross the line into "not truthful" at 2. Moderation doesn't take it seriously until 4. Law enforcement doesn't take it seriously until 5, if ever.
Moderation in a private vehicle for speech could take it seriously at any stage they choose (and I'd argue that the freedom to decide where the line is inside private stewardship is in fact part of freedom of discourse).
And there probably should be forums which have content standards based on truth according to the best efforts of those running the place to determine the truth. Perhaps not every forum should be that way, but some could be, and I think that's the standard that things like scientific journals aspire to.
#4/#5 -- I have questions about whether police/executive enforcement should be directly dealing with cases like this, but it certainly seems to me that people would be within their freedom of discourse rights to take someone making those statements to court. And courts are also places where questions of truth/fact are taken seriously along with questions of law, and obligation to be truthful solidly outweighs any freedom some might imagine they have to lie.
The theoretical ability to falsify something (or to prove it) has no bearing on the realities of propaganda, extensive domain knowledge or the lack thereof, and how such positions are ultimately arrived at.
Namely, trust in the institutions.
How many facts that form the bedrock of your worldview have you, personally, verified? Have you, personally, walked down the chain of evidence for certain scientific (i.e. falsifiable) claims and personally attempted to falsify them?
You're gonna get replies basically saying "but free speech is about protection from the government not corporations". This is the stock answer, even though corporations in America are generally considered to be equally if not more powerful than the government (for good reason).
>Sometimes even coming to such views as "free speech is dangerous" and that "we should limit free speech" (by blocking the views I don't like).
Yeah right, saying me not listening to a screaming preacher on the street is the same as the state locking them away is why I don't listen to free speech absolutists. Me having a blocklist or using an app to construct one is not an impediment to your freedom anymore than me changing the channel on my TV is an impediment to the freedom of a random news anchor editorializing.
If you really want to support free speech then support the right to not listen. They go hand in hand. Stop trying to force people to be captive audiences then we might have a starting point.
Lots of extremists, especially in the authoritarian[0] or right-wing edges of the political compass, practice various forms of censorship. This isn't merely "let's pass a law to make it illegal to say a thing", but would also include things like harassing other people in public forae with sock-puppets, ballot-stuffing online polls to make their side look more publicly favored, flooding websites with expensive HTTP requests (DDoSing), or publishing personal or hidden information in an attempt to scare someone into not speaking (doxxing). All of the above behaviors should be considered just as censorious as vanilla-flavor state-actors censorship.
Furthermore, because these behaviors nominally involve something that resembles an act of speech, people occasionally try to defend said acts on "free speech" grounds and call the curtailment of censorship acts itself a form of censorship. This is a mistake. Fringe extremists are not merely "spreading their ideas", they are chilling other people's speech. This is just as much of a danger to society as the banning of other people's views that you mentioned.
This is a naive view. Twitter does not enable free speech for a single person on this planet. Every el single prison in the world who can access Twitter can also access any number of other ways to speak freely.
> it all started with limits on the freedom of speech
No, it all started with your citizens giving up on democracy. They probably chose safety or convenience or stability (economic, probably) or a mix of them.
That's how all democracies fail (barring ones invaded by other countries). People don't want them anymore.
Where people really want democracy, they fight for it.
It's that simple. Yet unbelievably hard to manage in practice.
So in your model, some other random person can come along and force you to use unlimited amounts of your own resources to broadcast whatever they want to say?
We have freedom of speech in that the government cannot persecute us for what we say.
We do not have the right to commandeer other people’s resources without their permission to rebroadcast what we want to say.
Speech/information needs to be processed/filtered/analyzed. People may not be equipped to deal with certain information - hence we try to manage it externally and internally.
Suppressing from of information starts at early, at childhood. We try not bombard our children with all the information indiscriminately. We curate and provide age appropriate information to ensure optimal development and growth.
Once a person becomes adult they are supposed to gather and process information on their own. However, even as adults we are susceptible to deception. Our judgement can be fooled, feeling can override our logic.
In conclusion, I think there's a need for curation of the information/speech. Not forbidding it outright, but certainly to help humans discern facts from fiction, for example.
I think that's wrong. Speech is sending signals that are converted into information. The difference is, the information can be good or bad depending on what you already have. If we go with the usual Hitler example, Hitler's speech makes people take other people into concentration camps only if they are already inclined into doing it(i.e. if you air the Hitler speech in USA, Americans don't start putting the Jews on trains). Therefore, limiting Hitler's speech is like fighting infection with painkillers when you actually need antibiotics.
It's getting really bad here in Canada. The governments directly funds, and contributes to the media companies. And recently passed laws for all media companies to be licensed. And of course decided to deny said license to one of his strongest critics, Rebel News. Which I don't much care to watch, but I do on occasion do watch RT do get a different perspective. Just yesterday I found out that RT was blocked on youtube and removed from cable. Just crazy to me that a government thinks it has a right to decide which news organizations I'm allowed to view.
This meme about first world countries not valuing freedom and freespeach while people from formerly authoritarian place understand it better if common on HN.
But meanwhile, first world countries are significantly less likely to slip into full on authoritarianism and generally do better in that regards.
> Coming from a country that had made a transition from a (rather messy) democracy to an authoritarian fascist police state in just 15 years, I tell you this: it all started with limits on the freedom of speech.
Was this the government restricting speech, or private enterprise?
free speech as an american concept does not cover private businesses, it's specifically meant to curb government censorship
if private businesses had to uphold the same standards the internet would very quickly devolve into every space becoming 4chan... you'd see people protesting inside of stores, it would be a mess
maybe there's a call to make a platform like twitter a public utility, that would possibly solve it, but what a thorny situation that would be... I imagine the rules would likely be more restrictive than they are now, despite censorship laws. I'd guess they'd want to strip anonymity as well.
> Sometimes even coming to such views as "free speech is dangerous" and that "we should limit free speech" (by blocking the views I don't like).
This is such an oversimplification that it verges on being a straw man argument.
You talk about authoritarian take-overs. Your problem wasn’t limitations on free speech. It was that people who didn’t care about laws got into positions of power, and enough people in that country didn’t care enough when the law was ignored.
Authoritarians don’t care about precedents or laws. If a law is causing them problems they’ll change it. It happens all the time. And an ignorant or misinformed population can be easily distracted with red herrings like xenophobia and homophobia.
There’s been a rise in fringe extremists in the US. Many of them are ardent supporters of Donald Trump, who benefitted tremendously from the megaphone that Twitter provided, a company that isn’t even 20 years old and yet has come to represent freedom of speech somehow and arguably helped him get elected. This is the same man who launched an all out attack on elections, one of the tenets of the democracy; a man who also threatened to cut off access to White House press briefings to any news channel that attacked him; a man who sent the police on peaceful protesters in DC just so he could do a photo-op. All of those are serious attacks on democracy, and he has faced zero consequences, Twitter or no Twitter. Why? Because his zealot supporters are too busy trying to ban books, limiting abortion and bringing back an LGBT rights as a major political topic to care.
Extremism is dangerous too. Electing people who don’t care about the law is dangerous. Once those are allowed to fester and take over, democracy is already in grave danger and laws or precedents won’t provide much help.
We already have limitations on free speech in the "first world".
Ask somebody involved in a merger how "free" their speech is.
Or somebody involved in a court case.
At issue is what we choose to protect from harmful lies.
Wealthy people with good access to lawyers can sue for defamation. A courtroom is protected by perjury laws. Business is protected from fraud.
And yet the tools to fight the COVID pandemic are beneath protection? Minorities are beneath protection?
Look at the Americans -- half the country still thinks the election was stolen, and the only people facing consequences for that are the ones who lied about Dominion Voting Solutions because there a business had standing to show damages.
Free speech online has been tried, the end result is 4chan, which gave way to Qanon. When fascism takes hold in the first world, it will be "free speech" without any protection of truth that ushered it there.
This is quite patronizing to people in "first world" countries.
If there is no limit to free speech is it not possible that lies and falsehoods are so potent that spreading them leads to an authoritarian fascist police state?
There is a line that has to be drawn, for me it is solidly on the free-speech end of the scale, but absolutely not "unlimited".
I hope enough people will recognize when an idea is moving a society from democracy to autocracy and in this case all options to stop the autocrat should be used, including shutting down their ideas.
Trump walked very close to the line with his big lie on the legitimacy of the last US presidential election.
The irony is that Elon Musk is who calls himself a free speech fundamentalist has been quite happy to silence people's speech if it didn't suit him. Similarly all the people calling out twitter for violating free speech never complained that protesters were thrown out of Trump rallies or that he called for beating them up.
I do believe that there need to be limits on free speech and we also need to have means of equalising speech because otherwise we end up in the situation that the person with the loudest voice (the biggest resources) can say whatever they want and nobody else gets heard.
Do you remember why Trump was banned on twitter? He was using his social media presence as part of a plan to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, and he was banned from both Twitter and Facebook after the U.S. Capitol building was essentially sacked due to these efforts. That sounds pretty dangerous to me.
He, and others like him, never lost their right to free speech. Nothing stops them from creating their own website (which he has), or saying anything they want on the numerous platforms that do support them. They just lost access to social media platforms which by gamified design make spreading information (and misinformation) to the masses incredibly easy, so easy that a group of people were actually convinced that they had a mandate to attack the capitol to stop a cabal of pedophiles from stealing the 2020 election, a mandate from a president who at any time was going to unleash a flurry of indictments that would expose and jail the leaders of the Democratic Party.
I don't know what the right answer is, but January 6th was an event that proved that something was truly out of control. The 1st amendment is not going anywhere, but I do support efforts to make it at least a little harder, or rather not so ridiculously easy, to spread lies that can ravage a country's democratic processes. I know that sounds anti-free speech, but again, the U.S. Capitol was sacked by a group of people inspired by lies on social media, and I think we need to acknowledge we live in a new world because of that.
> Do you remember why Trump was banned on twitter?
I remember Trump being suppressed for many months on Twitter, his tweets censored, labelled as misinformation, and information damaging to his opponent was suppressed and labelled as 'disinformation'. By now, many of those claims have been proven to be false.
People cheering Trump's ban never ask themselves a question, what if this was a candidate they supported? They somehow magically think that no, they'll never be supporting such a horrible bad person so that the benevolent Twitter overlords would have to suppress. Yeah, that is absolutely impossible. Right. /s
> I remember Trump being suppressed for many months on Twitter, his tweets censored, labelled as misinformation, and information damaging to his opponent was suppressed and labelled as 'disinformation'. By now, many of those claims have been proven to be false.
Can you give a single example of a true statement being suppressed?
In some places it's not the capitol getting sacked but villages of families of a certain ethnicity. All because someone knew which button to push and had that ability to amplify it in social media.
"Free speech absolutism"? Sounds more to me like ignorance that there are literally teams of data science monitoring social coordinated inauthentic behavior to nip mob violence in the bud. No I don't want Elon Musk anywhere near them.
Our entire legal system rests on the (rather obvious) principle of hearing both sides in order to find the truth, but the brain rot has somehow progressed to the point where in the media this is considered some sort of fallacy (“both-sidesism”). Lots of people want to appoint some sort of information gatekeeper, with no anticipation that one day the gatekeepers might turn against you.
We must stop free speech! I am against Musk's actions - he will end up letting people speak. Saying what you want is too dangerous! When guests speak at colleges scream and yell! We must fight for no free speech!!! I beg you our democracy[1] is at stake! Ban all free thinking discussions!
[1] democracy is a system that only works if everyone thinks the same.
Classic situation where "Only a Sith Deals in Absolutes".
In practice, there is a tension. Absolute free speech is not necessarily safe - the Weimar Republic was a time of unprecedented freedom of expression and it ended badly. The freedom paradox is real: too much freedom can result in the death of freedom, by tolerating anti-freedom movements enough for them to snowball.
Also, you shouldn't assume that these "practical limits" on free speech are new, particularly for the US. In the second postwar period, airing leftist views often resulted in people being put under invasive surveillance - or worse.
There is always a tension in practice, and it's about finding an acceptable set of compromises. Germany is free but you can't print Hitler's works there, and that's just fine.
Most of the case, "different views" are not different; simply, they are just wrong ones. When people says "limit free speech", it's intended to limit these. Liberalism is meaningless without under democratic control.
I would guess the parent intended to convey that Russia weaponizes free speech in the US via troll farms/etc for foreign influence, not that they have it domestically?
Seems like my point has gone right over everyone's head who answered...
How well has what Russia done worked? Like how loved is Russia right now in the west? How many people agree with it?
(sidenote: the russia brexit involvement has been 100% disproven. The Trump russia thing has been 100% disproven. The hunter biden laptop was not russian disinformation)
Russia has free speech in that, until very recently, they were allowed to spew their fake news propaganda in Western countries through outlets like RT, Sputnik, Zero Hedge (that one's still on), etc. etc.
Maybe nobody who greenlighted the licenses to those channels could believe that there are enough idiots domestically who would not recognize it as lies and propaganda? As recent history has proven, there are always enough idiots to believe anything.
If you have absolute free speech, you'll have to allow the media of other countries (China, NK, Russia, who have you) to disseminate propaganda to your citizens until something like Jan. 6th happens.
Russia has been using sock puppet accounts to spread manipulative propaganda throughout western democracies for over two decades. They’ve been especially effective in the last ten years. Their goal of fomenting grievances among the factions within democracies, combined with a global refugee crisis they helped create in Syria has resulted in the rise of authoritarian leaders within over a dozen countries.
In other words, the Russian regimes free speech has given rise to authoritarians who would in all likelihood, limit free speech in other countries if or when they rise to power.
Not just the rise of authoritarian leaders, but promoting both extreme left and extreme right political opinions leading to questioning the legitimacy of democratically elected leaders and the destabilization of free societies.
Limits on free speech by government is dangerous. Private companies enforcing rules you have agreed to when you became a member, is something completely different.
There’s a difference between free speech and access to global loudspeaker. You don’t have freedom to get maximum engagement.
Twitter and Facebook are dangerous because they allow anything that gets them money. Political campaigns and foreign influence campaigns wield armies of bots to spew bullshit.
People of more libertarian bent tend to focus on some idealized vision of free speech. When those platforms enable fascists to overthrow democratic governments, you’ve won the battle and lost the war.
I don't agree with Twitter's moderation, but how exactly are we losing the freedom of speech?
Whiners are free to demand companies to boycott Twitter ads when they see a tweet they don't like. The companies are free to stop buying ads from Twitter. Twitter is free to appease these whiners by moderating speech the way they want it, so they don't lose out on revenue. Elon Musk is free to disagree with that business strategy and buy 10% of Twitter.
Twitter and freedom of speech are unrelated topics. You don't understand freedom of speech. I can literally censor you in public and that has nothing to do with freedom of speech. Also, tell Rwandans spreading propaganda is better than not being able to say what you want (genocide and all).
> Understand this: limits on free speech are far more dangerous to society than allowing fringe extremists to spread their ideas.
Germany has had such a policy regarding holocaust denial for decades, and they don’t appear to be on the verge of tyranny to me. It’s not as black and white as you make it out to be.
This is 100% true - but giving algos & bots the ability to spread disinformation on your network at low-cost and gaming networks to make it seem legit is what is dangerous.
From a Twitter / YouTube / Facebook standpoint - it's easier to just block bad content than fix the above problem.
Russia never had fundaments for democracy, its democracy was a facade and still is, all state controlled media were brain washing society from the 90s, there is no rule of law for you in Russia if you are against someone from the party or local government.
As an independence supporting Scot, I'm not much of a fan of the UK "state media" but even I can recognize that the BBC is no Rossiya. So that's who I name. UK.
From observing various internet forums, including this one, I noticed that people from the "first world" countries think Elon Musk actually cares about freedom of speech and isn’t just a bored billionaire throwing his weight around.
Your personal story might colour your preference here. I still think the Western European model of "Free Speech with consequences" is the best one around.
If you have a huge following and use Twitter to say without evidence "restaurant xyz uses rat meat don't go eat there, or 'Tim Cook has AIDS and will die in 3 months'", then that would be protected by free speech like the right-wingers want it.
But in the Western European model, you could be sued for making those claims and effectively hurting the restaurant, Tim Cook, and the Apple stock price.
I'd rather live in a society where that's not possible without dire consequences for the fraudulent "free speech" abuser.
There need to be equal repercussions for fraudulently claiming abuse, too. Search SLAPP to learn more about the current lack of repercussions against wealthy entities suing journalists.
SLAPP may be too strong but I don’t think it’s an unreasonable position that libel rights be enforceable at reasonable levels of financial risk. Some lawsuits are lost on technicalities and missing a technicality shouldn’t force someone to pay not only their own legal bills but also the journalist’s. There should be a very high bar for having to pay someone else’s legal fees, especially in situations where a publisher can use disproportionate resources in representation. The NYT is likely to spend over 10x on their defence as I spend on my case if they libel me. Do we want the financial bar to being able to defend oneself to raise by an order of magnitude?
Most laws are subjectively applied. That's what happens in societies made of men with opinions and not made of robots, always has been, always will be, the case of free speech isn't an exception
I have no idea how Europe handles libel, but it's interesting how Singapore uses it. The Prime Minister regularly sues people who accuse him of corruption. Most of it is deserved, but the requirements for libel are so low that conviction is more likely than not.
Interestingly, if fined more than $2,000 (most libel fines are in $100,000's), you are no longer able to hold political office in Singapore. That's also true in the UK (no idea the threshold - I think it's a prison term?).
I agree with the sentiment, but only because the government restrictions on speech are tested in courtrooms that have at least some degree of impartiality and transparency.
The problem with "Free Speech with consequences" arises when the consequences are increasingly policed by private corporations. Yes, host your own web server etc etc etc, but in reality, Twitter and Facebook really are the new town square.
> f you have a huge following and use Twitter to say without evidence "restaurant xyz uses rat meat don't go eat there, or 'Tim Cook has AIDS and will die in 3 months'", then that would be protected by free speech like the right-wingers want it.
ridiculous strawman. thats called defamation and you will be sued everywhere for it.
Perhaps "free speech absolutism" isn't quite the right framing here, but more "First Amendment absolutism," with all the known bounds and checks (defamation, libel, incitement to violence). It does give a US-centric bias, but may better convey the meaning and intent.
"Go lynch this man" is speech, but is not protected under the First Amendment. And the First Amendment gives much broader protection than most countries' legal systems do.
I believe you can sue anyone for anything. I don't think anything happened except people wasted time. There were no outright consequences for calling someone "pedo guy". The threat of law suits has certainly not bothered Alex Jones much.
You've got more free speech if you've got more money.
Also understand this: Free Speech Absolutism is as stupid as any other form of absolutism.
Absolutism, almost without exception, is an oversimplification. It's easy and facile to defend, but also wrong, in that absolutism by definition ignores all edge cases.
And some of those edge cases can have extremely severe consequences, effectively crashing the system and killing large numbers of people.
YES — the constraints on the ways in which govt can limit free speech should themselves be extremely constrained, precisely because the dangers of government constraints rapidly escalate.
Yet the dangers of disinformation, algorithmically amplified to maximize 'engagement' are also to the level where the system can be crashed and result in mass killings.
The effects of both can be seen from Russia this week. Their massive disinformation campaigns and combined with effective near-total suppression of free speech has 60% to 80% support and almost total suppression of dissent [0][1]. The result here is hundreds of millions of people supporting a genocide in their neighboring country.
Yet completely free access to all media, and not only speech but amplified media platforms can also bring down democracies. The spread of Russian disinformation specifically to increase polarization in democracies is working. It already converted Hungary to an authoritarian state, and France is now very close to falling to an authoritarian party...
The ability to deliberately manipulate the public conversation with tens of thousands of fake accounts is not free speech, it is freely amplified lies [2].
The real problem is that if free speech is converted to free amplification of whatever disinformation any authoritarian state thinks is in its interest, the result will be not more free speech, but the end of democracy and imposition of a far tighter regime on free speech.
Again, look at Hungary - they had an open democracy, and free speech resulted in divisions, and an authoritarian took over. Now, free speech is severely curtailed in order to keep the authoritarian in power.
Is the solution to curtail free speech at the outset? Maybe a little, something like the old Equal Time requirements for broadcast TV, or on social media, accurate identification of the source.
Probably more important and effective than curtailing free speech is to actively and in real-time counter the disinformation. This actually worked in the Ukraine war, as Russian disinformation efforts were countered and called out as the lies that they were within hours, which denied the Russians the cover they had when such pretexts went unchallenged in 2014 as Crimea was invaded.
So, yes speech must be biased very strongly towards the FREE end, but requiring a private platform to amplify any particular speech is just as un-free. If you want an amplified platform for your views that most consider abhorrent, you are FREE to make your own competing platform.
> The effects of both can be seen from Russia this week. Their massive disinformation campaigns and combined with effective near-total suppression of free speech has 60% to 80%
So your first example that springs to mind to prove the simplistic and facile nature of free speech absolutism is a disinformation campaign that expressly rests on the extensive control of free speech within a certain information venue in order to promote that disinformation? How does this make any sense whatsoever?
> It already converted Hungary to an authoritarian state, and France is now very close to falling to an authoritarian party...
And what, exactly, is the information which is not being censored which has resulted in what you claim are objectionable and dangerous results in Hungary and France?
> The ability to deliberately manipulate the public conversation with tens of thousands of fake accounts is not free speech, it is freely amplified lies [2].
So why equate it with free speech aside from to assemble a strawman which you then proceed to knockdown to make your case after just emphasizing yourself they're two different things.
What?
> requiring a private platform to amplify any particular speech is just as un-free.
Is that actually being proposed? Because I haven't seen anything like that?
> you are FREE to make your own competing platform.
This is observably false based on what happened to Parler and Gab. The truth of the matter is that big tech is very hostile to competition and will to the extent they are able outright forbid it. The only way to actually build competitive platforms that do not push their ideological agenda and circumvent their attempts to stop you is to do what Odysee has done, and even there, they're fighting a case against the SEC as we speak, so it's not like they're being left to simply go about their business.
To put an even finer point on it, you'll never ever see Xi or Putin say "I'm a free speech absolutist" or "let's have less censorship".
That so many people are taking the position of authoritarians, but presenting it as though they are protecting democracy, is truly baffling to behold. Elon removing these authoritarians from twitter's leadership and employee base, and restoring free speech principles, will be the best thing we've seen for democracy in a long time.
You’ll also never see them say “I’m a freedom from property rights absolutist” as in no state or private ownership but that doesn’t mean anything either. Dictators not going to say “xyz” doesn’t really have any bearing on the merits of xyz, and that doesn’t even get into how dictators are loose with the truth and often will lie about “I’m for xyz” while violating the spirit of xyz. So in other words, what a dictator says is pretty irrelevant.
In a way we're fortunate that the descent down the slippery slope happened far faster than we could have imagined. We went from "we'll only use these powers to censor the flat earthers" to country's major social media companies blacking out a damaging story about the former Vice President's son moments before the highest turnout election in American history: https://www.npr.org/2022/04/09/1091859822/more-details-emerg....
The basic problem with the notion of "censoring misinformation" and even "fact checking" is that the "flat earth" stuff isn't really what anyone cares about. It's the debatable stuff that people have the desire and incentive to censor. That's always the way it works out.
France bans most election coverage just before the election. It’s to prevent misinformation from coming in at the last moment without an opportunity to verify or properly understand it.
I mean thats a bit different from just blacking out anything that makes the Democrats look bad - which is whats currently happening on US Social Media platforms
Why do you think multi-million dollar tax paying enterprises are acting in a way that guarantees higher taxation, policies more hostile to business, and, more oversight? What do you think they stand to gain from this?
Besides, I suppose, emphatically opposing the alternative? Could this be it? Perhaps the alternative side is somehow bad for their business?
I strongly feel this is would explain what you claim to see, something I do not.
What I actually see is that coercion is at the root of your philosophy. Your arguments, demand that you have freedom of action at the expense of others. Your issue is that you are unable to compel compliance. Unsurprising since that concept is at the root of your ideology. Quite transparently, and distastefully so.
So you're against any limits on speech whatsoever, including the proverbial "shouting Fire! in a crowded theater" and inciting an angry mob to lynch their victim?
I expect that many of the people who used to say private companies can set policies and ban at their pleasure will begin to realize this is a bad policy and only serves to establish an echo chamber rather than a free exchange of ideas.
Of course that whole argument was a ruse and I believe that was hypocrisy that will get naturally exposed.
Amazing that anyone would think that the kinds of things that actually get moderated-out would have somehow enriched discourse — as if humanity doesn't have more productive things about which to amicably disagree.
So discussing the Hunter Biden laptop and whether or not the Steele dossier was a hit job by Hillary and co., whether some Covid policies made sense or not, whether it's fair or not that people who grew up as boys or men and take hormone treatment as they transition to females are fair in competing against biologically female athletes are all outside enriching discourse? The above is not to take sides, but rather allow discussion to find what makes sense. At times any of the above were taboo subjects.
Imagine some ideologue on the other extreme of the political spectrum were to take over (Musk is in my view, mildly libertarian) and suppressed talk about abortion rights, gender equality, police violence, drug liberalization, etc. That's what the extreme left is doing but obviously they have their own, different sacred cows.
I have good news for you: there is still a veritable cornucopia of tweets about Hunter's laptop, and the Steele dossier, and COVID policies, and trans folk as athletes out there. I see them every damned day with my own eyes. While there have been a few people who violated the ToS while pushing those agendas, it's hard to argue that anything of real value was lost during its enforcement.
Yes, yes… Long after it’s useful use by date. Maybe they’ll provide the same courtesy to the other sides too.
What, Boris Johnson attended a party during Covid… hush!!! Trump talked to Putin. No, no, we can’t prove it’s true. Let’s wait till it all boils over and it becomes irrelevant then you can talk.
Like I said, the discussions you're referring to are still out there. They're still happening — right now, as we speak. You're free to go join in on them. Nothing is stopping the vast majority of people who are talking about these things. Most such users, turns out, do not violate the terms of service.
Ok, why were the NYPost articles blocked? Why were articled related to Covid blocked and people deplatformed not for lying, but just opening questions?
If the owners of a web site do something with their own site that I don't agree with, I tend to just not go there. Beyond that, I don't care. It's not "the public square", and they're not the government. Point your browser somewhere else, maybe. Take some personal responsibility over how you vote with your attention instead of trying so hard to make yourself a victim.
I am not a victim, however, news, truthfulness and openness are victims. There are instances where you can't post reasonably certain events, not to mention verifiable facts, if they are counter narrative, but you can post unverified or very suspect information, if it follows a preferred narrative --that should be of concern.
What is the purpose or turning #bidenflation to #inflation on Twitter?
> Free speech absolutism is possible and is beneficial
I don't think we have evidence to support this. Pursuant to the last major thread on the topic, I was thinking further about it, and realized that the vast majority of progress civilization has made has been under conditions much more regulated in terms of which ideas may propagate. We've never had a situation where fake news can and does spread the way it does today, where authorities are being undermined like this and casually dismissed by people with no knowledge of the respective fields, etc.
The notion that all speech should be allowed actually seems stupid to me on its face, the more that I consider it.
> ..the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth produced by its collision with error.
John Stuart Mill was wrong. It is absolutely possible to convince someone who holds a correct opinion that their opinion is wrong.
This is a major blind spot of otherwise intelligent, thinking people: they believe that once a person is presented with the truth, it magically reveals itself to them as the superior piece of knowledge and the scales suddenly fall from their eyes. It's utter nonsense, and people don't work this way.
*Edit: To my replies, I'm addressing an epistemological assumption with this particular comment, not making a broader judgement one way or the other about Twitter's handling of speech. I don't care about Hunter Biden or whatever pet issue you have with the media.
“Correct” opinion, is also subjective. Someone thought let’s say the hunter biden laptop story was true at first, then someone convinced them it was wrong, because of censure.
And maybe that opinion was “wrong” because it didn’t promote some agenda or worldview that the majority hold.
What is true, and what is correct aren’t always the same thing.
And do you think an environment where undesirable ideas are suppressed would be conducive to believers changing their minds? Or do you think maybe those ideas would become further entrenched and evolve into QAnon and vaccine microchip theory?
Mill is one of my favorite philosophers, but his ideas on free speech need to be updated due to the internet. The amount of power technology gives us would have been inconceivable to him. There's no doubt in my mind the On Liberty would be a completely different book if he published it today.
The Taiping Rebellion in Qing China between 1850 and 1864. It was started by a man called Hong Xiuquan who failed his mandarin examinations, fell into a psychosis of some kind, and came to believe he was the brother of Jesus. The cult he started was wildly successful and turned an entire province into a cultist theocracy before being quashed by the Qing.
As many as 15% of Americans may hold QAnon beliefs [1]. Where is the evidence that "the opportunity of exchanging error for truth" is actually being seized?
It's all very well making an argument from principle, but if the real-world outcome is tens of millions of people believing absurd and dangerous conspiracy theories, I don't find the argument from principle very persuasive.
The evidence is that it's only 15%. Free speech doesn't guarantee everyone will have right beliefs. In fact, it's a certainly that in a free speech environment lots of people will have crazy beliefs.
Free speech does, however, guarantee that no one group can control which ideas—crazy or not—can be expressed. And that, in the long run, ensures that there will be space to push back against the crazy and the harmful, which tends to be good for the less powerful.
What would a non-flawed plan look like? One that results in everyone having "correct" beliefs? I'm pretty sure it would be a great deal worse than what we have now.
Nuking social media from orbit would be a good start. Any platform where what content you're shown is primarily driven by an algorithm is very suspect.
Furthermore, in the grand scheme humans beliefs being 'right' or 'wrong', people today probably have far more 'right' beliefs than ever during history. Conspiracy theories and wrong beliefs have been more prevalent in the past than today.
As usual the NYT tells half the story to advance an agenda. Ten years ago you coulda asked about Area 51 conspiracies and gotten the exact same response rates.
If you ask leading questions you’ll get the answers you’re looking for. The poll is bad and the data is meaningless if you’re trying to find out what people think. However if you’re trying to push a specific agenda, and convince a large part of the other 85% that many “others” are crazy and need to be “re-educated”well then it’s a very useful poll.
Yes, it shows that we're ok with people making their own decisions no matter how deluded, trying to pretend that this is some new phenomenon that is threatening the republic is hyperbole.
"Humans are mammals, so they are mostly either male or female" misinformation or opinion?
"Israel is an apartheid state, even one of its former ministers said this" misinformation or opinion?
"Government-funded groups like Hasbara Fellowships and CAMERA make up an operation to spread propaganda and influence our elections" misinformation or opinion?
And who should decide one or the other? If you have the names of any experts we should appoint at Twitter, Facebook etc, it would be great to know.
My point is that Twitter or Facebook or whoever can exercise their own free speech to not propagate what you say, whether that be for the reason of “misinformation” or for the reason “contains the letter X”.
I agree, but I think they should lose legal protection for the content on their platform, because they've demonstrated the ability to moderate it. They should be legally liable for the spread of hate speech, financial scams, etc.
Lost money on a bitcoin scam on twitter? They exercised their free speech to display that scam, and should be liable for it.
Anti semitism or other hate speech? Guess who chose to publish it - Twitter.
Problem solved. Be a publisher or be platform. Be both, eat liability nobody else has special exceptions for.
but either way that's all a distraction from the original point, which is that the line between misinformation and being mistaken, or misinformation or truth, is arbitrary nonsense from politically active groups working to push their agendas, not anything related to truth.
Regarding the tangent, this sort of argument is exactly why 230 of the Communications Decency Act was enacted; court cases proved that, if a forum moderated their content (including profanity, hate speech, etc), they'd be open to all civil liability[0], while if they decided to moderate absolutely nothing they wouldn't be liable for the content the users posted[1]. This meant that companies either had to screen _everything_ by human review to ensure it wouldn't introduce undue civil liability, if they also wanted to moderate things like profanity, pornography, hate speech, etc. Congress didn't want this to be the internet of the future, so they passed section 230 to enable any service provider to moderate content for certain rules without being directly liable for all the civil crimes and torts users post on their service.
Safe to say that making them choose either extreme will lead to the eradication of social media as we know it, as there's no way Twitter or Facebook would let people post if doing so would require them to 100x their legal team to deal with all of the new lawsuits they're directly liable for.
>Safe to say that making them choose either extreme will lead to the eradication of social media as we know it
This is by far the best possible result. I don't care about social media, I care that some companies have been handed special dispensation against liability that no other publisher gets, strictly to create a service that isn't necessary, and when they've demonstrated they can arbitrarily remove any content they want already.
Let them close. The people who care about social media as it exists in the status quo are advertisers looking to build profiles on people who have no idea how much information they're leaking through the apps often pre installed on their phones.
Let them choose to be publisher or platform, and reap the rewards and consequences their choice brings, instead of creating this special class of companies who control speech but are immune from lawsuits. They and the legal position they've been given are a cancer on society.
“Misinformation” is being used as a cudgel to suppress opinions or even facts that are, say - inconvenient - for someone’s narrative though.
Completely reasonable differences in opinion about the risk, origin, or proper mitigation of COVID were blasted as “misinformation” before they were eventually accepted by the wider establishment. The initial rush to completely censor such discussion early on is what caused all this free speech ruckus.
There’s always been nutty conspiracy talk, scams, hoaxes, lies, ignorance - especially on the internet - and we’ve learned to filter it out.
The “misinformation” label is going to backfire, though. Instead of ignoring it, people are going to take a closer look, because there’s probably something there that the labeler finds inconvenient. If it was simply untrue, then say so, call it “not true” or a “lie.”
Instead, “misinformation” is this kind of 1984-ish weasel word used to discredit inconvenient facts while maintaining plausible deniability when they turn out to be correct.
> Instead, “misinformation” is this kind of 1984-ish weasel word used to discredit inconvenient facts while maintaining plausible deniability when they turn out to be correct.
This is so well stated I’ve saved it with attribution for future reference and quoting.
You’ve hit the crux of the problem people today have with society at large. It truly feels like we’re living in the on ramp to one of the dystopian novels from our youth, 1984, the giver, etc. Large swaths of society see nothing wrong with controlling people’s thought.
As someone that was always very skeptical of the claimed effectiveness of the vaccine, despite the claims of its effectiveness by the experts at the time from both administrations. I feel vindicated when real world numbers come out like this.
Page 3, showing the unvaccinated testing at a much lower rate for covid than the double or triple vaccinated despite being forced to take a lot more tests.
I just assume it's easier to claim success than to actually achieve it. I also took a few stat courses at university, and saw problems with claims being made at that time. So I opted to wait. Now I'm glad I did.
Did you see their response on page 5? I'm skeptical like you generally but I find it a believable explanation.
"All results, including the positivity rates by vaccination status graph, are unadjusted. The team has observed that the positivity rates among unvaccinated individuals seen on the bar graph appear to be lower in comparison to vaccinated individuals. Furthermore, repeat testing among those who were previously positive in the last 90 days appear to confound the results. The team conducted additional analyses examining characteristics of the patient population by vaccination status and the impact of excluding recent COVID-19 cases (5.0% of total tests). Findings show that the unvaccinated group are typically younger and healthier, less symptomatic and less likely to report direct COVID-19 exposure or recent travel compared to vaccinated groups. Controlling for recent COVID-19 cases, results show that the unvaccinated group has a 17.1% higher positivity rate compared to the 3-dose group. Controlling for additional factors leads to a larger difference between groups."
Without a paper to show on how exactly they controlled for this difference its neither here nor there.
"Findings show that the unvaccinated group are typically younger and healthier, less symptomatic and less likely to report direct COVID-19 exposure or recent travel compared to vaccinated groups."
This just seems to be adjusting results until it fits your hypothesis. Release a a paper on the adjustments and lets see if it will withstand scrutiny.
Even without more details, I can already see some logical flaws here in the way they penalize the unvaccinated population.
They admit the unvaccinated are healthier and less likely to get sick, and adjust. Now the problem with this is they completely ignore the possibility they are healthier, because they did not take the vaccine.
They also discard recent results...why?
Also notice how they break down the into sub groups of the vaccinated into 5 months and over 5 months. This makes it seem closer than it really is. If you don't do that, you get
even a wider gap:
It could easily be that unvaccinated people are more likely to get a test when they have no symptoms but did have an exposure, because they know C19 has worse outcomes when unvaccinated.
Or, as you say - they are tested more often, routinely, without symptoms or exposures because of their status.
I'd say both are more likely explanations than the vaccine makes people more likely to contract covid, which appears to be what you're suggesting.
Well except. Take two groups, A and B. If A tests more often, then the accuracy of the results are more accurate, because you have more data points confirming the results and are more likely to count all the positive cases during the 10 day window when someone might test positive.
This is not a trivial difference either. The triple Vaccinated are 3 times more likely to test positive now, according to the Walgreens results, despite that group going in for testing at much lower rates.
Are there some circumstances under which we might see this pattern, sure.
But there are also some circumstances on the other side of the argument like Marek's disease that lead to the disease evolving to target the vaccinated.
Anyway, we went from expert claims of vaccine being 98% effective at preventing covid, to what now? hoping they will get the same infection rate as the unvaccinated. You have to admit the standards keep dropping.
Now this doesn't even consider the economic damage done by the lockdowns. That same Walgreens is running out of baby formula. It was a mainstream story just a day ago.
Also, Ontario is showing the same pattern. Though it over counts the unvaccinated in all categories, by including those that received a single dose, and those getting sick within 14 days.
Seems like more is being found out about covid, and so things which were thought early, turned out to have more nuance to them. Vaxxed people absolutely don't get hit as hard by covid, therefore requiring far less expensive hospital care. Since we all pay for this, this seems a reasonable thing to do.
What is not reasonable is me trusting YOU, someone who's arguments, seem somewhat ... unconvincing, about the severity of the covid infection you would spread to me without a care.
As for your babies, supply chain issues coincided with covid, they are not caused by it. Please research the issue, you will see.
Why not take a trip to a hospital and ask the staff what they see and think? Oh, and a mortuary, see what they are seeing.
> The notion that all speech should be allowed actually seems stupid to me on its face, the more that I consider it.
I couldn't agree more. I motion that we ban your speech immediately from this moment forward ;)
Kidding aside, you've set up a false dichotomy. While absolute free speech itself (holocaust denial, etc.) is absurd, history shows that you can either have absolute free speech or you have censor authorities abusing their powers for political gains. In the real world those are your only two options.
> In the real world those are your only two options.
This is completely ahistorical. For most of human history, across time and space, the reality on the ground has been some mixture of free speech and some limits on speech.
Of course, if you're an absolutist who insists that if there is ANY limit on speech, then there is no freedom of speech, then sure, there's only two choices. Very, very few humans that have ever lived view the world in this way.
You've set up your own false dichotomy, and have done it in literally the next sentence after accusing someone else of doing the same. Amazing.
The situation is nuanced. It's not black and white–it's not easy. There is some balance to be struck on free speech. Some speech should be protected (dissent against the government), some should be forbidden (inciting a riot), and it's a thorny ever evolving problem to figure out what exactly defines those terms.
I'm not sure it is a _false_ dichotomy though. GP is basically saying there are two options.
1. Absolute free speech
2. People who have the power to censor, and abuse it
You're basically just adding a third option
3. People who have the power to censor, and don't abuse it.
I think many people would argue that #3 is impossible, and an unachievable ideal. At the very least, nobody is ever going to be able to agree that power isn't being abused in #3. In which case, GP's original 2 options are not a false dichotomy, and are simply the reality of the situation.
>I think many people would argue that #3 is impossible, and an unachievable ideal. At the very least, nobody is ever going to be able to agree that power isn't being abused in #3. In which case, GP's original 2 options are not a false dichotomy, and are simply the reality of the situation.
I think many people would argue that #3 is not impossible, or an unachievable ideal. At the very least, nobody is ever going to be able to agree power is always being abused in #2. In which case, GP's original 2 options are indeed a false dichotomy, rather than the reality of the situation.
Wouldn't the very situation of a platform like Twitter censoring or moderating the speech on the platform represent a kind of middle-ground?
It's a private company, and one can start another one that caters to a different crowd (see Parler or w/e). The government is in no position to stop that, and nobody in this thread is arguing they be given such power.
As far as truly public spaces go, the law still allows all speech. Government can't stop someone from voicing their opinion at a public meeting based on content, etc. Even if it's Covid misinformation or something.
You have not demonstrated a false dichotomy. Even inciting a riot doesn't have to be forbidden. Rioting itself is the problem, not talking about rioting.
We may decide it's better to not allow rioting speech, but that doesn't make it a false dichotomy.
It's not quite that simple - not only can absolute free speech be absurd (a condition I don't really care about to be honest, untruth will always be prevalent), but it can be actively dangerous: free speech can include terrorist radicalisation, trying to convince people to join perform suicide bombings or shoot up churches. Much of the far right radicalisation in recent years has occurred in Internet forums.
That's not to say that the answer is obvious, but the current setup that we have where only the most egregious speech and harassment is explicitly banned and social norms are enforced by social pressure seems to work. I think a lot of people advocating for free speech are ambiguous as to whether they're arguing against explicit censorship or against social pressure, which can obscure the conversation.
"Terrorist radicalization" is a nonsense buzzword cultivated by warmongers and governments trying to manufacture consent for oppression.
Terrorists are radicalized by material conditions, the speech that is claimed to radicalize them is part of the process but it is not causal. Western imperialism created ISIS, not a handful of bloggers who are mad about it.
Do you think if you read ISIS propaganda you'd feel compelled to join, or is the speech itself not the primary factor in radicalization?
I agree 100%, material conditions are the initial cause, but that outside the affected area that simply causes disaffection - terrorist propaganda directs that disaffection towards killing civilians. Given that far right radicals are created by the material conditions of late capitalism and misdirected towards hating minorities by propaganda, the only thing we can really do about that (aside from trying to change those conditions, which we should already be doing) is to try to avoid them being contacted by fascists looking to utilise their anger.
I think it's very strange that I see the same people defending one person's right to advise a present murderous regime on how to use cryptocurrency to get around sanctions and then advocate for jailing other people for voicing dumb opinions about historical murderous regimes.
> Pursuant to the last major thread on the topic, I was thinking further about it, and realized that the vast majority of progress civilization has made has been under conditions much more regulated in terms of which ideas may propagate. We've never had a situation where fake news can and does spread the way it does today, where authorities are being undermined like this and casually dismissed by people with no knowledge of the respective fields, etc.
I don’t think you have evidence to support this either. Really hard to say when progress in a civilization happens, and how it would be different if norms were different.
Just because historically speech has been controlled doesn’t mean anything. Slavery also was well accepted and “progressed” civilization, but most people don’t want slavery in the modern world.
I think you made a good point; to me the result is that we have to work off of where we are now and we are going, in the contemporary moment. And to me, that establishes even further that, at minimum, big platforms should be allowed and encouraged to moderate speech. The reason I say it strengthens that position is because a lot of the historical arguments fall away, leaving us with a world where free speech and the internet have permitted things like QAnon and anti-vaxxers to flourish.
> We've never had a situation where fake news can and does spread the way it does today, where authorities are being undermined like this and casually dismissed by people with no knowledge of the respective fields, etc.
If authorities were never “undermined” you would still be drinking cocaine, giving your kids cough syrup laced with heroin, spraying people with DDT, and also smoking the cigarette brand your doctor recommended.
early 14c., "to train or instruct in some specific subject," from Old French informer, enformer "instruct, teach" (13c.) and directly from Latin informare "to shape, give form to, delineate," figuratively "train, instruct, educate," from in- "into" (from PIE root *en "in") + formare "to form, shape," from forma "form" (see form (n.)). In early use also enform until c. 1600. Sense of "report facts or news, communicate information to" first recorded late 14c. Related: Informed; informing.
But what if authorities would never have been believed? If everyone just dumped their trash into the countryside, drove 120 mph in cities, gave a damn about building codes or safety measures?
If authorities were never “undermined” you would still be drinking cocaine, giving your kids cough syrup laced with heroin, spraying people with DDT, and also smoking the cigarette brand your doctor recommended.
> The notion that all speech should be allowed actually seems stupid to me on its face, the more that I consider it.
The logical conclusion of this is speech should be regulated. And if speech is regulated, the next question is by whom? Good luck trying to get people to agree on this and even more good luck having this not be abused by those in charge.
What you will end up with is a dictatorship like China and Russia.
There are bountiful examples of regulated speech in the modern world and yet the world isn't only China and Russia.
Speech is regulated right here on this platform, where you clearly have no qualms with participating. Speech is regulated in Germany, where it is outright illegal to express Nazi-sympathizing opinions or to deny the Holocaust. Speech is regulated in the US, where you cannot shout "fire" in a crowded theater or promote investments you haven't disclosed your stake in.
The government doesn't mandate beliefs. In this case, the government denies you a platform to spread particular beliefs. It's hard to argue that leaving holocaust denial out of the discourse is losing much of value.
It's something I believe isn't a slippery slope. We have ample evidence that denying a platform to limited sets of beliefs (e.g., Holocaust denial or Nazi sympathizing) does not quickly devolve to total censorship the likes of which we see in China and Russia, which was the original argument you made.
If you're backing down from that original assertion I'm happy to argue other aspects of this discussion, but I'm not going to chase you around in a circle while you keep re-framing the argument.
> We've never had a situation where fake news can and does spread the way it does today, where authorities are being undermined like this and casually dismissed by people with no knowledge of the respective fields, etc.
There have had situations where the authorities are the ones generating fake news, and they have also criminalized dissent or corrections. I view that situation as more threatening than the current one.
> We've never had a situation where fake news can and does spread the way it does today, where authorities are being undermined like this and casually dismissed by people with no knowledge of the respective fields, etc
Real authorities don't need society to defer to them as such. Their mastery over nature--the power of their ideas to deliver tangible outcomes--makes their authority undeniable.
It's the people whose expertise is of marginal real-world value who insist on deference to their "authority." At the limit, it's the clergy that insist on social norms to defend their claim to authority. Today, you'll find those sorts of folks mostly in the social sciences, insisting that their PhD in XYZ studies entitles them to speak authoritatively on issues of general concern: https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm.
They do have that authority. One of the reasons I left tech is precisely this attitude I see prevalent among engineers where they don't respect other peoples' areas of expertise.
Just because something is of general concern doesn't mean everyone is equal in terms of their mental models or knowledge of the issues.
"Knowledge" is not the same as "expertise" in the sense OP means above. Clergy go to school and have degrees and have deep knowledge in their field, but that doesn't mean that ordinary people owe them any deference on areas of general concern.
True authority automatically draws respect because it enables those experts to do things and explain things ordinary people cannot. It's not just engineers--it's carpenters, accountants, lawyers, doctors, electricians, mechanics, etc. If literacy rates were skyrocketing because of the work done by Doctorates in Education nobody would be making snarky comments about them.
> True authority automatically draws respect because it enables those experts to do things and explain things ordinary people cannot.
Taking a generous view of what you're saying ("authority gets as much respect as it merits in a kind of free market of ideas/actions"), I just think that's not true of contemporary Western culture at all. People denigrate authority all the time without any knowledge of the subject-matter. It's become a real problem in this culture.
I also don't know why you think authority and expertise need to be tied to "doing".
And, on both points, I can assure you lawyers can't "do" anything particularly interesting and also that what narrow expertise they do have is constantly denigrated--it definitely does not automatically draw anyone's respect lol. Often, they have a good knowledge of how law and government work, and also the reason why some laws are how they are. I see a lot of people denigrating and dismissing reasoned articulations of why some laws are x, why you can't automatically blame y government official for z outcome, etc. I find that people on the political fringes tend to really just totally ignore such things because they just want to blame (blame is a huge part of both progressivism and Trumpism). We have an adolescent culture.
> I just think that's not true of contemporary Western culture at all. People denigrate authority all the time without any knowledge of the subject-matter.
Not authority that delivers tangible results. Nobody is like "those aerospace engineers don't know what the heck they're doing."
> It's become a real problem in this culture.
I would say a worse problem is practitioners of non-rigorous fields demanding the deference accorded to rigorous fields. For example the recent kerfuffle in Virginia about parents versus "expert" teachers.
> I also don't know why you think authority and expertise need to be tied to "doing".
Because that's the only way to separate what's real from quackery and avoid recreating the clerical classes of yore.
> And, on both points, I can assure you lawyers can't "do" anything particularly interesting and also that what narrow expertise they do have is constantly denigrated--it definitely does not automatically draw anyone's respect lol.
At the end of the day, when the government knocks on their door, people call the most expensive lawyer they can afford. Yes, that expertise is narrow, just like a carpenter or electrician or a mechanic. But within their narrow expertise--writing briefs or making a case to a jury--they can deliver tangible results for their clients.
> I see a lot of people denigrating and dismissing reasoned articulations of why some laws are x, why you can't automatically blame y government official for z outcome, etc.
Which is great! It would be profoundly anti-democratic for lawyers to point to their credentials and say that someone makes them "experts" in fairness, justice, and governance. But that's exactly what you see people in non-rigorous fields doing. Teachers think that because they have expertise in how to teach Phonics, that means they should be broadly untrusted to decide what children should learn and how they should be socialized. Epidemiologists think they should be making calls on whether bars are more or less essential to society compared to churches.
Society has lots of debates about very important things: how to socialize children, what's fair and w hat's not fair, how to treat people who are different from the majority, how to make tradeoffs between safety and freedom, etc. You can't have a healthy society where these debates are being monopolized by people saying "do what I say because I have a PhD."
I agree it's a counterpoint, but I disagree it's fatal. I think they're an instance of "bad facts make bad law."
Vaccines are unusual in a few respects: (1) recently they've fallen into the generalized backlash against lockdowns; (2) by their nature the benefit is in the reduction of low probability events that people mis-estimate anyway; and (3) polling on the issue often conflates questions of science, such as do vaccines work, with questions of policy, such as whether they should be mandatory.
Your personal agreement with the opposing view notwithstanding, if a counterexample is true (OP posted a good one) then it is fatal to the rule it contradicts
so feel free to retract the now dead claim that "True authority automatically draws respect" (which itself is perfect example of a no true Scotsman fallacy)
Free speech absolutism doesn't mean you can get away with any crime just because it involved you saying something.
Even free speech absolutists agree that falsely yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theatre in order to cause a fatal stampede is (and should be) a criminal act. But the crime is not the utterance of the word. You could commit the same crime by setting off a fire alarm. In either case, the crime is in the action of tricking a group of people into stampeding.
Similarly, impersonating a police officer is illegal. You could do this by lying (telling a gullible person that you are a police officer), or by wearing a police uniform in public. The criminal action is tricking people into thinking you're a police officer, whether you do it with lies or clothes. Lying itself is not illegal, but a lie may constitute an action that is criminal.
> Even free speech absolutists agree that falsely yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theatre in order to cause a fatal stampede is (and should be) a criminal act.
Then they are not really 'absolutists'. Either you are free to speak or not. If you are considering something as criminal act and some other not then you are not 'free speech absolutists'. Words can have consequences yes, but you are here just arbitrary choosing which one can and which one can not have consequences.
John Stuart Mill is considered an absolutist and he invented the harm principal.
This is because shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater is not a free exchange of ideas, it’s enticement of injury.
Here’s the gist of it: “Mill argued that even any arguments which are used in justifying murder or rebellion against the government shouldn't be politically suppressed or socially persecuted. According to him, if rebellion is really necessary, people should rebel; if murder is truly proper, it should be allowed. However, the way to express those arguments should be a public speech or writing, not in a way that causes actual harm to others. Such is the harm principle: "That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others."”
It makes sense, but how can you possibly reconcile that with reality.
Reality is much more complex. The effects that have been sought through the manipulation of "free speech" on platforms like Twitter are so dangerous because they are insidious. They are insidious because they are matrix, they are not linear (like "go kill that guy"). The bad actors seek to leverage it to gradually sway opinion into such a state that everyone is shouting exactly what they want them to shout.
This isn't arcane knowledge anymore, it's been the subject of exposé after exposé over the past decade.
Those kinds of effects weren't possible at scale over other forms of communication. It's the immediacy and the context-less nature of the communications that enables them.
Applying Mill's argument here is like trying to apply Earth's physical constraints to actions on the moon.
The rules governing those platforms aren't perfect, but they're like a gardener spotting new weed growth and clipping it off.
If you want freedom, it was never in Jack Dorsey's (or now Elon's) garden, man. (or, What freedom was there ever in the courts of kings?)
> This is because shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater is not a free exchange of ideas, it’s enticement of injury.
Many people who say they are free speech absolutists aren’t exactly known for appreciating this nuance. Hence why every open forum ultimately degrades into anarchy. I’m not saying an absolutely open forum couldn’t survive (let alone thrive), I’m just saying we haven’t seen one yet.
> the way to express those arguments should be a public speech or writing
When we have a society that actively ignores expert opinions, it makes it hard to take arguments for absolute free speech seriously. And online forums tend to not appreciate “quality” arguments over high-volume “quantity” one-liner rebuttals. Online forums tend to see users eventually switch over to mob mentalities, where normal rules of argument and civil discourse don’t hold any weight. You can reason with a person. You can’t reason with a mob. This is why online speech, absolute or not, is such a tough problem.
I guess my take is that this is an issue of theory vs practice.
> the way to express those arguments should be a public speech or writing, not in a way that causes actual harm to others
The assumption here is that expressing those arguments as public speech or writing does not cause harm. I think this is wrong. Arguing for extermination of the Jews did, in fact, cause harm. Bullying someone into suicide does, in fact, cause harm. Spreading propaganda can, in fact, cause harm.
A lot of potentially harmful political speech on social media seems to avoid actual incitement, though. If there is a kind of speech such that the intent is to cause harm, and the effect is to cause harm, but its form allows it to be categorized as “free exchange of ideas”, I’m not sure how I can support this kind of view.
Oh for sure, but I think you and Mill might not be too far off:
“The example Mill uses is in reference to corn dealers: he suggests that it is acceptable to claim that corn dealers starve the poor if such a view is expressed in print. It is not acceptable to make such statements to an angry mob, ready to explode, that has gathered outside the house of the corn dealer. The difference between the two is that the latter is an expression “such as to constitute…a positive instigation to some mischievous act,” namely, to place the rights, and possibly the life, of the corn dealer in danger.”
I just don’t think philosophers back then realized our society was going to become so polarized, with global reach. His views do presuppose a progressive society to be able to host this speech, so it’s possible we’re no longer a progressive society. (re: more and more “opinion” speech winding up being harmful to others, both left wing overzealousness, and right wing opinions inciting harm)
Yeah, I think we're not too far off in principle, you rightly guess that the key difference for me is how society has changed since that time.
Now, you can make these kinds of claims about the corn dealer on television, on twitter, in dark-money facebook ads, to angry mobs gathered anywhere but the corn dealer's house, all while knowing that online forums are circulating rumors of the corn dealer running a pedophilia ring, and still be afforded plausible deniability when violence results.
I don't have a solution, because if the corn dealer _is_ starving the poor, we should be able to discuss that openly, and I don't think I want to give the State the power to make such a discernment, because it would be too easy to abuse.
Mill is wrong. because he ignores the extremely strong negative effects of sustained disinformation campaigns, and immediate and obvious harm should not be the bar. Society could never handle that, it just thought it could.
Such an attempt to force feed any and all uninformed or malicious opinions down society's proverbial throat, plays right into the hand of the very active disinformation campaigns that are quite actively reshaping politics and opinion in countries around the world.
And an un-nuanced promotion of supposed 'free speech' in the context of such clear and widespread societal harm that is currently occurring, including as the backdrop for real wars with people dying, does not at all resemble a sincere effort at improving the state of affairs. At all. It frankly stinks of yet another billionaire attempting to make sure this simple, malicious, gaming of public opinion remains easy in the near future.
I believe that labelling people as absolutist confuses the issue. JSM advocated liberty up to the point of harming others. Almost everyone in the Western world agrees with this as stated. The differences lie in the vagueness of defining "harm". I don't think JSM defined it explicitly. For some people, harm means physical bodily harm. For others, social triggers legitimately count as harm.
If you include social triggers as harm then free speech becomes meaningless. Only the most vapid and inane speech would be protected under such a definition. The reason speech needs protection is because there will always be some group wanting it suppressed because they believe it will cause harm.
being offended isn't being harmed. People who want to control others who offend them claim they're being harmed, when they're just offended. Allowing those people veto powers on others speech is antithetical to freedom.
It's the veto that's the problem, right? You feel they are claiming harm in order to escape the offending situation. In fact, perhaps they would take exception to your assertion that they are actively seeking control, is that not a possibility?
How do you know they are not being harmed by those who actively utter speech designed to be hurtful? Is it not also antithetical to freedom to allow such people to attempt to make existing in what's left of the commons as painful as possible?
What qualification can you present that would make me trust in your assessment of some other person's level of tolerance to abuse?
And really, "tolerance to abuse" here means "inability to escape abuse."
Sorry, offense, you said offense, of course your willful offending never becomes abuse. In my experience that is a difficult line to always see clearly. Can you share how you maintain that balance always? Your insight into other people must be incredible, I eagerly await your reply.
>In fact, perhaps they would take exception to your assertion that they are actively seeking control, is that not a possibility?
Why would them taking exception mattered if they couldn't control the speech of others? Let them take exception and do whatever they want with it so long as it doesn't affect the rights or ability of others to speak.
>How do you know they are not being harmed by those who actively utter speech designed to be hurtful?
Is speech hurtful or offensive? That's the crux of the issue, and you've assumed the end before you argued a position, so you've put the cart before the horse and assumed your intended consequence. It's not a logical argument.
>What qualification can you present that would make me trust in your assessment of some other person's level of tolerance to abuse?
Who are you again, that I need to provide qualifications to you? And why do you keep assuming the conclusion by saying offensive speech is 'abuse', when it isn't? What qualifications do you have that let you do that?
>And really, "tolerance to abuse" here means "inability to escape abuse."
again, assuming being offended is the same thing as being abused. Nonsense.
>your willful offending
I find your bad faith argument offensive, so we'll take your definitions and say they're abusive and you're being willfully abusive to me - please stop abusing me.
>Is speech hurtful or offensive? That's the crux of the issue
Agreed (well, "can it be", but otherwise same thing)
We heard some arguments that it can be (encouraging suicide, dehumanizing minorities, inciting insurrection,etc).
Do you think it cannot be? What are your arguments to support this position if so?
>assuming being offended is the same thing as being abused.
Nonsense
Do you belive, even if the speech were to rise to the level of abuse, it would be harmful? If not, the distinction seems meaningless. If so, it seems a tacit admission that speech can be harmful.
>We heard some arguments that it can be (encouraging suicide, dehumanizing minorities, inciting insurrection,etc). Do you think it cannot be? What are your arguments to support this position if so?
Some of these claims are stupid, and some of these claims apply to speech that is already illegal even with freedom of speech. It doesn't apply to twitter, given the majority of the speech being censored has nothing to do with that. It's like arguing about abortion by using a motte and bailey involving abortion post rape - its an emotional argument that accounts for something like 1% of all abortion if that. It's not an honest argument as to what is going on.
I think speech in general should be legal. I think speech can be offensive. I don't think most speech is hurtful. Are the founding fathers of the united states guilty of being hurtful, and should they have had their speech censored? They incited an insurrection.
Such blanket approaches and nonsense examples (compared to what's actually being censored) are just the work of people looking to use misleading examples instead of the common examples.
>o you belive, even if the speech were to rise to the level of abuse, it would be harmful?
This is again putting the cart before the horse. "if speech rises to the level of abuse..." assumes that speech is abuse, which it isn't.
It is widely accepted that speech can be used to inflict emotional or psychological abuse.
You're very concentrated on people simply being "offended", as if the law can be used to prosecute you for once calling someone an idiot. It can't as far as I'm aware, and very few people want that.
Speech can be harmful if it deliberately and consciously exploits or invokes trauma, undermines identity, or inflicts significant anxiety, depression or PTSD. Intimidation and harassment are often carried out via speech. It is illegal in most states if carried out on the basis of race, religion, colour or sexual orientation.
Again, my point is that there is a grey area around the line where speech becomes harmful and ought to be censored. The problem is that we don't have a coherent definition to determine where exactly the lines is in that grey area, and John Stuart Mill didn't either.
It seems that our fundamental disagreement is that you do not believe speech can cause harm OR rise to the level of abuse, something which, I as a random dude disagree with, but moreover, people qualified to evaluate harm to people disagree with, and the people who wrote our laws criminalizing multiple forms of harmful speech disagree with.
So, I guess nothing really left to discuss, unless you want to make a convincing case in advocacy of your position.
Wouldn't defining "harm" that narrowly mean defining "harm" for a lot of people in a 1984 way? Why should your definition of "harm" supersede theirs?
(Mostly rhetorical; I don't necessarily disagree with you on this, but I think your take is callous and ignores an inherent contradiction of free speech maximalists).
your take on harm harms me, change or be guilty of harming others...(j/k)
your take is essentially an endless take of "why shouldn't we include offending as harm" and the answer is because its not harm. Or we can just proclaim other people's opinions I don't like as harm and stand in a circular firing squad, which is what society seems to be doing now.
Opinions such as offense is not harmful? He's asking why you feel empowered to define someone being upset at some comment as something other than harm. As am I.
Is it not possible that your unilateralism on this issue has galvanized the will of the victims of the conduct you espouse to oppose you via controlling speech?
Seems that what we have now, which is essentially Isiah Berlin's negative liberty would be a good compromise. Negative liberty:
"liberty in the negative sense involves an answer to the question: 'What is the area within which the subject—a person or group of persons—is or should be left to do or be what he is able to do or be, without interference by other persons" --Isaiah Berlin
Basically working to eliminate coercion of individuals as much as possible.
This state would serve everybody except, of course, those who were seeking to coerce people either overtly or covertly, instead of persuade them, which I feel is something different.
> Opinions such as offense is not harmful? He's asking why you feel empowered to define someone being upset at some comment as something other than harm. As am I.
Being offended is an emotional reaction that has nothing to do with whether you're harmed or not. Being upset is not a constitutionally protected class or situation. It's just someone who thinks their emotions are more important than other people's ideas. Why do you feel empowered to pretend being upset means you've been harmed? It's a fiction that has nothing to do with reality.
It's unclear what your definition of harm is. It sounds like you take it to mean only physical harm, and not e.g. psychological harm? Are death threats or racist/sexist abuse harmful or not?
Hopefully the poster finally explains why _their_ definition of harm which excludes emotional harm, should be considered an authoritative definition, and others' should not
It does indeed seem like their entire view on this issue depends on said definition of theirs being correct, because if it isn't, the view completely falls apart. And yet, they haven't well explained _why_ it's correct
I love how you claim the word harm is vague and hard to define in one sentence then apply bias to your definition claiming only your view as legitimate.
Maybe harm isn't hard to define? Maybe you people just keep making shit up?
In what point in time or space has a human had the ability to communicate all of their ideas and not have consequences from them? There has never been a time in history in the United States where you could say or publish absolutely anything you wanted and were immediately absolved of all responsibility, government or otherwise, by invoking the first amendment. The US obscenity law still exists on the books today. [1]
Funny that Musk is famous for catering to those human urges. Fast car! Big rocket! He even talks about rewarding limbic impulses and I am convinced that is why he is so successful.
Bravo! He absolutely fell into his own trap! An this is why free speech is a complicated issue. And besides - one person would say "you get people to stampede", meanwhile the perpetrator will say "that's only your opinion, I'm a comedian, here is my Youtube Jackass channel where I do things like that all the time and my intention is never to hurt anyone!". How you gonna prove if he's genuine or not? Jury that has their own opinion? And what if he really IS genuine in just being a stupid joker? Okay, so now you gonna tell him "you cannot say that!". Then we back to square one - controlling free speech.
This is a ridiculous twisting of what people are talking about, with no nuance, which life has. It's not just 0 or 1.
There are very clear rules that have been worked out in the legal system for what constitutes incitement to violence for example. It has to be actual call to cause physical violence, right where violence might happen, soon or immediately. If you are standing outside a house yelling burn it down, that is incitement. Yelling burn down the capitalist system on Twitter is not incitement, because it is not direct and it's not immediate.
What many silicon valley techies have now done is move things beyond the legal system, which has worked reasonably well for decades, and thought that they can create a better system. Except it seems in practice this is much more difficult than it seems. Posting pictures of the severed head of Trump seems fine them with them (legally, I think this is ok anyway), but posting a satire article of a transgender woman military officer is not, and gets your silenced. Oh, and let's just block the legitimate story of the president's son's laptop.
In a way this is an extremely arrogant and elitist way of acting, you are saying you are going to create a better legal system than the evolving common law one we've used for a very long time.
It's also pretty obvious in the last 5 years that this leads to all sorts of conflicts of interest, and Silicon Valley elites really don't seem to be doing a fair job. Surprise suprise, what legal experts and judges have refined over decades works better.
Free speech absolutism, to me, means that the speech cannot be punished, but if the speech causes direct and immediate harm to others, you can be held accountable. Shouting "Fire" in a crowded theater is fine, but if there's a stampede and someone dies, you can be held liable at some level. I think that's a reasonable balance between zero suppression of speech and consequences for actions.
> the vast majority of progress civilization has made has been under conditions much more regulated in terms of which ideas may propagate.
Lots of good things have happened in spite of bad conditions that hampered progress. These bad conditions have often revolved around a lack of freedom of expression, especially in the modern era, where this has been extensively documented.
For example, there has historically been intense stigma for expressing skepticism of the local religion, and scientists have famously suffered for it. Should we bring that back as well, since most progress has been made under such conditions?
If not, why? Do you like today's authorities better than those of centuries past?
And isn’t twitter really reinforcing that already? So the sun rises and sets as it has for billions of years in the past and will another billion at least.
Yup, Twitter is just another “locality” no different than a town, state, or region. It has pockets of subgroups with different beliefs and has an overarching majority opinion. It is different only in the speed that communication travels peer to peer (and maybe in its size) but otherwise it is indeed the same shit that humanity does and has done for millennia.
Only you get the benefit of a whole, new organization of people to shame you into submission independent from your already binding social organizations. How wonderful.
Edit-and I emphasize shame because the number of people who agree with everybody on earth is vanishingly small. Meanwhile, twitter does push your content to potentially everybody on earth. And we know that the people most likely to respond to content are those who disagree with it.
> These bad conditions have often revolved around a lack of freedom of expression, especially in the modern era, where this has been extensively documented.
Yeah, I just don't think this is true. I think a lot of progress has been agnostic in this sense--i.e., "free speech" in the sense that modern advocates of the term use it had nothing to do with, e.g., the invention of automobiles. Was it the yellow journalism of the late 19th/early 20th century that gave us any of the progress of those eras? It was instead property rights and basic rule-of-law things.
> For example, there has historically been intense stigma for expressing skepticism of the local religion, and scientists have famously suffered for it.
Again, a problem that wasn't solved via allowing every grandmother to be exposed to and propagate conspiracy theories; if anything, one might argue, those biases might have been continually reinforced if everyone had their say. Query whether the kinds of people who have brought about the positive changes to which you allude were analogous to Fauci or whether they were analogous to Breitbart.
This argument always revolves around whether the authority with the power to restrict speech can be trusted not to abuse that power. I don't think the state can be trusted to decide what is propaganda and what is a conspiracy theory.
Historically, states have been the foremost perpetrators of propaganda and conspiracy theories. Democracies are not immune. See the propaganda efforts surrounding the Vietnam and Iraq wars, just the top of a very long list. The protest movements against these wars were so powerful and inspirational because the state had so little power to suppress them. Similar movements in Russia and China essentially do not and can not exist.
State power is a ratchet. Limits on state power, once removed, do not come back. Every power we give to the state today will be used against us decades from now, in an utterly different context, with utterly different people in charge. Giving away limits only makes sense to stave off imminent demise, which, panicked op-eds aside, is not what we face today.
I mostly agree with the people who currently have the most power to censor speech. My interests and viewpoints would be advanced by increased state censorship. But I am still against it for the reasons above.
I'm more okay with private companies deciding these things, because other private companies can do things differently. They do not have the monopoly on power that the state does. I think a cultural norm favoring free speech should apply, but it's reasonable for platforms to apply judgment to set more limits.
I feel like this contrasts with what I thought your position was based on your previous posts. As far as this particular post goes, I'm not sure I really disagree with you lol
From your previous posts, I thought you were not okay at all with private companies regulating speech on their platforms.
My initial position was that censorship has historically been mostly bad. My more fully explained position is that censorship is bad enough that we should not let the state censor, but not bad (or good) enough that the state should interfere in the publication of speech by private media platforms.
I guess this is why the best opinion-havers write essays instead of hot takes in the comment section.
I do not understand the eagerness to cede strong individual rights of expression to faceless institutions. Do you expect these institutions to be on your side? They will happily shut you up, permanently, the moment they do not like what you have to say.
As the other poster said, our right to speech is not something a corporation needs to abide by, it's something the government needs to abide by (at least in the US).
I see your point below about basically that we should have a more expansive view of the Right than the scope of its actual legal application, and, while I think it has merit, I ultimately think it's just a normative view that most of us simply don't share.
If I don't like Twitter's policies, I won't use Twitter (I already don't, and would be even less inclined if someone like Musk owned it). Not to mention it's not clear that Twitter is even censoring speech--there is plenty of garbage on Twitter. The notion it's even an example of censorship is laughable, actually.
Censored data presents a selection bias issue, but from what I can tell, Twitter's censorship seems to have little rhyme or reason. It is neither effective at suppressing lies and propaganda, nor effective at permitting reasonable discourse that falls afoul of some mob's opinion.
They still have every right to do it, but I'd be more interested in the merits of censorship if there was any institution that seemed to be doing a half-decent job of it.
I do not think that social media platforms should be obligated to publish anything any individual wants published on them, and I do not think they should be legislated into a particular attitude toward speech. But a permissive default attitude with limited restrictions seems preferable to me, and such an attitude amounts to a policy of free speech in a facially obvious sense.
You're getting downvoted because majority of the US is some variation of Christian so it's bizarre to see someone state that neo-marxism is as popular as you think it is.
Neoliberalism as a term is something that the Left came up with to describe all policies they don't like.
There was something called Neoliberalism in Europe but doesn't really fit with what is called 'Neoliberalism' became and was basically a term had very little use for decade and was basically not used anymore by anybody.
Then the term 'neoliberalism' was used in a article used to critic the Chile Coup and from there spiraled into a everything that is not far left. Its really a critic of the Far left against the Center Left and has from there expanded to basically encompass everything.
Its a terrible term that the supposed neoliberals have never actually used. But I guess is a great term if leftist hang around with each other and try to prove how smart they are. Anybody from the center left to the far right is an evil neoliberal apparently.
Because if not then claiming that traditional neoliberalism is the 'local religion' is crazy as you could win a single election with classical neoliberal ideas.
Jesus, please read Economics - the User's Guide', it explains that Neoliberalism is a school of thought in economics, real economists debate it's merits, along with classical, neoclassical, Shumpeterian, etc.
This comment is so big on hating the left, it's bordering on 'race mixing is communism'
Its not hating on the left, its just an observation in what circle the word is uses. The far right and other groups also have words they use to describe anybody not them and make up all kinds of stuff about it. Its typical thing of defining an out-group and then claiming they share some evil traits.
Analysis of communication patterns always show that like minded people talk far more to each other then anybody outside. And that holds even for a lot of social sciences.
Its like liberation calling everybody 'statists' for example, no matter if they are far-right extremists or 60s socialists. Or how in certain socialist circles everybody not them is a 'facist'. Or who Trump stlye far rightist might call everybody 'internationalist'.
It became to encompass basically everything, foreign policy, trade policy, state budgets, domestic urban regulation, bank regulation, monetary policy and so on and so on and then you could always blame 'the neoliberals' for all things that are bad in the world even when no such group exist other then in the mind of those that made up its existence in the first place.
So basically you apparently have this amazingly powerful force in the world called 'neoliberalism' that apparently controls everything and dominates everything state institution are all guide by the evil 'Mont Pelerin Society'.
But if you actually look at facts beyond conspiracy theory in-group building nonsense.
If you look at major economic institutions like World Bank, IMF, Presidential economic advisers and so on, you will see you find that in the last 40+ years about 1000 to 1 to be mainstream (ie Neo-Keynsian) economists dominate pretty much every major economic institution and government position. Their major intellectual tradition is very firmly connect to Keynes, Arrow, Hicks, Samuelson and not Hayek and Friedman.
To see how far this mind bending logic goes here a paragraph from a typical paper on the subject:
> Second, the endurance of neoliberalism is itself a matter which requires explanation. The global financial crisis appears to have resulted in a strengthening, and not a weakening, of neoliberalism and the experts that propagate it. States appear even more committed to defending the interests of finance, against other political interests, and increasing the reach of finance into everyday life.
> Neoliberalism: A Bibliographic Review William Davies (2014)
Ok, so let me get this straight. Neoliberal experts protect the status quo of state protection of financial institutions. Over 30 years the amount of regulation and government budget have gone up consistently and all of this while supposedly neoliberalism was the dominate force in the world.
Maybe, just maybe all these people are not libertarian firebrands who grow up reading Hayek and Friedman but simply normal educated main stream economist and social scientists with far more influenced by the mainstream traditions, they are center right or left people who very much believe in typical state functions and regulation and majority vote democrat.
Its almost as if the world (shockingly) isn't controlled by the Mont Pelerin Society and a hidden cabal of neoliberal social scientist but why ever admit that when they are the perfect 'Emmanuel Goldstein'.
The problem is that Musk has legitimately advanced society in a number of ways with each of his adventures. He is a ... very complex person to put it lightly, and even for his legitimate issues and scandals he caused (e.g. blatant ignorance of SEC regulations or calling a rescue diver a pedophile), he still has the achievements on his "good side".
I think these two aspects are inexorably intertwined, the same personality trait.
On the plus side, you get first principles thinking, bull in a china shop unstoppability. You get important progress in rocket technology (reuse and radically lower cost per kg delivered). You get electric vehicles that people want to buy, at scale, after decades of slow walking by the rest of the industry.
On the minus side, you get the naive notion that Twitter could be made radically more "free" without turning into a cesspool that loses the bulk of its mainstream audience.
Musk with a lot of help of others and a lot of government subsidies you mean. The same subsidies he now things aren't needed, that others don't need subsidies because he doesn't need them anymore. Note this is based on his public comments, not his actual actions as his actions show he still loves subsides.
I suggest that someone who can spend 40 billion of a social media platform doesn't need taxpayers to give him quite as much assistance as he gets.
> Musk with a lot of help of others and a lot of government subsidies you mean
Yeah, but unlike Boeing/ULA and others who just milked the government for its cash and lobbied for further pork all the fucking time while delivering shit, Musk's leadership actually made real progress out of the cash they got from the government.
> The same subsidies he now things aren't needed, that others don't need subsidies because he doesn't need them anymore.
What Musk has realized is that most of the current political and economic leaders aren't interested in progress, only in filling their bank accounts. So why hand out subsidies to people that will only put them to waste anyway? And yes, Musk is also interested in filling his bank account, but it's undeniable he's pushing his people to leave a lasting legacy for society.
Personally, I believe that government subsidies for progressive projects are a good idea in principle, but their allocation should be completely restructured for projects above ~10M dollars: instead of lump sums that are doled out, they should be structured into quarterly payments and clearly tied to reaching milestones. No more "pork projects" that only serve to reelect corrupt politicians.
Yeah. Tangentially, I wonder if free speech absolutism can only hold so long as shame still exists in wide enough numbers. Psychopaths occur probably too frequently…
Never revealing his "true nature" has been a critical part of his myth building - people tend to fill in the blanks and mold the idea of Elon Musk into their ideal.
When I was there I never talked to a single British or Afrikaans that I would ever describe as white supremacist, or even racist. Everyone of them at some point voted ANC, mostly in Mandela‘s time.
However, going through Durban, I saw the dead remains of Namibian immigrants who were just necklaced in a almost 100% black area. Almost all the murder or violence there is white aggressors. I was forced out of Escort one day for being white. And our car was attacked by bottles and rocks in Mooi River, very presumably because we were the only white people around, although I didn’t ask specifically.
Slandering someone you don’t know as white supremacist because they are a South African white, is really messed up.
> the vast majority of progress civilization has made
You know for such a scientifically-minded group as HN, we sure seem to embrace Whig History as if it's axiomatic that the progress we've made thus far is some sort of global maxima.
We don't have a control group timeline. We don't know the type and speed with which we'd have made different progress under different intellectual or social regimes.
There is absolutely NO reason to believe that the path we've taken has led us to the Best Of All Possible Worlds.
I just think the limit on our knowledge that you describe should lead us more towards caution than the opposite in a lot of situations. Because it could be worse too.
It's intellectually lazy to ignore the very different power of the internet and the very different social context in which the relevant technologies are developing. For example, the Gutenberg press didn't let literally any idiot immediately distribute their inane thoughts to everybody. There were still barriers of literacy, etc.
Actually, it was in a sense worse, it only let those able to afford to print distribute their potentially inane thoughts. It did not distinguish whether thoughts were inane or not, it only distinguished how much money you had. The assumption that being able to afford something prevents one from or is mutually exclusive with having inane thoughts to express is, I think all of history would corroborate, completely unwarranted.
In general, more free speech is always preferable to less free speech. If you could stand on your proverbial soapbox and say something in the town square then you should be able to say the same thing on Twitter (modern day town square) without being censored. No one knows exactly what Elon will do but I think whatever he does will be a positive ... IMHO.
"In general, more free speech is always preferable to less free speech."
Again, why? This is something people are repeating almost dogmatically in this thread, and the examples from history they point to in order to support this are inapposite in numerous ways.
On the other hand, we have pretty concrete examples about how verifiably false information is spreading in contemporary society, in addition to things like hate speech.
> The notion that all speech should be allowed actually seems stupid to me on its face, the more that I consider it.
Who will decide which speech will be forbidden, and on what basis will the decision be made? How accountable will this person or body be, and to whom? Will it work transparently or in secret?
How will it enforce its decisions? Who will be bound by them? What punishment will be appropriate for those who utter forbidden words?
The praciticalities of censorship-enforcement are as nightmarish as the "ethical" arguments for it.
Well, we have seen how authoritarian repression of alternative viewpoints turned out, with the imprisonment of Galileo, execution of Thomas More, horrors of Stalin and Hitler and too many more to mention.
And we have seen what immense improvements of the conditions of man came through a free society like the founding of USA, with freedom of speech and eventual total abolishment of slavery. (Slavery, which up to then more-or-less had been part of the vast majority of civilizations, from Asia to Africa, to America, to Europe).
And now you argue to run that experiment again, just to be sure?
The United States abolished slavery later than most other Western countries,
including the British Empire,
and at its founding was "free" only for a minority of white, land-owning males.
While the Bill of Rights protected local elites from dictates of the federal government,
it was not applied to state governments until the 20th century.
State-level blasphemy laws were applied up until the 1930s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blasphemy_law_in_the_United_St....
Additionally, free speech was applied highly unevenly throughout the 20th century.
The 1960-70s liberation movements that gave us most of our substantive freedoms
were fought viciously by the US government,
with methods that went as far as assassination:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO.
This, however, is not particularly relevant to content moderation on websites.
The US wasn't like this in terms of free speech right off the bat (in both legal and cultural terms), and your historical analogies aren't well-supported. Stalin was able to kill a lot of people due to, inter alia, a lack of what we could term "the rule-of-law", and he did it in part to direct as many resources as possible towards industrialization. Hitler is a demagogue who arguably took advantage of a situation where anyone could say almost anything, and where faith in more standard institutions was low.
Nobody is advocating for actually punishing people based on what they say, let alone in as dire a manner as execution, so the examples of Galileo and Moore are irrelevant.
>> We've never had a situation where fake news can and does spread the way it does today, where authorities are being undermined like this and casually dismissed by people with no knowledge of the respective fields, etc. ... The notion that all speech should be allowed actually seems stupid to me on its face, the more that I consider it.
Seeing this come from someone in the legal profession is deeply concerning, although I guess I shouldn't be surprised that a "Biglaw first year" is in favor of restrictions on speech that would elevate their corporate clients' interests over the public's.
It's important to understand history here, which you obviously do not. The Gutenberg press took the power of knowledge transfer from a small group of people (the church) and gave it to the larger public as a whole. You would argue that this did not accomplish as much as the internet has because people were still illiterate and writers still had to find a publisher; however, you are arguing quantum (erroneously, as well) rather than kind and so we should actually look at the quantum of change the internet has wrought. To do this we need to fast forward from the 15th century to the 20th and examine another technology that caused a fundamental change in the spread of information: radio.
Radio blew away your literacy barriers, and the early history of radio establishes that (prior to FCC regulations) nearly anybody could start their own local radio station. "Fake news" and anti-authority speech was rampant in the early days of the radio. There are numerous books on the subject and the government's attempts to rein in this speech, you can find most of them by googling the phrase "Radio Right." Along comes TV, and sensationalism grows along with people's access to information.
Now we can accurately compare quantum. Did the internet bring about as large a change in conditions as the Gutenberg press? That answer is not so clear cut as you have argued elsewhere here. The Gutenberg press took from the privileged few and gave to a much larger class of people. The internet took from a larger privileged few (radio and television) and gave to a much larger class of people. However, similar to the Gutenberg press's problems with literacy and access to a publisher, the internet's impact is diminished by its own barriers: access to the internet at all, access to electricity, and literacy (English is not the world's language, after all).
The history of mass communication is not as black and white as you seem to suggest, and it is certainly not as barren of important movements forward. Where we are today is just the end of a long, slow march towards giving the public more free speech and access to information, a march which has been subverted and fought by governments every step of the way. The government's primary way of fighting this has historically been the "rule of law" that you so passionately advance as the reason for our current situation, but you could not be more off the mark. The rule of law is malleable and its use changes as populism waxes and wanes. I urge you to become more educated on the history of mass communication.
"Seeing this come from someone in the legal profession is deeply concerning, although I guess I shouldn't be surprised that a "Biglaw first year" is in favor of restrictions on speech that would elevate their corporate clients' interests over the public's."
Pretty dumb ad hominem, and demonstrates you know few young lawyers (lawyers on the whole tend to actually be pretty left, and young lawyers in biglaw tend often to be pretty far-left compared to the general population). The corporations are not too harmed either way, in any event, at least far as I can tell.
Personally, one of my main motivations to go to law school was to sort of shore up the center. I wasn't surprised people were stupid enough to vote for Trump, but I came to realize that this stupidity and the often blind hatred for "the establishment" on both political fringes posed an actual threat to society. My classmates/peers tend to be more staunchly on the progressive side of things.
Even conceding you know more about the history of mass communication than I do, I don't see how what you're saying supports either side of this. But this is useful context, so thanks, I'm happy to be corrected (see this is actually good speech because you're lending knowledge to the situation).
That isn't an ad hominem. I haven't attacked your position because of your obvious conflict of interest, I've merely pointed it out. I didn't say, "This person is a corporate shill and so you shouldn't listen to them about free speech!" I said, "It makes sense that you would be in favor of restrictions on speech that benefit your clients." I'm not casting doubt on your argument because of your bias. In fact, I attack your position's substance head on by providing actual historic context.
I could not be further from an ad hominem if I tried.
And I'm well aware of the supposed leftist slant of younger biglaw lawyers. I just don't acknowledge it as a true value they hold. Actions speak louder than words, and biglaw on the whole works against liberal values.
All speech must be allowed. The problem to solve is the scale and speed of diffusion.
Most speech used to be confined into the room it was spoken or into a circle of friends. Damage was limited. Now everybody can chat with everybody else. The damage can bring down countries in a few years.
It’s a common talking point in the US that the second amendment was written in a time when the most powerful guns were rifles that shot balls which took tens of seconds, at best, to reload. That the authors of the right to bear arms weren’t thinking about automatic handguns and that the amendment can’t apply to today because of modern weaponry.
Maybe that’s the same for the first amendment too: it was written for a different time, with the technology of the time in mind, and so it can’t apply now.
It's funny, because a lot of the arguments in this thread in favor of maximal free speech use the example of past religious suppression and orthodoxy as support, and they act like they are on the side of the bloody Enlightenment, piercing the darkness of ignorant r3ligionz, but if you disagree with the rules set by the constitution on speech or guns[0], they want to cling to that text as it was written in the 18th century religiously, the same way a fundamentalist Muslim doesn't want to alter anything in the religion despite societal changes that have occurred since the 7th century (using this example because I'm Muslim, not because I'm a bigot who wants to pick on Muslims).
[0] Legally, it's debatable whether the 2nd Amd applied to the bearing of arms for personal use, but we can go by the law on the books right now, and I think that the ship has sailed anyways
I get what you're trying to say, but a) I just don't see a strong case for why the fundamental proposition that it all must be allowed is something we should all hold; b) I don't think, even given/assuming the desirability of allowing all speech, the tension you allude to is resolvable.
The saddest thing about this bid going through is that we're going to miss out on the next SpaceX or Tesla and he's going to be pulling his hair out over this intead.
If the bid is accepted, he's going to want to build his own app store otherwise Google & Apple will kick the Twitter app off if his version of free speech doesn't align with their version of censorship.
Gab discovered this early on and pivoted accordingly.
Yes, you cede much more of your personal data using the apps than the browser. I would view myself as deranged were I to install those apps on my phone today. The features are there to entice you you install the app.
As a Twitter shareholder I would vote against this. Musk says there is tremendous financial potential in Twitter but then offers $54 a share, which is not even 2x the IPO price. That’s not a “tremendous potential” premium.
There is a lot of evidence that platforms which de-prioritize moderation have trouble attracting revenue and experience significant compliance costs. See: the sad story of Moot, who ran one of the most popular social websites in the world and ended up with absolutely nothing to show for it.
This looks more like a hobby to me than a business decision. Hobbies are fine as long as they don’t distract from the job, like Bezos buying Washington Post (he is a hands-off owner who spends very little time on it). But Musk is in two high-risk positions with Tesla and SpaceX. He worked over last Thanksgiving and sent a rather dramatic email about it. So I would be concerned about his ability to multi-task. He has already tried to run three businesses at once and he had to use Tesla to bail himself out of Solar City’s troubles.
Why is the IPO price the relevant metric? In fact, I would argue that exactly because it's been such a poor investment since the IPO, the fact that he's willing to offer a premium over recent market prices is a positive. Then again, I don't own any Twitter, so my views are irrelevant in that sense.
One major point of going public is to give the first investors liquidity. The banks and funds that supported this financing event (the buyers at IPO) are the ones being pitched: Vanguard, Morgan Stanley, BlackRock, Fidelity, etc. They might have bought the dip but only after buying into the IPO.
TWTR started trading 8.4 years ago at 45/share (after being priced at 26). SPY was priced at 180 and is today at 440. Gold was down near 1200 and is now at 1900. Twitter grew in value at 2.2%/yr before inflation while the S&P index grew 11%/yr. Factoring in the IPO pop (which screws the VCs), Twitter would have grown at 9.1% per year.
(The banks also have strategies that earn them more at IPO, so they probably are earning slightly more than 10% per year on their investment.)
In short, Twitter is not keeping up with the broader economy at Musk's price. You're telling the investment banks, mutual funds, and most-senior vested employees that their company has the same worth as a low-risk government bond or a bar of metal.
> In short, Twitter is not keeping up with the broader economy at Musk's price. You're telling the investment banks, mutual funds, and most-senior vested employees that their company has the same worth as a low-risk government bond or a bar of metal.
Exactly! The stock has been a terrible investment since IPO, and Twitter management has done a terrible job of unlocking value. It's current management that has failed to keep up with the broader economy. Musk thinks he can do a lot better if he has full control. Musk's price is a reflection of how poorly current management has done; he is not trying to compensate you for future growth.
If you think current management can drive the share price much higher, then you should not sell to Musk. If you think current management is just going to be more of the same, Musk is giving you a big premium over where the stock had been trading, and you should take his offer.
If Musk thinks Twitter will be worth $400 in five years' time, then he can realize that value for himself. He'd be very foolish to offer you that price now.
His companies and investments have done well by VC standards. It's probably a "not great" idea to refuse his offer.
I also understand his point about mismanagement from a anecdotal user perspective: I hate the platform but not the concept.
- Horrendous UX (Why can't I see the context of a tweet?)
- Seemingly crappy bot policing (Really? You, "Megan, Warrior, mother, wife, respect all animals, bless our troops, go cowboys [football][usaflag][fingerhorns]" really have 4138 followers and 4087 followed? Plus, the first follower I click has the same corny bio style, 4112 followers and 4056 followed, and only retweets political tweets?)
- Creates aggressive echo chambers and lopsided arguments. (Influential user blasts another, their army of followers comment and like each others comments, blasted user's entire dialogue gets buried under army's despite having valid arguments.)
- I'm sick of seeing the thoughts of politicians and celebrities.
I think we agree on Twitter generally but I don't really get your examples. I also have the "Minimal Twitter" extension installed, and use Twitter exclusively on desktop so that certainly may color my opinions.
1. Seeing the context is as easy as clicking on the tweet. Tracking multiple threads off the same initial tweet would be nice if it were easier, but I'm not sure the UX would work for something like that (it's not an easy problem).
2. 100% agreed that the bot policing is garbage.
3. I think this is part of the chronological aspect of threads and replies, I'm not sure how you fix this without having an algorithm decide which tweets to show, which has its own host of problems.
4. I only see these when someone I follow retweets it, which is almost always something political. I honestly don't remember the last time I've seen a celebrity tweet, but that might be because of the extension I've installed.
Or they realized that their initial expectations were inaccurate. The market in general sure did, so why not the IPO investors? It boils down to how they perceive the opportunity cost of the decision, not how they valued the company a decade ago.
Because that's probably when the GP bought in, and the GP is mostly concerned about what their return would be from this.
A 54% premium on the current price is absolutely in the ballpark of "tremendous potential." If you think it's not, it's easy to vote against this. I'm not sure I buy Elon's "the company has to be private to make these changes" argument, and if there was a path for current public shareholders to remain private shareholders and potentially reap the rewards of a future acquisition or second IPO, I think a lot of them would be all for it.
Snowwrestler in this context, I've always taken it to mean two comments above whatever comment says "GP" (grandparent/grandposter of current comment). But I've seen GP/OP used in slightly different contexts which is sometimes a bit confusing admittedly.
>> This looks more like a hobby to me than a business decision. Hobbies are fine as long as they don’t distract from the job
If he’s taking the company private the future of the company should be irrelevant to you right? The only thing that matters is whether or not you think the price is fair.
>> Musk says there is tremendous financial potential in Twitter but then offers $54 a share, which is not even 2x the IPO price. That’s not a “tremendous potential” premium.
He believes the potential is predicated on taking it private and clearing house. The IPO price also seems irrelevant. Whether or not you think Twitter can exceed that price again is relevant.
Given it was at ~$70 last year he seems to be coming in too low for me as I think Twitter can get back to that point relatively quickly.
> and wants to see Twitter add value to society in some way.
Define "add value", because otherwise I'm laughing hard at this notion.
If you define it purely as "produce a product that people enjoy using or find useful", then sure, it adds value.
But at a higher level, asking if it's a net positive on society as a whole, and I'd say Twitter will never succeed at that. Social media has caused a breakdown in political discourse where people no longer seek to understand, but instead seek to "win", and Twitter's short message limit completely eliminated any possibility of actual conversations in favor of 140-character[0] zingers that are nothing more than ridiculous straw men. Nuance is a thing of the past.
[0] I know it's 280 now, but for the longest time it was 140, and I'm not sure the difference really matters. It's still incredibly limiting.
> Define "add value", because otherwise I'm laughing hard at this notion.
I have a NLP/linguistics hobby,and Twitter has been a fantastic gold mine for generating corpora for "low-resource[1]" languages. No other social network is as open as Twitter is to scraping such information, and I have no confidence this will be the case if it's taken private to "unlock value". Hell, I even planned to use a Twitter bot to generate parallel corpora (for translations) since Twitter provides easy and free access to native speakers of almost every language that is currently spoken on this planet.
I'm just a filthy casual, I bet there are hundreds (or thousands) of PhDs and papers that would not have been possible without Twitter; I have no doubt that Twitter adds value to society by virtue of its breadth and openness. Sadly, Twitter is also is detrimental to society, by virtue of its breadth and openness; but I know which side is easier to monetized.
I agree with you, certainly, but you must see that a shareholder could believe that Twitter has this potential under current management but wouldn't under Musk, or under a different management but still not with Musk. Whether they are mistaken can only be determined by playing out the future.
I’m not convinced Twitter changed political discourse. It just lowered the price of a microphone to a point that I can get public-transit levels of discourse without leaving my home.
OP mentioned being worried changes Musk implements would effect revenue opportunities. They also mentioned the offer was poor because it didn’t match up to the IPO price. I think my assumption that the OP cares about this as a financial investment is fair.
The real arrogant move is jumping into a conversation to tell someone they are arrogant without any evidence to back it up.
For starters, GP's comment is absolutely not out of line, as explained in their sibling comment to this.
Second, a large amount of your comment history is just telling people how "out of line" their comments are. There is a downvote button for that. Stop spamming it. It is you who is out of line.
The downvote button is for low quality comments, not for disagreement. If you had been here for any significant length of time, you would know that.
It’s also a bit ironic when you say “stop spamming” from a sock puppet account you created specifically to reply to my comment, but you probably already knew that when you did it.
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken.
I did not accuse them of astroturfing, shilling, being a bot, brigading, or being a foreign agent.
I said they were a sock puppet account created three minutes before leaving their one and only comment as a reply to my own. These claims are verifiable, and their behavior lowers the standard of discourse in this forum.
Just because their account was created for this comment, does not mean the comment itself is worth disregarding. Throwaway accounts exist for many reasons.
You can address their point and move on. Leveling accusations unrelated to the point lowers the standard of discourse too.
edit: to add to this, the claim that this is a sockpuppet is not a verifiable claim.
> If he’s taking the company private the future of the company should be irrelevant to you right? The only thing that matters is whether or not you think the price is fair.
The future of the company is relevant to you if you care about Twitter and it's impact on the world.
Even if you're a shareholder, you can care about more than just money. Shares represent more than money - they also represent power.
Shareholders have the power to decide whether the wealthiest person in the world should take unsolicited control over what's arguably the most powerful communication platform in the world.
I agree with you that $54 is too low. Basically I don’t think his pitch matches his offered price, and I think the explanation is that he is trying to buy a hobby on sale.
> There is a lot of evidence that platforms which de-prioritize moderation have trouble attracting revenue and experience significant compliance costs.
I think Musk would moderate bots more given his experience. But people less maybe.
> use Tesla to bail himself out of Solar City’s troubles
No, he thought, hey, I'll fix cars, and space, and solar. And that's not going the worst it could go, so maybe I can fix Twitter. He's not doing things for profit.
moot made 4chan and ran it off servers in his basement because he was inspired by Futaba channel and 2chan, and he wanted to create an English-oriented forum to discuss anime with others in an anonymous fashion.
I wouldn't say he got nothing to show for it, considering his goal never was financial gain or anything of the sort.
You are implying that advertisers would boycott a free speech platform, and this might be true for some advertisers, when Facebook was boycotted by some activist businesses it didn't dent their bottom line.
Also - Twitter is more of a networking and influence tool in my opinion for "important people". These people are MUCH more likely to pay for Twitter, it's not like facebook where 99% of people would never pay for it. Which I think is what Musk was hinting at with blue badges for $2.
If he does that, boycotting advertisers will matter much less.
Advertisers didn’t boycott Facebook because Facebook ads are a money making machine. They demonstrably work because of the depth and breadth of Facebook’s data targeting. You can’t compare it to Twitter; advertisers may be more willing to dump Twitter as a platform as it isn’t as valuable.
>Moot, who ran one of the most popular social websites in the world and ended up with absolutely nothing to show for it.
4chan? not really a 'social media' website. I think he did a good thing making it and we need more spaces like this in a more restrictive internet space
It might be a hobby decision, or it might be self-protection against censorship; I'd like to know.
As an owner, he wouldn't have to be the person running the shop. Unlike Tesla and SpaceX, I'm sure Twitter can be managed by someone other than himself.
It's an indicator, not always the best one though. Your car has probably started every time you tried for years, but if it's suddenly -50c it's a very good bet that it won't this time.
In this case it's pretty clear that Musk doesn't have the bandwidth to run another company in the same way as he runs Tesla and SpaceX. You can reach that conclusion any number of ways, counting the number of hours he (claims to/appears to) put in, listening to his own statements on the matter - where he has repeatedly outright said this, observing his relatively hand-off approach to his more recent ventures like neural-link or the boring company.
It seems unlikely that his behavior at Tesla or SpaceX is about to change significantly, so it seems unlikely that he'll try and take as active a roll at twitter.
> As a Twitter shareholder I would vote against this.
Which is your right, but do you own nearly 10% of twitter like elon musk with the ability to buy up to nearly 15%? Unless you own big blocks of shares, your vote really doesn't matter.
> Musk says there is tremendous financial potential in Twitter but then offers $54 a share, which is not even 2x the IPO price.
Twitter IPO'd nearly 10 years ago. The IPO price really doesn't factor in today.
Musk offered $54 and twtr is currently trading less than $47. It means that major investors don't value twtr higher than $54 and do not expect a bidding war. If twtr was trading above $54, then it would indicate that musk was undervaluing twtr and investors expect a bidding war. Also, the fact that it is trading so much below $54 indicates that many don't expect twtr to sell itself to musk. Regardless, it will be interesting what happens in the coming months.
“ See: the sad story of Moot, who ran one of the most popular social websites in the world and ended up with absolutely nothing to show for it.”
when you say absolutely nothing you mean money. but millions of people have fond memories of what his site used to be. nobody would say that about facebook or twitter.
You're not focusing on foundational principles - you're looking at current status quo surface level/shallow consequences of decisions.
E.g. Low moderation making difficulty attracting revenue is because that's based on an ad revenue based model.
Tesla and SpaceX aren't high risk positions - both have been proven for years now.
You're concerned about his ability to multi-task because he's successfully turned Tesla into the most valuable company in the world, and at the same time lead SpaceX to probably the most valuable private company in the world?
I'd saw your analysis is at least a few degrees off.
Did you consider what will happen to your current stock value if the BOD doesn't sell to Elon, and if Elon then sells off his shares and starts a competitor and moves himself and others follow? Do you think Twitter is anywhere near an upward trajectory that will provide you a better return than the relative stagnant value the stock has had for awhile now?
If you are a TWTR shareholder, then you should vote for this deal.
Just open a chart and see what a disaster TWTR stock is since transitioned into the Biden administration. The market (institution shareholders) is not stupid. The lower price is how the free market punish TWTR for their actions. They have lost a lot of their users due to many of their limited free speech and work with government actions.
I'm not sure I'd expect coherence from anyone who has a problem with Trump getting banned from Twitter.
The biggest problem twitter had there was that they had rules and then certain users with such a large following that they where unwilling to enforce them.
It took a literal insurrection on the capitol to do it.
I don't have a solution, moderation is inherently a problem for that case.
It's absolutely nothing to do with Biden. TWTR start sliding in October, 10 months after he took office. It's currently the same price as late 2020. It's almost like there is a war, another wave in the pandemic, and sudden inflation and those things are effecting the markets overall.
> See: the sad story of Moot, who ran one of the most popular social websites in the world and ended up with absolutely nothing to show for it.
Normally “Really? I’ve never heard of it.” isn’t good evidence, but when you’re asserting that Moot was one of the most popular social websites in the world it does have some bearing.
> And it's really weird. I assumed Moot was mega famous with tech folks.
Only a certain subsection of us. My husband used 4chan in high school and college and told me about it and that's how I learned about him. 4chan is definitely a good case study in how being popular and engaging won't lead to monetary gains if your platform is too toxic. 4chan is still quite popular but half of the site is infested with actual "Hitler did nothing wrong" types.
I don't think on Twitter we should be 'free speech absolutists'. Its a private company, no need for lots of people.
What I would actually like is seriously shooting down these idiotic bots. Like seriously, they have the exact same name and picture as the main account. How the fuck do we not have machine learning, fuck a bunch of bash-scripts to figure this out?
It makes the platform borderline unusable how much crypto spam bots exist on it.
That said, not a fan of Musk waste his time with Twitter. SpaceX, Tesla are plenty.
The bots are necessary for the quarterly user counts to look good during the shareholder report.
Once they've finished pretending the bot accounts have ad-watching eyeballs, they follow up a couple months later with a token crackdown of some small amount of them.
As much as I very much admire the output of Elon's various ventures, I'm not sure of the value of this move, either for him or Twitter.
I think Twitter often brings out the worst of his character (or perhaps "reveals"?)
I wonder if he might be too emotionally invested in how Twitter operates for this to be a good move, given his numerous Twitter-led controversies. I worry about the motivations behind him trying to do this.
But I could be wrong. And to be fair, I can think of worse owners...
I’d be very surprised if this is emotional thrashing from someone who has been very long-term focused and first principles oriented in all of his other endeavors.
I guess I’m judging him based on his moments of “unwise” behaviour on Twitter, but perhaps that’s focussing on the wrong thing when compared to the progress of the likes of SpaceX and Tesla.
This is like Warren Buffett's hostile takeover of Berkshire Hathaway (then a failing textile company) because their CEO made him assmad, that ultimately just prevented him from becoming even more disgustingly rich.
Musk is gonna be left with a pile of worthless, shit stock. Of course once one of the streaming services releases a docu-drama about Twitter's rise and fall (like they did for Theranos, Uber, and WeWork), Musk can charge decent money to play himself.
Sometimes being reckless and a heretic helps society move forward.
I'm starting to become a fan of Musk. Guy is sitting on $256B in net worth. That's so rich it's like trying to picture the distance from the earth to the sun, your brain struggles.
I get the sense he's going to be the Howard Hughes of our time. Weird ideas and a ton of money make for some interesting moves. Not everything he does will be positive, but his imprint will be one for the history books.
I have to admit: I hope this happens mostly for the entertainment value.
Also, I think that this business of shutting down opinions of people we dislike or disagree with is really bad for society long term. I think Musk might stop that.
I am 100% sure that Musk would be fine with people criticizing him, Tesla or SpaceX or anything else that he has a hand in and would never shut anything like that down. Like that time when he started a personal vendetta against someone who suggested he didn't know what he was talking ... oh, wait.
I agree. People on HN love to theorize about reshaping current social media platforms, and now we may get to see someone actually attempt to do it. I hope people aren't so invested in Twitter they would rather this not happen.
I'm of the opposite opinion. I think being even more lax than Zuckerberg on psy-ops, hate speech, denialism, racism and misinformation will be quite dangerous to society. Some of the necessary conditions of speech itself might collapse, in a way that the very idea of 'speech' will become nearly impossible.
It will be terrible, for the Western democracies anyway - it will likely help Putin and Xi tremendously though.
I'm not reasoning, I'm playing devil's advocate as someone who is laptop-agnostic. A couple posts back in my history you can see I wrote the converse to someone.
Also, it's not that the laptop is a right-wing fabrication, but the... uh... existence of material relevance to the election I think? Something about it was dismissed as right-wing misinfo but, again, idk enough about the topic, I'm just trying to see what I can gather from different views now that the dust has settled.
If the charge is that it was sequestered by members of the right-wing and then intentionally released right before the election to influence the outcome, then yes that is definitely true.
But there were claims that this was a hoax, forged documents, or sourced from Russia. There has never been any evidence backing those claims, AFAIK.
Arguably he already has it but if Elon manages to turn Twitter around and grow it to be on par with Facebook and TikTok then nobody could deny he has the greatest Midas touch in the world.
In the literal sense, it would be banning zero content. Not even gory, adult-themed/non-family-friendly content. Personally, I'm all for that. You can't have good without bad. Giving more freedom means giving it to bad actors just as much as good actors. That's just something people can't seem to come to terms with.
I left out the "spam" from my comment, because I agree, automated spam detracts from conversation. That's something I think 99% of people can agree on. But banning someone for mentioning firearms, or their skepticism of <insert-latest-corporate-media-push-here> is crazy to me. Same with people talking about their sexuality or whatever liberals do these days. Nobody gets banned for saying what's on their mind. And it's not the platform's job to prevent people from getting their feelings hurt.
I visit several every day because I like my memes spicy, and I'm not afraid of new or controversial information. The super woke cultists and their narratives that dominate the mainstream ones quite frankly get repetitively boring and predictable after a while.
And yet I remain a lib left pot smoking hippy who wants Medicare for all, and minorities/gay folks to be as armed as they want to be.
OK. I'm a huge admirer of everything Musk has a accomplished, but... W.T.F.?
Taking on Twitter will not only be a huge amount of work, it is likely consume a ridiculous amount of talent -- which could be focused instead on building next-generation humanoid robots, electric vehicles, energy solutions, reusable spaceships, and space stations.
Musk has a long history of taking on more than it's humanly possible, but so far he has been narrowly avoided failure. Recall that Tesla was ready to file for bankruptcy at one point in 2019.[a]
He hasn't sold any shares, so he's likely borrowing against his Tesla stock to finance this hostile takeover, exposing himself to all sorts of potentially ugly debt squeezes.
I really, really, really hope Twitter doesn't become a black hole that sucks talent and energy away from more important things. More than that, I hope this latest battle doesn't become Musk's Waterloo.
I agree, this seems like a distraction for him, and probably more ego driven than anything. Although much of his success has been through being a public figure on Twitter, maybe he sees it as investing in his image.
> it is likely consume a ridiculous amount of talent
He has indicated that he'll fire most of the employees[1]. In practice, I think he'll move the talent pool whose job is to optimize ad delivery at Twitter to Tesla/SpaceX/OpenAI etc... and make Twitter paid for by the users, not by the advertisers [2].
I don't know if it's a "burden" (please learn what "burden of proof" means and where and how to use it)... but yes, that tweet is an indication of his intent.
Here's the thing. That phrase "burden of proof" is used by those building fake authority to build up an audience and sell pseudointellectual content to their userbase... the likes of Sam Harris, Scott Adams, Neil d. Tyson etc. are known to do that and it seems to be used in those crowds. It seems like a great phrase when they seem to use it when talking to people they already agree with and make other people look silly (video title: "Sam Harris owns X") and it may be a hit in that crowd where the audience is clueless about it... but if you take it outside, people will point out to you that it's silly.
In forums like this, when it comes to new things, people are trying to make sense of what is happening by sharing their opinions and what they are basing them on... in hopes of getting either supporting or opposing views and letting that collective opinion sharing guide themselves and others into what might really be happening. We're not defending out scientific paper nor are we building up fake authority to scam people.
He can borrow against his Tesla and Space X holdings. The Twitter stake itself can be used as collateral. Or he can sell shares of them.
There is LBO financing, where the purchased company itself borrows to fund the purchase. But I doubt a company as risky as Twitter can borrow a significant fraction of the purchase price. And Musk doesn't have a history of using financial engineering like that.
You're mixing terms. "Leveraged buyout" is really a term of art referring to a purchase largely financed by debt issued by the purchased company. It only works with well established businesses with really reliable revenue streams. If the business fails, the debts go unpaid.
I would be surprised if Twitter could raise as much as 10% or 20% of its own purchase price.
if the board wanted to sell they would establish that in a reply and ask for the details of his financing. They don't want to sell and financing isn't the issue, its just a red herring.
Twitter does not make any great money. It has to go private backed by a wealthy individual to stay afloat for more time without the regulatory worries. It's just a noisy online market place with mostly garbage.
I doubt he will make it actually work, but at least it will be fun show to watch from outside. There will be some changes if he succeeds. And the effects of those should generate plenty of content to follow.
Activist investors almost never buy the entire company outright. The objective is to buy enough stock to have influence on the board, pressure them to make changes that they think would be beneficial and then sell. I think the last time twitter was targeted by actual activist investors, they never bought more than 5-6% of the stock but that was enough to force Dorsey to make changes.
one has to wonder why those dumb old economy guys have never taken twitter apart and tried to turn it around like Musk proposes? they are probably too dumb
Yeah, any other person or company unlike Tesla wouldn't be able to fuel the levels he does... I really don't understand that, but thankfully I don't have enough money to bet against him...
I see his number one publicly visible skill as being a great shill and a master marketer. I agree that not everyone can do this. but is it possible there are skills that people at activist hedge funds have that Musk and his team may not have in equal measure?
On the contrary. They were making investments. This is Musk’s version of buying a yacht, but one that amplifies his persona and increases his wealth. Matt Levine talks about this in detail in his most recent Money Stuff piece.
I don't have an opinion over the consequences for politics over this, I'm just excited over the potential shakedown of the social media landscape that I grew to despise. Musk is an activist, can make it or break it.
He is absolutely right over its enormous potential, all the problems it has - as a business or ones it creates for the society - can be solved.
Free speech absolutism is possible and is beneficial once you ensure that someone is not gaming the system, i.e. someone pretending to be more than one person. Add some other social mechanisms that we organically use in our daily lives to combat bad actors, for example if someone is caught BS'ing degrade their reputation and amplify the defence of the victims(thus, solve the problem of sensational lie being viewed a million times and no one seeing the correction).
Filter bubbles? Doesn't have to be a thing, you have all the data to detect bubbles and pop them by introducing them to each other. "More from the same" algos are a choice, TikTok successfully serves you new content - doesn't think that just because you liked a cat you want cats and cats only.
"Free speech absolutism is possible and is beneficial once you ensure that someone is not gaming the system, i.e. someone pretending to be more than one person."
This is probably the core motivation behind the $2/month blue checkmark fee proposed by him. You don't need to moderate social media if you can just send the cops credit card details of the person spam-posting swastikas, agitating for violence or breaking other established laws. I hope we all agree that laws against libel, glorification of crime, threatening people are not exactly censorship.
It’s not such a bad idea, and it was the initial intent of blue checks: proving that an account wasn’t impersonated. But they couldn’t roll out verification at scale, so they only verified high-ish profile accounts. As a result, over time, the blue check has come to be a sort of class signifier and lost its original purpose (I sometimes see verified anon accounts, what even was verified?)
Rolling it out at scale could improve the rampant spam/astroturfing problem, even if it would be imperfect.
I think about Twitter occasionally and I'm always amazed that the company has thousands of employees.
If he charged $2 / month for an individual to get a blue check and $100 / month for a company to get verified then eliminated ads, could he get the staff count down to under 100 people?
I remember when Facebook bought Instagram. Instagram had something like 13 employees. Why does Twitter need two orders of magnitude more?
So to replace Twitter's current revenue at those rates, you'd need something like 170 million blue check marks or 3 million corporate accounts.
How many do you think is realistic? Reducing your revenue by an order of magnitude to reduce your headcount by an order of magnitude seems like a bad plan.
Revenue puts a ceiling on profit. You can't sell at a loss and make it up in volume, but you also can't make more profits than revenue.
Right now there are 360,000 blue check marks on Twitter. If I spot you the first million blue checkmarks and the first 100,000 business profiles, that's only $144M of revenue per year. Even if that is 90% profit, $130M / year profit on a $50B investment is not particularly brag-worthy.
I assume Musk needs Twitter to be profitable, but as somebody trying to sell cars, and satellites and big solar projects and space launches around the world, the platform can help him in other ways too.
> I remember when Facebook bought Instagram. Instagram had something like 13 employees. Why does Twitter need two orders of magnitude more?
Companies tend to hire more employees as long as the marginal benefit to doing so is greater than the marginal cost. Even minor improvements to a product like Twitter can boost revenue by millions. Reducing the headcount might not maximise their income.
There will be exceptions though. Valve does lot more than most video-game companies with far fewer employees.
A "video-game company" doesn't necessarily have to be a game developer, and being a distributer is enough. Consider how "music company" aptly applies to Spotify.
Which they can do, once you get over a very high bar indeed.
We have literally seen the Supreme Court protect speech advocating for violence against the Government.
>Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444 (1969), was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court interpreting the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Court held that the government cannot punish inflammatory speech unless that speech is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action".
Specifically, the Court struck down Ohio's criminal syndicalism statute, because that statute broadly prohibited the mere advocacy of violence.
Wait, just for clarification... do you believe a company should be allowed to censor speech on its own platform if it wants to do so? Or are you saying a business should not be allowed to remove any posts unless a court has given its approval?
The assumption that cops in the US actually care about someone posting swastikas is questionable. We already have lots of people posting about crimes on twitter accounts under their real names, and the cops very frequently don't do anything about it. A sizable number of the swastika posters are cops, too, as demonstrated by the periodic investigations into police departments that reveal those sorts of things.
P.S. Requiring someone to have a credit card doesn't feel like free speech absolutism to me. A pretty big number of people don't have the ability to make credit card payments. Do their voices not matter?
Also, if there are people complaining of censorship you can always give them a '4-chan mode' and watch them come back asking how to switch it off after 5 min.
> Also, if there are people complaining of censorship you can always give them a '4-chan mode' and watch them come back asking how to switch it off after 5 min.
I'm not so sure what a four chan mode would look like. Can you please elaborate? Inspite of the constant mockery of the janitors, my understanding is they work practically around the clock for zero pay trying to keep the boards (not that I go to /b/ much) as clean as possible. It definitely is not a free for all and my understanding is most people gladly support heavy handed IP bans for example if someone posts commercial pornography on a "work safe" four channel board like technolo/g/y.
Moreover, some of the boards are very slow to the point that frequenters seem to get annoyed by a low quality post pushing down better posts by saying things like "thank you for your blog post" (I assume sarcasm, I don't know for sure) or "a thread died for this".
Also there are (from what I've read) filters available to filter out posts with certain keywords and people coming up with ways to have their posts show up for people with filters using different techniques.
I don't post anything on 4chan as I don't feel like a part of the in-crowd though and would genuinely like to know what a 4 Chan mode would look like.
> I don't post anything on 4chan as I don't feel like a part of the in-crowd though and would genuinely like to know what a 4 Chan mode would look like.
I don’t think there is a requirement for being part of the in crowd to post on 4chan. Then again, I’ve never posted there either.
I think the point is that 4chan mode would be the “absolute free speech” mode. And if that is where we are going, it will be quite a ride. I can’t imagine Twitter surviving it, but it will be interesting.
> I think the point is that 4chan mode would be the “absolute free speech” mode. And if that is where we are going, it will be quite a ride. I can’t imagine Twitter surviving it, but it will be interesting.
I think what I've learned from 4chan is that words like (redacted) shit general in /g/ or calling OP a (redacted) is ok on 4chan specifically. Except the name(redacted) and trip(redacted), we are all pseudonymous there so when someone says you are a (redacted), they don't mean to say you are of a specific ethnicity or gender. It means you are acting like an idiot or something they disapprove of?
I can imagine a 21+ social media network that has no explicit moderation but you would still need protection from spam, flooding, and other bad actors once you get to a certain size.
> he would be sued for enabling the NYC subway terrorist
The problem with that is that yesterday it was swastikas, today is the letter Z, tomorrow who knows what else we might have in store?
Also, putting in prison all the people who have displayed their swastika-love thingie online [1] would have meant Mariupol falling sooner to the Russians, a thing contrary to the beliefs of many who propose laws like that.
> Free speech absolutism is possible and is beneficial once you ensure that someone is not gaming the system, i.e. someone pretending to be more than one person
You can have free speech absolutism or controls to stop gaming the system. Pick one.
After that it becomes a debate over which controls to have, and the argument that multiple accounts is worse than incitement to racial hatred or antivax nonsense isn't a clear cut one.
A lot of the "free speech" complaints about social media amount to complaints about social media platforms adding content warnings about [alleged] sensational lies or penalising their reputation anyway.
You realize NYPost are the ones who slutshame a NYC EMT for moonlighting on OnlyFans to make ends meet because their salary is criminally low? You know, they find the fact she's making some X-rated content more wrong than her salary being at the poverty level.
> I don't want my platform to say anything about this
You should have the freedom to start such a forum without being regulated out of existence and join such a forum without fear of isolation. You should not be able to force other privately owned forums to adopt your view.
If they ask Twitter or some other platform to derank your view and manage to convince the platform to do so, that’s an end result of free speech.
One of the main arguments for free speech is that you let everyone talk without government interference and let private actors decide what are good and bad ideas.
Everyone in this post who wants these public platforms to be forced to host all speech sound like what they really need is to have these platforms to be nationalized and run with government rules. What’s confusing to me is the majority of the people I see who want these platforms to host all speech are also in the same group that thinks everything should be done by companies and not the government
This is exactly what's going on. Twitter censors one type of opinion and elevates another. People with the opinions which are currently being elevated are terrified of the potential loss of social power.
For what it's worth, I think this fear is misplaced. Unless Elon can figure out how to run Twitter without ads, woke-bigotry is safe as long as advertisers are using woke politics to distract from their evils.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights should be a pretty good baseline.
> Art. 12: No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
And, as is always the question, to what extent is this one-off example representative of the totality of Facebook's efforts to stop the spread of misinformation?
Are 50% of the "censored" posts regular reporting? 1%? 0.00001%? Shouldn't a detail like that matter?
If I could make the rules, my rule for conversations about one-off examples would be that you have to immediately follow up by talking about how representative that example is of the phenomenon you are using it to illustrate.
>A lot of the "free speech" complaints about social media amount to complaints about social media platforms adding content warnings about [alleged] sensational lies or penalising their reputation anyway.
Exactly. And I would add, nobody who claims they are a "free speech absolutist" can stay consistent with that declaration after even one or two simple questions.
Does free speech absolutism mean unmoderated ISIS and Al-Qaeda posts are fine? Because we need to expose them to healthy debate for the benefit of societal progress? The answer typically is "well that's not speech, that's _____", and then it's a debate over why there's a special different word for the type of speech they want to prohibit.
You may do, but the self-proclaimed "free speech absolutist" trying to buy Twitter thinks that making certain claims and revealing certain information about his companies is not at all fine, hence all the litigation against critical former employees
"Free speech absolutism is possible and is beneficial [once ...]"
I hope you know what free speech absolutism entails. I don't think your statement is true at all.
Absolute (really, absolute and complete) free speech would allow companies to lie about the efficacy of medication, lie about the ingredients of products, permit lying under oath, allow libel, insults, threats of violence etc. I am not sure I want that. I prefer clear, written rules for that.
I think that's alright. They lie, get sued, pay fines. That's why we have regulations for food and drugs.
I don't advocate that speech shouldn't have consequences. I advocate that speech shouldn't be blocked. Twitter, or any platform, shouldn't be doing the police work. They should be indifferent to the speech like a telephone company is indifferent on what people speak on the phone and those who create problems should be dealt with appropriately through relevant channels.
If J&J claims that their talc powder is good for you, their false claim shouldn't be deleted by Twitter. Instead, the appropriate authority should take care of it and victims should collect damages. Their tweet should stay there as a relic.
Suing and paying fines as a means of preventing abuse of free speech isn't working. Very rich individuals can pay fines without blinking, but the really pernicious one is the lawsuits - a large legal team can make it hell for any smaller actor, can delay and run the case down, can settle privately and completely bury the issue, etc.
I'd rather see us fix our enforcement mechanisms to work better before trying to take off the filters on dangerous and violent free speech.
> I don't advocate that speech shouldn't have consequences.
We already have free speech and consequences. Twitter and Musk have nothing to do with free speech issues.
You want absolute freedom of speech but then you want to limit a company and platform in what it says, which it does by allowing or disallowing certain content? And you would prefer a single person, who has a history of devious activity, having totalitarian control over said company and platform? It doesn’t make sense.
No we don't have it on the Internet. On the internet(including YC), the norm is that your speech is removed and/or you are blocked from further speech (as a consequence) if you say the wrong thing where "wrong" is defined by the platform operators.
Musk may choose to make Twitter an absolute free speech platform but he might choose to make it something else. I hope for the former. He might end up to turn it into something horrible or just leave it as is but I don't know why would you spend $50B to do just that.
Compelling companies to host stuff in its original context in perpetuity even if they want to remove it because it continues to harm people and whilst trying to resolve social media cesspits with more aggressive real world policing and punishments sounds like the worst of both worlds...
I don't know anything about compelling companies but speech by itself cannot harm anybody.
Stuff that Hitler said are benign within the context of knowing what happened in WW2, his words are merely a historic relic and no one start putting Jews in camps just by reading his words. His words are not a spell that makes people do things when you read them. Back then his words caused harm because they were said within the context of 1930s-1940s Europe.
The context doesn't disappear when you block speech. Let the speech exists and enable fair pushback for the opponents of the said speech is the way to handle it, IMHO.
For example, instead of pretending that racists don't exists by deleting their arguments and accounts, let them say the things they have to say and enable the opponents of it have the same reach.
The "by itself" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Sure, if you post someone's home address with an allegation that they're a paedophile, the instruction to attack them doesn't harm them, it's people following the instruction. And the bombardment of words sent to harassment victims isn't the sole factor in the emotional state of harassment victims, and it's the virus that kills not the antivax sentiment etc etc.
But they harm people rather more directly than Twitter having the freedom to delete those words if its management feels that would be the responsible thing to do does...
These things happen only in consequence free environments(deleting a comment or blocking an account is not a the kind of consequence I'm talking about).
No, there's no problem there. Speech freedom being absolute doesn't have anything to do with lying, scamming, giving orders to do illegal things etc.
Think of this having absolute freedom over how you spend your money. There's no direct mechanism preventing you from buying illegal stuff but you can still get in trouble if you buy illegal stuff. This is not a contradiction.
I don't have a strong opinion on this. Maybe there should be a button to show you why exactly you get what you get. I definitely don't like the opaque nature of these content curation algos.
> I don't advocate that speech shouldn't have consequences.
By that definition the entire world is an absolute free speech paradise already.
You can say anything you want. Sure you might be canceled, jailed, fined, killed, tortured, or anything else -- depending on what you say, who you say it to and where you say it. But you're absolutely free to say it!
In traditional sense, the free speech is implied to be about your relationship with your government. If you get jailed, fined, killed etc... by your government you obviously don't have free speech.
On the internet platforms, admins can't do any of that but they can effectively silence you(IRL silencing you is very hard).
And they're never GOING to use it, because Twitter isn't for them.
The Tiktok crowd is not the Twitter crowd. The Twitter crowd is not the Facebook crowd. The only platform that truly has cross-group viability is instagram, and that's only because it's a visual platform.
Twitter is a place where you make short, concise statements and people yell at you. Remove the character limit and it's just a feature-barren Facebook but with a bunch of people you don't even personally know. Everybody has been crying that it can "be more." It doesn't want to "be more." "Being more" is antithetical to the spirit of the enterprise and will kill it.
It's popular but it's mostly garbage where people scream at each other, among the bots and scammers. You can improve the interaction modes, improve discoverability etc. thus improving its value per user instead of inflating total number of users.
> What unrealized potential does Twitter have left after 16 years of existence?
How much potential communication was left in the human race have after the first 7,000 years since written script started appearing? The answer is, most potential was still unexplored.
Everything in modern civilisation is still young. Especially new communication platforms.
The potential value of a communications platform is always handwavy up to the point the revenue is realised. It is well-nigh impossible to forecast what the social media landscape will look like in the medium-long term; especially if someone cares about profit. Twitter has only been experimenting with making money since 2018.
Twitter had ample time before 2018 to experiment with making money, though. I'm not saying that Twitter should have known how to do that in 2006, but they probably should have by the time they IPO'ed 8 years later, in 2013.
And Glancing over their S-1, they're making money now with the same means that they were planning to in 2013.
Free speech absolutism and "ensure that someone is not gaming the system" are opposites. Having multiple accounts isn't the only way to game the system. There are plenty of trolls out there and they are creative.
Once you are large enough to attract some trolls, if you don't have good moderation, comment quality goes to hell, and users care about that. Running a large social media site isn't kind to people who aren't willing to do what works for ideological reasons. You are fighting the trolls with a deliberate handicap and they will absolutely take advantage. So are you going to ban people who are disruptive or not?
TikTok is heavily moderated. That's why they became popular - the moderation was better than the competition.
Heavy moderation can potentially work. But it needs to try and be objective and politically neutral, not based on mobs of activists actively trying to get their opponents banned/silenced.
But this is nonsense -- what does "politically neutral" even mean in this context?
> not based on mobs of activists actively trying to get their opponents banned/silenced.
Moderation literally is silencing/banning someone.
----
My (slightly uncharitable) take is that when "non-political" or "objective" gets brought up in this context it usually means anything that the poster already agrees with, and "political" or "subjective" means value judgements that the poster disagrees with.
But any moderation policy you bring up in a private space -- from banning alt-coin scams to blocking pornography to deciding what does and doesn't constitute harassment -- all of that is a balance between protecting communities and allowing people more space to speak, and making political decisions about what content does and doesn't belong in those categories.
All of these categories are socially constructed and based in part on group consensus about the types of content and people we would like to see banned/silenced.
----
I'll also point out that using a word like "objective" can sometimes make free speech policies more strict. There have been multiple points in history where we believed something to be objective and settled truth that later turned out to be false.
So not only does this ignore the reality that moderation is inherently somewhat subjective and political and needs to be in order to protect communities, it also ignores the reality that moderation is inherently somewhat subjective and political and needs to be in order to avoid over-censorship.
What is and is not settled knowledge is often a contentious debate, and by treating it like it's not a contentious debate and like the decisions about what to ban are just fully impersonal and objective, we open the door both to people who want under-moderation and (surprisingly) also to people who want over-moderation or want to quell criticism of establishment ideas. By treating these moderation decisions like they're not decisions, we allow both over-aggressive and under-aggressive moderators to hide behind a veil of objectivity and to avoid responsibility for the choices they make about the content they allow.
Concepts like "objective" and "politically neutral" are what Walter Bryce Gallie called "essentially contested concepts."
Even in a system where moderation was administered perfectly, there would be some percentage of people who fundamentally objected to the accuracy and even legitimacy of moderation based on its outcome. A "correctly" administered system would probably still be one in which disgruntled people dismissed "correct" choices as activism, biased motives, etc.
Getting rid of vaccine misinformation would lead to antivax cranks saying the pharmaceutical industry is using their financial power to influence moderating. Getting rid of 2020 election misinformation will lead to conservative narratives about "mainstream" media silencing their voices out of political bias. The liberal narrative on moderation decisions would say it excludes minority and disempowered voices. And all sides would invoke concepts like "objectivity."
The problem is that not that all sides do it, but the opposite, that there really is a real underlying truth out there, and it really will be the case that some people are going to be systematically wrong at every level at which they register objections to moderation, and the correct response is that their concerns are unfounded.
Of course that won't make people happy, but it shows that the limits of what is possible are limits relating to human nature that won't be uniformly satisfied by any system.
> Free speech absolutism is possible and is beneficial once you ensure that someone is not gaming the system, i.e. someone pretending to be more than one person.
Regardless of whether or not it would be a good idea for Twitter to remove moderation, personally my feeling is that if someone says they're a free speech absolutist and they oppose burner accounts and anonymity, then they're not actually a free speech absolutist.
It's become more common in certain circles to say that free speech is fine as long as people have a persistent ID and reputation, and I do like reputation systems to a certain degree -- but I want to point out that "a persistent ID and a reputation system" is just "social consequences" with extra steps.
I sometimes suspect that the people who propose those systems are (unintentionally) arguing for a world with even more self-policing about what people say online, and I have over time come to suspect that a world with lots of communities that have strict moderation policies and that are occasionally closed off entirely, but that generally allow more anonymous accounts -- is probably a world with more free speech (and hopefully less free speech of a harmful kind) than a world where everybody gets one voice and it's tracked everywhere. Again that's a separate conversation, but the point is that if your definition of free speech absolutism is that anyone can say anything they want wherever they are without social or political consequences, then (regardless whether or not that's a good idea) persistent identifiers are a step backwards from that goal.
Free speech absolutism is a choice that does not promote the open discussion of ideas. It is a choice that promotes the loudest and nastiest voices and pushes out everyone else.
The problem is that the alternative is way worse… You have to create some authority that decides what constitutes a nasty opinion and what doesn’t.
And the moral of the history is: in 2020 the COVID lab-leak hypothesis was considered a nasty idea, one that only uneducated, bitter conspiracy theorists could support. People have been banned from the effective monopolists of public discourse over this idea.
Then sometime around 2021 the same idea became acceptable.
Not surprisingly, this change in the public perception of this idea over social media followed the viewpoint of the major political party the owners of social media cheer for.
This is bad, bad, bad for political discourse and rational thinking!!
As far as I am concerned: long love the free market of ideas!
Assuming the factual premises of what you're saying are true, the problem with the lab-leak thing was that it was bandied about by Trump and his supporters as some kind of excuse for his poor handling of the pandemic (which began before the pandemic even started via his dismantling of certain government functions meant to deal with such outbreaks). They also were people who wanted to downplay the severity of the disease overall, act like everything could continue as normal (for largely selfish reasons), etc.
Don't get me wrong--I think the initial response to Covid was probably overzealous, and it has lasted way too long (once we had vax, everyone should have been done with it).
My point is simply that they wielded the info/idea in an ideological way, and this led to it being dismissed, whereas if the idea was discussed and established among experts first, it would have been taken more seriously. In other words, bare, unregulated, irresponsible free speech did harm in advancing this idea.
You are clearly differentiating between Trump's experts and current experts. You either believe in the infallibility of experts or you don't. There can't be "poor handling of the pandemic" unless you are willing to contradict the infallibility of experts.
Fields of expertise have their own internal ways of determining authority; the Trump side of things has tended on the whole to not go with the most authoritative of thought-out views of things.
The only way it works is if people have some skin in the game.
To go the "free speech" route everyone should have to use their real identity. I realise this excludes people under repressive governments where free speech has really been lost, and you can be thrown in jail or worse for a seemingly mundane opinion.
But for those living in a democracy make them use their real identity. Otherwise everyone is just trolling with zero consequences.
That doesn’t follow. In an illiberal country they’ll just ban any large platform that allows anything. How would free speech absolutism on a platform or in some other country have any impact on a state like that?
Banning a platform outright isn't as easy. Some countries like Russia are absolutely willing to do that, but a lot of smaller illiberal countries still need to curry favours with their own population and banning a popular platform will cause some unrest.
For example, Turkey banned and unbanned Facebook several times.
Bootstrapping a network the size of Twitter is nothing like easy, and might even be impossible this late in the game. Gold rushes of new users tend to wear off as new areas calcify into established concepts.
(The same would be true for launching a modern day FriendFeed / Bebo / MySpace etc)
I'd add that even if by doing this he ends up destroying twitter, it will still leave room for the growth of something new. Twitter has a lot of legacy baggage, and either it had to be shaken up dramatically or burned to the ground in order for this social media landscape to change. This could go either way.
> Gold rushes of new users tend to wear off as new areas calcify into
established concepts.
I hear ya. It's the crowd he's buying. But to me Twitter has no
"established concept". Maybe I'm the stupidest person on the planet
right now, but what exactly is Twitter? Does Musk have a brilliant
solution looking for a problem. Or is this just playing games with
money and power for it's own sake?
It is a bit like coal mining.. even the default new account experience encourages subscribing to a bunch of spam, when what is needed is mining one seam in that mess containing just the desired content (people).
Finding a tight-knit specialist community goes against everything the Twitter UI encourages, but it's how most folk who are deeply loyal to the platform actually use it. When configured well, the timeline should be significantly comprised of conversations between known people talking about desirable topics.
Personally I think this is the core of the tool - free, open access to specialist communities with no membership requirements, and no need for upfront reputation. If some conversation between experts interests you and you have a question, you can just ask.
One approach is to start by following one account you really like, then mining their replies following the folk they actively engage with. Do this for a few iterations and the result will quickly become an extremely intimate, engaging, and topical timeline. It only takes a few meaningful questions and comments added to these conversations for the follows and inclusion to start flowing your way.
It's like a watercooler around which a huge bunch of people with interesting takes and things to say on lots of different interesting things have gathered. It takes a while to find the information streams as they are not made obvious, but at least for me I got much better first hand information of both Covid and Ukrainian war from the people I follow before media.
Simultaneously, Twitter is an algorithmic echo chamber. I had the opposite experience: fear porn scaremongering throughout the pandemic with microchips in the vaccines, 5G nonsense, graphene in the vaccines, the evils of Bill Gates, and far more. My interest in Twitter has declined massively year-on-year. I used to use it as an IRC replacement with hashtags in TweetDeck in place of channels. Now all the fun stuff is happening on Matrix protocol in Matrix Spaces.
"fear porn scaremongering throughout the pandemic with microchips in the vaccines,"
Any of the algorithmic timelines are generally horrible, agreed.
I follow only people who tweet and retweet reasonable things. I use the timeline with content only from the people I choose to follow ("Latest"), and don't follow lunatics. This is a fairly nice experience, but needs a curated list of people to follow, building of which needs a while.
The only way I can stomach Twitter is using a browser extension that removes retweets and likes from others, and recommended stuff from Twitter. Also removed the Trending/News area, and the Explore tab. Added a chronological timeline back too, but really don't use it much, and feel a lot better for it.
I don't think it's even necessarily about who you follow, there's a lot of pushing celebrities who are into this rubbish.
My conspiracy theory is that Musk foresees the decline of society and owning a massive platform of communication provides him with a lot of power. Why buy a newspaper when you can buy the communication of so-much-more?
Musk has had success with Paypal, Tesla and SpaceX. All of those are/were mostly engineering problems first and then marketing problems second. None of the major problems at Twitter these days are engineering problems, but rather they are all related to politics and human group psychology. I don't see what Elon could bring to the table that Twitter does not already have.
PayPal wasn't rally an engineering problem, at least not at the scale of Tesla and SpaceX.
I'm torn. I think he has some good ideas (more open, paid vs. ads, crack down on bots), and for sure the necessary leadership to focus resources on those topics. On the other hand, it's not good that rich people own more media.
For PayPal to succeed it had to viciously hammer on a huge number of users who it algorithmically suspected might maybe be scammers. Blocking a tremendous amount of free activity in the process, punishing many innocent in addition to the guilty. This was done to create something that felt safe enough to get mainstream use.
That sounds somewhat like the Twitter of today, and not much like a hypothetical super-free-ified twitter.
The main draw for Truth Social is not posting on it. If he was "truthing" 50 times a day, they would be doing a lot better.
I suspect some negotiation is going on. The main content creator wants a bigger slice of the business.
Trump never posting on TruthSocial seems to be a pretty low commitment from him. Or maybe he sent a welcome/test message. Meanwhile, he doesn't even have someone crossload his blog entries.
"he could easily build a much better rival with different values."
Steretypically of social media - I see Twitters greatest asset being it's current network of influencers, analysts, thinkers, artists and colleagues. All the people I want to follow are already on twitter. I don't care about the platform or the tech, I care about all of the interesting people posting there. I would claim that is the true power of the platform atm - it's network.
I just despise Twitter for its double standard. It allows the tweet of Khamenei to call for “eradication” of Israel and its people, yet it blocks so many people in the name of “inciting violence”. It blocked people who called for wearing masks or SIP in early 2020, but later blocked people who cited Nature paper. If Twitter were in the middle ages, they would for sure ban Galileo, and if they were in 19th century, they would for sure ban Darwin — because one can’t be anti-science and science can’t be wrong, right?
Twitter is a disgrace to the modern society. Their hypocrisy goes to no end.
> Free speech absolutism is possible and is beneficial
The jury is out for me, how can we say it's automatically beneficial if it's not sacred and only a mean to an end for society/people, that end depending on your views (GDP, happiness, sustainability...)?
Also IMHO like any liberal absolutism, the forces will inevitably make who has the more money own and game the system, it's a proxy for Oligarchy. It can be good but only under certain philosophical positions and economic theories that not everyone agree on.
> Free speech absolutism is possible and is beneficial once you ensure that someone is not gaming the system, i.e. someone pretending to be more than one person.
And how is one supposed to do that, especially against nation-state actors such as Russia and China, both of which have been caught or implicated multiple times now, or against ordinary criminals?
> Filter bubbles? Doesn't have to be a thing, you have all the data to detect bubbles and pop them by introducing them to each other.
Great idea, expose LGBT people to Christian fundamentalists, it's not like harassment from these groups and their ideology isn't one of the leading causes of suicide of LGBT people.
"Filter bubbles" are the self-organized "social mechanisms that we organically use in our daily lives to combat bad actors" you were talking about.
Completely agree. People who think unmoderated online platforms are equivalent to a flourishing state of nature have not really thought one or two steps ahead.
No thought whatsoever about the fact that increasing automation makes astroturfing, propaganda, "coordinated inauthentic activity" possible in a way that was not easily practical before.
Additionally, no one thinks about what filter bubbles really are in practice, or models what they imagine to be the healthy exchange of ideas, or whether our present choices to be selective about information have broader array of functional purposes than are captured by an oversimplifying term like "filter bubble."
I feel like this is a conversation about free speech on the internet that is due to mature, and that as it matures there will be a new inventory of 101-level fallacies broadly understood by everybody. One fallacy would be the idea that bots, trolls, harassment campaigns, mob mentality and coordinated state-based campaigns are the same as a "free market of ideas" that leads to the optimal state of exchange of ideas. Another fallacy would be the notion that any act of preferentially selecting sources is comprehensively analyzed and understood by labeling it a "filter bubble."
Why do people use the word cult when it's someone popular who they dislike? It's inaccurate and a waste of connotation.
He's not a cult leader as he's not doing cult things. Musk isn't making a new religion, he just has fans. No less than Justin Bieber annoyingly had.
He's an activist as he's trying (and succeeding) at affecting change according to his beliefs. He's also certainly an opportunist as he's an entrepreneur. What point are you trying to make with "people's best interests"? He holds his interests to heart and that might happen to align with some people.
Look up the phrases "cult of personality" and "personality cult". These are not new or controversial terms, and it's certainly not a novel application to Elon Musk's mythos, one in which he actively participates in crafting and molding. You would be naive to think this is an inaccurate portrayal.
>Free speech absolutism is possible and is beneficial
I'm not sure why everyone is talking about this as though it's on the horizon? The article doesn't mention "free speech" as a goal, it mentions:
- selling account privileges
- making HQ a homeless shelter
- edit button
In other words, monetization and PR.
The major free speech issue on Twitter is not whether certain people are allowed to be on Twitter. It's whether Twitter enables its users in carrying out harassment campaigns against people whose speech they don't like. These campaigns often feature unethical and fraudulent behavior, e.g. fake anonymous Yelp reviews complaining about an employee, encouraging/performing vandalism of the business, phone calls in the middle of the night, borderline slanderous exaggerations sent through anonymous channels, etc. It's quite misleading to characterize these internet mobs as "people exercising their right to criticism", and they tend to rely on the ability of people to anonymously take action against someone who is not anonymous. Fixing it would require more controls on Twitter, not fewer.
> I'm not sure why everyone is talking about this as though it's on the horizon? The article doesn't mention "free speech"
Because if Musk said "I have no problem with Trump or Nazis on the platform and would unban them", he wouldn't have nearly the same support as he does now.
Instead people's reaction is "yay, edit button! Go Musk Daddy!"
>Because if Musk said "I have no problem with Trump or Nazis on the platform and would unban them", he wouldn't have nearly the same support as he does now.
This remains true after he acquires it. The claim that one of the most image-obsessed investors in the world is going to make changes that are obviously unpopular seems dubious and frankly paranoid.
That’s all very nice sounding, but there’s a kind of gritty assembly language that this all compiles down to: “I want the high-speed electronic dissemination of information shaped like this.”
It’s an open question whether or not it’s possible to avoid shaping the firehouse in a modern liberal democracy, but you could go your whole life and never meet a person truly disinterested in bending it towards their particular tribalism.
The whole time I was at FB I had two groups of people, each screaming in one ear, that we were not doing enough to suppress the “other” people.
How do you put shit on a global electronic network without “gaming the system”? Have no bias? You got that down we should make you king.
> Free speech absolutism is possible and is beneficial once you ensure that someone is not gaming the system
First and foremost gaming seems to be nigh on unavoidable.
Secondly and most importantly, "absolutism" is not a good thing. I know I'll get downvotes but it needs to be said: some speech is not healthy for society, primarily hate speech.
And we have that today in Fox News -- actively promoting hate speech and helping to widen the divide in the US.
edit: yes, much news is garbage (CNN et al), but my point remains that speech designed to foster hate of others is not healthy and welcome dialog in this regard.
> Free speech absolutism is possible and is beneficial ..
We (the internet) tried that with 8chan. Things kept escalating to the point where a bunch of people got murdered in a synagogue. Condoning violent echo chambers will always ALWAYS lead to significant violence.
> once you ensure that someone is not gaming the system, i.e. someone pretending to be more than one person
For this to work you would need a worldwide government identity check protocol implemented by all participating countries, something like OAuth so you could register only one account connected to that real identity, it could still be anonymous from other users perspective. Problem here is that even if that would make bot problem less significant it would not eliminate it. You would have farms of hacked identities and then in countries with really low income you could buy those identities (digital access) for a few dollars per piece.
TikTok does have filter bubbles, they're just geographic rather than profile specific. eg you wouldn't find any content on the Ukraine invasion from a Russian IP.
What the right calls "free speech" has been tried by several investor-backed social media startups. In every case it has turned into a sewer of racism, misogyny, death threats, and non-monetizable yuckkyiness.
Nobody has an answer to that problem, yet. If there is no answer, turning Twitter into a desolation for trolls will not help Twitter.
These trolls want to go back to Twitter to torment everyone who rejected them. Good luck creating shareholder value that way.
I guess the solution would be tying your identify to your account. If you do something illegal then you can be held accountable. The problem is, how many of twitters users would vanish if they suddenly needed to be identifiable?
I'm not sure I really get the points you're making here. You've said "I don't have an opinion over the consequences for politics over this" but also "free speech absolutism is possible and is beneficial". And "Filter bubbles? Doesn't have to be a thing" but also "degrade [bad actors] reputation and amplify the defence of the victims".
I don't (apparently controversially) think that a lack of "free speech" is anywhere near top of the list of Twitter's problems. It's way more pressing that the amazing content on it has become completely drowned out by a cacophony of bad actors. It's not just the bot armies, but the legions of individual contributors posting and sharing obvious churnalism and outrage bait that it's _impossible_ to escape from.
I had to stop using Twitter regularly maybe a year or so ago for my own health. I could feel my blood pressure spiking every time I opened the app, and it wasn't because of algorithms or filter bubbles or censorship – if anything, the opposite. It was just increasingly not possible to use it for the things I had always loved about it—breaking news, shared conversations, interesting updates etc. from people and organisations I was interested in—without having to wade through buckets of deliberately rage-inducing shit.
Twitter itself might bear some responsibility for that. The obvious bot problem is out of control, and it was becoming increasingly user hostile to anyone who wanted to _avoid_ their attempts at "bubble popping". But maybe the bigger problem is that it's fundamentally hard to get people to behave respectfully in a a global public forum like that.
The only way I've dealt with this is, every couple of years, to unfollow everyone and carefully pick who I follow again in a niche community that is interesting to me at the time.
The consequences for politics are literally the only thing that matters here. Even if Musk doesn't intend to reinstate Trump's account (and certainly, nothing he's said indicates he wouldn't do that), the second he controls Twitter he will be under enormous pressure to do so. If he declines to do so, it will be damaging to his business with government. If he agrees to do so, there will be a huge amount of public discontent with Musk and his companies.
Worse, from that point on everything that happens as a result will be on Musk and his companies. There won't be any more repercussions for powerful politically-motivated speakers, even if they explicitly call for violence. This will motivate extreme behavior and extreme responses. Boycotts for Tesla and Starlink (whose customers almost certainly tip liberal) will absolutely be on the table.
Even if you personally love Musk, the success of his consumer-facing businesses depends on broad adoption by consumers. That's all at risk now. CEOs of this kind of business may have politics, but they traditionally avoid political firestorms because of these concerns. Musk is obviously rich enough that he doesn't care, but his shareholders probably should.
Literally the only people that care about any of that, are the ones deep lost in the Twitter funnel. Here's the truth: Whatever happens on Twitter, it's going to have zero effect on your personal life. All these 140 character blurps about politics, the virtue signaling, the constant anger, outrage and cancel culture, it has melted people brains. It's all just an echo chamber, tightly kept in within bounds, and people will sell their soul, define their inner being, say whatever it takes, for bogus dopamine hits. Nobody has morals or ideology on Twitter, they are all just optimizing for likes.
It's only "US-centric" if you include its vassal states in the definition, more correct to say "West-centric view" probably.
That's of course assuming these things aren't happening on Twitter in other spheres (which would be an interesting data point - it would indicate that it may not be something intrinsic to the format, but with current issues in Western culture).
How large is Twitters non-Western user base anyways, in percentages?
I was recently looking at the payment options for a M3 RWD and have actually paused everything last week when the first Twitter news came out, because that's exactly where my mind went too.
If this whole move ends up with trump reinstated, I just cannot support any of his companies with my money, ever. And I'll do what I can to dissuade colleagues if their values align with mine.
I currently live in Germany, where German cars are very common, but yeah, I was trying NOT to give money to a German car manufacturer already before Ukraine got invaded, because they have immense influence on the local government and are to (co-)blame for the sad delay in adopting EV and government incentives (and when incentives come out, they try to structure them to exclude Tesla as much as possible). Plus the diesel scandals.
I guess I'll wait and see. But wanting an EV, not wanting something as small as a Zoe, or too expensive, and hating SUVs (I know, I know, too many conditions), it's hard to find an alternative. I may have to settle for an ID.3 or a Cupra if Tesla is no longer an option.
For the record, I currently do have a German car - bought it used, 12ish years.
> If he declines to do so, it will be damaging to his business with government.
How would failing to reinstate Trump's account be damaging to his business with the government? Wouldn't it matter whether the Federal government is under a Democrat or Republican executive?
Republicans control a minority of Congress right now but will likely control a majority by 2022. Maybe both branches and the Presidency in 2024. Ordinarily we like to pretend that political action doesn't affect your business, but Trump made it pretty clear that he's willing to retaliate against political enemies using the power of the state [1]. This feeling may not be broadly shared, but currently Trump is the most influential person in the GOP and a leading candidate for 2024.
Yeah, I agree with you generally (I don't think Congress is that important in this context; it's more the Executive Branch), I just don't see how that supports the above poster, unless one assumes that a Republican is going to win in 2024.
If there are two parties and you think one party might abuse the Presidency to help/harm your business, and the other won't... which one are you going to spend time ingratiating yourself with?
This is quite interesting. Regardless of which way you vote when it comes election time, Trump would have a much better chance if he had social media access again. If Musk takes control of Twitter and gives Trump access again it could have an enormous impact on the outcome of that election and the future of America. It’s interesting (and terrifying) that someone could take Twitter private and exercise that level of power. I can’t imagine it would be long until the government regulated it at that point but given the US strong protections for free speech I’m not sure how much regulation can occur.
Surely it depends on what Trump does with his account, right? Does Chick-Fil-A suffer from it's decisions politically? If Trump incites insurrection with his account, why not just do what Twitter did? Everybody is unhappy with Twitter. Complaining about twitter is the engagement desired. It's not political, extremists on both sides are upset.
I suppose those who own stock are also upset, I just realized. I don't think liberals will boycott Tesla and Starlink unless they become associated with their political opponents, enough that the environmental aspect would become secondary. If that happens... well, that's a lot of sales regardless, right?
Free speech absolutism means spam, child porn, revenge porn, death threats, sexual harassment and defamation are all allowed. You’re cool with all that?
So again, you’re down with people disseminating child porn and sexually harassing their coworkers? Unmoderated Viagra ads and phishing scams on social networks? Because those are direct consequences of free speech absolutism.
The ability for people to call a black Twitter user the N-word, a female user to "fuck off and get raped," a liberal/conservative user to eat a bullet, as well as spreading known falsehoods and toxic content (either as gospel or for the lulz) -- all without getting banned for having "alternative views."
> Free speech absolutism is possible and is beneficial
What?
As it stands, free speech absolutism is being weaponized by those with the money to manipulate the crap out of it. It has no benefit in a society that is driven by the highest bidder writes the rules _and now the news_.
> Free speech absolutism is possible and is beneficial
How can Twitter possibly get even more liberal in terms of free speech? Just look at the trends occasionally, they are really, really stressing the boundaries of free speech and crossing into defamation territory without being censored in any way. You can't start a trend comparing a democratically elected politician to Hitler and expect no repercussions.
The US president has just won the largest popularity contest in the world, and by nature of the role has a mandate to bring ideas into the political discourse for a couple of years. It isn't so much that there should be special protection. If Twitter's policy bans the president it is way out of line with actual as-measured community expectations.
Let's not get hyperbolic; it's the largest political popularity contest in the US. In India, 600 Million people voted in the 2019 Indian General Election. Eurovision is also bigger than the US General Election, at least by viewership (I couldn't find televoting numbers).
The POTUS should be treated as just a person to Twitter. However, that person has the resources of the world’s most powerful government. POTUS doesn’t need Twitter to get a message out.
But look at it from the other direction. What about all the people who follow him, fans and haters alike, who now have to go elsewhere to see what their sitting president has to say. It's unfair to them to do things like that. And honestly it's pretty childish. Just like the struggle session they put you through if they've taken action against your account. They literally make you delete your own tweet. Which doesn't sound like much, but they had to build that functionality when they fully have the power to do it themselves. It's intentionally spiteful.
Liberal ideals have no hold on Twitter. The liberal ideal is to let as many people as possible have a Twitter account.
Did you read their announcement when they banned him[0]? Banning the man representing, at minimum, a quarter of a country with such nakedly partisan logic is an embarrassment to anyone who wants to pretend Twitter cares about liberal political ideals. They were listening to voices in their head rather than reading what Trump wrote; voices which obviously won't tolerate anything outside a narrow, illiberal view.
Cool. What I'm saying is that you cannot pay lip service to liberal ideals while also suggesting that simply having a very large number of people vote for you is evidence that you shouldn't be removed from a service for policy violations.
The system has to be compatible with liberal ideals before its correct operation causes liberal outcomes.
A system that, based on their flimsy justifications, simply bans political opponents isn't liberal. The classic position a liberalist should take is that the service policy needs to be reformed to embody better values around free political speech.
Not that I'm too invested in the situation. Twitter will be on the way out soon enough if it doesn't pull its head in and tolerate serious dissent from the favoured narrative.
Trump was allowed to run rampant bringing "ideas into the political discourse" for his entire term. Also, it was his personal account that was banned. The official presidential account is still there.
And as the president, he had the entire American media apparatus at his disposal. The premise that somehow an American president can't effectively communicate policy without a Twitter account is absurd. Previous presidents have been able to manage just fine.
Implying that morality is just whatever is popular? Do you think Middle Eastern Twitter should allow people to talk about how they're going to exterminate the Jewish and gay people? And Russian Twitter should allow calling out locations of humanitarian corridors so the military and mine them? And Chinese Twitter should ban all discussion of faults of the CCP? Because those things are often community expectations.
The US is very, very divided. Trump won with basically 50% support, he lost re-election, and then lost even further support when he started making up lies about election fraud. Even if morality was derived from popularity (or just profitability, if that's what you think Twitter did it for), Trump no longer had close to a majority. Maybe his comments were in line with expectations of 60% of Republicans, but the other 70% of the country thought that was what was unacceptable.
> Surely the same standards should be applied to all users?
The standard under discussion seems to be free speech absolutism with the question "how much more liberal could twitter get". The ban of Trump just makes a good high profile example of Twitters current limitations on free speech.
They banned the personal account of the president not the official account. The official account was tweeting until after the election. I would have loved to see if they would have banned the potus account if he tweeted from there but we'll never know.
He got banned as a citizen of the united states, welcome to people's sovereignity where the politicians have the same fundamental rights as the citizens they represent.
The problem with Twitter - and any social medium - is that moderation is very hard to scale. And that's exactly the trade-off big platforms have made in order to grow their userbase. That's just one problem.
Centralization also generates other problems: authority and lack of partipation. These platforms lack proper affordances regarding discovery and curation. As a user, you're automatically gravitating towards the loudest voices, the biggest or most active communities.
For instance, on Reddit, there's a canonical /r/sports subreddit. It has 20 million fans, but it's mostly focussed on american / UK sports. Searching for "sports"doesn't yield anything comparable. Only a fraction of those 20 million fans is really active posting and commenting. There's an /r/worldsports subreddit but has a grand total of 350 redditors.
When it comes to Twitter, the net result is that only a fraction of users is responsible for the vast amount of tweets, while about 50% are basically lurkers. [1][2] In that regard, the "free speech" argument is only a real concern for a very small, yet extremely vocal fraction of Twitter users. The same applies to Reddit as well.
The worrying part isn't the "free speech" argument such as it is posited. It's that all of this results in a lack of participation in any debate. The userbases of social media might be more akin to the placid crowd on a market place listening to someone ranting of a soapbox, and less a salon where everyone actively engages and interacts with each other.
The problem is not if there is free speech on the platform but how it's perceived you will always have an extrem loud minority (no matter what political orientation) that will drown out the rest of the platform just by crying about censorship. It will be interesting to see what will happen to them when there is nothing to cry about anymore.
Not banning and suspending people or hiding tweets for alleged violations of vague and arbitrary standards would be great, to start with.
Go to any political tweet and you'll see countless hateful messages, why aren't they banned, yet others are? I've never seen any reason for it. Clearly they take a side or draw a line on some issues they consider important to control, but not others.
It seems to me it would be far better in my opinion for twitter to foster strength rather than fragility by empowering users to take responsibility for their own feelings and have the tools and maturity to not read things they can't cope with, rather than trying to police what people write centrally. It absolutely could be the modern town square and would be great if it supported real freedom of speech, in my opinion.
I don't see how a comparison with 4chan is any evidence for that. There are also heavily regulated forums which are not popular. So clearly that's not the reason for whether or not one is going to be popular.
> You can't start a trend comparing a democratically elected politician to Hitler and
See, in my opinion, you should be absolutely fee to do that
> expect no repercussions.
The first "repercussion" that comes to mind is to block their account or something like that but I think this is the wrong course. When they do or say something stupid In real life, the repercussions are that they are judged as a stupid person and not simply silenced. I think, this must be the norm in social media too. Just make sure that whatever they say sticks to their identity and if later they change their mind, they can apologise and ask for forgiveness.
I have this idea where your identity can be secret to the society but known to the platform. I.e. the platform knows you as a real person, you have just one account but you have an option to post anonymously too. You use your anonymous account to engage with the community about stuff that you normally wouldn't dare(i.e. controversial political stance, your sexual orientation kind of stuff).
If you post something very bad with your anonymous account(i.e. call for violence, hate speech etc), you get your anonymous posting rights revoked and your posts deleted. You can override the deletion by de-anonimization of the posts. If whatever you said is something criminal(plans to attack this, kill that, sell dirty bomb etc), the law enforcement takes care of it and the platform stops acting as a police.
edit: Oh I missed the part where your identity is actually encrypted, not known to the platform in plain format. To challenge the platform censorship and put back your removed comments you decrypt your identity. If you are afraid of state actors coming after you, you simply move on and your identity stays secret.
The platform doesn't need to be solving all the problems if the world. For example, if you are Russian dissident in Russia you first need replace Putin IRL, then you can use it as a westerner, challenging the politicians.
So.. now the platform knows your name. And the Afghan/Saudi/Russian/China gov tell twitter to release the name of the user. Sounds like a great result for the LGBT users.
> So.. now the platform knows your name. And the Afghan/Saudi/Russian/China gov tell twitter to release the name of the user. Sounds like a great result for the LGBT users.
Oh I missed the part where your identity is actually encrypted, not known to the platform in plain format. To challenge the platform censorship and put back your removed comments you decrypt your identity. If you are afraid of state actors coming after you, you simply move on and your identity stays secret.
The platform doesn't need to be solving all the problems if the world. For example, if you are Russian dissident in Russia you first need replace Putin IRL, then you can use it as a westerner to engage in politics.
How many gov's in the West are trying to remove E2E encryption? I know the EU is attempting it for chat tools. We have to "save the children".
In Australia assisted Access means any encrypted data is not safe. (Because the gov could have required the introduction of a back door, without even telling the company in question.)
I think Canada has something like that in place too. So if you take part in a protest, (even on twitter) be prepared to have your bank frozen.
> You can't start a trend comparing a democratically elected politician to Hitler and expect no repercussions.
You realize that Hitler was literally democratically elected?
He and his party were democratically elected to the German parliament. They proposed to form a coalition government with some other parties, which was approved by the (separately democratically-elected) president. Then he proposed legislation which would give himself wide-ranged emergency powers, which was approved by the democratically-elected parliament. Everything he did was technically legal and constitutional.
So ask yourself: When would you have blocked literal Hitler from Twitter?
I think the take-away lesson from Nazi Germany is that we need to start fighting fascism and authoritarianism much earlier in the process.
> Then he proposed legislation which would give himself wide-ranged emergency powers, which was approved by the democratically-elected parliament
I'm German and graduate with polish-german history as honors class.
Where to even start.....
First of all, the only reason they took the political path was because Hitler's coup against the German government in 1923 failed.
The "democratic" approval you paint here happened while the SA, the NSDAP's personal thug squad, as well as the SS (no introduction necessary) had infiltrated the building and were "observing" the voting procedure. This was illegal, especially since they were uniformed for intimidation.
You are also ignoring the fact that this "technically constitutional" decision was only possible because they spontaneously (same day) changed the legal framework in a way that meant that non-present (intimidated) representatives count as present. Only this way they achieved the necessary votes.
What even legitimized this situation in the first place was an exploitation of the weak Weimar constitution (as in abuse of loopholes due to it's young nature of 20 years, same applies to the German democratic history as a whole, first time a democratic persistent government was in power was in 1918).
You are completely ignoring the Reichtagsbrandverordnung which eradicated the fundamental rights as well as the divison of powers (!) which should not have been able to be touched. This was a breach of the Weimar constitution by the way, so the Nazi rise to power was 100 % not constitutional.
And lastly you decontextualized the comparison since Hitler obviously did a lot more than just being a cheater in politics
I realize technical accuracy is important, but I don't think any of your points take away from the main point I was making: Hitler was a democratically-elected politician; so comparing other democratically-elected politicians to Hitler is not an automatic non-sequitir; and blocking democratically-elected politicians who exhibit fascist and authoritarian behavior is a reasonable choice.
> First of all, the only reason they took the political path was because Hitler's coup against the German government in 1923 failed.
Sure; I knew about that (and other illegal activities) and was trying to think of a way to make it clear I wasn't including that in "everything". It wasn't really possible without being awkward and taking away from the main point; so I relied on my readers to understand the implicit limitation of "everything".
As for the rest, I could have said "mostly constitutional with some bending" and it would have had the same point. Obviously digging into it, the fact that Germany at that time didn't have a tradition of democracy, and its constitution was problematic, is important to know. But most people in the US, at least, don't realize that Hitler took a mostly legal route to power at all. That's the main thing I want to get across to people.
Platforms like Twitter have become de facto utilities. They should be prevented from censoring anything that is not breaking the law, which means filtering tweets on a per country basis to comply with national laws, nothing less, nothing more.
> Platforms like Twitter have become de facto utilities.
No, they have not.
I cannot live without water or electricity; perhaps also a general Internet connection (in the modern world). I live my life just fine without Twitter.
Twitter is an online service that some people find useful and others ignore completely. There is nothing utility-like about it.
Can political or civil society organisations exist without access to social media platforms these days? No. These platforms are utilities of the modern democratic and pluralistic society.
Because this is well established fact. You can research the topic for yourself if you wish. Just a quick Googling: [1]
Social media have been key to political campaigning in the last 10 years or so. This made headlines in relations to the Brexit referendum in the UK and it had made headlines after Obama's first presidential campaign which was a pioneer.
Lots of politicians have chosen to make Twitter their main method of communication. I am able to speak to my representatives via Twitter quite easily while they ignore my emails. They can choose (if they wish) to block me on Twitter and limit my ability to communicate with them or see important information they post there and not elsewhere. Either it’s a utility or our politicians need to be held to stricter rules re communication with their constituents.
If politicians choose to use Twitter, but could just as easily choose communication on the web by other means (like email, or another platform) then that makes Twitter merely convenient, not a "de facto utility".
Modern political campaigns are fought and won on social media. Politicians do not choose to use them, they have to use them to have a chance to get their message across.
> Modern political campaigns are fought and won on social media.
For the current definition of "modern".
In the 1800s then-modern political campaigns were fought and won in newspapers and pamphlets.
Pre-WW2 then-modern political campaigns were fought and won on the radio.
Post-WW2 then-modern political campaigns were fought and won on television.
None of those were treated as public utilities AFAICT, so I'm not why the medium of communication now suddenly makes a difference (Marshal McLuhan notwithstanding).
Trump didn't win because he personally had social media accounts from which he spread his message - canvassing by his followers (until they kept going Nazi and getting banned) were what was effective. Trump's own social media use has been a net negative for him, he mostly just rants and shitposts. If he'd been banned from Twitter earlier, he might have gotten more accomplished.
Also, coverage of Trump by the mainstream media was likely far more effective than social media at getting him elected. If nothing else, it provided the material that got spread across social media.
Obama's victory was due in large part to social media as well, but not due to Obama's personal accounts.
Trump utilized newspapers, TV news networks, rallies, and word of mouth as well. He's banned from twitter right now but still tops the poll of who would win the next election
You can do that on email, irl, with real letters, etc. It hasn’t been a problem. If someone is particularly harassing you then it becomes a legal issue.
What Twitter could do is just stop promoting and spreading content people don’t like. Rather than completely ban problem users like trump, just stop showing them in trending feeds and give people the option to block the users so you don’t see them.
Yes - a lot of people claim that shadow banning, downranking etc. are censorship. I disagree, they necessary to keep online places as civil as they are.
There's also content that is regarded by mental health experts as harmful in large quantities - downranking that is also important to not cause existential harm to people.
It's legal to use the n word in the US as far as I know, but I think harassment probably isn't ('spamming' sounds like harassment), that's where the balancing act is. Now, it is not legal to throw the n word at someone in most European countries. Hence why I said that these platforms need to filter on a per country basis for all countries they want to operate in.
As I said, Twitter and other major platforms have become de facto utilities and it's no longer a valid argument to claim that as private businesses they are free to do as they please because they yield too much power.
I have a Twitter account but I've barely used it ever, and do okay for myself socially. I don't think it's a utility. I have plenty of options, and use the ones that interest me most.
So the governments would pay Twitter for moderation and for subsidizing the platform, if advertisers leave in response?
I think that the governments should treat social media platforms similarly to other addictive/harmful substances, such as junk food, sugary drinks or tobacco... with a focus on prevention and education.
And using these platforms for official communication (from elected officials and public services) should be either prohibited or heavily discouraged.
A "free speech" platform would give users more power to control their communications with others and transparency of how the "system" worked.
Very simple things that we had with usenet like killfiles and threaded conversations are foreign things to the younger generations. Things like shadowbans and a central authority that just decides to disable your account would be non-existent. Heck, we even had a form of "blue checkmark" with finger daemons.
Fully agree. Open source the platform. Nobody cares to copy Twitter's software. It's not revolutionary. It's tailored to their infrastructure specifically. They have the network effect going for them. If they were going to be displaced by a technologically-superior platform, Mastodon would have done it already. There really isn't a downside.
Twitter has immense influence on the zeitgeist than any other single media property. For a person like Musk, $43B is an investment that would pay for itself in short order by the various kinds of market manipulation he could engage in. He has cheated so many times without consequence. Why not take it to the next level? Pump and dump, favorable sentiment for his companies, signal boosting his pocket politicians, and so on. Truly frightening.
By definition a hostile takeover is one that is done without the blessing/recommendation of the current board of directors.
Most private takeovers are negotiated by the board/management (ostensibly on behalf of the shareholders). Going over their head and straight to shareholders is when it's called a hostile takeover.
As far as Elon not planning to replace the board/management. I would say that it is a foregone conclusion that he will clean house if his takeover succeeds. He has been actively critical of their management.
I'm not sure what is needed from the board here, but I think there's a difference between a board recommending something, and having a fiduciary duty to present an offer to shareholders. Where are you reading that this needs the board's blessing?
If the board doesn't approve, he goes to the shareholders and asks them to replace the board (or becomes such a large shareholder he can do it himself).
Twitter's bylaws contain anti-takeover provisions which would make a hostile takeover difficult. In their latest 10K they list these provisions which includes "authorizing 'blank check' preferred stock, which could be issued by our board of directors without stockholder approval and may contain
voting, liquidation, dividend and other rights superior to our common stock". So if Musk attempted to get shareholders to vote out the board, the board could issue preferred stock with voting rights which could dilute Musk's votes.
People complain about fiduciary duty lawsuits but "authorizing 'blank check' preferred stock, which could be issued by our board of directors without stockholder approval and may contain voting, liquidation, dividend and other rights superior to our common stock" and then using it to go against a vast majority of shareholders could result in a huge court fight.
This seems like a win/win. If Elon takes over Twitter and fixes it, we get free speech there (plus, product innovation!). If Elon is rejected, battle lines clearly drawn and hopefully many alternative platforms (innovating on product as well as terms of service; enjoy tankie-twitter!). This is like the great unbundling of Craigslist, probably created 100x consumer surplus over a decade.
At worst it's amusing to see all of the hysteria it generates from the people use see 'free speech' as a slur. Although these Twitter people seem to get off on FUD and hysteria.
People mocking the very concept of free speech by saying "freeze peach" during The Fattening of reddit in 2015 was one of the most appalling things I've ever seen.
There is a threat about Elon dumping his shares if he doesn't get his way.[0]
Elon has been known to pump and dump various things. Look at what happened to Bitcoin when Tesla announced they would no longer be accepting it. He is essentially saying take this offer or I am going to tank your share price.
“If the deal doesn’t work, given that I don’t have confidence in management nor do I believe I can drive the necessary change in the public market, I would need to reconsider my position as a shareholder,” said Musk.
> Musk said that if he succeeds in his bid, he would seek to retain as many other shareholders as the law allows for a private company, rather than being sole owner.
This really changes the equation for stakeholder value. The offer isn't Twitter-owned Twitter or $54.20/share, it's Twitter-owned Twitter or Elon-owned twitter.
It's sorta funny; I had a call scheduled to talk to a recruiter at Tesla but seeing this reminded me just what kind of guy is ultimately the CEO of the company. I feel very strongly that company culture permeates from the top, and I don't want to swim in whatever cesspool is leaking from the top of that pyramid.
It’s interesting to contextualize this with a regular persons life. This amount will present about 1/7 of his net worth.
However unlike a traditional purchase this will be n investment and depending on how it goes, he can get even more money.
If an average person had a max net worth of 3 million this would be like them deciding to buy a 400K investment property, or a laundry mat.
That aside, this is also a great example of how easy it is to become richer if you’re rich.
Musk buys at $39 pumps all month to $54. He can either sell and easily make billions profit or take over the entire company at what can only be described as a discount compared to potential.
Not to mention twitters stock hardly does well. He can just try again on the next dip if he likes.
> Musk buys at $39 pumps all month to $54. He can either sell and easily make billions profit or take over the entire company at what can only be described as a discount compared to potential.
He can’t sell his whole stake for a profit. There’s nowhere near enough liquidity. The moment he tries to sell billions of dollars of stock it’d tank.
He can't sell after a move like this, it would be illegal. He's announcing his plans to not just hold but also to control the company, specifically to unlock value - means making some top level choices that makes Twitter stock move valuable. Had he dumped immediately after purchase he'd be prosecuted for market manipulation (realities of liquidity notwithstanding).
Yes, the exact timing is up to the circumstances. But selling a significant amount within the next month would almost certainly be considered an obvious manipulation attempt
He'll have to do it the same way he bought his current stake: slowly, over weeks and months, a little bit every day. A totally standard thing to ask your investment bank to do.
He owns about 70 million shares. Before he announced his stake, the stock had a daily trading volume of about 20 million. I agree it's not super slow, but also not super fast. Probably a reasonable speed given the volume.
because the price itself only indicaes that there is someone wantin to buy shares at that price - it doesnt indicate the number of shares that would go would he accept that price.
That's not quite how it works if you make a formal takeover offer. It's basically telling existing shareholders that he'll buy their stock at $54. If enough of them don't want to sell (depending on how it's structured), the deal falls through. It's a one-off purchase at $54 if it does go through. He can't buy more stock in the interim (I think).
1. Go to above $54, in which case musk profits and he can try again later (headwinds are strong in tech generally right now)
2. Go between $39 and $54 in which musk profits
3. Drop under $39 in which musk can further solidify his stake, for much cheaper than his takeover offer.
There’s basically no scenario in which musk loses assuming he’s serious and is willing to play the long game. Musk will either make a lot of money, or own Twitter.
I think this is an offer to the board, proposing that it compel all shareholders to sell at $54/share. The board can decide on the proposal without consulting the shareholders.
In practice the board will do what management thinks best. The various directors probably have legal duties as fiduciaries and will want to act in a manner such that they can demonstrate they performed those duties in good faith, but they will have enormous latitude so long as they observe certain forms.
There are likely procedures by which someone can force a shareholder vote on a proposal, but Musk isn't using them here. These are probably structured by the company bylaws.
IIRC the regulations are such that if you make a takeover offer, you can't do that? Not sure though, my work is only M&A-adjacent, so I'm not an expert.
It's not an obvious good idea to buy Twitter though - and is especially risky if you're not wanting to just continue to run the business as is without potentially de-stabilizing it and destroying it in the process.
The closest thing we had (have) to online free speech was (is) Usenet. But distributors of child porn along with Andrew Cuomo (when he was the New York state attorney general) making a deal with a number of major ISPs resulted in most ISPs discontinuing their Usenet service.
The unregulated nature of Usenet and spam/malware arguably killed it, not a NY politician. ISPs generally didn't carry a lot of newsgroups anyway, and the best service was always from dedicated Usenet providers.
Sadly these days it's only useful for binary downloads if you also use an NZB indexer. Does anyone still use it for discussion?
> The unregulated nature of Usenet and spam/malware arguably killed it, not a NY politician.
But it did lead to a lot of major ISPs dropping their usenet service around the same time. That killed a lot of existing newsgroups because most, if not all, the regular posters stopped participating. That's what happened to the newsgroups I used to frequent by the late 2000s.
> ISPs generally didn't carry a lot of newsgroups anyway, and the best service was always from dedicated Usenet providers
On the 3 or so ISPs I used when posting to usenet, they pretty much carried the vast majority of groups under the big 8 hierarchy. But what you say was definitely true for binary groups, where retention and completion were far more important metrics in terms of level of service and usability.
> Does anyone still use [usenet] for discussion?
I've heard that several of the groups under the comp hierarchy are still relatively active.
I used to just take accusations of CP at face value, but knowing how entrapment-happy and truth-ambivalent the US Government can be, I find myself wondering if the killing of usenet wasn't just a part of the "hacker crackdown" and the crackdown on piracy. Piracy in particular is not something that most people had/have any real or natural compunction against.
Why isn't Elon buying Truth Social? Because it's not the hardware and software that he would be buying it's the equity which is people. Truth Social can have piles of servers and the best software but it can't buy or generate truth.
The power of the megaphone is what's he's buying. Idk what "Truth Social" is, and that's precisely the point: it isn't worth a dime. Musk is buying users by the millions. Attention craving users, but still users.
I understand hostility isn't a term-of-art or something special, but in business parlance the sources I've read seem to point at hostility being the practical term for "without board/director/management approval"
The board determines management, and it appears the offer is only to the board at this time. Hostility depends on the board's lack of approval and continuation of the offer.
Maybe I've missed some news, but I only see Musk making a request to the board at this time. Although everything else seems to fit the normal fact-pattern of hostility (wanting change, not being satisfied with current power, escalation, etc.), technically I don't think we are there yet.
He could load up on puts and sell his position. Pretty sure he does these games read somewhere there was massive Doge purchase weeks prior to his fandom of said coin.
With this play, "funding secured" for his Twitter killer.
I don’t understand how [0] suggests Twitter is dying. Is a power law distribution of content production on a social network that strange? What % of HN comments come from the top N accounts? Is Twitter lying about growing user numbers?
Well done, he won't be on the Supervisory Board - so bought the shares for useless. Now complete takeover announced - rejected - share price rises - shares sold again, good money made
Elon is just a troll who happens to be richest man on earth. He is just trolling SEC. Bid price 54.20 is a joke and people do not yet realize and take him seriously, anyone notice 420 ? Everyone remember he wanted to take Tesla private for 420 and funding secured.. he is just doing classic pump and dump.. he did with Tesla and took out all short sellers.. Now he's doing the same for Twitter, he will make money and sell twitter stocks. SEC is a joke.. they should come hard down on him.
> SEC is a joke.. they should come hard down on him.
Honest question, what is the illegality or infraction he is committing? He's filing the proper paperwork, presumably he will follow through if the offer is accepted. What can the SEC actually do?
Only reason he filed paperwork this time is last time he got fined. So his calculation was lets do paperwork and avoid fine.. Does anyone really think 54.20 is a serious offer or its just in his regular pattern of 420 behavior? I can almost guarantee it will never go through even he knows it. Thats why its his best and final offer.
Do you really think Twitter is sudden interest to him away from Tesla/SpaceX or Hyperloop? last time he was in "Web" was PayPal and thats ages ago.. it Never has interested him probably very boring. He was never into social. he's just thinking this as a quick way to make 15-20% return in few months and have fun. He got bored of pumping Dogecoin, now he's on twitter trying to make money, even though he does not need it. its just fun for him to send people in loop and trigger bunch of folks.
None of that has anything to do with my question, though. It doesn't matter what his motivations are. The question is, what law or regulation has he violated? On what basis can the SEC go after him, specifically?
And you might wonder why he did not join board and what background check he failed ? Surprise .. in his SEC filing he said he is going to be a passive investor and then suddenly tried joining the board and then when was not allowed he tried to just waste news cycles by trying to buy the whole company . I understand lot of People are Elon fan boys. Which I don’t .. I prefer people who are good not horrible .. yeah great job with Tesla or space x .. but give me a break on him making Twitter free speech bastion .. if he had so much interest maybe he should go buy his buddies truth social and make that amazing .
Sec requires if you buy more than 5% of company you should disclose for a reason. He kept buying till 9% and then disclosed it . He did not buy all in one day .. it was months long project .. so he kept prices low and the. After announce you see the bump.. so yeah there is your answer and I’m sure there might be others rules being bend .. by our lord our savior Elon musk
I am a Musk fanboy. But I don't think he should be a gatekeeper for free speech evangelism. No matter how fair Elon thinks he is, a completely private entity or person cannot guarantee unbiased free speech. There has to be regulation and oversight.
So if Musk wants to take over Twitter, sure, no one's going to stop him. But let's not expect it means that free speech principles will be upheld. It's probable that under Elon's regime, Twitter might suppress anti-Tesla topics.
Ironically, I suspect Musk publicly buying Twitter is likely the shortest path to regulation. Talk of regulation and oversight has been going on for years but I suspect that this could be the trigger for such legislation.
> No matter how fair Elon thinks he is, a completely private entity or person cannot guarantee unbiased free speech.
The gov has shown to be unwilling to hold free speech laws to social media companies, and Twitter has been so aggressive in censoring dissident political opinion.. what else are you proposing we do?
Can someone give me a layman's explanation as to why taking Twitter private would allow Elon to make the changes he wants to make that he couldn't do if it was still public?
Twitter lost the trust of important users who have seen people censored for tweets that go against management's politics. Nobody thinks it's cool to build a community of hundreds of thousands of followers, only to be censored out at the most critical moment. That confidence will never be regained as long as Twitter has the same management and the same board. You would need to replace the board (the owners) and the management. Musk will also add his own name—a powerful brand itself—to Twitter's brand; but for the thing to work, Musk needs to be in full control. A private company also has less disclosure obligations, which is a valuable plus.
If he takes the company private (solo or with other investors), he'll make sure to have the votes to impose the CEO of his choice, with the option to change him/her whenever he pleases. That should be a sine qua non.
Twitter definitely has potential but at the moment it is a cespool of triggered personalities where the voice of the sane and interesting people is drowned in an endless screaming.
I find it hilarious and refreshing for someone so rich and so powerful to not have a focus group tested, bland, grey façade. He completely embraces the juvenile humor that I hope I have until the day I die. Just my personal opinion.
He genuinely isn't funny. Even Trump had a certain traumatized stand-up element to his rambling, whereas Elon just sounds like a man surrounded by people telling him how smart he
is all the time.
There’s an account called Elon Jet which uses publicly available information to track Elon's private jet and post take off and landings. Elon offered 5k to the owner to take it down[1]. He has blocked loads of people for mocking or disagreeing with him.
Are those actions evil or wrong? Not really, but I also don’t think they’re the actions of an ardent believer in free speech which this thread is making him out to be.
Saying you believe in free speech and acting out a belief that everyone should have an equal right to say their piece without fear of being silenced are two different things.
Offering money to take down a twitter account seems totally reasonable. If you're saying that Elon would've terminated the account if he owned Twitter, I don't think there's any evidence to support that.
But it seems trivially obvious that, if Musk owned Twitter, that account and ones like it that target Musk will disappear.
As much as I like Tesla and respect SpaceX, I do note that Musk rarely misses an opportunity to benefit himself.
The whole crypto market manipulation event is one obvious example; what abstract ethical behavior was driving that debacle? I say there was none and that it was a transparent attempt to make money while trolling the crypto community.
Not that I actually fault him for doing that. It just points out how broken the entire cryptoverse is. But my point is that he is prone to doing things for his own benefit and/or without regard for the consequences.
What I haven't seen is evidence that he would take some kind of high moral position on free speech absolutism against his own self interest. To me it's more a question of "prove that he won't do it" than to prove he will.
If he ends up buying Twitter, we'll find out either way.
That is entirely baseless. I'm fairly certain that whole affair was just some social media assistant offering money to someone for Musk to have slightly increased privacy and PR(since private jet use is really bad for the environment). They offered like $5k to take itf down which to Musk is literally like giving a homeless person a couple quarters. All flight traffic is public though. Banning a Twitter account would do nothing as all that information is already public record. You can track whoever you want on sites like Flightradar. I really doubt Musk cares that much at all, if he was ever actually even aware that the Twitter account existed.
That's not what free speech is about. Free speech protects your opinions from the state. Someone offering you money to take down public information about them is just a transaction between citizens. Nothing to see here.
To be fair, I'm a European citizen, so I'm not too familiar with the first amendment. I believe the basic princies hold true on both sides of the pond, though.
Free speech is just the ability to speak your mind without fear of reprisal or censorship.
It is not something we technically have here on HN or on twitter or in other such places.
Most governments that claim to value the concept of free speech usually have it said somewhere in their governing documents that the government will honor this concept.
Right, but censorship can only happen at the state level. The New York Times not letting Alex Jones write a column is not censorship or reprisal, it's an editorial decision. Same for Twitter or HN. The Douma deciding to ban certain words like "war" or "invasion" in relation to Ukraine, or the executive arresting bloggers on planes, that's censorship.
However the law has to put boundaries on free speech, because it can easily infringe on someone else's basic rights, so there is no such thing as completely free speech in practice. Even within the circle of your best friends, there would be limits to what you can say, wouldn't there?
I do believe we agree. I'm merely trying to be precise in my use of words like censorship, lest they become meaningless.
>Right, but censorship can only happen at the state level.
False. Censorship can and does happen at the twitter/facebook/youtube/reddit/wikipedia level all the time. It's the main reason there are alternatives to all of them. They tend to call it "content moderation" but that's just newspeak for censorship. Real content moderation would be limited to spam removal and child porn. What all the big tech companies do is censorship.
censorship can happen at all levels, its just that speech rights only protect you from censorship by the government. The censorship at other levels can still exist, and be meaningful.
Can’t really call yourself a free speech absolutist at the same time though unless you’re comfortable with blatant lies. Malicious/manipulative speech is still speech
That's an interesting question. I have been thinking about how social media might be run in a way that allows for such filtering, but without a centralized filtering authority.
Maybe you could rate actors. And you could also refer to actors' ratings of other actors. Weighted by the rating of the actor.
No doubt it's been done. But maybe something like that.
Publicizing the movements of people in real time is not a good faith example of free speech. Banning such accounts is reasonable under any framework of ownership, public or private. There is no good faith need for anyone to know private information like this.
Blocking people from interacting with you on twitter is an exercise of free association, also a right embodied in the first amendment of the US constitution.
Freedom of speech is not the right to an audience, nor is it a right to stalk.
“Stalking” is doing a lot of work there, it's publicly available information. The account isn't literally tailing his jet.
If you're a billionaire and buy a private jet you naturally have less privacy than other people and that's the breaks. If you go on SNL hold wild press conferences you will have even less privacy. That's the cost.
You cannot be rich, ostentatious, and private. Gotta pick just two.
Irrelevant distinction. Most doxxing is just collecting publicly accessible information. Stalking and intimidation is still stalking and intimidation whether you use public information or not.
I personally dislike Musk and most things he says and does, but I am grateful for the fact that his actions lead to more hilarious chronicles by Matt Levine (Money Stuff).
Hmm, Mark Cuban for no cash starts a cost-based online pharmacy to help people. I really do not see any factual proof that Elon making money saves civilization.
Or I do not see how refusing to follow SEC rules will get Elon any closer to buying twitter as I do not think SEC would ever allow it without doing a massive lawsuit to block it. Which means Leon is motivated by his beef with SEC not saving civilization.
As a free speech absolutist, I might actually start using Twitter if it were run by Elon. Unfortunately I’m not terribly optimistic about it happening.
Does anyone else think he is trying to do this so it gets accepted and announced on 4/20?
I worry, because Twitter is a very real outlet for many oppressed people. Matrix technology is good, but nowhere near as widespread or easy to use yet. I worry that Twitter will be bought and Musk turns out to be a far-right or far-left extremist that makes Twitter into a much more biased political platform.
Twitter is already about as politically biased as they come. Removing its current censorship would improve the platform as an outlet for oppressed people.
Why is this discussion only about the free speech on the internet? This is a business news story about an SEC filing. There is certainly other possible interesting discussions in regards to the financial aspects of this story.
If it cannot happen here in this discussion, HN should not be so quick to flag/dupe/dead the other submissions which are from other business or news publications.
Mostly but not entirely off topic, just something I thought about this morning, a hypothetical feature of twitter.
Imagine being able to flip a switch (a “green profile check mark”) that would disable banning and muting features for you. And will only allow another green check marks to engage in conversations with you.
Will this help break the echo chambers, or will it create a tyrannical majority? Both?
Bezos has Washington Post as his mouthpiece. Murdoch has Fox News. Musk doesn't really need more money. I don't think this is just pump and dump.
Is it possible Musk is looking to buy a method to influence a populace for his own ends? I.E. is this a method for him to influence a population to gain power and sway over elections, organizations, etc?
I just learned this today, a bit shocked. Isn't anyone concerned that Saudi Arabia – not exactly a beacon of human rights and dignity for all people – holds 5% stake in Twitter?
My take, this is about putting a valuation on non-twitter social. Reddit has more users than Twitter, and a valuation 1/5th of twitters. If Twitter is worth 47 billion to someone, then reddit should be worth 50-100 billion.
Unfortunately it's not possible to know if Elon has a major stake in any privately held social companies.
The offer will fail: The tell is that it is a "final" offer. In fact, if the offer were accepted, Elon would be hard pressed to come up with the actual cash for an all-cash offer. The offer isn't meant to be taken seriously.
After his "final" offer is rejected, Elon will rage quit his position in Twitter.
We've talked about compliance and advertising revenue, which I think are good points for discussion.
The motivations of Elon are unclear. What is clear is that he hates feeling like his behavior is being controlled or monitored. He loves attention. He's petty. For someone who wants to advance the world and get to Mars, he obsesses over small slights and squabbles far too much. Twitter is far from being some technological marvel. They have a decent application with lots of reach. Doesn't really match the rest of Elon's assets. Doesn't seem to align with his goals.
But let's imagine Elon's Twitter. Let's say he isn't bound by laws and contracts preventing it and he says "anything goes" on the platform. What happens to advertisers? I assume they leave. What happens to staff? I assume they get fired when the revenue dries up. We know what "free speech twitter" looks like; an uber-conservative site devoid of real life and full of misinformation.
Does allowing medical (and other) misinformation and promotion of violence to spread on Twitter serve Elon's ends? Perhaps, if he wishes to make an attempt to become an autocrat (which wouldn't be surprising; it's every geek and billionaire's dream) or support one. It doesn't seem like he'd fight the spread of that misinformation with corrective speech, as he has what's (at best) a loose relationship with the truth.
Imo, he's taking responsibility. If as an individual you can deploy the most money in the world, what do you do with it? Twitter became a negative-sum game of people competing to debase themselves in service of narrative in exchange for nothing but the approval of others who had already done the same. Unlocking that negative cycle can release a lot of captive value for everyone. The best way to do that is to connect great minds and scale them based on their revealed desires.
I remember Musk offered to solve world hunger but the NGO people who said they could do it flaked when (pen in hand) he offered to cut them a cheque. The next best thing is to provide a platform for discourse so that smart people indexed on truth and reality can thrive and wield influence.
The opportunity is that Twitter just isn't funny, and as a signal of alignment to truth, that's a pretty honest sign it has become oppressive and that it has become a thing that most people just do not want. The controversial censorship on Twitter has been against humour, which makes Musk's play such an obvious win. As an activist target, Twitter has spent almost a decade contorting itself and spending a lot of effort to make itself suck, and it just needs to suck slightly less to be a benefit to humanity. Value for money, it's probably the most effective $43B anyone has spent in the US.
> I remember Musk offered to solve world hunger but the NGO people who said they could do it flaked when (pen in hand) he offered to cut them a cheque.
I hadn't heard about this, but looking it up now, it seems that your account isn't accurate. According to these articles he asked the UN to detail how they would spend the money and they did.
According to the mashable link, the world food program people just said, "it's complicated, let's meet," to shift responsibility, and then said went around saying he didn't follow through.
It is complicated and although money can help, many of the problems have to do with corruption and graft, rather than a lack of resources. The United States alone gives 3.7 billion dollars a year in aid [1]. And the sum total of world aid is much greater.
But if the dictators and juntas on the ground aren’t willing to help, and if the logistics companies and war lords redirect it to their friends, more money doesn’t really help.
And nor does a clever plan from the UN, which is already trying to avoid the grifters, but also has its share of internal corruption.
> U.N. World Food Program executive director David Beasley did respond to Musk's original tweet last month, clarifying that "$6B will not solve world hunger..."
Not long before Elon bought a 9% stake, one of the largest satire accounts on twitter was suspended for a joke. They are literally censoring humor and that may have been the final straw.
Also worth noting that he was one of the ACLU's biggest donors when they were still focused on protecting free speech and liberty.
Would prefer not to reveal my identity - it could be searched. I can paraphrase though. It was a thread a couple years ago on how nazis can be punched, but it was spreading to anyone who was perceived as right wing, such as Andy Ngo, with the excuse that they are all nazis. Being a pacifist, I replied with something sarcastic along the lines of "As long as we are punching nazis, why don't we also punch the taliban, ISIS, MS13, Zionists, north koreans, evangelicals, trump supporters, and puppies?" Obviously not serious, but I was banned for promoting violence. Ironic considering the thread I was replying to was all about unironic support of real world violence. My joke wasn't a good one, but it was a joke.
"Value for money, it's probably the most effective $43B anyone has spent in the US."
Yikes.
A more realistic take: this is a petty reaction on par with Peter Thiel suing Gawker into oblivion. Musk doesn't really care about Twitter's role as a tool for good, he cares about his ego.
It's cultish when people say it's good just because they want to think it's good.
It's cultish when people say it's bad just because they want to think it's bad.
When the person you're responding to makes a strong assertion about a person's intentions[1] and you respond suggesting that anybody who might not think this way is part of a cult, it comes off very much that you want the assertion to be true.
Unless your belief is truly, "Anybody who might possibly agree with {{some specific person}} is part of a cult," then this comment does not do your thoughts justice. There's more to be said and you did not bother to say it.
[1] > Musk doesn't really care about Twitter's role as a tool for good, he cares about his ego.
Just to help your reading comprehension, he's suggesting that anyone who says stuff like "Value for money, it's probably the most effective $43B anyone has spent in the US" might have drank too much of the Kool-Aid.
> Twitter became a negative-sum game of people competing to debase themselves in service of narrative in exchange for nothing but the approval of others who had already done the same. Unlocking that negative cycle can release a lot of captive value for everyone. The best way to do that is to connect great minds and scale them based on their revealed desires.
> Twitter became a negative-sum game of people competing to debase themselves in service of narrative in exchange for nothing but the approval of others who had already done the same.
I'm trying to imagine this statement actually both having meaning and corresponding to reality and failing.
>Value for money, it's probably the most effective $43B anyone has spent in the US.
That seems unlikely. USD$43 billion could buy ~1,150,000 homes[0], which is double the number of homeless people in the US[1].
Getting a 1/2 million people into stable living situations could boost the economy by adding a couple hundred thousand to the work force (it's really hard to hold a decent job if you have no place to store your stuff or take a shower), with the median income for all workers over the age of 15 at ~USD40,000 [2] would add ~US$8,000,000,000 to the economy, as well as reducing dependence on public programs to help support them.
Of course, buying whole houses for half a million people isn't actually necessary. A reasonably sized apartment (based on household size) for each set of homeless folks would cost significantly less than that.
What's more, the children who could be helped by something like this are more likely to have good school experiences and improve their education -- boosting their lifetime earnings potential as well. Not to mention the economic boosts to local communities hit hard by homelessness.
So, no. Buying Twitter isn't anywhere close to the best use of US$43B. In fact, I suspect we could end homelessness in the US for significantly less than that. That seems a lot more useful than a payout to TWTR shareholders and making it one of Musk's vanity hobbies.
What's the chance of him just polling off a dogecoin? Price went up, he sells, then says "sorry for rejecting my offer" (which of course had "secured funding" and all that).
Would be a great way to make a few extra billion and of course the SEC won't do mcuh
Basically whether it’s rational to dump his stake in Twitter to you or me doesn’t matter. He Carries enough influence that investors will spook and it may trigger a sell off. It’s possible Dorsey knew this was coming and parag is enjoying the leftovers
If I was Jack Dorsey, I would take this deal in a heartbeat. Twitter stock has not gone anywhere in the last 9 years it has been public. It does not make any money. This is like the Yahoo deal where Microsoft offered a bunch of money for Yahoo.
Scary if he wins. One super powerful shit disturber with a personal agenda controlling one of the largest social news sources out there.
It goes from a company fighting to survive, who probably has little agenda (or time and power to really fight for it), to a company that exists simply to serve the whims of one man's agenda and every change and action will be for that purpose, albeit not advertised as such. How else better to amplify one's voice and discredit anyone else's? Sow chaos, fuel rumours, surface chatter that will affect markets to his favour and to dick around with politicians and countries that aren't doing him any favours. It definitely doesn't sit right.
The real question is why, because I very much doubt he wants to "improve" twitter, it's more like what does he want to accomplish by owning the platform to advance his other goals.
As a fan of Musk and his companies, I personally hope this fails. He's already busy enough running SpaceX and Tesla which matter significantly more to the future of humanity than a website that lets people type 280 characters.
Long after people land on Mars and spread to the farthest reaches of the solar system, humans will still be social creatures, and thus there will be social media.
All of mankind’s achievements and technological advancements eventually culminate in more social media.
Social media, especially in a narrow sense (e.g. Facebook and Twitter are "social media", forums and chat programs are not) is not necessary for humans to interact. Nor is the current model of social media - with "influencers", viral content, and a strong incentive for performative interaction - necessarily the best one for society.
Internet communication has value to humanity. I'm not so sure that's true about social media as it exists today.
Given the reports of how freaked out employees were on the possibility of Musk on the board, they must be fleeing in droves now that he'd own the company.
I can't believe this many people really care wtf is going to happen to Twitter. I hope Musk takes the hardware running it and makes it into an AGI who's sole job is to pass the butter.
This underscores the importance of federated social media like Mastodon, which offers a broad range of instances (servers/communities) that never will be owned and controlled by a single guy.
the things Musk says about twitter in the press release, dont seem to be necessarily true - that twitter has some unique social utility, or a great deal more value that is not being maximized. I guess reality distortion fields work, but people are wise to twitter, and what it is and isnt good for. and any changes or enhancements that make it worth 70 per share once more are likely to be more about new engagement models like 10 second videos or something, not crossing some imaginary line of maximal free speech. I dont know.
The thing that is absolutely puzzling to me in these conversations is it seems that people who generally believe in the free market desire what amounts to regulation on social media platforms, inversely, to protect 'free speech' when in fact Twitter has the absolute right in the free market to moderate as they see fit when free speech only protects from governmental actions.
And to those who would make the argument that Twitter is too big to not be protected under free speech, I would say that Twitter is _excellent_ at making its user base seem more important than it is. Go outside, talk to people. Twitter is just a shitty microcosm.
Twitter holds a massive amount of soft power. And the sooner we acknowledge it, the better. It seems a matter of national security that a foreign power could accumulate the centralized reigns of Twitter as well. (not that decentralized solutions will solve this. It will actually be even riskier that they will be abused similarly)
Jack could have maneuvered so it stays in the hands of the board, but as expected he has pooched that.
Big social media companies, just like all other companies, desire regulations that solidify their market share and make it more difficult to create a new competitor. What generally happens in the US is a new regulation is drafted that theoretically achieves some good end, but whose true purpose is to make it more difficult for competitors to enter the space. That's why companies pay lobbyists.
This line of reasoning is very popular but I don't see how people take it seriously. Twitter (and other major social media platforms) have become de facto "government instrumentalities" under the dual effect of pressures from without and pressures from within.
The same revolving door policies we all recognize in other industries apply to major media companies, as well, meaning the leadership within these organizations is harmonized with the leadership of the state. Moreover, media OWNERSHIP is a subset of portfolios that have massive influence on government policy (and vice versa). Meanwhile, there have been numerous incidents of major political figures cajoling the social media giants to censor speech. When Congress and the President are threatening to regulate your industry while "asking for help," that's a significant leverage over your so-called "private" business.
And, Twitter is not "just a shitty microcosm". For good or ill, Twitter functions basically as the public slack channel of the news media industry. Twitter flame wars wag the dog of the news cycle. It's also a target of propagandists world-wide. Like it or not, Twitter has an outsized influence on public discourse.
> Twitter is _excellent_ at making its user base seem more important than it is
Most of Twitter is a shitty microcosm, yes; but on the other hand, more than a few objectively "important" people seem to only engage with the sphere of public discourse through Twitter.
Right now, that's just their voluntary engagement, and they could switch. But a single policy forcing use like e.g. "the Office of the President will make all non-press-conference communications only through Twitter" and suddenly there'd be a dire need for regulation.
> Twitter has the absolute right in the free market to moderate as they see fit when free speech only protects from governmental actions
You confuse free-speech-the-legal-concept (which yes mostly deals with governmental actions' with free-speech-the-principle. You treat the law as if it was equivalent to the moral norm, and that's just not the case.
Yes, twitter is legally allowed to moderate as they see fit. But just because what they do is legal does not mean it is right.
The notion of free speech is so central to the American ethos that, when a company which espouses to be a function of the town square idea takes it on themselves to suppress and censor "right speech", it just doesn't sit right with a lot of people. Even though a non-government entity may have the right to do it, it doesn't make it morally right.
I've at least studied a lot of what other legal scholars have to say on the topic.
I think even the most staunch free market advocates understand the danger of monopolies. I think the same strain of thought makes them understand the danger of oversized government.
And so many of these companies are very arguably monopolies and should be either broken up or turned into a utility. In many people's minds, there's been what looks like a quid pro quo to do favors for government officials in order to avoid sensible efforts to regulate these essential communication platforms to even 1% of the level of say financial institutions.
Twitter may be a microcosm, but Twitter, Facebook and Google's communication platforms are responsible for enough speech to flip elections, to endorse or suppress vital information, and topple regimes. It's not something to be taken lightly.
I agree with you wrt. Twitter being a decently sized hub of possible vital information. I’m actually writing a paper for a national security course at the moment on Russia’s combined cyber warfare strategy that emphasizes misinformation and misdirection.
I’m just attempting to make sense of what I view as a hypocrisy from free market advocates and point out that as far as the Constitution goes, private entities aren’t responsible for upholding your speech on their platforms.
I see what you’re saying about legal scholars, and in my mind that raises the question that if monopolies should be regulated by even staunch free market advocates, shouldn’t extremely dangerous speech be regulated in some capacity on some platforms by even staunch free speech advocates?
I know and recognize that can be a slippery slope, but people far smarter than me haven’t untangled it so I won’t even try.
Maybe I’m wrong, please change my mind if you think I am :-)
I don't think that's particularly puzzling. While many of them are likely simple hypocrites, there is the position that the government's job in the market is to enforce the minimum amount of regulation needed to maintain a 'free' (as in competitive) market, in which framework a push for government to step in and regulate social media is understandable due to network effects being particularly relevant for it.
Personally I would agree with the argument that Twitter (and Facebook, Reddit and Youtube) are too big to not be regulated into behaving more responsibly at minimum. They're microcosms compared to the real world, but they're big parts of the internet world and thus influence many people's lives heavily, especially young people and especially over the past 2 years.
Currently it's standard practice for social media platforms to have content policies that intentionally avoid providing specifics on unacceptable content, many of them also avoid telling users exactly what the offending content is and don't offer any way to seriously appeal decisions. I think this is responsible for the vast majority of these free speech complaints, people are effectively left to assume the worst, which is extremely irresponsible for companies so large.
We see these frequently on HN too, where someone had their twitter or youtube account banned, are assuming they've been censored for saying something about the company and can't get in touch with a responsible human to find out. Usually they're just forced to start over with a new account.
Thus, I think the fix would be regulations on content policies of sufficiently large social networks that require the policies to be more well-defined, require the specific offending content to be shown along with the exact policy violated and requiring the availability of an appeals process which at least eventually reaches a human.
It might also be worth requiring some amount of disclosure on the automated moderation system's performance (ie how many automated takedowns happened and how many had to be reinstated upon appeal).
I disagree with the framing. For some good reasons and some insane reasons the US government has decided to treat corporations as “people”. Corporations are otherwise strictly regulated in thousands of ways but somehow regulating their ability to shape narratives with selective suppression and amplification of the speech of their users is sacrosanct?
Don’t get me wrong; I’m not a fan of the free market and “corporations as people”. I’m just pointing out what I view as an odd hypocrisy, that being that deregulation is a good thing except when it isn’t. Maybe I’m wrong though, I’m happy to have my mind changed
In the cesspit of a social media website, people accuse Twitter of being a social media cesspit.
I've seen people arguing for absolute freedom of speech, except in malicious circumstances, but seem to think that malicious is easy to define.
I've seen people ask if there really are any other alternatives to individuals owning huge wealth. Or people saying that doing immoral things is ok if it's within the law.
That assumes a dichotomy of either: everything is allowed, or Twitter blocks things they want to block.
There are other forms of moderation that might be acceptable to people who are otherwise free speech absolutists. Crowd-sourced block lists (i.e. subscribe to a list of accounts marked by other users as spam), with the option to introduce your own exclusions to the list.
Alternatively, a web-of-trust model where you only see tweets & replies from people you follow. Or maybe the people you follow + the people they follow. Or maybe configure it on a per-person basis, if you trust person A's followee list more than person B's.
There are a ton of options. The point is that users don't currently have a choice, and have to deal with Twitter's policies with no opt-out or whitelisting.
What you're describing is really just maintaining your own bubble in social media. This is something that most people think is a bad thing, on both sides of the spectrum. You're not talking about speech which is generally felt to not be permissible in public.
To give an example, this would like saying Elon Musk could simply block the twitter account that follows his private jet, rather than persuade the account to stop. It's not really the same thing.
Eh, it's just the squeaky wheels, like it is anywhere. I find that people are much more likely to speak out (or up/down vote) in support of something they also do that they feel vaguely guilty for, possibly in an effort to assuage their guilt be explaining themselves and looking for people to tell them it's okay, than people are to condemn others, depending on the acceptableness of what's being discussed.
I think most people don't want to come across as puritanical hard-asses, so either keep quiet or are not as forceful in their criticisms and condemnations in a public forums like this with lots of different subgroups. That may make it seems like people are generally accepting of a behavior when they're not.
Importantly, I think this isn't limited to online forums, but it is lessened when there's more conformity in group discussion which is easier when it's smaller. That has it's own dangers though, such as being much more accepting of problematic behavior because the group is all similar in a way that makes it acceptable.
I think the solution is to see it for what it really is, and just realize what you see isn't always representative of the norm.
Imo that thread was worse and not comparable. This one is mostly revolving around Twitter and it's moderation policy, there's no veiled racism as far as I can see
This feels more like hes trying to make the Twitter stakeholder lawsuit go away by announcing an offer (who wants to be suing their new boss?) than an actual acquisition attempt.
I can't imagine Musk can make Twitter any worse than it is. As much as I would have liked it to be a medium that elevated humanity, with some exceptions, it's served to be quite the opposite. I'd be pleased if Twitter disappeared from existence, but maybe Musk either improves it or leads to demolish it, and by no means would I suggest standing in the way.
You see, I think Twitter is different things to different people. I use it quite a lot - for putting out news about my local swimming club, the school’s parent teacher association and at work communicating with customers. I find it great, and don’t have to deal with toxicity because I don’t go out looking for it.
Unfortunately, you don’t have to go out and look for it though. Twitter was not supposed to be a worse RSS-feed, so if that’s your use case, nice, but that scope is ignorant to the reality of its market-fit.
That's true, and is the case with Facebook as well. I'm mostly commenting on the overall effect Twitter has had on civilization, and not so much that on the individual level. If Twitter has enriched society, I've yet to have noticed. In contrast, at least Tesla makes electric cars, expensive they may be, and even Facebook Marketplace is an improvement over Craigslist.
Oh yeah, Facebook. I think my grandpa used that once.
Don't get me wrong, Facebook can be bad, but I think Facebook was primarily bad at the personal level. It performed adverse psychological experiments on its users and it leaked data. Twitter is I think bad at a large scale because it's created a global shouting match while implementing ridiculous and often unspoken rules for the sake of protecting the establishment.
At least you can sign off of Facebook and never use it again. Twitter, on the other hand, is given such undue power over the flow of information and intercultural sentiment, and news from both the mainstream and the digital outskirts reference it all the time. Whether I have a Twitter account or not, I can't avoid it, because mere tweets make the news constantly. I'd say that Twitter is far more influential than Facebook at this point.
Has Musk made it clear why he thinks Twitter doesn’t serve the goal of free speech with explicit reasons? I don’t follow him so he may have mentioned them in the past.
>As a result, I am offering to buy 100% of Twitter for $54.20 per share in cash, a 54% premium over the day before I began investing in Twitter and a 38% premium over the day before my investment was publicly announced. My offer is my best and final offer and if it is not accepted, I would need to reconsider my position as a shareholder.
This seems like he's mostly trolling them or looking for an excuse to sell. The chances they accept and he can get 100% seem low, this is a one-time offer with something of an ultimatum, and it seems a bit unlikely he wants to share that much Tesla to get the money in the first place.
Private takeovers usually assume a premium share price. The more credible a buyout offer is, the closer the stock price will rise to the offered price. It's exactly what got Musk in trouble for tweeting about taking Tesla private in 2018.
I see this positively. Musk cannot save what the Internet is becoming, but he may be able to prevent Twitter from being completely captured by leftists fascists.
"absolute free speech" lol. If I used Free wifi at starbucks and before I left the clerk tried to charge me a dollar for internet because it wasn't "absolutely free" then I would call it false advertising.
Don't use the words free and speech together if it's not "absolutely free."
"Elon Musk's raging narcissism launches all-out $43B assault on his credibility and fortune"
Without any understanding that the his right-wing narcissistic suppliers who rage in public about being prevented from raging in public are not the sort of people who become good paying customers for a free platform.
This is like the universe seeing Elon Musk and issuing a course correction.
For the avoidance of doubt: this is dreadful for Twitter's longevity. Twitter's only sustainable future while staying true to its roots, is as a market utility co-owned by media companies.
A billionaire pouring money into a money-pit is fine only for as long as it holds his interest as a plaything (which might be a long time, considering his narcissism)
Twitter is on a years long decline and heading faster and faster towards stagnation with features no one cares about. Twitter "staying true" to its roots means continued decline and loss of shareholder value.
Musk can pay for Twitter and still be the richest man in the world. It's like buying a boat for a normal person.
I've fully grasped that he is rich. Though he is not, actually, $43bn liquid rich, at all; he's going to need to sell chunks of his other businesses to do this. That potentially means handing over significant influence over SpaceX or Tesla, so he can buy the cause of his hurt feelings in his spat with the SEC.
I don't give a damn whether he is the richest man in the world now (he is not -- Putin is) or continues to be.
I don't think Twitter want to be compared to someone buying a pleasure boat. That really does underscore my point about it being a narcissism purchase though, with the added frisson of white male mid-life crisis, so I'll stipulate if you will!
The strategy I outlined in a single sentence for twitter to stay true to its roots means not having to worry about shareholder value or decline. There are several viable, thriving market utilities run on this basis (e.g. in currency trading markets). They do not decline and they are beholden to their shareholders only in continuing to provide the utility.
There is no way that Twitter owned by a random rich narcissist won't decline as it tilts at windmills.
Twitter owned by a set of media companies that have come to depend on it as a means to exist -- as a utility that supports the media market through enlightened self-interest -- is viable.
Elon Musk is The genius for manufacturing, super deep research, and science as evident with success he has.
He has no experience, or at least none that I read about. Social media is complex simply because of human element involvement and immense regulatory push and pull.
Given that, I cannot see how he can replicate the success for science, manufacturing, tech in the social scene.
Anyone else curious how Musk would handle that Twitter account tweeting about his private jet flights if he owned Twitter? Strange to think that might be the real litmus test of how much he cares about free speech.
> Anyone else curious how Musk would handle that Twitter account tweeting about his private jet flights if he owned Twitter? Strange to think that might be the real litmus test of how much he cares about free speech.
He would probably do nothing. Even under Twitter's currently very vague rules, that Twitter account didn't violate anything so I don't know how it would with even more specific ones he wants them to implement. All that information is already public record (you can lookup any plane like that's flight logs). He was probably just annoyed by it constantly popping up in his feed so he told an assistant to offer his equivalent of a couple dollars to the kid to stop.
>> Even under Twitter's currently very vague rules, that Twitter account didn't violate anything so I don't know how it would with even more specific ones he wants them to implement.
Rules don’t matter though. If it’s a private company owned by Musk he can just delete the account. No recourse for the user.
It’s so strange. At first it was intriguing since I had never heard of it before, but now given how often it’s brought up, I suspect some sort of forced Streisand effect deal is at play from all the people who don’t like Elon or are using it as a speculative argument of how he’s ackshually not technically free speech because clearly he spent billions just to take that account down.
I just realized that we can use the current stock price to derive a probability that Elon Musks offer will be accepted.
Let `cp` be the current stock price; let `op` be the original price, before the offer was made; let `bp` be the bid price, what Musk offered; and let P be the probability that the offer is accepted. Then it must apply that
`cp = op + P*(bp - op)`
Meaning: The current price is the original price plus the probability that the offer is accepted times the stock price premium if the offer is accepted.
=> P = (cp - op) / (bp - op)
Plugging in the current numbers gives us a probability of about 50 %.
Good idea, but actually you'll probably want to look at the option markets as well, to take account the exact strike price at which Musk wishes to take Twitter private. If you only look at spot price (i.e. TWTR stock), then you need some way to factor out all the other beliefs market participants have about Twitter (e.g. stat-arb correlations with NASDAQ index).
As of time of writing, the delta on a $55 TWTR call option expiring 2 months from now is 0.297, representing a ~30% probability it will be in-the-money. But you still need to subtract the probability that the share price gets there without Mr. Musk's help.
You can also google "merger arbitrage" on google scholar to find some more maths on the subject.
Good point. The spot price is definitely not the most accurate measure of this probability. For liquid stocks with advanced derivates it's probably possible to find a better probability using one of those advanced derivatives.
Social networks in essence mirrors the society so its hard to run a company without judging and censoring free speech if comany doesn't want to be something like 4chan. The bigger problem arises when this censoring and controlling starts affecting democratic processes, there are other bad side effects too. Maybe there should not be any Social networks or maybe we should have better democracy which doesn't crumble under these new powers of information age.
Hackernews is just as censorious as twitter. Comments get flagged and moderated solely by the positions taken within and then system has the gall to then tell you to read the comment policies which you didn't violate as they are from the libertine age that preceded this one.
Controversial post rarely reach the front page anymore and if they do they are full of reasonable and true comments fading into gray and finally away. Meanwhile the most on the nose, vile and hateful propaganda get's voted to the top with rarely anyone speaking against it.
I understand you do this for a good cause, because you think it will save lives or make society better. It won't.
There is an underlying reality with it's ground truth and that can only ever be glimpsed through the verbal sparring of ideas and ideologies.
To those truly concerned about "harmful misinformation", you should know that the greatest atrocities in human history were committed when one side, faction or ideology could dictated what everyone said and wrote.
This is not an accident.
The most harmful misinformation is that which no one is allowed to correct.
You've been posting tedious conspiracy theories based on little more than misunderstood statistics. It's not interesting. Everyone here is bored of politely entertaining such junk.
Good. Twitter is a top heavy company that could have its staff halved and still be good.
Elon would do a great job firing the staff and right sizing the company.
There was a chap who was involved in their AI department. Despite the initial question of why is there an AI department, the follow up is why is it doing so badly?
The title of this should be changed to the title of the article, "Elon Musk Makes $43 Billion Unsolicited Bid to Take Twitter Private".
The current title given here implies that Musk is likely to take over Twitter, which doesn't seem true after reading the article (which includes a quote about the proposed price being too low to be taken seriously).
pretty crazy to see the sheer unadulterated terror that the mere possibility of free speech absolutism instills in people. this way of thinking was not common like sixteen years ago—what changed?
Everyone here is talking about free speech and Twitter censorship, but I have a different take:
How do we know Elon Musk won't just ban criticism of him or his business ventures (Tesla / SpaceX / The Boring Company / Starlink / etc)?
We know that his claims of being a "free speech absolutist" are absolute bullshit, because the moment the speech is about him he turns to every trick in the book to try and censor it[0]. This includes firing internal critics of himself and getting dox on anonymous bloggers so he could threaten to sue their employers.
If Elon buys Twitter and makes any major changes to it's policies, it will be for the worse. I probably will delete my account at that point.
Your sentiment was my first instinct as well, that the only power worth that kind of money is the power to erase history. It's not about who's got the most bullets, it's about who controls the information.
He literally said today an interview unless a tweet was blatantly illegal it should not be deleted. He also said if there is any grey area as well it should not be deleted. He wants to open up all the shady algorithms twitter is using to promote/demote tweets.
I’ve been very unhappy with my Twitter use because it has an addiction pattern. I set a short screen time limit on my phone, but I keep breaking it. Yet browsing the feed generally makes me feel sad and anxious.
This news may be what I needed to delete my account.
It sounds like you should be unhappy with your own addictive tendencies and not necessarily Twitter. You may want to reach out to a specialist if you feel this is negatively impacting your life, as you'll likely start doing the same with some other app.
No, it’s not what’s happening. It’s just what ill-informed Musk fans think it means, because they don’t know the term, don’t bother to check it, and consider everything that doesn’t praise Musk as explicit condemnation.
Sort-of exactly the mechanism you’re complaining about.
I suspect his shares are now "locked" whilst the offer is considered; perhaps he can acquire more but I suspect he cannot sell, as it would be an obvious deception.
He would have to announce the withdrawal of the offer and then I assume he can begin selling.
If I was an investor in Tesla or SpaceX I'd be extremely opposed to this. Calling the shots at three important companies is basically a disaster waiting to happen, especially if you spend a lot of time posting memes on Twitter.
Imagine you're Musk. You have a bijjilion and 1 $. You use twitter heavily and see huge issues, you even see the results of your poll. You buy it for $50 billion and you fix those huge issues because they are in fact trivial to solve. The valuation of twitter would only go up, but Musk isn't even looking at it from a value investing point of view. He's looking at it from a societal point of view. He's looking at it from a 'worth more than currency' value.
Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.
-Albert Einstein
This isn't about nation to nation. This is about so many subjects. The peace between the republicans and democrats is only being kept by force right now. Censoring your political opponents eliminates the possibility of understanding.
My hope is that he does things that the "Twitter is a private company and they can do what they want" crowd hates. Twitter may cost $43B or more, but to witness the prostration of that crowd is truly priceless.
This seems like a massive waste of money.
Firstly, it will kill remaining trust in twitter and secondly the opportunity cost of spending that much money, like why not expand Telsa into India, or Asia in a big way.
Yeah, I get that, but for someone who talks a lot about his singular desire to do more space exploration, things like a tunneling company, a rocket company and an electric car company make sense. Twitter doesn't fit in that group too easily.
Elon's ventures are big enough now that they are a key thing in the politics game. I 'd wager one aspect of this is making sure his voice stands out (to be able to influence politicians 'bottom up').
What I missing about this is that is he actually going to take it private or fold it to some other company with massive over valuation like Tesla... In later case it will make money for him, because people are stupid... In first case it really seem expensive wasteful thing, billions buy lot of lobbying power...
For all those saying govnt should control platforms like this bear in mind that the free market is working even in this case. A single person decided to take a massive social media private only after a few years of it being a bad actor (see anti free speech sentiment around Twitter.) In a socialist/state-run world any regulation would take years to pass to only then cripple the platform and make it a worse version of itself in many ways maybe except the primary goal of the regulation.
A non-public Twitter will have less pressure from the outside to "perform" and not taken hostage to follow the current dogmatic norms of the population allowing it to undergo much needed and necessary changes to make it a better platform.
> Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk offered to take Twitter Inc. private in a deal valued at $43 billion, lambasting company management and saying he’s the person who can unlock the “extraordinary potential” of a communication platform used daily by more than 200 million people.
That's intriguing. Twitter's user facing APIs have been pretty stale in the last decade or so, in fact it could be said that they have regressed. If you regularly use something like Slack then it's easy to see how Twitter have wasted 1000s of integration opportunities. With the right direction it could become an exciting platform again. I don't think Musk intends to do anything like that, though.
I liked Elon Musk better when he was less focused on a being a celebrity and trying to protect his effectively infinite stack of virtual cash. At one point he was worth $300 billion--today it is merely $265 billion. He could literally retire 100,000 times over (a comfortable middle-class $80k/yr lifestyle)--or maybe just 10,000 times over (comfortably in the 1% at $800k/yr).
Money aside, clearly that's just not enough for him anymore. He got sucked into the fame game and inevitably had to step on faces to keep climbing. And that made him a target, and now he's going to go punish those Twitter trolls like a baby with an enormous wallet.
The only people complaining about free speech are literally right-wingers spreading verifiable lies (and this includes non US right-wingers). The fact that this is an issue is a tragic flood of propaganda by these liars.
I cannot think that Elon Musk owning/controlling Twitter will go even half the way he expects. He clearly only sees it as a potential platform for disseminating his opinions, which have regularly been wrong when it came to things like the pandemic. He's a potentially dangerous egomaniac and if he is allowed to own Twitter the best case scenario is that Twitter experiences a mass user exodus, worst case it turns into a social media platform for crazy nonsense like Newsmax and OAN. Sure, it could just turn into a Fox News equivalent, but that's barely better.
Such events is the moment when news agencies reveal their true faces. Compare how different outlets want to frame the narrative.
Axios: "Elon Musk goes into full goblin mode". This outlet pretends to be neutral in quiet times. They usually frame the narrative by omission of inconvenient news.
Reuters: "Elon Musk makes $43 billion cash takeover offer for Twitter". That's plain and factual.
RedState: "Liberals Absolutely Lose It Over Elon Musk's Hostile Takeover Bid of Twitter". But they don't pretend to be neutral: it's in their name.
So if he purports that Twitter now limits freedom of speech, the only thing he can mean by that is hate speech, dangerous medical misinformation, conspiracy bs, or calls to violence.
I've always had a gut feeling that Musk is politically on the far right spectrum farther than most people would believe, but now that he has joined the ranks of these misguided new right-wing "muh freedom of speech"-warriors, who never had any point to begin with, it's a strong indicator rather than just a feeling.
(1) Twitter is a poorly managed company and has been for a long time. A shake up could be a good thing.
(2) I don't see Musk as the person to do it. Mostly he uses Twitter to shoot himself in the foot and his free-speech fetishism doesn't ring true. Is he going to reinstate Trump's Twitter account? Is he going to encourage Narendra Modi to use Twitter to organize pogroms next?
It’s amazing to me that people really think someone like Musk would a good steward of free speech. This idea that the obscenely wealthy are going to come in and save us from ourselves, if only we can let them be in charge, is a tale as old as time, yet people keep believing it.
Yup. He's also removed people from Tesla beta programs if they say anything negative about the company. He's also accused people of being pedophiles for saying negative things about them- going so far as hiring people to try and prove the baseless accusations.
Elon is not a free speech advocate. He'll pretend to be occasionally, but that's not the same thing.
The obscenely wealthy control it now. He would be a much better steward of free speech than they are, that much is obvious. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
The current "stewards of free speech" on Twitter appear to be from the military-industrial complex (recalling when Twitter implied "undermining faith in NATO" is a bannable offence, since confirmed, and unironically citing ASPI as an "independent source" on which accounts to ban), so I personally view an eccentric oligarch as an upgrade.
The current regime is not a monarchy (who do you think the "king" is...?), it's a shadowy extension of the MIC, apparently with the primary purpose of monitoring and managing narratives of importance to them.
> This idea that the obscenely wealthy are going to come in and save us from ourselves, if only we can let them be in charge, is a tale as old as time, yet people keep believing it.
This sentence implies that we are being duped and should not let such people be in charge.
I’m wondering what GP would have us do instead. It’s unhelpful to make an observation about what someone should not do if it’s not obvious what would be better to do.
This is the best ethical replacement for what Twitter provides, and it gives control back into operators of communities because it is based on a standardized specification for a federated social web.
Elon Musk is into politics, isn't that looking strange somehow? I mean he wants to go to Mars, his project was "Flyin' mother nature's silver seed to a new home in the sun", and now he goes right in the opposite direction. Did he have any major setbacks with his Starship?
As somebody from the first world who has had the experience of moderating Internet forums… free speech in the sense of “the government generally shouldn’t control people’s speech, with limited exceptions” is good and necessary. Free speech in the sense of “everybody should be forced to platform every idea” is silly IMO. Left alone user content rapidly devolves into the most low-effort salient content - flame wars, political proselytizing and porn, mostly. If you want your platform to be about anything other than those, you need curation and moderation. This is key for a good user experience.
Note that you’re choosing to spend your time on HN (a relatively strongly moderated forum) instead of a less moderated forum like 8chan’s /b/.
I generally agree with you, but one thing that's been making me extremely uncomfortable lately (since 2016) is the attacking of alternate platforms/communities that are built. Back in The Day(TM), when people had issues with mod/admin decisions and they couldn't be resolved, they'd just spin off a new commmunity/chatroom/forum/etc. Some people would move, some would stay in both, and we'd wait to see if the disagreeing faction was large enough to sustain itself. If so, you'd just end up with 2/3 places to go to talk about X instead of 1.
Now it's more common to try to get 'bad' platforms dehosted altogether (e.g. Parler/Gab), subreddits try to get their 'alternatives' banned, and any company/group that challenges a big group is going to be bought out or otherwise dealt with. (See: FB's gobbling of companies to try to keep people in their garden instead of letting people chose which gardens they enjoy.)
We used to have the opportunity to walk into the woods and make our own playground. Now people will follow you and attack you for that. THAT'S the problem. Also we're becoming really fond of demanding community loyalty. HN doesn't have this problem (which is one reason I show up), but on other social media sites, it can be, for instance, forbidden to link to/talk about certain other sites. For example, on Reddit, it's common to ban people for posting in the 'wrong' Reddits, and on Twitter finding out somebody participates somewhere 'bad' is practically open season.
I should be able to go on HN and /b/, provided I follow my host's rules. I should also be able to set up my OWN site and explicitly say it's because I disagree with - say - HN's moderation policies without worrying about the site being attacked.
I think you need to look at history, "following people into the woods" and much worse than deplatforming has been ongoing for most of the existence of the US (and most/all other countries, just keeping it limited to a US discussion). I mean just look at what happened to people who demonstrated or supported civil rights in the 60s (hint:some were lynched), or gay lesbians in the 80s and 90s (and still). I actually agree that we need to move past these issues, taking a free speech absolutist stance is not the way. This is part of how these groups were and still are discriminated against.
Ironically, I'm a butch lesbian who came out in the 90s, so I'm well aware.
One of my less popular opinions in the queer community is that I AM a free speech absolutist (or close to it), even if it does result in some discrimination. (Even against me.) Of course we should minimize and work to eliminate discrimination in society, but that isn't the only value we have, and unfortunately social policies are always a case of trade-offs.
I also prefer to let the homophobes be open about it so a.) I know what they're saying and can undermine it and b.) so I know who to avoid. All pushing it underground does is make me nervous that everybody's a closet homophobe and means I can't change anybody's mind. (Which I have done on multiple occasions).
This is a good point! I think that the concept of "who do I want to associate with" is a different way to view things than "everyone I see in the world needs to treat me with agency"
I have a hard time knowing where that line is. Like you said,
> I AM a free speech absolutist (or close to it), even if it does result in some discrimination. (Even against me.)
People out there, due to their agency, may not agree with where my agency ends and theirs begins. I think if we have the privilege and feel able to "choose to avoid" those that we disagree with, we could have these discussions in the open without fear and actively change people's minds.
I don't know how to though. I've written about it here [1] but I still don't have a good answer for how do we draw that line of where your agency ends and mine/theirs begin.
I think it's such a hard question because the line moves in accordance to people's position in their culture and society. Even oppressed/marginalized people can have very different circumstances. For example, the 80s-00s were very homophobic, particularly in certain areas of the country, but one thing I had in my favor was a parent with their own household that supported me. That meant that if, say, my dad pushed the issue and was an ass, I just stopped visiting. And likewise, once he'd come around (took 3-4 years), if his family had been an ass to me, they would have lost us all because my immediate family was behind me.
I also tested well enough (I was the top scorer in the county on all of our standardized tests) that it was worth shutting up about my being a big fat homo.
That's a very different situation from a gay kid in an Evangelical home in rural Alabama in the 90s, or (moving outside of sexuality) an African American family in the US South in the 50s.
Agency is very tied into a person's individual circumstances, and trying to legislate rules and policy around that is a nightmare, particularly given it can change on a dime. (My MS diagnosis knocked out a fair chunk of my agency).
I think most people's instinct is to try to protect the most vulnerable, but that may end up stifling conversation to the point where the group dissolves/can't hold itself together OR opening people to being poached away to other groups OR other groups with different norms outcompeting or attacking that group.
We need to be careful not to monkey's paw ourselves.
<< taking a free speech absolutist stance is not the way.
I genuinely dislike this label. It is not an absolutist stance at all. If anything, it is simple a stance based on the foundational values of US as a country. And there is a reason for it. If you cannot express your real thoughts, the conversation gets confused with attempts to evade censor or completely incomprehensible since language gets too distorted to mean anything at all.
It is getting tiring. I am saying this as an immigrant from the old country, where censorship was a thing ( with author writing cringy articles in defense of it -- sounds familiar? ). It is sad for me to see US going that route.
> old country, where censorship was a thing. It is sad for me to see US going that route.
Why does this keep coming up? Nobody, absolutely nobody, is advocating for government restriction of free speech. That is the foundation of the US as a country.
Twitter didn't exist back then but newspapers certainly did. Town squares certainly did.
If the founding fathers wanted to say "if someone is speaking in a town square you can't throw tomatoes at them or shout them down", they would have.
Twitter moderating its content has zero to do with the foundations of America or censorship in other countries.
Sure. And the moment alternative to Twitter is even suggested, it is curbstomped from hackers, who see it as a 'permissible' target ( and seemingly it is based on the cheering that follows a hack ) and various service providers, who won't let it exist.
It is all fine and dandy to say 'build your own public square', but its point is somewhat lost, when you have a hard time even getting basic materials.
Why is anyone entitled to their own public square.
We Live In A Society. If you come to a public square - physically or on twitter, and scream something that the rest of society doesn't want to hear, you are exercising your free speech, and they are exercising theirs if they say they don't want to hear you.
But companies can? They are Schrodinger's publisher depending on who opens the box.
More to the point, so anyone can have a soapbox, but that soapbox will be kicked from under you in the form of hackers, ddos, and so on unless you use those tools. What is the next advice? Build your own Cloudflare? Your own ISP? It is madness and leaves us exactly where we are now.
You can't tell me everyone can have a soapbox if the soapbox is only theoretical in nature and in production deployment does not survive a day.
> but that soapbox will be kicked from under you in the form of...
Right. Just like a real-life soapbox.
I don't think you understand what it would mean to go into a public square - at ANY point in history, and start screaming the kinds of things that get you banned by Cloudflare, ISPs, and AWS.
We're not talking about stuff like "I have a different perspective on who should be chief of our tribe". The kind of political rhetoric that will inspire future generations of enlightened intellectuals to say "I disagree with what you say but I will fight to the death for your right to say it".
We're talking about content that has NEVER been acceptable to be preached in a public sphere. The kind of content that societies have always intolerated. Nothing is different. Nothing has changed about that.
<<We're not talking about stuff like "I have a different perspective on who should be chief of our tribe". The kind of political rhetoric that will inspire future generations of enlightened intellectuals to say "I disagree with what you say but I will fight to the death for your right to say it".
I think we fundamentally disagree despite sharing the same initial assumptions.
My argument is effectively that EVERYTHING is a matter of perspective and therefore a matter of opinion and as such protected, because people will disagree about everything, but, if they are indeed enlightened, they will defend it as an opinion. Just by saying that some topics are off-limits, you squarely place yourself as the arbiter of truth, which is a tricky position to be in, because some ideas are just too dangerous to impressionable minds.
Here is the fun part. That is true. Ideas can absolutely wreak havoc, but the appropriate, albeit labor intensive, approach is to help people work through them and not try to suppress it or worse, force it into the shadows.
<< We're talking about content that has NEVER been acceptable to be preached in a public sphere.
I don't want to belabor the point, but there were tons of things that were not acceptable and now are acceptable precisely because some decided to challenge status quo of what is 'never acceptable'. If examples are needed, note how quickly question of homosexuality moved from barely whispered to openly celebrated in US society.
I think we've arrived at the point where all the town squares are owned by a private corporation who can - so I am told - do whatever they want on their property. I guess this was always the terminal destination of American society: stuck in a company town with nowhere to go, while the government just looks on saying "they're not doing anything illegal, so I can't help!"
This is effectively where we are. History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme. I am personally saddened that it is not seen as a danger that it is.
But the founding principles have always had restrictions build in. Try for example publically calling for the assassination of the president (or any other person) and see how you fare. Or army members not being allowed to talk about their missions. I don't buy that these are fundamentally different, it is simply drawing the line differently of what is permissable free speech.
The comparison is not applicable. When you join the army, you give up certain rights to join that specific group. To make it even more important, the rules are clear and explicit.
Now compare it to Twitter or Facebook. You don't know what you signing up for. Their TOS effectively say they can ban you for things they deem wrong. It is only recently that we know how they evaluate it ( see CNN discussion of FB speech violence tiers ).
Free speech is just that. It is free speech. There is no TOS. It includes all sorts of nasty bits too, because that is what being human is. Trying to pretend otherwise is, at best, counterproductive.
But here we are. Entire nation scared of reality and in dire need to cover it up with soft language.
<< But the founding principles have always had restrictions build in.
Do they? I am reading the constitution and I don't see those restrictions. You may get a visit from some agencies, but that is to make sure you were not joking.
On the other hand, I do see a mention of when slavery is ok in US and yet people seem surprised when it is pointed out.
I am talking about restrictions to free speech and yes when you join the army your free speech is restricted. Which is a clear example of the government restricting free speech, but presumably that is OK?
The argument is a good one, but I think it is missing the nuance of the status of a soldier, who, for a variety of reasons, is not an average citizen ( note, how many restrictions are listed with qualifier 'while in uniform'[1]).
You can say what you want. Just don't make it look like the army is saying this.
It may sound like a contradiction, but it is not. You voluntarily join the army. You join that specific group and accept their 'rules'. It is harder to argue ( not impossible since there are naturalized citizens, who clearly opt in to become citizens ) that citizens by right of birth voluntarily opt into that set of rules. That is the where constitution comes in.
But restrictions like this don't just apply to soldiers, journalists can be prosecuted for revealing classified information, people can be prosecuted for treason because they revealed specific information to foreign agents, people can be sued for defamation. All these are restrictions to free speech.
My argument is every one believes there are limits to free speech they just place the boundaries at different places. And I stand by my position that the soldier example is on a fundamental level a restriction on free speech.
Censorship is an indelible part of human relations. You can never truly speak your mind, partly because the other person cant have it, but fundamentally because you cant either.
And that is a problem. Our communication depends on being able to articulate ourselves. Quality of our thoughts depend on the language. The quality of our discourse suffers, because our thoughts are being trained to offer 'safe' language.
If you do not see it as a problem, we have a problem.
That's really about monopolies on information and other gateways more than anything. We are so used to consolidation to one or few large platforms for us to access information or services. This is in large part due to network effects, but also due to poor regulation as well as us being lazy.
So if we have lot of different options to access information and your views are still unwelcome in all but the most extreme places, then I think it reflects quite poorly on your views. You might not get a platform, but that doesn't mean you're being persecuted.
It is, but I would argue that was one of the reasons for the establishment of free speech. Back when we were conceiving of free speech as a right, it was in direct response to a monopoly on information. In that case, it was the government backing up their monopoly on information with their monopoly on force. Now, it's companies backing up their oligarchy on information with their resources.
I think the problem is the monopoly on information, not its source. I understand some people disagree.
> So if we have lot of different options to access information and your views are still unwelcome in all but the most extreme places, then I think it reflects quite poorly on your views. You might not get a platform, but that doesn't mean you're being persecuted.
I agree with this. It's just important to still let those extreme places exist.
From my understanding of history which is probably incomplete, free speech is freedom from government restriction and prosecution, not about availability of information in the private sector. It boils down to the principle that we can't force other people to repeat your views.
Free speech as a concept has definitely been abused by people distributing mis-information. That's more of a modern problem as network effects and technology made mass distribution and co-ordination of mis-information affordable outside of governmental organisations.
In terms of "extreme places", the Internet is pretty free from restrictions already. You can pretty much set up a website with content that's not acceptable on any of the large media platforms.
Yes, that is how and why free speech was established. My argument is that we actually were reacting to the availability of information, but since the government (and outside of the US in some places the Church for whatever religion the state follows) was the only source of the monopoly, we assumed the problem was government. Like if you have somebody running around committing arson and you exile them but don't bother criminalizing arson; you addressed that particular actor but not the underlying problem.
> Free speech as a concept has definitely been abused by people distributing mis-information. That's more of a modern problem as network effects and technology made mass distribution and co-ordination of mis-information affordable outside of governmental organisations.
This is true, however, I would say it needs to be balanced against the situation before, where institutions acted unchecked and it was often impossible to act at all outside of them. I am sympathetic to the argument that misinformation is a problem and I even agree with it, I just think the ways we discuss solving the problem would be worse. It's not enough to solve a problem: We should try to solve it in a productive way. Otherwise we end up with a Pyrrhic victory.
> In terms of "extreme places", the Internet is pretty free from restrictions already. You can pretty much set up a website with content that's not acceptable on any of the large media platforms.
This is why I focused on things like pressure to buy out, DDOSes, immense legal resources being brought to bear, etc. You can set up a website, but if it becomes big enough, people start going after it with things other than just speech, and THAT'S where I draw the line.
> So if we have lot of different options to access information and your views are still unwelcome in all but the most extreme places, then I think it reflects quite poorly on your views.
And then those "most extreme places" (Parler, Truth Social) invariably fail because of the "worst people problem".
> So if we have lot of different options to access information and your views are still unwelcome in all but the most extreme places, then I think it reflects quite poorly on your views. You might not get a platform, but that doesn't mean you're being persecuted.
Historically, this perspective has proven to be laughable. Criticism of Putin can hardly be found except for the most extreme places (in some locations)
Meh- power is power. Fine, how about extreme positions like Jesus is god, earth is round, earth is not center of universe, slavery should be outlawed, women should not have to wear hijab, ...
>subreddits try to get their 'alternatives' banned
Every once in a while I come across a rumor that AHS and affiliated subreddits employ a strategy of posting illegal content (like child pornography) on subreddits/platforms that they want shut down for wrongthink. At some point it doesn't matter that the government allows for free speech if a small minority is able to control the flow of ideas for the rest of society; the effect is the same and technically an authoritarian government could trivially benefit from such censorship while ostensibly remaining neutral.
And, for the record, /b/ was the birthplace of hundreds of internet-wide memes in its heyday, with next to zero moderation. The fact that the average person can't stand an unmoderated forum doesn't mean that such fora have no place - especially considering the likelihood that there are campaigns (by the same type of people who try to get alternatives dehosted) to keep such places unusable by deliberately posting offensive and off topic content.
Well, that's where the whole business of Internet anonymity comes into play. What if people had to post their state-supplied identifying information at all times, so there was no doubt about who they were? This is more or less how traditional journalism works: the reporter doesn't generally get to hide behind a screen of anonymity. Editorial board op-eds are often unsigned, however.
I think anonymity is OK personally, it falls into the tradition of anti-government pamphleteering in pre-Revolution colonial North America under British Royal rule, and samizdat literature in the USSR.
I really want to believe in free speech absolutism, but have been really concerned how successful the "flooding the zone with shit" strategy in propaganda has been. This seems to have destabilized many western countries to varying degrees. The best solution I've heard for this is that we need better algorithms for what gets amplified by platforms and what doesn't. Similar to how thirty years ago I could have shouted all day about the moon landing being fake and it would have never made it into the evening news unless there was something more to it.
What's your thoughts on how we can defend against the shit flooding? I find yhis entire problem area really hard.
The flipside is that the old ways enabled institutions to lie to the people more easily. Remember Iraq? I just bring this up to keep us from getting rose-tinted nostalgia glasses about how much better things were before.
Another caveat to what I'm about to say is that I think we're in for a century of legal and political upheaval, so long term solutions will need to fit into whatever we build next.
That said, I think that there some things we could do.
I'd like to see/hear more about looking into the possibility of regulating sentiment, for example. Maybe you can write any POSITION you want on culture war issue X, but you can't write it in such a way it's only meant to inflame anger/cause despair/etc. Or perhaps you can, but you have to have some kind of warning label, or that content is allowed but turned off/blurred by default (like NSFW pics on Reddit), so you have to actively go out of your way to consume things that are 'bad' for you.
Also give people more tools and nudges. Like let people click through a Twitter profile and see that 80% of a person's Tweets are angry or about political topics. Somebody brought up tax policy as an example of something that doesn't get this treatment, and that's because tax policy is BORING and Slate/Newsmax aren't writing hit pieces about tax policy. People care about culture topics because the media whips them into a frenzy.
We could also force the companies to do due diligence in their R+D/feature implementations; maybe Twitter should be forced to prove that each new algorithm change makes people HAPPIER (or at least doesn't have terrible mental health effects).
Also I advocate for digital history and basic internet infrastructure information to be taught at the K-12 level; so much of the problem is that people don't understand how any of this works at a VERY BASIC level.
Dehosting is a problem of capitalism which is why the erosion of the progressive era regulations and the attempts to prevent their reinforcement and update are things that need to be settled now. Today, we live in the second Gilded Age where maybe a dozen people can affect policies that impact millions of people. You want freedom then you have to put limits on what the rich can do or make it unlawful to be that rich (divestment and breakup).
That's whataboutism. Should there be any concentration of productive forces such that a few people can command or influence others policies to adversely (or even positively) affect millions of people simply because they own stock in said companies?
I protested a war in front of the White House. Can’t do that in Russia right now. I am far more worried about the effects of misinformation than I am about people getting booted off Twitter.
No, dehosting is a problem common across all socio-economic systems. It is even more prevalent in non-capitalist systems.
Much of the driving force behind today's dehosting is a result of increasing government intrusion into how information is shared on the internet. Congress has been openly threatening tech companies about "misinformation" for the past decade or so and this is a very predictable result.
One historical example that comes to mind that has nothing to do with capitalism is the uproar around the translation of the Bible into vernacular languages because it broke the Church's moral information monopoly.
"Bad" platforms aren't bad because "we disagree with them."
They're bad because they're lying to people en masse and inciting rebellion.
And yes, I absolutely think that behavior that reaches that bar should be squelched. The dangers of enabling the spread of misinformation are entirely too visible in today's society.
The slippery slope argument is garbage in this case. No one has been banning political speech from major platforms. Heck, they bent over backwards to allow Trump and company to say the most outrageous things for years before finally stepping in and putting a stop to it.
And Parler being deplatformed for enabling the public organization of rebellion against the United States hardly seems like an "oh no, we're becoming Nazis!" moment.
It's only the most extreme views that result in deplatforming; "your view on taxes is different than mine" will never rise to that level, so there's no slippery slope.
So in what case can we justify enabling platforms to lie to people and incite violence? It simply can't be done.
If it's the first, I can find a TON of lying and misinformation on 'mainstream' sites and institutions. Off the top of my head, I can think of examples in the past year where the NYT and ACLU lied or misrepresented information, for example. There's also a shit ton of information flying around respectable Dem Twitter and Reddit whenever news events happen. Remember how many people thought that the people Kyle Rittenhouse shot were black and tried to stoke racial tensions using that talking point?
So obviously it's not the lying.
So let's talk about 'inciting rebellion.'
Everybody involved in the January 6th riot is a braindead moron. Trump is a braindead moron. And, frankly, if Trump were arrested, I wouldn't lose any sleep over it. That doesn't mean we crack down on speech. It'd be like ordering the USPS to open letters and report people if they plotted their stupid Dollar Store peasant rebellion using paper letters, or tapping everybody's phones.
I'm also exceptionally uncomfortable with the idea that inciting rebellion is inherently bad, as somebody who does believe we should resist tyranny and people have the right to rebel.
They should have been able to talk about how much the government sucks all they want, they crossed the line when they showed up to break into Congress.
> It's only the most extreme views that result in deplatforming; "your view on taxes is different than mine" will never rise to that level, so there's no slippery slope.
Taxes, probably not, but it'll be really interesting to see how union discussions, for example, are handled. Also I could definitely come up with some tax policies that would get me deplatformed from the big spaces. We just haven't dragged taxes into the culture war yet.
When the NYT says something that is factually incorrect, they issue a retraction. Everything they do say is fact-checked, even if they make mistakes.
That's not even close to "lying".
"Misrepresentation" can be a grey area that blends into framing and emphasizing certain parts over others. I didn't include misrepresentation on my list, and that was intentional. You can disagree with how an event is reported without the report containing any actual lies--and that falls under "a matter of opinion."
Things bouncing around "Dem Twitter," whatever that means, are hardly the fault of the NYT or ACLU. Whatever was said, it didn't enter my bubble, in that I never saw a claim that Rittenhouse shot any black people.
But I don't find Twitter useful, so I don't follow anything on it. Instead I read the NYT, and while I don't always agree with their editorials, I generally feel the information they publish as news is as accurate as they can figure out how to make it.
> It'd be like ordering the USPS to open letters and report people if they plotted their stupid Dollar Store peasant rebellion using paper letters, or tapping everybody's phones.
No, it really, really isn't like that.
It's more like shutting down stations from using the licensed public airwaves to disseminate incitement to violence or to broadcast blatant lies--and then later argue in court that "no reasonable person" should have believed those lies. I'm sure you know the latter actually happened, and the former was the law of the land until Reagan managed to tear down the Fairness Doctrine. [1] Which was found to be compatible with the First Amendment, and the only reason we don't have law to replace the original FCC rule is that Reagan vetoed it.
Regardless, my point is that there is potentially a way to limit speech that doesn't prevent people from complaining about the government but that also prohibits people from outright lying about the government (or other facts).
> Now it's more common to try to get 'bad' platforms dehosted altogether (e.g. Parler/Gab)
Well, no company can be forced to host antisemitism, holocaust denial and similar content [1] - most companies don't even want to host such content, simply because of how despised (or, in the case of Europe, illegal) it is.
>most companies don't even want to host such content, simply because of how despised ... it is
I don't think that's true because the frequency of bad ideas is evenly distributed. I'm sure there are many company owners that have those bad ideas and want to host them.
These ideas get suppressed because of societal norms. The problem here is when you disagree with the norm. I'm personally fine with making holocaust denial illegal, but it would be dishonest of me to claim that wasn't an authoritarian move, and that violates another, arguably more important norm! So we split the difference, and leave it up to individual choice. But that solution fractured when the internet split our norms into a thousand pieces, and has totally failed with the mainstream adoption of Trump and woke/cancel culture norms (both of which violate other, more important norms).
Frankly its terrible to feel like you're 'losing' people to bad ideas, and allowing communities to form around bad ideas accelerates the loss. We intuitively understand that some bad ideas are bad enough to lead to war, and vast human suffering. And so we come back to a justification for limited authoritarianism, because war is even worse than that.
I am also an American who disagrees with those European laws, though I understand them and why they came to pass. It's one of the difficulties of the issue: Free speech used to be more of a national problem, now it's larger, and, as you mentioned, international law and culture add even more variables to consider.
I understand the desire to abide by European standards, because the Holocaust in particular was so horrific, but there are countries that have laws against things like promoting homosexuality, so clearly legality can't be the only moral arbiter here because the laws are a.) contradictory and b.) we recognize authoritarian governments make oppressive laws and we shouldn't comply with them. Which means we need another standard, one that defines Holocaust denial as impermissible but discussions of being gay as fine.
I don't think anybody should HAVE to host holocaust denial, but if somebody does, they shouldn't be attacked for it. (And 'attacked' meaning attempts made to take down the content/sue facetiously/DDOSing, etc. Nothing stopping people from mocking the host or pulling their money).
I'm also wary of things like 'hosting anti-semitism' as a justification, because what is considered anti-semitic varies (like most kinds of bigotry). Is it anti-semitic to criticize the government of Israel? What about the gender issues in Ultra-Orthodox communities? (I'm not Jewish, but I feel the same way about groups that I am a part of: I might not LIKE being called a dyke, seeing somebody say all homosexuals are depraved degenerates, etc. but that's not the same as calling for my murder or trying to get me fired.)
> Which means we need another standard, one that defines Holocaust denial as impermissible but discussions of being gay as fine.
We actually have, and that is the Declaration of Human Rights.
Holocaust denial denies the very thing why this Declaration was formulated and accepted by all civilized nations. Discriminating against gay people violates Articles 1-3 of the Declaration.
The problem is that the US, its constitution being way older than the Declaration, has a far wider understanding of "free speech" and the responsibilities associated with it.
I mean, if we got every internet company to agree and had some kind of public standards and the ability to vote or otherwise talk through borderline issues, I'd be fine with that as a solution, even as somebody who does hold the US view of free speech.
The problem is that there's no way companies are going to leave money on the table or authoritarian governments are going to agree to that, so then you're right back to the two different set of standards where companies proclaim in the EU/US/etc. that they follow content moderation according to the DHR while letting some countries erase gay people and women, and if that happens, their claim to any kind of moral stand or objectivity can't be taken seriously.
Frankly, I think this issue is going to require some VERY large changes to our systems to deal with, but first we have to go through the panic period where the people in power realized they fucked up and try to save the system that serves them well. I'm of the opinion our information expansion over the last 15 or so years is as monumental as the invention of writing or possibly even just the printing press. Social upheaval is going to follow, and until we establish new systems, it's hard to know how to use those systems to combat this problem.
For example, I think the Constitution is outdated and we should rewrite it.
100% agree. Freedom of speech protects you _from_ government. The idea that government should compel commercial or private entities to give all voices a megaphone is misguided.
>> Now if you're not on the big platforms your opinion may as well not exist.
Before global social networks your opinion didn’t matter either. And that was probably a good thing. People are entitled to their opinions but most peoples opinions are idiotic and shouldn’t be broadcast around the world to be picked up and amplified by other idiots.
>>> Now if you're not on the big platforms your opinion may as well not exist.
> Before global social networks your opinion didn’t matter either. And that was probably a good thing. People are entitled to their opinions but most peoples opinions are idiotic and shouldn’t be broadcast around the world to be picked up and amplified by other idiots.
Oh but who decides what opinions are idiotic? This is how the idea of free speech emerged :)
This is a valid question. The answer is clearly not a firehose—free speech absolutist forums are selected against by users for the toxic pits they devolve into.
Multiple forums and the gating mechanisms of wealth and literacy were the Enlightenment era’s filters. We don’t want nor have those any more.
I'll gladly clear this one up for you. It is: whoever decided the T&Cs of the platform you're using - the ones you agreed to when you signed up.
If you're banned from Twitter for posting white supremacist hate speech, paedophilia, for organizing targetted harrassment or anything else Twitter deems contrary to their T&Cs remember that (depending on where you live) while you may have the right to express yourself, I have the right as the operator of a platform not to listen to you or have you on my platform.
What most of the people whining about being booted from Twitter are upset about is that they aren't able to annoy the people they want to anymore. I'm fine with this.
What a stupid and idiotic question! Why would you even think to ask such a thing?! I'll have you know that my understanding of the situation is so much more evolved than yours, because I saw a headline referring to an article on another site that said that my assumption with no data is correct, as dictated by my emotions being reinforced with the multitude of soundbites affirming my smugness in my perceived expertise based on my OWN research!
Do both democratic and meritocratic methods of polling suggest the opinion is harmful? Delete.
Otherwise it stays until consensus.
The edge cases pale in comparison to the broadly accepted manipulation of a near-majority. And furthermore compared to the point-of-no-return where the majority is sufficiently manipulated.
Edit: downstream comments emphasizing the edge cases must've missed my last paragraph. The improvement only has to be better than doing nothing. Right now doing nothing is arguably acutely affecting almost 50% of the US population. No way the edge cases add up to that.
> democratic and meritocratic methods of polling suggest the opinion is harmful? Delete.
This is, in essence, selecting for experts spouting popular opinions. That’s a dangerous incentive model. (All before we even get to the question of delineating the experts.)
Except that in the last 12 months, people have literally died because they believed non-experts creating and amplifying anti-vaccine conspiracy theories.
Should the majority be able to suppress the speech of minorities when they express unpopular opinions on, let's say, civil rights and equality? What is meritocratic polling and who specifically gets to evaluate merit?
If I were to get on twitter right now and start posting my opinions, no one would give a shit. There's something else going on that is promoting polarizing opinions and making these forums devolve.
I think it's monetisation. In the past, monetising your opinion was difficult. It was limited to a select few who could get on the TV or in the print media. Now, people are incentivised to say things which will generate controversy because eyeballs == money. If you got on Twitter and started posting polarising opinions and worked on promoting those eventually the engagement will (possibly) reach a point where you can gain financially from it and you're now incentivised to continue posting polarising content. The content doesn't even need to be ethically right/wrong, it just needs to make one group of people angry and another defensive. There are plenty of things we need to have a debate about as a society (because they are not black/white and require nuance to solve) but they will never get solved properly because both sides refuse to discuss the issue.
> Now if you're not on the big platforms your opinion may as well not exist.
I'm no so sure about that. Since leaving social media, I've become quite involved in local politics. I now know some state legislators on a first-name basis and multiple directors of state departments in multiple states. I can call up people I've helped get elected and get my thoughts right to them. I find my opinion to effect much more change than it did when I was shouting into the digital void.
> I can call up people I've helped get elected and get my thoughts right to them.
How about regular citizens who voted for those people but didn't "help them get elected"? Do they get to voice their opinions? Or what you're saying is that your politicians only serve those who directly donated resources (time is a resource) to them? Even though they should theoretically serve their whole constituency?
They absolutely do. The vast majority of the events I interact with these people at are open to the public with announcements in local news papers. They have dedicated communication channels. The last person I helped spent every Saturday for two months hanging out at the town dump to meet people and hear their concerns. He is planning on making it a monthly event going forward. It can be amazing how empty town, village, and county board meetings are. Show up, state your opinion in a respectful manner, come prepared with an informed argument, and take the time to chat with people afterwards. They'll remember you and if you have a consistent track record of being level-headed and productive, you can start to carry some real influence.
Like much in life, half the battle is just showing up.
If you can't be bothered to contact your representative, how does your representative know your opinion?
You don't need social media to inform your representative of your opinions--and quite frankly, more direct communication is probably more effective in informing your representative of your opinions than social media.
TIL that, despite the fact that I vote and write and discuss things with my friends, my opinion doesn't exist because I don't share it on Twitter or Facebook.
>Now if you're not on the big platforms your opinion may as well not exist.
This view somewhat misses the point. If you get on the big platforms and become famous, TODAY, you might have an opinion that matters to quite a few people. What about BEFORE? What platform were the big youtubers using in 2002? The big instagram influencers, where were their voices being heard in 1998? Paraphrasing you, "their opinions didn't exist".
What about the people that get pushed off those large platforms through constant abuse, threats and trolling? Do their opinions not matter? Or more general: at what point does an utterance stop being an opinion and start being assault?
What about cases where the defendant can’t pony up the money to sue? What about cases where the defendant has no viable way to sue in the US, where the social media networks mostly reside?
Well, then, it's interesting that Spike Lee's comments were judged to be threatening harassment (he settled after legal action was taken against him and a judge ruled the case could proceed), yet he was never banned or removed from twitter.
Let me be clear, this isn't about the Martin case -- this is about an uninvolved person who had nothing to do with the case at all being singled out for harassment by Spike Lee. And @Jack thought it was just fine. This isn't about supporting some stealth agenda; it's about not telling a posse to attack some innocent old man.
> Now if you're not on the big platforms your opinion may as well not exist.
As someone who lives in a deep red state, I can tell you that the banning of various alt-right voices from mainstream social media has amplified their appeal among those inclined to listen, not eliminated it. There are plenty of channels for sharing your ideas besides Facebook and Twitter, and they use them.
Before global social media there were newspapers, TV networks, and books. If you weren't on them, which was much harder to get on, your opinion didn't matter
But we live in a Meta-gopoly. Basically a control system by pseudo-chosen monopolies in various verticals that are all run by NGOs, but in bed with GOs.... with a revolving door of influence.
Look at the revolving door between FB and the NSA, or the fact that Amazon is building, running GovCloud, or that the CEO owns one of the big media firms, and that he is able to get clearance for satellites and rocket launches...
The non-existent lines between global corporate influence and which governments either benefit or suffer from the tech reach is quite disturbing.
Free speech is a cultural phenomenon in addition to a constitutional policy.
Everyone wants to reduce everything to laws for some reason when the whole reason they are laws is because we value them culturally. The law is a last resort. We shouldn't be setting societal boundaries merely on extreme limits of law.
Trying to fix these cultural issues at gunpoint via courts is no better than trying to fix culture via censorship and social isolation.
There is this constant borrowing of justification from the constitutional/legal side to argue that companies should moderate their platforms in a particular way.
Then there is just a marketing angle of saying you're free speech to pull users from the platform that you think is against free speech.
The whole thing feels really shaky as a genuine movement and feels more like regulating companies they don't like.
I don't. I agree approximately 60-85%. The reality is that big media companies can shape information. This has been going on for years and arguably had a role in getting us into the war in Iraq.
Either way, we are shaping the landscape of free speech, when that's how the vast majority of communication, discussion and organizing happens.
That said, I don't know how someone looks at the history of reddit and still wants uncheck free speech.
> Biden administration ‘flagging problematic posts for Facebook,’ Psaki says
If you think that social medias speech policies are developed in a vacuum from influence from politicians, then you're mistaken. How could it be? Imagine being a CEO and getting dragged in front of Congress every 6 months to explain yourself. Or politicians calling your platform a threat to democracy and threatening to break you up. You think that would have no impact on your speech policies?
What would government restriction on speech look like if not soft (effective) influence on big media companies?
> if you think that social medias speech policies are developed in a vacuum from influence from politicians
Moving the goalpost. Nobody claimed private companies should ignore government sources.
You asked about “the government tell[ing] private platforms what speech is acceptable.” That would be a First Amendment violation.
> What would government restriction on speech look like if not soft (effective) influence on big media companies?
Flippantly: Russia.
Less flippantly: freedoms exist in balance. Taking an absolutist stance on individual speech curtails freedom of association. In practice, I suspect it will make most social media unusable in its current form. (Which may be for the worst.)
> Moving the goalpost. Nobody claimed private companies should ignore government sources.
You asked about “the government tell[ing] private platforms what speech is acceptable.” That would be a First Amendment violation.
You saw the parent's linked article about the White House flagging posts for Facebook, right? Are you trying to make the argument that it's OK if the government "suggests" what Facebook/Twitter should do with posts on their platform, but they're only crossing the line if they _make_ Facebook/Twitter flag certain posts? I think it's a distinction without difference. The usual scenario I give people in this situation is, how would your view on this change if Trump "suggested" how Facebook could flag certain posts and then Facebook followed through with it. No demands, just "suggestions." Still OK with this relationship between the government and a private company?
> Are you trying to make the argument that it's OK if the government "suggests" what Facebook/Twitter should do with posts on their platform, but they're only crossing the line if they _make_ Facebook/Twitter flag certain posts?
No. Nobody was. That’s why it was moving the goalpost [1].
This (the Musk thing) isn't about that though, right? It's just him wanting the platform to be more open, not wanting the government to require that any particular platform be open.
>This (the Musk thing) isn't about that though, right? It's just him wanting the platform to be more open, not wanting the government to require that any particular platform be open.
What is Musk's definition of open? How is that any better than the status quo? Because your bias happens to overlap with Musk's? Given his treatment of whistleblowers and employees at his current companies it's not at all clear that he actually values openness and free speech.
The complete merger of the 'private economy' and the 'state government' is a defining feature of both fascism and communism across the 20th century. Such relationships already exist to a large extent across the USA and Europe, notably defense contractors and their government partners, but also increasingly you see corporate media intertwined with state power as well.
The government grants charters to corporations. Corporations are thus franchisees of the state. The idea that corporations are sovereign rule makers for society and not bound to the laws of the land is misguided.
If the government charters corporations that suppress free speech, then they are effectively making a law that abridges free speech.
Some private enterprises are treated like government services and regulated as such. Utilities, for example. I doubt there are many countries where the electricity company can fire a paying client. The key is not who manages or owns the business, but whether it's a commons platform - something needed to function in society.
So yeah, there's a pretty strong case to be made that certain internet companies are like that. Can you survive without social media? Sure, but you can also survive without sewer. It's just a lot harder to live a normal life.
Electric utilities were granted monopoly status in order the treat them as utilities, prior to the 1930s they were just private companies that were wildly successful, and didn’t want to expand into unprofitable rural markets.
That’s not the dynamic occurring today, social media is available in even the most rural setting, albeit in a reduced form to support low bandwidth.
Do we really want to allow Facebook and Twitter monopoly status and then treat them as defacto government entities? Will that result in better services? I do not think so.
As we’ve seen with TikTok’s rise, competition within the space leads to better outcomes, not treating social media companies as “utilities”. Social media companies are not in any way comparable to a sewer system, an electric grid, or a phone line network.
History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes. Electric power, water, sewage, phone, internet access... each has its own specific history, times 170 countries. Not all identical, but the outcomes are pretty similar.
SM is clearly different from that and very much still in flux, and overly regulating it would be more of a burden than an advantage. Some amount of regulation may help though, especially designed to encourage diversity of ideas.
But mostly I wanted to counter the meme that "it's not censorship if it's a private company". Yes it is, when you have only one twitter and a handful of SM companies in total. It's not the ownership that matters, it's the ubiquity and the effect.
>History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes. Electric power, water, sewage, phone, internet access... each has its own specific history, times 170 countries. Not all identical, but the outcomes are pretty similar.
They all require physical infrastructure to every house, to provide service capacity. As such, we don't want 7 different companies for each, laying 7 different sewer systems and 7 different electric grids.
When the service is virtual, the same infrastructure limits don't materialize in the same way. We don't need to run new ISP lines to bring on a new platform.
So while ISP are certainly more like classic utilities, websites and social platforms just aren't.
>But mostly I wanted to counter the meme that "it's not censorship if it's a private company". Yes it is, when you have only one twitter and a handful of SM companies in total. It's not the ownership that matters, it's the ubiquity and the effect.
Corporate censorship isn't a "free speech" problem. SM companies just aren't enough like a utility, they are not actually required to function in society (unlike electricity, and running water).
Did you learn nothing from the battle over NetNeutrality?
> As such, we don't want 7 different companies for each, laying 7 different sewer systems and 7 different electric grids.
I think decentralization is better way than building one big ISP controlled by the government. I live in a place (Utah), that has a non profit owned fiber infrastructure and leases it out to different ISPs, where you can even buy the dark fiber yourself for like $2500. I can choose from 10-15 ISPs with highly competitive prices and service. The ISPs can have whatever policies they want but the free market will take care of them pretty fast.
Except you can argue that we don't have only one twitter. We have many, and potentially thousands. I can fire up my own version of twitter in a couple of minutes. I (or my group, clan, subculture, whatever) can fire up my/our own facebook in minutes. OTOH I only have one electric power supplier to my home.
> especially designed to encourage diversity of ideas.
Exposure to diversity of ideas is not a problem on social media. What drowns out most ideas is actually threat of cyberbullying and internet mobs, being drowned out by bots, and algorithmic sorting that prioritizes controversial content over moderate voices. Only the last one is related to moderation/editorial choices by the company and it’s rarely framed as a free speech issue.
> Some amount of regulation may help though, especially designed to encourage diversity of ideas
I wonder if limited Section 512 reform is the answer [1].
Remove it for social media platforms over a certain size that sell ads. Create a safe harbour if they form an independent appeals commission, like the one Facebook did; but with teeth on enforcement, tightly-scoped but binding rulemaking powers, and rules about how its members are chosen. Company can flag and ban. Users can appeal. Commission can go to the courts to enforce its will or force discovery. (Maybe throw in a couple commission members elected by users, I don’t know.)
FWIW, there is a precedent regarding shopping malls and the like. They are clearly private property, yet they must provide access for political activity.
> As we’ve seen with TikTok’s rise, competition within the space leads to better outcomes
I disagree. The whole social media industry is rotten and needs a dose of... something... to bring it back to sanity. Strict limits on user data collection and algorithmic "feeds" would be a good start IMHO. Otherwise the same patterns repeat themselves, where the most rage-inducing content gets spread the furthest.
I dont know where the line is, but we should agree that a line is needed.
People are saying a line is not necessary. That is at the core, the problem. We need to agree that these companies -by accident or otherwise- have become a common good, similar to a "utility"
Take a similar example: at some point a company stops being a company...and becomes a monopoly. Where is that line? We dont know. However its important we recognize private companies operating as monopolies are not in the best interests of society.
Private companies operating as common goods providers should be subject to additional rules. That is what we should agree on. Then let others define what that is.
If you "do something" about algorithmic feeds then that law is going to be written by politicians or their advisers.
If you, engaged user of a tech site, a developers forum, have no idea what that should look like, then why would the "something" from politicians work out better?
I think bringing back the adventurous side of the internet is important. Back in the day if you wanted to find information about a specific topic you had to search(not google search) for it. In doing so, you weren't inundated with more and more information that starts relevant, but quickly devolves into whats trending to drive DAUs and add clicks.
SM is not a utility but the ability to disseminate information to huge number of peoples is and it's just as important to regulate as electricity and sewage. Moderation of information is the fourth arm of the government and needs to be developed if we're ever going to be able to trust each other again.
It has never been an issue before because the means of communication have always been limited but modern electronic communication has changed all that and it's clear that we can't exist in this wild west phase anymore.
SM had eroded the trust in institutions and between people and groups. It had put all of us in bubbles just to sell ads. Informational and cognitive hygiene must be recognized and taught to everyone so people can defend themselves and take care of what they hold dear and true.
>So yeah, there's a pretty strong case to be made that certain internet companies are like that. Can you survive without social media? Sure, but you can also survive without sewer. It's just a lot harder to live a normal life.
In my experience, there is actually not a pretty strong case to be made for that, as evidenced by all the people who say there is a strong case to be made, but then fail to make a strong case. Perhaps they mean, "a case which convinces me, specifically, 1 person who is already convinced"?
Also, trying to survive without sewer is what led to The Plague's last big hit. Even the Romans knew it was unhealthy. Meanwhile, in this case, INCREASED use of social media is what's been shown to be unhealthy.
> there is a strong case to be made, but then fail to make a strong case
Especially given:
1) The number of digital outlets. Utilities tend to be regulated when there are no alternatives or merely 1 alternative (especially when monopoly is being intentionally granted for the purposes of not duplicating infrastructure). We're not hurting for options in ways to talk to each other these days.
2) The abundance of very diverse conversations on display on the most popular social media. Political poles are pretty well represented with content in proportion to their influence (and all this even considering that the right of private vehicles for speech to set rules for discussion and even make editorial choices is itself a free speech right).
> 1) The number of digital outlets. Utilities tend to be regulated when there are no alternatives or merely 1 alternative (especially when monopoly is being intentionally granted for the purposes of not duplicating infrastructure). We're not hurting for options in ways to talk to each other these days.
It's anecdotal, but I don't feel this to be true in my personal life. I am not on Facebook by choice. But I feel like it impoverishes my life in a number of ways:
1. Most of my family and friends post their life updates on Facebook.
2. My neighborhood uses a Facebook group for most communication and coordination.
3. Several local companies use their Facebook pages to broadcast their events, sales, etc, and as their primary form of outreach.
4. Several local hobby groups do the same.
In each case, this is general communication and information that I want in my life, but I can't get it easily. Even when I go out of my way to get it (private conversations, visiting websites, etc), I still miss things because Facebook has the network and it's the primary way my communities communicate.
So while in principle I agree with everything you said, in my own life I empathetically agree with the subjective sense that it feels like a utility. It feels like living without something important in some ways.
(It was easier when I was married and my wife was on Facebook and could relay information to me. Also anecdotal, but I've heard of this arrangement a number of times.)
Google, Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, Twitter are all private entities. Let's say they don't like the Democratic party. They can single handedly cause a media block out and be able to unfairly influence the elections, view of the world etc. You won't be able to find a single search result or a speech or tweet.
In this context we can't afford to treat these companies as private entities. They should not be able to block/ban whoever they want just because they feel threatened and challenged by their views.
You say “single handedly”, but you just named five different services by three different companies. Do you see the problem here?
Are all the radios broken? Do newspapers not exist? Has TV vanished? Fox News alone has millions of viewers every week. There are hundreds of other outlets from which people get their news.
You really think Twitter can unilaterally erase something from public consciousness?
This is taking away the very obvious point: at some point, lack of participation alone is seen as a sign of nonconformity. Which itself has caused enough issues for individuals while at least "making it seem" as if the majority are okay with the status quo.
It's one thing to be denied access to these platforms. It's another thing entirely to see a specific opinion pushed on the young and the less critical, trickling down to actual demands, rules and restrictions. These platforms are powerful enough to do so. You can find many examples of misinformation translating to demands in CS and IT alone, and these are still relatively harmless.
You’re moving the goalposts. There are plenty of entities that can unilaterally have that great effect. That doesn’t mean they’re so vital to public wellbeing that the government needs to take them over or whatever it is we’re talking about.
I actually don’t think giant corporations are desirable. But that’s not the discussion people are having here. They’re claiming that Twitter is so indispensable, so woven into the fabric of everyday life that it’s tantamount to a public utility, like electricity or sewage.
Okay, but you’re acting as though it’s the same claim as “Twitter has a lot of power”.
I’ve explained my reasoning against the utility claim. If you want to defend it, do so. It might be reasonable, but you haven’t offered anything other than substituting it with a different argument.
It's not the same claim as being indispensible, but it's the same claim as being extremely vowen into everyday life. I think that claim reflects what is actually being discussed better. What I offer is not a defense of the claim, but a request to consider the claim seriously.
In the public utility metaphor, utilities were not defined until they became defined. There's no reason to discount a possible category of "utilithing" that shares some properties with the existing one but not others.
It might be that I missed your explanation (was it in a sibling thread?), but in this thread I don't see a consideration for that idea. "They are not so vital" is not an argument against it, but your personal value judgement.
It’s in my root comment in this thread. I’m not giving my personal value judgment — it’s the value judgment of the ~75% of adults in the US who don’t use Twitter. It’s a real stretch to say that something less than a quarter of the population uses is “vital” for everyday life. How many Americans do you think go a month without electricity or sewage?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe the majority of those companies already did that with the Hunter Biden laptop story.
If only Fox News is covering something and you’re not allowed to talk about it on Twitter, Facebook, etc. then there’s no effective way for it to reach everyone who doesn’t watch Fox.
Right, which is fine. I don’t watch Fox because I don’t like the content Fox produces. You seem to be interested in turning Twitter into some sort of firehose wherein I’m forced to consume Fox content anyway.
Me too. But they have FB accounts, IG accounts, TikTok accounts and so on. The share of people without any kind of social media presence or consumption is shrinking everyday.
Not long ago twitter, telephony/mobiles and electricity didn't exist, and people lived normal lives - but over time "normal" is redefined.
The issue isn't twitter, but online discourse in general, and what happens when it becomes "normal". There is also an issue of choice - it is normal not to read books, as many people do not; yet I wouldn't accept this means you can deprive people who want to read of a library.
Right, and not long before that didn’t have electricity before too. In 2022 in the US, living without electricity is very abnormal. Living without Twitter is… not.
If your issue is online discourse in general, then we’re in a good place: it’s very easy to set up your own website and distribute whatever content you want without needing permission from corporations.
The implication here is that this doesn't have a convincing case behind it?
Then when would you act? There are already plenty of monopolies and "lobbies" in America on the basis of the same efficiency (not acting until it's a "problem") - maybe proactive caution around big business should be the norm given all the historical abuses, from beef to chemicals to medicine to tobacco?
> The implication here is that this doesn't have a convincing case behind it?
The explication, I guess, yeah. I was and am explicitly saying that, yes.
> Then when would you act?
When the prediction that this may become a issue becomes more convincing, somewhere between where it's at now, and climate change, which already has a convincing case that it WILL become a issue (nay, IS one!)
> maybe proactive caution around big business should be the norm given all the historical abuses
Agreed, proactive caution towards things for which there is a convincing case that it is or may become an issue
> I know plenty of people who don’t have Twitter accounts and live extremely normal lives.
Even this I'd say is a stretch. If they're consuming any kind of news or contemporary entertainment, Twitter is absolutely impacting their lives. The degree to which it quickly propagates groupthink and shared narratives is difficult to overstate.
Do you think pre-Internet mass media — one-way communication from corporation to consumer — does not propagate groupthink and shared narratives?
We live in a society, so of course popular things will have nth-order effects on everyone’s lives. TikTok, Facebook, Fox News, the New York Times, Disney, Nintendo, Steam, Itch, Bandcamp, your friend’s podcast. It’s extremely unclear to me why Twitter should be singled out here.
> Do you think pre-Internet mass media — one-way communication from corporation to consumer — does not propagate groupthink and shared narratives?
It certainly did, but not as quickly, and not in a separate channel from the media itself.
Put bluntly: today's journalists, entertainers, and influencers can very quickly arrive at the same (sometimes factually incorrect) narrative through following the same in-group of people on Twitter, which then results in "real" news, entertainment, and other media being produced that share the same groupthink and narrative. This can happen in hours, even minutes.
But it's not clear to your average consumer that what's dictating the stories on nightly news, Saturday Night Live, or the late night shows is actually Twitter, and the ease with which the same people can create the same bubbles without explicitly coordinating.
Size. Market penetration of Twitter is orders of magnitude above that of Nintendo or your friend. You should rather ask: how does influence scale relative to size?
> Sure, but you can also survive without sewer. It's just a lot harder to live a normal life.
Not really but that sense of learned helplessness is certainly good for their bottom line. I imagine it increases your propensity to buy whatever crap they're spamming your feed with.
In reality life without social media is a much happier existence.
> Or if you think SM is bad, then it can be a collective decision to ban SM, like we ban heroin.
Off topic but I don't think banning heroin did anyone any good. We still need proper labeling, packaging, and storage laws. We still need laws that prohibit drugging someone without their explicit permission. We probably need laws that don't allow sale to minors. We probably need ban on advertising "controlled substances". We might even say certain things you can only get under medical supervision by a licensed medical professional.
I just don't think possession ought to be a crime like it is today. Endangering others, sure but possession is just asking for abuse by law enforcement.
That specifically worked for Greek democracies, which were as much about the ability to exclude the most powerful as they were to enable the public participation in power.
In those cases the solution isn’t to force those companies to moderate their content differently, but to prevent them from becoming de-facto monopolies.
The popularity of Twitter, Facebook, Amazon and Google’s core products isn’t the issue. The issue is that any time a successful competitor comes up, they can just buy them out.
Imagine if Facebook wasn’t able to buy Instagram, and it had survived as a competing platform?
There’s no need to apply the concept of “free speech” to private companies. There is every need to regulate monopolies so that a handful of tech giants don’t have the power to effectively suppress content across the majority of the outlets people are using every day.
Twitter sells you a voice to a possibly broad audience depending on how many followers you have, the ads are a micro-currency to facilitate these transactions between voice haver and voice hearer.
That's been utterly ruined by the blue check mark verification system.
Promoting a specific type of user over another is antithetical to the original ideals of Internet forums - whereby the most interesting / useful / "good" content filtered to the top regardless of authorship.
> So yeah, there's a pretty strong case to be made that certain internet companies are like that. Can you survive without social media? Sure, but you can also survive without sewer. It's just a lot harder to live a normal life.
Holy crud, then break them up if they're that powerful. The right to private moderation is part of the 1st Amendment and should only be abridged in very specific circumstances; don't get rid of the 1st Amendment just because you're scared of Facebook's lobby arm.
There are lots of platforms other than Twitter/Facebook. Anti-monopoly regulation against tech companies has reasonably wide bipartisan support in the US. We also have more evidence nowadays that social media doesn't necessarily have to result in natural monopolies. There are so many things we could do rather than significantly abridge people's rights to free association.
- The government could dump monetary grants into Mastodon/Matrix or otherwise subsidize federated/self-hosted alternatives the same way that we've subsidized renewable energy.
- The government could stop allowing purchases by these tech giants in general.
- The government could split up Facebook/Instagram/Horizon.
- The government could push for more open app policies on stores or regulate sideloading (seriously, the amount of pushback this idea gets as a violation of Apple's rights, compared to the amount of support for regulating social network moderation is wild to me. Both of those are an interference in private rights, but one of those things is also a significantly bigger restriction of 1st Amendment rights than the other).
- The government could force open APIs between services (Europe is trying to do this, we'll see whether or not they get it right).
- If that's too much interference into the market, the government could explicitly legalize adversarial interoperability and revise the CFAA to make it easier to scrape websites.
- Then there's an entire conversation to be had about payment systems online and why we have some of the market forces that we do have around monetizing eyeballs and paying for content.
----
But to immediately jump to treating Facebook as a public utility -- not only is that a really drastic step with a lot of 1st Amendment implications, it's also kind of a depressing step because it assumes we couldn't make better social networks than Facebook/Twitter, and I absolutely believe we could. It's depressing to think that we can't ever move past them and the only thing we could do is just try to reduce one specific problem that they have.
I don't want Facebook to be an essential service; even if they didn't censor anything I don't want to use Facebook. I don't really care what their moderation policy is. I hate almost everything about the website; I want alternatives, not a more regulated monopoly. I don't even like the ad-supported model in the first place, I think that monetizing attention is antithetical to creating a good social network.
The view that Facebook is an utility assumes the world only consists of the United States. If it’s a utility and 75% of its users are outside the US, whose utility is it? The UN?
That is a really good point. There is a certain kind of nationalism/exceptionalism inherent in the US deciding that Facebook is both too essential to be left to its own devices and that naturally the US should decide what its policies end up being for the rest of the world -- and I often forget that perspective because I'm in the US and to a certain extent guilty of forgetting about the wider implications of US policy sometimes.
On the other hand, a robust market has fewer of those problems -- the US deciding "we don't want a US company to control the entire market, and we want more companies with differing policies" doesn't have the same implications as the US deciding, "we want the US company to do what we want everywhere." So there's a lot less exceptionalism rolled up in the idea of subsidizing alternatives; and non-US governments have already started to talk about either subsidizing some alternatives like Matrix or adopting them internally within government departments.
Unless the idea is to only regulate how Facebook handles content being displayed to US users, but (while companies do often have country-specific policies), drastically increasing the scope of that kind of system has a lot of its own implications about filter bubbles and communication between countries.
>The government could dump monetary grants into Mastodon/Matrix or otherwise subsidize federated/self-hosted alternatives the same way that we've subsidized renewable energy.
As one example, France has generous tax deductions that effectively triple the value of your contribution for places like Framasoft, although it's not necessarily targeted just at free software.
I completely agree with you in the abstract, but I worry primarily about this chain of causality:
Network effects -> market forces -> political will
I think splitting up these giants is supremely important, but the only healthy approach long term is to require open APIs for cross-service interoperability. This is the only solution to separate network effects from market forces.
It's not unreasonable to want to be able to communicate with your friends, family, and brands you like in a convenient way.
_Either_ you require interoperability so that people can separate their (real) social networks from their choice of technological-implementation, _or_ you allow things to grow unbounded such that they become de facto utilities.
Longer conversation than I'm willing to go into here, and I assume that you already know this anyway, but this is a point that Cory Doctorow pushes a lot. His take is that sites like Facebook in particular got where they are because they were able to scrape and remotely manage other sites, and that after they rose to dominance (among other things like buying competitors) they also pushed to shut down a lot of those systems and make it harder to do what they did.
I'm interested in seeing how EU legislation works out here. I tend to sometimes be relatively skeptical about EU legislation because I think the final results tend to miss the mark or get compromised or have side-effects, but I have seen a lot of people that I respect a lot say that this legislation is good, so I'm really curious to see what happens with it.
I don't personally think that network effects are the only thing that's factoring into current tech dominance -- my evidence for that is that Facebook has had to buy competitors before, and I don't think they would have felt that threat if they were confident in network effects alone to save them. I've also gone through enough internal emails from the various leaks from Facebook to where I can see some the anti-competitive strategies they tried that (in my mind) were in a very different category than just locking down an API. But network effects are certainly an important part of the puzzle, and even ignoring the market, having more user agency to remotely control accounts and build/use their own clients for services is (in my opinion) a really important part of individual freedom, so I'm all for improvements in that area.
And highly agreed, the problem with Facebook is not that people want to talk to friends and family. I don't think that people's instincts to be connected to each other should be treated as something that's unreasonable or bad.
I actually agree with the Mastodon/Matrix/federated approach, I'd just be worried about hosting/network neutrality. There is also a bit of a monopoly over popular protocols, esp. when it comes to Microsoft control over windows/edge and google search/chrome.
I'll point out that the 1st Amendment implications of regulating hosting are much less severe than the implications over regulating moderation on sites themselves.
Different people have different ideas about where to draw these lines: I personally am fairly skeptical about requiring hosting services to carry content, I think that has a lot more implications than people realize and I think that autonomy over how people manage computers and what content they serve is something we should try very hard to protect.
On the other hand I was initially skeptical of network neutrality back when it was first entering the public debate, but ended up completely changing my views and supporting it pretty much wholesale, I think that there's decent historical evidence that Title 2 classification didn't harm Internet innovation last time we tried it (in fact, the opposite happened, innovation exploded), and also I think there's much stronger evidence that service providers are actually a natural monopoly and could be treated like a public service. And I think the risk of unintended consequences is much lower.
And I also support either forcing Apple to allow alternative app stores or (possibly better) just forcing them to allow alternate web browsers and to loosen restrictions on what platforms/websites apps can tell the user about, so that PWAs can start making progress again on iOS and browsers can start to fill in the gaps in their platform -- which obviously is a restriction of their rights, I just think the benefits heavily outweigh the downsides.
My feeling is that every time we go deeper down the chain and closer to the "bare metal" of how the Internet works, it becomes a little bit safer to regulate neutrality. We have a lot of low-level changes we can make to the Internet that could go a lot further towards correcting some of the actual flaws that the Internet has, rather than just trying to regulate symptoms of those flaws.
The implications of FAANG moderation are only so serious because FAANG companies control so much of the market. It is better to actually fix that problem rather than to try and slap a band-aide on top of it (especially when that band-aide might carry a lot of unintended consequences).
So would you be happy to see ISIS recruiting videos in your feeds? What about your children's? I would consider the calls for free speech much more believable if they had been made when ISIS accounts were blocked. However, people only started calling out when it affected white supremacists or conspiracy theories popular with a portion of the white conservative constituency.
This tells me that most people are quite happy with limits on free speech, just not "their side".
Yeah but Twitter just isn't that relevant. And social media is a many-dimensional gradient of often questionable value.
Leaving FB properties, for example, is actually pretty nice when you've hit a certain spot in your life. Some forums give me much more than FB ever did. HN is more useful. There isn't some necessary set of social media sites everyone has to have.
If I didn't have a sewer in my city they would throw their shit on the streets like they did 150 years ago.
If I didn't have social media absolutely nothing happens. It doesn't become a public safety issue...in fact the public will be better off for it.
Electricity and Sewer can and will be cutoff if you do not follow the terms of service. If the electric company discovers that you do not have a circuit breaker you will be cutoff.
Sure, but the terms of service cannot legally include such things as "You have political opinions we dislike" as a valid reason for terminating service.
Why would they? They are not providing a service for sharing opinions.
Twitter is a service for sharing your opinions with the public. Obviously terms of service are going to include limits around your ability to share your opinions. If the service had no terms, that would mean that you could post 1 million spam replies to every single tweet anyone made.
Similarly Twitter's TOS shouldn't include anything around electricity usage.
Which website contains “you have political opinions we dislike” as a valid reason for terminating service? Unless you are arguing that threats of violence are valid political opinions.
What's interesting is that this is a new manifestation of the free speech argument, from new social and political quarters. Prior to this version of the free speech debate, the defenders of free speech would, say, donate to ACLU, oppose laws that criminalize protests, express concern over authoritarian countries jailing reporters, oppose prosecution of whistleblowers, oppose consolidation of corporate media, etc.
But this new constituency emerged after events like Gamergate and Charlottesville protests, and they show up to defend participants in events like those but can't be mobilized to become active in other issues that historically have been ones where people become involved out of principle.
>such things as "You have political opinions we dislike"
If I wrote the rules, anytime someone used the phrase "political opinions you dislike" there would be a popup list for the following before you can submit your comment:
* violent incitement
* Al Qaeda and ISIS
* state sponsored misinformation campaigns run by automated bots
* coordinated messages from automated bots for marketing & brand management
* harassment
* doxxing
* defamation
* revenge porn & child porn
* vaccine misinformation
* election misinformation
* spam and phishing attacks
And next to each you can click a checkbox to indicate which ones you personally endorse being defended as protected speech, which you believe to be implicated. Then people can mouse over the part of your comment that says "political opinions", see the list of things you clicked on, and know what you are talking about.
This way we don't have to worry that you're equivocating between garden variety political topics (e.g. the economy, taxes) and all the other stuff when you say "political opinions you dislike."
Do you think Twitter optimizes their speech policies for a good user experience? My impression is that things that are very mainstream are disallowed on Twitter while very fringe ideas as allowed
I apologize if I was unclear - the post I was replying to was making a general statement about moderation, and so was I. Some level of moderation is essential to keep good user experience. I do not know enough about twitter’s particular moderation policies to comment on them. It is possible (and likely) that they could be improved - but I do not think removing all moderation would be an improvement.
Nearly all of the useful "moderation" on Twitter is me choosing who I follow. Some of it is me choosing who I block. Everything else is a rounding error by comparison. Or at least it should be. I've no idea how involved Twitter's algorithms are in my experience and that scares me a little bit.
I don't mind if Twitter wants to offer me their own opinion about which posts are bad and which people are bad, but I should be allowed to opt out of that. Better still, they could have multiple competing paid services offering filtering/blocking tailored to different themes. Paid—because if they have an economic incentive to satisfy their subscribers, they'll satisfy their subscribers. The problem with the free filtering done by Twitter today is that they have an economic incentive to satisfy their shareholders.
> Nearly all of the useful "moderation" on Twitter is me choosing who I follow. Some of it is me choosing who I block. Everything else is a rounding error by comparison. Or at least it should be.
Not really.
…you appreciate the point being made by the parent post right?
Unmoderated communities devolve, in practice, to porn, scams, flame wars and trolling. There’s lots of evidence that’s how things turn out.
What you’re after is different moderation, not no moderation; what you see as excessive moderation can’t be replaced with no moderation without creating a clone of 4chan.
So.. I guess.. just remember what you’re asking for is actually a bad thing. What you actually want isn’t what you’re asking for; unless what you want is 4chan, in which case, you can just go hang out there instead of on twitter..
For what it's worth, my day job is running a reasonably large discussion forum (whirlpool.net.au) which is relatively famous for its heavy-handed moderation. We aren't shy on banning people and we stamp down on trolls hard.
But I don't see the parallel between that kind of moderation and a firehose like Twitter. My experience of twitter is almost entirely defined by the people I follow. Yes there's junk and the occasional troll, but I'm an adult capable of making observations about the properties of any "bad" content I might see. Expecting other people to sanitise my experience for me is unhealthy and doomed to failure.
> My experience of twitter is almost entirely defined by the people I follow
This is probably, broadly speaking, false.
Maybe it was once true, and maybe it should be true, but I guess it’s more likely that most people (including you) see and interact with all the people you follow, interacting with all the people they follow (retweets, etc.) interacting with all the people they follow.
3 degrees of separation.
If you never saw any tweets other than the immediate people you follow tweeting to each other, then perhaps… but, that’s not how twitter works.
…and then on top of that, how did you end up following those people? Personal friends? Or perhaps, via twitters moderated hash tags?
That’s different moderation, not no moderation.
What you’re describing is something closer to signal/WhatsApp groups; different, much less moderated personal groups. Sure. Good for what it is…
> Maybe it was once true, and maybe it should be true
Which is pretty much exactly the point I was making in my original contribution to this thread.
Yes to the degrees of separation. That's the point of following people—to be exposed to their curation. I followed many people because they were friends of friends; I've unfollowed many people because I wasn't impressed with the people they interacted with, even if I had no problem with them.
There are certain topics on twitter that if I say anything about them, even in passing, I'll get dozens of automated @ replies trying to spam something to me. Blocking accounts who use @ to spam would be an example of worthwhile moderation.
On the other hand, blocking someone for making jokes about a celebrity's weight (which Twitter has done!), is something that, in my opinion, is an example of an overreach.
The existence of spam is an immutable fact of any platform, the only question is how sophisticated they need to be to clear whatever hurdles are placed in front of them. Smarter filtering of spam will only lead to more sophisticated spammers.
Thanks for clearing that up. Moderation is definitely important but moderation, apart from the obvious abuse and illegality, should be done on the smallest level possible. Banning someone from a platform for expressing an offensive view is not moderation; its censorship. Creating customizable user filters or groups that hide these people is a better answer. Reddit has a lot of their own problems, but the federated model of subreddits works. The problem arises when some subreddits are banned or the overlap of mods on each subreddit, but in principal its correct.
I would love shared filters on twitter. For instance, if I don't want to hear things about topic X, I can download a topic X filter that's community maintained that hides posts from troll accounts or keywords. You can mix and match filters. This is better than banning people. Is twitter going to allow back all those people that were banned for discussing lab theory?
> Moderation is definitely important but moderation, apart from the obvious abuse and illegality, should be done on the smallest level possible.
That's your opinion, and you're absolutely welcome to hold it. I understand that position, but I don't agree, and I would prefer a more strongly moderated platform. That's my opinion. If a platform has too little moderation for my tastes, I may choose to leave it, and that would be bad for an ad-based platform's profitability, not to mention network effects, etc. Given enough users (and employees!) who think like me, the platform has an incentive to perform stronger moderation.
I think we should have more platforms to choose from, and maybe even require some kind of inter-operation between them. We should enforce existing anti-trust law on these big platforms, not try to force them to change their moderation policies.
Abuse is spam, doxxing, fraud, etc. Very narrow. I don't think this should include something like banning someone for saying "learn to code" because its a "targeted harassment campaign" [0]. However you can pose with the severed head of a sitting US president and that'll be okay and still standing up today [1] . Come on.
Show me people banned for only discussing the lab theory. There was a global mistake in harshly categorizing the lab leak theory as wrong, but the people who were banned were banned because they used the theory (which it still is) to advance dangerous views that Twitter decided not to engage with.
There’s the word media in social media. A newspaper will carry a theory, but not an article using the theory to spuriously decry public health mesures.
> Note that you’re choosing to spend your time on HN (a relatively strongly moderated forum) instead of a less moderated forum like 8chan’s
This is a good point!
I agree with both you and the parent - which is to say that I'm entirely torn on this subject.
Moderation on platforms makes sense. Trying to work out where to draw the line is difficult. And free speech is incredibly important.
How to balance these competing concerns is really beyond me.
I'm a proponent of the idea of "the solution to bad speech, is more speech", but if you take this to its logical conclusion on the internet, you often end up in the wild west.
"I'm a proponent of the idea of "the solution to bad speech, is more speech", but if you take this to its logical conclusion on the internet, you often end up in the wild west."
If that's the logical conclusion, and I'm making the assumption this based on your observations, why are you a proponent of it?
"I think this is for the best, however it always leads to problems"
> "I think this is for the best, however it always leads to problems"
Well to be fair, I did say I was torn on this and have no answers :)
The concept of "the solution to bad speech, being more speech" is somewhat of a safe default to me. All things being equal, I think it's more important to err on the side of protecting the voices of those who should and need to be heard, while accepting the risk that these very protections may also inadvertently benefit "extremists" in that they too are more likely to be heard.
I prefer this balance, as opposed to the opposite, of strict moderation. Silencing the voices of those with something important to say, in order to ensure that we don't let any extremists get their views out.
So that's my default starting position.
But I'm not absolutist about it. I think we can't be too binary about it, at either end of the spectrum. The answer is not one of two choices, "100% no free speech" or "100% free speech". Instead, it's presumably somewhere in the middle.
So the answer is probably, "light touch, just enough moderation, based on some form of consensus".
How you define "just enough" is a tough problem.
Perhaps it's the consensus part that's missing at the moment.
I think this only appears to be a contradiction, because your concerns apply at different scales.
You can reconcile the tension by insisting that the public utility platforms (e.g., Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, etc.) remain neutral with respect to non-criminal content, but give people the tools to moderate and curate speech at a more granular level (like subreddits, or tools to filter who you see on Twitter).
I like this idea, but things like “tools to filter who you see on Twitter” rely on self moderating of content you’re exposed to. We all already have that capability in many respects.
Eg I don’t really use Twitter at all apart from the odd tweet that will be referred to me. I moderate what I see by actively avoiding most social media (aside from HN of course) because I’ve decided that this is the easiest way to avoid sub-standard content that doesn’t add value for me. (A sweeping statement but just for sake of argument).
So let’s say someone says something extremely insulting about a minority group - just on the right side of legal, but otherwise a disgusting remark when measured against social norms.
Do we say that the utility platforms shouldn’t touch this because it’s not illegal?
Because some of those subgroups of people and individuals with the moderation/curation responsibilities will proliferate that content rather than moderate it.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, and I’m not arguing for strong censorship - I don’t have a counter suggestion, I’m just thinking it through…
I don't think it's a free speech issue. It's just a scalability / UX issue arising from the problem that 100,000 people are trying to communicate in the same room, and 99% of those people have nothing new to add to the conversation. The self-moderation features on Reddit and HN are a step in the right direction. On Twitter and Facebook, there is no downvoting, which amplifies low quality content. This decision is tied to their revenue generation models, because they don't want to limit participation. Reddit and HN focus on improving signal to noise-ratio, which is more important metric, and I think even more can be done in this direction.
Because moderation here works quite well and they usually aren't the ones being moderated. Like someone wrote earlier in this thread, why aren't the free speech advocates using less HN to debate hacker/tech stuff and using more 8chan or something?
I think that probably stems mostly from Hacker News avoiding controversial subjects in general. When they do slip through, the moderation can be pretty bad, particularly when it comes to new accounts. I've seem innocuous comments shadowbanned for voicing fairly milquetoast heterodox opinions (with shadowbanning in general being a pretty unpleasant action). Usually that isn't an issue with accounts that have been here for a long time, but since Hacker News doesn't allow people to delete comments, you have to be comfortable with having that comment tied to you for decades to come (not always the safest thing in this environment).
The whole thing ends up exerting a chilling effect on alternative opinions.
Assuming the content is the same: why is censoring a prominent voice worse than censoring someone less well-known? Prominent voices inherently have greater platform access, professional clout, etc. Whereas lesser-known figures do not have such privileges and are therefor more greatly impacted by censorship.
Prominence just makes it tougher for the platform to avoid ambiguity in their justifications. Some moderation is valid but other times it can be too much. None of us have the time to spend personally reviewing the claims of every contributor who feels like they were treated unfairly.
We see this with Twitter now. People complain about various tweets being blocked, and there's always a "back-and-forth" about how Tweet A is against their guidelines but somehow Tweet B isn't. But when they outright ban (e.g.) Donald Trump, there's no ambiguity any more. The discussion moves beyond the minutia of spam / bot handling and into something more concrete.
Though you're right: censorship of those with smaller voices is at least as problematic. We just all ultimately have limited resources available and focusing on the more clear-cut examples is more likely to be successful.
This site self-selects. People who think the moderation is good stay, people who think it is bad leave. There are plenty of alternatives to this site, you can easily find one that suits your needs. It's not an effective monopoly like the big social media giants.
There are other ways to implement moderation that isn't censorship.
I've proposed "blocklists" before, where users could create different blocklists (e.g. "no vegans"), other users could subscribe to them, and there would be some default blocklists (e.g. "no porn" and "no gore") that people could also unsubscribe...
The only problem with that idea is that the blocklists will inevitably end up being used to slander and malign other groups as people will use them to assign unpleasant labels to others. In the end, someone will need to moderate the lists, so you're right back at the same moderation problem. Humans on the internet tend to find all the creative ways to be assholes-at-scale.
So long as everyone using the platform can modify their own list, no it's not the same problem at all. The question is: do I get to decide who I listen to, or do you?
You can already block people on Twitter. The problem arises with shared blocklists. How is a shared blocklist identified? Well, the odds are that it will probably need to have a name. You now have the following problem: the name can be used to promote hate if the name of that blocklist is visible to other users, or to falsely associate a given user with other nefarious groups, as Google will probably crawl the lists and the results will show up in searches. The whole thing ends up being exactly an added moderation mess, just like what you started with, but with a few more layers of indirection and different ways it can be abused. Plus you still have the original problem of moderating messages that needs to be solved.
Solutions like this look great initially if everyone uses them properly, but everything falls apart when people inevitably start actively abusing the new feature. The design needs to handle assholes-at-scale from the outset.
>free speech in the sense of “everybody should be forced to platform every idea” is silly IMO.
That's a red-herring. The debate isn't really about free speech rights on a private platform. 'Web-scale' platforms will always need a certain level of moderation. This debate is really about the who is within the Overton window and who isn't. Conservatives and certain parts of the Progressive Left want to be within this Overton window, while mainstream Democrats want to keep them out.
Having said that, there is a related matter of government's indirect incursion into moderation policies of private social media companies, by way of use of executive and legislative threats, and what that actually means for constitutionally protected speech. Right now that part is ignored by the supporters of one political party because it serves their political goals.
People have to understand that by accepting the concept of "platforming," they're joining the anti-free speech camp. The whole idea of "platforming" is that there should be no obligation to allow opinions with which the "platform" disagrees. Disagreement occurs whenever the least tolerant, most militant group of employees says so.
Contrary to this, we should have a free speech culture where the norm is that people can say what they want. Moderation is necessary but it should always be an exception.
> Note that you’re choosing to spend your time on HN (a relatively strongly moderated forum) instead of a less moderated forum like 8chan’s /b/.
Moderation on HN is based on tone and quality, not content. This distinguishes it from almost everywhere else on the internet.
> Moderation on HN is based on tone and quality, not content.
... That is still content-based moderation, since it's based on the actual text being written and not the circumstances (time, place, manner) of its writing.
Content may have been a poor word choice. What I meant is that comments here are rarely moderated because the message in the comment is deemed wrong by the moderators.
Sure they are. Broad classes of messages are forbidden on HN. No matter what tone you use, you can't disparage nationalities, genders, or races here, or make arguments that would tend to have that effect; you can't attempt to psychiatrically diagnose other commenters; you can't question the good faith of a commenter here, or suggest that they're shills; you can't collect personal facts about other commenters and marshal them as arguments; the list goes on. These aren't tonal issues, they're substantive. What might set them apart is how sweeping they are.
"Platforming" is just weasel wording by people who want to justify censorship. Just like "misinformation" has become a blanket justification to censor.
Once you have human arbiters determining what is and what is not "good" information, and censoring based on it, you are acting in bad faith against free speech.
Do you think they just let anyone publish in a newspaper? Outside of cable access, you couldn't just hop on TV previously either.
This is entirely a social media age problem. This isn't "OMG, we're censoring" it's "we're applying the same limitations that have always existed on a new medium" - which is people deciding on what is in good taste (to them) and appropriate for their platform (to them).
They don't let "just anyone" publish in a newspaper but almost all major newspapers allow voices across the political spectrum in the form of letters and op-eds.
That's what free speech culture is about. It's the idea that "everyone gets their say" and by disagreeing and arguing, we get closer to the truth. It's sad that more and more people are taking your view, which is that people can publish contrary opinions but there's no reason in particular to do so.
>They don't let "just anyone" publish in a newspaper but almost all major newspapers allow voices across the political spectrum in the form of letters and op-eds.
Yes... that are heavily curated by the Editors. They don't publish every OpEd, nor every Letter to the Editor they get. Yes, they post dissenting viewpoints constantly - that is the function. But that isn't free speech at all in the context of social media and what you're describing.
>That's what free speech culture is about. It's the idea that "everyone gets their say"
Again, not everyone - not even most people get their say. Certainly none of the rantings and ravings get published. Solid, cogent, fair or interesting letters get published in credible platforms (i.e. newspapers and TV) - as determined by the Editors or the OpEd review boards depending on the governance of the particular platform.
> and by disagreeing and arguing, we get closer to the truth.
Agreed - but that has nothing to do with allowing all view points and anyone with an idea, no matter how dangerous or how bad. Hell, even in full page advertisements, Newspapers can and will choose not to take your money if it's something that they think is harmful or antithetical to their platform. And they always have.
This isn't new or unique.
>It's sad that more and more people are taking your view, which is that people can publish contrary opinions but there's no reason in particular to do so.
What I'm trying to share with you is that you are the outlier here. What everyone is describing is more or less status quo prior to social media taking an "anything goes" stance. That has never been the reality prior to that.
> Yes... that are heavily curated by the Editors. They don't publish every OpEd, nor every Letter to the Editor they get. Yes, they post dissenting viewpoints constantly - that is the function. But that isn't free speech at all in the context of social media and what you're describing.
It's exactly free speech in the context I'm describing; the idea that dissent is good and everyone gets their say. Social media is free and open so it's quite clear that the bar for curation is going to be lower than a newspaper with finite space.
> Again, not everyone - not even most people get their say. Certainly none of the rantings and ravings get published. They sure did on Twitter.
Virtually everyone should get their say. The bar for censorship should be extremely high.
> Agreed - but that has nothing to do with allowing all view points and anyone with an idea, no matter how dangerous or how bad.
Yes it does. How could it not? And who determines what is "dangerous or bad"?
> What I'm trying to share with you is that you are the outlier here. What everyone is describing is more or less status quo prior to social media taking an "anything goes" stance. That has never been the reality prior to that.
It used to be the case that most speech was in-person and local. Most people were relatively tolerant and there wasn't a lot of curation. There was a consolidation in the 20th century, which is what you're referring to. Now things are opening back up.
>It's exactly free speech in the context I'm describing; the idea that dissent is good and everyone gets their say. Social media is free and open so it's quite clear that the bar for curation is going to be lower than a newspaper with finite space.
Explain to me how you would get your OpEd published or get on TV tomorrow, today, or 20 years ago. Explain to me how _everyone_ gets to do it.
>Social media is free and open so it's quite clear that the bar for curation is going to be lower than a newspaper with finite space.
The point is it doesn't need to be. Newspapers are now no longer constrained by how much paper they can fold. TV is no longer constrained by how many channels can be broadcast OTA or via Coax.
>Virtually everyone should get their say. The bar for censorship should be extremely high.
Censorship is not the same thing as not publishing your drivel. Are you suggesting that if you submit an OpEd to the Wall Street Journal and they don't publish it that they're censoring you? They're making a curated, editorial choice, it's not censorship - they are a private company with no obligation to publish or give platform to your ideas.
>Yes it does. How could it not? And who determines what is "dangerous or bad"?
This is what I'm telling you - in all media formats prior to The Internet, the owner of the platform or editor of the platform or governance for OpEds determined what was worth publishing/platforming and what wasn't.
>It used to be the case that most speech was in-person and local.
Is that good or bad?
>Most people were relatively tolerant and there wasn't a lot of curation.
We burned "witches". There has never been a time in human history where we were more tolerant than today.
The Catholic Church murdered people for suggesting that our solar system was heliocentric.
We have less curation than we've ever had in human history - by miles. We may have over-rotated.
>There was a consolidation in the 20th century, which is what you're referring to. Now things are opening back up.
There has always been consolidation - through money and power. There was an opening in the 20th century, and we've been less constrained every day since the invention of the printing press.
Newspapers are a red herring because they have limited space and don't solicit opinion pieces from random people. It is censorship to obstruct someone from posting on some social media site because their post is bad/wrong/dangerous. What else could it be?
Under some conditions censorship is acceptable. The law, for example, sets those conditions at "incitement to imminent lawless action". Private companies need to set their own conditions for censorhip. My argument is that the bar should be high, much higher that it is on most sites, and that free speech culture is extremely valuable.
My historical argument is simply that, in the US, there was a period of openness followed by a period of consolidation. This was the result of the media that existed (nationally prominent papers and tv channels are necessarily centralized). We're heading back to openness due to the internet. Enjoy the ride.
> Newspapers are a red herring because they have limited space and don't solicit opinion pieces from random people.
As I said, Newspapers haven't been constrained by space for 20 years. More than half of their subscribers are digital only.
Anyone is free to submit a letter to the editor or an oped. They don't inherently solicit them. They just actually curate, moderate and only publish the ones they deem worth publishing.
>It is censorship to obstruct someone from posting on some social media site because their post is bad/wrong/dangerous.
Why? If it's my social media site, and I don't like what you're saying, how am I censoring you by saying you can't do it on _my_ platform?
>What else could it be?
Me exerting my rights on my property (my social media platform). Same way I don't have to let you scream whatever you want from my front lawn.
>Under some conditions censorship is acceptable. The law, for example, sets those conditions at "incitement to imminent lawless action". Private companies need to set their own conditions for censorhip. My argument is that the bar should be high, much higher that it is on most sites, and that free speech culture is extremely valuable.
The bar seems very high already for most social media platforms, honestly. Do you believe it is censorship to choose not to allow things to be platformed/printed that are clearly lies?
Is it OK to print lies if no one is harmed (i.e. you're selling crystals to make your sleep better)? What if you're selling crystals that cure cancer and someone buys that instead of actually going to a cancer doctor?
>My historical argument is simply that, in the US, there was a period of openness followed by a period of consolidation. This was the result of the media that existed (nationally prominent papers and tv channels are necessarily centralized). We're heading back to openness due to the internet. Enjoy the ride.
That's just the cycle of things - everything bounces between the extremes. We go too hard one direction, then overcorrect in the other.
The social media age is probably an over correction to openness, with no one fact checking anything, spreading lies rampantly. This was analogous to the snake oil that was the plague of the early 1900s. Do you believe we should go back to that? We stamped that out through regulation and limiting the claims people can make. Is that censorship? Is it bad?
I'm not going to reply anymore, it was good discussing with you.
Twitter is only barely comparable to a newspaper, and only in the ways that fit your narrative. It's almost like new technologies force us into new ways of thinking about things.
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas suggested extending common carrier legislation to cover social media platforms. That would essentially prevent them from censoring any content legal in the US.
I don't understand your point about user experience. Twitter is already mostly low effort flame wars, political proselytizing, and porn. But people seem to still use it anyway.
>Note that you’re choosing to spend your time on HN (a relatively strongly moderated forum) instead of a less moderated forum like 8chan’s /b/.
>Free speech in the sense of “everybody should be forced to platform every idea” is silly IMO.
This is a strawman. Nobody forced twitter to build twitter. When you build an open platform and let anyone sign up, you're offering a platform. When you then arbitrarily decide to remove people from it for wrongthink you're reneging on the deal. Framing it as "forced to platform every idea" is nonsense. Phone companies are literally required not to discriminate based on content and it's been on the whole a good thing. I don't know why social media gets to be both a platform and an editorial board. It's bullshit.
>ote that you’re choosing to spend your time on HN (a relatively strongly moderated forum) instead of a less moderated forum like 8chan’s /b/.
Why do moderators always act like a person can only use one website? Is it a power thing? I use reddit, facebook, hn, .win, poal, twitter, and 4chan almost every day.
>If you want your platform to be about anything other than those, you need curation and moderation. This is key for a good user experience.
This is just your opinion. For me a good user experience isn't even possible if I'm silenced or "moderated" (read: censored).
I think this topic is a little messier than how you put it.
4chan's /b/ is the same exact place that:
- posted racist, misogynist, misandrist, and shocking porn
- stood up to scientology
- acted as an obfuscator for anonymous
- led raids on other communities
A normal person can pick the things out of that list they don't want and say "be gone". The problem is, the other things on that list don't exist without it. This is generally the allegory and type of connection that keeps our idea of "government free speech" tied somewhat closely with (what I call) "personal free speech".
On the other hand, I moderate smaller communities than /b/ (and other large forums) and I agree, in these smaller settings there are left and right political grifters, there's content that will cause people to leave or backlash, and endless personal disputes that must be mediated.
The problems between my small communities (a couple thousand) and large forums (hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions) are very different, and they serve a very different purpose in the larger ecosystem of communication that I think is difficult to quantify.
You guys should start a fundraiser or something, so you can stop hosting this on your basement Raspberry Pi cluster and finally rent out some proper cloud hosting :D
It's frustrating that this topic keeps being discussed as if there are only two options. Why not provide each individual users with powerful tools that let them specify the type of content they want to see and when. They can have a large amount of presets and with a single button click users can change what they'll be seeing or they can spend some time and modify it to their liking. People can also share the filters they created. Even better create an open API and let companies compete with each other over who provides the best filters.
Moderation is important, but why leave it up to executives at these massive companies to decide what is acceptable and what isn't. Let each user decide for themselves.
> Why not provide each individual users with powerful tools that let them specify the type of content they want to see and when
Tools like adblock/ublock/etc dramatically improve user experience and performance on the internet, yet less than 30% of desktop users employ adblocking. Requiring end-users to set up filters to not be accosted by content that most people find objectionable will generally not be a winning proposition.
I don't think that is a good analogy. In this case these filters would be presented to you as you setup your account. In addition with filter sharing any user would only be one button press away from adopting someones else's filter. There could be a wide diversity of filters and users can change their filter by the minute. Imagine if browsers treated adblock/ublock/etc as integral parts of your experience and not as an extra add-on.
> Why not provide each individual users with powerful tools that let them specify the type of content they want to see and when.
Agreed, but that's the issue - many people don't want anyone to see some content because they are convinced such misinformation causes people they don't like to be elected, etc. I'm of the opinion that filtering is its own type of propaganda.
Governments don’t control these massively influential communications platforms (Maybe they should?)
In some ways, huge tech companies are more powerful than governments. So why should they have the power to essentially remove ideas from public discussion?
> In some ways, huge tech companies are more powerful than governments
Sure, but in other ways, they are not.
They do not, for example, break the government's monopoly on force; tech companies generally cannot compel you to pay taxes or imprison you. If you make them unhappy, mostly the worst thing they can do is ignore you -- and unlike a government, they cannot force others to ignore you, and they cannot much affect your life outside of their own transactions with you.
The centralization of multiple forms of power is more concerning than the mere existence of power in separate spheres. You say "maybe they should?" but collaboration between the organization that controls force and the organizations that control speech seems like an opportunity for much more substantial oppression.
> So why should they have the power to essentially remove ideas from public discussion?
A private company is not required to publish your rants on the current state of underground mole peoples' infiltration of the highest offices of the world's governments. If you somehow get it onto the platform, and they are made aware of it, they can unpublished it.
Just like the NYT is not required to post every opinion piece that is submitted to them.
The NYT can control what they print, and they are also responsible for what they print.
Twitter can control what it "prints", but is not responsible.
Those situations aren't the same. At all.
Historically, there were platforms (like newspapers) that had full control of what information they disseminated and had full responsibility for that information, and "common carrier" platforms (like the phone company) that did not control what information was disseminated and accordingly were not responsible for it.
Twitter and its brethren want the best of both worlds -- freedom to censor, but no responsibility.
> Twitter can control what it "prints", but is not responsible.
I agree that this is a problem that I wish was addressed, but honestly, I dont know what kind of overreaching, anti-freedom (/s kind of?) law would need to be passed. The reason it worked for news papers was they were printing news, and news has to be true (or at least not outright lies).
Twitter, Facebook, *chan, parlor, Truth social (is that actually a thing yet?) would all just say they dont print the news, and that every post is opinion.
Which even the NYT opinion pieces don't fall under the same editorial scrutiny as their news, and legally are completely separate.
I think you'll find that online media is explicitly protected from being sued for defamatory or infringing content under the DMCA, as long as they take the material down.
Print media cannot "take down" content, but does enjoy a similar immunity as regards third party content. You should probably educate yourself on the subject, it would save you from making silly arguments.
You say that like there aren't hundreds of social media platforms out there now and like it isn't trivial for a technical person to set up your own social media service on some "bulletproof host" in Lithuania or Russia.
There isn't a dearth of social media. There are a couple of GIANT social media websites that have sprung up in the last 2 decades, but there are dozens of semi-popular niche-ier forums that cater to any rant you might want to leave.
This is complaining that you won't be able to get all the audience you want for a deranged mole people rant. It wasn't too long ago that there were only one or two TV channels in any one area - should the mole people rant have been a mandatory presence on those media as well?
And very easy ways for people to create their own platforms/blogs with their own rules too, they almost certainly won't have the same reach as the larger platforms but it seems to be a common view that Facebook/Twitter/etc. owe people access to their platform and maximum potential audience for some reason. Personally I really don't understand how those espousing free speech principles are making arguments that seem to require other private individuals and companies to repeat/amplify speech they don't want to
> And very easy ways for people to create their own platforms/blogs with their own rules too, they almost certainly won't have the same reach as the larger platforms
That's the point. FB/Twitter are now public utility size and usefulness. Your blog, not so much.
I'm sympathetic to the argument that Facebook/Twitter/etc. are too large and have too much power for lobbying/influencing public discourse, although I think if anything making them a public utility would make that situation far worse as opposed to just breaking them up or something else to make the market more competitive
But also just because they are big platforms why does that give people a right to be on them? Is my speech less free because I have a smaller audience?
So this is all about, as another commenter said, complaining that you can't get the largest audience for your mole people rant. Facebook and Twitter are both very large social hubs, but they still get to pick what they publish. They are giving you the ability to publish anything you want until enough people (or the right people) complain about it.
It is democratized moderation. If your following is small enough to skirt the mods, then you can post what ever you want. If your following is huge and you post a bunch of lies about sewer mutants, or that the covid vaccine gives you rabies, or that Hillary Clinton is actually a space alien in cahoots with Planned Parenthood to subsist off the flesh of aborted 6 year olds, then YES, they will remove your posts, and potentially ban you for a period of time.
This literally happens to my aunt every few weeks. She gets a weeks long ban for basically reposting only Russian spam, gets her account back and does it again. It has never even been permanent.
You are absolutely correct. Do you remember when your parents would have some weird rule you didn't agree with, and their justification was "my house, my rules." This is basically the same thing. You don't have to follow the rules, but if you get caught breaking them, there could be some grounding and privileges taken away.
I do not get why people are under the impression that Twitter has to indulge their every tweet. They do not, will not, should not, and have not since the founding of the platform.
If you walk into a McDonalds and start selling your own hamburgers out of the bathroom unbeknownst to them, is it censorship when they finally discover the atrocity and have you removed? Is it stifling competition or free speech? Probably, but their house, their rules.
> So why should they have the power to essentially remove ideas from public discussion?
They don't. They never have. You're ascribing way more power to tech companies than they've ever had.
That being said, the combined power of tech companies and media companies -- of which there are many -- does have the ability you're talking about. (For example, Fox, Warner, Google, Nytimes, etc.) The lines certainly have become a bit blurred, with Comcast and Verizon buying media companies though.
I agree a single company doesn't have all the power, but for some reason they generally seem to act in concert with one another. Take for example the Hunter Biden laptop story. It was suppressed "by mistake" according to Jack himself [1]. Later, survey indicated many voters believed it was a "very important" story [2].
Strangely, practically everyone knows about the Hunter Biden laptop story, so no, that was certainly not very suppressed -- and you certainly did see articles about it in established media organizations, just not all of them. So, no, it was not "essentially removed" from "public discussion" as the OP claimed.
In fact, your bringing up the story (which I immediately recognized) proves the point. It is indeed, part of public discussion.
There were articles about the story published by many mainstream news organizations before the election -- including the Washington Post, The New York Times, Politico, Vox, Techcrunch, CNN, CBS News, and USA Today, among others. I fail to see the "supression" of the story from the public discussion, based on the reality of the situation.
Edit: The point is that the story was part of the "public discussion" -- though I understand that some people disagree with some of the articles that were part of the public discussion. Disagreement is a normal part of "discussion." The original claim I was responding to was that this story was "suppressed" from "public discussion." It was not.
You're making no distinction between the content of the coverage. The Hunter Biden laptop story was widely covered pre-election in the context of it being false or disinfo.
It was extremely well known. What you're doing is how Foxnews, the number one cable news network in many situations, claims a story isn't being reported on by the "main stream media".
You've ignored the point. Twitter made the claim that they made a mistake, should they be held to your standard that "you have to offer evidence to prove that claim."
If social media companies actually had the true power to remove topics from public discussion, there would not be public discussion on increasing regulation on these companies or breaking them up.
Well the former Democratic PAC leader now Facebook PR executive had that story pulled until such time it could be “fact checked”. Still waiting 16 months later.
> Governments don’t control these massively influential communications platforms (Maybe they should?)
Trusted News Initiative says otherwise. Which is why all big platforms either censor or warn public on information that is counter to the Western governments narratives.
Try paying for things at a shop or service that only accepts credit cards when you've been banned from having one. Who bans you from that? Payment processors.
If all the insurance companies decide they won't insure you, how will you get health care? The government had to intervene (with the ACA) because that particular problem was so bad.
People trying to immigrate often have to use email to communicate with government agencies. If gmail bans their account, they can no longer talk to the immigration agency. I've seen a couple different people have this exact problem.
There are plenty of other examples.
Certainly governments have the power to do all these things as well, but large influential companies can absolutely ruin your life if you get the wrong kind of attention (or in the case of automated policy decisions, get unlucky).
This is something much different from the previous claim (that companies are as powerful as states). None of this means that the company is more powerful than any state.
And regardless - no business is going to send you to prison, while the state can. No business will shoot you, while the state can. So even in this interpretation of "how much can they fuck up my life" the state wins.
Many of the things I cited are powers that businesses have and the US government does not have. I don't know why this is hard to understand.
Businesses are free to shoot you as well, private security guards can carry guns in most parts of the US. Businesses can also send you to prison via false police reports, which is a thing that has happened periodically.
All things you listed are entirely in the power of governments - even the smallest ones. I'm actually fighting with the state about one of these you listed as we speak (healthcare insurance).
There is a fairly interesting documentary of what Denmark thinks of free speech. To an extent where politicians are protected from setting the Quran on fire, full well knowing that it is designed to incite hatred. I don't know what the danish voice on silencing dissenting eastern perspectives on the war in Ukraine is, but the EU citizens seem to be themselves cheering on censorship more and more these days.
The documentary itself is quite interesting in my opinion.
For Twitter, perhaps a good compromise would be: instead of banning problematic accounts, set to them a "default-mute" state where only people who choose to follow the account can see its tweets.
It may be good idea hundred years back where (only?) government was being all powerful in a person's life . So if government denied people speech they are roughly blocked from everywhere.
Now with huge dependency on cloud/ social platform to conduct daily life they are pretty much government. SO getting blocked from them has much larger impact then it would be 50-100 years back.
Spending time or getting blocked on HN is not as materially impacting as it would be on big cloud services. So it does not compare well.
Nobody is upset that Twitter is moderating porn. (And in fact it allows porn!) People are upset that Twitter censored what turned out to be a true story about the son of the now President, or that you can be blocked or banned for running afoul of rules of decorum embraced by a small minority of the population. If Twitter banned porn and not those other things, people wouldn't be complaining!
The difference between the two is less significant when a few large tech companies monopolise online discourse. Water an electricity is considered a "utility" but still delivered by many private companies - why isn't the same argument used there? I'm sure plenty of people would support cutting off utilities for neo-nazis; that doesn't men it's a good precedent.
Consider gabber et al was cut off by their hosting companies, a much harder space to enter for non-established companies - maybe net-neutrality should be extended from traffic to hosting/computing facilities?
> Left alone user content rapidly devolves
> you need curation and moderation
the thing about online content is that it doesn't work like a free-speech bazaar. You can choose which soapbox you want to visit. You can choose what networks to participate in.
Also, it should be noted that that these types of places sometime devolve because of bubbles/moderation; e.g. reddit /politics/ is a toxic echo chamber because it bans/downvotes dissenting opinion, resulting in a groupthink-mentality.
> instead of a less moderated forum like 8chan’s
and that's a choice, until it isn't (e.g. 8chan is banned/blocked/deplatformed)
Not enough people are aware of the Paradox of Tolerance:
"The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant. Karl Popper described it as the seemingly paradoxical idea that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance."
I find it hilarious when this paradox is trotted out because Popper’s final conclusion was we should tolerate intolerance up until it promotes imminent violence.
He’d be entirely opposed to censoring intolerant views the way most people think of intolerance.
I think everyone on the Internet has heard of that paradox by now, and it is always misinterpreted by people who only want their speech to be allowed.
Popper was talking about literal Nazis. We do not know what percentage of the numerous Twitter bans he would have approved (my guess is around 5%). We do not know if he would have been astonished by the fact that proponents of his paradox never use it against overt communist propaganda but only against alleged fascist propaganda (the bar for being called a Nazi has never been lower).
It’s not just the government. Companies like Twitter are so ubiquitous that they are a form of government entity now, especially when they enforce government talking points. When Twitter decides that talking about the lab leak theory gets you kicked off the platform, they are becoming nothing more than a government tool. This was the breaking point for Musk and for me as well.
Not giving a “platform” to alternative views, no matter how “damaging” you or the government feels it is is crucial for a democracy.
Twitter is not a forum though. I understand the need to moderate a forum, since it’s equivalent to a public place with a limited number of rooms.
Twitter, on the other hand doesn’t map to that model. If me and my friends want to tweet things to our group, no one is being forced to follow or read that content. I don’t see any justification to moderate that, beyond content that’s actually illegal like child porn, terrorism, etc.
I think the large issue with some of these major platforms is that there's some pretty transparent government "suggestion" into these platforms regulating speech that the government doesn't like. It's along the lines of "take care of this or you'll be getting some "help" with your taxes, stocks, etc."
Now, there may be an argument that Twitter, for example, has become such an integral part of the public square that the government SHOULD compel Twitter to allow every form of speech on it. And that could be a reasonable argument to make.
What it wouldn't be is free speech. It would, in fact, be coerced speech.
What if ISPs start really inspecting your traffic and then ban you when you start visiting certain sites they don't like? You going to say the same thing then especially when how ingrained the Internet has become in everyday life?
I’m surprised this hasn’t already happened. If everyone’s browsing history was published in the way everyone’s opinion is published on twitter then I bet ISPs would be blocking sites left and right
> “everybody should be forced to platform every idea”
Not everybody should have to, but the behemoths that are the only thing that resembles a public square today, e.g., Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit, should have to.
There is a difference between a civil discourse and abuse filled with obscenities. There is also a difference between fair moderation and suppression of dissent.
When I post on HN anything about Trump or vaccines, HN doesn't add a note to my post informing readers about the 'correct' view on the problem. HN does restrict personal insults, and does it consistently for all sides of the conversation. That is fair moderation. Because it is fair, I don't feel that my (or anyone) right for free speech is limited here. The spirit of free speech principle is not violated.
Twitter, on the other hand, was applying their rules very selectively, discrediting views that they consider 'incorrect' with various notices, and blocking or restricting users with political views they don't like. That's suppression.
Of course, Twitter, like other plaftorms, DOES have the right to run their platform as they see fit, private company and all, but here comes another facet of this problem: everything can formally be a private platform, yet everything can be run by the government. It is not a hypothetical situation, in Russia every remaining media source is directly or indirectly controlled by the government. Putin's best friend, an oligarch, owns all social networks in Russia, and can just shut down any user that tries to oppose the war. No, not censorship, free enterprises.
It is a known fact that oligarchy can merge with the government very closely, and do become a de-facto cernsorship arm of the ruling party, while formally retaining their rights to block anyone who's views they don't like. This is not a theoretical problem and this is what happening now.
So the free world is not facing a difficult problem, how to balance the possibility (and dire necessity!) of having a public discourse on painful problems faced by the society with the rights of the commercial platforms that this discourse takes place on. I'd prefer Twitter to be politically neutral than trying to actively taking one side. That would be better for them, for their users, and basically for everybody. And it is actually fully within their rights.
I think we're not discussing the real point here which isn't whether "full completely unregulated free speech" should be the norm on twitter or not. Elon isn't proposing allowing CP or whatever the worst stuff you see on 8chan is. The battleground is simply in a much subtler grey area of idea space. Elon basically seems to think there's been push to disallow discussion about quite reasonable subjects (which indeed would have been allowed on HN too, e.g. covid vaccine pros and cons) and he'd like it to be allowed again.
Note also that twitter is quite different from traditional forums in the way it's structured. You follow people, you can block people. The analogy to traditional forums needing moderation isn't really one-to-one.
The subtle point is that the public forum cannot be owned, and that while the public forum is subject to the law, no one can moderate its content.
What has effectively happened is that the public forum has arisen in the cyberspace. We were not prepared for that since that has never happened.
If the govt hired a contractor to oversee a public good, the contractor could not decide who was allowed in or not, or who was allowed to speak, that wouldn't fly under the law.
Some of the large platforms have (accidentally?) come to own the commons. They cant exercise control just like any other standard property, while the commons are still subject to the law of the land.
Instead of a blanket statement like "my property, my rules" we should be working to define the commons. That is a valid debate. We can debate that definition, which is similar to "what constitutes a monopoly?"
This is the correct perspective imo. Our tech has outpaced our laws. We as a society need to rethink how we operate and move forward with these new technologies without being buried under the wave of change they bring.
Section 230 was our first attempt and it has served us decently. I think it's time for a tune-up with a fresh perspective now that we have a few decades of experience under our belt.
Making claims without scientific backing probably shouldn't be a bannable offence. The spirit of science is about discussion and counter arguments and being open to being wrong or even the idea that the consensus might be invalid, not about coercion.
> spirit of science is about discussion and counter arguments and being open to being wrong or even the idea that the consensus might be invalid
I have seen very few antivax arguments made in the spirit of science. Those that were got repeated lacking the original comment’s nuance.
Keep in mind that the spirit of science was developed with the gates of wealth, literacy and education in mind. Remove those, add in anonymity, or even pseudonymity, and the system veers towards chaos. We are far more open, today, than the Enlightenment-era West was. That requires new tools and guardrails. (What this discussion, broadly, is about.)
Keep in mind, Merriam-Webster changed the definition of 'anti-vax' to include being against vaccine mandates [0]. So if you are against mandatory COVID vaccines for 5 year olds, you are technically an 'antivaxer'.
I don't know how many people have gotten banned over this (though I'd guess nonzero) but it shows just how easy it is to fall under the new draconian speech policies enacted by the majority of social media.
Well now you're just making a "no true vaccine skepticism" argument. We heard concerns about massive increases in blood clots, in infertility, that it would kill more people than covid, that it changed your DNA, that it increased rates of miscarriage, a ton of wild and crazy things and even more mundane things like because you could still get COVID afterwards the shot was worthless. You can't just say "well, us REAL sceptics (sic) only believed a and b, but not c-z, therefore all the skepticism was correct."
Indeed. The only way any of the sceptics' claims have even a sliver of validity is as a motte-and-bailey fallacy of their original claims. For example, the claim that the vaccine doesn't work morphed into the claim that the vaccine doesn't stop transmission—a claim which wasn't even true until the delta strain showed up. Omicron has been a substantial challenge to vaccine efficacy (vaccines which, it's important to remember, are still only tuned to wild type COVID-19) but they're still providing significant protection as proven in large scale statistics.
> The Scottish and UK data (which they'll now stop publishing) show that the effectiveness against hospitalization and death of those with only two shots is now negative.
I certainly can't address all your points as we're quickly spiraling into incomprehensibility, but I don't think it's unfair to say that for the majority of those points as "there's at least a small chance they are possible". That doesn't warrant a victory lap as any sort of triumph of the skeptical viewpoint. You've shifted your argument from your doubts have been proven true to your doubts still existing, which is incredibly fitting for the your initial argument and vaccine skepticism in general.
Incomprehensibility? Where exactly is what I write incomprehensible? And the response to not understanding some points is that you don't address any points and declare victory? That's bad faith.
Meanwhile my post fades into grey soon to be invisible and then the next person like you can claim that they just don't see those science-minded vaccine skepticism comments / posts.
> You've shifted your argument from your doubts have been proven true
No, that's not what I did. I showed that there is actually evidence for each of the points you brought up.
People get banned from yt and twitter for quoting scientific papers that don't align with "the message". In fact it's been yts official policy since mid 2020 to ban anything COVID that doesn't conform to what the WHO is saying.
HN may be “heavily” as you say, moderated, but you are allowed to discuss things that counter any narrative as long as you make a reasonable effort at presenting your ideas in a reasonable way.
You don’t get banned for criticizing bitcoin, VCs, Hunter Biden, US policies, BLM, the police, inflation, gender, feminism, masculinity, etc., etc, whereas Twitter tends to ban things that go counter to particular narratives even in the face of evidence. You’re a epidemiologist and critique Covid policies? Not allowed!!!
Not when there’s bidirectional communication happening between govt and tech companies on these issues. We’ve seen them coordinate to erase particular stories from the public narrative etc. They literally have manipulated elections by doing this.
These companies were engaged in a covert surveillance program on behalf of intelligence agencies too. That by itself makes them effectively an extension of the state.
The only time I see rank propaganda on HN, it’s about stuff Elon Musk loves, like the blockchain or self-driving cars. I dread what he’ll do to Twitter.
It does become an issue of government censorship when the heads of these companies are hauled before congress with the threat of breakup or regulation, while simultaneously being questioned about the "incorrect" speech they allow on their platforms.
Hacker News isn’t comparable to Twitter. They’re not doing coordinated censorship with other big tech companies or working on behalf of intelligence agencies to spy on their users etc. Twitter & other large corps aren’t just private companies because they have such strong relationships with the government. Politicians also threaten to penalize them for not doing censorship the way that they want, so they aren’t really acting in a free market regardless.
People keep moving the goalposts and it never ends up making sense. The fact of the matter is that HN has moderation which people enjoy. You can't come in here talking about whatever you want, however you want. The same goes for Twitter. Trying to split them apart by size, audience or whatever is meaningless.
HN is a fraction of Twitter's size, and moderation isn't going to scale linearly. I doubt anybody, including Elon could really solve this problem apart from taking the reddit approach.
Looking at what is not allowed on HN, the same things are disallowed here. How is that not the same?
Elon will either let Twitter be run over by political spam and see it lose its value, or realize he needs to healthily stifle some speech to maintain his investment.
>> Looking at what is not allowed on HN, the same things are disallowed here. How is that not the same?
Not true. If Donald trump wanted to post here on tech or business I think he'd be allowed. The ban hammer might come quick not because of his views, but his inflamitory style. Twitter sensors ideas, not language.
>> If you hypothesise about it, that's A OK, if you claim that it's 100% verified, that's not, because it's not been proven one way or the other.
But what is used as the ground truth? For the lab leak it will likely never be known. Even so, if Twitter is declaring certain parties as authorities on subjects that's not good - particularly in highly politicized situations.
I suspect most of the commenters supporting the right of a private company to moderate content is completely contingent on what those moderation policies are. Commenters feign holding an absolute position but would certainly balk if the moderation ever turned against them and the idea they support.
If you believe on principle, the right of private companies to moderate content, then you must support all kinds of absurd outcomes: Twitter deciding to subtly push pro-Russian viewpoints, Facebook deciding to boost antivax content etc.
I believe those things would be within Twitter's rights, but would object to them as being bad ideas that would make me not want to use the platform. That isn't the same as saying I think Twitter doesn't have the right to do them, though.
Right but this kind of reasoning presumes a world where everything is equal, truth in unknowable, and our priors for two statements like "women should be allowed to vote" and "a woman's place is in the home and they are too emotional for politics [1]" are that they're equally valid and likely to be correct.
So I can totally understand why basically no moderation is in this world is appealing but surely we can do better than that. Who's gonna argue that the extremely racist "Obama is a Kenyan Muslim baby photoshop" is well reasoned take that isn't based in hate? So when I say I like having moderation I'm not arguing that I'm fine with literally arbitrary completely unaccountable moderation.
[1] This was a real anti-suffragist take in the early 1900s. Which is hilarious because 100 years later it's overwhelmingly the men in politics having public emotional outbursts.
Isn't the free-market answer to this problem for users to move to other social media platforms that moderate in a way they prefer? The problem here is how powerful and walled-off Facebook and Twitter are, making competing difficult if not impossible. Perhaps if we solve that problem, everyone can get what they want.
I think saying that, on principle, companies should not moderate content at all is equally absurd as it would allow malware, CP, abusive content, and spam to run rampant. All we're really arguing about here is to what extent do we want these platforms to moderate content. Should they be limited to only removing illegal content? What's the line on "illegal" (no company could afford to consult lawyers for every post they remove)? What about spam, which is not necessarily illegal but disruptive to the service?
If I remember correctly, Google put a ton of resources into a Facebook competitor and failed spectacularly. A well funded, immediate millions of users, and an unrivaled ad network… fell on its face (for reasons of course, but none nullify the above facts).
Now, please make the case for any startup to compete with Google’s resources.
If the only case you can make is time, there is a problem with this monopolistic system.
You're effectively saying that Google failed, therefore nobody can succeed. This suggests that Google threw all its might and resources behind Google+ and still came up short. I don't think that's true, but even if they did, throwing sufficient resources at the problem was not the issue, the problem seemed to be poorly understood within Google. They seemed to be building "Facebook but Google-branded, but also somehow not Facebook" and then when it was struggling early on instead of trying to fix it, they just went "Ok all Google users have a Google+ now" and acted like they were blowing up.
There is a very interesting counterexample. A company that Facebook saw as enough of a threat that they bit the bullet and spent what was at the time an eyewatering amount of money on a company with a product that was built by a tiny team - Instagram.
We can't ever know what would have become of Instagram had it not been acquired, maybe it would just be the aspirational selfies-and-travel-pics app or maybe it would grow and become something altogether different. But it is certainly clear to me that the failure of Google+ does not mean someone can't build a company that could grow to rival Facebook. They may seem dominant in social media now, but companies which have been completely dominant in their field have been known to totally collapse - remember Nokia?
Absolutely there is a problem. That was my point. If we fix the monopolization of these industries, we solve the moderation issue as well via the free market.
Obviously solving the kind of monopolies created by social networks is hard. The best proposals I've heard is forcing them to open up their social graphs/APIs to competitors, but that's not without its own issues (e.g. bad actors siphoning off user data, like Cambridge Analytica).
> Isn't the free-market answer to this problem for users to move to other social media platforms that moderate in a way they prefer?
It's not that easy. You want to be where your audience is. People are on Twitter since there is a huge (potential) audience. Thus if the moderation only affects a small group and majority doesn't even notice others being moderated it is a tough game.
>I suspect most of the commenters supporting the right of a private company to moderate content is completely contingent on what those moderation policies are.
Of course it is. Reading "Rules for Radicals" helps calm the nerves when you see previously anti-governance "anarchists" cheering for governments and private corporations. You make your enemies play by their own rules, then disregard the rules when they're no longer useful to you.
> I suspect most of the commenters supporting the right of a private company to moderate content is completely contingent on what those moderation policies are.
I'm one of those commenters, and I'd point to Gab, Parler etc as companies who are already doing exactly that and are well within their rights to do so. And of course, their free speech (curation and flagging) is balanced by their users' freedom of association: if twitter radically changes their moderation policies, they could risk driving away their userbase and even their developers.
Well, I also believe that no single company should be allowed to have more than 10% market share in any market. So I would have competition, with different companies having different moderation policies.
Honestly, this challenged my view a bit, because I am a person who believes a private company has a right to moderate content, and I think you're right, I've been resting on that view because largely companies seem to have not done anything insane (IMO) with that.
Looking at it now, I honestly think it's totally okay for Elon Musk to buy Twitter and change fundamentally what its policies are. I think it'd be devastating for the platform, and I think a competitor would swoop in and scoop up the vast majority of folks who would find a "free speech site" repugnant, but I believe that's up to the platform to decide (right up until the platform violates a law, of course).
Out of all of this, I'm just kicking myself for not being that competitor. There's a ton of turmoil here, I think a Twitter-That-Is-The-Same-Except-Not-Named-Twitter could do real well right now.
Kind of a ridiculous statement. "If you support any laws whatsoever, then you also support laws forcing Russian viewpoints, laws against vaccines, etc."
Oh I know, this is like twitter account number 5 since twitters introduction. I tried Mastadon, Diaspora, and many others over the years. The only platform I've managed to leave for good (5 years and counting) is anything associated with facebook because that's the easiest set of platforms drop.
Is that the cycle? I've been using Twitter for 10+ years and I doubt I'll stop anytime soon. Heck, I still use Reddit daily despite it having been in steady decline for many years now.
Personally, I suppose that the internet has become significantly more stable over the years.
Twitter is a mob launch pad. It's ran by outrage addicted, sadistic, cruel bullies. It's as if all of the world's village idiots joined forces and became the ruling class in culture and speech.
It is Twitter that has normalized and promoted inhumane tactics like context switching, bad faith discussion, talking behind you to others instead of towards you (quote tweeting), screenshotting, obsessively digging through one's history, mob launches, and in some cases cancellations, death threats, etc.
No normal person engages with another person like this. They are tactics to use when at war, but this is business as usual on Twitter. Worse, it's richly rewarded. It's a place where brains and conversations go to die.
I hope the offer gets accepted, it's not like he can make it worse. Or perhaps he should intentionally make it worse and sink it.
I don't intend to refute anything you've written because I agree with pretty much all of it. But there is more to Twitter than that. Twitter is also a collective mind in a way that has only previously existed in science fiction. There are conversations about virtual reality where I regularly engage with people from Europe, Asia, the US, some people who don't really go out of their house but are very active on VR Twitter, displaced Ukrainian developers finding VR development work... and really thought-provoking interactions every week, like a "My Dinner with Andre" in the global hive-mind. I think of Twitter as something like "The Internet" or "nuclear fission" -- a tool so powerful that it can either destroy or save the world, and to just destroy it would be a catastrophic loss.
The human hive mind existed long before Twitter. Very little of a human's knowledge is discovered by them, it's passed from generation to generation. First it was spoken, then written, then typed.
But social media, when looked at through the lens of collective thought, is unwell IMH(umble)O.
I remember participating in old phpBB forums in the mid/late 90s. You'd show up for an hour, read everything that happened over the last few days, go off an think about it, come back later and respond. The conversations were deep and thoughtful, even if the topics weren't. If I sat in a room with someone who thought/behaved like these forums, I'd be comfortable. It would be a good conversation, I'd feel safe, and I'd probably walk away learning something new.
If a physical human thought the way the Twitter hive mind thinks - I'd avoid them. They would be terrifying. Jumping from thought to thought, rapidly transitioning emotional states, unable to focus on a topic for more than a social media cycle, constantly checking to see if people like what they said... The hive mind on many of the popular social media platforms is not healthy.
I don't think this outcome is inevitable when large groups of people come together to communicate. It feels like a byproduct of engagement driven social media - where the flywheel of growth/profits is coupled to humans constantly indicating to the system that they are "engaged" by interacting in some way.
You're obviously right. Multiple things co-exist at Twitter.
The general narrative is toxic woke, which is the dominant culture, followed by the counter force on the right, equally toxic but far less powerful.
That's the head, and at the tails end there's lot of small things that in itself may be fine. You might find the best deepsea fishing community at Twitter.
I often wonder if you could make something like a Reddit clone or image board use the Usenet network model.
I imagine that it’s hard now that full service ISPs are so rare. Paying extra for access is probably not something many people would want to do, even though it would probably make for more healthy and diverse discourse than anything that always needs to be advertiser friendly.
But the greatest obstacle is probably that many users and service providers would consider the inability to ban someone across the whole network to be a bug rather than a feature.
I was a heavy Usenet user but the Usenet population was such a small fraction of the world's population (and the Usenet post mechanics were much less targeted) that I didn't have the same kinds of interactions on Usenet as I do on Twitter.
You're talking about a specific subset of Twitter. The Twitter I use is 99% positive, good news, friendly interactions. I've gained at least one job directly through Twitter.
This is not a good take. Despite who you follow, Twitter shows you random stuff and also shows you the trending section. That section is just full of controversial things.
I deliberately ignore the trending section because twitter has a 'trends blacklist'. So it's Twitter Management Approved Trending™, not what's actually trending.
This comment is made very often but it doesn't negate the point.
The discussion is not about one's individual experience, it's about the general cultural phenomenon that is Twitter. When extremists have millions of followers and thereby have an outsized (negative) influence on society this has a macro impact.
True, but you don't have to participate and you can try to stop it, if you want.
>It's ran by outrage addicted, sadistic, cruel bullies.
Not sure, but I think this is false. It seems to be run professionally, for profit, and with a great deal of thought.
> It's as if all of the world's village idiots joined forces and became the ruling class in culture and speech.
False, but with a seed of truth: Twitter has undue influence over decision makers because it satisfies their constant need for feedback. Powerful people take Twitter feedback far more seriously then they should. The worst example being businesses that fire people because of a cancel mob to "protect their reputation". (IMO such cancellations do far more harm to the business reputation demonstrating terrible judgement)
>No normal person engages with another person like this.
False. Or rather, you characterize Twitter engagement in one way, and ignore all the other ways. I, for example, enjoy engaging with smart, good people from around the world. The key is to a) be careful about who you follow, and b) give 0 care about likes, retweets, etc. Twitter is not really one place, it's a huge network of places, a bit like Reddit, and so behavior and content varies significantly.
> False. Or rather, you characterize Twitter engagement in one way, and ignore all the other ways. I, for example, enjoy engaging with smart, good people from around the world.
You don't need Twitter to do that. Arguably, it was easier to engage with the smart, good people from around the world on IRC since it wasn't through the guise of microblogging 240 characters at one another in public. I think it's perfectly fine to characterize Twitter by it's lowest common denominator.
> The key is to a) be careful about who you follow, and b) give 0 care about likes, retweets, etc.
Sounds like it's a fundamentally broken system then, no? If it's incentivizing toxic engagement and behavior patterns, that's an issue.
> Twitter is not really one place, it's a huge network of places, a bit like Reddit, and so behavior and content varies significantly.
No, it is "one place". There are federated networks similar to Twitter like Mastodon and Pleroma where that is the case, but Twitter is one homogenous userbase, for better or worse. You're lumped in with the left-wing pundits, the right-wing trolls and everyone in between.
Generally speaking, this comment kinda makes me sad. Nobody needs to take the bullet for Twitter, of all places. It's notoriously shitty by-and-large, and while some people have gotten it to work for them (more power to you), trying to claim it's a universally altruistic platform if you ignore the bad stuff is simply disingenuous.
You are not communicating in good faith, changing my words and their meanings, in an effort to promote your dogmatic view. Ironically it is this, not the platform, that is the root of the problems that seem to bother you. Good day!
Sir you are engaging with negative communities, out of your own free time
Twitter, is just how you construct your feed; if you gravitate towards toxic communities/follows, that's just a reflection of yourself
Twitter in my experience has some incredibly informative people from multiple industries and plenty of positive ribbing, but mainly used to collaborate and support each other
People have always engaged with other people like they do on Twitter.
You don't think even before social media there was a world where people spread lies about you, spread hatred and people who would do anything in their power to ruin your marriage, career or life in general?
You just see it more these days because it's more easily visible. It doesn't mean it happens more than it used to.
It needs to be better policed but I sense it's way undervalued being one of the few huge media platforms. It's a smart move. Meta market cap was 1T down to 600B. Other techs market caps? 43B sounds like a bargain.
Just the hype off this, and the excitement that will inevitably follow every tweak to the platform - tens of billions up in value.
while this might be true for most of Twitter, my experience is very different. I've been following researchers mostly and aside from very recently published work there are very interesting conversations or thought threads.so i guess it heavily depends on your Twitter bubble
He is more competent but also much more likely to use it as a political lever and to gather information and take revenge against people he doesn't like.
A person “like” him? What does that even mean? You mean a successful entrepreneur? Or will we instead only focus on what you believe to be any negative characteristics? Do us a favour if you reply: list what is great about people like Elon Musk, and then list what is bad about people like him please.
- is known to have outbursts of rage during which he shouts and insults employees
- is known to publicly humiliate employees
- has been reported to physically assault an employee
- takes revenge against journalists, Twitter users or divers - the forms of revenge includes doxxing, personally asking the person's employer to get them fired, publicly accusing the victim of pedophilia
- is a narcissistic attention whore who has complained in leaked emails that the media don't talk about him enough
Ah ok so you deliberately choose to ignore listing all his positive attributes. I can’t take your criticisms seriously because it shows wilful bias. You realize half of what you wrote could be levelled against Steve Jobs as well?
You mean that time when the sitting president of the US encouraged his followers to storm the Capitol and stop Congress from formally ratifying the democratically elected next president?
When he encouraged them to behave violently and actually told them he’d be right there with them?
That time when, what, 4 people got killed, directly related to a call by the president to urge his supporters to stop the peaceful transition of power?
Out here in the real world outside the Trump cult that’s what these events were.
No actually, from an outsider view the comment you replied to is exactly right. For a lot of non-americans it's borderline hilarious to see how cheesy and hyperbolic the narrative around the riots that happened on that day is (I remember it got to the point where "this is worse than 9/11" was an unironic take). I guess it's fine and it works for internal consumption for political rhetoric, but that's it.
By the way your comment is exactly proving their point. It's a bit amazing actually, you literally repeated the same tired hyperbolic talking points. And the claim that the riots killed 4 people has been debunked repeatedly.
You might think it’s cheesy to warn about autocrats and attacks on democracy but I happen to think that’s very important.
I wasn’t aware that there weren’t actually 4 deaths so my bad. I guess the whole episode is a nothingburger since only one person got actually killed there?
Or would you care to respond to any of the other points?
I think you misread my comment. The cheesy part isn't to talk about the events, or what trump did. It's the insane hyperbole, and the never ending exaggeration in the words used to describe what happened.
A good example of that is the death count: we got to the point where some people were so desperate to turn the whole situation into an iconic, unprecedented historical attack that they counted a cop who died the day after from a stroke in the death count. The "insurrection" narrative does not sound credible without deaths or violence, so the fact that the only death was a rioter killed by cops was a pretty inconvenient plot hole.
I assume you are pretty informed and even then, you still had in mind the spurious death count. That goes to show just how much the early hyperbole poisoned the entire discussion around the events and spread disinformation.
Another example of disingenuous reality bending is the claim that the rioters were "armed so they came here to overthrow the government". When I think they found one or two person with a firearm.
To me it's simple, if the riots were actually that bad, the huge disinformation push and extremely disingenuous rhetoric wouldn't have been needed.
You're clearly trying to minimize what happened. Alone, the amount of effort you are making to discount the words and actions of the President of the United States is damaging to the country. The real damage isn't in the people who died but in the damage to our democracy, our institutions, and our credibility in the world.
What am I discounting? If I got any facts wrong, let me know. Otherwise it's just that your interpretation is different. I know some americans have a very "you are either with us or with the terrorist" outlook to... everything but I can assure you that I'm not making any particular effort. Your hyperbole is duly noted though.
I agree that the damage isn't in the people that died (because they didn't) and that the damage is more towards the institution. The problem is that the narrative for a year has been to make martyrs out of the 4 deaths (not the fifth, for obvious reasons). Sure, now that it's untenable to do that I hear that the "deaths didn't even matter!" but that just makes the entire thing even more blatant.
For all I care, trump could've been arrested for what he did. Again that's not my point, my argument was mostly that the borderline hysterical bend to every single detail of that day
is a bit embarrassing. You can say that the president caused an illegal riot to influence or interfere with the electoral process and should be arrested, without going into "it's an insurrection and a coup attempt by armed militias trying to kill congress members and also etc etc."
It reminds me of when the conservatives were trying to do everything to make the black lives matter protests sound like an insanely violent anarchist civil war.
I guess I deeply disagree that it’s hyperbole to keep reminding people of the fact that the sitting president of the US did not commit to a peaceful transition of power and encouraged his supporters to storm the Capitol to “stop the steal” and went so far to tell them he’d be right there with them.
A strongman who loses and sends a mob to the legislature is a staple in the history of democracy. It isn't a sign of stability. It made me update some priors.
"cheesy and hyperbolic"? What would have happened if the coup was successful? Or what would have happened just if those quick thinking staffers didn't grab the ballot box while taking shelter before the legislature was breached? There was nothing "cheesy" about it. It was deadly serious; literally, people died.
The party of gun ownership showing up to protest without their guns is not a coup attempt. And it's ridiculous to say that it was. There were like 100,000 people there, and they counted a guy who died of a stroke the next day as a death. There's literally videos of them casually walking around and obeying the velvet ropes cordoning things off. There's also videos of them being let in. One guy was recently just acquitted for exactly that reason.
The real reason it's being overblown is the protesters accidentally showed the nation that you can just show up en masse at congress and demand change. They really don't want that idea spreading. They might have to actually represent their constituency instead of their oligarch donors. That would be very bad for campaign funding.
First, the fact that deaths from a drug overdose and natural causes are included in the casualty list is in and of itself ridiculous. Should the casualty list for WW2 include everyone who died of natural causes from 1939 to 1945?
Second, the one death from gunshot is of an unarmed rioter, shot by the Capitol Police. I have no problem whatsoever with the death; if the Capitol Police had actually used their weapons and training immediately, as opposed to letting rioters run rampant inside the Capitol, a tremendous amount of trouble would have been avoided. But the death is not of a lawmaker or someone else otherwise uninvolved.
Third, the death from gunshot is also not a police officer. In particular, it is not Officer Sicknick, who was lauded by one and all for weeks as a martyr to the TrumpNaziKKK forces ... only for the autopsy to find that he died of a stroke that had nothing to do with the riot (the autopsy specifically checked for blunt force trauma (i.e., "hit by a fire extinguisher") and exposure to tear gas). And yet the claims made after the riot, of many cops being killed by the rioters, were never widely disavowe and continue to be believed, as can be seen elsewhere in this very discussion.
I'm barely an hour outside of DC and nobody cares about 1/6. Partly because Americans are pretty used to nutjobs storming public buildings, and partly because they're also used to extreme rhetoric from politicians.
Wouldn't you think it would be weird for all social media platforms refuse to air content from a leading contender for the presidency? Does the platform just pretend he doesn't exist? Can they play clips of him speaking in the debates? How about if he wins, do they just block anyone posting his inaugural address? Create two worlds, one in which he is president and another social media world in which he doesn't exist. Very weird.
I think Elon Musk is a free speech absolutist, so woke people - or who are against social injustice and racism - will remain on Twitter. (Which I personally think is a good thing.)
I guess my opinion is not popular, but I'll just say this: If Musk lets Trump back on I'm deleting my account. I've heard others say the same thing. That's a fact, not an opinion.
we are a flawed democracy/republic. people on parlor and gab, which i'm not one of, are for traditional values because that is what built this country. the only pro-authoritarian ive seen is from the social media giants and blue sate gov's.
I don't know how to ask this question without it sounding charged, but please take it as literal as possible and coming with absolutely no aggression:
Do you think removing Trump was pro-democracy? I stand very firmly against being removed on principle of him being an ex-president of the US, this comes from someone who probably thinks he should be prosecuted for (likely) falsely claiming election fraud, or IMHO stretching the definition in his favour.
I think this should be regulated, if not for everyone, at least for highly important accounts, and it should NOT be a private country that has so much power over the next US election.
Yes, absolutely. A former president was undermining trust in the democratic system with no evidence of wide spread fraud, who encouraged people to attack the capital during the peaceful transfer of power, who was also encouraging people to subvert the election process at the state level. He and his assosciates had an anti-democratic plan to keep him in power.
"Boards have a fiduciary duty to the shareholders."
Xi and the CCP/Chinese Government make a bid to buy Google, for a 20% premium.
They also bid to buy Twitter, Facebook and Microsoft. All for 20% premium.
Should shareholders do 'the right thing' and sell?
Assuming you're not a Twitter shareholder why do you care about investors interests? Why don't you care about your interests?
Why do plebes constantly argue against their own interests?
As a Twitter user, I pretty much don't want Elon Musk involved, and I don't really care too much otherwise.
Every organization has stakeholders: customers, suppliers, financiers (investors and debtors), execs, employees.
If a Union forms, they can take considerable control away from investors.
If debtors come calling, they can take considerable control, away from investors.
'Externalizations' such as issues in the public good, or environmental issues - matter.
Usually, we like to think of those things, in the context of a 'Charter' that highlights those things i.e. some 'Crown/Gov. Corporations', things like the CBC, US Post etc..
When you say 'things that don't matter vs. things that do' - that could be true, or only even true from a certain perspective.
For example, you might think they should not focus on moderation, but instead, advertising. Well, without appropriate moderation, the ship could sink. Also, issues like moderation can be hard and ultimately satisfy nobody, and frankly, might not even be an operational distraction (although it probably is).
Finally - as property of Elon Musk - Twitter will be literally whatever he wants it to be.
Rich People have, throughout history, bought newspapers etc. for the entire purpose of slandering their opponents. The news wasn't even 'real' until just a few generations ago, it was all tabloid.
Elon Musk could will likely censor those who disagree with him and his colleagues, and boost/amplify those who's interests are aligned with him - maybe not as badly as others, but it could be that.
If you're going to take a 'principled stand' on this issue, it's going to have to be one probably of the externalized common good, not so much shareholders.
Moderation makes sense when somebody is hijacking your platform and ruining the experience for everyone else.
How does someone ruin anything for anyone on twitter, when you can just unfollow/block on your own, and follow whomever you want?
Seems to me that "moderation" these days is the same as "censorship". The same way the EU decided that their citizens cannot think for themselves and need to be protected from Russian lies like small children.
I'd very much like Elon to take over Twitter, since he has clearly expressed he doesn't believe in pre-emptively censoring anyone just because their views are not aligned.
> How does someone ruin anything for anyone on twitter, when you can just unfollow/block on your own, and follow whomever you want?
So if we don’t ignore bots or “troll farms” (or whatever they are called these days) then it’s pretty clear how the experience of any user on the platform can be “ruined”. If you’re spending a ton of time blocking / unfollowing instead of engaging with others on the platform, then that could be one way that many “someone’s “ can ruin Twitter for others.
>Seems to me that "moderation" these days is the same as "censorship".
Extremely funny that you say that in a forum that is so heavily moderated.
>I'd very much like Elon to take over Twitter, since he has clearly expressed he doesn't believe in pre-emptively censoring anyone just because their views are not aligned.
Yes, as we all know Elon Musk is an extremely trustworthy person and I'm sure he will go out of his way to keep his word (as he has always done in his life) in order to do good to the world, even to his own detriment. /s
> Yes, as we all know Elon Musk is an extremely trustworthy person
He refused to ban Russian media through Starlink when everyone was banning them and anything that smelled like russian. So I'd say he can take the heat for free speach when it truly matters.
Of course, he refuses to ban things when that doesn't impact his bottom line! (and in fact gives him good pr)
But that's easy enough, it's free. But we do see how much he truly cares about freedom when his $$$ is on the line, say when he goes full gilded-age union-busting on his employees for example.
The idea behind freedom generally is that despite the fact that most people don't behave optimally, it is unjust to curtail their right to behave suboptimally, so long as that behaviour doesn't directly impact others.
> so long as that behaviour doesn't directly impact others
I'm not sure how one person being misinformed directly harms another. Can you elaborate? Surely the misinformed person would have to act to directly harm another person, which is already covered by existing laws I imagine.
How many of the positions you strongly advocate for here on HN would you estimate are ultimately the result of misinformation or propaganda that you've fallen victim to?
First " since he has clearly expressed he doesn't believe in pre-emptively censoring anyone just because their views are not aligned. "
This is completely false. Nobody is barred from Twitter pre-emptively, and nobody is barred because their 'views are not aligned'
More importantly, it's naive to believe that the commons can decipher the truth.
They cannot - neither can you or I - in a world of total disinformation.
The 'truth' does not rise to the top, rather, the ideas that are the most seductive, that appeal to our impulses and beliefs, are the ideas that rise to the top and especially if there are potent interests - and there always are i.e. Economic or Political, that 'free forums' will be controlled by those interests which will likely have nothing to do with any kind of 'truth' - which is in the public good.
People are busy, and the world is complicated - so we need centres of credibility.
For example - Doctors and Medical Information.
That's a hugely regulated sector, because we don't want Yahoos selling you 'Cures for Cancer' when they don't work at all. And there would be a Trillion dollar business there, if were allowed, causing untold harm. We already have a lot of problems there actually.
There is no 'free speech' in Medical Information.
I'll use your own example against you:
Do you think that Europeans are magically smarter than Russians? How is it that large number of Russians, even those who technically have access to 'outside information' come to such a deluded view of reality established by Putin?
Why do you think that Europeans are going to magically enlightened and not susceptible to his made up reality?
Putin has not 'cut off' Russia, he just needs to raise the barriers a little bit (i.e. VPN), because most people will just watch the propaganda otherwise.
That way, he can create a 66% buy-in in Russia.
If he can aggressively drive his misinformation into Europe, he could create a 15% support, and maybe 25% disinclination, enough to tilt the tables in many political situations, based on complete fabrications.
In the Weimar Republic, Stalin had direct control over 17% of the Bundestag via his direct control over the German Communist Party achieved through control over popular information ie propaganda in the commons.
30% of the USA public believes that the election was stolen, which is a lie.
If you take a survey among progressives about police violence against African American and ask them to put some numbers down (i.e # of unarmed African Americans being killed by police) - you'll get outrageous answers, not really based on any kind of reality.
And both of those things are problems even in the current system which has 'some integrity'.
All un-moderated public places turn into chaos very quickly - that's the first problem.
More importantly - they will be used by forces to create the reality they want.
It's fine to have a view of what Twitter should and should not be of course, if you want Elon there, that's great.
But nobody who is not a Twitter investor should really care that much about 'fiduciary responsibility'. The 'Truth' is a much, much more important public good that some random guys economic interest.
I don't disagree, however I would hold that these centers establish themselves naturally, in absence of any regulation. There is a reason that one's reputation was of paramount importance before this regulation came into being. Well-raised people didn't fall for quackery simply because they were taught only to transact with reputable purveyors.
I personally would very much like to make my own decisions based on the information available, and I don't need the government to limit my options or hold my hand in any way. I also have no problem with letting misinformed people fail to the full extent that their failure implies, including pursuing quackery for their medical ailments. I fundamentally don't think it is the government's job to protect people from their own misfortune or personal failure.
The problem with "the truth" is that it substantially doesn't exist, beyond reproducible scientific inquiry. How do you know, for sure, as a matter of scientific fact, that the election wasn't tampered with in any way? I'm not suggesting that it was, only that it is unknowable. As with any question of the historical record, all we can do is look at the facts available to us and apply our best judgement. These questions are fundamentally ones on which free people should be entitled to disagree.
I don't want an authority dictating what is and isn't the "right" interpretation of history or current events, simply because no authority can be relied on to get this 100% right. Being forced to conform to one lie is far, far worse than hearing many.
1) Government is not 'in your way' - it's 'your government'.
2) There are absolutely some areas where governance has to be there - financial disclosures and regulation, and in Healthcare. Those are two examples where the can be no substitute.
3) "I personally would very much like to make my own decisions based on the information available, and I don't need the government to limit my options or hold my hand in any way. "
You are completely incapable of doing this.
Do you have a medical research team that can research every drug you take to the full extent?
Do you have an auto safety team that can research and test drive every car you buy?
Do you have a legal and business team that can fully research every company you work with and work for?
It's absurd. We utterly depend on networks of integrity and there isn't a person who can avoid it.
That said - for more common forms of information - you can access almost anything you want on the internet. So long as you're not making bombs or threatening to kill people - you can read lies, and lie if you want - to your hearts content.
Twitter is not the Internet, or the Government.
4) " I also have no problem with letting misinformed people fail to the full extent that their failure implies, including pursuing quackery for their medical ailments."
The lack of self awareness here is borderline offensive.
In a world without regulation with respect to medical information than there is now way of determining what quackery is
YOU will 100% be a victim of 'quackery' the very first time you take any medicine at all!
Unless you can literally run a medical trial on every medicine you buy - then you have no clue if what you are buying is legit or not.
... unless you developed 'sources of authority'.
We develop these 'sources of authority' for good reason.
In the end, if you don't want to take your doctors advice, you don't have to. Nobody will stop you from ingesting poison to cure a cold, but, the rest of us want to have access to credible information, so we won't let you tell other people that your poison is a magic cure for a cold.
5) "The problem with "the truth" is that it substantially doesn't exist"
This is false.
" How do you know, for sure, as a matter of scientific fact, that the election wasn't tampered with in any way? I'm not suggesting that it was, only that it is unknowable. "
This is absurd reasoning along the lines of: "Can you prove to me that Biden and Xi are not the same person?!? How do you know for sure!?"
The election actually was tampered with. We know there are false ballots and registration with 100% certainty. We also know with very high certainty, that the issues are not widespread and that the election had integrity.
In much the same way you and your bank can agree, with a high degree of certainty, how much 'money' is your digital bank account. We have process, records, oversight, validation, systems of integrity.
Most things can be resolved to some reasonable factual basis.
"The 2020 was not 'stolen'" - That's factual.
"Ivermectin cures COVID". As far as I know, false.
"COVID Vaccines are Dangerous". Well, that's an editorialisation, but the facts of the matter can definitely be established, and put into perspective.
But finally this:
"I don't want an authority dictating what is and isn't the "right" interpretation of history or current events,"
Who is trying to do that?
What government is telling you what to think?
We're talking about Twitter moderation.
Twitter is a private company, that has some kind of relevance towards 'public commons', it means that you probably can't go on there saying things about medical technology that are completely false, and possibly not saying things about the status of state that have meaningful impact. And you can't threaten people. That's it.
Nobody is telling you what to do or what to believe, but if you're trying to lie about election outcomes (and it's having a material impact on democratic legitimacy) - you're going to be off the platform.
I'd like to note that you've disregarded my main point, that reputation serves as a fine solution to problems of trust.
> Government is not 'in your way' - it's 'your government'.
Government is in my was as soon as it prevents me from peacefully doing something/transacting with someone. If I want to take a loan and would only qualify at a rate deemed "predatory", it may still be in my interest to do so. If I want to pursue experimental, unregulated treatment for an ailment, it may still be in my interest to do so.
Aside from that, if I want to sell my kidneys, take heroin, or eat rat poison, who else has the right to tell me that I can't? Who can claim more ownership over my own person than I?
> Do you have a medical research team that can research every drug you take to the full extent?
> Do you have an auto safety team that can research and test drive every car you buy?
I don't need to, all I need is to trust a reputable provider of these goods/services. Auto safety ratings for instance are perfectly provided by the IIHS, a reputable, independent nonprofit. We don't need government to solve trust problems.
> there is now way of determining what quackery is
I couldn't disagree more. Academic and medical reputation is can can continue to be the driving force for integrity in healthcare and medical science, much as it is in non-medical science.
> "Can you prove to me that Biden and Xi are not the same person?!? How do you know for sure!?"
Well today I can be reasonably certain, but how long do you think that certainty will last? 100 years? 1000? 10,000? At some point it will be akin to asking "How do we know Jesus was a real person?", which is rather a valid question don't you think?
> Nobody is barred from Twitter pre-emptively, and nobody is barred because their 'views are not aligned'
Maybe so. What about branding accounts as "pro X" or "anti X"? Because Twitter's been doing that, albeit much less explicitly. You can see now that some journalists get the tag "Russian affiliated" just because they try to report on all sides the same way. Isn't that akin to taking a stand against or something? Why would you need to brand someone on their views if not to censor them in a way?
> it's naive to believe that the commons can decipher the truth
Where's the enlightened group of individuals that decide what truth is and is not? Who decides who's a common, and what parameters do you use? I'd really like to know.
> The 'truth' does not rise to the top
If you mean your twitter feed, certainly not. But on the long term, it surely does.
> that 'free forums' will be controlled by those interests which will likely have nothing to do with any kind of 'truth' - which is in the public good
So, you're saying that the Twitter board knows what's best for the public good and what's not. They're the enlightened ones then? How did they attain this state?
> Why do you think that Europeans are going to magically enlightened and not susceptible to his made up reality?
I'm saying they should decide for themselves. Nobody should tell you what you can and cannot read. That's your right, and that includes listening to lies. If you want people to see beyond lies, teach them to recognize those lies instead. Critical thinking is what's required.
Of course, then they'll also be able to see through YOUR lies, so maybe that's what they don't want?
> If he can aggressively drive his misinformation into Europe
Forget about Putin. How will you be able to tell misinformation from truth in your own government, when instead of pushing for critical thinking, you push for banning people?
---- "You can see now that some journalists get the tag "Russian affiliated" just because they try to report on all sides the same way. "
No. That's not what that means.
'Russian Affiliated' does not mean 'taking the side of Russia'. It literally means 'Russian Affilated'. That's factual and relevant, not a bias.
---- "Where's the enlightened group of individuals that decide what truth is and is not?"
Doctors and Medical Researchers get to decide what medicines work and which one's don't. Not Pilots and Aerospace Engineers.
Engineers, Pilots get to decide what constitutes 'safe to fly'. Medical researchers do not.
And you (assuming you are neither) do not get to decide that.
Imagine if we didn't have systems of integrity for flight safety and medical technology.
Would you be in a position to run clinical trials on every drug you consumed?
Are you going to run flight safety tests on every plane before you get on?
Of course not.
We have to create systems of integrity or nothing will work.
Now - if you want to go on the internet and do your own medical research, you can do or say (almost) anything you want so long as you are not causing harm.
------ "The 'truth' does not rise to the top. If you mean your twitter feed, certainly not. But on the long term, it surely does."
The 'truth' does not rise to the top in the commons. The truth only rises to the top if conscientious people decide to create systems in which it does.
Generally 'free expression' is required for the truth to come to the fore, but in completely open systems, the person with the most seductive narrative will determine what most people believe, about most things.
Again using medical example: were it not for regulatory constraints around what people can say about drugs they are selling it would be a 'free for all'. Medical tech would go back to pre-Englightenment era, it would be a disaster. We'd have to immediately start to develop systems of trust back in that community one way or another.
----- "So, you're saying that the Twitter board knows what's best for the public good and what's not. They're the enlightened ones then? How did they attain this state?"
I didn't imply anything like this.
Twitter employees don't know anything about anything, they don't have to and it's not relevant.
But they do know that Person A is Person A - meaning they can legitimize names. They also know what consensus is around some medicines like Ivermectin, because they have access to trusted resources. Then find out which journalists work for which government. They know if the US election was stolen or not.
And of course they know what a violent threat is when they see it more or less.
And so they act on that.
That's not 'Enlightenment' of any kind.
------- "I'm saying they (Europeans) should decide for themselves. Nobody should tell you what you can and cannot read"
You're misunderstanding the situation, and misunderstanding human nature.
Nobody is telling Europeans what to think. They are making it more difficult for sources of propaganda to misinform - and that's a big difference.
We are all mostly passive with respect to the information we consume. Most of it we just absorb by seeing it on the news or whatever. That means, if someone can take control of 'common sources of information' then they can fill the commons with misinformation.
This idea that even intelligent people are immune to propaganda is false. If you let Putin control 50% of the news, he will spew all sorts of information, hide other bits, in a way that will allow him to manipulate people.
If everyone went out and actively researched everything it would be less of a problem.
'The Commons' makes decisions based on what they consume on a passive basis, that's the reality of it.
Nobody is banning anything in Europe, or anywhere else. 'Twitter' is not the Internet, it's just a little thing.
If Europeans want to actively go and watch Russian TV, read Russian blogs, and absorb every bit of Putin propaganda - they are free to do so.
But we are not going to allow Putin or those like him to infest our public commons with bullshit.
Of course it would not pass muster, which is my point.
There is a giant 'non market force' at play there a certain kind of regulatory apparatus which most people understand exists for good reason.
This regulatory condition obviously supercedes 'fiduciary responsibility' of the Board.
Communications is a protected industry because powerful foreign interests can take control of narratives, precisely because people in the commons - including you and I - are fairly easily pursuaded.
'Truth' is really hard to do, it's a public good and it's why at the national level we have protections - and - it's why both Twitter, Google etc. as 'sources of information' fall under a different perspective of governance than say, a 'cracker company'.
I know you're arguing in good faith but don't you think putting crazy hypotheticals like Xi buying any US company is a little silly? There are probably better examples to further your point.
> Xi and the CCP/Chinese Government make a bid to buy Google, for a 20% premium.
They also bid to buy Twitter, Facebook and Microsoft. All for 20% premium.
Should shareholders do 'the right thing' and sell?
The right thing isn't necessarily selling. In that case the right thing is to consider the offer and decide if it's worth it or not. In this case the answer would probably be "No" and the US Government probably wouldn't let it happen either.
Non-hostile version of a takeover requires a board approval at least. Depending on the jurisdiction and the company bylaws certain amount of the shareholders (say 75%+) has to vote for the takeover to actually happen.
Edit: Under normal circumstance, single entities cannot 'easily' obtain a large share of the stocks even if they actively buy.
hostile takeover is a common way to describe the fact that you are taking over a company by buying back its public share. Nothing unusual if you read financial news.
And just like that, Twitter engineering might somehow develop the same poor culture and work-life balance as Tesla and SpaceX. If I was there, I'd be groaning at this news.
Take a look at the world around us. If you’re a Twitter employee, how much does this really matter? If the worst happens you will find a new job in no time. You will still be far better off financially than most people in the world today.
What if Twitter employees threaten to leave en-masse? I'd seen some reports that people quit when he became the largest shareholder. It's not outside the realm of possibility.
Along these lines, I thought Lulu Cheng's (Substack VP) hiring post was quite telling of the malaise in Twitter (and frankly all Big Tech):
> If you’re a Twitter employee who’s considering resigning because you’re worried about Elon Musk pushing for less regulated speech… please do not come work here.
I applied there because of that! And, I literally just scheduled my first phone screen with them. It's not the best fit for my current skillset, but I'm excited to potentially work for the platform that hosts journalists like Taibbi, Greenwald, etc.
Excellent. It is an important cause and although I am a progressive, I am glad some conservative voices are being heard. We need to debate a few things that are getting out of control. The current situation is completely untenable for a functioning society and Substack is going against the grain with grace and humility.
The tech industry appears to be closer to favoring unionization than we ever have been. I take your point, but the Chapelle outrage is a very small example compared to what's happening here.
Tech workers are poised to leave their jobs far more readily than many other professions.
My read on it is that the employees who work at Twitter, when they can work at any other tech company, prefer to work at Twitter because they think that by moderating the world's messages, they are making it a better place.
Wow, I had never heard that. Seems quite an odd thing to be proud of - it's a necessary evil. You'd think the exact opposite, like 'giving people a voice', would be a stronger motivation.
I mean, the above comment leaves open that there are many reasons. Is it so crazy that he would use money to take down the account after offering money for the owner to take down the account?
You assume that he wasn't just trying to make it worth the guy's well for a bit of privacy. He didn't think the guy had any other reasons to be tracking his plane than making a quick buck through his donations page. He stopped bothering once he realized the guy had petty ambitions for fame. (Which btw that guy continues to play up for the media and drags out the idea long after Musk has dropped it.)
This is terrific. He said it will require threat with guns to get them to violate free speech. If true, this type of leadership is exactly what humanity needs.
I still don't understand the interest individuals have in proprietary, restrictive, unnecessary, platforms.. but for those who tolerate that sort of thing, I assume Twitter will become more valuable to them.
PS: Note to Musk -> If you are looking to control a company
you don't need to buy 100% of shares. Just a majority
of shares or special rights shares if they exist. Save
your money and help the less lucky ones:
43 Billion Dollars!? Of all the important issues in the world, Twitter is where this sort of money might go? Twitter! Oy vey have we lost sight of whats important. That's enough to give every research PhD student in the USA a sorely needed extra $15k every year for the next ~50 years. Sure glad we aren't living in an age where incentivizing technological breakthroughs on a societal level is an important thing to do.
I use twitter, I get something out of it, and I probably disagree with Musk politically on several issues. But if he were to take Twitter private, and change it, or whatever... Honestly, that's his prerogative; I'm certainly not in a position to stop him. Whether it's "good" or "bad" is not something that's really under my control. It's just a shame that this wealth isn't used for something more productive.
Just because he spends 38% over market price for Twitter doesn't mean that the realizable value of Twitter to anyone but the people who have already sold to him goes up by that 38%, nor, even if it did, does it mean it retains that value once he takes control.
True, but I'm not too concerned whether Musk loses $43 billion or makes a 9% return on his money. While I don't imagine most people would be happy "losing" ~16% of their net wealth, when you have a quarter of a trillion dollars, I don't know that it makes any difference. Wealth and money mean something different at Musk's scale.
Twitter is the public square for elite discourse in the US. It's surprising the price is that low. As a business maybe not, at least not in the short term, but the externalities are...compelling.
Also this is an investment - not a donation. The expectation is that the $43b will drive direct ROI - not something that a donation to students will provide to an investor.
That's a good point. I guess I just question the value of having any more "direct ROI" when you already have a quarter of a trillion dollars. Surely, at that level, the things that improve the quality of your life -- especially to a systems thinker type -- are positive social changes?
I would have to hard disagree. I think free speech is one of the most important issues we face today, it's worth any price IMO, including the ultimate price.
Free speech doesn't mean being able to say anything one wants on every platform one wants to say it on. There are real free speech issues out there but I don't see how this is one of them.
I see nothing good about some billionaire buying a communication medium millions of people use every day but I'm happy to be told why this is better than Twitter being a public company.
It's not like he's spending it for nothing in return. He's buying a business that has the potential to be cash flow positive (although it's been a couple years). He must see potential to make the service better and make money doing it. I can't speak for him obviously but based on his prior large bets, he's willing to lose it all but that's never his intention at the outset.
True, but one of these is set in a messy and complex interlocking system of multi-stakeholder incentives. The other seems to be more or less the whims of one individual.
You can point to any large amount of money spent and say that it could be spent better. At least this is staying in the country and could potentially benefit people.
It will be fun when the Internet mobilizes a mass exodus to a new or competing platform to fuck him over. He lives his online life with a foot three inches from his mouth, cocked and loaded, and waiting to scatter his brains to the wind. The first time it goes off after the takeover, Twitter will burn to the ground.
Because at its core, woke culture isn't righteous; it's petty and it's fueled by have nots fucking with haves because they can.
EVERYTHING Elon does is circled around his belief that we need to be living on Mars. Spaceships to get there. Satellites for communications when we get there. Electrical cars since no oil to drive there. Tunnel boring to make the roads and cities there.
Why would buying Twitter be any different? He currently is meeting serious resistance from USGOV and FAA on launching Starships. Postponed many times and may be postponed yet again due to environmental studies in TX.
Maybe; just maybe; total guess here; He thinks twitter would be a benefit to him during future elections to help either steer the future governments to directions he wants; or at a minimum move away from the one currently in power that's holding him back. I can certainly see it helping with his mantra "Going to Mars soon". Just another cog in the engine.
I just do not think this is about the money. A lot of people are talking about his stock price etc. Elon has never been about the money. It is about his end goals. Either the purchase of twitter is his repairing a social injustice he perceives, not normally on his radar. Or; it is a move to further his goal.
I really think this whole "everything Elon does is for Mars" is yet another story/myth he's perpetuated.
He's a businessman. He wants money; he wants respect; he wants power. Like most businessmen/politicians/people of stature of that caliber, he's just couching it all within a story that's much more palatable to the general public than saying that.
Also, I personally have always found how Tesla fits into this Mars equation laughable: why are we building sprawling infrastructure that needs cars on Mars? Is his imagination limited to Atherton, but on Mars? A much better use of limited resources (and oxygen) to build infrastructure would be to build denser, walkable colonies with major corridors served by public transit. Electric light rail or self-guided people movers are not new or novel, but we all know how Elon feels about public transit.
> postponed yet again due to environmental studies in TX.
If Biden picked up the phone to Dickson over at the FAA that PEA could be done in days. Likewise if Biden asked him to "make sure it's all done right" (or something) we're looking at many more months of waiting... and Musk is going to get bored/creative and do stuff like this!
Twitter and Facebook should either be forced to accept regulation around banning and denial of access to their content or should be forced to remove accounts of government officials and government utilities. It’s somehow become the defacto standard that government can release updates on social media at faster rates than any other channel of communication that they use and that people can be banned from accessing that communication. I think it’s disingenuous to say Twitter is not a public utility given the way it is used by government offices and politicians to communicate. Especially given the way Twitter had actively worked to facilitate that.
Barring a legal requirement for government to share all information to citizens on other channels at the same pace as they do on Twitter, being banned from Twitter prevents access to information that one is legally entitled to. That is clearly unacceptable.
I think Twitter should be able to moderate content as a private entity. But they’ve knowingly created a situation where outright banning is a powder keg and I feel like they’ve mostly lost the right to do so. They should have a good case for making accounts read only but they are definitely causing huge problems when they ban someone.
I'm going to prune some of the top-heavy subthreads and possibly restrict the page size a bit. There are over 2500 comments in this thread, and if you want to read them all you're going to have to click "More" at the bottom of each page, or go like this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31025061&p=2
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31025061&p=3
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31025061&p=4
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31025061&p=5
...and so on. Sorry everyone! (Yes, fixes are coming, yes it's all very slow.)
Edit: also, if some of you would log out for the day, that would ease the load considerably. (I hate to ask that, but it's true. Make sure you haven't lost your password!)