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.
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.