Does a "right person" exist?
Musk is an infinitely better influence on something like Twitter.
Mackenzie Scott will leave running the platform to the people familiar with it. That's exactly why she's the best person to own Twitter and turn it into a public good vs. Elon, who also knows absolutely nothing about running Twitter, but will no doubt intervene.
Musk made his comments in context of social networks. In a digitizing world where all conversation is centered into a handful of platforms, those platforms become the free speech carrier, no matter who owns them.
Yes, you're technically correct, but it's irrelevant from a pragmatic point of view. A legal definition of free speech is worthless if said free speech cannot be expressed in the places where most speech happens.
You can argue that major platforms like Twitter are essential to free speech, maybe even persuasively. What you can't do is make your case as if it were a self-evident fact. It is not.
I've never heard of AAJC. You linked a news article that proves her donation but doesn't make the organization seem sinister. I search AAJC and I get a bunch of results that do nothing to tell me anything sinister. I check Wikipedia and there are a handful of political stances, some of which are expected from political NGOs. I can't find any indication that anyone views this organization as anti-Asian. Based on what I've found, I assume what you mean is that this organization seems to support affirmative action in college admissions, a position that sets them apart from many other Asian groups, and which you could argue hurts Asian participation in colleges relative to a race-neutral admissions standard. Again, I had to do research to figure out that was what you were thinking of, I couldn't read your mind.
I'm not saying you're wrong in your belief, or that you can't make the argument you're making, I'm saying short-circuiting the entire argument and just declaring it so is both intellectually facile and unlikely to inform anyone about anything. I've seen the same argument before when people on the right baldly assert that the SPLC is a "hate group" -- when what they means is some nuanced take on a particular political stance SPLC takes being disagreeable to conservatives.
But then that's not the only leap you make. It's not just taken as obvious that AAJC is an anti-Asian organization, and everyone knows that, and no one could think differently: it's also taken as an obvious conclusion that anyone who donates to them in spite of this must be an idiot dilettante who doesn't even understand what they're giving money to. I don't think that's a reasonable conclusion to draw. I think a much more reasonable conclusion to draw would be that Mackenzie Scott supports affirmative action in college admissions, doesn't mind supporting an organization that supports affirmative action in college admissions, and knows exactly what she's supporting.
Again, not trying to change your mind about the organization or about Scott, trying to encourage you to express yourself in a more useful way so that readers actually know what it is you're trying to say.
That's fair--I was trying to avoid a lengthy rant.
> But then that's not the only leap you make. It's not just taken as obvious that AAJC is an anti-Asian organization, and everyone knows that, and no one could think differently: it's also taken as an obvious conclusion that anyone who donates to them in spite of this must be an idiot dilettante who doesn't even understand what they're giving money to.
I'll get to AAJC in a moment, but I want to address this first. My conclusion that MacKenzie Scott is a dilettante is based on timing. She donated a bunch of bunch of money to random racial justice organizations just a couple of months after George Floyd was killed, and again shortly after the "AAPI Hate" news cycle after the Atlanta shootings. But she has no track record of involvement with Asian communities or Asian issues in the past. There is no reason to believe she has any understanding of the issues facing Asian Americans, what they want, or who really represents their interests. She just up and decided to donate to a bunch of organizations purporting to represent minorities. That's the opposite of Bill Gates-style "informed philanthropy."
Ordinarily, uninformed donations merely risk being wasteful. In the context of identity-based organizations, however, they can be severely prejudicial to minorities. Asians, Hispanics, etc., all have specific interests. There are myriad internal debates within those groups about everything from policing to welfare. But wealthy white donors like MacKenzie Scott can effectively be kingmakers--their donations can completely drown out grass-roots support. And they create an incentive structure where the most successful organizations end up being the ones that make themselves attractive to donors like Scott, not the ones that are most effective at advocating for Asians or Hispanics.
> Based on what I've found, I assume what you mean is that this organization seems to support affirmative action in college admissions, a position that sets them apart from many other Asian groups, and which you could argue hurts Asian participation in colleges relative to a race-neutral admissions standard.
It's undeniable that affirmative action and movements to end meritocratic admissions hurts Asians. If Ivy League student bodies perfectly reflected the country's composition, you'd eliminate about 60-70% of the Asians. In Silicon Valley it would be over 80%. As shown by the voting on Prop 16, Asian voters oppose such measures even in California. In Virginia, the end of meritocratic admissions at TJHSST resulted in Glenn Youngkin getting half the Asian vote--a remarkable result given that almost all Asians in the state live in heavily Biden-voting liberal Northern Virginia.
It doesn't matter whether you think it's the right thing to do on the whole. If you're an organization purporting to represent Asian interests, it's unconscionable to support policies that reduce Asian representation and are contrary to what Asians themselves want. But AAJC goes further than that. They sought to overturn a federal district court judgment in Virginia that found that changes to the admissions process of a public magnet high school were "racially motivated": https://cases.justia.com/federal/district-courts/virginia/va... (p. 16). In that case, one of the Board members behind the policy indicated in a text message that the policy changes seemed to have an “anti Asian” motivation.
Can you imagine the NAACP ever throwing its weight behind policies intended to reduce Black representation, where there was evidence of "anti Black" motivation? That would never happen.
Matt Yglesias has written at length about organizations that lend Asian identity and political capital to generic progressive causes funded primarily by white mega donors like MacKenzie Scott. See this excellent article from Matt Yglesias about the "Asian" organizations opposing Andrew Yang: https://www.slowboring.com/p/yang-gang?s=r ("However, I think a more important point about Yang versus the activists here is that it reveals — and not for the first time — that progressive identity-oriented activist organizations often have very little connection to the groups they purport to represent.")
There is a long tradition of this. These organizations purport to represent minority groups, but by necessity work to advance the ideological interests of their mostly white benefactors. Yglesias references an excellent paper by Devin Fernandes at Johns Hopkins that deconstructs this phenomenon in the context of Ford Foundation using its donations to overhaul the Mexican-American Legal Defense Fund: https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/bitstream/handle/1774.2....
As Yglesias writes about Fernandes: "Ford funds MALDEF because it wants to do Mexican-American political organizing — but it wants that organizing to reflect Ford’s vision, which means the group needs to be somewhat insulated from the views of actual Mexican-Americans."
AAJC is also skeptical of hate crime laws because of their purported impact on other groups: https://www.advancingjustice-aajc.org/press-release/groundbr.... They have also adopted the rhetoric of anti-Asian groups in calling Asian values regarding assimilation, work, and education, a "model minority myth.”
Scott's uneducated and irresponsible philanthropy contributes to the disenfranchisement of Asians in the political discourse. Her donations to organizations like AAJC not only drowns out the voice of organizations who don't make themselves so attractive to wealthy white people. They enable AAJC and others to actively campaign against the interests of the Asians they purport to represent.
Many are funded by government entities under political control. They end up supporting whatever agenda the powerful politicians are pushing or else they risk losing that funding. Almost invariably this is not the same as Asian interests.
Currently the top issues in the SF Asian community are crime and education (and inflation and small business hassles to a lesser degree). This what everyone talks about. Yet the local Asian orgs have been counterproductive on all of these fronts and are actively support the politicians widely blamed for exacerbating these problems.
Really disheartening to see almost every SF Asian leader co-opted by the rich or powerful. Similar dynamic in other racial and affinity groups. Anyone with influence eventually sells out the people they have influence over. These orgs just institutionalize that transaction.
It would be one thing if your point was that billionaires should keep their grubby hands off of Twitter, but that's not what I see you to be saying here. You seem to just object to Scott being involved.
What’s anti-Asian about AAJC? The only thing I found is that management treated its unionized employees like shit.
Given twitter has not respected free speech, and Elon has no track record (AFAIK) of thwarting free speech, what makes him so wrong?
And the other guy was a guy that pushed himself into the media light and made headlines and also not deserving any.
Musk is also in a leadership position where his opinion is highly valued by many thousands, and he decided to abuse that authority and power.
"Pedo guy" is not defamation, just an insult barked back at someone who told him to stick a submarine where the sun doesn't shine.
Not the classiest response, but nothing to cry about.
Considering we're talking about someone who's footing the bill to make significant innovation in multiple sectors, I still view him favourably. I disagree with him politically on a few topics and agree on others.
I hope it's not going to be like DuckDuckGo, which started like a service against Google biased / curated results and ended up manually hiding what they deemed russian propaganda during the latest war, effectively doing what Google was doing.
That's despicable. He's an evil narcissist and a dangerous person.
This absolutist and judgmental attitude is what makes social networks hell. I wonder what your worst moment was and whether it happened offline or online, and how would you like to be judged for it by others.
Too many people cosplay the Old Testament God.
It was not just a "moment"; he could have said that he misspoke and that he was sorry. But he persisted, and put up a nonsensical defense where he said "pedo" was a kind of nice nickname in his home country in his youth (which nobody corroborated).
He showed that what he wants is eradicate opponents and will stop at nothing. That's probably what has brought him where he is. But we don't have to respect it.
Elon was mean on Twitter. It's not like he paid people in the Thai government to frame the guy or something - which would seem much more "stop at nothing" to me.
I think it's basically the same moral fault, though maybe a slight difference of degree, to accuse a person of being a pedophile on bad evidence as it is to accuse someone of being an evil narcissist out to eradicate on bad evidence.
Also the insult matters. "Pedophile" is currently, in the English speaking world, the worst label imaginable. This was not just any insult, the kind one says when they're annoyed at someone in traffic for example. This was intended to kill. It was extremely mean. I maintain it revealed his true character.
But you're free to think I reveal mine.
Regarding "evidence" Elon's reasoning, if I recall correctly, was that an adult man moving to Thailand was inherently suspicious for pedophilia. Thailand has some reputation for sex tourism, especially of the underage variety. This is, as I said, bad evidence. Likewise, your belief that Elon is an evil narcissist who will stop at nothing to eradicate opponents is based on bad evidence - the mean/bad tweets.
Finally, I don't think that you reveal your character. I don't judge people based on short comments - at least not comments such as these. Just like I don't think Elon's tweets were especially revealing or damaging to his character I don't think your comments are that meaningful for your character.
TL;DR free speech is between you and the government, not between you and someone else or some other company.
Then the government should pass laws stating that these private corporations are no longer able to moderate their own platforms as they see fit. There is no "second meaning" without concrete legal precedent.
this is a clear violation of the First Amendment, which makes it legal to publish lies.
Yep — here we're getting into Prior Restraint. It's both against the law to restrain free speech such as lies, but as you rightly point out, this speech can have other legal consequences.
Tell them to call it freedom of expression if you're so inclined, and keep supporting their fight for it.
Anything less is detracting from their point, seemingly intentionally.
(the term gets thrown around a lot, and has been devalued into meaninglessness by the Russian government, but it does have a legal meaning in Germany and France)
really now?
That and its excessive use on social media renders "Nazi" mostly useless as a descriptor, outside of those groups that explicitly and deliberately reference Nazi symbology and ideology.
Note: smaller than that of the same ideological but different geopolitical alignment that Russia has been sponsoring for years (Azov exists, but it's smaller than Sparta) in the same conflict.
>some far-right militia activity in some places
FYI, those guy with wolfsangel and black sun insignias and swastika tattoos are not a militia but a legitimate unit of Ukraine's national guard
https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/sonnen...
https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/wolfsa...
That's up for debate. Modern communication is so monopolized by twitter/FB that the argument of "they are a private company" no longer holds.
We can bemoan Russian interference in the elections all we want. But the power Twitter/FB hold is far more impactful on domestic and international democracy than any russian agent every could be.
Yes, everyone knows that.
It's a bit different though when you have massive social media platforms that have monopolies over public discourse.
Well, one alternative would be that they have to decouple their front-end and back-end and provide open APIs to their backend (posts/tweets, friends lists, etc.).
Facebook/Twitter can moderate/censor whatever they want on their own front-ends, but they can't remove anything from the backend.
People/companies can build alternative front-end apps that access the fb/twitter graphs and censor in a different way - so that users have an alternative.
(Note that FOSTA/SESTA already imposes a proactive legal obligation to censor within the US, and overrides s230)
No, it's not. If you want corporations to be beholden to the first amendment then pass laws saying that private companies can no longer moderate their platforms, full stop.
Elon could build and own 100% a competitor to Twitter for much less than the 3 billion he spent to get 9% of twitter.
The problem is getting the competitor to have traction. For that you need to have the idea for a differentiator that will hook people, and unlike engineering talent you can't buy this!
Everybody knows this? Truth Social needs to be told. The app can barely launch, and got a head start forking Mastadon as far as we know. They have hundreds of millions (a few billion?) in capitalization.
Everyone knows people who haven’t actually tried tend to underestimate the difficulty in other’s work.
To be clear, nowhere did I say the engineering is the hardest part.
I have an entire bookshelf of books about how to do this, but I’ve never been asked about it during a coding interview. I think it's less of "you can't buy it" and more of that no one values it.
https://www.amazon.com/Building-Successful-Online-Communitie...
But I also like Seth Godin's books a lot, e.g. All Marketers Are Liars, Free Prize Inside, and Purple Cow.
A lot of my reading on web stuff has been vaguely in those categories though, in terms of either academic research, academic theory, digital ethnography stuff, psychology and sociology, marketing theory/praxis, plus whatever I've read on design and UX.
I would say the single book that founders in the tech industry would benefit from reading the most is probably Punished By Rewards by Alfie Kohn. I feel like every other startup puts themselves out of business by fucking up on the super basic things that book discusses. I end up having to explain it to people all the time.
The mere fact that the platform belongs to him can help a lot
There is no doubt hes not happy with the current way Twitter restricts speech which is heavily biased and so he wants to change that.
Nope, he has a history of silencing or trying to silence opinions that he doesn't like.
Edit: Why is this downvoted? How does it make any sense to have them as public, for profit, companies, when we all know what happens when their growth stops? How sleazy they all become? Heck, they're sleazy as-is. Who here likes where Reddit is headed, for example?
To be honest interpolation is something that will be ripe for abuse by actors like 4Chan just because they can. I’m not seeing a way to ensure the banning of users while allowing interoperability that isn’t solved already by email.
If the solution to this is to not allow the banning of users, then how does one combat things such as child porn, revenge porn, etc.
I'm also not for absolute free speech, so yes, users should be banable in case of abuse.
The main thing I'm against is the fact we're taking for granted various methods of online communication (Twitter like broadcast, Reddit-like centralized forums, plus I'd actually put WhatsApp like instant messengers here). And they should just be dumb pipes.
They shouldn't try to add a ton of smart features they sell to <<other companies>>. Because their incentives are out of alignment with their direct user needs. They will serve whoever pays them instead of whoever uses them.
The classic enterprise software dilemma which in that case creates functionally horrible software. For online software it creates morally horrible software, instead.
ActivityPub is a W3C specification at the Recommendation stage, which basically means it's ready for production.
This would allow groups like, oh, house.gov to run their own platform and assign every congress person their own interoperable user account (AOC@HOUSE.GOV for example) and it works pretty much the same way email works.
The problem is, companies know these and they subtly sabotage these standardization efforts.
Look at the web. Desktop UI toolkits have had solid components since the start. From the late 80s and early 90s. The web is maybe getting them universally in 2024.
I mean, it's great that we have standards, but can you really afford to wait 30-40 years? I'll be frank with you, if you're a professional in our field, 30-40 years is your entire career. Many people in IT actually retire even earlier or move up to management and basically out of regular IT, after 5-10-15 years.
And people can only care so much. Heck, many Open Source hackers move on after 5-10 years. Only a handful last 30 years.
Faster moving standards are a sort of utopia, it seems.
Elon has the emotional stability of my 13 year old cousin, and changes his mind as often.
There is zero sign that his support for free speech is a spontaneous idea that he will lose interest about in a few month. And there is also no way to achieve it but certainly there is plenty room to improve with Twitter.
He is still actively pursuing those goals, they are just very difficult projects. Objectively he has done more for promoting space travel than most any other individual today.
He has his flaws sure, but people generally admire his willingness to pursue bold aspirations with extreme tenacity.
- Elon wants to take Tesla private and has the capitalization
- Elon wants to rescue Thai children stuck in a cave
- Elon will sell Tesla stock to end world hunger
- Elon wants to fight Putin in a 1-on-1 to end the war in Ukraine
- Elon thinks 98% of the US will be covered in Supercharging stations by 2015
- Elon wants to send 2 people into space by 2018
...
Elon has a long history of underestimating how difficult things are and gives up quietly or is proven immediately to be wrong.
Edit:
Forgot about this site https://www.elonmusk.today/ which does a better job than my memory of documenting some of Elon's outrageous tweets.
Add:
- Elon wants to fund the repairs of any house in Flint that's water contaminated.
- Elon wants to use bricks from the Boring Company to create low cost housing.
- Elon is starting a candy company that will be amazing.
- Elon wants to use SpaceX rockets to power aircrafts for quicker trips from New York to London in 29 minutes.
- Elon received government approval (verbally) to build a tunnel for the hyperloop from New York City to Washington DC.
...
BTW he did give them the money: https://fortune.com/2022/02/15/elon-musk-5-7-billion-donatio...
They wouldn't give him a plan...which I bet he figured would happen.
The long-term conversation ended with him asking questions about rampant child abuse under the watch of the UN.
Get your facts straight.
He tweeted about it after he'd bought the stock but before that knowledge was public, which I think is further proof that Musk is somewhat disingenuous.
After buying but before announcing seems like a good time to see what your fans think.
Musk behavior is such a rorschach test.