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Comment by smt88 | Hacker News Reader

> An optimistic would think that Elon had enough self-awareness to realize it would be an overall distraction for Twitter with little benefit.

Assuming Musk did take over Twitter, he wouldn't need to be much of a distraction. He could dictate a few rules (don't moderate Twitter, don't ban anyone, etc.) and then leave the company to function as it did before.

I think what he doesn't realize is that reducing moderation on Twitter would lead to a death spiral. Humans would find it less useful, and bots would find it more useful. No one wants to be on a platform that is 99% bots posting inflammatory political content.

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Not really. One of the hard things about changing the course of a company is that you actually need people to do the things you want them to do. That means actually being hands on and checking things are getting done. Otherwise people will nod and agree in meetings and then just carry on as they were before. This is especially hard if people are resistant to the changes you want to make.

Taking over and issuing commands doesn't work unless people have nowhere else to go. If Elon tried that at Twitter there would probably be an exodus of engineering and ops people.

Then you need to deal with the outcome.

If Twitter started doing no (or very little) moderation it would suddenly be in conflict with many laws around the globe including the EU and the US.

That did fly a few years ago but I doubt it does today.

Other shareholders might not be to thrilled about them being banned

The US does not have laws requiring moderation except for illegal content (like child porn) and DMCA takedowns.

Most platforms fail miserably at removing the former and just automate the latter. Twitter could spend a small fraction of their current moderation budget and still be in compliance with US law.

That's right, but other countries do and I've seen plenty of local companies spending advertising dollars on Twitter and targeting local users.

Of course Twitter is free to leave those markets at any time but I don't think other shareholders besides Musk would appreciate that.

Even in America, some brands were not that interested appearing next to fringe/extreme (though legal) content. And advertisers are the real customers of Twitter and all social media after all.

If you read what Musk says now or years ago he actually is very much for moderation, but not censorship or banning people of the platform. In a way Musk is for something similar to HN point system.

I get that, but the line between moderation and censorship is very culture and topic dependent.

That's obviously true for authoritarian countries like China but even in "the West" there are competing definitions of what constitutes free speech.

If you want to operate in those countries (at scale) you need to localize your moderation policies and therefore "take a stance". Cost of doing business globally.

HN is a bad analogy because it has a lot of invisible moderation tools used by the all-powerful moderators, including:

- banning

- shadow-banning

- deleting offensive messages

- detaching off-topic threads

The only difference with HN is that their rules are different. Everything else is very similar to Twitter.

Hn is like Gab though, the users feel aligned with the management ideologically so they don't mind being censored by them.

> One of the hard things about changing the course of a company is that you actually need people to do the things you want them to do.

Dorsey chose not to ban Trump, and then he did. That was a huge change for Twitter, and it didn't seem to rock the boat at the company at all.

Twitter also didn't ban politicians at all for a long time. That was another major policy change that Musk could simply revert back.

Dorsey chose not to ban Trump, and then he did. That was a huge change for Twitter, and it didn't seem to rock the boat at the company at all.

This is (probably) a good example of why it's hard. Dorsey understood that banning Trump would have been problematic, so he didn't. He, and probably others, worked to change the company internally to be somewhere where they could do that. Rather than do it and then deal with the fallout he worked to steer the company to be more open to being to be somewhere without Trump. Then he could ban Trump without the fallout.

That's how you change a company. Buying a big chunk of it and then issuing decrees about how it works now is much less likely to work. No doubt Elon understands that completely, and has no intention of doing it. He'll work to move Twitter in the direction he wants, maybe with the help of others, until he can then claim to have changed it overnight or something. He's not silly.

The company didn't really change at all, it's simply that Jan 6th made it easy to justify the ban.

Small loss.

Bigger than you think. Every right wing "free speech" platform has collapsed in flames partially because it seems like the majority of their people do not have the experience to build and run such a platform. I am reminded of the elementary mistakes made in the design of Parler.

I don't think Musk's ideas about free speech extend to allowing unfettered botting.

Comment isn't referring to spam bots, but the bot networks used for astroturfing.

The "bot networks used for astroturfing" are a much used fiction of pro-Musk and anti-Musk people alike. They basically don't exist. Upvote bot networks exist certainly however.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6246561/

> Here we analyze 14 million messages spreading 400 thousand articles on Twitter during ten months in 2016 and 2017. We find evidence that social bots played a disproportionate role in spreading articles from low-credibility sources. Bots amplify such content in the early spreading moments, before an article goes viral.

I would also be interested in finding more studies that relate to what percentage of scientific research Americans thoughtlessly write off as "fiction" and the corresponding media diets.

You should be aware that academic research into Twitter bots is indeed unreliable. Calling it fiction wouldn't be far wrong. A selection from the many issues you'll find if you read such papers:

- Inability to be replicated, not even in principle.

- Using definitions of "bot" that captures verified humans like e.g. the POTUS.

- Ignoring false positives in the data set or not even trying to measure them at all.

- Using opaque ML models trained off an irrelevant data set which (when measured by outsiders) have 50%+ FP rates.

- Logic errors and difficulty reasoning about causality.

- Mis-statements about what their own data actually shows.

- Refusal to acknowledge or address any of these problems.

There's a paper that thoroughly debunks this field here:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3814191

and it's also available in talk form here:

https://archive.org/details/hopeconf2020/20200726_2000_Peopl...

and if you're in a hurry I summarized the paper here:

https://blog.plan99.net/fake-science-part-ii-bots-that-are-n...

NB: Some of my own meta-research into these papers is cited in their paper and talk.

Edit: I took a quick look at the paper you linked and it has many of the same problems. Amongst other things it explicitly classifies satire as "digital misinformation". One of the authors is Flammini who is well known for writing nonsensical pseudo-scientific papers in this space, in fact, he's mentioned in the talk linked above.

Different cases. Those things are funded by politicians and foreign governments to influence the general populace. The scale is completely different.

What does that even mean? The study refers to the type of bots I was talking about, the same as I suspect that comment's GP is talking about. If there's an extra special variety of astroturfing bots that don't exist, that's great. It seems obvious to me that this discussion was about bots that do exist.

Twitter themselves have said that they have millions of fake accounts in bot networks[1].

What evidence do you have that Twitter is lying about this? Why would they harm their brand by saying that they're infested with bot networks when they actually aren't?

1. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/exclusive-twitter-pul...

There is plenty of evidence they do, can you prove the contrary?

Proving a the lack of existence of something is impossible.

In other words, you're making a claim that's impossible to verify?

He said he's a "free speech absolutist," which is an obvious lie. But if we take him at face value, then free speech must include people paid by foreign governments to post pre-written messages.

That definition of free speech isn't even alien to the US. Corporations' freedom of speech in this country is protected even when it includes paying other people to speak.

An absolutist wouldn't have an issue with a teenager posting public flight data about his jet. Given his maturity level, it wouldn't surprise me if the entire stock purchase started as an attempt to shut down @elonmuskjet.

On 4/9 Musk twitted that he would be in favor of $2/month fee for verified account, paid annually to deter bots.

How can anyone tell the difference between a fascist disinformation network and a sincere idiot?

Well, one has a social security number. Just look at all the information Facebook takes from people, requiring a government issued credential to verify your account isn't even farfetched anymore.

Many governments have been rolling out SSO for their suite of digital service applications, I can totally imagine an "internet passport" type situation in the future, where a government issued SSO authorization can be used by social media companies.

For the record, I'm wholeheartedly against that kind of thing, but it's hardly beyond the pale for the companies in question I think.

> requiring a government issued credential to verify your account isn't even farfetched anymore

Facebook already does this with driver's licenses in the US in some cases.

France does this with age-verification for porn sites. Visit pornhub via French vpn to see.

Why wouldn't government-sponsored influence networks mint "legitimate" passports for their bots/legends?

I wonder whether he's really thought about the technical ramifications, though. Even an edit button would have pretty major consequences and things could get into the weeds pretty fast if you had to start diffing edits to see who retweeted what at which point. This might be the kind of thing that would be a major distraction for Musk if he started to put his engineering mind to it, rather than just making a few snarky quips and letting people make of them what they will.

As opposed to now where it's 98% bots posting inflammatory political content?

The amount of moderation is a completely separate question from whether that moderation is even-handed and the moderators truthful.

Nobody wants bots, but those are not the question in moderation discussions.

So he wants to return it to 2014 Twitter? Oh the humanity!

TBH I'd be also fine with returning to 2004 Twitter.

You mean no twitter at all? Because if that's the point, you can always do what I do with most other social networks — I just don't use them.

Right. But sometimes people who have interesting information choose, for reasons incomprehensible to me, to publish it on twitter. I use nitter.net to get to it, but if they have chosen a less horrible platform it'd be even better.

Media has an impact in the world we live in even without our participation

I think most people forget or are unaware that Twitter was dying before Trump came in and made it an essential platform for every politician and media outlet.

My bet is that engagement is down with all the moderation. This is not an endorsement of Trump, just an acknowledgement of what made Twitter huge/powerful in the first place.

I don't think people are outraged about "bots" being moderated. It's more about huge accounts with non-liberal views like Trump.

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