If Elon Musk gets his way, Twitter will lose years of progress
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Twitter isn't important. It doesn't matter if it fails.
MySpace declined into irrelevancy. The world didn't end.
I happen to really enjoy twitter. It got better when trump was kicked off. It’s getting better now. So called free speech champion Musk will only ruin it.
Life doesn't revolve around social media. Social media didn't exist two decades ago, and things were just fine. Multiple social media platforms have come and gone, and things are just fine.
It's a freaking media platform, nothing else.
There was Usenet in 1980.
Also, deleting all posts and links to the Hunter Biden laptop story before the election might have drastically changed the election. Is asking them to be fair for stories on the right as well as stories on the left asking too much?
What about the other censorship I mentioned, ie. banning all Hunter Biden content for being "false" when it was (and always has been, and still is) actually true?
If it allowed to edit, then its subject to the laws of a mag or news paper.
If it's not subject to those laws then it's not allowed to edit.
It has to choose.
Section 230(c)(2)
Trump fits all of that AND is a threat to democracy. That there’s porn on the site doesn’t matter.
It's the enforcement of the rules unequally that many of us find repulsive.
Where does it say they have to be equal in their treatment? It doesn’t. There’s a right side and a wrong side to things. If Twitter leans left by not editorializing and editing things on one side or the other so be it. For now they’re taking down things I disagree with and that’s fine by me. Those that don’t like it can go to Parler, Truth Social (lol), Gettr, or any other such place.
First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a communist; Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a socialist; Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a trade unionist; Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out - because I was not a Jew; Then they came for me - and there was no one left to speak out for me.
Which one of your friends do you nominate to tell you what you can and cannot read? Which one of your family members do you nominate to tell you what you can and cannot say?
If a person cannot nominate one for each then you can't say you agree with moderation.
As long as it is the side you prefer. Sweet irony would be Elon taking it over and making it switch sides.
Despite how hilarious that would be, I would prefer the site be fair to both sides and allow open discourse.
I don't agree that we're Trump loving here. I personally thought he did the world wrong. He pulled down the collective brain. But I will say he's not alone.
I think the issue of free speech can best be summed up in this question.
Which one of your friends or family members do you wish to nominate as the person who gets to tell you what you can read? If you cannot nominate one person (specifically one person) then you can't honestly argue against FS.
It is privately owned, but it acts as a public square. For the same reasons that we defend the right to Free Speech at the public level, we should push the platforms that act as public squares to guarantee Free Speech.
We have already seen how limiting Free Speech, in the name of fighting "disinformation", can be abused.
This is the kind censoring I've personally been subjected to:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28411734
Meanwhile on Twitter, the "fact-checkers" are now taking it upon themselves to try to discredit tweets that make the leading personalities of the political left look bad:
This is abuse of the allegedly impartial fact-checking process for clearly ideological ends.
Another demonstration of this is the Facebook "whistleblower". She explained that she was motivated to blow the whistle after one of her friends was, in her words, radicalized, through Facebook. Of course she doesn't consider herself, a lifelong "ally" and supporter of far-left causes, who worked on a search feature allowing Pinterest users to search by skin tone - in order to discriminate in favor of people of certain colors - radicalized. Because that's pro-establishment radicalism.
Yet another would be Twitter's policy of banning people who refer to males who present as women with male gender pronouns. This moderation policy enforces left-wing ideological values, like the idea that gender is a property that is self-chosen, and for something that acts as a public square to push left wing ideology via censorship is deeply inappropriate.
Like Glenn Greenwald said:
https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1434854149087182848
>>The entire "anti-disinformation"/"anti-extremism" industry is a gigantic fraud, funded by the same tiny handful of billionaires, governments and NGOs: a scam to control discourse while feigning neutral, non-ideological goals to battle "disinformation"
The fight against disinformation is really a fight to stifle dissent against the establishment and its official ideology, which I prefer to call Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity (DIE).
> It is privately owned, but it acts as a public square. For the same reasons that we defend the right to Free Speech at the public level, we should push the platforms that act as public squares to guarantee Free Speech.
I disagree.
Free speech means that no government has the right to tell content publishers - in this instance Twitter - what to and what not to publish, modulo the standard legal exclusions of child abuse material and incitement. (This viewpoint changes if we're discussing a common-carrier or a natural monopoly, where universal service obligations are necessary).
On the Internet, it's the Internet itself which is the public square. The content publishers like Twitter are merely commercial operators of 'printing presses' which make their material available to information consumers/citizens within that public square.
Content publishers should have every right to censor/reject/moderate any content submitted to them. If the content submitter doesn't like this, then they too can spin up their own content publishing platform on the Internet and publish what they desire.
And for that reason, as private citizens, we should use market means, like the one Musk is resorting to, to push for it to respect Free Speech, so that diverse viewpoints have the space to be expressed. If major platforms, that act as public squares, play the role of picking and choosing what content can be published, and if they all coalesce around the same values in deciding what content to permit, then inevitably, the public discourse will be severely constrained, and biased in favor of the dominant narrative. This is dangerous to society because it eliminates the rigorous and unbounded discourse needed to solve the complex problems society faces.
I guess this must be a Your-Mileage-May-Vary situation.
I've never used Twitter as anything more than just (rarely) reading it as a micro-blogging web-page, never published anything on it, never interacted with anyone on it and have always encouraged everyone I know to also avoid using it.
Perhaps if you and others did the same, then we wouldn't need to be having this discussion.
We have to work hard to make sure that the Internet and only the Internet remains the public space, and to never give such power to any entities like Twitter - commercial or otherwise.