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Comment by shrubble | Hacker News Reader

1) I don't recall much outrage over Amazon's Jeff Bezos, a billionaire, buying the Washington Post; nor that the Atlantic is owned by Steve Jobs' widow. Nor the many other cases of rich and powerful people owning media properties.

2) Is it really that much of a "public square"? Since only about 22% of USA adults are on Twitter; and 80 percent of the tweets come from 10 percent of users (thus 2.2% of the USA population). see https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2019/04/24/sizing-up-tw...

Could it be more that the noisy journalists are on Twitter, but the rest of us don't really care all that much ... ?

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Moreover, few were willing to regard Twitter as a “de facto public square” when the cancel culture debates were raging. Then Twitter was merely a private company exercising its rights to moderate its platform… which I sympathize with, but also there’s a functional reason to enforce free speech in the public square, and at a certain scale social media is the public square and it’s probably better to protect the rights of the many at the expense of the owner. I suspect if Musk buys Twitter it will reveal some hypocrisy on both sides (some “free-speech” people will advocate for Musk’s right to moderate as he sees fit and other “private platform” people will advocate against moderation).

Of course, whether or not social is “a public square” is not well-defined.

So what rights to Twitter should the people have and what mechanism would be used to enforce those rights? Or has Twitter not reached the scale where you consider it the public square?

I don’t really know what to do with Twitter. I think it could be interesting to regulate social media networks such that they are required to speak some open protocol. Twitter is thus just one portal/view into an underlying network, and they can moderate it how they like but you could also switch to some other portal while continuing to interact with your Twitter contacts. Basically Twitter doesn’t own your content or your connections; you can take that with you if you leave Twitter. But that’s pretty radical; I don’t necessarily advocate it.

The most concerning thing about twitter is the combination of A) people on twitter thinking twitter is representative and normal, combined with B) journalists taking A as gospel.

I love articles on tabloid sites like CNN et al that have a headline of "People are freaking out over X!"

And then the article is composed of 5 random people who tweeted about X.

The Twitter-induced infantilization of journalism isn't even funny anymore. Once I would expect journalists to dig for interesting stuff among their contacts. Sifting through Twitter cannot make up for that.

"What's an invesssstigative journalisssst, my preciouss hobbitsses?" - "Something from the First Age, Sméagol."

And once they publish the article, other people share it and some portion of people say "I can't believe people are saying X!" without realizing it was 5 bots.

Lather, rinse, repeat, and suddenly you have a "movement" or "trend" from absolutely nothing.

Check out Ryan Holliday's "Trust me, I'm lying" to see how it works.

And all of the people turn out to be bots run by the same propaganda firm pushing a narrative.

Not just CNN, pretty much all of the main media providers do exactly this.

> Could it be more that the noisy journalists are on Twitter, but the rest of us don't really care all that much ... ?

Most of the available evidence seems to indicate most of Twitter is bots or people who are indistinguishable from bots because they don't have any opinions of their own. I don't see much loss in Twitter being bought, or ceasing to exist entirely.

> 2) Is it really that much of a "public square"? Since only about 22% of USA adults are on Twitter; and 80 percent of the tweets come from 10 percent of users (thus 2.2% of the USA population.

That sounds pretty sizable to me. "Public Square" is an analogy to a physical space where people would gossip and politic, but that doesn't mean everyone in town engaged in it, and popularity isn't a new thing, it would always be the case that a small number of voices have outsized reach.

I cant think of anything remotely in twitters caliber where the public of the world can go to freely gossip with one another.

Scientists, authors, journalists, techies.. a huge amount of really smart creative people are on this platform sharing their lives, cool things they find, & discussing topics & current affairs. I can roll up to any given conversation and join it.

I cant think of anything that comes remotely, no where near as serving as effectively as the public square of the world as twitter.

Dinging it because it only has x% would be modestly interesting to engage in of there was anything even faintly as connective, populated, & open to the world. There is not. Remarking that some people have outsized presence mirrors the real world: to expect the world engages in a public square exactly the same way as one another is absurd & a discredit.

> "Public Square" is an analogy to a physical space where people would gossip and politic

I don't think so, as that analogy would mean literally any space where people gather is a public square, including my living room. Typically what's implied by "public square" is that the space is owned by a government, and the public by proxy, and (in the US at least) is bound by Constitutional restrictions that private entities and citizens aren't.

When people say things like "Twitter is the de facto public square" what they're arguing is that Twitter should be considered (or converted into) public property, and no longer be allowed the free speech rights enjoyed by private enterprise, which include the ability to ban users, or moderate or delete content for any reason other than explicit legal necessity.

What is your address? You're open > 12 hours a day to the public right? How many hundreds of people can you fit?

It feels a weird impulse to me, this being persnickety about what is or isnt a public square. We're comparing trees and oh this one is deciduous but this one is evergreen, so these arent the same sort of assemblages... the differences dont justify overlooking the commonality: these are forests. In the macro these are the same.

And the differences dont even match up. There's a number of what would be considered public squares around that are privately owned. There are court cases about planned redevelopment of some thta would end long decades of public use too, & no clear sense of how these challenges will resolve. I see the common forest of the public square in all of these, even if not all are explocitly carefully planned; that the public is there, & has been, & uses it is a more noteable distinction to me. The behavior not the legalese is the dominant characterizer to me.

Its obvious that twitter is the clear & obvious site for the piblic to congregate & mingle online, without any compare.

> When people say things like "Twitter is the de facto public square" what they're arguing is that Twitter should be considered (or converted into) public property, and no longer be allowed the free speech rights enjoyed by private enterprise,

I do think twitter would be better as a public good, & i think any nation with democratic values whatsoever would be actively competing to create equivalent public utilities, to better protect & afford speech more securely & in perpetuity. I think what uou fear is up for debate, far from certainv calling it a town square or public square doesnt meam twitter has no rights. But perhaps we should indeed limit their corporate personhood tonsome degree, in reflection of their emerged nature as a preeminent public utility. Perhaps.

I dont think you can argue against the logic just because you dont like one possible implication. I tend to think the implication is less dire than you project, but I see it all as very much up for debate, not forgone in how it would conclude.

Indeed, a public square with a potential reach of 2.2% of US population can probably not be realised anywhere locally (f2f). Back of the envelope guess is that would amount to 6-7 million people in one spot.

1) WaPo or The Atlantic are not so intimately involved in my life. I tweet on Twitter and send DMs and meet people, etc. I consider Twitter personally to be much more interactive and actively engaging than most news agencies.

2) fair point that not many people actually talk there. I wonder how many actually talk in a public square though. Probably a similar minority. The thing about Twitter is that it gets quoted in other media sources—TV, radio, print—anf the conversation doesn't stay just to those talking on Twitter. Yes that happens with NYT articles but Twitter amplifies so much conversation so that what gets spread on Twitter often finds its way to dinner tables.

As Scott Adams recently pointed out, even if we restrict this argument to the US, while the numbers are truein a very superficial sense, it completely misses the fact that this 2.2% of the US population seems to decide what journalists get to talk about, which then affects the entire population.

So it's a bit like arguing bees are irrelevant because they are a small percentage of the animal kindgom, completely ignoring the fact that losing the bees would kill off the whole planet.

Quite right!

This process is exposing the hypocrisy of the Twitterverse. They, the vocal blue-checkmarks, were happy and smug when "their guy" -a billionaire, was setting the tone, now that a different billionaire would set a different tone, they are now expressing concern where before they did would dismiss it with, go set up your own platform and a private company can set its own speech rules!

I've been around family lately which means I've been hearing FM radio and seeing TV news. The twitter story was being run nonstop for my entire last visit so at one point I asked everyone if they used twitter or knew anybody who uses twitter and the answer was no from everybody. Everyone knew instagram users and tiktok users but no twitter. I myself use twitter sometimes but it's just when I get linked to tweets, I don't actually use twitter for the sake of using twitter. It's really strange to me that it's given so much more legitimacy than other social media sites when hardly anyone is using it.

It's telling when their concern is that he is going to decrease censorship and increase transparency.

Private media companies are different from platforms. Twitter, Facebook is more like phone network than a broadcasting or printing company.

Media producers have always been since founding been owned and controlled by someone. I really don't understand why is it different that now a some new billionaire owns it...

The UK/NPR model is the only way to do it right. Media companies simply can't make money, and therefore unless there is public funding it is inevitable we'll end up with a bunch of pet media outfits at the whims of rich tycoons.

"I don't recall much outrage over Amazon's Jeff Bezos, a billionaire, buying the Washington Post"

I do. Everyone from Jacobin Mag to Forbes was asking "Why?" and the implications. Was the tenor as furious as Musk with Twitter? Not really, but I'd argue the nature of the news cycle and the tenor of this purchase is quite different. Bezos wasn't known for endless attention grabbing then (and outside of the occasional messy divorce and space dick flight, still isn't now) and the purchase in appearance was very standard faire, albeit a little anxiety inducing for some folks for its implications.

Musk + Twitter on the other hand, follows a couple of years of Elon's post-Trump style endless attention-grabbing via constant performative jackassery/shitposting/sneering at rules of the "mere mortal" class, and includes his defective approach to following SEC rules, hostile takeover antics, etc.

So the "outrage" (and I'd argue it's less actual outrage and more exasperation at the perpetual circus) is a bit different in that respect.

Right, I too remember so many people discussing how bad it was for humans that Bezos bought the Post, and I don’t follow print media news closely.

Since the term “public square” originally referred to a gathering place for a few hundred or few thousand people, I think it can be applied safely to a site with nearly 70 million American users.

22% is absolutely fucking huge

there was a fair bit of noise but the comparison isn't really that apt because the Washington post and the Atlantic aren't even metaphorical public squares but publications by and for the chattering classes and moving from print oligarchs to tech oligarchs in ownership is angels dancing on the head of a pin.

It's because we don't actually love the science, it's just what we lkke to say. Elon was the darling until we didn't need him anymore, he talked to the jujitsu guy, and now he is othered.

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