On april 17th I made the prediction that the US government was in control of twitter for probably this reason. I got flagged for this.
A day later a bunch of former intelligence people basically said this is a good idea. That's funny to me.
A day later a bunch of former intelligence people basically said this is a good idea. That's funny to me.
Thanks, vouched even though I'm not sure your claim about "every major player" being out is correct (https://money.cnn.com/quote/shareholders/shareholders.html?s...). Still, easier to have that conversation elsewhere now that there's a general public conversation about it, so it's harder to hand-wave it away as conspiratorial.
Institutions like Blackrock or Vanguard don't get to vote, they may at most provide a proxy vote at cost.
The typical 'conspiracy' around those 2 is that their management can threaten entities like twitter with delisting. Twitter is then removed from their holdings at tremendous cost. So they have kind of a little threat and they get some say to do stuff like climate change and diversity stuff. Ultimately the orgs still take this upon themselves. It's an easy thing to bluff against.
Yes maybe some of these institutions have some players involved but I dont see it.
Twitter looks tremendously undefended.
It's ultimately a free speech issue. You can't demand people to self-censor because their previous employment places unjustified credibility their nonsensical views. The way to combat this is through better civic and media literacy.
You're right but is this one a goofy take? Or is there a real something here?
He was on Babylon Bee's show. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvGnw1sHh9M 2.4 million views in last 3 months. In this video they in detail discuss the problem with political banning.
2 months later, Babylon Bee got banned off twitter for a joke. Clear political banning and violation of section 230.
The idea is you won't get banned for making jokes about trans stuff, but you'll instead get banned for saying something bad about US global hegemony. It's not a culture war issue so nobody is going to care that you got censored.
This has been posted a bunch of times, and it's wrong. Section 230 doesn't prohibit political bannings. It doesn't actually prohibit any banning at all.
This is the relevant section (from https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230).
> (2) Civil liability > No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of— > (A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or > availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, > lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise > objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected;
Even banning for constitutionally protected speech is explicitly allowed.
Whether that's a good thing or not is a separate conversation, but nothing presently in section 230 would prevent Twitter/Facebook/etc from banning an entire political party.
Technology based mesh networks are not going anywhere. Unless the public itself revolts against the state it will always stick its fingers in them.
One planet, one reality on the ground. If people don’t want big government they need to replace it.
You call it brand building, I call it destroying democracy.
Former intelligence people churn out all sorts of goofy takes because they're paid to, and after those goofy takes have been blasted by every corporate media outlet 24 hours a day for a month or two, they transform from goofy takes into orthodoxies that you could be fired for denying.
Vast amounts of ground, fortunately. How about the fact that we can have these conversations fully uncensored? That little thing known as freedom of speech, which is still overwhelmingly alive and well. I enjoy its use, aggressively, on a daily basis without persecution and have for decades uninterrupted.
[1] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/muenchen-urteil-faceboo...
He certainly wouldn't be supportive of censoring racist commentary that didn't incite immediate physical violence.
For example, if your main form of communication online is through companies owned by Meta, it’s very easy to effectively censor a point of view or group of people through deplatforming, but if there are dozens of platforms that becomes more difficult.
While more authoritarian countries rely on direct censorship, the US instead promotes the viewpoints they want people to subscribe to: positive reinforcement. You can see this with the government’s involvement with the entertainment industry, or with the military paying sports leagues to promote patriotic displays.
Tech companies being private entities means that they can censor or at least stop the viral effects of social media on ideas that don’t fit the mold.
There’s a lot you can do to shape public opinion without violating the first amendment.
It’s kind of similar to the way local news stations will run “stories” that amount to advertisements for various products or local businesses. Or you might see a funny meme on Reddit where the joke mostly has to do with a company.
Not to say that there aren’t valid reasons to do stuff like this…there’s plenty of harmful speech out there that makes the world a worse place. Hateful, violent, or misleading speech is a legitimate problem. For example, there’s a report that claims most anti-vaccination online content comes from just 12 sources. [1]
It seems a little bit alarming that such a small group can amplify speech in a way that has cost perhaps thousands of lives.
[1] [PDF] https://f4d9b9d3-3d32-4f3a-afa6-49f8bf05279a.usrfiles.com/ug...
The bigger point to discuss. If twitter is under control of the US government. I have no idea if it is or not, it just seems to be the case.
You dont get to make the comment 'twitter is private, free speech only applies to government' because twitter == government.
The other consideration I had. What if the us government doesnt explicitly own twitter. They simply dont realize the us government has hacked access to moderate and censor things in a clandestine way? Now it's an even more complicated subject but wouldn't justify the stock market situation that brings me to the point.
it's true, twitter == government but not twitter === government. Meaning that the conversion happens in the underlying JIT engine where government hacks twitter to do what it wants.
So the idea is that you could make a first amendment complaint against the government for hacking twitter if it infringed your free speech with that hack, but you could not say twitter cannot just turn off my account because while twitter == government it does not === government.
I ask because I'm pretty sure real (non-US government) people post to Twitter and get real retweets. How is the US government controlling it?
I imagine this would have blown wide open a long time ago if true. (Also Occam's Razor?)
I feel like Twitter had an outsized representation along social media giants. It’s one of the smallest by MAU; and has a history of management problems. Isn’t occans razor here that is just a poorly run company?
I don't use twitter. Because of Elon I wanted to test and do have an account right now. I connected to my canadian political folks and chess people. I liked lots of things, but I never commented or retweeted. I then commented on a chess person with a positive tweet and I was quietly censored. Absolutely no way should have my account been treated this way.
>I feel like Twitter had an outsized representation along social media giants. It’s one of the smallest by MAU; and has a history of management problems. Isn’t occans razor here that is just a poorly run company?
If you're listed on the S&P500, you can't say that's poorly run. Poorly run would never have gotten there.
This is no different than HN's shadowbans but I don't see people complain about free speech on HN to the same frequency on Twitter. Further still, the fact that you are only just now creating an account further reinforces to me that most people don't actually use Twitter and their entire perception of the platform comes from news headlines. Twitter has the least amount of moderation of all the social media giants. Try posting porn on Facebook and seeing how long that lasts.
When you say your tweet was censored, you mean it's no longer on your timeline? If your tweet was deleted Twitter would have sent you an email about it. If you are complaining that that you can't see it in the user's replies, well any large twitter user is going to have many replies, and a message from a new account will likely not make the top of the fold.
>If you're listed on the S&P500, you can't say that's poorly run. Poorly run would never have gotten there.
Enron??? The many dot coms?? Lehman Brothers?? There hasn't been a major stock market correction in nearly 15 years; there are plenty of companies out there that are swimming naked. Twitter management is no stranger to public executive issues with it's board + CEO.
I retract my comment that US gov owns Twitter. It's not that, it's way way worse. I had an incorrect assumption.
My mistake. Maybe I can't think of the one I'm trying to think of. I don't need a name or rule really.
Philosophically speaking, if you have a few competing ideas and no way to come to a conclusion. The simplest explanation is the best one to go with.
> Positing a connection between Twitter and the US government, without supporting evidence but just because it "makes sense" - is anything but parsimonious. That remains true even if such a connection does eventually turn out to exist. "Do not attribute to malice that which is explained by incompetence" is likely to be the more applicable principle here.
I did provide evidence in my original post. Perhaps you dont accept my evidences for some reason?
I believe I should consider a rebuttal to my evidences. Are the other S&P500 companies so tremendously undefended from takeover?
WBD recently joined S&P and they are pretty undefended, not as bad as twitter.
CPT is worse than WBD.
MOH is worse than CPT.
NDSN is about WBD.
CEG is worse than all of them.
Woah. I kind of disproved myself? I haven't considered this. Tesla is like the only defended stock I can find? I haven't checked them all.
https://www.multpl.com/s-p-500-pe-ratio
Haven't checked on this in awhile. It's high but is trending down post covid recession.
The S&P500 is full of zombies? Is this seriously happening? wow. I haven't seen anyone talking about this. What the hell happened?
Just checked TSX60 for Canada. AEM, AQN, ATD, BCE, BMO, BNS, ABX, and they are all good. BHC is the first one that looks maybe questionable but nowhere near problematic.
Just checked a random selection of FTSE 100. BP, BATS, BLND. All healthy.
I feel like disproving myself wasn't a good thing though. I need to go spend some time on questrade.
People have been talking about it[1]; it's just that Elon hasn't so it doesn't end up in the media hype cycle. The S&P 500 is really just the 5 big megacap stocks.
That's what makes this Twitter so weird, as a company it's relatively unremarkable; it's not larger than Snapchat both in terms of marketcap and MAU, but in the media you would think it's the primary competitor to Meta.
Twitter gets a lot of flack about censorship and free speech; but it's by far the most libertarian platform - it still has a chronological timeline! If you had followed Donald Trump on Twitter, you would see all his tweets whenever he tweeted them. If you followed him on Facebook, Facebook would hide most of his posts on your feed! And yet Twitter is the boogeyman, the enemy of free speech.
Twitter the company, and Twitter the boogeyman are two seperate entities. If you read about Twitter from NYT headlines, maybe it makes sense they are government controlled. If you actually spend time on the platform you will find a platform that largely hasn't changed in the past 10 years, but still trying to wrangle it's political influence since the Arab spring days.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/10/investing/sp-500-tech-stocks/...
This isn't it. I follow financial news, primarily financial post and economist, I havent seen anyone talk about this at all. It's crazy that I even thought to check on this. Obviously twitter being undefended was quite unusual, why would they all be this way?
In fact when I look at Microsoft and Apple... holy shit I haven't seen the problem that bad.
Meta isn't bad, but then again 500 billion market cap and pe ratio of 13? wtf? different problem altogether. People are clearly predicting huge crash on meta. No idea if that's coming.
Amazon isn't bad at all. Bezos is defending just as Musk is defending Tesla. I probably should go through all the S&p. I wonder if other stock markets are seeing this. UK and Canada obviously arent.
>Twitter the company, and Twitter the boogeyman are two seperate entities. If you read about Twitter from NYT headlines, maybe it makes sense they are government controlled. If you actually spend time on the platform you will find a platform that largely hasn't changed in the past 10 years, but still trying to wrangle it's political influence since the Arab spring days.
No that's not the problem. I dont think that the us gov is controlling anymore. When I checked tsx60 and ftse1000 there's no examples for at least the ones I checked. I admittedly didnt check them all.
I have never seen this before, it's not natural. I don't know what the terminology would be. Zombie is the wrong word. Of all my positions, Tyson is the only 1 that is bad like this; though I'm not exposed to the USA that much.
Arab spring days? Yes.
I expect it may even start the same way. Will it be a Nicholas McCrary?
Will it be food scarcity? Biden publicly said this will be the case.
Elon is way ahead of me in understanding the situation.
Let's not start coding political documents in JavaScript now. (Insert additional joke about the interpreter engine running on 9 robed meat processors).
That hasn't been true for months. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_United_States_Capitol_att...
Wiki used to call it insurrection but it's not that. I understand the criticism that perhaps it's because it's political, but that's the because the whole subject is political.
>It was certainly a dangerous mob driven by Trump and cronies intending to interfere with the US election proceedings without justifiable cause beyond pseudo-creedal feelings that somewhere, somehow, the election was stolen.
Dangerous seems an over reach.
Contemporary comparison you have mostly peaceful riots and actual insurrections like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Hill_Occupied_Protest
It's really important to see what's happening here. It's ultra important to be able to talk about these things.
Republicans need to address the police brutality and objectively proven racism.
Democrats need to address some things as well.
These conversations have to happen and they are going to hurt.
They don't call it insurrection only because "seditious conspiracy" is the more legally accurate term, and the charge on which convictions have already been obtained. But ask a layperson to describe the difference and you'll get nothing. Even the US house and senate voted on impeachment for "incitement of insurrection" despite the legal distinction. Saying that it's "not insurrection[legal]" might be true, but HN is not a court and saying "not insurrection[common]" here is false.
\o layperson here. My observation of January 6 was the people being punished were part of a hapless, mindless mob who believed the lies of kakistocrats playing on their economic insecurities and political loyalties.
>They don't call it insurrection only because "seditious conspiracy" is the more legally accurate term, and the charge on which convictions have already been obtained.
I think I saw this on twitter. I'm not going to argue over this one. Even the wikipage extensively uses the word insurrection still.
This is a super non-issue. In fact, the differing reactions and hard line take on these contemporary political protests is all that matters.
I could also point out, but it won't help: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republican_efforts_to_restrict...
Elon isn't too late. Seemingly he's ahead of me on this one. I didn't realize how bad it is.
I just hope Canada and Mexico stay out of this.
Trump lost, can nobody see that continuing to talk about him is counterproductive? On both sides!
If you read my prior comment, you'll note a distinct lack of discussion regarding this unrelated topic.
> But another "protest" gets a little out of hand and it's an attempt to overthrow the government.
Correct. The mob that actually performed the violent protest may not have come to the Capitol that day to overthrow the government, but the people spurring them on had other designs. Calling for the murder of the government official performing their duty is a key tell for that; to my understanding there is further evidence beyond incendiary and violent rhetoric.
But please, let's stay on topic instead of deflecting to the ills of Antifa and her counter-agitators. That conversation just reinforces the backfire effect since the trivial triggering conversation challenges deeply held worldviews.[0]
Don't confuse tools with crafters.
Don't let the tiny vocal minority of fools chanting election fraud trick you into thinking regular folks would go along with some half-baked coup attempt - they'd be met with laughter and scorn. I've discussed this at length with friends and family, some of whom have pretty strong political views.
But if they're in nominal control of the military, and have 40% of the country expressing a modicum of sympathy, then you let loose a pretty dangerous situation.
how many people from Jan 6 have been charged with insurrection?
Here is a quick Google result for your perusal: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.insider.com/all-the-us-capi...