Good, I hope he buys it and shakes things up. Twitter needs a revamp
whenever something like this happens you have to ask yourself why now and what’s in it for Musk (let’s be real: nobody spends this much without an agenda). My fear is that Musk’s endgame is to reinstate a specific account that was banned after some specific events around a specific election. If this is what’s happening he can frack off.
This will elevate the level of discussion to be more like the highly praised philosophy forum known as 4chan.
I'm sure all the users will appreciate it and not leave immediately.
1. Twitter is totally open free speech 2. This scares people away and user counts drop 3. Twitter censors and users come back
But this didn't happen. Twitter and other, at the time, free speech platforms like Reddit were experiencing rapid user growth throughout their free speech phases. The "this will scare away users" justification for censorship is used entirely as an ex post facto justification.
There's a reason why none of the other purported full free speech platforms ever taking off and it's because they end up so odious that advertisers never go near them and the userbase stalls out. Personally I think most of the people that believe full freedom of speech is possible have never been a moderator of even a small social media platform. If you have two users and one of them is harassing, stalking etc another user you eventually have to make a decision which of the two you want to keep around, and it inevitably involves you censoring one of them.
But it's not good enough, we must be forced to listen to hear how the COVID vaccine is a mind control weapon and why we must fight (((globalists))).
Don't you recognize that this is exactly what happens?
They do end up going to their own corners of the web, and idealogical-activists refuse to leave them alone and try and shut them down wherever they go. Look at how many times Gab, Parler, and other more free speech sites have been shut down.
Given Elon's predilection for trolling it's odd he doesn't realize those people who are banned don't want to build anything, they just want to watch the world burn.
Good. Time to break it up and enforce fair rules.
the reason twitter works and is successful is that you have people from all backgrounds and walks of life. people that get banned don't follow the rules that Twitter has (if the rules are fair, etc, is another discussion, but everyone has to follow the rules)
it's in the direction of "I don't want Musk to mess with Twitter". I personally cannot do anything about it but watch and voice concern, but if enough people see the concern I am voicing maybe this will lead to a better outcome. who knows?
For me, this is the thing that bothers me the most: if he thinks it is the closest we have to a public square, why does he think that the richest private individual in the world should decide how it is run?
It seems he's saying "the oligarchy is not running this well so we should make it a dictatorship, not a democracy," which is in his right to say or believe, I just wonder how much we have lost faith in democracy if we agree.
Isn't the fact that twitter is NOT part of our democracy the crying call of the left? "It's not censorship because it's a private company and they can do what they want (as long as they only censor anything I don't agree with)!"
Oh NO, Elon might make twitter a free speech platform where differing views can be expressed!
I don't claim that the current oligarchy is doing it well, I don't claim that a Musk monarchy would not do it better, and I don't claim that even a democratic structure would do it well.
I was merely trying to point out the different governance structures and question our collective faith in democratic structures.
Allow me to steelman this position a bit for you though. I think the root, gut feel that many Americans have is that they are sick of being pushed around and mismanaged by ineffective, small-minded, out-of-touch bureaucrats. This affliction seems to affect every aspect of our lives. If you have a problem with Comcast, you have to go through a robo call center that makes it physically impossible to actually talk to the people that are authoring your pain. You can't get mad at the person on the phone, because they can rightly say that it's not their fault your bill doubled. And yet, what's left unsaid is that things are specifically arranged this way on purpose.
The social architecture of our society is so "democratic" that there is no responsibility, no human spirit, no .. humanity in the way we deal with things. You can bet that Twitters internals follow this rule, and I'm sure when they talk about the failings they've had as a company, the blame is blandly smeared around. As a democracy fades into a bureaucracy, politics and corporate culture just descends into tee-totalling, cover-your-ass box checking that you're doing everything "by the book". It is the soulless HR department in place of actual values and kinship.
So you might see this newfound lack of faith in democratic structures less as a vote against democracy and more like a vote _for_ humanity. If you put Musk in charge, one thing you know is that there is a dude - a fully human dude, foibles and negative qualities included - who is running things. Looked at from this perspective, you can almost even get your head around what it would be like voting for trump. Okay, maybe not, but maybe you can get a few steps closer.
I appreciate you taking it further and I think I can relate. The frustration with things being too ineffective and the drive to have a human responsible for something. I believe monarchies can be highly efficient, as many other top-down hierarchies. I think the challenge lies in that while one can efficiently help, one can also efficiently harm.
So, yeah, a part of me loves that a human could come in and make it more structured, more "the buck stops here" (ironically from the US President, the leader of a democratic republic), and I also worry about what happens when that person goes in a direction we don't like or a direction that harms or kills us. May seem like an exaggeration for a social media company, however, many genocides have been fueled by language through mass media.
> The social architecture of our society is so "democratic" that there is no responsibility, no human spirit, no .. humanity in the way we deal with things.
This is why I actually believe more in the idea of representative democracy than direct democracy. Yes, not as much responsibility as a single owner, but allocated responsibility to a few while being owned by many.
Lol, if you think the left is genuinely defending the rights of private corporations, I don't think you know much about the left...
Probably the defining ideological organizing principle of the left is social equality, which is the exact opposite organizing principle of corporations, that being profit over all. Corporations are organized as dictatorships; leftists prefer them to be organized as democracies of, by, and for workers. Corporations censor the free speech of their workers, restricting what they say and how they can organize themselves; leftists want to take away the power corporations have to do this.
Insofar you are hearing anyone you perceive to be on the left supporting the rights of corporations like twitter to do what they want, perhaps consider they are throwing the argument in the face of corporate friendly Democrats and Republicans who have created this situation themselves by granting corporations such power over our lives, and are now only complaining when it hurts them politically.
I'm waiting for the day when that's tackled honestly by those groups, because right now it seems to me that politicians want to force specific companies like Twitter to stop hurting them politically while still maintaining corporate power and the inflow of corporate cash into their reelection campaigns. Thy want to call Twitter a "town square" and a "public good", and carve out exceptions that would specifically limit its power while still maintaining the power of the corporations they prefer to wield it. Meanwhile they will argue vociferously that healthcare, education, housing, even roads and broadband aren't public goods and must be kept privatized or turned into private ventures.
Under our current system (not created by leftists), corporations are people too and have more rights and power than natural humans. Leftists will stop pointing out that corporations have this power as soon everyone else stops arguing that corporations should have this power.
what experience does musk have to make twitter better and why is this expensive unique so that twitter itself cannot make the changes?
twitter back in the day was awesome until they turned hostile to the 3rd party developers.
Elon musk - smart and crazy
This is all you or Morgan Stanley need to know, besides Elon claiming he doesn't care if the venture makes money.
Without an engagement-maximizing algorithm that promotes the most divisive content, those accounts would just be preaching to their own choirs. Meanwhile other people could pop in and see just how unhinged and ridiculous they are.
Maximizing engagement means maximizing dishonest trolling, hate, fear, controversy for the sake of controversy, and catchy tabloid bullshit. The most engaging content is basically an adversarial attack on higher human cognition. It typically works by bypassing the rational mind and shooting for the amygdala.
Make it a simple timeline again. Nix recommendations in favor of search. Make it just a forum, not an inherently biased Skinner box that sucks out peoples' brains.
I'd support that regardless of who he lets back on the platform, because algorithmic social media is the real problem. Algorithmic social media is what got Donald Trump into the presidency, among many other things.
why spend time actually educating people and giving them the tool of critical thinking when you can create a cesspool that enables and amplifies xenophobia, racism, sexism, you name it.
why call out certain behaviors that are horrendous when you can normalize them and pretend this is part of the normal public forum?
Person A tells you about a new discovery at NASA. Person B tells you the Earth is flat and bombards you with "irrefutable" proof. Which maximizes engagement?
I really do think engagement maximizing algorithms explain much (but not all) of our collective descent into insanity since about 2010-2012 when they became popular.
ask yourself: why were those accounts banned?
Money. If your advertisers flee, meeting payroll gets exponentially more difficult.
what’s the ideology that’s being “suppressed”?
+5 for mental gymnastics
Twitter is/was a ban happy shithole.
It is absolutely trivial to get banned on Twitter. My favorite example is someone I know getting banned for posting pitbull fatality statistics. They were banned for “racism”. Against dogs.
Twitter needs a top to bottom purge.
The replies were full of people saying things like "this is exactly like how white people post statistics to say black people commit more crime! Report this person for racism!"
It was charts of dog fatalities per year broken down by breed.
Bringing back the accounts that spew stuff which pushes advertisers away will not make Twitter more financially successful than they are today.
Hell, maybe that's his intent. What if it turns out that rather than being a free speech absolutist, he thinks social media is destroying the world and the best way to solve that is to crush it out of existence, starting with Twitter.
That wouldn't work, of course, but it would be entertaining.
Of course, he may just do the opposite, and start banning people on the left. That would align more closely with how he runs the companies he is currently in control of.
how many times would you try to debate that person before deciding it’s a waste if time?
Free speech is measured by the tolerance for speech that you hate.
It's not hard to defeat bad ideas with good ideas. Or you can just ignore it by turning off the channel. That's always an option.
That's a load of crap. You cannot debate with conspiracy theorists. Debates only work when both sides are acting in good faith.
we don’t have unlimited time an unlimited attention spans. we also deal with uneducated, easily manipulated people that will just discard anything that does not match their world view and just amplify the bs.
Sending Flat Earthers off to their own dark corner is how they become entrenched. Leave them in the public square, in broad daylight, so they are exposed to evidence to the contrary. That's how you defeat bad ideas over time.
We didn't need to censor anyone to get here.
On longer timescales, the truth wins, because it is real, and everything else is not. False beliefs are persistent but simply can't compete with reality.
a lot of people, on the internet, are not open to this and will chose the bs over any fact, argument, reason.
I'll pass. And I'm sure many others will too.
Why would he pay 50 billion for that? What does he gain from it? Goodwill? Leverage on Trump in case the latter becomes President again?
the gov already pumped billions of dollars in tesla and space x through different programs. if that pumping increases that would be great, right?