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Comment by tablespoon | Hacker News Reader

> Social media is a cesspool right now, they seem to have a negative impact on democracy and humanity in general, and public social media companies have no incentive to clean themselves up because that will hurt shareholder value in the short term. Buying the company and taking it private will give him the ability to make those hard choices and try to make a social media company that is positive for humanity.

AFAIK, his publicly-stated plan is to not "clean [Twitter] up," but rather turn it into more of an un-moderated cesspool.

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The perspective of "un-moderated" equaling "cesspool" is entirely based on whether or not you hold any opinions which are unpopular with the powerful.

I had an account I created in 2009. I had a modestly decent number of followers due to some past blogging on data science and DIY electronics. My account was suspended because I talked about the lab leak hypothesis before it was decided that it was ok to do so by The Good People™.

Maybe you hold some opinions that will also one day be unpopular with The Good People™. If you do, you'll soon find out that censorship is a very clumsy tool.

I'm with you, but should a person who holds no forbidden opinions today really feel worried that one of their opinions will be forbidden in the future?

You've got to think, if someone has the exact set of approved opinions today, that's almost certainly not a coincidence, but a sign that they form their opinions based on what is approved. And in that case they're at no risk of ever having a meaningfully unpopular opinion.

Unfortunately, you make an excellent point. And yes, I do think that the majority of people, when given the choice between what they know to be right and what they know to be popular, will choose the latter. Additionally, they will aggressively attack those who hold the unpopular opinion to buy themselves protection from the witch-hunters going after those with unpopular opinions.

> The perspective of "un-moderated" equaling "cesspool" is entirely based on whether or not you hold any opinions which are unpopular with the powerful.

Eh, no. It's more about signal to noise ratio. Because if recent history has taught us anything, it's that crowdsourced lies are often at least as compelling as the truth.

> My account was suspended because I talked about the lab leak hypothesis before it was decided that it was ok to do so by The Good People™.

Realistically, "un-moderated" will be 99% Qanon and Stop-the-Steal and 1% the kind of stuff you say you posted. The most obsessive have the loudest voices in those spaces, and people who believe wacky things seem to be more obsessive than those who don't.

The lab leak stuff gave me whiplash for sure. Early on, if you had the audacity to suggest that a coronavirus came out of a coronavirus lab, people would unironically call you a racist fascist right-wing lunatic.

Now it's officially a credible theory[1].

This is exactly why moderating "The Truth" is so dangerous. The people claiming to be the arbiter of the truth are politically motivated and self serving.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/16/politics/biden-intel-review-c...

Additionally, most of them were utterly innumerate. There's nothing more infuriating than the "I'm not a math person" folks sitting there gleefully pretending to understand data as they disseminate mass panic.

Maybe he thinks an unmoderated cesspool is better than a moderated cesspool. Either way, you're swimming in shit. Twitter not being a cesspool is an appealing fantasy, but only that.

> Maybe he thinks an unmoderated cesspool is better than a moderated cesspool. Either way, you're swimming in shit.

I'm sure he thinks that. Apparently he's a "free speech absolutist."

> Twitter not being a cesspool is an appealing fantasy, but only that.

It's not a binary condition. Twitter can be a cesspool with relatively more or relatively less shit. I'm sure his preference will result in relatively more shit.

Personally, I've appreciated a having society that lacks the shit Donald Trump created on Twitter.

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