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Comment by jchw | Hacker News Reader

The only thing I can think of is that unlike I would assume most executives, he seems to use Twitter much more like the average user. That said, I think Yishan Wong just about hit the nail on the head as to why Musks approach is likely flawed.

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Yishans take on it was fascinating. For anyone else, I highly recommend reading it: https://nitter.net/yishan/status/1514938507407421440?s=21&t=...

Which part was fascinating? The part he says social media platforms do not care about politics? That is a load of bull crap. They do care and they have a preference. Not because of their political beliefs but because of money.

No, they really don’t care. The difference is that if they did care, they’d care about where the money came from. They do not.

That does mean that it’s biased to what advertisers think is OK, but it’s always going to be biased. It’s just not really a bias based on a deep agenda or underlying conspiracy. I actually believe that. There may be some controversy but nobody has really demonstrated much consistent bias, less anything more sinister.

Here's the REAL twitter link to that take: https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1514938507407421440#m

The caveat, I think, is that what he describes is quintessentially American. I'm pretty well travelled and have only seen such overt and absolute polarisation in the US. I'm sure there are others but I haven't seen it in Europe, Africa or the far East. It's quite the source of amusement in my circles.

I say this knowing Elon is (was?) South African.

That is a good read, but being a child of the old internet, I agree with his axioms but disagree with his conclusions. I would rather Elon let these so called dangerous ideas fester into bad behavior, letting twitter turn into 4chan, where every day someone successfully advocates for hatred and arguably causes multiple deaths, than see a single 140 character post censored. You can call that naive, but the reality is that many of us have aeen speech turn into physical violence, and still prefer that to nervously polite dialog that avoids ideas that are likely true but might make someone act poorly.

I agree with you in principle, but 4chan doesn't have the reach Twitter has, as soon as those platforms start having a wide enough reach, they are dangerous. I mean, Facebook was used to incite genocide and Twitter nearly toppled but damaged a democracy. Maybe the solution is to prevent social networks to gain too big of a reach.

If the landscape was more granular people would be cross posting stuff and using aggregation services. That was already the case to some extent. I think the answer is to let people be people and watch it all burn. Maybe someday some future society will learn from the mistakes we are making. But I don't think those mistakes include failing to protect ourselves from being exposed to inflammatory ideas. That sort of track record just gives conspiracy theorists more credibility.

What a horrible take that censoring civil truthful factbased discussion is ok because some nutjob might draw wrong conclusions.

> civil truthful factbased discussion

I'm not sure you can call what's going on on Twitter any of these words, at least on any even slightly polarizing topics.

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