Elon Musk and Twitter Reach Deal for Sale
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
If it where so easy why hasn't Facebook, Reddit, YouTube or any one else figured it out?
I have seen this over and over again. Once you reach mass global adaption it becomes practically impossible to operate a "fair" and clean platform.
This idea that one platform works for the whole world is like believing in one world government. It doesn't work. It doesn't even work within the United States. People are just too different.
IMO, if anything will ever work it's a federated platform that is self governed by its regions. Reddit is somewhat that but there is a single US centric company in control and they ultimately decide which subreddit get deleted.
The hard part isn't the technical part, but the human part. Human systems are hard. Beyond around a hundred people, the hard problem is the organizational one. I (and many of the other people on HN) can tell you what Facebook, Google, Twitter, Apple, Microsoft, or many other organizations ought to do. If they did it, they'd be wildly more successful. On the other hand, if you made me the CEO, I (and the other armchair generals) wouldn't be able to make them do it.
* Beyond the original founder, the CEO usually doesn't care about the company, but about their annual bonus, their next job, their golden parachute, keeping the board happy, and setting up for their next job.
* Employees don't care about the abstract company. They often want to make the world a better place, a decent pay check, interesting work, and good work-life balance
... and so on.
Facebook is a bunch of people working on pet projects from monopoly profits. If you make me the CEO, I won't be able to fix that. Google is managed in crazy ways around short-term objectives which don't align to overall success. Can I tell you what it ought to do better? Sure. Could I make it do it? Heck no. Microsoft, I haven't followed in a while, but used to be torn apart by internal feuds. Etc.
The upsides Elon has are:
- He owns the thing, and has aligned incentives for himself, at least.
- He has a pretty good track record with actually getting things like this done in organizations he's been at.
From a technical perspective, I know a few people as good as Elon. That's hard, but not that hard. Elon is top 0.01%, probably, which means 1:10,000, which means I can find 30k Americans as good at him, and many more people worldwide.
On the other hand, managing thousands of people in a coherent direction? That's *HARD*.
Well, until today, Facebook, Reddit, Youtube and Twitter are all doing exactly the same things with regards to content moderation so at least Elon can try doing something different for a change.
There's a lot more out there. For example, slashdot has a unique moderation mechanism where random users were temporarily promoted to mods and could assign tags rather than just take things down.
Filtering could allow users to choose to block anonymous accounts. Feed algos could prioritize content that presents a quality differing view rather than just reinforce filter bubbles.
Speaking for personal experience, I met a Facebook person at Folsom Street Fair, through a friend of a friend who I had already marked as super fucking creepy. They were remarkably upfront about it, being drunk and apparently I have a good poker face. See also the "Aimee Challenor" affair at Reddit, and the fact that their initial defense was "Highly recommended by other staff" - They never looked further into that, for a fact.
Are you sure the reason isn't ideological? After all, the people running them are all ideological cousins.
Old space told the same thing about reusable rockets.
Doesn’t mean Elon will get it right this time, but you cannot fault him for thinking people don’t get it and he can solve it and he has the resources to back his vision .
Better than say bezos or elision are doing with their fortunes at least he is trying something.
Losing 40 billion isn’t all that much money for him and losing twitter is not all that bad for us either so why not
if he somehow manages to fix it, that could be great too.
Those people would still be banned because csam content isn't free speech.
The comments are not really more informative, but they seem a lot less offensive and somewhat more coherent than I remembered.
I found it a little unsettling actually, as though the whole community had quietly been ai-rehabilitated or re-educated or something.
I do think employees will scream "bloody murder," but it will be the wrong employees screaming the hardest. Twitter should be neutral, and support diversity. Twitter employees can't tolerate red states, let alone the diversity of the broader world. Muslims constitute over a billion people. Chinese are over a billion. Toss in Latin America, Slavic countries, and so on, and you have a broad swath of cultures which views out-of-line with woke Twitter employees.
If Elon can make Twitter less progressive, white, affluent, Western, blue state value aligned, that's a bigger, broader userbase.
On the other side, Twitter hasn't really improved since coming out. The number of employees has more than doubled since 2017, and it's not quite clear why. There's a lot of work to be done on either the cost side or the product improvement side. I don't feel like it has much beyond momentum.
A key question is whether Elon will be able to make a workplace environment competitive with FAANG. He's not known as a great guy to work for. He will need that calibre of talent (if not the current quantity).
I hope you realize they're also out of line with Elon's eclectic libertarianism, and that those cultures not only disagree with woke employees but also with his 'free speech absolutism' and I hope Elon recognizes this because I have no interest in having American 'free speech' imported.
He has benefited his entire life by massive government support: his early money largely coming through growing up with access to what was essentially slave labour, to his modern successes in which he took massive amounts of money from the government, while also refusing to pay taxes. He demands law enforcement protect his interests, while intentionally and repeatedly ignoring the law himself.
That is his “libertarianism” is a return to his heritage: he should be a part of a privileged society, where the core cost of keeping the country running should be borne by people have as few rights and resources as possible. Anything he can do to create his childhood utopia he will do.
And if I understood Elon correctly by the way, the reason he took Twitter over in the first place is precisely because he considers it 'the public town square' that everyone is forced to use.
Or is it just the white supremacy, antisemitism, homophobia, transphobia that you want back?
This is a very simple question. You either want unbiased or you are saying that the stuff that “wokeness” limited is good, and should be given a large platform.
Yes or no? This is a very simple binary question
We talk in absolutist terms, not because we all are actually absolutists, but because the moment you say you favor restrictions on speech, someone wants you to support restrictions big enough to cover a "military operation". We aren't interested in going there. If we can't actually make absolute free speech work, that's at least where our hearts are and the direction we push toward.
So, OK, if you want to say "aha, see, you really don't believe in absolutely free speech", well, great, enjoy your pointless victory. We're going to keep pushing in the direction of speech that is as unrestricted as possible.
What I am trying to say, is that I am sick of pandering to that bullshit deflection. If you hate some minority, and think that you are in the right for doing so, you should just be saying that. You shouldn't be claiming other stuff is being censored, and that's what you're correcting, as a cover to get back to bigotry, attacking minorities, and of course that other favorite: trying to overthrow elections.
Because that's the only significant censorship that twitter has added, and even that is fairly minimal.
No, I want free speech because I actually believe in free speech.
I absolutely agree that if people hate some minority, they should be able to say it outright. That should carry social stigma, but not a prison sentence, public shaming, or economic ruin. Censoring people isn't effective. If people feel oppressed, they dig in.
I live in one of the wokest parts of the US, and it's also probably the most racist place I've been. You can't have open conversations with people. All the racism and bigotry is just closeted and hidden.
I used to live in a part of the US where a few people were openly racist, and it was a million times better. Most people weren't racist. The ones who were, you could avoid. You could also talk to people about their beliefs, and you know something? People got less racist over time. Open conversations also meant you could explore reasons for achievement gaps and employment gaps, and there was slow and steady progress.
Free society is prerequisite to addressing prejudice, not the other way around.
The only thing that has changed since the classic quote are market dynamics: Platforms can generate ad clicks by lying, polarizing people and promoting hate. That, we ought to address. But we ought to address it without outright cancelling / censoring / banning / ostracizing people. Technically, that's not even hard to do; if people post crap, The Algorithm shouldn't bump it up. From a market perspective, that's impossible without regulation; if Twitter/Facebook/etc. don't promote hate, lies, and polarization, a new platform which does will take over.
It’s triggering to a lot of people to use the term ‘binary’ in that manner. You need to check your Hetero-privilege. It’s hateful and hurtful to non-binary posters.
You have used the common trope of the pretty much fictional extreme - there are definitely people who abuse terms like “triggered”, etc for stuff that by clinical definition isn’t - but what you’re attempting to do is take a large group of real humans, and reduce them to a caricature so that you can then treat them as non-people.
This is a standard step, taken by many groups, many times, targeting many groups to justify discrimination, persecution, and worse.
This kind of trivialization and dehumanization was and is used by people justifying sexism, slavery, apartheid, segregation, homophobia, transphobia, anti-semitism, anti-Palestinian, anti-Catholicism, anti-Protestantism, manifest destiny, by the japanese vs Chinese or POWs, Koreans vs Philippines, British vs Italian immigrants, etc, etc
Persecuting people is not something that seems specific to any single group, history is replete with one group trivializing another.
I would just like you to recognize that your reflexive response to my calling out what censorship is being targeted, and that it is not a “free speech for everyone” action as is being claimed, was to immediately attempt to trivialize the identity of another group of humans. It’s not materially different from people in the south creating uppity black stereotypes, crooked nose Jews around every corner, the gay people preying on innocent straight people.
You could be totally fine with that, the problem people seem to have is more often being called out on it, than actually doing it.
I’ve encountered plenty of liberals that will happily do or say racist or phobic things (phobia is super common in the “liberal” democrats), but get upset if you call them out on it.
It’s the same thing with “dog whistles”: people treat saying certain specific words as bad, but instead of stopping the statements they simply change the words used. So a variety of words and phrases became “urban youth”, “Jews” became “globalists”, etc
To me it seems a lot of the “anti-censorship” complaints are more people being upset that they’re behavior is getting called out.
1) You listed a broad range of issues.
2) Each of those issues have different definitions. "White supremacy" means KKK in red states, and "the dominance of white culture in the design of American institutions" in woke culture. "Child abuse" can mean paedophilia or spanking.
My experience with these questions is that one answer leads to one definition, and another to the other. I've been down this road with woke individuals before. "Yes" takes you to a definition which makes you look like a KKK-supporting pedophile, and "No" to a definition which leads to policies offensive to most people in the world.
And that's about where I think Twitter should place standards:
- Algorithms should poorly rank inflammatory, polarizing content. This is the bulk of where Twitter's market cap comes from, so Elon loses money.
- Humans should remove content which most people in the world would find grossly offensive. Not woke white Westerners, but most people.
Should some content be censored?
That is a yes/no question.
I gave extremes of what content means, so that hopefully everyone would agree that some content should be censored. A free speech absolutist might say that the answer is no, but I suspect the overwhelming majority of people could find something above that they agree should be censored.
My reason for being so aggressive here is because I am sick of the “anti-censor” brigade claiming that they’re simply fighting for all free speech. What I want people to acknowledge is that they do there is simply that there’s just been a bunch of things censored that they want to be able to say.
We can argue about what that content is, but everyone here knows that different groups fundamentally disagree about a number of those things that are currently not allowed on Twitter. Personally I look at the things Twitter let’s you report, and which of those things are actually not allowed - many of the report pathways simply say “this is allowed, you can simply block this person” - the only things that I have actually ever seen actually get removed are people fairly explicitly calling for violence, saying entire races, lgbt people, specific religions, etc are “diseases”, “paedophiles”, “should be locked up, executed, …”, etc
Based on that experience, and based on the conversation surrounding “anti-wokeness”, it sounds fairly clearly as though that is the content that people believe is being wrongly censored.
Everyone here has seen the many, many reports from conservatives claiming that they are being unfairly censored and subjected to discrimination and bias on social media platforms. I’ve also seen how in every single study it has been found that there is no such bias.
So again, we get to I know the kind of content that has been censored, and if people are making the claim that Twitter is censoring “too much” or that it needs to “protect free speech”, then that is the only content that is available to “uncensor”.
I would love to be proved wrong, but I do not see any evidence of what people feel is being unfairly censored, that I do not believe falls into the above categories.
Even our former president doesn't fall into the bin of "explicitly calling for violence, saying entire races, lgbt people, specific religions, etc are 'diseases', 'paedophiles', 'should be locked up, executed, …'," I'm not going to debate whether he should have been censored; just that your argument is dishonest to an extreme. I'm not sure if that's intentional, but if not, you should re-examine your assumptions. You might be being dishonest with yourself.
My own opinion is that the best way to make Twitter fair (or academia, whose studies you cite) is to have broad representation representing the world. This includes:
- Middle Eastern Muslims
- African Americans
- African Africans (e.g. living in Africa)
- South Americans
- Indians
- Chinese
- Koreans
- Russians
- Folks in red states
- Etc.
Those refer to actual Koreans in Korea, not Korean Americans.
If something offends a majority of people, remove it. If it only offends Western liberal white San Francisco types, keep it. You'll find most of the world doesn't agree with anyone else on issues like gender relations.
If you want to "fairly" represent the cultures of the world (by population), Twitter would be run by a majority of CCP Chinese, and anything that contradicts the party would ultimately be censored, and people who speak against the party would be immediately reported so they can be imprisoned.
Lots of cultures have attitudes towards human rights that are wrong. Some cultures are downright barbaric, and believe in things like stoning gays or executing women who commit adultery. They are incompatible with a free society. When their societies mature to the point where they can identify with our values, they can have a seat at the table.
The West has, for a long time, believed that other cultures were "downright barbaric" and needed to "mature to the point where they can identify with our values" before they could "have a seat at the table."
So long as bigots run tech companies, there will be a market serving the other 6 billion.
The same could be said if you compared these groups to Republican Trump voting god fearing peoples. Thats how we ended up with things like the Muslim ban and evidently a response to that mentality in the form of the extreme left(Twitter woke mob, Antifa, etc.)
On sites like HN and popular commentary like Joe Rogan I only ever hear this argument in one direction: against Leftists and never hear the criticism of the same being done (for a lot longer) by the Right.
I really wonder about this part. His model with SpaceX was basically the opposite- Lots of cheap junior areospace engineers backed a small quality of top tier experts.
I am genuinely curious - because I recall terrorists, white supremacists, Nazis, homophobic, transphobic, and antisemitic content.
I recall them stopping promotion of the violent overthrow of the US
None of this seems bad, unless you are a free speech absolutionist, in which case you also have to publish Al Qaeda, ISIS, child abuse, etc, alongside your storm front streams
Once it became clear that the conspiracy theory was just that, repeatedly promoting said conspiracy seems to be of questionable value, to anyone other than the GOP, who themselves repeatedly sued twitter for the identity of critics.
So yeah, I do think it was reasonable to stop that propaganda after it became clear the conspiracy was false, and "reporting" on the laptop was being used solely to continue promoting that conspiracy. Is that a more borderline case, sure, I'll accept that. Is the literal president promoting the overthrow of the elected US government something that is debatable? nope. Is that something the anti-woke people say was wrong? yup.
So I generally equate "anti-woke" with: anti-law, anti-democracy, pro-violence, pro-bigotry, pro-segregation, pro-conspiracy, etc and I have yet to see any evidence that the anti-woke/pro-"free speech" people clamoring for changes to twitter do not fall into those buckets.
I have never seen any evidence in fact of an "anti-woke" person not defending hate speech, I have however seen many vigorously demanding that all LGBT content be silenced to "protect children", or that American history be censored or rewritten in school.
Given that track record it is hard to see that the "anti-twitter-censorship" folk are operating out of a position of good-faith.
I would invite you to read the article again if you think its propaganda:
https://nypost.com/2020/10/14/email-reveals-how-hunter-biden...
Of those you listed, only terrorism should be removed by law in the U.S. while the others are all things you, the reader, attribute to others and ascribe intent behind. You cannot prove intent, no matter how many mental gymnastics you perform. And then even if somebody expressly admitted to intent for those topics, they're not illegal. I don't care if you want them to be, they aren't. Get over it.
My advice is don’t hold your breath. This is exactly what you think it is.