Looks like the deal is done:
Pushbacks on Elon threatening to bring free speech back (hopefully addressing the toxic witch hunts, cancelling) were seemingly orchestrated by incumbent billionaires with their own mainstream media outlets feeling threatened by it—because it would undermine the impact of their own loudspeakers if views that challenge popular narratives or The Current Thing.
Anyways, I am not a fanboy of Elon by any means other than SpaceX, I think it was a refreshing move for a billionaire to not just buy another mainstream media outlet. Unsure what will happen going forward ....
but strictly from a business point of view, buying Twitter for the purpose of profiteering was a bad one, but at his level, money has become irrelevant, its more about control here.
Having said that I do question how far he would be able to take the free speech thing as a private company.
The alternative facts and hate speech that dominate Facebook have been incredibly harmful for society, and I think there should be tighter guardrails for online content moderation. There are legitimate reasons to disagree on this issue.
You can censor comments suggesting the current understanding of the science might be flawed, but then what happens when the understanding shifts to that censored understanding? Do you go censor all of the comments, CDC articles, and news clips that communicated the incorrect understanding? Do you remove the censorship for the old comments? Are there any repercussions for unknowingly leading people astray, and perhaps even causing some deaths for those who thought they were protected by flawed guidelines?
When was this exactly that YouTube was banning videos for saying it was airborne? Examples?
I'm considering running for president on a one issue platform: A constitutional amendment to criminalize false claims that a non-governmental actor has violated your free speech.
"Unacceptable views" could include: Covid came from a wet market, the Iraq war was about WMD, etc. Pick your controlversial topic, there's going to be a battle over even the limits of rational debate - ones you agree with and ones you definitely don't.
You may be happy with the censorship flavour of the month now, but wait until a government comes into power that you dislike. Imagine what G.W. Bush would have done with the censorship powers available now?
You're opening the floodgates to massive governmental and corporate control. I want no part of that, and I don't want my democracy to be destroyed by the broader effects that would have. If you're consciously advocating for that, then I disagree with you in the strongest terms. Yes, there's an ocean of trolls out there. And the effects of strong censorship are far worse.
I think a big problem is the short attention span of most people - myself absolutely included. But finding ways to amplify the influence of those who have paid attention and reduce it from those who only read the titles - that could be interesting as well. There's lots of info out there to use ML to discern low quality input, it'd be interesting to see it applied for good instead of evil!
Maybe this is OpenAI's next challenge :)
The irony of this statement in a discussion about taking a public company private
"common limitations or boundaries to freedom of speech relate to libel, slander, obscenity, pornography, sedition, incitement, fighting words, classified information, copyright violation, trade secrets, food labeling, non-disclosure agreements, the right to privacy, dignity, the right to be forgotten, public security, and perjury."
Regardless of if his or the company's official claims, when network effects centralize virtually everyone into a small number of platforms, it becomes a defacto utility. This has wide ranging and damaging effects on actual democracy. I don't particularly care what statements Twitter has made, if their platform has such wide ranging negative effects then it becomes an issue that needs to be addressed. How that's addressed is another question, but being a private entity doesn't magically free them from accountability of the negative effects of their platform.
Twitter is a business and it literally has nothing to do with democracy at all. Using twitter is a personal choice, if you don't like it, don't use it. That's the solution. Your perception of their business being negative or even positive is neither here nor there.
Once that was done, they noticed that people aren't free to speak & won't use a platform where they are constantly under attack from racists, sexists & harassers. As a private entity, Twitter cared more about people feeling comfortable participating than it did about other people's "right" to bully, harass or send dick pics.
They also realized that if they kept letting their platform be used to radicalize terrorists, the government was going to shut them down because they were harmful to the community. It's also possible that they didn't feel great about helping people murder people they hated. Repeatedly.
By that point Jack had realized that "Free Speech" is a lot more nuanced than he imagined as a 29 year old with no background in sociology, philosophy, law or political science. Jack still believes in freedom: he just knows now, experimentally, that you can't achieve that by letting might make right.
Nobody is arguing that constitutional rights directly apply here. They're arguing that free speech is important, especially when the government has been pushing around that private company: https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2021/07/15/gover...
He was recently quoted as having "[..] encouraged employees to remain focused and told them 'we as employees control what happens'"?
Is that quote accurate?
If so, not only is the latter part apparently a straightforward falsehood, but seems to demonstrate more ability re: daft virtue-signalling than creating value for shareholders.
"Being held to account" is only meaningful if the ones holding you to account are doing so in good faith, and via a semblance of rationality.
Why not? How much time and effort have to go in to recognizing shitty behavior (cat calling, brown face, jerking off in front of someone without consent, etc)?
Besides, if they have such a short attention span, they can't cancel anyone -- canceling only works if you keep shunning them for a long period of time.
Arguably, the root cause lies with the employer that fires them or landlord that evicts them, but it take a lot of integrity to stand up to a large angry mob filled with ignorant and self-righteous anger.
If you watch the full, unedited video it's actually very easy to see the situation was far more complex than the media portrayed it to be: A crowd of young kids wearing Trump hats (distateful to say the least, and a powderkeg of a situation), some _actual_ black supremacists (the Black Israelites) spouting off some real hate, and a smaller group of indigenous protesters. This was a recipe for bad interactions, but in reality the kid (Nicholas Sandmann) that got all the online hate appeared to be trying to keep the peace (getting his friend to stop doing the tomahawk chop), and was confronted somewhat aggressively by a grown adult (Nathan Phillips).
There's more nuance to be had of course (and those kids should not have been there, wow!), but the media got it completely backwards based on some very creative editing apparently to support a given narrative.
Cancel culture in this case turned the mob against that kid. With little to no understanding of the actual situation, and based only on the most superficial stereotypes (red trump hat, conservative, probably doesn't like indigenous people, etc). I'll admit even I fell for that trap before I watched the whole video. It is simply unfair and inappropriate to target a CHILD who happened to get caught up in this crazyness. We have a young offenders act in my country for exactly this reason. And the amount of hate he got was incredible.
So yes, cancel culture has, does, and will continue to make mistakes. "How much time and effort" should you go to to not ruin an innocent person's life?
I don't know, but you should at the very least make an effort to get informed on the situation via multiple sources before you break out the daggers. And be aware that you're being fed a diet of what is often corporate misinformation.
canceling is a label applied to play the victim when people are being held accountable for things they don't want to be or by people they don't consider equal.
What word should we use instead then?
What word is suitable to describe low-context, online-mob-driven pile-ons / denunciations?
(Perhaps you’ve never seen that happen?—that would be remarkable.)
The problem, as usual, being that you are trying to describe something with a term where the common usage is just plain bad faith.
Unfairly attacked?
Harassed?
There’s lots of words…the common usage of cancelling is none of them nor what you described. The common usage is what no one in this thread seems to want to admit. And it’s why the same people who cry about cancel culture want to use it’s supposed existence as a reason to actually restrict others free speech.
But I think I see your point. It's a phrase that can be used lazily and in bad faith and itself contribute to degraded discourse.
It’s important to note that there is a significant portion of the people employing this term in bad faith who are doing now intentionally and to cause confusion. The problem with a new term is that it will, almost inherently, be co-opted by these same groups.
The attempts to mislabel are intentional and coordinated. I think you are coming from a good hearted place, and it’s nice to be able to have this convo, but a new label won’t fix it because the label isn’t the problem the use is.
Man you're just coming out swinging.
Remember when a scientist was cancelled over a shirt? On a day of greatest achievement of his professional life? We remember.
Justine Sacco was definitely canceled, in exactly the way you are denying happens. There is a legitimate discussion to be had on the phenomenon, and it can't be hand-waved away by claiming it's completely legitimate. Clearly it's not.
The fact that real things happen doesn’t make using the same term to describe not real things happening acceptable.
I can’t call out of work because there was a blizzard if there wasn’t a blizzard recently where I actually live
Cancel culture is a real thing. It's a new thing enabled by the structure of the systems we've only just created. I think a label is justified (even if this one kind of sucks). And of course concept creep will find this label weaponized almost as soon as it's been created.
That's kind of the era we live in: bad faith abuse of language by the extremists on all sides.
Not sure where your 'rule of elites' angle into play here, good faith and rationality are things that are debated and roughly agreed upon within societies and institutions (perhaps I do agree with your statement "These are emergent properties that come from free speech"). My point(s) were explicitly that: - Cancellation often happens with ill intent from bad actors: partisan, one sided policies that don't apply to 'their side'. You'll see little in the way of due process, benefit of the doubt / chairitable intepretation. - That combined with reactionism and little desire to combat base stereotypes, makes an easily weaponizable army.
I found Jonathan Haidt's description of cancel culture to be on the mark. It's all about intimidation: Not just for the one being cancelled, but of everyone else who's watching. It's a prelude to a wave of self-censorship.
He got banned from all Academy events for 10 years
Anything legal should be allowed, this already excludes 95% of cancel targets. For the rare illegal 5%, only the courts and public authorities should be allowed to investigate and administer punishment.
how is he supposed to address these without restricting speech?
How would those two things not increase under absolute freedom of speech?
Agreed. Bezos, Gates, Musk, etc don't buy media companies for money. They buy it for influence, propaganda, etc.
> Having said that I do question how far he would be able to take the free speech thing as a private company.
I like Musk and generally support things he is trying to do. But I'm not holding my breath. No way he allows twitter to be a free speech platform. Nobody spends $44 billion to allow others to have their say. Nobody spends $44 billion for other people's benefit. Maybe he'll make some symbolic gesture like letting trump back on the platform, but I'm guessing twitter will be his personal megaphone to push his products mostly.
Or maybe this is a watershed moment and elon's purchase of twitter is the start of a shift back to what the internet/social media used to be.
How do you do that while keeping the content open? Of course Twitter itself can simply not ban people or hide/remove posts, but that's all part of Musk's free speech angle. Apart from that how do you tamp down witch hunts etc without interfering with the content itself?
Maybe there is more behind it? https://app.finclout.io/t/A3lkgnE