It's telling that no one is worried about being censored by Elon. They're worried about Elon not censoring others.
He's tried to get a teen to take down a Twitter account that follows his private jet: https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-jet-tracking-teen-...
He's fired anyone who disagrees with him: https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-elon-musk-ruthlessly-f...
He's fired employees for YouTube videos: https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-employee-self-driving-...
He's fired people for walking too close: https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-reportedly-terrifi...
He refused to pay severance to the Tesla founder unless he took down a blog post: https://www.wired.com/2009/06/eberhard/
He blocks people on Twitter: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1279326187559374849?lang...
Sure, he's never censored people the same way he could on Twitter, but he's also never had the chance.
@prvc while you do this volunteer fanboy work of defending him, given the opportunity he'd just as soon eject you out the nearest airlock. It's sad really, he's essentially a Borg with a malfunctioning emotions implant.
It isn't a crime, it is the American way.
No, that doesn't mean you're better than anyone.
When was grace in power determined to be a useless quality?
I doubt that you even are. The "we" you used earlier was certainly a mischaracterization of your supposed "power".
At the very least, they aren’t resigning and relegating themselves to be a victim of Elon Musk. That’d be weakness and the opposite of “power”.
You are as weak as anybody else, don't have delusions now.
Sure, our opinions are equally useless, but there’s varying degrees of being able to take action on that opinion.
Elon Musk can afford Twitter and do whatever he wants with it. You can’t.
I can afford to be unemployed while traveling nonstop for years on end. I can work on whatever TF I want. No BS meetings or a boss. That’s freedom, and freedom is power. You probably can’t. Do you have a boss? If you do, that person is already more powerful than you. I’m probably more powerful than your boss, since I report to no one except the government. I can afford to not work for employers who values I don’t agree with, or just don’t feel like working for. If you are enjoying being a wage slave, be our guest.
If you’re so smart, don’t be poor. Don’t be delusional for me. The world is pretty fair for people with good ideas and the ability to actually execute on them. Talk is cheap. You can also short or long Twitter or any stock too, if your opinion had any economic merit. At the very least, don’t dread Monday. That sounds awful. Bet you have student loans too. Can’t relate.
What freedom do you have in stopping Musk from buying Twitter? Everything else is irrelevant.
>You probably can’t.
Another assumption.
>If you’re so smart, don’t be poor. >Bet you have student loans too. Can’t relate.
Next time you go out on a date, I suggest you show them this comment.
>The world is pretty fair for people with good ideas and the ability to actually execute on them.
I'm happy that you haven't had any significant pains in achieving your financial independence. But just know that, if you want to make it to the big leagues, you will have to recognize the advantages you were given in order to fully make use of them. Musk, Gates, Buffet are priveleged, to be sure, but they are smart. They are in tune with the reality of their privilege. They are grateful for it, and that is essential to why they made it. Only because they are in tune with their reality, can they can shape it.
Good luck.
Passive aggressive intolerance and ageism. Aren’t you supposed to be virtue signaling?
> in the US
Explains why an American team winning American “football” are deemed “world champions”. Why did you assume OP spent his youth in America? Even if they are in America now, they could have been adopted from an orphanage in a different country. Logic.
If you grew up in the slums you might make it out with a good, stable, comfortable life through good planning and will. But becoming rich enough to buy Twitter? To influence people on a global scale? You're not going to do that without the approval of the incumbents. And you are deluding yourself to think they are meritocratic. Consider how long it took -it is taking- for people with tattoos to not get written off as gang members or no lifes.
Kindly refrain from assuming people's privilege and mentality. You don't know shit, sorry to say.
You’ve just moved the fencepost to a random percentile. WE could very much mean anyone who owns companies, or at the very least the non-working class who controls land, labor and capital, as opposed to being the labor and barely owning land nor capitalz
Another assumption.
>as opposed to being the labor and barely owning land nor capitalz
What the fuck kind of misanthropic sociopath are you?
Are you seriously implying that people who don't own land or capital are just dumb? Have you considered that they simply don't want to deal with the headache or that they don't want to commodity the work of other human beings like you?
EDIT:
You are closer to the slums than you are to Musk. You have no grasp of the magnitudes. $500k is nothing to them.
It seems to me you're defending this reasoning because you think you are "we". You're not. You can't put satellites into space from out of your own pocket.
I think someone coming from the mud can obtain their own capital and land. But that doesn't make them able to affect humanity on a global level. To someone who can, their power is nothing.
Or maybe you are just a troll and I am falling for it hard
Is honest introspection not part of your more kindness in this world mission?
> Supporting assholes is pretty hard hearted dude.
Nowhere did I write I support anybody. And you don't know my gender / dudeness.
> You are literally condoning them harassing other people.
Nowhere did I condone anything, neither literally nor figuratively.
> abusing their significant amount of power
Nowhere was abuse of power discussed.
You asked me whether I "perceive people in powerful positions being assholes as a problem?" and I said no. You don't know my perception beyond that, the only information you have about me is that my perception differs from yours.
In response you very rudely and judgmentally insulted me in a condescending manner. You mentioned that you experienced unnecessarily aggressiveness towards me. Your own words.
You claim you are all about kindness but then you proceeded to gaslight about being judgmental. And now you're digging in and just making things up and acting like a jerk.
Phoney kindness selectively extended only to people you find agreeable is no kindness at all. It is how you treat people different than yourself that reveals your true colors. You are simply a bully.
He was bullied as a child, and your comment is probably true about many autistic people.
I'd say Elon is using free speech for populist reasons and will not deliver a Twitter with true free speech (he is too insecure and besides almost nobody would ever use a platform like that), but no need for personal attacks (it just points at your own insecurities).
He managed to become a billionaire even though he's autistic so I think it's fair to criticize him on the same level as we do others.
If you don't do that, perfect.
Having autism would not be an excuse, by the way. It's just orthogonal and isn't something people are assumed to have say in, like their skin color. Attacking that (calling emotionless Borg and so on) actually hurts any point about specific problems with his actions.
I misinterpreted your "Don't bother, nobody has any sympathy for autism here" comment as a way of saying "People are so hard on him, even though he has autism", so my bad.
The existence of fanboy armies is entirely orthogonal to any discussion we’re having here. Their existence should have no bearing on how Elon is judged by a neutral observer.
He didn't violate any of his stated principles with his earlier actions.
If he goes a year or two without taking such action, will you reverse your opinion?
Which is partly why free speech absolutists cannot exist. Eventually, everyone draws a line in the sand. In the case of Elon Musk, that line in the sand seems to move depending on whom does the censoring.
[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1499976967105433600?s=20...
Twitter is a private platform, that now belongs to Elon Musk. If you don't like it, build your own.
“Build your own Twitter!”
“Build your own ISP!”
“Build your own DNS”
“Build your own copper lines!”
And now Chomsky has gone as far as to say that people who disagree with him (vis a vis vaccines) should be put in a desert and build their own societies. When asked if those people wouldn't die of starvation he shrugged it off.
Citation for Chomsky?
Firing people is a lot more than that lol
Being fired is exponentially more impactful and harmful for the average person than being banned from Twitter and has a much higher chilling effect on free speech than Twitter censorship does.
I don't understand the logic being twisted around here -- Musk himself has complained about ruining people's livelihoods over political/social disagreements. Getting people fired because of their social media is one of the chief complaints people have about "cancel culture."
If people aren't going to criticize Musk for attacking employees over blogposts, then it's going to be real hard for me to take them seriously whenever they talk about Twitter mobs.
I'm also arguing that it's silly to say that it's an existential problem for Twitter to do moderation because it's a public square while simultaneously saying that there's no problem with denying critics access to a place of business or firing them from their jobs. I will point out that "denying people access to a private place of business" is literally what Twitter does when it bans people.
Musk has the right to fire employees that argue against company policy, but firing critics is an obvious characteristic of someone who does not actually have that radical of a view about free speech and mostly just likes to think to himself that he does. If you want to understand someone's views about free speech, don't look at how they react to far-away political discussions that largely don't affect their life, see how they react when the speech hits them closer to home. Every time that Musk actually takes offense over speech, I see him immediately lash out in a way that is uncharacteristic of a free speech advocate, and very often that takes the form of trying to financially or reputationally harm critics -- both of which are actions that are a heck of a lot worse than banning someone from Twitter.
>Dear @ElonMusk: Thank you for reaching out to me. I heard from our phone conversation that you feel that my post, “Dear @ElonMusk: You should be ashamed of yourself”, was a personal attack on you.
Do you really think this is journalism, and that you have to serve a customer who treats you like that?
Second link:
>Mark Goldberg, a Morgan Stanley banker that helped take Tesla public in 2010, told Higgins that Musk repeatedly threatened to fire bankers from Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs before Tesla's IPO launch in 2010.
Poor bankers. Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, very sensitive people I'm sure. Also, the linked Twitter thread shows one event described with Tim Cook was denied by both of them. It looks like a typical poorly sourced attack rag.
>https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1421150913075503112?s=20
First Amazon review of the book:
>I'm always somewhat skeptical when it comes to accounts of what transpired in meetings behind closed doors; especially when the accounts are largely from people that left Tesla on bad terms.
You can imagine at this point there's no need to go through the rest of the list, and that list would actually have the opposite effect of the one you intended.
Yes, it could be. Need to read the rest of the article to know whether it was merited or not. Elon has done lots of scummy things (Tesla battery swap scam for one).
> and that you have to serve a customer who treats you like that
You don't have to, but when you are pretending to be the paragon of free speech, it is an important data point.
And no, it doesn't really mean "then Twitter is right to ban everyone because they are private" since we're far from being in any kind of free market. Existing regulations, powerful existing lobbies and de-facto monopolies mean we should strive towards a complex balance.
I personally believe that freedom of association is an important part of the First Amendment and while I think that Musk has a thin skin and is abusing his power to censor his employees, I also think he has the right to do that. But at the same time, it's ridiculous for anyone concerned about public censorship to compare entirely personal blocklists to firing someone from a company or banning them from a place of business.
Musk has (some) right to censor people at his companies and he has a lot of right to choose who he does business with, but I also have the right to call him a hypocrite whenever he waxes poetic about censorship ruining people's livelihoods, as if your boss firing you because of a Twitter post is somehow worse or in any way different than your boss firing you or denying you severance pay because of a public blog post.
> And no, it doesn't really mean "then Twitter is right to ban everyone because they are private" since we're far from being in any kind of free market.
If you think that Twitter should have different rules because it's big, then the answer to that is to either break it up or nationalize it. Certainly, the answer to "this thing is too big to be bound to the whims of one elite person" is not to privatize it under one elite person.
What you're doing now is far worse than Musk trying to manage his own private companies and reputation, you're fear mongering; "what if he's the boogie monster!"
Managing a private company is not akin to managing free speech on a "public square" - and Elon seems quite aware of this. He's also quite aware of the risk and threat of tyranny if the general population doesn't have a place they won't be censored by systems toeing the line for domestic or foreign bad actors/interests, whether they're for-profit industrial complexes or authoritarians.
Why do you think Hacker News exists as a space to have reasonable, we’ll-intentioned discussion? I’ll answer for you: moderation.
Without moderation, all anonymous public discussion forums devolve into cesspools. By and large, reasonable people don’t want to participate in these places. Twitter certainly isn’t the best place for meaningful discourse right now, but without moderation it can certainly be a hell of a lot worse.
Elon strikes me as an insecure man and opportunistic free speech champion. I don't think accounts like TESLAcharts would survive on the new Twitter. Stonks are supposed to go up, so your speech is definitely free to help that.
Once people like that get rid of inconvenient to them speech limitations, they inevitably end up with new ones, overt or hidden. There is never unconditional free speech in any society.
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-04-12/musk-is-of...
"I mean, frankly a top priority I would have is eliminating the spam and scam bots and the bot armies that are on Twitter," he said. "I think these influence … They make the product much worse. If I had a dogecoin for every crypto scam I saw, I would have a hundred billion dogecoin."
https://www.thestreet.com/.amp/technology/twitter-deal-bots
In fact, I think Twitter announced new measures of linking bots to bot operators back in Feb, so I have no idea why this bothers Elon so much (unless being identified as the owner of the entire Tesla bot horde is exactly what he is worrying about).
I for one, if you made me pick an example, would point to his treatment of Vernon Unsworth.
There are varying definitions of 'censorship' floated in this thread. A lot of people in this thread who are defenders of Musk are willing to apply the label censorship to 'canceling people'...or at least when certain people get push back. If we take their definition at the word, if we take it as honest, then it is reasonable to apply to his own actions.
vis a vis, by the definition of censorship floated in support of Musks purchase, he censored Vernon.
Do I buy that definition? no...but...I don't think 'cancelling' is censorship, I think its just another form of free speech thats given a hostile label to bound free speech in a hierarchical way.
Otherwise, and its worth noting this actually highlights the subtext of the overall conversation, there are two definitions of censorship being applied by some people - a broader one to speech they like, and a narrower one to speech they don't.
Because one, Twitter right now is already difficult site to be on if you’re queer and not using a chain-block extension to deal with bullies, edgelords, and bridagers, and opening the floodgates isn’t exactly going to help.
And two because people spewing hate have already learned to avoid most moderation by dressing them up as “ideas/alternative views”
Some real takes I’ve gotten in my replies unsolicited.
* “I don’t hate gay people I just think they’re existence is a sin, they’re pedophile groomers, and they shouldn’t be allowed to be married.”
* “I don’t hate trans people, I just think that trans men are just confused self hating women, that trans women are rapists, and that they shouldn’t be allowed to have any representation in media because they will brainwash kids into ‘gender ideology’ (whatever that is).”
I both don’t really feel like dealing with this on a day to day basis and I’m really afraid that the literal decades of progress is going to be undone by giving a huge megaphone to these people whose hate manifests in real life harm.