Elon Musk Owns Twitter; CEO and CFO have left
cnbc.com
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Personally I don't think this acquisition is healthy for a democracy, but nonetheless, it's something I want to observe. I've always thought these platforms need more democratic structures of governance and this is a change in the opposite direction so I'm rather interested in what the future holds and the consequences of this buyout!
Before big tech, there were no global platforms where anyone could just speak to millions/billions of people for free (as in money).
You weren't "censored" by big tech because there was nothing much to censor. In the past, if you wanted to reach a massive audience, you had to go through the traditional news media, big book publishers, major TV stations, or the like, and they were definitely selective about who was allowed to speak.
Also, the so-called "town square" where strangers gather to discuss politics in public is largely or entirely a myth. There are of course public spaces, but what happens on Twitter is not what happens in real physical town squares. And of course there are city council and other government meetings, but they are strictly controlled by government officials, not a free-for-all free speech zone.
In my experience, and I used to run a "freedom of speech" channel back in IRC many years ago where I allowed anything as long as it wasn't illegal. These sort of measures end up restricting freedom of speech much more than enabling it. The reason is very simple, if people are allowed to say anything; then harassment becomes the norm and because a lot of the targets of these harassment are more sensitive then they end up leaving. You might think this is okay, but I tend to disagree, as I believe when people harass others out of a platform that it constitutes a form of violence.
Of course, I think this is actually a very complicated subject. And that's precisely my point on why I believe we need to have better conversations on what do we actually want. But as things stand now, this conversation is always reduced to what Elon Musk now thinks should happen. To me, this form of monarchic governance is sub-par to what is required for a platform as big as twitter.
The problems I've run in to on it is that that some channels on IRC were run by powertripping assholes, and you'd get banned for disagreeing with them or having different opinions.... even if you were perfectly polite, didn't threaten or harass anyone, etc.
Of course, you could just go somewhere else... on to another channel, another network, or off IRC entirely... the internet's a big place.
Still, the fact that some popular channels were dominated by assholes and there weren't viable alternatives to them sometimes is a problem for people wanting to participate in a large public space.
You can do exactly the same thing on IRC... and IRC had that a long time before Twitter even existed.
In many ways, these people don't really care about having a space to say things and instead they want a space to be able to say it to people who don't want to hear it. It is why they don't actually use the spaces they've created for themselves like parlor or truth social. They want to tell trans people that they are not valid, they want to tell women to stop having abortions, they want to tell black people that they're criminals, etc. They need an audience. And if you allow them to have it, what ends up happening is that these people being insulted and belittled will leave.
Traditionally there was more friction to speech. I don't even mean just that the average person doesn't have access to a national platform like CNN. Even something like mailing out fliers had non-trivial costs. It's the same reason why junk mail is generally less of an issue than email spam.
In a traditional town square, people are not anonymous and the "square" was local enough for there to be social consequences to actions. On Twitter, many of the posters are anonymous and even those who aren't often live on the other side of the country.
It's kind of a trade off. I think what's a bit annoying is that often times these discovery features are used to advertise rather than to provide actual good recommendations.
Ps: I don't use Twitter, frequently only when a very interesting hn discussion points there
This is the main reason it's the only social media company I use. I can avoid the algorithm completely.
I also use Twitter lists and made a list of close friends so I can see a feed of just their tweets in case I miss them in the chronological feed.
The tools are already there. The UX to surface them needs to be better though.
I do think Twitter should moderate what they promote and recommend but don’t think they are responsible for posts and users that users manually seek out.
Trump may come back but Twitter really only has bandwidth for one "narcissist" at a time. Trump would be competition for Musk plus Trump has Truth Social so Musk might keep him at arms length for a while. Then there's Kanye, all of these decisions will impact and weigh on Musk's reputation in the celeb sphere (if that's important to him). Twitter is a mainline to the media.
Subscriptions => onlyfans. There will likely be some payment p2p angle. There will be better customer service integration for a business's customers and tools that businesses will pay for. consumers will use it b/c call out culture gets you resolution vs calling into some call center.
There might be a tiktok play. Maybe better DMs that are more whatsapp like.
> Personally I don't think this acquisition is healthy for a democracy
Fewer than a quarter of Americans use Twitter. Empty rhetoric is empty.
They had a problem when Jeff Bezos purchased The Washington Post.
Do you have any reason to believe they are? Except journalists, I he obviously are.
And not just politicians, but as others have said, everyone in any sort of position of power is bound to have twitter. From corporations to personalities. Of course, there are other social medias but a lot of the speech and discussions that happen in the world are somewhat mediated by twitter.
Less democracy means less people are in control of the decisions, that is precisely what has happened.
If Elon sticks to the ideals he has espoused and open sourced more of the algorithms and policies of Twitter, that is possibly an improvement.
As an example from governments: The Chinese legislator is ruled by the communist party. The National People’s Congress has almost 3000 representatives. Even though there are almost 10x more representatives then in the USA legislator (which is still more then double per capita), this doesn’t mean the China’s legislator is more democratic then the USA’s legislator. Far from it. Now if Xi Jinping would dismantle the Congress and assume dictatorial powers (like Caesar crossing the Rubicon) this would just move China from being a totalitarian republic to a dictatorship (again like Ancient Rome after the civil wars), at no point in this affair does the common population in China have any say in the laws that govern them (not even by proxy, as is the case in the USA; but by proxy of a proxy of a proxy etc. effectively thinning out any democratic say to nothing).
One mechanism of accomplishing that would be to restrict people who are using communication platforms to violate democratic norms.
I'm not advocating that is the best way to accomplish protecting democracy. I'm just pointing out that "free speech maximalism" doesn't address the need to protect democracy.
People can respect you as a person, but no I don't think people have to respect different viewpoints. I can respect that you have a lived experience that differs from mine and that your viewpoint is X, but I do balance that against my own views and speak my own truth as well.
If you think that you have to respect every viewpoint that differs, think of the viewpoints of the party you dislike. Think of any of their views. Do you respect their _view_ or do you respect the person and want to allow their speech while disagreeing with it?
Me? I think the best way to deal with speech I don't like is not filtering or censorship its more speech. Anytime I see an implication that someones view needs to be filtered I think "You first."
Only a fascist would force free speech onto people.
Shareholder oversight is limited to addressing the agency problem (i.e., by firing executives if they egregiously harm profits). It's simply not a "democratic structure of governance", and has nothing whatsoever to do with content or moderation decisions. Even "activist investors" focus on things like dividends and buybacks, not content moderation.
Twitter's stock tanked 12% after Trump was permabanned; shareholders clearly had no say in it, or he would never have been banned.
Since shareholders' main impact is to incentivize management to maximize long-term value, and Musk will now own the majority of Twitter stock himself, the incentive has not changed. Even if Twitter was still public, shareholders would have no say in Musk's decision to reinstate (or not) Trump, for example. And importantly, a company being private doesn't mean it has no shareholders; it just means shares are not traded on public exchanges.
I think these platforms need to be more democratic, I don't think they're democratic at all as publicly owned companies. However, I do think control is now even more centralized residing in just one person. Which, imo, is an even worse state of affairs.
To me, democracy in these platforms is not about what speech is moderated but about taking the decision, in the first place, to do so. How is that decision taken, who is responsible for such decisions? It's about who is deciding rather than what is decided. Democracies will not always favor our personal points of view, but that wouldn't make them less democratic (think for example of the swiss people voting against face coverings, a democratic decision that goes against what I personally consider is correct).
I do consider a public company to have a more democratic structure of governance compared to a privately owned company simply by the fact that people could gain access. Of course, with such concentration of wealth it is a bit of a pipe dream. But think for example of Norway and their wealth fund; this is a country that invests in companies and steers influences them. They can't really do that with a private corporation.
In any case, this is not really a hill i would be willing to die on in any case. I want more democracy in platform governance.
This is an interesting point, curious if you could elaborate how you see elontwitter as unhealthy to democracy.
Twitter has no impact on the democratic institutions or function of the politicians. In fact, national security ensures the function of the elected politicians to continue. The only day twitter's influence can do anything to influence the democracy is election day.
The only thing that is unhealthy to a democracy on election day is anything which makes the election unfair. It's not twitter boarding up windows while the vote is being counted. Twitter does have impact on how people vote.
It's the politician and journalist's jobs to ensure the people are educated and know how to vote. This is where twitter comes in. Their current censorship of only 1 side of politics was an effective way to ensuring people didn't know how to vote. Resulting in a measurable boost to the given team. This is the unhealthiness. This is what elon at least claims he plans to fix. So to me, elon buying twitter is potentially going to be better for democracy.
And then there is a part of me, as a participant of whatever democracy is left in the United States, is concerned with what could happen if a particular user is allowed to use Twitter again after their orchestration of certain events.
I typically use Twitter pretty passively. Most of my follows are tech oriented, journalists or local politicians, and it feels like every thread that has mentioned Musk's acquisition closing has been flooded with new accounts hailing the return of banned users.
It could be related to the subject matter, of course, but this has been during non-trending times and on posts that generally have mostly genuine engagement.
With the announcement today that he'll be reverting lifetime bans, I expect things to get even worse and the quality of the conversations to be near non-existent.
Doubt Musk has some unthought of revolutionary way to detect and neuter botnet accounts, and if he's insisting on laxing the enforcement of such accounts, it's going to get mucky real quick.
It's never good when someone denies the legitimacy of the very system that brought them into power. This is the part that makes him "terrible for democracy".
Embezzling every penny he could, modeling himself after Hitler, raising a mob to storming the capital to kidnap the vice president, and filing fake lawsuits about the election, was far far worse than losing the unofficial popular vote.
50 million+ people voted for a republican or non-democrat, they didn't vote "for trump". Just like when Biden won, 70 million+ people weren't voting for Biden, they were voting for a democrat, non-republican, or more specifically: anyone but Trump.
It's insanity when there are, for all intents and purposes, two people on a ballot to say "we chose this person specifically!!!". No you didn't, you chose one of the two options that was given to you, and since they are normally on the opposite end of the political spectrum you just chose the one "closest" to your views out of the two. Almost everything that happened up until that point is literally out of any normal individual person's control.
Unlike Facebook and how it's captured an older audience that's relative inelastic to moving to other platforms, I don't see people sticking around on Twitter nor do I see employees staying around either.
With major members of the C-suite turning over and his outright public aggression toward them I'd sure be concerned if I worked there.
That's why he wanted to buy it.
I understand that's not all that goes into managing a social network, but if he mostly gets out of the way other than bot-blocking, as seems to be his intent, he might be okay.
And that's based on what exactly?
> He'll bring on a few yes-men executives that'll applaud him
Again, based on what?
Now here's a prediction actually based on Musk's past perf:
He'll bring in people who get shit done, and get it done fast. Twitter will achieve things everyone says is stupid, ridiculous and impossible now as he's done in the past 20 years with Tesla and SpaceX.
That will be followed by a large swath of copy-cats who will try to replicate it to no avail.
What you makes you think Tesla is just an engineering problem?
You have regulation, laws protecting dealers, government negotiations, lobbying (and that's just from top of my head) and not to forget, large distributed software and hardware infrastructure
SpaceX: strong relationships with customers, dealing with lots of government and private companies that are paying you millions of dollars, etc.
> You're assuming that the attributes that lead to success in those companies will also carry across.
There are many attributes across the board that is needed to succeed in a scale of those companies. Even in Musk's existing companies, he's most definitly not suited to do certain tasks. It's well known and that Gwen Shotwell is a huge part of SpaceX'es success to date. I agree that social network requires its own area of knowledge and experience, but Musk isn't literally doing all this by himself. He attracts talent and that's the key.
Which company would that be?
Weird claim.
Twitter has been mismanaging for years. I doubt Elon could do worse.
Enjoy your cult. I'm sure it's warm and safe.
But thanks for your input.
Have a great day.
As usual, Musk fails to be funny.
You’d think he could afford some good gag authors but that probably goes against his ego.
Is this official position of some jokes association? I wouldn't want to laugh at unfunny joke.
None one can say we have that right now. Facebook, instagram, TikTok are left wing. Truth social, gettr, etc... Are right wing. Where's the "neutral", centric platform? There's none. Twitter could become this platform.
I'm not in Truth social but I won't consume any left wing platform either. Twitter is the closest thing to "centric" pov and it's still heavily skewed to left ideologies.
The main issue here is that the climate is soo polarized that you can't even discuss anything because if you don't agree 100% with me then you become my enemy. This is one of the reasons on why Hitler rose to power. Don't listen to what the other side is saying even if what they are saying make some sort of sense. They are wrong and they are destroying the world.
I,for once, want to believe twitter can be saved and dialogue can come back.
>Where's the "neutral", centric platform?
Are you.. serious? You construct this statement as if Facebook, instagram, tiktok, reddit etc are somehow mandated or left wing by some fake construction..
Truth social, gettr and whatever other bullshit people made are the only ones created for people of some specific viewpoints to go there because they don't understand they are in the vast minority on their views which is why no one wants to hear about their bullshit on the rest of the internet.
So maybe you should be asking yourself the simple question: if every neutral platform naturally swings left.. hmm, that couldn't possibly mean because most people are actually more left leaning in this country?