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Comment by lake_vincent | Hacker News Reader

Well, speaking in those terms, I think the thing to watch will in fact be censorship. Elon is extremely idealistic, so it will be fascinating to watch him melt down when confronted with the reality of how complex free speech and censorship issues really are. I predict that he will succeed in turning Twitter into the rightwing safehaven that "Truth" Social, Parlor, etc have all been trying to become.

He's making a deal with the devil to fund Twitter, and if that means selling out to guys like Peter Thiel and other conservative power brokers, then he will do it. Just in time for the 2024 presidential election media cycle too...What could possibly go wrong?

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Idealistic?

Elon Musk has been talking about how awesome Gigafactory Shanghai is for the past year, thanks to Chinese workers who don't talk back to their boss and work harder than their American counterparts.

Dude loves his Chinese anti-speech factory. Or at least, he already is pretending to do that so that he gets his Chinese sales numbers up.

Musk makes the public statements he needs to do business. He has no morals outside of money as far as I can tell. Dude is 100% willing to spout off anti-American propaganda / stereotypes to serve his Chinese masters (at least, this year when his Chinese factory is opening up. We will see if he really believes those words or if he's just playing dumb or something...)

EDIT:

> I think there will be some very strong companies coming out of China. There’s just a lot of super talented and hardworking people in China that strongly believe in manufacturing. And they won’t just be burning the midnight oil. They’ll be burning the 3am oil. So they won’t even leave the factory type of thing. Whereas in America, people are trying to avoid going to work at all.

I view this as America needs to do better. Not sure why that's anti-American. You fan be good to somebody to tell them the truth and for them to apply themselves. Lie to them and speak American exceptionalism is not pro-America. Its brainwash

Elon Musk wouldn't comply with American COVID19 restrictions in his first factory.

But when China goes 100% lockdown for the past year, he turns a blind eye to it and calls them hard workers instead. His anti-American bias, at least when talking with the Chinese, is pretty darn obvious.

Of course, it all disappears when he flies back to the USA. My point is he's a two-faced double-talking political type. He says what he needs to say to get the money and prestige he needs to do what he wants. Expect more pro-Chinese sentiment from him. The Chinese factory is one of the most important elements of Tesla's strategy right now.

This is why I’ve gotten tired of him. He’s yet another thermometer just reading the temperature to figure out how to profit. No surprise that reading changes everywhere he goes.

He’s a politician/actor for business, and people love it. Everybody claims to hate politics, but it’s become yet another reality tv drama to which we’ve become addicted. Elon is a great actor and he’s paid very well for it. He knows the game he’s playing, and has no moral compass to hold him back.

Unfortunately, it’s the most real form of reality tv yet, where we all eventually bear the consequences. Personally, I have never and will never use or read Twitter. My concern for most social media platforms is whether or not they’re going to damage society.

It’s not like we have a choice anyway. So take a good look at your surroundings, and a year or two from now, ask yourself if we’re better or worse off than now.

> I predict that he will succeed in turning Twitter into the rightwing safehaven that "Truth" Social, Parlor, etc have all been trying to become.

I actually don't think so, I think this was bluster, or if they are safe haven it will be safe in the way that a subreddit is safe. You can freely talk amongst eachother but that content won't be promoted to people who don't want to see it.

I mean this was his latest tweet: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1586059953311137792?cxt=...

My prediction is he ends up growing twitter into a fairly bland chat/communications app/social network, and the focus on global political and social debates slowly weans over time.

> This Tweet is unavailable. Learn more

Can't help but smile.

Did you block him? I still see the tweet. Maybe he got selectively shadowbanned :-)

Twitter's had a few technical issues today (huh.) and I've had the same with other tweets. If you reload you should see it.

Shows up for me.

Here's the text of it in case others can't see it:

> Twitter will be forming a content moderation council with widely diverse viewpoints.

> No major content decisions or account reinstatements will happen before that council convenes.

Twitter does that occasionally. Just reload the page until it works.

I don't think they've ever had more than 2 9s of reliability.

personally I think he's going to try to grow it, but if he's smart a competitor to youtube along with the social media portion would be a huge move that twitter is actually positioned well to pivot to.

  My prediction is he ends up growing twitter into a fairly bland chat/communications app/social network, and the focus on global political and social debates slowly weans over time.

So far Musk's brought back a very high profile antisemite (Ye) and a bunch of others took the hint to return to Twitter. I'm pretty sure bland isn't the right word.

https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Racist-tweets-quickl...

  "Elon now controls twitter. Unleash the racial slurs. K---S AND N-----S," said
  one account, using slurs for Jews and Black people. "I can freely express how
  much I hate n-----s . . . now, thank you elon," another said.

…

  Some of the Twitter influx was organized on other platforms, including the pro-Trump
  forum TheDonald, where its top posts Friday morning showed tweets celebrating lies
  about Trump's 2020 election loss and memes criticizing transgender people under the
  headline "When you can't get banned on Twitter anymore."

My prediction is Musk flails about, burns a pile of money, and decimates any goodwill his associated companies (e.g. SpaceX, Tesla, Starlink) currently have.

Musk earlier today he didn’t bring Kanye back. I mean he’s certainly riling up the dregs of humanity and now not like a good person but I don’t think he’s going to burn 44 bil

> My prediction is Musk flails about, burns a pile of money, and decimates any goodwill his associated companies (e.g. SpaceX, Tesla, Starlink) currently have.

I hope you’re right.

This morning NY Daily News was claiming Ye was allowed back. It'd be nice if that were wrong or has since been redacted, but I'm not going to hold my breath.

As for Musk, he's playing with other people's money. At that scale he can afford to tell the American banks to go fuck themselves. The foreign investors are probably cheering on this nonsense. The Saudis want pro-oil republicans, the Russians are going to relish the chaos, and at the very least the Chinese will cheer on the loss of a TikTok competitor. There aren't a lot of guardrails here.

https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Kanye-West-s-Twitter-acc...

Really the Ye thing doesn’t matter because I under minded my own argument :-) I think all those terrible things are coming but he’s going to thread the needle around discoverability to make it palatable. Too much chaos isn’t good for anyone even bad actors if the site becomes irrelevant, but we’ll see, I’m not super convinced youre wrong. Maybe Twitter has enough momentum to stay in the public eye in spite of itself.

And what if China requests a tweet removed or user banned and puts a Tesla factory or those sweet tax cuts on the line?

Oh that's what I mean - he will enforce his own definition of free speech and censorship. It will be usual "Rules for thee but not for me" kinda thing. It will be a constantly shitfing goalpost, and he will always have some bullshit justification for why whatever he decides is correct. It won't be free speech, it will be Elon speech. He is a petulant child with too much money, and not enough humility. His sink stunt tells you everything you need to know - this is all about Elon. God help us all.

"Rules for thee but not for me"

I mean, that's no different from Twitter and other platforms currently operate in terms of how they define hate speech or who they cancel.

It's not easy is it?

I think the point is that while right now, 'unfair' things might happen, perhaps they will become even more uneven in the future, as he exerts more personal sway into what's ok and what's not, rather than attempting to stick to some guidelines.

> that's no different from Twitter and other platforms

Exactly -- and I think that's the source of most folks' pre-schadenfreude. A lot of us have been around long enough to have seen "free speech" platforms come and go and this feels no different, so far.

The simple (and inevitable) solution is for some accounts or tweets to be withheld in certain countries. No company can avoid complying with the law; but they can't be forced to take down a tweet worldwide either.

> No company can avoid complying with the law; but they can't be forced to take down a tweet worldwide either.

Sure they can. "You take down tweets we don't like, or Tesla loses China as a market, we arrest all the employees currently in China, and take your factories and other assets there".

Can he say "fine"? Sure, technically.

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