Wasn't it the idea of Musk to give everyone on Twitter absolute freedom of (amplification of) speech?
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33475031 for more details and sources.
p.s. thanks to Dan Luu for putting it all online!
So far it's a case study demonstration of poor and uninspiring leadership.
Outsized attention given to harmless shitposting at Hollywood actors while Iranian terrorists are allowed to post propaganda unchecked despite reports.
Selective application of rules against things like "hacked content" used against certain politicians and organizations with certain political leanings but not others (in one case leading to the censorship of a .gov domain even over direct messages).
Verification badges issued to nobody journalists and sometimes for monetary compensation in contravention of their stated policy.
The existence of shadow banning which was lied about in Congress before leaked screenshots of the backend tools showed that multiple kinds of shadow bans exist.
Manual manipulation of the ostensibly algorithmic trending list.
It is hard for me to even imagine a way in which Twitter's moderation could possibly be any less fair or transparent.
In the meantime I would ask you to remember that HN is not a journal, a debate stage, or an encyclopedia article, instead it is an informal discussion on the internet. As such, participants are allowed to recount things from memory.
How do I know you're not lying?
I think you've been lied to so many times about this that you think it's true. A common tactic with right wing media.
See hunter biden crimes in china, election fraud, etc
Assumption of good faith and an understanding of the obvious fact that not everything that happened on the Internet gets written about by a "credible source" (which often is a synonym for "the media", and given your unwarranted partisan swipe there, likely a synonym for "the media that agrees with me"). At least one of the things I mentioned above, namely fruitless reporting of terrorist content (where I specifically was the person clicking on the report button) while the CEO got involved with a Hollywood star's gripes, is something I was involved in. What source would even possibly exist?
You can either take my word for it as someone that's been here for over 10 years and isn't in the habit of making shit up, or you can not.
It's not that I doubt your honesty, it's an issue of not enough information or context to figure out anything substantial at all.
Examples were provided. If you do not doubt their honesty, then you agree that unfair moderation took place.
I also feel like all these discussions are a distraction from the real issue. The average person doesn’t like using Twitter and never will.
Aren't most people on Twitter exactly to follow those influencers? I don't think most people would ever expect global engagement from any of their tweets.
The real issue here is not average people, but people with something important to say who are not rich, like scientists and activists. They (and their followers) are the ones who might be hurt by the expensive checkmarks.
Also, further down in the chat log there's this:
> [redacted]: Hey Elon -my name is Jake Sherman. I'm a reporter with Punchbowl News in Washington I cover Congress. Wonder if you're game to talk about how Twitter would change for politics if you were at the helm?
What's with the [redacted]? Does Musk give journalists insulting names in his contact list?
Check out the clickable link sources, it's interesting to see how cavalier billionaires are in their private life, the "hard work" consists of mostly just scheming. Not even data-driven in this case, only napkin math:
I remember Jason's mahalo which was supposedly a "human powered" search engine which would out compete flawed algorithmic search of Google. Mahalo eventually became a spam content generator for SEO.
I think he was a tech journalist who failed upwards into becoming a VC. Which reminds me- what is parislemon up to?
> Jason: Day zero
> Jason: Sharpen your blades boys [dagger emoji]
> Jason: 2 day a week Office requirement= 20% voluntary departures
I don't mean to trivialize their achievement, but I thought that was pretty funny.
Free speech is the right to speak, not the right to force everyone to listen. The federation model codifies this.
And then people who are unhappy with the mere existence of other servers hosting speech they dislike will launch coordinated attacks on the upstream infrastructure and revenue streams of those servers, as we've seen time and time and time again. And of course this will just be justified as giant corporations merely engaging in their free expression by ensuring that certain narratives cannot be easily communicated between willing parties via a digital medium.
And if I’m too quick to block servers, my users will leave for less restrictive alternatives. Same if I’m too slow to block bad actors: people being harassed by users on those servers will leave for somewhere more moderated. In short, there’s a feedback loop that tends to optimize a community’s moderation to follow that community’s preferences. What more could you possibly ask for?
You got it backwards. Mastodon was created back in 2016 when Twitter censorship was starting to get way out of hand. Its description was "A decentralized solution to commercial platforms, it avoids the risks of a single company monopolizing your communication."