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Comment by hobbitstan | Hacker News Reader

The FTC has, historically, been one of the more spineless agencies in the US. Elon has nothing to fear that a few lawyers can’t fix.

And calling Twitter a ‘town hall that we love’ shows the bias of the article and the source. Twitter has been a one-sided political propaganda and censorship machine for many many years.

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I have to imagine Facebook and Uber had a few lawyers and one paid $4.9B in fines and the other's former-CSO is now awaiting sentencing on an obstruction of justice conviction.

The interesting proposition here is that Twitter could have lost the organizational capacity to comply with these consent decrees, or at least abdicated the responsibility to the engineers...which sounds bananas.

The Prequel-meme writes itself...

    ELON-AKIN: I'm not worried about the FTC. I build rockets.
    PADME-GNINEER: Then I shouldn't be either.
    ELON-AKIN: ...
    PADME-GNINEER: I shouldn't be either, right?

Trying to pass the compliance risk on to the engineers is insane. And I don't think the FTC buys it. It's a long shot because the ultra wealthy rarely have to face real consequences in America, but there's a real possibility that Elon Musk goes to prison over his flippant disregard of the FTC.

> The interesting proposition here is that Twitter could have lost the organizational capacity to comply with these consent decrees

Since Musk has taken over (2 weeks) they have, unless I misunderstand something, lost the head of trust and safety twice: the first fired for being part of the team that held Musk to his cobtract, the second resigning today.

I love the smell of peak HN in the morning. Smells like denial.

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