“Negative/hate tweets will be max deboosted and demonetized”
twitter.com
twitter.com
Here's one example quote from June, 2022:
“I think there’s this big difference between freedom of speech and freedom of reach in that one can, obviously, let’s say in the United States go in the middle of Times Square and pretty much yell anything you want. You’ll annoy the people around you, but you’re kind of allowed to just sort of yell whatever you want in a crowded public place, more or less, apart from 'this is robbery' — probably that would get you in trouble.
“So but then whatever you say, however controversial, does not need to then be broadcast to the whole country. So I think generally the approach of Twitter should be to let people say what they want to do within the bounds of the law, but then limit who sees that...”
Source: https://www.teslarati.com/elon-musk-china-censorship-twitter...
A message spreads on Twitter because individuals on Twitter amplify it (with engagement, retweets etc.) which is itself a form of speech: if you say something bad, and I retweet it, I am engaging in speech. Imagine a piece of land with 500 million people on it: a person 500 million people away from you cannot hear you, but if you say something and people choose to repeat it until it reaches that person… that’s Twitter. To prevent that is, in any framing, limiting free speech.
Twitter has some magical engagement-driving algorithms (for example, the homepage) but these are not the primary driver of engagement/reach on Twitter, so they could be removed entirely and this problem would remain.
So you’re probably right to say this isn’t a sudden 180 on his thoughts, but it still highlights how faulty his framing of free speech is.
Which problem? Seriously: the only legitimate problem I know of is that Twitter gives artificial reach to things via algorithmic engagement. They literally send me push notifications for tweets their algorithm thinks is interesting.
If you retweet something some asshole says and I don't like it, I should probably just unfollow you because you could have just screenshotted the original tweet and included the image... that was you actively sending that content, and wasn't the original anymore.
(FWIW, the reason I don't trust this is because I actually further disagree with your assertion that the algorithms aren't causing reach, because Twitter no longer does linear timelines: everything you see, including from your followers, has been curated by the engagement-driving algorithm, and so if he starts down-modding stuff then it actually will work and actually will reduce reach as you will be less likely to see it even if the people you follow retweet it.)
Twitter provides reach to speech. You cannot remove reach from Twitter without rendering Twitter useless. Pre-Elon Twitter addressed the problem of giving bad speech reach by removing the bad speech. Elon’s “free speech absolutist” position is that removing speech is wrong so he’s going to remove the reach… which has the same outcome as removing the speech.
I think you’re vastly overestimating how much the algorithms matter, they’re not relevant to the problem Elon is trying to address.
You absolutely can.
The way that it is still useful, is if instead of being perma-banned for a bad tweet, instead an account just has that tweet only prioritized.
That way, the bad stuff is stopped, without draconian ban policies destroying your account.
I'd equate it more to people in Nebraska can't hear the guy yelling in Times Square, nor should they.
If people like this guy and want to hear him, they can go to Nebraska and listen to him (follow on Twitter).
If he does something outlandish and makes the national news, people will know about it (a lot of retweets).
What Elon is describing (as I understand it based on the limited information provided) is restricting reach within your network, i.e: you tweet something bad, the tweet won’t show up on your followers feed.
As far as I can tell, this is already how Twitter works.
I have plenty of people I follow who I almost never see tweets from anymore in my timeline, but if I go to their accounts directly I can see they are saying a lot of things.
People call it being shadowbanned.
Yeah, unless those get suppressed too which is what currently happens on social media sites like Facebook, Reddit and (pre-Musk) Twitter.
There is no way authorities can gently steer public debates in the "right" direction. Any meddling is overstepping a line and problematic.
I still don't understand what his logic is. What is the philosophical value of free speech if no one is able to hear that speech? Is his viewpoint that free speech is just about babbling on into an empty void? What is the value in protecting that? How does one argue that shadowbanning isn't infringing on someone's speech. And for the record, I think shadowbanning is generally a good thing for online communities, but I also support outright bans and don't go around pretending I'm a free speech absolutist.
That’s how tweets spread and get massive faster/more than typical virality.
Now imagine turning that off. You can still say what you want, and your followers will see it, but it won’t get blasted out to that whole world.
I don't think there's any coherent principle, and in practice it really encourages bad actors to find exactly where the line is.
It can be regarded a positive thing insofar that it constitutes a limit on twitters ability to censor.
So an even more insidious and targetted form of shadow ban.
In a charitable reading it looks like Elon wants to remove hateful speech from the latter and leave it off the former.
This will allow you to say what you want and to follow who you want. Who ends up in your suggestions has nothing to do with free speech.
If the postal services decides to ban you from this "papers you might like" service you are still allowed to send as much mail as you want to whoever you want, but you no longer have access to the postal service expertise in spreading your news.
This can obviously be abused but it is also very different from being unable to send any mail at all.
I think media should function to encourage speech that balances social and individual utility. That is, speech that has important protection from powerful actors like the government and CEOs, but also that incentivizes true and useful information, in all the nuance that is necessary to actually understand the world. (Obviously entertainment is useful as well.)
But engaging lies are not a form of speech I value, and equating the current operation, or slightly-more-permissive version of it, of an overwhelmingly constructed forum (i.e. Twitter and it's retweet system) with "free" speech doesn't make much sense.
There is no pure expression of speech in this sense. All speech is shaped and limited by incentives and technological particularities.
No, he has said that he wants people to be able to set their own filters. So no or few top-down filter policies, but more bottom-up filter policies.
Also, how does this change “users cost money” issue? Does not private company need to pay bills? Unless you mean that he’s now free to bail company out using his income from elsewhere…
Go back to what twitter was in the beginning: you see the tweets of people you follow. That's it.
So in the end, you have things like this where eventually "following" is not there to help you it's there to help the social media company data mine you for signals. The contract is that you then can get indirect secondary benefit, hopefully you have a better chance of then getting the messages people are trying to send you. But the power relationship is very clear; their needs are first and yours are second.
I also want to see tweets I would find notable/interesting, from people I don't follow, if I knew they existed. An algorithm would help with that suggestion.
What I really want is Spotify's "Discover Weekly", and "This song's radio", but in Twitter.
When Spotify's Discovery Weekly gives me a playlist, it's giving me songs I've never heard before, that it thinks I'll like. The decision if I like them is completely my own. Spotify's recommendations aren't thinking for me. If I had more time to listen to a thousand random songs a day, I might stumble across their recommendations. But, their recommendations aren't thinking for me, they're just categorizing and skipping most of the garbage* related to my dislikes.
* Spotify has 80 million songs. If I listened to the first 10 seconds of every song, for 8 hours a day, it would take me over 70 years.
This could control top posts, but theoretically also their replies.
It's the stupid replies that make Twitter annoying, not so much the top posts for me.
It's much harder for people complaining about toxicity if they can filter it out. Then it'll be harder for them to argue someone should be deplatformed. Because then they would be arguing that you and I should be barred from reading that person.
Having people's tweets obliterated by a new Algorithm(tm) because it decided they are bad definitely doesn't feel like a good fix for the issue.
And I guess it makes sense to de-promote poisonous speech, since our primal brains have a tendency to naturally amplify and accord outsized importance to hate, outrage and other strong negative emotions, although those are mostly hugely detrimental to civil society.
Social harmony is underrated in the West. We're all willing to sacrifice our social fabric - and thus ultimately our averaged personal happiness - in favor of individualism. A social system like Twitter should have systems and patterns that correct for our flaws here.
You might argue that the optionality of personal filter tweaking makes all the difference. But in terms of practical impact, it's meaningless. Not enough people are going to take that option to make a difference.
The point is, there will always be a gatekeeper.
The prime example is when someone's tweets don't show up in the timelines of subscribers. People who specifically what to hear that speech never get a chance to.
I don't think it's fair to expect the algorithm to be open-source so soon, but I also don't think this represents anything like the meaningful changes he promised, so it's relatively insignificant.
This is closer to the HN model where you can see it if you really want to via showdead.
I think that Musk has realized that his free speech absolutism conflicts with his goal of increasing profits. So now he's trying very hard to find a compromise.
Some people who get banned on social media are banned for a reason. You’re not going to ever get mainstream advertisers moderating twitter like it’s 4chan.
Hacker News does exactly this, and the people using this site like it.
if a comment section is all spam for penis enlargement pills no one hangs out there. instead, they go to comment sections where the platform owners actively decide to remove spam. they censor away posts for all different kinds of spam.
That is, what I find so awful about most social media (and places like YouTube) is how they focus on some of the most anger-inducing content for "engagement". That is, I think the problem is much more their algorithms than what people actually post.
That said, I think that, realistically, being at the bottom of the heap won't actually be much different from being banned - which I actually think is a good thing.
Conservative speech like "lower taxes are better", "extract more petroleum", and "prayer should be allowed in public school" were never targeted.
The "conservative" speech banned were things like "LGBT people should have their human rights denied" and "Let's get together and attack the Capitol to stop the transfer of power".
> It is simply a shift of power from the left to the right, financed by a handful of billionaires, Wall Street banks and Saudi/Qatari Princes.
That raises the question of what are the "dividends" for those parties, regardless of the financial success of Twitter.
I am, although I disagree with the characterization "naive". Twenty years ago Musk's attitude was widely held, particularly in the tech industry. I see nothing incredible about the proposition that Musk believes this still. Also, the whole "if you have any point of agreement with people on the right, you are alt-right" thing seems silly to me. There are other positions between team red and team blue.
If anyone doesn't believe this how those involved viewed the situation, read Musk's text messages that were exposed in court[1].
That was perhaps one problem with Twitter, and no, this is not the same thing.
Other, much bigger problems were that they'd arbitrarily block (as in: make invisible) tweets, replace them with "warnings" of dubious provenance, declare "misinformation" (often based on poor/biased understanding of the topics at hand; recall the repeated flagging of the Cochrane Collaboration Twitter account last year [1]), ban accounts entirely after "three strikes" of this sort, and many other egregious acts of censorship that frequently correlated more strongly with political ideology than with fact or actual threat.
Musk's comment doesn't say how they're going to decide what is hate speech, and that's pretty critical context here, so we'll see. There's obviously going to be a narrow class of speech that needs regulation, on any social platform. But if it's possible to say pretty much anything outside of this narrow class of content without getting banned, it would be a significant shift toward freedom of expression.
[1] https://twitter.com/cochranecollab/status/150445846882413363...
(Cochrane is the gold standard for medical evidence review. Flagging them for "misinformation" would be hilariously misinformed, if it weren't so scary.)
Elon is, as usual, totally full of shit, people have a natural disdain for flippant dishonesty.
Wasn't the status quo to ban accounts completely, due to individual tweets, rather than hide individual tweets?
This seems much much more permissive.
More permissive perhaps, but not by much, and Trump remains banned - so bans remain a part of the toolkit.
If a person wrote obscenities on twitter and nobody saw them or can discover them, did they write anything? If they did, how do you know when you haven't seen it. If they didn't, how is it different from never writing it in the first place?
...and not to forget the mainstream media that love to refer to extremist tweets as it is an easy article to write.
The purpose of following a person is to see their tweets. How is this a "problem"?
This makes for a very civil, but bland conversation. People engage with negative/hate tweets.
I personally like talking politics without insults, but most people are incapable of it.
It is easy to detect insults.
I would fully expect the next thing for you to say is "I can program my own Twitter in a week"
Trying to figure out language intent is just the kind of thing an engineer/moderator says is easy and then is in deep water a month later after a phrase that means "you're great" in one language means "you're a donkey's anus" in another.
When you're moderating a small group it can be somewhat easy, everyone tends to speak the same language, and quite often it just falls into a groupthink that excludes situations like this. But when the situation scales you don't just have users that actively want to use the service, you have adversarial users that want to abuse your service and make it hell... and those users can be exceptionally clever.
Facebook and Twitter both grew very popular without an algorithm. Then they chased the almighty engagement metrics.
Now he will figure out that the bloat of microservices and employees was there also for a reason.
After all, he knows that revenue comes from ads, and those who pay for ads have some power to influence the rules. It's not like Twitter is totalitarian just because Dorsey is a totalitarian guy by nature. It even seems that he kinda isn't. It's just the fact, that there are other powers that at certain level start being far more influential, than the CEOs opinion. And these powers tend to be quite totalitarian.
Musk it just a populist. Not living up to his promises isn't a sign of short-sightedness. In fact, it seems to be working great for him so far. Not sure if it will with Twitter, but it did, and still does with Tesla, FWIW.
Being an engineer / content moderator in an environment where there's a guy constantly introducing chaos via idiotic "Couldn't we just…?" mandates can't be fun.
If they had applied the rules consistently, they'd be reasonable enough, but they never did or even particularly tried. I don't have any hope that Elon will, either, though.
Yes, but some claim to do so while deliberately doing the opposite, while others say they're bad at it while actually trying. Corporations (such as Twitter) are exclusively toward the former end of the spectrum.
So it is claimed, but I don't think that's true and without data it's simply a matter of opinion.
A for profit business definitely could definitely codify how to profit and how to price in its charter. Too much profit is just a bad excuse.
Banning accounts vs reducing reach? Vastly different
This doesn't mean say anything you want, but for any given subject matter, there is absolutely a way to discuss it respectfully. This is the type of censorship that is common online right now. Platforms aren't just following guidelines, they are actively deciding which things can be discussed and which things cannot. In the case of Twitter, it seems this censorship is controlled by the stakeholder advertisers. Personally I would like to live in a world where society is not controlled by powerful capitalist interests.
It is not true that what twitter was doing was already the inevitable perfect compromise, or that advertisers were demanding that the sitting POTUS be banned even though SCOTUS had ruled people had a right to interact with him on twitter.
Here it seems like the poster and anyone else can directly search for the poster's account or the "filtered" post and still see it. But I guess the tags won't work. Kind of a middle ground. Perhaps they will explicitly remove/block the tags so the poster knows this is happening, which at least isn't tricking them.
To clarify, Musk said nothing whatsoever about tags. Another read of Musk's tweet is that your timeline won't show tweets with a negative sentiment analysis score.
Given recent events, I'm reluctant to assume Musk's vague goals will be implemented in the narrowest and most delicate way possible.
Unless they're pretending to be him (or advertisers) for a joke on Twitter, in which case they seem to very quickly get banned.
(As for the joke angle, twitter has decided it's too risky to allow humour that relies on brazen impersonation. Parody accounts that are clearly indicated as such are still allowed.)
And frankly, if this was a concern, maybe eliminating the way to tell whose account is who they say they are was a terrible business move.
Dude's got the most fragile ego as this whole episode has demonstrated.
Most of the folks getting banned for actually pretending to be someone else were either obviously a joke because they were totally silly, or were only able to look remotely real because of the idiotic $8 "you're real if you pay us" policy.
Shadowbanning applies to accounts.
Also, nowhere in that thread does it say that the user won't be told the Tweet was demonetized, which is the dictionary definition of shadowbanning.
I am not trying to provoke a flame war here either actually if it comes off that way. I think the business of social apps is trendy and you have to know your audience.
But that's only true when you delete posts and block users. It makes mistakes so costly (and with machines being so easily manipulated) that we need to run too many decisions past people because our decisions here are making huge impact at a personal level for those involved.
But if you're willing to accept "hidden at default-browse-level" wrongly appearing every now and then it becomes totally solvable.
We were trying to scale fact-checkers and playground-nannies but the trick is to get rid of those roles and use users to flag what users like and/or don't like directly. You can do a staggered release to previously critical people, and known-objective people, once a few posts have been flagged.
A couple weeks ago, Elon said that Twitter’s content policy (and account reinstatement) would be decided by a moderation council composed of people with diverse views. There have been no reports of this council being formed yet.
Edit: why was this post flagged?
Kathie Griffin, Jorden Peterson & Babylon Bee have been reinstated.
Trump decision has not yet been made.
https://www.insidehook.com/article/tech/elon-musk-worst-twee...
Twitter needs a dislike button. Every social media platform needs a mechanism for explicit negative feedback. Yes, people will use it to downvote ideas they don't like. Yes, it will come with its own challenges. That's how real life works. It doesn't make that speech disappear, it just deprioritizes it.
Given that he already wants to do this, it's better to let humans have input than to pretend as if algorithms know what's best for us.
4chan does this and it works surprisingly well.
Of course, this is great for user engagement, but it will also make the actual user experience pretty horrible.
And the nice thing is that there's no oversight board, there's just your comment, you can always reply if you don't agree. The only measure of success is the number of replies, and funny, insightful or contrarian posts usually get those. Plus, everyone is completely anonymous so you can really be anyone.
There is no going above that. That's what psychological abuse looks like, and you're justifying it to yourself
You can have a community that isn't full of passive aggressive people and also not a disgusting shithole. Look at hn as an example. You're only hurting yourself in the long run
This IS twitters dislike button.
No problem you say, let's just tweak the detector to let that through. So you're going to write exceptions? What happens when "mondays" becomes some sort of code word for racial epithets? How do you detect that? This has happened before, look up what happened to r/clownworld.
This is straight up an unsolvable problem. You need human labeling, which is what a dislike button accomplishes.
FWIW, I do not like the dislike or like buttons.
Well, it seems unlikely to be human-driven, given how many of the employees and contractors who were responsible for content moderation have been laid off.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/elon-musk-twitter-layoffs-outso...
>Negative/hate tweets will be max deboosted & demonetized.
Guess this guy finally realized that a free for all model is not feasible.
Is your usage of quotations marks intended to adhere to one of these?
If so, which one, and how?
If not, what is the intent of them?
-------------------------------------------------
https://www.grammarbook.com/punctuation/quotes.asp
- Rule 1. Use double quotation marks to set off a direct (word-for-word) quotation.
Correct: “I hope you will be here,” he said.
Incorrect: He said that he “hoped I would be there.” (The quotation marks are incorrect because hoped I would be there does not state the speaker's exact words.)
- Rule 8a. Quotation marks are often used with technical terms, terms used in an unusual way, or other expressions that vary from standard usage.
Examples:
It's an oil-extraction method known as “fracking.”
He did some “experimenting” in his college days.
I had a visit from my “friend” the tax man.
> I had a visit from my “friend” the tax man.
If you're going to pull out the dictionary in bad faith, it would behoove you to read the defs you're pulling out.
I think it's fun and informative to draw attention to cognitive functionality of humans when they are opining on the cognitive functionality of other humans, particularly in "smart" communities when the topic of discussion tends to exploit cultural norms and catalyze ~unforced (note: speculation) cognitive errors.
Brute force stats like Naive Bayes is still as good as it gets on platforms like Twitter where speech patterns are too short and irregular for traditional NLP to be very useful.
There are no coherent long form texts generated by AI models but 280 characters is very easy because people will give the author the benefit of the doubt and interpolate the missing context.
Sentiment analysis is way worse than that in adversarial scenarios, where a human is trying to outwit the machine.
My prediction for this whole thing: Elon Musk [again] gets swept up by AI hype, tries to replace humans with software, and it doesn't work. Like at Tesla, so at Twitter.
Freedom of speech is freedom from censorship or moderation. Not freedom from discomfort
That would seem to violate causality.
"You are not allowed to criticize the CCP" is speech.
"I order you to kill/hang that vice president" is speech, and the dead don't speak.
Any syntactially correct but illogical thing, basically. The textbook example is "have you stopped beating your wife? yes or no, asshole".
Most humans aren't very good at being rational. Undermining someone's capacity for correct reasoning and effective communication is a whole dark art - one that is fundamental to our entire social reality. Also known as "trolling", in the offline world - as "bullying", or if you want to be academical about it, "exercising soft power".
Of course, it's only considered reprehensible if an individual does it.
The possibility that Twitter was configured the way it was when he bought it for a reason apparently didn’t occur to him.
I hate my job :) -> probably loves their job.
I love my job :( -> probably hates their job.
Without emoji sarcasm is often hard to detect even for a human.
What do I really mean?
Putin is a piece of shit who bombed my family! I’m sorry Dave, I can’t allow you to post that.
The organized groups and the anti-fans would be easy to automate discovery of. Just flag people who reply in a similar manner no matter what they're replying to, and cross them with voting rings. Declaring war on negativity and hate is pretty silly, though.
Will Elon deboost tweets from Ukrainians condemning Russian war crimes?
Will he deboost his own negative tweets toward US politicians?
Will he deboost US politicians’ tweets criticizing the other party?
Will he deboost tweets critical of his management of Twitter?
Discouraging “negativity” necessarily means “discouraging negativity based on some ideological priors”
What changed was that a small group of technocrats took it upon themselves that any questioning of their ideology was “hate speech.”
US laws are wildly imperfect, but the laws are at least applied by people rather than algorithms.
• down with people who believe X!
• long live people who believe not-X!
The line between negativity and positivity is just a matter of framing.
Oh, how I would hope that "positivity" and "negativity" would be understood as relating to position and negation, like in your example! But in practical usage (as in "stay positive" or "we don't want that kind of negativity around here") they're semantic stopsigns for silencing voices that express unhappiness.
I think the term for a culture of only accepting expressions of happiness as valid, with the goal of suppressing constructive disagreement, is "toxic positivity".
If they’re going to restrict the ability to retweet, that sounds a lot like shadow-banning, which is exactly what many people complain about, the people Musk seems to be listening to.
I guess it makes sense if people are really using the “home timeline” rather than chronological. That just seems bizarre to me as it misses the whole essence of Twitter. How is it a real-time news source if the newest stuff isn’t always front and centre? How is it a crowd-sourced “public square” if a black box algorithm decides what you read, rather than your own hand-curated list of followed accounts?
This whole debate would make sense if it were about YouTube, but Twitter?
Dwarfing all that in the long term is the missile defense system (Space Development Agency project) that Griffin started in 2019.
by the 14th most reasonable advertisers had paused their spend if not backed out entirely.
but after the bombshell office lockout and mass exodus today? to think a ToS change with a skeleton crew of H1B's and lifers that arent even allowed at their desks is going to reverse the course of decline is farcical. This is the kind of massive failure that triggers disaster recovery plans. This ship is sinking, and whatever life thats valued on it will either jump ship to a competing platform or Mastodon. You took a 44bn USD risk and managed to absolutely destroy any credibility in your leadership in under a month. At this point its best to hope markets dont start reconsidering your other companies as risky business.
I think this is inevitable.
One, Elon is trying to prop up Twitter by using SpaceX money to buy ads. He's dipping his hand into other companies to keep his new toy afloat for a while longer. I don't know if the word "contamination" is appropriate here, but it's pretty clear that Elon doesn't see any kind of sharp boundaries between his various enterprises.
And two, I think a lot of customers are going to start rethinking Elon's offerings. Tesla used to be a status symbol. Driving one meant you were forward thinking, that you were on the bleeding edge, and probably conscientious about the environment. Now, Tesla is "that company Elon owns." There is no way this doesn't hurt Tesla's bottom line, and there's no way investors don't realize this.
All Elon had to do was shut up and bask in the accomplishments of others, but he couldn't manage to take his own ego out of it. Will it ruin him? Probably not. We he still be the richest man in the world in a year or two? Also probably not.
I hate to break it to you, but generally only other Tesla owners feel that way. Otherwise, I doubt the public does. In fact, I personally feel the opposite, that's it's a symbol of a "techbro".
In a weird tangent, I've been thinking about the TV Show "Ted Lasso", and why it's so popular lately. Ted Lasso is the exact opposite of Elon Musk, even to a fault. People don't care if Elon succeeds anymore, but they do want Ted Lasso to.
Even without "contamination", TSLA stock price collapsed by over $100+ because Elon Musk predictably sold $Billions of stock to pay for the TWTR buyout. Its not like $33 Billion came out of nowhere. Elon had to sell TSLA to get that money.
If TWTR keeps losing money, Elon will be forced to sell more and more TSLA stock to keep it afloat.
And this is all the legal / ethical way of doing things. No "contamination" in just selling stock to support another. Even then, we can see the huge drop in TSLA stock prices (compared to the rest of the market, which rebounded in the past few weeks on good inflation data).
Come to think of it, why does SpaceX need to advertise at all? Those who need to launch rockets already know who can do it.
I agree with you though that Musk’s brands are becoming too associated with his personality, which is mercurial and irksome. Caveat emptor.
https://seekingalpha.com/news/3907399-fake-free-insulin-twee...
What is there to look at? If you want other people's money, chances are it'll come with strings attached.
Eli Lilly was the pharmaceutical company that attracted the most attention. Their stock was down 4% the day of a fake tweet. But pharmaceutical companies were down generally that day, some as much or more than Eli Lilly. Lots of companies had fake tweets written about them - some had good days on the stock market, some had bad - almost like stock market prices are a random walk day to day, sometimes up and sometimes down.
From a common sense perspective it's pretty implausible that an obviously fake tweet could shift market perceptions by billions of dollars. I don't think that really happened at all.
I also don't see why advertisers would care about the office lockout or layoffs. Advertisers certainly don't want their ads running next to offensive content, but if Musk can control that - why should advertisers pull out?
I'm by no means a proponent of the fediverse but this is one arena it has a leg up in. Federators are free to draw their own cultural borders online rather than relying on a centralized for-profit company to draw them. (Or leave them undrawn, which has been Twitter's stance so far.)
Given all that, the only way to monetize twitter is to use it as leverage on political leaders and business leaders. This was most likely Musk plan, he then got out-framed by the Delaware courts and lost all his confidence to punch up, so he's punching down by abusing employees.
- I am a follower of xxx. Will I see it?
- I specifically go to twitter.com/xxx. Will I find X on that page?
- X is a reply to a popular thread I'm reading right now. Will I see X?
So, what exactly being "deboosted" means on Twitter? It just won't appear among all the recommended trash on some "most popular" feed, or does it mean that it's basically invisible unless I somehow guess the specific ID of that tweet?
Michael Griffin is an important person in Elon's real (non-mythical) history that he'd probably rather you not know about,
Also, I'm still confused by what "search for it directly" means. Like, you won't see it in author's feed at all unless you have an id of that tweet? Can you find it by searching Griffin + Musk in Twitter's search bar?
People treating this as a backpedal or a commitment to keep back moderation have not thought this through -- this is a fig-leaf.
You guys are getting paid?
The whole bad news/outrage gets eyeballs is a major part of why the internet is more shit lately in my opinion.
Whether that works out remains to be seen but conceptually I like the idea.
Moderation teams are massively cut, meaning advertisers have to worry about their products beside hate speech or worse. At the same time, Elon is explicitly un-banning people who were banned for hate speech, promising that no ads will show beside their future hate speech- it will just show to their many many followers who come to the site to see that exact thing. I'm not certain advertisers will be encouraged by this.
Engineering is massively reduced, meaning the operational excellence of the system is in question- what good is paying for ads if the site is down so often that users don't come back?
And there's all of the potential issues with the SEC and other legal problems that aren't being addressed because Elon fired the teams that handled those things. No sane advertising agency is signing a long-term contract with Twitter. There's just too much uncertainty.
Elon Musk is not cut out to be the CEO of a software company. The problem is that he is the only person that isn't aware of that at this point.
This is actually something that would be in line with Musk's previous communications. Twitter needs to become less dependent on advertising, much less so, so that its value as a public forum isn't held hostage by a few shy giants that would love to see cute kittens and meaningless platitudes next to their ads.
The idea that free services supported by extensive ads is the only way to go has been too long taken for revealed wisdom. The downsides are only now becoming apparent.
That said, the method chosen by Musk seems to be very chaotic and destructive, and it is totally unclear to me if Twitter can actually build a different business model without going belly-up first.
This is the YouTube "Dislike" button for Twitter.
The argument I hear most often from pro censorship people is that it's not as simple as having a voice, your voice is amplified by algorithms on these sites, you're giving someone a megaphone. This decision appears to solve that problem while not censoring anyone. I'd say a shadow ban would go too far, but just not promoting it sounds like a reasonable compromise.
Nobody likes to be policed this way. The road to tyranny is paved with good intentions. We went from "the bird is free" to the bird is free according to one minds view. Hitler also had a vision to cleanse what was deemed rotten and also had one mind. He surrounded himself with yes men and we all know where that story ended up.
It's very difficult for one mind to be aware of it's own biases especially when so much power is concentrated towards it and around you are a bunch of ass kissers who want to claw at your pockets.
Let's all call it what it is:
Twiranny!
Aside from the staffing changes, what unique insight do you have, that Elon Musk does't have, that makes you so confident that the platform is doomed? And so quick at that.
No system I've ever seen is 100% automated. Especially for occasional tasks eg. hot patching emergency security fixes or refreshing expired internal certificates.
When you have a big tech company with thousands of employees, the pareto principle comes into play in a huge way: proably only 10% of these people are actually doing any work that directly impacts the platform.
At least half the employees are probably not doing anything really useful. This applies even to tech companies with a mere 100 total employees. At 3000 employees it's probably even more so. Specially with the majority "working from home".
There are probably only about 10 key engineers who understand at a deep level how things are working.
On the other hand, Musk is bootstrapping a hardcode engineering culture where a lot of the platform can be implemented from scratch in a few weeks by top engineers if he can hire them, and I'm pretty sure he can.
His "Fork in the road" email is actually brilliant, many just don't realize it. He is good at making engineers a "high status class"; see this analysis by Samo Burja: https://samoburja.com/how-elon-musk-is-making-engineers-cool...
There are many top teir engineers who are eager to work for him.
I stopped reading at this point.
From what I've seen, Elon's companies pay below-market for most roles. Levels.fyi indicates that, on average, engs take a 10-15% pay cut by deciding to work for Tesla.
I'm sure there are a handful of engineers that exist that could save Twitter single-handedly, but none that would do it for the pay he's offering.
If he does, look for the exact same people who defended Twitter bans a year ago to suddenly become "free speech absolutists" (for a while...)
They'll also probably still be of the opinion that equating those groups with EW is utterly pants-on-head bonkers, and is a poster child of the kind of both-sides brain rot that the media inflicts on us a daily basis.
But what does this mean for like, the Babylon Bee or The Lincoln Project? I'd say both of them can be negative at times.
What does it mean for libertarians or anti capitalists who are strongly averse to the way things are run today?
(I deliberately tried to highlight that this sort of change could impact people of various political persuasions, trying to not "pick a favorite" by only showing how this could impact my "team".)
(FWIW, I've always believed that moderation is a good thing on Twitter, and that free speech absolutism is just not tenable on the platform.)
It's been fascinating to watch this guy come in and absolutely crush any dissenting voices then immediately start restricting speech on the "free speech zone" platform of his.