Musk says suspended Twitter accounts will be granted amnesty ‘next week’ | Hacker News Reader

Musk says suspended Twitter accounts will be granted amnesty ‘next week’

thehill.com

8 pointsmfiguiere14 comments

As a privately owned space it's not really a free speech channel, it's not government. But that said, the more Musk enables at will consensus decisions and states that's the binding principle the more diffuse "it's not a commons" becomes in some ways. The commons is defined by use and practice. Still, everyone is bound by T&C so it's contracted right of use and access: not much freedoms

I would love to see a breakdown on 3m votes by economy. Musk is typically unaware of international matters, most comment worldwide focusses on US domestic left/right politics but the middle east, FSU and the India/Pakistan border exemplify places where speech matters could blow up.

Twitter is said to be 400m people worldwide. 3m is less than 1% engagement.

I feel like I should be happy about this because in my opinion, my account was wrongly banned for involving the line "Russians sending their children to die in Ukraine." (I meant, stand by, and intended this to be political about soldiers being sent to die, but Twitter decided that I was fomenting violence against minors).

But I guess I'm not really excited to join whatever Twitter is becoming. I feel like I'm being let back into the building alongside a lot of unsavoury types...

Perhaps the good-will you feel towards your dead-russian-kids joke Ban, could be applied by you to all the other banned users' ban reasons Maybe they were just joking too, and are all also really on the right side of history

Obviously I’m not referring to minors, but the soldiers. “Mothers sending their sons to war” but gender neutral.

Moderation at scale is hard. It requires (intellectually competent) humans in the process. Which is very expensive.

So what is Twitter's business plan? How is Elon planning to recoupe his investment here? Advertisers aren't going to like turning the platform into a free-for-all hellscape (which is what's going to happen). There's already been an industry wide pullback in marketing budgets across the board due to economic downturn fears. I imagine Twitter is the first contract they cancel after the recent chaos. They don't need Twitter; Twitter needs them. A subscriptions service and charging for blue-checks is not going to cut it - the users don't need Twitter either and would just as soon drop it.

Seems like Elon and crew got into Twitter thinking it should be "free speech" platform first, and a business second. As it turns out Twitter was only ever a business, and business is fickle.

This doesn’t seem bad in an - Twitter is platforming people I disagree with kind of way, it more feels bad in the - this boat has a weight capacity kind of way. What’s the 4d chess move here?

My best guess is that it further satisfies the narrative of "we're gonna be more free speech!" while also adding more eyeballs to advertise to?

Though I have no clue how many people this is.

While I won’t pretend to be completely ambivalent to the rights argument about freedom of speech, do people really find value in a platform that is all crypto scams and poop emoji’s? Sounds expensive to store.

As an Elon stan who reports the occassional fake-crypto tweet/youtube videos, on Twitter many of them are already demoted to the "Show me the Spam" section.

Actually I guess re-adding all those accounts would be good data for training the new spam models

Agree. What good is a “town square” if speech is practically limited by all the screaming and open sewers?

Clearly Twitter is "boat" but what is "weight capacity"? As has been seen by the wave of Fake Verified accounts - Musk is changing and breaking things, moving rapidly towards Twitter's new normal

If the "weight capacity" is server load, then fixing things like "Twitter Home is 100 poorly-batched RPC calls" will easily allow them to have way more users on the same server costs

The weight capacity is moderation, I guess it depends if you think they were blocked for being bots, “hate speech” or being Conservative. Presumably a _lot_ of bots have been bannner. If it’s one of the first two; he has said he wants to continue to moderate people according to local laws and he’s let go most of the moderation staff. Maybe they’re speed running auto mod and it won’t matter. Or maybe it’s mostly the third and it won’t matter.

My Twitter experience has been actually very pleasant. It's easy to block trolls and bots, and what they did with automatically hiding low-rated accounts behind "expand to see more replies" was also a big deal, IMO.

Seems like the radical neo-libertarian Musk naturally gravitates to the Wild West style chaos, so that's where it's going back to, I reckon [spits].

No offense to the Wild West. It may have been actually an environment with more laws and norms than we generally associate it with.

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