Instead his "free speech absolutism" is a brand, it's there to signal what kind of person he is, it's not a set of principles and therefore cannot stand up to scrutiny.
I wish more people would understand this. For people like Musk, his personal brand is extremely important and they spend a lot of effort portraying and selling a specific image. It is an important part of his success as a businessman. FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried is another example. His disheveled, messy geek look was calculated, and in an interview after FTX’s collapse he basically admitted that some of his opinions and philosophies that he espoused before were BS to push a specific narrative.
Musk has repeated “free speech” enough times that it’s become part of his brand. And people will associate that with him regardless of what he actually does. In his view Twitter is free speech. An attack on Twitter (as he alleged Apple was doing) is an attack on free speech. Twitter dying means the death of free speech. To claim that a company is the embodiment of free speech is ridiculous yet so many people buy into it.
Weird theory, but it points to Elon not being quite as foolish as the left would believe.
Let's not pretend the site wasn't an absolute disaster before the acquisition though. If I clicked on even a single trending topic about a game or news item I'd often be presented with unfiltered hardcore porn. Then there would be topics of innocent things like landscapes that get filtered. It was a complete joke and harmful place to visit.
No, you wouldn't. Either you don't know what hardcore porn actually is, or you're exaggerating.
Could be related?
Another data point: Been using Twitter daily within the past two years and I’ve never encountered anything remotely close to the filtering blunder you describe.
Also instead of a company struggling to be consistently profitable it was actually a complete dumpster fire that was doomed to fail in the near future if not for the timely intervention
Well, it never had a ban on porn as such, did it? Although I'd venture "full of porn" is an exaggeration. Do you have numbers?
> and especially child porn which previous leaders didn't care about.
Got a source for that? As best I know, they weren't considered a problem by the authorities. Unlike now where they have one (1) moderator (thanks to Musk's firings) for the entirety of Asia (tens of millions of users.)
> it was actually a complete dumpster fire that was doomed to fail in the near future
Their 2020 figures show that, apart from an unfortunately timed $800Mi settlement, they'd have made $580Mi profit. Now that's not a great profit on $5Bi revenue but it's definitely not "a complete dumpster fire that was doomed to fail", is it?
> if not for the timely intervention
Which has added $1Bi a year debt payments. Now that is "a complete dumpster fire that was doomed to fail"...
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But it was a managed absolute disaster that was trying to be better.
And so regulators such as EU, FTC were okay to let it continue to operate.
That is clearly changing since Musk took over.
> Musk has repeated “free speech” enough times that it’s become part of his brand. And people will associate that with him regardless of what he actually does.
The models here are the guru/savior/grifter, which encompasses and goes beyond just "brand".
Why don't the followers see the contradictions in what the guru says and does? Some of them are truly deluded, but a whole lot of them understand it just fine and just want to see if they can get in on the action.
It accomplishes absolutely nothing - people are perfectly willing to put their real name and reputation behind their harrassing and toxic behavior. It does, however, make it easier to extend harassment campaigns to people's homes, businesses, families, etc.
Just like people are happy to have signs on the gardens or stickers on their truck they are more than willing to tell people their views online. Especially because they don't work for some multi-national that cares what their political views are. And so there are no consequences for whatever they say or do.
An incoherent person? What do you mean?
When Trump said on Jan 6th he wants his supporters to "fight" to "stop the steal" a lot of people took that as endorsing violence to storm the capitol. I think that's less clear-cut than Nazi endorsement, but other people disagree.
Main thing I care about is "covid misinformation" is no longer banned. So Twitter won't ban an epidemiologist who posts a clinical study saying mRNA vaccines lower sperm counts anymore. https://legalinsurrection.com/2022/06/im-an-md-suspended-by-... Bans like that were just absurd.
The real reason is that Kayne was booted is that he toxic waste and having him on Twitter would have damaged the Twitter brand and cost Elon money.
Edit: I want to add that I don't believe this is due to his manic depressive disorder but because he's a naraasstic asshole. Posting a picture of a swastika then saying how the Nazis and Hitler are great is the most obvious way to get attention.
Fuck Kayne West
My understanding is that Twitter did not specify what exactly (i.e. which set of tweets) Kanye is banned for.
wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika
So when kayne used it, of course he referred to the Nazi symbol and just wanted attention and strongly hint at his antisemitism.
But other people can mean something very different:
"In several major Indo-European religions, the swastika symbolises lightning bolts, representing the thunder god and the king of the gods, such as Indra in Vedic Hinduism, Zeus in the ancient Greek religion, Jupiter in the ancient Roman religion, and Thor in the ancient Germanic religion."
Then why make this generalised statement?
" I can't see what other meaning today it could have?"
Because I know people who are into germanic livestyle and they are NOT nazis, but they would like to use that old symbol freely. So that is one counterexample. There are people today who use the swastika who explicitley do not refer to the nazis.
But like I said, when people like kayne use the swastika, their meaning is very clear and different.
If an individual book owner decides to have a backyard barbecue of all their pro-Nazi propaganda or an individual theater owner doesn't feel comfortable running Jojo Rabbit, that's up to them.
Most people would interpret the phrase "I’m a bit sleepy tonight but when I wake up I’m going (def) con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE" to mean preparing to go to war or enter into conflict against, not preparing to defend against an attack from, jewish people.
Also being a republican (politican) is a choice and therefore valid to be a target of hatred. People aren't born Republican , however bring Jewish is considered both an ethnic group and religion. This is the key to why it's acceptable to attack a political group verus an ethnic group.
Jews have different views, they don't act as one group, they don't have a hierarchy like republicans, nor don't put out group statements.
Afaik, nobody at twitter2.0 has made a clear statement as to what tweet caused the permanent suspension. Just commenting "that is not" is not at all the same as saying "and this will get you banned".
[1]: https://www.politico.com/news/2022/10/10/kanye-wests-twitter...
Someone was proposing incitement to violence has a threahold etc. This to me is clearly incitement to violence.
Some have claimed he didn't know what "death con" (defcon) means to which I say what could he have possibly meant. It's <something negative> on Jewish People.
Personally, I think he probably meant something else that very likely could have been closer to an incitement of violence, but he doesn't have the vocabulary and we can't convict someone for what you think might be in their head.
Possibly due to very limited imagination?
The technical definition of a word is not as important as the real world usage of the word.
And pretty sure most people would consider using Defcon in that way to be hostile.
but i was thinking, does this tweet "I’m a bit sleepy tonight but when I wake up I’m going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE," incite violence? I don't think it does.
Now if he said "when i wake up i want to read on the news how all of you went death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE" that would be inciting violence to me. btw, i'm thankful Taylor Swift is mostly benign, her fans are fanatical to the point of acting like a brain washed cult. Anything she tells them to do is done.
Can't understand how you can be racing to explain and apologize that.
Nailed it
When you combine that with him using "death con" instead of "defcon" and the tenor of his comments both before and since (posting a swastika?) it is a little hard to imagine he meant he was preparing to defend himself from an attack rather than going on attack. "I'm a little sleepy, but after I wake up I'm going to prepare for an attach By JEWISH PEOPLE." Is this seriously what you think he was saying?