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Comment by h2odragon | Hacker News Reader

For the nth time: that's not why people are upset. People are upset because Elon positioned himself as some kind of free speech absolutist and turns out to be a worse dictator than anybody even had predicted.

It's the hypocrisy that does it, not the fact that he runs the place as he sees fit.

A good amount of people are also upset that he seems to be burning it to the ground.

I saw this coming a mile away and closed my account on the day before the sale became final. Utterly predictable. More than a decade to build it up and 30 seconds to close it. Too bad.

I mean at this point he's as nutty as a Scooby Doo villain burning down the community centre.

Only if the Scooby Doo villain had previously spent $44b on said community center!

Apaprently, Scooby-Doo villains aren't as crazy as real-life ones.

This was EXACTLY the same case against Twitter though: they are obviously politically bent, but they market themselves as the public square. They pitch over and over that they absolutely don't moderate on the basis of politics. If they simply admitted they're politically-bent, that'd be fine, but they don't. That's what Elon is doing now, that's what Twitter did then.

To be clear I'm not a fan of what Elon is doing either (because he's doing the exact same thing Twitter did: posture as unbiased while obviously being biased), but I also recognize the only thing that's changed here is the direction of the bend.

Twitter was a public square. Right now it is slated to become the Elon adulation machine, which is about as far from a public square as you can be. Twitter as it was was far from perfect, but at least they were trying to ride the line and to find enough middle ground that as long as people behaved they'd be able to post there. The current Twitter isn't even trying.

As for the politics, if Elon is free to do as he pleases (which as far as I'm concerned he is as long as he drops the hypocrisy), so were the previous Twitter owners. You can't have it both ways.

I'm not sure I'd call Twitter a "public square" during any point in it's lifecycle, it was always more like an internet-connected pillory...

I had a blocklist with > 10K entries and about 12K followers when I quit, Twitter was mostly what you made it. For me it served a lot of purposes and I got a lot of mileage out of it, and even if I disagreed with plenty of people there on plenty of subjects as a rule it worked fine in that capacity.

Twitter banned Jordan Peterson, The Babylon Bee, and a sitting president, and suppressed information about a huge corruption scandal that invoked a presidential candidate that helped elect the worst president in recent history.

So much for being an apolitical town square.

I suggest you look into the reasons for those bans.

As for the 'the worst president in recent history' and that scandal: opinions differ. But it's clear where you stand.

a huge corruption scandal that invoked a presidential candidate that helped elect the worst president in recent history.

Trump lost his reelection campaign...

Bruh

If you have been following discussions here you know perfectly well that everyone agrees it's his right to lash out as arbitrarily as he wants. He can zap every journalist! Any politician that has ever irritated him! Comedians whose jokes fail to amuse him! He is perfectly entitled to do that and I have yet to see anyone saying saying he needs to be hauled in front of Congress or whatever.

IT's just amusing to laugh at the wholly predictable revelation that he's a giant hypocrite with the emotional continence of a 6 year old. While a lot of people considered him an asshole, he started the week as the richest man in the world. He looks to be ending it as a punchline.

>Where's all the "private company, they can do what they want" voices now?

Twitter belongs to Elon, so he can do whatever he wants with it. Other people can rightfully call him a hypocrite though.

Hopefully, Twitter's userbase will mostly vanish except for some far-right radicals that love him, and the company will implode, taking Elon's money with it. I'm not so sure, though. The general public usually seems to love being abused by big corporations, but not always.

Uhh, they obviously can do what they want? But pre-Elon Twitter never claimed to be a bastion of Free Speech.

They claimed to not moderate on the basis of political opinion but recent leaks reveal that's false.

No, the "leaks" did not reveal that Twitter was moderating on the basis of political opinion. They revealed that right wingers have a larger amount, in absolute terms, of moderation actions leveed against them.

But it could be the case that the side that uses "groomer" as a casual insult, surrounds drag shows armed with AR15s, propagated revenge porn of a political opponent's son, and follows a former President who's openly demanding the suspension of the US Constitution is actually just engaged in more TOS-violating behavior.

It could also not be the case, too, for what it's worth. But we don't know which is true given what's been revealed by the "leaks."

What we do know, for absolute certain, is that Musk's moderation behavior is nowhere remotely close to the free speech/public town square utopia that he pitched to the world. And hey, no one said it needed to be! Well, no one but he.

It actually did not. What it showed was that there was a lot of internal process around the banning of higher profile accounts and that they in fact had standards. If political opinion was the driver Trump would have been banned a lot earlier than he was.

Anybody who's worked content moderation at scale (like, products with 100+M users) would read the description and nod along understandingly. I think they did favor some democratic narratives, but personally I feel like that's the perogative of the company.

That's fair, but even so what I found admirable is mostly the restraint. If it had been me I would have wielded the ban hammer a lot more freely. Ditto HN by the way.

And I'm saying that as the former moderator of a 1M+ active accounts community.

Boot taste that good?

Yes, he can do what he wants, but it can still be despicable.

I don't even find it despicable, just sad. I mentioned yesterday how it seemed as if he was on a quest to destroy it, quoting him as saying that the mere existence of social media was inhibiting civilization's conquest of Mars and putting human consciousness at risk.

Perhaps he concluded that he needs to destroy the public square in order to save it. Or that provoking sociocultural instability serves some grand strategic purpose, like Adrian Veidt in Watchmen (which looks more prescient by the day). It's also possible that he's having a psychotic break with or without the aid of very expensive drugs and that other than his brother nobody is in a position to tell the ubermensch with the giant balance sheet that he needs to several days of bed rest.

The great thing about being a hypocrite is that anytime you get criticized you can just call your detractors hypocrites.

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