I genuinely believed that he would try to allow more free speech on Twitter. There was a small chance that the experiment will succeed.
I guess he never wanted that: he just lied. But why?
I guess he never wanted that: he just lied. But why?
He’ll do it again later. That’s why you shouldn’t believe what he says. It’s _not_ that he’s _lying_ - he believes what he says when he says it - he just has no care for consistency and will change his mind whenever it looks prudent, without regard for others.
I am not defending this. It may have helped him to business success in the past, but it is severely damaging to interpersonal relationships. It is a terrible way to live a life.
The sad thing is he'd probably only need to sit down and read a dozen or so books in order to figure out how to make Twitter actually successful, but you know he's going to be too lazy to ever actually do this.
If someone changes their mind that's not hypocrisy. I want to stick to that definition because to do otherwise seems to be to be disapproving of people's ability to change their mind. People changing their mind is necessary for the political process to work (and for society and friendship in general!)
Elon Musk might indeed be a hypocrite, but I don't think he's necessarily being hypocritical in this case. If he _continues_ to harp on about freedom of speech on Twitter while keeping this policy in place that will be hypocritical though.
[Edit: I'm not trying to defend Musk in general. I think the facts of the current situation, and things he's done in the past, are pretty terrible!]
Because lying helped further his narrative in the public which is advantageous to him. Similar to how he lied for years about FSD.
Why not? Lying is cool, fun, makes people like you if you tell them what you want to hear, and even profitable. You can really inflate your stock values by simply lying about what you can achieve. It's not like there will be any negative consequences to this behavior.
edit: Alright, here is my latest idle theory: he wants (or wanted at some point) to become a news mogul and a US Republican kingmaker. And since Twitter is (for many people) the news:
1. buying Twitter;
2. achieving absolutist control over it;
3. getting rid of the Libs while appealing to Republican victimhood.
...makes some kind of sense.
Buying Twitter would be a strategic campaign move.
Of course a lot of people now realise he's an asshole, and he's likely to lose a lot of money on the deal. So maybe that plan won't work out.
It's been a real case study in self-harm. Many who were neutral or positive before - because of Tesla, SpaceX, and some of his other projects - are now varying shades of hostile.
And he's unlikely to win over the fascist vote, because Flynn is going to have that locked up when he emerges from behind Trump's shadow.
One of the few requirements to become US president is that you must be a natural born citizen. So Musk is out, as he’s born in Pretoria, South Africa and neither of his parents were US citizens.
But that's a wild guess. I introduced this speculation in the thread but for all we know, he's just really bad at handling frustration and that's how it manifests.
Or perhaps that was the situation at the beginning of this year, and one of Musk's motivations for moving to Texas, beyond his previously-stated ones.
He signed the deal when the market was way up. He was probably riding high and overconfident on his wealth. The market corrected, his wealth dropped and he tried damn hard to get out of the deal. Turns out the deal was hard to get out of so he's trying to make the best of it.
I think he's earnestly trying to make Twitter successful and profitable. This is just his best effort.
If it's the case, it's just... sad.
People are gullible. It was pointed out by many parties the various ways he had suppressed the speech of others over the years, especially of his workers. Yet just because Elon Musk said he was for free speech, people believed him. Yet it would be unreasonable to expect somebody who doesn't especially value speech in the workplace to make twitter more pro-speech. Musk is not some civil libertarian.
I think honestly the history of social media is sites which started out with close to a policy of free speech absolutism slowly changing as cracks appeared. Jack Dorsey is gone, Aaron Schwartz is dead, Zuckerberg is in decline. The experiment already happened and speech gradually became more and more curtailed.
I think the answer here is that he has no idea what he's doing and is making it up as he goes.
So Musk talked about being a free speech absolutist, until such a time as he felt threatened by it. The only thing Musk actually believes is that he is the most deserving person to wield power, and because he the most deserving, anything he does in support of that is justified. He can justify it by saying, I'm making humanity an interplanetary species, and in doing so I will save billions of lives.
(He won't make us an interplanetary species, his plans for colonizing Mars are gibberish, nothing he does is truly justified.)
For some reason, most online communities appear to be fueled by stimuli that are exact opposite of what we find in healthy real life communities. It seems difficult to grow a social network with just positive feedback.
There are a variety of problems with that approach — not least that he'd be aiming for the primary targets of oil company propaganda.
For that kind of use, owning Tweeter, with absolute control on content and a user base stoked up on anger against "the Libs", "the pedophiles", "the establishment", "the deep state", etc. would be invaluable.
(I mean, just skim through this whole comment thread.)
So, in the end, it doesn't matter whether he was for absolute free speech or not. At least not to Musk. And a lot of Musk fans.
I’m not sure what galvanized him but have wondered whether it is as simple as the transgender rumors (Grimes, his daughter) being true. Given his wealth it’d be natural for him to be a low tax/regulation Republican but he’s clearly way more motivated by the culture war and the QAnon end at that. Taking this as a personal affront would explain him being so willing to risk everything else just to hurt the people he sees as enemies.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fen...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservatism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionary
(See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressivism)
It's useful to tease these concepts apart so we can better understand & critique certain policy positions. When Democrats vocally oppose student loan forgiveness, they are practicing conservative politics, for instance. It's not simply that Republicans are reliably conservative and Democrats are reliably progressive.
And there are many other forms of politics, these are just the most prevalent in US politics today.
Conceptually, yeah. In reality, it's the "conservative" party and they practice "reactionary" politics.
Moderation is hard. And it matters, both to keep audiences & advertisers. Besides, First Amendment-based moderation is not even possible for an international company. Most of Europe have strict laws on holocaust-denial. Thailand & the UK have laws banning speech offensive to their royal families.
..etc, etc..
The UK may technically have some old law on the books stating this but it's never enforced. I mean, the Sex Pistols ("God save the queen... A fascist regime...") demonstrated this quite convincingly.
I did hear about someone getting arrested for yelling at Prince Andrew in a funeral procession, but that was for breach of the peace during a funeral and (importantly) was thrown out in court.
Growing up, I saw plenty of posters with words like "The great Royal debate: should we hang them, or should we shoot them?" and no one cared in the slightest.
There is for instance, many stories about royal improprieties that have been covered up in recent years, in exchange for “juicy” Harry & Meghan stories being circulated in their place. This is probably at the core of the schism within the royal family. I can read about it, because I’m not in the UK. Bet it’s not very well covered in the UK though.