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Comment by threatofrain | Hacker News Reader

When things were easy Elon Musk said that his concept of free speech means anything that's legal, and that all else was censorship.

But when billions were at stake, Elon's concept of free speech transformed: no shitting on Coke or Nestle because that makes Twitter risky to brands, no swastika by Kanye even though it's technically legal, no offhand mention of Mastodon because that's where some users are exiting to. And when reporters shit on Elon during a live voice chat, Elon swiftly removed the feature from the entire site.

This coming from a guy who thinks it's fair play to repeatedly accuse a rescue worker of pedophilia during a deadly rescue mission, even going as far to clarify that he specifically means sex with underaged Thai boys.

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He doesn't care about anything or anybody other than himself, and will do and say whatever benefits himself in each situation. He has no morals and no principles.

I don't know about that.

I think he just approached Twitter like he approached building electric cars or rockets. The latter are both a series of (admittedly very hard) engineering and technical challenges to solve with few, if any, gnarly social or political issues to navigate other than those which inevitably arise in any growing or large company. The hard problems are all engineering and technical (probably regulatory too, in fairness). There will be a lot of failures along the way but, most of the time (barring things that are physically impossible, or orders of magnitude beyond current cutting edge manufacturing techniques), you can brute force your way through - or find an alternative approach - with enough R&D effort/money and enough smart people.

But Twitter is nothing like this: it's all about the people, the politics, the social aspects, and simply having an end goal in sight and pushing hard towards it isn't going to get you to where you want to go - in fact, where you want to go may not even be possible due to different cultural and legal constraints around the globe. No disrespect to any engineers at Twitter but the code and infrastructure aren't the hard parts of that business at all.

I don't know that I'd describe him as unprincipled, but he is perhaps quite naive along certain axes. I think this is actually relatively common amongst very successful people who haven't experienced that much in the way of substantial failure: they can be really bad at dealing with choppy waters when they arise (I've seen this from quite close quarters, as it happens) because it sort of deconstructs who they think they are. And you really only learn who you are when the going is tough.

The trouble with the learning-by-crashing strategy is that it worked great for rockets, OK for self-driving cars on closed tracks, and terribly for Twitter because Twitter has people "aboard".

Every time he tweaks the rules and "crashes" twitter, a bunch of people leave, build a new network elsewhere, and never come back. Or are permanently banned and can't appeal through the back channel like pg.

(edit: the @garius "trust thermocline" concept is a good elaboration https://twitter.com/garius/status/1588115310124539904 )

Thanks for sharing. The "trust thermocline" was a good short read.

Oh, yeah, don't get me wrong: I'm giving my (unequivocally outsider's) perspective on how I think he fucked up, not excusing it.

P: He has no morals and no principles.

> I think he just approached Twitter like he approached building electric cars

aren't tesla systematically overconfidently marketed self-driving car capabilities which caused fatalities proving P's point?

If the standard were "It caused a fatality, shut it down," nothing would ever get built. This came up as a human rights issue with the World Cup, but if you're uncomfortable with that, wait until you see how many deaths happened constructing the Empire State Building. You can certainly call Musk overconfident, but "People died. DIED," isn't a strong argument.

I get your point but ... isn't "people died" pretty much the strongest argument at all practically possible? Think about it

Human life is the most important thing in the world. Wouldn’t you agree when it comes to your family?

Tesla also got funded through zero-emissions vehicle credits so I'd say the problem is always political. Same for the Staged combustion cycle engines, wouldn't it been for the US gov access to the N1 descendants I seriously doubt they'd been able to make such a progress.

Not sure why it should be different for a company like Twitter dependant on global access.

Sure, but getting those credits entails a much smaller group of people to avoid pissing off, and a much smaller corpus of regulation to avoid falling foul of.

A much (much) larger proportion of the hard work with Tesla was on vehicle development. Just look at the story of the development of the original roadster, which started out in concept as a modified Lotus Elise, but ended up being basically a completely reengineered car, and the reengineering was made that much more difficult by starting from an existing platform rather than from scratch with a clean slate.

With Twitter you have a clumsily handled set of layoffs, with lots of talk about Musk wanting to see code samples from engineers (and frankly way too much talk about Twitter's engineering in general), carried out in front of an already more-politicised-than-the-general-population userbase, features retired, introduced, withdrawn, etc., and in general lots of thrashing around. And all of this in view of an entire audience with a greater-than-the-general-population bias towards kicking off and taking matters viral.

Tesla started small: Twitter was already (relatively) a giant company with thousands of employees. It's just a fundamentally less "make it soable" situation than a small, primarily engineering focussed, car startup.

Given he was forced to follow up on the deal or face a market manipulation lawsuit, my personal opinion is that Musk wanted to work directly hands-on on Twitter's direction, overestimating his knowledge and know-how from the early dotcom. Given thefame he got from SpaceX and Tesla he seems to have fallen victim of his own illusory superiority. It's just a website right? For the matter I really have my doubts of him being able to personally code review a modern complex stack).

This is the only difference I spot, meaning no one was oversighting his internal management of the company. His inputs went live into operations as if they were tweets.

Yeah, I think we're probably in agreement for the most part. From both points of view he overvalued his prior experience, and the skills gained, in a scenario with which he was unfamiliar.

> even though it's technically legal,

This hits home one of the things I consider to be a problem with the single platform approach.

Swastika's are actually not legal in some parts of the world, in others they're taken as a symbol of peace.

When there is content moderation it feels weirdly totalitarian because the political stances of (say: Europe) are wildly different than the polarised extremes of the USA.

A platform should not moderate content, twitter (and facebook) want the perks of being a platform (being not legally culpable for content moderation) and the perks of being a closed community (strict moderation on issues they perceive as problematic, usually to investors).

This is having your cake and eating it too.

Twitter should not be a platform, it is beholden to a global standard and rules and culture are too diverse.

The same is true with Facebook.

They used to be a symbol of peace throughout the world (the Northern hemisphere at any rate), but then a genocidal madman abused them as a symbol of violence and hate. Unfortunately, most uses of that symbol even in present-day U.S. still come from idiots wishing to emulate the aforementioned madman in glorifying violence and hate. There are some highly notable exceptions, e.g. in Native contexts but they're not nearly enough to reappropriate the symbol to good use, and this will likely remain the case for the foreseeable future.

Also, rumor has it that what Kanye posted is actually the official logo for some weird UFO religion called Raelism. (Be warned that the Wikipedia article on them prominently displays that logo. You'll probably want to not look at it and/or engage at your own pace, so as to avoid any offense.)

Moderation should be carried out on a per jurisdiction basis, but that is obviously more complicated and costly (but I think major platforms already do that to an extent).

Indeed, some things are perfectly legal in one country but illegal in another so an unique, global moderation policy would have to follow the smallest common denominator among all countries served, which would obviously minimise the extent of allowed content.

> Moderation should be carried out on a per jurisdiction basis

How do you feel about deleting post that criticise Iranian politics and ban accounts showing support to protests in Iran? Only for the Iranian audience of course. Then how do you feel providing the list of accounts who shared certain images and messages to Iranian courts, knowing that some of them would be executed?

Note: Twitter already does that in countries where operates. I guess they don't do it in Iran only because they can't operate in Iran as a business(sanctions) but they do it in Turkey since the Gezi protests in 2013. Turkey doesn't have capital punishment, instead they throw people in jail for years awaiting trail.

I don't feel anything about it. If you choose to operate in a country then you have to follow local law. If you don't want to do that then don't operate in that country. The site may still be accessible there of course, but you have no presence there and don't target that country so can ignore its laws, and if they are not happy they can block you.

Twitter actually does hide tweets in specific countries based on local legislations.

But this is the whole thing about global social networks. The issues with jurisdictions and politics are nearly insurmountable - it's an impossible task - and somehow the old Twitter chugged along.

Musk never spent 30 seconds thinking about any of this.

I agree with this. It seems like the primary issue with content moderation on social media is structural rather than policy problem.

In the same way you have privacy setting, I think social networks need to enforce geographic settings too. If you want to publish tweets publicly to a global audience then you as a user need to ensure you're posting content that complies with all global speech laws, otherwise you can't complain if the platform is forced to censor or remove your content / account.

I think US citizens should be able post anything that's legal to other US citizens, but the idea that you should then expect Twitter to be forced to publish that content in all geographies because of the US free speech rights seems absurd. While I might personally I think "Ye" should be allowed to post Swastikas to Twitter, in reality that's against the law in many countries.

Then you have the advertisement issue. I'm not even sure how you build a platform that respects internal speech laws which would also be advertiser friendly. Again, it seems like the business model is structurally broken if we value free speech above advertiser friendly speech.

As soon as you have a form of editorial control ( which includes decisions about what to highlight and where to place it https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Editing ) you seize being a platform and become something else. One could argue that maybe twitter could become a platform by removing any form of recommendation engine (including likes) and simply acting as an aggregator of reverse chronological feeds, but then what would the business case be?

Social media has been eating up advertising by skirting in between the lines, acting as if they don't censor and are mere platforms (and thus aren't liable for falsehoods spread via them) while censoring and curating content heavily to ensure advertising cash keeps rolling in.

I think it is time for (and with recent legislation proposals in the EU, am hopeful for) changes that either severely limit the type of advertising and control these wanna he platforms can accept and exert or simply makes them legally for spreading falsehoods and endangering the public via users they choose to jot exert their editorial control over.

Its not swastika for a milionth time

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