Elon Musk ‘Shadow Bans’ All of Matt Taibbi’s Tweets, Including Twitter Files | Hacker News Reader

Elon Musk ‘Shadow Bans’ All of Matt Taibbi’s Tweets, Including Twitter Files

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17 pointsceejayoz12 comments

Is there any pushback from the Twitter "freedom of speech" crowd? That is, are the people who welcomed "The Twitter Files" as evidence of Twitters past suppression of free speech vigorously decrying this suppression?

I think that crowd has gone quiet as they realized the billionaire private owner was not going to be the champion of (their perception of) great Constitutionally-enshrined freedoms they thought he'd be.

At some point Musk will need to wake up and accept that he screwed up with Twitter, whether in paying an inflated price or in how to run the company. It seems highly unlikely it is ever going to have the market cap he paid for it. What he seems to want is twitter to generate a good amount of money by doing anything possible, and since there are no good ways for that to happen, he has to resort to ridiculous things which only sink twitter earning capabilities. At some point he might need to think of twitter as a sunk cost.

I have no opinion on the future of twitter as a platform, but a money making platform it is unlikely to become.

It's my impression that Musk was more interested in using Twitter to further his own interests (ego, SpaceX, Tesla, political ambitions), control the national conversation (see politics), and be useful to leaders around the world (Saudis/China/Russian/GOP)

We poke fun about him meeting his debt obligations but the people who put up the money will gladly put up more, or gleefully watch the platform crumble so they can go back to doing shady shit with more secrecy.

Or is my "tin foil hat" too tight?

Are you aware that his real goal is to make Twitter into a wechat-esque app, x.com, and have you considered the economics of that business at scale?

Almost every app wants to be a wechat esque app. Musk mentions all kinds of goals about twitter all the time, and none of that info can be used to understand his real goal. The economics of that business is irrelevant (yes, it is lucrative and everyone wants it). You don't become wechat esque by charging people money. And if that is the goal, you should be hiring more and more to add features, since that's what a super app is. Nothing Musk has done aligns with building a super app.

The reality is that he vastly overpaid for twitter, and has no way of making good money. Hence all the antics. Had he bought it at 10B or so he would have a better chance of making money out of it.

I see his tweets:

https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Amtaibbi

Might've rolled it back after incorrectly accusing Taibbi of being a Substack employee the other day. https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/10/23678105/elon-musk-substa...

True also it could have been a bug, twitter does have more bugs these days.

That'd be a remarkably narrow and convenient bug.

I meant whenever the writer tried to search for his tweets search was broken and they misinterpreted what was happening.

If search was broken in general, wouldn't there have been a whole lot more people complaining about that instead?

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