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Comment by sundaeofshock | Hacker News Reader

You are ignoring the whole Verification process. It was the only platform where users could have interactions with prominent people in a variety of fields and know the interaction was legitimate. That mattered! Killing the verification system chased away many blue checks, who happened to generate a huge amount of traffic for the site.

Musks politics on their own didn’t create problems. However, Musk’s tolerance for hate speech sure as hell did. There aren’t many major advertisers were willing to risk having their ad show up next to hard core hate speech.

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As somebody who used to do anti-abuse engineering for Twitter, maybe I'm biased here. But I don't think his politics are separable from his tolerance for hate speech. I think they're closely related.

The tricky part here is, as you point to, not wanting to see people abused is turning out to be good business. That's why Twitter came around on hate speech, harassment, and the like. Claiming to be the "free speech wing of the free speech" party sounds great, and it's appealing certain types of people. But at the end of the day, a place has to choose. Either you keep the people who want to shout racial epithets or you keep the people who they're shouting at plus the ones who don't want to be around that. It's the that nazi bar Twitter thread, but at scale: https://www.upworthy.com/bartender-explains-why-he-swiftly-k...

But back to politics. Racial resentment waxes and wanes in American history. Most of us know it went into decline after the civil war, during the Reconstruction. Many don't hear, though, that there was an upswing, known as the Nadir [1] that peaked in the early 1900s with events like the Tulsa Massacre [2]. This period includes the only time an American government was violently overthrown [3]. It waned and we eventually got the Civil Rights Movement, sometimes known as the Second Reconstruction.

We're now in a period that some call the Second Nadir. Racial resentment has increased, and the US's political parties have sharply diverged on levels of racial resentment. One of the biggest political divides is around being "woke", which noted liberal Ron DeSantis defines as "the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them." The agreement with that also sharply diverges by party. And Musk has very much chosen a side, repeatedly rejecting "wokeism".

Most people can dodge or ignore questions of systemic issues; it's bigger than their choices. But Musk just spent $44 billion to buy control of a major system for conversation. In Twitter's CEO seat, there are a lot of switches to flip, and few of them have a "neutral" position. E.g., You have to pick between the Nazis or the people they like to harass. Same deal for the people who hate black people, women, Mexicans, trans people, queer people, et cetera, ad nauseam. The "woke" move is pretty clear here: you decide you want your platform to be a reasonably humane and inclusive space. The anti-"woke" move is also clear: you gut the anti-abuse efforts and turn the terrible people loose (perhaps occasionally nuking a few accounts when they cause too much bad press). All in the name of freedom, of course.

The problem for Musk is that's terrible for business. Even if you don't care at all about systemic injustice, most people find distasteful the ugliness that drives ethnic cleansing campaigns, digital and otherwise. The US consumer economy is diverse enough that businesses can no longer focus exclusively on the (shrinking) white audience; they want all the eyeballs. He's supposedly a business genius, so we'll see which breaks first: Twitter's financials or his anti-"woke" politics.

[1] known as the Nadir: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadir_of_American_race_relatio...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilmington_insurrection_of_189...

> which noted liberal Ron DeSantis defines as "the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them."

That's not a quote from Ron DeSantis. From [0]:

> Ryan Newman, DeSantis’s general counsel, said the term referred to “the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them.”

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/12/05/desantis-...

Technically true. But Newman said it on the stand, under oath, an a case where DeSantis was being sued for firing a "woke" prosecutor. So I think that's as close to an official answer as we're going to get from DeSantis.

> Technically true.

There's no technically true - there's what you wrote, which was untrue, and what I wrote, which was true. Technically is entirely unnecessary in that assessment, especially when you go on to admit that DeSantis hasn't actually given an answer.

I get your point. But politicians are not lone individuals; they are effectively teams. They have all sorts of people thinking and speaking for them. This is about a topic where most of the anti-"woke" crowd will absolutely never given an answer, because to answer accurately about it gives the game away. For example, consider the example of Bethany Mandel, a person who wrote a whole anti-"woke" book, who somehow can't define it when asked: https://www.forbes.com/sites/danidiplacido/2023/03/16/anti-w...

But if we're being extremely precise, something you are apparently very excited about, you'll note that I didn't say that Ron DeSantis said those words. I said that DeSantis "defined" it that way. Given that this was one of his closest legal advisors speaking under oath to a judge, I think it is entirely correct to say that this is their true definition of "woke".

I’m going to remain “excited” for, what is for most people, the most basic level of truth, by attributing quotes to the correct people, yes, which somehow you seem to think is “extreme precision”. The only question for me is whether the somehow is because of your obvious dislike of DeSantis or whether it’s a general attitude.

As to whether the “anti-woke crowd” will never give an answer, I’ve seen plenty of answers given. (Cherry) Picking out one person who panicked[0] on television isn’t going to invalidate the many other times answers have been given. Again, I prefer the truth of the matter to fallacy.

[0] https://www.newsweek.com/define-woke-bethany-mandel-conserva...

She didn't just panic on TV. She failed to define it in the book, too. If that's panic, I guess she panicked for 18 months given she "spent a year and a half researching, writing, and editing"? Sounds exhausting. And here, in the article defending herself, she had plenty of time for one-sided boo-hooing and why-is-the-mean-liberal-hurting-my-children nonsense, but I don't see her defining it there either. (I guess she panicked again!) Something I note you conspicuously failed to do here, despite how you totally saw it defined by your Canadian girlfriend.

The reason anti-woke people generally avoid defining it is because once they do, they look at best ridiculous. Merriam-Webster has it as, "aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)". Wikipedia has it as "being conscious of racial discrimination in society and other forms of oppression and injustice". That is not far off the Team DeSantis definition. But to people outside the far-right epistemic bubble, that just doesn't sound particularly bad. So to keep fundraising (and book sales) up, no useful definition must be given.

It's the same style of smear you see from the Civil Rights era, where MLK and the Freedom Riders were decried as communists. Were they? That wasn't the point. The point was to get people mad at vague and shadowy things. It was and is to activate tacitly racist whites against a boogeyman that is socially acceptable to froth about. So it's the literal truth that "anti-woke" means anti-"being conscious of racial discrimination".

> Something I note you conspicuously failed to do here, despite how you totally saw it defined by your Canadian girlfriend.

What are you babbling about?

The irony of someone claiming I'm lying in a thread where they've been shown to be so divorced from the idea of what truth is (which is edifying in itself) that they think stating the actual truth is somehow a technicality.

Here's one of my Canadian girlfriends defining woke, that I saw just the other day.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cp2650xsuES/

Already you have chosen a path of such tribalism that if anyone opposes anything you say - no matter how wrong you clearly are - means that you have to cast childish aspersions that are easily countered. Perhaps it's time to, shall we say wake up to yourself.

> You have to pick between the Nazis or the people they like to harass.

Nice rhetoric, but no you still do not get to censor people.

> The US consumer economy is diverse enough that businesses can no longer focus exclusively on the (shrinking) white audience

On your "woke", "humane", "inclusive spaces", I hope that celebrating the "shrinking" of the black population of any country on Earth would put you in the category of the terrible people... Double standards etc.

That isn't rhetoric. It's an inescapable fact of running a platform. You have to choose. If you choose the maximalist free speech position, you get the Nazis. You lose the speech of the people they harass, because a lot of them will either leave or stay and shut up. So the maximalist no-moderation position also ends up with a lot of speech suppressed. Plus, as a business reality, a platform that is smaller and with much lower ad revenue.

> hope that celebrating the "shrinking"

I'm not celebrating it. Again, it's just a business reality. In the Jim Crow era, businesses could ignore the non-white market, even be hostile to it. See, e.g., the Negro Motorist's Green Book. But most national-scale businesses can no longer do that, because the non-white market is much larger, as is the chunk of the white market that is reluctant to associate with open bigotry. And that part, I'm happy to celebrate.

Twitter has ample restrictions on harassing people. You are talking about censoring views, not harassment/insults. You core argument, that anyone is taking a "maximalist free speech" allowing people to harass others, is a lie.

> Twitter has ample restrictions on harassing people.

Twitter has never had adequate restrictions on harassment. The were approaching it asymptotically for a while, but that's now in retreat.

> You are talking about censoring views, not harassment/insults.

Yes, I am also talking about censoring views. For example, views like, "the [ethnic group] must be exterminated to ensure white survival" do not belong on Twitter. For many reasons including both that they help shift the Overton Window toward genocide [1], and because it's really bad for Twitter as a business to have that shit running rampant.

> You core argument, that anyone is taking a "maximalist free speech" allowing people to harass others, is a lie.

Nope. It's sincerely held, so at the very worse I could be wrong. But I'm not.

Some free-speech absolutists are absolutely pro-harassment. Every banned jackass has a deep believe that their free speech trumps absolutely everything else.

A good chunk of the rest are just indifferent to harassment, generally because they're comfortable white men who do not normally experience harassment as a means of social control. Many in this group may be inclined to use it themselves when one of the lesser orders is out of line, but they probably wouldn't recognize it as harassment when they do it. See e.g., Manne's "Down Girl" for more.

And the remainder just haven't thought it through. They fail to see it as balanced with other rights, like freedom of association or freedom from harm. Typically, this is the adolescent (or frozen adolescent) view, where they don't have a theory of rights much beyond "YOU'RE NOT MY DAD YOU CAN'T MAKE ME". Which is, y'know, a start on an ethical understanding, but they haven't yet gotten to things like Rawls's Veil.

Regardless, anybody who takes a maximalist position on free speech, by which I mean an expressed or implied view that it trumps all other rights, is in effect pro harassment. Because any sort of platform that tries to follow it, as Twitter did in its early years, will be absolutely full of it.

[1] https://www.adl.org/sites/default/files/documents/pyramid-of...

> "the [ethnic group] must be exterminated to ensure white survival"

Nice example of speech that is currently not allowed on Twitter.

> [1] https://www.adl.org/sites/default/files/documents/pyramid-of...

An insane slippery slope, from "Non-inclusive Language" straight to genocide! This is laughable...

> they're comfortable white men

What a weird thing to say. You're not like the other comfortable white men, that's what you mean right?

> Typically, this is the adolescent (or frozen adolescent) view, where they don't have a theory of rights much beyond "YOU'RE NOT MY DAD YOU CAN'T MAKE ME".

Belittling people does not make you superior. It makes you sound full of fear and resentment, which by the way is still not justification for pro-censorship positions.

> Regardless, anybody who takes a maximalist position on free speech, by which I mean an expressed or implied view that it trumps all other rights, is in effect pro harassment.

Yes, and anyone who is pro-cars, is in effect pro-car accidents!

> Nice example of speech that is currently not allowed on Twitter.

It is an example of speech that free-speech absolutism would permit. And example of the sort of view that I would not permit on a platform I am running. And yes, Twitter and most platforms ban it for good reason.

> An insane slippery slope, from "Non-inclusive Language" straight to genocide! This is laughable...

A great example of the way free-speech absolutists don't engage with the consequences of their views. Which is why I'm done here.

> And yes, Twitter and most platforms ban it for good reason.

Thanks for pointing out that you are wrong in pretending that Twitter is governed by this "free-speech absolutism" strawman.

> A great example of the way free-speech absolutists don't engage with the consequences of their views.

Calling normal people nazis doesn't mean normal people are nazis, it just means that you have a serious problem. It might also indicate, depending on how much control you want to exert on said normal people, that you are a totalitarian.

> Which is why I'm done here.

Cool! This was always allowed. At least, on platforms with freedom of expression.

Don't confuse tolerance for free speech with the dubious concept of hate speech and its selective application.

Ah yes, that's why he banned all those journalists who spent time reporting on the lawsuits against him, because he's all for free speech.

Nah, the dude is for his brand of free speech, which is you can hate the people he hates and you can do what he likes and you can stay on his website.

Interesting how you provided a direct counter example and your comment got flagged for it. I thought the free speech absolutist crowd wouldn’t mind someone disagreeing with them

Wow. This is a totally legitimate, reasonable comment and you got flagged for it.

I've actually never seen that on HN before -- every flagged comment I've ever looked at turned out to be full of abusive language and attacks.

It makes me sad that multiple HN'ers flagged this. :(

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