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Comment by olalonde | Hacker News Reader

He cut Twitter's expenses significantly while avoiding reliability issues (a feat that debunked several predictions by tech "experts" on HN about potential major outages) and while adding several new useful features. Admittedly, his decision to unban several controversial figures was debatable from a business standpoint, at least in the short term. However, this was not an oversight but a conscious decision, based on principles rather than profits.

Your impression is probably heavily biased by traditional media, who in general do not like him one bit.

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>his commitment to uphold freedom of speech over profits

For your consideration, here's some evidence to the contrary. Twitter now agrees to 80% of censorship requests from various governments vs 50% previously.

>Twitter’s acquiescence to autocratic or non-liberal regimes is not an exaggeration by critics of the social network. [...] Since Musk’s takeover, the company has received 971 requests from governments (compared to only 338 in the six-month period from October 2021 to April 2022), fully acceding to 808 of them and partially acceding to 154. In the year prior to Musk taking control, Twitter agreed to 50% of such requests, in line with the compliance rate indicated in the company’s last transparency report (none have been published since October 2022). Following the change of ownership, that figure has risen to 83%, according to the analysis of the data by the technology information portal Rest of World.

Source: https://english.elpais.com/international/2023-05-24/under-el...

My understanding is that Elon's position is to defer to the law regarding speech. So it would make sense that censorship is increasing in some countries while decreasing in others. In the US, Twitter was previously censoring a lot of legal speech and I believe that's what mostly concerned him.

Edit: I perhaps used "free speech" a bit ambiguously in the previous comment. I edited it to "principles" to avoid causing more debate about semantics.

It makes sense if he only cares about certain types of speech. Given he censors more overseas than previous Twitter leadership did (without getting banned) - it's really hard to argue he is motivated by principles rather than politics and money.

Furthermore, a person who is strongly principled on freedom of speech would not ban people he disagrees with. Yet, he's done that in spades. I mean come on. Can we just stop with this pretending?

I can't say I have followed this enough to form a strong opinion, but let's say you are right, what would be an alternative motivation? Can we at least agree that this wasn't a decision driven purely by short-term profits? And can we agree that it was done at some personal cost? For example, his public image taking a big hit. Surely, Elon must have anticipated the impending backlash from both advertisers and mainstream media.

We can certainly agree on that. I think the problem is that he's now motivated by ego above all else. Elon is... different.

>However, this was not an oversight but a conscious decision, underscoring his commitment to uphold freedom of speech over profits.

Why did the same commitment to speech over profit not apply to his decision making when he filtered Substack, or Mastadon URLs?

My understanding is that Elon is mainly interested in eliminating ideologically and politically motivated censorship. He has recently given an interview on what he calls the "woke mind virus"[0], in which he talks about his views on free speech. Banning links to a Twitter competitor would not necessarily be inconsistent with this objective.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFEaTk--tZo

It's certainly not consistent with being a "free speech absolutist", which was the descriptor he gave himself.

The first definition I found on "free speech absolutist":

> Free speech absolutists believe that any limitation on political speech is veering into dangerous territory. They believe that restricting free speech in any way, including curbing insulting or factually incorrect speech, means assigning gatekeepers who decide what can and cannot be expressed in public.

Twitter's censorship policy does seem to have moved in that direction in general.

But I grant you that the terms are a bit overloaded and it's not always clear what people mean by them.

PS: Edited "free speech" to "principles" since it was causing much debate about semantics.

Twitter has been falling over during even moderate load this year, and completely crapped out last night during Musk's embarrassing soiree for Ron DeSantis. Musk is a bootlicking clown who deserves every bit of mockery he gets.

Twitter didn't "completely" crap out. There was a slight hiccup when a Twitter Space event was delayed by 20 minutes as engineers worked to accommodate the unexpected load. But speaking from personal experience as a daily Twitter user, I've noticed no significant issues post-takeover.

This type of exaggeration perfectly illustrates the mainstream media's tendency to perpetuate misinformation about Twitter. It contributes to the false narrative that Elon's stewardship is 'destroying' Twitter, which is far from reality.

Using "the mainstream media" as a bogeyman was tired 20 years ago, and it's even more tired these days. We can view Elon Musk's own depredations plainly on Twitter itself, with no "mainstream media" involved, and the evidence of Twitter's decline (that just so happens to correlate with Musk's takeover) can be observed directly on Twitter as well, with blue-checked right wing fruitcakes boosted to the top of every timeline, shrieking about trans people and "white replacement" in an attempt to foment violent hatred against the current crop of undesirables. But please, continue to delude yourself into thinking that "mainstream" media is the problem here.

Considering your strong disagreement with Elon's stance on content moderation and free speech, might it be possible that your perception of Elon 'destroying' Twitter stems more from personal bias, or 'wishful thinking', rather than a balanced appraisal of the facts? It's hard to know for sure as an outsider, but it would personally surprise me a lot if Twitter was in fact dying.

Would pre-elon Twitter have handled 500k in one Twitter space? :)

Considering that Twitter's infrastructure team was gutted and all the current infrastructure is the work of pre-Elon Twitter: yes, by definition.

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