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An employee exodus from Twitter would only be a good thing in my eyes. They're all too ideological from my experience.
by AustinDev 5y ago
An employee exodus from Twitter would only be a good thing in my eyes. They're all too ideological from my experience.
- beaconstudios 5y agoThe company will still be ideological, but will simply follow Musk's ideology. Whether that's good or not depends on if you agree with him - I don't.
- cjbgkagh 5y agoWhat goes around comes around. If Twitter wasn't so ideological to begin with then Musk may not have decided to meddle. I personally would like companies to be less ideological in general. EDIT: By less ideological I mean less interference on behalf of an ideology. Allowing all legally covered free speech would be the minimum interference possible by a company but not necessarily the maximally profitable position. Some interference may actually be a good thing - I think many companies have gone too far. My problem with companies being ideological is that they are signaling a willingness to interfere that invites substantial pressure from third parties to do so which can cut both ways.
- somebehemoth 5y agoIs the argument that Musk will make Twitter less ideological? My assumption is that he’ll push for his own ideology. If so, nothing gets better unless you happen to agree with Musk’s ideology. If nothing gets better we’ve traded one echo chamber for another.
- stale2002 5y ago> the argument that Musk will make Twitter less ideological Well musk seems to want Twitter to follow the principles of open and free discourses with less moderation. So it seems like there will be less forced top down moderation.
- beaconstudios 5y agothat is an ideological position.
- stale2002 5y agoI don't think you understand what people mean when they say less ideological. For example, would you call it ideological that the government does not arrest people for criticizing it? Imagine if we compare 2 governments, 1 which arrests people for criticizing it, and another that doesn't. In the context of this comparison, the one that censors less people, most would call less ideological. By ideological, people usually are talking about enforced ideology. So if you censor more people, then that is enforcing your ideology more, and if you have less censorship then that is less enforcement of ideology.
- beaconstudios 5y agopeople call things less ideological when they agree with them more, that's all - if your views are unexamined then they look like a natural or intuitive position. The idea that freedom primarily exists as a lack of compulsion is libertarian or neoliberal ideology. Your total freedom from censorship is somebody else's freedom to harass and send death threats - obviously the line has to be drawn somewhere or twitter devolves into 8chan, and oftentimes people call for a nebulous "free speech" or "anti-censorship" instead of specifying what particular speech is being censored that they think is legitimate. Moderation is essential on the internet. If people think something is being censored and it shouldn't be, they should point to specific examples.
- educaysean 5y ago> principles of open and free discourses with less moderation That is an ideology > For example, would you call it ideological that the government does not arrest people for criticizing it? Um, yes
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
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- psyc 5y agoNo. The idea is that moderation wouldn’t tend to select for/against specific ideologies. Twitter discourse will remain extremely ideological in character.
- shon 5y agoHow would you describe Twitter’s ideology as compared to Musk’s?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- IntelMiner 5y agoTwitter is a psychological hell-hole that like all social media preys upon the absolute worst of humanity in a perpetual negative feedback loop to generate advertising dollars to sustain itself Elon is a deluded billionaire who cares only about himself
- FFRefresh 5y agoHow do you determine whether someone only cares about themselves? How do you determine whether someone doesn't only care about themselves?
- IntelMiner 5y agoThe same way anyone else does. By subjective observation and opinion of the subject This isn't "The Good Place" where an objective arbiter of the net good or bad we put out into the universe through our entire existence can be measured
- efitz 5y agoMusk is very pro-free-speech-even-speech-that-offends. Twitter is very ban-anything-that-doesn’t-comport-with-our-woke-worldview-and-call-it-hate-speech-or-disinformation. Also they selectively apply TOS against people they don’t like while regularly ignoring blatant TOS violations from people they like.
- astrange 5y agoWell, except for when their head of moderation offers to personally ban leftists for the people you say aren't allowed on the site. https://twitter.com/chadloder/status/1496034016209915904 https://twitter.com/chadloder/status/1496034016209915904
- Clubber 5y ago>Is the argument that Musk will make Twitter less ideological? My assumption is that he’ll push for his own ideology. If so, nothing gets better unless you happen to agree with Musk’s ideology. If nothing gets better we’ve traded one echo chamber for another. That may be true, but if ideology in moderation is what's killing twitter, that already exists, so it will be just as bad as it is now, just a different flavor I would think. People might not like the new flavor though, but for many people, it's already ruined by having any flavor at all. I guess what I'm trying to say is if Musk just changes the flavor, it will just continue to suck. If he removes the flavor, it will be better for public discourse.
- StanislavPetrov 5y agoThere's no way to know if Musk will seek to impose his own brand of ideology or make it less ideological overall (I'm hoping for the latter). For example, if he stopped banning users who "misgendered" people on Twitter, but instead started banning those who "took God's name in vain", I would qualify that has imposing his own brand of ideology (just for the sake of argument I have no idea if he is religious or what his stance is on "gendering"). If, on the other hand, he stopped banning of users who "misgendered" people, and didn't replace that behavior with a ban on something he frowned upon, I would qualify that as "less ideological". Obviously in this day and age many authoritarians will argue that the absence of censorship is an ideology in itself, but I think most reasonable people can agree that overall, less censorship = less ideology.
- zeruch 5y ago"I personally would like companies to be less ideological in general. " The irony here is laughable.
- unethical_ban 5y agoFree speech and vibrant debate are ideologies. Respecting free speech while limiting the amplification of hate speech and Russian disinformation is an ideology. I think those are good ideologies for a social media platform to have.
- bequanna 5y agoWhat ideology is that? Musk has hinted that he views Twitter as a public forum and should be moderated as such. Until now, I think Twitter's not-so-slight political lean has been viewed as detrimental to the company (and public discourse). I hope the people who work at Twitter and think it is OK to bring your politics to work go elsewhere. We would all benefit from platform where telling jokes that offend only the wokest doesn't get you banned and silenced.
- wwweston 5y ago> What ideology is that? Musk has hinted that he views Twitter as a public forum and should be moderated as such. “the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes 'What the hell is water?'”
- throwaway894345 5y agoI take your (rather tired) point that for some sufficiently broad definition of "ideology", even moderate viewpoints are "ideologies". Even still, moderation should feel like water to a fish--it should be moderate, it should roughly represent the viewpoints of the people rather than trying to tug the Overton Window in any particular direction (that's activism, not moderation). And yes, this too is subjective--you could argue that moderation should be indistinguishable from far right or far left activism if you really want. EDIT: Seems like a lot of disagreement with this, but would love to hear some compelling arguments to justify activist moderation.
- malermeister 5y agoHere's Žižek commenting better than I could: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIwMIrj5Ulo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIwMIrj5Ulo >I already am eating from the trashcan all the time. The name of this trashcan is ideology. The material force of ideology - makes me not see what I'm effectively eating. It's not only our reality which enslaves us. The tragedy of our predicament - when we are within ideology, is that - when we think that we escape it into our dreams - at that point we are within ideology. In other words, what you think of as moderate and not ideological is a result of your ideology itself. For a more thorough, very academic examination of ideology, I can recommend the book The Sublime Object of Ideology.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- PathOfEclipse 5y agoNot everyone has an ideology. Having an ideology is a bad thing. It generally means you reduce the complexity of the world into a simple narrative, and this results in you having incorrect beliefs, making bad decisions, and supporting bad causes. The goal should be to abandon all ideology, not change to a different, better one, although better is always an improvement over worse.
- beaconstudios 5y agoan ideology is a model of the world. You can have a more nuanced ideology (which is a good thing), but you can't have no ideology at all. Otherwise, you can't engage with questions like "why are there poor people and rich people" or "is it ethical to steal bread to feed your family". There are no non-ideological answers to these questions, so your best hope for non-ideology is to cling to and never question the status quo.
- PathOfEclipse 5y agoI disagree, and so do other thinkers more well-known than I. With regards to "why are there poor and rich people", the answer is so complex as to occupy entire libraries. I've personally read Thomas Sowell's "Wealth, Poverty, and Politics", where he delves into a number of important factors for economic disparity that in vogue ideologues tend to ignore. And, that's the point. Their ideology blinds them to the complexity of the world. There is similarly a non-ideological answer to "should I steal bread to feed my family?" It involves tradeoffs like: * what will happen if I steal this bread? Could I get caught and therefore no longer be able to provide for my family? What effect will it have on myself and on society? * what will happen if I don't steal the bread? Is there any other way to provide food for my family? Can I accept their death as a consequence for obeying a moral law? You weigh the tradeoffs, risks, and expected outcomes, then make a decision for yourself, which may or may not be the right answer for your specific situation and may or may not generalize to other situations or other people. As Jordan Peterson says: " Ideologues are the intellectual equivalent of fundamentalists, unyielding and rigid." And also: "Beware, in more technical terms, of blanket univariate (single variable) causes for diverse, complex problems." Your definition of ideology may differ from that, but in practice, I find that when we call someone an ideologue today, or refer to an ideology, it is always a false narrative-based over-simplification of the world.
- mrfusion 5y agoOpen discussion isn’t an ideology. It’s all ideologies.
- mjfl 5y agowell our world is ideological now. You don't get to choose 'no ideology' anymore. You have to choose. And Musk's is least bad to me.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- deanCommie 5y agoCan you name one public Twitter ideology except a commitment to not spread vaccine misinformation? At this point if anyone thinks that vaccine debate is ideological, I don't think we will change each others mind in either way, but I'm just curious if there are any examples. As far as I can tell that is the one and only piece of controversy. They banned Trump.
- indy 5y agoThey prevented spreading the story of Hunter Biden's laptop just before the last American election [Edit: it's strange to be downvoted for a factually correct statement.]
- nullc 5y agoThe thread I created on validating the legitimacy of one of those emails using DKIM back when the story broke was quickly flagged. Be glad all you got was a downvote.
- astrange 5y agoThat means nothing except his email account was hacked and put on a random laptop, which is what happened. They're free to delete any emails they like, or even add some as long as you don't check every single one.
- nullc 5y ago> means nothing except his email account was hacked and put on a random laptop, which is what happened I've never seen this suggested, certainly not in any official communication by the relevant parties. It would be a weird evidentiary standard to construct highly complex, even far out defenses, for someone accused of dubious conduct that must be defeated when they won't even put their own credibility on the line in arguing them themselves. > They're free to delete any emails they like Absolutely, but that doesn't do anything to answer validated emails which are concerning on their own, in isolation.
- guelo 5y agoWhat experience is that? Reading idelogical opinions?
- AustinDev 5y agoHaving worked with a few dozen former and current Twitter employees.
- LarrySellers 5y ago
- throwmeariver1 5y agoBut now they are contained to one entity wouldn’t it make more sense with your reasoning to keep them together?
- robbyking 5y agoThat's a sweeping generalization for a company with over 5,000 employees.