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Of course no one can speak for Musks intention in buying twitter. But what gives me sort of a really bad feel is the fact that he complained about twitter being

Of course no one can speak for Musks intention in buying twitter. But what gives me sort of a really bad feel is the fact that he complained about twitter being bad (in his view, which many might agree or not) and so a solution seems to be that he simply bought his way in and now he actually has power to make changes to the platform, a power almost no other twitter user has. This is a platform with millions of users, any changes affect a massive amount of people! The wishful thinker in me goes "I really hope he takes this opportunity to push twitter towards federation, decentralised moderation or a user-centric democratic control of what is essentially a public plaza" but I know it's not going to happen. Elon thinks things should be a certain way and he has the money, and therefor the power, to make them happen. I'm really more of an observer in this situation as I don't really use twitter very much, but this whole thing just feels so... wrong :/!

rektide 5y ago
generally yeah, the masively imbalanced power structure of what elon himself called a public forum being top down dictated & controlled by a private company with zero responsibility to the world is a shitshow mess. this is like the national usa budget, where 813 billion is spent on military & defense, 40m is spent countering china, and less than 40m is spent on international assistance, domestic relief concerns, basically general do gooding. if musk had been willing to spend a couple million to support actual public forums, tried supporting ActivityPub or Mastodon or other efforts, this money could have gone a long long long long way. instead of breaking the problem apart & trying to find creative solutions, musk &al are putting all their eggs in owning/controlling/manipulating the one authoritarian semi-public-but-actually-totally-private media system we have. for all Jack's talk about being sorry for leading to centralization, for all everyone's mismay at relying so heavily on a flawed & fickle twitter, there seems to be nearly no one willing to put money to something they cant control & own personally. if you love it you've got to set it free. simple as can be. the world needs to own their mediums. some day!
- jerojero 5y ago
  When I was seeing Musk complaining about twitter I kept thinking: "you know, there are alternatives out there... they're just not popular". As you say, imagine if instead of spending billions of dollars in twitter stock he had instead used it to boost these sort of alternatives? It's not even a couple million, it's billions that he spent to buy twitter stock. But I really don't think he cares. He probably sees a business opportunity here more than anything else.
smt88 5y ago
It's very clear from Musk's prior speech and behavior that being a "free speech absolutist" is unrelated to buying Twitter. He's an authoritarian, and authoritarians always need to hide behind some higher-purpose ideology (socialism, libertarianism, protection from invaders, etc.) If he were really a proponent of free speech, he would lobby to break up Twitter and decentralize broadcast power, not buy himself a piece of a centralized broadcaster. There is nothing but self interest here. He could even have started his own platform himself or just boosted Mastodon or something like that, but he didn't. He doesn't want to democratize anything, he just wants to get away with doing whatever he wants.

rektide 5y ago

generally yeah, the masively imbalanced power structure of what elon himself called a public forum being top down dictated & controlled by a private company with zero responsibility to the world is a shitshow mess. this is like the national usa budget, where 813 billion is spent on military & defense, 40m is spent countering china, and less than 40m is spent on international assistance, domestic relief concerns, basically general do gooding. if musk had been willing to spend a couple million to support actual public forums, tried supporting ActivityPub or Mastodon or other efforts, this money could have gone a long long long long way. instead of breaking the problem apart & trying to find creative solutions, musk &al are putting all their eggs in owning/controlling/manipulating the one authoritarian semi-public-but-actually-totally-private media system we have. for all Jack's talk about being sorry for leading to centralization, for all everyone's mismay at relying so heavily on a flawed & fickle twitter, there seems to be nearly no one willing to put money to something they cant control & own personally. if you love it you've got to set it free. simple as can be. the world needs to own their mediums. some day!

jerojero 5y ago
When I was seeing Musk complaining about twitter I kept thinking: "you know, there are alternatives out there... they're just not popular". As you say, imagine if instead of spending billions of dollars in twitter stock he had instead used it to boost these sort of alternatives? It's not even a couple million, it's billions that he spent to buy twitter stock. But I really don't think he cares. He probably sees a business opportunity here more than anything else.

smt88 5y ago

It's very clear from Musk's prior speech and behavior that being a "free speech absolutist" is unrelated to buying Twitter. He's an authoritarian, and authoritarians always need to hide behind some higher-purpose ideology (socialism, libertarianism, protection from invaders, etc.) If he were really a proponent of free speech, he would lobby to break up Twitter and decentralize broadcast power, not buy himself a piece of a centralized broadcaster. There is nothing but self interest here. He could even have started his own platform himself or just boosted Mastodon or something like that, but he didn't. He doesn't want to democratize anything, he just wants to get away with doing whatever he wants.