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I don't have an opinion over the consequences for politics over this, I'm just excited over the potential shakedown of the social media landscape that I grew to

• nonrandomstring 5y ago
  Musk may be about to make the biggest mistake of his career. This BBC article [1] posted a little earlier seems to indicate it's not NFT's that are slipping here so much as interest in Twitter. He seems to be acquiring this for the wrong motives when he could easily build a much better rival with different values. [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-61102759 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-61102759
  • outsb 5y ago
    > easily build a much better rival Bootstrapping a network the size of Twitter is nothing like easy, and might even be impossible this late in the game. Gold rushes of new users tend to wear off as new areas calcify into established concepts. (The same would be true for launching a modern day FriendFeed / Bebo / MySpace etc)
    • nonrandomstring 5y ago
      > Gold rushes of new users tend to wear off as new areas calcify into established concepts. I hear ya. It's the crowd he's buying. But to me Twitter has no "established concept". Maybe I'm the stupidest person on the planet right now, but what exactly is Twitter? Does Musk have a brilliant solution looking for a problem. Or is this just playing games with money and power for it's own sake?
      • fsloth 5y ago
        "but what exactly is Twitter?" It's like a watercooler around which a huge bunch of people with interesting takes and things to say on lots of different interesting things have gathered. It takes a while to find the information streams as they are not made obvious, but at least for me I got much better first hand information of both Covid and Ukrainian war from the people I follow before media.
        • hammyhavoc 5y ago
          Simultaneously, Twitter is an algorithmic echo chamber. I had the opposite experience: fear porn scaremongering throughout the pandemic with microchips in the vaccines, 5G nonsense, graphene in the vaccines, the evils of Bill Gates, and far more. My interest in Twitter has declined massively year-on-year. I used to use it as an IRC replacement with hashtags in TweetDeck in place of channels. Now all the fun stuff is happening on Matrix protocol in Matrix Spaces.
          • fsloth 5y ago
            "fear porn scaremongering throughout the pandemic with microchips in the vaccines," Any of the algorithmic timelines are generally horrible, agreed. I follow only people who tweet and retweet reasonable things. I use the timeline with content only from the people I choose to follow ("Latest"), and don't follow lunatics. This is a fairly nice experience, but needs a curated list of people to follow, building of which needs a while.
            • hammyhavoc 5y ago
    • version_five 5y ago
      I'd add that even if by doing this he ends up destroying twitter, it will still leave room for the growth of something new. Twitter has a lot of legacy baggage, and either it had to be shaken up dramatically or burned to the ground in order for this social media landscape to change. This could go either way.
    • Aeolun 5y ago
      If there is anyone on the planet that can start a new social network and get millions to join just by asking it’s probably Elon.
      • themitigating 5y ago
        I would have thought that before it failed to happen for "Truth Social"
        • HWR_14 5y ago
          Trump never posting on TruthSocial seems to be a pretty low commitment from him. Or maybe he sent a welcome/test message. Meanwhile, he doesn't even have someone crossload his blog entries.
        • bdavis__ 5y ago
          The main draw for Truth Social is not posting on it. If he was "truthing" 50 times a day, they would be doing a lot better. I suspect some negotiation is going on. The main content creator wants a bigger slice of the business.
          • themitigating 5y ago
            What makes your suspect this?
    • WJW 5y ago
      Musk has had success with Paypal, Tesla and SpaceX. All of those are/were mostly engineering problems first and then marketing problems second. None of the major problems at Twitter these days are engineering problems, but rather they are all related to politics and human group psychology. I don't see what Elon could bring to the table that Twitter does not already have.
      • shafyy 5y ago
        PayPal wasn't rally an engineering problem, at least not at the scale of Tesla and SpaceX. I'm torn. I think he has some good ideas (more open, paid vs. ads, crack down on bots), and for sure the necessary leadership to focus resources on those topics. On the other hand, it's not good that rich people own more media.
        • kylecordes 5y ago
          For PayPal to succeed it had to viciously hammer on a huge number of users who it algorithmically suspected might maybe be scammers. Blocking a tremendous amount of free activity in the process, punishing many innocent in addition to the guilty. This was done to create something that felt safe enough to get mainstream use. That sounds somewhat like the Twitter of today, and not much like a hypothetical super-free-ified twitter.
  • WaxedChewbacca 5y ago
  • fsloth 5y ago
    "he could easily build a much better rival with different values." Steretypically of social media - I see Twitters greatest asset being it's current network of influencers, analysts, thinkers, artists and colleagues. All the people I want to follow are already on twitter. I don't care about the platform or the tech, I care about all of the interesting people posting there. I would claim that is the true power of the platform atm - it's network.
  • paulgb 5y ago
    > This BBC article [1] posted a little earlier seems to indicate it's not NFT's that are slipping here so much as interest in Twitter. That’s not how I read the article at all, and Google trends confirms that NFT interest has trended down whilst Twitter holds steady. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=Nft,Twitter https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=Nft,Twitte...
  • Zigurd 5y ago
    Nobody has yet been able to "build a much better rival with different values." If there isn't a good theory about why that is, reshaping Twitter to be more like those failed experiments is a not a likely path to success.
  • danso 5y ago
    Musk realizing the difficulty of building a competitor vs just outright buying Twitter is the best argument in favor of his wisdom.
• schleck8 5y ago
  > Free speech absolutism is possible and is beneficial How can Twitter possibly get even more liberal in terms of free speech? Just look at the trends occasionally, they are really, really stressing the boundaries of free speech and crossing into defamation territory without being censored in any way. You can't start a trend comparing a democratically elected politician to Hitler and expect no repercussions.
  • mrtksn 5y ago
    > You can't start a trend comparing a democratically elected politician to Hitler and See, in my opinion, you should be absolutely fee to do that > expect no repercussions. The first "repercussion" that comes to mind is to block their account or something like that but I think this is the wrong course. When they do or say something stupid In real life, the repercussions are that they are judged as a stupid person and not simply silenced. I think, this must be the norm in social media too. Just make sure that whatever they say sticks to their identity and if later they change their mind, they can apologise and ask for forgiveness. I have this idea where your identity can be secret to the society but known to the platform. I.e. the platform knows you as a real person, you have just one account but you have an option to post anonymously too. You use your anonymous account to engage with the community about stuff that you normally wouldn't dare(i.e. controversial political stance, your sexual orientation kind of stuff). If you post something very bad with your anonymous account(i.e. call for violence, hate speech etc), you get your anonymous posting rights revoked and your posts deleted. You can override the deletion by de-anonimization of the posts. If whatever you said is something criminal(plans to attack this, kill that, sell dirty bomb etc), the law enforcement takes care of it and the platform stops acting as a police. edit: Oh I missed the part where your identity is actually encrypted, not known to the platform in plain format. To challenge the platform censorship and put back your removed comments you decrypt your identity. If you are afraid of state actors coming after you, you simply move on and your identity stays secret. The platform doesn't need to be solving all the problems if the world. For example, if you are Russian dissident in Russia you first need replace Putin IRL, then you can use it as a westerner, challenging the politicians.
    • john_the_writer 5y ago
• mytailorisrich 5y ago
  Platforms like Twitter have become de facto utilities. They should be prevented from censoring anything that is not breaking the law, which means filtering tweets on a per country basis to comply with national laws, nothing less, nothing more.
  • john_the_writer 5y ago
  • themitigating 5y ago
    So I want to spam the n word on twitter as replies to popular users that should be ok even if it causes users to leave and damage the business?
    • mytailorisrich 5y ago
      It's legal to use the n word in the US as far as I know, but I think harassment probably isn't ('spamming' sounds like harassment), that's where the balancing act is. Now, it is not legal to throw the n word at someone in most European countries. Hence why I said that these platforms need to filter on a per country basis for all countries they want to operate in. As I said, Twitter and other major platforms have become de facto utilities and it's no longer a valid argument to claim that as private businesses they are free to do as they please because they yield too much power.
      • themitigating 5y ago
        Define a utility
      • ss108 5y ago
        It's not a "utility". It's a social media site that is arguably a net negative for society irrespective of what kinds of moderation policies it has.
    • zaphirplane 5y ago
      Not you specifically. The free speech advocates really confuse free speech (in the global sense not just the American amendment) with saying anything Free speech isn’t freedom to plan a drug deal or anything or illegal There are definitely unenforced laws regarding harassment but they fall into the illegal category Where it’s interesting is silencing say a pro Russia person or an anti vax person
• luciusdomitius 5y ago
  "Free speech absolutism is possible and is beneficial once you ensure that someone is not gaming the system, i.e. someone pretending to be more than one person." This is probably the core motivation behind the $2/month blue checkmark fee proposed by him. You don't need to moderate social media if you can just send the cops credit card details of the person spam-posting swastikas, agitating for violence or breaking other established laws. I hope we all agree that laws against libel, glorification of crime, threatening people are not exactly censorship.
  • paulgb 5y ago
    It’s not such a bad idea, and it was the initial intent of blue checks: proving that an account wasn’t impersonated. But they couldn’t roll out verification at scale, so they only verified high-ish profile accounts. As a result, over time, the blue check has come to be a sort of class signifier and lost its original purpose (I sometimes see verified anon accounts, what even was verified?) Rolling it out at scale could improve the rampant spam/astroturfing problem, even if it would be imperfect.
  • bartimus 5y ago
    Also makes it a lot harder to set up an army of bots.
    • luciusdomitius 5y ago
      Also, if there are people complaining of censorship you can always give them a '4-chan mode' and watch them come back asking how to switch it off after 5 min.
      • pooper 5y ago
        > Also, if there are people complaining of censorship you can always give them a '4-chan mode' and watch them come back asking how to switch it off after 5 min. I'm not so sure what a four chan mode would look like. Can you please elaborate? Inspite of the constant mockery of the janitors, my understanding is they work practically around the clock for zero pay trying to keep the boards (not that I go to /b/ much) as clean as possible. It definitely is not a free for all and my understanding is most people gladly support heavy handed IP bans for example if someone posts commercial pornography on a "work safe" four channel board like technolo/g/y. Moreover, some of the boards are very slow to the point that frequenters seem to get annoyed by a low quality post pushing down better posts by saying things like "thank you for your blog post" (I assume sarcasm, I don't know for sure) or "a thread died for this". Also there are (from what I've read) filters available to filter out posts with certain keywords and people coming up with ways to have their posts show up for people with filters using different techniques. I don't post anything on 4chan as I don't feel like a part of the in-crowd though and would genuinely like to know what a 4 Chan mode would look like.
• ckastner 5y ago
  > He is absolutely right over its enormous potential What unrealized potential does Twitter have left after 16 years of existence? Twitter is incredibly popular, but as Docker already showed, being incredibly popular doesn't have to translate to financial success.
  • xnx 5y ago
    Twitter totally missed the opportunity to turn Vine into Tiktok.
  • mrtksn 5y ago
    It's popular but it's mostly garbage where people scream at each other, among the bots and scammers. You can improve the interaction modes, improve discoverability etc. thus improving its value per user instead of inflating total number of users.
    • nemothekid 5y ago
      Make Twitter more popular by turning it into the same algorithmic garbage as every other platform.
  • roenxi 5y ago
    > What unrealized potential does Twitter have left after 16 years of existence? How much potential communication was left in the human race have after the first 7,000 years since written script started appearing? The answer is, most potential was still unexplored. Everything in modern civilisation is still young. Especially new communication platforms.
    • ckastner 5y ago
      That's a hand-wavy platitude about the general human condition that has nothing to do with Twitter specifically. Yes, global communication marches on, but that says nothing about specific platforms. Just look at MySpace.
      • 5y ago
• matthewdgreen 5y ago
  The consequences for politics are literally the only thing that matters here. Even if Musk doesn't intend to reinstate Trump's account (and certainly, nothing he's said indicates he wouldn't do that), the second he controls Twitter he will be under enormous pressure to do so. If he declines to do so, it will be damaging to his business with government. If he agrees to do so, there will be a huge amount of public discontent with Musk and his companies. Worse, from that point on everything that happens as a result will be on Musk and his companies. There won't be any more repercussions for powerful politically-motivated speakers, even if they explicitly call for violence. This will motivate extreme behavior and extreme responses. Boycotts for Tesla and Starlink (whose customers almost certainly tip liberal) will absolutely be on the table. Even if you personally love Musk, the success of his consumer-facing businesses depends on broad adoption by consumers. That's all at risk now. CEOs of this kind of business may have politics, but they traditionally avoid political firestorms because of these concerns. Musk is obviously rich enough that he doesn't care, but his shareholders probably should.
  • themitigating 5y ago
    You'd think the CEO of an electric car company, that was started to help the environment, would cater to a difference audience
    • ss108 5y ago
      You think he really wants to help the environment?
  • chiggsy 5y ago
    Surely it depends on what Trump does with his account, right? Does Chick-Fil-A suffer from it's decisions politically? If Trump incites insurrection with his account, why not just do what Twitter did? Everybody is unhappy with Twitter. Complaining about twitter is the engagement desired. It's not political, extremists on both sides are upset. I suppose those who own stock are also upset, I just realized. I don't think liberals will boycott Tesla and Starlink unless they become associated with their political opponents, enough that the environmental aspect would become secondary. If that happens... well, that's a lot of sales regardless, right?
• jfk13 5y ago
  > all the problems it has ... can be solved. I'm not sure I see much reason to share your optimism about this.
• skybrian 5y ago
  Free speech absolutism and "ensure that someone is not gaming the system" are opposites. Having multiple accounts isn't the only way to game the system. There are plenty of trolls out there and they are creative. Once you are large enough to attract some trolls, if you don't have good moderation, comment quality goes to hell, and users care about that. Running a large social media site isn't kind to people who aren't willing to do what works for ideological reasons. You are fighting the trolls with a deliberate handicap and they will absolutely take advantage. So are you going to ban people who are disruptive or not? TikTok is heavily moderated. That's why they became popular - the moderation was better than the competition.
  • bluescrn 5y ago
    Heavy moderation can potentially work. But it needs to try and be objective and politically neutral, not based on mobs of activists actively trying to get their opponents banned/silenced.
    • glenstein 5y ago
      Concepts like "objective" and "politically neutral" are what Walter Bryce Gallie called "essentially contested concepts." Even in a system where moderation was administered perfectly, there would be some percentage of people who fundamentally objected to the accuracy and even legitimacy of moderation based on its outcome. A "correctly" administered system would probably still be one in which disgruntled people dismissed "correct" choices as activism, biased motives, etc. Getting rid of vaccine misinformation would lead to antivax cranks saying the pharmaceutical industry is using their financial power to influence moderating. Getting rid of 2020 election misinformation will lead to conservative narratives about "mainstream" media silencing their voices out of political bias. The liberal narrative on moderation decisions would say it excludes minority and disempowered voices. And all sides would invoke concepts like "objectivity." The problem is that not that all sides do it, but the opposite, that there really is a real underlying truth out there, and it really will be the case that some people are going to be systematically wrong at every level at which they register objections to moderation, and the correct response is that their concerns are unfounded. Of course that won't make people happy, but it shows that the limits of what is possible are limits relating to human nature that won't be uniformly satisfied by any system.
• notahacker 5y ago
  > Free speech absolutism is possible and is beneficial once you ensure that someone is not gaming the system, i.e. someone pretending to be more than one person You can have free speech absolutism or controls to stop gaming the system. Pick one. After that it becomes a debate over which controls to have, and the argument that multiple accounts is worse than incitement to racial hatred or antivax nonsense isn't a clear cut one. A lot of the "free speech" complaints about social media amount to complaints about social media platforms adding content warnings about [alleged] sensational lies or penalising their reputation anyway.
  • nxm 5y ago
    Facebook blocking valid NY Post articles (just one last week) is not a content warning… it’s flat out censorship
    • themitigating 5y ago
      Which article is currently being blocked?
      • glenstein 5y ago
        And, as is always the question, to what extent is this one-off example representative of the totality of Facebook's efforts to stop the spread of misinformation? Are 50% of the "censored" posts regular reporting? 1%? 0.00001%? Shouldn't a detail like that matter? If I could make the rules, my rule for conversations about one-off examples would be that you have to immediately follow up by talking about how representative that example is of the phenomenon you are using it to illustrate.
    • delfinom 5y ago
      You realize NYPost are the ones who slutshame a NYC EMT for moonlighting on OnlyFans to make ends meet because their salary is criminally low? You know, they find the fact she's making some X-rated content more wrong than her salary being at the poverty level. There is no "valid" content from that tabloid.
• TazeTSchnitzel 5y ago
  Free speech absolutism is a choice that does not promote the open discussion of ideas. It is a choice that promotes the loudest and nastiest voices and pushes out everyone else.
  • refurb 5y ago
    What if the loudest and nastiest voices are the only ones speaking the truth?
    • krapp 5y ago
      They aren't.
    • themitigating 5y ago
      That would be great but it's a hypothetical. How would you prove that's happening?
      • refurb 5y ago
        That's the point - you can't tell.
  • zakk 5y ago
    The problem is that the alternative is way worse… You have to create some authority that decides what constitutes a nasty opinion and what doesn’t. And the moral of the history is: in 2020 the COVID lab-leak hypothesis was considered a nasty idea, one that only uneducated, bitter conspiracy theorists could support. People have been banned from the effective monopolists of public discourse over this idea. Then sometime around 2021 the same idea became acceptable. Not surprisingly, this change in the public perception of this idea over social media followed the viewpoint of the major political party the owners of social media cheer for. This is bad, bad, bad for political discourse and rational thinking!! As far as I am concerned: long love the free market of ideas!
    • ss108 5y ago
• tarsinge 5y ago
  > Free speech absolutism is possible and is beneficial The jury is out for me, how can we say it's automatically beneficial if it's not sacred and only a mean to an end for society/people, that end depending on your views (GDP, happiness, sustainability...)? Also IMHO like any liberal absolutism, the forces will inevitably make who has the more money own and game the system, it's a proxy for Oligarchy. It can be good but only under certain philosophical positions and economic theories that not everyone agree on.
• matthewmacleod 5y ago
  I'm not sure I really get the points you're making here. You've said "I don't have an opinion over the consequences for politics over this" but also "free speech absolutism is possible and is beneficial". And "Filter bubbles? Doesn't have to be a thing" but also "degrade [bad actors] reputation and amplify the defence of the victims". I don't (apparently controversially) think that a lack of "free speech" is anywhere near top of the list of Twitter's problems. It's way more pressing that the amazing content on it has become completely drowned out by a cacophony of bad actors. It's not just the bot armies, but the legions of individual contributors posting and sharing obvious churnalism and outrage bait that it's _impossible_ to escape from. I had to stop using Twitter regularly maybe a year or so ago for my own health. I could feel my blood pressure spiking every time I opened the app, and it wasn't because of algorithms or filter bubbles or censorship – if anything, the opposite. It was just increasingly not possible to use it for the things I had always loved about it—breaking news, shared conversations, interesting updates etc. from people and organisations I was interested in—without having to wade through buckets of deliberately rage-inducing shit. Twitter itself might bear some responsibility for that. The obvious bot problem is out of control, and it was becoming increasingly user hostile to anyone who wanted to _avoid_ their attempts at "bubble popping". But maybe the bigger problem is that it's fundamentally hard to get people to behave respectfully in a a global public forum like that.
  • frabcus 5y ago
    The only way I've dealt with this is, every couple of years, to unfollow everyone and carefully pick who I follow again in a niche community that is interesting to me at the time.
• Zigurd 5y ago
  What the right calls "free speech" has been tried by several investor-backed social media startups. In every case it has turned into a sewer of racism, misogyny, death threats, and non-monetizable yuckkyiness. Nobody has an answer to that problem, yet. If there is no answer, turning Twitter into a desolation for trolls will not help Twitter. These trolls want to go back to Twitter to torment everyone who rejected them. Good luck creating shareholder value that way.
  • basisword 5y ago
    I guess the solution would be tying your identify to your account. If you do something illegal then you can be held accountable. The problem is, how many of twitters users would vanish if they suddenly needed to be identifiable?
    • themitigating 5y ago
      Failure of a business can still occur with legal speech, like racism. How would tying your identity to an account help in that situation?
      • basisword 5y ago
        Depends on your jurisdiction. Racist is certainly not legal in the UK and people have been prosecuted for tweeting racist messages.
    • QuadmasterXLII 5y ago
      I assume you don’t mean ‘you can have free speech absolutism by making it easier to have real life consequences for saying the wrong thing’
• lossolo 5y ago
  > once you ensure that someone is not gaming the system, i.e. someone pretending to be more than one person For this to work you would need a worldwide government identity check protocol implemented by all participating countries, something like OAuth so you could register only one account connected to that real identity, it could still be anonymous from other users perspective. Problem here is that even if that would make bot problem less significant it would not eliminate it. You would have farms of hacked identities and then in countries with really low income you could buy those identities (digital access) for a few dollars per piece.
• blenderdt 5y ago
  I think there is a huge distinction between the potential business opportunity and the potential social opportunity Twitter is offering.
• delfinom 5y ago
  > Free speech absolutism is possible and is beneficial What? As it stands, free speech absolutism is being weaponized by those with the money to manipulate the crap out of it. It has no benefit in a society that is driven by the highest bidder writes the rules _and now the news_.
  • c1yd3i 5y ago
    Citation? What are you talking about?
• sabertoothed 5y ago
  "Free speech absolutism is possible and is beneficial [once ...]" I hope you know what free speech absolutism entails. I don't think your statement is true at all. Absolute (really, absolute and complete) free speech would allow companies to lie about the efficacy of medication, lie about the ingredients of products, permit lying under oath, allow libel, insults, threats of violence etc. I am not sure I want that. I prefer clear, written rules for that.
  • mrtksn 5y ago
    I think that's alright. They lie, get sued, pay fines. That's why we have regulations for food and drugs. I don't advocate that speech shouldn't have consequences. I advocate that speech shouldn't be blocked. Twitter, or any platform, shouldn't be doing the police work. They should be indifferent to the speech like a telephone company is indifferent on what people speak on the phone and those who create problems should be dealt with appropriately through relevant channels. If J&J claims that their talc powder is good for you, their false claim shouldn't be deleted by Twitter. Instead, the appropriate authority should take care of it and victims should collect damages. Their tweet should stay there as a relic.
    • seventytwo 5y ago
      if you can sue them, and their right to speech is absolute, then you won’t win. See the problem here?
      • mrtksn 5y ago
        No, there's no problem there. Speech freedom being absolute doesn't have anything to do with lying, scamming, giving orders to do illegal things etc. Think of this having absolute freedom over how you spend your money. There's no direct mechanism preventing you from buying illegal stuff but you can still get in trouble if you buy illegal stuff. This is not a contradiction.
        • seventytwo 5y ago
• scythe 5y ago
  >Free speech absolutism is possible and is beneficial I'm not sure why everyone is talking about this as though it's on the horizon? The article doesn't mention "free speech" as a goal, it mentions: - selling account privileges - making HQ a homeless shelter - edit button In other words, monetization and PR. The major free speech issue on Twitter is not whether certain people are allowed to be on Twitter. It's whether Twitter enables its users in carrying out harassment campaigns against people whose speech they don't like. These campaigns often feature unethical and fraudulent behavior, e.g. fake anonymous Yelp reviews complaining about an employee, encouraging/performing vandalism of the business, phone calls in the middle of the night, borderline slanderous exaggerations sent through anonymous channels, etc. It's quite misleading to characterize these internet mobs as "people exercising their right to criticism", and they tend to rely on the ability of people to anonymously take action against someone who is not anonymous. Fixing it would require more controls on Twitter, not fewer.
  • deanCommie 5y ago
    > I'm not sure why everyone is talking about this as though it's on the horizon? The article doesn't mention "free speech" Because if Musk said "I have no problem with Trump or Nazis on the platform and would unban them", he wouldn't have nearly the same support as he does now. Instead people's reaction is "yay, edit button! Go Musk Daddy!"
    • scythe 5y ago
      >Because if Musk said "I have no problem with Trump or Nazis on the platform and would unban them", he wouldn't have nearly the same support as he does now. This remains true after he acquires it. The claim that one of the most image-obsessed investors in the world is going to make changes that are obviously unpopular seems dubious and frankly paranoid.
      • deanCommie 5y ago
        Trump and fascists are INCREDIBLY popular.
• danShumway 5y ago
  > Free speech absolutism is possible and is beneficial once you ensure that someone is not gaming the system, i.e. someone pretending to be more than one person. Regardless of whether or not it would be a good idea for Twitter to remove moderation, personally my feeling is that if someone says they're a free speech absolutist and they oppose burner accounts and anonymity, then they're not actually a free speech absolutist. It's become more common in certain circles to say that free speech is fine as long as people have a persistent ID and reputation, and I do like reputation systems to a certain degree -- but I want to point out that "a persistent ID and a reputation system" is just "social consequences" with extra steps. I sometimes suspect that the people who propose those systems are (unintentionally) arguing for a world with even more self-policing about what people say online, and I have over time come to suspect that a world with lots of communities that have strict moderation policies and that are occasionally closed off entirely, but that generally allow more anonymous accounts -- is probably a world with more free speech (and hopefully less free speech of a harmful kind) than a world where everybody gets one voice and it's tracked everywhere. Again that's a separate conversation, but the point is that if your definition of free speech absolutism is that anyone can say anything they want wherever they are without social or political consequences, then (regardless whether or not that's a good idea) persistent identifiers are a step backwards from that goal.
• mschuster91 5y ago
  > Free speech absolutism is possible and is beneficial once you ensure that someone is not gaming the system, i.e. someone pretending to be more than one person. And how is one supposed to do that, especially against nation-state actors such as Russia and China, both of which have been caught or implicated multiple times now, or against ordinary criminals? > Filter bubbles? Doesn't have to be a thing, you have all the data to detect bubbles and pop them by introducing them to each other. Great idea, expose LGBT people to Christian fundamentalists, it's not like harassment from these groups and their ideology isn't one of the leading causes of suicide of LGBT people. "Filter bubbles" are the self-organized "social mechanisms that we organically use in our daily lives to combat bad actors" you were talking about.
  • glenstein 5y ago
    Completely agree. People who think unmoderated online platforms are equivalent to a flourishing state of nature have not really thought one or two steps ahead. No thought whatsoever about the fact that increasing automation makes astroturfing, propaganda, "coordinated inauthentic activity" possible in a way that was not easily practical before. Additionally, no one thinks about what filter bubbles really are in practice, or models what they imagine to be the healthy exchange of ideas, or whether our present choices to be selective about information have broader array of functional purposes than are captured by an oversimplifying term like "filter bubble." I feel like this is a conversation about free speech on the internet that is due to mature, and that as it matures there will be a new inventory of 101-level fallacies broadly understood by everybody. One fallacy would be the idea that bots, trolls, harassment campaigns, mob mentality and coordinated state-based campaigns are the same as a "free market of ideas" that leads to the optimal state of exchange of ideas. Another fallacy would be the notion that any act of preferentially selecting sources is comprehensively analyzed and understood by labeling it a "filter bubble."
    • ss108 5y ago
      I don't think we will get to that level of maturity, and part of the problem is unbridled free speech itself lol In contemporary society, it seems that the kind of free speech we have seems only to lead to greater stupidity by helping bad ideas propagate. > People who think unmoderated online platforms are equivalent to a flourishing state of nature have not really thought one or two steps ahead. They don't look two steps behind either. All their historical analogies, for example, are sophomoric crap.
• bmitc 5y ago
  Musk is not an activist. At this point, I’d consider him a cult leader and an opportunist. He does not have people’s best interest at heart.
  • dpbriggs 5y ago
    Why do people use the word cult when it's someone popular who they dislike? It's inaccurate and a waste of connotation. He's not a cult leader as he's not doing cult things. Musk isn't making a new religion, he just has fans. No less than Justin Bieber annoyingly had. He's an activist as he's trying (and succeeding) at affecting change according to his beliefs. He's also certainly an opportunist as he's an entrepreneur. What point are you trying to make with "people's best interests"? He holds his interests to heart and that might happen to align with some people.
    • bmitc 5y ago
      Look up the phrases "cult of personality" and "personality cult". These are not new or controversial terms, and it's certainly not a novel application to Elon Musk's mythos, one in which he actively participates in crafting and molding. You would be naive to think this is an inaccurate portrayal.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• seventytwo 5y ago
  > Free speech absolutism is possible and is beneficial once you ensure that someone is not gaming the system This is unbelievably naive. It’s like saying “a perfectly lassie-faire economy is possible, if no one is greedy”. Someone will ALWAYS be trying to game the system.
• yibg 5y ago
  How do you define free speech absolutism? Is it literally anything goes? Anything legal? Is porn ok?
  • gaws 5y ago
    > How do you define free speech absolutism? The ability for people to call a black Twitter user the N-word, a female user to "fuck off and get raped," a liberal/conservative user to eat a bullet, as well as spreading known falsehoods and toxic content (either as gospel or for the lulz) -- all without getting banned for having "alternative views."
• jaidhyani 5y ago
  Tell me you've never worked on a team trying to address these issues without telling me you've never worked on a team trying to address these issues.
• jakelazaroff 5y ago
  Free speech absolutism means spam, child porn, revenge porn, death threats, sexual harassment and defamation are all allowed. You’re cool with all that?
  • ransom1538 5y ago
    END FREE SPEECH. We can't possibly live in this world. Things must be controlled! THINK of all the bad things we could hear!
    • jakelazaroff 5y ago
      So again, you’re down with people disseminating child porn and sexually harassing their coworkers? Unmoderated Viagra ads and phishing scams on social networks? Because those are direct consequences of free speech absolutism.
      • ransom1538 5y ago
        Exactly we need an END TO FREE SPEECH. I propose a list! We make a list of things that are "OK" and ALLOWED -- LIKE KINGS of 14th century.
• cinntaile 5y ago
  Advertisers don't tend to like free speech absolutism.
• px43 5y ago
  > Free speech absolutism is possible and is beneficial .. We (the internet) tried that with 8chan. Things kept escalating to the point where a bunch of people got murdered in a synagogue. Condoning violent echo chambers will always ALWAYS lead to significant violence.
• e12e 5y ago
  > TikTok successfully serves you new content - doesn't think that just because you liked a cat you want cats and cats only. I agree with most of your comment - but tiktok might be a terrible example: "One App – Two Worlds: This Is TikTok in Russia and Ukraine (nrk.no)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30917474 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30917474
• hnlmorg 5y ago
  TikTok does have filter bubbles, they're just geographic rather than profile specific. eg you wouldn't find any content on the Ukraine invasion from a Russian IP.
  • imbnwa 5y ago
    TikTok also figures out your racial identification and political orientation if you let either actively or passively
• hintymad 5y ago
  I just despise Twitter for its double standard. It allows the tweet of Khamenei to call for “eradication” of Israel and its people, yet it blocks so many people in the name of “inciting violence”. It blocked people who called for wearing masks or SIP in early 2020, but later blocked people who cited Nature paper. If Twitter were in the middle ages, they would for sure ban Galileo, and if they were in 19th century, they would for sure ban Darwin — because one can’t be anti-science and science can’t be wrong, right? Twitter is a disgrace to the modern society. Their hypocrisy goes to no end.
• JaimeThompson 5y ago
  >Free speech absolutism Musk's actions show he doesn't support that.
• pstuart 5y ago
  > Free speech absolutism is possible and is beneficial once you ensure that someone is not gaming the system First and foremost gaming seems to be nigh on unavoidable. Secondly and most importantly, "absolutism" is not a good thing. I know I'll get downvotes but it needs to be said: some speech is not healthy for society, primarily hate speech. And we have that today in Fox News -- actively promoting hate speech and helping to widen the divide in the US. edit: yes, much news is garbage (CNN et al), but my point remains that speech designed to foster hate of others is not healthy and welcome dialog in this regard. Divide and conquer for the win.
• benreesman 5y ago
  That’s all very nice sounding, but there’s a kind of gritty assembly language that this all compiles down to: “I want the high-speed electronic dissemination of information shaped like this.” It’s an open question whether or not it’s possible to avoid shaping the firehouse in a modern liberal democracy, but you could go your whole life and never meet a person truly disinterested in bending it towards their particular tribalism. The whole time I was at FB I had two groups of people, each screaming in one ear, that we were not doing enough to suppress the “other” people. How do you put shit on a global electronic network without “gaming the system”? Have no bias? You got that down we should make you king.