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I'm not sure Musk knows what he's doing, this feels like a personal vendetta. I'm also not sure he has any likelihood of succeeding in the first place, I wouldn

I'm not sure Musk knows what he's doing, this feels like a personal vendetta. I'm also not sure he has any likelihood of succeeding in the first place, I wouldn't necessarily assume anyone is going to take him up at that price. And (quite frankly) I don't think that Musk is a very good free speech activist. I think he's regularly hypocritical about free speech and regularly engages in his own forms of censorship; I don't think he has a particularly coherent philosophy about how to approach free speech. All that being said, I don't really see the problem with him trying this, and I don't necessarily see a ton of downside to him succeeding or failing. I'm perfectly willing to grab the popcorn and just watch. Twitter is not a great social network, and I don't think it's amazingly well managed. If it gets worse and Musk does a bunch of radical changes, maybe more people will start using Mastodon. If he fails, no harm done. If he joins on and does nothing and just monetizes it more aggressively, then :shrug:, Twitter is probably eventually headed in that direction anyway. Go for it. I've got no confidence that Musk can actually innovate in this space, and little to no confidence that he'll actually even get the control he wants, and he might actually make things worse if he does succeed, but on a certain level who cares? It really stinks for artists/communities on Twitter that might be hurt by that happening, but again, I don't really have a lot of confidence that Twitter isn't going to start hurting them anyway, so I don't know that this really matters all that much for them. :shrug: Maybe 2 years from now I'll look back at this comment and think it's naive.

loceng 5y ago
He arguably didn't know what he was doing with Tesla or SpaceX, nor The Boring Company et al, though he seems quite good at solving for problems he deems worthy enough of his attention - or that draw his attention strongly enough. Elon also doesn't need to innovate himself, he simply needs to be a signal, a beacon or lighthouse to others who know they are capable of innovating - and where they may now actually attempt to work for/at Twitter/with Elon because they may now believe they have a chance of implementing systems as they may believe Elon will be able to understand their design - and therefore getting approval.
- Spooky23 5y ago
  The obvious question is, “What problem is he seeking to solve?”
- smt88 5y ago
  SpaceX seems like a success. Starlink probably will be, too. Tesla survived because of government subsidies and a neverending deluge of hype from Musk. Boring Company is utter nonsense and a huge failure. That track record seems... pretty random. Maybe Musk was an important factor, maybe his engineering and marketing teams were, maybe luck was the most important thing.
  - cduzz 5y ago
    Regarding tesla, lots of companies survive entirely because of Government Subsidies. Resource extraction from public lands, no bid cost + contracts for defense department projects, last mile monopolies for cable companies. You going to then argue "but we'd have it all better if there were no meddling government!" ? There are plenty of places that have no government and they seem pretty miserable. People (ideally) select other people every interval of time to make important decisions (aka "government"); sometimes those decisions adversely affect some people and help others disproportionately (your job is cutting down trees and 99% of the trees are gone? Well, you may lose your job before cutting down that last 1% because the trees have value as trees instead of lumber; sorry them's the breaks). Life is hard and full of difficult choices. There are winners and losers. It's better for everyone to make decisions by discussion and consensus rather than violence. But free speech is "will the government arrest/fine/murder you for what you say (or don't say)" not "do I have to listen to you blather on when I'd rather not". There's tremendous nuance to "free speech". If I'm a cake maker and you ask me to make a cake saying "Fuck Jewish Space Lasers!" can I say no I'd rather not? I'm not sure. Maybe I've got terms of service already, maybe I'm just a harried cake maker trying to be civil and a good person and I'd rather not be an asshole even by proxy. You could probably switch the message to "Happy anniversary Steve and Paul!" and offend some other set of people. We seem to live in a society where some set of people just want to be rude and uncivil and force us all to watch like we're in a clockwork orange needing programming. Please no, and while you're at it I'd rather you stop pouring garbage into my father in law.
splatcollision 5y ago
Maybe we'll see less links to unreadable twitter threads posted here. One can only hope!
- dmix 5y ago
  Nothing makes me roll my eyes than seeing a tweet have 1/24. Pigeonholing stuff onto platforms where it doesn't fit. Reddit is turning into a Tiktok aggregator as well, overbearing music, aggressive edits, and juvenile takes. At least those are short though.
sonicggg 5y ago
Musk does not hold any position in the government. My understanding is that the fight for free speech is about the government censoring individuals. The first amendment of the US already protects people from that. Any private platform can do whatever they want though.
- tinybrotosaurus 5y ago
  What is worse, government censorship or digital censorship through big tech? Remember when all these corporations banned Trump at the same time? Imagine not being able to buy from Amazon when there is no retailer left. Imagine not being able to listen to music or watch movies when all of it is only available through streaming. What about having all your email deleted because a Google bot flagged your account. Or being shadow banned in social media, having no impact on any discussion.
  - pacerwpg 5y ago
    As somebody who is banned on Twitter for unclear reasons, I can unequivocally say that this is preferable to being thrown in jail or fined by the government
  - themitigating 5y ago
    but there isn't one retailer or one social media service so why should I imagine fictional scenarios when considering your question?
  - CrazyStat 5y ago
    > What is worse, government censorship or digital censorship through big tech? Government, no question about it. Twitter doesn't throw you in jail.
- dpbriggs 5y ago
  There's the ideal and ethic of free speech which isn't "provided" by the government. It's ok to be annoyed or disagree with private censorship. Good or bad Musk wants to open the platform up. Whether that will just change the speech to what he likes or actually broaden it we'll see.
rwmj 5y ago
I think he's dumb wasting so much money on this, but why on earth wouldn't shareholders want to sell out to him? If I held Twitter shares I'd be quite keen to get rid of them.
- next_xibalba 5y ago
  "The billionaire businessman who led the resurrection of the electric vehicle industry and the birth of the private spaceflight industry is an idiot." - internet commenter. Musk has proven himself to be a very savvy investor. And his operational track record is nearly unmatched. Particularly because it straddles so many different industries: internet 1.0 (Zip2), banking and payments (PayPal), manufacturing and transportation (Tesla), aerospace engineering and spaceflight (SpaceX). If there is anyone in the world who could pull this off, my money would be on him.
  - mbesto 5y ago
    > If there is anyone in the world who could pull this off, my money would be on him. And since he's got so many projects on-going, you think he has all of the time in the world to pull this one off? Explain that ONE to me?
  - cma 5y ago
    He had that whole fake solar shingle scam presentation thing to bail out his own cousins and self.
  - schoolornot 5y ago
    At some point I stopped investing in companies and started investing in people. There's a small group of businessmen out there that have the Midas touch.
    - SuoDuanDao 5y ago
      Would you care to share some of your other people you invest in? It seems like a good strategy in this day and age.
  - 5y ago
Abishek_Muthian 5y ago
I agree with your statements. Every Billionaire who recently acquired a large media house[1] mentioned in the interviews as doing it for 'Upholding Journalism' or something of those lines which also implicitly meant 'Supporting right to free speech'. But I'm bewildered about how this particular acquisition is only about 'Right to Free speech' vs 'No Right to Free Speech' and not really about hostile takeover of a business by a Ultra-Billionaire with impunity? I guess that has something to do with how good Elon is at controlling the narrative, Even reputable news agencies start with 'Elon who claims himself as a free speech absolutist...'. And that was before he controlled Twitter. Anyways, Two major social media firms seems to have consolidated with individuals who are supposed to run a social media firm. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-45550747 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-45550747
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
aerovistae 5y ago
Agree with everything you wrote except "maybe more people will start using Mastodon". I didn't even know this existed until you said it, which doesn't bode well for mass adoption given that I'm someone who's on the internet daily. Moreover, Mastodon.com is owned by a forestry machine business, and googling Mastodon gives a first result for a rock/metal band. I think "Mastodon.social" might be about as bad as a web address can get for mass appeal / catchiness.
- riffic 5y ago
  > mass adoption is absolutely not a priority for the Mastodon software project. Try looking on Github: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon
slibhb 5y ago
> I don't think he has a particularly coherent philosophy about how to approach free speech. The only people with coherent philosophies of free speech are for absolute freedom of speech or absolutely no freedom of speech. It's by pusuring incoherence, by threading the needle between those extremes that we create an open, free speech culture where freedom is the norm and censorship occurs only in extreme situations. I generally agree with the rest of your post ("who cares?"). I would add that if Elon buys twitter and deletes it, I would be fine with it.
- danShumway 5y ago
  > I would add that if Elon buys twitter and deletes it, I would be fine with it. This is completely off topic and not at all your fault, but even though we are actively talking about Elon Musk and he should have been the primary person in my head, and even though the spelling is different -- for some reason my brain still interpreted "Elon" in the above sentence as Ellen DeGeneres, and I got really confused for about 10 seconds about why you felt the need to add that you would also be OK with her specifically buying Twitter.
specialist 5y ago
Yup. Anything pushed to its logical extreme becomes its own opposite. Since society can't or won't reign in either corporate or social media, perhaps we should remove all restraints and let then destroy themselves, and hopefully each other. Further, how could Musk possibly be any worse than @jack, Zuck & Sandberg, Murdochs, Theil, etc, etc. Pox on all their houses.
Traster 5y ago
I think the one thing you're missing out is the true potential downside. Which is that over the last decade Silicon Valley social media companies have taken an extra-ordinarily long and painful path to understanding how they need to handle speech on their platforms. Musk's position is basically "Do what Mark Zuckerberg did in the early 2010s". There is a reason why facebook no longer acts like that, there's a reason facebook has changed it's name to disassociate from that. And Facebook didn't suffer from their actions there - the commonwealth did. Potentially this is Musk bringing back systematic misinformation, troll farms, accidentallly enabling genocides etc. etc.
- danShumway 5y ago
  You're not necessarily wrong, but Twitter's moderation policy is already basically terrible and I have very little confidence that they'll be able to improve it significantly in the future with or without Musk. Most of the moderation policies that they are proposing are regularly co-opted to target oppressed or minority groups. They don't seem to be particularly consistent or great about catching abuse in the first place. The site's structure itself seems to encourage bad actors. It's certainly the case that Musk could potentially make that worse, but I guess I have so little confidence in Twitter's ability to get better on that front that I'm not sure it matters all that much in the long run. Better moderation on these platforms requires a large re-think in how we approach moderation in the first place, and it requires a more socially responsible perspective about the platform's purpose. I don't think that Musk being in charge or not will make that happen, and if he does turn Twitter into even more of a cesspool, then maybe that'll encourage alternatives. I'm not an accelerationist when it comes to social media, but I think that Musk/Twitter's attitudes towards free speech online are often both naive and incompetent and the site continuing to worsen might be the only way to get people off of it; and I'm not sure what blocking Musk actually preserves about the site (other than possibly that Musk might push for more aggressive monetization). There are people right now who rely on it that would need to find other hosting, and that does genuinely stink. But... I mean, it's gonna get worse for them regardless. > Silicon Valley social media companies have taken an extra-ordinarily long and painful path to understanding how they need to handle speech on their platforms I don't want to be pessimistic, but I don't really feel like social media companies have learned how to handle speech or that they've become competent about doing moderation at scale. I don't think there ever was a point where they figured it out. If we've learned anything it's that moderation at a global scale is kind of unworkable, and that's why having smaller communities that pay more attention to the content they host is so important. I'm particularly pessimistic about the possibility of AI/algorithmic moderation (which many of these companies are leaning into more and more), mostly because I don't see a ton of evidence that it's good enough at scale to replace human moderation. So I'm not worried about Musk bringing back systematic misinformation or troll farms or accidentally enabling genocide because as far as I can tell Twitter already has that problem; I don't think Musk can bring it back because I don't think it ever went away.
Jsebast23 5y ago
Twitter only needs one change, and is as simple as this: make users confident that they will never be censored for saying something that goes against management's politics. Twitter has seriously violated this trust. That's why current management cannot save Twitter. Even if they say they will accept all speech from now on, nobody will believe them.
richliss 5y ago
I think Musk believes that Twitter is the primary meeting place and seemingly unified-ish mouthpiece of anti-capitalists in the west and he's seeing that they are making dangerous progress. He's someone who is a capitalist and feels that $50B is a worthy investment to disrupt anti-capitalist momentum.
- hutzlibu 5y ago
  I think that is a very narrow view on events. First, I really do not think twitter is a anticapitalist forum and second, controlling twitter communication yields quite some power. Single tweets made furor on the stock market. It is probably way more about money, than anti activism, or pro free speech activism. (plus the personal vendetta of the twitter bot, who published Elons flights).
- parineum 5y ago
  > they are making dangerous progress lol Twitter has 400 million users GLOBALLY. How many are bots? How many are active? How many are "anti-capitalists"? Twitter is not representative of anything except twitter.
  - nomorecomp 5y ago
    You say that, but the memes and quotes generated from twitter posts and threads spread far and wide. You'll see people who don't even use Twitter quoting things almost verbatim 3 months after it blew up. Same with 4chan and the fringe right sadly. The memes, like "OK Groomer" start out in some weird radical place but then catch elsewhere if they are viral enough.
aasasd 5y ago
maybe more people will start using Mastodon For sure. Dozens of users will migrate to Mastodon.

loceng 5y ago

He arguably didn't know what he was doing with Tesla or SpaceX, nor The Boring Company et al, though he seems quite good at solving for problems he deems worthy enough of his attention - or that draw his attention strongly enough. Elon also doesn't need to innovate himself, he simply needs to be a signal, a beacon or lighthouse to others who know they are capable of innovating - and where they may now actually attempt to work for/at Twitter/with Elon because they may now believe they have a chance of implementing systems as they may believe Elon will be able to understand their design - and therefore getting approval.

Spooky23 5y ago
The obvious question is, “What problem is he seeking to solve?”
smt88 5y ago
SpaceX seems like a success. Starlink probably will be, too. Tesla survived because of government subsidies and a neverending deluge of hype from Musk. Boring Company is utter nonsense and a huge failure. That track record seems... pretty random. Maybe Musk was an important factor, maybe his engineering and marketing teams were, maybe luck was the most important thing.
- cduzz 5y ago
  Regarding tesla, lots of companies survive entirely because of Government Subsidies. Resource extraction from public lands, no bid cost + contracts for defense department projects, last mile monopolies for cable companies. You going to then argue "but we'd have it all better if there were no meddling government!" ? There are plenty of places that have no government and they seem pretty miserable. People (ideally) select other people every interval of time to make important decisions (aka "government"); sometimes those decisions adversely affect some people and help others disproportionately (your job is cutting down trees and 99% of the trees are gone? Well, you may lose your job before cutting down that last 1% because the trees have value as trees instead of lumber; sorry them's the breaks). Life is hard and full of difficult choices. There are winners and losers. It's better for everyone to make decisions by discussion and consensus rather than violence. But free speech is "will the government arrest/fine/murder you for what you say (or don't say)" not "do I have to listen to you blather on when I'd rather not". There's tremendous nuance to "free speech". If I'm a cake maker and you ask me to make a cake saying "Fuck Jewish Space Lasers!" can I say no I'd rather not? I'm not sure. Maybe I've got terms of service already, maybe I'm just a harried cake maker trying to be civil and a good person and I'd rather not be an asshole even by proxy. You could probably switch the message to "Happy anniversary Steve and Paul!" and offend some other set of people. We seem to live in a society where some set of people just want to be rude and uncivil and force us all to watch like we're in a clockwork orange needing programming. Please no, and while you're at it I'd rather you stop pouring garbage into my father in law.

splatcollision 5y ago

Maybe we'll see less links to unreadable twitter threads posted here. One can only hope!

dmix 5y ago
Nothing makes me roll my eyes than seeing a tweet have 1/24. Pigeonholing stuff onto platforms where it doesn't fit. Reddit is turning into a Tiktok aggregator as well, overbearing music, aggressive edits, and juvenile takes. At least those are short though.

sonicggg 5y ago

Musk does not hold any position in the government. My understanding is that the fight for free speech is about the government censoring individuals. The first amendment of the US already protects people from that. Any private platform can do whatever they want though.

tinybrotosaurus 5y ago
What is worse, government censorship or digital censorship through big tech? Remember when all these corporations banned Trump at the same time? Imagine not being able to buy from Amazon when there is no retailer left. Imagine not being able to listen to music or watch movies when all of it is only available through streaming. What about having all your email deleted because a Google bot flagged your account. Or being shadow banned in social media, having no impact on any discussion.
- pacerwpg 5y ago
  As somebody who is banned on Twitter for unclear reasons, I can unequivocally say that this is preferable to being thrown in jail or fined by the government
- themitigating 5y ago
  but there isn't one retailer or one social media service so why should I imagine fictional scenarios when considering your question?
- CrazyStat 5y ago
  > What is worse, government censorship or digital censorship through big tech? Government, no question about it. Twitter doesn't throw you in jail.
dpbriggs 5y ago
There's the ideal and ethic of free speech which isn't "provided" by the government. It's ok to be annoyed or disagree with private censorship. Good or bad Musk wants to open the platform up. Whether that will just change the speech to what he likes or actually broaden it we'll see.

rwmj 5y ago

I think he's dumb wasting so much money on this, but why on earth wouldn't shareholders want to sell out to him? If I held Twitter shares I'd be quite keen to get rid of them.

next_xibalba 5y ago
"The billionaire businessman who led the resurrection of the electric vehicle industry and the birth of the private spaceflight industry is an idiot." - internet commenter. Musk has proven himself to be a very savvy investor. And his operational track record is nearly unmatched. Particularly because it straddles so many different industries: internet 1.0 (Zip2), banking and payments (PayPal), manufacturing and transportation (Tesla), aerospace engineering and spaceflight (SpaceX). If there is anyone in the world who could pull this off, my money would be on him.
- mbesto 5y ago
  > If there is anyone in the world who could pull this off, my money would be on him. And since he's got so many projects on-going, you think he has all of the time in the world to pull this one off? Explain that ONE to me?
- cma 5y ago
  He had that whole fake solar shingle scam presentation thing to bail out his own cousins and self.
- schoolornot 5y ago
  At some point I stopped investing in companies and started investing in people. There's a small group of businessmen out there that have the Midas touch.
  - SuoDuanDao 5y ago
    Would you care to share some of your other people you invest in? It seems like a good strategy in this day and age.
- 5y ago

Abishek_Muthian 5y ago

I agree with your statements. Every Billionaire who recently acquired a large media house[1] mentioned in the interviews as doing it for 'Upholding Journalism' or something of those lines which also implicitly meant 'Supporting right to free speech'. But I'm bewildered about how this particular acquisition is only about 'Right to Free speech' vs 'No Right to Free Speech' and not really about hostile takeover of a business by a Ultra-Billionaire with impunity? I guess that has something to do with how good Elon is at controlling the narrative, Even reputable news agencies start with 'Elon who claims himself as a free speech absolutist...'. And that was before he controlled Twitter. Anyways, Two major social media firms seems to have consolidated with individuals who are supposed to run a social media firm. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-45550747 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-45550747

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

aerovistae 5y ago

Agree with everything you wrote except "maybe more people will start using Mastodon". I didn't even know this existed until you said it, which doesn't bode well for mass adoption given that I'm someone who's on the internet daily. Moreover, Mastodon.com is owned by a forestry machine business, and googling Mastodon gives a first result for a rock/metal band. I think "Mastodon.social" might be about as bad as a web address can get for mass appeal / catchiness.

riffic 5y ago
> mass adoption is absolutely not a priority for the Mastodon software project. Try looking on Github: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon

slibhb 5y ago

> I don't think he has a particularly coherent philosophy about how to approach free speech. The only people with coherent philosophies of free speech are for absolute freedom of speech or absolutely no freedom of speech. It's by pusuring incoherence, by threading the needle between those extremes that we create an open, free speech culture where freedom is the norm and censorship occurs only in extreme situations. I generally agree with the rest of your post ("who cares?"). I would add that if Elon buys twitter and deletes it, I would be fine with it.

danShumway 5y ago
> I would add that if Elon buys twitter and deletes it, I would be fine with it. This is completely off topic and not at all your fault, but even though we are actively talking about Elon Musk and he should have been the primary person in my head, and even though the spelling is different -- for some reason my brain still interpreted "Elon" in the above sentence as Ellen DeGeneres, and I got really confused for about 10 seconds about why you felt the need to add that you would also be OK with her specifically buying Twitter.

specialist 5y ago

Yup. Anything pushed to its logical extreme becomes its own opposite. Since society can't or won't reign in either corporate or social media, perhaps we should remove all restraints and let then destroy themselves, and hopefully each other. Further, how could Musk possibly be any worse than @jack, Zuck & Sandberg, Murdochs, Theil, etc, etc. Pox on all their houses.

Traster 5y ago

I think the one thing you're missing out is the true potential downside. Which is that over the last decade Silicon Valley social media companies have taken an extra-ordinarily long and painful path to understanding how they need to handle speech on their platforms. Musk's position is basically "Do what Mark Zuckerberg did in the early 2010s". There is a reason why facebook no longer acts like that, there's a reason facebook has changed it's name to disassociate from that. And Facebook didn't suffer from their actions there - the commonwealth did. Potentially this is Musk bringing back systematic misinformation, troll farms, accidentallly enabling genocides etc. etc.

danShumway 5y ago
You're not necessarily wrong, but Twitter's moderation policy is already basically terrible and I have very little confidence that they'll be able to improve it significantly in the future with or without Musk. Most of the moderation policies that they are proposing are regularly co-opted to target oppressed or minority groups. They don't seem to be particularly consistent or great about catching abuse in the first place. The site's structure itself seems to encourage bad actors. It's certainly the case that Musk could potentially make that worse, but I guess I have so little confidence in Twitter's ability to get better on that front that I'm not sure it matters all that much in the long run. Better moderation on these platforms requires a large re-think in how we approach moderation in the first place, and it requires a more socially responsible perspective about the platform's purpose. I don't think that Musk being in charge or not will make that happen, and if he does turn Twitter into even more of a cesspool, then maybe that'll encourage alternatives. I'm not an accelerationist when it comes to social media, but I think that Musk/Twitter's attitudes towards free speech online are often both naive and incompetent and the site continuing to worsen might be the only way to get people off of it; and I'm not sure what blocking Musk actually preserves about the site (other than possibly that Musk might push for more aggressive monetization). There are people right now who rely on it that would need to find other hosting, and that does genuinely stink. But... I mean, it's gonna get worse for them regardless. > Silicon Valley social media companies have taken an extra-ordinarily long and painful path to understanding how they need to handle speech on their platforms I don't want to be pessimistic, but I don't really feel like social media companies have learned how to handle speech or that they've become competent about doing moderation at scale. I don't think there ever was a point where they figured it out. If we've learned anything it's that moderation at a global scale is kind of unworkable, and that's why having smaller communities that pay more attention to the content they host is so important. I'm particularly pessimistic about the possibility of AI/algorithmic moderation (which many of these companies are leaning into more and more), mostly because I don't see a ton of evidence that it's good enough at scale to replace human moderation. So I'm not worried about Musk bringing back systematic misinformation or troll farms or accidentally enabling genocide because as far as I can tell Twitter already has that problem; I don't think Musk can bring it back because I don't think it ever went away.

Jsebast23 5y ago

Twitter only needs one change, and is as simple as this: make users confident that they will never be censored for saying something that goes against management's politics. Twitter has seriously violated this trust. That's why current management cannot save Twitter. Even if they say they will accept all speech from now on, nobody will believe them.

richliss 5y ago

I think Musk believes that Twitter is the primary meeting place and seemingly unified-ish mouthpiece of anti-capitalists in the west and he's seeing that they are making dangerous progress. He's someone who is a capitalist and feels that $50B is a worthy investment to disrupt anti-capitalist momentum.

hutzlibu 5y ago
I think that is a very narrow view on events. First, I really do not think twitter is a anticapitalist forum and second, controlling twitter communication yields quite some power. Single tweets made furor on the stock market. It is probably way more about money, than anti activism, or pro free speech activism. (plus the personal vendetta of the twitter bot, who published Elons flights).
parineum 5y ago
> they are making dangerous progress lol Twitter has 400 million users GLOBALLY. How many are bots? How many are active? How many are "anti-capitalists"? Twitter is not representative of anything except twitter.
- nomorecomp 5y ago
  You say that, but the memes and quotes generated from twitter posts and threads spread far and wide. You'll see people who don't even use Twitter quoting things almost verbatim 3 months after it blew up. Same with 4chan and the fringe right sadly. The memes, like "OK Groomer" start out in some weird radical place but then catch elsewhere if they are viral enough.

aasasd 5y ago

maybe more people will start using Mastodon For sure. Dozens of users will migrate to Mastodon.