6 ms·

If Elon Musk gets his way, Twitter will lose years of progress

6 points by sidcool 5y ago

WaxedChewbacca 5y ago
clouddrover 5y ago
> It’s a shame that the world’s richest man might derail that progress in the service of amusing himself. Twitter isn't important. It doesn't matter if it fails. MySpace declined into irrelevancy. The world didn't end.
- gigatexal 5y ago
  My guess is you’re bearish on all social media. I’m not. I happen to really enjoy twitter. It got better when trump was kicked off. It’s getting better now. So called free speech champion Musk will only ruin it.
  - adastra22 5y ago
    It's... social media. Life doesn't revolve around social media. Social media didn't exist two decades ago, and things were just fine. Multiple social media platforms have come and gone, and things are just fine. It's a freaking media platform, nothing else.
    - randomdata 5y ago
      > Social media didn't exist two decades ago There was Usenet in 1980.
      - adastra22 5y ago
        Usenet isn’t social media though? There’s no social aspect to it. No friend feeds, like buttons, etc. So there’s no amplifying effect.
        randomdata 5y ago
        It is absolutely social media. It is not a clone of Facebook (rather Facebook is not a clone of Usenet), but that's not what defines social media.
  - johng 5y ago
    I'm curious how it got better when Trump was kicked off? Also, deleting all posts and links to the Hunter Biden laptop story before the election might have drastically changed the election. Is asking them to be fair for stories on the right as well as stories on the left asking too much?
    - gigatexal 5y ago
      Trump is a toxic individual that used the platform to bully and lie. His lies about Covid got his followers to avoid the vaccine and some died. His lies about the election undermine democracy. There’s no reasoning with him. His removal cleaned up the site a lot. Though this is my opinion and Trump-loving HN is going to downvote me for it.
      - johng 5y ago
        I agree with you that he is a toxic individual and he definitely told lots of lies. This happens on Twitter all the time though. Politicians from both sides do this but they don't get banned for life.... and never a sitting or ex President. What about the other censorship I mentioned, ie. banning all Hunter Biden content for being "false" when it was (and always has been, and still is) actually true?
        gigatexal 5y ago
        In the grand scheme of things a laptop is a lot less important than a sitting President inciting a riot to overturn an election. You know neither are even in the same realm of magnitude. Stop making three equal. But even if Twitter was censoring the right so be it. They don’t have to be fair to any one side. The right can build their own platform and censor the left. I won’t join it. Because and I don’t know how many times this needs to be reiterated: Twitter has no obligation to be fair to anything or anyone. It’s not a public square. It’s not a federal institution. It’s a platform. And platforms can make editorial decisions.
        john_the_writer 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
CryptoPunk 5y ago
>>it might instead be a petty man animated by a misguided notion of free speech that mostly means posting anything you want to a privately owned social network regardless of the potential harm it may cause It is privately owned, but it acts as a public square. For the same reasons that we defend the right to Free Speech at the public level, we should push the platforms that act as public squares to guarantee Free Speech. We have already seen how limiting Free Speech, in the name of fighting "disinformation", can be abused. This is the kind censoring I've personally been subjected to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28411734 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28411734 Meanwhile on Twitter, the "fact-checkers" are now taking it upon themselves to try to discredit tweets that make the leading personalities of the political left look bad: https://archive.md/go6EU https://archive.md/go6EU This is abuse of the allegedly impartial fact-checking process for clearly ideological ends. Another demonstration of this is the Facebook "whistleblower". She explained that she was motivated to blow the whistle after one of her friends was, in her words, radicalized, through Facebook. Of course she doesn't consider herself, a lifelong "ally" and supporter of far-left causes, who worked on a search feature allowing Pinterest users to search by skin tone - in order to discriminate in favor of people of certain colors - radicalized. Because that's pro-establishment radicalism. Yet another would be Twitter's policy of banning people who refer to males who present as women with male gender pronouns. This moderation policy enforces left-wing ideological values, like the idea that gender is a property that is self-chosen, and for something that acts as a public square to push left wing ideology via censorship is deeply inappropriate. Like Glenn Greenwald said: https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1434854149087182848 https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1434854149087182848 >>The entire "anti-disinformation"/"anti-extremism" industry is a gigantic fraud, funded by the same tiny handful of billionaires, governments and NGOs: a scam to control discourse while feigning neutral, non-ideological goals to battle "disinformation" The fight against disinformation is really a fight to stifle dissent against the establishment and its official ideology, which I prefer to call Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity (DIE).
- conz 5y ago
  Parent comment states: > It is privately owned, but it acts as a public square. For the same reasons that we defend the right to Free Speech at the public level, we should push the platforms that act as public squares to guarantee Free Speech. I disagree. Free speech means that no government has the right to tell content publishers - in this instance Twitter - what to and what not to publish, modulo the standard legal exclusions of child abuse material and incitement. (This viewpoint changes if we're discussing a common-carrier or a natural monopoly, where universal service obligations are necessary). On the Internet, it's the Internet itself which is the public square. The content publishers like Twitter are merely commercial operators of 'printing presses' which make their material available to information consumers/citizens within that public square. Content publishers should have every right to censor/reject/moderate any content submitted to them. If the content submitter doesn't like this, then they too can spin up their own content publishing platform on the Internet and publish what they desire.

6 points by sidcool 5y ago

> It’s a shame that the world’s richest man might derail that progress in the service of amusing himself. Twitter isn't important. It doesn't matter if it fails. MySpace declined into irrelevancy. The world didn't end.

gigatexal 5y ago
My guess is you’re bearish on all social media. I’m not. I happen to really enjoy twitter. It got better when trump was kicked off. It’s getting better now. So called free speech champion Musk will only ruin it.
- adastra22 5y ago
  It's... social media. Life doesn't revolve around social media. Social media didn't exist two decades ago, and things were just fine. Multiple social media platforms have come and gone, and things are just fine. It's a freaking media platform, nothing else.
  - randomdata 5y ago
    > Social media didn't exist two decades ago There was Usenet in 1980.
    - adastra22 5y ago
      Usenet isn’t social media though? There’s no social aspect to it. No friend feeds, like buttons, etc. So there’s no amplifying effect.
      - randomdata 5y ago
        It is absolutely social media. It is not a clone of Facebook (rather Facebook is not a clone of Usenet), but that's not what defines social media.
- johng 5y ago
  I'm curious how it got better when Trump was kicked off? Also, deleting all posts and links to the Hunter Biden laptop story before the election might have drastically changed the election. Is asking them to be fair for stories on the right as well as stories on the left asking too much?
  - gigatexal 5y ago
    Trump is a toxic individual that used the platform to bully and lie. His lies about Covid got his followers to avoid the vaccine and some died. His lies about the election undermine democracy. There’s no reasoning with him. His removal cleaned up the site a lot. Though this is my opinion and Trump-loving HN is going to downvote me for it.
    - johng 5y ago
      I agree with you that he is a toxic individual and he definitely told lots of lies. This happens on Twitter all the time though. Politicians from both sides do this but they don't get banned for life.... and never a sitting or ex President. What about the other censorship I mentioned, ie. banning all Hunter Biden content for being "false" when it was (and always has been, and still is) actually true?
      - gigatexal 5y ago
        In the grand scheme of things a laptop is a lot less important than a sitting President inciting a riot to overturn an election. You know neither are even in the same realm of magnitude. Stop making three equal. But even if Twitter was censoring the right so be it. They don’t have to be fair to any one side. The right can build their own platform and censor the left. I won’t join it. Because and I don’t know how many times this needs to be reiterated: Twitter has no obligation to be fair to anything or anyone. It’s not a public square. It’s not a federal institution. It’s a platform. And platforms can make editorial decisions.
        john_the_writer 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

CryptoPunk 5y ago

>>it might instead be a petty man animated by a misguided notion of free speech that mostly means posting anything you want to a privately owned social network regardless of the potential harm it may cause It is privately owned, but it acts as a public square. For the same reasons that we defend the right to Free Speech at the public level, we should push the platforms that act as public squares to guarantee Free Speech. We have already seen how limiting Free Speech, in the name of fighting "disinformation", can be abused. This is the kind censoring I've personally been subjected to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28411734 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28411734 Meanwhile on Twitter, the "fact-checkers" are now taking it upon themselves to try to discredit tweets that make the leading personalities of the political left look bad: https://archive.md/go6EU https://archive.md/go6EU This is abuse of the allegedly impartial fact-checking process for clearly ideological ends. Another demonstration of this is the Facebook "whistleblower". She explained that she was motivated to blow the whistle after one of her friends was, in her words, radicalized, through Facebook. Of course she doesn't consider herself, a lifelong "ally" and supporter of far-left causes, who worked on a search feature allowing Pinterest users to search by skin tone - in order to discriminate in favor of people of certain colors - radicalized. Because that's pro-establishment radicalism. Yet another would be Twitter's policy of banning people who refer to males who present as women with male gender pronouns. This moderation policy enforces left-wing ideological values, like the idea that gender is a property that is self-chosen, and for something that acts as a public square to push left wing ideology via censorship is deeply inappropriate. Like Glenn Greenwald said: https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1434854149087182848 https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1434854149087182848 >>The entire "anti-disinformation"/"anti-extremism" industry is a gigantic fraud, funded by the same tiny handful of billionaires, governments and NGOs: a scam to control discourse while feigning neutral, non-ideological goals to battle "disinformation" The fight against disinformation is really a fight to stifle dissent against the establishment and its official ideology, which I prefer to call Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity (DIE).

conz 5y ago
Parent comment states: > It is privately owned, but it acts as a public square. For the same reasons that we defend the right to Free Speech at the public level, we should push the platforms that act as public squares to guarantee Free Speech. I disagree. Free speech means that no government has the right to tell content publishers - in this instance Twitter - what to and what not to publish, modulo the standard legal exclusions of child abuse material and incitement. (This viewpoint changes if we're discussing a common-carrier or a natural monopoly, where universal service obligations are necessary). On the Internet, it's the Internet itself which is the public square. The content publishers like Twitter are merely commercial operators of 'printing presses' which make their material available to information consumers/citizens within that public square. Content publishers should have every right to censor/reject/moderate any content submitted to them. If the content submitter doesn't like this, then they too can spin up their own content publishing platform on the Internet and publish what they desire.