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My take on Elon's offer for Twitter

• pillowkusis 5y ago
  This thread is an interesting perspective on social media "censorship" that you don't hear often. Of course everyone working at a social media company has an ideological bias, and that can come out in the product. But consider also that the latest censorship controversy creates negative PR, makes people leave the platform, attracts regulatory attention, and ultimately, hurts the company's profits. Content moderators are at least as worried about that as they are about making sure their ideological opponents aren't given a voice. Social media companies are in the unenviable position of playing referee in the culture war, and like referees in any sport, they're going to constantly be criticized for doing it, right or wrong. These companies are global and universal, and there's no way they can satisfy all parties. Sometimes, the values of left and right, or Iran and the US, or Israel and Palestine, are just irreconcilable. You're better off just trying to avoid as much trouble as possible, and avoiding negative media attention. Reddit is probably the most ham-fisted example of this approach. Their content moderation is pretty hands off, but as soon as any subreddit attracts negative attention, it's quarantined or banned, no matter if the controversy is justified or not. When Russia invaded Ukraine and Russia Is Bad Now, they just straight up banned /r/russia and any link to an .ru domain! That does nothing to address the conflict, but it does keep those NYT opinion pieces from showcasing Problematic Russian Bot Behavior on Reddit. I'll note that I don't think this model fully explains moderation policies at Twitter or other social media sites. I genuinely believe moderation leans left due to an ideological monoculture (I've seen it first hand). But it's important to recognize the difficult situation social media sites are in.
  • afpx 5y ago
    If you look up the archive from that time frame, you'll see that /r/russia was pure Russian propaganda.
    • user3939382 5y ago
      I've been accused several times recently of believing "Russian propaganda" about the war in Ukraine which of course I find very offensive. I'm an intelligent person, I've analyzed the situation, listened to different sources, and come to the conclusion that the western powers, the US in particular, and to some degree Ukraine, are not as much in the right as they pretend to be. From my perspective, the western political establishment is, through the corporate media, daily pushing propaganda to support their narrative. When it comes to individuals, it would be nice if we could all respect each other's right to our own opinions without attacking other people's intelligence, attacking their character, or accusing them of bad faith.
      • SkinTaco 5y ago
        Interesting, I wasn't aware there was any ambiguity. To be honest I'm not really paying any attention to it though. What kinds of reasons (valid or invalid) is Russia giving? Are there actually nazis in Ukraine?
        • stormbrew 5y ago
          While the Azov Batallion is definitely a concerning and real thing, it's worth noting that Ukraine's president is Jewish. It's a particularly twisted sort of irony to talk of "de-nazifying" a country while also trying to assassinate its Jewish president.
        • decremental 5y ago
          Yeah, they call themselves the Azov Battalion. They're open about it. Whether or not that's an actual concern of Russia is debeatable but the nazi presence in Ukraine has been largely suppressed by our media so as to not taint the narrative of good vs. evil. As you can imagine it's a very inconvenient truth.
          • exogeny 5y ago
            I think it's more that than no one sane would consider the presence of Nazis as justification for Russian slaughtering innocent civilians.
  • wvenable 5y ago
    > Their content moderation is pretty hands off, but as soon as any subreddit attracts negative attention, it's quarantined or banned, no matter if the controversy is justified or not. That's the point. They just want the controversy to go away. To suggest that they should care about justification is to make them moral arbitrators.
    • pillowkusis 5y ago
      Exactly! I don't respect it, but it's a very understandable response. Just stop making this controversy our problem. The "correct" response in my eyes is to say "we are a platform, we aren't responsible for the speech of our users as long as it is legal," but that's a very expensive and profit-negative strategy these days.
      • wvenable 5y ago
        > we aren't responsible for the speech of our users as long as it is legal Except if you are hosting content, you are responsible for it. Maybe not even legally but you are still responsible. You can't simply wash your hands of content that you literally pay to host on the internet just because a user posted it.
  • julianeon 5y ago
    I'm surprised I haven't seen the 'steelman' argument for Musk and free speech on Twitter, made as faithfully as I can to emulate Musk's perspective. I'm going to make it (disclosure: I don't personally believe it). When Trump was booted from social media, it was censorship. We tend to overlook this, because Twitter & FB agreed on it; but another perspective is possible, that Trump should be able to speak freely as the leader of the country supported by half its population (no less than 40%, anyway). Trump should be able to make statements that aren't censored because, when he makes them as President, they are inherently newsworthy & worthy of circulation. But to take this even further, this isn't simply about one guy's Twitter takes; it's much larger than that. Because under Trump we were starting to see the emergence of something that is probably inevitable: the full hybridization of popular culture, technology, and media, in the form of a perpetually on engine of user engagement. This is probably the model of the future, and Twitter is uniquely positioned to not just bring it to the people (as it was under Trump), but to monetize it (which they didn't do, really). What are the upsides of this? A more engaged voter population. A move of politics back towards the center of cultural life, where it should be. A closer integration of politics, culture and ecommerce. And, if done in a principled way, an end to the perception that people can be suppressed for saying the wrong thing (see: Trump). That's the value that Musk could unlock. That's what could conceivably make Twitter as important as FB, and even more central to American life. That, combined with some aggressive product delivery, and a shakeup away from the product doldrums, could be transformative for Twitter. If Musk gets his way, that's the change he could make.
    • chubot 5y ago
      Trump should be able to make statements that aren't censored because, when he makes them as President, they are inherently newsworthy & worthy of circulation. FWIW this isn't really adding something to the conversation, not that I've been paying very close attention. I believe Facebook and Twitter already had a "heads of state" clause in their policy that recognizes this. Yup: https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/3/22474738/facebook-ending-political-figure-exemption-moderation-policy https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/3/22474738/facebook-ending-p... In other words, heads of state were already allowed to say things that normal users aren't, based on the reasoning you state. According to executives that made a one-off decision, Trump crossed those more relaxed lines. Of course a lot of it had to do with the transfer of power in the US -- he would soon no longer be a sitting president. As Yishan says, these decisions aren't really based on "principles". They are based on "shitstorms that are brewing and that we want to avoid", of which January 6 was a perfect example.
• qiskit 5y ago
  His description of "old internet" and freedom is wrong. The "old internet" was predominantly american ( 90%+ ) and we didn't just want to protect free speech from conservatives attacking porn, but from everyone ( soccer moms, woke leftist, europeans, ADL, canadians, etc ). > it means you're standing up against EVERYONE, because every side is trying to take away the speech rights of the other side. Exactly. That's why the old internet defaulted to free speech. Because everyone understood that taking their free speech meant my free speech was vulnerable and it was impossible to just censor one and not everyone else. > It's also where Russia is fighting a real war against us This nonsense. Just the russians? What about the british, israelis, canadians, australians, saudis, chinese, iranians, etc. Not to mention the biggest threat - our own government. What percentage of foreign propaganda is russian? 1%? Just like all the russian money spent on facebook gave trump the presidency? All $40K was it? > I want you to pause for a minute and think about your political alignment and whether you're on the left or right of this issue, because you probably think one of those things. I'm neither and social media clearly leans towards one side. > Elon is one of those, because he doesn't understand what has happened to internet culture since 2004. Or as I call it, just culture. The culture was formed by censorship. The social media companies are trying to change culture. Get rid of censorship and we'll see about the culture. If yishan is right, how come real world culture is so different from social media culture? Perhaps because censorship allows a tiny minority to have the most influence/say? > Facebook's userbase has at various times been left-leaning, then right-leaning, then bifurcated. So has Reddit's. Twitter's also. The social platforms don't care. Is that why they collectively banned trump. Because they don't care? > It is because we brought all of our old horrible collective dysfunctions onto the internet The horrible collective dysfunctions were on the old internet long before social media. > They are censoring because they are large social platforms, and ideas are POWERFUL and DANGEROUS. That must be why we censor libraries... Instead of wasting pages of text and much of our time, he could have been honest and answered in less than 140 characters - "We censor because of money". The only difference between old internet and new internet is money and shareholders and centralization. The guy talks about everything - culture, russians, old internet, etc but ignores the elephant int the room. Money makes the world go round and money makes social media censor. If you are dependent on ads, you probably will have to conform to money's demands. I do wonder how elon will deal with the problem of money/ads. Though taking the company private and owning it outright should give him more leeway, I doubt he's willing to lose money year after year on twitter.
• fellowniusmonk 5y ago
  I co-ran a co-working space for many years in a zeitgeisty tech city as a side thing to keep my companies rent cheap (kind of.) We were early holders of bitcoin meetups, we threw crypto events, we gave away schwag with those guys who 3d printed guns. We hosted "Young African Leaders" events (yali) and hosted some amazing people from overseas. We hosted the local 2600 meetup and other maker events. We hosted the local colleges Asian chamber of commerce events. We threw parties with thousands of people filtering through our converted warehouse space. We had actual communists and unabashed capitalists and new atheists and couldn't care less multi generational atheists and old burnouts and young idiots, people abandoned by their families, from loving families and Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus.. We had classes for robotics, pickling vegetables, we burned a lot of stuff and made some huge art installations. We kicked people out for being shitty and insulting (which was extremely rare among members, totalling 3 people over many years). We occasionally reprimanded people who were fine in person but abusive online. Hell is other people. I miss what we built and the ideas and companies and the hope and economic power our members could tap into. But I do not miss the bad behavior, the guy who seemed cool and nerdy until he gets drunk and starts trying to physically corner women. The attempted rapists who came to some of our larger warehouse parties and had to be removed by police. The assholes who came in with bad faith arguments or the copious number of bad faith actors trying to monetize our more inexperienced members. We were a meatspace, old internet, freedom of speech group and we kept our facilities a little dingy just to keep things more maker oriented and attract less of the superficial. Having seen it all in person it's always the bad faith actors, the predators, the non-makers and the fragile egos that come out. We did a good job in person having ideological, cultural and class diversity because "making" was our prime member criteria. I don't see how it's possible on the internet at large. I've seen many terrible people in person and at least there were consequences for overtly evil or lying acts, I just don't see it happening on the consumer internets social media platforms. Great perspective to read about and rings very true with my years "sitting at the city gates" in our modern times.
  • Scoundreller 5y ago
    sounded like a fun place!
• omgmajk 5y ago
  This is surprisingly sober.
• oska 5y ago
  This twitter thread was also submitted and discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31039827 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31039827
  • eatonphil 5y ago
    Unclear to me from the comments why that submission was flagged. It seems reasonably on topic to me and not intrinsically flamebait-y. I guess enough people just hit the flag button.
    • cryptonector 5y ago
      It's Musk day at HN. Some might be exhausted.
      • hello_popppet 5y ago
    • dang 5y ago
      Probably because the title was badly editorialized, which is against the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
      • eatonphil 5y ago
        That's fair. This submission title was editorialized a bit too at the time of my comment but I guess it survived not being flagged long enough for someone (yourself maybe) to adjust the title.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• Meekro 5y ago
  > Replace "lab leak theory" with whatever topic you think has been unfairly censored, and the reason it was censored (or any other action taken against it) is not because of the content of that topic, I ABSOLUTELY ASSURE YOU. Pretty sure this is not true. The Hunter Biden laptop story was censored for one reason, and one reason only: it was a bombshell dropped at the 11th hour, and liberals were afraid that it would result in Trump winning re-election. The truth or untruth of the story was beside the point; if it had been Trump Jr's laptop, it would never have been censored. Censorship is not inevitable. If Musk had been in charge of Twitter back then, this story would not have been censored.
  • bfgoodrich 5y ago
  • jpgvm 5y ago
    It wasn't so much censored as it was boring and irrelevant. If it was driving clicks it wouldn't have been "censored".
    • chasd00 5y ago
      > If it was driving clicks it wouldn't have been "censored". You have it backwards, it was driving clicks and the algo was full steam ahead getting more clicks. It had to be manually removed to stop the spread.
      • PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
        I could "release" a story on how I found an iPad on a bus that shows that Donald Trump Jr. has sex with babies and then posts it on a hidden social media network. I could release it (like Guiliani did with the Hunter Biden story) with no verifiable evidence, just an insistence that this is all true. The story would be false, because I just made that up. I would think it would be pretty remiss of FB or Twitter to allow my invented story to spread given its completely unsubstantiated nature. Now, if at a later date, it turned out that people were able to verify that DTjr did in fact have sex with babies and shared the videos with a private network, it would also be remiss of FB and Twitter to prevent discussion of it. We live in an era where people can release stories with generated audio, video and other visual media to make any invented point they want. The idea that these stories should be able to be spread around freely even in the absence of any actually verified facts is fundamentally absurd. If you were to get that wish, I am absolutely certain that you would hate the world it would create even more than you might the current one.
• Havoc 5y ago
  Speaking of Twitter - Still can't believe these stupid thread style posts are the prime way to communicate medium length messages these days. Mid sentence breaks and all. And then you need a threadreader to unfuck said stupid format. Anyway - in this case the content is on point
• drooby 5y ago
  > The social platforms aren't censoring you (or some idea you like) because they disagree with you. They are censoring because they are large social platforms, and ideas are POWERFUL and DANGEROUS. > Let me be clear: if you run a large social network, you will be forced by inexorable circumstance to censor certain things, you will be forced to "arbitrate" on topics you have an (inevitably) limited understanding of, and it will all be really really shitty. > (The alternative is just collapse of the platform, so I guess you do always have a choice - but then you're not a social platform anymore) I'd love if he provided an example of these powerful and dangerous ideas that must be censored. This is exactly the kind of language that any powerful organization that is scared of losing power says - it's all in the interest of saving lives... okay, what are the examples? Why is this not a matter best handled by law enforcement? This just further convinces me that social media is a cancer to society.
  • throwmeariver1 5y ago
    It's easy an idea that alienates more than 20-30% of your user base as he said they don't really care about politics and I believe him. Can be something simple like a fucked up redesign... looking at you Digg.
    • drooby 5y ago
      ahh shit okay I see. Yeah social media is a cancer. At least in its current centralized form.
  • Spivak 5y ago
    I mean the list of banned subreddits is (mostly) known if you want a few hundred examples. https://old.reddit.com/r/reclassified/comments/fg3608/updated_list_of_all_known_banned_subreddits https://old.reddit.com/r/reclassified/comments/fg3608/update... Like I would post some highlights so people don't have to click the link but I don't even feel good about posting most of the names of the subs. They're just... awful.
    • syshum 5y ago
• ALittleLight 5y ago
  At one point Yishan writes something like the various social media execs may vote, identify, and donate as Left much more than Right, but they are also typically white men. The implication seemingly being that white men aren't Lefties? Never mind that people from China or India are dramatically overrepresented in tech companies, more so than white people and those demographics tend to be Left leaning. Yishan's argument seems to boil down to "Trust me, they aren't biased."
  • AussieWog93 5y ago
    >people from China or India >Left leaning Where the hell have you been working!?
    • ALittleLight 5y ago
      In the United States, where Indian and Chinese people tend to vote Democrat, and where Silicon Valley and Twitter are situated.
      • AussieWog93 5y ago
        Ahh yep, I forgot about US partisan politics for a sec there.
      • halamadrid 5y ago
        A couple of things that I have observed: 1. A lot of the Indians and Chinese are on visas means no right to vote (ex: Twitter CEO) 2. Those that can vote - cares more about paying less taxes than anything else which usually means voting Republican, except if the candidate is a far right fanatic
      • baskethead 5y ago
        Indians and Asians tend to vote Republican. Indians are the riches ethnic demographic in the US, almost 3X the average wage of white people.
        • 5y ago
• Barrin92 5y ago
  >My most immediate takeaway from this novella of a thread is that Twitter is way overdue for long form tweets! (Musk's response) this may very well be the first thing in my life I've agreed with Musk on. By god scrolling through an entire essay chopped up with random replies and profile links thrown in because you have to click "show more replies" (which pops up twice?) over and over is awful. Just link to a Twitlonger. On yishan's actual points I agree though. Companies moderate haphazardly and improvise and they care about their bottom-line and to extinguish shitstorms. There's no coherent ideological bias on any sufficiently large social network, they just pivot to whatever is causing chaos on any given weekday. One important point stuck somewhere in the middle is his observation that in the physical world, no public square, or public debate looks like what's on display on internet social networks. All of them have rules, civility is a thing, if you're crazy someone's likely going to throw you out, there's identity instead of anonymity and so on. Maybe provocatively, "cancel culture" is simply culture. Culture is a bunch of rituals, rules, coercions, customs and traditions that predominantly tell us what not to so so we don't behave like a bunch of naked apes.
  • ec109685 5y ago
    What Twitter client are you using? Mobile web at least threads it just fine. So much so I don’t understand why people use threadreader a given the junk that adds to a conversation as its being requested and replied to.
    • Barrin92 5y ago
      >What Twitter client are you using? Mobile web at least threads it just fine. Chrome on the desktop right now. I agree that the mobile app is a better experience.
    • hoherd 5y ago
      If you think mobile web threads fine, as in makes a good UX for reading written text, then that difference of opinion is the source of our and perhaps the parent of your post's disagreement. Mobile web looks just as awful as desktop web. I don't understand how people read on sites like this. I never read twitter threads unless I go through thread reader. It's intolerable otherwise. I am not affiliated with thread reader at all. EG for the OP link: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1514938507407421440.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1514938507407421440.html
• NaturalPhallacy 5y ago
  No discussion including both reddit and free speech would be complete without this little bit of history: >We want to democratize the traditional model by giving editorial control to the people who use the site, not those who run it. >— Reddit FAQ 2005 >We've always benefited from a policy of not censoring content >— u/kn0thing 2008 >A bastion of free speech on the World Wide Web? I bet they would like it," he replies. [reddit]'s the digital form of political pamplets. >— u/kn0thing 2012 >We will tirelessly defend the right to freely share information on reddit in any way we can, even if it is offensive or discusses something that may be illegal. >— u/reddit 2012 >We stand for free speech. This means we are not going to ban distasteful subreddits. We will not ban legal content even if we find it odious or if we personally condemn it. Not because that's the law in the United States - because as many people have pointed out, privately-owned forums are under no obligation to uphold it - but because we believe in that ideal independently, and that's what we want to promote on our platform. We are clarifying that now because in the past it wasn't clear, and (to be honest) in the past we were not completely independent and there were other pressures acting on reddit. Now it's just reddit, and we serve the community, we serve the ideals of free speech, and we hope to ultimately be a universal platform for human discourse (cat pictures are a form of discourse). >— u/yishan 2012 >Neither Alexis [u/kn0thing] nor I created Reddit to be a bastion of free speech >— u/spez 2015 And more recently this quote from reddit a employee: "Our rule1 protects groups that are attacked based on a vulnerability, which doesn't pertain to white people or men as a group." Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/NgOxEg0.png https://i.imgur.com/NgOxEg0.png What is rule 1? "Remember the human. Reddit is a place for creating community and belonging, not for attacking marginalized or vulnerable groups of people. Everyone has a right to use Reddit free of harassment, bullying, and threats of violence. Communities and users that incite violence or that promote hate based on identity or vulnerability will be banned." (https://www.redditinc.com/policies/content-policy https://www.redditinc.com/policies/content-policy) So in practice, according to one of their employees it's actually: "Remember the non-white male human. Reddit is a place for creating community and belonging, not for attacking non-white people or women. Everyone except white people and men have a right to use Reddit free of harassment, bullying, and threats of violence. Communities and users that incite violence or that promote hate against non-white people or women will be banned." And this is absolutely born out in their repeated banning of male-centric subs, while the most toxic community I've ever seen remains, because it's wildly sexist against the correct sex. And there are multiple "fragile white redditor" type subs also. Reddit used to be a cool new thing with real potential. I remember participating in the first secret Santa and my gift was the third most popular in the world. And the utterly wholesome Ameristralia movement. Then they shot it in the head in 2015 and completed their bait & switch. tl;dr: reddit is really, really racist, sexist, and authoritarian
• astrange 5y ago
  It more or less all seems true to me. I thought it was amusing that the replies were full of people with no moderation experience trying to fight with him about all of it by going "umm actually it's obvious that x", where x is something that totally conflicts with the next reply over.
• madrox 5y ago
  It's for these reasons that I'm convinced massive social networks are not the future of the internet. It's too hard to win. Most people will fatigue and retreat to products that offer a more comfortable media experience made up of community members more like them. This seems to be happening on platforms like Twitch and Discord already. I don't think Twitter is mismanaged. It's just as bad idea that's living past its point in time.
  • randomsearch 5y ago
    Yes. Something that seems to be lost in the debate is _why should social media be allowed to exist at all?_ Social media is a tool that allows anyone to say anything, regardless of its basis in fact, and then amplify that statement to a level that is also unrelated to whether it is true (or nice, forgiving, generous). A nasty or false statement actually gets amplified _more_ because algorithms optimise for engagement. There’s then this weird argument of “we can’t act like a publisher because its logistically impossible to police the high volume of tweets.” Well, yes, I agree, it is logistically impossible. But the correct conclusion is not “therefore give up policing” but rather “don’t allow high volume broadcast of tweets.” That is, don’t allow this form of social media to exist. This anything goes culture has not had great benefits for society, but has most certainly created great harm. The weaponisation of social media by enemy states is an obvious example. Making social more local, that is only your followers can see only your original content is a simple fix that probably works. It just makes less money.
• aaron695 5y ago
• syshum 5y ago
  His entire thread falls apart when the very rules of a given platform show an ideological bent to them. you can not claim the company is not biased when the very rules for which guide the enforcement is biased
  • paulmd 5y ago
    if what you're trying to say here is that one side makes use of antisocial tactics more than the other and is hit harder by moderation as a result, that's not really Twitter's fault or problem. I think the example you're reaching for is racism/homophobia/transphobia, and how those run afoul of the "don't treat people like shit/debate the validity of their existence" rules, and how the left is comparatively un-affected by that rule because they don't generally do that stuff. It's unfortunate that one of the parties continuously makes that stuff a voting issue, but like, you don't get a pass on the "no festering bigotry" just because it's mainstream discourse in your circles.
    • homonculus1 5y ago
      • paulmd 5y ago
        People being less hateful in general would be preferable, but immutable characteristics seem to be an obvious brightline. But you're right that stuff like r/fatpeoplehate shouldn't really be on the site either, the hate is absolutely noxious and it's all the worse because it's "acceptable" and "not an immutable characteristic". And the "quarantine zone" strategy absolutely does not work, it just festers and metastasizes to the rest of the site. Nothing is stopping you from making your own social-media site where you're allowed to say the N-word all you want, it's happened numerous times over Reddit's history when they crack down on one of the various hate forums that sprung up over the years. Nothing is stopping you from getting real mad about brands of cars, or computer parts, either. I don't know why some people are so willing to die on this hill, like, is it really such a sacrifice for you to not debate the existence and rights of minorities (sexual or otherwise)? Again, that may feel like oppression after coming from a position of supremacy, but it's not. Sexual minorities are only the latest in a long line of targets. In the 80s and 90s it was satanic panic, then drugs and black people, immigrant "caravans" and other ways to weaponize bigotry and otherism. It's a consistent theme, and it's powerful. It doesn't matter if it's sexual minorities, or race, or anything else. There is no class of people whose existence and rights you should be debating, period, and the framing that it's acceptable to debate sexual minorities because at least it isn't racial minorities isn't valid, full stop. That's an antisocial mindset and you're gonna get shunned (or isolated to clusters of like-minded individuals) until you stop. Maybe that's a tough perspective for the engineer mindset but it's how the world works... people don't like their existence being a topic of debate, and people don't want it on their platforms or in their social circle. It all goes back to what the twitter guy said - stop being a fucking dramabomb constantly and you won't be "censored". Being an asshole is a great reason to be shunned, or canceled, or whatever the shun-ee's are calling it now.
• rosmax_1337 5y ago
  And yet, as the world communicates by way of technological means nowadays, rather than public gatherings and speeches, there is a larger and larger need for free speech on tech platforms. I frankly don't see a good solution, because the world is multipolar and subject to different laws regarding free speech. If countries were concerned for the respect of their own boundries of free speech they would begin developing (godawful, I'm sure) alternatives to twitter, facebook, youtube, google, etc. If each country had their own echo chamber, it would make sense if you squint very hard and try to ignore the fact that people wish to communicated across country borders. So yeah, it's not going to change any time soon. I will say this though, while appreciating his thread, he is dead wrong about the idea that the censorship is equal ended. "Nationalism", in the broad sense, irregardless of wether it is left or right leaning economically, is censored across the board far, far greater than "Liberalism".
  • skippyboxedhero 5y ago
    All of these problems existed before. Most of today's democracies have had rules around public gatherings and speeches. The situation with Twitter is, effectively, analogous to the invention of the printing press which started the political pamphleteering industry ("political"...the early state of that industry resembled Twitter, at least in England...lots of accusations of X public person being a secret papist or drinking children's blood...very little real discussion). I am not sure exactly what the solution is (and you are right, that it becomes more complex on a global scale) but, as some of the comments in OP thread inadvertently allude to, a lot of today's moderation is just censorship. At no point in history has been up to companies to do this (in some countries the media is self-regulating, but that is regulation...not deciding that something shouldn't be published because it is "wrong" in some way...that is up to the courts and govt, not the press). The problem is the separation of content creation and distribution...the guy who runs the newspaper stand isn't responsible for the NY Times publishing something that is inaccurate. So I think the goal is parity with existing rules: people are responsible for what they post, not companies (and btw, this applies legally...in the UK, you can be prosecuted criminally for something you post...so quite why these companies need to stick their oar in to "protect" users is unclear).
• meatsauce 5y ago
  • 1986 5y ago
    It makes a lot more sense if you include the previous tweet as well. > There is this old culture of the internet, roughly Web 1.0 (late 90s) and early Web 2.0, pre-Facebook (pre-2005), that had a very strong free speech culture. This person isn't specifically talking about the general American right to free speech, I don't think, rather the libertarian / "Californian ideology" bent of the 90s web and those who were at its forefront.
  • dang 5y ago
    Could you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN? You've unfortunately been doing that a lot lately. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit more to heart, we'd be grateful.
    • georgia_peach 5y ago
      And yishan's meandering "OK boomer" thread is substantive? At least meatsauce's comment was to-the-point, and didn't waste as much of our time.
      • dang 5y ago
        I don't think that's an accurate description of the OP. It made some interesting points about internet moderation at scale. Even if you're right about the OP, though, commenters here need to follow the site guidelines regardless of how bad someone else's contributions are or they feel they are. Otherwise we just end up in a downward spiral (given that everyone always feels like they're just reacting to something else that's worse). https://hn.algolia.com/?query=downward%20spiral%20by:dang&dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?query=downward%20spiral%20by:dang&da... https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
  > It's also where Russia is fighting a real war against us, using free speech literally. But that's another story too
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• farmerstan 5y ago
  Pretty interesting perspective, I wish it were in a different format so I could read it easier. I think the biggest problem with globally scaled companies is that HUMANS can’t mentally scale their expectations with the size. Meaning, if you have 10,000 people pissed and tweeting about something, you think “Oh my God this has gone viral, something has to be done!” But 10,000 angry tweets are nothing. 100,000 angry tweets are nothing. But to a single human it’s humongous but compared to the size of Twitters audience, some 300,000,000 people, 100,000 is not material. Combine that with the majority that probably agree with you being silent, it’s easy to feel like you’re on the wrong side if you disagree. But you might not be. Someone with guts needs to say, fuck the 100,000 angry tweets, this is the right thing to do. That person is Elon. And I’m not a fanboy at all because I generally hate him. But I admire his actions here. All I know is that he is a “fuck it” kind of guy and that’s what will lead social media out of this mess. People need to stop worrying about tens of thousands of angry tweets and just have the proper internal compass.
  • skinnymuch 5y ago
    You say you generally hate him but then list multiple positive things about him that go against generally hating him. How do you hate someone generally while saying the person with guts is that person and they are a “fuck it” kind of person that will help social media. None of this remotely squares with hating the person. All the positives about Elon are what any one who likes him or admired him would say. None of what was written would be what most non status quo, non center/center right people would say.
    • farmerstan 5y ago
      I can generally hate someone but also see their good qualities. It’s not mutually exclusive at all.
      • skinnymuch 5y ago
        Yes that is true. However hating someone and then liking multiple facets of them to this degree is what doesn’t seem like it squares up. Unless it’s more of a hating Twitter and social media so much that Elon is better than that. You are absolutely right my logic was..well illogical :)
• temp8964 5y ago
  He doesn't have clear thoughts. His example: left wing wokes complain racist/sexist speeches exist, center / right / libertarians complain they are censored. Are you kidding me, how are those two equivalent? First, center / right / libertarians is a big group, they are not the opposite of the left wing wokes, they are not the one make racist/sexist speeches. Second, left wing wokes complain the platform does not censor others enough, center / right / libertarians complain the platform censors themselves too much. How the hell are those two comparable? Just because you mention the left this this, the right that that, does not make the two points comparable.
  • skinnymuch 5y ago
    Yes. It is painfully awful faux intellectual phony stuff. Every one is to blame. Everyone can be put into one side (multiple times when he said what the left does or thinks or said “you have thought this way as a person of X identity”...it was never true. Generalizations. Meanwhile the praise for various billionaires and the defense of corporations where “they kind of care about money” before saying people in general are the problem. The thread actually contains “they [corporations] only kind of care about money”. Is there anything else to say.
• stevespang 5y ago
• TameAntelope 5y ago
  I'm glad he's putting a voice to something I feel has gone under-discussed during this whole "free speech" debate: it's rarely the mere topic that gets someone into trouble, but how the topic is presented. If you want to say (almost) literally anything, you can find a way to do it that won't get you in trouble anywhere. It's the tone, the timing, and the specific phrasing that causes the problem, not the idea itself. You can say some truly abhorrent things on Twitter and they won't ban you, if you say it the "right" way, and I feel like a depressingly small number of people realize that.
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  • jesusofnazarath 5y ago
  • npunt 5y ago
    Agree, and to add further to this, the medium of Twitter does itself no favors in the 'how the topic is presented' dept. Twitter's context-less, short-form, hot-take, free for all design is really great at priming people to react rather than consider. So many aspects of the product reinforce this, which is a result of the top line metric being engagement. It's a dumping ground for emotions and generally a shitty medium for anything mildly controversial. When I see discussions like this, I'm disappointed people miss just how influential the product & medium is on these problems. Product is not 100% of the problem (everyone has content moderation problems) but it's definitely a big contributor to the problem as the medium makes it hard to have good faith discussions. There are a lot of product improvements Twitter could make to improve discussion quality, and I've mocked up several [1]. While individuals there are very motivated to solve these problems, I'm not sure there's the same will to solve them at the top. [1] https://twitter.com/nickpunt/status/1513429343833563139 https://twitter.com/nickpunt/status/1513429343833563139
    • swilliamsio 5y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message
• SnowHill9902 5y ago
  This reads more like he burned out on Reddit than a real analysis of why Twitter could or could not be “saved.”
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• gonzo41 5y ago
  This is a good take, but I hate thread. Feature request for twitter would be a word limit per hour, so you could just put a couple of paragraphs up and not be able to tweet for 2 hours.
  • makeitdouble 5y ago
    The worst interpretation of you request would be “he’s talking too much and should shut up for 2 hours” It seems to me the more direct request would be an option to glue tweets together or have a max number of notifications per account per hour if that’s what’s hitting you the most.
    • gonzo41 5y ago
      Yeah, I meant it more along the lines of a quota system around time, rather than silence people. But whatever, I with musk at least on one point, maybe it's time for longer tweets.
• jimmydeans 5y ago
  Twitter and Reddit came here to shout down free speech.
• bspear 5y ago
  This whole debacle has illustrated how distracting social media can be. Elon is taking time away from worthwhile things to pursue a fool's errand
• tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
  A lot of really good points being made. What the thread didn't explain - how do platforms get destroyed if they don't moderate enough? For example, what stopped reddit from letting the more extreme subs stand, letting the people screaming about it scream until enough people got tired of hearing it? Reddit in particular has the advantage of having separate subreddits, which can have different tolerances for different behaviors.
  • DoctorOW 5y ago
    I mean... remember Voat? That was literally the whole point was they would take the refugees from banned subreddits into their Reddit clone. The place got unbearably racist and then the site died. I remember because I checked Voat out periodically for a while, I was on the fence about this whole "free speech" debate until I saw the end result.
    • mynameishere 5y ago
      I think that was a one-man operation and he ran out of money. My guess: Since he couldn't also spin up his own advertising network, he was out of luck.
    • account42 5y ago
      Continuing to allow fringe views is entirely different from a forum made for those whose views were deemed too extreme elsewhere.
  • sangnoir 5y ago
    > What the thread didn't explain - how do platforms get destroyed if they don't moderate enough? You get brigading or other ever-escalating, internecine battles, and lose a huge chunk of users who get put off by the toxicity and dysfunction, and it becomes a downward spiral as the concentration of radicals in the userbase increases. A sibling comment mentions Voat (which died in the cradle), but I think Digg is a different example of how platform can implode when most users - who are not ideologically invested either way - get tired of drama.
• nunez 5y ago
  One of Yishan's bigger points is how managing a social media company can make you eat shit on a constant basis, which is exceptionally hard for CEOs entering that space. Elon eats shit on a daily basis, from everyone, from multiple angles. Wouldn't this actually make him a decent fit for the job?
  • rpmisms 5y ago
    He definitely has the pain tolerance for it; I don't think that's a valid concern here. I honestly do think his ownership would cause significant improvements.
• andrew_ 5y ago
  > They DON'T CARE ABOUT POLITICS. They really don't. I'd like to know how that claim can be made given the videos that a certain dubious "Project" has collected of real employees talking about how much they care about the politics of it all. What of the employees who are completely transparent on the platform talking about their activism as related to their job at the platform? There must be nuance missing here, otherwise it's blatantly untrue and I'm unsure how Y could be that niave. I really don't believe he is, but this is baffling.
  • wokwokwok 5y ago
    sigh That's the point though; who caaaarrrreeeeesssss what the employees think? Do you care what the political views of your plumber are? I do not. Do you care what the political views of the person who writes the app that runs your smart tv? I don't caaaare. What I care about is what the platform does as a company, and yes, I know, people run companies, and that means they have some impact... but fundamentally twitter is run by a bunch of people who are trying to derive value for their shareholders. That means building things, getting users, and not wasting a shit load of time and money on content moderation. That's the point; it's not about caring about politics; it's about making problems go away, so they can make money by selling ads (or whatever) and making people click on cat videos. You have a handful of examples you're clinging to, which show some people doing something you don't like, so EVERYONE MUST BE DOING IT. That's exactly the point this post was making; you're assuming the tiny bit of data you have, is reflective of the entire management structure, company, employees and corporate decision making process. It's not. > I'm unsure how Y could be that niave. I really don't believe he is, but this is baffling. That's the point this whole thread is making. You can choose to believe in that conspiracy theory style stuff, but, really... it shouldn't be a surprise to find that some people don't.
    • Fervicus 5y ago
      I would care about the political views of the person who wrote the app that runs on my smart TV if my TV started blocking certain content because they think it's wrong think and that I should be protected from it.
    • 5y ago
• slibhb 5y ago
  I find this rambling, repetitive, and wrong. What happens if we don't censor? Violence? Trump wins the election? Twitter dies? The example he uses is the lab leak hypothesis which is the worst example he could have picked. Lab leak was unsayable for months then it became mainstream and nothing happened. Are we seriously supposed to think Twitter would have collapsed if lab leak hadn't been censored for N months? It is true that moderation, which amounts to censorship, is required on these platforms. But the bar for moderation should be way higher and these platforms should stop playing whack-a-mole with "dangerous ideas". If they do stop, I predict that nothing bad will happen.
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  • philjohn 5y ago
    Some people sent death threats to Fauci over the lab leak hypothesis as they blamed him for funding some research at the Wuhan lab. Real, taxpayer, money had to be spent on his security detail. Once again - people who claimed that the lab leak hypothesis was 100% verifiably true were in the wrong, people who talked about it as one of the theories were unnafected.
  • skinnymuch 5y ago
    The general schtick were and is people convinced of the lab leak with no solid conclusive evidence. That never changed to this day.
• occz 5y ago
  https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1514938507407421440.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1514938507407421440.html
• StanislavPetrov 5y ago
  >it means you're standing up against EVERYONE, because every side is trying to take away the speech rights of the other side This is just plain false. There is a large contingent of people, myself included, who aren't on anyone's "side". The false, binary Republican vs Democrat crowd is, collectively, a shrinking minority of the population. Intelligent, moral people don't want to take away the speech rights of anyone. Twitter has a block button which everyone is free to use to shield themselves (and only themselves) from any speech they find objectionable. The very crux of free speech is being willing to fight for the right of people you hate and despise to speak freely. Obviously, there are many people who today oppose free speech (both those who openly admit their opposition, and those who cravenly claim to support it while opposing it at every turn). But its patently wrong and absurd to claim (as the author of this Tweet thread does), that everyone opposes free speech. Free speech and free thought are the two prerequisites for a free and democratic society. The twin pillars upon which all else rests. Those who oppose free speech are the enemies of freedom and democracy, despite their hollow claims and feigned benevolence.
• muskmusk 5y ago
  Why is it that people like this guy think the way he ran a social network is the only way to run one? Humans have been running online social networks for under two decades. We are awful at it. This "it can't be done better"-attitude is so defeatist. Not to mention egotistical (someone can do a better job than me? Preposterous!)
  • steve_adams_86 5y ago
    I imagine I’d be pretty jaded after running Reddit. I get jaded scrolling through it for a few minutes
• TedShiller 5y ago
  Very good try, but he falls in the same camp as the very people he criticizes. His reasoning completely falls apart once you introduce the Hunter Biden laptop.
• bluehorseray 5y ago
  I don't see how the problems the author describes can't be resolved by putting an end to banning accounts / de-platforming people for posting offensive, albeit legal, content. Which is what I thought Elon said he was going to do. If neither the left or the right can point to accounts being banned, I think at the very least they may stop complaining about the "censorship" issue.
• tb0ne 5y ago
  > Because it is not TOPICS that are censored. It is BEHAVIOR. This post gives an interesting perspective, but this statement cannot be right. There are absolutely topics, that, no matter how civil you approach them, will result in a ban.
  • no_tea_please 5y ago
    This is very true. One topic in particular will get you banned on Reddit and Twitter, and, usually, flagged on here, simply for stating observations of material reality. Any meaningful discussion of this topic only really takes place on niche feminist forums.
• hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
  I thought this was a very good thread, and I agree with most of his points. Importantly, think how Reddit itself evolved it's stance against free speech. As Yishan points out, Reddit was pretty much "free speech absolutist" in the early days. They would allow anything that wasn't outright illegal. But then, things changed, and IIRC the first example of this was the ban of r/jailbait. I remember how many of the mainstream media were doing exposés on jailbait, and thinking "if Reddit doesn't ban this, they're toast" - it was a topic that was so universally abhorrent, on both the right and left, that despite being technically legal at the time, you could easily see how governments would either ban it themselves, or remove liability protection for platforms, which is essentially game over for all the platforms. It's not hard to see how the platforms then carried this stance to ban anything causing "harassment" or "harm" - probably most people wouldn't be against the ban of r/FatPeopleHate, but then what about areas like trying to overturn the election results, which any rational reading of the facts is a clear falsehood (especially given the number of prominent Republicans who agreed there was no evidence of widespread fraud), despite how many people believe it. So the idea that you can have a viable "absolutist free speech" social platform is just nuts. The ones that have been tried always devolve into a cesspool of racism and QAnon-level conspiracy theories. There is simply no way to run a modern social network without moderation (or censorship as it's called if your posts are the ones removed). Just look at this site: despite attracting a more "rational" crowd, at this point I think dang's moderation is a critical factor in its success.
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  • mherdeg 5y ago
    As a total outsider the key pieces of Yishan's leadership I remember are: * His "every man is responsible for his soul" view on free speech absolutism ( https://web.archive.org/web/20140908001917/http://www.redditblog.com/2014/09/every-man-is-responsible-for-his-own.html?m=1 https://web.archive.org/web/20140908001917/http://www.reddit... ) -- somewhat different, I think, from current policy ( https://www.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043513411 https://www.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043513411 ) * Promising Condé Nast that if they surrendered some equity the tech people would build a big company and then ... delivering as promised? Advance Publications has gotta be pretty happy with where their investment has gone and I think it's credible it wouldn't have happened without the equity changes
• hartator 5y ago
  I don't know. The only argument against leftist views that he talk about is that Silicon Valley elites are men. Whereas everything else are right wing views that have been censored.
• prepend 5y ago
  > They would like you (the users) to stop squabbling over stupid shit and causing drama so that they can spend their time writing more features and not have to adjudicate your stupid little fights. I don’t think so. I think they love the drama. They have more impressions and make more money from rage. The rage has to be over unimportant things so the status quo doesn’t change. They want people upset over the dumbest stuff possible and arguing all the time. They want people complaining about being banned or not banning people or whatever. This is he problem with social media. It makes more money to be loud and without value. If people are fulfilled and learn the answer to their question they stop. If they are angry and searching they go forever.
  • gorgoiler 5y ago
    It’s really nice on HN when the administrators detach a reply from the main thread. Folks can carry on arguing about vim/emacs but the number of newcomers piling on drops away. Twitter, on the other hand, does this: #vimVSemacs is trending, click here to wade in!!
  • riffraff 5y ago
    Hear hear! This is a beautiful and insightful thread which completely avoids talking about money. Not all social networks devolved into hate filled screaming fests, the main reason they do is because that drives engagement, which brings money, which makes stakeholders happy. This is the only reason that running Twitter as a private company owned by a single rich dude might make a difference.
  • pcurve 5y ago
    I enjoyed reading it but I couldn’t get on aboard with his statement “ Because it is not TOPICS that are censored. It is BEHAVIOR” It’s both. In fact the most dangerous ideas to me are the ones that are discussed with perception of civility and factuality yet are patently false.
  • jamesrom 5y ago
    And why is it _never_ the reason given by the censors? When topics are banned, some banal comment about verifiability or some other non-descript reason is given. It's never "we believe this is causing too much drama and might escalate to violence". I don't buy yishan's framing at all.
• traviswt 5y ago
  This is far longer than it needed to be. It’s a rant. A borderline incoherent one. There is a massive confusion here between anonymity and the physical/online distinction. Anonymity is always hard, even in real life. There’s a reason criminals like masks! Free speech is the guiding principle because nothing else makes sense and inevitably devolves into hive mind. Platforms should not be figuring out what speech to limit, they need to figure out how to avoid being publishers. The problem isn’t that they’re hosting bad content, the problem is that they’re promoting/publishing it.
• garbanz0 5y ago
  Am I crazy? Yishan's whole thread is completely irrelevant because it assumes Musk is telling the truth when he says he cares about free speech. Free speech enforcement is probably pretty low on Elon's list of reasons to buy Twitter.
  • ehsankia 5y ago
    I think the bigger point, above free speech, was that running a social network is hard, and Musk will fail at it, regardless of what his "goal" is, unless his goal is to run it into the ground.
    • gbhn 5y ago
      A good example of this is comments on this post. They're basically awful and reduce worthwhile traffic on this site by driving away more people than they attract. The reality of every forum, as the original author says, is that unless you censor topics that attract cranks, you'll eventually become a qanon platform (or the equivalent) and drive out all worthwhile participants. I'm not sure what the global rule is called, but something like volume nonlinearity or kookiness asymmetry it something. If you have a bunch of looks everyone else leaves. You're options are to get rid of them or fail. It sucks but there it is.
  • RivieraKid 5y ago
    Exactly. The average Redditor can see through Elon's BS, most people here and Yishan can't. Or they want Twitter be owned by someone who is closer to them politically.
  • peepop6 5y ago
    As an outsider looking at Twitter I think they're fooling themselves if they think the problem is lack of free speech. When I click a Twitter link what I usually see are: - bots and spam - low quality replies that add nothing (usually from bimbos or 3rd worlders trying to get the attention of a celebrity) - shallow one liners to an idea that people don't like As much as upvotes were made fun of, I think Reddit had the right idea because at least the upvoted posts were almost guaranteed to be of "readable" quality. And if you wanted to, you could easily sort the thread by most controversial and read the unpopular opinion. Now Reddit is a website where free speech is actually lacking with shadow bans and slightly controversial posts getting removed.
• jelliclesfarm 5y ago
  Is there a tl;dr for this Twitter thread? He lost me at : [..]Elon is one of those, because he doesn't understand what has happened to internet culture since 2004. Or as I call it, just culture. [..] They would like you (the users) to stop squabbling over stupid shit and causing drama so that they can spend their time writing more features and not have to adjudicate your stupid little fights.[..] Internet ‘culture’ in 2004 and even a decade before that was Glorious! I think we should all squabble more and get it out of our systems. A society that doesn’t interact genuinely(even if it’s ‘squabbling’) is a sterile society. The sentiments expressed there..that I think I grokked..is like someone who has never had sex trying to explain sex to 40 year old virgins. Free expression is too valuable and precious to be sacrificed for techbros to ‘write more features’. They are trying to sterilize the Interwebs. They are trying to redefine the ‘Free’ in free speech. I hope they fail.
  • ehsankia 5y ago
    The tl;dr is that running a social network / content moderation is a really fucking hard problem, and Musk has no clue what he's in for. That no matter how much you are against censorship, you will eventually have to do it to some level when running a sufficiently large platform, and every tiny mistake you make will be interpreted the worst way possible, and each side will use it as proof that you are discriminating against them. Also, I don't think that quote was saying 2004 culture was bad, far from it. He was just trying to say the way we ran the internet back in 2004 no longer "works" today.
    • throwaway48375 5y ago
      I mean it does. 4chan still exists it just isn't as popular as twitter.
    • jelliclesfarm 5y ago
      Thanks. I would still vote for more squabbling. Because every conflict will end if there are ways to exit and ‘keep face’(a Chinese concept of losing with dignity). Having no other big social media alternatives, people are unable to find community and think it’s better to kill instead of sparring. As in..better to cancel someone and deplatform an opponent rather than fighting it out. It’s good to ‘squabble’, I feel..because when you squabble, we recognize who to avoid and who is like minded. In the long run, it results in a truly diverse community that has long term peace. Almost 8 billion people and only one Twitter. There should be more. Why isn’t SV and the rest of tech community not coming up with more viable competition? Twitter could invest in non competing spawns for other topics or in other regions witb their systems code and/or open sourcing their code. I mean..with a little bit of creative thinking, so many possibilities exist. Give people room to wander..the internet is big!
• mherdeg 5y ago
  I've sometimes wondered if the way American media and culture treat people like Musk, Bezos, Gates is that we have no royalty -- there's no hereditary monarchy and indeed the old money keeps a studiously low profile. Do human cultures just need kings and princes? Is there a special kind of celebrity niche that the billionaire businessman fills that occupies an ancient hierarchical part of our society? I read Yishan's post here as kind of like a duke commissioning an epic poem in the hopes it'll influence the king. Maybe it'll work -- he shot his shot, and he's a pro at putting in just the right Internet comments in just the right place. But I wonder why I'm so fascinated about seeing this conversation between these two nobles. Is this how the English lower classes saw their royalty in the 17th century? Did they chatter about the king's foibles on the street while they were out costermongering?
  • hello_popppet 5y ago
  • alephnan 5y ago
    > Is there a special kind of celebrity niche that the billionaire businessman fills that occupies an ancient hierarchical part of our society? So basically the ruling class.
  • jmeister 5y ago
    People tend to have instinctive respect for earned authority. This same reverence is also given to sportstars and artists. American billionaires, for all their faults, have the most “legitimate” authority in modern(post-enlightenment, post-martial) history. https://blogs.law.columbia.edu/uprising1313/files/2017/09/arendt_what-is-authority.pdf https://blogs.law.columbia.edu/uprising1313/files/2017/09/ar... > The authoritarian relation between the one who commands and the one who obeys rests neither on common reason nor on the power of the one who commands; what they have in common is the hierarchy itself, whose Tightness and legitimacy both recognize and where both have their predetermined stable place. This is also why the “millionaiahs and billionaihs” rhetoric from the left falls flat with immigrant populations. The rich and successful people here are way better than the kleptocrats and oligarchs elsewhere. For example: There’s some good stuff that’s been written comparing Russian oligarchs with western businessmen, their spending habits, values, lifestyles etc.
• deleted 5y ago
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• TeeMassive 5y ago
  That was a long thread who didn't say much outside of the usual suspects for being against free speech: "far-right, harassment, Russia, think of the children". All of which can are not the biggest criticisms directed at Twitter right now. He does not address the Hunter Biden laptop story, the ban of the last president for saying the election was stolen (even if it happened twice before that in the last 20 years and was a frequent talking point), woke politics getting people banned (most normal people do not know what asking for pronouns are about), etc. Also the fear that open discourse leads to genocide has no basis in History. Genocides happened because those in power could speak without any counter voices and their crimes not getting exposed publicly.
  • skinnymuch 5y ago
    The thread was equally against anything left of center. The thread was pretty kind to the right. Since the thread was about the status quo. Which is a core conservative stance. As well as the high praise of mega corps and billionaires. Which the center and right are much cozier with than the left.
• nobodyandproud 5y ago
  > And the old GenX tech titans are right there with you - vaguely left-wing but also center-right - seeing their version of "censorship" - and drawing all the wrong conclusions from it about what's happening with the management of social platforms. Other than the tech-titan part, that’s spot on. Also: OMG, a reference to GenX. It’s not flattering at all, but I’ll take it.
• jdrc 5y ago
  > They would like you (the users) to stop squabbling over stupid shit and causing drama so that they can spend their time writing more features and not have to adjudicate your stupid little fights. Hum, the whole thread sounds very narrowminded, lacking imagination and frankly a bit stupid. This sentence may be true , but where is the evidence that they will do anything to stop users from doing it? reduce engagement and you reduce flamewars. Find the balance that is good enough for you and you won't need to moderate too much. But it seems social networks choose not to do it because of both money and political power. IT's also a bit disingenuous to pretend that drama is a sideshow or distraction and that social networks have better things to do. Drama is at the core of glorified forums aka social networks, it is what attracts people's attention which brings the mony. we ve all been running forums and communities on the internet for decades, these are not new problems
• srcreigh 5y ago
  The thing is, nobody except this dude has actually explained the situation properly. The context of the "world of pain" is that nobody convinced everybody it's just damage control and profits and not about their ideas being bad. Do you think Elon could convince everybody? would that make it less a world of pain?
• skittleson 5y ago
  Let him do it. Skake up that board a bit
• deleted 5y ago
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• chx 5y ago
  Yishan is also behind. By now, one half of the debaters have simply left reality and facts behind. Makes moderating a tad bit hard.
• rittera 5y ago
  One of the ideas mentioned was that "ideas lead to real world events". This is true of all ideas. There are millions of tweets right now that are encouraging Ukrainians to kill Russians, other countries to get involved and kill Russians and escalate the war and get more Ukrainians and Russians killed. According to Yishan, these tweets should all be removed because they are dangerous, yet they are not removed. Danger isn't bad, it is life. Maybe words on the internet will lead to a murderous government being violently overthrown. Who knows. It all goes back to a bunch of elitists determining which ideas should be visible, and therefore which violent and non-violent events occur. They are playing god with the world, and it is their own best interests that will be served, whether consciously or subconsciously. Essentially, Yishan is arguing for real-life thought-police, and he is doing this because he probably did this at Reddit and needs to quell his cognitive dissonance. If somebody does something illegal in real life, arrest them. Until then, they must be allowed to discuss ideas that could lead to real life harm, theoretically. This is because there is no such thing as "we have removed all the posts that could lead to harm". It is like the "you can't talk about immigrants taking jobs because people will attack immigrants". What about the theoretical people who lose their jobs? There are always two sides, even when you are blocking the "harmful post", you are silencing someone else and creating harm. Silencing particular groups is a great policy for those in power, because they can enact changes without pushback. Real life harm like "house prices so high I have to live with my parents at 50" will not be considered harm, but the pushback against ideas that lead to this situation might. There is no perfect utopia where everyone is at peace, there are just people trying to take resources from other people. That is the nature of life, and tech CEOs pretend this isn't the case for convenience reasons.
• dustinmoris 5y ago
  A lot of what was said in this thread is very inconsistent with reality. For example: > Example: the "lab leak" theory (a controversial theory that is now probably true; I personally believe so) was "censored" at a certain time in the history of the pandemic because the "debate" included ... > massive amounts of horrible behavior, spam-level posting, and abuse that spilled over into the real world - e.g. harrassment of public officials and doctors, racially-motivated crimes, etc. This is not true. Any message, irrespective if EVERYONE KNEW it was true, for example that COVID-19 is statistically less of a risk to children than the flu, was censored and labelled as fake news or even taken down. Free speech is dead in its current form where social media companies are peddling the fake news by our Western governments to control our thinking. They will make you believe that Iraq has mass destruction weapons if they want a war and they will make you believe that a minor cough virus will kill your child if they want to control your life.
  • philjohn 5y ago
    I think it's important to take a step back here. I saw plenty of people saying "Covid is less severe in Children" without any issue. The people who had tweets taken down were saying things like "Children can't die from Covid, open the schools, there's no risk at all" but ignoring that: a) Children did in fact die b) Children did in fact bring Covid home from school which infected potentially at risk parents/other family members. See also the lab leak hypthesis (and a good example when people talk about "banning ideas!") - if someone said "Hey, we can't rule out the lab leak hypothesis", that's presenting an idea, not claiming something that hasn't been proven is true and I saw MANY people posting that without issue. When people said "It was engineered in a lab to be more deadly to humans, and it leaked out" that's stating something as fact that had no definitive evidence, and would likely result in a "This may be untrue" labels.
    • dustinmoris 5y ago
      Literally just now as I was watching BBC Breakfast this is what was said on TV by two scientists who were interviewed almost daily for the last two years and portrayed as fact checkers and our sources of truth: The Valneva vaccine was approved in the UK and might be very important because it trains our body against all proteins of the virus as opposed to just the spike protein which is what the AZ and Moderna/Pfizer vaccines were doing so far, so probably giving us better protection against future variants. Cool... that sounds great and very logical. Body learns about the entirety of the virus and therefore will be better to fend off new variations of it in the future. But that doesn't sound like some profound new scientific discovery we have made. This sounds like science 101 to me, so WHY did the same two scientists vehemently refuse to acknowledge in any shape or form that people who have had COVID-19 and therefore had been exposed to a huge viral load of the ENTIRE virus with all its proteins might have also acquired a better immune response than a vaccine which only trains your body against a single spike protein? It's the same principle, but because it was not WOKE to say the truth. It's plain simple, we are all being brain washed with selective reporting and fake news and its enforced by social media so that critically thinking minds cannot undermine our increasingly more authoritarian governments which try to control our thinking in order to control our lives and get what they want - more powers in their favour.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• RivieraKid 5y ago
  The key issue here is not content moderation or censorship but the possibility that someone like Musk gaining power over Twitter. Musk wants Twitter because he wants more power.
• dalbasal 5y ago
  Like many liberty principles, free speech is a lot more complicated to implement as a ruleset than most proponents like to admit. Think of democracy. The people rule, right? In practice, it's an endless field of possibilities. You can't really take the democracy principle from one field (eg government/parliament) and just apply it to another, say a democratic company, union or whatnot. You will need to create a different institution embodying "democracy" and it may not be similar at all. Same goes for free speech. The Free Speech of constitutions and human rights laws just distinguishes between crimes and not crimes. That is fine for determining who goes to jail or not. It is not applicable for determining how YouTube's recommendation algorithm works, what monetisation rules are, and how comments are moderated. It's fine to adopt free speech as a principle, ideal even. It is foolish and naive to think this is trivial to derive an actual ruleset from principle alone. Imo, it's disingenuous at this point to say you're "doing free speech," and treating this as a meaningful statement. There is nothing that's derivative of this statement. For all the idealistic calls for free speech, I've heard almost no one forward an actual model for free speech that could be applied twitter or some other site. What about HN. Some things are off topic. There are taboos like middlebrow dismissals. There are bans and shadow bans. Is this a free speech platform? This stuff is complicated. Simple to criticize, but free speech proponents don't even know what exactly they (we) are asking for.
  • reubens 5y ago
    Strongly agree. I would be surprised if Elon himself doesn’t realise this, and is just using the phrase as a promotional tool. At the end of the day, he’s just hoping to buy a medium that has long term growth potential.
  • CryptoPunk 5y ago
    >>For all the idealistic calls for free speech, I've heard almost no one forward an actual model for free speech that could be applied twitter or some other site. Twitter acts as a public square, so people should be free to express themselves in any way they want, up to the limits of the law. We want Free Speech in places that act as public squares for the same reason we want the government to respect free speech: it is the only way to ensure critically important contrarian voices are not stifled. Blocking/filtering algorithms should be open source, with every user free to implement any one that they want for their own feed.
• celdon25 5y ago
  This guy's "take" made me cringe a bit with all the cliche arguments presented as if they were uniquely his.
• akomtu 5y ago
  This will be remembered as a historic battle for the Twitter Fortress between the Order of Control and the Order of Freedom. The fortress seems small, but its strategic location allows to steer speech in the kingdom. The King himself, who is a high ranked official in the Order of Control, has been taking a neutral position on public, but the knights of the Freedom look very determined this time and the King may have to unleash his royal army. Just like in the medieval ages, the King doesn't realise that it's his own people, the silent majority, who's fighting him: they've grown up and no longer need his "royal" permissions for anything.
• anticristi 5y ago
  May I express how annoying it is in the 21st century to read such a long prose in Twitter format? Feels like the UX is worse than paper newspaper.
• p0d 5y ago
  The creators of twitter, facebook were children who created a Frankenstein. They had no understanding of human nature. They have amplified good and more so evil. The mistake that people make is thinking that human nature is good by default
  • consumer451 5y ago
    > They had no understanding of human nature. I find it impossible to believe that anyone who runs a social media site at any scale doesn't learn the truth, very quickly. The whole "we just didn't know" explanation is such line of crap. Once you have a few thousand (maybe even few hundred) social users you will learn that some humans are psychopaths. This knowledge is unavoidable. I would also like to point out that I disagree with lumping it all in as "human nature." When not brainwashed, humans are generally pretty agreeable, but we do have a significant number of psychopaths among us. I don't buy the naivete explanation for a second, and no one else should either. That story only serves to hide the real explanations which are likely much more interesting.
• nathias 5y ago
  > This free speech idea arose out of a culture of late-90s America where the main people who were interested in censorship were religious conservatives. In practical terms, this meant that they would try to ban porn (or other imagined moral degeneracy) on the internet. Free speech isn't from the 90s, or America. The mental gymnastics of people who have no principles but would still like to be seen as having them ...
• throwawayacc2 5y ago
  > All my left-wing woke friends > All my alt/center-right/libertarian friends The woke mob would destroy him if he said something as taboo as “my alt right friends”. The mental censorship is so strong he can’t say it even for the sake of the example. But trust us, there’s actually no institutional bias!
• jbverschoor 5y ago
  I guess twitter contains a lot of data to feed to neuralink
• langsoul-com 5y ago
  Why can't he tweet the start and link to some blog for the rest. Instead of 50 stringed tweets :(
• jokethrowaway 5y ago
  I don't know in which world this guy lives but after hours and hours of debate with both right wingers authoritarians and left wing authoritarians, right wingers complain about freedom of speech nowadays, left wingers complained about freedom of speech 15 years ago. As th Twitter thread mentions, 15 years ago it was about porn, gore and videogame - nowadays is about talking about your political ideas. I was firmly on the left side 15 years ago, nowadays the only left wing battle I support is drug liberalisation. In the age of cancel culture I've heard of nobody on the left being persecuted for their ideas, at best I've heard them being criticised by the other side and they run successful campaigns to deplatform them. My impression is that the educated substrata of society got progressively more left wing authoritarians (likely because of their strategic control of mainstream media and education) and nowadays all the 20-30 something that run big tech have certain authoritarians ideas painted as being virtuous. An authoritarian internet will undoubtedly raise kids who will be even more authoritarian than the current generation.
• unixhero 5y ago
  Who is Yishan?
• arein3 5y ago
  Bad take, disingenuous
• nailer 5y ago
  > they DONT CARE ABOUT POLITICS. They really don’t. How was censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story not caring about politics? How is banning gender critical theory not caring about politics? Yishan simply isn’t keeping up with twitter in the last few years.
• Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
  I find it very ironic how people who were fine with censuring people whose opinions they didn't like, repeating "free speech does not imply free reach" and "private companies can do as they please", are suddenly freaking out when there is a slight possibility that they might emerge on the censured side.
  • nailer 5y ago
    I honestly don’t think there is that possibility. Elon hasn’t discussed censoring the far left and I don’t think he cares or feels it’s productive to do so.
    • Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
      I agree, that it is very unlikely to happen. But even the danger of losing the privileged position when the opposition is muffled it's already enough to feel threatened. This is deeply telling.
• drnonsense42 5y ago
  Yishan is trying to be impartial but some of that is bologna. What Elon really stands to lose is left-wingers leaving the platform in protest if a viable alternative emerges for the prominent figures to bring their audience over to. Right-wingers will come back in droves unless the platform dies altogether. Twitter would also get legislated to shreds in retaliation if the democrats have a strong majority + White House at any point in the future (assuming it maintains its relevancy). But one part I really cannot reconcile is his capitalist interests and his free speech gambit are only potentially overlapping in the US. How many governments will put up with this crap or will many finally ban Twitter altogether? That statement even applies to democratic governments. That’s not going to increase his monetizable user base. Something’s got to give- and with a financed 43 billion it might be his morals. Perhaps he has another gameplan but it’s hard to imagine.
• lvl102 5y ago
  Elon Musk absolutely does not care about free speech. He’s no history of ever standing up for it. He doesn’t even understand what it means. The fight over Twitter is about control. Control of narratives. And the price to do that right now, due to Twitter’s ridiculously bungled management, stands at $60-70B.
• JacksonGariety 5y ago
  This doesn't make sense. If Twitter isn't politically biased, then why do they have elite progressive news agencies doing fact-checking? If Twitter "doesn't censor topics, only behavior" then why do they explicitly state that they censor misinformation?
• gverrilla 5y ago
  > So fine, this is what I think about that. I will assume the takeover succeeds, and he takes Twitter private. why is ":" out of use nowadays?
• cloutchaser 5y ago
  He’s right about the complexity of the problem. He’s wrong about this being something equally affecting left and right. While I’m sure there’s plenty of extreme left wingers who have been banned, who are annoyed at Twitter, there is no left wing Hunter Biden laptop equivalent. There’s also no Donald Trump banning equivalent, even though there’s plenty of tweets from prominent politicians encouraging violence in the BLM times. So no, it’s not just moderation. Silicon Valley has picked a side, and it changing their businesses to suit that side.
• amelius 5y ago
  Question: if someone built an alternative (e.g. open-source) version of Twitter, could the new EU regulation (see [1]) aid in forcing Twitter to interoperate with that new service? [1] https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/24/dma-political-agreement https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/24/dma-political-agreement
• heystefan 5y ago
  "And the worst part, the part that is going to hurt ALL OF HUMANITY, is that this will distract from his mission at SpaceX and Tesla, because it's not just going to suck up his time and attention, IT WILL DAMAGE HIS PSYCHE." Ugh, so cringy.
• tacosbane 5y ago
  tldr; free speech is hard because regulating speech is impossible
• JamesAdir 5y ago
  This thread is ignoring one point - how social media companies manipulate the posts/tweets/reddits to create more engagement while promoting the most flaming and toxic debates and participants, since again it create more engagement. It's not that the fault lies on anonymous participants who can't behave. Their behavior is promoted by algorithms that look to trigger a response. Elon offer to make Twitter algorithms open source are one great step towards achieving a better Internet, even on social media.
• Volker_W 5y ago
  > All my left-wing woke friends are CONVINCED that the social media platforms uphold the white supremacist misogynistic patriarchy... > All my alt/center-right/libertarian friends are CONVINCED the social media platforms uphold the woke BLM/Marxist/LGBTQ agenda... Not judging and willing to be proved wrong, but the difference seems to be that the left usually wants more censorship, and the right wants less censorship. The far right is usually mad that they got censored but only rarely mad that the left did not get censored. The far left is usually mad that the right did not get censored but only rarely mad that the far left did get censored. > Because it is not TOPICS that are censored. It is BEHAVIOR. Again, not judging and willing to be proved wrong, but the right is a lot ... rougher, aggressive ... that the left, even when talking amongst themselves. Pacifists and civil talking people etc. are usually found on the left.
  • civilized 5y ago
    Back when I was on Twitter, my biggest observation was that the left-right continuum doesn't necessarily help explain things very much by itself. You have to talk about specific coalitions and fan clubs. Here's a very incomplete list: - On the right: right-wing journalists, right-wing podcast fans, Trump-heads, Cernovich-heads, Peterson-heads, Pepe avatars, right-wing anime avatars, ultra-trads, open neo-Nazis - On the left: left-wing journalists, Tumblr fans, left-wing podcast fans, K-pop fans (this is a SURPRISINGLY large and powerful group), activist defenders of rights for various marginalized groups, left-wing anime avatars, nonprofit group figures, Antifa, tankies On each side you have certain groups and certain subsets within those groups who use censorship or censorship-adjacent techniques, like mobbing, character assassination, public shaming, doxxing, or fabricating false and misleading narratives optimized for virality. The biggest thing you want to avoid is getting into the gun-sights of anyone with a large following, left or right. Or someone who will work tirelessly to doxx or spread lies about you.
  • 6thaccount 5y ago
  • mrjangles 5y ago
    Well first, Twitter literally banned the President of the United States while allowing ISIS and other terrorist groups to have free reign. All this tells me is that one of your friend groups is perfectly happy lying to themselves about what is going on. >Again, not judging and willing to be proved wrong, but the right is a lot ... rougher, aggressive I am yet to see anyone on the right openly talking about murdering black people, whereas it is common for left wing twitter users to talk about murdering white people (remember the new editor for the New York Times had a number of tweets to that effect). Also, posting pictures of themselves with severed heads of their enemies while covered in blood seems like a thing among left wing users. I am in fact struggling to think of anything "rough" or "aggressive" from the right, even at the most extremes that comes close to the norm of the left on that platform.
• memish 5y ago
  Paul Graham's response: I read @yishan's thread about Twitter and agree, as I think anyone who's run a forum would, that Elon is "in for a world of pain," or at least for a type of pain both much nastier than hard engineering problems, and with far less upside as well. Where I think he's mistaken is his claim that the left and right both want to ban each other roughly equally. Among the elite, and within Twitter specifically, there is much more inclination to ban the right. I say this as someone whose political views, if you force them onto the left-right spectrum, probably end up about 80% toward the left. E.g. I've spent millions over the past several elections supporting the Democrats. It used to be that censorship was something the right did, and free speech was something the left were in favor of. But over the last few decades, banning "problematic" ideas has become a huge component of left culture (http://paulgraham.com/heresy.html http://paulgraham.com/heresy.html). Plus tech companies in general, and especially Twitter, lean to the left. Imagine walking around Twitter pre-Covid. You'd find plenty of openly far-left employees. How many openly far-right employees would you find? I don't think you'd find any. The combination of (a) the left's recent focus on banning heretical ideas, (b) the leftward lean of tech companies generally, and (c) the leftward lean of Twitter even among tech companies, means that right-wing speech is much more likely to get banned on Twitter than left. That's why people on the far right keep starting lame Twitter alternatives. You don't see people on the far left doing that. They don't need to. They have Twitter. https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1515235822890532864 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1515235822890532864
  • agloeregrets 5y ago
    Paul Graham claiming to be left wing is some comical stuff.
• daenz 5y ago
  I made it through the whole thread. In my opinion this [0] is the crux of their argument. Essentially that some ideas are dangerous and cause bad behavior and that's why they're censored. They also pine in for an old internet that was great because of free speech and something like that. They seem to forget that it was full of flame wars and people being terrible also. Some of the language that they use indicates that this person views the users as lesser... As people that must be managed and shaped, and it's the leaders job to do that, despite the fact that the leaders are severely flawed. I see their points, but they are looking at the problem purely through the lens of what has existed, and not through the lenses of what is possible. Elon is not that person, and so saying he's going to fail because no one has ever done it before doesn't really apply to Elon. 0. https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1514941586517336071?s=20&t=SuGnYpX06nxkwZKD2T5_yQ https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1514941586517336071?s=20&t...
• dnsproxyserver 5y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=twitter.com/yishan https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=twitter.com/yishan
• vivekd 5y ago
  so in the thread he talks about;how ideas can be lightning rods' He says >That is just an unpleasant, inconvenient truth that all of you (regardless of your political leaning) need to accept about speech. Ideas really ARE powerful, and like anything else that is powerful, yes, they can be DANGEROUS. thats the basis of free speech and the reason some people want to protect it. These guys dont agree with it and thats fine. I mean there are good reasons someone might disagree with free speech. But I mean be honest, be honest about what the debate is. Dont say you support free speech but some ideas can be dangerous. Just say you dont agree with giving everyone free speech at all times and have an honest conversation about that instead of spewing that silicon valley doublespeak
• RickJWagner 5y ago
  Looks like he's ok with everybody out there, except religious conservatives. I wonder if he sees the blind spot.
• hitovst 5y ago
  I'm sure Elon is aware of this, but he should be prepared to deal with those who oppose freedom, and who flood platforms that do not restrict speech with the most disgusting, degenerate, awful, things possible. There are ways of managing this, but it will turn decent people away. It would be challenging to tolerate them on your own platform, and it is undesirable to use these platforms if you don't have to. There's the rub. The vast majority of, let's call it "communication", on the web is noise. The next largest portion is nonsense. We get all manner of stuff that is unimportant, and then we get the tiny percentage that is stuff that matters, or would matter, if anyone could find it. The chicken and egg at the center of hope for humanity is the protection of free speech, and right to bear arms. One protects the other, and they both protect everything else. We have an incredible need for truth, and for insight into what the world's most dangerous people are doing, while virtually all programming is intended to leave people disinterested in the info and condemning of the messengers. There is a tactic that has not been used against the enemies of humanity, and their flooding any signal with noise.. Every individual has the right to speak freely, with few exceptions. One of them that used to be taught to kids is, "but, you can't shout "FIRE" in a theater when there isn't one". In other words, we're not allowed to communicate lies with the intention of terrorism. Every individual has freedom of "press". The liars which own "media" (and the reason why Elon is interested in Twitter, and the liars are interested in preventing it) would have you believe that they are press, and you are not... when the truth is liars are not "press", and anyone communicating the truth is. I have no idea how it would be achieved, but anyone running a free platform these days should look into eliminating liars from it. If anything good could come from AI, it might be the elimination of those useful idiots from platforms who use and tolerate logical fallacies.. but, one step at a time.
• alophawen 5y ago
  You should probably start a blog instead.
• DrBoring 5y ago
  My premesis for any time I try to predict Elon Musk's motivations are: 1 his primary goal is to advance humanity, and 2 he is partially a Randian Objectionist. I also make the presumptuous guess that his actions are often aimed at making money to fund his endeavors to venture into space etc. He doesn't have the ability to fund his plan using the tax dollars (productive wealth) of a whole county's people, so to fund his goals, he skirts the laws to gain capital via various speculative bets. I theorize that his absurd behavior is a ruse. He knows what he is doing. He plays the role of idiot rich kid to get people to underestimate him. Based on these premesis, I theorize that his reason for buying Twitter is to either as a vehicle to fund his humanity aspirations. Whether it's a long term investment, or some cash grab, I don't know. I'm not knowledgeable enough on the financial probabilities of Twitter to make that call. Working from the assumption that is interest in Twitter is part of his plan to advance humanity, I would say he wants it for it's user population. He wants to stear them from the toxic community which they sometimes are into something more productive. Think of the changes we've seen at stackoverflow in which they have tried to steer communication into a more friendly place for new members. I could imagine changes to the Twitter ui that would encourage users to reflect upon the words they are about to post.
• skoczko 5y ago
  It is some hilariously contrived premise that Elon Musk is going to "democratize" Twitter by taking it private. It's almost as contrived as Putin sending "peacekeeping and de-nazifying" forces to Ukraine. (If you're wondering why this unusual association occurred to me, it's because I saw a video with Musk saying that he's likely the second wealthiest man after Putin). Why do we (the public) always fall for the "powerful men" type, be it billionaires or despots, promising to fix all our problems?. This is the antithesis of democracy. Democracy is slow, painful and often mistaken but the added value is that few people get shot on the street. Twitter under Musk will be like the Mad Max's Thunderdome.