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what does “shake things up” mean? whenever something like this happens you have to ask yourself why now and what’s in it for Musk (let’s be real: nobody spends
by mirceal 4y ago
what does “shake things up” mean?
whenever something like this happens you have to ask yourself why now and what’s in it for Musk (let’s be real: nobody spends this much without an agenda). My fear is that Musk’s endgame is to reinstate a specific account that was banned after some specific events around a specific election. If this is what’s happening he can frack off.
- memish 4y agoHe should reinstate all accounts that were banned for political or ideological reasons. Or just straight up do a jubilee of all accounts unless they posted illegal content.
- mirceal 4y agowhy? what’s in it for him and what does it mean for all the other people in the US and in the world? ask yourself: why were those accounts banned?
- zionic 4y ago> why were those accounts banned? Twitter is/was a ban happy shithole. It is absolutely trivial to get banned on Twitter. My favorite example is someone I know getting banned for posting pitbull fatality statistics. They were banned for “racism”. Against dogs. Twitter needs a top to bottom purge.
- mrtranscendence 4y agoI call bullshit. Nobody was banned from Twitter for being racist against dogs. Full stop. Did not happen.
- mirceal 4y agoi mean... i can see some automatic system banning some users. does that mean twitter does this on purpose? probably not.
- zionic 4y agoNot going to dox myself via sharing their @. It's banned now so you can't see it anyways. They were attacked by some pitbull advocacy club and likely mass-reported. The replies were full of people saying things like "this is exactly like how white people post statistics to say black people commit more crime! Report this person for racism!" It was charts of dog fatalities per year broken down by breed.
- mrtranscendence 4y agoI still don’t believe that’s the whole story. Maybe it was automatic due to the large number of reportings. But I’m certain nobody at twitter said “yep, let’s ban him for racism against pit bulls”.
- PKop 4y agoIdeological warfare. He supports their views. What's in it for the people banning these accounts?
- mirceal 4y agois it ideological warfare though? what’s the ideology that’s being “suppressed”?
- rootusrootus 4y ago> What's in it for the people banning these accounts? Money. If your advertisers flee, meeting payroll gets exponentially more difficult.
- rootusrootus 4y agoWouldn't that be a violation of his fiduciary duty, at least in the same way that other people in this conversation have defined fiduciary duty when criticizing the board for adopting the poison pill? Bringing back the accounts that spew stuff which pushes advertisers away will not make Twitter more financially successful than they are today.
- xur17 4y agoIf he takes the company private, does he have a fiduciary duty to it?
- rootusrootus 4y agoThat's true, if his intent is to take it private, he could run it into the ground on purpose. Hell, maybe that's his intent. What if it turns out that rather than being a free speech absolutist, he thinks social media is destroying the world and the best way to solve that is to crush it out of existence, starting with Twitter. That wouldn't work, of course, but it would be entertaining.
- MrMan 4y agoDo his lenders enjoy him runni g the collateral into the ground?
- theobeers 4y agoAfaik, he views Twitter as the closest thing we have to a genuine public square on the web, and he thinks it’s poorly managed and ideologically captured. Musk also uses Twitter a lot, so it’s believable that he wants it to be something better than what it currently is.
- mirceal 4y agobetter how? what experience does musk have to make twitter better and why is this expensive unique so that twitter itself cannot make the changes? twitter back in the day was awesome until they turned hostile to the 3rd party developers.
- jimkleiber 4y ago> Afaik, he views Twitter as the closest thing we have to a genuine public square on the web, and he thinks it’s poorly managed and ideologically captured. For me, this is the thing that bothers me the most: if he thinks it is the closest we have to a public square, why does he think that the richest private individual in the world should decide how it is run? It seems he's saying "the oligarchy is not running this well so we should make it a dictatorship, not a democracy," which is in his right to say or believe, I just wonder how much we have lost faith in democracy if we agree.
- skellington 4y agoWho is running it now? A Saudi prince and a bunch of other tech oligarchs? Why would Elon be worse than that? How is twitter a democracy now? Did you cry this much when Bezos (the then richest person) bought the Washington Post? Isn't the fact that twitter is NOT part of our democracy the crying call of the left? "It's not censorship because it's a private company and they can do what they want (as long as they only censor anything I don't agree with)!" Oh NO, Elon might make twitter a free speech platform where differing views can be expressed!
- saboot 4y agoIt's not just trump, it's likely we'll see other "unfairly censored" people like David Duke, Milo, and Alex Jones. This will elevate the level of discussion to be more like the highly praised philosophy forum known as 4chan. I'm sure all the users will appreciate it and not leave immediately.
- mirceal 4y agowhy don’t these “unfairly” censored people build their own platform? oh! it’s hard. much harder than spouting their bs and complaining about “free speech”
- api 4y agoSome of them tried and either failed miserably or built cesspools only other hate addicts want to visit.
- mirceal 4y agoexactly! the gist of it is that they need people from the “other camp” and they need to get into shouting matches to feel like they matter and their crackpot ideas are valuable.
- saboot 4y agoThey've already made a half dozen platforms, the market has clearly said that the majority of users are happy with Twitter as it is without them. But it's not good enough, we must be forced to listen to hear how the COVID vaccine is a mind control weapon and why we must fight (((globalists))).
- eks391 4y agoThe unfairly banned people have made several platforms, they just never blow up and you don't hear about them. It's like an employee gets fired from target, a well known and established company, so they make their own pseudo target and you're shocked that you've never heard of their small one Edit: corrected autocorrect miswording
- sergiotapia 4y agoIf his agenda is polar opposite of the current agenda, I can't wait to see it. I would love to see him turn Twitter into a free-for-all where all LEGAL under US law material is allowed. Where YOU as an individual can mute/block things you do not want to see. It's incredible this idea today is considered "dangerous".
- saboot 4y agoYes, I can't wait to see the place I get real time news updates and tech discussions become a platform for Holocaust denial.
- mirceal 4y agoyes, but fReE SpEeCh! /s
- memish 4y agoIt's EASY to counter Holocaust deniers because there is so much evidence that it happened. It's like debating flat earthers. No problem. Why be threatened by things that are easily debunked in day light? It's not hard to defeat bad ideas with good ideas. Or you can just ignore it by turning off the channel. That's always an option.
- rootusrootus 4y ago> It's not hard to defeat bad ideas with good ideas. That's a load of crap. You cannot debate with conspiracy theorists. Debates only work when both sides are acting in good faith.
- mirceal 4y agohuh. this naive approach is cute. but here is the thing: the amount of effort required to refute bullshit is at least an order of magnitude higher than the effort required to produce it. we don’t have unlimited time an unlimited attention spans. we also deal with uneducated, easily manipulated people that will just discard anything that does not match their world view and just amplify the bs.
- api 4y agoI'd be fine with bringing back most of these banned accounts if the algorithm also died. Without an engagement-maximizing algorithm that promotes the most divisive content, those accounts would just be preaching to their own choirs. Meanwhile other people could pop in and see just how unhinged and ridiculous they are. Maximizing engagement means maximizing dishonest trolling, hate, fear, controversy for the sake of controversy, and catchy tabloid bullshit. The most engaging content is basically an adversarial attack on higher human cognition. It typically works by bypassing the rational mind and shooting for the amygdala. Make it a simple timeline again. Nix recommendations in favor of search. Make it just a forum, not an inherently biased Skinner box that sucks out peoples' brains. I'd support that regardless of who he lets back on the platform, because algorithmic social media is the real problem. Algorithmic social media is what got Donald Trump into the presidency, among many other things.
- mirceal 4y agoisn’t it convenient to blame everything on the algorithm? why spend time actually educating people and giving them the tool of critical thinking when you can create a cesspool that enables and amplifies xenophobia, racism, sexism, you name it. why call out certain behaviors that are horrendous when you can normalize them and pretend this is part of the normal public forum?
- api 4y agoPerson A walks past you and smiles. Person B walks past and punches you in the face. Which maximizes engagement? Person A tells you about a new discovery at NASA. Person B tells you the Earth is flat and bombards you with "irrefutable" proof. Which maximizes engagement? I really do think engagement maximizing algorithms explain much (but not all) of our collective descent into insanity since about 2010-2012 when they became popular.
- mirceal 4y agothe algo amplifies nasty things. that’s for sure. i guess my point is that those nasty things exist independently and have backing (and we should not normalize them).
- xdavidliu 4y ago> My fear is that Musk’s endgame is to reinstate a specific account that was banned after some specific events around a specific election. Why would he pay 50 billion for that? What does he gain from it? Goodwill? Leverage on Trump in case the latter becomes President again?
- mirceal 4y agoone hand washes the other. the gov already pumped billions of dollars in tesla and space x through different programs. if that pumping increases that would be great, right?