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This whole thing has been rather interesting to observe. I do wonder how the platform will change now that it's privately owned. I don't really care a lot about

• jackosdev 4y ago
  Isn't he going to be bringing back people who were banned off the platform, that's more democratic. US has a bunch of problems but the one thing you used to get right is freedom of speech before big tech had so much influence, I thought the major purpose of Elon wanting to buy twitter was to uphold freedom of speech as it is written in the constitution, given it's something of a town square now.
  • helf 4y ago
    • Nomentatus 4y ago
      His absolutism doesn't extend to bots. His absolutism probably doesn't extend to having no real recommendation algorithm, and just random views for everyone. If he throws in a PageRank-like algorithm a la the central Google algorithm; or even just the choice of that, you might get the equivalent of some pretty solid moderation. Google definitely has holes and problems, but it can't be considered absolutist re free speech.
    • onethought 4y ago
      Can you give some examples of silencing his dissenters? Or where he has undermined democracy to make money? I'm genuinely curious if I've missed these, as I'm not familiar with any by my own recollection.
      • fzeroracer 4y ago
        You mean other than the time where he harassed someone, called them a pedophile and hired a detective to investigate and try to dig up dirt on them because they got under his skin? That guy, who now has everything anyone has ever said in private messages on Twitter?
        • weberer 4y ago
          Who was that?
          • cyberpunk 4y ago
            Wasn’t it that diver who saved all those children in Thailand or… whereever?
            • aceazzameen 4y ago
              Yes.
        • onethought 4y ago
          So that isn't an example of silencing dissenters, or of undermining democracy. I agree it's some pretty ugly character on show. But that wasn't what I was asking.
  • cycrutchfield 4y ago
  • rpd9803 4y ago
    • megaman821 4y ago
      At this point people like you are just being pedantic. Uses of First Amendment and Free Speech are clearly referring to having a large window of acceptable speech. If people want to include porn, gore, harassment and spam in their colloquial definition of free speech, it is exceptional enough that should point it out up front.
    • skissane 4y ago
      “Free Speech” != “1st Amendment”. The later is a US constitutional amendment which aims to protect the former, but other US laws also protect free speech (state constitutional provisions, statute law)-the Bill of Rights is legally just a minimum, so other laws are allowed to go even further. Non-legal factors (culture/etc) also have a role to play in protecting free speech. And of course, other countries have free speech as well (to varying degrees), but the US constitution has nothing to do with that.
  • lapcat 4y ago
    > one thing you used to get right is freedom of speech before big tech had so much influence Before big tech, there were no global platforms where anyone could just speak to millions/billions of people for free (as in money). You weren't "censored" by big tech because there was nothing much to censor. In the past, if you wanted to reach a massive audience, you had to go through the traditional news media, big book publishers, major TV stations, or the like, and they were definitely selective about who was allowed to speak. Also, the so-called "town square" where strangers gather to discuss politics in public is largely or entirely a myth. There are of course public spaces, but what happens on Twitter is not what happens in real physical town squares. And of course there are city council and other government meetings, but they are strictly controlled by government officials, not a free-for-all free speech zone.
    • Nomentatus 4y ago
      Indeed, the fringers scraped together enough cash to mimeograph a few dozen leaflets and tucked them under cars windshield wipers; but that didn't get them far. They might be able to take out a cheap ad in a rag magazine advertising a self-published book, but that's about it. There weren't boards to put up posters, and putting a poster on a telephone pole (etc) was a crime (recent court cases have changed that without a change in the law, where I am.)
  • jerojero 4y ago
    There are different views on what freedom means. In my experience, and I used to run a "freedom of speech" channel back in IRC many years ago where I allowed anything as long as it wasn't illegal. These sort of measures end up restricting freedom of speech much more than enabling it. The reason is very simple, if people are allowed to say anything; then harassment becomes the norm and because a lot of the targets of these harassment are more sensitive then they end up leaving. You might think this is okay, but I tend to disagree, as I believe when people harass others out of a platform that it constitutes a form of violence. Of course, I think this is actually a very complicated subject. And that's precisely my point on why I believe we need to have better conversations on what do we actually want. But as things stand now, this conversation is always reduced to what Elon Musk now thinks should happen. To me, this form of monarchic governance is sub-par to what is required for a platform as big as twitter.
    • amadeuspagel 4y ago
      Twitter is fundamentally different form and IRC channel. In an IRC channel, everyone sees every message, that's why moderation is necessary. On twitter, people themselves choose who to follow and block, they themselves moderate their own experience.
      • pmoriarty 4y ago
        You could ignore people on IRC too, choose whether or not to join a particular channel or not, and choose which people to message in private. The problems I've run in to on it is that that some channels on IRC were run by powertripping assholes, and you'd get banned for disagreeing with them or having different opinions.... even if you were perfectly polite, didn't threaten or harass anyone, etc. Of course, you could just go somewhere else... on to another channel, another network, or off IRC entirely... the internet's a big place. Still, the fact that some popular channels were dominated by assholes and there weren't viable alternatives to them sometimes is a problem for people wanting to participate in a large public space.
        • amadeuspagel 4y ago
  • ss108 4y ago
    Impressive deployment of buzz words.
  • hagbarth 4y ago
    People will leave pretty quickly if there is no moderation. People don't want to be in such places. Just check the missing popularity of Parler.
    • amadeuspagel 4y ago
      Network effects are a perfectly sufficient explanation for why people don't use parler. Can you name one example where people switched from a bigger to a smaller network, because the bigger one allowed too much freedom of speech?
      • lupire 4y ago
        Why don't "free speech" networks ever grow to be the bigger one in the first place?
        • amadeuspagel 4y ago
          Twitter and facebook did grow big when they were free speech networks.
  • harimau777 4y ago
    I think it's somewhat more complicated than that. Traditionally there was more friction to speech. I don't even mean just that the average person doesn't have access to a national platform like CNN. Even something like mailing out fliers had non-trivial costs. It's the same reason why junk mail is generally less of an issue than email spam. In a traditional town square, people are not anonymous and the "square" was local enough for there to be social consequences to actions. On Twitter, many of the posters are anonymous and even those who aren't often live on the other side of the country.
• Gigachad 4y ago
  Tbh the best direction for twitter to move in is to stop recommending content people did not subscribe to. And then adjust the rules to allow anything legal to be tweeted to your own page. If you object to someones tweets, don't follow them. There may still need to be rules on replying to others tweets since thats pushing content on people.
  • justapassenger 4y ago
    There’s very good reason why platforms like that recommend the content. Without it, it you’re not a power user (and that’s usually tiny %), your experience gets boring/empty pretty fast, as the platform ages.
  • jerojero 4y ago
    Discoverability is important, but imo there should be a dedicated section for it instead of mixing it with the tweets of the people you actually follow. But on the other hand, people might not really be willing to "switch tabs" and so if you move the feature somewhere else then people will never really see it. It's kind of a trade off. I think what's a bit annoying is that often times these discovery features are used to advertise rather than to provide actual good recommendations.
    • Gigachad 4y ago
      Perhaps an alternative is rather than getting banned from the platform, you can just get banned from discoverability if your posts are a detriment to the community. But your direct followers can always keep seeing your content.
      • ufo 4y ago
        I imagine they'd also have to find a solution for replies and retweets. Those also can also show up on your feed, even if the original post is not from someone you follow.
        • amadeuspagel 4y ago
• theGnuMe 4y ago
  Political ads are back on the table for sure. Hopefully easy to disable though. Trump may come back but Twitter really only has bandwidth for one "narcissist" at a time. Trump would be competition for Musk plus Trump has Truth Social so Musk might keep him at arms length for a while. Then there's Kanye, all of these decisions will impact and weigh on Musk's reputation in the celeb sphere (if that's important to him). Twitter is a mainline to the media. Subscriptions => onlyfans. There will likely be some payment p2p angle. There will be better customer service integration for a business's customers and tools that businesses will pay for. consumers will use it b/c call out culture gets you resolution vs calling into some call center. There might be a tiktok play. Maybe better DMs that are more whatsapp like.
• PainfullyNormal 4y ago
  > but it's influence on politics is very real. > Personally I don't think this acquisition is healthy for a democracy Fewer than a quarter of Americans use Twitter. Empty rhetoric is empty.
  • _aavaa_ 4y ago
    Sure, but it seems like that quarter contains, for starters, essentially all of the mainstream journalists.
    • PainfullyNormal 4y ago
      Maintstream journalists write what the owners of their publications tell them to write, especially when it comes to politics. The idea that a change in ownership of a relatively small social media company is going to have a "profound impact on democracy" is stupid. Especially since nobody seems to have a similar problem when a major media conglomerate changes ownership.
      • lapcat 4y ago
        > Especially since nobody seems to have a similar problem when a major media conglomerate changes ownership. They had a problem when Jeff Bezos purchased The Washington Post.
  • mapme 4y ago
    This is assuming that political power comes from influencing all Americans rather than a small fraction who hold true power (politicians, donors, journalists, industry groups, etc.). If the small fraction is all on Twitter then viola the rhetoric is meaningful.
    • lupire 4y ago
      > politicians, donors, journalists, industry groups, etc Do you have any reason to believe they are? Except journalists, I he obviously are.
• hitpointdrew 4y ago
  How on earth can you think this is less democratic? It is by far more democratic. Twitter under previous leadership was on a banning, censoring, rampage against anything that didn’t agree with their own narrative.
  • DarknessFalls 4y ago
    It's not a "narrative", it's called the Terms of Service, which specifically forbid inciting violence and hate speech. Trump, Kanye West, and other nut cakes broke those rules and that's why they got banned, after repeated warnings.
    • thesis 4y ago
      https://twitter.com/khamenei_ir/status/22815824658 https://twitter.com/khamenei_ir/status/22815824658
      • wellthatsawrap1 4y ago
      • DarknessFalls 4y ago
        The rules should be applied wherever they are broken, but that doesn't mean we should hold Trump or Marjorie Green or Kanye West unaccountable. They have rightfully earned their bans.
  • jerojero 4y ago
    Because less people are now in control of the decisions. In theory, a public company is controlled by its shareholders who are the ones that choose the board. Now the company is privately owned, meaning there are less owners than before. Less democracy means less people are in control of the decisions, that is precisely what has happened.
    • onethought 4y ago
      But that's not really true - few shareholders or shareholder groups had enough % to choose the board.
• OrangeMonkey 4y ago
  > Personally I don't think this acquisition is healthy for a democracy, Only a fascist would force free speech onto people.
• concinds 4y ago
  This is a significant misunderstanding of what shareholder oversight does. All the biggest shareholders were humongous asset managers; hard to call that "democratic" governance. Shareholder oversight is limited to addressing the agency problem (i.e., by firing executives if they egregiously harm profits). It's simply not a "democratic structure of governance", and has nothing whatsoever to do with content or moderation decisions. Even "activist investors" focus on things like dividends and buybacks, not content moderation. Twitter's stock tanked 12% after Trump was permabanned; shareholders clearly had no say in it, or he would never have been banned. Since shareholders' main impact is to incentivize management to maximize long-term value, and Musk will now own the majority of Twitter stock himself, the incentive has not changed. Even if Twitter was still public, shareholders would have no say in Musk's decision to reinstate (or not) Trump, for example. And importantly, a company being private doesn't mean it has no shareholders; it just means shares are not traded on public exchanges.
  • jerojero 4y ago
    I don't think I ever called it a democratic governance? I think you might have misunderstood my point. I think these platforms need to be more democratic, I don't think they're democratic at all as publicly owned companies. However, I do think control is now even more centralized residing in just one person. Which, imo, is an even worse state of affairs. To me, democracy in these platforms is not about what speech is moderated but about taking the decision, in the first place, to do so. How is that decision taken, who is responsible for such decisions? It's about who is deciding rather than what is decided. Democracies will not always favor our personal points of view, but that wouldn't make them less democratic (think for example of the swiss people voting against face coverings, a democratic decision that goes against what I personally consider is correct). I do consider a public company to have a more democratic structure of governance compared to a privately owned company simply by the fact that people could gain access. Of course, with such concentration of wealth it is a bit of a pipe dream. But think for example of Norway and their wealth fund; this is a country that invests in companies and steers influences them. They can't really do that with a private corporation. In any case, this is not really a hill i would be willing to die on in any case. I want more democracy in platform governance.
• nsonha 4y ago
  personally I don't think twitter is healthy for a democracy
• incomingpain 4y ago
  >Personally I don't think this acquisition is healthy for a democracy, but nonetheless, it's something I want to observe. This is an interesting point, curious if you could elaborate how you see elontwitter as unhealthy to democracy. Twitter has no impact on the democratic institutions or function of the politicians. In fact, national security ensures the function of the elected politicians to continue. The only day twitter's influence can do anything to influence the democracy is election day. The only thing that is unhealthy to a democracy on election day is anything which makes the election unfair. It's not twitter boarding up windows while the vote is being counted. Twitter does have impact on how people vote. It's the politician and journalist's jobs to ensure the people are educated and know how to vote. This is where twitter comes in. Their current censorship of only 1 side of politics was an effective way to ensuring people didn't know how to vote. Resulting in a measurable boost to the given team. This is the unhealthiness. This is what elon at least claims he plans to fix. So to me, elon buying twitter is potentially going to be better for democracy.