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Many commentators seem to think this is a sudden, recent backpedaling from a previous absolutist view on free speech. However, Musk has been promoting the "free

Many commentators seem to think this is a sudden, recent backpedaling from a previous absolutist view on free speech. However, Musk has been promoting the "freedom of speech" vs "freedom of reach" distinction for a while, at least months before his takeover, including describing how such a policy should be implemented at Twitter. Here's one example quote from June, 2022: “I think there’s this big difference between freedom of speech and freedom of reach in that one can, obviously, let’s say in the United States go in the middle of Times Square and pretty much yell anything you want. You’ll annoy the people around you, but you’re kind of allowed to just sort of yell whatever you want in a crowded public place, more or less, apart from 'this is robbery' — probably that would get you in trouble. “So but then whatever you say, however controversial, does not need to then be broadcast to the whole country. So I think generally the approach of Twitter should be to let people say what they want to do within the bounds of the law, but then limit who sees that...” Source: https://www.teslarati.com/elon-musk-china-censorship-twitter-free-speech-vs-free-reach/ https://www.teslarati.com/elon-musk-china-censorship-twitter...

aaomidi 4y ago
Sooooo shadow bans.
- mr90210 4y ago
  You bet!
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- baq 4y ago
  What do you think makes HN comments worthy of reading after all those years
- shapefrog 4y ago
  I thought shadow bans were bad ... its all very confusing.
  - faeriechangling 4y ago
    Shadowbans are fundamentally anti-transparency, but they are useful, I wouldn’t hesitate to automatically shadowban suspected spammers.
- Natsu 4y ago
  The modal shadow ban is that people can't read your stuff at all, even if they go looking for it. This is closer to the HN model where you can see it if you really want to via showdead.
- nomel 4y ago
  It is per tweet, not per account. How is this a shadowban?
- wvenable 4y ago
  Yeah that was my thought. What's the difference between this and actually deleting the tweet? If nobody but you can see your tweet (without linking to it directly) is it even a tweet then?
hooverd 4y ago
Confusingly, that's what all the free speech absolutists spend their time yelling about. The right to not speak in the public square but have a megaphone.
- lliamander 4y ago
  I disagree. What the free speech side is arguing is that by trying to restrict "reach" you are trying to prevent interested consumers of that speech from ever hearing it. The prime example is when someone's tweets don't show up in the timelines of subscribers. People who specifically what to hear that speech never get a chance to.
  - blitzar 4y ago
    Deplatforming is simply a form of limiting reach, a twitter ban isnt an internet ban
    - luckylion 4y ago
      And disallowing someone to live on earth isn't a death sentence. They can always migrate to Mars.
      - SantalBlush 4y ago
        Was this comment transmitted via internet, and are we on Twitter?
        luckylion 4y ago
        The point is a more general one: deplatforming is censorship in all but name because of coordination. You're gone from Twitter, "go build your own", you do and the CDN blocks you, "go build your own", you do and providers don't peer with you. Limiting reach on the other hand is a much better alternative. I can still communicate with other experts about the inconvenient truth that cows are not real, I just don't pop up in your search when you search for "where does milk come from".
phphphphp 4y ago
That analogy doesn’t really fit with the model of Twitter. If we are using the town/time square example, what Elon is describing is the digital version of putting a noise-cancelling box around the people saying “bad” things so that nobody can hear them. A message spreads on Twitter because individuals on Twitter amplify it (with engagement, retweets etc.) which is itself a form of speech: if you say something bad, and I retweet it, I am engaging in speech. Imagine a piece of land with 500 million people on it: a person 500 million people away from you cannot hear you, but if you say something and people choose to repeat it until it reaches that person… that’s Twitter. To prevent that is, in any framing, limiting free speech. Twitter has some magical engagement-driving algorithms (for example, the homepage) but these are not the primary driver of engagement/reach on Twitter, so they could be removed entirely and this problem would remain. So you’re probably right to say this isn’t a sudden 180 on his thoughts, but it still highlights how faulty his framing of free speech is.
- EMM_386 4y ago
  > If we are using the town/time square example, what Elon is describing is the digital version of putting a noise-cancelling box around the people saying “bad” things so that nobody can hear them. I'd equate it more to people in Nebraska can't hear the guy yelling in Times Square, nor should they. If people like this guy and want to hear him, they can go to Nebraska and listen to him (follow on Twitter). If he does something outlandish and makes the national news, people will know about it (a lot of retweets).
  - karpierz 4y ago
    If they're max deboosted, you won't see their posts even if you follow them; you'll only be able to see their posts by going to their page.
  - trompetenaccoun 4y ago
    >people will know about it (a lot of retweets) Yeah, unless those get suppressed too which is what currently happens on social media sites like Facebook, Reddit and (pre-Musk) Twitter. There is no way authorities can gently steer public debates in the "right" direction. Any meddling is overstepping a line and problematic.
nicbou 4y ago
Where would you set the line of the right to reach? Would it be fair to say "not on my platform"?
AYBABTME 4y ago
I like the idea of having personal filters on the receiving end, sort of like how I can decide to search Google using "Safe search: Moderate" or no safe search filtering. And I guess it makes sense to de-promote poisonous speech, since our primal brains have a tendency to naturally amplify and accord outsized importance to hate, outrage and other strong negative emotions, although those are mostly hugely detrimental to civil society. Social harmony is underrated in the West. We're all willing to sacrifice our social fabric - and thus ultimately our averaged personal happiness - in favor of individualism. A social system like Twitter should have systems and patterns that correct for our flaws here.
- triceratops 4y ago
  The question with "personal filters" is always "who makes the filters?". Because most users are not going to spend their time meticulously tuning their filter configurations. They'll take whatever defaults and go about their day. Or maybe use some popular community-developed filter configs. You might argue that the optionality of personal filter tweaking makes all the difference. But in terms of practical impact, it's meaningless. Not enough people are going to take that option to make a difference. The point is, there will always be a gatekeeper.
SoftTalker 4y ago
Why not just ditch the algorithms. Go back to what twitter was in the beginning: you see the tweets of people you follow. That's it.
- nomel 4y ago
  I don't want purely that, because I end up drowning in uninteresting tweets from everyone I follow. I want to see notable tweets, from the people I follow, because I don't care if they're eating a sandwich. I also want to see tweets I would find notable/interesting, from people I don't follow, if I knew they existed. An algorithm would help with that suggestion. What I really want is Spotify's "Discover Weekly", and "This song's radio", but in Twitter.
  - trompetenaccoun 4y ago
    That's clearly part of the disagreement. Some people want to think and decide for themselves what to like and follow while others want private corporations/algorithms do some of that thinking for them. Or at least narrow down the choices, which is effectively the same thing.
    - nomel 4y ago
      > private corporations/algorithms do some of that thinking for them When Spotify's Discovery Weekly gives me a playlist, it's giving me songs I've never heard before, that it thinks I'll like. The decision if I like them is completely my own. Spotify's recommendations aren't thinking for me. If I had more time to listen to a thousand random songs a day, I might stumble across their recommendations. But, their recommendations aren't thinking for me, they're just categorizing and skipping most of the garbage* related to my dislikes. * Spotify has 80 million songs. If I listened to the first 10 seconds of every song, for 8 hours a day, it would take me over 70 years.
  - oneeyedpigeon 4y ago
    Why not both? You have the option to see whatever tweets an algorithm decides you want, I have the option to see all the tweets from the people I'm following? In fact, I'm not even 100% sure that the 'latest tweets' / 'top tweets' setting isn't supposed to do exactly that, it's just unclear (and twitter regularly switches the setting from latest to top anyway). If I had my dream twitter, I'd go further: let me choose whether I want to see retweets, let me choose to show quote tweets, but only if the quoted tweet is from somebody I follow, etc.
bane 4y ago
There's also the possibility that once he got inside and saw some of the truly incredibly toxic shit that exists in the twitterspace he realized that he can't own the pipeline that spews that garbage all over the world completely unmolested.
- faeriechangling 4y ago
  Yeah I think anybody who has ever moderated might understand how true this is. There’s a bit of a irony to being a mod where the more effectively one does their job the less people understand why what you’re doing is necessary in the first place. Some people who get banned on social media are banned for a reason. You’re not going to ever get mainstream advertisers moderating twitter like it’s 4chan.
andy_ppp 4y ago
Schrödinger’s Musk, both a free speech absolutist, a right wing f-the-libs troll and a silencer of negative hate tweets all at the same time.
not2b 4y ago
This might be what Elon is thinking, but some of his fans will be bitterly disappointed if he executes on it and no one sees their tweets any more because they are hateful. How can they own the libs if the libs don't see their attacks (likewise for the reverse direction)?
- sangnoir 4y ago
  You may want to hold off on making any judgement until you see what will be considered "hate speech" as well the effectiveness of the Twitter sentiment analysis algorithms.
  - not2b 4y ago
    I'm not confident that they will get it right, or that they will apply it fairly; reducing the reach of the boss's tweets won't go over well.
- EFreethought 4y ago
  I think conservatives are more concerned with owning the libs than the reverse direction.
yodsanklai 4y ago
The difficult question is who decides what is "negative" and what should be boosted or deboosted, and how to do it at a global scale.
jasonhansel 4y ago
This seems like an arbitrary distinction; in the end, there's not much difference between having a tweet be removed and having it be "deboosted" until nobody sees it. I think that Musk has realized that his free speech absolutism conflicts with his goal of increasing profits. So now he's trying very hard to find a compromise.
phkahler 4y ago
I don't like platforms deciding what I see. I connect with people to get their posts. Period. I want them all, or let me control my filters if there are any.
- SantalBlush 4y ago
  >I don't like platforms deciding what I see. Hacker News does exactly this, and the people using this site like it.
  - phkahler 4y ago
    I do not subscribe to specific people on HN though. I don't consider it "social media" which is what I meant.
- toofy 4y ago
  if anyone truly enjoys "no moderation" from a platform, its a _very_ small number of people. if a comment section is all spam for penis enlargement pills no one hangs out there. instead, they go to comment sections where the platform owners actively decide to remove spam. they censor away posts for all different kinds of spam.
dundarious 4y ago
I don't think this fully captures his prior sentiments. This was all packaged with the idea that the algorithm should be made public, possibly literally even posted to github. Without that, he's just doing same kind of unaccountable tweaks as the previous operators, and there will still be sizable cohorts of users that feel "persecuted" and others who feel like their feed remains full of "negative/hate" content. I don't think it's fair to expect the algorithm to be open-source so soon, but I also don't think this represents anything like the meaningful changes he promised, so it's relatively insignificant.

aaomidi 4y ago

Sooooo shadow bans.

mr90210 4y ago
You bet!
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
baq 4y ago
What do you think makes HN comments worthy of reading after all those years
shapefrog 4y ago
I thought shadow bans were bad ... its all very confusing.
- faeriechangling 4y ago
  Shadowbans are fundamentally anti-transparency, but they are useful, I wouldn’t hesitate to automatically shadowban suspected spammers.
Natsu 4y ago
The modal shadow ban is that people can't read your stuff at all, even if they go looking for it. This is closer to the HN model where you can see it if you really want to via showdead.
nomel 4y ago
It is per tweet, not per account. How is this a shadowban?
wvenable 4y ago
Yeah that was my thought. What's the difference between this and actually deleting the tweet? If nobody but you can see your tweet (without linking to it directly) is it even a tweet then?

hooverd 4y ago

Confusingly, that's what all the free speech absolutists spend their time yelling about. The right to not speak in the public square but have a megaphone.

lliamander 4y ago
I disagree. What the free speech side is arguing is that by trying to restrict "reach" you are trying to prevent interested consumers of that speech from ever hearing it. The prime example is when someone's tweets don't show up in the timelines of subscribers. People who specifically what to hear that speech never get a chance to.
- blitzar 4y ago
  Deplatforming is simply a form of limiting reach, a twitter ban isnt an internet ban
  - luckylion 4y ago
    And disallowing someone to live on earth isn't a death sentence. They can always migrate to Mars.
    - SantalBlush 4y ago
      Was this comment transmitted via internet, and are we on Twitter?
      - luckylion 4y ago
        The point is a more general one: deplatforming is censorship in all but name because of coordination. You're gone from Twitter, "go build your own", you do and the CDN blocks you, "go build your own", you do and providers don't peer with you. Limiting reach on the other hand is a much better alternative. I can still communicate with other experts about the inconvenient truth that cows are not real, I just don't pop up in your search when you search for "where does milk come from".

phphphphp 4y ago

That analogy doesn’t really fit with the model of Twitter. If we are using the town/time square example, what Elon is describing is the digital version of putting a noise-cancelling box around the people saying “bad” things so that nobody can hear them. A message spreads on Twitter because individuals on Twitter amplify it (with engagement, retweets etc.) which is itself a form of speech: if you say something bad, and I retweet it, I am engaging in speech. Imagine a piece of land with 500 million people on it: a person 500 million people away from you cannot hear you, but if you say something and people choose to repeat it until it reaches that person… that’s Twitter. To prevent that is, in any framing, limiting free speech. Twitter has some magical engagement-driving algorithms (for example, the homepage) but these are not the primary driver of engagement/reach on Twitter, so they could be removed entirely and this problem would remain. So you’re probably right to say this isn’t a sudden 180 on his thoughts, but it still highlights how faulty his framing of free speech is.

EMM_386 4y ago
> If we are using the town/time square example, what Elon is describing is the digital version of putting a noise-cancelling box around the people saying “bad” things so that nobody can hear them. I'd equate it more to people in Nebraska can't hear the guy yelling in Times Square, nor should they. If people like this guy and want to hear him, they can go to Nebraska and listen to him (follow on Twitter). If he does something outlandish and makes the national news, people will know about it (a lot of retweets).
- karpierz 4y ago
  If they're max deboosted, you won't see their posts even if you follow them; you'll only be able to see their posts by going to their page.
- trompetenaccoun 4y ago
  >people will know about it (a lot of retweets) Yeah, unless those get suppressed too which is what currently happens on social media sites like Facebook, Reddit and (pre-Musk) Twitter. There is no way authorities can gently steer public debates in the "right" direction. Any meddling is overstepping a line and problematic.

nicbou 4y ago

Where would you set the line of the right to reach? Would it be fair to say "not on my platform"?

AYBABTME 4y ago

I like the idea of having personal filters on the receiving end, sort of like how I can decide to search Google using "Safe search: Moderate" or no safe search filtering. And I guess it makes sense to de-promote poisonous speech, since our primal brains have a tendency to naturally amplify and accord outsized importance to hate, outrage and other strong negative emotions, although those are mostly hugely detrimental to civil society. Social harmony is underrated in the West. We're all willing to sacrifice our social fabric - and thus ultimately our averaged personal happiness - in favor of individualism. A social system like Twitter should have systems and patterns that correct for our flaws here.

triceratops 4y ago
The question with "personal filters" is always "who makes the filters?". Because most users are not going to spend their time meticulously tuning their filter configurations. They'll take whatever defaults and go about their day. Or maybe use some popular community-developed filter configs. You might argue that the optionality of personal filter tweaking makes all the difference. But in terms of practical impact, it's meaningless. Not enough people are going to take that option to make a difference. The point is, there will always be a gatekeeper.

SoftTalker 4y ago

Why not just ditch the algorithms. Go back to what twitter was in the beginning: you see the tweets of people you follow. That's it.

nomel 4y ago
I don't want purely that, because I end up drowning in uninteresting tweets from everyone I follow. I want to see notable tweets, from the people I follow, because I don't care if they're eating a sandwich. I also want to see tweets I would find notable/interesting, from people I don't follow, if I knew they existed. An algorithm would help with that suggestion. What I really want is Spotify's "Discover Weekly", and "This song's radio", but in Twitter.
- trompetenaccoun 4y ago
  That's clearly part of the disagreement. Some people want to think and decide for themselves what to like and follow while others want private corporations/algorithms do some of that thinking for them. Or at least narrow down the choices, which is effectively the same thing.
  - nomel 4y ago
    > private corporations/algorithms do some of that thinking for them When Spotify's Discovery Weekly gives me a playlist, it's giving me songs I've never heard before, that it thinks I'll like. The decision if I like them is completely my own. Spotify's recommendations aren't thinking for me. If I had more time to listen to a thousand random songs a day, I might stumble across their recommendations. But, their recommendations aren't thinking for me, they're just categorizing and skipping most of the garbage* related to my dislikes. * Spotify has 80 million songs. If I listened to the first 10 seconds of every song, for 8 hours a day, it would take me over 70 years.
- oneeyedpigeon 4y ago
  Why not both? You have the option to see whatever tweets an algorithm decides you want, I have the option to see all the tweets from the people I'm following? In fact, I'm not even 100% sure that the 'latest tweets' / 'top tweets' setting isn't supposed to do exactly that, it's just unclear (and twitter regularly switches the setting from latest to top anyway). If I had my dream twitter, I'd go further: let me choose whether I want to see retweets, let me choose to show quote tweets, but only if the quoted tweet is from somebody I follow, etc.

bane 4y ago

There's also the possibility that once he got inside and saw some of the truly incredibly toxic shit that exists in the twitterspace he realized that he can't own the pipeline that spews that garbage all over the world completely unmolested.

faeriechangling 4y ago
Yeah I think anybody who has ever moderated might understand how true this is. There’s a bit of a irony to being a mod where the more effectively one does their job the less people understand why what you’re doing is necessary in the first place. Some people who get banned on social media are banned for a reason. You’re not going to ever get mainstream advertisers moderating twitter like it’s 4chan.

andy_ppp 4y ago

Schrödinger’s Musk, both a free speech absolutist, a right wing f-the-libs troll and a silencer of negative hate tweets all at the same time.

not2b 4y ago

This might be what Elon is thinking, but some of his fans will be bitterly disappointed if he executes on it and no one sees their tweets any more because they are hateful. How can they own the libs if the libs don't see their attacks (likewise for the reverse direction)?

sangnoir 4y ago
You may want to hold off on making any judgement until you see what will be considered "hate speech" as well the effectiveness of the Twitter sentiment analysis algorithms.
- not2b 4y ago
  I'm not confident that they will get it right, or that they will apply it fairly; reducing the reach of the boss's tweets won't go over well.
EFreethought 4y ago
I think conservatives are more concerned with owning the libs than the reverse direction.

yodsanklai 4y ago

The difficult question is who decides what is "negative" and what should be boosted or deboosted, and how to do it at a global scale.

jasonhansel 4y ago

This seems like an arbitrary distinction; in the end, there's not much difference between having a tweet be removed and having it be "deboosted" until nobody sees it. I think that Musk has realized that his free speech absolutism conflicts with his goal of increasing profits. So now he's trying very hard to find a compromise.

phkahler 4y ago

I don't like platforms deciding what I see. I connect with people to get their posts. Period. I want them all, or let me control my filters if there are any.

SantalBlush 4y ago
>I don't like platforms deciding what I see. Hacker News does exactly this, and the people using this site like it.
- phkahler 4y ago
  I do not subscribe to specific people on HN though. I don't consider it "social media" which is what I meant.
toofy 4y ago
if anyone truly enjoys "no moderation" from a platform, its a _very_ small number of people. if a comment section is all spam for penis enlargement pills no one hangs out there. instead, they go to comment sections where the platform owners actively decide to remove spam. they censor away posts for all different kinds of spam.

dundarious 4y ago

I don't think this fully captures his prior sentiments. This was all packaged with the idea that the algorithm should be made public, possibly literally even posted to github. Without that, he's just doing same kind of unaccountable tweaks as the previous operators, and there will still be sizable cohorts of users that feel "persecuted" and others who feel like their feed remains full of "negative/hate" content. I don't think it's fair to expect the algorithm to be open-source so soon, but I also don't think this represents anything like the meaningful changes he promised, so it's relatively insignificant.