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Ah damn, I hoped for a fair experiment to demonstrate absordity of total free speech, but istead we got bog standard hypocracy! Boo! If you are caught wonderin

Ah damn, I hoped for a fair experiment to demonstrate absordity of total free speech, but istead we got bog standard hypocracy! Boo! If you are caught wondering why some people still support Elon - in 'true conservative' society, like Russia or Saudi states, hypocracy is means of demonstrating hierarchy. So as a leader, you show that you are dominant by demonstrating that rules don't apply to you. That makes you even more of a strongman and grows your support. So if you are a fan of strongmen, stamping out dissent and competition is exactly the expected behaviour.

teawrecks 4y ago
Aw man! No one could have seen this coming!
nopenopenopeno 4y ago
And we should criticize historical communist leaders accordingly, instead of criticizing socialism whole cloth.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
tlogan 4y ago
I genuinely believed that he would try to allow more free speech on Twitter. There was a small chance that the experiment will succeed. I guess he never wanted that: he just lied. But why?
- synu 4y ago
  I don’t know if he lied or not but I get the impression he doesn’t have any particular plan, and is just doing / saying whatever comes to mind at any given moment. Who knows, but from the outside it comes across that way.
- dbspin 4y ago
  Musk has a long track record of lying about his intentions and his products prospects. It appears he plays the part of an authentic well intentioned engineer whose principles and good sense override his politeness, well enough to fool a huge number of people.
- les_diabolique 4y ago
  Because he's our generation's P.T. Barnum
- root_axis 4y ago
  > he just lied. But why? Because lying helped further his narrative in the public which is advantageous to him. Similar to how he lied for years about FSD.
  - grogenaut 4y ago
    What is FSD?
    - delecti 4y ago
      "Full Self Driving".
    - tremon 4y ago
      Full Self-Driving, aka Tesla's autopilot.
  - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    Or perhaps more damning, since FSD was a prediction which are notoriously hard, he lied about his academic credentials and immigration status for decades, which is harder to excuse.
- maxbond 4y ago
  I'm not being hyperbolic when I say I believe the explanation is that Musk is a fascist. Fascism is notoriously difficult to define, but what I mean here is that Musk ultimately believes only in the will to power; all stated principles will ultimately be abandoned at the time when they conflict with his will to gain & maintain power. You can compare this to Trump; Trump excoriated Clinton over her handling of classified information wrt her email server, but not only did many Trump administration officials (including his children) make similar mistakes, but we've seen with the document scandal that he had no regard for classified information when it suited him to keep them in an unlocked closet space. (This is not to defend Clinton; I have no interest in doing so.) So Musk talked about being a free speech absolutist, until such a time as he felt threatened by it. The only thing Musk actually believes is that he is the most deserving person to wield power, and because he the most deserving, anything he does in support of that is justified. He can justify it by saying, I'm making humanity an interplanetary species, and in doing so I will save billions of lives. (He won't make us an interplanetary species, his plans for colonizing Mars are gibberish, nothing he does is truly justified.)
- tompagenet2 4y ago
  Because he's always been an insecure child, who says what he thinks will make him popular or stand out to a group of acolytes. Sometimes that'll work for a while, sometimes it'll really help, but over time you get more cocksure, more convinced of your own greatness and more foolish.
  - wombatpm 4y ago
    My wife always thought him to be a jerk. I thought he was a visionary. Twitter has proven my wife was correct
    - lolc 4y ago
      He can be both.
- anonymousab 4y ago
  It turns out he's just everything his critics has said he is, and that he is indeed just following his preexisting standard of behavior. That's just how it is sometimes.
- Klinky 4y ago
  He lied because it's way more noble to be a "champion of free speech" than a champion of hate speech and far-right rhetoric. Much of the base that buys into this rhetoric hates complexity or nuance. "Unrestrained freedom" is an easy concept to promote, yet impractical to apply rationally, something that those who fully buy into the concept fail to comprehend, as they only subscribe to a surface-level understanding.
- Yoric 4y ago
  I've been wondering whether he's planning to run for some office (in South Africa? US?). At least, that would make his burning through $44Bn, lying so much and voluntarily antagonizing/ostracizing "the Libs" somewhat logical. edit: Alright, here is my latest idle theory: he wants (or wanted at some point) to become a news mogul and a US Republican kingmaker. And since Twitter is (for many people) the news: 1. buying Twitter; 2. achieving absolutist control over it; 3. getting rid of the Libs while appealing to Republican victimhood. ...makes some kind of sense.
  - TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
    I think he's hoping for a run in 2028. Possibly 2024, but that's a little close. Buying Twitter would be a strategic campaign move. Of course a lot of people now realise he's an asshole, and he's likely to lose a lot of money on the deal. So maybe that plan won't work out. It's been a real case study in self-harm. Many who were neutral or positive before - because of Tesla, SpaceX, and some of his other projects - are now varying shades of hostile. And he's unlikely to win over the fascist vote, because Flynn is going to have that locked up when he emerges from behind Trump's shadow.
    - Xylakant 4y ago
      > I think he's hoping for a run in 2028. Possibly 2024, but that's a little close. One of the few requirements to become US president is that you must be a natural born citizen. So Musk is out, as he’s born in Pretoria, South Africa and neither of his parents were US citizens. https://www.usa.gov/election https://www.usa.gov/election
      - roflyear 4y ago
        To be president, but plenty of other government positions.
        Xylakant 4y ago
        I doubt Musk would be interested in a mere government position where he has to act on the orders of a boss. Very few of those are open to elections in the first place, so he probably could have one if he just wants it. Apart from having a conflict of interest that would probably bar any reasonable president from offering one.
- faeriechangling 4y ago
  >he just lied. But why? People are gullible. It was pointed out by many parties the various ways he had suppressed the speech of others over the years, especially of his workers. Yet just because Elon Musk said he was for free speech, people believed him. Yet it would be unreasonable to expect somebody who doesn't especially value speech in the workplace to make twitter more pro-speech. Musk is not some civil libertarian. I think honestly the history of social media is sites which started out with close to a policy of free speech absolutism slowly changing as cracks appeared. Jack Dorsey is gone, Aaron Schwartz is dead, Zuckerberg is in decline. The experiment already happened and speech gradually became more and more curtailed.
- jrmg 4y ago
  I don’t think he lied. I don’t think it’s even hypocrisy - he just put very little thought into his previous belief and changed his mind. He’ll do it again later. That’s why you shouldn’t believe what he says. It’s _not_ that he’s _lying_ - he believes what he says when he says it - he just has no care for consistency and will change his mind whenever it looks prudent, without regard for others. I am not defending this. It may have helped him to business success in the past, but it is severely damaging to interpersonal relationships. It is a terrible way to live a life.
  - Alex3917 4y ago
    > he just put very little thought into his previous belief and changed his mind. The sad thing is he'd probably only need to sit down and read a dozen or so books in order to figure out how to make Twitter actually successful, but you know he's going to be too lazy to ever actually do this.
  - d23 4y ago
    He has repeatedly shown a proclivity for lying, so I don't know why it should be ruled out altogether. And regardless of what the intent or driving motivation was, it's still hypocrisy.
    - jrmg 4y ago
      I'd only accuse someone of hypocrisy if they did one thing while saying another simultaneously. If someone changes their mind that's not hypocrisy. I want to stick to that definition because to do otherwise seems to be to be disapproving of people's ability to change their mind. People changing their mind is necessary for the political process to work (and for society and friendship in general!) Elon Musk might indeed be a hypocrite, but I don't think he's necessarily being hypocritical in this case. If he _continues_ to harp on about freedom of speech on Twitter while keeping this policy in place that will be hypocritical though. [Edit: I'm not trying to defend Musk in general. I think the facts of the current situation, and things he's done in the past, are pretty terrible!]
- MrMan 4y ago
  as the parent said, look into the personalities and games played by dictators over the last 120 years. maybe common threads.
- pjc50 4y ago
  > he just lied. But why? Why not? Lying is cool, fun, makes people like you if you tell them what you want to hear, and even profitable. You can really inflate your stock values by simply lying about what you can achieve. It's not like there will be any negative consequences to this behavior.
- scythe 4y ago
  The only remotely plausible explanation that isn't plain narcissism on Elon's part is the hypothesis I found on Matt Levine's blog (which he credited to someone I forget): Elon, by positioning himself as a conservative, hopes to convince Republicans to buy Teslas (and his other products). There are a variety of problems with that approach — not least that he'd be aiming for the primary targets of oil company propaganda.
  - Yoric 4y ago
    Alternative possibility (which, to clarify, is just a random idea of mine, not even a hunch): he sees himself as some sort of political figure, either as a candidate or as a kingmaker – just the position that, if I understand correctly, Trump has lost a few weeks ago. For that kind of use, owning Tweeter, with absolute control on content and a user base stoked up on anger against "the Libs", "the pedophiles", "the establishment", "the deep state", etc. would be invaluable.
- acdha 4y ago
  He’s thrown in as a movement conservative. You could tell because what he described as infringements on freedom of speech weren’t just wrong but consistently inaccurate matching the ways they were portrayed in the right-wing media. I’m not sure what galvanized him but have wondered whether it is as simple as the transgender rumors (Grimes, his daughter) being true. Given his wealth it’d be natural for him to be a low tax/regulation Republican but he’s clearly way more motivated by the culture war and the QAnon end at that. Taking this as a personal affront would explain him being so willing to risk everything else just to hurt the people he sees as enemies.
  - maxbond 4y ago
    I'd point out his positions are reactionary, not conservative. He doesn't want to preserve an existing state of affairs, he wants to counter recent progressive movements. The old guard politician from Chesterton's fence [1], the prototypical conservative in my mind, would view someone who wanted to put the fence back up, after the matter has been exhaustively litigated and the fence taken down, as just as if not more foolish than the politician who had wanted to take it down without understanding. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fen...
    - acdha 4y ago
      Fair point. Common usage of those terms is definitely muddled.
    - freejazz 4y ago
      You are just describing the current US conservative party...
      - maxbond 4y ago
        The Republican Party are distinct from the concept of conservative and reactionary politics. They practice both. As do the Democratic Party for that matter. A mental might might be that a party is a group of practitioners and these types of politics are tools they use to accomplish an agenda (though that model implies these tools are amoral and equivalent, which I don't agree with - I find conservative politics unobjectionable, though I tend to disagree with conservative positions, and reactionary politics thoroughly objectionable, as it usually goes hand in hand with bigotry). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservatism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservatism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionary (See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressivism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressivism) It's useful to tease these concepts apart so we can better understand & critique certain policy positions. When Democrats vocally oppose student loan forgiveness, they are practicing conservative politics, for instance. It's not simply that Republicans are reliably conservative and Democrats are reliably progressive. And there are many other forms of politics, these are just the most prevalent in US politics today.
- lawn 4y ago
  A pathological liar is lying, I wonder why. I think the answer here is that he has no idea what he's doing and is making it up as he goes.
- wfaler 4y ago
  Not sure he lied. I think he fooled himself into thinking that moderating a social media platform can be done on a rose-tinted ideological basis. Then reality hit, and the fact is, there are so many edge-cases that being ideologically consistent is almost impossible. Moderation is hard. And it matters, both to keep audiences & advertisers. Besides, First Amendment-based moderation is not even possible for an international company. Most of Europe have strict laws on holocaust-denial. Thailand & the UK have laws banning speech offensive to their royal families. ..etc, etc..
  - alasdair_ 4y ago
    >Thailand & the UK have laws banning speech offensive to their royal families. The UK may technically have some old law on the books stating this but it's never enforced. I mean, the Sex Pistols ("God save the queen... A fascist regime...") demonstrated this quite convincingly. I did hear about someone getting arrested for yelling at Prince Andrew in a funeral procession, but that was for breach of the peace during a funeral and (importantly) was thrown out in court. Growing up, I saw plenty of posters with words like "The great Royal debate: should we hang them, or should we shoot them?" and no one cared in the slightest.
    - wfaler 4y ago
      The UK royal family has pretty wide control over what can and cannot be said about them in the media. There is for instance, many stories about royal improprieties that have been covered up in recent years, in exchange for “juicy” Harry & Meghan stories being circulated in their place. This is probably at the core of the schism within the royal family. I can read about it, because I’m not in the UK. Bet it’s not very well covered in the UK though.
- yongjik 4y ago
  I don't think Musk calculated that much, but a lot of people who cheered for Musk "because he was for free speech," are still cheering for Musk because... whatever. Because it's his company now and he can do whatever he wants and that's good? (I mean, just skim through this whole comment thread.) So, in the end, it doesn't matter whether he was for absolute free speech or not. At least not to Musk. And a lot of Musk fans.
- KerrAvon 4y ago
  Asking why he lied is like asking why the clouds rained on you. This is exactly the same mistake people make with Trump: you think he’s actually a human being who feels emotions and responds to them like the rest of us. But he’s really a sociopathic narcissist. They aren’t like us; they are purely driven by the drive for adulation and attention, and their lives as presented to us are fictional to the extent that they can get away with it.
- omoikane 4y ago
  Lying leads to anger, and anger leads to engagement. For some reason, most online communities appear to be fueled by stimuli that are exact opposite of what we find in healthy real life communities. It seems difficult to grow a social network with just positive feedback.
- freejazz 4y ago
  Because you would have never supported him if he told the truth.
drdaeman 4y ago
Honestly, this. I wasn't expecting much but was hoping that at least Elon has some unorthodox idea to try. What he promised wasn't supposed to work, but no matter who he is and what he believes in, I had to give him some respect - dude had actually put his money (lawsuit or not) where his mouth was, and that's a commendable thing. Except that... I really don't like roasting people - that's just faux pas, so I'll rather say that what he does makes no sense to me, and I fail to see the correspondence between Elon's past statements and current actions. Which makes me disappointed.
- guerrilla 4y ago
  > dude had actually put his money (lawsuit or not) where his mouth was, and that's a commendable thing. No he didn't. He was forced to.
  - KerrAvon 4y ago
    Nobody forced him into committing to buy Twitter in the first place. What they forced him to do was follow through on that commitment per the contract he signed.
    - guerrilla 4y ago
      Exactly, my point is he literally tried to refuse to put his money where his mouth was. He said some bullshit and tried to back out. This is nothing deserving of respect.
  - cpsns 4y ago
    Somehow people are still trying to convince themselves Musk is a good, virtuous guy. It probably has a lot to do with them not being able to admit they were wrong, or that they bought his PR bullshit. The reality is he's an awful person who in this case is the proverbial dog that caught the car.
- manderley 4y ago
  We have to "commend" him for saying that he wanted to buy Twitter and then (after some legal troubles) following through? Why?
MrMan 4y ago
great comment this drama is from the authoritarian playbook
noirscape 4y ago
This is always how it goes. Free speech absolutists that run web communities basically always stop short the moment they feel like they are under threat (regardless of any actual threat). Even the most infamous of free speech platforms will just ban users who hurt the admins feelings. Back when Gab switched over to using a hostile fork of Mastodon for a backend[0], Torba banned the users of FreeSpeechExtremist (a Pleroma instance with well... the exact kinda ruleset the name would imply) from being able to interact with users on the Gab test instance (they hadn't figured out how to disable federation at the time). The crime of FSE in this particular case? Ridiculing Gab users for paying money to access basic features that any other Mastodon/Pleroma instance could give them for free. I can list off quite a few other examples of notable "free speech zones" doing this sorta thing, but really it's not worth shining a light on most of them. It's always "free speech for me, not for thee" with these people. And the dumbest part is that if they were just open about it instead of bloviating about how supposedly important they think free speech absolutism is, I don't think most people would pay them any mind. You don't get this anger when the rules include in a clearly written way: "if I don't like what you're doing, for any reason, you're out" (also known as the escape hatch clause). It's when you write the rules in abstract ways that are supposed to be "fair" that you get this problem, and especially if you're bloviating about how the only rule you supposedly believe in is the right to free speech and "US law" (the only concession usually put in writing by these absolutists). Because then people will start beholding you to that level of enforcement and they will ridicule you for being a hypocrite on that ideal. [0]: Curious aside - Gab is not on the banned social media list. Wonder if Musk seeks that audience.
- richbell 4y ago
  > This is always how it goes. Free speech absolutists that run web communities basically always stop short the moment they feel like they are under threat (regardless of any actual threat). Years ago, I was banned from a "free speech" / skeptic subreddit because I corrected someone who turned out to be the head mod.
- SahAssar 4y ago
  > Even the most infamous of free speech platforms will just ban users who hurt the admins feelings. Out of curiosity: did 4chan ever try to ban anyone for talking about moot?

teawrecks 4y ago

Aw man! No one could have seen this coming!

nopenopenopeno 4y ago

And we should criticize historical communist leaders accordingly, instead of criticizing socialism whole cloth.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

tlogan 4y ago

I genuinely believed that he would try to allow more free speech on Twitter. There was a small chance that the experiment will succeed. I guess he never wanted that: he just lied. But why?

synu 4y ago
I don’t know if he lied or not but I get the impression he doesn’t have any particular plan, and is just doing / saying whatever comes to mind at any given moment. Who knows, but from the outside it comes across that way.
dbspin 4y ago
Musk has a long track record of lying about his intentions and his products prospects. It appears he plays the part of an authentic well intentioned engineer whose principles and good sense override his politeness, well enough to fool a huge number of people.
les_diabolique 4y ago
Because he's our generation's P.T. Barnum
root_axis 4y ago
> he just lied. But why? Because lying helped further his narrative in the public which is advantageous to him. Similar to how he lied for years about FSD.
- grogenaut 4y ago
  What is FSD?
  - delecti 4y ago
    "Full Self Driving".
  - tremon 4y ago
    Full Self-Driving, aka Tesla's autopilot.
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  Or perhaps more damning, since FSD was a prediction which are notoriously hard, he lied about his academic credentials and immigration status for decades, which is harder to excuse.
maxbond 4y ago
I'm not being hyperbolic when I say I believe the explanation is that Musk is a fascist. Fascism is notoriously difficult to define, but what I mean here is that Musk ultimately believes only in the will to power; all stated principles will ultimately be abandoned at the time when they conflict with his will to gain & maintain power. You can compare this to Trump; Trump excoriated Clinton over her handling of classified information wrt her email server, but not only did many Trump administration officials (including his children) make similar mistakes, but we've seen with the document scandal that he had no regard for classified information when it suited him to keep them in an unlocked closet space. (This is not to defend Clinton; I have no interest in doing so.) So Musk talked about being a free speech absolutist, until such a time as he felt threatened by it. The only thing Musk actually believes is that he is the most deserving person to wield power, and because he the most deserving, anything he does in support of that is justified. He can justify it by saying, I'm making humanity an interplanetary species, and in doing so I will save billions of lives. (He won't make us an interplanetary species, his plans for colonizing Mars are gibberish, nothing he does is truly justified.)
tompagenet2 4y ago
Because he's always been an insecure child, who says what he thinks will make him popular or stand out to a group of acolytes. Sometimes that'll work for a while, sometimes it'll really help, but over time you get more cocksure, more convinced of your own greatness and more foolish.
- wombatpm 4y ago
  My wife always thought him to be a jerk. I thought he was a visionary. Twitter has proven my wife was correct
  - lolc 4y ago
    He can be both.
anonymousab 4y ago
It turns out he's just everything his critics has said he is, and that he is indeed just following his preexisting standard of behavior. That's just how it is sometimes.
Klinky 4y ago
He lied because it's way more noble to be a "champion of free speech" than a champion of hate speech and far-right rhetoric. Much of the base that buys into this rhetoric hates complexity or nuance. "Unrestrained freedom" is an easy concept to promote, yet impractical to apply rationally, something that those who fully buy into the concept fail to comprehend, as they only subscribe to a surface-level understanding.
Yoric 4y ago
I've been wondering whether he's planning to run for some office (in South Africa? US?). At least, that would make his burning through $44Bn, lying so much and voluntarily antagonizing/ostracizing "the Libs" somewhat logical. edit: Alright, here is my latest idle theory: he wants (or wanted at some point) to become a news mogul and a US Republican kingmaker. And since Twitter is (for many people) the news: 1. buying Twitter; 2. achieving absolutist control over it; 3. getting rid of the Libs while appealing to Republican victimhood. ...makes some kind of sense.
- TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
  I think he's hoping for a run in 2028. Possibly 2024, but that's a little close. Buying Twitter would be a strategic campaign move. Of course a lot of people now realise he's an asshole, and he's likely to lose a lot of money on the deal. So maybe that plan won't work out. It's been a real case study in self-harm. Many who were neutral or positive before - because of Tesla, SpaceX, and some of his other projects - are now varying shades of hostile. And he's unlikely to win over the fascist vote, because Flynn is going to have that locked up when he emerges from behind Trump's shadow.
  - Xylakant 4y ago
    > I think he's hoping for a run in 2028. Possibly 2024, but that's a little close. One of the few requirements to become US president is that you must be a natural born citizen. So Musk is out, as he’s born in Pretoria, South Africa and neither of his parents were US citizens. https://www.usa.gov/election https://www.usa.gov/election
    - roflyear 4y ago
      To be president, but plenty of other government positions.
      - Xylakant 4y ago
        I doubt Musk would be interested in a mere government position where he has to act on the orders of a boss. Very few of those are open to elections in the first place, so he probably could have one if he just wants it. Apart from having a conflict of interest that would probably bar any reasonable president from offering one.
faeriechangling 4y ago
>he just lied. But why? People are gullible. It was pointed out by many parties the various ways he had suppressed the speech of others over the years, especially of his workers. Yet just because Elon Musk said he was for free speech, people believed him. Yet it would be unreasonable to expect somebody who doesn't especially value speech in the workplace to make twitter more pro-speech. Musk is not some civil libertarian. I think honestly the history of social media is sites which started out with close to a policy of free speech absolutism slowly changing as cracks appeared. Jack Dorsey is gone, Aaron Schwartz is dead, Zuckerberg is in decline. The experiment already happened and speech gradually became more and more curtailed.
jrmg 4y ago
I don’t think he lied. I don’t think it’s even hypocrisy - he just put very little thought into his previous belief and changed his mind. He’ll do it again later. That’s why you shouldn’t believe what he says. It’s _not_ that he’s _lying_ - he believes what he says when he says it - he just has no care for consistency and will change his mind whenever it looks prudent, without regard for others. I am not defending this. It may have helped him to business success in the past, but it is severely damaging to interpersonal relationships. It is a terrible way to live a life.
- Alex3917 4y ago
  > he just put very little thought into his previous belief and changed his mind. The sad thing is he'd probably only need to sit down and read a dozen or so books in order to figure out how to make Twitter actually successful, but you know he's going to be too lazy to ever actually do this.
- d23 4y ago
  He has repeatedly shown a proclivity for lying, so I don't know why it should be ruled out altogether. And regardless of what the intent or driving motivation was, it's still hypocrisy.
  - jrmg 4y ago
    I'd only accuse someone of hypocrisy if they did one thing while saying another simultaneously. If someone changes their mind that's not hypocrisy. I want to stick to that definition because to do otherwise seems to be to be disapproving of people's ability to change their mind. People changing their mind is necessary for the political process to work (and for society and friendship in general!) Elon Musk might indeed be a hypocrite, but I don't think he's necessarily being hypocritical in this case. If he _continues_ to harp on about freedom of speech on Twitter while keeping this policy in place that will be hypocritical though. [Edit: I'm not trying to defend Musk in general. I think the facts of the current situation, and things he's done in the past, are pretty terrible!]
MrMan 4y ago
as the parent said, look into the personalities and games played by dictators over the last 120 years. maybe common threads.
pjc50 4y ago
> he just lied. But why? Why not? Lying is cool, fun, makes people like you if you tell them what you want to hear, and even profitable. You can really inflate your stock values by simply lying about what you can achieve. It's not like there will be any negative consequences to this behavior.
scythe 4y ago
The only remotely plausible explanation that isn't plain narcissism on Elon's part is the hypothesis I found on Matt Levine's blog (which he credited to someone I forget): Elon, by positioning himself as a conservative, hopes to convince Republicans to buy Teslas (and his other products). There are a variety of problems with that approach — not least that he'd be aiming for the primary targets of oil company propaganda.
- Yoric 4y ago
  Alternative possibility (which, to clarify, is just a random idea of mine, not even a hunch): he sees himself as some sort of political figure, either as a candidate or as a kingmaker – just the position that, if I understand correctly, Trump has lost a few weeks ago. For that kind of use, owning Tweeter, with absolute control on content and a user base stoked up on anger against "the Libs", "the pedophiles", "the establishment", "the deep state", etc. would be invaluable.
acdha 4y ago
He’s thrown in as a movement conservative. You could tell because what he described as infringements on freedom of speech weren’t just wrong but consistently inaccurate matching the ways they were portrayed in the right-wing media. I’m not sure what galvanized him but have wondered whether it is as simple as the transgender rumors (Grimes, his daughter) being true. Given his wealth it’d be natural for him to be a low tax/regulation Republican but he’s clearly way more motivated by the culture war and the QAnon end at that. Taking this as a personal affront would explain him being so willing to risk everything else just to hurt the people he sees as enemies.
- maxbond 4y ago
  I'd point out his positions are reactionary, not conservative. He doesn't want to preserve an existing state of affairs, he wants to counter recent progressive movements. The old guard politician from Chesterton's fence [1], the prototypical conservative in my mind, would view someone who wanted to put the fence back up, after the matter has been exhaustively litigated and the fence taken down, as just as if not more foolish than the politician who had wanted to take it down without understanding. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fen...
  - acdha 4y ago
    Fair point. Common usage of those terms is definitely muddled.
  - freejazz 4y ago
    You are just describing the current US conservative party...
    - maxbond 4y ago
      The Republican Party are distinct from the concept of conservative and reactionary politics. They practice both. As do the Democratic Party for that matter. A mental might might be that a party is a group of practitioners and these types of politics are tools they use to accomplish an agenda (though that model implies these tools are amoral and equivalent, which I don't agree with - I find conservative politics unobjectionable, though I tend to disagree with conservative positions, and reactionary politics thoroughly objectionable, as it usually goes hand in hand with bigotry). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservatism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservatism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionary (See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressivism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressivism) It's useful to tease these concepts apart so we can better understand & critique certain policy positions. When Democrats vocally oppose student loan forgiveness, they are practicing conservative politics, for instance. It's not simply that Republicans are reliably conservative and Democrats are reliably progressive. And there are many other forms of politics, these are just the most prevalent in US politics today.
lawn 4y ago
A pathological liar is lying, I wonder why. I think the answer here is that he has no idea what he's doing and is making it up as he goes.
wfaler 4y ago
Not sure he lied. I think he fooled himself into thinking that moderating a social media platform can be done on a rose-tinted ideological basis. Then reality hit, and the fact is, there are so many edge-cases that being ideologically consistent is almost impossible. Moderation is hard. And it matters, both to keep audiences & advertisers. Besides, First Amendment-based moderation is not even possible for an international company. Most of Europe have strict laws on holocaust-denial. Thailand & the UK have laws banning speech offensive to their royal families. ..etc, etc..
- alasdair_ 4y ago
  >Thailand & the UK have laws banning speech offensive to their royal families. The UK may technically have some old law on the books stating this but it's never enforced. I mean, the Sex Pistols ("God save the queen... A fascist regime...") demonstrated this quite convincingly. I did hear about someone getting arrested for yelling at Prince Andrew in a funeral procession, but that was for breach of the peace during a funeral and (importantly) was thrown out in court. Growing up, I saw plenty of posters with words like "The great Royal debate: should we hang them, or should we shoot them?" and no one cared in the slightest.
  - wfaler 4y ago
    The UK royal family has pretty wide control over what can and cannot be said about them in the media. There is for instance, many stories about royal improprieties that have been covered up in recent years, in exchange for “juicy” Harry & Meghan stories being circulated in their place. This is probably at the core of the schism within the royal family. I can read about it, because I’m not in the UK. Bet it’s not very well covered in the UK though.
yongjik 4y ago
I don't think Musk calculated that much, but a lot of people who cheered for Musk "because he was for free speech," are still cheering for Musk because... whatever. Because it's his company now and he can do whatever he wants and that's good? (I mean, just skim through this whole comment thread.) So, in the end, it doesn't matter whether he was for absolute free speech or not. At least not to Musk. And a lot of Musk fans.
KerrAvon 4y ago
Asking why he lied is like asking why the clouds rained on you. This is exactly the same mistake people make with Trump: you think he’s actually a human being who feels emotions and responds to them like the rest of us. But he’s really a sociopathic narcissist. They aren’t like us; they are purely driven by the drive for adulation and attention, and their lives as presented to us are fictional to the extent that they can get away with it.
omoikane 4y ago
Lying leads to anger, and anger leads to engagement. For some reason, most online communities appear to be fueled by stimuli that are exact opposite of what we find in healthy real life communities. It seems difficult to grow a social network with just positive feedback.
freejazz 4y ago
Because you would have never supported him if he told the truth.

drdaeman 4y ago

Honestly, this. I wasn't expecting much but was hoping that at least Elon has some unorthodox idea to try. What he promised wasn't supposed to work, but no matter who he is and what he believes in, I had to give him some respect - dude had actually put his money (lawsuit or not) where his mouth was, and that's a commendable thing. Except that... I really don't like roasting people - that's just faux pas, so I'll rather say that what he does makes no sense to me, and I fail to see the correspondence between Elon's past statements and current actions. Which makes me disappointed.

guerrilla 4y ago
> dude had actually put his money (lawsuit or not) where his mouth was, and that's a commendable thing. No he didn't. He was forced to.
- KerrAvon 4y ago
  Nobody forced him into committing to buy Twitter in the first place. What they forced him to do was follow through on that commitment per the contract he signed.
  - guerrilla 4y ago
    Exactly, my point is he literally tried to refuse to put his money where his mouth was. He said some bullshit and tried to back out. This is nothing deserving of respect.
- cpsns 4y ago
  Somehow people are still trying to convince themselves Musk is a good, virtuous guy. It probably has a lot to do with them not being able to admit they were wrong, or that they bought his PR bullshit. The reality is he's an awful person who in this case is the proverbial dog that caught the car.
manderley 4y ago
We have to "commend" him for saying that he wanted to buy Twitter and then (after some legal troubles) following through? Why?

MrMan 4y ago

great comment this drama is from the authoritarian playbook

noirscape 4y ago

This is always how it goes. Free speech absolutists that run web communities basically always stop short the moment they feel like they are under threat (regardless of any actual threat). Even the most infamous of free speech platforms will just ban users who hurt the admins feelings. Back when Gab switched over to using a hostile fork of Mastodon for a backend[0], Torba banned the users of FreeSpeechExtremist (a Pleroma instance with well... the exact kinda ruleset the name would imply) from being able to interact with users on the Gab test instance (they hadn't figured out how to disable federation at the time). The crime of FSE in this particular case? Ridiculing Gab users for paying money to access basic features that any other Mastodon/Pleroma instance could give them for free. I can list off quite a few other examples of notable "free speech zones" doing this sorta thing, but really it's not worth shining a light on most of them. It's always "free speech for me, not for thee" with these people. And the dumbest part is that if they were just open about it instead of bloviating about how supposedly important they think free speech absolutism is, I don't think most people would pay them any mind. You don't get this anger when the rules include in a clearly written way: "if I don't like what you're doing, for any reason, you're out" (also known as the escape hatch clause). It's when you write the rules in abstract ways that are supposed to be "fair" that you get this problem, and especially if you're bloviating about how the only rule you supposedly believe in is the right to free speech and "US law" (the only concession usually put in writing by these absolutists). Because then people will start beholding you to that level of enforcement and they will ridicule you for being a hypocrite on that ideal. [0]: Curious aside - Gab is not on the banned social media list. Wonder if Musk seeks that audience.

richbell 4y ago
> This is always how it goes. Free speech absolutists that run web communities basically always stop short the moment they feel like they are under threat (regardless of any actual threat). Years ago, I was banned from a "free speech" / skeptic subreddit because I corrected someone who turned out to be the head mod.
SahAssar 4y ago
> Even the most infamous of free speech platforms will just ban users who hurt the admins feelings. Out of curiosity: did 4chan ever try to ban anyone for talking about moot?