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When things were easy Elon Musk said that his concept of free speech means anything that's legal, and that all else was censorship. But when billions were at s

When things were easy Elon Musk said that his concept of free speech means anything that's legal, and that all else was censorship. But when billions were at stake, Elon's concept of free speech transformed: no shitting on Coke or Nestle because that makes Twitter risky to brands, no swastika by Kanye even though it's technically legal, no offhand mention of Mastodon because that's where some users are exiting to. And when reporters shit on Elon during a live voice chat, Elon swiftly removed the feature from the entire site. This coming from a guy who thinks it's fair play to repeatedly accuse a rescue worker of pedophilia during a deadly rescue mission, even going as far to clarify that he specifically means sex with underaged Thai boys.

user_named 4y ago
He doesn't care about anything or anybody other than himself, and will do and say whatever benefits himself in each situation. He has no morals and no principles.
- bartread 4y ago
  I don't know about that. I think he just approached Twitter like he approached building electric cars or rockets. The latter are both a series of (admittedly very hard) engineering and technical challenges to solve with few, if any, gnarly social or political issues to navigate other than those which inevitably arise in any growing or large company. The hard problems are all engineering and technical (probably regulatory too, in fairness). There will be a lot of failures along the way but, most of the time (barring things that are physically impossible, or orders of magnitude beyond current cutting edge manufacturing techniques), you can brute force your way through - or find an alternative approach - with enough R&D effort/money and enough smart people. But Twitter is nothing like this: it's all about the people, the politics, the social aspects, and simply having an end goal in sight and pushing hard towards it isn't going to get you to where you want to go - in fact, where you want to go may not even be possible due to different cultural and legal constraints around the globe. No disrespect to any engineers at Twitter but the code and infrastructure aren't the hard parts of that business at all. I don't know that I'd describe him as unprincipled, but he is perhaps quite naive along certain axes. I think this is actually relatively common amongst very successful people who haven't experienced that much in the way of substantial failure: they can be really bad at dealing with choppy waters when they arise (I've seen this from quite close quarters, as it happens) because it sort of deconstructs who they think they are. And you really only learn who you are when the going is tough.
  - pjc50 4y ago
    The trouble with the learning-by-crashing strategy is that it worked great for rockets, OK for self-driving cars on closed tracks, and terribly for Twitter because Twitter has people "aboard". Every time he tweaks the rules and "crashes" twitter, a bunch of people leave, build a new network elsewhere, and never come back. Or are permanently banned and can't appeal through the back channel like pg. (edit: the @garius "trust thermocline" concept is a good elaboration https://twitter.com/garius/status/1588115310124539904 https://twitter.com/garius/status/1588115310124539904 )
    - bartread 4y ago
      Oh, yeah, don't get me wrong: I'm giving my (unequivocally outsider's) perspective on how I think he fucked up, not excusing it.
    - badwolf 4y ago
      Thanks for sharing. The "trust thermocline" was a good short read.
  - eagleal 4y ago
    Tesla also got funded through zero-emissions vehicle credits so I'd say the problem is always political. Same for the Staged combustion cycle engines, wouldn't it been for the US gov access to the N1 descendants I seriously doubt they'd been able to make such a progress. Not sure why it should be different for a company like Twitter dependant on global access.
    - bartread 4y ago
      Sure, but getting those credits entails a much smaller group of people to avoid pissing off, and a much smaller corpus of regulation to avoid falling foul of. A much (much) larger proportion of the hard work with Tesla was on vehicle development. Just look at the story of the development of the original roadster, which started out in concept as a modified Lotus Elise, but ended up being basically a completely reengineered car, and the reengineering was made that much more difficult by starting from an existing platform rather than from scratch with a clean slate. With Twitter you have a clumsily handled set of layoffs, with lots of talk about Musk wanting to see code samples from engineers (and frankly way too much talk about Twitter's engineering in general), carried out in front of an already more-politicised-than-the-general-population userbase, features retired, introduced, withdrawn, etc., and in general lots of thrashing around. And all of this in view of an entire audience with a greater-than-the-general-population bias towards kicking off and taking matters viral. Tesla started small: Twitter was already (relatively) a giant company with thousands of employees. It's just a fundamentally less "make it soable" situation than a small, primarily engineering focussed, car startup.
dijit 4y ago
> even though it's technically legal, This hits home one of the things I consider to be a problem with the single platform approach. Swastika's are actually not legal in some parts of the world, in others they're taken as a symbol of peace. When there is content moderation it feels weirdly totalitarian because the political stances of (say: Europe) are wildly different than the polarised extremes of the USA. A platform should not moderate content, twitter (and facebook) want the perks of being a platform (being not legally culpable for content moderation) and the perks of being a closed community (strict moderation on issues they perceive as problematic, usually to investors). This is having your cake and eating it too. Twitter should not be a platform, it is beholden to a global standard and rules and culture are too diverse. The same is true with Facebook.
- mytailorisrich 4y ago
  Moderation should be carried out on a per jurisdiction basis, but that is obviously more complicated and costly (but I think major platforms already do that to an extent). Indeed, some things are perfectly legal in one country but illegal in another so an unique, global moderation policy would have to follow the smallest common denominator among all countries served, which would obviously minimise the extent of allowed content.
  - conradfr 4y ago
    Twitter actually does hide tweets in specific countries based on local legislations.
  - mrtksn 4y ago
    > Moderation should be carried out on a per jurisdiction basis How do you feel about deleting post that criticise Iranian politics and ban accounts showing support to protests in Iran? Only for the Iranian audience of course. Then how do you feel providing the list of accounts who shared certain images and messages to Iranian courts, knowing that some of them would be executed? Note: Twitter already does that in countries where operates. I guess they don't do it in Iran only because they can't operate in Iran as a business(sanctions) but they do it in Turkey since the Gezi protests in 2013. Turkey doesn't have capital punishment, instead they throw people in jail for years awaiting trail.
tawaycrypto 4y ago
Its not swastika for a milionth time
- tawaycrypto 4y ago
  [flagged]

user_named 4y ago

He doesn't care about anything or anybody other than himself, and will do and say whatever benefits himself in each situation. He has no morals and no principles.

bartread 4y ago
I don't know about that. I think he just approached Twitter like he approached building electric cars or rockets. The latter are both a series of (admittedly very hard) engineering and technical challenges to solve with few, if any, gnarly social or political issues to navigate other than those which inevitably arise in any growing or large company. The hard problems are all engineering and technical (probably regulatory too, in fairness). There will be a lot of failures along the way but, most of the time (barring things that are physically impossible, or orders of magnitude beyond current cutting edge manufacturing techniques), you can brute force your way through - or find an alternative approach - with enough R&D effort/money and enough smart people. But Twitter is nothing like this: it's all about the people, the politics, the social aspects, and simply having an end goal in sight and pushing hard towards it isn't going to get you to where you want to go - in fact, where you want to go may not even be possible due to different cultural and legal constraints around the globe. No disrespect to any engineers at Twitter but the code and infrastructure aren't the hard parts of that business at all. I don't know that I'd describe him as unprincipled, but he is perhaps quite naive along certain axes. I think this is actually relatively common amongst very successful people who haven't experienced that much in the way of substantial failure: they can be really bad at dealing with choppy waters when they arise (I've seen this from quite close quarters, as it happens) because it sort of deconstructs who they think they are. And you really only learn who you are when the going is tough.
- pjc50 4y ago
  The trouble with the learning-by-crashing strategy is that it worked great for rockets, OK for self-driving cars on closed tracks, and terribly for Twitter because Twitter has people "aboard". Every time he tweaks the rules and "crashes" twitter, a bunch of people leave, build a new network elsewhere, and never come back. Or are permanently banned and can't appeal through the back channel like pg. (edit: the @garius "trust thermocline" concept is a good elaboration https://twitter.com/garius/status/1588115310124539904 https://twitter.com/garius/status/1588115310124539904 )
  - bartread 4y ago
    Oh, yeah, don't get me wrong: I'm giving my (unequivocally outsider's) perspective on how I think he fucked up, not excusing it.
  - badwolf 4y ago
    Thanks for sharing. The "trust thermocline" was a good short read.
- eagleal 4y ago
  Tesla also got funded through zero-emissions vehicle credits so I'd say the problem is always political. Same for the Staged combustion cycle engines, wouldn't it been for the US gov access to the N1 descendants I seriously doubt they'd been able to make such a progress. Not sure why it should be different for a company like Twitter dependant on global access.
  - bartread 4y ago
    Sure, but getting those credits entails a much smaller group of people to avoid pissing off, and a much smaller corpus of regulation to avoid falling foul of. A much (much) larger proportion of the hard work with Tesla was on vehicle development. Just look at the story of the development of the original roadster, which started out in concept as a modified Lotus Elise, but ended up being basically a completely reengineered car, and the reengineering was made that much more difficult by starting from an existing platform rather than from scratch with a clean slate. With Twitter you have a clumsily handled set of layoffs, with lots of talk about Musk wanting to see code samples from engineers (and frankly way too much talk about Twitter's engineering in general), carried out in front of an already more-politicised-than-the-general-population userbase, features retired, introduced, withdrawn, etc., and in general lots of thrashing around. And all of this in view of an entire audience with a greater-than-the-general-population bias towards kicking off and taking matters viral. Tesla started small: Twitter was already (relatively) a giant company with thousands of employees. It's just a fundamentally less "make it soable" situation than a small, primarily engineering focussed, car startup.

dijit 4y ago

> even though it's technically legal, This hits home one of the things I consider to be a problem with the single platform approach. Swastika's are actually not legal in some parts of the world, in others they're taken as a symbol of peace. When there is content moderation it feels weirdly totalitarian because the political stances of (say: Europe) are wildly different than the polarised extremes of the USA. A platform should not moderate content, twitter (and facebook) want the perks of being a platform (being not legally culpable for content moderation) and the perks of being a closed community (strict moderation on issues they perceive as problematic, usually to investors). This is having your cake and eating it too. Twitter should not be a platform, it is beholden to a global standard and rules and culture are too diverse. The same is true with Facebook.

mytailorisrich 4y ago
Moderation should be carried out on a per jurisdiction basis, but that is obviously more complicated and costly (but I think major platforms already do that to an extent). Indeed, some things are perfectly legal in one country but illegal in another so an unique, global moderation policy would have to follow the smallest common denominator among all countries served, which would obviously minimise the extent of allowed content.
- conradfr 4y ago
  Twitter actually does hide tweets in specific countries based on local legislations.
- mrtksn 4y ago
  > Moderation should be carried out on a per jurisdiction basis How do you feel about deleting post that criticise Iranian politics and ban accounts showing support to protests in Iran? Only for the Iranian audience of course. Then how do you feel providing the list of accounts who shared certain images and messages to Iranian courts, knowing that some of them would be executed? Note: Twitter already does that in countries where operates. I guess they don't do it in Iran only because they can't operate in Iran as a business(sanctions) but they do it in Turkey since the Gezi protests in 2013. Turkey doesn't have capital punishment, instead they throw people in jail for years awaiting trail.

tawaycrypto 4y ago

Its not swastika for a milionth time

tawaycrypto 4y ago
[flagged]