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It appears that you can't even "like" a post containing the word "substack", which has the effect of suppressing discussion of the fact that substack is shadow-

by paulgb 4y ago

It appears that you can't even "like" a post containing the word "substack", which has the effect of suppressing discussion of the fact that substack is shadow-banned on twitter. Edit: tedunangst correctly points out that the tweet in question also contained a link to substack (though to documentation, not a newsletter) https://twitter.com/paulgb/status/1644336599914651649 https://twitter.com/paulgb/status/1644336599914651649 So is anyone around still willing to defend Elon Musk's “freedom of speech includes speech I don't like” promise, or has everyone admitted that that was all a farce?

paxys 4y ago
The hardest thing in the world is to get a stubborn person to admit they were wrong. They will double and triple and quadruple down on their stance even if they themselves are hurting because of it. This really describes the entire American political climate right now.
- api 4y ago
  It’s worse. The various cults of the American political landscape seem to almost delight in being stubbornly wrong as long as it angers the other side. The goal is to own the libs, offend the fundies, troll the MAGAts, trigger the boomers, whatever. People just want to fight. The ideas seem like a side show. Maybe it’s all just a pressure valve for rage over rapid change and socioeconomic uncertainty.
  - dotcoma 4y ago
    I live in Italy a it’s more or less the same here.
  - libsarescum 4y ago
    [dead]
  - kgwxd 4y ago
    People existing: ... People mad certain people exist: We will directly violate your rights every chance we get! People existing: You can't do that, we'll fight back. People mad certain people exist: Help! We're being oppressed! Some people want to fight, some people need to defend themselves from those people.
  - DesiLurker 4y ago
    Yes BoTh SiDeS aRe SaMe!
- kragen 4y ago
  contrary to the implications of your comment, elon musk doesn't seem to be doubling down on his stance favoring free speech
  - UncleEntity 4y ago
    He’s doubling down on not being wrong to buy twitter for somewhat dodgy reasons?
  - paxys 4y ago
    Elon has never had a stance favoring free speech. His behavior has been consistent since the day he took over Twitter – anything he likes will be amplified, anything he does not will be removed.
    - papito 4y ago
      Musk's behavior and what he claims his stance is are different things. And, in fact, we call this kind of diversion "hypocrisy".
tedunangst 4y ago
That tweet contains a link to substack, not just the word.
- paulgb 4y ago
  You're right, thanks. I've edited my comment.
jedberg 4y ago
Everyone who starts a social media site begins with the premise of "I'll allow all legal speech". Facebook, Twitter, reddit. They all started out unmoderated. But then as you get into it, you realize that you just can't do that if you want to make money. Take reddit for example. Shaming fat people is legal. Being antisemitic is legal. Being a racist is legal. Most pornography is legal. But it turns out almost no one wants to spend money supporting that. So it makes sense to block things that hurt the bottom line if you are running a business. To 4chan's credit, they never cared about money, and so they were probably the freest platform out there that somehow didn't devolve into nothing but racist hate, which is usually how absolute free speech social media go (although they certainly have their fair share of it). Musk was like any other social media outsider looking in -- "Why can't they just allow all legal speech??" And then his pocketbook was on the line and he realized why.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > Musk was like any other social media outsider looking in – “Why can’t they just allow all legal speech??” And then his pocketbook was on the line and he realized why. Musk started new, though different, active moderation from very early on, and as he has escalated that it hasn’t been mostly in ways that contribute to Twitter profitability (it may be in his financial interest more indirectly, through currying favor with a particular political faction, but that’s not indicative of a discovery rather than his initial motivation for buying Twitter.)
- azangru 4y ago
  > But then as you get into it, you realize that you just can't do that if you want to make money How do other networks survive? Gettr, Rumble, Truth.social? Locals? Is parler still around by the way? Arent these crowds sufficiently large to want to advertise to, or to monetize in some other way?
  - bmarquez 4y ago
    I use Rumble and Locals frequently. Basically they're large enough now that normal creators (and not just those banned for extreme content) will post there, so if someone has both a YouTube and a Rumble, I watch the Rumble to support competition to Google. Locals has more of a Patreon-like model and isn't affected much by advertising. Gettr and Truth.social seem to be declining (IMO those two should merge because their user demographic is the same.)
azangru 4y ago
> So is anyone around still willing to defend Elon Musk's “freedom of speech includes speech I don't like” promise, or has everyone admitted that that was all a farce? Not that I want to defend Musk - I've heard of (not experienced directly; I am not a Twitter user) so many screw-ups and back-peddling that my opinion of him has dropped significantly - but presumably they regard Substack as a competitor, and they do not want to drive their traffic to the competitor (as before they tried to stop driving traffic to Mastodon). Is this really a free speech issue?
- graeme 4y ago
  Twitter shut down its substack competitor
  - starkparker 4y ago
    Substack just launched its Twitter competitor, called Notes: https://on.substack.com/p/introducing-notes https://on.substack.com/p/introducing-notes
- guelo 4y ago
  Yes? There is no business profit exception to free speech.
  - yucky 4y ago
    As we've heard millions of times before when the shoe was on the other foot, this is not a free speech issue. Even more so now that Twitter is a private company.
    - bena 4y ago
      The issue isn't about the position itself, but who is claiming it. Or on whose behalf it is being claimed. Musk pitched a $44 billion fit because Twitter wasn't "free speech enough" for a "free speech absolutist" like him. So he bought it and said he'd allow all legal speech on it. All of these moves are directly counter to Musk's stated positions. Furthermore, these moves are more capricious. You'll just never know what's not going to be allowed tomorrow. Or what decisions will be reversed the next day. Before, who was making the moderation decisions at Twitter was opaque. But you knew their guidelines. Inciting an insurrection should be against Terms of Service in general. Now, we know who is making the decisions, but we have no fucking clue as to why they're being made. Or, we know why. Because these entities have offended Musk in some way. But as to what will cause him offense on any given day, we have no idea.
hn2017 4y ago
People who still support Musk at this point despite many scandals have had their head in the sand for months and won't be persuaded. As someone who used to be a Musk fan, it's disheartening to see him become radicalized.
- bmelton 4y ago
  It's always baffled me that people seem so intent to need to take the whole person when evaluating anything they've done. Some actions offer color for their current activities, most don't. Someone considered to be "bad" in whatever aspect still has good qualities, people that love them, and likely, kindness in their hearts. A good writer who is a bigot is still a good writer. Elon still has things he's smart about, and things he's dumb about. But as it sits, if I'm a fan of the work Elon has done with SpaceX or Tesla, I have to qualify those things because the assumption is that I've just cosigned every dumb/negative thing he's ever said, when that isn't true.
  - lanstin 4y ago
    I put a trans flag on my Model 3, just to try to make this point. But Tesla was just again found guilty of abhorrent racism to their workers so perhaps the greyness of Elon’s moral abilities is more pervasive than it seemed at first.
  - Eisenstein 4y ago
    It isn't your fault, but when someone jumps on a soap box and cries for attention and generally acts mean, spiteful, and petty -- and refuses to admit that they are wrong about anything -- people tend to really dislike them. And you can claim that we should be able to remove actions from author but that is not human nature. When you call a genuinely good, self-sacrificing person a 'pedophile' because they refused to praise your showcase gimmick, people tend to look back at everything you have done previously in the light of 'is everything good I have heard about this person a forced narrative?'. You can't walk back from that. This is why reputations are so important -- it doesn't matter if you solved world hunger -- when people find out you are a bully who takes credit for other people's work and refuses to acknowledge criticism and fires people because you are in a bad mood then they are going to associate you with that and doubt that you actually did all that much to solve hunger in the first place. You can complain about human nature as much as you want, but a lot of the time there is a good reason for it. People who consistently lie probably didn't do all the good things you thought they did, for one.
yucky 4y ago
I'm old enough to remember when we were told Twitter isn't the government so this isn't a free speech issue and if people don't like it they can build their own platform and blah blah blah.. Does that still hold now?
- paulgb 4y ago
  Yes, that still holds. Nobody is forcing Twitter to be a free speech platform. It was Elon's claim that it would become one under him, and he garnered a lot of support on the basis of that idea, only to repeatedly make fools of people who fell for it.
- papito 4y ago
  So, the people who were defending Musk before now finally "see" the difference between moderation and free speech, and even point it out. So, was that "free speech absolutism" even argued in good faith, I wonder, or was it at all performative outrage at nothing, to own the libs?
  - yucky 4y ago
    I think most people against censorship are still against it. I just find it ironic that the people who supported censorship before are now up in arms.
    - dorkwood 4y ago
      I’d like to hear more about this kind of thing. Has Twitter censored brands like this in the past?
      - _djo_ 4y ago
        No. Not before Musk took over. For one, it’s the kind of thing likely to get you sued for anti-competitive practices.
      - yucky 4y ago
        They banned NY Post for reporting on Hunter Biden's laptop and the contents showing "10% for the big guy" in reference to his father getting kickbacks on some shady Ukrainian and Chinese deals that Hunter facilitated.
VirusNewbie 4y ago
>So is anyone around still willing to defend Elon Musk's “freedom of speech includes speech I don't like” promise, or has everyone admitted that that was all a farce? This is absolutely consistent with what he's said over and over before the twitter takeover. He said he has no problem with limiting the exposure of distasteful tweets, but he doesn't want to ban people or PREVENT people from posting. His answer to "can people post hateful things" has always been "up to a point yes, we'll let them but we will also take measures to prevent it from being amplified in any way".
- flangola7 4y ago
  He has not only banned from the platform but openly fired employees who said critical things of him on it. He has absolutely no problem silencing people.
  - VirusNewbie 4y ago
    I've...never heard that he banned people who were critical of him. Do you have a link or an example?
    - kevviiinn 4y ago
      Well he just silenced the competitor substack, which is the article you're commenting on
      - VirusNewbie 4y ago
        Holy shit have you even followed the thread you are commenting on? We just talked about how he did not silence substack, what he did was refuse to amplify it. Do you have any evidence he silenced it or are you changing the definition mid conversation?
        kevviiinn 4y ago
        Preventing people from interacting with tweets effectively silences the conversation
willcipriano 4y ago
We would have to start a little further back wouldn't we? Those who are demanding free speech on Twitter all of the sudden, I thought it was a private platform, what happened?
- kevviiinn 4y ago
  What happened to Elon claiming he wanted free speech? That stopped pretty quickly after he took over twitter
tiedieconderoga 4y ago
Maybe Twitter users can learn from how Chinese netizens work around their microblogging censors. Once you realize that a keyword like "substack" is banned, you start using similar-sounding standin words. "Stacksub", "sub stack", "scooby snack", and so on. Keep the censors busy, and the blocklists full of nonsense.
- tmpz22 4y ago
  American TikTok users have been using the term "Mascara" as an alternate for discussing Sexual Assault which is deranked/censored/more-heavily-moderated. I fear its a cat and mouse game. Once something goes viral enough the moderation team will notice it too.
- archagon 4y ago
  One nice thing about democracy is that you can opt out of a service if you don't like its policies. This all seems a bit silly when you can move over to Mastodon or similar.
  - tiedieconderoga 4y ago
    Sure, I can. But I can't force other people to, at least not without changing the definition of "opt". If people insist on using it, they'd may as well be internet-y about it.
paulddraper 4y ago
I'll defend "freedom of speech includes speech I don't like." I'm unsure of the promise you refer to. I approve of Twitter's recent improvements on free speech. I don't approve of shadowbanning a competitor, though I understand why. Best of luck!
Laaas 4y ago
Even Matt Taibbi has stopped defending Elon: https://open.substack.com/pub/taibbi/p/the-craziest-friday-ever https://open.substack.com/pub/taibbi/p/the-craziest-friday-e... Incidentally, I started using Substack because of this. Talk about Streisand Effect.
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  "'I never thought leopards would eat MY face,' sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party."

by paulgb 4y ago

paxys 4y ago

The hardest thing in the world is to get a stubborn person to admit they were wrong. They will double and triple and quadruple down on their stance even if they themselves are hurting because of it. This really describes the entire American political climate right now.

api 4y ago
It’s worse. The various cults of the American political landscape seem to almost delight in being stubbornly wrong as long as it angers the other side. The goal is to own the libs, offend the fundies, troll the MAGAts, trigger the boomers, whatever. People just want to fight. The ideas seem like a side show. Maybe it’s all just a pressure valve for rage over rapid change and socioeconomic uncertainty.
- dotcoma 4y ago
  I live in Italy a it’s more or less the same here.
- libsarescum 4y ago
  [dead]
- kgwxd 4y ago
  People existing: ... People mad certain people exist: We will directly violate your rights every chance we get! People existing: You can't do that, we'll fight back. People mad certain people exist: Help! We're being oppressed! Some people want to fight, some people need to defend themselves from those people.
- DesiLurker 4y ago
  Yes BoTh SiDeS aRe SaMe!
kragen 4y ago
contrary to the implications of your comment, elon musk doesn't seem to be doubling down on his stance favoring free speech
- UncleEntity 4y ago
  He’s doubling down on not being wrong to buy twitter for somewhat dodgy reasons?
- paxys 4y ago
  Elon has never had a stance favoring free speech. His behavior has been consistent since the day he took over Twitter – anything he likes will be amplified, anything he does not will be removed.
  - papito 4y ago
    Musk's behavior and what he claims his stance is are different things. And, in fact, we call this kind of diversion "hypocrisy".

tedunangst 4y ago

That tweet contains a link to substack, not just the word.

paulgb 4y ago
You're right, thanks. I've edited my comment.

jedberg 4y ago

Everyone who starts a social media site begins with the premise of "I'll allow all legal speech". Facebook, Twitter, reddit. They all started out unmoderated. But then as you get into it, you realize that you just can't do that if you want to make money. Take reddit for example. Shaming fat people is legal. Being antisemitic is legal. Being a racist is legal. Most pornography is legal. But it turns out almost no one wants to spend money supporting that. So it makes sense to block things that hurt the bottom line if you are running a business. To 4chan's credit, they never cared about money, and so they were probably the freest platform out there that somehow didn't devolve into nothing but racist hate, which is usually how absolute free speech social media go (although they certainly have their fair share of it). Musk was like any other social media outsider looking in -- "Why can't they just allow all legal speech??" And then his pocketbook was on the line and he realized why.

dragonwriter 4y ago
> Musk was like any other social media outsider looking in – “Why can’t they just allow all legal speech??” And then his pocketbook was on the line and he realized why. Musk started new, though different, active moderation from very early on, and as he has escalated that it hasn’t been mostly in ways that contribute to Twitter profitability (it may be in his financial interest more indirectly, through currying favor with a particular political faction, but that’s not indicative of a discovery rather than his initial motivation for buying Twitter.)
azangru 4y ago
> But then as you get into it, you realize that you just can't do that if you want to make money How do other networks survive? Gettr, Rumble, Truth.social? Locals? Is parler still around by the way? Arent these crowds sufficiently large to want to advertise to, or to monetize in some other way?
- bmarquez 4y ago
  I use Rumble and Locals frequently. Basically they're large enough now that normal creators (and not just those banned for extreme content) will post there, so if someone has both a YouTube and a Rumble, I watch the Rumble to support competition to Google. Locals has more of a Patreon-like model and isn't affected much by advertising. Gettr and Truth.social seem to be declining (IMO those two should merge because their user demographic is the same.)

azangru 4y ago

> So is anyone around still willing to defend Elon Musk's “freedom of speech includes speech I don't like” promise, or has everyone admitted that that was all a farce? Not that I want to defend Musk - I've heard of (not experienced directly; I am not a Twitter user) so many screw-ups and back-peddling that my opinion of him has dropped significantly - but presumably they regard Substack as a competitor, and they do not want to drive their traffic to the competitor (as before they tried to stop driving traffic to Mastodon). Is this really a free speech issue?

graeme 4y ago
Twitter shut down its substack competitor
- starkparker 4y ago
  Substack just launched its Twitter competitor, called Notes: https://on.substack.com/p/introducing-notes https://on.substack.com/p/introducing-notes
guelo 4y ago
Yes? There is no business profit exception to free speech.
- yucky 4y ago
  As we've heard millions of times before when the shoe was on the other foot, this is not a free speech issue. Even more so now that Twitter is a private company.
  - bena 4y ago
    The issue isn't about the position itself, but who is claiming it. Or on whose behalf it is being claimed. Musk pitched a $44 billion fit because Twitter wasn't "free speech enough" for a "free speech absolutist" like him. So he bought it and said he'd allow all legal speech on it. All of these moves are directly counter to Musk's stated positions. Furthermore, these moves are more capricious. You'll just never know what's not going to be allowed tomorrow. Or what decisions will be reversed the next day. Before, who was making the moderation decisions at Twitter was opaque. But you knew their guidelines. Inciting an insurrection should be against Terms of Service in general. Now, we know who is making the decisions, but we have no fucking clue as to why they're being made. Or, we know why. Because these entities have offended Musk in some way. But as to what will cause him offense on any given day, we have no idea.

hn2017 4y ago

People who still support Musk at this point despite many scandals have had their head in the sand for months and won't be persuaded. As someone who used to be a Musk fan, it's disheartening to see him become radicalized.

bmelton 4y ago
It's always baffled me that people seem so intent to need to take the whole person when evaluating anything they've done. Some actions offer color for their current activities, most don't. Someone considered to be "bad" in whatever aspect still has good qualities, people that love them, and likely, kindness in their hearts. A good writer who is a bigot is still a good writer. Elon still has things he's smart about, and things he's dumb about. But as it sits, if I'm a fan of the work Elon has done with SpaceX or Tesla, I have to qualify those things because the assumption is that I've just cosigned every dumb/negative thing he's ever said, when that isn't true.
- lanstin 4y ago
  I put a trans flag on my Model 3, just to try to make this point. But Tesla was just again found guilty of abhorrent racism to their workers so perhaps the greyness of Elon’s moral abilities is more pervasive than it seemed at first.
- Eisenstein 4y ago
  It isn't your fault, but when someone jumps on a soap box and cries for attention and generally acts mean, spiteful, and petty -- and refuses to admit that they are wrong about anything -- people tend to really dislike them. And you can claim that we should be able to remove actions from author but that is not human nature. When you call a genuinely good, self-sacrificing person a 'pedophile' because they refused to praise your showcase gimmick, people tend to look back at everything you have done previously in the light of 'is everything good I have heard about this person a forced narrative?'. You can't walk back from that. This is why reputations are so important -- it doesn't matter if you solved world hunger -- when people find out you are a bully who takes credit for other people's work and refuses to acknowledge criticism and fires people because you are in a bad mood then they are going to associate you with that and doubt that you actually did all that much to solve hunger in the first place. You can complain about human nature as much as you want, but a lot of the time there is a good reason for it. People who consistently lie probably didn't do all the good things you thought they did, for one.

yucky 4y ago

I'm old enough to remember when we were told Twitter isn't the government so this isn't a free speech issue and if people don't like it they can build their own platform and blah blah blah.. Does that still hold now?

paulgb 4y ago
Yes, that still holds. Nobody is forcing Twitter to be a free speech platform. It was Elon's claim that it would become one under him, and he garnered a lot of support on the basis of that idea, only to repeatedly make fools of people who fell for it.
papito 4y ago
So, the people who were defending Musk before now finally "see" the difference between moderation and free speech, and even point it out. So, was that "free speech absolutism" even argued in good faith, I wonder, or was it at all performative outrage at nothing, to own the libs?
- yucky 4y ago
  I think most people against censorship are still against it. I just find it ironic that the people who supported censorship before are now up in arms.
  - dorkwood 4y ago
    I’d like to hear more about this kind of thing. Has Twitter censored brands like this in the past?
    - _djo_ 4y ago
      No. Not before Musk took over. For one, it’s the kind of thing likely to get you sued for anti-competitive practices.
    - yucky 4y ago
      They banned NY Post for reporting on Hunter Biden's laptop and the contents showing "10% for the big guy" in reference to his father getting kickbacks on some shady Ukrainian and Chinese deals that Hunter facilitated.

VirusNewbie 4y ago

>So is anyone around still willing to defend Elon Musk's “freedom of speech includes speech I don't like” promise, or has everyone admitted that that was all a farce? This is absolutely consistent with what he's said over and over before the twitter takeover. He said he has no problem with limiting the exposure of distasteful tweets, but he doesn't want to ban people or PREVENT people from posting. His answer to "can people post hateful things" has always been "up to a point yes, we'll let them but we will also take measures to prevent it from being amplified in any way".

flangola7 4y ago
He has not only banned from the platform but openly fired employees who said critical things of him on it. He has absolutely no problem silencing people.
- VirusNewbie 4y ago
  I've...never heard that he banned people who were critical of him. Do you have a link or an example?
  - kevviiinn 4y ago
    Well he just silenced the competitor substack, which is the article you're commenting on
    - VirusNewbie 4y ago
      Holy shit have you even followed the thread you are commenting on? We just talked about how he did not silence substack, what he did was refuse to amplify it. Do you have any evidence he silenced it or are you changing the definition mid conversation?
      - kevviiinn 4y ago
        Preventing people from interacting with tweets effectively silences the conversation

willcipriano 4y ago

We would have to start a little further back wouldn't we? Those who are demanding free speech on Twitter all of the sudden, I thought it was a private platform, what happened?

kevviiinn 4y ago
What happened to Elon claiming he wanted free speech? That stopped pretty quickly after he took over twitter

tiedieconderoga 4y ago

Maybe Twitter users can learn from how Chinese netizens work around their microblogging censors. Once you realize that a keyword like "substack" is banned, you start using similar-sounding standin words. "Stacksub", "sub stack", "scooby snack", and so on. Keep the censors busy, and the blocklists full of nonsense.

tmpz22 4y ago
American TikTok users have been using the term "Mascara" as an alternate for discussing Sexual Assault which is deranked/censored/more-heavily-moderated. I fear its a cat and mouse game. Once something goes viral enough the moderation team will notice it too.
archagon 4y ago
One nice thing about democracy is that you can opt out of a service if you don't like its policies. This all seems a bit silly when you can move over to Mastodon or similar.
- tiedieconderoga 4y ago
  Sure, I can. But I can't force other people to, at least not without changing the definition of "opt". If people insist on using it, they'd may as well be internet-y about it.

paulddraper 4y ago

I'll defend "freedom of speech includes speech I don't like." I'm unsure of the promise you refer to. I approve of Twitter's recent improvements on free speech. I don't approve of shadowbanning a competitor, though I understand why. Best of luck!

Laaas 4y ago

Even Matt Taibbi has stopped defending Elon: https://open.substack.com/pub/taibbi/p/the-craziest-friday-ever https://open.substack.com/pub/taibbi/p/the-craziest-friday-e... Incidentally, I started using Substack because of this. Talk about Streisand Effect.

ceejayoz 4y ago
"'I never thought leopards would eat MY face,' sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party."