4 ms·

You are ignoring the whole Verification process. It was the only platform where users could have interactions with prominent people in a variety of fields and k

You are ignoring the whole Verification process. It was the only platform where users could have interactions with prominent people in a variety of fields and know the interaction was legitimate. That mattered! Killing the verification system chased away many blue checks, who happened to generate a huge amount of traffic for the site. Musks politics on their own didn’t create problems. However, Musk’s tolerance for hate speech sure as hell did. There aren’t many major advertisers were willing to risk having their ad show up next to hard core hate speech.

memish 4y ago
Don't confuse tolerance for free speech with the dubious concept of hate speech and its selective application.
- hobs 4y ago
  Ah yes, that's why he banned all those journalists who spent time reporting on the lawsuits against him, because he's all for free speech. Nah, the dude is for his brand of free speech, which is you can hate the people he hates and you can do what he likes and you can stay on his website.
  - robby_w_g 4y ago
    Interesting how you provided a direct counter example and your comment got flagged for it. I thought the free speech absolutist crowd wouldn’t mind someone disagreeing with them
  - crazygringo 4y ago
    Wow. This is a totally legitimate, reasonable comment and you got flagged for it. I've actually never seen that on HN before -- every flagged comment I've ever looked at turned out to be full of abusive language and attacks. It makes me sad that multiple HN'ers flagged this. :(
ugh0 4y ago
[dead]
wpietri 4y ago
As somebody who used to do anti-abuse engineering for Twitter, maybe I'm biased here. But I don't think his politics are separable from his tolerance for hate speech. I think they're closely related. The tricky part here is, as you point to, not wanting to see people abused is turning out to be good business. That's why Twitter came around on hate speech, harassment, and the like. Claiming to be the "free speech wing of the free speech" party sounds great, and it's appealing certain types of people. But at the end of the day, a place has to choose. Either you keep the people who want to shout racial epithets or you keep the people who they're shouting at plus the ones who don't want to be around that. It's the that nazi bar Twitter thread, but at scale: https://www.upworthy.com/bartender-explains-why-he-swiftly-kicks-nazis-out-of-his-punk-bar-even-if-theyre-not-bothering-anyone https://www.upworthy.com/bartender-explains-why-he-swiftly-k... But back to politics. Racial resentment waxes and wanes in American history. Most of us know it went into decline after the civil war, during the Reconstruction. Many don't hear, though, that there was an upswing, known as the Nadir [1] that peaked in the early 1900s with events like the Tulsa Massacre [2]. This period includes the only time an American government was violently overthrown [3]. It waned and we eventually got the Civil Rights Movement, sometimes known as the Second Reconstruction. We're now in a period that some call the Second Nadir. Racial resentment has increased, and the US's political parties have sharply diverged on levels of racial resentment. One of the biggest political divides is around being "woke", which noted liberal Ron DeSantis defines as "the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them." The agreement with that also sharply diverges by party. And Musk has very much chosen a side, repeatedly rejecting "wokeism". Most people can dodge or ignore questions of systemic issues; it's bigger than their choices. But Musk just spent $44 billion to buy control of a major system for conversation. In Twitter's CEO seat, there are a lot of switches to flip, and few of them have a "neutral" position. E.g., You have to pick between the Nazis or the people they like to harass. Same deal for the people who hate black people, women, Mexicans, trans people, queer people, et cetera, ad nauseam. The "woke" move is pretty clear here: you decide you want your platform to be a reasonably humane and inclusive space. The anti-"woke" move is also clear: you gut the anti-abuse efforts and turn the terrible people loose (perhaps occasionally nuking a few accounts when they cause too much bad press). All in the name of freedom, of course. The problem for Musk is that's terrible for business. Even if you don't care at all about systemic injustice, most people find distasteful the ugliness that drives ethnic cleansing campaigns, digital and otherwise. The US consumer economy is diverse enough that businesses can no longer focus exclusively on the (shrinking) white audience; they want all the eyeballs. He's supposedly a business genius, so we'll see which breaks first: Twitter's financials or his anti-"woke" politics. [1] known as the Nadir: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadir_of_American_race_relations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadir_of_American_race_relatio... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilmington_insurrection_of_1898 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilmington_insurrection_of_189...

memish 4y ago

Don't confuse tolerance for free speech with the dubious concept of hate speech and its selective application.

hobs 4y ago
Ah yes, that's why he banned all those journalists who spent time reporting on the lawsuits against him, because he's all for free speech. Nah, the dude is for his brand of free speech, which is you can hate the people he hates and you can do what he likes and you can stay on his website.
- robby_w_g 4y ago
  Interesting how you provided a direct counter example and your comment got flagged for it. I thought the free speech absolutist crowd wouldn’t mind someone disagreeing with them
- crazygringo 4y ago
  Wow. This is a totally legitimate, reasonable comment and you got flagged for it. I've actually never seen that on HN before -- every flagged comment I've ever looked at turned out to be full of abusive language and attacks. It makes me sad that multiple HN'ers flagged this. :(

ugh0 4y ago

[dead]

wpietri 4y ago

As somebody who used to do anti-abuse engineering for Twitter, maybe I'm biased here. But I don't think his politics are separable from his tolerance for hate speech. I think they're closely related. The tricky part here is, as you point to, not wanting to see people abused is turning out to be good business. That's why Twitter came around on hate speech, harassment, and the like. Claiming to be the "free speech wing of the free speech" party sounds great, and it's appealing certain types of people. But at the end of the day, a place has to choose. Either you keep the people who want to shout racial epithets or you keep the people who they're shouting at plus the ones who don't want to be around that. It's the that nazi bar Twitter thread, but at scale: https://www.upworthy.com/bartender-explains-why-he-swiftly-kicks-nazis-out-of-his-punk-bar-even-if-theyre-not-bothering-anyone https://www.upworthy.com/bartender-explains-why-he-swiftly-k... But back to politics. Racial resentment waxes and wanes in American history. Most of us know it went into decline after the civil war, during the Reconstruction. Many don't hear, though, that there was an upswing, known as the Nadir [1] that peaked in the early 1900s with events like the Tulsa Massacre [2]. This period includes the only time an American government was violently overthrown [3]. It waned and we eventually got the Civil Rights Movement, sometimes known as the Second Reconstruction. We're now in a period that some call the Second Nadir. Racial resentment has increased, and the US's political parties have sharply diverged on levels of racial resentment. One of the biggest political divides is around being "woke", which noted liberal Ron DeSantis defines as "the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them." The agreement with that also sharply diverges by party. And Musk has very much chosen a side, repeatedly rejecting "wokeism". Most people can dodge or ignore questions of systemic issues; it's bigger than their choices. But Musk just spent $44 billion to buy control of a major system for conversation. In Twitter's CEO seat, there are a lot of switches to flip, and few of them have a "neutral" position. E.g., You have to pick between the Nazis or the people they like to harass. Same deal for the people who hate black people, women, Mexicans, trans people, queer people, et cetera, ad nauseam. The "woke" move is pretty clear here: you decide you want your platform to be a reasonably humane and inclusive space. The anti-"woke" move is also clear: you gut the anti-abuse efforts and turn the terrible people loose (perhaps occasionally nuking a few accounts when they cause too much bad press). All in the name of freedom, of course. The problem for Musk is that's terrible for business. Even if you don't care at all about systemic injustice, most people find distasteful the ugliness that drives ethnic cleansing campaigns, digital and otherwise. The US consumer economy is diverse enough that businesses can no longer focus exclusively on the (shrinking) white audience; they want all the eyeballs. He's supposedly a business genius, so we'll see which breaks first: Twitter's financials or his anti-"woke" politics. [1] known as the Nadir: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadir_of_American_race_relations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadir_of_American_race_relatio... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilmington_insurrection_of_1898 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilmington_insurrection_of_189...