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> If the original Twitter crew had been about 30% less overtly willing to censor news, language, people, or ideas they didn’t like, Musk probably wouldn’t have
by medler 3y ago
> If the original Twitter crew had been about 30% less overtly willing to censor news, language, people, or ideas they didn’t like, Musk probably wouldn’t have bought the company, and the blues would still be in control of Twitter
The author makes the same mistake Elon made when he bought Twitter, namely, thinking that Twitter management was hellbent on pushing leftist propaganda, when really they were apolitical operators trying to make as much money as possible. And their masterstroke was convincing someone to overpay for their company by an enormous amount.
- c_crank 3y agoThe means by which Twitter could make money is by catering to advertisers, and those advertisers often had strict political biases. Musk complains about this often.
- jakelazaroff 3y agoThat’s fine, though. Why do we take for granted that the “town square” should be able to exist as a for-profit enterprise?
- c_crank 3y agoPeople are nostalgic for the days of the Federalist and Anti-Federalist papers when people were fine debating their opposing views in the papers without dropping the hammer down on one side for being morally repugnant.
- jakelazaroff 3y agoWho is “people”? Do Black people miss the days when you could pick up the paper and read people arguing for Jim Crow? My life would definitely not be improved if I had to listen to people telling me how Jews control the banks.
- c_crank 3y agoPeople like Musk who self identify as classical liberals, or whatever the faddish term for that happens to be. Going by surveys, a lot of black people are against increasing immigration. Openly crossing that line is often justification for dropping the internet hammer. One gets the sense that, at some point, the hammer was used with more restraint.
- ethanbond 3y agoOr it was just used against other people. You know, exiling gay kids from their families and friends has been a longtime tradition. Is that not “the hammer?”
- c_crank 3y agoIt's not the same hammer I'm discussing. The equivalent would be censorship of pleas made in favor of homosexual causes, which the US is not particularly known for.
- ethanbond 3y agoWhat? You don’t think women/homosexuals/minorities were barred from holding certain cultural megaphones?
- c_crank 3y agoFredick Douglass owned and published a newspaper that was not censored - when you look at abolitionist articles or early drafts from the Seneca Falls Convention, you are not likely to find a bunch of scribble marks or other equivalents to the [deleted] tag that litters the internet today.
- ethanbond 3y ago“X group wasn’t censored because I can find an instance of X that wasn’t censored” is quite the argument. You know you can find plenty of racist and sexist scribbles all over the internet, not [deleted]. According to your logic: proof that they are not censored!
- ethanbond 3y agoIt helps that neither of those sides were morally repugnant. When moral repugnance really did have to get addressed between a national divide, the hammer did get dropped down on one side of them (the Civil War).
- c_crank 3y agoSlavery wasn't a new thing when the Constitution was written. The divide between the North and the South was noted by several founding fathers as a nasty issue, and it was probably a mistake to unite the two territories in such a way to begin with.
- ethanbond 3y agoHmm it was only on the fringes of culture that people were strongly against slavery around the founding of the country. Then there was a “moral awakening” via the Quakers that made it less and less culturally viable until culminating in open warfare. So culture shifted underneath the issue, just like is happening today with all sorts of issues of moral repugnance.
- c_crank 3y agoThe moral shift played a part in galvanizing enthusiasm for the war, but the Civil War ultimately was started by Northern statists who were adamant about maintaining a firm control over the North American heartland. Recall that the Emancipation proclamation came three years into the war.
- jakelazaroff 3y agoAre you really pushing the Lost Cause narrative here? It’s revisionist history that’s widely rejected by historians. The main cause of the war was slavery. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Cause_of_the_Confederacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Cause_of_the_Confederacy
- 3y ago
- chasing 3y agoOn the other hand, if something’s morally repugnant it should be called out as such.
- JieJie 3y agoWhat about one that allows concessions outside, though? How might a vendor be able to set up shop, maybe for a small fee? Or should the public conversation be a designated no-enterprise zone? Ideally, ethics would prevent us from mixing business with politics and pleasure, but maybe there is a balance that would allow for a way to fund these social projects we say we value so highly, but turn out our pockets when it's time to drop a dollar into the plate as it gets passed by. I'm tired of watching democratic institutions shrivel and die only to be replaced by plastic replicas. Seemingly fundamental forces keep tearing down our Towers of Babel, and I wonder if we'll ever learn that the best organizational patterns for humanity are smaller groups responsible to and holding responsible the state. Whenever we try to do things bigger than that, we end up getting all authoritarian and creepy.
- jakelazaroff 3y agoI think the analogy has stretched past its breaking point, because I don’t quite understand what you’re saying.
- gingerrr 3y agoIt's not like their original comment is that opaque, but here's my attempt to break down (translate?): Are we going to continue to allow capitalist enterprise to have a say in public policy conversation (concessions stands outside the town square)? Ideally no from an ethics perspective, but then we as a populace need a way to and habit of contributing directly ourselves to fund social services ("dropping a dollar in the plate" - reference to collecting tithe during Catholic services). They're tired of seeing public services starved of funding, then privatized and replaced by corporate, profit-driven ("plastic") replicas. Basics of human nature keep undermining our attempts to build giant organizations together. We need to make and keep government a local, small-scale, accountable practice we all participate in, rather than one giant federal tent nobody is connected to - that gets Orwellian. Hope that helps and hope I represented it faithfully.
- JieJie 3y agoI was thinking specifically journalism and newspapers, which acted as our national "town squares" up until social media killed it. Advertisers would pay for a portion of the page and we would paste in their business card alongside the news and opinions. That's how we used to fund public debate. Now we fund it by watching advertisements scroll past tweets by journalists and politicians, debating and sharing memes. Meta and Twitter reap those profits now. "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one." –A.J. Liebling I just think it would be cool if the public had some kind of ownership over the debate, rather than someone else who gets to determine the terms under which it occurs. The internet was supposed to be our public square. Even better if the public can profit from all the money that gets generated from selling our attention. We can use that for public services, like you mention. You did a great job, though. Thanks.
- AnimalMuppet 3y agoWell, as far as I can see, the only options are for-profit, charity, and government-run. Of those, charity is undependable, and government-run has an obvious conflict of interest. For-profit worked for a couple of centuries in the form of newspapers. (Letters to the editor was the only part that was really a "town square", and that was subject to the whims of the editors. But for much of that time, there was competition between newspapers, so they tended to allow most viewpoints to be heard at least every now and then.) So for-profit worked... and then it didn't, at least in the form of newspapers. Twitter also worked, but it's even-handedness is in question, and there isn't good competition if you don't trust it to be honest.
- jakelazaroff 3y agoWhy does government have a conflicting interest? Like, when has the US government ever taken down a website that didn't contain illegal speech?
- AnimalMuppet 3y agoTaken down a website? Perhaps never. Now, what about a US government-run website? Do you trust them to keep that an open forum for criticism of Biden? Or Trump? Or the Congress that appropriates money to fund the website? I don't.
- jakelazaroff 3y agoMy point is that you can just make your own website!
- AnimalMuppet 3y agoMy point is that, if the government makes a "town square", you can't trust them to let it be an honest town square. Sure, you can make one yourself. But then it's either for-profit, or charity; it's not government. So you're answering something, but it's not what I said.
- GloomyBoots 3y agoYou’re not wrong about the advertisers but I wouldn’t cède the point they’re trying to refute either. People claim that executives are are purely motivated by money, but that just doesn’t hold up with the advertisers or with Twitter itself. They have their own political agendas, and time and again they are willing to sacrifice short term profit for long term political victories. Money is power. People who want power want to use it. They’re not just dragons sitting on their hoards.
- c_crank 3y agoIf you go down that road of thinking, you'll end up noticing that those with the most power usually aren't the most rich. Power is power, and it usually involves some butter, but more guns.
- lamontcg 3y ago> those advertisers often had strict political biases. yeah, those bloody socialists.
- c_crank 3y agoCuriously, many large corporations seems to be full of employees who believe strongly in socialism of some kind.
- rybosworld 3y agoRight-leaning users were banned more often than left-leaning users. https://psyarxiv.com/ay9q5 https://psyarxiv.com/ay9q5 The reason is that Conservative/Republican users of Twitter also tended to break the rules more often. Particularly in regards to sharing misinformation. Depending on which side of the aisle you lean, it's very easy to spin this one way vs the other.
- freitzkriesler2 3y agoMisinformation is in the eyes of the beholder and the best way to dismiss misinformation is to let it shine under the light of scrutiny. By banning it entirely, you let it fester which is where we're at today.
- lobf 3y agoNo, misinformation is objective, and allowing it to propagate lets it fester.
- c_crank 3y agoThe belief that wearing general purpose masks would prevent the spread of COVID 19 was misinformation that festered for quite some time.
- lobf 3y agoOkay buddy. Masks absolutely help reduce the spread of particulates but you can pretend that’s not true if you want.
- c_crank 3y agoMasks do reduce the spread of particulates by some amount. Reducing the spread of particulates by some amount has a negligible impact on the spread of COVID 19 and other respiratory viruses. To believe otherwise is, again, misinformation.
- zo1 3y agoYou could maybe argue they weren't pushing a leftist agenda, sure. But they conveniently didn't fight for freedom of speech either. They were just very comfortable so long as the prevailing opinion on the wider media matched their beliefs. The "right" doesn't have this luxury. Even the fringe left or far-left have a media "free pass" that they enjoy. And no one seems to understand this part of the criticism of the media by the right.
- Incipient 3y agoNot sure about that. Desantis seems to be having a jolly good time of making up random stuff and everyone going along with it. Don't get me wrong, both extremes in your politics are beyond messed up. The US is falling into irrelevance (slowly) and all y'all doing is trying to define what makes someone a woman haha
- tennisflyi 3y ago> when really they were apolitical operators trying to make as much money as possible. Yes. That’s it. From 37signals, Slow Ventures, to the most generous perks. It’s not for you. It’s for them.
- poplet 3y ago[flagged]
- foxes 3y agoLol, realistically it really isn't. The fact that there are plenty of complaints about muh leftist censorship is pretty indicative.
- WHYLEE1991 3y agoyeah this site has WAY more in common with 4chan's political leanings than say...the comment section of like metafilter or something.
- btreecat 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dang 3y ago"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents." "Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- uni_rule 3y agoTo me it still reads that more libertarian than anything else.