Many commentators seem to think this is a sudden, recent backpedaling from a previous absolutist view on free speech. However, Musk has been promoting the "freedom of speech" vs "freedom of reach" distinction for a while, at least months before his takeover, including describing how such a policy should be implemented at Twitter.
Here's one example quote from June, 2022:
“I think there’s this big difference between freedom of speech and freedom of reach in that one can, obviously, let’s say in the United States go in the middle of Times Square and pretty much yell anything you want. You’ll annoy the people around you, but you’re kind of allowed to just sort of yell whatever you want in a crowded public place, more or less, apart from 'this is robbery' — probably that would get you in trouble.
“So but then whatever you say, however controversial, does not need to then be broadcast to the whole country. So I think generally the approach of Twitter should be to let people say what they want to do within the bounds of the law, but then limit who sees that...”
That analogy doesn’t really fit with the model of Twitter. If we are using the town/time square example, what Elon is describing is the digital version of putting a noise-cancelling box around the people saying “bad” things so that nobody can hear them.
A message spreads on Twitter because individuals on Twitter amplify it (with engagement, retweets etc.) which is itself a form of speech: if you say something bad, and I retweet it, I am engaging in speech. Imagine a piece of land with 500 million people on it: a person 500 million people away from you cannot hear you, but if you say something and people choose to repeat it until it reaches that person… that’s Twitter. To prevent that is, in any framing, limiting free speech.
Twitter has some magical engagement-driving algorithms (for example, the homepage) but these are not the primary driver of engagement/reach on Twitter, so they could be removed entirely and this problem would remain.
So you’re probably right to say this isn’t a sudden 180 on his thoughts, but it still highlights how faulty his framing of free speech is.
> ...so they could be removed entirely and this problem would remain.
Which problem? Seriously: the only legitimate problem I know of is that Twitter gives artificial reach to things via algorithmic engagement. They literally send me push notifications for tweets their algorithm thinks is interesting.
If you retweet something some asshole says and I don't like it, I should probably just unfollow you because you could have just screenshotted the original tweet and included the image... that was you actively sending that content, and wasn't the original anymore.
(FWIW, the reason I don't trust this is because I actually further disagree with your assertion that the algorithms aren't causing reach, because Twitter no longer does linear timelines: everything you see, including from your followers, has been curated by the engagement-driving algorithm, and so if he starts down-modding stuff then it actually will work and actually will reduce reach as you will be less likely to see it even if the people you follow retweet it.)
My point is that the algorithms used by Twitter did not create the problem of bad tweets having reach. Elon could turn off every piece of engagement-hacking functionality within the Twitter system and it would not solve the problem. The algorithms just exist to eek out better engagement numbers.
Twitter provides reach to speech. You cannot remove reach from Twitter without rendering Twitter useless. Pre-Elon Twitter addressed the problem of giving bad speech reach by removing the bad speech. Elon’s “free speech absolutist” position is that removing speech is wrong so he’s going to remove the reach… which has the same outcome as removing the speech.
I think you’re vastly overestimating how much the algorithms matter, they’re not relevant to the problem Elon is trying to address.
> If we are using the town/time square example, what Elon is describing is the digital version of putting a noise-cancelling box around the people saying “bad” things so that nobody can hear them.
I'd equate it more to people in Nebraska can't hear the guy yelling in Times Square, nor should they.
If people like this guy and want to hear him, they can go to Nebraska and listen to him (follow on Twitter).
If he does something outlandish and makes the national news, people will know about it (a lot of retweets).
That’s how Twitter works already — that’s how the “filter bubble” concept is able to exist, you’re only exposed to things in your self-selected bubble.
What Elon is describing (as I understand it based on the limited information provided) is restricting reach within your network, i.e: you tweet something bad, the tweet won’t show up on your followers feed.
Basically shadow banning, which a lot of the “anti-woke” brigade have been complaining about for years and thought Musk would stop. Unsurprisingly, it turns out it’s more complicated to run a social media site than some people might think.
This, exactly. Although I'm still convinced that at least 90% of cases where people complain about shadowbanning are nothing more than them being unable to handle the idea that others just aren't all that interested in what they have to say.
The problem is there’s fundamentally no difference for the user posting such things. They both result in low engagement, and the tools deliberately and necessarily don’t differentiate, after all you kind of can’t tell the banned individual. So they just can’t tell and it exacerbates their view it’s stacked against them.
> you tweet something bad, the tweet won’t show up on your followers feed
As far as I can tell, this is already how Twitter works.
I have plenty of people I follow who I almost never see tweets from anymore in my timeline, but if I go to their accounts directly I can see they are saying a lot of things.
Are you using the chronological timeline? If you're using the algorithmic timeline, this can happen even if a user isn't shadowbanned. Facebook does this too.
Any meddling? Like when people of one ethnic group use social media to organize a massacre of another group (as has happened in a number of countries)? Social media have correctly tried to suppress that, and I worry about what happens when people who speak the language get fired because they aren't coders.
Your own example is the best argument against such censorship. Myanmar is a heavily censored military dictatorship, the violence is against the Rohingya is state sanctioned. Journalists have been arrested for as much as reporting on it:
>So you’re probably right to say this isn’t a sudden 180 on his thoughts, but it still highlights how faulty his framing of free speech is.
I still don't understand what his logic is. What is the philosophical value of free speech if no one is able to hear that speech? Is his viewpoint that free speech is just about babbling on into an empty void? What is the value in protecting that? How does one argue that shadowbanning isn't infringing on someone's speech. And for the record, I think shadowbanning is generally a good thing for online communities, but I also support outright bans and don't go around pretending I'm a free speech absolutist.
Charitably, I guess the idea is that people won't have their accounts banned for previously bannable hate speech, so their other tweets are still handled normally.
I don't think there's any coherent principle, and in practice it really encourages bad actors to find exactly where the line is.
He’s not making it so many people can’t read a tweet, or making it so certain tweets can’t become popular, he’s making it so twitter won’t promote said tweet.
It can be regarded a positive thing insofar that it constitutes a limit on twitters ability to censor.
In a world of bots and sock-puppets, it feels pretty far from a town square example already. If you acknowledge that you won't ever be able to stay ahead of bot and sock-puppet detection enough to remove it from the platform (and no one seems to think that's a winnable contest for the platform)), you're left with letting that drown out the town square, or to deemphasize it's worst impacts and maybe also impact some of your most negative and hateful users too. But maybe this just shows why Elon shouldn't have used the town square analogy before, it doesn't fit well with what actually exists and causes people to believe it should work in ways it can't (without the equivalent of letting someone bring a microphone and loud speakers to drown out the rest of the town square).
LATE EDIT: I thought of another analogy. Imagine that the national postal service of your country add a "papers you might like" service; people in this hypothetical can go to the post office submit their proposals and then the post office sends it around to whoever it thinks might like your mail.
If the postal services decides to ban you from this "papers you might like" service you are still allowed to send as much mail as you want to whoever you want, but you no longer have access to the postal service expertise in spreading your news.
This can obviously be abused but it is also very different from being unable to send any mail at all.
Anyone's ability to broadcast on Twitter is only as far as the system dynamics of Twitter and its users allows them. Retweeting is not some pure expression of speech that needs to be "free", it is limited already shaped and limited by all kinds of incentives and technological particularities (character limit, anyone?).
I think media should function to encourage speech that balances social and individual utility. That is, speech that has important protection from powerful actors like the government and CEOs, but also that incentivizes true and useful information, in all the nuance that is necessary to actually understand the world. (Obviously entertainment is useful as well.)
But engaging lies are not a form of speech I value, and equating the current operation, or slightly-more-permissive version of it, of an overwhelmingly constructed forum (i.e. Twitter and it's retweet system) with "free" speech doesn't make much sense.
> Anyone's ability to broadcast on Twitter is only as far as the system dynamics of Twitter and its users allows them. Retweeting is not some pure expression of speech that needs to be "free", it is limited already shaped and limited by all kinds of incentives and technological particularities (character limit, anyone?).
There is no pure expression of speech in this sense. All speech is shaped and limited by incentives and technological particularities.
The biggest thing he can actually do is taking the company private. Until then it's just an ad platform with a goal of delivering shareholder value. Any users that decrease the value of the platform get silenced because they cost money. Yishan Wong made the excellent point that spam is free speech and is rarely hate speech or threats, it's just really annoying. And nobody bats an eye at banning spam.
I was under impression that he did take it private and it is no longer publicly traded.
Also, how does this change “users cost money” issue? Does not private company need to pay bills? Unless you mean that he’s now free to bail company out using his income from elsewhere…
Perhaps the most infuriating “feature” of all modern social media is that people I specifically follow do not manage to land their more interesting and controversial thoughts on my timeline, and vice versa. I don’t understand what the point of following someone is, if some of their content is not gonna reach me. How can I be more explicit in conveying my intent of reading those thoughts?
Seems to me that at some point in nearly every company's timelines, the customer relationship inverts and the company stops seeing their role being to service the customer and rather the customer's role being to service the company. It's a nearly inevitable aspect of success that customers come to depend on a company's product or service and at that point the power relationship inverts. If a company is any good, it achieves this, and if it's not, it probably gets replaced by a competitor who is better at it.
So in the end, you have things like this where eventually "following" is not there to help you it's there to help the social media company data mine you for signals. The contract is that you then can get indirect secondary benefit, hopefully you have a better chance of then getting the messages people are trying to send you. But the power relationship is very clear; their needs are first and yours are second.
Have you made sure to turn on the option for viewing them in strict time order? It gets mysteriously reset sometimes, particularly when using the phone.
I don't want purely that, because I end up drowning in uninteresting tweets from everyone I follow. I want to see notable tweets, from the people I follow, because I don't care if they're eating a sandwich.
I also want to see tweets I would find notable/interesting, from people I don't follow, if I knew they existed. An algorithm would help with that suggestion.
What I really want is Spotify's "Discover Weekly", and "This song's radio", but in Twitter.
Both of which are totally reasonable desires - but you should be the one that gets to decide which "mode" you're operating in. If you want only (and all) followees tweets - go to that view. If you want just the "greatest hits" of your followees - a second view. And if you want to trust in The Great Algorithm and take some recommendations, that's also reasonable. What I think people are really opposed to isn't necessarily recommendations algorithms, but rather algorithmic recommendations being forced upon them when not requested.
Twitter already allows the chronological timeline, though they seem to reset it back to algorithmic after some time has elapsed (or something I'm not sure what conditions reset it and it feels non-transparent/shady.)
Huh, strange. It seems they seem very interested in 'remembering' your "2FA" phone number but not your view preferences. Must be a bug somewhere in their DB.
I think that there should be a small algorithm specific for everyone, instead of the great algorithm. Possibly with the ability of grouping your follows into channels, each channel with a small algorithm built on your previous interactions with the channel.
That's clearly part of the disagreement. Some people want to think and decide for themselves what to like and follow while others want private corporations/algorithms do some of that thinking for them. Or at least narrow down the choices, which is effectively the same thing.
> private corporations/algorithms do some of that thinking for them
When Spotify's Discovery Weekly gives me a playlist, it's giving me songs I've never heard before, that it thinks I'll like. The decision if I like them is completely my own. Spotify's recommendations aren't thinking for me. If I had more time to listen to a thousand random songs a day, I might stumble across their recommendations. But, their recommendations aren't thinking for me, they're just categorizing and skipping most of the garbage* related to my dislikes.
* Spotify has 80 million songs. If I listened to the first 10 seconds of every song, for 8 hours a day, it would take me over 70 years.
Why not both? You have the option to see whatever tweets an algorithm decides you want, I have the option to see all the tweets from the people I'm following? In fact, I'm not even 100% sure that the 'latest tweets' / 'top tweets' setting isn't supposed to do exactly that, it's just unclear (and twitter regularly switches the setting from latest to top anyway). If I had my dream twitter, I'd go further: let me choose whether I want to see retweets, let me choose to show quote tweets, but only if the quoted tweet is from somebody I follow, etc.
They should create a configuration of levers of some sort of context: controversial (slide the up or down), newsworthy, celebrity, sports. Not tags per se, those get too varied. Some basic directional sliders that skirts a fine line between avoiding echo chamberism and allowing people to filter things that offend them.
This could control top posts, but theoretically also their replies.
It's the stupid replies that make Twitter annoying, not so much the top posts for me.
It's much harder for people complaining about toxicity if they can filter it out. Then it'll be harder for them to argue someone should be deplatformed. Because then they would be arguing that you and I should be barred from reading that person.
The combination of the new Circles twitter feature with the non-algorithmic timeline is a good attempted remedy for this - people can share their niche tweets only with circles which allows filtering which audiences they're for. It has problems, but multiple people I follow have successfully started using them to make their main timeline less cluttered.
Having people's tweets obliterated by a new Algorithm(tm) because it decided they are bad definitely doesn't feel like a good fix for the issue.
I like the idea of having personal filters on the receiving end, sort of like how I can decide to search Google using "Safe search: Moderate" or no safe search filtering.
And I guess it makes sense to de-promote poisonous speech, since our primal brains have a tendency to naturally amplify and accord outsized importance to hate, outrage and other strong negative emotions, although those are mostly hugely detrimental to civil society.
Social harmony is underrated in the West. We're all willing to sacrifice our social fabric - and thus ultimately our averaged personal happiness - in favor of individualism. A social system like Twitter should have systems and patterns that correct for our flaws here.
The question with "personal filters" is always "who makes the filters?". Because most users are not going to spend their time meticulously tuning their filter configurations. They'll take whatever defaults and go about their day. Or maybe use some popular community-developed filter configs.
You might argue that the optionality of personal filter tweaking makes all the difference. But in terms of practical impact, it's meaningless. Not enough people are going to take that option to make a difference.
Confusingly, that's what all the free speech absolutists spend their time yelling about. The right to not speak in the public square but have a megaphone.
I disagree. What the free speech side is arguing is that by trying to restrict "reach" you are trying to prevent interested consumers of that speech from ever hearing it.
The prime example is when someone's tweets don't show up in the timelines of subscribers. People who specifically what to hear that speech never get a chance to.
That's not an issue of the platform, that's simple boycotting and companies just have to make the choice of either biting the bullet and keeping them, or banning them. In all this however, lies a question that nobody asked, what's the responsibility of the party getting banned? Why should the person have the right to spill bigotry and hatred without facing any consequences?
This question is asked and answered all over HN, any time a debate touching on "free speech" comes up, including the current top-voted comment.
Independent of that: what crosses the line is nowhere like settled. Many people like to act as if what they find offensive must obviously be treated as if it were beyond the pale. They're probably living in a small filter bubble where the speech in question is unquestionably offensive. Their views are rarely majority opinions, however.
The point is a more general one: deplatforming is censorship in all but name because of coordination. You're gone from Twitter, "go build your own", you do and the CDN blocks you, "go build your own", you do and providers don't peer with you.
Limiting reach on the other hand is a much better alternative. I can still communicate with other experts about the inconvenient truth that cows are not real, I just don't pop up in your search when you search for "where does milk come from".
I completely reject the notion that asking someone to build their own site is censorship, or that a private company turning away users is censorship. If someone has an internet provider, they have the means to communicate. It has always been this way, and only recently have certain groups raised an issue with the way internet content creation works.
> If someone has an internet provider, they have the means to communicate.
Right, but what if that internet provider turns them away? How do they communicate? Do they ask Space X to shoot up a few satellites for them? If Musk says No, do they build their own rockets?
It's not worth debating the slippery slope that is conjured up here, unless you can prove that someone actually needed to build their own rockets because every IP has turned them away from hosting a legal website.
This might be what Elon is thinking, but some of his fans will be bitterly disappointed if he executes on it and no one sees their tweets any more because they are hateful. How can they own the libs if the libs don't see their attacks (likewise for the reverse direction)?
You may want to hold off on making any judgement until you see what will be considered "hate speech" as well the effectiveness of the Twitter sentiment analysis algorithms.
I don't think this fully captures his prior sentiments. This was all packaged with the idea that the algorithm should be made public, possibly literally even posted to github. Without that, he's just doing same kind of unaccountable tweaks as the previous operators, and there will still be sizable cohorts of users that feel "persecuted" and others who feel like their feed remains full of "negative/hate" content.
I don't think it's fair to expect the algorithm to be open-source so soon, but I also don't think this represents anything like the meaningful changes he promised, so it's relatively insignificant.
Yeah that was my thought. What's the difference between this and actually deleting the tweet? If nobody but you can see your tweet (without linking to it directly) is it even a tweet then?
This seems like an arbitrary distinction; in the end, there's not much difference between having a tweet be removed and having it be "deboosted" until nobody sees it.
I think that Musk has realized that his free speech absolutism conflicts with his goal of increasing profits. So now he's trying very hard to find a compromise.
There's also the possibility that once he got inside and saw some of the truly incredibly toxic shit that exists in the twitterspace he realized that he can't own the pipeline that spews that garbage all over the world completely unmolested.
Yeah I think anybody who has ever moderated might understand how true this is. There’s a bit of a irony to being a mod where the more effectively one does their job the less people understand why what you’re doing is necessary in the first place.
Some people who get banned on social media are banned for a reason. You’re not going to ever get mainstream advertisers moderating twitter like it’s 4chan.
I don't like platforms deciding what I see. I connect with people to get their posts. Period. I want them all, or let me control my filters if there are any.
if anyone truly enjoys "no moderation" from a platform, its a _very_ small number of people.
if a comment section is all spam for penis enlargement pills no one hangs out there. instead, they go to comment sections where the platform owners actively decide to remove spam. they censor away posts for all different kinds of spam.
I'm certainly not a fan of how Musk has handled the Twitter takeover, but this sentiment, "New Twitter policy is freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach", seems highly reasonable to me, no?
That is, what I find so awful about most social media (and places like YouTube) is how they focus on some of the most anger-inducing content for "engagement". That is, I think the problem is much more their algorithms than what people actually post.
That said, I think that, realistically, being at the bottom of the heap won't actually be much different from being banned - which I actually think is a good thing.
People’s problem with Twitter was always that they would arbitrarily decide what is or isn’t acceptable speech, and Elon’s new solution does…exactly the same thing. The only thing that will change now is that liberal politicians and views will start being targeted rather than conservative/alt-right ones. Is anyone here really naïve enough to believe that this whole saga has been about “free speech”? It is simply a shift of power from the left to the right, financed by a handful of billionaires, Wall Street banks and Saudi/Qatari Princes.
> The only thing that will change now is that liberal politicians and views will start being targeted rather than conservative/alt-right ones.
Conservative speech like "lower taxes are better", "extract more petroleum", and "prayer should be allowed in public school" were never targeted.
The "conservative" speech banned were things like "LGBT people should have their human rights denied" and "Let's get together and attack the Capitol to stop the transfer of power".
> It is simply a shift of power from the left to the right, financed by a handful of billionaires, Wall Street banks and Saudi/Qatari Princes.
That raises the question of what are the "dividends" for those parties, regardless of the financial success of Twitter.
Look at the history of banned accounts [1] You don't need polynomial regression to figure out that nobody was being banned for traditional, non-hate and non-violence-inducing conservative or liberal speech. It's mostly harassment, threats, impersonation and disinformation.
Nobody has been banned for advocating: lower taxes, higher taxes, cuts to government spending, increased government spending, abortion rights, anti-abortion rights, etc.
The problems with Twitter's previous approach to banning is that those banned for "disinformation" were consistently anti-establishment and right-of-center. Twitter strictly enforced its Terms of Service against political opponents of its favored party, while often turning a blind eye to offenses from those more closely aligned with their staff's ideology.
The description on Wikipedia regarding ZeroHedge's suspension is heavily biased. Why do they link to a BuzzFeed News article, instead of ZH's actual article? Which parts of the ZH article are proven false? Buzzfeed doesn't say, and neither did Twitter. Same for Dr. Robert Malone, what exactly is "misinformation" about his content, and who is making that determination? What is the censor's area of expertise to make such a judgement? Who is the censor?
Candace Owens was banned for criticism of a governor's COVID policies. Where does that fit in your characterization of bannings as "harrassment, threats, impersonation, and disinformation"?
Meanwhile, grifter Talcum X still has a Twitter account with 1 million followers, despite endorsing violence on multiple occasions and threatening to dox innocent law enforcement personnel.
And of course Kathy Griffin not rating a ban for a pic of Donald Trump's severed head (because comedy), but numerous other users were banned for making similar violent jokes/threats about politicians.
> That raises the question of what are the "dividends" for those parties, regardless of the financial success of Twitter.
My guess is that they see twitter as the central online hub of anti-capitalist ideology, which is also correlated with marginalized identity politics. If the bankers could nip that growing movement in the bud before it fully coalesces into something with real political power, then that would seem to be well worth $44B (which of course they wouldn't actually lose because they'd write off their losses against their taxes).
> My guess is that they see twitter as the central online hub of anti-capitalist ideology
Then joke is on them because the far right is also anti-capitalist, but in the form of ethnonationalist socialist authoritarianism (Yes, there are many shorter names for that).
Or perhaps they're actually on board with that approach since they have found that an increasingly pluralistic democracy does not serve their interests.
But in the end, it's probably just that owning an tool of chaos is itself a form of power.
> Then joke is on them because the far right is also anti-capitalist
It might look like anti-capitalism, but time and time again, the far right's "problem" with capitalism is actually a problem with the results of liberal democracy in capitalist societies.
They very much want capitalism, but not a corrupted form of it. They feel that capitalist liberal democracy rewards the wrong people, like allowing what were once subservient minorities to succeed and accumulate wealth, sometimes surpassing the success of the majority, or allowing non-traditional people, art, cultures, etc to flourish if there was a market for it.
For example, Nazis were very much about the Social Darwinist aspects of naked capitalism, and the word privatization was coined to describe Nazi economic policy[1]. However, they were very much against the results that capitalist liberalism allowed to flourish, which were the basis for their rhetoric around "degeneracy" and campaigns against what they saw as degeneration of traditional (and ultimately mythical, given the Aryan supremacy mythos) culture. They saw capitalism as corrupted by Jewish and foreign cabals that pulled the strings to keep the Volk down. What they ended up doing is seizing capital from Jewish people and gave it to German capitalists[2], which I wouldn't describe as anti-capitalist at all:
> Business owners benefitted as much as private individuals. Companies like Neckermann, which sold mail-order goods and vacation packages, and Evonik, a manufacturing group formerly known as Degussa, bought businesses formerly owned by Jewish people. The ability to consolidate power made them leaders of their industries, and implicit partners with the Nazi government. Each of these transactions were legal, and many were meticulously recorded.
While far right rhetoric seems on its face like it's anti-capitalist, because if you squint it can kind of look similar to the rhetoric from the left, that's a folly. Fascism and its ilk are reactions to liberal capitalism, and coincidentally, socialists have a lot to say about capitalism, but the similarities end there. It's a mistake to take such rhetoric as being inherently anti-capitalist and not, instead, anti-liberal society.
> They very much want capitalism, but not a corrupted form of it.
Let me clarify and demonstrate that we basically agree. The difference is inclusivity vs exclusivity.
They want exclusive socialism - as in guaranteed high base living standards - for an ethnic elite, built on the labor and deprivation of an subservient ethnic underclass working natural resources that the ethnic elite hold own over.
There will still be those who own more capital and less, but importantly they will be limited to the ethnic elite.
There are plenty of historical examples of this: slave economies in the Americas, extractive colonialism, apartheid, Jim Crow and so many other examples.
I would agree that liberal capitalist democracy runs counter to all of those goals, because it is (at least in-theory) inclusive.
> Is anyone here really naïve enough to believe that this whole saga has been about “free speech”?
I am, although I disagree with the characterization "naive". Twenty years ago Musk's attitude was widely held, particularly in the tech industry. I see nothing incredible about the proposition that Musk believes this still. Also, the whole "if you have any point of agreement with people on the right, you are alt-right" thing seems silly to me. There are other positions between team red and team blue.
> People’s problem with Twitter was always that they would arbitrarily decide what is or isn’t acceptable speech, and Elon’s new solution does…exactly the same thing.
That was perhaps one problem with Twitter, and no, this is not the same thing.
Other, much bigger problems were that they'd arbitrarily block (as in: make invisible) tweets, replace them with "warnings" of dubious provenance, declare "misinformation" (often based on poor/biased understanding of the topics at hand; recall the repeated flagging of the Cochrane Collaboration Twitter account last year [1]), ban accounts entirely after "three strikes" of this sort, and many other egregious acts of censorship that frequently correlated more strongly with political ideology than with fact or actual threat.
Musk's comment doesn't say how they're going to decide what is hate speech, and that's pretty critical context here, so we'll see. There's obviously going to be a narrow class of speech that needs regulation, on any social platform. But if it's possible to say pretty much anything outside of this narrow class of content without getting banned, it would be a significant shift toward freedom of expression.
(Cochrane is the gold standard for medical evidence review. Flagging them for "misinformation" would be hilariously misinformed, if it weren't so scary.)
Trump and Elon have learned how to be controversial, which drives engagement. They literally are the result of the algorithms that have driven engagement.
Yeah, it's very reasonable but it's also the status quo prior to Elon buying twitter. Elon openly attacked twitter for its moderation policies and made a public spectacle about big tech censorship and styled himself as "free speech absolutist" in his own words. Now that Elon's own money is on the line he's completely done a 180 and is using the exact same reasoning to defend his moderation policies as did his detractors when he was on the other side trashing twitter.
Elon is, as usual, totally full of shit, people have a natural disdain for flippant dishonesty.
Twitter has historically utilized a wide range of moderation strategies including deranking, post removals, fact checking blurbs, temporary bans, permanent bans and more.
It appears that three of these that you listed, which are the most silencing, will no longer be used (assuming legal content): post removals, temporary bans, permanent bans.
I don't understand how the new policy is "status quo", if this is true. That's a very significant change of policy.
> It appears that three of these that you listed, which are the most silencing, will no longer be used (assuming legal content): post removals, temporary bans, permanent bans.
This is not the case given that Twitter has removed posts[1] and banned accounts that were critical of Musk[2].
Nothing that Elon said suggests that twitter will no longer issue bans or remove posts. In fact, we know that permanent bans are still in place, and he will obviously continue to do both.
In place and just as arbitrary as ever. Just this morning someone I follow had an 18+-only alt account of theirs suspended when they blocked a minor who was following that account.
> Nothing that Elon said suggests that twitter will no longer issue bans or remove posts.
I don't see anyone claiming that there will be no bans. I take this post as communication that comments, that previously would have been banned, will be max de-boosted, instead.
Enforcement was historically quite lax, especially for public figures. It's quite common to see a tweet which is just a screenshot of the "we locked your account until you delete this bad tweet" popup that someone got for posting something horrible, and the screenshot (containing the post that got them actioned!) doesn't get deleted. It takes a lot of boundary pushing to get your account nuked unless you get targeted by DMCA notices or you REALLY piss off someone with connections.
I don't understand this perspective. The Babylon Bee was banned for misgendering someone. It looks like they would not be banned under the new policy. That is an extreme difference.
This is misleading. They were banned for the tweet. They opted out of removing the tweet, which would lift the ban.
In the new policy, they would not be banned for the tweet. The fact that they were banned in the old policy, and would not be banned in the new policy, is irrefutable proof that the policies are very different, which means, by definition, it's not "status quo":
status quo:
the existing state of affairs, especially regarding social or political issues.
I don't see a difference between censorship and demonetization/"deboosting". end up in the same situation via different means. No centralized medium can claim to do that seriously, it's a waste of resources and attention.
Your 'yelling into the void' here is every yell being recorded and kept, every person who has a link to a recording being able to hear it, every person who follows a chronological playback of your yells being able to hear them all, etc, i.e. there is no 'void'.
Yelling into the void is the central mechanism of twitter and platforms like twitter. I is why when I joined a mastodon server the whole thing felt so weird to me, I was expecting irc. Whom am I talking to? No one and every one. You yell into the void and hope someone is listening.
Note that the same could be said for any mass publishing platform, posting a web page is also yelling into the void. or publishing a book or writing a newspaper article.
If a tree falls in a forest and nobody heard it, did it fall?
If a person wrote obscenities on twitter and nobody saw them or can discover them, did they write anything? If they did, how do you know when you haven't seen it. If they didn't, how is it different from never writing it in the first place?
It is unfortunately not how Twitter works. It is very hard to restrict freedom of reach. If you follow a person with extreme opinions, you will still see their posts. Even if Twitter managed to address that problem, there will be users that created curated list of Tweets of interest to their followers.
...and not to forget the mainstream media that love to refer to extremist tweets as it is an easy article to write.
Elon Musk is talking about restricting freedom of reach. That works for Google, however, not for Twitter. The entire point of Twitter is to be able to follow people you are interested in.
My original point was directed on Elon's Musk belief he can solve hate issues on Twitter by limiting the reach of negative or hateful tweets. It is an approach that works for Google, as they can filter such results. As you point as well, Twitter is about networks and if you are interested in a controversial person, you will follow them. That is good from an individual perspective, as you should have this freedom, however, it can be negative for the society as a whole. A good example is fake news.
> however, it can be negative for the society as a whole.
Society wouldn't see the persons tweets, only the followers would. So, it "protects" society, and lets the follower see the controversy they desire.
Or, are you suggesting that the individual shouldn't be allowed to see the controversial speech, because they can influence society? I think there have been far too many examples, in history, where the individual was right and the larger opinion of society was incredibly wrong, for this to be a goal to move towards.
This is not a solvable problem. There is no algorithmic way to detect speech that needs to be boosted and deboosted on social media because there is no way to actually algorithmically detect what is truthful and what is just manipulative propaganda and marketing.
it isnt about truth or fiction, it is negative/hate tweets. I run a politics forum and the one rule is no insulting other people, groups, or positions.
This makes for a very civil, but bland conversation. People engage with negative/hate tweets.
I personally like talking politics without insults, but most people are incapable of it.
I would fully expect the next thing for you to say is "I can program my own Twitter in a week"
Trying to figure out language intent is just the kind of thing an engineer/moderator says is easy and then is in deep water a month later after a phrase that means "you're great" in one language means "you're a donkey's anus" in another.
When you're moderating a small group it can be somewhat easy, everyone tends to speak the same language, and quite often it just falls into a groupthink that excludes situations like this. But when the situation scales you don't just have users that actively want to use the service, you have adversarial users that want to abuse your service and make it hell... and those users can be exceptionally clever.
>>I would fully expect the next thing for you to say is "I can program my own Twitter in a week"
as a perfect example you just called achenatx a moron by implying that they would insult twitter employees by implying twitter is trivial.
it's an insult by way of a hypothetically ascribed insult and there's no chance in hell that either of them would trigger sentiment detection because they are so context dependent, even worse it's cultural context not textual context
I don't know about English, but in other languages you need to know the context to distinguish "hate" speech and insults. If I call someone "You, motherf*er!", without context you don't know if I'm insulting that person or just acknowledging my friend who just made a great joke.
That's a truly amazing viewpoint, I honestly can't imagine how one could express the solution that clearly.
In case you can't guess, I'm not serious. However if you download a sentiment analysis model and feed it my first paragraph it'll claim it was positive.
Sentiment analysis is a really really really hard problem, especially for short texts.
Everyone is assuming OP is meaning ML and that they're in the just-enough-knowledge-to-be-dangerous phase.
The problem that needs solving isn't "catch anything that could, upon deciphering, hurt someone's feelings a bit". It's "catch enough despicable or aggressive comments before they cause problems for others".
The later is easily doable because part of the signal is the interactions and you only need to damp bad interactions down until they aren't self-sustaining wars across the feeds of the uninterested, not sanitize every post so that they're all toddler-safe.
Once you stop trying to prevent bad thoughts and switch to trying to create a good forum it becomes tractable at any scale.
So free speech absolutist is starting to adapt rules which are roughly similar to Twitter's current rules. And those rules are existing for a reason, rules don't popup from a thin air. What a surprise...
Now he will figure out that the bloat of microservices and employees was there also for a reason.
I'm careful about formulating an opinion on the topic, because I still don't understand what "deboosted" will mean in practice, but I don't think your evaluation of the situation is fair. I'm pretty close to an "antifan" of Musk, but I don't really think he is a fool, and I don't think it is news to him. Maybe the public believed he meant "an absolute freedom of speech" (did they? lol), but I don't think he was really meaning it at any point.
After all, he knows that revenue comes from ads, and those who pay for ads have some power to influence the rules. It's not like Twitter is totalitarian just because Dorsey is a totalitarian guy by nature. It even seems that he kinda isn't. It's just the fact, that there are other powers that at certain level start being far more influential, than the CEOs opinion. And these powers tend to be quite totalitarian.
Musk it just a populist. Not living up to his promises isn't a sign of short-sightedness. In fact, it seems to be working great for him so far. Not sure if it will with Twitter, but it did, and still does with Tesla, FWIW.
The dude rolled in with an understanding of the space one would expect of a college sophomore doing just OK in an interview for a PM internship, but is somehow expecting everyone to be amazed by his keen insight.
Being an engineer / content moderator in an environment where there's a guy constantly introducing chaos via idiotic "Couldn't we just…?" mandates can't be fun.
If they had applied the rules consistently, they'd be reasonable enough, but they never did or even particularly tried. I don't have any hope that Elon will, either, though.
"apply the rules consistently" is like "unbiased journalism", it is an impossible standard that literally nobody adheres to. Further, anyone claiming intentional bias in moderation behavior is just making it up because there are thousands of moderation decisions made every day, the details of which they are not privy to.
> "apply the rules consistently" is like "unbiased journalism", it is an impossible standard that literally nobody adheres to.
Yes, but some claim to do so while deliberately doing the opposite, while others say they're bad at it while actually trying. Corporations (such as Twitter) are exclusively toward the former end of the spectrum.
For profit businesses will never apply rules consistently, there is too much profit in inconsistency. Hell, anything ran by humans, in by belief, is incapable of applying any set of complex rules consistently. Individuals can't even apply moderation rules consistently as our emotions and how we're feeling on a particular day can dictate what we ignore and the punishments we choose.
There is an inherent contradiction calling censorship = free speech. Censorship of any form is already a violation of free speech, and therefore cannot be free speech itself. That said, no platform can be absolutist or it would devolve into a porn site, however there is a "spirit" of free speech, that is meant to uphold the principle and allow for ANY subject matter to be discussed.
This doesn't mean say anything you want, but for any given subject matter, there is absolutely a way to discuss it respectfully. This is the type of censorship that is common online right now. Platforms aren't just following guidelines, they are actively deciding which things can be discussed and which things cannot. In the case of Twitter, it seems this censorship is controlled by the stakeholder advertisers. Personally I would like to live in a world where society is not controlled by powerful capitalist interests.
a person who holds free speech absolutism as a value, trying to navigate a compromise with advertisers is a far sight better than a person who does not believe in free speech.
It is not true that what twitter was doing was already the inevitable perfect compromise, or that advertisers were demanding that the sitting POTUS be banned even though SCOTUS had ruled people had a right to interact with him on twitter.
Note that this is the dictionary definition of shadowbanning, which is the primary thing the free speech advocates on Twitter were hoping Elon would stop Twitter from doing.
I thought the point of shadowbanning was to trick the poster into thinking their posts were visible while they were hidden from everyone else.
Here it seems like the poster and anyone else can directly search for the poster's account or the "filtered" post and still see it. But I guess the tags won't work. Kind of a middle ground. Perhaps they will explicitly remove/block the tags so the poster knows this is happening, which at least isn't tricking them.
> But I guess the tags won't work. Kind of a middle ground. Perhaps they will explicitly remove/block the tags so the poster knows this is happening, which at least isn't tricking them.
To clarify, Musk said nothing whatsoever about tags. Another read of Musk's tweet is that your timeline won't show tweets with a negative sentiment analysis score.
Given recent events, I'm reluctant to assume Musk's vague goals will be implemented in the narrowest and most delicate way possible.
I'm a Free Speech advocate. What I hoped Elon would do is stop the permanent banning of people from the platform and the removal of tweets. He appears to be at least somewhat delivering on that hope. Having a tweet 'deboosted' rather than completely removed and the tweeter also permanently removed is a substantial improvement.
This is not being banned for what you say, however controversial (i.e. prevention of free speech). This is being banned for pretending someone else is saying something. Such bans are not a free speech issue. Fraud is fraud.
(As for the joke angle, twitter has decided it's too risky to allow humour that relies on brazen impersonation. Parody accounts that are clearly indicated as such are still allowed.)
What's the difference between being prevented from lying and beyond prevented from lying about your identity? If you're going to advocate for absolute free speech, you should be ready to commit.
And frankly, if this was a concern, maybe eliminating the way to tell whose account is who they say they are was a terrible business move.
The difference is very clear. One is saying whatever you want to say under your own public identity or under a pseudonym. The other is pretending that someone else is saying something. It's not 'lying about your identity', that's a miscasting. It's pretending someone else is saying things that they are not. Free speech does not include fraudulently pretending that other people are saying things that they have not / would not say. Claiming that Free Speech must include this is intellectually dishonest and intellectually uninteresting as an argument.
There's a lot of folks who clearly put "this is a parody" in every one of their "I'm Elon Musk" tweets and got banned and are still banned. He's kept redefining "clearly indicated" but only after banning people who were making fun of him.
Dude's got the most fragile ego as this whole episode has demonstrated.
Most of the folks getting banned for actually pretending to be someone else were either obviously a joke because they were totally silly, or were only able to look remotely real because of the idiotic $8 "you're real if you pay us" policy.
That's a good point. But I think also what mattered are how the content policies are enforced. I think Musk misread the situation. I do believe Twitter was biased about bans previously but that is because its user base wanted those bans. Social media apps tend to have a specific target demographic. In that sense, Twitter was not really in the "public town square" business but the memes and speech business of a specific demographic. It's not surprising there is an exodus from Twitter now that Musk has shown no loyalty to that base. Yes, it's petty but I've seen far worse on the internet. If Musk wanted something different he should have spent less money making a new app.
I am not trying to provoke a flame war here either actually if it comes off that way. I think the business of social apps is trendy and you have to know your audience.
The difference between hiding a particular problematic tweet and all tweets of an account is important though. It seems Elon refers to the former, while shadow banning refers to the latter. Let's hope it is so.
Is there clear evidence that shadowbanning existed on Twitter? Misunderstanding eventual consistency doesn’t count. I’m not going to be surprised if there is real evidence, I’ve just never seen any.
It also virtually requires human content moderation who, as we've seen time and time again, will classify more and more conservative opinions as "negative/hate" and fewer and fewer liberal opinions. So in other words, Jack Dorsey's Twitter all over again.
People have been seeing it as one big moderation problem and it's a bunch of smaller problems, plus the problem of people actively gaming the system and operating at large enough scale for it to always be bigger than humans can handle.
But that's only true when you delete posts and block users. It makes mistakes so costly (and with machines being so easily manipulated) that we need to run too many decisions past people because our decisions here are making huge impact at a personal level for those involved.
But if you're willing to accept "hidden at default-browse-level" wrongly appearing every now and then it becomes totally solvable.
We were trying to scale fact-checkers and playground-nannies but the trick is to get rid of those roles and use users to flag what users like and/or don't like directly. You can do a staggered release to previously critical people, and known-objective people, once a few posts have been flagged.
Further in the thread he names some banned accounts that will be reinstated.
A couple weeks ago, Elon said that Twitter’s content policy (and account reinstatement) would be decided by a moderation council composed of people with diverse views. There have been no reports of this council being formed yet.
Oh great, more unaccountable black-box "algorithms" that invisibly classify your tweets. Machines can't detect satire, they don't understand nuance or context, they don't understand tone. This will affect platform speech in strange ways as people naturally attempt to evade the algorithm.
Twitter needs a dislike button. Every social media platform needs a mechanism for explicit negative feedback. Yes, people will use it to downvote ideas they don't like. Yes, it will come with its own challenges. That's how real life works. It doesn't make that speech disappear, it just deprioritizes it.
Given that he already wants to do this, it's better to let humans have input than to pretend as if algorithms know what's best for us.
I heavily suspect that "number of replies" is exactly the type of thing that creates an unpleasant atmosphere, unnecessary conflict and promotes ridiculously radical views and hot takes to the top. People like to argue, and the more objectionable a tweet is, the more they will argue.
Of course, this is great for user engagement, but it will also make the actual user experience pretty horrible.
Trust me, once you get the hang of it, 4chan is surprisingly wholesome. Sure I've been called a niggr/faggt/subhuman/kike/retard, I've been asked to kill myself countless times, countless people told me they had fucked my mom, etc. But when you go above that, you see that it's refreshing and lot less toxic than passive-aggresiveness and the brigading that upvotes/downvotes/retweets bring (in places such as Twitter or Reddit, or even here). There's some sort of camaraderie that goes beyond.
And the nice thing is that there's no oversight board, there's just your comment, you can always reply if you don't agree. The only measure of success is the number of replies, and funny, insightful or contrarian posts usually get those. Plus, everyone is completely anonymous so you can really be anyone.
As someone who spent way too much time there in the mid 00's, 4chan is incredibly toxic and the existence of strong intra-group cohesion doesn't make it "wholesome". Otherwise we can say a KKK chapter is wholesome because they also do potlucks.
> I've been asked to kill myself countless times, countless people told me they had fucked my mom, etc. But when you go above that
There is no going above that. That's what psychological abuse looks like, and you're justifying it to yourself
You can have a community that isn't full of passive aggressive people and also not a disgusting shithole. Look at hn as an example. You're only hurting yourself in the long run
Lol fuck no, HN wears me down. 4chan is like having a beer with buddies shooting the shit and throwing some banter.
HN is like a forced "after office" with snob coworkers you don't get along with, and you have to tiptoe around the topics and what you say, while HR is around. It has interesting moments, though.
I see what you're saying but there is just no way that you can argue 4chan is wholesome. The lack of moderation has created a community that encourages some of the worst human behaviors. The correlation between mass murderer and 4chan fanatic is too distinct to ignore.
Let's see where Musk takes it... but of course one of the biggest differences is that 4chan is anonymous, while Twitter at least requires some sort of name.
No it isn't. It's an algorithm using rough sentiment analysis and god knows what else to judge your tweet, unaccountably and invisibly. "I hate mondays" I tweet. Whoops! Tripped the "negative tweet detector" and my tweet is deprioritized!
No problem you say, let's just tweak the detector to let that through. So you're going to write exceptions? What happens when "mondays" becomes some sort of code word for racial epithets? How do you detect that? This has happened before, look up what happened to r/clownworld.
This is straight up an unsolvable problem. You need human labeling, which is what a dislike button accomplishes.
Well, it seems unlikely to be human-driven, given how many of the employees and contractors who were responsible for content moderation have been laid off.
What the hell does "demonetize" even mean? YouTube uses that term to mean they won't pay the creator. Twitter doesn't pay anyone. Removing ads just makes the content better.
- Rule 1. Use double quotation marks to set off a direct (word-for-word) quotation.
Correct: “I hope you will be here,” he said.
Incorrect: He said that he “hoped I would be there.” (The quotation marks are incorrect because hoped I would be there does not state the speaker's exact words.)
- Rule 8a. Quotation marks are often used with technical terms, terms used in an unusual way, or other expressions that vary from standard usage.
Examples:
It's an oil-extraction method known as “fracking.”
I am serious, and it is indeed that sometimes...but I wonder if that's the intent Ztynovovk had when making the comment (or: what it "is" from within the initial frame of reference, as "is-ness" is relative to the observer).
I think it's fun and informative to draw attention to cognitive functionality of humans when they are opining on the cognitive functionality of other humans, particularly in "smart" communities when the topic of discussion tends to exploit cultural norms and catalyze ~unforced (note: speculation) cognitive errors.
As someone who specialized in this area for years in social media specifically, I have never seen evidence you can get past 80% accuracy with any known sentiment analysis method.
Brute force stats like Naive Bayes is still as good as it gets on platforms like Twitter where speech patterns are too short and irregular for traditional NLP to be very useful.
Even non-traditional NLP won't work. There is no way to algorithmically enforce "good" speech. I agree that the character limitations don't help and the 280 character limitation is the main reason Twitter is such a mess.
There are no coherent long form texts generated by AI models but 280 characters is very easy because people will give the author the benefit of the doubt and interpolate the missing context.
Sentiment analysis is way worse than that in adversarial scenarios, where a human is trying to outwit the machine.
My prediction for this whole thing: Elon Musk [again] gets swept up by AI hype, tries to replace humans with software, and it doesn't work. Like at Tesla, so at Twitter.
It's more fundamental than that. Some forms of speech can indirectly or directly limit the speech of others. Free speech absolutism in an unachievable panacea; it is a logical fallacy.
Like Comcast deciding they don't want workers discussing unionizing using the internet infrastructure that they privately own. Or financial institutions like PayPal freezing and seizing your money on their "private property" because of speech they don't like. Or when AWS, Microsoft, and the largest and most powerful corporations in human history coordinated to take a separate social network offline because of speech they didn't like.
Or when Twitter and Facebook coordinated to falsely label a true story "Russian disinformation" days before an election, literally preventing people from sharing it with each other privately on the world's largest communications networks. Whether Hunter Biden smoking crack with prostitutes would impact the election, or is even anyone's business, is questionable to me. But so is having billionaire tech CEOs decide what people can discuss through private communications with the express intent of suppressing information related to a political campaign.
The same goes for credit card monopolies like VISA and Mastercard coordinating to destroy businesses like Mindgeek because of moralist outrage from another "side."
Except this doesn't prove the point asked. I can literally write your second example and in fact, I will; I hereby order whatever shadowy figures monitor all internet communications to kick zamalek off of the internet. There; has that in any way impacted your ability to respond to me? Has my speech at all affected yours? The thing you're actually against is the execution of an action, killing or hanging or whatever else. The basic right of freedom of speech is not that. This equivocation between speech and action, this insistence that speech itself is fundamentally harmful and must be controlled, censored, and limited, is pretty fundamentally undemocratic in ways that most actual authoritarians who rose to power in the past century would be quite familiar with.
What if I had a sonic cannon that could blast a house off it's foundations? Is a DDoS attack speech? No. No one argues that in good faith. Stop justifying your conclusions by redefining speech to something else. There are actual, reasonable arguments for the limitations of speech - "speech is actually just any noise and people can play noise really loudly and that can cause hearing damage" is not one of them.
Your argument is, abstractly, "Isn't censorship also speech?" My response is, no, censorship is not covered under free speech. This is a faulty supposition that many people who are generally opposed to free speech hold. Preventing people from hearing someone speak is self-evidently the most anti-free-speech act it is possible for a private individual to do.
That isn't my argument at all. My argument is that for you to stop me from shouting over your speech, you would be limiting my speech. I could argue that I am shouting so that everyone can hear me. I could be shouting important things. Limiting my speech is censorship.
Free speech absolutism is a paradox. The only way to resolve that paradox is to limit speech that limits the fundamental (so-called "God-given") rights of others.
>I could argue that I am shouting so that everyone can hear me. I could be shouting important things.
You could argue that, yes. What you can argue doesn't matter. I can also, equally, argue that I am free to DDoS someone I don't like, because there is no technical limitation to my doing so, and that anyone attempting to stop that is inhibiting my free speech or free use of whatever hardware I control. Where does anyone argue that? Where has anyone argued this version of free speech that you are presenting the fallacies of? I have never heard even the most die-hard free speech supporter advocate that someone is free to follow you around all day, yelling to drown out your voice. And if this free speech absolutism is a position that no one holds, why are you arguing against it?
>"I order you to kill/hang that vice president" is speech, and the dead don't speak.
This started by you giving the example of an order to kill someone as being free speech that so-called free speech absolutists would logically protect. But the thing that is actually a problem, in that example, is that you are (presumably) using whatever existing power you have to unlawfully kill someone. The fact that someone could literally say those words to cause that effect in no way mandates that free speech advocates defend literal murder.
> And if this free speech absolutism is a position that no one holds, why are you arguing against it?
Musk is a free speech absolutist, by his own admission. His followers are likely similar.
> I have never heard even the most die-hard free speech supporter advocate that someone is free to follow you around all day, yelling to drown out your voice.
It's a contrived example, but despite that free speech absolutism allows for it.
>Musk is a free speech absolutist, by his own admission.
I don't think his concept of free speech absolutism matches yours. Given the other things I've heard (something about moderation teams with diverse voices, and this news about deboosting) it seems more likely that you're arguing against a strawman here.
>It's a contrived example, but despite that free speech absolutism allows for it.
Does the free speech absolutism you're arguing against allow for sonic cannons? Doxxing? Lighting burning crosses on people's yards? If so, again, it's pretty far away from any form of free speech I've ever heard a free speech advocate actually... advocate for. I'm asking this seriously; can you point me to anyone honestly arguing for that as a social ideal?
Edit: In fact, this topic roused some curiousity in me, so I went to look up what the actual philosophical roots of "free speech absolutism" were. The first result[0] is rather creepily relevant, discussing Elon Musk's bid on Twitter and his self-admission as a free speech absolutist. Very relevant to your arguments are the following passages:
> Free speech absolutism has its roots in philosophical theories dating back to the 17th century, but it was first discussed as a defined principle by the 20th century free speech advocate and philosopher Alexander Meiklejohn.
> His writing focused on the United States, and much of his thoughts were put forth in the context of American constitutional law. In fact, the very idea of “absolutism” – that there are certain absolute principles in political, philosophical, ethical, or religious matters – is an American idea. In theory, a free speech absolutist would be extremely hesitant (or refuse) to draw a line between free speech and hate speech in most contexts, and in all contexts where the speech could possibly be considered political speech.
> This commitment to self-rule, in Meiklejohn’s view, justified and formed the basis of the constitutional right to unfettered free speech guaranteed by the United States Constitution, and warranted its absolute nature, meaning it should not be weakened or watered down to bend to other social values.
> However, his understanding didn’t extend to private speech about issues not of public concern. So, while your right to publish your views about a social issue is safeguarded, even if others may take offense, Meiklejohn believed that you can’t rely on free speech protection to shout casual abuse at someone on the street. (emphasis added)
So yes, even the original, definitive free speech absolutist disagrees that your example is allowed by the principles of free speech.
Then, while you aren engaging in free speech, you are also engaging in stalking/harassment. If you stopped following the person who, presumably, doesn’t want you following them, you are still free to say whatever you like at any volume.
Free speech isn’t just “I can say whatever I want.”
It’s also “nobody can make me say something I don’t want to.”
And then also “I don’t have to listen to anything I don’t want to.” (You are here.)
And finally, “I can’t stop other people from listening to what they want to hear.”
This is the point of “if a tree falls in a forest and nobody js around to hear…” Speech is communication which is bidirectional, it can’t be free unless both sides are free to engage or not.
Elon Musk has already said he supports unrestricted *legal* speech on Twitter, and that individual cultures should decide what that is for themselves, through their local legal system.
He calls himself a free speech absolutist, and he's already banned parody, racist but legal (in the US) speech and criticism of himself and his technical knowledge - which is more restrictive than Twitter was prior.
As is the plan to "deboost" negative and hateful tweets - I'll remind the court that when Youtube did the same thing, many people here considered even demonetizing and downranking content to be censorship, and antithetical to free speech.
You are suggesting that in an environment without the right to free speech, there is no right to free speech.
Back to the twitter context: if I bought twitter and simply did nothing at all, anyone would be free to post anything, because in order to stop it, I'd have to act, which I already said I won't do.
Humans function in a society only, no one exists and speaks in vacuum. What someone says can encourage you to say something or preclude you from speaking, if you are not a sociopath.
>What can I say that prevents you from saying something?
Any syntactially correct but illogical thing, basically. The textbook example is "have you stopped beating your wife? yes or no, asshole".
Most humans aren't very good at being rational. Undermining someone's capacity for correct reasoning and effective communication is a whole dark art - one that is fundamental to our entire social reality. Also known as "trolling", in the offline world - as "bullying", or if you want to be academical about it, "exercising soft power".
Of course, it's only considered reprehensible if an individual does it.
I don't think that's true. The only way to limit speech on an algorithmicially mediated platform is via algorithms and there is no algorithm that can encode non-trivial properties of language regardless of what the AI maximalists might say to the contrary.
This is wrong as often as it's right. I predect that "I hate my job :)" on social media really does mean the speaker hates their job at least 40% of the time. It's sort of a "this is fine"[0] smiley; the smiley is the sarcasm while the statement is literally true.
It's exceedingly easy to detect sentiment for any human who cares and follows context, next to impossible to do automatically. "Good job Elon :)" can mean diametrically opposing things depending on author's views and what they wrote up to this moment. Same with "I love my job :)", etc. Employing an AI solution could cause some fun blunders but would likely amplify the amount of burning sarcasm overall.
The worst aspect of twitter is the anti-fans who follow people just to disrupt any conversations that they're having, and the organized trolling groups. You could interpret this is saying that those people are going to be pushed out of threads, but you could interpret it in any way. He's really not saying anything.
The organized groups and the anti-fans would be easy to automate discovery of. Just flag people who reply in a similar manner no matter what they're replying to, and cross them with voting rings. Declaring war on negativity and hate is pretty silly, though.
There's still a question of how "negative/hate" is defined and whether this will be transparent. I'm skeptical, but the general principle of discouraging and not profiting from negativity is, uh, positive.
Disagree. We don't have laws banning hate speech. We have laws that allow "hate" to be an aggravating factors in crimes. And we have juries to determine whether the application of hate crime statutes is appropriate for a particular crime.
US laws are wildly imperfect, but the laws are at least applied by people rather than algorithms.
By anyone who uses them as the loaded terms that they are.
Oh, how I would hope that "positivity" and "negativity" would be understood as relating to position and negation, like in your example! But in practical usage (as in "stay positive" or "we don't want that kind of negativity around here") they're semantic stopsigns for silencing voices that express unhappiness.
I think the term for a culture of only accepting expressions of happiness as valid, with the goal of suppressing constructive disagreement, is "toxic positivity".
I’m confused about what’s actually being suggested here, if anything. Regardless of whether stuff is “boosted” and “monetized” or not, people can still retweet stuff, right?
If they’re going to restrict the ability to retweet, that sounds a lot like shadow-banning, which is exactly what many people complain about, the people Musk seems to be listening to.
I guess it makes sense if people are really using the “home timeline” rather than chronological. That just seems bizarre to me as it misses the whole essence of Twitter. How is it a real-time news source if the newest stuff isn’t always front and centre? How is it a crowd-sourced “public square” if a black box algorithm decides what you read, rather than your own hand-curated list of followed accounts?
This whole debate would make sense if it were about YouTube, but Twitter?
I've discovered that if you tweet the name "Michael Griffin" + "Elon" (or "Musk"), nobody will see your tweet organically unless they search for it directly.
Michael Griffin is an important person in Elon's real (non-mythical) history that he'd probably rather you not know about,
Can you clarify your point? Is the accusation that Musk received CIA money from Griffin? Or that Space X had an easier time of getting government co tracts because he was buddies with Griffin?
"SpaceX also designs and launches custom military satellites for the Space Development Agency as part of a new missile defense system in low Earth orbit. The constellation would give the United States new capabilities to sense, target and potentially intercept nuclear missiles and hypersonic weapons launched from anywhere on Earth. Both China and Russia brought concerns to the United Nations about the program, and various organizations warn it could be destabilizing and trigger an arms race in space."
This is a perfect example of how an algorithm will fail. I suppose someone could argue that your comment isn't negative (or negative enough to warrant de-boosting).
Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is the sort of damage control id expect to see from someone only peripherally aware of or involved in their businesses accountability or strategic operations. This concern from advertisers has existed far too long for an executive action to have any meaning. the marketing conference call on november 3rd was your red flag where advertisers voiced their displeasure with firing large swaths of the content moderation team. The checkmark fiasco that wiped billions off corporate ledgers on a friday of active trading left a pretty sore spot with them as well that you never seemed to completely address. To corporations looking at this release today youre just some guy dragging a plumbing fixture through the lobby of your new office demanding hardcore work and cutting staff and --lets be honest-- at least Chainsaw Al Dunlap made stockholders rich in the process of scorching earth. So far youve just made the entire platform look like the bombing of dresden.
by the 14th most reasonable advertisers had paused their spend if not backed out entirely.
but after the bombshell office lockout and mass exodus today? to think a ToS change with a skeleton crew of H1B's and lifers that arent even allowed at their desks is going to reverse the course of decline is farcical. This is the kind of massive failure that triggers disaster recovery plans. This ship is sinking, and whatever life thats valued on it will either jump ship to a competing platform or Mastodon. You took a 44bn USD risk and managed to absolutely destroy any credibility in your leadership in under a month. At this point its best to hope markets dont start reconsidering your other companies as risky business.
> At this point its best to hope markets dont start reconsidering your other companies as risky business.
I think this is inevitable.
One, Elon is trying to prop up Twitter by using SpaceX money to buy ads. He's dipping his hand into other companies to keep his new toy afloat for a while longer. I don't know if the word "contamination" is appropriate here, but it's pretty clear that Elon doesn't see any kind of sharp boundaries between his various enterprises.
And two, I think a lot of customers are going to start rethinking Elon's offerings. Tesla used to be a status symbol. Driving one meant you were forward thinking, that you were on the bleeding edge, and probably conscientious about the environment. Now, Tesla is "that company Elon owns." There is no way this doesn't hurt Tesla's bottom line, and there's no way investors don't realize this.
All Elon had to do was shut up and bask in the accomplishments of others, but he couldn't manage to take his own ego out of it. Will it ruin him? Probably not. We he still be the richest man in the world in a year or two? Also probably not.
> Tesla used to be a status symbol. Driving one meant you were forward thinking, that you were on the bleeding edge, and probably conscientious about the environment.
I hate to break it to you, but generally only other Tesla owners feel that way. Otherwise, I doubt the public does. In fact, I personally feel the opposite, that's it's a symbol of a "techbro".
Could we avoid participating in this? The price hikes were pretty brutal, but tesla and their charging infrastructure are still at or near the top of the list when it comes to electric cars that you can actually purchase, at least from the perspective of someone looking to replace their ancient mazda in the next year or so.
Also people don't deserve to be judged by their car unless it is a modern german luxury car in which case they obviously are the kind of person who makes bad life choices.
> Also people don't deserve to be judged by their car
In a way, that was my point, because I was responding to this: "Driving one meant you were forward thinking, that you were on the bleeding edge, and probably conscientious about the environment."
Correct. All of my few encounters with a Tesla in the wild were a near accident. That + the attitude I see from Tesla fans online cement a negative view.
Elon deserves a lot of credit for Tesla. But now I'm starting to hear the term "Muskmobile" bandied about when people refer to his car. It's not like Tesla is the only game in town anymore either.
In a weird tangent, I've been thinking about the TV Show "Ted Lasso", and why it's so popular lately. Ted Lasso is the exact opposite of Elon Musk, even to a fault. People don't care if Elon succeeds anymore, but they do want Ted Lasso to.
"Magamobile" is the name I've been hearing. Unfortunate timing for Tesla really given that their early mover advantage has been basically eroded at this point.
> I don't know if the word "contamination" is appropriate here, but it's pretty clear that Elon doesn't see any kind of sharp boundaries between his various enterprises.
Even without "contamination", TSLA stock price collapsed by over $100+ because Elon Musk predictably sold $Billions of stock to pay for the TWTR buyout. Its not like $33 Billion came out of nowhere. Elon had to sell TSLA to get that money.
If TWTR keeps losing money, Elon will be forced to sell more and more TSLA stock to keep it afloat.
And this is all the legal / ethical way of doing things. No "contamination" in just selling stock to support another. Even then, we can see the huge drop in TSLA stock prices (compared to the rest of the market, which rebounded in the past few weeks on good inflation data).
Random thought -- is it a conflict of interest to sell so many shares, knowing that it will have a major impact on share price? If you know your personal actions (needing to sell a lot of TSLA shares to buy Twitter) will have an impact on your professional responsibilities (keeping the TSLA share price high), when does that become a conflict? Is there a way to mitigate that conflict?
That's the board's problem. Normally, you're not supposed to have the largest shareholder, CEO, and Board Chair be the same person.
SEC forced Elon off the board chair at least. But yeah, its a well known fact that Tesla's setup is full of conflicts of interest. It doesn't seem like the shareholders (or the board) feels like fixing it though.
Teslas are nice cars. Owning one is a status symbol, but I don’t think Elon Musk is the deciding factor when it comes time to buy one or go elsewhere. Until other car makers get their acts together and produce luxury EVs with charger infrastructure, consumers will overlook Elon Musk’s antics.
I agree with you though that Musk’s brands are becoming too associated with his personality, which is mercurial and irksome. Caveat emptor.
What accomplishments of others? They took a simple database driven tweet index, that just showed tweets as they were posted, and turned it into a politically polarized echo chamber. They created dozens of internal social “teams” to ensure their algorithm blocked what they didn’t like and showed only what they liked, and destroyed any actual discourse that was on the site at all. Elon likes the CONCEPT of Twitter, sees how simple it is once you strip away the shackles of the algorithm, and has money to burn. He’s still unfathomly rich after the acquisition. Let him do what he wants. Let him shut it down for good. Who cares? It’s his to do so with.
Is it false? At most I think we can say it's unclear, but Eli Lilly seem to take it seriously since they pulled all their ad spend from twitter in response.
A discussion about viral tweets and stock price collapse that doesn't address the topic of high frequency trading bots? And written by a PhD in bioinformatics, who gives zero evidence of his claims. Why should we pay attention to his argument?
Even if it is, he's right. Although this is anecdotal, I have a friend who works in finance that said the drop in stock was coincidental to the stock price dropping. Apparently pharmaceuticals are a defensive sector in a bear market, and the market popping up last week meant the price of Eli Lilly dropped, as I understand it. In his words that tweet causing the stock to drop was "fake news"
There is never going to be a way to conclusively ascribe the drop in stock price to any one event. However, the act of pointing out the high cost of insulin to a large audience not causing a drop in stock price would be highly suspect. I personally doubt it was the Tweet itself that caused the drop. No one should/would have believed it was an actual statement by Eli Lilly.
But in a bear market, this bad publicity about the high price of a mandatory medication for a large population is likely going to have an effect.
Or it could have also been a coincidence... there's no way to know.
High frequency trader bots watch random accounts? That seems like a bad strategy. Maybe they're watching news headlines - but that seems like a media problem where a storm of articles about nothing drive the very story they are talking about.
> bad publicity about the high price of a mandatory medication for a large population is likely going to have an effect.
I know this is orthogonal to the stock price drop, but this kind of bad publicity (gouging sick people in need of your product) actually turned out to be a good thing for the public and for overall justice.
Advertisers sure have a lot of influence in what gets published. Perhaps it's time to look critically at that. They're certainly the last group of people I'd trust with... anything. Their job is literally to manipulate people, yet somehow they became the arbiters of morality and permissibility.
For example, we've put severe restrictions on what kind of strings employers are permitted to attach. We also look very carefully at concentration of capital and collusion.
Note that this is not necessarily a call for legislation, but certainly people should be aware of who shapes and filters their communications, and how, just as they should be aware that e.g. 90% of US media are owned by 6 companies (in 2011, down from 50 in 1983) [1].
There are entire university departments dedicated to analyzing the influence and cross-ownership of media and capital, even though one could just as easily dismiss that with "What is there to look at? It's just free markets at work."
I've seen a lot of people comment, especially on Twitter, about "The checkmark fiasco that wiped billions off corporate ledgers on a friday" - but it's completely untrue.
Eli Lilly was the pharmaceutical company that attracted the most attention. Their stock was down 4% the day of a fake tweet. But pharmaceutical companies were down generally that day, some as much or more than Eli Lilly. Lots of companies had fake tweets written about them - some had good days on the stock market, some had bad - almost like stock market prices are a random walk day to day, sometimes up and sometimes down.
From a common sense perspective it's pretty implausible that an obviously fake tweet could shift market perceptions by billions of dollars. I don't think that really happened at all.
I also don't see why advertisers would care about the office lockout or layoffs. Advertisers certainly don't want their ads running next to offensive content, but if Musk can control that - why should advertisers pull out?
It has to be deliberate. I have never been on twitter, and have not even been able read incidental twits that get pushed my way since they required JS.
So it is truly a non issue one way or the other for me.
But I can not see any possible goal except to not only destroy the particular company but to further destroy the idea of something like it as viable.
Musk's vision for Twitter has finally been realized: if you want to whistleblow or say not nice things about Tesla, SpaceX, or Musk himself, no one will see it. Nothing bad about him or his companies will trend on Twitter ever again.
Sounds like a complicated moderation position to take. "Negative" and "hate" are a matter of perspective and Twitter is a global product. What meets a legal definition of "hate" in one nation is state-sponsored "religious belief" in another. Do you weigh the tweets differently based on who's looking at it?
I'm by no means a proponent of the fediverse but this is one arena it has a leg up in. Federators are free to draw their own cultural borders online rather than relying on a centralized for-profit company to draw them. (Or leave them undrawn, which has been Twitter's stance so far.)
The main reason some of us go on Twitter is it is where the politicians and other leaders tweet. It is the only place where we can talk back to them. This talking back is probably considered negative. If our voices will be silenced, I will just subscribe to a few of the people still there using RSS feeds. All real discussion will move elsewhere.
And all the above is very bad for commerce. Social media should be lubricants for commerce, that's how they make money. Or in Twitter case they dont.
Given all that, the only way to monetize twitter is to use it as leverage on political leaders and business leaders. This was most likely Musk plan, he then got out-framed by the Delaware courts and lost all his confidence to punch up, so he's punching down by abusing employees.
Good points. As rich as he is, he is heavily dependent on defense contracts and the global financial system who can pull his strings. He is also punching down on the regular working class who want a voice against the powerful. A more neutered and sanitized environment seems to be the future of Twitter. The fediverse looks more beautiful every day.
Pretty much going according to plan. Next step will be tweets from the political left being downranked by the algorithm/shadowbanned because Elon considers them “hate speech”.
I think he's heading towards making people pay for reach to try to get more subscription revenue. In my opinion paying for reach is what started Facebook's decline, when people realize that "your" followers are not actually theirs they lose interest.
I'm not using twitter (and not going to), so please explain, what that means, exactly. So, let's say it is decided by Musk&co that X (written by xxx) is a hateful Tweet.
- I am a follower of xxx. Will I see it?
- I specifically go to twitter.com/xxx. Will I find X on that page?
- X is a reply to a popular thread I'm reading right now. Will I see X?
So, what exactly being "deboosted" means on Twitter? It just won't appear among all the recommended trash on some "most popular" feed, or does it mean that it's basically invisible unless I somehow guess the specific ID of that tweet?
I've discovered that if you tweet the name "Michael Griffin" + "Elon" (or "Musk"), nobody will see your tweet organically unless they search for it directly.
Michael Griffin is an important person in Elon's real (non-mythical) history that he'd probably rather you not know about,
Isn't it more possible than something nefarious that no one is interested and the twitter algorithm just doesn't think people will care so its downranked in searches?
Was it that way before Musk bougth Twitter? Or you didn't check before?
Also, I'm still confused by what "search for it directly" means. Like, you won't see it in author's feed at all unless you have an id of that tweet? Can you find it by searching Griffin + Musk in Twitter's search bar?
The interesting question to me is whether Twitter will still allow a strictly reverse chronological feed of tweets from accounts you follow. It's been getting harder and harder to hold onto that as a user.
What does deboosted mean? Does twitter show you tweets from people you don't follow (and people you follow don't retweet)? Or does that mean you won't see the tweets from the people you follow?
Fumbling forward, path still unclear. Who and how is negative determined?
Is opposing oppression considered to be negative? Sentiment analysis of the protest orientated tweets would probably deem them so
what's the difference between a valid criticism and negativity? it would be hard enough to identify "hate", but "negative"...that leaves a lot of room for interpretation.
A question, I am used to monetized in the youtube sense, where you get a portion of your videos ad revenue, I did not think twitter did this. Does demonetized mean something different there?
This is his worst idea yet, it's basically the ideal approach for bullying. Only the target will see the bullying so their supporters will be ignorant, and continuous bullies will be permitted to continue indefinitely.
People treating this as a backpedal or a commitment to keep back moderation have not thought this through -- this is a fig-leaf.
It's all about economics of demand for what Twitter is offering: advertising. Elon's changes have massively harmed the value of an ad on Twitter.
Moderation teams are massively cut, meaning advertisers have to worry about their products beside hate speech or worse. At the same time, Elon is explicitly un-banning people who were banned for hate speech, promising that no ads will show beside their future hate speech- it will just show to their many many followers who come to the site to see that exact thing. I'm not certain advertisers will be encouraged by this.
Engineering is massively reduced, meaning the operational excellence of the system is in question- what good is paying for ads if the site is down so often that users don't come back?
And there's all of the potential issues with the SEC and other legal problems that aren't being addressed because Elon fired the teams that handled those things. No sane advertising agency is signing a long-term contract with Twitter. There's just too much uncertainty.
Elon Musk is not cut out to be the CEO of a software company. The problem is that he is the only person that isn't aware of that at this point.
"It's all about economics of demand for what Twitter is offering: advertising. Elon's changes have massively harmed the value of an ad on Twitter."
This is actually something that would be in line with Musk's previous communications. Twitter needs to become less dependent on advertising, much less so, so that its value as a public forum isn't held hostage by a few shy giants that would love to see cute kittens and meaningless platitudes next to their ads.
The idea that free services supported by extensive ads is the only way to go has been too long taken for revealed wisdom. The downsides are only now becoming apparent.
That said, the method chosen by Musk seems to be very chaotic and destructive, and it is totally unclear to me if Twitter can actually build a different business model without going belly-up first.
It seems a little unfair that people who hang out in hateful places get a better UX (ie no ads). If anything, they should generate ads for anti-hate groups and therapy providers and plaster the feed with them.
You can feel potentially relieved that mostly they get trashier ads, rather than no ads. Supplements and gambling and anime blow up dolls used to be the order of the day on 4chan at least.
What is not discussed is who decides what is negative and what is hate? (or what is parody). No one is going to disagree that hate speech has no place, but who is the watcher and who is the decider? Probably a bot.
Sounds reasonable. I'm a bit of a free speech absolutist, so I say no to censorship no matter how insulting the content may be, but that doesn't mean anyone is required to amplify anything.
The argument I hear most often from pro censorship people is that it's not as simple as having a voice, your voice is amplified by algorithms on these sites, you're giving someone a megaphone. This decision appears to solve that problem while not censoring anyone. I'd say a shadow ban would go too far, but just not promoting it sounds like a reasonable compromise.
Things like these will lead to Twitter losing market share eventually to a more non-authoritarian platform "eventually". People want to police themselves.
Nobody likes to be policed this way. The road to tyranny is paved with good intentions. We went from "the bird is free" to the bird is free according to one minds view. Hitler also had a vision to cleanse what was deemed rotten and also had one mind. He surrounded himself with yes men and we all know where that story ended up.
It's very difficult for one mind to be aware of it's own biases especially when so much power is concentrated towards it and around you are a bunch of ass kissers who want to claw at your pockets.
There's some interesting discussion in this thread about whether this is the right or wrong move for Twitter. However, after the debacle last night, I think it's a moot point, I simply don't see twitter.com still running within the next few months, possibly within the next few weeks. He's fired 50% of the company, reports seem that conservatively 50% of the remainder just quit yesterday, their subscription service had to be cancelled in the process scaring off their primary revenue source. They don't seem to be in any position to moderate, develop features, or, if some ex-employees can be believed, even keep the service running with who they have left. I honestly think within the next week or two we'll see a significant outage of the platform, and it'll never be brought back up to 100%, if at all. It's a stunning display of incompetence from the once admired richest man on Earth. So he can make all the policy changes he wishes, I don't think anyone will be around to see them happen.
This is the correct take. Without the staff and institutional knowledge of a 16 year old service, no amount of hand waving will keep the service healthy. It’s a stunning display of what not to do.
Perhaps the Twitter code is convoluted and messy, but really, you think to such a degree that even a small team of highly-motivated, skilled engineers could not figure it out and keep it running?
Any motivated, highly skilled engineers that's worked on long running global software systems will tell you that maintaining systems is hard, and coldbooting a system is even harder.
I agree that there will likely be a serious outage, probably several, but there's too much money on the table for twitter to just go away. The product, although poorly monetized, is immensely successful and widely loved. If Musk and all remaining twitter employees just disappeared, somebody would pick up those pieces. Granted, it's likely impossible to maintain stability on a totally alien system of that scale, but it's not impossible to figure out how to run it at all. Stability will come with time, and because of twitter's importance to our society, they'll probably have the time.
> I simply don't see twitter.com still running within the next few months, possibly within the next few weeks
Aside from the staffing changes, what unique insight do you have, that Elon Musk does't have, that makes you so confident that the platform is doomed? And so quick at that.
Because the former Twitter engineers who literally built it have said so. And I've personally worked on a few "web-scale" apps before and I believe them.
No system I've ever seen is 100% automated. Especially for occasional tasks eg. hot patching emergency security fixes or refreshing expired internal certificates.
'Aside from the staffing changes' could be like asking why Germany lost WWII, 'aside from the Allied armies.' Any company is bound to struggle and forget how to run itself when the staffing cuts are that deep and unhappy.
When you have a big tech company with thousands of employees, the pareto principle comes into play in a huge way: proably only 10% of these people are actually doing any work that directly impacts the platform.
At least half the employees are probably not doing anything really useful. This applies even to tech companies with a mere 100 total employees. At 3000 employees it's probably even more so. Specially with the majority "working from home".
There are probably only about 10 key engineers who understand at a deep level how things are working.
On the other hand, Musk is bootstrapping a hardcode engineering culture where a lot of the platform can be implemented from scratch in a few weeks by top engineers if he can hire them, and I'm pretty sure he can.
>He is good at making engineers a "high status class"
From what I've seen, Elon's companies pay below-market for most roles. Levels.fyi indicates that, on average, engs take a 10-15% pay cut by deciding to work for Tesla.
I'm sure there are a handful of engineers that exist that could save Twitter single-handedly, but none that would do it for the pay he's offering.
He can get away with paying below market rates to Tesla engineers for the same reason video game companies can do it: people think it would be cool to work there. It doesn't seem plausible to me that if Musk can't get people to work at Twitter for cheap he wouldn't just offer more rather than let it die.
Waymo is working in the same "cool" field as many of the Tesla SWEs and pays much better than equivalent positions at Tesla, with less stress from impossible constraints and deadlines. He can get away with it because either he doesn't think he needs the top talent or some engineers are willing to make sacrifices to work for their idol
Well, either way, the fact that he's getting what he wants for a lot less than Waymo has to pay doesn't mean he can't or won't pay more if he has to. And if there are engineers who idolize him so much, why do you think he'll have trouble recruiting for Twitter? I think it's Tesla they idolize, not Musk, so he'll need to pay a lot more to get people for Twitter.
This is the relevant part of the "Fork in the road" email:
> Design and product management will still be very important and report to me, but those writing great code will constitute the majority of our team and have the greatest sway.
Most companies put engineers _below_ design and product management: the designers and product people make decisions, and programmers just implement.
Once you're past the $120k/year mark does a higher salary matter that much really? It only matters if you don't find anything fulfilling about your job.
What would you rather?
$180k/year with great say over the product or $220k/year with little say on the product?
I have lost count of the number of caveats that have been applied daily to his “free speech absolutism”. Any bets on how soon he will permanently ban folks like AOC and Elizabeth Warren under some new “policy”?
Nope. Private property, owner makes the rules, it is his right. But in this case, I will criticize those decisions and say they are bad. Go free speech!
Nah, they'll probably still have the opinion that Nazis and hate speech doesn't belong on Twitter.
They'll also probably still be of the opinion that equating those groups with EW is utterly pants-on-head bonkers, and is a poster child of the kind of both-sides brain rot that the media inflicts on us a daily basis.
What is a "negative tweet" or a "hate tweet"? Those two concepts sure seem ambiguous. Hate tweet, I suppose, is marginally easier to understand than a hate tweet, I guess...
But what does this mean for like, the Babylon Bee or The Lincoln Project? I'd say both of them can be negative at times.
What does it mean for libertarians or anti capitalists who are strongly averse to the way things are run today?
(I deliberately tried to highlight that this sort of change could impact people of various political persuasions, trying to not "pick a favorite" by only showing how this could impact my "team".)
(FWIW, I've always believed that moderation is a good thing on Twitter, and that free speech absolutism is just not tenable on the platform.)
It's been fascinating to watch this guy come in and absolutely crush any dissenting voices then immediately start restricting speech on the "free speech zone" platform of his.
Here's one example quote from June, 2022:
“I think there’s this big difference between freedom of speech and freedom of reach in that one can, obviously, let’s say in the United States go in the middle of Times Square and pretty much yell anything you want. You’ll annoy the people around you, but you’re kind of allowed to just sort of yell whatever you want in a crowded public place, more or less, apart from 'this is robbery' — probably that would get you in trouble.
“So but then whatever you say, however controversial, does not need to then be broadcast to the whole country. So I think generally the approach of Twitter should be to let people say what they want to do within the bounds of the law, but then limit who sees that...”
Source: https://www.teslarati.com/elon-musk-china-censorship-twitter...