This is not about content moderation. This is yet another instance of a CEO with no guard rails antagonizing, for no discernable reason, the revenue source for something he bought for $44B.

Elon can pile up $44B and set it on fire if he wants to. But he does have co-investors, even if most of them don't care if they ever see their money again. He does have creditors who do care.

At what Twitter would be valued today, the creditors effectively own it. Depending on the schedule for debt service, and Twitter's ability to pay, they will have something to say about the quality of leadership at Twitter.

That's not what he said and we shouldn't upvote headlines that are complete lies. He said that he offered the content moderation council as an olive leaf to activist groups so that they'd stop trying to push advertisers off of Twitter. He said he was back stabbed so the deal is off.

fwiw, I was not editorializing when submitting the headline. I just used the headline from the post I was linking to. I know hacker news sometimes rewrites headlines and remember thinking that they might decide to do that in this case, though I see that it has so far stayed the same.

Fair enough. Should I be enraged by Musk or by advertisers that try to sanitize their online presence and want certain users gone? I think the latter are a far more negative influence on online content.

Advertisements in general are just crummy. These are people who sell our privacy and attention to greedy suits who hire marketing departments to create a generic product-centric universe with a soundscape of corporate elevator music from hell. They don't care about our "safety", they only really want the minimal amount of our trust required to not lose enough sales to go under. The idea that they or their self-reported ESG score stand for anything is laughable.

Just because someone's actions show you can't trust their words doesn't mean you have to be outraged.