As a micro-publishing platform, it's hard to beat.
There are very few topics that are both worthy of a news story and able to be summarized even remotely well in 140 characters. It is literally the downfall of journalism and in my opinion is a major driver in the complete lack of rational discussion in politics today.
A great example was the learn to code meme.
This is a separate point, but what exactly does Twitter do to provide a direct connection to the masses that the rest of the internet doesn't? The only difference is that Twitter, through some combination of marketing, first mover advantage, addictiveness to the right audience, whatever, happened to what the developed world chose as its social media platform of choice for current events.
That's orthogonal to its actual appropriateness for being such a platform and to its utility to global/national society as a whole.
Going off tangent again, but the same analogy goes with Facebook - it was nice to connect with people and see their updates until it became this rotten, ad driven, divisive tool. Remember FB restricted to college users back in 2005?
Maybe there is some kind of “aging” phenomenon with social networks. They all rot. MySpace, Digg, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter and coming up next - Instagram.
I am not saying we should ban them. Just disrupt them.
Twitter is a combination of the worst things:
Public shouting
In very short form
Attacks rise to the top
No way to discuss the substance together
No wonder society is overrun by outrage mobs and #hashtag movements.
Twitter only encourages misunderstanding and posts without thought. The character limit is a big driver of this.
If Musk wants to take his company private then he can do whatever he wants, but there is a different set of rules for CEOs of publicly traded companies for a reason.
I recently heard this described as removing context. Which made me facepalm. Obvious, right? (Sorry, I shoulda bookmarked it.)
FWIW, I think every public figure should hire someone to manage their social media presence. As in, doesn't a CEO have more important things to do?
Press releases still exist. Although even then I'd wager the copy writers do a better job of legal due diligence than Musk.
I recently read a group of high profile journalists (mainstream media) stating that "Twitter is where we get the news from"...
Twitter has become a sort of real-time news agency. If you follow the correct profiles in your niche/sector not even Reuters can beat the speed of 95% of the events. If there's a newsworthy event, chances are it's first on twitter than in any other media outlet.
Wow. This is unbelievably scary.
Imho news should be curated & not first to the wires. News should involve individual fact checking and less web of trust.
I understand how we consumers might want to listen to a journalist's feed, but journalists using it as a source too? It's nothing but a self referential feedback loop otherwise!
One word describes the problem: covfefe
https://twitter.com/freakonometrics/status/10205573001537044...
Is that just for entertainment or did you use that information in some way?
It's similar to papers or tv stations crowing how they broke a story. So what? Do I really need (or do most people) to know that there is a mass tragedy (only one example) the minute it happens? It can't wait? Not everything that happens is '911' grade information.
"just" is just your opinion
> Do I really need (or do most people) to know
I do.
Reading the entire sentence makes it clear that "just" refers to whether or not they "use that information in some way", and that is not an opinion.
> I do.
You cut off "the minute it happens". It's not about whether you learn it, but how rapidly.
Breaking a story matters if no one else was looking, but yeah not of everyone was racing.
How is that a good thing? Without proper fact-checking it's just rumors. And there are a lot of instances of fake news spreading on Twitter before full information is available.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/20/tesla-replaces-general-couns...
I'd pay for it just to have my wife be able to say "Really? You want to tweet another picture of the cat? No."
Personally I'm amused and ok with famous people facing the consequences of voicing their opinions, and also them getting roasted by normal civilians in public thanks to twitter.
I get that twitter main usage is this, but you can accomplish that with literally any social media/personal website.
What twitter really facilitates is seeing feeds from random people and famous people responses to other (famous or not) people.
In discussing having a N-second window where a user can correct typos, Dorsey brought it down to a tradeoff between real-timeness and correctibility. Essentially he feels that much of Twitter's charm as a platform comes from the fact that updates feel "live", so every delay from tweet source to delivery needs to be given a heavy cost in the cost/benefit analysis.
Adding a delay like that as a feature (especially for a figure notable enough to move the stock market with a tweet) would undermine that message completely, by preventing that figure from engaging with the conversation in real time.
Just from an economic line of thought, even a cursory look at Tesla and Elon's history of public statements would make a reasonable investor think "Gee, the CEO talks a lot. Maybe don't read too much into it."
Otherwise you (the investing public) are going to say "well he could have a great factory, or he could be spouting off again, guess I'll keep the money under the mattress."
It would make it very hard to raise money to do big things.
It’s more effective than sitting on hold waiting for a giant company to ignore you.
One reasonable tweet about an issue and usually a customer service rep reaches out.
I tweeted about how a company saved Christmas for our family with a last minute furniture delivery. We were going to take a secondary choice on color for that item to arrive on time.
The CEO of the company got involved and we got the right color on time.
Company is LoveSac and they were great but wouldn’t have even know about the issue without Twitter.
Only if there's a good PR opportunity to be had, which is exactly the case you described.
But on a bigger scheme, it is sad to see this happening while "puffery" is legal and the damage it is causing is far bigger than anything elon's tweets have caused. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0CyBv18A5k
0. This line is in the 2013 8-K filing by Tesla: "For additional information, please follow Elon Musk’s and Tesla’s Twitter accounts: twitter.com/elonmusk and twitter.com/TeslaMotors "
“Capitalism” wasn't named “capitalism” by it's opponents because it protects consumers and leaves capitalists out in the cold.
I can get the news a bazillion different ways. I don't need Twitter for that. But I also enjoy seeing the reaction from the various communities of which I'm a part, from work to the ski club to the people I follow on Twitter or Facebook. Social media is much better when it's social, not broadcast.
Am I in danger of creating my own little bubble this way? Sure, as has always been the case with RL associations as well, and the remedy is the same as well - learn critical thinking, don't rely on any one of them for your information, etc. And even if each of my social-media "avatars" is in a bubble at least it's my bubble, the result of my own conscious curation and not someone else's idea of what bubble I should be stuffed into.
They have since slowly killed this value, by changing how the timeline is ordered, increased character limit, etc.
That’s extreme. Just give the securities lawyer the password. Elon clearly lacks the discipline to work with pre-approval. So have him draft tweets, send them to the lawyer, and then watch them go live. He can read his feed but not write to it.
In the event that anything actually happened on twitter, someone was probably being negligent in terms of tendering and governance. It doesn't make sense for a few tweets to be critical, so they probably weren't.
Incidentally, I think we should have referendums (local, national, scotland..) to ban leaders from twitter. Maybe Jack Dorsey could be sold on this.
I think even if so, that's a terrible idea.
Said citizen and his company avoided prison time and massive fines respectively by agreeing to said restrictions as the result of earlier fraudulent misrepresentations on a private account he demanded the corporation register as an official public account for regulatory purposes.
So...yes. Definitely they can enforce an agreement he voluntarily entered into for a medium he deliberately turned into a regulated source.
Let's not forget Musk owes a fiduciary duty to Tesla shareholders and his tweets have repeatedly lost shareholders money and induced people to purchase shares on false/misleading information. That's securities fraud.
Source: Corporate & Securities Attorney. I was once the approver of many such tweets. Though thankfully the people I worked with were exceedingly reasonable in comparison to Musk.
Edit: Missed a word.
Also, the SEC is a regulator for a reason. Saying the company is cool with it (even when it’s really unclear if that’s actually true give the voting setup) is completely irrelevant to if the behavior is acceptable to society. After all, grifters are totally fine with gritting when they’re the ones doing it, but that doesn’t mean grifting a societal benefit.
[0] https://www.thestreet.com/investing/stocks/how-elon-musk-con...
https://twitter.com/_jameshatfield_/status/11001772987230945...
A lot of people don't realize this is industry-standard. Any reasonable CEO wants to make sure they aren't inadvertently committing securities fraud with the send of a tweet.
Tweets being reviewed by the legal department are par for the course at any publicly-traded company.
The point of the SEC is to prevent harms like that. The point of the SEC's 2018 settlement with Elon was to prevent him from investor-harming tweets like the one he made by requiring tweets about Tesla to be reviewed for accuracy and correctness before posting.
Does it matter that it was outside of trading hours?
> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech,
A civil contract between a company and individual does not fall under this at all. They could add anything to that contract and it is up to you whether you sign it. If a company demands you to walk to the office like someone out of Monthy Python's Ministry Of Silly Walks, they sure can. It's up to you whether you accept it. There are some explicit limitations to this (class discrimination, whistleblower protections etc) but beyond that, it's a free country.
2) I don't see how it's a terrible. Musk is breaking federal laws as CEO and putting the whole company in jeopardy. It's no different than a rogue firstline worker speeding down the road drunk in a company vehicle.
I’m just speaking my mind, new to this site. Sorry to have disappointed you.
I admire Elon for his vision, and actually also admire his radical style despite of its unpopular image - I watched the video where he smoked pot on the radio show. It was a really amazing conversation about future of humanity. He just needs to stop tweeting. You may say it’s fixing the symptom, but here if we take Twitter away, he would stop yelling stupid FCC punishable things.
As a side note, Twitter has hardly done anything useful for the society. I never got into twitter and never understood its value. Conversations are one sided, blog posts are separated into incomprehensible chain of tweets, people are insulting with no repercussion - it’s a giant echo chamber of loud people. One thing it has done is to improve customer support by shaming companies publicly, which is a really sad state of affairs.