a sizeable investor is no different than us in that they have no non-public info
Assuming Musk did take over Twitter, he wouldn't need to be much of a distraction. He could dictate a few rules (don't moderate Twitter, don't ban anyone, etc.) and then leave the company to function as it did before.
I think what he doesn't realize is that reducing moderation on Twitter would lead to a death spiral. Humans would find it less useful, and bots would find it more useful. No one wants to be on a platform that is 99% bots posting inflammatory political content.
Not really. One of the hard things about changing the course of a company is that you actually need people to do the things you want them to do. That means actually being hands on and checking things are getting done. Otherwise people will nod and agree in meetings and then just carry on as they were before. This is especially hard if people are resistant to the changes you want to make.
Taking over and issuing commands doesn't work unless people have nowhere else to go. If Elon tried that at Twitter there would probably be an exodus of engineering and ops people.
If Twitter started doing no (or very little) moderation it would suddenly be in conflict with many laws around the globe including the EU and the US.
That did fly a few years ago but I doubt it does today.
Other shareholders might not be to thrilled about them being banned
Most platforms fail miserably at removing the former and just automate the latter. Twitter could spend a small fraction of their current moderation budget and still be in compliance with US law.
Of course Twitter is free to leave those markets at any time but I don't think other shareholders besides Musk would appreciate that.
Even in America, some brands were not that interested appearing next to fringe/extreme (though legal) content. And advertisers are the real customers of Twitter and all social media after all.
That's obviously true for authoritarian countries like China but even in "the West" there are competing definitions of what constitutes free speech.
If you want to operate in those countries (at scale) you need to localize your moderation policies and therefore "take a stance". Cost of doing business globally.
- banning
- shadow-banning
- deleting offensive messages
- detaching off-topic threads
The only difference with HN is that their rules are different. Everything else is very similar to Twitter.
Dorsey chose not to ban Trump, and then he did. That was a huge change for Twitter, and it didn't seem to rock the boat at the company at all.
Twitter also didn't ban politicians at all for a long time. That was another major policy change that Musk could simply revert back.
This is (probably) a good example of why it's hard. Dorsey understood that banning Trump would have been problematic, so he didn't. He, and probably others, worked to change the company internally to be somewhere where they could do that. Rather than do it and then deal with the fallout he worked to steer the company to be more open to being to be somewhere without Trump. Then he could ban Trump without the fallout.
That's how you change a company. Buying a big chunk of it and then issuing decrees about how it works now is much less likely to work. No doubt Elon understands that completely, and has no intention of doing it. He'll work to move Twitter in the direction he wants, maybe with the help of others, until he can then claim to have changed it overnight or something. He's not silly.
> Here we analyze 14 million messages spreading 400 thousand articles on Twitter during ten months in 2016 and 2017. We find evidence that social bots played a disproportionate role in spreading articles from low-credibility sources. Bots amplify such content in the early spreading moments, before an article goes viral.
I would also be interested in finding more studies that relate to what percentage of scientific research Americans thoughtlessly write off as "fiction" and the corresponding media diets.
- Inability to be replicated, not even in principle.
- Using definitions of "bot" that captures verified humans like e.g. the POTUS.
- Ignoring false positives in the data set or not even trying to measure them at all.
- Using opaque ML models trained off an irrelevant data set which (when measured by outsiders) have 50%+ FP rates.
- Logic errors and difficulty reasoning about causality.
- Mis-statements about what their own data actually shows.
- Refusal to acknowledge or address any of these problems.
There's a paper that thoroughly debunks this field here:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3814191
and it's also available in talk form here:
https://archive.org/details/hopeconf2020/20200726_2000_Peopl...
and if you're in a hurry I summarized the paper here:
https://blog.plan99.net/fake-science-part-ii-bots-that-are-n...
NB: Some of my own meta-research into these papers is cited in their paper and talk.
Edit: I took a quick look at the paper you linked and it has many of the same problems. Amongst other things it explicitly classifies satire as "digital misinformation". One of the authors is Flammini who is well known for writing nonsensical pseudo-scientific papers in this space, in fact, he's mentioned in the talk linked above.
What evidence do you have that Twitter is lying about this? Why would they harm their brand by saying that they're infested with bot networks when they actually aren't?
1. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/exclusive-twitter-pul...
That definition of free speech isn't even alien to the US. Corporations' freedom of speech in this country is protected even when it includes paying other people to speak.
Many governments have been rolling out SSO for their suite of digital service applications, I can totally imagine an "internet passport" type situation in the future, where a government issued SSO authorization can be used by social media companies.
For the record, I'm wholeheartedly against that kind of thing, but it's hardly beyond the pale for the companies in question I think.
Facebook already does this with driver's licenses in the US in some cases.
Nobody wants bots, but those are not the question in moderation discussions.
My bet is that engagement is down with all the moderation. This is not an endorsement of Trump, just an acknowledgement of what made Twitter huge/powerful in the first place.
Who decides?
Because Twitter's decorum's track record is better? You must have missed an episode or two.
The general public would be better off if Tesla and/or SpaceX actually accomplished their stated goals. What they’ve done is great but they’re not done and need leadership.
Twitter would be way worse off if he turned it into Gab or 4chan with an edit button. Both their product and their financials.
Musk himself is turning into a cringy Twitter troll. If a friend of mine were acting like that I’d tell them to put the phone down and go for a walk. The less he thinks about Twitter the better.
Current evidence suggests Musk is both capable of building industry defining electric car and space tech companies and incapable of "fixing" his own tweets to the extent that they stop getting him into trouble and losing him board seats.
I don't know about the regulatory guidelines which would or would not have barred Elon from exercising any sort of control in the board, but my sources from Twitter are telling me that folks were not happy about the prospect of Elon wanting to change Twitter to be in his image and it's likely this that the higher-ups communicated to Musk and told him to please back away (hence the 'I believe this is for the best' affirmation line from Agrawal himself).
He also says in the previous paragraph that they [had?] believed that having Musk on the board would "be the best path forward." It's sort of a Rorschach test. You could divine either opinion you wanted from the post.
The part I don't get: why is Elon still tweeting ideas for improving Twitter and shaking things up?
That is weird, trolling doesn't seem like Elon's thing at all.
As an actual troll he hasn't really done much but post tired memes until buying a large stake in Twitter. Time will tell whether he's actually going to do anything interesting with this stake but based on track record I'm going with no.
Most of what qualifies him as a troll could be gleaned from a ten minute crash course in /b.
Or is it about making the most people the angriest?
It's like arguing about whether McDonald's is good food.
Some people think that suggesting an Edit button is telling.
"Here is the only imaginable use of an edit button. You post a tweet saying “I love puppies” with a picture of a cute puppy. A thousand people retweet your tweet; a thousand more quote-tweet it with comments like “what a good boi!” A week later, you edit the tweet to say “I think the Nazis got a bad rap,” with a picture of Hitler. Years later, a professor is denied tenure because someone digs through her old tweets to find that she called Hitler “a good boi.” This is absolutely the only purpose for the edit button, and oh man does accomplished Twitter troll Elon Musk know that. "
(Matthew Levine last week)
Limit the time the tweet is editable, and postpone publishing tweets until that timer has run out.
Or show a history of what the post has looked like.
The latter... perhaps, I guess? But then why bother? Are people so desperate to keep their internet points proxies by retweets and likes that they can't fathom reposting if there was an egregious error?
To me the whole exercise is one of malicious populism. It's an idea that appears liberty-generating on the surface and is used to gather a mob but has no real utility.
He's still the largest shareholder and he has a lot of soft power to sway opinions in the public sphere.
Maybe he'll use his influence to replace the board with people who are less politically polarized. Maybe his new board will re-write the charter so he can eventually become CEO.
I don't think this game is over.
> Employees raged on internal message boards, expressing fears Musk will sabotage their culture and make it hard to do their jobs
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/04/07/musk-tw...
but then again, i wouldn't put it past elon to do all the things that the SEC explicitly tells people not to do.
https://www.investor.gov/introduction-investing/investing-ba...
Elon has always been in hot waters with the SEC and should have all the attorneys in the world making sure all Is are doted and Ts crossed. I'd think we're in a reverse Hanlon's razor situation: don't assume incompetence when it can readily be assumed to be malice.
If he wants to join the board he needed to have filed correctly disclosing his acquisition of the shares earlier. To do otherwise is illegal and the SEC will surely take legal action. Filing now can't make everything OK, Elon can't go back in time and retroactively disclose the purchase.
I also find quite amusing the fact that Twitter's original 140 character limitation stemmed from compatibility with SMS gateways.
That part of Twitter is now all but obsolete, I assume. But we're left in a regressed state where people still communicate long-form text as if going through SMS ("threads").
That's very telling, Parag implicitly admits major changes coming up. There is a theory on Twitter that Elon will attempt an outright takeover.
I would say one of the first changes would be to re-instate Trump, which would bring back a huge amount of free marketing.
Here is a single account that by far generated the most brand awareness of Twitter than anything else. "Twitter" was mentioned in every news outlet every single day. And it drove engagement from both sides.
I think a lot of people can see the liberal bias hurting the company and were waiting for something like this. Just look at how many people are coming out from the wood work talking about free speech.
The funny thing is that here is a platform where you can choose who you listen to and who you don't by following and blocking, contrasted to all other news outlets who give you no filtering options, and force you to literally switch off the service if you don't want to hear from someone.
It makes no sense for Twitter to need to ban people.
If Twitter is afraid of Musk interfering with things as they are, the best possible way to get Musk to buy the company (with what would be pocket change for him) would be to ban him.
Musk one step ahead.
At least he made the effort to include accessible alt-text. (Interestingly, the accessible text differs *slightly* from the picture-of-text version -- different draft revisions? Even social media CEO's don't seem comfortable with this workflow).
edit: here's a diff with highlighting: https://i.imgur.com/R9wf2H5.png
I'm relying on Verge's transcription of the screenshoted text,
https://www.theverge.com/2022/4/10/23019802/elon-musk-not-jo...
What an interesting mistake. There must have been three or four messages. I wonder if the CEO acted alone or as a part of a team.
Talk about “no good deed goes unpunished.”
Whoops. Time to bow out.
(Thank you for pointing out the mistake so gracefully. Have a good night.)
One problem with Twitter’s alt text is that it’s too short. I copy paste HN comments into alt text, but am almost always met with an error. In that situation I just link to the original comment, but the CEO couldn’t do that here.
I'm so sorry to continue: please introduce some padding while you're at it; the text being so close to the window borders in stock emacs is so offputting. Signed with love, a recent emacs convert.
edit: I see word-wrapping now, thanks!
Yeah, my emacs config is a work in progress.
And so it shall remain
Hahaha Sisyphus had a similar problem
Narcissus fell in love with his own reflection:
> Edit: He'd show up in hacker news chat to call me a pedophile if it made his techy fans scream beligerantly.
This isn't appropriate to say on Hacker News.
[Citation needed]
This is one of the silliest things I've heard people make up about Musk.
> This is one of the silliest things I've heard people make up about Musk.
https://youtu.be/Ebxiu1-RoKI?t=1278
Have fun licking his boot.
Thanks for polluting my watch history with that idiot.
Did you mean an optimist?
It amuses me more than it should that the CEO of Twitter has posted an image of text (from the iOS Notes app?) to get around the Twitter character limit.