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.