This is probably the core motivation behind the $2/month blue checkmark fee proposed by him. You don't need to moderate social media if you can just send the cops credit card details of the person spam-posting swastikas, agitating for violence or breaking other established laws. I hope we all agree that laws against libel, glorification of crime, threatening people are not exactly censorship.

Rolling it out at scale could improve the rampant spam/astroturfing problem, even if it would be imperfect.

If he charged $2 / month for an individual to get a blue check and $100 / month for a company to get verified then eliminated ads, could he get the staff count down to under 100 people?

I remember when Facebook bought Instagram. Instagram had something like 13 employees. Why does Twitter need two orders of magnitude more?

How many do you think is realistic? Reducing your revenue by an order of magnitude to reduce your headcount by an order of magnitude seems like a bad plan.

Right now there are 360,000 blue check marks on Twitter. If I spot you the first million blue checkmarks and the first 100,000 business profiles, that's only $144M of revenue per year. Even if that is 90% profit, $130M / year profit on a $50B investment is not particularly brag-worthy.

Once a company gets big enough, 95% of an employees job is navigating the bureaucracy. So the head count goes way up.

Companies tend to hire more employees as long as the marginal benefit to doing so is greater than the marginal cost. Even minor improvements to a product like Twitter can boost revenue by millions. Reducing the headcount might not maximise their income.

There will be exceptions though. Valve does lot more than most video-game companies with far fewer employees.

Wait a minute when did Valve go back to being a video game company?

• How many are engineers?

• How many work in customer service?

• How many are in compliance?

• How many are in marketing?

• How many are ICs and how many are managers?

• How many are in HR?

• How many are in finance?

This runs into a problem because of the inherent inequality of "crime".

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges.

As far as I'm concerned, if you want to force a business to censor speech, get a court order.

Which they can do, once you get over a very high bar indeed.

We have literally seen the Supreme Court protect speech advocating for violence against the Government.

>Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444 (1969), was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court interpreting the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Court held that the government cannot punish inflammatory speech unless that speech is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action".

Specifically, the Court struck down Ohio's criminal syndicalism statute, because that statute broadly prohibited the mere advocacy of violence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio

I much prefer the rule of law to the rule of Twitter mob.

P.S. Requiring someone to have a credit card doesn't feel like free speech absolutism to me. A pretty big number of people don't have the ability to make credit card payments. Do their voices not matter?

I'm not so sure what a four chan mode would look like. Can you please elaborate? Inspite of the constant mockery of the janitors, my understanding is they work practically around the clock for zero pay trying to keep the boards (not that I go to /b/ much) as clean as possible. It definitely is not a free for all and my understanding is most people gladly support heavy handed IP bans for example if someone posts commercial pornography on a "work safe" four channel board like technolo/g/y.

Moreover, some of the boards are very slow to the point that frequenters seem to get annoyed by a low quality post pushing down better posts by saying things like "thank you for your blog post" (I assume sarcasm, I don't know for sure) or "a thread died for this".

Also there are (from what I've read) filters available to filter out posts with certain keywords and people coming up with ways to have their posts show up for people with filters using different techniques.

I don't post anything on 4chan as I don't feel like a part of the in-crowd though and would genuinely like to know what a 4 Chan mode would look like.

I don’t think there is a requirement for being part of the in crowd to post on 4chan. Then again, I’ve never posted there either.

I think the point is that 4chan mode would be the “absolute free speech” mode. And if that is where we are going, it will be quite a ride. I can’t imagine Twitter surviving it, but it will be interesting.

I think what I've learned from 4chan is that words like (redacted) shit general in /g/ or calling OP a (redacted) is ok on 4chan specifically. Except the name(redacted) and trip(redacted), we are all pseudonymous there so when someone says you are a (redacted), they don't mean to say you are of a specific ethnicity or gender. It means you are acting like an idiot or something they disapprove of?

I can imagine a 21+ social media network that has no explicit moderation but you would still need protection from spam, flooding, and other bad actors once you get to a certain size.

No, this isn't free speech absolutism, and adding a paywall to any conversation on twitter would kill the site.

The problem with that is that yesterday it was swastikas, today is the letter Z, tomorrow who knows what else we might have in store?

Also, putting in prison all the people who have displayed their swastika-love thingie online [1] would have meant Mariupol falling sooner to the Russians, a thing contrary to the beliefs of many who propose laws like that.

[1] https://twitter.com/tyengeni1954/status/1503955204059938817

You can have free speech absolutism or controls to stop gaming the system. Pick one.

After that it becomes a debate over which controls to have, and the argument that multiple accounts is worse than incitement to racial hatred or antivax nonsense isn't a clear cut one.

A lot of the "free speech" complaints about social media amount to complaints about social media platforms adding content warnings about [alleged] sensational lies or penalising their reputation anyway.

There is no "valid" content from that tabloid.

The platform you’re using to blast it, within the confines of their platform.

You should have the freedom to start such a forum without being regulated out of existence and join such a forum without fear of isolation. You should not be able to force other privately owned forums to adopt your view.

One of the main arguments for free speech is that you let everyone talk without government interference and let private actors decide what are good and bad ideas.

Everyone in this post who wants these public platforms to be forced to host all speech sound like what they really need is to have these platforms to be nationalized and run with government rules. What’s confusing to me is the majority of the people I see who want these platforms to host all speech are also in the same group that thinks everything should be done by companies and not the government

For what it's worth, I think this fear is misplaced. Unless Elon can figure out how to run Twitter without ads, woke-bigotry is safe as long as advertisers are using woke politics to distract from their evils.

> Art. 12: No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

Are 50% of the "censored" posts regular reporting? 1%? 0.00001%? Shouldn't a detail like that matter?

If I could make the rules, my rule for conversations about one-off examples would be that you have to immediately follow up by talking about how representative that example is of the phenomenon you are using it to illustrate.

Exactly. And I would add, nobody who claims they are a "free speech absolutist" can stay consistent with that declaration after even one or two simple questions.

Does free speech absolutism mean unmoderated ISIS and Al-Qaeda posts are fine? Because we need to expose them to healthy debate for the benefit of societal progress? The answer typically is "well that's not speech, that's _____", and then it's a debate over why there's a special different word for the type of speech they want to prohibit.

As a free speech absolutist, "yes".

That's literally literally what the word "absolutism" in "free speech absolutism" means.

Try me.

I hope you know what free speech absolutism entails. I don't think your statement is true at all.

Absolute (really, absolute and complete) free speech would allow companies to lie about the efficacy of medication, lie about the ingredients of products, permit lying under oath, allow libel, insults, threats of violence etc. I am not sure I want that. I prefer clear, written rules for that.

I don't advocate that speech shouldn't have consequences. I advocate that speech shouldn't be blocked. Twitter, or any platform, shouldn't be doing the police work. They should be indifferent to the speech like a telephone company is indifferent on what people speak on the phone and those who create problems should be dealt with appropriately through relevant channels.

If J&J claims that their talc powder is good for you, their false claim shouldn't be deleted by Twitter. Instead, the appropriate authority should take care of it and victims should collect damages. Their tweet should stay there as a relic.

I'd rather see us fix our enforcement mechanisms to work better before trying to take off the filters on dangerous and violent free speech.

We already have free speech and consequences. Twitter and Musk have nothing to do with free speech issues.

You want absolute freedom of speech but then you want to limit a company and platform in what it says, which it does by allowing or disallowing certain content? And you would prefer a single person, who has a history of devious activity, having totalitarian control over said company and platform? It doesn’t make sense.

No we don't have it on the Internet. On the internet(including YC), the norm is that your speech is removed and/or you are blocked from further speech (as a consequence) if you say the wrong thing where "wrong" is defined by the platform operators.

Musk may choose to make Twitter an absolute free speech platform but he might choose to make it something else. I hope for the former. He might end up to turn it into something horrible or just leave it as is but I don't know why would you spend $50B to do just that.

Stuff that Hitler said are benign within the context of knowing what happened in WW2, his words are merely a historic relic and no one start putting Jews in camps just by reading his words. His words are not a spell that makes people do things when you read them. Back then his words caused harm because they were said within the context of 1930s-1940s Europe.

The context doesn't disappear when you block speech. Let the speech exists and enable fair pushback for the opponents of the said speech is the way to handle it, IMHO.

For example, instead of pretending that racists don't exists by deleting their arguments and accounts, let them say the things they have to say and enable the opponents of it have the same reach.

The "by itself" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Sure, if you post someone's home address with an allegation that they're a paedophile, the instruction to attack them doesn't harm them, it's people following the instruction. And the bombardment of words sent to harassment victims isn't the sole factor in the emotional state of harassment victims, and it's the virus that kills not the antivax sentiment etc etc.

But they harm people rather more directly than Twitter having the freedom to delete those words if its management feels that would be the responsible thing to do does...

That's why I advocate for platforms with structured identity secrecy. Here are some more details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31025271

See the problem here?

Think of this having absolute freedom over how you spend your money. There's no direct mechanism preventing you from buying illegal stuff but you can still get in trouble if you buy illegal stuff. This is not a contradiction.

So what is your view on content ranking algorithms? Should those be illegal, to ensure that the platform is indeed completely indifferent?

and if you disallow content ranking algos on twitter, then how do you search? Who or what gets to determine what is similar and/or relevant?

By that definition the entire world is an absolute free speech paradise already.

You can say anything you want. Sure you might be canceled, jailed, fined, killed, tortured, or anything else -- depending on what you say, who you say it to and where you say it. But you're absolutely free to say it!

On the internet platforms, admins can't do any of that but they can effectively silence you(IRL silencing you is very hard).

That sure stopped Purdue from telling everyone Oxycontin isn't addictive.

What unrealized potential does Twitter have left after 16 years of existence?

Twitter is incredibly popular, but as Docker already showed, being incredibly popular doesn't have to translate to financial success.

I’m interested and a bit nervous in what changes Musk will usher in. But I definitely see the opportunity for him to make a lot of money.

The Tiktok crowd is not the Twitter crowd. The Twitter crowd is not the Facebook crowd. The only platform that truly has cross-group viability is instagram, and that's only because it's a visual platform.

Twitter is a place where you make short, concise statements and people yell at you. Remove the character limit and it's just a feature-barren Facebook but with a bunch of people you don't even personally know. Everybody has been crying that it can "be more." It doesn't want to "be more." "Being more" is antithetical to the spirit of the enterprise and will kill it.

How much potential communication was left in the human race have after the first 7,000 years since written script started appearing? The answer is, most potential was still unexplored.

Everything in modern civilisation is still young. Especially new communication platforms.

Yes, global communication marches on, but that says nothing about specific platforms. Just look at MySpace.

And Glancing over their S-1, they're making money now with the same means that they were planning to in 2013.

If there is unrealized potential, the "free speech" sites, like Gettr, etc. have not found much of it.

Once you are large enough to attract some trolls, if you don't have good moderation, comment quality goes to hell, and users care about that. Running a large social media site isn't kind to people who aren't willing to do what works for ideological reasons. You are fighting the trolls with a deliberate handicap and they will absolutely take advantage. So are you going to ban people who are disruptive or not?

TikTok is heavily moderated. That's why they became popular - the moderation was better than the competition.

> not based on mobs of activists actively trying to get their opponents banned/silenced.

Moderation literally is silencing/banning someone.

----

My (slightly uncharitable) take is that when "non-political" or "objective" gets brought up in this context it usually means anything that the poster already agrees with, and "political" or "subjective" means value judgements that the poster disagrees with.

But any moderation policy you bring up in a private space -- from banning alt-coin scams to blocking pornography to deciding what does and doesn't constitute harassment -- all of that is a balance between protecting communities and allowing people more space to speak, and making political decisions about what content does and doesn't belong in those categories.

All of these categories are socially constructed and based in part on group consensus about the types of content and people we would like to see banned/silenced.

----

I'll also point out that using a word like "objective" can sometimes make free speech policies more strict. There have been multiple points in history where we believed something to be objective and settled truth that later turned out to be false.

So not only does this ignore the reality that moderation is inherently somewhat subjective and political and needs to be in order to protect communities, it also ignores the reality that moderation is inherently somewhat subjective and political and needs to be in order to avoid over-censorship.

What is and is not settled knowledge is often a contentious debate, and by treating it like it's not a contentious debate and like the decisions about what to ban are just fully impersonal and objective, we open the door both to people who want under-moderation and (surprisingly) also to people who want over-moderation or want to quell criticism of establishment ideas. By treating these moderation decisions like they're not decisions, we allow both over-aggressive and under-aggressive moderators to hide behind a veil of objectivity and to avoid responsibility for the choices they make about the content they allow.

Even in a system where moderation was administered perfectly, there would be some percentage of people who fundamentally objected to the accuracy and even legitimacy of moderation based on its outcome. A "correctly" administered system would probably still be one in which disgruntled people dismissed "correct" choices as activism, biased motives, etc.

Getting rid of vaccine misinformation would lead to antivax cranks saying the pharmaceutical industry is using their financial power to influence moderating. Getting rid of 2020 election misinformation will lead to conservative narratives about "mainstream" media silencing their voices out of political bias. The liberal narrative on moderation decisions would say it excludes minority and disempowered voices. And all sides would invoke concepts like "objectivity."

The problem is that not that all sides do it, but the opposite, that there really is a real underlying truth out there, and it really will be the case that some people are going to be systematically wrong at every level at which they register objections to moderation, and the correct response is that their concerns are unfounded.

Of course that won't make people happy, but it shows that the limits of what is possible are limits relating to human nature that won't be uniformly satisfied by any system.

Regardless of whether or not it would be a good idea for Twitter to remove moderation, personally my feeling is that if someone says they're a free speech absolutist and they oppose burner accounts and anonymity, then they're not actually a free speech absolutist.

It's become more common in certain circles to say that free speech is fine as long as people have a persistent ID and reputation, and I do like reputation systems to a certain degree -- but I want to point out that "a persistent ID and a reputation system" is just "social consequences" with extra steps.

I sometimes suspect that the people who propose those systems are (unintentionally) arguing for a world with even more self-policing about what people say online, and I have over time come to suspect that a world with lots of communities that have strict moderation policies and that are occasionally closed off entirely, but that generally allow more anonymous accounts -- is probably a world with more free speech (and hopefully less free speech of a harmful kind) than a world where everybody gets one voice and it's tracked everywhere. Again that's a separate conversation, but the point is that if your definition of free speech absolutism is that anyone can say anything they want wherever they are without social or political consequences, then (regardless whether or not that's a good idea) persistent identifiers are a step backwards from that goal.

And the moral of the history is: in 2020 the COVID lab-leak hypothesis was considered a nasty idea, one that only uneducated, bitter conspiracy theorists could support. People have been banned from the effective monopolists of public discourse over this idea.

Then sometime around 2021 the same idea became acceptable.

Not surprisingly, this change in the public perception of this idea over social media followed the viewpoint of the major political party the owners of social media cheer for.

This is bad, bad, bad for political discourse and rational thinking!!

As far as I am concerned: long love the free market of ideas!

Don't get me wrong--I think the initial response to Covid was probably overzealous, and it has lasted way too long (once we had vax, everyone should have been done with it).

My point is simply that they wielded the info/idea in an ideological way, and this led to it being dismissed, whereas if the idea was discussed and established among experts first, it would have been taken more seriously. In other words, bare, unregulated, irresponsible free speech did harm in advancing this idea.

To go the "free speech" route everyone should have to use their real identity. I realise this excludes people under repressive governments where free speech has really been lost, and you can be thrown in jail or worse for a seemingly mundane opinion.

But for those living in a democracy make them use their real identity. Otherwise everyone is just trolling with zero consequences.

Someone will ALWAYS try to game the system.

How would you prove that's happening?

If anything, with a majority of the world population living in illiberal or semi-liberal regimes, we need free speech absolutism more than before.

For example, Turkey banned and unbanned Facebook several times.

This BBC article [1] posted a little earlier seems to indicate it's not NFT's that are slipping here so much as interest in Twitter.

He seems to be acquiring this for the wrong motives when he could easily build a much better rival with different values.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-61102759

Bootstrapping a network the size of Twitter is nothing like easy, and might even be impossible this late in the game. Gold rushes of new users tend to wear off as new areas calcify into established concepts.

(The same would be true for launching a modern day FriendFeed / Bebo / MySpace etc)

I hear ya. It's the crowd he's buying. But to me Twitter has no "established concept". Maybe I'm the stupidest person on the planet right now, but what exactly is Twitter? Does Musk have a brilliant solution looking for a problem. Or is this just playing games with money and power for it's own sake?

Finding a tight-knit specialist community goes against everything the Twitter UI encourages, but it's how most folk who are deeply loyal to the platform actually use it. When configured well, the timeline should be significantly comprised of conversations between known people talking about desirable topics.

Personally I think this is the core of the tool - free, open access to specialist communities with no membership requirements, and no need for upfront reputation. If some conversation between experts interests you and you have a question, you can just ask.

One approach is to start by following one account you really like, then mining their replies following the folk they actively engage with. Do this for a few iterations and the result will quickly become an extremely intimate, engaging, and topical timeline. It only takes a few meaningful questions and comments added to these conversations for the follows and inclusion to start flowing your way.

It's like a watercooler around which a huge bunch of people with interesting takes and things to say on lots of different interesting things have gathered. It takes a while to find the information streams as they are not made obvious, but at least for me I got much better first hand information of both Covid and Ukrainian war from the people I follow before media.

Any of the algorithmic timelines are generally horrible, agreed.

I follow only people who tweet and retweet reasonable things. I use the timeline with content only from the people I choose to follow ("Latest"), and don't follow lunatics. This is a fairly nice experience, but needs a curated list of people to follow, building of which needs a while.

I don't think it's even necessarily about who you follow, there's a lot of pushing celebrities who are into this rubbish.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble

Can’t be. This doesn’t sound like something Elon Musk would do.

I'm torn. I think he has some good ideas (more open, paid vs. ads, crack down on bots), and for sure the necessary leadership to focus resources on those topics. On the other hand, it's not good that rich people own more media.

That sounds somewhat like the Twitter of today, and not much like a hypothetical super-free-ified twitter.

Steretypically of social media - I see Twitters greatest asset being it's current network of influencers, analysts, thinkers, artists and colleagues. All the people I want to follow are already on twitter. I don't care about the platform or the tech, I care about all of the interesting people posting there. I would claim that is the true power of the platform atm - it's network.

That’s not how I read the article at all, and Google trends confirms that NFT interest has trended down whilst Twitter holds steady.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=Nft,Twitte...

If there isn't a good theory about why that is, reshaping Twitter to be more like those failed experiments is a not a likely path to success.

Twitter is a disgrace to the modern society. Their hypocrisy goes to no end.

The jury is out for me, how can we say it's automatically beneficial if it's not sacred and only a mean to an end for society/people, that end depending on your views (GDP, happiness, sustainability...)?

Also IMHO like any liberal absolutism, the forces will inevitably make who has the more money own and game the system, it's a proxy for Oligarchy. It can be good but only under certain philosophical positions and economic theories that not everyone agree on.

And how is one supposed to do that, especially against nation-state actors such as Russia and China, both of which have been caught or implicated multiple times now, or against ordinary criminals?

> Filter bubbles? Doesn't have to be a thing, you have all the data to detect bubbles and pop them by introducing them to each other.

Great idea, expose LGBT people to Christian fundamentalists, it's not like harassment from these groups and their ideology isn't one of the leading causes of suicide of LGBT people.

"Filter bubbles" are the self-organized "social mechanisms that we organically use in our daily lives to combat bad actors" you were talking about.

No thought whatsoever about the fact that increasing automation makes astroturfing, propaganda, "coordinated inauthentic activity" possible in a way that was not easily practical before.

Additionally, no one thinks about what filter bubbles really are in practice, or models what they imagine to be the healthy exchange of ideas, or whether our present choices to be selective about information have broader array of functional purposes than are captured by an oversimplifying term like "filter bubble."

I feel like this is a conversation about free speech on the internet that is due to mature, and that as it matures there will be a new inventory of 101-level fallacies broadly understood by everybody. One fallacy would be the idea that bots, trolls, harassment campaigns, mob mentality and coordinated state-based campaigns are the same as a "free market of ideas" that leads to the optimal state of exchange of ideas. Another fallacy would be the notion that any act of preferentially selecting sources is comprehensively analyzed and understood by labeling it a "filter bubble."

In contemporary society, it seems that the kind of free speech we have seems only to lead to greater stupidity by helping bad ideas propagate.

> People who think unmoderated online platforms are equivalent to a flourishing state of nature have not really thought one or two steps ahead.

They don't look two steps behind either. All their historical analogies, for example, are sophomoric crap.

He's not a cult leader as he's not doing cult things. Musk isn't making a new religion, he just has fans. No less than Justin Bieber annoyingly had.

He's an activist as he's trying (and succeeding) at affecting change according to his beliefs. He's also certainly an opportunist as he's an entrepreneur. What point are you trying to make with "people's best interests"? He holds his interests to heart and that might happen to align with some people.

I'm not sure why everyone is talking about this as though it's on the horizon? The article doesn't mention "free speech" as a goal, it mentions:

- selling account privileges

- making HQ a homeless shelter

- edit button

In other words, monetization and PR.

The major free speech issue on Twitter is not whether certain people are allowed to be on Twitter. It's whether Twitter enables its users in carrying out harassment campaigns against people whose speech they don't like. These campaigns often feature unethical and fraudulent behavior, e.g. fake anonymous Yelp reviews complaining about an employee, encouraging/performing vandalism of the business, phone calls in the middle of the night, borderline slanderous exaggerations sent through anonymous channels, etc. It's quite misleading to characterize these internet mobs as "people exercising their right to criticism", and they tend to rely on the ability of people to anonymously take action against someone who is not anonymous. Fixing it would require more controls on Twitter, not fewer.

Because if Musk said "I have no problem with Trump or Nazis on the platform and would unban them", he wouldn't have nearly the same support as he does now.

Instead people's reaction is "yay, edit button! Go Musk Daddy!"

This remains true after he acquires it. The claim that one of the most image-obsessed investors in the world is going to make changes that are obviously unpopular seems dubious and frankly paranoid.

It’s an open question whether or not it’s possible to avoid shaping the firehouse in a modern liberal democracy, but you could go your whole life and never meet a person truly disinterested in bending it towards their particular tribalism.

The whole time I was at FB I had two groups of people, each screaming in one ear, that we were not doing enough to suppress the “other” people.

How do you put shit on a global electronic network without “gaming the system”? Have no bias? You got that down we should make you king.

First and foremost gaming seems to be nigh on unavoidable.

Secondly and most importantly, "absolutism" is not a good thing. I know I'll get downvotes but it needs to be said: some speech is not healthy for society, primarily hate speech.

And we have that today in Fox News -- actively promoting hate speech and helping to widen the divide in the US.

edit: yes, much news is garbage (CNN et al), but my point remains that speech designed to foster hate of others is not healthy and welcome dialog in this regard.

Divide and conquer for the win.

We (the internet) tried that with 8chan. Things kept escalating to the point where a bunch of people got murdered in a synagogue. Condoning violent echo chambers will always ALWAYS lead to significant violence.

For this to work you would need a worldwide government identity check protocol implemented by all participating countries, something like OAuth so you could register only one account connected to that real identity, it could still be anonymous from other users perspective. Problem here is that even if that would make bot problem less significant it would not eliminate it. You would have farms of hacked identities and then in countries with really low income you could buy those identities (digital access) for a few dollars per piece.

Nobody has an answer to that problem, yet. If there is no answer, turning Twitter into a desolation for trolls will not help Twitter.

These trolls want to go back to Twitter to torment everyone who rejected them. Good luck creating shareholder value that way.

I agree with most of your comment - but tiktok might be a terrible example:

"One App – Two Worlds: This Is TikTok in Russia and Ukraine (nrk.no)"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30917474

I don't (apparently controversially) think that a lack of "free speech" is anywhere near top of the list of Twitter's problems. It's way more pressing that the amazing content on it has become completely drowned out by a cacophony of bad actors. It's not just the bot armies, but the legions of individual contributors posting and sharing obvious churnalism and outrage bait that it's _impossible_ to escape from.

I had to stop using Twitter regularly maybe a year or so ago for my own health. I could feel my blood pressure spiking every time I opened the app, and it wasn't because of algorithms or filter bubbles or censorship – if anything, the opposite. It was just increasingly not possible to use it for the things I had always loved about it—breaking news, shared conversations, interesting updates etc. from people and organisations I was interested in—without having to wade through buckets of deliberately rage-inducing shit.

Twitter itself might bear some responsibility for that. The obvious bot problem is out of control, and it was becoming increasingly user hostile to anyone who wanted to _avoid_ their attempts at "bubble popping". But maybe the bigger problem is that it's fundamentally hard to get people to behave respectfully in a a global public forum like that.

Worse, from that point on everything that happens as a result will be on Musk and his companies. There won't be any more repercussions for powerful politically-motivated speakers, even if they explicitly call for violence. This will motivate extreme behavior and extreme responses. Boycotts for Tesla and Starlink (whose customers almost certainly tip liberal) will absolutely be on the table.

Even if you personally love Musk, the success of his consumer-facing businesses depends on broad adoption by consumers. That's all at risk now. CEOs of this kind of business may have politics, but they traditionally avoid political firestorms because of these concerns. Musk is obviously rich enough that he doesn't care, but his shareholders probably should.

Literally the only people that care about any of that, are the ones deep lost in the Twitter funnel. Here's the truth: Whatever happens on Twitter, it's going to have zero effect on your personal life. All these 140 character blurps about politics, the virtue signaling, the constant anger, outrage and cancel culture, it has melted people brains. It's all just an echo chamber, tightly kept in within bounds, and people will sell their soul, define their inner being, say whatever it takes, for bogus dopamine hits. Nobody has morals or ideology on Twitter, they are all just optimizing for likes.

That's of course assuming these things aren't happening on Twitter in other spheres (which would be an interesting data point - it would indicate that it may not be something intrinsic to the format, but with current issues in Western culture).

How large is Twitters non-Western user base anyways, in percentages?

Japan and India alone account for 14.0% and 5.6% of Twitter's users, which together are higher than the amount of users in the US at 18.4%.

If this whole move ends up with trump reinstated, I just cannot support any of his companies with my money, ever. And I'll do what I can to dissuade colleagues if their values align with mine.

I guess I'll wait and see. But wanting an EV, not wanting something as small as a Zoe, or too expensive, and hating SUVs (I know, I know, too many conditions), it's hard to find an alternative. I may have to settle for an ID.3 or a Cupra if Tesla is no longer an option.

For the record, I currently do have a German car - bought it used, 12ish years.

How would failing to reinstate Trump's account be damaging to his business with the government? Wouldn't it matter whether the Federal government is under a Democrat or Republican executive?

[1] https://slate.com/business/2018/03/donald-trump-wants-to-get...

But at this point, who knows who will win?

edit: oh you are the above poster lol

It's terrifying that a company has that power (and has already used it) regardless of who owns it.

I suppose those who own stock are also upset, I just realized. I don't think liberals will boycott Tesla and Starlink unless they become associated with their political opponents, enough that the environmental aspect would become secondary. If that happens... well, that's a lot of sales regardless, right?

This is unbelievably naive. It’s like saying “a perfectly lassie-faire economy is possible, if no one is greedy”.

Someone will ALWAYS be trying to game the system.

The ability for people to call a black Twitter user the N-word, a female user to "fuck off and get raped," a liberal/conservative user to eat a bullet, as well as spreading known falsehoods and toxic content (either as gospel or for the lulz) -- all without getting banned for having "alternative views."

What?

As it stands, free speech absolutism is being weaponized by those with the money to manipulate the crap out of it. It has no benefit in a society that is driven by the highest bidder writes the rules _and now the news_.

Musk's actions show he doesn't support that.

I'm not sure I see much reason to share your optimism about this.

How can Twitter possibly get even more liberal in terms of free speech? Just look at the trends occasionally, they are really, really stressing the boundaries of free speech and crossing into defamation territory without being censored in any way. You can't start a trend comparing a democratically elected politician to Hitler and expect no repercussions.

They literally banned the President of USA. Are you seriously asking this question?

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/struggle_session

Did you read their announcement when they banned him[0]? Banning the man representing, at minimum, a quarter of a country with such nakedly partisan logic is an embarrassment to anyone who wants to pretend Twitter cares about liberal political ideals. They were listening to voices in their head rather than reading what Trump wrote; voices which obviously won't tolerate anything outside a narrow, illiberal view.

[0] https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio...

A system that, based on their flimsy justifications, simply bans political opponents isn't liberal. The classic position a liberalist should take is that the service policy needs to be reformed to embody better values around free political speech.

Not that I'm too invested in the situation. Twitter will be on the way out soon enough if it doesn't pull its head in and tolerate serious dissent from the favoured narrative.

And as the president, he had the entire American media apparatus at his disposal. The premise that somehow an American president can't effectively communicate policy without a Twitter account is absurd. Previous presidents have been able to manage just fine.

The US is very, very divided. Trump won with basically 50% support, he lost re-election, and then lost even further support when he started making up lies about election fraud. Even if morality was derived from popularity (or just profitability, if that's what you think Twitter did it for), Trump no longer had close to a majority. Maybe his comments were in line with expectations of 60% of Republicans, but the other 70% of the country thought that was what was unacceptable.

The standard under discussion seems to be free speech absolutism with the question "how much more liberal could twitter get". The ban of Trump just makes a good high profile example of Twitters current limitations on free speech.

The governmental account is still active.

Centralization also generates other problems: authority and lack of partipation. These platforms lack proper affordances regarding discovery and curation. As a user, you're automatically gravitating towards the loudest voices, the biggest or most active communities.

For instance, on Reddit, there's a canonical /r/sports subreddit. It has 20 million fans, but it's mostly focussed on american / UK sports. Searching for "sports"doesn't yield anything comparable. Only a fraction of those 20 million fans is really active posting and commenting. There's an /r/worldsports subreddit but has a grand total of 350 redditors.

When it comes to Twitter, the net result is that only a fraction of users is responsible for the vast amount of tweets, while about 50% are basically lurkers. [1][2] In that regard, the "free speech" argument is only a real concern for a very small, yet extremely vocal fraction of Twitter users. The same applies to Reddit as well.

The worrying part isn't the "free speech" argument such as it is posited. It's that all of this results in a lack of participation in any debate. The userbases of social media might be more akin to the placid crowd on a market place listening to someone ranting of a soapbox, and less a salon where everyone actively engages and interacts with each other.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/03/16/5-facts-abo... [2] https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/11/15/2-comparing-...

Go to any political tweet and you'll see countless hateful messages, why aren't they banned, yet others are? I've never seen any reason for it. Clearly they take a side or draw a line on some issues they consider important to control, but not others.

It seems to me it would be far better in my opinion for twitter to foster strength rather than fragility by empowering users to take responsibility for their own feelings and have the tools and maturity to not read things they can't cope with, rather than trying to police what people write centrally. It absolutely could be the modern town square and would be great if it supported real freedom of speech, in my opinion.

My claim is that (in the US) if a platform allowed everything that was legal it wouldn't be popular.

However your first comment says "far better in my opinion for twitter..."

See, in my opinion, you should be absolutely fee to do that

> expect no repercussions.

The first "repercussion" that comes to mind is to block their account or something like that but I think this is the wrong course. When they do or say something stupid In real life, the repercussions are that they are judged as a stupid person and not simply silenced. I think, this must be the norm in social media too. Just make sure that whatever they say sticks to their identity and if later they change their mind, they can apologise and ask for forgiveness.

I have this idea where your identity can be secret to the society but known to the platform. I.e. the platform knows you as a real person, you have just one account but you have an option to post anonymously too. You use your anonymous account to engage with the community about stuff that you normally wouldn't dare(i.e. controversial political stance, your sexual orientation kind of stuff).

If you post something very bad with your anonymous account(i.e. call for violence, hate speech etc), you get your anonymous posting rights revoked and your posts deleted. You can override the deletion by de-anonimization of the posts. If whatever you said is something criminal(plans to attack this, kill that, sell dirty bomb etc), the law enforcement takes care of it and the platform stops acting as a police.

edit: Oh I missed the part where your identity is actually encrypted, not known to the platform in plain format. To challenge the platform censorship and put back your removed comments you decrypt your identity. If you are afraid of state actors coming after you, you simply move on and your identity stays secret. The platform doesn't need to be solving all the problems if the world. For example, if you are Russian dissident in Russia you first need replace Putin IRL, then you can use it as a westerner, challenging the politicians.

Oh I missed the part where your identity is actually encrypted, not known to the platform in plain format. To challenge the platform censorship and put back your removed comments you decrypt your identity. If you are afraid of state actors coming after you, you simply move on and your identity stays secret.

The platform doesn't need to be solving all the problems if the world. For example, if you are Russian dissident in Russia you first need replace Putin IRL, then you can use it as a westerner to engage in politics.

In Australia assisted Access means any encrypted data is not safe. (Because the gov could have required the introduction of a back door, without even telling the company in question.)

I think Canada has something like that in place too. So if you take part in a protest, (even on twitter) be prepared to have your bank frozen.

Anon is the only way to go.

You realize that Hitler was literally democratically elected?

He and his party were democratically elected to the German parliament. They proposed to form a coalition government with some other parties, which was approved by the (separately democratically-elected) president. Then he proposed legislation which would give himself wide-ranged emergency powers, which was approved by the democratically-elected parliament. Everything he did was technically legal and constitutional.

So ask yourself: When would you have blocked literal Hitler from Twitter?

I think the take-away lesson from Nazi Germany is that we need to start fighting fascism and authoritarianism much earlier in the process.

I'm German and graduate with polish-german history as honors class.

Where to even start.....

First of all, the only reason they took the political path was because Hitler's coup against the German government in 1923 failed.

The "democratic" approval you paint here happened while the SA, the NSDAP's personal thug squad, as well as the SS (no introduction necessary) had infiltrated the building and were "observing" the voting procedure. This was illegal, especially since they were uniformed for intimidation.

You are also ignoring the fact that this "technically constitutional" decision was only possible because they spontaneously (same day) changed the legal framework in a way that meant that non-present (intimidated) representatives count as present. Only this way they achieved the necessary votes.

What even legitimized this situation in the first place was an exploitation of the weak Weimar constitution (as in abuse of loopholes due to it's young nature of 20 years, same applies to the German democratic history as a whole, first time a democratic persistent government was in power was in 1918).

You are completely ignoring the Reichtagsbrandverordnung which eradicated the fundamental rights as well as the divison of powers (!) which should not have been able to be touched. This was a breach of the Weimar constitution by the way, so the Nazi rise to power was 100 % not constitutional.

And lastly you decontextualized the comparison since Hitler obviously did a lot more than just being a cheater in politics

> First of all, the only reason they took the political path was because Hitler's coup against the German government in 1923 failed.

Sure; I knew about that (and other illegal activities) and was trying to think of a way to make it clear I wasn't including that in "everything". It wasn't really possible without being awkward and taking away from the main point; so I relied on my readers to understand the implicit limitation of "everything".

As for the rest, I could have said "mostly constitutional with some bending" and it would have had the same point. Obviously digging into it, the fact that Germany at that time didn't have a tradition of democracy, and its constitution was problematic, is important to know. But most people in the US, at least, don't realize that Hitler took a mostly legal route to power at all. That's the main thing I want to get across to people.

No, they have not.

I cannot live without water or electricity; perhaps also a general Internet connection (in the modern world). I live my life just fine without Twitter.

Twitter is an online service that some people find useful and others ignore completely. There is nothing utility-like about it.

Social media have been key to political campaigning in the last 10 years or so. This made headlines in relations to the Brexit referendum in the UK and it had made headlines after Obama's first presidential campaign which was a pioneer.

If you're not on social media you're toast.

[1] https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/how-social-media...

For the current definition of "modern".

In the 1800s then-modern political campaigns were fought and won in newspapers and pamphlets.

Pre-WW2 then-modern political campaigns were fought and won on the radio.

Post-WW2 then-modern political campaigns were fought and won on television.

None of those were treated as public utilities AFAICT, so I'm not why the medium of communication now suddenly makes a difference (Marshal McLuhan notwithstanding).

Also, coverage of Trump by the mainstream media was likely far more effective than social media at getting him elected. If nothing else, it provided the material that got spread across social media.

Obama's victory was due in large part to social media as well, but not due to Obama's personal accounts.

What Twitter could do is just stop promoting and spreading content people don’t like. Rather than completely ban problem users like trump, just stop showing them in trending feeds and give people the option to block the users so you don’t see them.

Isn't this censorship?

There's also content that is regarded by mental health experts as harmful in large quantities - downranking that is also important to not cause existential harm to people.

The free speech advocates really confuse free speech (in the global sense not just the American amendment) with saying anything

Free speech isn’t freedom to plan a drug deal or anything or illegal

There are definitely unenforced laws regarding harassment but they fall into the illegal category

Where it’s interesting is silencing say a pro Russia person or an anti vax person

As I said, Twitter and other major platforms have become de facto utilities and it's no longer a valid argument to claim that as private businesses they are free to do as they please because they yield too much power.

I think that the governments should treat social media platforms similarly to other addictive/harmful substances, such as junk food, sugary drinks or tobacco... with a focus on prevention and education.

And using these platforms for official communication (from elected officials and public services) should be either prohibited or heavily discouraged.