News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources by evandale on Monday April 25, 2022 @09:48AM (#31154647)
>why can Elon, and only Elon solve the bot problem

To me it seems that he's the only one who wants to.

Re:Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources by EricE on Monday April 25, 2022 @11:11AM (#31155981)
Bingo. Google and everyone else makes money on volume, not quality of content. They don’t care if the majority of the volume of content is garbage as long as they get their clicks/impressions on ads.
Re:Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources by dimitrios1 on Monday April 25, 2022 @11:25AM (#31156186)
Reposting this because unsure why it was flagged, as it is perfectly valid and based in objective reality:

They (twitter) remove a lot of volume because it doesn't fit with their political narrative, even though this is financially detrimental to them.

Re:Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources by jfk13 on Monday April 25, 2022 @11:31AM (#31156283)
What's "a lot" of volume in the context of this claim? Do you have a source for the proportion of would-be active tweeters they block, or proportion of tweets they take down, or anything like that?
Re:Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources by nailer on Monday April 25, 2022 @01:43PM (#31158242)
Donald trump had a large amount of followers and did not threaten violence beyond his role as us commander in chief, much like his predecessors and successors have.
Re:Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources by dimitrios1 on Monday April 25, 2022 @11:38AM (#31156393)
In this case you don't even need a source. You just need to have your head out of the sand, but outside of that, you can look at all the users who have left the platform or became entirely inactive after Donald Trump was banned, then look at the surge of users the alternative Twitter platforms gained, and pretty much make a safe assumption they lost at least that. You can also take a look at Twitter's stock price in Jan 2021, where it was close to 77 dollars, and rising at the time, and compare it to the pre-Elon hype price of 39 dollars, with Goldman rating it as being closer to 30 dollars in true value.
Re:Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources by jfk13 on Monday April 25, 2022 @12:17PM (#31156973)
> you can look at all the users who have left the platform or became entirely inactive after Donald Trump was banned, then look at the surge of users the alternative Twitter platforms gained

Do you have those statistics on hand? I don't, so I was asking.

I know the stock price is substantially lower than its peak 1+ yrs ago -- it's easy to find a graph of that -- but it's not obvious to me that this is the result of Twitter's politics rather than other factors.

Re:Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources by raisedbyninjas on Monday April 25, 2022 @11:36AM (#31156359)
Trump was prompinent on twitter and violated their TOS for years. He was banned on Jan. 8th. If Twitter were protecting some political narrative, it wasn't reflected in their ban.
Re:Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources by dimitrios1 on Monday April 25, 2022 @11:41AM (#31156440)
This argument holds zero water. You have Iranian officials openly calling for revolution, Chinese foreign officials spreading literal propaganda, and Saudis calling for actual executions, which I would think also consistently violate their TOS, and yet have seen no similar measures taken against their accounts.
Re:Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources by raisedbyninjas on Monday April 25, 2022 @12:06PM (#31156828)
That only demonstrates lax enforcement, not that Twitters mission is pushing politics in lieu of money and active users. Trumps politics haven't changed since he started his right-wing schtick.
Re:Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources by nailer on Monday April 25, 2022 @02:25PM (#31158766)
It does seem odd that the example of enforcement is a very interpretative reading of a center right view, and the examples of non enforcement are every other direct call to violence.
Re:Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources by smaryjerry on Monday April 25, 2022 @12:04PM (#31156790)
I find the violating TOS argument for why Trump was banned flawed because the TOS allows for very vague interpretation. For example the tweets that supposedly got him banned said something to the line of “fight for democracy” and that was interpreted as encouraging actual fighting and the illegal activities on January 6th. It also ignores the fact that he said along the lines of “we need to go and march peacefully, don’t cause problems, that’s exactly what they want” and as everything was happening was tweeting that everyone needed to respect police, be peaceful and go home. Good luck even finding the tweets from January 6th because only a couple outlets even reported what they were, only that they violated TOS which is also very suspicious. Edit: typos/grammar.
Re:Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources by mcv on Tuesday April 26, 2022 @05:45AM (#31165564)
Does he? I haven't followed everything he said about this, but I thought he mostly wanted to undo bans. I haven't heard him about the bot problem.

Meanwhile everybody else does seem to see bots as a problem. So even if Elon wants to, I doubt he's the only one.