I guess he never wanted that: he just lied. But why?
Moderation is hard. And it matters, both to keep audiences & advertisers. Besides, First Amendment-based moderation is not even possible for an international company. Most of Europe have strict laws on holocaust-denial. Thailand & the UK have laws banning speech offensive to their royal families.
..etc, etc..
The UK may technically have some old law on the books stating this but it's never enforced. I mean, the Sex Pistols ("God save the queen... A fascist regime...") demonstrated this quite convincingly.
I did hear about someone getting arrested for yelling at Prince Andrew in a funeral procession, but that was for breach of the peace during a funeral and (importantly) was thrown out in court.
Growing up, I saw plenty of posters with words like "The great Royal debate: should we hang them, or should we shoot them?" and no one cared in the slightest.
There is for instance, many stories about royal improprieties that have been covered up in recent years, in exchange for “juicy” Harry & Meghan stories being circulated in their place. This is probably at the core of the schism within the royal family. I can read about it, because I’m not in the UK. Bet it’s not very well covered in the UK though.
He’ll do it again later. That’s why you shouldn’t believe what he says. It’s _not_ that he’s _lying_ - he believes what he says when he says it - he just has no care for consistency and will change his mind whenever it looks prudent, without regard for others.
I am not defending this. It may have helped him to business success in the past, but it is severely damaging to interpersonal relationships. It is a terrible way to live a life.
The sad thing is he'd probably only need to sit down and read a dozen or so books in order to figure out how to make Twitter actually successful, but you know he's going to be too lazy to ever actually do this.
If someone changes their mind that's not hypocrisy. I want to stick to that definition because to do otherwise seems to be to be disapproving of people's ability to change their mind. People changing their mind is necessary for the political process to work (and for society and friendship in general!)
Elon Musk might indeed be a hypocrite, but I don't think he's necessarily being hypocritical in this case. If he _continues_ to harp on about freedom of speech on Twitter while keeping this policy in place that will be hypocritical though.
[Edit: I'm not trying to defend Musk in general. I think the facts of the current situation, and things he's done in the past, are pretty terrible!]
Why not? Lying is cool, fun, makes people like you if you tell them what you want to hear, and even profitable. You can really inflate your stock values by simply lying about what you can achieve. It's not like there will be any negative consequences to this behavior.
I think the answer here is that he has no idea what he's doing and is making it up as he goes.
Because lying helped further his narrative in the public which is advantageous to him. Similar to how he lied for years about FSD.
Buying Twitter would be a strategic campaign move.
Of course a lot of people now realise he's an asshole, and he's likely to lose a lot of money on the deal. So maybe that plan won't work out.
It's been a real case study in self-harm. Many who were neutral or positive before - because of Tesla, SpaceX, and some of his other projects - are now varying shades of hostile.
And he's unlikely to win over the fascist vote, because Flynn is going to have that locked up when he emerges from behind Trump's shadow.
One of the few requirements to become US president is that you must be a natural born citizen. So Musk is out, as he’s born in Pretoria, South Africa and neither of his parents were US citizens.
But that's a wild guess. I introduced this speculation in the thread but for all we know, he's just really bad at handling frustration and that's how it manifests.
Or perhaps that was the situation at the beginning of this year, and one of Musk's motivations for moving to Texas, beyond his previously-stated ones.
He signed the deal when the market was way up. He was probably riding high and overconfident on his wealth. The market corrected, his wealth dropped and he tried damn hard to get out of the deal. Turns out the deal was hard to get out of so he's trying to make the best of it.
I think he's earnestly trying to make Twitter successful and profitable. This is just his best effort.
If it's the case, it's just... sad.
I’m not sure what galvanized him but have wondered whether it is as simple as the transgender rumors (Grimes, his daughter) being true. Given his wealth it’d be natural for him to be a low tax/regulation Republican but he’s clearly way more motivated by the culture war and the QAnon end at that. Taking this as a personal affront would explain him being so willing to risk everything else just to hurt the people he sees as enemies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservatism
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionary
(See also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressivism)
It's useful to tease these concepts apart so we can better understand & critique certain policy positions. When Democrats vocally oppose student loan forgiveness, they are practicing conservative politics, for instance. It's not simply that Republicans are reliably conservative and Democrats are reliably progressive.
And there are many other forms of politics, these are just the most prevalent in US politics today.
Conceptually, yeah. In reality, it's the "conservative" party and they practice "reactionary" politics.
So Musk talked about being a free speech absolutist, until such a time as he felt threatened by it. The only thing Musk actually believes is that he is the most deserving person to wield power, and because he the most deserving, anything he does in support of that is justified. He can justify it by saying, I'm making humanity an interplanetary species, and in doing so I will save billions of lives.
(He won't make us an interplanetary species, his plans for colonizing Mars are gibberish, nothing he does is truly justified.)
People are gullible. It was pointed out by many parties the various ways he had suppressed the speech of others over the years, especially of his workers. Yet just because Elon Musk said he was for free speech, people believed him. Yet it would be unreasonable to expect somebody who doesn't especially value speech in the workplace to make twitter more pro-speech. Musk is not some civil libertarian.
I think honestly the history of social media is sites which started out with close to a policy of free speech absolutism slowly changing as cracks appeared. Jack Dorsey is gone, Aaron Schwartz is dead, Zuckerberg is in decline. The experiment already happened and speech gradually became more and more curtailed.
There are a variety of problems with that approach — not least that he'd be aiming for the primary targets of oil company propaganda.
For that kind of use, owning Tweeter, with absolute control on content and a user base stoked up on anger against "the Libs", "the pedophiles", "the establishment", "the deep state", etc. would be invaluable.
(I mean, just skim through this whole comment thread.)
So, in the end, it doesn't matter whether he was for absolute free speech or not. At least not to Musk. And a lot of Musk fans.
For some reason, most online communities appear to be fueled by stimuli that are exact opposite of what we find in healthy real life communities. It seems difficult to grow a social network with just positive feedback.
Except that... I really don't like roasting people - that's just faux pas, so I'll rather say that what he does makes no sense to me, and I fail to see the correspondence between Elon's past statements and current actions. Which makes me disappointed.
No he didn't. He was forced to.
The reality is he's an awful person who in this case is the proverbial dog that caught the car.
In his case, I totally agree that backpedaling hard doesn't really makes him look good. Still, personally, at the time, I was still thinking "well, okay, he paid for it, that's something I can respect, he told some intriguing promises, let's see what he does what he bought", giving him a benefit of doubt.
And then I've said that I fail to see any consistency between his words and actions. Basically, "I used to think he'd try something interesting and I'm disappointed that I don't see it".
That's about it. I most certainly did not mean to endorse him, or anything like that. Just echoed a disappointment and shared an anecdote - what I used to think and what I think today. Sorry if that sounded weird.
Even the most infamous of free speech platforms will just ban users who hurt the admins feelings. Back when Gab switched over to using a hostile fork of Mastodon for a backend[0], Torba banned the users of FreeSpeechExtremist (a Pleroma instance with well... the exact kinda ruleset the name would imply) from being able to interact with users on the Gab test instance (they hadn't figured out how to disable federation at the time). The crime of FSE in this particular case? Ridiculing Gab users for paying money to access basic features that any other Mastodon/Pleroma instance could give them for free.
I can list off quite a few other examples of notable "free speech zones" doing this sorta thing, but really it's not worth shining a light on most of them. It's always "free speech for me, not for thee" with these people. And the dumbest part is that if they were just open about it instead of bloviating about how supposedly important they think free speech absolutism is, I don't think most people would pay them any mind. You don't get this anger when the rules include in a clearly written way: "if I don't like what you're doing, for any reason, you're out" (also known as the escape hatch clause).
It's when you write the rules in abstract ways that are supposed to be "fair" that you get this problem, and especially if you're bloviating about how the only rule you supposedly believe in is the right to free speech and "US law" (the only concession usually put in writing by these absolutists). Because then people will start beholding you to that level of enforcement and they will ridicule you for being a hypocrite on that ideal.
[0]: Curious aside - Gab is not on the banned social media list. Wonder if Musk seeks that audience.
Years ago, I was banned from a "free speech" / skeptic subreddit because I corrected someone who turned out to be the head mod.
Anyone claiming they are all about unlimited free speech on any platform is either delusional or lying -- the market costs (and laws) will always impact speech in the best case, and the people running the site will always hit their limits. It always devolves into "free speech (for some definition of free that I define as free)".
In twitters case, free speech is limited by the whims of musk's thin skin on one hand while open for concepts he agrees with like hate, antisemitic and racist alt right junk.
Out of curiosity: did 4chan ever try to ban anyone for talking about moot?
It has fairly bog-standard rules about not being a hateful jerk, it's just that enforcement of those rules is pretty spotty so the sites users consist mostly of hateful jerks.
For a more specific example; 4chan remains the only site to actually ban discussion of gamergate (and then discussion of the subsequent user blowback towards moot) due to it being a harassment campaign.
Most of 4chan is moderated, but poorly, inconsistently, and capriciously. Each board has its own set of rules, which are sometimes enforced and sometimes not, with different enforcement rates on different boards. Also there are global rules which are generally not enforced, except when they are.
That's what pretty much everybody is doing at this point.
Elon's critics rightly point out the problems with his arbitrary rule by fiat, but who among his critics are proposing anything more principled than his behavior? By and large, people are calling him a hypocrite without articulating any more principled vision for how social media platforms should be run.
> You don't get this anger when the rules include in a clearly written way: "if I don't like what you're doing, for any reason, you're out" (also known as the escape hatch clause).
This sounds like basically codifying the current Elon Musk mode of governance. Are you really suggesting that the Internet would be better if every social media site was operated in this way, as long as it is explicit in the rules?
Most people aren't supplying anything more principled. The reality of it is that it's REALLY DIFFICULT to run a generic-purpose social media platform. Twitter, pre-Musk takeover, had a whole bunch of teams, working groups, councils and employees whose task was to basically try to reduce the effects of Masnick's Impossibility Theorem[0] as much as possible. It is an established fact that Musk threw out the majority of these groups shortly after he took over the site.
The main reason people call Musk a hypocrite is because he was also very vocal about what he wanted to replace those policies with: unbridled free speech, with the only limitation being the law. He has not publicly abandoned this principle yet and to the contrary, still occasionally barks up the accounts of some far right users about how he's going to "restore free speech" on Twitter. By all public accounts, he's still believing in that idea, whilst also transparently setting policies on stuff that very much doesn't align with that belief (see this policy change, the recent banning of ElonJet and so on and so forth).
> This sounds like basically codifying the current Elon Musk mode of governance. Are you really suggesting that the Internet would be better if every social media site was operated in this way, as long as it is explicit in the rules?
It probably would be. I think it would actually improve the general state of the internet if people were aware more that the sites they use are effectively ran on the whimsy of other people. A lot of people live under the illusion that one singular website is supposed to be their free room to dump whatever thoughts they want. This idea both goes against the original goal of the internet and does not line up with reality. Codifying this sort of thing matters more than you think. It means people know where they stand. Nowadays this stuff still largely exists in the Terms of Services of most sites (not to mention that a big part of free speech is not a requirement to host anyone else), but being more open about that would be a much better move for transparency reasons.
So uh... yes? I am explicitly advocating for the implosion of generic purpose social media, I think what it has done on a broader scale is extremely damaging to society.
[0]: https://www.techdirt.com/2019/11/20/masnicks-impossibility-t...
The world needs places where people can discover new information that goes against their beliefs. For people to be receptive to taking in new information, it needs to happen in a forum where there is a basic modicum of civility and mutual respect, where people are rewarded for taking down the temperature rather than flaming. Otherwise we might as well write down our 2022 beliefs in stone, as closed to future revision.
If you are caught wondering why some people still support Elon - in 'true conservative' society, like Russia or Saudi states, hypocracy is means of demonstrating hierarchy.
So as a leader, you show that you are dominant by demonstrating that rules don't apply to you. That makes you even more of a strongman and grows your support.
So if you are a fan of strongmen, stamping out dissent and competition is exactly the expected behaviour.