Hacker News fell for it, hook line and sinker. The number of people saying "give him a chance" and "he actually believes in free speech" dominated those who were like, "he'll probably just change who gets banned to be more in line with his personal beliefs."
I saw somebody call Musk "Phony Stark", and that seems to me a pithy summary of the cognitive biases going on here. This place is a magnet for would-be world-changing tech geniuses. Musk's level of technical skill is in dispute, but he's been incredibly good at hyping himself as Thomas Edison 2.0, and has been very effective in using that to attract cheap capital for gee-whiz projects. I get why he got the benefit of the doubt here.
But the Twitter acquisition has blown some big holes in the myth. He talked a good game about free speech, but it was clear from his initial bid for Twitter that he didn't really understand the realities of the business or the difficulties of hosting speech at scale. And since he took over, he has stepped onto turf a lot of people here understand quite well: running a business, managing software development, and the dynamics of online forums and social media.
And I expect this disillusionment will continue. Somebody described the Twitter acquisition as "fragile narcissist buys criticism factory", so I expect Musk will feel emotionally compelled to engage with Twitter personally, rather than doing the sensible thing and turning it over to somebody competent while turning his attention back to his at-risk car company.
So look for more of him pursuing personal grudges and putting far-right political views (e.g. "The woke mind virus is either defeated or nothing else matters") into action with absolutely no regard to his pieties around free speech. In the US right, "free speech" is often code for "the powerful should never experience criticism or accountability". That may seem weird, but it's a specific instance of the more general point: "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect." Cross that with "free speech" and you get what Elon is doing: free speech for the right people, arbitrary deranking and account bans for the wrong.
I know what you mean, but I think it's worth being more generous here. Musk is very good at PR, so I think the adage about "all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time" applies here. If all you knew about him came from the general press, up until earlier this year it would have been easy to think positively and uncritically of him.
Speaking for myself only: Musk actually delivered electric cars that work. You can buy one, it will likely show up, and it will do what it claims to do. Building one of the few successful (ie not out of business) new car companies in the last 50 years is pretty damn impressive.
I'd heard of claims of labor disputes and other unsavory stuff at the Tesla factories, but honestly, I don't know of a single car company in the world without a history of and ongoing labor tensions.
The self driving was obviously a fantasy and Musk got way over his skis on claims there, but he's far from alone.
Watching him drive Twitter into the ground has been a revelation for me.
Eh, I was mostly neutral to mildly positive for lack of information. I knew he ran a couple of cool-sounding tech companies, but that was about it. I assumed he was at least somewhat competent and stable.
> In the US right, "free speech" is often code for "the powerful should never experience criticism or accountability".
This is just your partisan blinkers talking. Someone on the right could equally say “social justice” on the US left is often code for “now I take your stuff”. Both statements are partisan, largely inaccurate, and wholly unconstructive.
There are many people on the right deeply committed to free speech, like David French. There are many non-partisan institutions committed to free speech, like (formerly) the ACLU and (now) FIRE. There are many left wing people deeply committed to free speech, like those people fighting Florida’s “anti-woke” speech laws.
Abolitionism. Civil rights. Gay rights. Liberal triumphs built on free speech, on free criticism, even in the face of overwhelming odds. Don’t cede free speech to petty partisanship. Nothing good will come of it.
I agree that there are people on the right committed to free speech and who demonstrate it through action, and good for them. But there are also a lot of people who, as with Musk, use it more as a fig leaf. And there are plenty who are openly opposed to it.
And I think being honest about that is one of the best to keep it from becoming purely a partisan issue.
That’s, respectfully, very ignorant of the US right. Contrary to what Twitter would lead one to believe, Congresspeople like MTG wield absolutely no influence over the politics of the right, whereas the 2019 conflict over the future of Fusionism - the basic compromise underlying the coalition of libertarians and conservatives that comprise the modern US right - is defined by the debates between Sohrab Ahmari and David French. David French is a giant figure on the intellectual right.
(I don’t identify as a member of the right, to be clear, but these are just very obvious trends for anyone that actually observes the right, rather than just making assumptions guided by partisan antipathy.)
And mine is that that’s, respectfully, incorrect. There’s no partisan canard more banal than “other side dumb”. If you can’t understand why millions of well-intentioned people make different choices to you, what beliefs lead to those choices and where those beliefs come from; if you don’t understand how things like conservative media and the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute and opinion leaders like David French all interact and intersect to produce the maelstrom of the US right - from the beliefs of the base all the way to Congressional GOP policy - then you simply won’t be able to effectively reach people on the right. You’ll be just as ineffective at political persuasion as some right winger ranting about how all Democrats are just “dumb leftie communists”, or some such.
If the tradeoff is Elon bans all the horrible doxxers and childporn weirdos and permits all the vaxx skeptics, the non-establishment Left, and non-establishment Right.
Trump isn't a fascist! He's just "non establishment right"
Edit: I should probably point out this is sarcasm used to highlight the absurdity of the original posters "I'm fine with fascists ('non-establishment right') being back on twitter"
I should have done the reddit thing and added an "/s" to my comment to denote the intended sarcasm
My comment was exaggerated to highlight how absurd the OP's comment of "I'm completely fine with having 'non-establishment right' back" was. Because it boiled away any semblance of reality that these were awful people
He said from the very beginning that he would make mistakes. Anyone one person is going to be biased with decisions these decisions and is not going to make everyone happy all the time. The real test is whether he can establish systems that can patrol the speech, so that no one person is at fault. This takes time.
Elon Musk is an idiot who bought is own bull. This is just a case of the dog catching the car.
He's never going to develop 'systems that can patrol the speech' because he's far too vain and think skinned to allow actual open dialogue. Like every other conservative, the only speech he really cares about is his own, and he is completely comfortable banning or delisting speech he personally doesn't like. He's tyrant man child.
"tyrant man child" "far too vain" "thick skinned" "like every other conservative"
Ever look in the mirror? That's a lot of hate and presumptions to assume about one person. And Elon is most definitely not a conservative. He has stated he voted democrat his whole life. His support for republicans is only recent and says he is not against voting democrat sometime in the future.
>That's a lot of hate and presumptions to assume about one person
There is no assumption. It's based on the things he's said and done
>And Elon is most definitely not a conservative.
Yes he is.
>He has stated he voted democrat his whole life.
His word means nothing, but regardless, you can be conservative and vote Democrat. The Democrat party is for the most part the republican party with less bigotry.
>His support for republicans is only recent and says he is not against voting democrat sometime in the future.
His support for the GOP comes when they tried to overthrow the government and have installed a far-right religious fanatic majority on the highest court in the land? Yeah, he's conservative.
I'm pretty... confused, for lack of better terms, at the amount of vitriol that (overwhelmingly) liberals have exhibited during this whole ordeal. Dude bought a company. Stay or leave. Why is everyone flailing about so much? People have a weird obsession with Elon now.
Personally, I was skeptical of his claims to free speech and still am (especially given how he's handled it thus far). You simply can't have free speech platforms. You need protocols designed to achieve such a thing. Something like Twitter is always doomed to be censored.
But my disagreement ends there. I'm enjoying the Twitter files releases. Seeing the cooperation between Twitter and the feds is both unsurprising and unsettling.
Approximately nobody thinks Twitter is just another company. Clearly Musk doesn't think that; he's waxed poetic about how important it is to the future of humanity. Its hundreds of millions of users don't think it's just another company either. It demonstrably played an important role in journalism and public discourse.
> Dude bought a company. Stay or leave. Why is everyone flailing about so much?
What dude actually did was disrupt communities, which after all the talk about free speech, seems to have been a lot of the point.
Despite whatever personal feeling about Twitter you may have, some people liked it, formed social bonds there, and worked hard to post fun and interesting content. Not all of it was political outrage. Moderation policies were put in place by the old Twitter to make the experience of those people better, and Musk took those protections away. So now those people are in fact leaving after facing a deluge of hate that all of a sudden (for whatever reason) surged when Musk took over. That's the problem. Now my social network is spread across post, mastadon, substack, reddit, and twitter. And for what? To turn Twitter into Truth Social, which itself is trying to be Twitter? It's all so pointless and yet real damage to real relationships is being done.
If Twitter is the town square, Elon Musk is a natural disaster which rips through the town and destroys houses, forcing your friends to move to different towns. My problem isn’t that I made friends in the town; my problem is the natural disaster that ruined my town.
Social ties are important to people, no matter where and how they form. Breaking that up has real consequences. I’m sure you would feel the same way about your own social connections, and you wouldn’t appreciate someone blaming you for those ties being weakened by external forces.
My experience in threads about Elon and his companies, is there is a large number of people who are complete and absolute fanboys in the comments, that also heavily overlaps with a large group of people who have invested in tech stocks trying to get a return on their money.
Any criticism I've ever said of Tesla or Elon usually initially gets up votes and then half a day or even a few days later receives a lot of down votes. I always assumed it was people invested in his stocks doing it on their own, but his antics on Twitter show he's the kind of person that might actually employ people to down vote people critical of him and his companies.
We are not a monolith. I have many highly upvoted comments here pointing out that musks concept of free speech has always been half baked and would surely turn into “speech for me” once he’s actually running things.
Nobody "fell" for it. Musk is (self admittedly) on the autism spectrum, and his eccentric behavior in the past is well known, but his business ventures traditionally have been towards improving society, even if they are misdirected.
I mean all things considered, pre-Musk buyout, Twitter was largely the least moderated of the major social media sites I'm aware of. Yes, people constantly brigaded and flooded the like buttons, but unlike Facebook groups or subreddits, users couldn't ban other users comments, so you'd just have to accept the extremists.
So if Musk literally did nothing but continue that pattern, he could justifiably make the claim that it's as close to a bastion of free speech as could be allowed on a social media site of its size.
wow. It's almost like you haven't been around the past month. Did you even read the Twitter files? They were banning and shadow-banning all sorts of people! (They just called it "visibility filtering").
I am aware, but my point is that I'm decently confident that all big social media sites do what twitter does, on top of allowing community moderation tools, which Twitter largely does not.
The original claim is that Twitter was the least moderated. The argument was an argument in support of that. You're tilting at windmills, arguing against claims nobody made.
From what I saw it was just some people on Bidens campaign team reaching out asking Twitter to take down some tweets that contained leaked nudes of Bidens son, in line with Twitters ToS.
I feel like I've missed the boat on this, everyone is pointing at a smoking gun, but I haven't seen it yet.
Here's the last dump: part 5. From there you should be able to find the previous.
It's not just about "some nudes of Biden's son". It is about the suppression of a NY Post story about a laptop his son lost. It had details about conversations and taking money from foreign nationals. Supposedly, it was deemed Russian disinformation, but that was all a lie. It was real.
