Comment by ep103
2 years ago
You're assuming that Elon isn't doing what he intended to do, turn Twitter into his own personal, right wing echo-chamber with political influence.
2 years ago
You're assuming that Elon isn't doing what he intended to do, turn Twitter into his own personal, right wing echo-chamber with political influence.
Those have never done well. They want the angry/upset reaction they can't get in an echo chamber; the Parlers, Truth Socials, Gabs etc. will never give them this.
They're already asking Musk to stop lefties from being able to even block them; it's the same phenomeon as incels. Free speech was never enough; they want an audience guaranteed, too. https://twitter.com/stillgray/status/1604052966839062528
There's this shading in free speech absolutists from "I have a right to say what I want" to "I have the right to the audience I want".
That’s simply not true, per the policy:
https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/social-platfo...
> At both the Tweet level and the account level, we will remove any free promotion of prohibited 3rd-party social media platforms, such as linking out (i.e. using URLs) to any of the below platforms on Twitter, or providing your handle without a URL…
I don't follow. Did you mean to reply to a different comment?
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As much as I dislike Musk and what he's done to Twitter, I suspect he didn't intend that. I just think that's the natural outcome of his feelings, his position in society, and his relentless self focus.
David Roth did a good job looking at the dynamic: https://defector.com/the-eternal-mystery-of-a-rich-mans-poli...
And Adam Serwer has a useful take as well: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/12/legal-righ...
He's tweeted out some pretty hard right wing talking points and advocated voting for conservatives. It seems pretty intentional.
I agree he holds those opinions. I just don't think his intent in buying Twitter was to put it in the tank for the right.
It's not clear to me that he had a fully formed intent when he made a bid for it. And a big piece of evidence there was that he tried to weasel out and was forced to buy it. Another bit of evidence is the way he has obviously been impulsively half-assing pretty much everything he's done since he took it over. He does not look like a man with a plan.
But to the extent that he had clear intent, I think it was more about hubris. There's this phenomenon in the food industry where a rich person will basically say, "I have eaten at a lot of restaurants, so I'd be really good at running one!" So they will spend a bunch of money on launching and unless they hired competent industry experts and deferred to them, they'll create a clusterfuck. I think it's a similar deal with Musk: He was a dedicated and successful Twitter user, and he thought he could run it better. Turned out it was harder than it looks.
You're being downvoted because HN is a lolbertarian paradise, but this is correct. He wants the Parler audience.
>HN is a lolbertarian paradise
The idea that HN is some sort of libertarian paradise is ridiculous. This is definitely a liberal haven.
He could have bought parler, truth or whatever for far less and already been closer to his goal.
Twitter was/remains? a geopolitical & cultural instrument. The precise reason why there is a fight over who gets to say what on Twitter is because it is a powerful platform for propaganda and agitprop. You can organize uprisings on Twitter. That is why it is such a hot potato. (It is not about utility. think Payless vs Prada.)
Elon apparently bet on the fact that the establishment could not stomach the idea of reconstructing that high visibility platform elsewhere. Everyone knows it is not simply about technology. Twitter remains "the clown car that fell into a gold mine". He will probe on how far he can go but will promptly retreat (ex: EU).
My guess is that his strategy is to prolong this period of uncertainty. Things like PG's decision may signal a consensus that they need to reconstruct humpty dumpty elsewhere.
Watch for trends in use of twitter as a news source in establishment press. If that significantly declines, the political class will follow.
p.s. It is upsetting to think that one of the immediate beneficiaries of Twitter itself being 'deplatformed from polite society' is the relief it offers regimes like Islamic Republic. They are happy, that much is fairly certain.
> Twitter was/remains? a geopolitical & cultural instrument.
Give it a while.
I doubt Parler would have sold to him at the time, Owens and Farmer are probably still stoking Ye to make some ludicrous bid on it again.
Musk, on the other hand, needs the audience.
It'd be missing the political influence though, those don't have any influence and nobody would be paying any attention to what he does there.
There's this weird thing where a principal might be deluded about their own intentions. It's useful because it allows them to give inaccurate information about their future behavior without 'lying'. If a sincere/passionate person's actions regularly mismatch their words, suspect this.
So, like, Truth Social, only without, well, the main attraction? Hard to see much of a market for that.
I like how people always assume there is some genius underlying plan. All I'm seeing is an egomaniac going on a tantrum with something he didn't even want. What you are describing is what Trump wants with 'Truth Social' who himself wants nothing to do with Twitter.
> You're assuming that Elon isn't doing what he intended to do, turn Twitter into his own personal, right wing echo-chamber with political influence.
He simply unbanned accounts which were wrongfully banned. Accounts which simply communicated legal to hold opinions. There is nothing wrong or morally objectionable about this. I’d rather say it commendable.
If Twitter is becoming a right-wing echo-chamber it’s because left-wing accounts are leaving and nothing else.
So why are they? Are they afraid of having an argument where they can’t have the opposing view banned?
Cmon! You can do better than this.
> There is nothing wrong or morally objectionable about this.
Depends on the opinion. "We must kill all the [insert ethnic group]" is a legal-to-hold opinion. But I'd say it's both wrong and morally objectionable to provide a platform for transmitting that opinion. Which is why Twitter banned people like that.
And even for those without a moral sense, I should point out that it was also bad for business. Twitter had a business choice to make: they could keep all the blatant racists or they could keep the non-white audience they targeted plus the white people that don't like open racism. Even if you're a-ok with open bigotry, it's pretty obvious that the right financial choice is to boot most of the open bigots, so that the platform feels safe enough to everybody else.
> "We must kill all the [insert ethnic group]"
To be fair, that has always been allowed to say on Twitter as long as the target is either white, men or both.
The only news is now you’re (equally) allowed to spread that kind of toxic hate towards other groups as well.
Is that a good thing? Possibly not, but at least it is objectively more fair than it used to be.
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In a large number of cases because they've been banned.