This whole thing has been rather interesting to observe. I do wonder how the platform will change now that it's privately owned. I don't really care a lot about the platform itself, but it's influence on politics is very real.
Personally I don't think this acquisition is healthy for a democracy, but nonetheless, it's something I want to observe. I've always thought these platforms need more democratic structures of governance and this is a change in the opposite direction so I'm rather interested in what the future holds and the consequences of this buyout!
Tbh the best direction for twitter to move in is to stop recommending content people did not subscribe to. And then adjust the rules to allow anything legal to be tweeted to your own page. If you object to someones tweets, don't follow them. There may still need to be rules on replying to others tweets since thats pushing content on people.
Discoverability is important, but imo there should be a dedicated section for it instead of mixing it with the tweets of the people you actually follow. But on the other hand, people might not really be willing to "switch tabs" and so if you move the feature somewhere else then people will never really see it.
It's kind of a trade off. I think what's a bit annoying is that often times these discovery features are used to advertise rather than to provide actual good recommendations.
I use twitter because you can switch to a chronological feed by using the "sparkle/stars" button in the upper right corner. This removes all of the suggestions and tweets from people you don't know. Basically it turns discoverablity off. You still get retweets if shared by someone you follow (you can also turn that off by going to their profile).
This is the main reason it's the only social media company I use. I can avoid the algorithm completely.
I also use Twitter lists and made a list of close friends so I can see a feed of just their tweets in case I miss them in the chronological feed.
The tools are already there. The UX to surface them needs to be better though.
Perhaps an alternative is rather than getting banned from the platform, you can just get banned from discoverability if your posts are a detriment to the community. But your direct followers can always keep seeing your content.
I imagine they'd also have to find a solution for replies and retweets. Those also can also show up on your feed, even if the original post is not from someone you follow.
I don't see how retweets are a problem. If someone doesn't want to see retweets of a certain person, they can unfollow everyone who retweets them. Twitter even allows you to show only original tweets, and not retweets, from someone you follow.
I like that idea, but note that youtube already has that - the default "home" tab is the recommendation engine, you can go to the "subscriptions" tab to show only your subscriptions - and people still keep whining about it.
There’s very good reason why platforms like that recommend the content. Without it, it you’re not a power user (and that’s usually tiny %), your experience gets boring/empty pretty fast, as the platform ages.
True.
I'm interested in hearing from people I follow, and the comments they make and even the posts they like or retweet.
But to recommend other posts to me because the people I follow happen to simply follow (not interact with) other people, really screws with my feed.
Where does liability come in once third parties start flooding propaganda/misinformation to the masses? Do you simply allow it to be a convenient platform for a foreign govt to astroturf a local population to affect a local election with misinformation as an example of moral gray area where 'Keep it blindly open!' seems to fall flat I think.
Without recommendation, I think Twitter should have the same liability as an ISP for allowing posting over the internet.
I do think Twitter should moderate what they promote and recommend but don’t think they are responsible for posts and users that users manually seek out.
Isn't he going to be bringing back people who were banned off the platform, that's more democratic. US has a bunch of problems but the one thing you used to get right is freedom of speech before big tech had so much influence, I thought the major purpose of Elon wanting to buy twitter was to uphold freedom of speech as it is written in the constitution, given it's something of a town square now.
> one thing you used to get right is freedom of speech before big tech had so much influence
Before big tech, there were no global platforms where anyone could just speak to millions/billions of people for free (as in money).
You weren't "censored" by big tech because there was nothing much to censor. In the past, if you wanted to reach a massive audience, you had to go through the traditional news media, big book publishers, major TV stations, or the like, and they were definitely selective about who was allowed to speak.
Also, the so-called "town square" where strangers gather to discuss politics in public is largely or entirely a myth. There are of course public spaces, but what happens on Twitter is not what happens in real physical town squares. And of course there are city council and other government meetings, but they are strictly controlled by government officials, not a free-for-all free speech zone.
Indeed, the fringers scraped together enough cash to mimeograph a few dozen leaflets and tucked them under cars windshield wipers; but that didn't get them far. They might be able to take out a cheap ad in a rag magazine advertising a self-published book, but that's about it. There weren't boards to put up posters, and putting a poster on a telephone pole (etc) was a crime (recent court cases have changed that without a change in the law, where I am.)
Traditionally there was more friction to speech. I don't even mean just that the average person doesn't have access to a national platform like CNN. Even something like mailing out fliers had non-trivial costs. It's the same reason why junk mail is generally less of an issue than email spam.
In a traditional town square, people are not anonymous and the "square" was local enough for there to be social consequences to actions. On Twitter, many of the posters are anonymous and even those who aren't often live on the other side of the country.
In my experience, and I used to run a "freedom of speech" channel back in IRC many years ago where I allowed anything as long as it wasn't illegal. These sort of measures end up restricting freedom of speech much more than enabling it. The reason is very simple, if people are allowed to say anything; then harassment becomes the norm and because a lot of the targets of these harassment are more sensitive then they end up leaving. You might think this is okay, but I tend to disagree, as I believe when people harass others out of a platform that it constitutes a form of violence.
Of course, I think this is actually a very complicated subject. And that's precisely my point on why I believe we need to have better conversations on what do we actually want. But as things stand now, this conversation is always reduced to what Elon Musk now thinks should happen. To me, this form of monarchic governance is sub-par to what is required for a platform as big as twitter.
Twitter is fundamentally different form and IRC channel. In an IRC channel, everyone sees every message, that's why moderation is necessary. On twitter, people themselves choose who to follow and block, they themselves moderate their own experience.
You could ignore people on IRC too, choose whether or not to join a particular channel or not, and choose which people to message in private.
The problems I've run in to on it is that that some channels on IRC were run by powertripping assholes, and you'd get banned for disagreeing with them or having different opinions.... even if you were perfectly polite, didn't threaten or harass anyone, etc.
Of course, you could just go somewhere else... on to another channel, another network, or off IRC entirely... the internet's a big place.
Still, the fact that some popular channels were dominated by assholes and there weren't viable alternatives to them sometimes is a problem for people wanting to participate in a large public space.
The problem I had is that the space I created in the beginning was quite nice, and we had lots of nice people in it. But as word spread that people wouldn't get banned we started getting a lot of "undesirable" people, people that had been banned from every other place (and for good reason). In the end, it drove everyone else away and the channel died because once everyone was gone there was no reason for these undesirable people to stick either.
In many ways, these people don't really care about having a space to say things and instead they want a space to be able to say it to people who don't want to hear it. It is why they don't actually use the spaces they've created for themselves like parlor or truth social. They want to tell trans people that they are not valid, they want to tell women to stop having abortions, they want to tell black people that they're criminals, etc. They need an audience. And if you allow them to have it, what ends up happening is that these people being insulted and belittled will leave.
That happened to me on a Discord server I was a mod of. Too much fighting and genuine hatred led us to just shut the place down. While it was small it was fine, but after it grew it began being intolerable and all of us mods decided to just shelve it. Nobody can post, but now its just a place to store Discord emojis and stickers
At this point people like you are just being pedantic. Uses of First Amendment and Free Speech are clearly referring to having a large window of acceptable speech. If people want to include porn, gore, harassment and spam in their colloquial definition of free speech, it is exceptional enough that should point it out up front.
“Free Speech” != “1st Amendment”. The later is a US constitutional amendment which aims to protect the former, but other US laws also protect free speech (state constitutional provisions, statute law)-the Bill of Rights is legally just a minimum, so other laws are allowed to go even further. Non-legal factors (culture/etc) also have a role to play in protecting free speech. And of course, other countries have free speech as well (to varying degrees), but the US constitution has nothing to do with that.
His absolutism doesn't extend to bots. His absolutism probably doesn't extend to having no real recommendation algorithm, and just random views for everyone. If he throws in a PageRank-like algorithm a la the central Google algorithm; or even just the choice of that, you might get the equivalent of some pretty solid moderation. Google definitely has holes and problems, but it can't be considered absolutist re free speech.
You mean other than the time where he harassed someone, called them a pedophile and hired a detective to investigate and try to dig up dirt on them because they got under his skin? That guy, who now has everything anyone has ever said in private messages on Twitter?
So that isn't an example of silencing dissenters, or of undermining democracy. I agree it's some pretty ugly character on show. But that wasn't what I was asking.
Network effects are a perfectly sufficient explanation for why people don't use parler. Can you name one example where people switched from a bigger to a smaller network, because the bigger one allowed too much freedom of speech?
How on earth can you think this is less democratic? It is by far more democratic. Twitter under previous leadership was on a banning, censoring, rampage against anything that didn’t agree with their own narrative.
Because less people are now in control of the decisions. In theory, a public company is controlled by its shareholders who are the ones that choose the board. Now the company is privately owned, meaning there are less owners than before.
Less democracy means less people are in control of the decisions, that is precisely what has happened.
I think this is attributing democracy to capitalism which isn’t warranted. At best the structure moves from aristocracy to a dictatorship, neither of which are democratic.
As an example from governments: The Chinese legislator is ruled by the communist party. The National People’s Congress has almost 3000 representatives. Even though there are almost 10x more representatives then in the USA legislator (which is still more then double per capita), this doesn’t mean the China’s legislator is more democratic then the USA’s legislator. Far from it. Now if Xi Jinping would dismantle the Congress and assume dictatorial powers (like Caesar crossing the Rubicon) this would just move China from being a totalitarian republic to a dictatorship (again like Ancient Rome after the civil wars), at no point in this affair does the common population in China have any say in the laws that govern them (not even by proxy, as is the case in the USA; but by proxy of a proxy of a proxy etc. effectively thinning out any democratic say to nothing).
Before these 3 elites could choose, now this 1 elite can choose... I'm not sure it's worse, it's definitely not improved, but we are still letting a class of elites have control over our political discourse.
If Elon sticks to the ideals he has espoused and open sourced more of the algorithms and policies of Twitter, that is possibly an improvement.
It seems to me that democracy relies on there being a degree of respect/safety for diverging viewpoints. Therefore, for democracy to work there has to be some restriction on behavior that doesn't follow those norms. That could be in the form of educational enculturation into those norms, social consequences for breaking them, or censorship.
No, I said that democracy only works if there is some way of enforcing that the participants actually follow democratic norms; i.e. respecting diverging viewpoints.
One mechanism of accomplishing that would be to restrict people who are using communication platforms to violate democratic norms.
I'm not advocating that is the best way to accomplish protecting democracy. I'm just pointing out that "free speech maximalism" doesn't address the need to protect democracy.
People can respect you as a person, but no I don't think people have to respect different viewpoints. I can respect that you have a lived experience that differs from mine and that your viewpoint is X, but I do balance that against my own views and speak my own truth as well.
If you think that you have to respect every viewpoint that differs, think of the viewpoints of the party you dislike. Think of any of their views. Do you respect their _view_ or do you respect the person and want to allow their speech while disagreeing with it?
Me? I think the best way to deal with speech I don't like is not filtering or censorship its more speech. Anytime I see an implication that someones view needs to be filtered I think "You first."
It's not a "narrative", it's called the Terms of Service, which specifically forbid inciting violence and hate speech. Trump, Kanye West, and other nut cakes broke those rules and that's why they got banned, after repeated warnings.
The rules should be applied wherever they are broken, but that doesn't mean we should hold Trump or Marjorie Green or Kanye West unaccountable. They have rightfully earned their bans.
>Personally I don't think this acquisition is healthy for a democracy, but nonetheless, it's something I want to observe.
This is an interesting point, curious if you could elaborate how you see elontwitter as unhealthy to democracy.
Twitter has no impact on the democratic institutions or function of the politicians. In fact, national security ensures the function of the elected politicians to continue. The only day twitter's influence can do anything to influence the democracy is election day.
The only thing that is unhealthy to a democracy on election day is anything which makes the election unfair. It's not twitter boarding up windows while the vote is being counted. Twitter does have impact on how people vote.
It's the politician and journalist's jobs to ensure the people are educated and know how to vote. This is where twitter comes in. Their current censorship of only 1 side of politics was an effective way to ensuring people didn't know how to vote. Resulting in a measurable boost to the given team. This is the unhealthiness. This is what elon at least claims he plans to fix. So to me, elon buying twitter is potentially going to be better for democracy.
This is assuming that political power comes from influencing all Americans rather than a small fraction who hold true power (politicians, donors, journalists, industry groups, etc.). If the small fraction is all on Twitter then viola the rhetoric is meaningful.
Maintstream journalists write what the owners of their publications tell them to write, especially when it comes to politics. The idea that a change in ownership of a relatively small social media company is going to have a "profound impact on democracy" is stupid. Especially since nobody seems to have a similar problem when a major media conglomerate changes ownership.
Every politician uses twitter. Every politician's speech is dictated by what their followers believe, it is in many cases the most direct form of communication they have with their constituents. I don't like this situation, but it is our reality.
And not just politicians, but as others have said, everyone in any sort of position of power is bound to have twitter. From corporations to personalities. Of course, there are other social medias but a lot of the speech and discussions that happen in the world are somewhat mediated by twitter.
This is a significant misunderstanding of what shareholder oversight does. All the biggest shareholders were humongous asset managers; hard to call that "democratic" governance.
Shareholder oversight is limited to addressing the agency problem (i.e., by firing executives if they egregiously harm profits). It's simply not a "democratic structure of governance", and has nothing whatsoever to do with content or moderation decisions. Even "activist investors" focus on things like dividends and buybacks, not content moderation.
Twitter's stock tanked 12% after Trump was permabanned; shareholders clearly had no say in it, or he would never have been banned.
Since shareholders' main impact is to incentivize management to maximize long-term value, and Musk will now own the majority of Twitter stock himself, the incentive has not changed. Even if Twitter was still public, shareholders would have no say in Musk's decision to reinstate (or not) Trump, for example. And importantly, a company being private doesn't mean it has no shareholders; it just means shares are not traded on public exchanges.
I don't think I ever called it a democratic governance? I think you might have misunderstood my point.
I think these platforms need to be more democratic, I don't think they're democratic at all as publicly owned companies. However, I do think control is now even more centralized residing in just one person. Which, imo, is an even worse state of affairs.
To me, democracy in these platforms is not about what speech is moderated but about taking the decision, in the first place, to do so. How is that decision taken, who is responsible for such decisions? It's about who is deciding rather than what is decided. Democracies will not always favor our personal points of view, but that wouldn't make them less democratic (think for example of the swiss people voting against face coverings, a democratic decision that goes against what I personally consider is correct).
I do consider a public company to have a more democratic structure of governance compared to a privately owned company simply by the fact that people could gain access. Of course, with such concentration of wealth it is a bit of a pipe dream. But think for example of Norway and their wealth fund; this is a country that invests in companies and steers influences them. They can't really do that with a private corporation.
In any case, this is not really a hill i would be willing to die on in any case. I want more democracy in platform governance.
Political ads are back on the table for sure. Hopefully easy to disable though.
Trump may come back but Twitter really only has bandwidth for one "narcissist" at a time. Trump would be competition for Musk plus Trump has Truth Social so Musk might keep him at arms length for a while. Then there's Kanye, all of these decisions will impact and weigh on Musk's reputation in the celeb sphere (if that's important to him). Twitter is a mainline to the media.
Subscriptions => onlyfans.
There will likely be some payment p2p angle.
There will be better customer service integration for a business's customers and tools that businesses will pay for. consumers will use it b/c call out culture gets you resolution vs calling into some call center.
There might be a tiktok play.
Maybe better DMs that are more whatsapp like.
A part of me is curious about what will happen next.
And then there is a part of me, as a participant of whatever democracy is left in the United States, is concerned with what could happen if a particular user is allowed to use Twitter again after their orchestration of certain events.
From what I've observed, the uptick in botted/recently created accounts tweeting about that particular user has been pretty dramatic in the last few days.
Unfortunately it's anecdotally based on my feed and of who I follow.
I typically use Twitter pretty passively. Most of my follows are tech oriented, journalists or local politicians, and it feels like every thread that has mentioned Musk's acquisition closing has been flooded with new accounts hailing the return of banned users.
It could be related to the subject matter, of course, but this has been during non-trending times and on posts that generally have mostly genuine engagement.
With the announcement today that he'll be reverting lifetime bans, I expect things to get even worse and the quality of the conversations to be near non-existent.
Doubt Musk has some unthought of revolutionary way to detect and neuter botnet accounts, and if he's insisting on laxing the enforcement of such accounts, it's going to get mucky real quick.
The people didn't vote him in the first time. We just have weird rules that enable our minority party to win the presidency. This is often claimed to prevent tyranny of the majority, but it's not a boon for democracy, rather a way to limit the extreme outcomes of democracy.
It's never good when someone denies the legitimacy of the very system that brought them into power. This is the part that makes him "terrible for democracy".
Come on. 50million+ people voted for him. Maybe he "shouldn't have won" in some technical senses (but not others), but to say he wasn't hugely supported by the Demos, the People, is ridiculous.
Embezzling every penny he could, modeling himself after Hitler, raising a mob to storming the capital to kidnap the vice president, and filing fake lawsuits about the election, was far far worse than losing the unofficial popular vote.
Don't "come on" the idea of a real democracy. Yes, he got a lot of support. Yes, he won according to the rules. However, 2/3 of people do not think the rules should work that way.
50 million+ people voted for a republican or non-democrat, they didn't vote "for trump". Just like when Biden won, 70 million+ people weren't voting for Biden, they were voting for a democrat, non-republican, or more specifically: anyone but Trump.
It's insanity when there are, for all intents and purposes, two people on a ballot to say "we chose this person specifically!!!". No you didn't, you chose one of the two options that was given to you, and since they are normally on the opposite end of the political spectrum you just chose the one "closest" to your views out of the two. Almost everything that happened up until that point is literally out of any normal individual person's control.
The odds are that Twitter will probably be dead in a year. He'll bring on a few yes-men executives that'll applaud him when he guts development and then when everything grinds to a halt they'll catch the blame. Especially since he'll probably force something like integrated NFTs on a whim.
Unlike Facebook and how it's captured an older audience that's relative inelastic to moving to other platforms, I don't see people sticking around on Twitter nor do I see employees staying around either.
> The odds are that Twitter will probably be dead in a year.
And that's based on what exactly?
> He'll bring on a few yes-men executives that'll applaud him
Again, based on what?
Now here's a prediction actually based on Musk's past perf:
He'll bring in people who get shit done, and get it done fast. Twitter will achieve things everyone says is stupid, ridiculous and impossible now as he's done in the past 20 years with Tesla and SpaceX.
That will be followed by a large swath of copy-cats who will try to replicate it to no avail.
You're assuming that the attributes that lead to success in those companies will also carry across. Social media is not just an engineering problem. Elon's personal brand and his temperament is a massive liability for something like Twitter.
> Social media is not just an engineering problem.
What you makes you think Tesla is just an engineering problem?
You have regulation, laws protecting dealers, government negotiations, lobbying (and that's just from top of my head) and not to forget, large distributed software and hardware infrastructure
SpaceX: strong relationships with customers, dealing with lots of government and private companies that are paying you millions of dollars, etc.
> You're assuming that the attributes that lead to success in those companies will also carry across.
There are many attributes across the board that is needed to succeed in a scale of those companies. Even in Musk's existing companies, he's most definitly not suited to do certain tasks. It's well known and that Gwen Shotwell is a huge part of SpaceX'es success to date. I agree that social network requires its own area of knowledge and experience, but Musk isn't literally doing all this by himself. He attracts talent and that's the key.
I would believe this comment if it was some other billionaire. Elon Musk is a talented executive for tech companies. He got his start as a founding employee for paypal and moved onto tesla, which is essentially a tech company that makes cars
You can like or hate Elon Musk but it is not going to happen. It is really hard for tech giants to die, if companies that were run way worse didn't die, Twitter is not going to die. And he has experience of running tech companies anyway.
A social media company is a very different beast from a tech company, and very easy to quickly run into the ground. We've seen other platforms die very quickly because they institute things that chase off a bulk of users.
Not so different, perhaps, from his previous company PayPal however. There, detecting fraud with a hybrid AI/human examiner model was solution they found for that central difficult task. Unearthing bots and nation-state actors may not be too different, and Tesla AI is world-leading.
I understand that's not all that goes into managing a social network, but if he mostly gets out of the way other than bot-blocking, as seems to be his intent, he might be okay.
'Paypal' was literally falling apart and Musk had to be ousted and replaced because he was destroying the company. It was Peter Thiel that took over, renamed it Paypal and it became the success as we know it today. So if your barometer of success is Paypal, then Twitter is doomed.
I think PayPal survived. Without any course correction so far as I know. Whose idea the hybrid solution was I don't know - it's not impossible it was Thiel since Palantir is a suspiciously similar hybrid solution (or a series of them), in part. But more likely a third party. Witnessing the success of the hybrid solution up close would be enough to impress both of them with the lesson.
It's a meme where people like to say Elon isn't funny because they don't like him. I certainly don't think he's a particularly skilled comedian, but I'm also not butthurt he goofs around.
Odd sort of cult but I think the reusable rocket boosters are cool and thought letting the sink in funny. I guess silly humor is the new cult thing. But yeah there may be bots.
If Elon is true to his word, then twitter will be the best social platform to discuss topics in realtime and listen to different points of view and make our own conclusions.
None one can say we have that right now. Facebook, instagram, TikTok are left wing. Truth social, gettr, etc... Are right wing. Where's the "neutral", centric platform? There's none. Twitter could become this platform.
I'm not in Truth social but I won't consume any left wing platform either. Twitter is the closest thing to "centric" pov and it's still heavily skewed to left ideologies.
The main issue here is that the climate is soo polarized that you can't even discuss anything because if you don't agree 100% with me then you become my enemy. This is one of the reasons on why Hitler rose to power. Don't listen to what the other side is saying even if what they are saying make some sort of sense. They are wrong and they are destroying the world.
I,for once, want to believe twitter can be saved and dialogue can come back.
>None one can say we have that right now. Facebook, instagram, TikTok are left wing. Truth social, gettr, etc... Are right wing
>Where's the "neutral", centric platform?
Are you.. serious? You construct this statement as if Facebook, instagram, tiktok, reddit etc are somehow mandated or left wing by some fake construction..
Truth social, gettr and whatever other bullshit people made are the only ones created for people of some specific viewpoints to go there because they don't understand they are in the vast minority on their views which is why no one wants to hear about their bullshit on the rest of the internet.
So maybe you should be asking yourself the simple question: if every neutral platform naturally swings left.. hmm, that couldn't possibly mean because most people are actually more left leaning in this country?
Personally I don't think this acquisition is healthy for a democracy, but nonetheless, it's something I want to observe. I've always thought these platforms need more democratic structures of governance and this is a change in the opposite direction so I'm rather interested in what the future holds and the consequences of this buyout!