Elon vs Twitter update: Elon helped America win , Tesla stock through the roof

https://reason.com/2022/04/14/gatek...elon-musk-will-remove-the-gates-from-twitter/

Gatekeepers Very Afraid That Elon Musk Will Remove the Gates From Twitter
$43 billion takeover bid reveals knowledge-class anxieties over free expression
MATT WELCH | 4.14.2022 1:07 PM

News Thursday morning that the outspoken serial tech entrepreneur Elon Musk has offered to buy Twitter and take it private has surfaced widespread anxieties within the knowledge-class industries that free speech and even societal peace will be jeopardized if the Tesla CEO lifts content restrictions from journalists' favorite social media platform.

"I am frightened by the impact on society and politics if Elon Musk acquires Twitter," wrote Max Boot, columnist for The (Jeff Bezos–owned) Washington Post, on Twitter. "He seems to believe that on social media anything goes. For democracy to survive, we need more content moderation, not less."

Boot is a longtime apocalyptic troll—past lowlights include declaring that "I would sooner vote for Josef Stalin than I would vote for Donald Trump," and advocating the Federal Communications Commission go after Fox News to forestall "the plot against America." But his anxiety about allegedly unfettered free speech is revealingly common in media, academia, Silicon Valley, and the government.

"For somebody with a lot of money to just come in and say, 'Look, I'm going to buy a part of this company, and therefore my voice as to how your rules are adopted and enforced is going to have more power than anybody else's' — I think that's regressive after years of [Twitter] trying to make sensible rules," University of California, Irvine, law professor and former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression David Kaye was quoted in Vox on Tuesday. "Twitter has stepped away from this idea of it being the free speech wing of the free speech party, and being a more realistic custodian of speech on the platform."

Those "realistic" and "sensible" rules Twitter has adopted include banning thousands of political provocateurs (including then-President Donald Trump in 2021), suspending entire news organizations for publishing stories that turned out to be largely true, creating warning labels for COVID-19 "misinformation," strengthening filters for allegedly threatening speech, and so on.

"After all that, bringing Musk onto the board seems like a big step backward," former Reddit CEO Ellen K. Pao wrote last week in The Washington Post. "Musk calls himself a 'free-speech absolutist,' but like many 'free speech' advocates, he willfully ignores that private companies are free to establish some limits on their platforms."

At the core of these objections is the notion (misguided, in my view) that social media platforms, once they achieve a certain ubiquity, should be treated less like private companies, and more like utilities—subject to robust government regulation in the name of both the greater good and the protection of historically disadvantaged minorities.

"Musk's appointment to Twitter's board shows that we need regulation of social-media platforms to prevent rich people from controlling our channels of communication," Pao wrote. "For starters, we need consistent definitions of harassment and of content that violates personal privacy….If platforms continue to push for growth at all costs — without such regulations — people will continue to be harmed. The people harmed will disproportionately be those who have been harmed for centuries — women and members of marginalized racial and ethnic groups. The people who benefit from unrestricted amplification of their views will also be the same people who have benefited from that privilege for centuries."

The notion that unfettered speech hurts minorities hardest, therefore justifying protections against hate speech, is belied both by the history of the gay civil rights movement in America (as spelled out in Reason by Jonathan Rauch), and also by the experience in 1930s Germany, as Jacob Mchangama, author of the recent Free Speech: A History From Socrates to Social Media, explained in February to Nick Gillespie.

But those Hitler analogies can be just too tempting to fact-check. "Today on Twitter feels like the last evening in a Berlin nightclub at the twilight of Weimar Germany," tweeted City University of New York journalism professor Jeff Jarvis, who has otherwise spent much of the last two decades celebrating the "death of the gatekeeper."

Musk, love him or hate him, makes for an odd authoritarian. An immigrant who built a fortune on clean-energy companies, an entrepreneur who (along with competitors) showed what nongovernmental industry can accomplish in space, the pot-smoking former Saturday Night Live host has shown zero interest in running for public office or recruiting jack-booted thugs to enforce his preferences. And yet it's not just silly lefties like Robert Reich comparing the guy to actual evildoers.

"The world's richest man — someone who used to be compared to Marvel's Iron Man — is increasingly behaving like a movie supervillain, commanding seemingly unlimited resources with which to finance his mischief-making," Felix Salmon wrote in Axios.

Added former Chicago Tribune metro editor Mark Jacob: "Elon Musk is bad news. He should start his own platform, maybe Oligarch Social, and leave Twitter alone."

Perhaps ironically, the social-media-as-public-utility mindset is being embraced not just by a growing number of left-of-center knowledge-class professionals, but by some of their antagonists in the nascent trad-con right. "Twitter should be a public utility controlled by a rightly-ordered state," Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule tweeted today. "Short of that, I'm not sure I care which particular billionaires use it as an ideological playpen."

Populism of all ideological flavors tends to treat not just government but constitutional principles as instruments, to be used bluntly against ideological opponents. Twitter may have had some libertarian, anything-goes roots, but in the Trump era especially the company has become both the professional plaything and ideological piñata of the white-collar left.

Reich, helpfully, laid out the stakes this morning: "Trump must never be allowed back on Twitter."

The post Gatekeepers Very Afraid That Elon Musk Will Remove the Gates From Twitter appeared first on Reason.com.
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the Bee is still banned on Twitter

 

Elon Musk clearly does agree this is a problem, which is currently being caused at Twitter by the people currently running the company, who are some of the most aggressive managers and spreaders of misinformation that our species has ever produced.

Elon Musk is openly proposing to buy the company for the express purpose of enabling free speech, while removing Twitter from the role of promoting "politically correct" (another phrase for misinformation) establishment propoganda narratives, regardless of how blatantly deceitful they are.

 

I am talking about users tweeting/retweeting misinformation.

You’re talking about content moderation that supposedly disproportionately suppresses conservative viewpoints.

Different things. I want to know what his take on the former is and how he intends to deal with it, if at all.

 

The whole conservative view points are being suppressed is the biggest joke. They are adept of taking the smallest slight and blowing it up. The definition of histrionics.

 

Musk mused that if a tweet were particularly controversial, perhaps the company should not promote that tweet, but added, "I think we want to be very reluctant to delete things and just be very cautious with permanent bans; timeouts are better."​

Hmmm — perhaps he isn’t a “free speech absolutist”.

He should elaborate on how he’d revise content moderation to be more fair and inclusive, and which violations would warrant a “timeout” in his view.

 

so if it's a joke why do folks on the left fear Musk's potential purchase of Twitter? if conservative view points are NOT being suppressed, Musk is wasting his money. And wouldn't the left applaud that mistake by Musk? where's the problem?

seems like a win-win to me. Conservatives believe Musk is coming to their rescue, progressives get a good laugh at Musk's expense

 

The current crew at Twitter has no objection to misinformation, as long as it supports the narrative that they are dedicated to promoting, which is jam packed with fresh misinformation on a daily basis, published by them and their millions of users.

Any suggestion that the current crew that runs Twitter is comprehensively devoted to eliminating misinformation on its platform is monstrously and demonstrably false. In fact any such suggestion is an excellent example of "misinformation".

Anyone who believes they are qualified to arbitrate the exchange of information and truth - constantly, decisively, and correctly - is either maglomaniacally arrogant or is full on insane, and could very well be a bit of both. The people at Twitter are not within high-powered telescope range of having this ability.

Fortunately, Elon Musk realizes that truth is best vetted and established in a free speech environment, while corruption, tyranny, deceit and depravity thrive in an environment where free speech is "cancelled" and not permitted. Which explains your tribe's (and Twitter's) enthusiasm for the latter.

 

Because people don't want to see accounts like this on twitter.

Most of the left arguments against zero moderation is having to deal with it being a wild wild west which, if you've ever visited 4chan, is no fun for sane people.

 

if that's true then those people shouldn't follow accounts like that on twitter

 

If Twitter starts letting those kinds of account on, that's their choice - but it would definitely be so oft putting to many people that they would lose users en masse.

Great for free speech, terrible for business. And I think this becomes the ultimate question - how much right does a company like twitter have to make editorial decisions to maximize its profits? Should we hold twitter to a higher standard than any other company probably in the history of the US has been held to?

 

Have you ever been on a platform with no moderation because this kind of reply implies you haven't? What usually...almost always happens is accounts like that, people like that, win out. The sane people just leave for more positive spaces while the inmates take control of the asylum.

The whole "Just block them" mentality isn't sufficient when the culture of a website becomes that.

Like I said, go on gab, go on 4chan, see what you find. The first day gab opened I opened it up...nothing but hard ERs, Jewish question, race/IQ, complete fringe...post after post after post after post after post after post. "Just Block Them" at that point turns into "Just find another website."

 

that doesn't really bother me, again, 90 percent of twitter is generated by 10 percent of its users. And we could probably use a lot less twitter to make the world a better place

this (terrible for business) doesn't really bother me either

twitter can make all the editorial decisions it wants. It's now facing the consequences of those decisions.

that sounds fairly hyperbolic to me

 

that would be a good outcome then, wouldn't it. kind of a social media survival of the fittest

I have no interest in 4chan. I'm not sure why someone like you would want to be on 4chan. I'm extremely happy however that you have the freedom to go on 4chan if that's what floats your boat. Me? I have a hard time enough with twitter and Facebook.

 

Bingo. It's terrible for business. That's why all of these sites have the exact same rules because it's terrible for business. Including this website right here.

This isn't even counting rules against harassment which TOS has to prevent Twitter from being liable when some wacko (or a group of wackos) bully someone into suicide.

And this isn't even getting into the fact that Twitter is an international company that expects to operate in countries that do not have 1st amendments. Germany is absolutely going to expect Twitter to ban neo-nazis for instance or they will just pull the plug on the website.

 

If you want twitter to become irrelevant then sure.

Well point proven then. All of the people that think no moderation is a beautiful thing haven't seen it in action.

 

‘Censorship is free speech’ is the establishment’s Orwellian line on Elon Musk’s Twitter crusade

https://nypost.com/2022/04/14/the-establishments-orwellian-line-on-elon-musks-twitter-crusade/

 

I would have never seen that account if you didnt promote it.