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

Yes! That was the real threat behind the coup.

 

how do you figure there's going to be a "next time"? I think that's basically impossible, Pelosi turned down something like six requests for National Guard support from the ex-Capitol Police Chief. Six. If anything I think what happened on January 6 falls more on Pelosi's shoulders than on Trump's.

I just don't think it's going to happen again.

 

I sure hope that's the last time we see a President lose and then refuse to accept defeat. I doubt we ever have another insurrection but I sure hope nobody goes as far as trying to change the electoral votes.

 

As a Minnesotan now I consider it blasphemy to take Prince's words in vain.

 

https://www.city-journal.org/elon-musk-forces-a-free-speech-reckoning

Musk Makes the Mask Slip
The Tesla CEO’s bid to buy Twitter has prompted many prominent figures to admit bluntly that they oppose free speech.
Corbin K. Barthold
April 17, 2022

Though he has just offered to buy Twitter for around $40 billion, it’s far from clear that Elon Musk knows how to run a social media platform. Speaking about his bid at an event last week, Musk mused that people should be “able to speak freely within the bounds of the law.” But a social media product that came to be dominated by anti-Semitism, p*rn, coordinated abuse, virulent racial animus, and bot-generated foreign propaganda—all forms of speech “within the bounds of the law”—would soon have little value. During the same interview, Musk announced that his “top priority” is to eliminate spam—perfectly lawful communication. Musk does not seem to have thought this through yet.

Twitter is not necessarily a well-run business. Mark Zuckerberg once described it as a clown car driven into a goldmine. It has drawn scrutiny from activist investors before—a fact that likely played a role in Jack Dorsey’s recent departure—and is thus in a poor position to reject Musk’s offer on grounds that the company’s stock is undervalued. Still, from a business perspective, Musk has not explained how he would finance his purchase (he’s incredibly rich but not liquid), and he has yanked investors’ chains before (a few years back, he was about to take Tesla private, until he wasn’t).

If Musk is trolling the humorless progressives who dominate our institutional and cultural heights, though, he has already achieved a coup. That Musk mightbuy Twitter has caused a meltdown among Twitter elites. “Today on Twitter feels like the last evening in a Berlin nightclub at the twilight of Weimar Germany,” wrote one blue check. “[This] could result in World War 3 and the destruction of our planet,” exclaimed another. Robert Reich has equated Musk to Vladimir Putin.

Musk has done more than simply induce liberal tears. He has caused a mask to slip. He has prompted many prominent figures to admit bluntly that they oppose free speech.

These not-so-crypto authoritarians fall into two rough categories. Start with the snobs. These tend to reminisce about having only three network television stations. If you miss Walter Cronkite, you’re a snob. Snobs speak often of “protecting democracy,” but their ideology is better understood as feudal. The lower orders should not be allowed talk too much, either to the snobs or to one another. Peasants should not think for themselves. Information, in the masses’ hands, is dangerous.

Max Boot has led the charge for this group. “I am frightened by the impact on society and politics if Elon Must acquires Twitter,” he tweeted. “For democracy to survive, we need more content moderation, not less.” (Try to define “democracy,” as used in that sentence.) Boot then reiterated his point in a Washington Post column, arguing that because his tweet was widely denounced as stupid, his observation must have been smart. “There is way too much nonsense online,” he admitted. Indeed there is.

In his column, Boot invoked a recent article by Jonathan Haidt, a thoughtful critic of social media. As Haidt observes, the dynamics of social media virality cause attention-hungry fools to chase online “clout” with sneers and insults. Boot himself trades in this coin. Call it the Boot Model: show contempt for your fellow citizens; get mad when they respond; lecture them about their place; pine for an imagined past when speech was “managed” and the Boots of the world suffered no backchat.

The other response category is the victims. Some act like free speech is a freaky new idea. Others believe that it is a longstanding tool of white supremacy. Either way, they fear “unfettered” conversations and “dangerous” ideas. They make up the “words are violence” crowd.

The victims begin with a real issue—online harassment. The Internet is infested with jerks. Viewed as a whole, those jerks are an ecumenical lot. They target everyone. Yet the victims turn this shared problem to individual account, wielding it as a political cudgel. Writing, like Boot, in the Washington Post, Ellen Pao, former CEO of Reddit, worried that a Musk-run Twitter would “disproportionately” harm women and minorities. Conversely, she claimed, “unrestricted amplification” benefits “the same people who have benefited from that privilege for centuries.” Her prescription? Freedom must bow to safety—or, better yet, be redefined so that “freedom” means “safety.”

It’s revealing that so many elites belong simultaneously to the snob camp and the victim camp. “We are persecuted!” cry the nobles. If the shadowy forces of ancient Western patriarchy are riding so high, Pao might have wondered at how her plea for the oppressed found its way into one of the nation’s most prominent newspapers. Or at how it is that that paper, and the legacy media writ large, is reliably progressive. Or at why her bogeyman is assailing the social media power structure from the outside. Like Augustus, the Left reigns in part by assiduously denying that it reigns.

Not only does the Left rule; it is accustomed to ruling. Its leaders suffer from “arc of history” brain—a tendency to assume that every cultural dispute will in the long run break their way. In consequence, progressives have lost the knack for game theory. They forget that the other side gets a move, too, and they tend to be shocked when it goes ahead and makes one. Progressives act surprised when the institutions they’ve politicized lose legitimacy. They are mystified when the large swath of society on whom they heap scorn flocks to populist politicians. They howl in protest when an eccentric billionaire resists their effort to make “hate speech” mean “things that offend woke activists.”

It’s a pattern. The Left adopts a tactic; the Right shows that two can play; the Left clamors for new rules. Nothing has shifted faster, as a result of Musk’s actions, than the Left’s attitude about private ownership of social media services. For years, “build your own!” was a common progressive response to conservative complaints about content moderation. But that Musk might acquire Twitter points up the need, Pao insists, “to prevent rich people from controlling our channels of communication.” This in the Washington Post—an outlet owned by Jeff Bezos!

Were Musk to succeed in taking over Twitter, he’d do well to add some diversity of thought to the ranks. Perhaps a few vocal executives with “underrepresented” perspectives could have softened Twitter’s clampdown on Covid policy debates or flagged the drawbacks of blocking a certain New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop. Of course, Musk might improve (or damage) both the product and its effect on public discourse in many other ways. But the stubborn truth is that the drama surrounding Twitter is big news primarily to those who spend a lot of time on Twitter. Maybe the real lesson here is that the laptop class—Left and Right—should spend less time using, arguing about, and obsessing over social media.

As the philosopher Dave Chappelle once said, Twitter is not a real place.

Corbin K. Barthold is Internet policy counsel at TechFreedom.

​

 

Again, I don't think people understand the meaning of content moderation.

 

lol

 

I mean, the article is about Musk buying Twitter and how we would eliminate spam - a good thing by the authors standards. That's effing content moderation - which he then goes on to attack as some kind of censorship.

Article looks like a fluff piece without any real substance - just another let's find a way to spin things to rag on the left.

 

Haven't read this thread at all, but I'm totally for opening up all of the following that has existed in the past (as long as we do it all and be consistent):
-no moderation by social media companies allowed
-fairness doctrine reapplied to radio
-right of reply for all cable news and online news.
Bring the p*rn and hate speech to all forums plus Twitter (a lot of it is already there) and just keep it properly separated. Bring the conservative pundits to CNN and bring the liberal pundits to Fox. Screw this 21st century basterdization of the 1st amendment where private actor rights trump all.

That's the only acceptable alternative to me, otherwise we're just nitpicking whiners about companies opressing us when we're not getting enough attention via the medium we feel like we're entitled to.

 

The Title of this thread SULLIES "When Doves Cry".

 

For starters...

1. Just because something is cheap, doesn't mean it can't get cheaper. Same reason if people think the market is overvalued, they don't necessarily just liquidate everything to cash.
2. "Loading up your bags" in one stock is poor risk management for a long-term investor.
3. Just because something is cheap doesn't mean there might not be other, better opportunities for your funds depending on your individual risk tolerance, timeline, and goals.

 

I keep seeing articles about the right saying it's exposing the left. But I don't see any of these articles from the left actually saying they think Musk should not be allowed to buy twitter. Some seem indifferent; others aren't happy about it, but I have yet to see many people argue it should be illegal - you know, the difference between opposing free speech and not liking something. It's as though the right decided what they want the left to be arguing and then are arguing against it.

 

No - I think it was over before it ever started because Musk was never serious about acquiring twitter. The market seems to agree based on the valuation of the stock. The poison pill just reinforced it and unfortunately for Musk, limits his ability to drive the price higher before selling. This is what I posted on Page #1 of the thread, and I stand by it:

https://bbs.clutchfans.net/threads/...en-doves-cry-wahh.315260/page-9#post-14049161

It may go through some random ups and downs from Elon tweets, but he's not serious about buying Twitter and he's not going to end up owning twitter. I do think he'll make a profit from his market manipulations though.

 

For all of you "free speech" absolutists, I assume none of you have any experience working for a content platform. What you are asking for is impossible without ruining the business. Running any platform without moderation means setting your business on fire. Zero moderation means allowing unlimited spam, scams, and risks drowning a platform in things like hate speech and anger. Not only will that cause you to lose users but you'll lose advertisers as well (so your revenue will go to zero). Did all of you forget what the 90s were like? A place like clutchfans worked precisely because there was some good moderation where other forums had nothing and could quickly become cesspools.

There's a reason why unmoderated platforms have never taken off. The business model doesn't effing work. And no one has explained where we draw the line. So is it ok to ban spam and scammers from a platform? Is it ok to ban videos of violence? That would technically violate this absolutist idea of free speech. But if you say its ok to ban those then you're saying that content moderation is required. So then you enter a gray area. And remember that platforms care about one thing: money.

Platforms want two things: user growth and ad revenue/monetization. If the speech of users threaten either of those, the platforms will absolutely take actions. It is in their interest. These platforms aren't run as a service to society. They're for profit companies that take actions to maintain the integrity of their platforms. This is why facebook plays this game where they largely allow all kinds of disinformation (because they made the determination that the people who consume that stuff are highly engaged users that are some of their most profitable customers) but they'll draw the line on Trump because someone engineering an insurrection on their platform threatens to blow up advertiser relationships and potentially turns off a different set of users.

Now I think we can have a real discussion about how we moderate. I think the social media platforms leaned too hard into using AI to moderate and there are tons of stories of people getting banned because the AI misinterpreted posts while not banning people who obviously should be banned. And the inconsistency hurts the credibility of the platforms. But that's a discussion about how we moderate in a smarter way rather than Musk's contention that moderation is just bad.

 

This guy writes great articles (fun in a nerdy financial way if that is your thing). Anyway, he wrote one on this deal and I think it fairly lays out all the hurdles/realities of the situation...it is a little long, but very educational and he does try to dumb it down a bit for non finance geeks.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-04-15/sure-elon-musk-might-buy-twitter

 

paywalled

 

Content moderation is fine, within limits. I think that's a statement 95% of people can agree on.

The catch is agreeing on what those limits should be. So why is that not what we're all talking about?

Let's consider the case of the recently suspended accounts, "The Babylon Bee" and "Libs of TikTok". They tweeted out articles that is defined as "hate speech" by Twitter's TOS. They were suspended for 12 hours. If I'm not mistaken, they were asked to delete the violating tweets for the suspension to be lifted and they apparently have refused to do so. They claim to be taking a stand for "free speech", I guess? In this case, they are defining free speech as: "The right to engage in speech on your platform that you have defined as hate speech." If they have a problem specifically with how Twitter has defined "hate speech" (in this case, with regards to transgender people), they could have expressed that. Have they done so? Not that I'm aware of.

Where this conversation should be centered on, in my opinion, is: (a) Should Twitter disallow hate speech on its platform? and (b) How should Twitter define what qualifies as "hate speech"?