Elon's biggest problem @ Twitter - he's not funny at tweeting

Not really, it's a defacto endorsement of Twitter's new product.

 

I thought @AroundTheWorld elon was a champion of free speech ? You're telling me another billionaire turned out to be a fraud who lied in the name of capitalism....shocking....

 

Any business has a right to exclude people from its platform who are actively undermining their business model.

 

But Musk is a free speech absolutist.

 

lol

I think anyone with a few functioning brain cells knows that nothing is absolute, and certainly not anything Musk says.

 

He wants to run an immense and someday hopefully profitable game of whack-a-mole versus a planet of people with lots of time on their hands. Sounds ... likely (TM).

 

This entire thread is important... this is what musk has done to twitter to (1) tap revenue to pay for his overpay and (2) "own" the liberals...

 

I'm not that concerned, (but I'm admittedly ignorant of some details and particulars).

People who want real information and need real information, and people who need to transmit real, verified information, will figure out they have to abandon Twitter. There will just be an awkward transition time where some people still think it's legit, and yes, some people will lose some money (like always) and some people may even get injured (if they believe, say, a "weather outlet" that's actually a KGB bot says clear skies in Nebraska and the person then misses a tornado warning that used to reliably come via Twitter); or a "news outlet" (also from KGB) says Black people are rioting in a certain Detroit suburb and Bubba Michigan shows up with an AK looking to straighten it out, ends up shooting the only random Black person he can find, etc, etc. I'd expect those cases to be now more common than they are (unfortunately) common already.

Meanwhile, (as we see around these parts all the time, and on Youtube, etc): People who want misinformation that titillates them or supports only their political beliefs will find that information somewhere, be it new-Twitter, old-Twitter, the trad. internet, cable angertainment, local barber shop, or whatever.

The fact that Twitter becomes increasingly unreliable is just a transition. What's sad and lost is that we had another opportunity to capture a large audience and have an outlet for actual, helpful, actionable information. (Network news arguably used to do this and capture a broad audience.) But I doubt a new platform emerges that will capture the same breadth of audience. We'll just become further segmented, using different platforms I'd guess, further inhabiting parallel realities, but Twitter was never going to save us from that anyway.

 

Oh. You mean Elon is a lying clown? Agreed!

 

Correct. I mostly use twitter for fantasy football and to a lesser degree, for work (technology industry). But when my kids were in school twitter was very useful in providing very timely information about the schools including lockdowns and other safety concerns. Increasingly, we are not going to be able to rely on twitter for information. Even in the world of fantasy football, content providers are complaining that the new twitter is becoming increasingly unusable and are looking for other platforms.

 

The world is complex. He has certainly achieved a lot, and has been right about a lot of things. But nobody is always right or always wrong.

Even you aren't always wrong.

 

LOL. How could it be unreliable for fantasy football? Are there trolls out there pathetic enough to post bogus statistics or statistical trends? I guess I could see that. "Travis Henry doubled his yards per carry last year!"

Or: "Look for Natrone Means to have a breakout season in 2023 after sitting out 2022." And the guy retired decades ago. (?)

 

Hmm it might take him a while to get his money back…

 

You’d be surprised. On top of the trolls, there is much more offensive posts including the same crap on twitter overall, including politics, sexism, racism, etc.

 

Musk has pretty much been always wrong wrt to Twitter. It’s honestly a shock to witness how horrible he has been. It also speaks to how hard it is to run a social media company. For starter, you can’t be a person with a massive ego.

 

I have almost zero doubt that there will be a new company that can capture as big or a larger breadth of audience.

I think the gov has a place here. One thing Twitter is great at is mass emergency communication. But that is now not as reliable due to recent Twitter changes. In fact, without verification, it could be used dangerously on a mass scale (imagine a prank from a “gov” account that causes massive panic). I would like to see a public emergency infrastructure designed for mass shared communication of emergency response that is scalable from a small school to a the whole nation.

 

Good to know Zuckerberg is humble.