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

38. Outside the United States, Twitter’s decision to ban Trump raised alarms, including with French President Emmanuel Macron, German Prime Minister Angela Merkel, and Mexico's President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.

39. Macron told an audience he didn’t “want to live in a democracy where the key decisions” were made by private players. “I want it to be decided by a law voted by your representative, or by regulation, governance, democratically discussed and approved by democratic leaders.”

40. Merkel’s spokesperson called Twitter’s decision to ban Trump from its platform “problematic” and added that the freedom of opinion is of “elementary significance.”

Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny criticized the ban as “an unacceptable act of censorship.”
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what a bunch of wusses

​

 

Looks like the tweet itself was deleted by Twitter for violating its rules. Here were the preceding tweets in his thread:

Dr Mahathir Mohamad on Twitter: "RESPECT OTHERS 1. A teacher in France had his throat slit by an 18-year-old Chechen boy. The killer was angered by the teacher showing a caricature of Prophet Muhammad. The teacher intended to demonstrate freedom of expression." / Twitter

Includes this:



So in that offending tweet, he seems to be talking about "right to kill millions" in some twisted, abstract sense of justice, even when at the same time saying he doesn't approve of killing others.

 

How is any of that relevant?

 

lol

 

I just don't care that much. Twitter obviously capitulated to employees' demands to ban Trump while, at the same time, allowing leaders in the rest of the world to say inflammatory and violent things without reprisal. A blindness to international markets is not new within tech; Facebook and Google have certainly been playing catch-up to moderating their own international expansion for years.

But I also don't think that anyone is entitled to a Twitter account even if that person is the president of the United States. If the company decides that they don't want someone to use it, they can arbitrarily use the banhammer much like Clutch can do on this BBS. For all of the creeching about "blue check" people being gatekeepers to the conversation on Twitter, what happens on Twitter is hardly impactful to the lives of those who are not on the platform (and that is, after all, most people).

Now, if somebody wants to argue that existing communication laws are woefully weak in the digital age and that the founding fathers could never have imagined information dissemination beyond books and orphans yelling "Read all about it!" on the street corner, I'm all ears! Maybe Elon will create a modern day "Fairness Doctrine" for Twitter.

 

Do you think him stating that he doesn't approve of killing earlier in the thread is irrelevant to how one interprets his tweet about Muslims having a "right" to kill millions of French people?

 

Yes.

The statement is utterly inexcusable, no matter what other things he says.

 

well the Post is covering the story anyway

Fifth ‘Twitter files’ release details furious debate to ban Trump — despite no policy violations

https://nypost.com/2022/12/12/fifth-twitter-files-installment-details-trumps-last-hours-on-platform/

excerpt:

However, Vijaya Gadde — Twitter’s since-fired head of legal, policy and trust — pushed back on the initial finding, writing: “The biggest question is whether a tweet like the one this morning from Trump, which isn’t a rule violation on its face, is being used as coded incitement to further violence.”

In a subsequent message, Gadde suggested the term “American Patriots” could be considered part of that code.

Gadde’s talking point was repeated later in the day by a member of Twitter’s so-called “scaled enforcement” team, who suggested that Trump’s tweet violated Twitter’s policy against “glorification of violence.”

“If we consider ‘American Patriots’ to refer to the rioters, they have a point,” the person wrote.

Another person wrote, according to Weiss, that the “scaled enforcement” team came to view Trump “as the leader of a terrorist group responsible for violence/deaths comparable to Christchurch shooter or Hitler and on that basis and on the totality of his Tweets, he should be de-platformed. They will continue to push that argument with leadership and we will see where it falls.”

Shortly before Trump’s ban was handed down, Yoel Roth — the former head of “trust and safety” at Twitter who played a key role in suppressing The Post’s reporting on first son Hunter Biden — told a colleague of his own concerns over the ongoing debate

“Multiple Tweeps have quoted The Banality of Evil suggesting that people implementing our policies are like Nazis following orders,” Roth told a colleague, later adding: “People are angry and want to express themselves, but the way the conversation happens can close off meaningful engagement.”

The internal messages reveal the push to ban Trump was not universal among Twitter’s rank-and-file, with one staffer warning their colleagues on Jan. 7: “Maybe because I am from China, [but] I deeply understand how censorship can destroy the public conversation.”
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more at the link

 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/twitte...t-musk-11670856198?mod=hp_opin_pos_6#cxrecs_s

Elon Musk’s Twitter Files Revelations Are Instructive but Not Surprising
They tell us what we already knew but bring into focus the mindset of the professional left.
By Gerard Baker
Dec. 12, 2022 3:10 pm ET

The Twitter Files have exposed how a powerful class of like-minded people control and limit the flow of information to advantage their monolithically progressive agenda.

The Twitter Files tell us nothing new. There’s no shocking revelation in there about government censorship or covert manipulation by political campaigns. They merely bring to the surface the internal deliberations of a company dealing with complex issues in ways consistent with its values.

If you think the first paragraph is true, you must be a tinfoil-hat wearing member of the vast right-wing conspiracy destroying our democracy. If you think the second is true, you’re a credulous apologist for the elite left-wing ideologues destroying our democracy.

If you think both are true, congratulations. You’re a reader of uncommon genius and perspicacity.

Unlike much of the media, which have chosen to ignore or deride it, we should welcome Elon Musk’s exercise in transparency. It is a fitting statement on the condition of modern journalism that many journalists profess disdain when an influential company opens up its internal documents on controversial topics for review and publication by journalists.

That said, I have a quibble: It would have been better to be fully transparent and publish as many of the original documents as possible with context, rather than have the disclosed information intermediated in ways that have enabled critics to cry foul. One example—citing the way Twitter “handled” explicit pictures of Hunter Biden as evidence of political bias rather than as enforcement of reasonable rules about privacy and decency undercuts the larger argument and enables detractors to dismiss the exercise as itself politically motivated.

I’m old-fashioned enough to believe that transparency is valuable for understanding the way an influential institution operates. But it is also true that there is little in these revelations we didn’t already know or surmise, though it does seem that the company’s previous denials that it engaged in shadow banning—quietly restraining the dissemination of certain users’ tweets—were at best a case of being economical with the truth.

There is, however, something instructive in the documents: They provide a valuable picture of the minds of those who make decisions about what gets amplified and what gets suppressed in our public discourse. While there were some dissenters at the company, the key decisions almost all went the way you would expect.

What we get is an unsettling insight into the approach to knowledge by which our cultural elites operate—what we might call an epistemological asymmetry between progressive ideologues and the rest of us.

It’s not that executives, editors, reporters and algorithm-writers at big media and tech companies consciously promote their ideological nostrums, mindful of and striving to overcome competing ideas. It’s much worse. If you’re an executive at Twitter with the Orwellian title of “head of trust and safety” or a “disinformation” and “extremism” reporter at NBC News, or an executive at the New York Times charged with enforcing intellectual homogeneity, you’re not simply promoting a view of the world that you espouse.

You are doing something much more important, which compels compliance and tolerates no alternatives: promulgating the One True Faith, a set of orthodoxies from which there is no legitimate dissent.

Here is the asymmetry: Most conservatives, or intellectually curious people, don’t think like this. They don’t think that someone with differing opinions on say, immigration restrictions, the right level of taxation, or the case for affirmative action is voicing a provably false and intrinsically illegitimate view that amounts to misinformation. They think their opponents’ beliefs are wrong and reflect flawed analysis or erroneous evidence. But they don’t think there is only one acceptable belief and that dissent from it is analytically impossible, intellectually dishonest and morally contemptible.

But this is the left’s mindset. It is why they don’t need instructions from government officials or public censors to determine access to information. They are themselves the controlling authority. They act in ways that are reminiscent of the pre-Enlightenment certitudes of the clerisy. They have a moral and normative view of knowledge that seeks to disfavor, suppress and ultimately extirpate heresy.

Twitter occupies an absurdly inflated amount of space in the minds of people in the media, myself included. While the decisions it makes about who or what to promote or suppress obsess us, its actions impinge little on the deliberations of most Americans. It is a private company and, in accordance with the principles of a free market, should be free to do what it wishes.

These revelations matter, however, not because of anything they tell us about Twitter. They matter because they show the way an entire generation of people who occupy positions of influence think about knowledge, truth and opinion.
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OK, but trying to better understanding what he meant isn't the same thing as excusing it. Twitter was right to delete the tweet. I'm not sure it warrants account deletion.

 

Why are you Twitter 2 Only Fans subscribers including rando replies to these Tweets?

 

this is inconvenient

 

"You are doing something much more important, which compels compliance and tolerates no alternatives: promulgating the One True Faith, a set of orthodoxies from which there is no legitimate dissent."​

One reading this article and never having actually visited Twitter would come away thinking that Twitter 1.0 only tolerated a particular view of things to be expressed, and any deviation from that would not be tolerated. That simply isn't true. That said, for sure there is a "left-wing" bias among tech workers, and employee values did affect difficult and internally debated decisions on issues like:

1. Should the Twitter moderation team be more cautious than usual immediately before a national election when it comes to potential disinformation from malign foreign actors?

or

2. Trump is no longer President, and his stream of baseless allegations and lies about the election resulted in a violent riot on January 6th and he is taking no responsibility for that -- should we finally suspend his account for his repeated violations and risk for further violence?

We need more people acknowledging that reasonable people can disagree on what is an appropriate decision when it comes to both of the above.

And I roll my eyes at the following paragraph:

"Here is the asymmetry: Most conservatives, or intellectually curious people, don’t think like this. They don’t think that someone with differing opinions on say, immigration restrictions, the right level of taxation, or the case for affirmative action is voicing a provably false and intrinsically illegitimate view that amounts to misinformation. They think their opponents’ beliefs are wrong and reflect flawed analysis or erroneous evidence. But they don’t think there is only one acceptable belief and that dissent from it is analytically impossible, intellectually dishonest and morally contemptible."​

What we have is different belief systems when it comes to social media content moderation and account suspension policy. The author of this article seems to completely gloss over how conservatives have largely been saying that one side (the people who create, maintain, and moderate these immense social platforms) are totalitarian and morally contemptible in their approach.

 

That kid is an example of what is weird with so many American Catholics. Honestly, it's befuddling to see any anti-pope Vigano supporters.

 

yesterday's misinformation is today's embarrassment

 

Yesterday's "conspiracy theory" is today's "nothing burger - everyone knew this already - why are you even talking about it?"