This sort of justifies the viewpoint that despite all his bluster, Elon will probably run Twitter the way a "reasonable executive" would. Not just release the hounds.
Keep the advertisers happy, but try to reduce the reliance on advertisers. Keep moderating content to reduce abuse, maybe eliminate the high profile banning but a person on the ground will have largely the same experience. (probably less action on more contentious issues, but you still can't use racial epithets and call for violence). Evaluate most employees or teams on the merits, there will be layoffs, probably big layoffs but they'll be managed incremental and strategic. Build more products and pivot the product strongly but again, not in the image of a Parler or a Truth Social.
Twitter won't become a cesspool because he understands that people need to be able to control what they see or they'll leave. Essentially try to create more safe spaces on twitter, not less.
I don't see anything in Elon Musk's past operation of businesses as CEO that suggests to me he's going to have a better sense of how to run a social network than the previous operators.
I predict the best case scenario is that he does no worse.
Twitter is basically an internet scale public bathroom wall with everyone scrawling short hot takes onto the walls. The best case scenario has always been that it shut down and I hope we are one day closer to that eventuality.
It is ironic and laughable that Elons post to advertisers is done with screenshots of text. After 20+ years of mainstream networked computing this is what passes as a state of art platform and user experience to communicate to n audience.
The bulk of the problems Twitter faces today are amplified and directly inflicted by the essential design of the product.
Many Twitter employees think Elon Musk can do better, especially with bolder decisions on obvious things. Source: several friends working there.
1. Spams and bots are rampant. Now I understand it's hard, but eliminating the obvious ones is not hard. A verified account impersonating people and selling crypto is just insane.
2. I used to ask for verification and get this. Twitter doesn't agree with verifying myself. What is this idiotic policy? I am myself.
3. People should allow to tweet as long as it's not illegal, especially from high profile accounts. Moderation might not go away, but it should be minimal.
My opinion is that, if twitter enables widespread verification where a lot more people can be verified, twitter's convo will get 10x better (e.g. now they can rank replies, people will act more reasonably).
The most likely result seems to be he sells it within 5 years after making zero meaningful changes and taking a massive loss. I don’t know if that’s a good or bad result.
>maybe eliminate the high profile banning but a person on the ground will have largely the same experience
It's either going to be a double standard or not. I moderated a busy gaming site for years. Users have nothing to do but re-post what got someone else banned and then complain things aren't consistent.
I would find the idea that a politician gets to say things, but I don't completely absurd.
> I would find the idea that a politician gets to say things, but I don't completely absurd.
That’s been Twitter’s official policy since they got criticized a lot for giving Trump passes on generally applicable rules in the runup to and just after thrbe 2016 election: they changed the rules so governments and sufficiently prominent public figures have wider latitude.
Musk selectively loosening restrictions on those who already have the loosest restrictions would be... well, not at all surprising.
I mean, if you think that “everyone is happy with Elon’s content moderation strategies” was one of the possible outcomes, well then I disagree, I think Elon is going to take heat for content moderation across the political spectrum.
If you moderated the 18-25, huge respect, I’m just adding background info: it’s a huge piece of French culture among geeks, like the 4chan, except most of the interesting website exists within the lapse between posting and being censored. It’s everything-ist and very bad taste. The rest is uninteresting, if it stays on, then it means it doesn’t say anything of any relevance. Moderators are kept to believe they’re administering a gaming forum with occasional slip-ups, whereas “being 410ed” became a colloquial word among teens (410 means your post returns HTTP-410, i.e. it was deleted). It’s like Snapchat, nothing lives for eternity (18-25 stands for the age, it’s not a 13-52 ratio, that would be banned). The 18-25 is a piece of ephemeral art.
I don’t understand. Are you saying that they repost something that got someone banned, they don’t get banned, and then they complain that it’s inconsistent? Why not ban the reposters?
So I believe your comment to be in good faith but it's overly optimistic.
First, whenever it comes to "free speech" 99% of the time people make that argument they're not arguging for "all speech". They're talking about "my speech". And most of that time they really just want to utter hate speech.
Second, the idea of what's normal or acceptable is built on deeply ingrained beliefs that typically aren't rational. You see this whenever Elon talks about the "far left". This is such a laughable concept. The "far left" in American politics quite often simply means "we should let trans people exist" (eg [1]). Even suggesting things like everyone deserves access to healthcare is viewed as an extreme left position in the US.
So when Elon argues he's a centrist, the calibration is off because your choices in mainstream American politics are mostly between extreme right (often called the "alt right") being the party of Trump and the center right in the form of the Democratic Party (eg [2]). There is no "left" in American politics. The takeover of neoliberalism in the US is near-total.
As for Elon's plans for Twitter, he's put a lot of money on the line and the letter to advertisers I think gives a good signal of where this is going. I predict Elon will simply cut costs, unban a few conservatives as a token gesture and wait a couple of years to take the company public again and get out. He may as well start making a "Mission Accomplished" banner now and book the aircraft carrier. This is basically the private equity playbook.
> You see this whenever Elon talks about the "far left". This is such a laughable concept. The "far left" in American politics quite often simply means "we should let trans people exist"
Look I’m probably somewhere between center and far left depending on your perspective and maybe that’s the point. For better or for worse(probably worse) the functioning of society is based on relative, not absolute belief.
I would agree that the (economic) policy of the democrats is center-right, but culturally the party definitely has a far-left voice. Radical feminism, postmodernism, anti-racism Mao struggles, gender puzzles. And to use the overused term "wokism".
Wokism is culturally dominant, but widely rejected all the way from center-left to anything to the right of that.
Republicans are economically right (so not extreme right), yet have a far-right outing, as you say.
> This sort of justifies the viewpoint that despite all his bluster, Elon will probably run Twitter the way a "reasonable executive" would. Not just release the hounds.
He literally just had every engineer print out the last 3 months of code lol
I understand he also laid off the entire data engineering team, that news being sourced from Messrs. Ligma & Johnson, two prankster nerds who went to the vicinity of Twitter HQ and walked around carrying cardboard boxes.
"Keep the advertisers happy, but try to reduce the reliance on advertisers."
I actually think the opposite is going to happen. He's already said he wants Twitter to be the most prolific site for advertisers saying that he thinks advertising can "delight, entertain, and inform you."
If he introduces a subscription model TikTok will pull ahead and take over the entire social media space.
Yeah, I'll be curious to see, now this is not first hand, but I was referencing this pitch deck to investors which seems like the most honest version of Elon?
Since it's directly connected to the money, but who knows.
From advertisers perspective TikTok has already won in the social media space. It’s going to take another year or so for advertisers and TikTok to figure it all out but from talking to the guys who do focus on brands social media spends they can’t get on TikTok fast enough.
Based upon his build up, this will be a fig leaf/scapegoat .
I don't see anything in his behaviour which would justify your "optimistic" outlook. Sure it won't degenerate in one of those gutter platforms right away but I doubt he'll be able to maintain an acceptable level as long as he's directly involved. He just doesn't make the the impression of an adult person.
imho this may end up being really good for the rest of the internet if it drives away interesting and important people to other platforms.
> He just doesn't make the the impression of an adult person.
No, obviously not. Ramping up his car company from roughly nothing to major global presence, kickstarting the world on electric traffic, and setting up private space rocketeering on the side. Oh, and becoming the supposedly richest person on the planet in the process. How insufferably childish of him.
Earlier this year he seemed pretty set on the idea of allowing whatever's legal, making Twitter all about free speech. But now it'll just get some minor changes? If it's true, why the change of heart?
As your namesake understood intimately, we can’t know it’s in someone’s heart. And as a reasonable modern observer should understand, Elon makes frequent course adjustments. Not only don’t we know how it’s going to work out, my guess is he doesn’t know either at the moment.
I think his goal is to figure out how to do this and keep it sane and keep the advertisers and grow the membership. It will take a long time to get there, and Twitter will have to look very different to get there.
It may be time to consider the possibility that you have been reading far too much in to the inane witterings of one of the world's most prolific compulsive liars and fantasists.
>Elon will probably run Twitter the way a "reasonable executive" would. Not just release the hounds.
Is there a list of how many different institutions and investors have money in Twitter now? Because I remember Musk taking in a lot of money for this takeover. And those people probably had the smarts to give them an exit in case Musk decided to release the hounds.
Because he’s usually self deprecating? I didn’t think this was a particularly kind analysis, my assessment was basically he’ll do whatever makes him the most money (or loses him the least)
A bunch of accounts like The Babylon Bee and Ye have been unbanned w/o input from any such committee of diverse viewpoints. I don't have much faith that Musk will not act unilaterally in service of his friends and allies.
Babylon Bee being suspended was one of the dumber things the previous Twitter rules had done. It's a satire site, it's right leaning, nothing in the piece they said was hateful or even an unpopular view. Kanye's ban, he's just a mentally ill person. I don't think he meant "death con" he just didn't know that it's actually "def con." His remarks are still reprehensible.
Twitter's whole moderation problem has been it is very, very inconsistent. I've seen accounts from certain political persuasions be banned or suspended, but then I have seen someone openly tell someone to kill themselves (or that they deserve to be killed or beaten) and the tweet was never removed, and the person was never suspended/banned because of the account it was aimed at. The Onion has had some questionable pieces that weren't any better than what Babylon Bee had, and they were never touched. The moderation has to be consistent; I don't think a council is a bad idea, especially for bigger account bans.
All that said, I hope Trump is never allowed back, but he probably will be. In any case, things have to be equally applied and that has not been the case to anyone paying attention. Even the doxing rules have basically been completely ignored if it were aimed at -some- people.
Then, there are things like the Taliban, Russia, China, etc which have at times actively cheered on social media about the death of Americans or an American defeat... having active accounts but then you ban sitting members of the US government? (I think Trump deserved it, but there are others.) How does that make any sense at all?
Let's avoid disinfo. Neither account was banned to begin with. Both accounts were restricted, which could be lifted after the user deletes the offending tweet. It's overwhelmingly likely Musk had nothing to do with either case (and he said so himself).
I think one reasonable policy could be "form a council of diverse viewpoints and only ban someone if they all (or mostly all) agree the person should be kicked off" and another reasonable policy could be "form a council fo diverse viewpoints and ban someone if one (or a couple) think the person should be kicked off.
I think its fair to say the committee will end up being a scapegoat - but to be charitable to the idea in general its pretty clear that not 100% or even 75% of the population thinks that Babylon Bee should be banned. If you have a system where one voice on the committee can ban someone then most liberal comedians would be banned for played up reasons, too.
Were they? I know I can see their pages, but I don't see any new content from them. realdonaldtrump is still suspended, I imagine we'll just have to wait to see what happens.
Babylon Bee was never unbanned (because they were never banned in the first place, just suspended and continue to be suspended) and Ye was unbanned before Elon Musk ever took over.
So, create a court system basically that decides on free speech issues. Got it. Likely will arrive at the same conclusion as the legal system that’s been operating for over 200 years.
There’s a reason the legal system said free speech is out to the point of direct imminent harm. It was the arrogance of 20 year old programmers in silicon valley who thought they could create a better legal system.
That's one big problem with these (US based) companies. They don't apply the spirit of the laws in their own home country that allowed/allows them to exist.
Zuckerberg has even claimed that fb is a "digital town square".
They don't mind enforcing speech laws of other countries, lowest common denominator.
No tears would be shed if they were broken up, nationalized, etc.
”(probably less action on more contentious issues, but you still can't use racial epithets and call for violence)”
This hasn’t been the case until now. Just as an example lot of radical leftists, BLM activists etc. have openly called for extermination of white people and contantly used racist rhetoric without any consequences. Meanwhile a lot of convervatives, libertarians etc. have been banned/suspended from Twitter due to false ”hatespeech” reporting.
No one has ever asked for ”hounds to be released”. No one sane wants Twitter to become another 8chan. What people want is the one-sided 1984 experiment to end.
I got a 7 day ban for a tweet that included “political suicide pact” as an idiom.
I then got permanently banned for including the line, “sending their children to die in Ukraine” in a tweet.
The “appeal” button causes me to get a denied email within one minute. This tells me no humans are in the loop on any of this.
I don’t think these tweets were controversial or require any diversity of viewpoints. They just require appreciation that you cannot automatically moderate anything accurately unless you are prepared to be very very VERY relaxed about the rules.
I’m not sure Elon is even interested in fixing this kind of problem. He seems focused on the politics and “cancel culture” type issues (whether they’re real or imagined).
On the other hand, I’ve reported posts for using racial slurs (you know the one) and for calling for genocide … and been cheerfully told they didn’t break any rules but that I can block the user if my feelings were hurt. These sites aren’t moderated ideologically, they’re moderated randomly
I got a 48 hour ban recently for sharing a quote from an article we were discussing. The quote was nothing special, just a statement from a spokesperson for a company. The "problem" was that I included the name+title of the person I quoted, and that somehow got flagged as me "doxxing" that person and their place of work. Whose job it was was to be a public spokesperson for this company..
It wasn't any political or contentious topic, so no idea what set it off. Basically along the lines of "as X working at Y said in the article, they want to do Z soon".
My SIL got permanently suspended for posting pitbull attack statistics. Some pitmommy group (what they called themselves) found her tweets and mass-reported her.
I doubt a human was ever in the loop, if you get enough reports off with your head.
Twitter ignored multiple reports of personal threats directed at me specifically (involving concentration camps and general death threats, etc.) "This tweet doesn't violate Twitter rules." People I didn't know, who I had zero negative interactions with before. That was way before Musk.
You just can't have human moderation at that scale. They have to brainstorm how to prevent these tweets in the first place, rather than how to catch and delete them.
> Twitter ignored multiple reports of personal threats directed at me specifically (involving concentration camps and general death threats, etc.) "This tweet doesn't violate Twitter rules."
I want a site where I can see all these screenshots of tweets with Twitters "This tweet doesn't violate Twitter rules" in the shot.
Pair it with another site that has screenshots of tweets that were banned, that obviously don't violate the rules as shown in the first site.
> You just can't have human moderation at that scale
Effective human moderation - or at least, followup to moderation - should be the necessary cost of scale. If you can't operate at a certain number of users under that constraint then you shouldn't.
Yeah buggy ais plague twitter and facebook. Something similar happened to me on facebook, apparently i violated a french law when using a harmless idiom. Was unbanned within the hour tho because it was obvious i wouldn't really sell my own kidney to buy ethereum if it dropped at 200 usd despite its ai thinking i am involved in human traffiking. They even apologised which was nice.
Having said that i think relying solely on the judgement and discretion of rich powerful ceos to regulate political discourse is dangerous. Its how oligarchies are born. We need clear laws on how such platforms and news sources or distribution mediums work.
Yeah, people self-censor nowadays. Common to see TikTok videos where a benign use of the word "kill" is crossed out or spelled differently just to avoid running afoul of automatic filters. You do what you gotta do.
I got a permanent ban for quoting a video which contained "when do start killing white people" and said that this was bad. Banned for inciting violence, upheld on appeal and told it would not be looked at again. Twitter's current moderation policy is extremist ideological garbage.
A few years ago I tried to reply to a discussion with a link to the Anti-Federalist Papers, and my tweet was censored/blocked. If I recall correctly, it was labeled as misinformation or something. The censorship on Twitter goes far beyond hate speech or threats of violence.
> This tells me no humans are in the loop on any of this.
At that scale, it's very hard to achieve. 500M tweet a day. Let's suppose 1% of the tweets are flagged by users or by keyword, that would be 5M of tweets a day to review. Let suppose that one person can review 1000 tweets a day, that would be 5000 people working full time. And even with humans, there'll always be some flagging that will be contested.
Besides, different countries have different legislation regarding what can be be published on the web. It's a hard problem to solve, even with the best intent.
I don't think Musk is going to fix this. I think it'll be more about reinstating people like Trump on the platform.
Where I'm from, minimum wage is around 15k per year. So hiring 5k people would cost 75M in salaries, and let's just double it for other operation costs, 150M. People don't work 24/7, so we must quadruple it for triple shifts + weekends. That leaves us at around 600M: yes, that's terribly expensive. 1
But maybe we don't need to review all the reports! What if we rank them? Correct reports grand a user positive 'report karma', and they climb higher. Posts that are 'trending' in reports should also climb higher. New posts take priority over old posts, ie let's police new content, not everything that has been ever written. And of course, we can also use modern techniques, ie AI to score the reports.
If Twitter did that and could review the top 10% of reports, at 60M per year, would that be worth it? If successful, I think so.
1: this number is biased because it assumes all reports are independent, but I suspect a significant amount of reports would concern a low number of posts, eg controversial or political posts from accounts with a large follow count.
Potentially of intellectual interest: Some people here might be wondering about speech that is "harmful," with the famous quote about "you can't yell fire in a crowded theater." That quote from the Supreme Court is commonly used to justify why there need to be restraints on free speech.
This is actually a popular misconception. The decision where "you can't yell fire in a crowded theater" was from was actually overturned in almost entirety in Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969. And even then, it was only an analogy, and never actually was the law. You actually, theoretically, CAN yell fire in a crowded theater. Websites on both sides of the isle have admitted it is a terrible analogy for defending censoring certain content for being potentially harmful. It is, quite literally, a legal myth. A legal myth that still affects our Congress today while they examine how to prevent the spread of misinformation [1].
[1] For an example (out of many) of why regulating misinformation is legally almost impossible, see United States vs Alvarez, which ruled that the Stolen Valor Act of 2005 (which criminalized faking having a military honor) is legally protected speech and the act was a violation of the constitution. Since then it has been extended with a new 2013 act which requires intent to gain something by fraud, which hasn't been struck down (yet).
There is clearly speech that is harmful without considering that case. Basically the entire concept of “conspiracy” is harmful speech. That said, Twitter is a private company and the First Amendment isn’t the holding factor.
When did "The United States government is watching and logging everything you do" change from conspiracy to common knowledge? I'll admit they use third party contractors for storage and some log collecting instead of doing so in-house, but the question remains.
Everyone seems to say there’s no moderation policy that will please everyone. Sounds right. But the real physical world has freedom of speech and it works pretty well. There’s a KKK meeting going on somewhere right now and yet none of us are bothered. Is the issue really freedom of speech or is it that Twitter puts people who would absolutely hate each other into the same room? What if you just fix that second part instead of worrying about the first?
However, to the larger point, in pre-internet times if you were to enter a public forum and shout racial obscenities it wouldn't be possible to do so anonymously, I imagine you'd get cited for creating a public disturbance (possibly thrown out on appeal if you bought an expensive lawyer?), and you'd suffer multiyear reputational damage [at least in small town].
These mechanisms seem to work - I scarcely ever seen in-person behavior that sinks to the level of online behavior. And I think we're all happier for it, imagine if the public playground allowed strangers from all over the world to shout whatever phrase they want anonymously with no transportation cost.
AI / GPT3 / sentiment analysis is probably roughly at the point where they could just _not_ show you posts you're likely to strongly disagree with. I know there's other issues around echo chambers, though, I just think if someone thought about this for a long time, they may be able to figure something out. Back when Google+ was being planned, they took it as a given that not everything should be said to everyone.
This cross-post seems pretty relevant to have here given the amount of discussion about this whole acquisition -- one of the key points in the submitted article is that "content moderation is the product":
This is going to be an interesting claim considering that he's pro letting Trump back on the platform.
That guy, despite being the president, repeatedly said things that got other people banned with their rules. Some how other leaders claimed this was a said day that he finally got punished for it.
I think Twitter should have a concept of silent ban i.e. only people that are following the account can see someone's tweet and other's could see that only by opening full link and not through search. While it was obvious that Trump's tweet was causing negative emotions in people, it is also clear that Trump had other sources in which he could express opinions and it was liberal newspaper who are the first to report that he said something wrong.
"how can twitter be truly unbiased in how we allow our most wealthy users to go 'death com 3' on all marginalized people and not just one small group of marginalized people"
Readit News
Keep the advertisers happy, but try to reduce the reliance on advertisers. Keep moderating content to reduce abuse, maybe eliminate the high profile banning but a person on the ground will have largely the same experience. (probably less action on more contentious issues, but you still can't use racial epithets and call for violence). Evaluate most employees or teams on the merits, there will be layoffs, probably big layoffs but they'll be managed incremental and strategic. Build more products and pivot the product strongly but again, not in the image of a Parler or a Truth Social. Twitter won't become a cesspool because he understands that people need to be able to control what they see or they'll leave. Essentially try to create more safe spaces on twitter, not less.
I predict the best case scenario is that he does no worse.
It is ironic and laughable that Elons post to advertisers is done with screenshots of text. After 20+ years of mainstream networked computing this is what passes as a state of art platform and user experience to communicate to n audience.
The bulk of the problems Twitter faces today are amplified and directly inflicted by the essential design of the product.
Tl/Dr; nothing of value was lost.
1. Spams and bots are rampant. Now I understand it's hard, but eliminating the obvious ones is not hard. A verified account impersonating people and selling crypto is just insane.
2. I used to ask for verification and get this. Twitter doesn't agree with verifying myself. What is this idiotic policy? I am myself.
3. People should allow to tweet as long as it's not illegal, especially from high profile accounts. Moderation might not go away, but it should be minimal.
My opinion is that, if twitter enables widespread verification where a lot more people can be verified, twitter's convo will get 10x better (e.g. now they can rank replies, people will act more reasonably).
either elon musk is the business genius a lot of people think he is (I think he is this) and he turns Twitter around and it's awesome.
else twitter fails and doesnt exist. net positive for the world and net negative for Elon, also good for humanity .
It's either going to be a double standard or not. I moderated a busy gaming site for years. Users have nothing to do but re-post what got someone else banned and then complain things aren't consistent.
I would find the idea that a politician gets to say things, but I don't completely absurd.
That’s been Twitter’s official policy since they got criticized a lot for giving Trump passes on generally applicable rules in the runup to and just after thrbe 2016 election: they changed the rules so governments and sufficiently prominent public figures have wider latitude.
Musk selectively loosening restrictions on those who already have the loosest restrictions would be... well, not at all surprising.
If the contents of a law violates Twitter's TOS, can we not disseminate it on Twitter?
First, whenever it comes to "free speech" 99% of the time people make that argument they're not arguging for "all speech". They're talking about "my speech". And most of that time they really just want to utter hate speech.
Second, the idea of what's normal or acceptable is built on deeply ingrained beliefs that typically aren't rational. You see this whenever Elon talks about the "far left". This is such a laughable concept. The "far left" in American politics quite often simply means "we should let trans people exist" (eg [1]). Even suggesting things like everyone deserves access to healthcare is viewed as an extreme left position in the US.
So when Elon argues he's a centrist, the calibration is off because your choices in mainstream American politics are mostly between extreme right (often called the "alt right") being the party of Trump and the center right in the form of the Democratic Party (eg [2]). There is no "left" in American politics. The takeover of neoliberalism in the US is near-total.
As for Elon's plans for Twitter, he's put a lot of money on the line and the letter to advertisers I think gives a good signal of where this is going. I predict Elon will simply cut costs, unban a few conservatives as a token gesture and wait a couple of years to take the company public again and get out. He may as well start making a "Mission Accomplished" banner now and book the aircraft carrier. This is basically the private equity playbook.
[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/17/elon-musk-should-apologize-f...
[2]: https://twitter.com/cnbc/status/1471615893411090433?lang=en
Look I’m probably somewhere between center and far left depending on your perspective and maybe that’s the point. For better or for worse(probably worse) the functioning of society is based on relative, not absolute belief.
Wokism is culturally dominant, but widely rejected all the way from center-left to anything to the right of that.
Republicans are economically right (so not extreme right), yet have a far-right outing, as you say.
He literally just had every engineer print out the last 3 months of code lol
Definitely a story to be careful on
Take your originally intended actions and obscure responsibility for them until risks of accountability are sufficiently mitigated?
I actually think the opposite is going to happen. He's already said he wants Twitter to be the most prolific site for advertisers saying that he thinks advertising can "delight, entertain, and inform you."
If he introduces a subscription model TikTok will pull ahead and take over the entire social media space.
No it won't. A lot of people simply aren't interested in short form video.
I think there will be another app that is half way between Twitter and LinkedIn.
https://www.pymnts.com/news/investment-tracker/2022/musks-pi...
TikTok is not taking over the entire social media space any time soon.
I don't see anything in his behaviour which would justify your "optimistic" outlook. Sure it won't degenerate in one of those gutter platforms right away but I doubt he'll be able to maintain an acceptable level as long as he's directly involved. He just doesn't make the the impression of an adult person.
imho this may end up being really good for the rest of the internet if it drives away interesting and important people to other platforms.
> scapegoat
No, obviously not. Ramping up his car company from roughly nothing to major global presence, kickstarting the world on electric traffic, and setting up private space rocketeering on the side. Oh, and becoming the supposedly richest person on the planet in the process. How insufferably childish of him.
Earlier this year he seemed pretty set on the idea of allowing whatever's legal, making Twitter all about free speech. But now it'll just get some minor changes? If it's true, why the change of heart?
I expect Twitter to continue canceling people for holding the wrong opinions, it's just that the definition of wrong will flip.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-twitter-takeover-see...
- Elon Musk
Is there a list of how many different institutions and investors have money in Twitter now? Because I remember Musk taking in a lot of money for this takeover. And those people probably had the smarts to give them an exit in case Musk decided to release the hounds.
Isn't this his duty to shareholders as long as Twitter is (still) a publicly traded company?
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Twitter's whole moderation problem has been it is very, very inconsistent. I've seen accounts from certain political persuasions be banned or suspended, but then I have seen someone openly tell someone to kill themselves (or that they deserve to be killed or beaten) and the tweet was never removed, and the person was never suspended/banned because of the account it was aimed at. The Onion has had some questionable pieces that weren't any better than what Babylon Bee had, and they were never touched. The moderation has to be consistent; I don't think a council is a bad idea, especially for bigger account bans.
All that said, I hope Trump is never allowed back, but he probably will be. In any case, things have to be equally applied and that has not been the case to anyone paying attention. Even the doxing rules have basically been completely ignored if it were aimed at -some- people.
Then, there are things like the Taliban, Russia, China, etc which have at times actively cheered on social media about the death of Americans or an American defeat... having active accounts but then you ban sitting members of the US government? (I think Trump deserved it, but there are others.) How does that make any sense at all?
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/28/technology/kanye-ye-twitt...
I think its fair to say the committee will end up being a scapegoat - but to be charitable to the idea in general its pretty clear that not 100% or even 75% of the population thinks that Babylon Bee should be banned. If you have a system where one voice on the committee can ban someone then most liberal comedians would be banned for played up reasons, too.
Im not a elon fan. At all. but the knee jerk reaction he gets at this point is kind of deserved… however you’re better off not falling into that trap.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1586073042534297601
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What's wrong with unbanning a satirical account?
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There’s a reason the legal system said free speech is out to the point of direct imminent harm. It was the arrogance of 20 year old programmers in silicon valley who thought they could create a better legal system.
They don't mind enforcing speech laws of other countries, lowest common denominator.
No tears would be shed if they were broken up, nationalized, etc.
This hasn’t been the case until now. Just as an example lot of radical leftists, BLM activists etc. have openly called for extermination of white people and contantly used racist rhetoric without any consequences. Meanwhile a lot of convervatives, libertarians etc. have been banned/suspended from Twitter due to false ”hatespeech” reporting.
No one has ever asked for ”hounds to be released”. No one sane wants Twitter to become another 8chan. What people want is the one-sided 1984 experiment to end.
I then got permanently banned for including the line, “sending their children to die in Ukraine” in a tweet.
The “appeal” button causes me to get a denied email within one minute. This tells me no humans are in the loop on any of this.
I don’t think these tweets were controversial or require any diversity of viewpoints. They just require appreciation that you cannot automatically moderate anything accurately unless you are prepared to be very very VERY relaxed about the rules.
I’m not sure Elon is even interested in fixing this kind of problem. He seems focused on the politics and “cancel culture” type issues (whether they’re real or imagined).
You can spend more money to reduce the std deviation, and spend less while increasing it, but you can't eliminate the randomness.
It wasn't any political or contentious topic, so no idea what set it off. Basically along the lines of "as X working at Y said in the article, they want to do Z soon".
I doubt a human was ever in the loop, if you get enough reports off with your head.
You just can't have human moderation at that scale. They have to brainstorm how to prevent these tweets in the first place, rather than how to catch and delete them.
I want a site where I can see all these screenshots of tweets with Twitters "This tweet doesn't violate Twitter rules" in the shot.
Pair it with another site that has screenshots of tweets that were banned, that obviously don't violate the rules as shown in the first site.
Has any large social media site ever solved this?
4chan does by having no rules: if you show up, expect the absolute worst of humanity.
Reddit does by having countless volunteer moderators who basically do 98% of the moderation.
Facebook suffers from the same problems as Twitter.
Effective human moderation - or at least, followup to moderation - should be the necessary cost of scale. If you can't operate at a certain number of users under that constraint then you shouldn't.
oh you definitely can. It's just not remotely cost effective and would ruin the bottom line of any tech company.
Having said that i think relying solely on the judgement and discretion of rich powerful ceos to regulate political discourse is dangerous. Its how oligarchies are born. We need clear laws on how such platforms and news sources or distribution mediums work.
At that scale, it's very hard to achieve. 500M tweet a day. Let's suppose 1% of the tweets are flagged by users or by keyword, that would be 5M of tweets a day to review. Let suppose that one person can review 1000 tweets a day, that would be 5000 people working full time. And even with humans, there'll always be some flagging that will be contested.
Besides, different countries have different legislation regarding what can be be published on the web. It's a hard problem to solve, even with the best intent.
I don't think Musk is going to fix this. I think it'll be more about reinstating people like Trump on the platform.
But maybe we don't need to review all the reports! What if we rank them? Correct reports grand a user positive 'report karma', and they climb higher. Posts that are 'trending' in reports should also climb higher. New posts take priority over old posts, ie let's police new content, not everything that has been ever written. And of course, we can also use modern techniques, ie AI to score the reports.
If Twitter did that and could review the top 10% of reports, at 60M per year, would that be worth it? If successful, I think so.
1: this number is biased because it assumes all reports are independent, but I suspect a significant amount of reports would concern a low number of posts, eg controversial or political posts from accounts with a large follow count.
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This is actually a popular misconception. The decision where "you can't yell fire in a crowded theater" was from was actually overturned in almost entirety in Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969. And even then, it was only an analogy, and never actually was the law. You actually, theoretically, CAN yell fire in a crowded theater. Websites on both sides of the isle have admitted it is a terrible analogy for defending censoring certain content for being potentially harmful. It is, quite literally, a legal myth. A legal myth that still affects our Congress today while they examine how to prevent the spread of misinformation [1].
https://abovethelaw.com/2021/10/why-falsely-claiming-its-ill...
https://reason.com/2022/10/27/yes-you-can-yell-fire-in-a-cro...
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/shouting-f...
https://www.whalenlawoffice.com/legal-mythbusting-series-yel...
https://www.thefire.org/you-can-shout-fire-in-a-burning-thea...
[1] For an example (out of many) of why regulating misinformation is legally almost impossible, see United States vs Alvarez, which ruled that the Stolen Valor Act of 2005 (which criminalized faking having a military honor) is legally protected speech and the act was a violation of the constitution. Since then it has been extended with a new 2013 act which requires intent to gain something by fraud, which hasn't been struck down (yet).
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[0] https://www.facebook.com/journalismproject/facebook-oversigh...
If someone were to enter a privately owned "public square" in the physical world and start yelling racial slurs, they'd be removed by the cops.
However, to the larger point, in pre-internet times if you were to enter a public forum and shout racial obscenities it wouldn't be possible to do so anonymously, I imagine you'd get cited for creating a public disturbance (possibly thrown out on appeal if you bought an expensive lawyer?), and you'd suffer multiyear reputational damage [at least in small town].
These mechanisms seem to work - I scarcely ever seen in-person behavior that sinks to the level of online behavior. And I think we're all happier for it, imagine if the public playground allowed strangers from all over the world to shout whatever phrase they want anonymously with no transportation cost.
Robins v. Pruneyard Shopping Center
What? I think a lot of people are very bothered by that... especially the victims.
I think that's an entirely different product. Something closer to Discord or Telegram. Would be interesting to see a pivot along these lines.
- HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33371297
- Submitted article: https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/28/23428132/elon-musk-twitt...
That guy, despite being the president, repeatedly said things that got other people banned with their rules. Some how other leaders claimed this was a said day that he finally got punished for it.
Often they even stop showing to followers, you just get blended out of the algorithm
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