Elon Musk wants to buy Twitter
April 14, 2022 7:36 AM Subscribe

Elon Musk has offered $43 billion to buy Twitter, saying he believes "in its potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe". He already owns 9% of the company, and just declined an invitation to join its Board, which would have restricted his ability to buy a controlling share. It might be a passing whim, or an effort to remove moderation. Former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao says, "we need regulation of social-media platforms to prevent rich people from controlling our channels of communication."
posted by joannemerriam (207 comments total) 15 users marked this as a favorite

No amount of money is going to improve his Tweets.
posted by qntm at 7:38 AM on April 14, 2022 [15 favorites]

If this happens, I imagine it will mean Trump can get back on the platform immediately.
posted by msbrauer at 7:40 AM on April 14, 2022 [51 favorites]

The resources to do anything, anything at all, and the petulant rush to spend them on... that.

Can you imagine an ego that frail. An imagination that narrow, an identity that hollow.
posted by mhoye at 7:40 AM on April 14, 2022 [158 favorites]

The thing that Elon Musk proves on a daily basis is that the SEC needs way more enforcement teeth and penalties need to be a lot higher.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 7:41 AM on April 14, 2022 [100 favorites]

The price of Twitter stock is up substantially from his purchase price level, leading to speculation that this is a pump and dump strategy too.
posted by bonehead at 7:42 AM on April 14, 2022 [32 favorites]

I suspended my Twitter account the minute I learned that Musk was being offered a board seat, so I think I'm around two and a half weeks from my account permanently being deleted. Given that I already referred to it as "the hellsite" and frequently bemoaned how much I was doomscrolling, I haven't had too many second thoughts.
posted by thecaddy at 7:42 AM on April 14, 2022 [6 favorites]

I wouldn't rush to assume that he actually has the funding lined up.
posted by praemunire at 7:42 AM on April 14, 2022 [15 favorites]

Money may not buy happiness but it sure can facilitate a lot of weird bullshitty behavior.

I wouldn't rush to assume that he actually has the funding lined up.

He'll simply leverage the debt against future sales of small cave-rescue submarines.
posted by cortex at 7:46 AM on April 14, 2022 [21 favorites]

I am 100% on the "this is a pump and dump" for his shares boat. Elon has demonstrated he has no compunctions about manipulating the markets, and has thus far faced absolutely zero consequences for doing so. Why should he stop now?
posted by Zargon X at 7:47 AM on April 14, 2022 [33 favorites]

It's OK, I made an NFT of Twitter so actually I own it.
posted by chavenet at 7:48 AM on April 14, 2022 [90 favorites]

8 Men: Single YT PSA
posted by drowsy at 7:48 AM on April 14, 2022 [7 favorites]

‘No man is rich enough to buy back his own past.’ –Oscar Wilde
posted by robbyrobs at 7:49 AM on April 14, 2022 [26 favorites]

Shady as fuck. Not only did he violate SEC rules by disclosing his purchases too late, not only did he have an agreement to join the board (It's not binding, but it shows he clearly knew what the board's terms were before initially agreeing to join), but now he expects us to believe he's serious about buying the whole company (I seriously doubt he can front $45B without a lot of institutional funding)?

None of this is credible, and he's clearly been dicking everyone around. Like, probably on the correct side of the law. But it's stunning to me how a company like Twitter got all the way to the point of announcing he'd be joining the board when clearly he was playing them.

And the worst thing is he'll just eventually move onto the next mark at some point, because there's always a mark. Even in the ownership of a multi-billion dollar company, there's a always mark.
posted by Room 101 at 7:49 AM on April 14, 2022 [38 favorites]

When you saw only one tweet in the void, it was then that I marked you.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 7:53 AM on April 14, 2022 [3 favorites]

💙
posted by Nelson at 7:53 AM on April 14, 2022

I say this as someone who has made maybe a half dozen positive Musk fpps in the past: fuck this guy.
posted by Literaryhero at 7:55 AM on April 14, 2022 [58 favorites]

The newest horseman of the apocalypse is "Guy who inherited a horse from his dad and thinks it makes him a genius".
posted by Etrigan at 7:58 AM on April 14, 2022 [97 favorites]

What if he just bought twitter and then shut it down immediately?
posted by JDHarper at 8:02 AM on April 14, 2022 [2 favorites]

We need to keep rich people from controlling our channels of communication, says rich person in charge of a major channel of communication

Edit: my bad I thought she was still in charge there
posted by stinkfoot at 8:09 AM on April 14, 2022 [1 favorite]

The resources to do anything, anything at all, and the petulant rush to spend them on... that.

It was the only way to stop that kid from tweeting his private flight details...
posted by xdvesper at 8:11 AM on April 14, 2022 [21 favorites]

Also worth noting: the offer price of $54.20. Especially given his previous foible of announcing (on twitter) he was considering taking Tesla private at $420 per share. No shot that the offer price wasn't intentional for the memes, just making it even more likely that this is a fundamentally unserious offer.
posted by Room 101 at 8:12 AM on April 14, 2022 [9 favorites]

Yeah, Pao has both been gone from Reddit for a good long a while and been pretty regularly critical of some of the excesses at the intersection of shitty rich people and corporate social media. I haven't followed her closely at all but this feels consistent with the kind of stuff I've seen pop up from her over the years.
posted by cortex at 8:12 AM on April 14, 2022 [6 favorites]

What if he just bought twitter and then shut it down immediately?

Best Case Scenario
posted by briank at 8:13 AM on April 14, 2022 [21 favorites]

media is a public utility
posted by eustatic at 8:17 AM on April 14, 2022 [8 favorites]

No shot that the offer price wasn't intentional for the memes, just making it even more likely that this is a fundamentally unserious offer.

Counterpoint from our own rusty:

“Elon isn’t serious about twitter unless he’s willing to offer $69.42” is both a joke and the best financial analysis currently available.

posted by cortex at 8:17 AM on April 14, 2022 [12 favorites]

His downward spiral meltdown phase is approaching rapidly if it hasn't already begun. It's hard to see stuff like this and not think about how he is losing his grip on reality. There is being energetic enough to run multiple companies, which is questionable enough, and then there is this manic sort of behavior which is about as far from sober as you can get.
posted by feloniousmonk at 8:20 AM on April 14, 2022 [15 favorites]

I think the board will turn the offer down (and fend off any shareholder revolt) because there are a number of really good reasons why this wouldn't be in the shareholders' best interest even though the offer is high. It's revealing that his argument is grandstanding about "free speech" rather than making an actual argument for actually increasing shareholder value.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 8:21 AM on April 14, 2022 [10 favorites]

"twitter is a de facto public square, which is why I, as a billionaire, am able to buy the whole thing"

seriously, what scum. smart/lucky enough to realize the most profitable enterprise in the world: supporting fantasy. the fantasy of free speech. the fantasy of going green without sacrificing anything. the fantasy of living in space. fantasy after fantasy. this is why he's nearly the richest person on earth
posted by AlbertCalavicci at 8:24 AM on April 14, 2022 [13 favorites]

Wow. Just think of how many real problems and how much pain and suffering in the world he could
alleviate with that $43 billion.

But instead he's butt hurt about the way Twitter enforces their ToS.

Is there anything we can do to help him get to Mars faster?
posted by chillmost at 8:27 AM on April 14, 2022 [44 favorites]

Elon Musk is infamously paper-rich and cash-poor. He funds 100% of his lifestyle using loans against his stock holdings. When one of his investments went bad (SolarCity), he had to arrange a dubiously legal all-stock transaction with another, related company in order to save it -- because there was no way he could make the necessary cash injection himself.

I strongly suspect his offer to the board is a PR stunt. It is not an "open tender." (he is not offering to buy stock from anyone willing to sell) No, he offered to acquire the entire company in an all-cash deal. The board, of course, is going to doubt whether he can actually come up with the cash. It is not particularly good for shareholders if they agree to a sale and the sale falls through because the bidder isn't credible, and the board has to evaluate that risk.

For Musk, he gets to look cool and win a bunch of internet points if the Twitter board shoots him down on this bid. If they actually accept his bid, he has to find $40B. Uh-oh.

I think the funniest outcome would be if the board gives Musk's bid their seal of approval, and it goes to a shareholder vote, and Musk actually has to summon $40B in cash from god knows what source. That can only be hilarious. Either Musk ends up owning (and mis-managing) a $40B boat anchor, or Musk is publicly humiliated and we all have a sensible chuckle. It's a win/win for internet snark artists.
posted by your postings may, in fact, be signed at 8:30 AM on April 14, 2022 [25 favorites]

A lot of people think Musk is meming with the 420 stuff but based on some things Grimes has said I really think he (like some other rich tech bros) has started buying into a techno-mystical philosophy drawing from the intersection of psychedelic culture & silicon valley. I wonder if any journalist has dug into this.
posted by muddgirl at 8:33 AM on April 14, 2022 [10 favorites]

It's OK, I made an NFT of Twitter so actually I own it.

This week, an NFT of Jack Dorsey's first tweet, which originally sold for $2.9 million last year and which was listed for ~$46 million in a week-long auction, attracted a final bid of.........wait for it..........two hundred eighty dollars.

(via the excellent web3 is going great)
posted by msbrauer at 8:35 AM on April 14, 2022 [42 favorites]

SEC filing, which features the phrase "this is not a threat".
posted by credulous at 8:36 AM on April 14, 2022 [4 favorites]

If he destroys Twitter it will be the best thing he ever does and if we're lucky he'll infuriate all the world's most irritating people (other than him) at the same time. Great news for drama.
posted by atrazine at 8:37 AM on April 14, 2022 [5 favorites]

What if he just bought twitter and then shut it down immediately?

Not sure if the best use of $40 billion dollars or the worst, but it would certainly be interesting to watch
posted by BungaDunga at 8:38 AM on April 14, 2022 [4 favorites]

For Musk, he gets to look cool and win a bunch of internet points if the Twitter board shoots him down on this bid.

Could this move (and it's hopeful rejection) be a pretext for him launching his own network and beating the Parlr/Truth Social grifters to their marks?

It's not that hard technologically to start a Twitter-like platform, the only problem is getting enough publicity to lure a critical mass of people onto it quickly before it's derided as a joke/vanity project. Musk making a very loud bid for Twitter, getting rejected, and then declaring that he's going to found his own network with ~~blackjack and hookers~~ free speech would give him that publicity.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 8:38 AM on April 14, 2022 [2 favorites]

If it gets most of the idiots off Twitter I'm okay with it.
posted by seanmpuckett at 8:40 AM on April 14, 2022

SolarCity wasn't just bailed out by a "related company"; he used Tesla to buy it out. There's a major lawsuit about that, Musk testified last summer. The decision should be any day now, if he loses it might cost him $2B.

Musk's success continues to confound me. He acts like a total jackass in public. From what I've heard he's also a jackass in private. But Tesla and SpaceX are both amazing, important, enormously innovative companies. Jury is still out on long term financial success but I sure wouldn't bet against them. How does it happen? My understanding with SpaceX is that it's actually run by very good people and Musk stays out of their way. Don't know about Tesla.

One of his particular skills is financial. He's managed to keep both Tesla and SpaceX afloat despite some very investment-intensive business development. At least some of that is on the back of government subsidies, some of which are scammy but many are meaningful. We wouldn't have a US space program without SpaceX now. His skill at conjuring billions out of thin air makes me a little nervous about saying "nah Twitter is OK Musk doesn't have the money".
posted by Nelson at 8:40 AM on April 14, 2022 [22 favorites]

It's hard to see stuff like this and not think about how he is losing his grip on reality.

what amount of wealth attributed to a single person marks the line where, by default, you just aren't part of the reality of "the rest of us".. not a new question, I'm sure people have a number beyond which we go from "doing quite well" to the kind of wealth that just does not need to be amassed by a person. The mere fact we tolerate this kind of wealth is probably one of the reasons we won't make it much further as a species.
posted by elkevelvet at 8:47 AM on April 14, 2022 [6 favorites]

a final bid of.........wait for it..........two hundred eighty dollars.

Some recent graffiti I spotted in North London.
posted by Paul Slade at 8:51 AM on April 14, 2022 [14 favorites]

I take him at his word that he is a 'free speech absolutist' and wants the premier discussion/media property re-opened up to no-holds-barred / not-our-job-to-censor-people content (non-) moderation.

I'm more a big-picture / the-ends-justify-the-means guy so don't want to live in a totalitarian garbage discourse state like what happened in Russia and China, where bad actors prove the adage that ‘Falsehood will fly from Maine to Georgia, while truth is pulling her boots on’, and Brandolini's Law drives out intelligent, honest discourse.

We need more light and less heat in this crappy decade and century that is similarly 20% loaded already.
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 8:52 AM on April 14, 2022 [5 favorites]

started buying into a techno-mystical philosophy drawing from the intersection of psychedelic culture & silicon valley. I wonder if any journalist has dug into this

The "conference" is held yearly...
posted by rozcakj at 8:52 AM on April 14, 2022 [3 favorites]

Counterpoint from our own rusty:
Sir, that's K5's own.
posted by 922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a at 8:52 AM on April 14, 2022 [11 favorites]

The worst of the internet is a kind of best of the internet, I suppose.
posted by Going To Maine at 8:58 AM on April 14, 2022 [2 favorites]

I have an extremely low opinion of both twitter and Musk so I’m a fan of this. To be more specific I guess I’m basically an accelerationist when it comes to twitter. It’s so sad to me to hear politicians, journalists and activists worldwide act as supplicants to a California corporation. Musk owning the company is not a substantially different scenario, just takes the mask off a bit from my perspective.
posted by Wood at 9:03 AM on April 14, 2022 [4 favorites]

what amount of wealth attributed to a single person

I think there's out of touch in the sense of "it's a banana, what could it cost, $10?" and then there's a level beyond that consisting of basically getting high on your own supply which is where we seem to be with him now. It's businessperson/stoner ideation with the unusual exception of there having been someone present to write the ideas down and then act on them. "Fuck them, what if we just bought Twitter?!" "Let's do it boss, you're so smart!"
posted by feloniousmonk at 9:06 AM on April 14, 2022 [6 favorites]

I take him at his word that he is a 'free speech absolutist'

Remember when an expert criticized Musk’s plan to rescue trapped students and Musk called him a pedophile and rapist and hired a private detective to destroy his reputation?
posted by rodlymight at 9:13 AM on April 14, 2022 [47 favorites]

Join Mastodon

Need help finding the right instance, check this site.
posted by Hey, Zeus! at 9:15 AM on April 14, 2022 [12 favorites]

Sir, that's K5's own.

Kuro5hin's gone, MetaFilter's still here. Rusty is our Foster child for good now.
posted by cortex at 9:15 AM on April 14, 2022 [18 favorites]

If it gets most of the idiots off Twitter I'm okay with it.
But, whereever they go, the idiots won't have as much fun without non-idiots to harrass, so I'm afraid any relief would be ephemeral.
posted by sohalt at 9:16 AM on April 14, 2022 [4 favorites]

I take him at his word that he is a 'free speech absolutist' and wants the premier discussion/media property re-opened up to no-holds-barred / not-our-job-to-censor-people content (non-) moderation....

....We need more light and less heat in this crappy decade and century that is similarly 20% loaded already.

Because obviously only the reason Twitter is such a cesspool of weaponized disinformation, spiraling conspiracy theories, and overt threats of physical violence to women and minorities is because the truth keeps getting moderated down, and if only we could eliminate that moderation completely we'd unleash the awesomely disinfecting power of MOAR SPEECH to drown it all out.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 9:16 AM on April 14, 2022 [8 favorites]

What if he just bought twitter and then shut it down immediately?

Best Case Scenario

Awww, but then where would I repost the dumb jokes I come up with here on Metafilter, so that the whole world can ignore them instead of just MeFites??
posted by Greg_Ace at 9:20 AM on April 14, 2022 [12 favorites]

My understanding with SpaceX is that it's actually run by very good people and Musk stays out of their way

Gwynne Shotwell is awesome and shouldn't be in anyone's shadow, let alone a petulant manchild like Musk.
posted by Dr. Twist at 9:22 AM on April 14, 2022 [6 favorites]

If it gets most of the idiots off Twitter I'm okay with it.
But, whereever they go, the idiots won't have as much fun without non-idiots to harrass, so I'm afraid any relief would be ephemeral.

This is borne out by studies of the "We're about REAL free speech!" sites -- they serve primarily as petri dishes for the worst memes, which are judged primarily by how much heat they generate back on Twitter and Facebook.
posted by Etrigan at 9:32 AM on April 14, 2022 [5 favorites]

I take him at his word that he is a 'free speech absolutist'

There's no reason to do that; Musk is a thin-skinned hypocrite when it comes to free speech. In addition to his harassment of Vernon Unsworth that rodlymight mentions above there's also the numerous employees he's fired because they criticized their employer, his cancelling a customer's order because the guy was rude, and his whining and threatening the NYTimes because they wrote some true but mean things about him. Details here or here.

Worth noting the specific comment about being a "free speech absolutist" was his defense of Russian propaganda in Ukraine. And while I support the particular policy decision (Starlink and content filtering) it's funny how he's all freeze peach about Russian warmongering but the moment someone is a little mean to him personally he retaliates with every stifling weapon at his disposal.
posted by Nelson at 9:32 AM on April 14, 2022 [37 favorites]

‘No man is rich enough to buy back his own past.’ –Oscar Wilde

"Oh hi lol" - Elon Musk
posted by The Bellman at 9:32 AM on April 14, 2022 [1 favorite]

According to my email I set up my Mastodon account 4 years ago to the week and, thank goodness, it's still active. Time to finish setting up the profile.
posted by JoeZydeco at 9:34 AM on April 14, 2022

Well I guess I have to retract my rage quit from Metafilter to chime in here.

I wonder if all these folks reflexively crapping on Twitter even use it now. The irony that Reddit remains a Metafilter favorite, Reddit is SO MUCH more toxic than Twitter. Don’t even get me started on FB, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube — all significant hubs of disinformation, harassment of minorities, and right wing extremist recruitment.

Yes Twitter has major drawbacks and you could no doubt cherry pick all kinds of horrible looking behavior from that mess. It’s the best we’ve got right now though, in fact I get much better info from Twitter than Metafilter now. So instead of this kneejerk “Twitter bad mmkay” maybe we could consider what Twitter is doing right compared to the truly horrible social media, and how we could use that example to build something better.
posted by viborg at 9:35 AM on April 14, 2022 [17 favorites]

Interestingly, TWTR hired Goldman Sachs to advise why this bid of $54.20 is too low when GS has a sell rating on the stock and a $30 price target. If this is about shareholder value which is what a public company is about, then they should take the money and run.

As for financing it, what is the difference if he actually sells some TSLA stock or borrows against it? Almost every founder/CEO type borrows against their stock or options. Two reasons. One it still gives them the upside of the stock. Two, it keeps their voting shares intact. aHe is using Morgan Stanley as his advisor. I am pretty sure they will figure out a way to finance this if he is indeed serious.

I am confused as to why censorship or as the progressives put it, "Content moderation" is the way to go. I have never seen where censorship or content moderation is good for democracy. Let it play out. If it doesn't work out and all the pundits and bots leave the platform, he loses his money. Sounds like that would be a good thing to a lot of people. If it works out and there is a free exchange of ideas, then isn't that what we want in a free society? The right to express differing opinions. Look what TWTR did to Trump, it lost him the election. If he had just kept his zany ideas to himself and not Tweeted all the time, he likely, in my opinion, would have won the election. Sunshine brings to light (pun intended) bad ideas. They will be refuted.

I hate Trump. The best thing that happened to the country is that he Tweeted and thus showed a majority that he is batshitinsane. By censoring, TWTR is just giving the right like Tucker something to complain about. If he loses the TWTR line of attack, what does he complain about next? Obviously, something, but I think the best outcome is for Musk to play at this game, realize it is harder than he thinks and then watch TWTR slowly fade away.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 9:36 AM on April 14, 2022 [2 favorites]

Gwynne Shotwell is awesome and shouldn't be in anyone's shadow, let alone a petulant manchild like Musk.

She also buys into the delusional idea that we'll be using the Starship/Super Heavy for commercial intercontinental travel. Which tells me she's been huffing from Musk's supply for too long.
posted by drstrangelove at 9:40 AM on April 14, 2022 [5 favorites]

The best thing that happened to the country is that he Tweeted and thus showed a majority that he is batshitinsane.

Unfortunately this is ahistorical. For some this happened, I'm sure. But his tweeting ALSO significantly grew his fanbase and the overall threat to democracy.

TR is just giving the right like Tucker something to complain about

They're going to find something to complain about no matter what — I'd prefer if they complain about their losses instead of, like, pronouns.
posted by wemayfreeze at 9:43 AM on April 14, 2022 [22 favorites]

Look what TWTR did to Trump, it lost him the election.

Twitter might have lost him one election.
posted by Etrigan at 9:44 AM on April 14, 2022 [8 favorites]

Sunshine brings to light (pun intended) bad ideas. They will be refuted.

... Citation needed? If anything has taught us about the last 2 years, just because the bad ideas are refuted, didn't mean they will be believed. It's all about who presents the ideas, and how well they present them. Just because it's true doesn't make it easy. Your eyes tell you the earth is flat.

Free speech absolutism can come from a good place, but just because good ideas should push out bad ones, doesn't mean they will. Free speech absolutism also can come from a place to make sure to give air to all kinds of bad ideas, while simultaneously shouting down good ones.

As the kids say "you are not immune to propaganda".
posted by jonnay at 9:51 AM on April 14, 2022 [43 favorites]

Look what TWTR did to Trump, it lost him the election.

There's a far stronger argument to be made that Twitter almost won him the election, because its extremely lax moderation served to protect most violent bigots and fascists--many of whom Musk agrees with--from any consequences for attacking their victims. In fact, there have been far more times where transphobes, white supremacists, actual neo-Nazis, etc have used Twitter's reporting tools as weapons. In effect, the censorship isn't coming from "progressives", it's coming from the very same people who blanket both social media and tradition outlets with complaints that their voices aren't being heard.
posted by Glegrinof the Pig-Man at 9:55 AM on April 14, 2022 [33 favorites]

I am confused as to why censorship or as the progressives put it, "Content moderation" is the way to go. I have never seen where censorship or content moderation is good for democracy. Let it play out.

Your argument is 100% goalpost moving.

Let it play out to when? It's already played out to an armed insurrection against the Capitol. It's already played out to electing a President who displayed an unprecedented contempt for basic American principals. It's already played out to spreading disinformation about vaccines which have resulted in hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths. It's already played out to sitting members of Congress questioning a highly distinguished and qualified nominee to the supreme court about 4chan conspiracy theories.

The best thing that happened to the country is that he Tweeted and thus showed a majority that he is batshitinsane. By censoring, TWTR is just giving the right like Tucker something to complain about. If he loses the TWTR line of attack, what does he complain about next?

Something else? You're being awfully naive in assuming that a pundit who makes money and wields power by complaining about things is just going to give up complaining and go silent if we correct this one thing. And by endorsing Qanon, Republicans have shown that if they don't have anything to complain about, they'll just make up a conspiracy and complain about that!
posted by RonButNotStupid at 9:56 AM on April 14, 2022 [76 favorites]

media is a public utility

social media tube inspection
posted by snuffleupagus at 9:57 AM on April 14, 2022

I hold a very low opinion of other people's ability to handle the "free exchange of ideas". When I look around I don't see a politic involved in true discourse, I see people who just want to be affirmed that they are the chosen. They choose their media because it supports their priors. This is widespread, but the GOP have simply become fully disconnectioned. They deny reality and science wholescale, they aren't out debating the merits of some policy. Conservatives in the US are screaming about groomers, and are engaged on twitter to 'own the libs'.

I follow GOP party spokespeople on twitter - and even these 'professionals' are largely indistinguishable from qanon. There isn't an exchange of ideas on twitter or on any other medium. An entire political movement in the US has become identity based, and as has been noted before, you can't use logic to convince someone to change their views when their politics where never informed by logic.
posted by zenon at 9:57 AM on April 14, 2022 [19 favorites]

Admittedly a SWAG, but it seems like half the links in the Ukraine threads are to Twitter, so it seems like the consensus here is that it has some redeeming qualities.
posted by achrise at 9:58 AM on April 14, 2022 [8 favorites]

‘No man is rich enough to buy back his own past.’ –Oscar Wilde

This message brought to you by your corporation's employment practices insurance agent.
posted by snuffleupagus at 9:58 AM on April 14, 2022 [1 favorite]

Could this move (and it's hopeful rejection) be a pretext for him launching his own network and beating the Parlr/Truth Social grifters to their marks?

Maybe, but as various people (including I think Aaron Rupar and Amanda Marcotte) have pointed out, it sure seems like one of the reasons the various right-wing freeze peach social media platforms ain't doing so hot is that it's no fun to own the libs if there aren't any libs around to own. Turns out the freeze peachers are far more interested in trolling people who disagree with them than having a "safe place" for conservative ideas.

Not that Musk would necessarily grasp this, but there's a good chance his own social media network would just be a money pit.
posted by soundguy99 at 10:02 AM on April 14, 2022 [12 favorites]

Wow there are actually still free speech fundamentalists here? How sheltered can you be? When Metafilter mods remove hateful content do you feel the need to legislate that endlessly too?

The true blind spot in this analysis is how money now effectively equates to speech. Of course the owning class is invested in spreading bullshit, they’ve made it clear that quite a few of them now consider democracy itself to be a liability. Given that reality it’s hard to comprehend how free speech fundamentalism is anything but corporate propaganda in effect. I’m also guessing the free speech fundamentalists somehow managed to ignore the fact that 4chan exists.
posted by viborg at 10:02 AM on April 14, 2022 [48 favorites]

A good video about what's wrong with the entire "marketplace of ideas" free speech naivety.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 10:10 AM on April 14, 2022 [2 favorites]

There's a live interview with him right now on TED.
posted by dobbs at 10:17 AM on April 14, 2022 [1 favorite]

tell me you're a free speech absolutist and I know enough

you're either a teenager (you will grow out of it), or you're deluded, or you are of the wealth class who benefits from this absolute bullshit

all things are not equal.. who owns the media, who decides what speech gets amplified? these are things any discerning 17-year-old can figure out very quickly.
posted by elkevelvet at 10:17 AM on April 14, 2022 [28 favorites]

I am somewhat of a free speech absolutist, but I concede that the biggest problem is not censorship itself on a private platform, it is who decides what should be censored or not is the issue. There are certain things that I think almost everyone would agree should be censored such as some QAnon stuff, some Antifa stuff, Obama is an alien type stuff, the pizza parlor story, etc. Look at the Hunter Biden laptop story. Censored because it was supposedly false and Russian plant. Turns out that it is 100% true. Even the Times and the WAPO have conceded that. That is what I mean by let it play out. A story will ultimately be proven true or not true.

What I don't want is another echo chamber. Look at FOX or CNN. They are just propaganda arms of the Repubs and the Dems. I think even they would agree with that. So TWTR should just become/remain a dem echo chamber? Meh. As someone who has voted for both Dems and Repubs, I prefer to TRY to get both sides.

I do agree that TWTR is a private platform and they can do what they wish. Build your own if you don't like it. Some have tried. Musk decided it was faster and cheaper to just buy an existing one.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 10:18 AM on April 14, 2022

tell me you're a free speech absolutist and I know enough

you're either a teenager (you will grow out of it), or you're deluded, or you are of the wealth class who benefits from this absolute bullshit

all things are not equal.. who owns the media, who decides what speech gets amplified? these are things any discerning 17-year-old can figure out very quickly.

Isn't that the argument to hear all information? Anyone can figure it out for themselves what is right or wrong.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 10:20 AM on April 14, 2022

>who decides what speech gets amplified

yes, a big problem with social media is the pay-for-play aspect. Facebook's top articles, the crap Youtube on AppleTV puts in my face that Google should know I'd never want to watch.

My blocklist on twitter is a mile-long and wish it was easier to expand, but this post:

https://twitter.com/cabel/status/1514628723269533697

highlights the wonderful "exchange of ideas" just bubbling under the surface there.
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 10:22 AM on April 14, 2022 [5 favorites]

Musk seems like he would like to be Murdoch. Any media outlet he touches will be twisted to reinforce the patriarchal white supremacist status quo.
posted by seanmpuckett at 10:22 AM on April 14, 2022 [7 favorites]

I am confused as to why censorship or as the progressives put it, "Content moderation" is the way to go.

Because there are approximately no online forums without content moderation. Even Trumpy "free speech" forums have content moderation! It's not that content moderation is good or bad, it's that it's inevitable. Every successful forum ends up inventing some sort of content moderation. All of them. And it's not because the people running them aren't pro-speech.
posted by BungaDunga at 10:25 AM on April 14, 2022 [18 favorites]

Maybe the answer is either to have Bezos commit his money to outbid Musk or for the Board of TWTR to just say "No".
posted by JohnnyGunn at 10:26 AM on April 14, 2022 [1 favorite]

Anyone can figure it out for themselves what is right or wrong.

After twenty-odd years on the internet, I just think this is not how human brains work, alas.

People's brains prefer wrong over right, since truth is a lot uglier than alternative bullshit the bullshitmakers cook up.
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 10:26 AM on April 14, 2022 [20 favorites]

What I don't want is another echo chamber. Look at FOX or CNN. They are just propaganda arms of the Repubs and the Dems. I think even they would agree with that.

No. Whatever bias CNN might have, it pales in comparison to the amount extreme right-wing propaganda that gets channeled through Fox News. You're bothsidesing. This is a false equivalence born out of getting information only through an echo chamber.

Censored because it was supposedly false and Russian plant. Turns out that it is 100% true. Even the Times and the WAPO have conceded that. That is what I mean by let it play out. A story will ultimately be proven true or not true.

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 10:26 AM on April 14, 2022 [45 favorites]

Look at the Hunter Biden laptop story. Censored because it was supposedly false and Russian plant. Turns out that it is 100% true.

What does this even mean? What is "the Hunter Biden laptop story", as far as you understand it? What were the claims laid out in that story? What has been proven "100% true"?

Also:

I am somewhat of a free speech absolutist

+

There are certain things that I think almost everyone would agree should be censored such as ...

LOL. You are not a free speech absolutist. You are someone who clings to a claim of free speech absolutism when it's convenient, and then disavows it when such absolutism puts you obviously on the wrong side of history. If you're an absolutist, own it, otherwise just admit that you already concede that free speech should not be absolute and at that point we're just debating how much restriction should exist.
posted by a faithful sock at 10:27 AM on April 14, 2022 [51 favorites]

Musk loves it when he can pump and dump and troll simultaneously. Why would he bother following through? There's costs, effort and exposure associated with that. And work.

His fans will only celebrate he ploy all the more for its smug blatancy.
posted by snuffleupagus at 10:28 AM on April 14, 2022 [5 favorites]

Isn't that the argument to hear all information? Anyone can figure it out for themselves what is right or wrong.

A raw feed of all tweets as they happen would be approximately useless. There are 10,000 tweets per second. Which ones should it show you?
posted by BungaDunga at 10:29 AM on April 14, 2022 [4 favorites]

That a laptop of Hunter Biden's exists and has information on it.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 10:30 AM on April 14, 2022

It should show you the ones you follow
posted by JohnnyGunn at 10:30 AM on April 14, 2022

It's a lot easier to attack free speech absolutism than it is to defend speech codes being defined by Dorsey, Agrawal, The Vanguard Group (8%), Morgan Stanley (8%) and the various other stakeholders, power holders, and decision makers inherent in basing one of the world's pre-eminent chatrooms in a California-based corporation.

I wasn't happy when Twitter banned Donald Trump because, to me, none of the people responsible for twitter's decision own an ounce of moral authority. At the time some EU legislators complained about the decision because they felt that twitter's operations were critical to their civil society. Yeah, no shit, what are you going to do about it?

Not twitter, but currently there's a lot contention about Facebook's speech codes with respect to Ukraine versus other conflict areas in the world. So, global activists must again beg a California corporation for permission to speak.

I hope Elon rips the mask off this bullshit system. I hope he destroys twitter and we're forced to either do without or build decentralized systems.
posted by Wood at 10:31 AM on April 14, 2022 [2 favorites]

I said somewhat of an absolutist not an absolute absolutist. Like I recognize that screaming "Fire" in a crowded theater is not acceptable under free speech.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 10:31 AM on April 14, 2022

So instead of this kneejerk “Twitter bad mmkay” maybe we could consider what Twitter is doing right compared to the truly horrible social media, and how we could use that example to build something better.

Twitter is fundamentally bad in the way that PowerPoint is fundamentally bad. Like, any scientist who uses Twitter to communicate (more like self-PR) disappoints me.
posted by polymodus at 10:33 AM on April 14, 2022 [4 favorites]

Look at FOX or CNN. They are just propaganda arms of the Repubs and the Dems

Bruh, CNN just started a show produced and hosted by Chris Wallace, who worked for Fox News for almost two decades and only quit because they were getting too openly racist for him.
posted by Glegrinof the Pig-Man at 10:34 AM on April 14, 2022 [21 favorites]

That a laptop of Hunter Biden's exists and has information on it.

Any laptop with a BIOS screen does. One that can boot windows? Lots of information. What information was it you were concerned about?

I'M A POLICY WONK
posted by snuffleupagus at 10:34 AM on April 14, 2022 [14 favorites]

That a laptop of Hunter Biden's exists and has information on it.
posted by JohnnyGunn

Hunter Biden has a laptop? And it has information on it? That describes the laptop of nearly every person that owns a laptop. It feels like you’re leaving out something news-worthy about these “100% true” claims…
posted by a box and a stick and a string and a bear at 10:36 AM on April 14, 2022 [22 favorites]

I don't know what is on the laptop nor do I really care. I just know that TWTR blocked the NY Post from Tweeting about it and now a year+ later the NY TImes and the WAPO confirm that whatever the NYP said about the lapptop was accurate.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 10:40 AM on April 14, 2022

I only joined Twitter within the last 2 years (and I think have made one or two tweets - I just skim read over a few interesting accounts daily and typically don’t look at comments - like 10 mins max sort of usage)

But I have been amazed how many pro-Tesla, pro-Musk accounts and content seems to be suggested for me. Kind of like how Facebook always used to ask me if I wanted to follow Mark Zuckerberg - even after I literally blocked his account in the app from seeing mine. I honestly just assumed Musk had a stake in Twitter before his recent minority stake.
posted by inflatablekiwi at 10:40 AM on April 14, 2022 [3 favorites]

Twitter is fundamentally bad in the way that PowerPoint is fundamentally bad. Like, any scientist who uses Twitter to communicate (more like self-PR) disappoints me.

I don't particularly care about whether you're disappointed or not, but twitter has some incredible scientists on it doing amazing work communicating science things.

Seconding the push back on "twitter sucks" — yes it sucks, but it has amazing things and people and communication happening on it all the time.

If Musk was one of the people who meaingfully contributes to the good discourse on there, I'd be curious to see what he can do with the platform. As he's a petulant child and primarily a troll on the platform, him actually buying it (unlikely; I'm on team troll/pump/dump) would just result in more of the bullshit. If that happened I get the sense some folks here would revel in the shadenfreude of twitter being truly taken over my trolls and running all the good folks off the platform. Which … yay for accentuating the negative?
posted by wemayfreeze at 10:41 AM on April 14, 2022 [10 favorites]

This Hunter Biden thing seems kinda lame. Can we move on?
posted by seanmpuckett at 10:42 AM on April 14, 2022 [7 favorites]

Wow there are actually still free speech fundamentalists here?

i don't know if i'm a free speech fundamentalist, but i am a defender of the 1st amendment - the united states cannot dictate to people what they can say, period

it also cannot tell your local newspaper, or tv station or a nationwide social media outlet who or what they can allow on their platforms as they have freedom of the press - so if twitter wants to kick donald trump off their platform, censor posts on whatever subject they like, or require everyone to post in pig latin, they can

do you know what the real difference is between today and 60 years ago? - all the bullshit, all the sick memes, all the crappy dumb ideas, all of it was a big part of our culture back then, but we didn't have the opportunity to see and confront all of it if we wanted to - now we do - the oral culture of that time was every bit as poisonous as parts of the internet these days - not only that but the establishment and mainstream culture of that time were a lot more repressive

it takes a long long time to persuade people from bad things in their culture and shutting them up won't do it

-----------------------------------------------------

Look at the Hunter Biden laptop story.

look up the legal term "chain of custody"

the actions of the computer repair person and his friends in politics and the media pissed all over the concept and made it so it's probably going to be impossible to admit the contents of the laptop (or its portable hard drive?) into a courtroom for evidence

one can wonder whether this was due to stupidity or clever design - it's easy to allege all sorts of things are on a laptop if you never have to have it examined in court
posted by pyramid termite at 10:43 AM on April 14, 2022 [16 favorites]

Citizen Musk
posted by philip-random at 10:44 AM on April 14, 2022

now a year+ later the NY TImes and the WAPO confirm that whatever the NYP said about the lapptop was accurate.
posted by JohnnyGunn

Here’s a quote from the NYP article, JohnnyGunn: “Other material extracted from the computer includes a raunchy, 12-minute video that appears to show Hunter, who’s admitted struggling with addiction problems, smoking crack while engaged in a sex act with an unidentified woman, as well as numerous other sexually explicit images.”

And you’re telling us this “turns out that it is 100% true”???
posted by a box and a stick and a string and a bear at 10:52 AM on April 14, 2022 [7 favorites]

And that it somehow is a matter vital to the integrity of the First Amendment that Hunter Biden did cocaine, had sex and likes porn? Does your sense of freedom of expression have any notion of the right to private expression as a part of that liberty?
posted by snuffleupagus at 10:54 AM on April 14, 2022 [7 favorites]

Pyramid termite, no one here has argued against the first amendment afaik. This discussion has exclusively been about free speech in privately owned corporate media platforms, not about absolute restrictions on speech. Can we please stop with the arguing against imaginary opponents.

As for the argument scientists are on Twitter for PR, well yeah. As it turns out the actual currency of social media is egotism. Almost no one (apart from maybe a few of the truly committed denizens of this site) is on social media for purely altruistic, impartial and rational reasons. As wemayfreeze said there is a lot of good science on Twitter, MUCH better than Reddit for example. Reddit practically seems like it was purpose-built for astroturfing, concern trolling, greenwashing or whatever you want to call it.
posted by viborg at 10:57 AM on April 14, 2022 [1 favorite]

> What I don't want is another echo chamber. Look at FOX or CNN. They are just propaganda arms of the Repubs and the Dems. I think even they would agree with that.

This is a "both sides bad" false equivalence that isn't well borne out by examination of their actual content. The kind of stuff Media Matters does for example. It is itself propaganda put forward by the more right-leaning media to justify themselves. Again not well supported by an objective look at the sites.

It's part of a continuing effort in conservative circles to make everything relative, to file off the edges of whit it means to be factual and objective. This is deliberate, not accidental. By moving away from ideas of verifiable truth, any recoinception (or simple lie) can be respun as "my opinion" and no worse of better than any other viewpoint. Because everything is opinion and nothing is verifiable. What is "true" (or as Colbert puts it "truthy") is simply whatever idea is shouted longest and loudest.

Of course, people have died because of this "opinion" and "alternate facts" nonsense. The hocus-pocus about COVID cures is further along the "everything is an opinion" road.

So a long way of saying, no, I do not agree with this equivalence. Evidence and careful reporting matter. I do not hold up CNN as a shining example of journalism well done all the time, but they're trying harder than Fox is. It's telling that CNN calls itself a news organization and is at least partially accountable, while Fox ducks behind the opinion and entertainment labels when challenged. They are not the same at all.
posted by bonehead at 10:59 AM on April 14, 2022 [19 favorites]

Is there anything in the Hunter-Biden-laptop narrative that doesn't immediately decay into Qanon/Pizzagate-level bullshit about Fauci biolabs and luciferian deep state child trafficking tunnels?
posted by acb at 11:00 AM on April 14, 2022 [24 favorites]

> Look at the Hunter Biden laptop story. Censored because it was supposedly false and Russian plant. Turns out that it is 100% true. Even the Times and the WAPO have conceded that. That is what I mean by let it play out. A story will ultimately be proven true or not true.

I shouldn't bite the bait, but this is simply not true, no matter how much it is regurgitated in the Republican media-sphere. The NY Times has not conceded that the laptop is Hunter Biden's, nor should they because the provenance of the laptop is incredibly sketchy and gets more so with every detail learnt. The NY Times used an email made public via the laptop story, that they confirmed against other sources, to flesh out a story. It was always believed that some material on the laptop was genuine because Hunter Biden's iCloud account was compromised and mixing true data with manufactured is exactly what you would do if you wanted to make a plant.

It is a sign of the absurdity and emptiness of Republican media that two sentences in a NY Times article can be deliberately misread and then that misreading can be used to generate thousands of articles and people can come to believe the falsehood that the NY Times 'has conceded' the laptop is genuine instead of just directly reading the article in question. Manufacturing truth through repetition in action.
posted by Ktm1 at 11:01 AM on April 14, 2022 [47 favorites]

Pyramid termite, no one here has argued against the first amendment afaik. This discussion has exclusively been about free speech in privately owned corporate media platforms, not about absolute restrictions on speech.

( viborg, I think that was pyramid termite's point--that free speech "defenders" are supporting something very different than the First Amendment and that they're the ones who deliberately conflate an argument about the former as an argument about the latter )
posted by RonButNotStupid at 11:02 AM on April 14, 2022 [4 favorites]

This thread is SO meta.
posted by whatevernot at 11:06 AM on April 14, 2022 [9 favorites]

We need to keep rich people from controlling our channels of communication, says rich person in charge of a major channel of communication

In related news, Lachlan Murdoch ranting about elites.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 11:10 AM on April 14, 2022 [3 favorites]

somewhat of a free speech absolutist

I also redefine hamsters to mean whatever I want them to.
posted by Etrigan at 11:12 AM on April 14, 2022 [20 favorites]

This thread is SO meta.

Let's keep Zuckerberg & whatever he's choosing to call his technoempire out of this. One billionaire per thread.
posted by nubs at 11:12 AM on April 14, 2022 [6 favorites]

I seem to recall reading some drama about his companies having lawsuits, harassment, and bad Covid protocols, though.

I don't get his "success" either if he acts this awful all the time.
posted by jenfullmoon at 11:13 AM on April 14, 2022

I don't know what is on the laptop nor do I really care.

is not compatible with the claim

Look at the Hunter Biden laptop story. Censored because it was supposedly false and Russian plant. Turns out that it is 100% true.

If you don't know what the claim is, how can you evaluate whether or not it's true?

What is true, incontrovertibly, is that (super) wealthy people shape the information most people receive in many ways, some subtle and some obvious. (Here, they've convinced you that national news media messed up bigly, but in a way that you definitely don't need to bother yourself to think about). A push for "Free speech absolutism" is just the claim that this is OK and doesn't need to change.

This thread is about a (super) wealthy person proposing to buy twitter, thus gaining the ability to shape the information that many people receive. He's made clear that he is not a man of principle and is willing to go to great lengths to settle petty personal vendettas.

An argument for "Free speech absolutism" is an argument that this is OK, that petty men with fragile psyches should have the power to affect global fora at their whim. It's utterly divorced from the lived experience of anyone who isn't a child or extremely privileged.
posted by dbx at 11:13 AM on April 14, 2022 [27 favorites]

Oh thanks RonButNotStupid, I misread that and I was out of line there. Sorry.

I still take issue with the fundamental argument though, and it still seems like they are not engaging with the other side here in good faith.

There’s quite a bit to unpack here but what seems particularly wrongheaded is this notion that there’s less bullshit in the information sphere now. Okay yeah maybe back in the day your weird uncle would rant about Area 51 or the JKF assassination (setting aside that there are real kernels of truth in both those theories unlike current unhinged right wing disinformation).

The specific issue here is mass media though, and just as one specific case study it’s quite clear that there was significantly more bullshit in the mass media after Fox News started. Even more so since the rise of social media, to restate this highly pertinent point which the right wing here would apparently love to sideline: MONEY = SPEECH now.
posted by viborg at 11:14 AM on April 14, 2022 [2 favorites]

Next you'll tell me that Hunter Biden didn't use that exact laptop to inject snake venom into the American water supply.

The point of the exercise is not that Hunter owned a MacBook, or that Hunter owned that specific MacBook. The point is that Republican operatives (particularly Rudy) attempted to parlay that into the wildest possible claims imaginable about what was _on_ said laptop, just as they did years before with Hillary's Buttery Emails. Hunter's sex life, Hunter's drug use, Hunter's dealings with Ukraine interests, Hunter's kickbacks to his father, Hunter's being fully owned and operated by Communist China, all without tangible evidence that (a) the laptop was actually Hunter's, (b) the provenance of the laptop and its hard drive could be demonstrated to any measurable standard, (c) Rudy or someone affiliated with him never connected that HD to something and added or removed things, or (d) that _even if any or all of the above were true_ that it added up to anything meaningful or legally suspect.

And, of course, all they had to do was put it out there under "news" accounts and Whisper-Down-The-Lane took it for a wild ride. Hunter had child porn! Hunter had videos of Hillary using adrenochrome! Ten Percent for the "Big Guy!" Joe is a Chinese puppet! The Biden Crime Family!

All RIGHT before a crucial election.

So they had two options. One was to allow unlimited discourse painting these accusations as being taken seriously, at a point where even many conservatives conceded that if there _had been_ any weight to them, if the Laptop from Hell was truly that damning and incontrovertible, that they wouldn't hold press conferences making claims; they'd have trumpeted every last delicious ASCII character of it to every news media source in the world, the FBI, the DOJ, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band and everyone else with a computer and electricity.

The other was to listen to multitudes of intelligence experts and say "this is very, very, very likely to be disinformative bullshit" and treat it as such, and minimize its ability to swing a national election, treating it as about as credible as other QAnon fodder.

That is what is at stake here. Twitter is not the Infallible Guardian of Truth. But they do have the ability and the right as a private company to say, "If you want to spread unverifiable propaganda, do it somewhere else."
posted by delfin at 11:18 AM on April 14, 2022 [36 favorites]

This Hunter Biden thing seems kinda lame. Can we move on?

Wish we could. But, once the Republicans take back the House, you're going to see the Jan.6 investigation switched to an "Impeach Joe Biden at Any Cost" circus, and you can bet the laptop will feature bigly in the proceedings. It's going to be a full-on Q-Anon MAGA spectacle.
posted by Thorzdad at 11:21 AM on April 14, 2022 [16 favorites]

i don't know if i'm a free speech fundamentalist, but i am a defender of the 1st amendment - the united states cannot dictate to people what they can say, period

Except that's never been the case at all, given the fact that defamation is in the law. In fact, we as a nation have routinely proscribed the contours of the First Amendment throughout our history, for reasons both good and bad. Furthermore, we see the prohibitions of the First Amendment used to push for harmful policy, such as Floyd Abrams' failed attempt to argue that facial recognition is protected by it, which would have kneecapped attempts to regulate the technology.

I find that a lot of Americans have a hard time talking about free speech because of the way we've put the First Amendment on a pedestal.
posted by NoxAeternum at 11:22 AM on April 14, 2022 [4 favorites]

It does seem crazy that a fairly extreme capitalist like Musk is POed that twitter isn't tilted his way enough already.

Twitter amplifies conservative politicians. Musk himself benefits from this, and has used it to his own monetary advantage now a few times. Including likely this one.

It makes more sense to assume that 99% of what he says in public, including this, is simply mumming, an attempt to manipulate opinion and through that market reactions to his own benefit.
posted by bonehead at 11:24 AM on April 14, 2022 [3 favorites]

foo, bar, baz, hamster
posted by snuffleupagus at 11:28 AM on April 14, 2022

this is the circus now

this is what people want.. they want the spectacle of a Biden impeachment--perhaps by then it will conclude with a public hanging, or better yet stoning.. pay for the privilege..

I don't think people care if something is "true" or reality-based anymore, all those horses left the barn and a handful of people (relative to the whole) are left clutching pearls and pretending anything we think matters. You're either chomping at the bit to see this circus get turned up to Full Crazy, or you're too busy surviving to have energy to care, or you're in the wealth bracket where this somehow means "profit"
posted by elkevelvet at 11:29 AM on April 14, 2022 [5 favorites]

WTR hired Goldman Sachs to advise why this bid of $54.20 is too low when GS has a sell rating on the stock and a $30 price target. If this is about shareholder value which is what a public company is about, then they should take the money and run.

The price of Twitter is down for the year and a lot of people would be selling at a loss.

Look what TWTR did to Trump, it lost him the election.

"Twitter" is a much more plausible explanation for how Trump was able to get enough traction to come out of nowhere and win the first election than for why, after his dismal performance in the job, he lost the second one.

But of course, nobody really knows how much of an impact Twitter made—in comparison with everything else—in either election.
posted by straight at 11:38 AM on April 14, 2022 [4 favorites]

What do Free Speech Absolutists think of spam filters, I wonder? Are they fine with their ISP -- or even a megacorp like Google -- deciding what does and does not reach their Inbox?

I have important offers and a good-faith belief these people are interested in reading about them. How dare you interfere with my participation in _{the free marketplace of ideas? _{please come on my podcast}}
posted by The Lurkers Support Me in Email at 11:40 AM on April 14, 2022 [5 favorites]

Crazy thing about Twitter is that it has a $1.2B/yr R&D budget.

At $300k/head that would be *two* Infinite Loop-era Apple Campuses (i.e. 4,000 laptop-bangers).

There's another 1.5X on top of that for SG&A, natch.
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 11:44 AM on April 14, 2022 [1 favorite]

see this circus get turned up to Full Crazy

there were all sorts of changes, things went down
posted by snuffleupagus at 11:47 AM on April 14, 2022 [1 favorite]

This thread makes the free thread look... well - not as free?
posted by piyushnz at 11:58 AM on April 14, 2022

I also redefine hamsters to mean whatever I want them to.

PETA shall hear of this, you filthy beast.
posted by flabdablet at 12:20 PM on April 14, 2022 [2 favorites]

Twitter is now trading below the price is closed at yesterday, and the volume is only up a little, so if this was a pump and dump, it was a very unsuccessful one.
posted by ssg at 12:25 PM on April 14, 2022 [1 favorite]

do I have 43 4343 43 going once 44 do we going for 44 or 44 45 47 50 53 53 53 53 come back for 53 going 54 54 57 57
posted by clavdivs at 12:28 PM on April 14, 2022 [2 favorites]

We expect complete success within two years, though. It's really not that hard.
posted by flabdablet at 12:29 PM on April 14, 2022

Meta Gere: Snark Eater
posted by snuffleupagus at 12:30 PM on April 14, 2022 [1 favorite]

In the anti-Twitter column, this should probably be noted.
posted by viborg at 12:34 PM on April 14, 2022

You can't be somewhat of an absolutist the same way you can't be somewhat pregnant. What you are is pro free speech. This is a word that allows gradations of support. Please don't use the word absolutist anymore, because it is a word that does not.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 12:41 PM on April 14, 2022 [10 favorites]

> “Elon isn’t serious about twitter unless he’s willing to offer $69.42” is both a joke and the best financial analysis currently available.

$420.69, surely.

$69.42 doesn't make any sense as a meme. Can't have 4:20 without the 20.

And in the universe we live in, memes are all that counts.
posted by flug at 12:45 PM on April 14, 2022

Indeed, but the other way around
posted by snuffleupagus at 12:48 PM on April 14, 2022 [1 favorite]

> Look what TWTR did to Trump, it lost him the election.

Trump dominated by the daily media conversation, the 24-hour news cycle, every day until his twitter account was pulled.

The ability to do that is literally his superpower. But it very, very much depended on Twitter.

I was reading "Trump said Crazy Thing X" news headlines literally multiple times every day for the five years leading up to January 8th, 2021, when his Twitter account was pulled.

I've read maybe two or three such stories in the 15 months since.

Trump is still in the news once in a while. But the breathless and ubiquitous "Trump just said Crazy Thing X!!11!!!" coverage disappeared almost immediately.
posted by flug at 12:53 PM on April 14, 2022 [44 favorites]

Please don't use the word absolutist anymore, because it is a word that does not.

Free speech "absolutism" is a movement that does actually exist, and which has specific tenets and beliefs, mainly centered around the idea that restrictions on speech are inherently bad and should be avoided. So yes, I will keep using the word, because it is referring to a very real thing.
posted by NoxAeternum at 1:06 PM on April 14, 2022

This thread makes the free thread look... well - not as free?

am I to interpret this comment as an observation that this thread features a topic, and people are responding to the topic (vs. a sort of free-for-all post on anything that happens to come to mind.. in which case.. how is this different from any MetaFilter thread)? or is the freedom you seek the freedom of a "free speech absolutist" who does not wish to have their views challenged? I'm having a bad day, forgive me if I jump to an uncharitable interpretation but if you swing by to freely state what you mean, I'm all ears
posted by elkevelvet at 1:09 PM on April 14, 2022

His Twitter account wasn't pulled in a vacuum, January 6 happened. All the media took flak for amplifying him, and the mood shifted.
posted by snuffleupagus at 1:10 PM on April 14, 2022 [1 favorite]

the mood shifted

The mood as expressed through the will of Jack Dorsey and the board and shareholders of twitter.
posted by Wood at 1:13 PM on April 14, 2022 [2 favorites]

> Isn't that the argument to hear all information? Anyone can figure it out for themselves what is right or wrong.

As you may have noticed over the last several years this has been proven incorrect approximately infinity times
posted by churl at 1:17 PM on April 14, 2022 [28 favorites]

I'm positing it was the other way. He didn't pick $54.20 because it's meme-y. He decided to buy Twitter because he saw the 12 month average stock price wan $54.20.
posted by muddgirl at 1:17 PM on April 14, 2022 [4 favorites]

The mood as expressed through the will of Jack Dorsey and the board and shareholders of twitter.

And your point? Let me ask this - do you think that deplatforming Trump from Twitter was wrong? Because if it was the wrong thing to do, it should not matter who pulled the lever, right?
posted by NoxAeternum at 1:22 PM on April 14, 2022

So yes, I will keep using the word, because it is referring to a very real thing.

I think the statement "Please don't use the word absolutist anymore" was directed at those people who are calling themselves "somewhat of a free speech absolutist" or "a free speech absolutist but..." -- in other words, they are not free speech absolutists. I don't think it was intended to mean "don't use the phrase 'free speech absolutism' at all"
posted by Saxon Kane at 1:23 PM on April 14, 2022 [6 favorites]

That's right, that's how it was intended.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 1:25 PM on April 14, 2022

(A tweet) @DaryRezvani: Men will literally offer to buy Twitter instead of taking care of their son named R2D2.
posted by Wordshore at 1:27 PM on April 14, 2022 [22 favorites]

pyramid termite: the united states cannot dictate to people what they can say, period

libel/slander/defamation
harassment
uttering death threats
threatening the president or pretty much anyone else under Secret Service protection (this one gets its own federal statute)
inciting a riot
perjury
making false statements to the Feds (this is one of the things that Martha Stewart got convicted of instead of insider trading)
obscenity
copyright violations
certain forms of treason

And this isn't even getting into the bulk of restrictions on commercial speech which are kind of their own separate thing and maybe not quite as relevant.

I feel like there's this idea that this kind of "free speech absolutism" has been the bedrock of American 1A jurisprudence forever when there have been noticeable... err... deviations from this absolutism. In particular, for just under 40 years, movies weren't considered protected speech (which led to the privatized, self-censorship regime of the Hays' code). Also, this is your periodic reminder that the "shouting 'fire' in a theatre" standard was established in order to put socialists in jail for pamphleting against WWI conscription but then re-evaluated 50 years later to allow Nazis to march in Ohio. This is, of course, not to say that I agree with the Schenk decision or whatever but rather to point out that "the United States cannot dictate to people what they can say, period" is a bit ahistorical. The US definitely can and has put certain speech out of legal protection, it's just that the standards have varied over time.

Basically, what I'm saying is that I think practically no one (apart from probably a marginal fringe of anarcho-libertarians, probably) is really "absolute" in their approach to free speech. There's pretty much always a recognition that some speech does bring harms and should be penalized in some ways; the disputes are really about what the harms are, what the penalties should be, and who/what should determine these.
posted by mhum at 1:42 PM on April 14, 2022 [34 favorites]

And your point? Let me ask this - do you think that deplatforming Trump from Twitter was wrong? Because if it was the wrong thing to do, it should not matter who pulled the lever, right?

I don't think deplatforming Trump was wrong. I don't agree that that's the main question though. My point is that this power is profoundly in the wrong hands right now. (This power that one previous poster described (well) as Trump's "dominat[ation of] the daily media conversation ... very, very much depended on Twitter.")

We could discuss cases, many beyond Trump and many more beyond the borders of the United States, where Twitter got things "wrong" as well. Cases, probably even where you and I would agree that twitter was deeply wrong as well as others where we'd be on opposite sides of the issue.

The fact that Elon can make a hostile bid on this power is a symptom of the rot. It's a plain fact of where this power sits, which is in a California-HQ'ed US corporation. The fact that they sometimes make the "right" decision is not the great truth.

We could also, speculate, on values worldwide and democratic which might profoundly differ from the existing values and governance of Twitter. Values that could lie on either end of any sort of ideological spectrum you'd care to throw down. California's attempt to legislate mandated representation of women and minorities on corporate boards was recently overturned by CA courts. Elected Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Terry Green has just had an incredibly outsized influence on speech worldwide.

Not as a "gotcha" but in the interest of genuine debate: you asked me what I thought about the Trump decision specifically. I'd ask you: do you have an opinion about twitter's policies and decisions generally, or about the process that produces them?
posted by Wood at 1:47 PM on April 14, 2022 [3 favorites]

The mood as expressed through the will of Jack Dorsey and the board and shareholders of twitter.

Among a lot of other media that stopped breathlessly amplifying his every word. The event soured some his audience's appetite for all that too, at least temporarily, and then Biden took office.

Dorsey is weird focus on in that it seems from his personal foibles and etc that he would himself prefer a free for all. Ideologically, and because it would be a whole lot easier and more profitable for Twitter (funny how those things line up). From a derivative investor perspective, the decision represents a corporate judgment that the loss of goodwill from failing to do so, or the regulation that might be imposed otherwise is more important than the lost users or traffic.

Elected Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Terry Green has just had an incredibly outsized influence on speech worldwide.

What? How?
posted by snuffleupagus at 1:49 PM on April 14, 2022 [1 favorite]

Are you under the impression that a minute order in a trial court is precedential? It will invalidate the law if not appealed, which may well happen. But it's not doing anything but applying existing law to the statute. In any event, it's a trial court ruling on one California corporate law in California.
posted by snuffleupagus at 1:57 PM on April 14, 2022 [1 favorite]

The mood as expressed through the will of Jack Dorsey and the board and shareholders of twitter.

No, the national mood that they reacted to.
posted by straight at 2:04 PM on April 14, 2022 [1 favorite]

I thought the Heavy Metal space car was cool but this is some bullshit.
posted by kirkaracha at 2:06 PM on April 14, 2022 [2 favorites]

I'd ask you: do you have an opinion about twitter's policies and decisions generally, or about the process that produces them?

Twitter's policy making is a notorious dumpster fire. But what has historically driven said burning bin has been cultural attitudes towards free speech "absolutism" - remember, this is the company that had argued over keeping ISIS beheading videos up.

Which leads to my other belief - that free speech "absolutism" is an incoherent mess of a philosophy that has long since been co-opted into a defense for abusers and bigots and worse through use of euphemistic language meant to remove context from arguments. It is a movement that argues that speech should be protected while arguing that speech is harmless, completely ignoring the positions being in tension.
posted by NoxAeternum at 2:13 PM on April 14, 2022 [17 favorites]

Almost all absolutisms do more harm than good. In fact I struggle to think of one that hasn't.
posted by flabdablet at 2:18 PM on April 14, 2022 [2 favorites]

It looks like a Saudi billionaire prince who drinks out of a mug with his face on it has stymied the other billionaire's plans.
posted by credulous at 2:46 PM on April 14, 2022 [4 favorites]

So TWTR should just become/remain a dem echo chamber?

Bit telling that you are convinced that removing threats, hate speech, and harassment removes 100% of republicans from the venue. Maybe they could stop being batshit vicious assmonsters instead? Then they could come play in the sandbox like the other kids.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 2:47 PM on April 14, 2022 [24 favorites]

I'm a little bit sad to think that I'm probably the only one who wants a bloc of history-nerd Twitter shareholders to demand Musk up his tender offer by $0.20 per share.

"Fifty Four Forty or Fight"" still has a nice ring to it..
posted by Nerd of the North at 2:53 PM on April 14, 2022 [6 favorites]

That progressives believe companies run by or for billionaires, hedge funds and private funds setting the acceptable terms of discourse is going to end well for them is continuing marvel. A forward-looking progressive would be trying to start her own version of Gab.
posted by MattD at 3:06 PM on April 14, 2022

Here in the non-hypothetical real world, my BIL is a big Qanon proponent/pusher, with also deep links into the general Dominionist movement (most churches in Idaho are too 'liberal' for him), and his Twitter account got killed in the sweep they did last year.

All he did on Twitter was shitpost a coordinated daily narrative defending Trumpism, attack vaccine mandates, masking requirements, and push that anti-parasitic drug etc. and attack liberals all day. What a waste. We don't talk much any more.
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 3:14 PM on April 14, 2022 [5 favorites]

I have never seen where censorship or content moderation is good for democracy.

At the very least, actual content moderation (not the kind you see on Twitter) would prevent malicious lies and outright slurs from being hurled at minorities with the ultimate aim of driving them from public discourse. “Good for democracy” is an interesting phrase to use. I mean, if we’re holding up “rule by the people” as our goal (and it’s a solid goal!) shouldn’t having more people involved in the process of governance be a good thing? The more, and different voices, the easier it becomes to make rules that cover all, that protect all?

Yet, the absolute shit levels of moderation at Twitter, Facebook, etc, consistently look the other way at targeted coordinated campaigns against LGBTQ+ users, and BIPOC users, let alone casual slurs and outright lies, yet, in many cases, will act quickly to delete comments or lock accounts that speak against such actions. Why do you think the construction wypipo or any other similar words exist? It’s because social media sites are quick to delete conversations where BIPOC people discuss white people, while generally refusing to use the same level of moderation when outright racists are making posts with wild accusations about Black people.

The assertion that people will generally figure out what is true and what isn’t is a quaint idea, usually asserted by a person who believes that there is no wool over their own eyes, and hey, congrats, you have access to the real truth! Does that include the understanding that the long running undercurrent of anti-trans hostility on social media, the lax moderation of anti-trans posting essentially turned them into the group it was okay to demonize, to scapegoat? I mean, even the dumbest racist out there knows you can’t make an angry post about having to share a bathroom with a Black person. Trans people on the other hand? No one is going to delete that post. And here we are, with state governments essentially trying to legislate trans people out of existence based on an absolute cacophonous mountain of bullshit, hatred, lies, and outright falsehood. So, no, I’m sorry, I don’t buy the assertion that Anyone can figure it out for themselves what is right or wrong. It’s not just wrong, it flies in the face of recorded human history. Or, to add another log to the pile, did you not notice the tiny still stupid voice in the wilderness that vaccines are bad, man, until the ball got rolling and two years into a pandemic, vaccination rate maps of the nation can essentially tell us what media the people living their consume?
posted by Ghidorah at 3:38 PM on April 14, 2022 [41 favorites]

I just watched this video by Hoeg Law and found it informative about the legal aspects of this.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 3:43 PM on April 14, 2022

i'm pretty exact in how i choose to use words - "the government can't dictate to people what they can say" to me is a much different concept than saying that certain kinds of statements can result in court actions being taken - it means to me that there is prior restraint, that certain subjects have been declared illegal to talk about, that certain things will not be criticized, and most importantly that certain statements will be required of people - like having to say the pledge of allegiance - i never said the government couldn't or shouldn't allow courts to adjudicate this

when i was growing up there were not supposed to be religious references in the school, but believe me, there most certainly were - my biology teacher had bible verses up all over his classroom

the government could not dictate to me what i said about it or whether i sued the school over it but you can bet your ass my classmates and neighbors would have

i kept my mouth shut

ahistorical? *shrugs* - it's also ahistorical that people shouldn't own other people, beat their spouses and their kids or kill other people because they look different than them

or for that matter, make death threats, harass people, etc etc, things that are going on right now as we speak in the u s a, often without a thought of anyone being punished for them

hell, didn't we just watch a president incite a riot a little over a year ago?

but let's face it - the real problem isn't what people say in this country - it's who they are - people are rarely punished for what they say, but for what they are - what they say is just an excuse - and those doing the punishment are often not government agents - or if they are, they are breaking their own laws to do so

at least the government is much less inclined to do this than the people it represents - people have a real lack of respect for one another in the u s a and it shows
posted by pyramid termite at 3:43 PM on April 14, 2022 [2 favorites]

meta-Metafilter: I have never seen where content moderation is good for democracy.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 4:13 PM on April 14, 2022 [5 favorites]

There are certain things that I think almost everyone would agree should be censored such as some QAnon stuff, some Antifa stuff, < ... >
Look at FOX or CNN. They are just propaganda arms of the Repubs and the Dems.

Interesting juxtaposing.

What QAnon stuff should be allowed? What Antifa stuff should be banned?
posted by bootlegpop at 4:25 PM on April 14, 2022 [5 favorites]

You can be a conservative on Twitter; hordes of people are, loudly and proudly. They will tell you how horribly they're being censored at the top of their lungs, in the very media that they claim they're blackballed from. Few of them connect those particular dots.

You can be a QAnon dingbat on Twitter; hence how "Watch the Water," the latest wingnut conspiracy theory on COVID's sinister secrets, trended hard the other day.

You can be just about anyone or anything on Twitter. But what you can't do is post targeted harassment, or content that may get someone killed, or blatant hate speech. Every speech code has its own gray areas around its edges, naturally, but you have to work pretty hard to get banned from Twitter.

Many Trumpoids work pretty hard at it.

Because their version of "free speech!" is one where they _can_ post targeted harassment, they _can_ post hate speech, they _can_ declare gay and lesbian and trans people to be horrible godless deviants, they _can_ use racial jokes and slurs, they _can_ echo medical misinformation, they _can_ treat it as if they're the only ones whose opinions matter.

And it's kind of telling how badly they want to do that.
posted by delfin at 5:43 PM on April 14, 2022 [28 favorites]

I have never seen where censorship or content moderation is good for democracy.

There are more people living in democracies without a first amendment like right to free speech than there are people living in the USA. Many of those democracies have arguably higher levels of democracy than the USA. To paraphrase Will McAvoy: And with a straight face, you're gonna tell students that America is so star-spangled awesome that we're the only ones in the world who have ~~freedom~~democracy? Canada has ~~freedom~~democracy. Japan has ~~freedom~~democracy. The UK. France. Italy. Germany. Spain. Australia... Belgium! has ~~freedom~~democracy.
I'm going to posit that Canadian democracy works just fine despite mechanisms in place to curtail things like hate speech.

Bit telling that you are convinced that removing threats, hate speech, and harassment removes 100% of republicans from the venue.

Classic reality having a "liberal" bias.

I was reading "Trump said Crazy Thing X" news headlines literally multiple times every day for the five years leading up to January 8th, 2021, when his Twitter account was pulled.

To be fair he was president of the USA or a main party candidate for that job for those years. We kind of had to listen to his batshittery.
posted by Mitheral at 6:11 PM on April 14, 2022 [8 favorites]

CNN is certainly often quite vapid but "CNN is Fox News for Democrats" is one of the sillier hot takes I've seen in a while.
posted by aspersioncast at 6:33 PM on April 14, 2022 [20 favorites]

Indeed, CNN is shit. Fox is propaganda. Huge difference.
posted by dobbs at 6:41 PM on April 14, 2022 [15 favorites]

This whole "The overlords based in CALIFORNIA are EVIL" stuff is hugely amusing in its insanity. 👍
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 6:46 PM on April 14, 2022 [5 favorites]

The One Where The Pedo Guy Trolls Everyone
posted by glonous keming at 7:10 PM on April 14, 2022 [2 favorites]

Oh FFS Elon put down the phone and finish the fucking starship already
posted by mbo at 7:13 PM on April 14, 2022 [3 favorites]

One thing that occurred to me about truth on twitter vs. bullshit, is that there is ever only one ground truth [not that this 'truth' can necessarily be manifestly evident to anyone], yet the bullshitters are free to carefully craft multitudinous variations of bullshit in opposition, each designed to appeal to a slice of the audience.

This is what Qanon and its general wrapper conservative movement has been doing for quite a while now, evolving their messaging like the Borg do, trying to find what sticks best.

They succeeded recently with the anti-CRT bullshit, remains to be seen how well their current gay-panic campaign works out this year.
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 8:24 PM on April 14, 2022 [3 favorites]

The Tower of BlabElon.
posted by Oyéah at 8:29 PM on April 14, 2022 [5 favorites]

So I guess I probably laid the California thing on a little thick. Realistically the whole Americaness thing is a more substantive factor. It’s legit cultural imperialism. Reading the room obviously mefi has quite a bit more love for twitter than for facebook. I see them as similarly problematic.
posted by Wood at 8:44 PM on April 14, 2022 [3 favorites]

Youtube has a deep and serious problem with non-appealable content review being abused by bad actors to shutdown legitimate discourse, e.g. here.

Thus far Twitter's content moderation appears to be more like removing the fuckwits who go around sticking "Biden did that" on area gas pumps.
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 8:59 PM on April 14, 2022 [1 favorite]

“So I guess I probably laid the California thing on a little thick. Realistically the whole Americaness thing is a more substantive factor.”

Sure, I get that. American cultural imperialism is a valid concern. You sure seemed to specify California without fail, though, which was a little odd, IMO.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 10:23 PM on April 14, 2022

> I have never seen where censorship or content moderation is good for democracy.

Do you have a spam filter on your email account?
posted by AlSweigart at 11:09 PM on April 14, 2022 [16 favorites]

lol Reddit is not "so much more toxic than Twitter" by any objective measure.

Quite the contrary in my subjective experience.

Hate Twitter
posted by spitbull at 2:49 AM on April 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

That a laptop of Hunter Biden's exists and has information on it.

I have Hunter Biden's Etch A Sketch. It is a portal to a dimension of perfidy beyond the comprehension of human decency.
posted by Chitownfats at 3:15 AM on April 15, 2022 [9 favorites]

>lol Reddit is not "so much more toxic than Twitter" by any objective measure.

>Quite the contrary in my subjective experience.
Crucial to a conversation about internet discussion spaces and convincing people with your words (previously known as the art of rhetoric) is not undermining your point. If the goal is an equivalent comparison, your subjective evidence is a distraction. Maybe Twitter's moderation is paid contractors without topic specialism while Reddit has moderators with community standing and and investment in their subreddit -- which doesn't change that some subreddits are hives of scum and villainy

(After COVID, there's got to be an uptick in morality because some choices lead to better and some to worse outcomes, so we want to raise the bar and filter in favour of the choices that lead to good outcomes. On top of that the information you would use to discern what outcome is likely for a choice has to be valuable and hard-won -- the unnecessary deaths of people who didn't choose good outcomes of vaccination offer us a reminder. That notion of 'how we come to believe true what we believe to be true' is a key point in whether online conversations lead to better or worse outcomes, and Twitter in the hands of a for-profit advertisers-set-priorities business isn't a lot different to Twitter in the hands of a private individual setting its priorities.)
posted by k3ninho at 4:09 AM on April 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

>>> I have never seen where censorship or content moderation is good for democracy.

Do you have a spam filter on your email account?

Or have you ever used Metafilter? They have content moderation.
posted by dobbs at 6:03 AM on April 15, 2022 [10 favorites]

Other people wiser the I am share about the moderation/free speech angle: Yishan, who ran Reddit (thredreaderapp version).

"This free speech idea arose out of a culture of late-90s America where the main people who were interested in censorship were religious conservatives. In practical terms, this meant that they would try to ban porn (or other imagined moral degeneracy) on the internet.
"...
" The internet is not a "frontier" where people can go "to be free," it's where the entire world is now, and every culture war is being fought on it.
"It's the MAIN battlefield for our culture wars.
"It means that upholding free speech means you're not standing up against some religious conservatives lobbying to remove Judy Blume books from the library, it means you're standing up against EVERYONE, because every side is trying to take away the speech rights of the other side.
"...
" I'm now going to reveal the institutional bias of every large social network (i.e. FB, Twitter, Reddit):
"Are you ready?
"Here it is...
"They would like you (the users) to stop squabbling over stupid shit and causing drama so that they can spend their time writing more features and not have to adjudicate your stupid little fights.
"That's all.
"They DON'T CARE ABOUT POLITICS. They really don't. ..."
posted by k3ninho at 9:09 AM on April 15, 2022 [3 favorites]

pyramid termite: i'm pretty exact in how i choose to use words - "the government can't dictate to people what they can say" to me is a much different concept than saying that certain kinds of statements can result in court actions being taken - it means to me that there is prior restraint

Alright, fair enough. Most self-proclaimed free speech absolutists/fundamentalists/fanatics/etc... I've encountered on the internet don't really go into such fine distinctions and there's no need to go down the prior restraint rabbit hole in this thread, especially since if we're talking about that level of legality & constitutionality, none of it is directly applicableto private entities like Twitter.
posted by mhum at 9:25 AM on April 15, 2022

Other people wiser the I am share about the moderation/free speech angle: Yishan, who ran Reddit (thredreaderapp version).

Oh, it's the guy who literally wrote how free speech and proper moderation meant that he was obligated to allow the largest release of nonconsentual pornography stand on Reddit (that is, until one of the victims noted that her images were taken while she was underage, at which point his response shifted to "nuke the site from orbit, it's the only way to be sure.")

So yeah, I have to find his position...questionable.
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:46 AM on April 15, 2022 [8 favorites]

"They would like you (the users) to stop squabbling over stupid shit and causing drama so that they can spend their time writing more features and not have to adjudicate your stupid little fights.
"That's all.
"They DON'T CARE ABOUT POLITICS. They really don't. ..."

The Mighty Algorithm pretty clearly rewards the squabbling and the drama. A Like or a Thumbs-up or a Favorite is a brief interaction that doesn't engage people nearly as much as a Reply or a Quote-Tweet or something else that starts an argument that will result in lots of people logging in to chip in their two cents about whether keninho is basically Hitler or Etrigan is even worse than Hitler, complete with highlarious memes. It's why people like Ben Shapiro post stuff that is clearly the dumbest shit you're going to read today -- all of the people falling over themselves to dunk on him raise his engagement metrics and introduce his shit into even more people's TLs, and even if a tiny fraction of those people think Wait, maybe Shapiro has a point..., then that's more people than he gets from a well-thought-out post that just gets a bunch of hearts from his followers and they don't bother RTing it.
posted by Etrigan at 9:53 AM on April 15, 2022 [6 favorites]

So I guess I probably laid the California thing on a little thick. Realistically the whole Americaness thing is a more substantive factor. It’s legit cultural imperialism.

This is a legit concern; but the "Californian Ideology" moment has passed (arguably with 9-11) and the techbro ethos is no longer an exponent of Silicon Valley as an actual place in California. And as far as the Californian judiciary goes, the CA Supreme Court is about as erudite and progressive a high court as you'll find in the United States. (I hope Godwin Liu gets on SCOTUS some day.)

The appellate courts are a mixed bag. The trial courts can be conservative; they reflect their counties. LASC is not particularly conservative (though voters everywhere sadly do like to elect former prosecutors) and it is also the largest trial court system in the world by courtroom and case volume. Ten million people are under its jurisdiction.

Complaints about "California" are sus as it's a careworn right-wing dogwhistle in US politics. Around every possible cultural and economic issue, plus guns. Same with the nefarious "Ninth Circuit Judges" (for whom the ritual epithet is "unelected Federal" -- weird to hear complaints about elected judges).
posted by snuffleupagus at 10:23 AM on April 15, 2022 [5 favorites]

Matt Levine has a good analysis of where the deal stands today.

Still I imagine that Twitter's bankers at Goldman Sachs will sit down with Musk's bankers at Morgan Stanley and Goldman will say “so uh where's the financing coming from” and Morgan Stanley will say “oh the financing is in this can” and hand Goldman a can and Goldman will open the can and a bunch of fake snakes will pop out. “AAAHHH,” Goldman will scream, and then they will chuckle and say “oh Elon, you got us again” and everyone will have a good laugh. Because, again, uniquely among public-company CEOs, Elon Musk has in the past pretended he was going to take a public company private with pretend financing! I am not saying that he’s joking now; I am just saying he’s the only person who has ever made this particular joke in the past.

Meanwhile, the Twitter board is enacting a poison pill which will make a hostile takeover more difficult.
posted by Nelson at 10:37 AM on April 15, 2022 [6 favorites]

"They DON'T CARE ABOUT POLITICS. They really don't. ..."

Yes, Facebook so doesn't care about politics that...they hired conservative fixer Joel Kaplan to a senior position in the company.

Don't piss on my leg and say it's raining, Yishan.
posted by NoxAeternum at 11:06 AM on April 15, 2022 [10 favorites]

Complaints about "California" are sus as it's a careworn right-wing dogwhistle in US politics.

Yikes. I'm not entirely happy with my ability to express myself, but so it goes. This isn't anywhere near what I was trying to get at. Ultimately my concern resides much more in the idea of general American cultural imperialism. I have an interest in observing what I can about people around the world trying to deal with FB/twitter/etc, using their own tools and powers. (For example with twitter specifically among many others there was the Morrison/China/special forces tweet flap, there is the Indian legal issues, and there was some EU response to the Trump ban.) People around the world use their own legislatures, executives, judiciary, civil society, journalism etc to try to affect Twitter, and reasonably so, for better or for worse.

I find the embedding in California to be an interesting detail, in terms of considering where global power lies, and given the federal system in the US. However, I obviously did lay it on too thick. It occurs to me that when I consider, German, Korean, (etc) companies I have extremely limited understanding of what further regional issues might be and probably it speaks to my own cultural embedding that I think the California regional issues are as interesting as I do. (I'm from Sacramento FWIW.) In a nutshell I definitely haven't meant to express any negativity towards California AT ALL. Just the idea that, well, something so critical to global civil society should be more... distributed. (I almost typed global, but actually to be brief I don't think journalistic ethics should be embedded in globe-spanning entities at all. Twitter is simply too big and powerful.)

On a tangent, I thought this "Is Twitter Going Full Resistance? Here’s the Woman Driving the Change" was a pretty interesting article.
posted by Wood at 11:09 AM on April 15, 2022 [2 favorites]

>lots of people logging in to chip in their two cents about whether keninho is basically Hitler or Etrigan is even worse than Hitler, complete with highlarious memes.
Well, if this was an imageboard and we had those features, but as the questionable link I shared says, there would MOAR features if finances could be averted from people being offensive and needing moderation. Holy mackeral, you can't even have a poll to tell me everything my conscience already knows just how Hitler I am. </flippant>
posted by k3ninho at 11:37 AM on April 15, 2022

I find the embedding in California to be an interesting detail, in terms of considering where global power lies, and given the federal system in the US.

If you're interested in this sort of thing you may want to look at the actual trends in forum shopping in civil rights, educational, financial, immigration, international environmental or IP litigation, which will point you towards courts in New York, Texas, the DC circuit, Delaware Chancery, etc and consider the impact of those jurisdictions beyond their boundaries.

Or other non-judicial examples, like the Texas Association of School Boards and its sway over material used nationwide.

Now, sometimes California does intentionally try to move the needle by regulation of large markets within CA with the idea of wider adoption -- prominent examples being environmental regulations and privacy.
posted by snuffleupagus at 12:04 PM on April 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

"They DON'T CARE ABOUT POLITICS. They really don't. ..."

By definition. Because they don't use the word POLITICS for anything they care about. POLITICS is how they label stuff that affects other people. Anything that affects them personally is GETTING PERSONAL.
posted by straight at 12:28 PM on April 15, 2022 [9 favorites]

By definition. Because they don't use the word POLITICS for anything they care about. POLITICS is how they label stuff that affects other people. Anything that affects them personally is GETTING PERSONAL.

Nah, the statement is, as I pointed out above, a demonstration of Yishan Wong not grasping what is actually happening, because the other major social media platforms, Facebook in particular, are very much politically engaged for very obvious reasons.

And while it was pointed out that he did run Reddit at one point, it's worth remembering that under his watch, Reddit was one of the largest white supremacist websites, not to to mention that Reddit faced a number of serious crises for the site, like the outing of abusive subreddits such as r/creepshots. Not to mention that when given the choice between enabling or not enabling the continued abuse of hundreds of women, he not only chose to enable it, but then wrote an essay on why doing so was the "virtuous" choice.

And that's not getting into the content of his thread, which is a jumble of the usual free speech "absolutist" rhetoric along with highlights such as his saying he believes the "lab leak" conspiracy theory and arguing that Jack Dorsey's second run at Twitter was good (an argument refuted by the existence of TikTok, among other things.) I found it darkly humorous that he talks about the abuse Ellen Pao faced at the helm of Reddit, given that a lot of it stems from the fact that she spent her time there cleaning up the mess that Wong left and the fallout from that.
posted by NoxAeternum at 2:39 PM on April 15, 2022 [6 favorites]

Are any of the "free speech!" people working to bring USEnet back? It seems like they'd be all over it. (I know USEnet is still out there, but it's a shadow of what it was 25 years ago.)
posted by The corpse in the library at 9:08 AM on April 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

No, they always want it to be THEIR new shiny thing. It's the expression equivalent of every libertarian wanting to re-imagine Waterworld.
posted by snuffleupagus at 9:34 AM on April 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

Usenet is basically a vehicle for transmission of pirated binaries these days, rather than a meaningful communication medium. Has been for a long time.

As for the wingnuts moving there, it's not as if they haven't tried to create their own social media racistopias; there are GETTR and Gab and Parler and Rumble and Truth Social and lord knows how many others of middling-to-zero importance.

But all of those are a distant smudge compared to Twitter's reach, and more importantly, they're echo chambers. There's no ready supply of leftists and liberals and moderates for them to dunk on in those venues. So the real goal is for Elon to throw the gates open so that they can swarm the site that people actually use with their opinions and yammering. Trump got ejected, so Trump and his minions returning and dominating it and driving out the normals sounds like poetic justice to them.

Me, I'm not leaving until dril does.
posted by delfin at 11:38 AM on April 16, 2022 [5 favorites]

Petty squabbling gets people to the internet marketplace, each day. The sale of ideas, full scale ideologies, leads buyers to selected money exchanges. War is the world's biggest business, therefore no peace on the web, without effective moderation.

Free speech most often means, free access to bank accounts, after minimal investment.
posted by Oyéah at 1:09 PM on April 16, 2022

Are any of the "free speech!" people working to bring USEnet back?

usenet was never a stronghold of free speech - it works like this - you have the right to post anything your server allows, but the rest of the servers have the right to choose not to accept your server as a peer

that's the short version - the long version probably hasn't been finished yet - and a lot of ISPs, including mine, have just plain dropped it

fluffy is not amused - meow
posted by pyramid termite at 8:49 AM on April 18, 2022

Also most people in its hey day were getting usenet access via their employer or their educational institute
; neither of which hesitated in 99% of cases to act swiftly to restrict controversial posters if they were brought to management's attention.
posted by Mitheral at 7:50 PM on April 18, 2022

> you have the right to post anything your server allows, but the rest of the servers have the right to choose not to accept your server as a peer

Say what you want about the tenets of Anarcho-Syndicalism, at least it's an ethos.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 6:48 AM on April 19, 2022 [2 favorites]

servers ought not shun their peers; rather they must unite against the domain controller and seize the means of database production
posted by snuffleupagus at 9:13 AM on April 19, 2022 [4 favorites]

Seize the Means of QA
posted by I-Write-Essays at 9:54 AM on April 19, 2022 [2 favorites]

Back to the Future of Twitter - "Twitter should go private and return to its pre-2012 approach of being a centralized service with third-party clients."

TwitterServiceCo would open up its API to any other company that might be interested in building their own client experience; each company would:
Pay for the right to get access to the Twitter service and social graph.

Monetize in whatever way they see fit (i.e. they could pursue a subscription model).

Implement their own moderation policy.
This last point would cut a whole host of Gordian Knots:
Market competition would settle the question about whether or not stringent moderation is an important factor in success; some client experiences would be heavily moderated, and some wouldn’t be moderated at all.

The fact that everyone gets access to the same Twitter service and social graph solves the cold start problem for alternative networks; the reason why Twitter alternatives always fail is because Twitter’s network effect is so important.

TwitterServiceCo could wash its hands of difficult moderation decisions or tricky cultural issues; the U.S. might have a whole host of Twitter client options, while Europe might be more stringent, and India more stringent still. Heck, this model could even accommodate a highly-censored China client (although this is highly unlikely).
I strongly suspect that a dramatic increase in competition amongst Twitter client services would benefit TwitterServiceCo, growing its market in a way that hasn’t happened in years. What is most exciting, though, is the potential development of new kinds of services that don’t look like Twitter at all.

Step back a moment and think about the fundamental infrastructure of the Internet: we have a media protocol in HTTP/web, and a communications protocol in SMTP/email; what is missing is a notifications protocol. And yet, at the same time, if there is one lesson from mobile, it is just how important notifications are; a secondary consideration is how important identity is. If you can know how to reach someone, and have the means to do so, you are set, whether you be a critical service, an advertiser, or anything in-between. Twitter has the potential to fill that role: the ability to route short messages to a knowable endpoint accessible via a centralized directory has far more utility than political signaling and infighting. And yet, thanks to Twitter’s early decisions and lack of leadership, the latter is all the service is good for; no wonder user growth and financial results have stagnated!

A truly open TwitterServiceCo has the potential to be a new protocol for the Internet — the notifications and identity protocol; unlike every other protocol, though, this one would be owned by a private company...

posted by kliuless at 10:50 PM on April 20, 2022 [3 favorites]

Musk now says he has $46.5B secured to buy Twitter. Color commentary in Elon Got His Money

I was skeptical myself. But this feels real? Twitter’s stock is barely changed as of 11 a.m. today, but my own estimate of how likely it is that Musk will buy Twitter has increased considerably.

posted by Nelson at 2:35 PM on April 21, 2022

Oh yeah, I was very skeptical, too. Now, if the financing can truly be secured, and, as Matt Levine points out in that Bloomberg article, he's willing to finance approximately $2Bn in yearly interest between himself and Twitter, it seems a lot more likely.

Could he still just not make a tender offer and walk away having said "ok I made more headlines and can muscle the board into doing things I want"? Sure.

No matter what, this is an absolute confluence of weird shit, from Twitter's board completely clowning itself by taking Elon at face value in the first place, to Elon being an erratic clown himself, to the weird (and really disturbing) cult of personality surrounding him driving a lot of the media narrative of this whole affair.
posted by Room 101 at 8:00 AM on April 22, 2022 [2 favorites]

Twitter, Elon Musk Are in Talks to Strike a Deal

sigh
posted by Ten Cold Hot Dogs at 3:14 AM on April 25, 2022

Media are updating their stories from yesterday to suggest that the sale might even be approved by today.

On a completely unrelated note: if it hasn't been posted here already, a good reminder to go and read Darius Kazemi's excellent guide on how to run a small social network site for your friends.
posted by Ten Cold Hot Dogs at 5:31 AM on April 25, 2022

On a completely unrelated note: if it hasn't been posted here already, a good reminder to go and read Darius Kazemi's excellent guide on how to run a small social network site for your friends.

Which isn't an actual answer to the problem of Musk taking over Twitter and throwing open the doors to hate and abuse in the name of "free speech". "Forking" doesn't work, and all it does is just leave behind the people who can't move to be abused.
posted by NoxAeternum at 6:50 AM on April 25, 2022 [1 favorite]

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