Twitter makes it super easy to do mass warrantless surveillance, because Twitter gathers millions of people together in the same searchable public space. It's a honeypot.
What's dangerous about the "public square" concept is that Musk doesn't just want a public square — one public space among many, one among equals — he wants the public square, a monopoly on online conversation. "I think I see a path to Twitter exceeding a billion monthly users in 12 to 18 months" https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1596751751532937217
We shouldn't have all of our conversations, political or otherwise, in one place. That's a giant mistake. We need decentralization for our own safety and freedom.
Yes, for example Facebook and TikTok.
> HN is no different in that respect.
Well, Twitter has over 200 million users. I believe that HN is much much smaller. HN also tends to be more anonymous.
Does that help?
That's the relevant number. So Twitter is about 1000x larger than HN.
From a surveillance standpoint, we're really only talking about commenters, on both sites.
Someone with 1mil+ followers is a whole other story. They have enough people watching their every move to cause problems if they are dealt with directly, so they need more attention for implicit handling over time, psychological and financial handling, etc. People with an audience can cause a lot of social, political, and ultimately financial damage to many entities just by some words. And in a world run by marketers, salespeople, lawyers, bankers, and politicians — this is the scariest threat imaginable.
Tech people can do a lot of technical damage but it is mostly just a thorn in the side of the machine. Even if they built something disruptive, an audience is needed for it to go anywhere, and most avenues for scaling anything disruptive are already tightly controlled / monitored by big tech.
I say this as what I believe the controlling authorities perspective is on the matter.