That is what everyone has been saying for years. I mean, it turns out they were wrong and Twitter was actually colluding with government agencies to bypass the first amendment. But censorship and targeted suspensions were defended tooth and nail by internet commenters.
Is this a problem now only because people you like are targeted? Surely people wouldn't be so shortsighted?
Musk's statement was that free speech would be allowed on Twitter. And yet, here he is chilling free speech. It's not surprising. It's just also really bad. So people are up in arms that they're losing a platform that, while by no means perfect, was better for free speech than it currently is.
They're just sick and tired of the billionaire hypocrite.
Yes, this is exactly the problem but in the opposite direction you are implying.
Musk believed that Twitter blocking the sharing of an article about ToS breaking behavior was worthy of the “Twitter Files” when the story was bad for his political opponent, but he thinks it is fine when the story is bad for him. It shows that he has no actual principled beliefs. He simply is acting in his own best interest.
Odds are people would be more willing to accept Elon’s rules if Elons’s rules weren’t a constantly moving target of whatever benefits him the most at this exact moment.
It's perfectly legal under the current rules as they apply to Twitter (in the United States) but one has to wonder (now and before) if it is advisable to keep them as such.
That is the public discussion societies around the world will have.
Elon Musk highlighted this issue by falsely and strongly claiming impartiality
I also find Musk's bans distasteful. Even if he can do it.
Oh, and he's revealed himself to obviously be full of shit. As is anyone cheering him on in the name of free speech. But I guess principles only last until they get in the way of petty tribalism.
You're making a false equivalence between the left and the right on this topic.
The left has said that moderating online communities is legal because of the First Amendment. They're private companies. The right then called for an end to the First Amendment as we've known it by banning private companies from moderating their platforms.
There has been no such call from the left. The left (and this thread) laments what Elon is doing, but no one is saying he's breaking a law or that he should be breaking a law. No one is calling for the government to step in.
First they aren’t “seething”, they’re not even that surprised, they’re just pointing out that the loopy billionaire was insincere the entire time.
It’s simply news when a famous person does the exact opposite of what they’ve been loudly pretending to champion for years. Man bites dog.
No. It is 100% A-OK for Ol' Muskie to ban who he wants for whatever spurious reasons he wants to post-hoc claim. It's his company, he can do that. 100%.
What people are correctly pointing out is that he rode in on his "FREE SPEECH IS GOOD" horse waving a "BOTS ARE BAD" banner, loudly proclaiming that "Only illegal speech will be banned", re-enabled a whole bunch of accounts for bigots based on bot-ridden unreliable polls, swerved hard to the alt-right lane, picked up a transphobic smoothie and blew both his feet off with a +100 Shotgun Of Hypocrisy by starting to ban people who mock, track, or report on him.
(My understanding was that the Twitter files did on the end not contain such evidence, but information overload … I may have lost some consensus)
Not exactly. At least here in Germany, there is established jurisprudence that Twitter and Facebook are public "town halls" for discussion and as such have to maintain some sort of freedom of speech, with the borders being set by German laws. That means that for example Holocaust denial, which is perfectly fine under US law, has to be regionally blocked for Germany, while some instances of what Twitter/FB consider to be "hate speech" under their rules still has to be made available.
The general judicial consensus in Germany is that while platforms do have a requirement to moderate discourse (e.g. to remove libel and outright Nazi content), they also aren't allowed to moderate too strictly.
And I think this also shows why corporate capitalism is inherently at odds with democracy: every corporation is effectively a dictatorship, their internal economy a plan economy, its rules at the whim of the CEO. And Elon is more eager than many CEOs to abuse this power. I wonder if it's going to lead to a revolution against corporations similar to the revolutions we got against monarchs.
You are presenting these two things as if they were mutually exclusive. They are not.
The problem is that people like Musk have spent ages arguing that banning fascists is bad because free speech absolutism is an important value. It turns out that free speech absolutism was never actually a value they cared about - the only thing that matters is that their guy is the one choosing the bans. If people like Musk had instead argued that platforming fascists is actually good this whole time then the discussion today would be different, but because they didn't want to publicly support fascists they had to fall back on the free speech absolutism argument, which has shattered into a million pieces.
So if I read right, you think being a billionaire is unethical. Don’t know if I agree or disagree.
Say you’re right, how do we prevent people being billionaires? Should they give up their wealth voluntarily, or do we have some mechanism that say gradually taxes their wealth as it approaches a billion to ensure it can never exceed the threshold?
If we did such a think, do you think it would disincentivise entrepreneurs?
I did not intend to say this in my post. I said that a billionaire's capacity for harm is greater than that of other people, so it is worse to be a hypocrite. But I also do believe that simply having a billion dollars is unethical as well, or at the very least antisocial.
> Say you’re right, how do we prevent people being billionaires?
This is hard. But I do not believe that "enforcing a policy that prevents billionaires is hard" is a reason for believing that being a billionaire is pro-social behavior. It would be both difficult and probably unwise to create a policy that punished people for cheating on their spouse or (less seriously) flaking on a social engagement without notice. But I think it is thoroughly reasonable to still say that those things are unethical.
I think that the challenges of policy preventing billionaires are largely related to enforcement and management of illiquid assets. I do not think that such a policy would disincentivize entrepreneurs. I believe that few entrepreneurs get into the business for the purpose of becoming a billionaire. Ending up with 900M is not going to cause anybody any tears. And if it is the case that such a policy disincentivizes entrepreneurship, then it sure as hell proves that the claimed incentives like personal satisfaction, self determination, job creation, and providing value to customers are all bullshit.
How do you think people's internal motivation systems work? I don't think anyone in history ever though "oh golly I can only make up to $999 million in my life, what a bother, guess there is no point in working hard".
I think it’s self evident that very rich people have more capacity for both good and bad, as they have more power in a capitalist society. To debate further there is a debate about capitalism, and whilst I’d like to see more social democracy and less laissez faire, going beyond capitalism is not something I want to jump into…
So I think ideally you’d like to see billionaires give up their wealth voluntarily, right? That seems internally consistent.
I think your last point is a good one, particularly a good response to those on the right who are always against progressive taxation: the cash should not be the only or perhaps even primary incentive. At least for entrepreneurship.
One issue with saying “900m enough” etc. is that often billionaires (or rich folk) are really just rich on paper. If your company is private it’s not necessarily easy to liquidate, for example. And maybe sometimes you want people to “own” lots of money in the sense that they need to steward it (maybe you want them to be an Angel investor, for example).
I guess I took you away a bit from “unethical” to “how do we solve it?” And it is still valuable to have ethics that cannot be enforced, because you want to be ethical yourself and be able to advise others.
There are logistical issues with illiquid assets. Everybody knows this. This is not, in my opinion, an interesting concern.
One way to help solve it is to call billionaires shitheads whenever possible.
That’s why its significant. Don’t act as if billionaires are just “one of us” when it comes to influence.
I would consider billionaires some of the biggest threats to democracy and national security.
Then Elon turns around does the same thing and suddenly they flip and claim they were always "free speech proponents" all along.
They should just be honest and admit it's all political.
But anyways, this NH post is now at 1320 comments. It's like CNN's talking heads shouting at each other.
The release of the previous management's internal communications showed the liberal and comfortable application of euphemism, justification after the fact, and technical deniability in upper leadership.
Twitter showing outage not over evidence that the culture of banning and de-amplifying both users and public interest topics without agency or notification, condemning by decision of a secret, unauditable council under influence of the federal government and corporations, and doing so under the tack of keeping their CEO in the dark shows how carefully calculated their appearance was. Remember, they lost their canary.
I don't think Elon Musk is much if any better. I also can't say that Twitter is any worse. Speech was being chilled and controlled before, and unless your definition of "free speech" is "being free from what offends me or is counter to my opinions and beliefs", it's more likely the hypocrisy you worry about is nothing more than actually being able to draw a line between an action and its cause and a target you can confidently level a finger at.
People will adjust as they ever have. However, the ones who interact now will be the influencers of what Twitter becomes. That is what matters, not any confused and petty logic that our leaders should all be infallible and godlike.
It's abundantly clear from his actions and inactions what is important to him, we have millennia of written history on these cases. At this point people are willfully ignoring it.
This man has done real damage to actual lives and communities in service of his ego, and he can’t even be forthright about his intentions. He can’t even stand by his own professed deeply held convictions, the entire reason he said this needed to be done, for more than 2 seconds before his own selfish ego takes precedence.
https://www.hueylong.com/programs/share-our-wealth.php
In the interests of full context, Huey Long was an authoritarian populist and the Reverend Gerald L. K. Smith was a white supremacist by any meaning of those words. (Long wasn’t, but he was certainly happy to work with Smith.)
Combine this with a general support of conservative fiscal policy as a wealthy business-owner and the libertarian ideals of a gen-X nerd who came of age during "information wants to be free" and obviously suffering from a compulsive social media addiction (pot calling kettle black here), and it's no surprise he's completely bought into "free speech conservatism", where slander and hatred are placed on even footing with legitimate political argument.
Elon is harshing the vibes of Twitter addicts.
It's no more sophisticated than that. I used to think it was. But look at conversations about Musk following the twitter purchase, compared to conversations about Musk regarding Tesla. I've come to see that it's just people and their personal relationship to their toys.
I don't give two cares about Tesla and have like 5 Tweets in 14 years. Conversations about either never really made sense to me when looking from the perspective of someone emotionally uninvested and just watching things come and go in the world. But look at tech as toy and it all makes sense.
90% of comment when Twitter was censoring before Musk were in support of it.
Now 90% of comments in this thread are against it.
You know HN has hundreds of thousands of users, right?
We all know why these rules are being made, that Elon musk's feelings were hurt and he's lashing out, but Twitter is pretending that it's for some consistent rule. Transparency would be for twitter to say straight up that it's against the rules to say things Elon doesn't like
People are making fun of him because of that, and really dont care about about the censorships or bans
Entrepreneurs are self incentivised rather than being externally motivated by money, and if the chances of not being a billionaire we're to stop somebody from being an entrepreneur, we wouldn't have entrepreneurs already
Mind you, if we jumped back a couple hundred years and asked: "does banning slavery disincentive entrepreneurs from starting plantations?"
The answer would be irrelevant to whether slavery should be banned