Then follow to the footnote: "[14] Elon did something else that tilted Twitter rightward though: he gave more visibility to paying users."
This is puzzling to me because: if you give more visibility to one group of people's speech, that means you are giving less visibility to another group of people's speech. Which is just another way of saying you are censoring their speech.
Again, the author asks: "...is there a way to prevent any similar outbreak of aggressively performative moralism in the future?" But preventing somebody from expressing their moral values again is censorship.
No matter what kind of media policies there are, the fact that there is limited bandwidth means that some views are going to be emphasized, and other views are going to be suppressed.
I also think the gruellingly slow death of legacy media and rise of bluesky and X (and mastodon) is a net positive for society, if only for the reason that ~tweets can be immediately and transparently rebutted, whereas brainwashing ‘news’ programs can’t.
The problem with this logic is that for the most part, new media isn't replacing legacy media; it's simply placing new layer of filtering in front of it. The vast majority of people sharing information on these platforms aren't journalists doing their own research. Instead, they're getting their information from journalists and just applying their own filtering and spin. "Rebuting" usually just involves linking to different news sources. You were always better just reading the legacy media in the first place.
As has been demonstrated time and time again, especially on the Internet, unmoderated discussion boards do not scale. Trolls can naturally push out the reasonable people by increasing the noise level. Once the number of users exceeds some small threshold it is basically a guarantee that trolls will move in. Shitposting is cheap, easy, and the people who do it have all the time in the world. If you don't moderate the board will become useless for substantive discussion.
I mean this was amply demonstrated back in the Usenet era. Nothing has fundamentally change with human psyche since then, so the rule still holds true. Twitter/X is just the lastest example.
You've hit the nail on the head here. If you let the trolls in they will suck all of the air out of the room.
Not at all - the difference here is choice. You can choose to pay or not to pay. And if you don't pay you are still seen.
There was no choice wrt visibility under the old regime, WrongSpeak was censored - you couldn't pay to be heard.
Now that doesn't mean the current situation is optimal, but it at least allows for the possibility of diversity of opinion. Left and Right can both choose to pay.
I don't know how many people I muted, banned, or how many times I clicked that I don't want to see something. Over time, Twitter gets better.
This being said, I prefer doing my moderation myself instead of having somebody I extremely disagree with (former Twitter employees) to do this for me.
This has multiple issues.
The older set up was not there to promote visibility but to provide a layer of authentification, most blue ticks were brands and recognisable people. Now its mostly scams, allowing anyone, especially potentially malicious actors, to don the mask of credibility is not "allowing the possibility of diversity of opinion" is allowing the fox in the hen house.
Secondly, if you imagine the goals of right wing people to maintain current power structures, and the left to disrupt them, then the ability to pay is already corrupted due to the current power structure being supremely lobsided. Aka those with all the money are effectively the only ones who can pay. (In law this is called 'right without a remedy', its when you technically have a right on paper but could never actually exercise it)
This whole situation also enables a problem we already know exists which are state actors. Russia was part of a disinfo campaign through FB tools in 2016 through cambridge analytica, and used bots in twitter in 2016 and 2020 through multiple state sponsored bot farms. Allowing that kind of state warfare to be amplified by spending money is really really poor choice from a platform prespective. Without those tools, organic growth is harder to achieve and getting around bot detection tools means a part of the infra would be caught before it caused damage (even under those circumstances, there was plenty of damage done). Removing all guardrails is a frankly indefensible choice in terms of public safety
There is definitely censorship on Twitter these days. A local strip club has its account suspended for "hate speech"
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/the-penthous...
> Twitter took action after a photo of the club's latest marquee reading, "Forever neighbours, never neighbors" went viral.
> The wording references president-elect Donald Trump's recent trolling of Canada by calling it America's 51st state, and uses the juxtaposition of the Canadian spelling of "neighbour" against the U.S. "neighbor" for political satire.
> ... the free speech social media platform shut down the club's account saying "it violates the X Hateful Profile Policy."
I don't see how you get to the idea that you can only pay for X if you are in some kind of financial elite, it's just normal subscription.
"Verification" is all well and good for the mainstream but pretty meaningless for niche and new voices; and we saw the consequences of unaccountable moderation for free speech by those doing the verification.
They believe in oligarchy so long as they are the oligarchs. They believe in authoritarianism so long as they are the authorities. They believe in censorship so long as they are the censors.
And now that they've amassed power that will be unopposed for the foreseeable future, there's no reason to pretend their goals are elsewhere. A single party system will cause them issues like Chin has, America has 30-50 years to get to that point and presumably they all plan on emerging as the Supreme Leader when that day comes - or at least landing in the inner circle.
"Consumers have emphatically rejected brands that ventured too far into wokeness. The Bud Light brand may have been permanently damaged by it."
as an endorsement of the social conservative elements of "antiwoke".
This is Musk argument but it fails on 2 important ways.
1) You had to pay to set up a bot farm to get X ammount of engagement before. Now you can pay 1 subscription and have access to the same or more engagement. So the financial burden to peddle things like Shitcoins is ludricusly lower
2) The subscription system is built ON TOP OF the system that previously meant trust. A system that still means verified in other platforms. Essentially hijacking trust through payment, which means the people who were educated on its meaning, or know about checks from a different platform are now EXRA succeptible to bad actors.
> I don't see how you get to the idea that you can only pay for X if you are in some kind of financial elite, it's just normal subscription.
Its not that _you can only_ pay it if youre rich. But lets say you wanna promote a specific idea, like idk "CRT is taught to children", which was an idea cooked up in a think tank to try and push for home schooling and defunding public education under the guise of some weird stuff being taught in schools.
You can easily coordinate buying accounts, talk points and the amplified attention of the subscription means you have a massive leg up. Compared to the other side, who would need to figure out what your plan is, grassroots organise, find funds for all its members to pay the subscription and then reply, without talking points and much higher risk of fucking up the response.
By virtue of having a megaphone you can pay for, you disrupt in large part the network effect of social media, and instead of consistent high quality posters you embolden and benefit people willing to pay. Its like Pay 2 Win but the whales are grifters and assholes.
> "Verification" is all well and good for the mainstream but pretty meaningless for niche and new voices; and we saw the consequences of unaccountable moderation for free speech by those doing the verification.
Well the consequences were pretty negligeble compared to the alternatives. FB tried low moderation and got to support 2 genocides. New Twitter has allowed neo nazi groups to organise and platform themselves, it has allowed the Turkish goverment and Saudi to disrupt dissent at home while they carry on bombings of Kurds and Yemenis respetvely.
Or is Trump getting banned from breaking the TOS much worse than Zuck and Musk allowing the taliban, Isis and any dictator who calls them get their way?
Also, in a time when the next president of the united states is quoting hitler and also saying that Hitler "had a lot of good ideas" I hardly think a very poor multi-page screed on the word woke is the best use of time and thought.
And really bad actors are taking advantage of the removal of the block feature, which was useful to block people from easily seeing your tweets, so that it leaves one open to nonstop harassment. Or in the case of Elon, forcing people to still get surfaced his tweets even if they blocked Elon on the platform.
Is this a reference to the law preventing teachers from speaking to young children about sexuality?
> ...and academic inquiry
I assume this is in reference to Florida's rejection of the College Board's AP Black History curriculum, which was rejected for containing "critical race theory" in violation of Florida Law. Surely our democratically elected state governments are better suited to have the final say in what goes into our kids heads than some NGO's Board of Trustees? Anyone who thinks educators make for less political judges than politicians is invited to review the donation history of teachers unions[0].
https://world.hey.com/dhh/google-s-sad-ideological-capture-w...
Is that not anti-woke?
To be clear, the law that the person I am replying to is likely referring to is Florida House Bill 1557, which passed in 2022 and originally applied to kindergarten through 3rd grade. In 2023, it was expanded to apply to all grades, K-12. Here is a quote from the rule [0], this is the rule's self-summary:
"The amendment prohibits classroom instruction to students in pre-kindergarten through grade 3 on sexual orientation or gender identity. For grades 4 through 12, instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity is prohibited unless such instruction is either expressly required by state academic standards as adopted in Rule 6A-1.09401, F.A.C., or is part of a reproductive health course or health lesson for which a student’s parent has the option to have his or her student not attend"
[0] https://flrules.org/Faw/FAWDocuments/FAWVOLUMEFOLDERS2023/49...
It's actively detrimental to good policy/education/business if only by the virtue of drowning out people who are just going about their day to day responsibilities.
>Again, the author asks: "...is there a way to prevent any similar outbreak of aggressively performative moralism in the future?" But preventing somebody from expressing their moral values again is censorship.
Censorship isn't the only way to prevent the rise of bad ideas. For example: "the solution to bad speech is more speech"
When Twitter's algorithm promotes certain topics and demotes others, that is a unilateral act made by a single, unaccountable entity that has full control over the platform. That is (or at least can be) censorship.
The guy who drove over people in the Christmas market in Germany recently openly backed the far right and was a racist. Elon removed all tweets that didn't match with the made up story that he was an islamist.
It's truly hard to imagine allies more "dangerous" (per the parent) than those who obstruct the vital "freedom of expression" that is... teachers talking to children about sexuality.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/719685/american-adults-w...
- Julius Nyerere
Yes, but when enough people who otherwise have little actual power get together to drown out "bad speech" with "more speech" it gets called 'cancel culture' and 'witch hunts' and is used as the primary example of 'censorship' on social media.