Musk buys a big chunk of Twitter

Musk buys Twitter and promotes the idea that it should be an open platform rooted in free speech principles.

Almost everyone on the right supports this.

Many on the left oppose it, some politicians like Elizabeth Warren responded that "this is a threat to our Democracy... we need to hold Big Tech accountable."

Shouldn't that tell you something about who values free speech in this country?

 

' Elon Musk's Twitter revolution: Rebellious staff claim their new boss is 'dangerous for democracy' | Daily Mail Online

Twitter has blocked its developers from making changes to the app to prevent it being sabotaged by left-wing staff angry at Elon Musk's $44billion takeover

 

Not really. It was down for the year but had been going up again for a bit. Pretty much what the overall market was doing.

 

From November up until March they were doing pretty bad. From the mid $60s down to the upper $30s.

 

Musk should definitely purge and fumigate that place when the time comes.

 

It is beyond fascinating to me how this has become a partisan thing.
I honestly wonder whether anyone has taken the time to read and understand his stated lifetime goals, they are 100 percent apolitical.
I still question how successful this will be, it it isn’t some plot to help Republicans or hurt dems. That isn’t who he is, or has ever been. His goals aren’t even remotely that provincial.

 

Not sure it's a political thing, libs seem to be upset over his promise of a free speech platform.

 

so the right supposedly supports free speech. But they back desantis for using the gov to penalize wdw for making a comment he disagreed with.

Trump followers should try to be more consistent.

 

You mean like most of the Market during that time? NASDAQ went from 16k to 13k during that time period.

 

This. I have never seen Musk as being politically leaning one way or another. And it's been amazing to watch many on the left get in such a tizzy at the thought of free speech. They seem to feel severely threatened by it and patronizingly say that apparently only they are capable of determining what should be said and what shouldn't and that "the people" need to be sheltered from speech that they (the left) determine is divisive, "hateful" or untrue. Only they (these same people on the left) can determine the wheat from the chaff and should have the ability to determine which are ideas that deserve to be shared and which are not.

Twitter IS the new town square. And just like the nut on the corner of Main Street holding up a sign proclaiming the "The End Is Near!" or a Nazi marching through Skokie denying the Holocaust or leftists shouting pro-Marxist dogma on Wall Street while wearing Mao and Pol Pot t-shirts, the free expression of ideas is tantamount to a free society whether you like them or not. You have to take the good with the bad otherwise you allow a small contingent of people to hold power over saying which is which. I trust free speech.

 

The problem with platforms such as Twitter, is it’s really NOT just like the nutty street corner preacher. That individual guy has to put himself out there in person, in the flesh. If people want to talk trash to him, they have to do it right there in person as well. On social media, people often hide behind anonymity, or aren’t even real people at all, instead the accounts are only there to retweet and boost narratives. It’s called “inauthentic behavior”.


Behind anonymity, people that wouldn’t be comfortable walking through public in Nazi garb, can anymously engage with their sick fantasies on Twitter. They can send people threats anonymously. Still, very few are willing to do these same behaviors openly with their identities known to all (save for the “influencers” who make enough money from their bs that they can turn it into an enterprise using these powerful platforms).

Part of Musk’s pledge is to verify human users and get rid of the bots. As I assume this guy doesn’t want his place to be a haven for the freak shows on the unmoderated platforms, perhaps part of his idea is to say you are free to say what you want, but your identity will 100% be outed by Twitter for all to see. So engage at your own risk. I would say that sort of arrangement would be fair game for “free speech”, but with the presence of inauthentic behavior and anonymity/fake accounts, the same issues will hit Musk in the face imo.

 

I guess this is the part where all the righties who threw a hissy fit and boycotted Twitter out of loyalty to Trump rejoin it, just to own the libbies.

 

I'm going to give Musk some time and see what happens. I like Twitter but not sure I would pay to use it.

The "free speech" standard is pretty open. Are all statements that are not clearly criminal fair game? Is the KKK going to be allowed to tweet out racist rants as long as they don't use Twitter to incite imminent violence? What about clearly incorrect statements of fact? For example, a conservative or liberal group starts tweeting right before an election and provides the wrong election date to confuse voters? I don't know if that would be illegal per se, but it's certainly not part of any honest discourse or debate. Then again, Twitter has hard core pornography on there, so it's already not limited to political discourse. Frankly, I'm amazed that has lasted as long as it has.

Overall, I definitely support erring on the side of allowing content, even if it's offensive or controversial. But at some point, if Twitter has nearly zero moderation, does it basically become 4chan? I looked at those types of boards over the years, and they were absolute cesspools.

 

I have no issue with this at all and I too tend to think this was his plan all along. He's too smart to allow Twitter to become nothing but a home for anonymous nutjobs since it would be an obvious recipe for failure.

 

Yeah, that's what I'm thinking, Musk might tick the "free speech" needle a notch at Twitter, but if you want to see what real "free speech" looks like, I agree, check out 4chan. It's dominated by racists, violence promoting idiots, anti-government groups, off the rails conspiracy theorists, incels that think raping women should be legal ... anyone normal is out of place. His investment in Twitter would tank pretty quick if he's serious about "free speech", as opposed to what we will likely get, "slightly less moderated speech".

 

Trump said yesterday he will not rejoin Twitter even if he's unbanned, because they were mean and unfair to him after he did so much for Twitter ... LOL. He did say he's evenutally going to start using Truth Social.

 

It would be better if he eventually started telling the truth!

 

Do the math, tell us what percentage of a drop Twitter had compared to NASDAQ.

 

And I'm cool with getting rid of bots, but not sure there's anything wrong with someone posting anonymously so long as they don't have a bunch of accounts. I'm not sure if there's any way to regulate it in that manner. But I can see there may be whistleblowers or other posters who don't want to open themselves up to harassment by using their real names.

 

You do the math. One is worse. Didn't say it was apples for apples. Just that the market in general went down from the time period in question. And cherry picking the high and low is brilliant. You must be a very good investor.