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What Elon Should Do About Twitter

37 Comments

EFF has some suggestions.

[Tuesday-morning update]

Elon conquers the Twitterverse.

[Update Wednesday morning]

The great Musk Twitter meltdown.

[Bumped]

[Update a couple minutes later]

Eccentric billionaire does more for free speech in one day than Republican politicians have in decades.

[Update a few minutes later]

Musk’s acquisition is making academia angry and nervous.

Good.

[Update a while later]

The week in pictures, Muskageddon edition.

[Late-morning update]

The need for Elon.

“…The likelihood of skewed priorities with the operational mindset within a company that displays this kind of lack of viewpoint diversity is stratospheric. When a GOP donor is harder to find on the payroll than a vegan cannibal, you have to expect that a uniform level of thinking would become entrenched. When every single person in the offices sits in the same bubble, those overseeing the enforcement of the terms of service will not question things when questionable decisions are made…”

37 thoughts on “What Elon Should Do About Twitter”

  1. The first paragraph:

    “Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter highlights the risks to human rights and personal safety when any single person has complete control over policies affecting almost 400 million users. And in this case, that person has repeatedly demonstrated that they do not understand the realities of platform policy at scale.”

    It took four people to write that.

    What’s really instructive is that here is an object lesson that all totalitarians and statists need to understand– you need to create rules and procedures with the knowledge and understanding that what you are creating could fall into the hands of your enemies and be used against you. This article doesn’t even get close to touching this, instead concentrating on minor procedural changes that seem to be more like a list of their pet projects to make “kinder, gentler” censorship.

    (It’s also a lesson that the Stupid Party will, once again, fail to learn if the expected blowout happens in November.)

    1. “It has long struggled to deal with bots and troubling tweets by major figures that can easily go viral in just a few minutes, allowing mis- or disinformation to rapidly spread.”

      Yeah, that screams censor things that make Democrats look bad, because that is what happened. How can we take an op-ed on this issue seriously when it traffics in some of the worst misinformation since 2016? They even advocate for mass blockings. That doesn’t square with the ideal of free speech.

      I do agree there needs to be anonymity. Its not like the feds can’t find out who a person is if they go postal and the feds fake more attacks than they bust, so its not like letting them read everyone’s correspondence will make anyone safer.

    2. ” instead concentrating on minor procedural changes that seem to be more like a list of their pet projects to make “kinder, gentler” censorship.”

      That’s also evident by the disappointing whining about how a popular figure can spread “misinformation” and/or “disinformation” quickly. I thought they supported free speech, but I guess not.

  2. (It’s also a lesson that the Stupid Party will, once again, fail to learn if the expected blowout happens in November.)
    I suppose there’s little comfort to be gained in the idea that this is not your father’s Stupid Party?

  4. Twitter has 400 million users? That’s all? WTF? Why does anyone take it seriously?

    I think it’s a garbage site, and I never use it for anything. I hate inclusion of tweets in articles, where they have what seems like a screenshot of the tweet, and then retype it in normal text. Who is the target market of crap like that?

    You know, I just realized that there’s something I hate. I don’t hate as a general rule. But I hate Twitter, and anything associated with it (except Elon).

    1. “Who is the target market of crap like that?”

      People who block Twitter at the browser level.

  6. What on earth are these people being threatened with, or promised, that they *ALL* betray us, without exception? And by who?

    Any small set of people with spines that actually do have the principles they espouse could have arrested this descent into totalitarian hell.

  7. Frankly, after thinking about it for awhile I wish Elon hadn’t taken on this project. I really prefer he’d focus on SpaceX and not get distracted by the culture wars. Let’s get to Mars first. If Twitter can keep up and survive fine otherwise I’d let it go. Maybe Elon feels that SpaceX is running into obstacles because of a counter productive narrative spawned by a faux mindshare site like Twitter. I dunno. I’d like to think the truth always wins out in the end. I just don’t want Elon losing focus. And I fear the Twit-verse if fully capable of doing that. He’ll only get dings for trying to ‘fix’ it no matter what he does. I hope this doesn’t backfire on him.

    1. OK, is this a sign that Elon thinks Super Heavy and Starship are going to be treading water for awhile?

      It also might not be a distraction as the Democrats working for the the federal government have used their jobs to go after Musk and his businesses. Twitter is a big part of how the Democrats and their government agents get things done. Musk can’t do much about the DNC Grima Wormtounges in the federal workforce but buying Twitter strikes at their heart of one of their civilian power bases.

      Locks only keep good men out and for Democrats, they are in a situation much like with Republicans on SCOTUS, at least they will follow the rules, and that works for Democrats because then they are the only cheaters.

      1. I think Elon was thinking of his kids.
        His kids on twitter and his kids on Mars.

        We don’t know what FAA going to do.
        It doesn’t look good, but they said they would say something in a couple of days.

        It as bad as Joe Biden delaying the lunar crew program.
        And Russia will not land a lunar robotic lander, and India delayed it’s robotic lander, until 2023.
        I have seen anything of US private landers, but as general rule their schedules will slip.

      2. That would be very cool:

        His opponents in the government are illegally interfering with his businesses, and using Twitter to coordinate it. Twitter won’t release the logs so he can sue.

        Buys Twitter. Sees logs. Sues into oblivion.

  8. Absolutely hilarious. As most here are fully cognizant of, for years ArsTechnica’s comment section has been a giant content-free (though occasionally entertaining) circle jerk encampment of progressive marxists, madly competing with each other over upvoting and downvoting. I believe if your browser is set to clear your cache at each restart, if you click on the comment icon for an article you get a simple list of comments ordered by upvotes minus downvotes.

    Right now the highest rated comment (out of ~1200) on Jon Brodkin’s piece is… “Fuck.” That ladies and gentlemen is the sum total of intellectual weight the left can summon on Elon Musk buying Twitter and taking it private. It really looks like 650 some participants at the comment section at that website decided the best, most reasoned, well-argued, rational and intelligent response to this development is… “Fuck.”

    Priceless.

    1. As most here are fully cognizant of, for years ArsTechnica’s comment section has been a giant content-free (though occasionally entertaining) circle jerk encampment of progressive marxists, madly competing with each other over upvoting and downvoting.

      Yes. Sadly, only the Eric Berger article comboxes are halfway bearable, because the hivemind hate is momentarily redirected at legacy aerospace companies and, most exceptionally, pork-chasing congressmen.

      Still, serious discussion of space policy or engineering is more easily and painlessly found in the NSF forums.

    1. What’s worse is, it’s not even fresh Woke Rage at the skit. Back in 2017, an entire humanities class at Reed College melted down when “King Tut” was screened for discussion. “That’s like somebody … making a song just littered with the n-word everywhere,” a member of the group, Reedies Against Racism, told The Atlantic. “The gold face of the saxophone dancer leaving its tomb is an exhibition of blackface.”

      You’d think the Twitter algorithm rage generators could have moved onto untapped Steve Martin outrages against humanity now, like The Jerk. Honestly shocked *that* one hasn’t been cancelled by now.

      1. It takes awhile for the comedy of irony to filter through the clay and gravel of semi-permeable wokeism before it seeps into the cancellation groundwater as pure outrage. It’s a very slow process through dense material.

      2. Oh, that likely isn’t the worst part. I suspect that if you look into the people who are upset about that, a large percentage will believe in some rather fanciful things about Africa similar to the last subway shooter in NYC and the Christmas Parade terrorist attack.

    1. Just saw a story I didn’t believe at first, actually still can hardly believe, but DHS Sec Mayorkas announced during the House hearings on the border that he’s created a “Disinformation Governance Board“. Worse, the person named to lead this Board, Nina Jankowicz, later announced on Twitter that’s she’s been involved with this for the past 2 months. I expect that to be lost as this news gets out, but that’s before (or at least around) Musk mentioned acquiring Twitter.

  12. You all don’t get it. Now that he owns Twitter, Musk is threatening to (as Sarah Hoyt likes to say) ruthlessly leave us the hell alone. That is a damn scary thing that no democracy can long survive. No billionaire (except Carlos Slim, Jeff Bezos, or Mark Zuckerberg) should have such control over a major media outlet.

      1. Sorry it was a fake tweet from Elon saying he was “deleting Twitter and for everyone to go outside and enjoy the fresh air. FB next.”

        Now, even for members of the SpaceX group, I see FB has removed it for failing a ‘fact check’ lol.

  15. Many academics and others on the left are saying they will be abandoning Twitter immediately!! Without even waiting to see what Musk does?

    To them I say: “Leap away, the basement window is wide open!”

    1. These are the same so-called academics who moved to Canada in 2016, right?

      (Why did they never want to move to Socialist paradises like Cuba or Venezuela?)

  18. “When every single person in the offices sits in the same bubble, those overseeing the enforcement of the terms of service will not question things when questionable decisions are made”

    This is true but the culture there is framed as just magically arising from nowhere when the reality is that the culture was created intentionally. Twitter didn’t end up as it did because of poor management, operating inefficiencies, or perverse incentives. Twitter wasn’t a byproduct of a bubble, the bubble is the intentional creation of Twitter. It was on purpose. It wasn’t an accident.

    Twitter is a case of management enacting effective policies. It is just that those policies helped to illegally rig an election and facilitate several coups. Their other policies are trash because Progressive Marxism is a trash ideology, however, they implemented those polices quite well.

    Redstate’s invitation to Twitter headquarters wasn’t lost in the mail. They weren’t invited.

    This is what people don’t get about free speech. While our laws are mainly restrictions on government, the idea of free speech is a cultural one and it doesn’t just rise up magically. How do you recognize free speech in your personal life? Free speech also has to be cultivated, grown with intent, within society.

    Who can say how Twitter will turn out? What we do know is that we can’t rely on eccentric billionaires to solve every problem. The other one is a sociopath who gives hundreds of millions to militant Progressive Marxist groups.

  19. All this talk about freedom is very fine but what it will come down to is money. Why do you think it works the way it does? It’s simple; it’s really easy and virtually cost free for a computer to pick up a word of short phrase to take down. Any sort of appeal process takes human intervention and that costs big time. How many milliseconds (microseconds) per tweet of human interaction, on average, does it take for the whole platform to become a vast money pit? What all of this shows is just how far we are from actual machine intelligence.

    Of course, with no rules at all, advertisers (money) won’t touch it with a ten foot pole. Maybe Elon can find a way to make it work, good luck to him.

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