Elon Musk now owns 9.2% of twitter...update.. will soon be the sole owner as Board of Directors accepts his purchase offer

[K1052]

'we had to destroy the village to save it'.

It's remarkably authoritarian to decide that the government needs to employ armies of people to monitor social media websites to enforce 'neutrality'. It's also remarkable that you don't seem to realize that what's considered 'neutral' is likely to be a lot more biased if you put politicians in charge of it than if you leave it as it is. Imagine what would have been considered 'not neutral' under Trump, for example.

Basically people looking at China and saying "Yes, that's some proper free speech so lets have that".

 

[Brovane]

And yet the world's richest man buying it Twitter is ....somehow not this?

Oligarchs are already Big-Tech so nothing changes.

 

[MomentsofSanity]

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.... today just got so much worse...

 

[Brovane]

First, all available evidence is that Twitter is neutral in moderation. Second, 'neutral' as decided by who? Is the idea that if they are found non-neutral at some point by a court or whatever that they become liable for all the various shit that was posted on there? That would again, lead to them fleeing to another country or shutting down entirely.

Also, imagine how insanely unworkable this would be as national policy. That would mean any time someone complained the courts would need to pore over each individual site's content moderation policy and then engage in some sort of evaluation of all the posts on it to decide if it was applied 'neutrally' or not, which would be a herculean task. How is a court evaluating the billions of messages posted on Twitter to decide if their content moderation is 'neutral'?

How do we know Twitter is neutral in moderation if we have no idea how Twitter is moderating?

 

[K1052]

How long till Elon trips over the advertisers that pay Twitter's bills? Two weeks? Three?

 

[fskimospy]

How do we know Twitter is neutral in moderation if we have no idea how Twitter is moderating?

Because you can look at the output. Turns out Twitter is doing a great job of moderating in a neutral way. This shouldn't be surprising though as Twitter has no incentive to behave otherwise - it would cost them money.

https://psyarxiv.com/ay9q5

TLDR: Republicans get suspended from Twitter way more often than Democrats do but the explanation is entirely explained by Republicans breaking the rules more often. This holds true when applying a standard from fact checkers but, even more importantly, holds true when you ask a crowdsourced group of people specifically selected for partisan balance.

Needless to say though, this required a lot of work by trained researchers to examine this for even a small cohort of people - your idea for doing this at scale for not only Twitter but the entire internet is completely infeasible.

 

[UNCjigga]

OP needs to edit thread title.

So…is this like George Soros buying out the Murdoch kids to get Fox News??? I’m curious how quickly things will change.

If AP/Reuters joined forces and built an alternative to Twitter for all the world’s journalists, I doubt it would be any better than what they have now.

 

[VW MAN]

How do we know Twitter is neutral in moderation if we have no idea how Twitter is moderating?

Why does twitter need to be defined as "neutral in moderation" as you say? What part of their Terms of Service coupled with current laws mandate that they need to be "neutral in moderation"?

 

[fskimospy]

Why does twitter need to be defined as "neutral in moderation" as you say? What part of their Terms of Service coupled with current laws mandate that they need to be "neutral in moderation"?

Oh his argument is that we should conditionally repeal section 230 and make its protections depend on a social media company being 'neutral'. If Twitter is not neutral in moderation the US government should set up a task force to examine all their moderation decisions and then punish them by holding them liable for all defamatory speech on the website, which would of course immediately bankrupt them.

Apparently that is a preferable decision to someone simply choosing to speak through one of the many, many other avenues available to them.

 

[cytg111]

Musk saves Democracy. In his own mind anyway.

So this is the decline of Elon… how the end starts.

 

[Brovane]

Because you can look at the output. Turns out Twitter is doing a great job of moderating in a neutral way. This shouldn't be surprising though as Twitter has no incentive to behave otherwise - it would cost them money.

https://psyarxiv.com/ay9q5

TLDR: Republicans get suspended from Twitter way more often than Democrats do but the explanation is entirely explained by Republicans breaking the rules more often. This holds true when applying a standard from fact checkers but, even more importantly, holds true when you ask a crowdsourced group of people specifically selected for partisan balance.

Needless to say though, this required a lot of work by trained researchers to examine this for even a small cohort of people - your idea for doing this at scale for not only Twitter but the entire internet is completely infeasible.

LOL. You mean the same company that banned discussion of the COVID Origin Lab Leak Theory? Only to turn out later it was a perfectly legitimate dialogue to have.

 

[brycejones]

How do we know Twitter is neutral in moderation if we have no idea how Twitter is moderating?

Twitter has no obligation to be neutral in its moderation.

 

[brycejones]

LOL. You mean the same company that banned discussion of the COVID Origin Lab Leak Theory? Only to turn out later it was a perfectly legitimate dialogue to have.

Now we're getting to the heart of it. Please tell us more.

 

[cytg111]

LOL. You mean the same company that banned discussion of the COVID Origin Lab Leak Theory? Only to turn out later it was a perfectly legitimate dialogue to have.

Except it was being used by right wing retards to justify not getting the shots and thus killing people. Thats the reason why cant have nice things.

 

[Brovane]

Except it was being used by right wing retards to justify not getting the shots and thus killing people. Thats the reason why cant have nice things.

Twitter was banning the discussion of the COVID Origin Lab Leak Theory in early 2020. What vaccinations were available then?

 

[Brovane]

Now we're getting to the heart of it. Please tell us more.

Can you tell me it was a dialogue not worth having?

 

[fskimospy]

LOL. You mean the same company that banned discussion of the COVID Origin Lab Leak Theory? Only to turn out later it was a perfectly legitimate dialogue to have.

This part of the paper seems to be highly relevant to you:

Yet these charges of political bias are based on anecdotal instances of particular platform actions(e.g.,Twitter’s permanent suspension of Trump’s account), rather than any systematic evaluation of how rates of platform enforcement –such as account suspension– vary based on users’ political orientations.

What you're doing is ignoring empirical evidence that tells you what you don't want to hear. Ironically, it's telling you exactly the thing you claim to want so you would think finding this out would make you happy.

 

[sactoking]

Makes me glad I don't use Twitter.

 

[Brovane]

This part of the paper seems to be highly relevant to you:


What you're doing is ignoring empirical evidence that tells you what you don't want to hear. Ironically, it's telling you exactly the thing you claim to want so you would think finding this out would make you happy.

You seem really upset that someone has a different viewpoint than you.

 

[brycejones]

Can you tell me it was a dialogue not worth having?

In the absence of actual evidence from meaningful sources. Yes it was a dialogue not worth having.

FYI wild "just connect the dots" speculation in the form or conspiracy theories is not evidence.

 

[HurleyBird]

I said I was more concerned with his destroying the planet via POTUS power than with his tweets, while he was was POTUS.

Now your argument is that he got into power because of his tweets??

That seems to be goalpost move.

When he was president he had MUCH more power than tweeting.

It's a big non-sequitur. The truth value of the original assertion is orthogonal to the truth value of the response.

 

[Brovane]

In the absence of actual evidence from meaningful sources. Yes it was a dialogue not worth having.

FYI wild "just connect the dots" speculation in the form or conspiracy theories is not evidence.

Yes it was a dialogue worth having.

I’ll describe the two theories, explain why each is plausible, and then ask which provides the better explanation of the available facts. It’s important to note that so far there is no direct evidence for either theory. Each depends on a set of reasonable conjectures but so far lacks proof. So I have only clues, not conclusions, to offer. But those clues point in a specific direction. And having inferred that direction, I’m going to delineate some of the strands in this tangled skein of disaster.

https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the...RbaCEkLPH1BZuOd4rOLc7eu9NPs7FRiqRuVNuUvHJPC_c

 

[Heartbreaker]

Musk saves Democracy. In his own mind anyway.

So this is the decline of Elon… how the end starts.

Well, help tilt democracy away from the Democrats, with their scary talk of billionaire taxes.

So, yeah, saving Democracy in ways that benefit Elon Musk.

 

[fskimospy]

You seem really upset that someone has a different viewpoint than you.

I'm not - and it's not my fault you believe demonstrably silly things and want to create some weird government truth corps to police social media content moderation.

I suspect there's nothing anyone can do that will lead you to admit you were wrong here because I think this thread makes it abundantly clear that this is an emotional issue for you. If you're able to take a step back and read that paper with an open mind I think you'll be very happy to find out that Twitter is better than you thought it was.

 

[brycejones]

Yes it was a dialogue worth having.

I’ll describe the two theories, explain why each is plausible, and then ask which provides the better explanation of the available facts. It’s important to note that so far there is no direct evidence for either theory. Each depends on a set of reasonable conjectures but so far lacks proof. So I have only clues, not conclusions, to offer. But those clues point in a specific direction. And having inferred that direction, I’m going to delineate some of the strands in this tangled skein of disaster.

https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the...RbaCEkLPH1BZuOd4rOLc7eu9NPs7FRiqRuVNuUvHJPC_c

You're wrong.