People’s problem with Twitter was always that they would arbitrarily decide what is or isn’t acceptable speech, and Elon’s new solution does…exactly the same thing. The only thing that will change now is that liberal politicians and views will start being targeted rather than conservative/alt-right ones. Is anyone here really naïve enough to believe that this whole saga has been about “free speech”? It is simply a shift of power from the left to the right, financed by a handful of billionaires, Wall Street banks and Saudi/Qatari Princes.
> The only thing that will change now is that liberal politicians and views will start being targeted rather than conservative/alt-right ones.
Conservative speech like "lower taxes are better", "extract more petroleum", and "prayer should be allowed in public school" were never targeted.
The "conservative" speech banned were things like "LGBT people should have their human rights denied" and "Let's get together and attack the Capitol to stop the transfer of power".
> It is simply a shift of power from the left to the right, financed by a handful of billionaires, Wall Street banks and Saudi/Qatari Princes.
That raises the question of what are the "dividends" for those parties, regardless of the financial success of Twitter.
Look at the history of banned accounts [1] You don't need polynomial regression to figure out that nobody was being banned for traditional, non-hate and non-violence-inducing conservative or liberal speech. It's mostly harassment, threats, impersonation and disinformation.
Nobody has been banned for advocating: lower taxes, higher taxes, cuts to government spending, increased government spending, abortion rights, anti-abortion rights, etc.
The problems with Twitter's previous approach to banning is that those banned for "disinformation" were consistently anti-establishment and right-of-center. Twitter strictly enforced its Terms of Service against political opponents of its favored party, while often turning a blind eye to offenses from those more closely aligned with their staff's ideology.
The description on Wikipedia regarding ZeroHedge's suspension is heavily biased. Why do they link to a BuzzFeed News article, instead of ZH's actual article? Which parts of the ZH article are proven false? Buzzfeed doesn't say, and neither did Twitter. Same for Dr. Robert Malone, what exactly is "misinformation" about his content, and who is making that determination? What is the censor's area of expertise to make such a judgement? Who is the censor?
Candace Owens was banned for criticism of a governor's COVID policies. Where does that fit in your characterization of bannings as "harrassment, threats, impersonation, and disinformation"?
Meanwhile, grifter Talcum X still has a Twitter account with 1 million followers, despite endorsing violence on multiple occasions and threatening to dox innocent law enforcement personnel.
And of course Kathy Griffin not rating a ban for a pic of Donald Trump's severed head (because comedy), but numerous other users were banned for making similar violent jokes/threats about politicians.
> That raises the question of what are the "dividends" for those parties, regardless of the financial success of Twitter.
My guess is that they see twitter as the central online hub of anti-capitalist ideology, which is also correlated with marginalized identity politics. If the bankers could nip that growing movement in the bud before it fully coalesces into something with real political power, then that would seem to be well worth $44B (which of course they wouldn't actually lose because they'd write off their losses against their taxes).
> My guess is that they see twitter as the central online hub of anti-capitalist ideology
Then joke is on them because the far right is also anti-capitalist, but in the form of ethnonationalist socialist authoritarianism (Yes, there are many shorter names for that).
Or perhaps they're actually on board with that approach since they have found that an increasingly pluralistic democracy does not serve their interests.
But in the end, it's probably just that owning an tool of chaos is itself a form of power.
> Then joke is on them because the far right is also anti-capitalist
It might look like anti-capitalism, but time and time again, the far right's "problem" with capitalism is actually a problem with the results of liberal democracy in capitalist societies.
They very much want capitalism, but not a corrupted form of it. They feel that capitalist liberal democracy rewards the wrong people, like allowing what were once subservient minorities to succeed and accumulate wealth, sometimes surpassing the success of the majority, or allowing non-traditional people, art, cultures, etc to flourish if there was a market for it.
For example, Nazis were very much about the Social Darwinist aspects of naked capitalism, and the word privatization was coined to describe Nazi economic policy[1]. However, they were very much against the results that capitalist liberalism allowed to flourish, which were the basis for their rhetoric around "degeneracy" and campaigns against what they saw as degeneration of traditional (and ultimately mythical, given the Aryan supremacy mythos) culture. They saw capitalism as corrupted by Jewish and foreign cabals that pulled the strings to keep the Volk down. What they ended up doing is seizing capital from Jewish people and gave it to German capitalists[2], which I wouldn't describe as anti-capitalist at all:
> Business owners benefitted as much as private individuals. Companies like Neckermann, which sold mail-order goods and vacation packages, and Evonik, a manufacturing group formerly known as Degussa, bought businesses formerly owned by Jewish people. The ability to consolidate power made them leaders of their industries, and implicit partners with the Nazi government. Each of these transactions were legal, and many were meticulously recorded.
While far right rhetoric seems on its face like it's anti-capitalist, because if you squint it can kind of look similar to the rhetoric from the left, that's a folly. Fascism and its ilk are reactions to liberal capitalism, and coincidentally, socialists have a lot to say about capitalism, but the similarities end there. It's a mistake to take such rhetoric as being inherently anti-capitalist and not, instead, anti-liberal society.
> They very much want capitalism, but not a corrupted form of it.
Let me clarify and demonstrate that we basically agree. The difference is inclusivity vs exclusivity.
They want exclusive socialism - as in guaranteed high base living standards - for an ethnic elite, built on the labor and deprivation of an subservient ethnic underclass working natural resources that the ethnic elite hold own over.
There will still be those who own more capital and less, but importantly they will be limited to the ethnic elite.
There are plenty of historical examples of this: slave economies in the Americas, extractive colonialism, apartheid, Jim Crow and so many other examples.
I would agree that liberal capitalist democracy runs counter to all of those goals, because it is (at least in-theory) inclusive.
> Is anyone here really naïve enough to believe that this whole saga has been about “free speech”?
I am, although I disagree with the characterization "naive". Twenty years ago Musk's attitude was widely held, particularly in the tech industry. I see nothing incredible about the proposition that Musk believes this still. Also, the whole "if you have any point of agreement with people on the right, you are alt-right" thing seems silly to me. There are other positions between team red and team blue.
> People’s problem with Twitter was always that they would arbitrarily decide what is or isn’t acceptable speech, and Elon’s new solution does…exactly the same thing.
That was perhaps one problem with Twitter, and no, this is not the same thing.
Other, much bigger problems were that they'd arbitrarily block (as in: make invisible) tweets, replace them with "warnings" of dubious provenance, declare "misinformation" (often based on poor/biased understanding of the topics at hand; recall the repeated flagging of the Cochrane Collaboration Twitter account last year [1]), ban accounts entirely after "three strikes" of this sort, and many other egregious acts of censorship that frequently correlated more strongly with political ideology than with fact or actual threat.
Musk's comment doesn't say how they're going to decide what is hate speech, and that's pretty critical context here, so we'll see. There's obviously going to be a narrow class of speech that needs regulation, on any social platform. But if it's possible to say pretty much anything outside of this narrow class of content without getting banned, it would be a significant shift toward freedom of expression.
(Cochrane is the gold standard for medical evidence review. Flagging them for "misinformation" would be hilariously misinformed, if it weren't so scary.)
Trump and Elon have learned how to be controversial, which drives engagement. They literally are the result of the algorithms that have driven engagement.
