Duh. Twitter is obviously hurting for cash. Blue subscribers are paying them, almost literally for the privilege of doing whatever they want - no incentive to ban/suspend them.
“Altruistic purposes”, what would those be? I’ve only seen him censor his opponents, spew bog standard far-right talking points and make poor product decisions. How is that “altruistic”?
There's part of me that considers driving the hate machine that is Twitter into the ground and general irrelevance an altruistic purpose.
The world would be better off without Twitter, until they can figure out how to separate the hate machine from its useful purposes in a sustainable way.
Finally destroying the hellsite, for the benefit of all.
(As someone who (a) used to enjoy Twitter a lot, (b) always suspected that Twitter was quite bad for society, I have mixed feeling about its current implosion.)
(To be clear, he obviously is not destroying Twitter for altruistic purposes; the above is a joke. It should not be necessary to point this out, but one odd attribute of figures like Trump and Musk is that there are always people who insist that everything they do, no matter how obviously ridiculous, is actually intentional and ingenious, so Poe’s Law is in full effect here.)
Not really, only if we assume the market is rational.
I think the fact that Elon Musk it the most successful entrepreneur in the world is a testament to the contrary. And that being a successful businessperson has nothing to do with merit or skill, but a lot more to do with happenstance, and former wealth.
Our public policy on the global market has been neo-liberalism on full steam, the rich are getting richer, not because business people are getting smarter, but because government is deregulating exploitation as a matter of public policy. Somebody is bound to become extremely rich in this environment, and it just so happens that the people getting extremely rich are either the ones that exploit workers (i.e. Jeff Bezos) or the ones that fool rich investors (i.e. Elon Musk).
He very clearly cares deeply about Twitter losing money. He was desperate to cut costs and increase revenue right from the start. He frequently whines about the cost of running Twitter. He has been stiffing a ton of Twitter's suppliers and not paying the bills.
And there's a good reason for this. He is using a his own Tesla shares as collateral for some of the debt.
Sucking up to autocratic rulers while claiming to be a free speech advocate is very altruistic (/s).
Saying Twitter was already in the ground and then praising the guy that dug the hole a lot deeper, is also suggesting that your assessment of him is not based on his business acumen.
Maybe you're hoping he's pumping your crypto bags? That's one of the things I consider him to be very good at.
Lack of moderation is 10x a worse problem for revenue that offending the blue icons.
Moreover, it seems most of the activists don't want to contemplate that bigotry runs in all directions and saying things about 'men' or 'white people' probably should fall under the same auspices ... which is why even as irresponsible and inconsistent as Musk is, he leans a bit more 'loose' than not which is probably preferable than ideological forms of censorship.
I also feel that as a society, we're going to get used to 'foul language' and that it just doesn't have the resonance it might have had.
Someone spreading fake papers saying 'doctors are trying to kill you with vaccines', with a ton of followers, is actually more problematic than some random dirtbag's side-comment.
Anecdote to the contrary, I personally got banned from Twitter for answering the question “What do you think about them men?” with “#KillAllMen”. Now this is obviously not a real threat to use violence, but it got me banned nonetheless. To me it seems like Twitter is perfectly happy to moderate against the likes of feminists and LGBTQ+ activists.
The statement 'kill all men' is literally a call to violence.
Now of course (probably?) you didn't mean it as that, but it still falls well within purview of 'obviously moderated', probably immediately, by the automated mechanisms, and frankly, how could you expect anything otheriwse?
The fact that you're willing to admit your bigotry and blatant hate speech on another forum, as though somehow you're a victim, is probably an exmaple of how we tolerate trolling dirtbag bigotry, so long as it 'targets the correct side'.
Never claimed I shouldn’t have been banned (and frankly, I’m a little glad I was), just providing an anecdote that “saying things about 'men' or 'white people' does indeed fall under the same auspices” as bigots on the other political wing.
Full disclosure though, I do believe moderation should not be applied equally across political the spectrum, when one extreme goes against a protected minority, but I won’t go into further details here on HN, as it would go against the guidelines of not engaging in political battles.
>>The fact that you're willing to admit your bigotry and blatant hate speech on another forum, as though somehow you're a victim, is probably an exmaple of how we tolerate trolling dirtbag bigotry, so long as it 'targets the correct side'.
Well said, it's like a neonazi taking pride in having advocated genocide of all Jews. This is why the "protected minority" ideology, whereby how people can be treated is based on the alleged victimization of their group, is dangerous.
>This is why the "protected minority" ideology, whereby how people can be treated is based on the alleged victimization of their group, is dangerous.
I remain hopeful that US laws and regulations regarding "protected classes" will someday be successfully challenged by the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause.
My "perennialy [sic] problematic ideal" is that the history book you got from the library has been overdue since 1972, and the historian has a 1950s conformist America mindset, which is the basis of the basic, red-pilled model of white male resentment.
There is no "nuance" in that mindset. It is factually wrong. It doesn't work today. It wallows in nostalgia. The nostalgia is, in part, to make up for the fact that the red pill contains no culture: No art, no literature, no music, no theatre - nothing that makes America a global cultural beacon, and nothing that women would want to spend any time with. It is a loser mindset, and deservedly so.
Would you please stop posting ideological flamewar comments to HN? You've done it repeatedly in this thread. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
We've had to ask you this before, so if you'd please fix this, we'd be grateful.
We've banned this account for posting flamewar comments and ignoring our request to stop.
Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Would you please stop posting ideological flamewar comments to HN? You've done it repeatedly in this thread. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
We've had to ask you this before, so if you'd please fix this, we'd be grateful.
I would gladly delete most of my comments on this thread. HN is a fine site and the way you run it is instrumental to keeping it that way. Still, you might give some thought to the healthiness of showcasing what are objectively fringe ideologies that would in other places be rightly be called out as, at least, adjacent to outright bigotry. There's another site that's dying because they think that stuff is good.
I mean, if someone says a group of people should be killed based on their political stance or sexual orientation that should be a criminal offense. And I might not support all of the groups these days, but I reject blanket statements like “all transgenders are pedophiles”. This is stupid and wrong. And if teenagers are tweeting this, they’re going to end up very stupid adults.
It’s our problem as a society and more precisely law enforcement problem. If you say that you want to put bullets in someone offline you should be prosecuted. Internet is not different.
You’re looking at this purely through your own lens, but I choose to look at this in terms of society as a whole. We have young people parroting extremist points of view. That’s a societal failure. Where did our education and child care systems go so wrong as to make extremism this attractive?
Carried through to its natural conclusion, we will end up in fascist states, young people will end up in prison or we’ll end up with more innocent victims. All options are bad, it’s just a question of worst.
Targeting Twitter and trying to fix what happens at childhood will not or reduce stop hate online.
Adults can still disseminate hate on other online channels.
Usually ignoring them, not giving them attention and just sending them to the forces.
Should you really give attention to them, the wisdom of the crowd that engages in (doxxing) is already a major deterrent, although I disagree with this, which is why ignoring them already works.
I’m still not following. What distinguishes things that are “real” from things that are “not real”. Like, chupacabras are not real, but Twitter isn’t like them.
When I come across someone like https://twitter.com/RocPhoenix2, are they can actual Nazi or just pretending to be one? What is the difference between a Nazi and a person who acts like a Nazi?
> I would highly doubt any real person would do what they write of in real life.
Why? It’s certainly a thing that people have done. What makes these people any different?
> Researchers collected tweets promoting hate from 100 Twitter Blue subscribers. The tweets were reported to the platform using Twitter’s own tools for flagging hateful conduct. Four days after reporting the tweets, researchers found that Twitter had failed to act on 99% of the posts and 100% of the accounts remained active. In the one instance that Twitter removed a hateful tweet, the account from which it was tweeted remains active.
Translation: Some "researchers" flagged a bunch of tweets they didn't like and then got mad when the accounts weren't bad 4 days later.
EDIT: Wow the votes on this comment are going "up and down more than an Essex birds underpants" as the BOFH would say. Seems like some people are taking umbridge with my summary.
Fisted by Foucault is a dark substack, meaning at least partly ideological lies and disinformation.
It's a bit like Zero Hedge in that it's one of those places where they like to talk about how the 'World Really Works!' aka 'behind the curtain' and they do so with some actual insight and intelligence, but ultimately there's a lot of BS and lies, and plenty of over misinformation.
The author is also a pro-Putin fascist / apologist who thinks that Putin's invasion of Ukraine must somehow be the result of Russia's victimization by other countries.
There are various example tweets in the article, quite clearly hateful and some calling for violence. Whether someone likes them seems irrelevant, the tweets are what the article says they are - at least the examples.
It’s kind of crazy how groupthink all of the blue checkmarks are, it’s like they’re all the same right-wing bot. Hundreds of them complaining day in and day out about trans people and CRT. Each coming to Elon’s defense after every stupid move he makes, saying Musk is for “free speech” every time he censors something. I wonder how many are actually just his sock puppets?
It really is incredible how they are all the same person. And it doesn't even have to be one of those reply threads where all the blue checks are being Very Concerned about trans people or CRT. Just watching them parrot each other's AI boosterism, or crypto, or real estate.
Ranking twitter blue subscriber's replies first is hilariously dumb. Sure, it strokes the ego of the people paying for it so they make some quick money off subscriptions, but damn, it's not doing any favours to the overall quality of the site.
Actually they rank the gold checks first which leads to the current hilarious practice where people will mention a gold-checked automaton in replies. The robot will also reply, which means your subthread outranks the blue checks.
I’m astonished this one ever got past the design stages. Even dating/hookup sites, who pioneered this pay-for-attention mechanic, have long ago realised that it’s a problem, and have largely either abandoned it in favour of other monetisation approaches or rationed it (For instance, Grindr has a feature where you can pay to move to the front of the grid, but only for an hour).
“The black culture has done more damage [than] the klan ever did”
“The Jewish Mafia wants to replace us all with brown people”
“Trannies are pedophiles”
“Diversity is a codeword for White Genocide”
“Hitler was right”, accompanied by a montage of the former dictator
Black people belong “locked in cages at the zoo”
LGBTQ+ rights activists need “IRON IN THEIR DIET. Preferably from a #AFiringSquad”
I think what you're describing for "something a racist would very likely say" is called a "Dogwhistle" and the reason it is hateful is that it's absolutely trying to set the bar for what they can get away with saying that's terrible without overstepping the line of what is going to get removed.
People understand the basic conceits of public politeness, so racists know they have to put in the smallest amount of work to let other people cover for them. These have not even really met that bar... But it's worth considering how much of this you would accept from say... known klan members?
Like, I get that if hate groups say it, it's not inherently hate speech, but at what point do you want to be defending hate groups? I don't feel like I need to get real in the weeds about how what the limit of shit I will put up with from KKK members is... And I think it's disingenuous to suggest we should really get deep in the weeds to iron out exactly how they can walk around the rules. We know who the rulebreakers are, and pretending like we don't until they say something truly egregious is like pretending leopards aren't gonna eat our faces.
Yeah... I mean, ultimately it's a private company and it can censor its platform how it wants. This means that it is welcome to include more hate speech, which clearly it is doing.
Not arguing that. But I do think it had a better set of standards for this before it came down to the subjective whims of how Musk was feeling on any given day.
Also, no one has ever considered misgendering hate speech in any legitimate conversation. If you have examples of people legitimately getting censored for misgendering someone, I would love to see it...
Pretty much yes. I think we can at least agree that political parties and those funding the parties behind the invasion of Iraq are at lest 95% there. And thus should be treated with same distain. Voters are maybe 90% there.
I mean, you're getting way to vague here. "Any group that have ever killed anyone? or done any bad thing?"
The nature of the law is being a lot less cut-and-dry than this. But I think hate groups are a pretty readily available opportunity. And there's a lot of them that are operating pretty openly.
Like, I hope no one is wringing their hands that we might get the wrong "nazis" or the wrong "kkk". Let's start with the very straightforward obvious groups, and then we can have a hand-wringing conversation about where to draw the line. But let's not pretend like this is a hard classification problem with hate groups openly running around.
I bet what the censorship zealots would like to see is that twitter removes much more subtle posts that the examples in the article. What can pass for “hate speech” will raise your eyebrows.
That's the problem. Decide some amorphous term like "hate" is not allowed, and the the goalposts shift to framing how everything you don't like is "hate".
Local laws vary, and I believe some commonwealth countries have pretty draconian ones, but outside direct calls for physical violence, I think it's an immediate slippery slope to telling people they can't say categories of things. If the kind of comments here are the worst that result, I don't think that's really a problem.
“The black culture has done more damage [than] the klan ever did” “The Jewish Mafia wants to replace us all with brown people” “Trannies are pedophiles” “Diversity is a codeword for White Genocide” “Hitler was right”, accompanied by a montage of the former dictator Black people belong “locked in cages at the zoo” LGBTQ+ rights activists need “IRON IN THEIR DIET. Preferably from a #AFiringSquad”
That's not the right framing. What are the specific things about any of those that warrant infringing someone's free speech rights? I mean you posted them twice in this discussion so apparently are ok with people reading them.
I quoted them twice because two (now three) people in this thread said the tweets weren’t that bad, so people should see for themselves exactly what these users are endorsing.
The trick being pulled here is to show some horrendously bad speech, say "just ban stuff like this that's super bad!", then once the precedent is set that censorship is okay in some circumstances, keep expanding that set of circumstances until it covers everything the establishment disagrees with.
Elon Musk has been censoring things left and right, with and without excuse. This isn’t about some sneaky way to censor Twitter. Twitter is already censored, just not hate speech.
I did this as it's the only way to make the site even barely usable. Then I asked myself, why even bother? Why give Musk traffic? I don't use Twitter anymore (after 10+ years) and can't say I miss it at all.
I think it depends on how you build up your bubble. I am also a 10+ Twitter user and I had a pretty drama free and informative timeline. Whereas for some people it has always been a cesspool. Sure my timeline got worse in the last year but I am still following valuable accounts that I'm not ready to give up yet.
If it makes you feel any better Elon claimed that large block lists make Twitter lose money.
But the last 10 years certainly taught me that "how could they allow this and didn't see it coming and did something against it?" has a much more nuanced answer than I would have thought earlier.
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