I find the question of ownership to be really interesting for a platform like twitter that relies, entirely, on user-generated content.
It seems to me like share-holder ownership is pretty incapable of dealing with the complexities of being such a global and influential platform. The plutocratic model of 1 share 1 vote and financialization of what is pretty much seen and used as a public service really gets in the way of turning the platform into something that could be truly useful for humanity.
I think we are very much due on a change of paradigm when it comes to these sort of services. What is it that twitter users want, what do governments want (many politicians use twitter as an official means of communication), what do workers of the platform want? All of these stakeholders should have a say in what is done with twitter.
To me, saying "the board is at fault" and thinking it could be better as a privately owned corporation is also missing the target. Of course, I think these tech billionaires think they can make better decisions for everyone and so to them it is obvious that a truly public form of ownership would be a mistake. It's the benevolent dictator story.
To finalise, it would be interesting to see an exploration on technologies that could help stake-ownership management so that we can have firms that are capable of making decisions that make people happier and societies a better place.
The issue here is that you're ignoring completely how Twitter was built, and how things like Twitter get built.
It's very easy now to say that everyone should get a say in what is done with Twitter, but back when Twitter was first launched what most people thought was that Twitter was stupid and would never get off the ground. I mean, who'd want a service where you can write only an amount of characters so short you can say nothing of substance?
It was people like Dorsey who bit the bullet and actually built the thing, which only later was proven to have potential. Never mind that people could be right - Twitter could be a stupid idea and it could have blown up in the founders' faces. It would be very good in that case that we didn't have a "truly public form of ownership" in that case - then it would have failed without damaging anyone but the founders.
But you can't get that protection to society without the flipside. If everyone gets protected from the blow-ups, then you need to make the people who create the ideas that seem very stupid but actually work out in a huge way be rewarded proportionately to how much everyone was wrong about the idea. Which is, thankfully, how it works.
The idea that Twitter should be "truly public" because the content there is user-generated ignores that there would be no Twitter and none of that user-generated content in the first place without a small group of people taking the risk to build something everyone considered "stupid". The idea that people who take that risk should have the fruits of their risk-taking taken from them for their success just means that such risks would not be taken.
Socialization - such as what you propose - is the flip side of corporate bailouts, and just as wrong: Bailouts make society liable for a business's failure while making the business the sole beneficiary of its own success, while socialization punishes the founders for succeeding while making them the sole holders of liability for failing.
I guess, but as someone else pointed out; the people who created twitter already greatly profited from the venture. I mean, Dorsey isn't part of the board anymore!
In a way, I'm questioning more the IPO than anything else; I think taking the company private after an IPO is a mistake and having it as shareholder owner company is also a mistake due to the size and influence of the platform right now.
I think as a platform grows there are many different ways that ownership can be distributed, no one thinks that a mom and pop shop needs to be socialised, but look at the size and influence of twitter (or facebook, or others). Do you really think people will stop innovating because they can't retain ownership of platforms with hundreds of millions of users? Any platform that gets to this size has already produced billions of dollars for their original owners! I think that's a cynical way of viewing the world, I mean, if anything there are tons of platforms out there that are built from the ground up with openness in mind.
I think you're not approaching things correctly when you say socialization is the flipside of a corporate bailout. The founders and owners of the platform are obviously entitled to compensation for their effort, but I believe there is a point where we can say "okay these people have done good enough!". I mean, big companies buy out smaller companies all the time; why do you think it would be so wrong for a state, or several states to buy out companies and then rework the ownership model of them? Maybe my original comment made it seem as though I was arguing for a state to simply take over. That is not what I'm saying, I'm saying, we need new ownership models. Lots of states around the world, for example, give benefits to people forming coops; but obviously with Twitter, it's a huge platform that already exists so what should be done about it?
> most people thought was that Twitter was stupid and would never get off the ground. I mean, who'd want a service where you can write only an amount of characters so short you can say nothing of substance?
This isn't how I recall the start of twitter. Since the transmission medium was sms/text messages, the character limit was due to what many characters could be sent in a single sms.
Twitter was seen as a genius application that allowed for sending group sms.
What it grew into, while stubbornly retaining the character limit baffled many people...
The disconnect for me is that I while I agree a lot with this line of reasoning: that is, that private risk taking and entrepreneurship generally is a net good. However, I don’t agree that it necessarily follows from there that such a system falls apart completely if we limit what founders are able to do in perpetuity.
Do you really believe that once you’ve made one thing at one point in time, you should be entitled to everything that follows from it, no matter the effect your subsequent a actually have?
The founders, investors, employees already HAVE been greatly rewarded for their risk and efforts, and in many cases are already off on new ventures. So the system worked as intended. Now the only risk is is held by the likes of Vanguard and a Saudi prince, who are unlikely to be deterred from participating in capitalism in the future if their positions were closed at $54.20.
I don't disagree with you! However, proposing that the government (for instance) should be able to forcibly socialize a platform "for the greater good" opens up some very risky avenues.
What if it doesn't have to be a government forcing but rather a user demanding? Any way that users unionize or demand "no attention without representation"?
Yes, stop using Twitter. It wouldn't work as a company without unpaid user engagement.
Comparing it to unionization or political representation is ridiculous. Most users of Twitter are getting exactly what they want from it: entertainment from a product that's provided "for free".
I believe a total boycott is one approach to try to get a group of people to change their behaviors. I think unionization is another approach that people take, who, for whichever reasons, don't want to leave, and try to gain collective bargaining power to change how the group of people behaves. I think political representation is another approach that people take to change the structure of decision making so that when people don't like something, they have more options than threatening to leave.
But as you say, maybe most, or even the vast majority, of Twitter users don't care and just want it for the "free" entertainment. And that's fine, I'm not saying that people who are satisfied with the current behavior should take any approach to try to change them. I guess I just don't think "well, if you don't like it, you should just leave" approach works very well in situations where it can be quite detrimental for people to leave. Maybe it seems easier because it's "just an app" but some people build much of their professional and social lives on some of these platforms—I know many of these platforms have mediated my professional and social lives during the pandemic—and just up and leaving everything behind may not be the approach that people always want to take for change.
This argues to the side of the point. There’s plenty of models where founders are rewarded for taking risks and the community ends up owning significant shares. In fact Jack himself seems to have been screwed out of much of his stake, which isn’t uncommon when going through many rounds + IPO, and he’s a big proponent of one of these alternative models.
One answer is something people here love to hate, and yet it’s proven to work well for this exact scenario.
It also solves in my mind a few other problems with social network startups. You see before it was almost entirely luck and timing, there didn’t exist many so if you had something unique and the collective unconscious was ready for something new you’d get lucky launching twttr at SXSW.
To beat Twitter or do something similar but different you’re back to the classic catch-22 of social networks, the users drives the value, but you need users. Startups like to give away a few hundred bucks to early adopters, but that just isn’t an incentive anymore.
What is an incentive, and has been proven without a doubt as one as of late, is giving away micro equity. Users will flock to your platform if they get a chance in the upside.
So it solves the catch-22, and it solves the long term ownership alignment problem.
It also attracts scammers, but that shouldn’t have ruined the whole deal for everyone. Unfortunately it did thanks mostly to the SEC.
There seems to be a trend of 'let's socialize this company: it's a public utility!' that is getting stronger. The problem is that people who say this haven't lived in a socialist country and bore the brunt of the ills of 'socialization'. Almost everywhere that governments nationalized corporations, they have turned into cesspools of corruption, inefficiency, and almost no accountability towards (paying) customers or society. I am willing to bet you wouldn't see Russians, Indians, Cuban expats, Venezuelans and others (who lived through the vicissitudes of socialist centrally planned economies) arguing for this.
Sure, but which side here really has the burden of proof that they are best option? It really seems to come down to that. Is the incumbent system really spared from the same or parallel criticisms (corruption, inefficiency, accountability) precisely because its incumbent? "We don't want that because it has been shown to be bad" has less of a ring to it these days, when all the same problems are replicated in the existing, private, commodified system.
People are not saying "let's do twitter like the USSR would have done it." People are rightly saying: "let's try something different."
This place alone, and sometimes despite the crowd in the comments, has taught me more about the ills of ad-based private social networking than anywhere else.
It just doesn't seem rational to me to label any drastic changes as filthy communism and just.. Move on
It's not 'filthy communism', and people who suggest nationalizing industries ought to be better informed: they are the ones who are suggesting the dramatic shift from the status quo. I am suggesting that the nationalization suggestion comes from a place of ignorance of the (grave) pitfalls of doing so.
Suggesting that industries be nationalized is not just "let's try something different"; it's something that's much more serious and has larger implications that should be weighed carefully, versus a corporation that's only answerable to its shareholders changing how it runs its product.
You’re using a couple of totalitarian states as an example, ignoring a whole bunch of nationalised companies in perfectly reasonable countries (like in western Europe), that work quite well. Britain is not turning into a communist hellhole because they nationalise some rail operators that failed to give a decent service.
To get a somewhat relevant example, I really haven’t seen a decent railway infrastructure manager that wasn’t nationalised. Private interests are too eager to cut corners.
Most of the countries you are referring to have a higher economic freedom index than the US and even tighter shareholder control of corporations. They have nationalized industries that are mature and run at a loss, like railroads and postal services. If you put Twitter in the category of "mature industries that should run at a loss" then you might have an argument.
> If you put Twitter in the category of "mature industries that should run at a loss" then you might have an argument.
I do not. I was reacting to the “socialism is EVIL” part of the OP. I won’t argue that Twitter needs to be nationalised, it can DIAF as far as I am concerned.
Not the person you originally responded to but you are literally doing the exact same thing you accuse the original poster of. You are using one example in western Europe while ignoring a whole bunch of countries throughout history that support the original posters point.
Seems to me when non socialist countries (western europe) nationalize companies it generally goes better than when socialist countries do.
So both you and the original poster are somewhat correct but you both are trying to manipulate the data to only support the cause you want.
> So both you and the original poster are somewhat correct but you both are trying to manipulate the data to only support the cause you want.
How so? Their point was that nationalisation was intrinsically totalitarian and bad. My point is that there are several counter-examples that show that it does not follow. I never said it was a panacea.
> what do governments want (many politicians use twitter as an official means of communication)
This needs to be changed; ideally governments would contribute directly into a digital commons directly from their own official web presence. We've had the answer since 2008 for this too - the federated social web.
public communications funded with public money should occur via public infrastructure. Twitter could be in the business of selling this (their hosted software on custom domains) to public agencies, institutions, groups, or anyone who just wants ownership of their own ActivityPub interoperable namespace.
EDIT: No one asked me but I just want to remind everyone here that Bluesky, a vaporware "protocol" initiative, is not doing anything of value.
Governments and politicians need to reach people where people are. Though I agree it is extremely important for governments to have official state-owned channels of communication; we can't close our eyes and pretend like people don't go to twitter first.
That's the situation we are in, that's the situation governments find themselves in. Due to network effects it's very difficult to get people out of these platforms so what should be done about it?
> Governments and politicians need to reach people where people are
One of the other points I've made elsewhere in this thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31067225) is that the public has jumped formats many times before. I suppose they will continue to do that as media evolves.
At least in the case of the US, you need to distinguish between _the government_ and _politicians_. I would agree with your position that, when a politician is acting in their official capacity or when the government as an entity itself is seeking to communicate, that communication should be done in an open manner using the infrastructure of the state.
However, when a politician, or a political group, seeks to communicate, it should _not_ be done on that same infrastructure. There are all sorts of negative implications of real First Amendment protections for speech "in the commons". If, for example, the government owned twitter, it would have to support and allow Neo Nazis, the KKK, cult leaders, and all sorts of other corrosive participants to have access. Private entities have greater leeway.
So, if you are saying the government and officials in their official capacity must communicate via some protocol (RSS, ActivityPub, printed letterhead, etc.) that can be shared and accessed equally by other platforms or tools, I'm on board.
But if you are arguing that Twitter should somehow be nationalized, I think that way lies dragons.
> So, if you are saying the government and officials in their official capacity must communicate via some protocol (RSS, ActivityPub, printed letterhead, etc.) that can be shared and accessed equally by other platforms or tools, I'm on board.
This option, completely. Thank you for the further substantiation of this idea.
An example of this would be a system set up specifically for members of the House of Representatives, each member having access to an account (member@HOUSE.GOV) and access is provisioned through normal directory services like LDAP. We do corporate/institutional email like this today, so the public is more than familiar with this principle.
Then, as a further extrapolation of this idea, we will have have all of the fire departments and police departments and departments of motor vehicles and what have you all running their own individual systems (or bidding for managed services that provide this), allowing for common subscription through standardized protocols - why are all of these groups sharing one giant Twitter.com namespace? Who knows but it's a tired system.
A single place where all government officials, maybe elected officials, can make announcements that you can filter (or follow officials youd prefer to follow, would that make it web app enough?)
by branch or state? Haven’t seen such a webpage yet.
You are describing a B Corporation. They can be started with charters which focus on something other than shareholder value. Feel free to start one as a competitor to Twitter.
>All of these stakeholders should have a say in what is done with twitter
That sounds reasonable, but the person who gets the real power is whoever mediates all those stakeholders and their different needs/goals/desires. Who do you think that will be?
It is why I think we need to explore new ways of democratic control and decision making! Through technology there could be different solutions to the problem of representation.
It is particularly interesting because twitter is so diverse, I think my point is mainly that there are no efforts put into turning making these things happen. And why would they be? The status quo works out very well for those in power.
>It is why I think we need to explore new ways of democratic control and decision making! Through technology there could be different solutions to the problem of representation.
Example of the latest crypto scam that I read about yesterday:
"...a fairly simple [governance] attack:
1. Propose a piece of code to the protocol that says "send the entire treasury to my address A"
2. Buy a bunch of equity tokens and vote the change in
3. Send the entire treasury to your address A"
Step 2 is possible because of flash loans.
"Literally in a single transaction, the attacker buys a ton of governance tokens, injects malicious code into the protocol through governance voting, then uses the malicious code to steal a bunch of money. Web3 is insane"
Ownership would require that users actually invest their capital. I and most other Twitter users have zero interest in doing that. We have better things to do with our money.
One doesn't necessarily have to invest money to get ownership of something. For example, I'm pretty sure worker-coops give ownership rights based on labor, not investment. I wonder if Twitter users could be considered as workers, customers, and clients. Workers as in the ones who produce the content and maintain other users' attention. Customers as the ones to whom people advertise. Clients as the people who advertise to others.
Twitter is very top heavy in regards to who posts and who gets followers / draws interest to the platform. You want Katy Perry & Co. owning Twitter? It wouldn't be an improvement, it would end in disaster. There's no scenario where you can distribute based on content creation and have it not end up like that, it'd be top heavy (relatively small group of outsized owners) in every outcome. When it comes to content, creators are a hyper minority in society (especially those that do it in a prolific manner), mimics and consumers are the extreme majority.
Ok, so make it not a pure worker-coop. I don't think a traditional cooperative structure would work on this anyway, even though expanding the "work" to people who not only reply but also retweet and like might get beyond the typically 1% / 1-9-99 rule of the internet[0].
Would I want only the "content creators" to make decisions on the platform? No. Right now, they don't even have that much official say, if any. I'd prefer that they have more say, that contributors have more say, and that lurkers have more say.
Twitter already compensates many of their employees for labor partially with equity. And many current employees were already users before being hired. So you're not proposing anything different from the current state.
I'm confused but maybe I didn't explain it clearly. I'm not suggesting to give equity to people who are currently official employees of Twitter or people who will become official employees. I'm suggesting to give equity to people who might not be considered employees or even contractors and may never be considered employees under US law.
What I was imagining was a way to have more representative democracy in tech companies, not just limited to the corporate shareholders, but perhaps through a cooperative structure that gives decision-making rights to the many stakeholders of the service, not the 1 share 1 vote model.
I guess overall I look at the document in the US that so many of us Americans revere and fight for—the Constitution—and see it as representative democracy and then wonder why we have private companies that don't have similar principles.
If you're doing work for financial compensation such as wages or equity then legally you're either an employee or a contractor. Calling that relationship by some other label doesn't change reality.
It's totally possible to found a B Corporation with a charter that formally gives decision making rights to stakeholders other than shareholders. Many such corps exist and anyone could found one as a competitor to Twitter. However this structure makes it more difficult to attract capital from outside investors.
> If you're doing work for financial compensation such as wages or equity then legally you're either an employee or a contractor.
Fair point. Apparently AirBnb petitioned the SEC to allow it to give equity to its hosts while still being a private company because that is currently illegal.
> However this structure makes it more difficult to attract capital from outside investors.
Another fair point. Outside investors seem to like to have 1 share = 1 vote, rather than 1 person = 1 vote, because then those with the most financial shares owned (typically investors) can have more decision-making power.
Equity gives you a share of the money pie, but it doesn't necessarily give you a share of the decision making pie.
The problem that I raise isn't necessarily with the profitability of twitter, but with the decisions that are made about where the platform goes as it grows or gets older. I believe everyone who participates in the platform should have some form of decision power over where it goes, for such a big platform there are many different actors involved but how many of them actually get to make decisions?
Where the profits go is one of the many decisions that are made, as it stands now, people with equity get some of the profits and that's about it. How much is reinvested, how much is paid out, and so on are not really decisions most equity-holders make.
If equity holders don't like where the platform is going or decisions about dividends then they can join with their peers to push through a shareholder resolution, or replace the Board members. This is similar to running a political campaign. But it seems some users and minority shareholders feel entitled to control management decisions without doing any of the hard work.
This model is already proven to work via Kickstarter, Gofundme, and Patreon. Users already have interest in investing in ideas that _don't even allow them to retain ownership_, like Star Citizen -- it's still a copyrighted piece of work despite taking a ton of money from users to fund their game.
That is hardly the same model. You are describing donations, not investments. Reliance on donations doesn't seem like a sustainable business model for running a huge worldwide enterprise. Eventually you run out of suckers with money to fall for the scam.
Meta nee Facebook "solved" this problem by being set up so Zuckerberg would always have effective control of the company, no? Have they arrived at a better place?
Facebook censors things similarly the way Twitter does. Matter of fact, all the major social media platforms do. I've seen friends and family banned for the silliest of things, for years and years now. We've only just now reached a point where politicians are being targeted, which is kind of insane.
The problem with censorship and I've posted this on HN plenty of times: Today it's the voice of those you disagree with, tomorrow it's your voice.
>The goal of these services is to make money by remaining popular, not to ban as many people as possible.
Many would argue that this isn't the case, and the "goal" of these services is actually to manage the public narrative at the behest (both directly and indirectly) of the wealthy and the powerful. Did Jeff Bezos really buy the Washington Post because he thought that it would offer the best return on his investment, or because he wanted to hold the bullhorn of one of the largest and most influential newspapers in the USA? Does Twitter choose which people to ban and what information gets promoted/demoted based on what's most popular, or based on the narrative they want to create and/or reinforce? Did the Twitter board really reject Musk's offer because it was too low or because they didn't want to give up control of the narrative to Musk?
Twitter makes money based on ads and advertisers put pressure on services if they feel pressure from the public. For example Tucker Carlson is a very popular show but 24% of the ads are for Fox news or related [1] and many advertisers have have stopped because of controversial speech [2].
Elon musk has stated that free speech is important to him. Let's assume if he purchases Twitter he'll decrease the amount of censorship. I'll make the claim that the less censorship a service has the less money it can make from advertisers.
Some have suggested that, maybe Musk did himself?, that he'll start charging users for the service however a survey stated that 74% of people would prefer an ad based service, if they were forced to choose the numbers are closer depending on the age bracket [3]. I'll claim that people wouldn't pay in sufficient numbers and would flee the service. What other popular social media service requires a subscription?
Therefore Twitter's action is in the best interest of the shareholders.
HackerNews also has competent and transparent moderation.
The problem with large social media companies is that:
1. Due to their size and scope, publishers often have to have a presence on there (giving them market power)
2. Due to their size and scope, the platforms often fail to properly adjudicate their rules correctly, and as a policy are often opaque or outright hostile towards their users regarding moderation (you're banned, we can't tell you why, now shut up and stop doing the thing you know you did)
The underlying problem is that these platforms do not properly fund their own moderation staff because it would cost too much. It's specifically the "make money by remaining popular" thing that causes this.
HN doesn’t promote comments based on a secret, politically motivated algorithm. Users also don’t get banned if they express a contrarian opinion. If I post something skeptical on Covid origins or the vaccines, I won’t get banned from HN. People can downvote, reply, or ignore as they choose. Even comments that are “dead” can still be read if one chooses. There is some common sense moderation, for example calling someone a nazi or some kind of slur can get you in trouble, but ideas themselves aren’t censored. HN doesn’t “fact check.” Ideas on HN compete on their merits generally. When Twitter and friends use “fact checks” as a weapon to suppress other viewpoints, that’s the problem.
The suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story right before an election is a shining example of the problem with Twitter. All sorts of “fact checkers” claimed it was a false story. Some even claimed it was a Russian plot (none of those who claimed such things had their Twitter accounts suspended by the way.) Two years later WaPo and The NY Times verified what the NY Post said all along.
Hillary Clinton maintains the 2016 election was stolen. Yet she’s still on all of the socials. There are still Democrats that claim 2004 was stolen and videos of their theories are still on YouTube.
The problem isn’t one of moderation. It’s a problem of so-called fact checking. Twitter, by “fact checking” has become a publisher. Moderation isn’t the same thing as fact checking. HN users do the fact checking (as opposed to HN itself,) but it’s left to the reader to decide for themselves.
Secret algorithms promoting content and opaque fact checking is the real problem with Twitter.
First - You make this claim "HN doesn’t promote comments based on a secret, politically motivated algorithm. " what evidence do you have for this secret politically motivation algorithm?
Censorship and Fact Checking: You are claiming that ideas are being censored via fact checking. However you state multiple examples hence you are aware of them and the ideas aren't being censored. The reason for this is that multiple services exist and therefore what is the damage of Twitter moderating with fact checks?
The Election:
Hillary Clinton conceded Nov 9th 2016
"“Last night, I congratulated Donald Trump and offered to work with him on behalf of our country,” Clinton said." [1] To be fair she rolled this back [4] but has she made it her entire platform or have the Democrats used it to whip up anger?
As to "Democrats" who make claims of election fraud or videos; are they elected officials, if so how many? I can become a member of a party by filling out a form or just state that I'm a "Republican" and say anything as well. Would it be fair to then say "Republicans are saying X"? That sounds like an easy way to damage the reputation of a group that basically has open membership.
The difference between previous elections and now is the number of election lawsuits, the amount of actual Republican politicians making the claim, the amount of time and number of news outlets discussing it, the January 6th attack, the number of protests that are still happening, states planning to send alternative electors, and the former president still claiming wide spread fraud.
In fact Trump has claimed 2016, the election he won, was fraudulent as well [2] and just last month filed a lawsuit about it [3] This isn't an argument about censorship only against comparing then and now.
This speaks directly to the "the board is the problem" argument, if Facebook is the same then the board is not the problem.
Can you elucidate an instance of someone you know getting banned from Facebook with the actual content they posted? I am genuinely interested because the only person I know banned from Facebook was hurling obscenities at someone's every post and comment over a period of time and got turfed.
I would really like to see what benign content can trigger it.
Look at their partners: Facebook, Microsoft, Google, YouTube, Twitch, Discord, Twitter, Reddit. This is how they all derive their terms of service. I noticed any time Discord had new rules or policies usually reddit followed suit.
I also noticed Discord has a new TOS update recently that put a lot of their known policy into black and white, but included an interesting tidbit about being able to ban people for off-platform TOS violations. I forget the name of a Twitch streamer who got banned recently for off platform behavior but if you are still following you will note how a policy in one becomes law in another and vice versa. They are all in some alliance and Elon Musk would likely ruin this.
This is extremely uncommon knowledge that you only run into it if you moderate on Discord and Reddit and dig deep enough. But also it should frighten you that if you do anything wrong all these platforms will ban you in unison and they absolutely can based on their TOS.
I wouldn't have, I was hoping for some specific stories because I would really, really like to know more about "normies" on these platforms getting banned!
I don't want names and addresses, I just would love to know examples of what they did.
The comment higher up specifically asked for anecdotes to strengthen your point. It's looking like you don't have any. As for sharing personal details, you kind of started down that path with "I've seen friends and family banned for the silliest of things".
I generally agree with you, but I strongly disagree that "politician" is in the same class as any random person. I find it rather bizarre that anyone would find more stringent requirements of politicians to be "insane" incredibly strange considering the power they hold over the average citizen. I see things as being quite the contrary, frankly, and regaining the ability to speak freely is as simple as resigning. Politicians (and the wealthy) are not a protected class and there's no need to treat them as such considering the power dynamic.
Can you give an example of someone being banned for voicing an opinion? I'm not from the US so i may not have been paying too close attention. But lies aren't opinions. The truth isn't an opinion for that matter either. Example: The earth revolves around the sun (fact), there is a 5g microchip in the vaccine (lie), the US education system is really bad because I have to give you these examples (opinion).
It is not about the topic. It is about how it is phrased. If I were to say you rank the worst, it would be a lie.
So I'm not knowledgeable enough to know if what you are saying is true. (they are censoring opinions). But it's not an opinion. It's either true or you are a liar.
>We've only just now reached a point where politicians are being targeted, which is kind of insane.
That your politicians can tell prvbable lies but that your electorate doesn't instant fire them is crazy. No accountability. Seems like a much larger problem to me. And people not distinguishing between objective and subjective matters like you will cause the US to collapse. That is my opinion though. I don't have facts, because I can't actually tell the future.
> people not distinguishing between objective and subjective matters like you will cause the US to collapse
Caution: Admitting ignorance on the topic and then levying an accusation that failure to discern is responsible for nation-state collapse seems like a large leap that one might want to avoid.
As to the rest: Most of the bans I've seen have been based around what I'll call controversial opinions, which I won't bother expounding on but some examples include references to Caitlyn Jenner's Olympic achievements, or whether they are biologically male or female.
Beyond that, I've seen a large number of bannings from those who questioned official government narratives:
* COVID vaccines have affect menstrual cycles
* COVID likely originated in Wuhan
etc.
These all seem to fall under the concept of 'opinion' and at least to the bulleted items, both of those opinions seem to have consensus support now, despite that they might have gotten you deplatformed just a year ago.
There has to be room for civil discourse to question official narratives (for the citizenry and elected representatives alike) and for elected representatives, it seems that "I think the narrative is incorrect and so I should resign to give voice to it" then leaves the politician ineffective at countering what may well be a disaster, and leaves open the possibility of a heckler's veto of sorts wherein the executive could merely inject insincere poison pills into the official narrative and then wait for their ideological opponents to resign in objection.
Meghan Murphy was banned from Twitter for deliberately misgendering trans people. She's on record saying that she has no problem with people having reassignment surgery etc, but then she built up a long track record of calling trans women "him" or using a name they've changed away from as a personal attack, and that's not a defensible "opinion" according to Twitter's terms of service.
But you can insult conservatives by calling them Nazis and that’s ok on Twitter. You can call Clarence Thomas an “Uncle Tom” or a “House N—“ and that’s ok. But using a different pronoun as a political statement — that’s where the line is?
Twitter's terms of service differentiate between calling someone a mean name once and establishing a pattern of harassment. The line is somewhere in there, apparently. Insulting people is not against the terms of service. Harassment is. It's not clear it's even possible to harass Clarence Thomas on Twitter as he doesn't seem to use the platform.
That's why I originally posted; it's not like Meghan Murphy posted one unkind thing about one person and suddenly found herself banned. It was a protracted pattern of behavior (at odds with her own stated beliefs, no less). So, the original statement that she was banned for "stating her opinion" is disingenuous at best and outright false at worst.
What an absolutely bizarre stance, that people calling you by the wrong name is harassment.
Where does this stop ? is calling Putin or some other pollitican a dictator harassment ? it's a name he almost certainly won't like. I can construct dozens of much more ridiculous examples. What's the difference between this and the pronoun thing ?
I don't think it is bizarre, it is a pretty clear effort at highlighting the fact that you are a transitioned trans person in an effort to hurt you and let all of the people seeing the message know what's up, and harass further.
It doesn't seem very complex. It is very different from calling Putin a dictator, that seems clear!
I feel like she knows what she's doing, or she wouldn't bother doing it.
I have to admit, 10 years ago when the LGBTQ community was struggling I was a strong supporter. After all the cancellations I really want nothing to do with organized LGBTQ. I don't know if they realize they are affecting people this way. It's probably all a numbers game to them.
I can’t speak for other contexts, but the organized lobby representing Asian Americans has very little relationship with Asian Americans themselves: https://www.slowboring.com/p/yang-gang
I don’t know how these organizations became so politically powerful. When organizations purport to be speaking for and making demands on behalf of “AAPPIs” like me and my family, you’d think maybe I’d at least heard of them at some point. :-/
You should continue to support the LGBTQ community and ignore "organized LGBTQ"!
Vote out folks engaged in this absurd "grooming" moral panic but don't pay any attention to people that want to cancel your grandma for not articulating the perfect version of inclusion!
Some people (eg Trump) are notorious for their use of it, but beyond that how can that notion be supported? Influential people might post on it but it's not like they're not on TV or in newspapers saying the same thing. Twitter's influence seems vastly overrated.
Anything that people spend lots of time on, and that gets to decide what they experience, is going to be influential. It shapes what they know about the world and how they feel about it, after all.
If you added up all the advertising money spent and all the payments to “influencers” and all the money spent on bot farms and fake accounts, you could approach a measure of that influence’s value.
Consider that 10% (probably more like 1%) of people make decisions that effect how society will go. At least in the English speaking world, those people care about what's happening on twitter. The other 90% use Facebook.
Possibly all, of the current social topics came to be topics because of academics and minorities leading the culture on that same site that has cache with the various kinds of elites.
> All of these stakeholders should have a say in what is done with twitter.
I love the new propaganda term "stakeholder". Stakeholders do have a say. If you don't like twitter, don't use it.
> I think these tech billionaires think they can make better decisions for everyone
No. They think they can make better decisions for themselves. Bezos didn't buy washingpostpost for everyone's benefit. Musk isn't trying to buy twitter for everyone's benefit. You don't become a billionaire by thinking of other people. Their PR team pushes propaganda telling the naive masses that these billionaires are doing it for the benefit for society.
> we can have firms that are capable of making decisions that make people happier and societies a better place.
How would "stakeholder capitalism" do such a thing? If there is an atheist stakeholder, a muslim stakeholder, an lgbt stakeholder and an anti-lgbt staekholder? And by "people", do you mean most people or the privileged woke leftists?
What we need is more competition. How we do that? Not really sure. Though I think nationalism is a good start. Why are japanese, brazilians, hungarians, etc all using twitter? They should be using their own national versions. And then maybe we'll get intranational versions of twitter competing with each other.
For a new company, product features tend to overlap current or future needs of the users. If they didn't think of other people, they would probably not be billionaires. I suppose once you're a large company you can influence users in a way, but not really in a mass mind-control sort of way.
>What we need is more competition. How we do that? Not really sure. Though I think nationalism is a good start.
The companies don't want the kind of competition you're proposing though. All these companies spend massive amounts of money in loss-leading markets just so they become the ubiquitous platform of choice in all markets. Also, given that we don't have a world-government - what exactly are you proposing?
I think you bring a very interesting point when you talk about how should so many different views be managed.
Well, that's I think one of the most interesting problems in political philosophy. And people have been discussing it since, well, forever! From Plato's republic to Machiavelli's The Prince.
In truth, I don't have an answer on exactly how is it that we can reach good decisions; but what I'm saying is that because there are so many different actors with different priorities it seems problematic for some of them to rule over everyone else. What are the decisions of the board prioritising? Probably share-price, and this comes with a whole set of baggage.
Is share-price really the parameter we should be optimising? I think many would say no, and in fact, I think when Elon Musk says he wants to take twitter private he might want the platform to go elsewhere; but what I question is that, is taking the company private really the most optimal way to ensure the platform heads in the right way? If you've got a good king, sure, you might have a good kingdom; but is this a sustainable way of structuring power? It doesn't seem as though it is, given that most countries in the world have transitioned from monarchies to more decentralized decision making structures.
Why is it that a platform like twitter is fine with a monarchic power structure but not our own states? I think in a way, I see twitter much closer to a state than I see it close to a small business that sells honey in the farm market. And so I think we ought to push for state-like, power structures. And in reality, I would like it for twitter to push it way further, to experiment and to improve on collective decision making! I don't think current states are as good as they could be.
It is _exactly_ what the commenter said they thought would add competition, fixing the free market in their mind. Im not reaching or twisting words, it is what they explicitly stated.
I guess it depends on what you would consider is being "on the right" or "on the left". Personally I would consider Elon Musk very much economically right wing, and I think the question of ownership in the firm pertains to the economy.
I don't really care much about Elon Musk's moral beliefs, I'm not trying to befriend the guy, I care much more about what he does with his money that affect society's power structures.
The right has successfully made calling out racism to be a bad thing these days. Feels like the right is currently enjoying a complete victory in talking points and memes. The left has been completely marginalized in the political vocabulary. Discussions like this Musk thing happen completely within right wing framing of the issues.
The right is successful because the left frequently calls people racist when they aren't. When everybody is a racist nobody is.
The left is almost always successful at political framing. Look at the don't say gay bill. It wasn't the right who came up with that name of the bill. Perhaps it is changing but it doesn't look like it to me.
They are enjoying victory in talking points in grassroots places, like social media, that aren’t controlled.
In almost every other place now the left dominates, anywhere where there is power or important people. Academia, tech, film, tv, music. You basically cannot get a right wing viewpoint in anywhere.
Hunter Biden's laptop? 2 years ago it was lies planted by the Russians and peddled by evil Russian sympathizer Republicans trying to destroy democracy. The New York Post was banned from Twitter. Now, leftist news outlets have come out and confirmed the information.
No, they confirmed that it was most likely his laptop.
The entire shit show of blind laptop repair techs not taking down any contact information but recognizing Hunter Biden, waiting three years and then snooping on the contents, and then reaching out to Steve Bannon and Rudy Giuliani (who he apparently had no difficulty contacting, but somehow couldn't reach Hunter to say "Hey, your laptop is fixed"), making multiple copies of a drive, and then the loss of said laptop when it was "shipped" across country by USPS, untracked, uncertified, when it came time to give it to the FBI?
thats not what happened, nypost started sharing some non story about alaptop trying to make it a big deal when it wasn't even confirmed. wouldnt that media be making it political to begin with? russia had nothing to do with it? What damning thing was confirmed since then? Why are you using antagonistic phrases like "leftist"
The entire board ex-Jack owns a little more than 1% of Twitter. It sure sounds like their interests are not well-aligned with those of the company owners.
If this is true, can shareholders (if they wanted to) sue the Board for being deaf to shareholder interest? Or just fire the Board and elect a new one?
What I am trying to understand is that – do the shareholders want these people to have cultural power?
if Musk can convince enough shareholders to call a vote they can vote on it directly. so usually the problem is trying to find the shareholders (or their proxies) and convincing them. (for example if half of twitter is owned by passive index funds it might be hard to persuade them to do anything)
I don't completely understand that argument. If a board member owns let's say 0.1 % of total shares, but that represents 90 % of his private fortune, he will be very incentivized to increase the value of the company. On the other hand, if it represents 1 % of his total fortune, I can see the point.
That misrepresents my point. Most people strive to increase their fortune no matter whether it represents a large share of a company's total market value or not. If they have a large stake in one company compared to other investments, then that company represents a larger leverage for them to increase their fortune.
There are many avenues for increasing your personal fortune through influence over twitter other than increasing the value of your shares-- particularly when you own relatively few twitter shares.
>It sure sounds like their interests are not well-aligned with those of the company owners
I don't understand what you mean. Who do you think the owners of Twitter are?
As far as I know, the vast, vast majority of shares are held by "institutions". The top ten funds owning shares in Twitter are index funds that mostly either buy the "total market" or the S&P 500.
If Twitter suddenly and completely vaporized tomorrow, these funds would have about a tenth of a percent headwind for that day. Nobody holding them for retirement would notice.
Really, I think it would make sense to say that the interests of the company owners are not aligned with Twitter.
Which is a good thing if you care about the rest of society and don't, for instance, want to contribute to the destruction of democracy to make a bit more profit.
Twitter doesn’t have interests beyond making a profit. The shareholders of Twitter don’t have interests beyond making a profit. The company’s owners are aligned with Twitter insofar as they both seek maximal return on investment.
Just because the interest of the company’s owners is small does not mean the interests aren’t aligned. In other words, magnitude != direction.
The board of Twitter has maximal power, but minimal interest. The owners of Twitter have minimal power and minimal interest too, relative to their other holdings, but maximal interest relative to the board.
>The shareholders of Twitter don’t have interests beyond making a profit
The shareholders of Twitter generally have 99.9% of their assets in other companies.
Therefore their interest in profits doesn't necessarily translate to an interest in Twitter profits. Even with the most abstract theoretical profit-maximizer model, damaging 99.9% of your investments in favor of 0.1% is not how an entity would act.
This is generally a good thing, but it's also what people are complaining about with the board of directors.
If shareholders and directors are not diversified, then they can make a lot of money through destroying democracy, poisoning rivers, whatever, and then escape to New Zealand or somewhere. You know, "externalities". Monopoly-guy in a top hat.
But if they are diversified, then the profits are not worth it to them, because many of the externalities are now internalized.
According to Twitters latest 14A page 77 all executive officers and directors as a group, ex-Jack, own 2479280 out of 763577533 shares-- including vested options. This is 0.324%.
How does it work with institutional investors? Like, do Vanguard and Blackrock get to assign a board member each to serve their interests indirectly? Perhaps that explains why.
Vanguard and BlackRock are well publicized as having pushed leftist politics through many of their initiatives[0]. The quote, in the article, of
>We vote in accordance with these governance principles to represent the long-term interests of Vanguard fund investors.
would imply that they may vote in ways that forward these leftist initiatives. However, there is no evidence to show that their votes on boards have any agenda beyond profit-maximization.
Blackrock has a strong environmental ESG bent currently. In a binary political system that’s how one of the biggest capitalists in the world get labeled “left wing”.
It’s not “left wing” but rather an effective co-opting of the left wing. It steers the conversation to being about the skin color of the board members and executives and away from the concentrated ownership of corporate shares.
It sounds like a "right wing boogeyman conspiracy theory" but it's absolutely the case. A lot of this woke D&I crap is coming from the top down through these ESG policies. If you want funds from big players, you need to play the game of diversity shenanigans.
Thanks for this. I have funds with Vanguard and didn't realize they went woke while I was not looking. I thought I was passive. Can you recommend some other investment company?
Institutional investors like Vanguard usually just confirm the board in whatever the board is doing. They effectively do NOT "own" the company in a way that would involve them making decisions on it.
Sometimes they pass questions on to the shareholders of the funds, which everyone ignores.
Both of these investors mentioned have “ESG” policies where they will deliberately influence companies to act in certain political ways, rather than purely for the furtherance of the company.
Whether that’s good or bad is up for debate, but the Vangaurds of the world certainly have interests beyond buying and holding all the stocks.
ESG funds are such a scam. They charge high management fees and because of the pressure to deliver market returns (without which almost no one would buy them) they end up owning substantially the same stuff-- when they exclude a company because its this weeks' press whipping boy they replace it with more shares selected to optimize their correlation with the replaced company. Now as always the only lesson to companies is "don't get caught" or "make sure you put a positive spin on it".
I wish they did meaningfully push companies to implement profit incompatible policies-- then at least they'd be interesting to short.
An "interest" seems to me like it has a bit of a connotation beyond a "preference".
It suggests some substantial motivation that I'm not sure ESG policies rise to the level of.
Individuals working for Vanguard have some motivation to talk about ESG and go through the motions.
But at the end of the day, if they buy all the stocks, and if their customers understand that they buy all the stocks, then how can ESG considerations make a meaningful difference in the overall job? It seems way too constrained.
Vanguard, IIRC, buys and manages a portfolio on their user's behalf. Their uses are the ultimate beneficiaries of the stock and can vote the proportional share they own.
> But even an unintended or informal campaign by two of the most important players in this battle—who reach a combined 90 million people on Twitter
That's some lazy journalism. They just added the two follower accounts and then rounded up by 1M. My guess is there is a big overlap between the two groups followers (and it should be noted that Musk has 82.4M of those ~90)
At this rate, we're gonna get a Weekend Update segment where they literally just read Twitter on air, and it will be indecipherable from what passes for "news" on most of these sites.
"This week's biggest critique of Biden's plan came from @massiveanus47, who wrote…"
That's the direction most 'journalism' takes. Minimal effort, lots of filler to pad out space, the one thing you actually cared about buried in the second-to-last paragraph, but not completely answered.
The biggest example of this I see is when I search for info about student loan cancellation or suspension. One particular website, which is known for paywalls and usually has some sort of "X free articles" popup, hosts what amounts to an editorial column by some guy, who always seems to have articles on the topic, but barely provides any kind of real information.
Of course, there are link callouts to other articles on that site, written by the same guy, which look like they'll be informative. They're usually not. They still eat up one of those "X free articles" slots and try to bombard you with ads, however!
Why can a poison pill dilute away a single shareholder’s stake, but doing some scheme where 51% of the shareholders dilute away the stake of the remaining 49% is illegal?
I'm not going to speak to the legal technicalities, but I can tell you some major differences in the situations.
- The poison pill is aimed at any investor trying to gather control, not a specific one. (At least legally)
- The poison pill is 100% avoidable. It triggers off some future event. This is similar to many other grandfather clauses like building codes, where things are changed going forward.
- 49% bought in thinking they were getting a share and a say in the company. Diluting them away is stealing and fraud (morally, not legally.) So, for instance, would be selling all the companies assets to Company 2 run by the same CEO and board (and who own 100% of Company 2) and letting Company 1 go bankrupt.
The situation is actually identical if Elon were to suddenly tomorrow purchase up to 49%. In that case, it would be the 51% diluting the 49%.
> So, for instance, would be selling all the companies assets to Company 2 run by the same CEO and board (and who own 100% of Company 2) and letting Company 1 go bankrupt.
IANAL, but this is actually theft - Minority shareholders have rights if a company is liquidated, and the courts are smart enough to recognize "Reorganize all assets under a new company owned only by the majority shareholder" as being that liquidation. As far as I'm aware, States Attorney General are the ones to prosecute this crime, so file a complaint there.
I would imagine there is definitely a course of civil action. I honestly don't know (but assume) that criminal action would probably depend on exactly how it was done. After all, Holmes's Theranos trial turned on federal wire fraud charges.
Absolutely - Everything is legal until you're caught. How easy it is to catch you and how easy it is to prove in a court of law are what matters.
As today's Money Stuff[1] opines - This kind of transaction can be really easily made legal, while still giving investors the middle finger. If the company is worth X, you takeover the board and carry out a merger that cashes out minority stakeholders for $1, you're liable for X. If the company is worth X, you takeover the board, and carry out a merger that cashes out minority shareholders for X * .8, you've got a good chance of getting away with it - The standards is "business judgment" vs "fiduciary duty". Companies have fiduciary duty to all shareholders. Sometimes that means that the board gets to dissolve the company for a lot less than it's worth.
It prevents a hostile takeover. It doesn't prevent the company from agreeing to be sold. It theoretically offers protections to negotiate a sale without the buying party having the ability to circumvent that negotiation.
The poison pill (in Twitters case) dilutes any shareholder who acquires more than 15%. (In practice, it's not automatic, but it's what happens). No shareholder currently owns more than 15%. Therefore if anyone doesn't want to trigger this (like Elon Musk) he can avoid dilution by not buying any more shares.
It's there to say "no individual can legally own more than 15% of Twitter" as someone is starting to buy Twitter up. Not say "we're going to explicitly screw Elon Musk after he bought 25% of Twitter."
> Can Elon and three of his "friends" own each 14.9999% of Twitter without triggering the poison pill, so getting to 59.999%?
I'm guessing not: 1) if it were that easy to circumvent, it would be a pointless tactic that wouldn't be bothered with; and 2) I haven't read the actual language, but IIRC some articles that have described it as also including "family members and individuals acting in concert."
A good rule of thumb is: if it took you a short amount of time to think of a "cleaver trick" to defeat something "important," your trick most likely doesn't work. That's either because it fails for reasons you haven't through of or someone already thought of it and countered it.
If he lied when they were setting up the poison pill, Twitter'd probably win the inevitable court case, and he'd get in trouble for misrepresenting his position.
Sure he did. The law recognizes his indirect control as possibility and all the SEC forms specify when they ask how much he controls they're including via those mechanisms.
I mean, if he owned some Google stock, and Google decided to buy 1% of Twitter, that would probably be different, because Elon wouldn't own enough of Google to make them do anything or even be aware of their investments. But if Tesla did, or he bought index funds that included Twitter, then yes.
I understand, thanks. Just wanted to be sure: did he have to necessarily fill out these forms before he said "I control x% of Twitter", or could it be that he didn't have to fill them out, and in practice didn't fill them out?
I think the answer is if Elon can convince Bezos, Gates and Brin that it would be a fun thing to do, they can. If Elon loans you $6 billion to buy 14.9999% of Twitter because you are such good friends it is not something you can do.
For that matter, if Elon promised Bezos, Gates and Brin they would make money on the deal (as opposed to doing it because it would be fun) it would also not be something they could do. Promise is doing a lot of work there.
First, off, this conversation is about triggering the poison pill. So in this case, it would trigger.
That's what the conversation is about.
But since you want to focus on incentives:
That's an immediate dilution of his (and his compatriots) shares until their combined percentage was 15%. Additionally, they can be subject to a shareholder civil suit by anyone who sold the them shares for any increase in value between the time when they sold the shares and the information came to light. Additionally, they can be subject to a shareholder civil suit by any shareholders for any decrease in value of their shares after that information came to light until endtime fuzzy. Additionally, a civil injunction preventing them from taking the company private, preventing their scheme from allowing them to do so and rendering their actions pointless.
Those are just the people who stand to make billions from any of those actions. The SEC can also pursue it's own charges, but since they won't individually make billions, they are less likely to do so.
Update: This is wrong. Ignore it.
The poison pill is not diluting any individual shareholder disproportionately. What it is doing is issuing the right to buy shares at a steep discount. For example, if shares of Company XYZ are currently trading at $50/share, the board would issue all the company's shareholders the right to buy stock at $25/share. Economically, everyone should exercise their rights since this is a good deal. The issue for the hostile bidder is that it can become quite expensive to actually fund the exercise price to maintain their ownership interest. The company now also has more cash and so purchasing all the remaining stock that the hostile bidder does not own will become more expensive/difficult.
The less technical answer is just that "the board runs the company and they can decide how to allocate new shares". This kind of trick is just one of many reasons why hostile takeovers virtually never work. And that's a good thing, precisely because it prevent disruptive attacks on companies competing in the market.
Remember Musk wasn't ever threatening a hostile takeover anyway. He knows it won't work. He was making an offer to the board to induce them to bless the sale. And the board responded with the poison pill, essentially as a way of saying "no". This is the way this kind of negotiation works.
And from the opposite perspective, arguments like "the board isn't performing its fiduciary duty by accepting Musk's offer" are likewise silly. The board is elected by the shareholders (the actual bureaucracy and process for this varies between corporations, I know nothing about Twitter). The level of oversight needed to ensure fiduciary fidelity is already there. No court is going to view a board trying to oppose a hostile takeover as a breach of fiduciary duty, that's ridiculous.
Hm, but in this concrete example Elon is also a shareholder, so he can buy for 25/share, right? And as more shares are being created the spot price on the market should drop, no?
Also, can the shareholders then sue the company (successfully? :)) for decreasing the price? ("everything is securities fraud" after all.)
>Hm, but in this concrete example Elon is also a shareholder, so he can buy for 25/share, right?
Nope. The poison pill allows everyone but the one who triggered the provision to buy shares at a discount. From Twitter's press release:
>In the event that the rights become exercisable due to the triggering ownership threshold being crossed, each right will entitle its holder (other than the person, entity or group triggering the Rights Plan, whose rights will become void and will not be exercisable) to purchase, at the then-current exercise price, additional shares of common stock having a then-current market value of twice the exercise price of the right.
Yes, but presumably enough of the other members with smaller purchasing power will still be each marginally incentivized to buy enough more such that it will dwarf Musk's motivation to outbuy any of them individually. At least that's how I understand it.
Is it illegal for 51% of shareholders to dilute away the stake of the remaining 49%? Serious question -- I don't know.
AFAIK (IANAL), companies have few restrictions on stock dilution as long as the dilution is in the best interest of the shareholders. You can make a legally defensible argument that one actor is bad and should be diluted, but it's probably hard to make a legally defensible argument for selectively diluting shares of idle shareholders.
Yes, this is a self-dealing transaction since it is detrimental to certain shareholders and not others without getting the adversely affected shareholder's consent. This is what Savrin sued Zuck over in the early Facebook days.
Be careful about trying to reason from first principles on stuff like this. Poison pill plans are bog-standard settled corporate law. The legal principle is that the board has the right (/duty) to judge the value of the company, and the courts, in most circumstances, don't second-guess it. The board can (and routinely does) decide that offers to acquire the company must be routed through the board.
Plans like this are why Microsoft doesn't own Yahoo, and why Carl Icahn didn't buy Netflix.
Are they actively attempting a hostile takeover and the board thinks that they'll hurt the company? Then I think that'd be legal. Otherwise I don't see how you could make a legally defensible argument around diluting shareholders just because of their beliefs
They were elected to the board by shareholders. That's entirely different than a hostile takeover. You can't say "this is not in the interest of the shareholders" when the shareholders voted for it
then lets dilute the shareholders who voted for it as theyh are clearly idealogically driven and actively hostile to the company itself or its profitability
Well, I guess if you’re a moral relativist that might be the case. I mean, why not burn the rest of the planet down for temporary profits? Why not enslave children in the Congo? It benefits the shareholders after all. How about murder and torture for hire? These decisions just seem so arbitrary. *shrug*
Taking into account Elon Musk is limited in the amount of stock he can sell from Tesla, the first conclusion is he does not have the money to buy Twitter.
I (and Tesla stockholders) am reminded of his announcements around buying Tesla in cash, too. This guy's fans seem to have an unlimited budget for "but this time, it's real!"
Can you provide sources or any meaningful numbers beyond handway 'most' regarding which of his shares are used as collateral?
His NW went from 20B to 270B in last 2 years.
If your house went from 200k to 2.7M, the bank will somehow find it in their heart to lend you a lot more dollas than before ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Doing the actual maths 40B is chump change and he could probably borrow couple hundred B or more if the things he's buying also have market value banks will lend on.
Unless he's somehow borrowed hundreds of Bills in the last 2 years? Any sources for that, I looked because of what you said but didn't see any actual info on loans beyond .5B in 2020 which is a fifth of a percent of his NW. Literally < 1% of his NW ??
Looking at Morgan Stanley CET1, and regulations on the percentage limits, of how much a bank can lend to a single customer, I don't think they can do this deal and stay compliant. But regulation compliance was never a problem at Wall Street.
What does Musk have in mind for Twitter? All speculation I have seen has been about free speech issues and similar. But can it be that he sees some kind of cross-pollination opportunities with his other companies? It has been his trademark, to use SpaceX to launch Starlink satellites, or put a Tesla on top of a rocket like a marketing stunt, etc. What can he do with Twitter once he controls it, in relationship to his other companies.
1. Improve the product (make Tweets editable for a period of time and things like that).
2. Run the service as if it was bound by the First Amendment (i.e. only illegal content should be removed, basically how every social network ran prior to a few years ago.)
3. Open source the ranking/spam code on GitHub and accept PRs.
He explicitly stated that he does not view it as a money-making opportunity. His goals are altruistic.
It may be hard for some (cynical people) to believe that someone would do such a thing but I believe he's completely sincere. He's got the $40 billion to spare and thinks it's important to humanity's ability to progress. I agree.
The only reason Zuckerberg gave up on free speech for Facebook was that he was scared of losing revenue. Musk isn't worried about losing the money, which means he can act out of principles rather than fear.
1. He needs Tesla to be highly profitable to achieve his ambitious goals of renewable energy. It's expensive to build factories, etc.
2. He needs SpaceX to be highly profitable to achieve his ambitious goals of multi-planetary life. It's expensive to build rockets, etc.
3. He doesn't need Twitter to highly profitable to achieve his ambitious goals of making it a global free speech platform. It's relatively cheap to run an internet service.
You seem to have it backwards. He became a billionaire as a consequence of creating immensely valuable companies, not the other way around. And he risked the entirety of his previously earned fortune in order to so. These are facts that you can verify for yourself.
That he's not highly motivated by money or luxury, at least at this stage in his life, is obvious for anyone to see.
Yes clearly the billions of dollars, millions of adoring fans, and immense power he's acquired are an unfortunate side effect of him being a good samaritan.
The fact is that no one in history that has great things for humanity did so without having some degree of mixed motivations.
There's no inherent contradiction in wanting to make lots of money, become popular, become powerful, and do good things for other people all at the same time. In fact, it's a very common set of motivations among smart people.
The article is about shareholder value, not profitability. Anyway, that aside, the article was specifically written to address the people writing Elon Musk's off as "...a self-absorbed corporate carnival barker..." which is a conversation happening within the context of the Twitter takeover attempt; hence, "managerial excellence". Musk's choice to share the article clearly demonstrates that he believes his ability to drive shareholder value to be a defence of his "managerial" credentials.
Whether his intentions for taking over Twitter are altruistic or not, I don't know, personally I don't think it's profit driven (but definitely wouldn't describe it as altruistic...) but defending your managerial ability on the basis that you're a producer of shareholder value in a conversation about the ability to run a "global free speech platform" is nonsensical and undermines any proclamation he makes about his intentions.
Am Ithe only one who see’s value in Twitter’s uneditablity? To me it allows for only two class of tweets: Real & Fake. With the real one easily verifiable against a fake one (archive cross comparisons)
Editing tweets I think has value, even if for a short period of time. The biggest complaints people have are the meaning could change. Which is a fair point, but this is only a problem if you view it in the context of deception. People might write a very strongly worded statement in the moment, then decide to tone down what they’ve written. I don’t view this inherently as a bad thing.
There is no "gold standard" example of a social media platform, and never has been. They're all pretty crappy due to misaligned incentives between users and customers (advertisers). But despite that, some of them still manage to be useful and entertaining.
how can you be both honest / sincere and a "mixed bag"? it honestly reads to me like you're overlooking some big inconsistencies in his behavior "just because he's human". I would normally agree with - but considering his status as the world's richest man makes me think he should be held to a much higher standard
> how can you be both honest / sincere and a "mixed bag"?
Because people can be both honest and dishonest about different things or at different times. No one is perfectly honest and even the worst person is probably honest some of the time.
> ...considering his status as the world's richest man makes me think he should be held to a much higher standard
This makes sense in some ways and absolutely none at all in other ways. The richest man should be judged harshly for displaying greed, for example, but not for making mistakes that money doesn't help prevent.
Given his history of making statements which, if I am being generous, are wildly optimistic year after year while not allowing experience to impact what he is saying I have less faith that he will actually do what he says.
Value wise his other states goals would be far better advanced if he used that money to speed them along instead of buying Twitter.
Full and outright racism was 100% allowed on reddit up until a few years ago. Same with Facebook. Groups and subs dedicated solely to racist rhetoric were super common.
Hate speech (racism, bullying, threatening, harassment) might as well be thought of as illegal. It may not be illegal by the literal word of the law, but in the interpretation most people in practice treat these as illegal.
Run the service as if it was bound by the First Amendment (i.e. only illegal content should be removed, basically how every social network ran prior to a few years ago.)
No large social network ever ran that way and I'm skeptical that any social network could be run that way and make a profit. Here are some of the things that are not actually illegal to publish under US law:
- Most forms of doxxing
- Adult nudity and pornography
- Most gore images and videos (industrial accidents, car crashes, corpses from war zones (including children), animal abuse...)
- Praise and promotional material for pedophilia
- Praise and encouragement for anorexia and other eating disorders
- Promotional material and instructions for suicide
- Praise and promotional material for terrorist groups like ISIS, as long as it doesn't call for "imminent lawless action." Much historically banned-by-bigtech ISIS propaganda was not actually illegal, which is why government officials urged companies to do something about it instead of just dispatching law enforcement.
- Spam that isn't delivered via email
- Coordinated foreign propaganda, e.g. "50 Cent Party" commenters piling on to criticize anyone who criticizes mainland China's government
- Jailbait images (in the sense of the banned-in-2011 subreddit r/jailbait)
A lot of things that 95% of Americans never want to see online are actually legal, just so widely reviled and moderated against that you rarely encounter them accidentally.
I think 99% of people would agree it's reasonable to have a very few, very clear exceptions. And it's possible to do so without falling down a slippery slope. We know this for a fact because sites like Reddit did it for over a decade, as did many other sites. It used to be that they didn't moderate content themselves for fear of losing their "common carrier" liability protection.
And many of these exceptions might not even necessarily even be exceptions to US law or the First Amendment. Abuse of computer systems (spam), Federal obscenity laws, etc.
And there are many potential approaches to hiding (with transparency) from view legal content that no one (or almost no one) actually wants to see, without necessarily even deleting it.
One obvious approach would be to allow users to dictate what kinds of content they want to see. An example is subreddits, where users who want to see gore could be free to do so. Twitter could implement similar kinds of self-moderation features.
There are probably even more creative approaches that could solve some of the echo chamber effects, misinformation, etc without heavy-handed global moderation. It's a hard problem but it'd be really great to see someone try at least.
It used to be that they didn't moderate content themselves for fear of losing their "common carrier" protection.
Reddit allowed porn from the beginning. Facebook never allowed nudity. Neither one of them had any common carrier protections to protect or to lose by these policies.
Reddit proves that even subreddits, personal filters, and other self-moderation tools are not enough to prevent politician, media, and advertiser pressure around controversial content. The jailbait subreddit, like every subreddit that has been banned, was full of willing subscribers.
I can't name any prominent American politicians who really want social media to publish everything that's allowed under the First Amendment. Do you know of any?
Some politicians say that they do but I don't believe they have considered the full scope of what is actually allowed under the First Amendment. For example, Senator Tom Cotton published an apparently fierce defense of free speech on his own web site in June 2020:
These social-media companies have improved the lives of Americans in many ways. But they should not be surprised public opinion is turning against them when they act as censors and moral scolds to millions of Americans. Nor should they expect to find many people rushing to their defense. In fact, to coin a phrase, those of us in their crosshairs might say: No quarter for Big Tech censorship.
However, in September 2020 he accused Netflix of distributing child pornography (the movie Cuties) and wrote:
Netflix has a basic legal responsibility to not stream child pornography or otherwise promote the sexual exploitation of children.
I don't think that he understands how broad the First Amendment actually is, and how narrow the exceptions for obscenity and child pornography are. He just wants to make tech companies stop censoring his tweets and start censoring movies. Likewise, many activists who are upset about (e.g.) LGBTQ content getting suppressed by YouTube algorithms don't much care about YouTube suppressing videos about guns and explosives.
There are few people except perhaps Constitutional scholars willing to defend the full breadth of what the First Amendment guards, much less require social networks to host content of similar breadth. I'm willing to defend the First Amendment as it currently exists, even the publications I find vilest, but I don't want social media forced to publish all of it.
I agree sites had different policies and I'm (intentionally) simplifying the history.
> Neither one of them had any common carrier protections to protect or to lose by these policies.
That is precisely the reason sites had a light moderation touch for years. I'm not sure where you're getting that from? The consensus (from lawyers I was advised by personally) was that too much moderation would open you up to liability, and so most social sites just enforced their ToS without wading into full scale moderation.
> I can't name any prominent American politicians who really want social media to publish everything that's allowed under the First Amendment. Do you know of any?
I'm sure there's probably at least one, but I have no interest in what politicians say they want. They're so often the people the Supreme Court is protecting us from. To me the question is what principles should guide us, and my answer is the First Amendment.
> I don't think that he understands how broad the First Amendment actually is...
I think he does understand how broad the First Amendment is. I also think he's probably much more willing to sacrifice short-term (or even long-term) revenue than most people would expect. I don't claim to know for sure though. And he might change his mind in the future.
What makes you think he is willing to sacrifice short term revenue?
- He's a businessman. You could argue that you need to be successful to have the resources to help people
- He sued Top Gear because of a somewhat negative car review of the original Tesla Roadster [1]. Would an advocate of free speech to the level some want here do that? Maybe he changed though, maybe he only wants free speech when it doesn't hurt him.
I'm honestly asking where the image of a champion of free speech comes from, besides what he says he'll do?
> What makes you think he is willing to sacrifice short term revenue?
Because we already know from his past behavior that he's willing to make long-term bets. And his statement that he doesn't view his interest in Twitter as a money-making venture.
> He sued Top Gear because of a somewhat negative car review of the original Tesla Roadster
That's a very biased way to frame it. IIRC Top Gear admits that they faked part of the review to make Tesla look bad, after Tesla proved that they had.
Believing in free speech doesn't mean you can't sue people that you believe have violated laws.
Or perhaps he simply made a mistake of judgement going after them legally and was wrong to do so. That's also not inconsistent with a belief in free speech.
> Believing in free speech doesn't mean you can't sue people that you believe have violated laws.
Musk doesn't just believe in free speech, he's called himself a “free speech absolutist”.
- One can either be a free speech absolutist, or not.
- If you are a free speech absolutist, you must take a position that all speech is permissible. Because if you don't then you aren't an absolutist, because one could then always take the absolute position that all speech is permissible.
- If you insist that it's okay to be an absolutist on free speech but still maintain that some speech is not permissible, then really we're not talking about free speech anymore but instead negotiating exactly what classes of speech are not permissible.
- Therefore, if Musk really is a free speech absolutist as he claims to be, he must support Top Gun's right to shamelessly lie about his product. As a matter of principle, libel is perfectly okay for a free speech absolutist. If you claim it's not, then I can find you a free speech absolutist who disagrees.
- Therefore Musk is either lying about his motives or he doesn't understand enough about the nuances of free speech to know he's doing. Either way he definitely shouldn't be trusted as a standard bearer or avatar for free speech.
Musk seems to have used the term "free speech absolutist" as a means of contrasting his First Amendment-style view of free speech with the severely qualified and diminished version currently available on platforms like Twitter.
So I agree that you're technically correct about what "absolutist" means, but I don't think it makes a difference in this case.
Anyone who is willing to run social media services as if they were bound by the First Amendment has my support. They may fail but at least they'd be trying to do the right thing, which is better than what we have today.
It's easy to project your hopes and dreams onto a person when you discount the meaning of their literal words and replace them with your own biases. I have no illusions that Musk's own conception of "free speech" is not just as qualified and diminished as what Twitter offers. If Musk had a legitimately impressive adherence to the principles of free speech, backed by deed, that would be one thing. If he could put his money where his mouth is in literally any other context, that would be a data point. But Musk's record on free speech is the opposite; he often uses the legal system as well as his own wealth to exert pressure which is anti-free speech. To be clear I'm not saying he is wrong to do this, but he's wrong on the basis of free speech. Indeed, Musk is very keen to restrict the speech of others when he feels that speech harms him. That's reasonable, but not principled.
Taken as a whole, to me this just indicates that Musk is not a free speech absolutist but instead a fair-weather supporter of free speech; he's for free speech when it works for him, but also anti-free speech when it works for him. This makes him no better or worse than anyone else IMO, but it certainly doesn't make him the standard bearer of free speech.
However, the thing that does make him worse than everyone else is that he lies about it. He calls himself a free speech absolutist knowing full well the meaning of those words. He's trying to paint himself as a champion when in fact he's not, which makes him either delusional or a manipulative liar. Either way, he shouldn't be the one at the helm of Twitter, if the rationale is that it would be a boom for free speech. It would just be more of the same. Welcome to the new boss, same as the old boss.
> It's easy to project your hopes and dreams onto a person when you discount the meaning of their literal words and replace them with your own biases. I have no illusions that Musk's own conception of "free speech" is not just as qualified and diminished as what Twitter offers.
Right there you're doing what you accuse me of doing, just in the opposite direction.
I will admit that I am doing that to some extent, but I feel I have some reason to believe I'm more likely to be right.
One major reason is that everything he has said seems to align with what was a very common viewpoint just a few years ago, which is best summarized by the Voltaire quote:
"I may not agree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
That's the sentiment behind the First Amendment and what I believe Elon Musk most likely believes in.
> ...which makes him either delusional or a manipulative liar
There are many more explanations for his past behavior other than him being delusional or a liar. He could have nuanced views, have simply failed to live up to his own ideals in specific instances, have justifications you can't imagine, etc. In any case, it's almost certainly a false dichotomy.
." Run the service as if it was bound by the First Amendment (i.e. only illegal content should be removed, basically how every social network ran prior to a few years ago.)"
Maybe I'm too cynical but I really don't think Elon is doing this for some high minded free speech principles.
> He's got the $40 billion to spare
He really doesn't though, which is part of why I think this is all a big joke. The vast majority of his fortune is tied up in his ownership of several companies. The Tesla shares are the most liquid, but he's already borrowing a lot against them.
Is he really going to sell a large portion of his SpaceX or Tesla ownership to fund a Twitter lark? I doubt it.
No institutional investor is going to commit billions of dollars to an investment that is explicitly not about making money. The only way he raises third party money for the purchase is if those investors understand that Elon is lying.
> Musk isn't worried about losing the money, which means he can act out of principles rather than fear.
Musk talks a lot about pursuing projects out of principle rather than for profit, while his actions have lead to becoming the richest person in the world. Color me jaded, but I don't think one becomes
the richest person in the world without trying really hard to make money. Disguising it as magnanimous behavior only helps.
Your assertion that he doesn't have 40 billion to spare seems unfounded.
Let's look at some actual maths.
His net worth has soared in the last 2 years. Forbes (1) has a historical chart with his 2020 NW at 20 Billion, and current at 269 Billion. Is there any indication that his borrowings against his shares has increased in ratio with their appreciation. I can't find info on that but the forbes articles notes the borrowings were subtracted from that NW.
As to what his borrowings were, there's a few articles I found that he had .5 Billion of personal loans in 2020. Since then he sold a lot/all of his houses. His NW also increase by 500 times that amount. Just can't credit your assertion that he couldn't borrow $40 Billion at the drop of a hat with some of his increased 250B share value as collateral.
It is, but if this whole thing has taught us anything it's that there are a very large number of people in the US that only believe in free speech for themselves and their political allies.
I'm guessing the board will have spoken to most large shareholders and they've indicated that they don't want to accept Musks Bid.
I don't think any large share holder has come out publicly in favour. It's below the price Twitter was most of last year and if they agree that Twitter has economic potential selling isn't in their interest.
Ironically, a way that Musk could get support is by offering to let some large share holders retain their ownership (and screw the retail investors). But he's said he "doesn't care about the economics at all" - which isn't going to impress many investment funds.
This is silly. I don't think instituational investors such as Vangard would take what he said in the TED interview literally "Doesn't care about the economics at all". He has said that about Tesla indirectly and it is one of the most extraordinary companies ever.
What he meant is he wants to build a great product.
I would vote against Musk's bid, but that's because I think the offer was clearly a publicity stunt. He wanted it to be rejected so he someone would listen to him complain able the board.
He's at least $50 off from making a genuine offer. Or, $150 per share, if he wants to back up that claim about not caring about the economics.
In some ways he's right about the boards dysfunction. The board should have fired Dorsey long before they finally forced him out. He's been an absent CEO for a long time, and let Twitter languish while he built Square.
They didn’t force him out and they basically asked him to come back even as a part time CEO when NO ONE wanted the job. Jack is Jack. He is not perfect but let’s not be unfair to him. Reviving Twitter is not possible without replacing the board and management.
Yup. Twitter's board kept a (nominally) 1/2 time CEO at the helm while Twitter floundered. Sadly, @jack's parting dig is equally true and useless. Tell us something we didn't know.
Which current board members were there during the earlier drama that Dorsey is referencing? There are probably just a few that he’s really talking about, the rest are just a rotating cast.
I think that's his point -- the board is a rotating cast that doesn't have a coherent vision for the company, or a dysfunctional vision if they do have one.
Jack is as much in favor of censorship as anyone currently on the board. The real reason the board doesn't want Elon in charge is because Twitter doesn't exist to make money. It exists now to steer politicians and drive the news cycle. When a board member says that Twitter is vastly undervalued it's not because he thinks it could be making more money. It's because he knows that much power is impossible to put a price on.
If a twitter user blocks another user, is the blocked user being censored because they can't speak to the user that blocked them? Is this infringing on their free speech?
If someone spams twitter with billions of messages, to the point where just about the only thing anyone sees are this one person's messages, would it be censorship to ban that person from making posts? Is this infringing on their free speech?
If someone posts instructions on how to make explosives using common household items, is it censorship to ban that person? Is this infringing on their free speech?
If someone posts information that misleads people about when and where to vote in an election, is it censorship to ban that person from posting? Is this infringing on their free speech?
>If a twitter user blocks another user, is the blocked user being censored because they can't speak to the user that blocked them? Is this infringing on their free speech?
A parallel situation appears to me as, someone on the street is talking to people walking by, to avoid hearing them I put on noise canceling headphones and walk away so I don't see them.
Am I censoring them, no. I am not interrupting their ability to speak freely. I'm simply exercising my right not to listen.
Banned twitter users are all free to type out what they would have tweeted, while twitter exercises its right not to listen to, and subsequently distribute it. A more apt analogy is that the person is using someone else's public address system to speak to a lot of people efficiently. Third parties may just keep their head down and ignore it, but the owner of the public address system can and should have standards of what their willing to amplify. The owner is also not restricting the speech of a person he refuses to amplify.
Sure. As long as they become legally co-responsible for the speech they are choosing to amplify, i.e. as long as they accept they are no longer just a platform.
Holding people legally responsible for speech means censoring speech the Government doesn't like. Holding people legally responsible for relaying other people's speech as long as they don't relay all speech, is essentially the same thing as banning the selective relaying of speech. For example, it would be impossible for Twitter to determine if any factual claim about a person or company would be considered defamation before they relay it, so they would essentially be forced to leave the US if they didn't want to relay genocide advocacy or whatever else they may have a moral objection to help spread.
That's what I find so frustrating about this debate. The people who claim to support free speech actually support more censorship by the Government. They seem to want the Government to be the sole judge of what is acceptable to say. That's the exact opposite of what I want. I want for nobody to be prevented from saying anything and for nobody to be forced to help anyone say anything. Both of those rights are equally important parts of freedom of speech.
> That's what I find so frustrating about this debate. The people who claim to support free speech actually support more censorship by the Government.
You have mis-interpreted.
People are saying that they should be treated like the telephone companies.
Do you think that the telephone companies are some massive apparatis of censorship and anti-free speech?
I don't think most people would say that. I think that would people would say that the laws that force the telephone company to do certain things, results in very little censorship of the phone network.
> Both of those rights are equally important parts of freedom of speech.
So then, telephone companies.
Do you think that the laws regarding telephone companies are some massive infringement on free speech? Because I think most people would say the opposite, that are laws regarding them help prevent censorship.
Everyone claiming that Twitter and other social media companies are infringing on their free speech are arguing that these companies must allow broadcast messages.
Telephone companies do not allow normal customers to broadcast messages. A telephone call is a targeted communication. You are calling one person, or perhaps a handful of people. Additionally, there are laws that (at least attempt to) prevent spamming and robocalling. Telephone users also have the right to be taken off of companies call lists.
> Telephone companies do not allow normal customers to broadcast messages. A telephone call is a targeted communication.
> there are laws that (at least attempt to) prevent spamming and robocalling. Telephone users also have the right to be taken off of companies call lists.
None of what you just said changes the idea that it is pretty silly to claim that these types of laws that force telephone companies to send certain messages are some huge infringement on free speech.
The laws that apply to phone companies are well accepted in society. And they could be expanded to other large communication networks, as they currently are well accepted and are not considered huge infringements on free speech, nor do people say that they support censorship.
> This would be a violation of freedom of association
No, actually. We force public businesses to not discriminate based on race, and we have laws that for the telephone company to send almost all calls on its network.
Nobody would say that those laws break our rights to freedom of association.
Similar laws could be place on social media companies that we already put on telephone companies, even if they wouldn't be exactly the same.
Telephone companies exchange legal liability for the content of what they carry, for not changing fee or pricing structures based on the use of their lines. However, they also charge fees for the use of their service to their end users.
People do not pay for the services in question here, so the idea they have a right to them is on shaky ground to begin with - i.e. if I give away free lemonade, I'm under no obligations to give it away to any specific persons.
But more importantly, there's a big difference between a transactive exchange between two parties, and a broadcast one: the telephone company is not obligated to advertise who uses their services or how they use them, whereas Facebook is a publishing platform that does - which goes to the question of association. You can discreetly use a telephone line: you cant discreetly use Facebook without Facebook branding.
So what does the proposed law then look like? Facebook is obligated to host your content next to the "Facebook" logo? Does the logo have to be there? Does the service have to be similar? What if Facebook decide your content just doesn't qualify for their branded tier, and instead will be hosted on "QuietBook.com", which they don't SEO optimize? Suppose you have a comment section on a personal website - why are you now allowed to remove comments there but Facebook isn't allowed to remove comments from it's service?
You have once again not contracted anything that I said. What I said was that we have laws that force businesses to do certain things, and very few people would say that these businesses are having their rights infringed on.
> So what does the proposed law then look like?
Well, what we could do, is take existing laws and extend them to social media companies. Such as the existing common carrier laws, or anti-discrimination laws.
> if I give away free lemonade, I'm under no obligations to give it away to any specific persons.
If you had a lemonade store, in a mall, and you were giving away free lemonade, but you refused to give away lemonade to black people, then you absolutely would get in trouble with the law.
Like c'mon. How did you not think of that immediately? I even referenced this in a previous comment.
> Facebook is obligated to host your content next to the "Facebook" logo? Does the logo have to be there?
Well, just take every single question that you asked, and apply them to if a store wanted to treat black people differently, and then you have your answer.
So whatever hypothetical you have, imagine if it was about a company being forced to follow certain laws, that prevent them from discriminating against black people.
And the answer to these hypothetical, is that if a company attempted to do these things to black people, then it would likely be disallowed.
And very few people would say that there is some large infringement on these companies rights in that situation.
So again: if I have a comment section on my personal blog - can I remove abusive comments? Ban abusive users? Can HackerNews ban or downvote comments so they're not seen? Can TalkBack radio screen which callers it puts on the air?
You can write a law to do whatever you want, but the reason rights like freedom of association are enumerated is because things will go very, very wrong quickly when you undermine them. Freedom of speech is protection from government sanction for voicing your ideas, but freedom of
association is protection of your being compelled to act due to the arbitrary desires of others.
> If you had a lemonade store, in a mall, and you were giving away free lemonade, but you refused to give away lemonade to black people, then you absolutely would get in trouble with the law.
No you wouldn't. You'd be in trouble if you ejected people from the premises on the basis of race, but there is no case-law which requires you to give away goods and services to anyone. But this comparison is completely irrelevant because "your opinions" are not a protected class, nor would they ever be.
To be fair, the primary effect of twitter blocking isn't to prevent the user performing the block from seeing the person tweeting, the primary effect is preventing the blocked user from commenting on particular parts of the site-- and preventing third parties from seeing their messages.
Reddit recently switched to this model too: if you block someone they can't comment in threads where you've participated unless they're a moderator.
I understand why-- just blinding yourself to someone harassing you just lets them defame you unchallenged. But a block function that mutes people is vulnerable to abuse.
> If someone posts instructions on how to make explosives using common household items, is it censorship to ban that person
god forbid anyone get access to information available for free in every public library in the US, or with 30 seconds searching online.
As far as I’m aware this is incorrect. A user who is blocked by another user is not prevented from commenting in a thread that the blocker participates it. It’s just shown a hidden message thing and they can’t reply to that specific message. If another user comes in and comments , they can reply to that comment.
On Reddit , a blocker can make it so that a user cannot participate at all.
Thanks for the correction, -- I've never been a twitter user so I only know second hand and was probably letting my understanding of how reddit works color my understanding.
well yes that was the whole point of censoring discussion of it and the media lying about its providence. "you can't prove" because everyone who should have been interested in the truth was interested in protecting their team.
The point of censoring the laptop was to help Biden and Twitter was wrong to do it. However the information on the laptop hasn't been released and yet you stated it was incriminating. This is probably why Twitter tried to block the story, because voters will be swayed without evidence but since there are a large number of media outlets the story got out anyway and the attempted censoring amplified the mistrust.
Why do you think there is evidence of wrong doing when all the information you have is that he has a laptop?
To be fair, those stories only became false after conservatives said the word "hoax" enough times. When actual Russians met with actual members of the campaign, and shared poll data, and distributed hacked materials, the stories weren't yet false.
it seems like most of it has been taken off the internet, aside from specific emails on some news sites, and no search engines are helping me find the original material.
I didn't follow this story that closely but I don't remember the information being released at all. In fact Tucker Carlson claimed he had the data being mailed to him, it was lost in the mail, then they found it but he decided to not release it because he felt bad for Hunter Biden.
This comment rings very true. The internet broke the business model that much of traditional media relied upon. Newspapers used to work hard to build trust and reputation in order to sell subscriptions, now they are bought up by billionaires to use a tools in driving political narratives (for example Bezos and Washington Post). I suspect Musk has a similar plan for Twitter. Which in this case Musk believes letting the unwashed masses speak freely benefits him.
"For decades, the conversation about nominations has been about the conflicts between party elites and everyone else. Today, that conversation is counterproductive. A better approach is to think about how voters and elites could best play their different roles: to make their political parties more representative"
Here's a selection of headlines that counter the implication that the paper is there to help Bezos
"Worker-led win at Amazon warehouse could provide new labor playbook
The unionization of a Staten Island facility at one of the country’s biggest employers shows how workers are emerging from pandemic with new tactics and energy"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/04/02/amazon-la...
"Jun 1, 2021 — A Washington Post analysis of Occupational Safety and Health Administration data shows Amazon's serious injury rates are nearly double those at higher rates than other firms"
"https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/06/01/amazon-..."
Ooo. I so wanted to downvote this comment for the “censorship” angle… but, for the rest of it, I think you’re right and I’d just be shooting the messenger.
The real reason the board doesn’t want Elon in charge is because he is trolling them and doesn’t have, or more likely doesn’t want to spend, the money to do what he claims he wants to do.
I can offer the board double of what Elon is offering them right now, and also say I will figure out the financing later in the year. Do you think the board would be derelict to turn down my offer?
Elon, the free speech absolutist, won't talk seriously about the spam or moderation needs of a public user forum because he doesn't give a shit about truth. He's all marketing and hype.
People seem to think that if Twitter dies, Mastodon will rise up or that we will return to forums or something. If Twitter dies a bunch of replacements will rise up until one of them is ordained as the winner and everyone moves to that new platform. We've seen this happen over and over and over with various platforms.
Apart from the two biggest I can think of, MySpace -> Facebook and Digg -> Reddit, when else has this happened? I can think of many more examples where the hegemon imploded and its market was eaten up by a bunch of different competitors, I don't know if there's normally a clear winner which serves the same market as the original.
For the record, Reddit had more traffic than Digg for many years before V4, it's just that Digg had more Windows users running the Alexa toolbar, so it was ranked higher.
We (reddit) visited Digg a little while before their V4 disaster and discovered (to the surprise of both teams) that our traffic was double theirs. Turned out most Digg users were also reddit users, but not the other way around.
What? This is revisionist as all get out, and it's not like a founder of reddit should be anecdotally referenced as a source for "reddit was always more popular than digg. they just had toolbar spyware" This comment is laughably ego driven.
The "v4 disaster" was the nail in the coffin where everyone left digg for good. Leaving digg for reddit became a meme in late 2008. It's no shock at all that by the v4 exodus in 2010 reddit was more popular. However 2007-2008 there were questions about which was a more compelling platform/format and which would foster a real community. By 2010 that question was answered, for sure, but "reddit always had more traffic but digg ranked higher cause toolbars" is borderline absurd.
My guess is both Elon and Jack will start to promote Bluesky with BTC at it's core for registration and ID purposes and prevent spam bots while offering a better alternative,
I called the mining collaboration between Tesla and Block/CASH last year during the price drop when Elon pulled BTC payment at Tesla; this makes sense they've both been on the receiving end of hostile take overs of their own companies and are heavily invested in BTC and have a strong view on how social media platforms have been going--Jack way more than Elon, Tesla and SpaceX but still a large holdings and stand to gain a lot from it.
I've never done social media, assuming HN doesn't count, and to be honest I'd consider playing with something like Bluesky if they move forward with it as I anticipate it will: if nothing else to see how the mechanics work.
tl;dr - They are different platforms, but they are still direct competitors, and Twitter is getting crushed.
I imagine the total addressable market (roughly) to be:
- humans with an internet connection
- Total their clock time
- Subtract all the time they are otherwise necessarily occupied (sleeping, working, etc. etc.)
The remainder is the time over which all media companies are vying. Twitter is competing against Netflix, Tiktok, physical books, etc. Some of these things can be done concurrently (watching Netflix while surfing the internet, listening to radio while driving), so add that time back or double it, whatever. But, basically, this is the state of play.
To say that Twitter is not competing against Tiktok, Snap, IG, etc. is to obscure the true state of play and competitive landscape. In 99.9% of cases†, you cannot scroll Tiktok and Twitter concurrently. So one or the other (or neither) is displaying ads to you. One or the other is generating revenue from those impressions. It is not really users over which they are competing. Rather, it is the ad inventory. The ad inventory is a function of time on site/app. Of course, ad inventory is definitely also a function of users–hence the focus on active users (xAUs). On that front, Twitter is a small fry[1]:
- Facebook (Meta): 2.9 Billion MAUs
- Instagram (Meta): 1.5 Billion MAUs
- TikTok: 1 Billion MAUs
- Snap: 557 Million MAUs
- Twitter: 436 Million MAUs
So, Twitter would have to generate a heckuva lot of engagement per user to generate anywhere near the inventory of other social media platforms. But we know they don't, as evidenced by their revenues and ARPU [2].
The relevance of Twitter does not originate in generating the biggest number of eyeballs on advertisements (it doesn't do well at all in that regard).
Twitter is relevant because a very specific audience of multipliers (particularly journalists, but also other influential public figures) use Twitter - often in person, while some marketing company runs their Facebook account. The public reach that Twitter can potentially provide is much bigger than that of any other social network, even though those networks may nominally have a multiple of the number of users of Twitter.
Musk gets this, and it is why he is interested in Twitter. The market doesn't get it, which is why it undervalues Twitter. However, you cannot blame the market for that; it is poised to undervalue Twitter, because the actual value of Twitter is not accessible to just anybody, but people like Musk, who are well-connected in the Twitter social graph. Hence the value of Twitter to someone like Musk is actually much larger than the value of the exact same Twitter to any random shareholder.
> Musk gets this, and it is why he is interested in Twitter.
You think this is why he's interested. He has not actually said this, correct?
Another plausible explanation is that it is his preferred social media and its (relatively) cheap because it is very poorly run and thus its growth and financials suck.
You maybe right about Twitter having outsized relevance with respect to its user base, but I'm absolutely not buying that "the public reach that Twitter can potentially provide is much bigger than that of any other social network". Meta's platforms reach BILLIONS of people.
Yes, but most of these are leafs on the (imaginary) unified global social graph.
Twitter's active users are much more likely to not be leafs, but multipliers, some able to reach even people completely out of reach of any social network (by transporting a story over to other media, like print or TV). And considering that even Facebook only has a minority of the world's population among its gigantic user base (and an even smaller minority among its active users), the ability to reach out to other media through Twitter is extremely valuable, in my opinion even more valuable than the ability to reach the giant Facebook user base directly.
The idea that every minute outside of working, sleeping, etc... would be thought of as being "owned" by some social network is sickening. Scrolling Twitter or TikTok shouldn't be a default activity.
Sadly, I think you might be more right than wrong for far too many people.
Just to be clear, I did not suggest that every minute outside of work/sleep/etc. is or should be "owned" by a social network. Rather, that is just the total, raw addressable market (at least to my naive mind).
Though I do think the developed world would be better off if people consumed less media (and social media).
not only that but dominant platforms have always evolved, going from mass media consisting of newspapers, to radio, to newsreels, to broadcast television, and then to primitive dialup services like AOL and Prodigy. I would expect this will continue to evolve, from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc, to standards-compliant interoperable services.
The audience, or in other words the public, always catch up and move to the next dominant platform. This is one reason why I think arguments about network effects are one to be taken with a grain of salt. The public will go wherever the content is. Twitter's audience is not going to remain as valuable as it previously was (ahem, mismanagement may be one reason for this).
I wonder if Elon plans to build a replacement himself in case his bid doesn’t go through. He alluded to a “plan B” in the recent TED interview (https://youtu.be/cdZZpaB2kDM).
What would make a replacement better in your eyes? Anything that reaches critical mass in the public will have the same sort of censoring and filtering.
One who passed 6th grade civics might also understand that the concept of “censorship” does not exclusively refer to US Government violations of the 1st Amendment, or even necessarily to government actions at all. Nor does the concept of “freedom of speech” begin and end with the US 1st Amendment.
Then again, this tweet from Jack has nothing whatsoever to do with any of that.
>> Is it just me, or does anyone else in the entire tech world actually know what "censorship" means? Is anyone else really deeply fucking tired of hearing it mis-defined, and hearing content moderation described as "censorship", as if it's some kind of obvious First Amendment violation, when anyone who got a C- in sixth-grade civics knows that it is not?
> One who passed 6th grade civics might also understand that the concept of “censorship” does not exclusively refer to US Government violations of the 1st Amendment, or even necessarily government actions at all. Nor does the concept of “freedom of speech” begin and end with the US 1st Amendment.
That's true, but it doesn't actually address the GP. Even a sixth grader knows it's not censorship to choose to not hand your megaphone to an asshole or troll (or to take it away from someone who, in your opinion, is using it for ill).
A vital element of free speech is the ability to select which speech you choose to transmit or amplify. Otherwise the "marketplace of ideas" can no longer sort the good ideas from the bad, and it becomes a cacophony of assholes and idiots.
> Even a sixth grader knows it's not censorship to choose to not hand your megaphone to an asshole or troll
If you give your megaphone to everyone by default (ie: anyone can sign up for Twitter), but then take it away from certain people you don’t like, it’s censorship. Even if you tell people ahead of time, “hey, you can’t use this megaphone to say X”, and then take it away when they say X, it’s still censorship.
It might be justifiable, it might not be, but it’s definitely within the definition of censorship and if you can’t start there, you’re arguing in bad faith to avoid uncomfortable connotations.
> If you give your megaphone to everyone by default (ie: anyone can sign up for Twitter), but then take it away from certain people you don’t like, it’s censorship. Even if you tell people ahead of time, “hey, you can’t use this megaphone to say X”, and then take it away when they say X, it’s still censorship.
No it isn't. Those conditions are made up, and seem retroactively concocted to label getting banned from twitter as "censorship."
And if it is, all you've done is make "censorship" look appealing and reasonable, which I doubt is what you were going for.
I am merely here to advocate for the position that words have meaning and that (in this case) they have well-defined meaning. I could not care less whether what I’m saying makes censorship look appealing and reasonable to you, I am perfectly fine with leaving room for you to advocate for censorship, even if I wouldn’t do the same.
But it is censorship. Moderation is not censorship. A moderator in a debate does not censor, he directs conversation. The fact that we’ve appropriated the term to mean censorship doesn’t mean that the definitions actually change.
Censorship is simply preventing people from saying what they would like to say.
A moderator would have the power to censor as some sort of final option when other moderation techniques failed. Generally we don't have instances where the moderator needs to use it.
So a moderator moderates, and extreme cases of moderation may censor. But there is still a distinction between censorship and moderation even if there are situations where one involves the other.
Moderation in a formal debate and moderation on online platforms and forums have come to mean different things. For better or for worse, the term does largely relate to censorship in the context of online communication.
> Free speech doesn't mean you have the right to hijack others' resources to your own ends, even in the most expansive interpretations.
That's what this argument is about... Currently, the laws don't require companies or individuals to uphold free speech when they are providing a public square venue.
If people want to create private subreddits or private Facebook groups, go ahead and moderate.
But twitter isn't doing that, they're providing a quasi public space but then dictating what can be said.
The argument were making is that is dangerous to democracy and the same free speech rights should translate here.
Arguing from the point of view of what current laws say when we are arguing that laws need changing is just tiresome, please either argue why your current laws are actually worth keeping using first principles or just stop.
> Free speech doesn't mean you have the right to hijack others' resources to your own ends, even in the most expansive interpretations.
Upon more thinking, I feel like maybe this was close enough to a first principles argument.
The reason I think in this case we have a right to some of these resources is due to the fact they are in essence exploiting the people's resource. We have to speak somewhere online, if you want us to congregate in your public square, we should be entitled to some regulations, in return, you get to advertise to us, charge fees for upgrades or boosting or whatever else you want to do.
Ideally in a free market we would be able to find a competitor and congregate there instead but since this isn't a free market and tragedy of the commons is a thing were stuck with twitter being a monopoly on public political discourse.
> Ideally in a free market we would be able to find a competitor and congregate there instead but since this isn't a free market and tragedy of the commons is a thing were stuck with twitter being a monopoly on public political discourse.
Twitter isn't a monopoly, though: there's all kinds of other social media services available, as well as other places where "public political discourse" occur.
Free speech doesn't mean you're entitled to your preferred choice of venue. I recall when I was a kid, the local Nazi didn't get a prime time spot on local TV, though I'm sure he would have wanted one. He had to make due with a public access slot that very few (if any) people would watch.
That same Nazi is also the reason passwords were implemented on the university computer clusters, because he was caught using them without permission (as a non-student) to print neonazi flyers.
I don't know if those examples really translate. They're both not public square resources. Twitter is different, it's an open platform where anyone can have a say. Until twitter deems it uncomfortable.
Tv airwaves and physical printers are not things open to the general public.
I'm aware of that. But as you are no doubt aware, a very very large number of commentators who really ought to know better are explicitly saying that it's a matter of "free speech rights" (which is obviously is not) or that it's a First Amendment issue (which, again, it obviously is not).
I'm very tired of it. I was just honestly wondering if anyone else is tired of it, too.
It seems to me that if could just stop debating in bad faith, perhaps we could then get to the actual issue, which is that some people think that private companies should not be allowed to do content moderation and that we'd all be magically better off if this were not allowed, or at least, not a common practice. Then we could have a debate on that question, without all the stupid noise about whether this is a real free speech issue.
I'm tired of people minimizing the problem by nitpicking. Like the conflict, which is what this is, a conflict between incompatible interests, just vanishes once I open up the dictionary. Oh! That's what that word means! Alright, let's go home everyone. Just World Hypothesis still holds. Nice work.
The crux of the issue is the same, regardless: silencing dissent.
Semantic arguments deployed to try to constrain the working definition of censorship (i.e. "it's a private platform, it can do what it want, if you don't like it just build your own and overturn overwhelming network effects through magic lmao!") are typically obfuscation and almost never in good faith.
And I think that you'll learn that a great many see right through them and are, indeed, very fucking tired of humoring them. Including, apparently, Elon Musk.
This is an example of "nutpicking": "The practice of sifting through the comments of blogs, email threads, discussion groups and other user generated content in an attempt find choice quotes proving that the advocates for or against a particular political opinion are unreasonable, uninformed extremists."
I think the problem is similar to "free software". Adobe will give you a copy of Acrobat Reader for $0.00 - that's "free software" right? It's "free" as in "no money changes hands" but not "free" as in "you can download the source code, modify it, redistribute it, redistribute it with your modifications, etc, etc".
So occasionally non-technical people would get confused by what is meant by "free software". To resolve the confusion some people called it FOSS or FLOSS, some people called it "Free as in speech" vs. "Free as in beer", some called it "Libre". But there is a meaningful distinction between locked-down proprietary software given away for $0.00 in furtherance of some ulterior commercial motive and software which is genuinely free for you to do whatever you want with it.
I think we need a similar distinction for the two meanings of "free speech". One which is the legal "Congress shall make no law..." narrow reading of the First Amendment and one which is the Voltaire style “I may not agree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” The first one is a law, the second is more of a moral value many feel is essential for a free society.
I think a lot of the problem is constitutional law running into Voltaire. You are correct that Twitter is not "censoring" in the sense that it's a private company not governed by the First Amendment. They are correct that Twitter is "censoring" content and is not providing freedom of speech for at least some users.
I like to think of it as the right to freedom of speech and the "spirit" of free speech.
The definition of the first is simple. You have the right of not been coerced to (not) say what you do (not) want to say. Note that this includes the possibility of being coerced not only by the government but by any other institution/individual. It also grants the right of private entities to arbitrarily decide their platform rules.
The spirit of free speech is more vaporous, but it's the idea that powers the right. It's the notion that every perspective deserves to be listened and that the society will be better as a consequence. It's one of the main values of western culture.
One can defend the right but not the spirit, the spirit but not the right, both or none of them.
people get their twitter accounts locked for having incidental background music playing in shared content. This is an amazingly punitive action for a trivial mistake, and Twitter's hands are effectively tied on this (the copyright mafia won this war a long time ago).
No one's forcing people to break Twitter's rules, they should have read them before they broke them.
People in the tech world used to use the term 'corporate censorship' freely. This was prior to the emergence to Big Tech as our virtual town square and its precise alignment with tech world virtues. Now we get pedantic lectures about the exact meaning of censorship; interweb lawyers refining ever deeper regressions of definition that neatly factor out every fall of the ban hammer.
Another way out of this mess is to sell to a chinese buyer. They may censor anyone who is critical of china, but at least they ll treat left and right equally bad.
Fei Fei Li is a senior CS professor at Stanford. She has previously had immense contribution to computer vision field, though as someone in ML field, I would agree to a some extent that she is now more of a evangelist unlike Dr. J Malik or M. Jordan, her contemporaries.
Her students have been pretty successful as well - Andrej Karpathy being one. Personally, I might sit on the fence on this one. Its maybe kind of alright to have someone having the research view of things. Lot of companies have such members in their board.
I assume you did no research on her before commenting - she’s a very successful computer scientist and spent (a little) time as a VP at Google Cloud. While I don’t know if her background makes her the most qualified to be on a board, she is most certainly not a socialite or completely useless.
She did fuck all at google cloud. Far as I can tell she has the credibility of a TED Talk speaker. Why is she trotted out all over the valley? She definitely seems to be more of a socialite than anything else.
She's a world-class researcher in computer vision. If anyone should be on the board, it's an accomplished computer science researcher who has mentored many young people at Silicon Valley U.
Sounds like the person you're replying to worked in the vicinity of her business unit, and was bitter about her as a VP.
It's a common situation someone with good external credentials get parachuted into a role that they're ultimately not fit for, drove initiatives that only wasted resources, and left behind a mess that others had to clean up. All while they're hailed as Jesus's second coming.
I don't know how Fei Fei Li performed, and don't want to pass judgment on that matter. Just if that was indeed the case, I could understand the frustration. Companies would rather spend 10 million poaching someone useless and let them spend 100 million on something useless, than to invest the same in existing good engineers and scientists that continue to deliver. Even worse is to keep watching those people failing upwards. This is more commonly a stereotype for MBA executives, but is often also true for academics that get significant appointments outside a research institution without the experience of managing a business project.
Ah, I now see glimpses of that from their other comments. I also agree with your general sentiments of academic credentials/aptitude not translating to managerial competence; granted, this may or may not be the case for Fei Fei Li, as you mentioned.
Wow, I find Jack Dorsey's conduct in this highly questionable. He left (or was he asked to leave?) as the CEO and is now trying to topple the current management.
If he was so much in favor of this, why did he not do this while he was the CEO, which was till a few weeks ago.
This is such a bullshit argument unless Dorsey thinks he himself was the reason Twitter sucked, because the Twitter board had him running the company for most of the last few years where Twitter went from becoming the center of conversation to a universally agreed blot on humanity.
It seems to me like share-holder ownership is pretty incapable of dealing with the complexities of being such a global and influential platform. The plutocratic model of 1 share 1 vote and financialization of what is pretty much seen and used as a public service really gets in the way of turning the platform into something that could be truly useful for humanity.
I think we are very much due on a change of paradigm when it comes to these sort of services. What is it that twitter users want, what do governments want (many politicians use twitter as an official means of communication), what do workers of the platform want? All of these stakeholders should have a say in what is done with twitter.
To me, saying "the board is at fault" and thinking it could be better as a privately owned corporation is also missing the target. Of course, I think these tech billionaires think they can make better decisions for everyone and so to them it is obvious that a truly public form of ownership would be a mistake. It's the benevolent dictator story.
To finalise, it would be interesting to see an exploration on technologies that could help stake-ownership management so that we can have firms that are capable of making decisions that make people happier and societies a better place.