Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private

Most speech used to be confined into the room it was spoken or into a circle of friends. Damage was limited. Now everybody can chat with everybody else. The damage can bring down countries in a few years.

Normally “Really? I’ve never heard of it.” isn’t good evidence, but when you’re asserting that Moot was one of the most popular social websites in the world it does have some bearing.

I'm not sure why everyone is talking about this as though it's on the horizon? The article doesn't mention "free speech" as a goal, it mentions:

- selling account privileges

- making HQ a homeless shelter

- edit button

In other words, monetization and PR.

The major free speech issue on Twitter is not whether certain people are allowed to be on Twitter. It's whether Twitter enables its users in carrying out harassment campaigns against people whose speech they don't like. These campaigns often feature unethical and fraudulent behavior, e.g. fake anonymous Yelp reviews complaining about an employee, encouraging/performing vandalism of the business, phone calls in the middle of the night, borderline slanderous exaggerations sent through anonymous channels, etc. It's quite misleading to characterize these internet mobs as "people exercising their right to criticism", and they tend to rely on the ability of people to anonymously take action against someone who is not anonymous. Fixing it would require more controls on Twitter, not fewer.

Regardless of whether or not it would be a good idea for Twitter to remove moderation, personally my feeling is that if someone says they're a free speech absolutist and they oppose burner accounts and anonymity, then they're not actually a free speech absolutist.

It's become more common in certain circles to say that free speech is fine as long as people have a persistent ID and reputation, and I do like reputation systems to a certain degree -- but I want to point out that "a persistent ID and a reputation system" is just "social consequences" with extra steps.

I sometimes suspect that the people who propose those systems are (unintentionally) arguing for a world with even more self-policing about what people say online, and I have over time come to suspect that a world with lots of communities that have strict moderation policies and that are occasionally closed off entirely, but that generally allow more anonymous accounts -- is probably a world with more free speech (and hopefully less free speech of a harmful kind) than a world where everybody gets one voice and it's tracked everywhere. Again that's a separate conversation, but the point is that if your definition of free speech absolutism is that anyone can say anything they want wherever they are without social or political consequences, then (regardless whether or not that's a good idea) persistent identifiers are a step backwards from that goal.