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Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources

reuters.com

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Re: Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources

#231

Am I the only person here that finds Twitter a nice place? I'm careful about who I follow, most of whom are tech people or educators. My feed is a really nice place to go, and I can't remember the last time I read or saw anything that triggered me in the slightest. I'm seeing loads of comments about how toxic Twitter is, but isn't that on you? Don't follow or engage and the algorithm will skip you over.

Not at all just you.

With the flexible content controls that Twitter already has in place, you can make Twitter to be just about as nice as you want it to be. If you mark your profile private, selectively follow, and either mute or block things / accounts that interfere with your worldview, it can be quite pleasant.

The problem is that you have to be public to get virality, and that virality opens you up to people who disagree. Locking your account and developing your own content haven is an easy tradeoff for those people sane enough to not need internet likes from random people.

Re: Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources

#232
post #113

“Everything that isn’t illegal is allowed” sounds great until you see what that actually means on the internet. Anyone who has ever worked in content moderation / trust & safety knows what kind of unrelenting deluge of obnoxious / disturbing / spam-filled / miserable race to the bottom of the lizard brain stuff that is constantly being pushed back on any moderately popular social media site. It seems so easy from a d…

I just hope the free speech absolutists consume their daily dose of asbestos shavings to exercise their freedom

Re: Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources

#233
post #113

“Everything that isn’t illegal is allowed” sounds great until you see what that actually means on the internet. Anyone who has ever worked in content moderation / trust & safety knows what kind of unrelenting deluge of obnoxious / disturbing / spam-filled / miserable race to the bottom of the lizard brain stuff that is constantly being pushed back on any moderately popular social media site. It seems so easy from a d…

let people filter for themselves. someone is offended by pornography so chooses an algo that accounts for that, another is offended by anti-trans sentiment and another algo accounts for that. everyone should be more broadly free to speak but we are not all forced to listen.

Re: Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources

#234
The main use of Twitter, to me, is that it gets news out of places that have poor, slow or no mainstream coverage, and does it fast - seconds after the event, in some cases. That won't be helped at all by unblocking the howling id of the right wing and (barely distinguishable) the paid and volunteer troll farms of every (would-be) dictator with a hate-on for reality. That will just adjust the ratio of piss to pool sharply in the wrong direction. To the point it may lose its utility.

Re: Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources

#235
post #113

“Everything that isn’t illegal is allowed” sounds great until you see what that actually means on the internet. Anyone who has ever worked in content moderation / trust & safety knows what kind of unrelenting deluge of obnoxious / disturbing / spam-filled / miserable race to the bottom of the lizard brain stuff that is constantly being pushed back on any moderately popular social media site. It seems so easy from a d…

There’s one obvious flaw in “Everything that isn’t illegal is allowed”: determining what is illegal. Free speech laws are some of the trickiest legal issues we grapple with in the US, and many statues hinge on the intent behind the speech. How is Twitter supposed to implement this (hypothetical) new policy? Do they always give posters the benefit of the doubt? Seems ripe for abuse. Assume the worst? Probably more censorious than it is today. Punt to the courts? Great, moderation now takes years and costs thousands of dollars. What is the standard of proof to take down a tweet? Preponderance of the evidence? What evidence is admissible? Does Twitter just internally recreate the US trial court system to manage this? Do they do that for every country? The point is, the law on these issues is complex and frequently requires significant interpretation. Maximalism is no silver bullet.

Re: Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources

#236
post #113

“Everything that isn’t illegal is allowed” sounds great until you see what that actually means on the internet. Anyone who has ever worked in content moderation / trust & safety knows what kind of unrelenting deluge of obnoxious / disturbing / spam-filled / miserable race to the bottom of the lizard brain stuff that is constantly being pushed back on any moderately popular social media site. It seems so easy from a d…

Yeah it's not even a mysterious lesson. A handful of "we won't censor or moderate except illegal activity" twitter clones have popped up and rapidly learned why moderation exists.

Re: Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources

#239

Am I the only person here that finds Twitter a nice place? I'm careful about who I follow, most of whom are tech people or educators. My feed is a really nice place to go, and I can't remember the last time I read or saw anything that triggered me in the slightest. I'm seeing loads of comments about how toxic Twitter is, but isn't that on you? Don't follow or engage and the algorithm will skip you over.

> I'm careful about who I follow, most of whom are tech people or educators

I tried to do this for years but I’ve been unable to do this because everyone just tweets about politics (or Twitter finds a way to inject their recommendations into my feed). So I gave up and stopped trying to control that.

Even when Twitter finally made the option to use ‘latest tweets’ instead of their feed, after a decade of making that difficult, it still seemed to be too far gone.

Now I only use Twitter when I get linked to it from other sources.

Re: Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources

#240

People act like this is some spiteful thing he's doing in order to just post edgy memes or have a 'private' social media for himself. Twitter, despite being a toxic place the majority of people avoid, brought in over 5 billion dollars last year. If elon removes bots, welcomes non-extremists back on, gets comedians and entertaining accounts back on board and lets people say what they want instead a bot army of shills…

I agree with you. Also, it would be great to be able to pay $5/month for no advertisements.
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