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Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll

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Re: Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll

#492
post #372
post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Murdoch is the worst possible example, being in it up to his eyeballs. It's especially the case in Australia, where his empire started and still dominates. This article is one of many, its headline and opening line being: "Special report: Rupert Murdoch, a hands-on newspaperman" "To illustrate the extent to which Rupert Murdoch used to micro-manage his newspapers,..." https://www.reuters.com/article/us-newscorp-murdo…

>"To illustrate the extent to which Rupert Murdoch used to micro-manage his newspapers,..." The 2011 article you linked emphasizes his activity with tabloid newspapers. I'm unfamiliar with those. From what I've read, he doesn't meddle with his "prestige" newspaper like WSJ. Maybe that's why the WSJ didn't censor itself on negative Theranos stories even though he invested $125 million in it and Elizabeth Holmes asked…

He didn't discriminate with his Australian broadsheets. Maybe US editors have more spine than Australian editors?

The Murdoch dynasty (Keith, Rupert, Lachlan, ...) are master newspapermen. Why burn goodwill killing a story about money that is already lost when that goodwill could be spent on influencing even bigger things?

Re: Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll

#493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not crazy and there is no flaw in your thinking. I guess we'll have to trust the serial liar on the results.

I just really liked him as a bad ass engineer. Sucks that he went this far

He isn't a badass engineer. He hires badass engineers and gets the credit for their work.

Re: Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll

#494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Jeff Bezos personally bought Washington Post but he left it alone and let the editors run it. What Jeff did do was invest some money into the IT department to modernize the workflow tools (metrics dashboards, etc) for journalists. He stayed out of the decisions of what stories get run on the front page. I don't think what you describe is actually possible. Compare Glenn Greenwald's writing about his work at an orga…

Thank you for posting that, it is a very interesting viewpoint. I do think there is a bit of an inconsistency in Greenwald's reasoning though, he can't really speak for his colleagues, but he can speak for himself. So maybe he's not so much talking about his colleagues at the end as he is talking about himself? Or does he see himself as more principled than they are?

He's writing about how he ended up being forced out of his own media outlet (his words; he was co-founder).

If he sees himself as more principled than they are, I would argue that the sequence of events he describes is sufficient justification for that view. It might not be, in a deep sense, true -- you could easily interpret him as being less afraid of losing a well-paid sinecure than the rest of the editorial board, as opposed to being more strongly attached to his own principles -- but it is true on the surface and it's an accusation he can fairly lodge. They caved; he didn't.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/my-resignation-from-the-int...

> the intended core innovation of The Intercept, above all else, was to create a new media outlets where all talented, responsible journalists would enjoy the same right of editorial freedom I had always insisted upon for myself.

> The current iteration of The Intercept is completely unrecognizable when compared to that original vision. Rather than offering a venue for airing dissent, marginalized voices and unheard perspectives, it is rapidly becoming just another media outlet with mandated ideological and partisan loyalties

> the brute censorship this week of my article — about the Hunter Biden materials and Joe Biden’s conduct regarding Ukraine and China, as well my critique of the media’s rank-closing attempt, in a deeply unholy union with Silicon Valley and the “intelligence community,” to suppress its revelations — eroded the last justification I could cling to for staying. It meant that not only does this media outlet not provide the editorial freedom to other journalists, as I had so hopefully envisioned seven years ago, but now no longer even provides it to me. In the days heading into a presidential election, I am somehow silenced from expressing any views that random editors in New York find disagreeable, and now somehow have to conform my writing and reporting to cater to their partisan desires and eagerness to elect specific candidates.

> To say that such censorship is a red line for me, a situation I would never accept no matter the cost, is an understatement. It is astonishing to me, but also a reflection of our current discourse and illiberal media environment, that I have been silenced about Joe Biden by my own media outlet.

Re: Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll

#495
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last month he implied he was looking for a successor: https://www.axios.com/2022/11/16/elon-musk-twitter-ceo-new-l... Although I'm not sure who would want to run Twitter now.

> Although I'm not sure who would want to run Twitter now. Especially while continually being at Elon’s mercy.

Ask any head coach of the Dallas Cowboys working under Jerry Jones how this kind of relationship works out for those involved. I get the sense that it would be very similar.

Re: Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll

#496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like elon or not it makes absolutely no sense to compare social media with effectively newspapers, they're completely different things. The only comparison I guess you could realistically have is zuckerberg, but even then it wouldn't work very well.

It’s only a tangent that they are newspapers compared to twitter. The real comparison is that the owners are billionaires and giants in their “industries” in some fashion. Elon forgot capitalist step zero: Choose profit before ego. That he is a bad capitalist will become apparent at a long enough temporal scale..

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Re: Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll

#497
post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it the fact they don't want anyone to question their belief system? Because that's what I see. When they are questioned, they martyrize themselves to spark more outrage. (I'm a victim of the woke left!) And then use that as a crutch to deflect further criticism or questions. If it wasn't Hunter Biden's Laptop, it would be something else, e.g. Pizzagate, Voting Machines, Mail-in Balloting, Fake school shootings, et…

I don't really think that's the case. We can see the dynamic in action on the Fediverse, a space where anyone can make their own server and moderate it according to their wishes. There are right-wing servers that have created their own walled gardens (Gab, Truth Social), but at the same time the left-wing servers have created server blacklists that include most of the "free speech" servers. Given the option, a lot of…

I'm not saying it doesn't happen on the left as well. I'm just saying it's easier to recognize when it does happen on the right. The Dominion v. Fox News lawsuits come to mind here. Parents of Sandy Hook v. Alex Jones, too.

Back around 1991/1992 the Democrats in congress were so convinced there was an October Surprise in the 1980 election. There just wasn't anything there.

Hugboxes don't force you to question your belief system, right? You can go on living in whatever world you want to. But anything coming out of those hugboxes, no one should take seriously, right?

Before social media we would have called much of this stuff "conspiracy theories".

Re: Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll

#498

I think he only posts polls when he believes he knows the outcome already. Yesterday he posted a poll about unsuspending the journalist accounts and when the outcome wasn't what he wanted instead of following the majority vote he posted it again with different options (with the same result, which he did abide by the second time). I think this indicates he's tired of Twitter already. But he still owns it, so who will…

He can likely manipulate the results on the backend anyway. This is a real cowardly way to make decisions, by pretending they come from someone else.

Clearly, the vote count is full of fraud because all of the users are bots anyways, yeah? In the pools of thought that Elon floats in, it would only be more fraudulent if Dominion was conducting the poll.

Re: Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll

#499
post #185

I think he only posts polls when he believes he knows the outcome already. Yesterday he posted a poll about unsuspending the journalist accounts and when the outcome wasn't what he wanted instead of following the majority vote he posted it again with different options (with the same result, which he did abide by the second time). I think this indicates he's tired of Twitter already. But he still owns it, so who will…

The second poll about unbanning the journalists went for 24 hours (the first was only an hour or so), so even though "now" was the winning option, he still got the outcome he was looking for by giving them a 24+ hour suspension.

>he still got the outcome he was looking for

what was that outcome? fewer people knowing about his childish behavior? no, that wasn't it. fewer people knowing about his private jet and the mechanisms of being able to track it. nope, didn't work that way either. showing the world he's a petulant little child that throws a hissy fit when he doesn't get his way. now we're getting somewhere.

Re: Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll

#500

Can you even turn Twitter around at all, even if he steps down and finds a replacement? It was burning money before Elon, after buyout it is technically in even bigger loss. Advertisers and many influencers have basically fled from it. Politicians are also looking into regulating or outright ban it due to recent headlines of suspending journalists and more. I still can't help but think that 40+ billion dollars probab…

I think it can be turned around. Scrap all the moderation changes musk has made, apologise to all the advertisers, keep headcount at a sustainable level (more than they have now but less than they had when musk bought it), and look to launch some new products (reviving Vine is the obvious one).

I don't think that will work as long as Musk is the majority shareholder.
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