tWiTtEr iS A PrIvAtE CoMpAnY, tHeY CaN Do wHaTeVeR ThEy wAnT
Elon Musk: buys Twitter to run it how he wants to
nO NoT LiKe ThAt
Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private
231–240 of 1001 posts
Re: Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private
#232Why isn't Elon buying Truth Social? Because it's not the hardware and software that he would be buying it's the equity which is people. Truth Social can have piles of servers and the best software but it can't buy or generate truth.
Re: Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private
#233As somebody from the first world who has had the experience of moderating Internet forums… free speech in the sense of “the government generally shouldn’t control people’s speech, with limited exceptions” is good and necessary. Free speech in the sense of “everybody should be forced to platform every idea” is silly IMO. Left alone user content rapidly devolves into the most low-effort salient content - flame wars, po…
> Note that you’re choosing to spend your time on HN (a relatively strongly moderated forum) instead of a less moderated forum like 8chan’s
This is a good point!
I agree with both you and the parent - which is to say that I'm entirely torn on this subject.
Moderation on platforms makes sense. Trying to work out where to draw the line is difficult. And free speech is incredibly important.
How to balance these competing concerns is really beyond me.
I'm a proponent of the idea of "the solution to bad speech, is more speech", but if you take this to its logical conclusion on the internet, you often end up in the wild west.
Re: Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private
#234Hee hee. Let's see what The Babylon Bee has to say about this.
I’m sure The Onion, but for morons, will have some great insightful takes
Re: Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private
#235From observing various internet forums, including this one, I noticed that people from the "first world" countries don't know the value of free speech and often take it for granted. Sometimes even coming to such views as "free speech is dangerous" and that "we should limit free speech" (by blocking the views I don't like). Understand this: limits on free speech are far more dangerous to society than allowing fringe e…
Nice comment (in the style of "I'll get downvoted for this but"), but I don't see how this is remotely related to the article at hand.
A multi-hundred-billionaire is bidding for a takeover of one of the largest internet public forums. How is this conducive to free speech?
Re: Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private
#236From observing various internet forums, including this one, I noticed that people from the "first world" countries don't know the value of free speech and often take it for granted. Sometimes even coming to such views as "free speech is dangerous" and that "we should limit free speech" (by blocking the views I don't like). Understand this: limits on free speech are far more dangerous to society than allowing fringe e…
Undermining the legitimacy of liberalism through enabling its abuse by extremists in violation of other laws is equally as dangerous.
Re: Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private
#237From observing various internet forums, including this one, I noticed that people from the "first world" countries don't know the value of free speech and often take it for granted. Sometimes even coming to such views as "free speech is dangerous" and that "we should limit free speech" (by blocking the views I don't like). Understand this: limits on free speech are far more dangerous to society than allowing fringe e…
Hacker News is moderated rather strongly (hi dang)
Re: Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private
#238Who else thinks he's hype driving the price up to dump the shares he already owns at a profit? He clearly has no reason to fear the SEC...
Re: Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private
#239From observing various internet forums, including this one, I noticed that people from the "first world" countries don't know the value of free speech and often take it for granted. Sometimes even coming to such views as "free speech is dangerous" and that "we should limit free speech" (by blocking the views I don't like). Understand this: limits on free speech are far more dangerous to society than allowing fringe e…
> Understand this: limits on free speech are far more dangerous to society than allowing fringe extremists to spread their ideas.
Germany has had such a policy regarding holocaust denial for decades, and they don’t appear to be on the verge of tyranny to me. It’s not as black and white as you make it out to be.
Re: Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private
#240I'm not sure Musk knows what he's doing, this feels like a personal vendetta. I'm also not sure he has any likelihood of succeeding in the first place, I wouldn't necessarily assume anyone is going to take him up at that price. And (quite frankly) I don't think that Musk is a very good free speech activist. I think he's regularly hypocritical about free speech and regularly engages in his own forms of censorship; I don't think he has a particularly coherent philosophy about how to approach free speech.
All that being said, I don't really see the problem with him trying this, and I don't necessarily see a ton of downside to him succeeding or failing. I'm perfectly willing to grab the popcorn and just watch.
Twitter is not a great social network, and I don't think it's amazingly well managed. If it gets worse and Musk does a bunch of radical changes, maybe more people will start using Mastodon. If he fails, no harm done. If he joins on and does nothing and just monetizes it more aggressively, then :shrug:, Twitter is probably eventually headed in that direction anyway.
Go for it. I've got no confidence that Musk can actually innovate in this space, and little to no confidence that he'll actually even get the control he wants, and he might actually make things worse if he does succeed, but on a certain level who cares?
It really stinks for artists/communities on Twitter that might be hurt by that happening, but again, I don't really have a lot of confidence that Twitter isn't going to start hurting them anyway, so I don't know that this really matters all that much for them.
:shrug: Maybe 2 years from now I'll look back at this comment and think it's naive.