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

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

#501

Post by Spivak »

overrun11 wrote: post #406

I suspect most of the commenters supporting the right of a private company to moderate content is completely contingent on what those moderation policies are. Commenters feign holding an absolute position but would certainly balk if the moderation ever turned against them and the idea they support. If you believe on principle, the right of private companies to moderate content, then you must support all kinds of absu…

Right but this kind of reasoning presumes a world where everything is equal, truth in unknowable, and our priors for two statements like "women should be allowed to vote" and "a woman's place is in the home and they are too emotional for politics [1]" are that they're equally valid and likely to be correct.

So I can totally understand why basically no moderation is in this world is appealing but surely we can do better than that. Who's gonna argue that the extremely racist "Obama is a Kenyan Muslim baby photoshop" is well reasoned take that isn't based in hate? So when I say I like having moderation I'm not arguing that I'm fine with literally arbitrary completely unaccountable moderation.

[1] This was a real anti-suffragist take in the early 1900s. Which is hilarious because 100 years later it's overwhelmingly the men in politics having public emotional outbursts.

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

#502

Post by funshed »

gotaquestion wrote: post #256

If he's so rich and smart, just make a better Twitter and people will flock to it, right? I mean, I thought he's for the invisible hand of the market yadda yadda yadda.

If he's so rich and sport, buy twitter and build on the shoulders of a giant.

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

#503

Post by derefr »

weakfish wrote: post #481

The thing that is absolutely puzzling to me in these conversations is it seems that people who generally believe in the free market desire what amounts to regulation on social media platforms, inversely, to protect 'free speech' when in fact Twitter has the absolute right in the free market to moderate as they see fit when free speech only protects from governmental actions. And to those who would make the argument t…

> Twitter is _excellent_ at making its user base seem more important than it is

Most of Twitter is a shitty microcosm, yes; but on the other hand, more than a few objectively "important" people seem to only engage with the sphere of public discourse through Twitter.

Right now, that's just their voluntary engagement, and they could switch. But a single policy forcing use like e.g. "the Office of the President will make all non-press-conference communications only through Twitter" and suddenly there'd be a dire need for regulation.

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

#505

Post by efitz »

weakfish wrote: post #481

The thing that is absolutely puzzling to me in these conversations is it seems that people who generally believe in the free market desire what amounts to regulation on social media platforms, inversely, to protect 'free speech' when in fact Twitter has the absolute right in the free market to moderate as they see fit when free speech only protects from governmental actions. And to those who would make the argument t…

I disagree with the framing. For some good reasons and some insane reasons the US government has decided to treat corporations as “people”. Corporations are otherwise strictly regulated in thousands of ways but somehow regulating their ability to shape narratives with selective suppression and amplification of the speech of their users is sacrosanct?

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

#506

Post by andrewmunsell »

yabatopia wrote: post #383

Let's ignore personality and societal issues for a moment and look at the value proposition. The 'best and final offer' of $54.20 per share is just too low to be acceptable for major investors. Just over year ago, Twitter shares traded at about $70 per share. Musk's offer is about 25% lower than last years peak. There's no reason to assume Twitter shares can't reach the same levels ever again, nothing much has change…

> If Musk thinks Twitter is that valuable to take such risks, current major investors will probably want to unlock that value themselves.

Doesn't this depend on if you actually agree with Musk's thinking and valuation of Twitter in the first place? Given the share price has been all over the place, clearly the market is not on the same page.

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

#507

Post by throw123123123 »

snowwrestler wrote: post #94

As a Twitter shareholder I would vote against this. Musk says there is tremendous financial potential in Twitter but then offers $54 a share, which is not even 2x the IPO price. That’s not a “tremendous potential” premium. There is a lot of evidence that platforms which de-prioritize moderation have trouble attracting revenue and experience significant compliance costs. See: the sad story of Moot, who ran one of the…

If this offer is rejected twitter stock will go -30/-50% so if your north start is prices this is as good as it gets.

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

#508

Post by seanw444 »

throw7 wrote: post #306

A "free speech" platform would give users more power to control their communications with others and transparency of how the "system" worked. Very simple things that we had with usenet like killfiles and threaded conversations are foreign things to the younger generations. Things like shadowbans and a central authority that just decides to disable your account would be non-existent. Heck, we even had a form of "blue…

Fully agree. Open source the platform. Nobody cares to copy Twitter's software. It's not revolutionary. It's tailored to their infrastructure specifically. They have the network effect going for them. If they were going to be displaced by a technologically-superior platform, Mastodon would have done it already. There really isn't a downside.

Let people censor who they want for themselves.

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

#509

Post by starkd »

weakfish wrote: post #481

The thing that is absolutely puzzling to me in these conversations is it seems that people who generally believe in the free market desire what amounts to regulation on social media platforms, inversely, to protect 'free speech' when in fact Twitter has the absolute right in the free market to moderate as they see fit when free speech only protects from governmental actions. And to those who would make the argument t…

The notion of free speech is so central to the American ethos that, when a company which espouses to be a function of the town square idea takes it on themselves to suppress and censor "right speech", it just doesn't sit right with a lot of people. Even though a non-government entity may have the right to do it, it doesn't make it morally right.
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