most likely he’ll figure out a better way to generate revenues and double the stock value
Thinking about this a little more, and picking something in the distant past to be less contentious about it, this has always been the danger of a free press and free speech, which belongs to everyone in the U.S. (even if you’re not a citizen, actually).
The example I will use is Walter Duranty at the NY Times and the Holodomor in Ukraine. Duranty knew Stalin was starving the Ukrainians deliberately. He and other journalists of the time, whether useful idiots or fellow travelers, used the literal Potemkin villages and other Soviet PR to parrot Soviet “successes” and to cover up purges and deliberate Soviet-made famines. Here is a NYT statement on Duranty’s stuff:
Some say he was merely duped, but we can set that to the side for now. Let’s come to present day.
It is amusing to me when various journalists get caught by people goofing around on twitter, making jokes specifically about journalists’ assumptions… and I actually can’t link to the series of tweets from a particular person yesterday that were obvious jokes to me (because it was so obvious as I knew who the person was) about the over-the-top reactions to Elon Musk buying Twitter that other people were taking as legit.
Well, that’s twitter for you – it’s supposed to be ephemeral.
I like how twitter reveals that buffoonery. I understand the journalists don’t like that, but they do have a choice – they don’t have to be on twitter or interact there. That people don’t have good judgment or self-control online… well, that’s on them.
Maybe they will leave, or at least have the good sense to switch to pseudonyms like many “normies”.
But many can’t give up the blue checks. Oh, vanity! vanity!
You see the problem with the whole “Fake News” argument is that we have a very partisan set of people deciding what is and what isn’t Fake News. If you tweeted stuff about the lab leak theory, it was removed, your account suspended, etc. That’s F-ed up. I don’t even understand why that was ever a theory that was partisan. I think it was because the orange dufus-in-chief said it, then it had to be wrong.
The same has gone for several other things in the last couple of years. People who are categorically not experts in the fields that they are muting is weird and frankly Orwellian. So if Musk allows people to post random crap, while at the same time destroying Twitter bots, I think that’s a win-win. I will never support the censoring of free speech. unless it is harassing in nature, calling for violence, or something like that. I find it deeply disturbing how OK so many people are with censoring things that people disagree with.
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Oh, sure. And Twitter, like anything that large, has lots of good features, too. I mean, you can’t be huge and important without being valuable to a lot of people. And anything huge and important will hurt a lot of people, too.
I’m not trying to argue that Twitter is either good or bad. Mostly just that it’s important. And it’s entering a new and potentially very different phase via this purchase.
difficult to comprehend what “famine that killed millions of Ukrainians” even actually looks like…
It seems like the most obvious consideration is whether he will unban Trump, how that might affect our politics/president/terrorism/etc.
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There was not a very clear distinction between things the dufus in chief said, and things that were harassing in nature or inciting violence.
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Do you have an example of this? I see YouTube and Facebook here, but not Twitter.
I agree with your post in general. But I also don’t think there’s any easy or good solution right now. In particular, I don’t buy that unregulated social media is not evil.
And keeping with your example, here’s an argument that Twitter screwed our views on the hypothesis, by tending to promote the worst hot takes.
Not everybody who dismissed the lab-leak hypothesis as a debunked crank obsession was this indifferent to the facts of the case. Far from it. The problem is that the people with the strongest views had the weakest interest in the truth. An asymmetry of passion between their insistence that the lab-leak hypothesis was false and racist and the weaker feelings of others — who, at most, believed the hypothesis was only possibly true — created a stampede toward the most extreme denial.
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Adding incendiary comments to every article you link is what Twitter is all about. It is either the Wuhan Flu / China virus from the communists, or a racist conspiracy theory pushed by the right.
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You might be right. Perhaps it was Youtube and Facebook. It’s obviously been a little while now, but I certainly remember lab leak topics being downright taken down on various platforms. I remember it being something that discussing on TV being a big no-no. What’s funny about it is I have no idea, but something that seemed like such a coincidence and you couldn’t even discuss it. But why? People can still argue the world is flat and that isn’t removed. 
I think you misunderstood his post.
You might often misunderstand his post? Who knows.
Indeed I did.
It’s a good question. Will have to Google it. Of course it could have just been considered part of “Covid misinformation” which was deemed harmful because it was killing people. In general, it all feels less like a coincidence to me and more like people don’t really know wtf they want.
Elon Musk’s not-so-secret weapon: An army of Twitter bots - Los Angeles Times (latimes.com)
In early November 2013, the news wasn’t looking great for Tesla. A series of reports had documented instances of Tesla Model S sedans catching on fire, causing the electric carmaker’s share price to tumble.
Then, on the evening of Nov. 7, within a span of 75 minutes, eight automated Twitter accounts came to life and began publishing positive sentiments about Tesla. Over the next seven years, they would post more than 30,000 such tweets.
With more than 500 million tweets sent per day across the network, that output represents a drop in the ocean. But preliminary research from David A. Kirsch, a professor at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, concludes that activity of this sort by so-called bots has played a significant part in the “stock of the future” narrative that has propelled Tesla’s market value to altitudes loftier than any traditional financial analysis could justify.
In a market in love with “meme stocks,” sexy narrative is proving far more profitable than financial analysis, said Kirsch, co-author of “Bubbles and Crashes: The Boom and Bust of Technological Innovation.”
Obviously. He makes his living off verbal inflation of value and he now owns the podium.
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Twitter’s best use was for real-time reporting. My lawyer aunt uses it for up-to-the-second reporting on cases of interest. Many people used it to record warzones like Ukraine in real-time, so news of hospitals being bombed were circulated in minutes rather than an article 8 hours later. Also in some cases it warned of earthquakes or other disasters in time for very attentive users to scramble to prepare.
I’ve never made an account on it so this doesn’t affect me, but hoping that part of it is unaffected.
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sumo tweets
You are not providing convincing evidence.
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I mean, in favor of Twitter’s existence.
I use it to keep with all sports. Takes too much time to Google results of NBA playoffs, NHL playoffs when they finally get here, MLB games, various local high school and college sports, and other things like my who my teams are trading, Angel Hernandez missing another call, etc. Just a convenient way to get the information in one place
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IFYP?
It’s not important to me, or anyone in my family. Especially as a source of getting news that might be of general interest.
I know that my kids and their cousins use instagram as a way of staying connected . . . but it’s also not their source for general information. Just staying connected to each other.