Elon Musk Twitter Trainwreck Mega-Thread

[Leo Gura]

12 minutes ago, Hardkill said:

I totally agree. However, it unfortunately looks like we may have too many people in the US who believe in absolute free speech and limited moderation. Do you think there will ever come a day when most Americans will be convinced by what people like you are saying?

I think most people understand that absolute free speech is a dumb idea, and they don't expect it of their social platforms.

Hardcore libertarians are a minority, which is why they never win any elections. It's an ideology which fails both in theory and in practice.

Don't forget that the loudest voices on social media are often the most ignorant and do not represent the majority.

Edited November 26, 2022 by Leo Gura

[Hardkill]

2 minutes ago, Danioover9000 said:

@Hardkill

   Ye old faithful method: default to next generation.

Yeah, the next generation will definitely be more liberal and open to new and improve changes. 

But given that younger generations tend to be more spoiled and entitled than older generations, wouldn't the younger generation be even more pissed about having their "free speech" being taken away from them? 

Also, I wonder how worried we should be about next generation becoming possibly more susceptible to toxic extreme-right wing messaging given how increasingly pervasive all kinds of information, including info. from alt-right media, has become. Also, how will the growing amount of right-wing and left-wing fringe outlets ever be stopped?

[Hardkill]

6 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

I think most people understand that absolute free speech is a dumb idea, and they don't expect it of their social platforms.

 

But don't all Republicans, whom as a whole makeup nearly half the US country, all believe in absolute free speech, especially after being taken over by Trump? Trump and MAGA all keep saying BS like "You gotta have freedom of speech no matter what..." and "big-tech and the radical left are killing our 1st amendments rights!!!!" 

6 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

I think most people understand that absolute free speech is a dumb idea, and they don't expect it of their social platforms.

Hardcore libertarians are a minority, which is why they never win any elections. It's an ideology which fails both in theory and in practice.

True. Non-Republican libertarians are indeed a minority. 

Edited November 26, 2022 by Hardkill

[Leo Gura]

3 minutes ago, Hardkill said:

But don't all Republicans, whom as a whole makeup nearly half the US country, all believe in absolute free speech

Definitely not.

You have to be much more careful with subscribing to such simplistic stereotypes.

This is just some narrative you invented based on cherrypicked media you've consumed.

Edited November 26, 2022 by Leo Gura

[Hardkill]

4 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

Definitely not.

You have to be much more careful with subscribing to such simplistic stereotypes.

This is just some narrative you invented.

Oh....

alright, then definitely libertarians and MAGA Republicans believe in absolute free speech, but perhaps not establishment Republicans. 

Then again, what about Ron DeSantis who says that does believe that big-tech and the radical left are "monopolizing" free speech? 

Edited November 26, 2022 by Hardkill

[Girzo]

1 hour ago, Hardkill said:

Then again, what about Ron DeSantis who says that does believe that big-tech and the radical left are "monopolizing" free speech? 

Politicians are politicians. They mostly don't care about things they say. He isn't saying that because he has been a free speech advocate all his life and became a politician to defend it. No, he is saying that because he is a politician. He is playing a different game, he is trying to score political points by using rhetoric and reffering common memes. He might even think personally that free speech is terrible and absolutist implementation of it would be a disaster and still nevertheless advocate it fervorously, because it's going to benefit him politically. If it comes to him having to implement any free speech policy and it not being radical enough or failing terribly, he can always blame that on someone or something else. Win-win for a politician, if his skills are top-notch he can say whatever he wants and never suffer consequences, someone else is going to take a beating.

[Danioover9000]

@mr_engineer

5 hours ago, mr_engineer said:

You are obligated to follow the law, as a social-media platform. My point is that your position as Twitter should be for free-speech. And you censor very sparingly, where you have to co-operate with law-enforcement. 

You are censoring the voice of common people in a so-called democracy. The people responsible for this should be hanged, honestly. 

It distorts the public's idea of public perception. And it demoralizes individuals who are not for these restrictive government-measures. People whose livelihoods, businesses got destroyed by the lockdowns and now by the climate-policies. 

   Gotcha, I'll leave you to figure out the right balance between censorship, cancel culture and de-platforming and regulation versus platforming, un-cancel culture and removal of censored speech, imagery and deregulation of laws

[Hardkill]

32 minutes ago, Girzo said:

Politicians are politicians. They mostly don't care about things they say. He isn't saying that because he has been a free speech advocate all his life and became a politician to defend it. No, he is saying that because he is a politician. He is playing a different game, he is trying to score political points by using rhetoric and reffering common memes. He might even think personally that free speech is terrible and absolutist implementation of it would be a disaster and still nevertheless advocate it fervorously, because it's going to benefit him politically. If it comes to him having to implement any free speech policy and it not being radical enough or failing terribly, he can always blame that on someone or something else. Win-win for a politician, if his skills are top-notch he can say whatever he wants and never suffer consequences, someone else is going to take a beating.

Yeah, perhaps you're right. He might be just sayings those things as mostly talking points.

Edited November 27, 2022 by Hardkill

[Hatfort]

6 hours ago, Bobby_2021 said:

Or maybe lefties are sexually repressed. Else why would you censor something normal in the left. 

Yeah, nice try twisting this into the exact opposite. Rightists are much more sexually repressed than leftists overall. As I said, most people on the left are cool with Hunter Biden doing drugs and having sex, that doesn't bother us at all. Well, crack is not the best choice, and there is certainly some danger about its usage, but we are much more tolerant about drugs in general and less repressing. The same about sexual experimentation. The ones trying to make a scandal story about it, those are the ones you are referring to.

I also want to add that I don't consider it fine to reveal intimate images of other people, I don't care what political views they have. I do respect privacy and I would say the same if it was one of Trump's sons in a similar situation.

[Leo Gura]

The whole point is that a social media platform must moderate content far beyond what is merely illegal.

In the same way that if you want to host a popular party, your party rules cannot simply be: anything legal goes. Your party must prohibit a bunch of stuff which is legal, but socially unacceptable, like bringing a dead skunk to the party.

In real life you cannot bring a skunk to a party because people will see your face, remember who you are, and blacklist you forever. But online, since most people are anonymous and have multiple accounts, this doesn't work. If you let people bring skunks, they will keep doing it and ruin every online party you ever throw. Thus you must ban such assholes. Because if they did that the real-world, they would be banned for simple indecency.

Musk's policy is effectively this: Let's allow everyone back to our party who has ever brought a skunk. Well, it's obvious that Musk doesn't understand how parties work.

Edited November 27, 2022 by Leo Gura

[Bobby_2021]

I don't want to make this a pro vs anti musk debate, because I am not a Musk fan.

Leo raised some good points on why content moderation is overlooked by Musk. I agree with that idealistically. Realistically speaking, the situation is a little complicated. 

I want to raise a few points. 

1. Get profit first. 

Twitter is one of the worst managed companies that also managed to make it relatively big. There are many toxic elements already in the management that made sure that twitter will not ever survive as a company. You need to maximize profit at the end of the day. This was inable to be achieved by the previous management. All the bad shit that Leo is predicting will happen under Musk(like Nazi coups) have already happened under the previous management. Taliban has used twitter to help them takeover afganistan. 

Twitter spaces were already poorly moderated that results in plenty of bullying, harrasment, terrorism etc. 

It is clear that the previous management did a shitty job overall. You need to give him time to fix this whole mess. 

2. 3500 people for managing content moderation raking in insane salaries is a huge drag on the company. I don't even think most of the people who were fired were from the content moderation team. Most of them were sloppy engineers. 

3. A tech company is run best by a tech bro like Musk. He can use hate speech detection by some AI run software instead of having people do the job which they are terrible at. There is a lot of untapped power in tech which twitter failed to make use of. Twitter has absolutely terrible features and user interface. 

Twitter will now have more features like long format threads, long videos etc. Despite all of this he will also bring down hate speech levels. If Musk was truly stupid, he could have removed content moderation policies as a whole. Instead he just fired the complacent staff, which is happening in almost literally every other big tech company. 

4. The altruistic "content moderation" team is a bunch of woke lefites. I do agree that a well moderated platform will lean left because they are biased towards good behaviour.

But twitter actually went too far in getting actual woke left to power in their team. And Big Tech became a tool of the left to stifle freedoms. They literally found #staywoke T shirts in their closet. They were getting too unnecessarily political. 

[Hardkill]

46 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

The whole point is that a social media platform must moderate content far beyond what is merely illegal.

In the same way that if you want to host a popular party, your party rules cannot simply be: anything legal goes. Your party must prohibit a bunch of stuff which is legal, but socially unacceptable, like bringing a dead skunk to the party.

In real life you cannot bring a skunk to a party because people will see your face, remember who you are, and blacklist you forever. But online, since most people are anonymous and have multiple accounts, this doesn't work. If you let people bring skunks, they will keep doing it and ruin every online party you ever throw. Thus you must ban such assholes. Because if they did that the real-world, they would be banned for simple indecency.

Musk's policy is effectively this: Let's allow everyone back to our party who has ever brought a skunk. Well, it's obvious that Musk doesn't understand how parties work.

Well, he does Asperger's and it doesn't seem like he ever bothered to learn how to improve his social skills adequately given how many people in business and marketing find him to be both difficult to work with and socially inept.

Edited November 27, 2022 by Hardkill

[Leo Gura]

Twitter is not a tech company. Twitter is a content moderation company. This is key to realize.

You cannot tech-bro your way out of a social governance problem. Twitter does not have a tech problem, they have a social governance problem. There is no software you can write which will make your party appealing to people. Managing a social space requires social intelligence and savvy, not more technology.

If you want to have a popular mass platform with happy advertisers, you gotta make a place where everyone feels safe. Not a jungle free-for-all.

Edited November 27, 2022 by Leo Gura

[Hardkill]

2 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

Twitter is not a tech company. Twitter is a content moderation company. This is key to realize.

You cannot tech-bro your way out of a social governance problem. Twitter does not have a tech problem, they have a social governance problem. There is no software you can write which will make your party appealing to people. Managing a social space requires social intelligence and savvy, not more technology.

Mark Zuckerberg is still the CEO of Facebook and he has an intellect and personality that are similar to Musk's. Would you say that Zuckerberg should also not be the CEO of his own company anymore?

[Leo Gura]

33 minutes ago, Hardkill said:

Mark Zuckerberg is still the CEO of Facebook and he has an intellect and personality that are similar to Musk's. Would you say that Zuckerberg should also not be the CEO of his own company anymore?

Well, Facebook's problems have been well-documented and he's certainly responsible for many of them.

Facebook is also a trainwreck of sorts. But at least they are profitable as a business.

The biggest difference is that Zuck is not out there promising people free speech absolutism. If Zuck took that stance, he would rightly be ridiculed for being naive and irresponsible. But Zuck understands moderation issue much better than Musk because he's had to deal with that crap for 15 years. Musk is like a child who just stumbled into it. That's really the issue.

It's like if I bought a rocket company and started issuing orders about how to build rockets but had zero rocketry experience. I would make a lot of bad decisions. The difference is that everyone knows that building good rockets is hard. But Musk does not appreciate that building good social platforms is even harder than building a rocket. Engineering is easy compared to solving socio-political issues. Which is exactly why this tech-bro attitude is popular in Silicon Valley. Tech problems are relatively easy to solve because they are well-defined and don't hinge on changing the minds of millions of people.

You cannot solve the problem of apes playing with dynamite by inventing even stronger dynamite for them to play with.

Edited November 27, 2022 by Leo Gura

[Danioover9000]

@Hardkill

29 minutes ago, Hardkill said:

Mark Zuckerberg is still the CEO of Facebook and he has an intellect and personality that are similar to Musk's. Would you say that Zuckerberg should also not be the CEO of his own company anymore?

   Based, comparing Elon Musk, a visionary engineer that created Tesla and SpaceX, to Mark Zuckerberg, a computer and website developer who specializes in social media websites.

[Forestluv]

@mr_engineer I agree that creating standards involves biases and can be difficult, yet that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it. Creating laws also involves biases, yet that doesn’t mean we should have no laws. 

My point was not that creating standards is bias-free and agenda-free. That certainly is an issue in creating standards. My original point was that having zero barriers paradoxically reduces maximum free speech free speech potential as does having too many barriers. 

Edited November 27, 2022 by Forestluv

[Bobby_2021]

You can design the algorithm such that it diminishes the reach of a tweet if it contains the phrase "fuck you" for example.

AI can detect the sentiment behind a tweet and control it's reach. An AI will determine the sentiment behind a tweet. But polarising and self validating tweets usually brings good engagement and user retention. So twitter may make less profits by shadow banning such tweets. 

Human mods are always sloppy and can't deal with hundreds of millions of people. You need to introduce tech and reduce the reliance of people as much as possible. 

As a end user, the reason I hate staying on twitter is due to the poorly maintained features and lag while using it. This must be changed from the inside out, first. That's what Musk is upto. 

[Danioover9000]

   I just hope that Elon Musk doesn't reverse the banned Twitter accounts like Destiny's or Trump's.

[Hardkill]

8 hours ago, Danioover9000 said:

   I just hope that Elon Musk doesn't reverse the banned Twitter accounts like Destiny's or Trump's.

He already has allowed Trump back on Twitter.

But here's a good analysis on that: 

 

What's wrong with Destiny?