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Notes -
It looks like it's finally happening: Elon Musk Twitter deal back on in surprise U-turn
I wonder if the recovery of Tesla stock has anything to do with this reversal. TSLA got as high as $310 two weeks ago (now back at $250), which is around the same price when he originally made the offer.
It will be interesting to see what happens if it does go through. Will Elon fix the bot problem for good? (likely not). Will some famous previously banned users be restored, notably Trump? Same for Jordan Peterson, who has not tweeted since July after being forced to delete a tweet, which he has refused. Same for The Babylon Bee, which stopped tweeting out of protest. Probably. Not good news for the left though if he does succeed.
There is a way that his investment could be nullified, if a few powerful players chose to do so.
Some Twitter alternative could be settled upon (doesn't matter which; let me make up "BuzzBuzz") and a news blitz saying "BuzzBuzz: the Twitter alternative everyone who's not a racist is fleeing to" (It doesn't need to be "racist," but I think that would be the most effective option) can be conducted, full of interviews of concerned citizens and celebrities and experts whose tepid support can be put alongside those who have no professional need to stay restrained, all distressed about the "unmoderated racist content."
And all at once, the "tweet on Twitter" bluebirds at the bottoms of articles on other sites get replaced with "buzz on BuzzBuzz" bees; search engines change their algorithms to keep up-to-date with what content is good; all the respectable normal people who don't want to be considered racist will hop over to BuzzBuzz, and the whole incident will go down in history as proof of the persistent, insidious power of racists, for they took over and destroyed Twitter.
Now. Of course it's true that all of that is nothing but a lurid fable. I would be astonished if anything even suggesting an attempt at that happened, much less with the speed it would probably take to succeed. But the point does remain that "established network" effects aren't so insurmountable if there exists some common signal people can look to telling them where to regroup. NYT+CNN would be more than sufficient, I think, but I am not so conspiracy-minded as to think they would really make the attempt.
What does it mean for them to succeed? People say that a lot of the draw of twitter is that it lets the common person talk with celebrities. If enough of a coordinated media effort happened like, the kayfabe will definitely look as if Buzz Buzz won, and there will be a bunch of the usual suspects declaring victory over racism.
Even if Buzzbuzz amassed only one-tenth the users of twitter (in real people, not bots), who's won? Keep in mind that knowing the true statistics and trying to publish them would probably be hatefacts. How would normies learn the user statistics? There are a lot of people who think /r/The_Donald's subscriber and active user counts were throttled and generally subreddit population numbers were astroturfed back then. These people also anticipate that Buzzbuzz's user counts would be inflated.
In short, wouldn't a world where barely anyone migrated to BuzzBuzz look very similar to a world where most people did?
Maybe I'm just a cynical biased culture warrior, but Elon's acquisition doesn't seem like it changes any culture- or Truth- producing institutions, so does it really matter which social media sites have more active users?
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