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So it looks like Elon Musk officially owns all of Twitter now, and he's already fired the CEO, CFO, and policy chief. I don't have any strong opinions on this, but does anyone want to stake some predictions?
Musk presents himself as a free speech absolutist, which is encouraging to me, but I'd be concerned about the conflict of interest. I anticipate there will be some accusations of throttling unfavorable opinions about either him or his companies (RIP rogue driverless Tesla videos). I think the tension between unrestricted speech and a quality user experience will continue to be a problem, as I can't identify an obvious solution. Blue checkmarks are making hilariously cataclysmic remarks but I predict Twitter will remain a favored haven for the journalist class.
did a control-f on this thread for the word "china" and nothing came up, so I'll just point out that before Musk took over Twitter China had no leverage over the platform to censor views they find objectionable, given that Twitter is already inaccessible in China. But Musk has a lot to lose if China were to pull their support for Tesla, since so much of Tesla's manufacturing capacity is located there.
Which means that if China were to, say, take offense at the views of people who are pro-Taiwan or anti-Xianjing-concentration-camps and wanted those views taken off of Twitter, they have a really tempting point of leverage! "That's a nice Tesla business you've got there, Musk, shame if something were to happen to it."
This is definitely the sort of thing that's already happened to other businesses over which China has had leverage-- see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blitzchung_controversy for when Blizzard fired a bunch of people for being vocally pro-Hong Kong on stream, presumably to avoid China financially penalizing Blizzard in retaliation.
That would indeed be terrible if, you know, Twitter weren't already knowingly penetrated by Chinese intelligence assets.
https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-twitter-inc-technology-congress-838866addb81ca93473b1c0dd280c2f2
It seems possible that the Chinese agents could surreptitiously sneak in some code to suppress certain content, but how would that remain undetected to the higher-ups or other employees? In contrast, if you have the 100% owner establishing a policy from the top, it's much easier to implement (granted the risk of a leak remains sky-high).
In some companies, maybe, but Twitter recently had a high-level security guy go whistleblower, citing issues like widespread unnecessary developer access and testing on production, a pattern and practice of hiding security issues and bugs from higher ups, and other problems that would make it possible to obscure (or whitewash) bad behavior.
fair point
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