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Related to the Twitter-Musk saga, Elon tweeted:
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587129795732770824
"If I had a dollar for every time someone asked me if Trump is coming back on this platform, Twitter would be minting money!"
Then the obvious question is, if Musk owns the site, why can't he just bring Trump back? What or who is stopping him?
As it turns out, Prince Alwaleed has a large interest in Twitter and helped finance the deal:
Senate Democrat wants national security investigation of Saudi Arabia’s role in Elon Musk-Twitter deal
Alwaleed and Trump are not on good terms https://www.thewrap.com/saudi-prince-fires-back-at-donald-trump-over-alleged-photoshopped-picture/
And others helped too: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/05/oracle-co-founder-ellison-to-give-1-billion-to-fund-musks-purchase-of-twitter.html
and https://nypost.com/2022/10/25/elon-musk-may-close-44b-twitter-deal-by-friday-report/
So this is unfortunate. It could mean that Musk cannot unban him for fear of Alwaleed selling his stake, or some agreement between Musk and his financial backers to keep Trump banned.
Wild conspiracy theory - the republicans and the anti-sjw are on a rise ... better not to give Trump a strong voice to fuck it up
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Could that be…Donald Trump?
https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/trump-to-stay-on-his-truth-social-amid-elon-musk-twitter-takeover
Who is invested in a Twitter clone that is trying to go public?
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/28/truth-social-merger-partner-stock-falls-after-trump-lauds-elon-musk-twitter-deal.html
Unbanning the account would be a major symbolic gesture. Trump does not have to use it.
If Musk unbans Trump, but Trumps ignores Twitter, that will reduce Musk's and Twitter's status.
What status? What is the fallout for Elon Musk if he says, “We’ve got Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on here, I’m lifting the ban on the 45th Potus,” and then Trump just stays on Truth social?
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Musk + Trump's fans want Trump unbanned as the ultimate 'own' on the left. I think Musk stands to lose more fans by not unbanning Trump than he stands to lose by Trump not using twitter if unbanned.
Musk's fanbase isn't own-the-libs tribal conservatives. It is (roughly) grey tribe technophiles who find wokists and San Francisco NIMBYs annoying. What fraction of American Tesla owners do you think vote Republican? Far more importantly, Musk is sufficiently publicly identified with all his companies that he needs to run Twitter in a way which is congenial to the various governments Tesla needs favours from.
Reading the comments on Elon's Twitter posts would suggests these people are a really small minority. But it's also possible pro-trump people are more vocal. And probably some grey tribers still want Trump unbanned from a principled free speech perspective even if they do not support Trump politically, or don't care either way. Surveys show Tesla owners are split politically, with small 3-5% bias in favor of democrats.
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Has anyone at all been unbanned yet? The most principled thing to do would be to create a formal, objective process for deciding who gets unbanned, and then the Trump decision logically follows from that process. Therefore, Musk wouldn't actually know the answer until the process has been determined. And maybe the Trump question is a big enough deal that it would bias the decision of how the process would work (maybe carving out exceptions to make it go one way or another), or maybe it doesn't. I expect that most reasonable processes would end up unbanning Trump, but I guess it depends on the criteria (maybe potential unbanees need to jump through some hoops to demonstrate the unjustness of their ban, and Trump doesn't feel like going through that).
I have no idea of Musk is actually going to do things that way. But if he is then there's like a 90% chance that Trump gets unbanned, but it isn't guranteed one way or another, so of course Musk can't commit to an answer yet.
I'd say the most principled method would be to unban everyone and then let the new ban process sort the wheat from the chaff. If their archived account system has reason for ban perhaps they can be selective in which populations they unban.
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Impossible while the left holds to the words are violence mantra. And if you can't get their buy in - you may as well just rule by decree.
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There's no such thing. You can at most ask "did this person do the thing they were said to do?", but that relies on a pre-existing category of "actions that mean a person did something". Someone has to decide what qualifies for each category.
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Such a process would certainly be a farce; it would be from the start captured by one side or the other.
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I can see the appeal to formalizing a process and that probably does make sense overall, but the enormity of Trump really does demand exceptional treatment. This is true whether he remains banned or is unbanned - the impact of the size of his audience, his stature as the former head of state of the most powerful nation in the world, and his previous prominence (mastery?) of the medium makes him at least an order of magnitude more important than any other user. Holding the guy that could singlehandedly spark mass political violence to the same standard as Catturd just doesn't make sense to me.
I'm not sure that it does. A good process would be one which treats people fairly and simultaneously handles large people well. If Catturd advocates for violence but the only obstacle to actually causing it is his lack of audience, then he should be banned for it the same as a larger person would be. If Catturd is allowed to say something mean but nonviolent, then someone large like Trump should be able to say the same mean but nonviolent things. A good set of rules is not consequentialist, because that's impossible to practically enforce since no one can predict the future, which just leads to subjective favoritism, as we've seen on Twitter so far. A good set of rules should be egalitarian, deontological, and as objective as reasonably possible so that people can predict ahead of time what is and is not allowed and then choose to act accordingly.
The class problems in our society are not caused by influential people being held to the same standard as everyone else when they need higher standards. The problem is that the standards aren't being enforced equally or objectively and so in effect they tend to be held to lower standards and find loopholes. Trump should be held to exactly the same standards as everyone else, because fairness is an important principle that we need more of in our society, especially from internet platforms. And if Trump being held to those standards would lead to a bad outcome then create a better set of standards that leads to a good outcome and hold everyone to those instead.
I’m sorry, I just can’t help but read “largest” with this context:
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The bigger issue to me is that there's no good way out of this mess if you're a Trump supporter. I see three possibilities:
If Trump doesn't get unbanned then it's a vindication for everyone who said he should be banned. As ardent a free speech advocate as Musk leaving the ban in place suggests that maybe Trump was just bad for business and his banning wasn't so much an example of woke tech companies running amok but of shrewd businessmen doing what was best for the company.
If Trump is unbanned but doesn't return to Twitter then the story of the unbanning is in the news for three days and then everyone forgets about it. So nothing really changes.
If Trump is unbanned and he starts Tweeting again then this is probably the worst outcome. It's essentially a high-profile validation that Trump's supposed business acumen is nothing but smoke and mirrors, that his "brand" isn't as big as he thinks it is, and that his fame is largely dependent on companies like Twitter. This is magnified by the fact that Trump has a decent chunk of change tied up in Truth Social and abandoning it for Twitter means that he thinks Twitter will make him more money. Which is why I'm guessing he won't start tweeting again regardless of what happens, unless Truth Social independently goes under.
it.
News plays a role in will be considered newsworthy. A story can be reported, which causes newsworthy reaction, on which news will again report. A vicious cycle can be created.
But it can also suppress a story, a response will not form, and the underlying event dies in obscurity.
In alternative reality, one in which journalists are against political censorship, banning from twitter a man as important as a sitting POTUS who also made avid tweeting a big part of his brand proven to be unjustified, would become a standard talking point inserted into every related article.
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No, actually a bunch of people have been getting suspended. It's not clear to me that Musk has really changed any of the content policies yet.
As of Oct 28, he had explicitly not done so: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1586149451348910081
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Related to a theme that's been touched on in other recent Elowitter threads: the thing about Al Waleed specifically doesn't really bother me. There are many problems with the behavior of anglosphere media, but the biggest is that they consistently agree on what the correct Overton window is, with only small deviations. If Musk decides to censor criticism out of pettiness, or keep Trump off as a favor to Al Waleed, then these are all unfortunate, but a relatively small price to pay for breaking the alignment between Twitter's totally-not-censorship and everyone else's totally-not-censorship.
Of course, sometimes there'll be alignment---in this case there pretty clearly is with respect to Trump. But that's more of a coincidence than it was before, so as far as I'm concerned it represents a strict improvement.
More interesting/concerning to me is the implication that Morgan Stanley, BofA, etc. may have some ability to influence these decisions. Are there similar cases in the past of those banks being part of large deals (by financing the individual/corporation making the purchase), and then exerting meaningful control?
More directly, I'm not sure I believe even the claim that Al Waleed is influencing things. Isn't it more likely that Musk merely wishes to give the appearance of some sort of reasonable process---or even more, intends to use the Trump question as an early test of whatever process he intends to set up ("content moderation council" was suggested Friday but I can't find any more recent evidence that this is happening)? "Normal" timescales for setting up a meaningfully different moderation process would be what, 6 months or more? I don't think too much can be read into a delay of a couple weeks, and what I can read into it is reassuring. Restoring Trump has symbolic value, but provides little actual protection (particularly for non-Trump people) going forward. Setting up a moderation system that would not have banned him in the first place is far better.
Based on my limited professional experience as a risk manager covering lending to private equity deals, I would say that lenders have no meaningful input into management decisions at PE-owned companies as long as they are not in financial trouble. The loans will have covenants (something like "Twitter needs to maintain free cash flow three times the interest on the senior debt and a book debt-to-assets ration of less than 75%") with a provision to call the loans (which would require Musk to put in further billions of his own money to replace them with equity or put Twitter into Chapter 11 with the likely result of the banks ending up as the main equity holders) if they are breached. What usually happens if a PE-owned company breaches covenants is that the lenders (who don't want to become owners) use this right as leverage to take a closer look at the business and decide if they think it is salvagable. Given Musk's negotiating power viz-a-viz the banks, I assume the covenants on this deal will not be binding unless Twitter gets into very serious trouble.
The other equity contributors have whatever rights they negotiated (default is that Musk gets what he wants as majority owner). Non-selling existing shareholders like the Saudis have a weak negotiating position so they almost certainly have no control rights at all.
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