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Notes -
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.
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 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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