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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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It's pandemonium again on twitter .

A tweet by musk about advertising got 70k likes in 10 minutes. To put this in perspective, a tweet he made yesterday about "small talk" got 70k but in an hour.

It's amazing how much people care about advertising.

My positions are: I don't think there is anything the left can do about the Musk threat, which is why I am optimistic. The left had 7 years to go after Trump and largely failed to stop him . https://greyenlightenment.com/2022/11/03/the-regimes-response-to-the-musk-threat-why-im-optimistic/

Second, I think people are over-estimating the implication as far as the government's response is concerned, but underestimating the social impact. I think this is a bigger deal than even the Russian invasion of Ukraine in terms of overall impact on society. As a force of sentiment , musk has raised conservative's odds by 10% or more.

The tweet in question:

Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation and we did everything we could to appease the activists.

Extremely messed up! They’re trying to destroy free speech in America.

Has he considered the possibility that it is not due to "activists" and, perhaps, is related to the fact that Twitter now has a CEO who shares easily debunked conspiracy theories?

  • -18

This is somewhat unrelated to the topic of what's responsible for the drop in Twitter's revenue, but the article's bent is so typical.

A surge in racist slurs, a coordinated campaign to spread antisemitic memes, an owner posting a baseless conspiracy theory: welcome to the first few days of Elon Musk's Twitter.

Right from the get-go, their argument is "Musk's Twitter is bad because people on it might feel empowered to say unapproved things", and as the article continues there's a strong implication throughout that speech should be curtailed.

The rationalisation for limiting speech never amounts to anything more than a claim that we should make sure people can't hear certain points of view for the good of society. Instead of having people duke it out in a public forum wherein ideas can openly and freely be challenged and contested, the idea is that we shouldn't allow sentiments that are "wrong" and "harmful" (at least according to the person taking umbrage) to be promulgated in any way, shape or form, even in an environment where people can challenge it if they disagree. Some people might hear them and be convinced of their arguments, and that means they should be pre-emptively stripped of access to ideas that we don't like.

All I'll say is that I, for one, certainly see no way in which allowing a small group of people to have a disproportionate amount of sway over the informational environment would ever go bad and result in the widespread persistence of false but unexamined ideas that end up having a negative impact on society.

EDIT: clarity