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Recent takeover of Twitter by Mr. Musk and the consternation it has caused even on moderate sites such as HN has me thinking about defences of censorship and complaints about "politically unreliable" figures having the power to shape peer-to-peer discourse online.
A possible reason to oppose Mr. Musk here is that perhaps conservatives have it wrong: maybe the moderation team before was fair-minded and pluralist, but now it will replaced with die-hard partisans hell-bent on preventing inconvenient truth from reaching the masses. This argument doesn't require one to defend partisanship of SNS moderation, so it can be deployed in a wider range of situations. Were the premise correct it is at least possible for the change to be for the worse. However recent revelation that leftists from around the world are given privileged access to twitter curation team which would then promote their niche perspectives thus giving them dispropotinate reach, has harmed the prospects of premise being true. As the decline of politics related "trending" since Mr. Musk is in charge.
Maybe one thinks that moderation wasn't neutral before, and won't be after, but still wants to oppose Mr. Musk. If one feels that ownership of a platform with 400M MAU confers unlimited right to influence public discourse, ie "It is a private company.", then one can hardly object now that show is on the other food.
But sometimes a smarter argument is made, namely that what was removed was hatred and incitement to violence. And if this meant that it was overwhelmingly rightists that were shut-down, this reflects poorly on them, and not on Twitter. But as Twitter itself promoted a racially preferential movement, the deathtoll of which is, despite its short existence, in the dozens (not to mention the second-order Ferguson Effect), one questions if minimizing violence is its goal.
But maybe all BLM violence is justified as it brings us towards a more just and peaceful world in the future ("Can't make an omelette without shattering shells."), while rightist violence only hastens the descent into a dystopia. For this to work, it has to be shown that a BLM protest which neither burnt, looted, nor murdered, is less effective of convicing the people of its cause, than what actually occured. To this one can object in two ways a) violent protest can show the necessity of a thin blue line that protects the people, thus backfiring and showing that actually Fund the Police is the answer or b) more empirically, that studies show that violence decreases support of cause in favour of which violence occurs.
Remember CHAZ? Multiple children were killed and it was memory holed. That is what this is about...
Why the Musk hate? Seriously... Why does Bill Gates get a pass? How many times was that guy on the lolita express? Why does Bezos get a pass? How much media does that guy own? It's like Vice news says something and all the hipsters get into lockstep.
The sheer power of media to influence public sentiment will never not be unsettling to me. And the fact that the public discourse is still in large part guided by a handful of entities that often seem to operate in lockstep is even more unsettling considering that the proliferation of social media should theoretically result in less narrative-control, yet media reporting in practice still informs most of the discussion, and with the help of censors social media has essentially become another one of their mouthpieces.
The underlying motivations on all sides aren't hard to figure out at all. The reason why the media absolutely hates the idea of freedom and neutrality on social media is because wrongthink on there takes some of their control away from them (so Musk is a threatening figure due to his stated free speech bent). Leftists go along with the censorship because the narrative being promoted by elites is theirs, and right-wingers oppose it because it's not theirs. And then there's the "moderate" majority, who, confronted with a skewed informational environment, largely take an anti-Musk and anti-free-speech slant on this topic due to lack of examination.
Unfortunately, this control that media currently has does mean they might potentially be able to shift sentiment enough to make Twitter haemorrhage blood if Musk steps out of line.
It was weird to watch people who were on tesla waiting lists change their opinion in real time. And the anger I get for pointing that out... lol
People change their opinions in response to new information. Elon Musk's public image has gotten both a lot harder to ignore and a lot more explicitly right-wing recently.
The quote in question from your article:
This statement that the article is reporting on does not seem "explicitly right-wing" to me at all - or particularly detestable and worthy of shunning, in my opinion. The idea of both parties acting as a check and balance for each other is not new and not particularly right-wing.
As to the remainder of the article speaking about his political lean, it does seem at a glance that he has been expressing greater support for Republican candidates (a shift from him having historically voted Democrat), but I still don't see why this is worthy of hatred. Public figures who are hard-line Democrats and who are critical of right-wing politics are not typically widely shunned like this.
I'm not even a Musk fan, but this basically admits that the widespread opposition to Musk largely exists for explicitly partisan reasons - for committing the crime of holding the "wrong" political opinions and daring to express them. And if he fell in line as yet another establishment mouthpiece, he would not be getting this heat.
EDIT: added more
Now I'm confused. I thought the topic of discussion was partisan opposition to Musk. There's other reasons to dislike him (his recent apparent incompetence running Twitter being the most salient at the moment). But a lot of the people pre-ordering electric cars are likely be to Democratic partisans, and it makes sense they would want to distance themselves from a brand that suddenly has much more visible ties to the Republican party.
Perhaps there was some miscommunication or misunderstanding - I thought the topic of discussion was still about why Musk generally gets a negative reception, and was of the impression that this was a continuation of that discussion.
Define "incompetence". The point of Musk's purchase was always sold as making Twitter function properly as a digital public square where people should be free to speak their minds. I would say the initial loss of users is to be expected, because Twitter's slant prior to Musk's acquisition would clearly have an effect on the user base - these users came to Twitter for a specific type of forum, and now that they're expecting that the focus of the platform might shift it's likely to attract a different base than it did before.
I also think that many of the issues Twitter is facing at the moment are fuelled by the disproportionately negative reporting on the topic of Musk, driven by the motivations I stated in my prior comment. This is basically sowing distrust and apprehension about a target, then claiming that the downstream effects of that negative reporting represents a failure on the part of the target. There's also the fact that orgs actually pressured advertisers to pause spending on Twitter in the wake of Musk's acquisition. Suffice to say that it's kind of hard for me to see all the issues as being his fault.
I'm actually not so sure if this holds for Tesla. "Surveys by research firm Morning Consult show that in January about 22% of Democrats were considering buying a Tesla, while 17% of Republicans were looking to purchase one. And that gap has been closing — Republican consideration of buying a Tesla has risen about 3 percentage points just since December’s survey. And Republicans are slightly more likely to trust the Tesla brand, 27% compared to 25% among Democrats. ... Data from Strategic Vision, which has surveyed hundreds of thousands of car buyers, shows that since 2019, 38% of Tesla buyers have identified themselves as Democrats, and 30% have said they’re Republicans."
None of this suggests a particularly Democrat-slanted customer base. The reason for the lack of political slant is because Tesla buyers are not primarily motivated by climate change concerns, rather it's performance and styling that concerns them.
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/02/03/cars/tesla-buyer-politics/index.html
Fair. There's a lot of people commenting on his apparent incompetence like having destroyed the verification system (the checkmark now means "is really who their username says they are or paid Twitter $8"). Whether that actually will lead to Twitter being less profitable in whatever timeframe you want to give him remains to be seen.
That surprises me. Thanks for the info.
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