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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29263 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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New Twitter policy just dropped:

Promotion of alternative social platforms policy

...

What is a violation of this policy?

At both the Tweet level and the account level, we will remove any free promotion of prohibited 3rd-party social media platforms, such as linking out (i.e. using URLs) to any of the below platforms on Twitter, or providing your handle without a URL:

Prohibited platforms:

Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Post and Nostr

3rd-party social media link aggregators such as linktr.ee, lnk.bio

Examples:

“follow me @username on Instagram”

“username@mastodon.social”

“check out my profile on Facebook - facebook.com/username”

Accounts that are used for the main purpose of promoting content on another social platform may be suspended. Additionally, any attempts to bypass restrictions on external links to the above prohibited social media platforms through technical or non-technical means (e.g. URL cloaking, plaintext obfuscation) is in violation of this policy. This includes, but is not limited to, spelling out “dot” for social media platforms that use “.” in the names to avoid URL creation, or sharing screenshots of your handle on a prohibited social media platform.

It's like the man himself says

The acid test for any two competing socioeconomic systems is which side needs to build a wall to keep people from escaping? That’s the bad one!

ETA:

Seems like some large accounts are calling Twitter's bluff. Dril posted a link to their linktree hours ago and so far both post and account are still up.

ETA2:

Musk now polling whether he should step down as head of Twitter, Yes in the lead with 51.5% and just over a million votes cast at the time of this writing.

ETA3:

The link at the top of this post is now a 404, apparently a result of the policy being rescinded, but the internet never forgets.

link is gone https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/social-platforms-policy

that was super fast. Talk about getting instant feedback. That is the nice thing about having such a large public persona.

Musk now polling whether he should step down as head of Twitter, Yes in the lead with 51.5% and just over a million votes cast at the time of this writing.

To put things in context, here is one alleged witness tweet (posted before Elon's new poll)

https://twitter.com/iamraisini/status/1604619857257025537

Screenshot:

https://twitter.com/TheKamillex/status/1604641087292932096

and obligatory classic literature quote:

https://twitter.com/ArielGonzalez_1/status/1604621934733524993

Remember that Saudi Prince @Alwaleed_Talal invested $1.89 Billion and Qatar @QIA about $400 Million in Twitter. They are the real Power at Twitter.

lmao what

Oh boy, that "pig to man" quote is potentially really spicy, given that the photo has Arab guys in it...

Anyways, I saw the "Arabian investors want to take over" theory advanced elsewhere, guess that's evidence for it.

An addendum: TheQuartering got Elon to reconsider the external links policy. The fucking Quartering. The simulation is truly breaking down.

I started wondering a few hours ago, because the rule seemed so obviously ridiculous. Is he trying the... is it called the "door in the face" trick? The same way that last year twitter updated their rules to ban all "media of private individuals without the permission of the person(s) depicted." Which they then quickly walked back and started only selectively enforcing on people they didn't like.

Is he doing a reverse Machiavelli's governor deal by focusing hatred on himself and then appointing someone else to head Twitter?

He's a war CEO, which means he eventually has to hand off to a peace CEO and it's extremely common to use this to let all the unpopular things you do in wartime stick to the man and start fresh. Consider how the British treated Churchill after WW2.

I just didn't expect it to happen so soon. And I'm really curious who will be the peace man.

It seems to mirror the anchoring strategy he used for pricing.

"This will cost twenty dollars"

"That's too much"

"K how about 8 then"

... and suddenly 8 doesn't seem that bad.

Is he doing a reverse Machiavelli's governor deal by focusing hatred on himself and then appointing someone else to head Twitter?

I'd call it the Lelouch Gambit, but that ended fatally, so...

Jesus I'd forgotten all about that show.

I think he's fast failing monetization methods beyond pure advertising. The $8 for a blue checkmark represents the money twitter makes per customer from advertisers a month, he's outsourcing and replacing advertisers with paying customers. The walled garden might be a way to create an ecosystem which doesn't send users to competitors media systems. Because of the sample size and data analytics just a few days of implementing policy can easily analyze changes traffic patterns. Maybe hold twitter hostage to other corps. They want twitter traffic? Those corps need to pay Twitter. Not a bad idea.

The question is if 1) I'm right, and he believes in his methodology enough to hold see it through even while all the whiners on twitter complain at him and hurts his popularity and 2) If he can find a successful model quickly enough to recoup his investment costs successfully.

Other platforms won't feel the need to pay for Twitter traffic, because they don't depend on it. What this change will do is enrage users who find it useful or even financially necessary to link to other platforms.

Looks like he's doing the New Coke strategy. Engagement is way up, no matter how much the media insist twitter is dying. People who promise to quit come back later. That is the genius of Musk's strategy...messing up twitter only makes it more popular and more media coverage about twitter.

Of course engagement is up - it's the world cup and American football time! The top of my "For You" page from a logged out browser in India is #fifaworldcup, ronaldo, #sachintendulkar, golden boot, france 4-2, money money money and greatest of all time. The non-football related topics are #sachintendulkar (a cricketer) and money money money.

A logged out page in America has 8/10 on top being NFL, the last two being "Happy Hannukah" and "Twitter CEO". The top of the page is literally Patriots vs Raiders scores.

I will take the opportunity to re-up a comment I left recently, explaining how Musk can make twitter profitable again: https://www.themotte.org/post/229/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/42105?context=8#context

tl;dr; sports + celebrities. No one cares about paul graham or taylor lorenz, lots of people care about Brady, Belichick and Dicker the Kicker. If you don't know who they are, that's your bubble. The only non-NFL humans that twitter America seems to care about are Tom Cruise, Elon Musk, Lionel Messi and (way down the list) Christina Aguilera.

tl;dr; sports + celebrities. No one cares about paul graham or taylor lorenz, lots of people care about Brady, Belichick and Dicker the Kicker

This policy has been an absolute disaster for that group, at least based on my little corner of non-political Twitter.

Until yesterday the effect of Musk on sports/hobby Twitter was zero to slightly positive - the only noticeable change was that the trending hashtags are less dominated by American politics. The Mastadon "migration" was never more than a handful, and even those that did set up accounts either forgot them after a week or just set them to mirror Twitter posts.

But the external links ban seems to have changed all that. Suddenly everyone is setting up alternative accounts, it's an order of magnitude bigger than the initial takeover. Linktree and similar services were very widely used so there are a lot of people that never cared about the takeover that now feel threatened. Even if you aren't personally affected Twitter has made itself look weak so people are concerned about it collapsing.

The policy has seriously undermined Twitter's standing in that area, in a way that looks like it will persist despite the U-turn.

But political Twitter has some power (hence the FBI's interest), and it should be possible to translate that power into money.

How do you propose to turn political twitter into an amount of money remotely proportional to the risk it poses to sports&celebs twitter?

Soft corruption. Twitter sells extremely expensive advertising to candidates and parties. It is known that if just one side pays for this advertising the algorithm overall greatly favors them.

No one cares about paul graham or taylor lorenz, lots of people care about Brady, Belichick and Dicker the Kicker

A lot of people cared about the twitter files. sports is a big part , but so is politics and other stuff.

I'm sure it is during the brief periods (presidential elections) when a spectacle is happening.

From what I recall of advertising analytics I've done in the past, it's even less profitable than the engagement numbers might suggest. Kellogs doesn't exactly love having Frosted Flakes associated with "Trump is the most raaaaacist guy ever", "Lock Her Up" or even "thousands dead in Somalia" and "plane crash" - it's just a negative mental association.

Tom Cruise, Aguilera and "Happy Hannukah" don't have this problem.

Imagine telling you-two-years-ago about that twitter poll. Why is Musk doing this? How are we feeling about moldbug's (iirc) "put any fortune 500 CEO in charge of the USA, even the second worst one, and it'll massively improve"?

Given the quote tweets, a twitter poll here is less "the will of the people" and more "who brigades and manipulates the poll more", so idk what the point is.

The USA is not Twitter. And I'd argue anything would improve Twitter, including the site's complete destruction.

"put any fortune 500 CEO in charge of the USA, even the second worst one, and it'll massively improve"?

Didn't Trump's presidency falsify this idea?

Moldbug presumably meant dictatorial power, not merely the presidency.

Most fortune 500 CEOs seem vastly overpaid relative to their competence and much of apparent success or skill is just happenstance, and not only that, huge blunders. The idea that you will get better leadership with CEOs just seems risibly false. For every Eric Schmitt there are dozens of Carly Forinas. CEOs, just like politicians, quality is at best mixed to poor.

Seems to me like a ham fisted way of transitioning leadership to someone else (eg Blake masters) without it looking like you failed (eg never intended to be long term ceo, had a vote etc).

Wait, why Masters? And how?

Someone (guessing Thiel) suggested to Elon that a Masters type should run Twitter as CEO.

The how would be Elon appointing him.

How are we feeling about moldbug's (iirc) "put any fortune 500 CEO in charge of the USA, even the second worst one, and it'll massively improve"?

Here's the catch, there is no one person in charge of the USA. It's a bunch of bureaucrats, special interest groups, NGOs and career staffers that largely control the US.

Also, business people tend to make great bureaucrats, and are hardly outsiders once they gain some power. Pompeo comes to mind.

How are we feeling about moldbug's (iirc) "put any fortune 500 CEO in charge of the USA, even the second worst one, and it'll massively improve"?

Between Musk and SBF, I'm starting to become embarrassed that I ever took the proposition seriously.

So he is basically trying to prevent competing social media networks from using his network to gain market share and the claim is basically hypocrisy?

Is the argument this is a free speech issue? It isn’t so different from Apple’s closed system approach. Whether it makes economic sense … well that’s a different question.

He said anything that isn't illegal should be allowed on Twitter.

Context is everything. It would be like someone putting up trade secrets and Twitter taking it down. Musk’s context was about not censoring political speech. Here there is no censor; it is just trying to limit competition from using twitters network to gain market share. Don’t be strict constructionists; find the meaning.

I don't think it was at all implied that it referred only to political speech, particularly when the most common types of speech people would get in trouble for included things like racism and misinformation.

Expect what is racism or misinformation is inherently political.

I feel a strong desire to steel man this decision by Twitter. While the obvious "Elon hypocrisy!" applies here to some degree, based on the discussions so far, I think many have forgotten or don't understand what Elon's goal for Twitter is: A well functioning time square for proper discourse (to make it look more like the Motte perhaps?). I believe Elon bought Twitter cause he saw the potential for Twitter to be a powerful center for civic discourse, but thought that its previous management's propensity for censorship and allowance of bots to run wild failed to provide the platform to have good civic discourse.

I want to emphasize it again: Elon wants to make Twitter into a place with better civic discourse and engagement. Think the Motte, but at scale.

And while at first glance, this censorship runs counter to his sub-goal of free speech, but I think it does facilitate better civic discourse on the platform. As a hypothetical, if someone replies to a post on the motte with "Check out my Facebook!" It doesn't add anything to the conversation, at best it's nothing, at worst it sidetracks good conversation. And the same applies to Twitter. So this change doesn't strike me as being antithetical to Elon's main goal here based on my understanding of his goals are.

I think many have forgotten or don't understand what Elon's goal for Twitter is: A well functioning time square for proper discourse (to make it look more like the Motte perhaps?). I believe Elon bought Twitter cause he saw the potential for Twitter to be a powerful center for civic discourse, but thought that its previous management's propensity for censorship and allowance of bots to run wild failed to provide the platform to have good civic discourse.

I think you're being too charitable. I do not see any reason to think he's particularly principled in what he sees as "a well functioning time square for proper discourse", I think he simply rejects the biases that the old owners had. Regardless of what he says, he has not been at all clear about what is okay or not okay (he said he wouldn't ban the jet tracker, then did so). He said Jones couldn't come back because his own child died, so he couldn't tolerate people using the death of children for political gain. This is not any position you'd hear endorsed on themotte, because the reason for banning Jones would come down to his willingness to engage in good-faith without preaching, not about the particulars of what he is preaching about.

As a hypothetical, if someone replies to a post on the motte with "Check out my Facebook!" It doesn't add anything to the conversation, at best it's nothing, at worst it sidetracks good conversation. And the same applies to Twitter. So this change doesn't strike me as being antithetical to Elon's main goal here based on my understanding of his goals are.

It would only be a problem if someone did this over and over. I think this rule is too vague to be useful. Twitter already has anti-spam measures to prevent this.

I believe Elon bought Twitter cause he saw the potential for Twitter to be a powerful center for civic discourse

I don't really think you can square the vision of Elon as particularly ideological (for free speech, technolibertarianism or whatever else) with a lot of the revealed policy decisions, and this includes actions and positions before the Twitter acquisition. At the end of the day, he's just not a particularly ideologically committed person. He'd like to be seen as such, and post-rationalises a lot of his decisions in that frame, but the underlying interests just seem like the usual, not-very-deep collection of personal and material.

This isn't a case of Elon setting a new policy, and then the policy being enforced. Elon's hitting the button himself after some personal slight or bad experience and then the policy is hastily written after the fact. See elonjet or the various journos getting knocked off (even taking spaces itself down). Before this, look at the breaking point for him on Covid policies (e.g. shutting down his factories), or with Trump's council of advisors, or his unwillingness to extend his supposed free speech principles to criticisms of China. Hell, he's now picking up the crusade against the independence of the federal reserve -- which he'll wrap in some principle or another but really comes down to the dire serviceability of the Twitter debt.

The main reason he initially bought Twitter wasn't altruistic, it was because the company was stagnant and overstaffed and had leadership that was largely content with that. For various reasons, Elon's succeeded in wringing significantly more productivity per dollar out of expensive tech talent in other domains. Now it turns out he's massively overpaid and is looking to offload shares at the original purchase price to various MENA autocrats.

The main reason he initially bought Twitter wasn't altruistic, it was because the company was stagnant and overstaffed and had leadership that was largely content with that.

I think it was a giant joke and then he realized he would actually be forced to buy it.

I think this steelman is hard to square with the part of the policy that says they'll ban you just for having the link in your Twitter bio.

If violations of this policy are included in your bio and/or account name, we will temporarily suspend your account and require changes to your profile to no longer be in violation. Subsequent violations may result in permanent suspension.

saying there. It's not just promoting your particular social media accounts that's banned. As far as I can tell they're b

This idea is so poorly thought out I think it will be reversed soon

All urls containing "facebook.com" are banned.

Ok, I'll admit, I didn't realize it was that severe a block. That is definitely going overboard on the block, if it was simply posts that had the appearance of: Follow me on Facebook at: foo_profile. Then I think my argument stands. You are absolutely right, that the restriction as currently implemented kills the ability to post content that might have substantive information from entering the discourse from one of the given sources and that is certainly too far a ban.

If my model of Elon's vision for Twitter is accurate, then this overreaching implimentation can potentially be explained by a lack of resources from Twitter right now. And will later be scaled back into something more reasonable on a per post level by implementing AI anomaly detection to pick up flagrant posts that are antithetical to good discourse.

If I'm not correct, well I'll be sad cause a Motte style discussion board at the scale of Twitter sounds like a dream. And I'd have to do some serious re-tuning on my model of Elon Musk.

I think Elon's lashing out of spite. Linking to any website should be allowed (save extreme cases like CP), if he's really serious about freedom of speech. The issue is that he was very loud about framing his takeover as a way to maximise freedom and it's hard to defend this.

I don't even mind the action itself. It's the inconsistency that bugs me.

He realized how much power he has and it went to his head

Well that's pretty stupid. I'd still rather have him in power than the previous ownership because at least the shitty abusive stuff he does isn't directed at my in groups but as far as justifying it as a general improvement all I have is that he's being more transparent, which isn't the most exciting rallying cry.

So we had what, 2 months of improved free speech on twitter? The Russian Revolution didn't go South this quickly. Either Elon has lost the plot (the mainstream narrative, but I refuse to succumb to Gell-Mann amnesia), or the user bleed is dire.

I keep noticing that all the accusations of hypocrisy neglect to include anything about the accuser actually opposing censorship; the argument appears to be "it's wrong when you do it," rather than "it's wrong."

And this doesn't make me any more supportive of giving them control over policy rather than the person they're attacking. Correct me if I'm misreading you.

If you can link me to where I've expressed support for the previous Twitter management banning links to alternate social media websites I would be fascinated to read it. Otherwise this seems like equivocation.

I mean, Musk explicitly talked about implementing free speech on Twitter, using the words "free speech". However I think before this policy dropped, there were many signs that he never actually followed through on the promise of free speech.

I agree with the rest of your comment, though. Calling out hypocrisy doesn't inherently make oneself better.

The policy also bans linktree, an aggregator of social media links into one link you put in your bio, needlessly inconveniencing existing users. It also inconveniences the many users who already had instagram links in their bio! Restricting users' advertising alternate platforms to prevent them from leaving, or seeing where their network left to, just inflames users more, causing more to leave - including paul graham, previously an elon defender. Paulg's tweets were occasionally interesting (as were Derek Lowe's, who left over elon's rightwing CW tweets and kanye).

But given the policy explicitly allows 'crossposting' individual posts from said sites, and given how poor enforcement of other twitter keyword / link bans has been in the past month, it won't actually prevent links to other sites - just crosspost an individual post, or obfuscate the link a bit.

Amusingly Graham's account seems to be suspended now. I guess you can violate the policy just by mentioning you have a personal blog where your other social media can be found, no actual post needed.

What is he doing? Tech people love paulg. the HN post over his suspension has 500 votes in 40 min!. idk. I love Barbara Streisand lol

It does appear to be blocking mastodon links in tweets right now. Including Instagram was a very strange choice.

Think I was right about flailing and turning the heat up too fast in untargeted ways.

Can you tell us how many people need to call Musk a hypocrite before you stop bringing up everything he does? Because boy am I sick of talking and reading about Twitter.

It's really interesting how Elon Musk taking over Twitter has been in the news cycle for like, what, a month at this point? Maybe even two? You'd think there'd be bigger news at some point, but no, all day every day it's just Musk Musk Musk.

I dunno, I'd rather hear more about fraud shenanigans in the world of cryptocurrency than what idiots on social media are doing

This is stupid. A huge amount of twitter traffic is for porn, which requires linking out. When the porn people leave you’re looking at a drop in ~6% of traffic and engagement. Seriously, type in “onlyfans” or “onlyfans . com/“ into Twitter search and be shocked at how much of twitter’s traffic is in the NSFW ecosystem. While Twitter ought to ban all porn, Musk should wait until he’s firmly hegemonic, not when he’s still on the brink of losing VIPs and advertisers. Btw, all the men who use Twitter to occasionally look at porn on their alts will follow wherever those accounts go, and that’s a lot of people.

Why should Twitter ban porn? Doing that at all will potentially kill it, regardless of how comfy Twitter and Musk's positions are.

Note the policy doesn't ban onlyfans links, just links to specific websites at the moment.

It will once Elon launches TwitterAfterDark to compete with Onlyfans.

I don't disagree that there's a lot of porn on Twitter, but most of the porn is located on the site, not offsite. So while some might leave I can't think of a reason why all of them would leave as long as the porn they came to the site for is still there.

There are a lot of NSFW artists and "content creators" on Twitter. These creators overwhelmingly have presences on other sites, and they very frequently use Linktree, Carrd, and other link-sites to help direct their followers to places like OnlyFans/Fansly, Gumroad, Newgrounds, Pixiv, and so on. Plus, on Twitter, as of this year, NSFW content is placed behind a hard login wall, limiting its visibility (probably on top of being de-ranked in the algo).

I'm not too familiar with Twitter porn, but if it's anything like Reddit then the on-platform content exists almost exclusively to promote off-platform services. Rigorous enforcement of the policy would end up removing the bulk of the NSFW content.

Banning onlyfans links would be bad for creators, who don't get compensated for the posing, camera, editing work it takes to make decent pics or videos - so their twitter serves to advertise the onlyfans, converting some percentage of free viewers to paying customers, incentivizing twitter use. (again onlyfans isn't banned so doesn't matter)

It's like the man himself says

The acid test for any two competing socioeconomic systems is which side needs to build a wall to keep people from escaping? That’s the bad one!

I've seen this "gotcha, you're a hypocrite!" tweet linked every single time someone has brought up this new policy in a discussion space I'm in, and at no point has the argument (implied or otherwise) gotten any better. Social media platforms are not socioeconomic systems and this is not a "wall" that Elon "built" to "keep people from escaping". At any time people are free to choose to leave Twitter without much consequence, which is not remotely the case if you're, say, looking to move to the US from Mexico, or if it's the 1960s and you're living in the USSR. Yes, yes, you can gripe that you'll lose all your followers or tweets or what have you, but that is not remotely the same as needing to uproot your entire life to move across national borders or needing to go through the US's complicated immigration system, nevermind the risk of death if you tried to do the same in the USSR, and to pretend that they are the same is... to put it politely, a category error.

This sort of hyperbole seems to be the norm around anything Elon Musk does. If Elon bans a bunch of journalists (nevermind all the journalists that were banned before he took over which didn't receive this sort of outcry), it's suddenly a "Thursday Night Massacre" and deserving of its own article on Wikipedia, alongside other actual massacres that took place on Thursday such as:

Bloody Thursday, Thursday Massacre or Thursday Night Massacre may refer to:

  • The Chiquola Mill Massacre, on September 6, 1934, during the 1934 textile workers' strike in the eastern United States
  • "Bloody Thursday", on May 15, 1969, during protests at People's Park in Berkeley, California
  • "Bloody Thursday", on February 17, 2011, during the fourth day of the Bahraini uprising

And just to be sure, let's look at the Chiquola Hill Massacre:

Violence broke out when Dan Beacham, the mayor and magistrate in Honea Path as well as the superintendent of the mill, ordered an armed posse of strikebreakers to fire into the crowd. As the crowd fled, six strikers were shot in the back and killed, one mortally wounded, and thirty others suffered less than mortal wounds.

Beacham obstructed court proceedings against himself and the other strikebreakers, and ordered some of the strikers arrested. Dozens of unionized workers were fired or evicted from their company homes, and after the defeat of the larger strike on September 23, the unionization effort in Honea Path largely came to an end. Until the 1994 publication of "The Uprising of '34" and the subsequent journalistic work of Dan Beacham's grandson, Frank Beacham, the events of the massacre were largely undiscussed in Honea Path. Today, the event is memorialized by a stone marker in nearby Dogwood Park.

Yeah, that's right. People literally getting shot and murdered and evicted from their homes is placed on the same level of importance and described in the same way as some people being unable to use their accounts on a certain social media app. Nevermind the fact that they still have a huge massive platform to publish their views because, you know, they're journalists and they work at giant media companies, so really this didn't do anything, and to compound the amount of nothing this did, Elon ended up unsuspending them anyway.

I would say something to the effect of "touch grass", but I know everyone's already been told that and clearly it's not working. So instead I will just reiterate that the internet is not real life and Twitter is a platform barely used by less than 5% of the population. It's really not important. Whatever stupid shit Elon Musk does is not going to be the end of the world, and not even the end of Twitter for that matter. If Twitter ever does get run into the ground, life will go on and things will continue as normal.

Isn't this the same logic that progressives deployed as a coutnerargument to the right's complaints of deplatforming, though? I think the basic line went similarly: Twitter is a private company, not a country, free speech does not apply here and being booted off of Twitter (which you deserve) is not the end of the world, because "cancellation" doesn't real.

Yes, yes, I know, double-standards, hypocrisy, shoe on the other foot, etc. But even so, are the anti-Musk people not correct for the same reasons the rightists were?

Considering Musk's vision of turning Twitter into an uber-app with payment systems and crypto integration, could one not argue that being deplatformed for breaking an anti-competitive rule is essentially being walled into a socioeconomic system? You'd have the social, the economic, the system, and the wall.

First, Twitter is not the uber-app proposed forth (not yet at least). Second, I doubt Musk will be able to achieve his vision of said uber-app on any timescale relevant to us. But yes, if Twitter is an uber-app with payment systems and crypto integration, the comparison to a socioeconomic system that builds a wall to keep people from escaping might be warranted.

I'm not 100% sure though because despite all the deplatforming of right-wingers, many have still managed to keep an audience and even earn some revenue.

I've seen this "gotcha, you're a hypocrite!" tweet linked every single time someone has brought up this new policy in a discussion space I'm in, and at no point has the argument (implied or otherwise) gotten any better. Social media platforms are not socioeconomic systems and this is not a "wall" that Elon "built" to "keep people from escaping".

Indeed - this is just something that fucks with ordinary user for no benefit for Elon whatsoever. Ordinary users do not see social media as exclusive competing religious sects, ordinary users have no problem using twitter, instagram, facebook, tiktok etc. simultaneously.

What Elon thinks will happen:

"I cannot link to my grandma's Facebook page to show my friends latest cute pics of her cat? So be it. I will stay only on Twitter, never ever look at Facebook any more, and tell granny to delete her facebook and move to Twitter if she wants to stay in contact with me."

What will happen:

"I cannot link to my grandma's Facebook page to show my friends latest cute pics of her cat? @#$#%^&&&!!! FUCK YOU ELON!"

We will see whether Elon's mega ego prevails over common business sense.

He seems to be running it as a business. No business gives free publicity to its rivals. Coke is not going to have people posting social media about "hey check me out trying the new Pepsi flavour". The New York Times will not have 'letters to the editor' where Sam of Ninth Street suggests everyone should read the coverage of the story in the Washington Post to get a better perspective.

So there is that, as against how Twitter and other platforms have been run, where people posting use them as begging platforms ("follow me on Facebook Instagram TikTok here's my Venmo buy me a Ko-Fi my Kickstarter is here"). Since people are accustomed to using social media as a means of increasing their income by directing potential readers/viewers/followers to other streams, then of course they're going to object to Elon taking this tool away from them.

I don't know if it's hypocrisy or not. From Musk's point of view, if Facebook or Instagram is a competitor and they're all fighting for a market share of contributors, then it's business sense to say "if you want to advertise on here, pay for it". It's not business sense if people think they should be able to link their own sites for personal use (and personal gain), and as you say, "eff you Muskrat I'm leaving, Facebook lets me link" is the result.

He seems to be running it as a business. No business gives free publicity to its rivals. Coke is not going to have people posting social media about "hey check me out trying the new Pepsi flavour". The New York Times will not have 'letters to the editor' where Sam of Ninth Street suggests everyone should read the coverage of the story in the Washington Post to get a better perspective.

Twitter users are not customers, they are product. Advertisers are customers buying the product, and will pay according to quantity of product.

Will this policy increase or decrease total number of twitter users and total time they spend on twitter? Elon thinks so. Is he right? Only time will tell.

It's a funny analogy. Both capture the claimed libertarian idea of 'if you're preventing people from leaving, you're doing something wrong'. In the soviet union case - fleeing starvation or poverty, versus the twitter case of 'making the platform slightly worse, maybe being racist'. But it's using that as an analogy! A manager can 'kill' a project, a musician can 'butcher' a piece, none of those imply actual violence. None of that implies violence.

Elon Musk is the new Trump. I can't read a goddamn thing on the internet without having to read about twitter related shenanigans. And Wikipedia articles are propaganda for the future.

Alright, many not literal massacres are labelled as 'massacres'. Fair enough. But a few journalists getting banned from a social media website is newsworthy enough to have that label and a Wikipedia article on it?

That's not where it ends. The college student who made the ElonJet twitter page also has a Wikipedia. A college student!

I mean, the leader of the Armed Forces of The World Hegemon getting banned didn't have its own article. It was discussed briefly in another article.

History is being rewritten in front of us. If one political tribes' story is lionized and signal boosted in the epistemic commons for the future to look back on, I don't know what else to call it. A Wikipedia article makes an event a part of history, 'something that happened'. What's written about at which length is weightage to assign importance to by readers in the future.

Roughly modeled as;

historical_importance_event = (wikipedia_article_exists)*(length_article)*(n_articles)

Its not only that which point of view its written from, its the fact that its written at all combined with how much its written about and where.

The fights of {Elons Detractors plurality political tribe} want their fights to be remembered in the way they viewed it and they are doing a lot to make that happen, not just in this instance.

And Wikipedia articles are propaganda for the future.

This is a great way of putting it; I remember trying to grope ineffectually towards this sentiment on The Old Place a couple of times.

One incident was where the NYT (I think?) published a "Gamergate: 5 years on" retrospective, which was pure its-a-harrassment-campaign agitprop, but raised eyebrows mostly for the question of WHY an e-spat needs a retrospective in a national newspaper. The answer, of course, is to complete the epistemic circle of "Newspaper -> Wikipedia notability criteria -> Wikipedia's article -> public consciousness -> official history". And why this needs to be completed on an e-spat is because GG has (rightly or wrongly) been identified by some as a watershed in distrust of the media and thus Trumpism.

In the present, people remember "You retarded shills, I was there and it didn't go down like that". In 20 years, when that defence doesn't work? The most accessible resource, Wikipedia, tells everyone (and with inline citations to "respectable articles in real newspapers") that it was all misogynistic trolling. Who ya gonna believe? References to contemporary / near contemporary accounts, or Grandpa's ramblings?

Propaganda for the future is exactly it.

And just like, the holocaust became questionable. Did it really happen? was it 6 million?

Just grandpas ramblings.

Of course I didn't ever doubt it in the past, but seeing the future narrative so blatantly being written (not just this but on other issues, e.g., Brexit, Trump, Covid, and now Elon) in a way that is completely wrong (or at least to my perspective) casts doubt on everything I didn't witness and everything that I haven't personally materially verified.

Whoever wrote the Wikipedia article on the Elon banning journalists, and whoever wrote that NYTs piece on gamergate have done more to make me doubt the holocaust than ten thousand David Irvings ever could*.

I am forced to wonder what cognitive defect I have that makes it impossible to not forget the previous truths and experiences I knew and had and just accept the new reality as written, as most people seem to do.

*which is still not much, maybe 10% doubt up from about 0.00001% in 2015, but don't let that dampen the dramatic flair here!

Seems like Wikipedia's "notability" rule is the same as (pre-Musk) Twitter's "notability" rule for verified accounts. Namely, it's nothing to do with notability at all, and it seems entirely to do with whether Wikipedia editors like it or not (barring cases that are too obviously notable to be dismissed like Trump).

This strikes me as a gross overreaction. The "massacre" label is commonly applied to such non-lethal events, and has been for decades. Eg the Saturday Night Massacre. No one understands that to be a claim that they are equivalent in any way to actual killing.

True, but what really happened? A bunch of eight/ten/who knows how many journos got suspended for two days, then it was back to business as usual. The journos in question cooked up a slogan to describe the awful tribulation visited upon them by not being able to tweet for two whole days - presumably because nobody reads them anywhere else and certainly not in the papers they work for, so if they're not on Twitter, they're invisible?

That being the case, are they really important enough that we should care? if Joe Massacred On Thursday gets fired from his journalism job on the Snow Plough Report and loses his Twitter account that goes with the job, then we won't hear from him any more than if Musk suspended him.

Or how about when the media does it to one of their own? Is that different?

I wouldn't call the Watergate dismissals a massacre either, and I would much prefer to use the word "massacre" to mean killing rather than broadening and overloading its meaning, which would make it less useful (i.e. you would learn less about the world from hearing the word "massacre"). In any case the severity of what Elon Musk did is in no way, shape, or form equivalent to what Richard Nixon did. For starters, Nixon didn't un-dismiss the special prosecutor afterwards, and what Musk did isn't illegal.

No one understands that to be a claim that they are equivalent in any way to actual killing.

I mean... I did. And that's not how it works. If I didn't know anything about Watergate and you told me something called a "Saturday Night Massacre" happened, I would assume that Nixon killed someone or something like that. This is what I mean when I say that overloading the meaning of a word makes it less useful, because if I accept that "massacre" could mean not killing, then if I didn't know anything about the Chiquola Hill Massacre I would wonder if it was just people getting fired or people getting killed.

It is, of course, a metaphor, and a very common one that, in ordinarily parlance, simply not meant to imply equivalence to an actual killing.

And, yes, what Musk did is not equivalent to what Nixon did. But I didn't say it was. I said that taking people to task for the very ordinary use of a very common metaphor "strikes me as a gross overreaction." But now I see that perhaps it is the result of ignorance, rather than hysteria.

Yeah, agreed. When someone says "massacre" I take that to mean that not just someone, but many people were killed. People using the word in another context are using the word wrong.

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