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Notes -
New Twitter policy just dropped:
It's like the man himself says
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The link at the top of this post is now a 404, apparently a result of the policy being rescinded, but the internet never forgets.
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:
And just to be sure, let's look at the Chiquola Hill Massacre:
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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!
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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).
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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?
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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.
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.
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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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