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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   15609 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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What errors has Musk made?

a) bought Twitter at an inflated price with borrowed money (remember that Twitter is not a profitable company) b) annoyed advertisers with erratic behavior like the poorly thought out "verification" system c) annoys users (especially content creators) with capricious moderation policies that are walked back a short while later.

Ok thanks. Seems mostly like annoying people, but I am not sure that many of them wouldn't have been annoyed no matter what he did.

The inflated price is an error, depending on what the assesment of the value is (I don't think markets fundamentally price things well here, as the power of twitter to shape discourse, or even the info dumpe din the "twitter files" are completely unacocunted for when purchasing individual shares in a way that purchasng them all doesn't.

What errors has Musk made?

By taking a capricious approach to addressing content moderation. While I like that he has been transparent about the process, it does seem like he has never really thought deeply about this complex problem, and did not come into the position with a clear set of principles on the matter. He probably should not be as hands-on as he is, as he is a shit-stirrer, which is not reflecting well on the prospects of Twitter becoming a more open and fairly adjudicated service.

Depends if you want an open and fairly adjudicsted service, or even believe such a thing is possible.

My rules enforced unfairly in my favour > your rules enforced unfairly in your favour.

With my rules and your rules fairly both discarded as Impossible fantasies ;) for illustration.

What Musk is doing in this view is then only an error inasmuch as it provides a point of cooperative hate, a target, for the opposition to organise against (without the need for communication as Musk provides the target signal flares himself by being clearly non on side).

Loudly broadcasting a strong commitment to free speech, then turning around and censoring not only legal-but-sketchy posts (like the one guy broadcasting his plane location), but even not-sketchy posts (like people talking about competing social media platforms). No matter how you slice it, this was an error. Either it is an error to censor after making such a strong public commitment to free speech, or it was an error to make that commitment in the first place without fully considering the ramifications.

Loudly broadcasting freespeach and then not breaking that means allowing lots of illegal content, among other things, otherwise it's just quibbling over where the line is and thus subjective ( subjective aka objective but only if you have certain priors haha). The error was to make a strong commitment to free speach in the first place I woukd agree.

Yeah, I'm not necessarily criticizing him for not running Twitter in a free speech absolutist way. But it was pretty dumb to say he would do so, and then go "well actually not really" after the fact. Dude should've given more thought to whether he could deliver what he was promising.

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