Cont: Musk buys Twitter II

I Am The Scum said:
Musk comments further on his feud with Mark Zuckerberg:

This man is 52 years old
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Geez, I'm a pretty big Musk hater and this is too pathetic, I'm actually feeling a bit bad for him.

I'm guessing he's too far up his own ass at this point for him to reassess the dumb things he's done that have lead to this and change course.

Really have to worry about how nasty Musk, and by extension Twitter, is going to get if this trend continues. Musk is already quite chummy with the nastier elements of the right wing community and this public failure could very well be the inflection point where he totally abandons any modicum of decency and plunges into the deeps.

Musk's Twitter is already awash in antisemtism and fascist conspiracy theories, and I suspect his product getting trashed by the Zuck controlled goliath will only accelerate the overt antisemitism tolerated by Musk.

The $8chan barb becomes more apt every day.
 
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jeremyp said:
Early onset dementia?

No, I think the real problem is that, when he got to the age where you are supposed to grow out of the frat boy mentality, he was already very rich and surrounded by people telling him he could do no wrong. He's not entering his second childhood because he never left his first.
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This seems an apt description of someone else in the news these days.
 
jeremyp said:
Early onset dementia?

No, I think the real problem is that, when he got to the age where you are supposed to grow out of the frat boy mentality, he was already very rich and surrounded by people telling him he could do no wrong. He's not entering his second childhood because he never left his first.
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There's probably something to be said about the damage that being obscenely wealthy tends to do to people's minds, but that's probably going a bit too far off topic.

Suffice to say, Musk is not unique in being a rich person who think he's God's Most Specialist and Smartest Boy and that having attitude lead them into fantastic blunders.
 
angrysoba said:
Yes, probably. The assumption by those that thought Twitter was too restrictive was the idea that it was the de facto public square, and that if you banned people merely for using the n-word or harassing the families of murdered children or other such noble pursuits then you are effectively acting as if you are the tyrant of some country that has no first amendment rights. I mean, it was always a stupid argument given that literally only one country has “first amendment rights” anyway, and once Musk became Twitter’s capricious dictator he made on the fly decisions to ban people he had personal issues with. But now, there are a plethora of social media platforms, mastodon, blue sky, threads, etc…. which puts the lie to the idea that being unable to say it on Twitter was effectively being unable to say it at all.
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Of course, the obvious answer is that Twitter isn't the public square, the broader internet is the public square in which Twitter is just one participant.

The anything goes, post whatever you like digital public square already exists. Anyone can get up on their soapbox by registering a domain and put out whatever screeds they like.

Twitter and other social media sites are much more like a cafe on the public square than the pubic square itself. And just like a cafe, allowing patrons to stand up on a chair, piss themselves, and scream slurs is generally bad for business. Even places that are largely open to the public have to exercise a bit of discretion to exclude the most anti-social elements if they want to remain attractive to the general public.
 
TurkeysGhost said:
Geez, I'm a pretty big Musk hater and this is too pathetic, I'm actually feeling a bit bad for him.

I'm guessing he's too far up his own ass at this point for him to reassess the dumb things he's done that have lead to this and change course.
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The second-hand embarrassment I get from reading his tweets is real no matter how much he sucks as a person. It's like watching your worst enemy slip and fall face-first into dog doo. Yeah, he deserves it, but damn, that's just nasty.
 
TurkeysGhost said:
Of course, the obvious answer is that Twitter isn't the public square, the broader internet is the public square in which Twitter is just one participant.

The anything goes, post whatever you like digital public square already exists. Anyone can get up on their soapbox by registering a domain and put out whatever screeds they like.

Twitter and other social media sites are much more like a cafe on the public square than the pubic square itself. And just like a cafe, allowing patrons to stand up on a chair, piss themselves, and scream slurs is generally bad for business. Even places that are largely open to the public have to exercise a bit of discretion to exclude the most anti-social elements if they want to remain attractive to the general public.
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attractive to the general public is really only a consideration because the entire platform, and all similar ones, is financed by advertising. with these giant platforms, you have free access to millions of eyeballs and access to a portion of the revenue. if you were to start your own site, you don't have that built in and if you did to broadcast to that many people it would be incredibly expensive.

so it's never really a free speech issue, just an i want access to your audience and platform but don't want to follow your rules issue. and if you don't believe it, check out how much self censorship they'll do if there's a demonetization threat. it's their own fault for getting in bed with advertisers to begin with
 
dirtywick said:
attractive to the general public is really only a consideration because the entire platform, and all similar ones, is financed by advertising. with these giant platforms, you have free access to millions of eyeballs and access to a portion of the revenue. if you were to start your own site, you don't have that built in and if you did to broadcast to that many people it would be incredibly expensive.

so it's never really a free speech issue, just an i want access to your audience and platform but don't want to follow your rules issue. and if you don't believe it, check out how much self censorship they'll do if there's a demonetization threat. it's their own fault for getting in bed with advertisers to begin with
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It's hard to imagine what other model would work besides advertisement. A paid membership system would probably result in a much, much smaller user base.
 
TurkeysGhost said:
It's hard to imagine what other model would work besides advertisement. A paid membership system would probably result in a much, much smaller user base.
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yes, you'd make a lot less money. to me, more evidence that free speech isn't the primary concern. it's the access to the ad money.
 
dirtywick said:
yes, you'd make a lot less money. to me, more evidence that free speech isn't the primary concern. it's the access to the ad money.
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The "free speech" angle isn't targeted to people that think much about evidence or consistency.
 
arthwollipot said:
I've seen a claim that Meta specifically hired developers that had been fired from Twitter, for the purposes of creating Threads. Don't know how much credence to give that report, though.
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Unless they have swiped stuff directly from Twitter, nothing illegal about their working for Meta. In fact, Stealing talent from other tech companies has been SOP in the Tech business since day one.
 
dudalb said:
Unless they have swiped stuff directly from Twitter, nothing illegal about their working for Meta. In fact, Stealing talent from other tech companies has been SOP in the Tech business since day one.
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It isn't even poaching talent, let alone stealing, when Musk fired them in the first place.
 
tyr_13 said:
It isn't even poaching talent, let alone stealing, when Musk fired them in the first place.
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Noncompetes are unenforceable in California anyway, where both companies are headquartered. "Poaching" is just boss speak for the normal functioning of the at-will labor market. Twitter would have to demonstrate some outrageously bad behavior by former employees (like ripping off proprietary code or other trade secrets) to have any kind of claim, which seems extremely dubious since Threads seems to be a text-based ripoff of Instagram more than anything else.
 
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