#Tweetstorm 14:1-5

[TheDeamon]

What’s funny is there seems to be a general feeling on the conservative side that Musk is somehow their natural ally.

He's strongly libertarian on most issues. While Libertarians and conservative overlap on a number of issues, where they diverge can have a rather significant gulf that needs to be spanned.

Musk would peddle his own underage daughters in a brothel if he found it to his advantage.

He has no moral compass as you would recognize it. He’s neurodivergent and plays by a rule book very few people are capable of understanding.

Welcome to the realm of Libertarians, where a great many of them are Anarco-Capitalists.

He’s very likely buying Twitter with the desire to shape politics and the world with it. He will let free speech fly then shape the narrative with algorithms. If you don’t understand how this is done you’re already playing out of your league.

To what end? His own. What might those be? Magic 8 ball says…

IIRC, he's also said he intends to make much of that same algorithm "far more transparent" and because he owns the company outright, nobody can use the SEC to force him to not make that information more widely available.

Obviously things like SEO counters are going to present a big problem for him, so it'll be interesting to see what they do manage to make public.

[TheDeamon]

My biggest concern are his other business exposures in China that may make him susceptible to pressure to censure for or provide data to the Chinese government behind the scenes. Also it could become an American right wing radicalization organizing tool again. Alex Jones, et al, will love the bigger platforms to spread their lies and con their followers again.

Uh, given Musk's track record over the past 20 years. I have a very strong hunch that most of Musk's business ventures in China are about "saving the world" first, and making a profit second. In fact, he probably considers everything he's invested in China to be "a write-off" from day one, where any profits he does obtain prior to China dropping the hammer on his businesses there is simply gravy. Basically, he's over there so China can steal that IP and incorporate it into their own activities.

[TheDeamon]

Explain attacking somebody who criticized his submarine move as a theatrical offer by calling him a pedophile without it being about his ego and narcissism.

Well, the claim had sufficient merit that the guy lost his lawsuit against Musk...

[TheDeamon]

How often do you troll around on 8chan? I don't, its not a good section of internet. Forcing everyone to block every internet troll is harmful to user experience and society. Forget being a public woman on twitter with no content standards. How many lude remarks and harassing messages are okay per day? How many people would walk right up to violent threats? You manage to participate as a civil member of society on this forum despite our moderation rules. Smaller scale but same idea. To foster civil discussion we have some standards. Some members walk fine lines around those standards but generally it works to allow people to largely discuss ideas without threatening each other or devolving into trading insults. Saying twitter shouldn't have any standards because people should be free to express hate as much as they want is crazy. Why can't twitter try to have a reasonable user experience without every Jew on twitter having to block every white nationalist neo nazi bone head who wants to say horrible things to them constantly. If someone is harming the user experience for the majority of users by expressing hate and being hurtful constantly, twitter (as a private entity) has the right to kick them off. The government can't put them in jail for their speech but getting kicked off twitter isn't a government action, first amendment doesn't apply.

Or you know, you provide content filtering options to your users, rather than adopt a one size fits all approach that caters to the lowest common denominator found among a group of people who share certain political leanings.

The problem with your solution of just block them is that for many people (women, Jews, black people, probably everyone else) their whole twitter experience would end up being consumed by blocking the worst million online trolls before they could actually engage with whatever community they wanted to in the first place.

You're assuming the only option would be to manually block all of those people on an individual basis at the end-user side of things. There are intermediate steps that can be taken.

If you want content filtering by the NAACP, ADL, GLAAD, The New York Times, and whomever else, knock yourself out. Just don't mandate that everyone else has to use the same settings for their use-case.

[TheDeamon]

Even if people had control of perfect opt in filtering that meant you'd never see somebody talking about subhuman n*ggers unless you deliberately choose to, it is in society's best interests to limit the spread of that message and reinforcement of behavior that inevitably leads to harm to the object of their hatred. That hatred might manifest as street altercations, murder, or verbal assault. Being able to see that there are millions of other racists subscribed to r/whitepower encourages racists to feel like it's normal and just another point of view. I mean like, sure that's pretty much what r/tuckercarlson is, but they have to speak in coffee at least.

See my prior post regarding how insulting, and frankly sad, it is to see so many people being fully bought into the idea of there being tens of millions of "racists in waiting" just waiting for their chance to connect with a Racist group online where they'll instantly transform from a 3 of out 10 on the racism scale to 11 out of 10 overnight(or over 20 years) because of that.

You ever consider the possibility that also works in reverse? That 3/10 guy, once exposed to 10/10 guy might very quickly become 1/10 guy instead. That is kind of what happened in the 1960's when the racism of the deep south was given national news coverage on television. Why should you expect people would find "full exposure" any less repugnant today?

Sure, if you let the racists "groom" their targets, you leave those people wide open for conversion, a little bit at a time. But they can only do that now because in major media channels, all they could hope to encounter is a caricature of such groups on a television drama or action/adventure.

[TheDeamon]

Why are you so scared of letting others make their own decisions on this?

January 6th.

I’m surprised you don’t see the danger as well. Considering your rightful concern about people openly calling for the killing of white people or cops. Such actors shouldn’t be given a public megaphone to recruit and radicalize. They can say all the nasty crap they want drinking in their backyard. We don’t need to have a forum that lets them easily and relatively anonymously broadcast that to the world.

So... If I'm of the view that Musk's approach makes it less likely that such an event would happen(at least, from the right wing) that's unacceptable?

The media forced those people into an extreme fringe by way of using censorship rather than rebuttals to address the issue. It made it impossible for friends, associates, and others to be aware of the scope of the issue and possibly walk those closer to them away from that ledge. Because Facebook and Twitter saw fit to ensure those people "knew" that such thoughts should not be posted there. Neighbors and friends can't fix problems they don't know about. This also in turn runs us back into the public square side of things.

[jc44]

Even if people had control of perfect opt in filtering that meant you'd never see somebody talking about subhuman n*ggers unless you deliberately choose to, it is in society's best interests to limit the spread of that message and reinforcement of behavior that inevitably leads to harm to the object of their hatred. That hatred might manifest as street altercations, murder, or verbal assault. Being able to see that there are millions of other racists subscribed to r/whitepower encourages racists to feel like it's normal and just another point of view. I mean like, sure that's pretty much what r/tuckercarlson is, but they have to speak in coffee at least.

See my prior post regarding how insulting, and frankly sad, it is to see so many people being fully bought into the idea of there being tens of millions of "racists in waiting" just waiting for their chance to connect with a Racist group online where they'll instantly transform from a 3 of out 10 on the racism scale to 11 out of 10 overnight(or over 20 years) because of that.

You ever consider the possibility that also works in reverse? That 3/10 guy, once exposed to 10/10 guy might very quickly become 1/10 guy instead. That is kind of what happened in the 1960's when the racism of the deep south was given national news coverage on television. Why should you expect people would find "full exposure" any less repugnant today?

Sure, if you let the racists "groom" their targets, you leave those people wide open for conversion, a little bit at a time. But they can only do that now because in major media channels, all they could hope to encounter is a caricature of such groups on a television drama or action/adventure.

I'm perfectly prepared to believe that majority of people when confronted by such extreme views just go "oh look, another nutter" but the issue is how big the minority is that goes "there must be something in that" and get drawn in (vs. what would have happened if not exposed).  Unfortunately you only need a small proportion of the population to be radicalized to to present a real danger to society.

[yossarian22c]

For those interested, there's an in-depth article published by the Brookings Institution.

Segregating ourselves so we do not have to listen to people who differ from us is not a remedy for the information externalities that make hate speech and misinformation so dangerous even to people who are not exposed to it. People cannot remain indifferent to what other people in society believe because what other people believe affects them. If enough people reject vaccines and other public health measures, we are all at risk from the next pandemic. If enough people become racists or intolerant of the LGBTQ community, significant parts of our community are not safe in their own society. And how are we going to agree on what to teach our children if there is no uniform public platform where we can exchange ideas?

By the same token, you do realize just how insulting it is that many people seem firmly convinced that there are "Millions of racists in waiting" just needing to encounter that one moment where another racist says just the right thing and BOOM they're instantly transformed into a diehard racist who thinks the German SS didn't go far enough.

It's not millions in waiting its thousands. The Buffalo shooter posted that he was radicalized on 4chan. People in his life at some point realized it, reported his threats to the authorities, had him involuntarily committed for a psychiatric assessment which he passed. Then a few months later he buys some guns and starts shooting up strangers at a grocery store. This is exactly the type of thing I was pointing out happens when the internet becomes all legal speech. This is the most extreme example and luckily very rare. But there is no reason to host the recruiters and radicalizers on mainstream services so that they can more easily reach the people vulnerable to radicalization.