Elon Musk buys Twitter to bring back Free Speech

[Ayashe Ninetails]

6 minutes ago, JeromFranzic said:

Me, too. In what barely passes as my RL twitter, I freaked out Vernon Reid (Living Colour) or Alex Skolnick (Testament) actually answered my responses LOL

LMAO this sounds exactly like my brother!! He's emailed me in the past like OMG LOOK LOOK VERNON REID JUST LIKED MY TWEET. 😂

[Silent Mistwalker]

There is nothing wrong with your Twitter account. Do not attempt to edit your tweet. We are controlling your thoughts. If we wish to make your tweets nastier, we will bring up the volume. If we wish to make it nicer, we will tune it to a whisper. We will control the rage. We will control the bliss. We can drain your mind, make it empty. We can change the focus to a soft blur or sharpen it to crystal clarity. Sit quietly while we control all that you see and hear. We repeat: There is nothing wrong with your Twitter account. You are about to participate in a mind-numbing adventure. You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind into... The Twitter Zone.

[SarahKB7 Koskinen]

 

😜

Edited April 26, 2022 by SarahKB7 Koskinen

[Paulsian]

I dont like the way these apps are preinstalled on devices. I especially do not like elected officals using them. Before the 2020 election, right before I installed twitter to try to communicate questionable polling practices and my new twitter account recommended before searching anything to follow several members of a political party. Hopefully they will add a way to filter out politicals and political content. It got scary because when I took a screen snip of all the politicals twitter recommended I should follow and posted it twitter suspended my account. Twitter died that day. I'm more of a pinterest type of guy anyways. 

I hope the new ownership will fix the problems and find ways to help people learn to be more civil to each other.

Wonder how many bots they find?

Edited April 26, 2022 by Paulsian
after thoughts

[Ceka Cianci]

12 minutes ago, Paulsian said:

I dont like the way these apps are preinstalled on devices. I especially do not like elected officals using them. Before the 2020 election, right before I installed twitter to try to communicate questionable polling practices and my new twitter account recommended before searching anything to follow several members of a political party. Hopefully they will add a way to filter out politicals and political content. It got scary because when I took a screen snip of all the politicals twitter recommended I should follow and posted it twitter suspended my account. Twitter died that day. I'm more of a pinterest type of guy anyways. 

OMG I hate that they are on my phone as well.. I disable them but just hate knowing they are there still in some way..

And Yes, I really hated seeing Twitter become a big part of politics..

I hate seeing politicians on their damn phones in congress..

When people really started getting taken out by twitter, I was like, Just stay off there you idiots What the hell is the matter with you?

They have one drunk night and get on twitter and their career is over the next morning because while they were passed out they trended..

I never ever signed up for any of them.. Not even the SL one they had a few years back..

I was like, Stay back!!

hehehe

[PermaRuthed]

But will we get the edit feature we've been begging for many years?

[Arielle Popstar]

1 hour ago, Luna Bliss said:

"Musk has long advocated a libertarian vision of an “uncontrolled” internet. That vision is dangerous rubbish. There’s no such animal, and there never will be.

Someone has to decide on the algorithms in every platform – how they’re designed, how they evolve, what they reveal and what they hide. Musk has enough power and money to quietly give himself this sort of control over Twitter.

Just to clarify, Musk has stated he wishes to make the algorithms for Twitter opensource:

Quote

 

Hours after Musk made his offer to buy Twitter, he repeated the idea for open sourcing Twitter's algorithms during an on-stage appearance at the TED conference in Vancouver. He also said it should be made clearer to users when any actions are taken by Twitter that impact what you tweet — such as decisions to amplify or de-emphasize tweets.

This way, he explained at TED, "there's no sort of behind-the-scenes manipulation, either algorithmically or manually." https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/19/tech/twitter-algorithm-open-source-elon-musk/index.html

 

Quote

Musk talks about freedom of speech but his real power is freedom of reach – reaching 80 million Twitter followers without accountability to anyone (including critics like me) – and enough money to buy himself a seat on Twitter’s board.

Musk has never believed that power comes with responsibility. He’s been unperturbed when his tweets cause real suffering. During his long and storied history with Twitter he has threatened journalists and tweeted reckless things.

In March 2020 he tweeted that children were “essentially immune” to Covid. He has pushed cryptocurrencies that he’s invested in".

If he takes it private he becomes the board doesn't he? And when someone buys and becomes the owner of a company, then why should they be accountable to anyone in regards to what they do in or with that business to the limit and extent of the applicable laws? This isn't China...yet. Back in March of 2020, he was not the only one saying children were essentially immune to Covid and there are still quite a few who say that other then those who want Pharma to have mandatory access to an even larger percentage of the population. Follow the monies.                Sounds like tilting at windmills.

[Nalates Urriah]

14 hours ago, StarlanderGoods said:

What do you consider censorship?  Is having Terms Of Service a form of censorship in and of itself?

TOS is TOS and not censorship. Declaring that illegal statements like: "Please kill ______" as not permitted is not what we call or mean by censorship. Nor is prohibiting nude or pornographic images on a site.

Technically both those examples show censoring. But they are not what we mean when we talk about censorship.

13 hours ago, StarlanderGoods said:

Are you playing devils advocate, or do you think that banning the spread of misinformation in the middle of a pandemic with millions of deaths was "a step too far" ?

Censoring misinformation is what most people mean by censorship. The problem comes from who gets to decide what is misinformation.

Who does get to decide what is and is not misinformation? And why would I trust your pick?

Consider. In the 2020 election cycle we had a load of supposedly reputable and trustworthy people from various levels of society and government telling us Hunter Biden's laptop was Russian propaganda. Now we have the NYT and Leftist sources telling us... "No... Hunter Laptop is NOT a Russian plant. It is for real... actually is his laptop." So, was the 2019, 2020, and 2021 information posted about the Hunter laptop NOT being real the actual misinformation? Was the censorship of actual information and an attempt to swing the election by government and media?

How do you stop liars from lying? When it serves the power structure way too many people support the lie.

With CoVid and the Vaccines have you considered how many of FDA's directors have a connection to Big Pharma? Have you researched to see why the CDC's recommendations disagree and their studies/statistics?

And what is with the vaccine coming out and the overall death rate in the world increasing by >40%?  While we do not have clear causation it is a striking correlation.

When the guy that developed the mRNA techniques, Dr. Robert Malone, says we have a problem, why is he censored? When a FOIA lawsuit forced Pfizer to release the documentation on their vaccine studies (now ~66,000 pages), which they wanted sealed for 75 years what did we find?

The point of freespeech is so we can disagree with others and our government. Misinformation and lies are countered by more speech.

Edited April 26, 2022 by Nalates Urriah

[Paulsian]

4 hours ago, AnthonyJoanne said:

Attempting to communicate on a meaningful level within a 240 character limit is farcical at best.

Increasing the character limit was a mistake in my opinion. I remember years ago trying to tweet something like this out and making every character count. Good times.

[sirhc DeSantis]

I dunno what the fuss is about. I went  down the disco wearing that 'musk d'Elon' and frankly the pull ratio was worse than that angels falling stuff. Thats a pretty low bar.
OK it had a built in 'clear the room of fanbois' effect but I could have had another pint and a bag of chips* for the same money.

*you younger readers will not get that joke. Involves the coop.

[Innula Zenovka]

A couple of points about Musk's offer to buy Twitter.

First, he's not doing this  entirely with his own money.   As The Times explains,  

Quote

the world’s richest man will not be able to ignore the pressure to make Twitter profitable from the string of banks, including Morgan Stanley, that have lined up to provide $25.5 billion (£19.6 billion) in debt financing, making Musk’s $44 billion acquisition one of the biggest leveraged buyout deals in history.

The tycoon’s accepted offer price of $54.20 a share to take the social media platform private was 38 per cent higher than the company’s share price before he revealed his interest — or, put another way, a lot more than what the rest of Wall Street believed it was worth.

He's going to have to keep Twitter's cash-flow, primarily based on advertising, looking pretty healthy in order to service this debt.

Second, and not unrelated to this, whatever his views on free speech, he's taking on Twitter at a time when both the EU and the UK (and possibly other jurisdictions too?) are introducing quite tight controls on social media, giving governments the power to require social media operators to take down hate speech and other extremist content, along  with various other constraints and regulations, under threat of very substantial fines.

So whatever Musk thinks about it, he's going to have to comply with EU and British law, even if that means restricting a lot of the more unsavory aspects of Twitter to the US.

I don't see it making a great deal of difference to me, at least -- I use Twitter to follow mainstream news sources in places I'm interested in,  particular specialist interest groups, like SL or medieval history, or particular creative artists, a few commentators I find interesting and entertaining (Ken White, Stonekettle, Amanda Marcotte, Talia Lavin) and to dive deep into topics that currently hold my interest (at the moment, Ukraine).    I don't see that changing.

 

Edited April 26, 2022 by Innula Zenovka

[Ceka Cianci]

11 minutes ago, Innula Zenovka said:

A few points about Musk's offer to buy Twitter.

First, he's not doing this  entirely with his own money.   As The Times explains,  

 

That's true..

If I remember right, I heard he only put up like 15 billion of his own money for the buyout and had to get funding for the rest..

A lot of his wealth isn't sitting around ready to be used.. He would have had to sell some things to make that big of a purchase on his own..

[Coffee Pancake]

8 minutes ago, Nalates Urriah said:

The point of freespeech is so we can disagree with others and our government. Misinformation and lies are countered by more speech.

Quality matters over quantity.

Twitter has a massive AI and botting problem, special interest groups with agendas hire people to run dozens of accounts per employee all day long.

There are huge state funded operations with thousands upon thousands of accounts running astroturfing operations, everything from states and geopolitics, attacking LGBTQ+ people, to antivax, to maga, to fossil fuel corporations and beyond. They aren't all easily identifiable.

The joke is "it's the russians", because they do run a wide range of campaigns and work a 9-5 local shift, but it's not just them. Every state is running massive social media operations and hiding behind VPNs.

These campaigns are broad and go beyond pumping some obvious narrative, great care is made to make the participants seem like very committed entirely real people. This extends right up to personal level engagement, winning real individuals over to a cause is a key part of the strategy.

 

Simple example. JK tweets some homophobic or transphobic bile, and a thousand gender critical accounts appear out of the wood work to have a love in. Most of these accounts aren't individually run by a mass of people weirdly passionate about that singular issue. They are run by a small number of people specifically to create the appearance of a grass roots movement and driving engagement though a feedback loop. Rowling trends every weekend .. mainly because trans opposition groups aren't funded and the people running the accounts have real jobs during the week.

 

Elon has stated he wants to solve this specific problem.

He want's to do it by getting everyone's real identity and giving everyone a blue check.

Which falls at the first hurdle as Twitter is a garbage company that is universally untrusted.

The second hurdle is that it's easy to spin up accounts, meet the identity requirements and then hand it over to astroturfing organization.

[Coffee Pancake]

2 minutes ago, Ceka Cianci said:

That's true..

If I remember right, I heard he only put up like 15 billion of his own money for the buyout and had to get funding for the rest..

A lot of his wealth isn't sitting around ready to be used.. He would have had to sell some things to make that big of a purchase on his own..

Buy using that initial stock purchase as leverage and attempting a buyout, he evades investigation for all the SEC rules he broke buying those shares in the first place.

[Luna Bliss]

1 hour ago, Ceka Cianci said:

The worlds gonna burn anyways, we might as well have some fun while the A/C is still working.. hehehe

Hard to walk that line...keep that balance of a tear in one eye and a twinkle in the other.  It's the only way to stay sane though.

[Ceka Cianci]

6 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Buy using that initial stock purchase as leverage and attempting a buyout, he evades investigation for all the SEC rules he broke buying those shares in the first place.

Isn't he getting fined for that? I thought I heard he was getting fined..

Not that a fine is going to do much of anything..

[Luna Bliss]

52 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

If he takes it private he becomes the board doesn't he? And when someone buys and becomes the owner of a company, then why should they be accountable to anyone in regards to what they do in or with that business to the limit and extent of the applicable laws? This isn't China...yet.

Big business is not free to do whatever they want, nor should they be. Their behavior affects the rest of society, often in very detrimental ways, and so we are not obligated to be under their complete control. Their interest is only in themselves yet their behavior affects everything surrounding them, and that's why we place limitations on them, why we have laws. They should never be given complete control (or grant them the status of 'personhood', as was done by the US in recent years).

When we control big business, force some limitations on their behavior, this does not mean we become China!  In fact, it is not controlling the power of oligarchs who own big business and funnel the goodies disproportionately to themselves that is the very reason why the US is now becoming more like China -- less and less a Democracy and every day more controlled by those with moneyed interests who do not have the common good at heart.

So yeah, applicable laws we need to tighten big time.

Edited April 26, 2022 by Luna Bliss

[Ceka Cianci]

2 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

Hard to walk that line...keep that balance of a tear in one eye and a twinkle in the other.  It's the only way to stay sane though.

That whole post was not a serious post.. It wasn't meant to go one way or the other, but just for giggles...

The guy spraying the musk is Nicknamed The Situation, from Jersey shore..

I just seen that GIF and couldn't resist thinking of a caption for it.. hehehe

[Silent Mistwalker]

Students today are educated connecting dots. Almost none of it spent teaching them the skills necessary to connect dots. The magic of connecting dots is that once you learn the techniques, the dots can change but you’ll still be good at connecting them.

-Seth Godin

Edited April 26, 2022 by Silent Mistwalker

[sirhc DeSantis]

29 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

Big business is not free to do whatever they want, nor should they be. Their behavior affects the rest of society, often in very detrimental ways, and so we are not obligated to be under their complete control. Their interest is only in themselves yet their behavior affects everything surrounding them, and that's why we place limitations on them, why we have laws. They should never be given complete control (or grant them the status of 'personhood', as was done by the US in recent years).

When we control big business, force some limitations on their behavior, this does not mean we become China!  In fact, it is not controlling the power of oligarchs who own big business and funnel the goodies disproportionately to themselves that is the very reason why the US is now becoming more like China -- less and less a Democracy and every day more controlled by those with moneyed interests who do not have the common good at heart.

So yeah, applicable laws we need to tighten big time.

You mean Amerikkan biz and views. Be specific. You are not the World and you are getting tedious by your Amerika centrism. With respekt

[Paul Hexem]

53 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

Big business is not free to do whatever they want, nor should they be. Their behavior affects the rest of society, often in very detrimental ways, and so we are not obligated to be under their complete control. Their interest is only in themselves yet their behavior affects everything surrounding them, and that's why we place limitations on them, why we have laws. They should never be given complete control (or grant them the status of 'personhood', as was done by the US in recent years).

When we control big business, force some limitations on their behavior, this does not mean we become China!  In fact, it is not controlling the power of oligarchs who own big business and funnel the goodies disproportionately to themselves that is the very reason why the US is now becoming more like China -- less and less a Democracy and every day more controlled by those with moneyed interests who do not have the common good at heart.

So yeah, applicable laws we need to tighten big time.

Fun fact, the US was never a Democracy. As a matter of fact, pure democracy is actually really bad, when you think about it.

Additionally, the biggest problem with the concept of expecting government to regulate everything is that these people don't understand what they're regulating. They make laws requiring technology that doesn't exist. Imagine if they tried to pass laws regarding in world activity in SL? It'd be a nightmare.

[Extrude Ragu]

56 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Simple example. JK tweets some homophobic or transphobic bile

I'd be interested in some direct quotes of what you consider as such, because in my experience usage of terms that end in -phobic or -ist tend to be a snooty attempt to dismiss a serious matter that is causing harm to ordinary peoples families as 'hate'.

It's gotten to the point in recent years where once I would take such accusations seriously, today I would roll my eyes - So it would be good to see that these terms are being used to discuss real issues and not just whatever some lobby does not like.

[Luna Bliss]

56 minutes ago, sirhc DeSantis said:

You mean Amerikkan biz and views. Be specific. You are not the World and you are getting tedious by your Amerika centrism. With respekt

Why would I need to state we're speaking about the US specifically when on this thread we're discussing Elon Musk (an American), and an American Company (Twitter)?

Besides, I'm an Earth Mother, even out to the Moon, I'm in meta-land and my thoughts stretch out to the Universe and back, encompassing your location and mine.
  I got no cuntree I'm proud of.     
But coming back down to Earth, why would I try to talk about other countries I'm not so familiar with, or do so when needing to describe an actual occurrence in my own location.

You want to talk about where you live?  Then open your mouth.               I actually do love learning about other countries.

Besides all that, you should listen to the stories in the US now, because from my cursory studies of what's happening around the world, what's happening here in the US is coming for you next.

[Love Zhaoying]

13 minutes ago, Extrude Ragu said:

1 hour ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Simple example. JK tweets some homophobic or transphobic bile

I'd be interested in some direct quotes of what you consider as such, because in my experience usage of terms that end in -phobic or -ist tend to be a snooty attempt to dismiss a serious matter that is causing harm to ordinary peoples families as 'hate'.

It's common knowledge that J.K. Rowling has said / written things in the past which are transphobic. Do you really want us to Google it for you? I picked this summary at random.

https://www.glamour.com/story/a-complete-breakdown-of-the-jk-rowling-transgender-comments-controversy/amp

[Luna Bliss]

33 minutes ago, Paul Hexem said:

1 hour ago, Luna Bliss said:

Big business is not free to do whatever they want, nor should they be. Their behavior affects the rest of society, often in very detrimental ways, and so we are not obligated to be under their complete control. Their interest is only in themselves yet their behavior affects everything surrounding them, and that's why we place limitations on them, why we have laws. They should never be given complete control (or grant them the status of 'personhood', as was done by the US in recent years).

When we control big business, force some limitations on their behavior, this does not mean we become China!  In fact, it is not controlling the power of oligarchs who own big business and funnel the goodies disproportionately to themselves that is the very reason why the US is now becoming more like China -- less and less a Democracy and every day more controlled by those with moneyed interests who do not have the common good at heart.

So yeah, applicable laws we need to tighten big time.

Expand  

Fun fact, the US was never a Democracy. As a matter of fact, pure democracy is actually really bad, when you think about it.

Additionally, the biggest problem with the concept of expecting government to regulate everything is that these people don't understand what they're regulating. They make laws requiring technology that doesn't exist. Imagine if they tried to pass laws regarding in world activity in SL? It'd be a nightmare.

Of course we are technically a Republic, but we tout 'democracy' as our biggest aspiration all the time -- especially when we invade and attempt to control other countries. *Sad laugh*

There you go again...sliding from one extreme to the other...if I'm saying big business shouldn't rule us then I must be saying only the gubbermint can!
PS Never said such a thing. There should be an interplay between the two -- individual freedom/'big business' AND the government with its laws so that some don't hoard it over others.

FUN FACT (as you say) -- the government receives input from supposedly knowledgeable sources before making decisions. Sometimes that does work out, but it's all too common for money to do the talking.