Muskovite Birds of a Feather: Notes on the Great Twitterpation

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Like I said, compared to its rivals, Twitter invested far less in user safety. The battle to suppress child exploitation predates Musk’s takeover. Companies were suspending their advertising because their ads were appearing next to child abuse content. Where we’re you then?

 

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No. It was a problem before Musk took over.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/...s-next-child-pornography-accounts-2022-09-28/

https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/twi...cle_a14b22ae-23d5-11ed-946f-9f5c1b4bd54e.html

 

Certes, even you can comprehend the difference bewtween one circumstance and another.

To wit, it was over a month ago↑ when I suggested that one of the things about tears for the content team layoffs is that they weren't especially great at their jobs, before; on Jack's watch, content moderation was often visibly an exercise in applied dullardry.

Toward which, it is true we presume you are smart enough to discern the basic difference between Twitter struggling to fulfill its duties, and abandoning the effort.

And Elon could even get Jack to disagree about how the company handled child exploitation: That is, certainly you can understand the difference between a question of whether a company is capable of attending certain duties, and a decision that a company should not attend certain duties.

It's not difficult.

At the end of the day, it's important to remember that Jack and Elon are, technically speaking, on the same side; what we're seeing is internecine dispute. We must remember that both are of a range that prefers the free speech of deception, defamation, conspiracism, and supremacism. The difference is that Jack understands the business implications, while Elon easily convinces us he does not. There is only so much ground Jack could give on community definitions defying reality, and Elon is the unsparing retort against those boundaries.

 

Thanks for the apostrophe correction. I returned the favor.

Funny thing is, is that Jay Graber said that Elon was just testing the limits of what he can get away with in this reality to see if it is, in fact, a simulation.

Elon did say that buying twitter was an accelerant to creating X, the everything app, which would allow him to sell user data for advertising. However, Bluesky is an attempt to develop a decentralized social network landscape.

Here's Jack’s ↑ take on it.

"I think it's worth both trying to move Twitter in a better direction and doing something new that's decentralized," Musk wrote to Dorsey.

Dorsey told Musk that Twitter should be "an open-source protocol, funded by a foundation of sorts that doesn't own the protocol, only advances it," arguing Twitter "can’t have an advertising [business] model."

Dorsey, who remained on the Twitter board until May this year after stepping down as Twitter CEO in 2021, has said Bluesky Social will be "a competitor to any company trying to own the underlying fundamentals for social media or the data of the people using it"—potentially making it a rival to the likes of Twitter, Meta's Facebook, and Instagram, as well as Snapchat and TikTok.

However, despite both Dorsey's and Musk's support of cryptocurrencies bitcoin and dogecoin, the Bluesky protocol doesn't use blockchain technology.

"I'm confident in our decision to not put social media content on a blockchain," Bluesky CEO Jay Graber posted to Twitter this week. "It's blockchain optional and blockchain agnostic. I personally wouldn't build a system that backs up your posts on-chain."

Bluesky wants to give control of data back to users rather than centralizing it within a company. Company control of vast swaths of user data has allowed social media giants to become some of the world's most influential companies over the last decade and sparked fears they're unable to responsibly wield such power."

Are they collaborating, and if so, is this a good thing?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/billyb...eal-radical-plan-for-twitter/?sh=531f61976045
https://atproto.com/
https://blueskyweb.xyz/

 

One of the most interesting subtexts about the Muskovization of Twitter is how badly it injures certain longstanding, retarded chatter about free speech.

It's not just the Muskateers, but a larger politic worshipping the cacophony of free-speech absolutism¹. It's always been obvious: Suppress the new, protect the old, call it freedom.

And, let's face it, arguments like we've endured during the Twitter drama, advocating the free speech of cacophony, are hardly unfamiliar, and easily denigrated and humiliated simply by observing what those pretend principles actually do. Now that some billionaire has gone and spent forty-four billion dollars for futile hope of fulfilling the free speech of cacophony, it seems fair enough to wonder if the longtime advocates who always pretended it was about anything else are embarrassed, yet.
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Notes:

¹ Which, in turn, is about as absolute as Biblical literalism is literal. Perhaps it's all in how you say it.​

Spoiler

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The justification is that people will only be able to distinguish between truth and lies if they can hear a variety of different opinions. A clash of opinions in the marketplace of ideas is a good thing.

 

That is not a valid justification for unbridled free speech.

There can and should be limits on free speech

In Twitter's instance there is the brake of public distaste for some of its offerings that ,by a multiplying effect drives away its source of income which is mainly advertising

If this deterrent proves deficient then there are legal remedies which can be attempted.

The clash of opinions in public forums is absolutely essential but needs to be moderated appropriately.

In case anyone's ears are burning I am not talking about this (private) forum but about the laws and practices in society in general (although those laws apply to the owners of this and similar sites too I fervently hope)

 

It's a bogus justification; while the underlying principle sounds attractive, the application tends to be license of falsehood. The justification, as such, is a swindler's utterance demanding that "free speech" disrupt and even prevent communication.

It actually stands out that people have such trouble understanding such basic notions: When the known swindler says free speech means you both must let him grift and are forbidden from attacking him so personally as to imply anything he says or does is improper or incorrect, it's not really free speech.

And it's one thing to observe the difference between a private forum and societal laws and practices, but as a matter of principle, we can observe that the free speech of cacophony is dysfunctional both in concept and application: The free speech of cacophony shepherds fraud and deceit, equivocates to pretend there is no difference. If I suggest "free speech" ought not mean your words have no value, the free speech of cacphony is the reply; in such an environment, scientifically valid data has no greater value than calculated falsehood or popular superstition, and what is true or false is held in basic parity. It is a wilful parity between what is true and what is not true.

And there never really has been any justification for it; the free speech of cacophony is and always has been a refuge of scoundrels.

 

If there are inaccuracies of opinion, you’re free to use your power of persuasion to counter it. We should all be able to sort out facts and reach our own conclusion.

"Cutting through the acronyms and argot that littered the hearing testimony, the Internet may fairly be regarded as a never-ending worldwide conversation. The Government may not, through the CDA, interrupt that conversation. As the most participatory form of mass speech yet developed, the Internet deserves the highest protection from governmental intrusion.

True it is that many find some of the speech on the Internet to be offensive, and amid the din of cyberspace many hear discordant voices that they regard as indecent. The absence of governmental regulation of Internet content has unquestionably produced a kind of chaos, but as one of plaintiffs' experts put it with such resonance at the hearing:

What achieved success was the very chaos that the Internet is. The strength of the Internet is that chaos.

Just as the strength of the Internet is chaos, so the strength of our liberty depends upon the chaos and cacophony of the unfettered speech the First Amendment protects."

https://casetext.com/case/american-civil-liberties-union-v-reno-3

 

I strongly agree.

Those who go on and on about "disinformation" seem to me to be implying that they (unlike their opponents) have some semi-divine "God's-eye" way of discerning what the truth IS in any controversial politically-charged matter. Hence they have some extra-Constitutional right to censor anyone who disagrees with their views, suppposedly to prevent the ignorant masses from being led astray.

While in real life, there is often disagreement about what the truth really is. It's even worse when the subject turns from matters-of-fact to matters of intuition, feeling and opinion, where no factual truth-of-the-matter even exists. About all that can be done in the latter case is let the different opinions be heard and let the reader make up his/her own mind.

When disagreement concerns matters of fact, if one side thinks that their belief is better justified than their opponents' belief, it's the (self-proclaimed) "superior" side's responsibility to present their justifications and make a persuasive case for them.

 

BBC online uses as a subject heading...Elon Musk to quit as Twitter CEO when replacement found

I think to have a replacement pretty much requires that someone has to quit first doesn't it?

 

Is Rudy the brown nosed reindeer looking for an alternative to his legal work?

 

But that's about a different question of chaos and cacophony.

Here is a basic illustration:

• Imagine that we are able to muster a handful of scholars to examine the record we have vis à vis a particular bolide event and what seem to be related legends, focusing on two Biblical stories, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and the fall of Jericho. We need archaeologists, anthropologists, and maybe even a semiotician. Hebrew scholars are, of course, a must, as are historians specializing in the development of myth and legend. Also, we're going to need a handful of specialized physicists, chemists, and astronomers. What we don't have is an explicit atheist telling us God doesn't exist, or an evangelical Christian explaining how we need to ask Jesus into our hearts in order to truly understand the Hebrew experience. These omissions, even exclusions as such, are no offense against free speech. That is, if we must change the subject so drastically in order to accommodate free speech, we surrender the purpose of the symposium; in that way, the free speech of cacophony defeats free speech.​

We've seen a version of it at Sciforums. The idea of rational discourse used to be important to this community, but we gave it up because it is viewed as a danger to free speech; the obligation to rationally support one's argument really disrupts supremacism, and God only knows the strength of diversity on the Internet is that truth and falsehood have finally achieved parity.

Another way to look at it on the societal scale is that one of the reasons conservatives feel subject to greater scrutiny is that they have a harder time answering for their arguments. The party of supremacism, antivax, religious extremism, and disinformation is going to feel canceled whether anyone actually censors them or not, because what they have to say is constantly rebuked, set aside, ignored as much as one can, and so on, because they are so often wrong or simply lying.

The justification that people will only be able to distinguish between truth and lies if they can hear a variety of different opinions presumes those diverse opinions reasonably accurate and expressed in good faith, and this seemingly straightforward reality seems absent from so many invocations and utterances of the principle. It's absent from your presentation, Yazata's concurrence, and most other iterations occurring around here.

It's also missing from celebrity iterations; the crackpot Canadian professor, the American expatriate congressional spouse and former media CEO, and however many counterrevolutionary podcasters, substackers, and quilletteers.

It is easy to be generally wary of inanimate, insensate principles existing in a vacuum; there are, generally, perfectly understandable reasons why someone might wish to reserve validity and reliability from diversity, but they are almost inevitably dysfunctional.

At Sciforums, the basic justification is that we do not wish to suppress political views, but the hook is easy enough to spot: Are we, then, acknowledging that a given political view cannot be expressed without disinformation, fallacy, and disruption? And if the proposition is to attend behavior, the practical reality is that the behavior is itself subsumed as speech; at least, that's how it goes around here.

We're not unique in that way. To the other, while the idea of a forty-four billion dollar object lesson in this execrable equivocation spurs particular chatter about the existential fact of billionaires, it behooves us to also observe what requires that equivocation.

Consider the overlap, for instance, between the CRT and Cancel Culture panics, and even the striking silence of the cancel culture complaint about censorship, intimidation, and silencing in schools. Some even come around to support school censorship and the silencing of educators, and no, that appearance of contrast is not new, nor the counterpoint that there is no contrast.

But there is also a question, whether here↑ or at Twitter or in living encounter, about what seeks shelter in which safe harbor of equivocation. And then there is the reality of what cacophony means in any particular setting, or to any particular purpose. While it is often an interesting endeavor trying to parse ill-considered interchangeability of free speech and the First Amendment, the more important details are both more particular and less uneducated.

Here at Sciforums, for instance, discussions take place in a linear, chronological arrangement, and our threads can be easily overwhelmed by the unbridled free speech of cacophony. Threadsquatting, for instance, is not utterly unheard of, and there is no real disincentive against wilful disruption. Moreover, as some crackpottery is less unfavored than other, it can be recycled in order to disrupt. And if we're all standing around in a large public square and talking to each other, sure, the cacophony is nearly obligate. But within functional pathways, it easily disrupts flow. Trying to follow a vigorous thread presents various challenges according to the subject matter and subjectivity; those who wish to disrupt with racist platitudes, or adventures at the grocery store, or complaining about stylistics, word counts, and even the fact of supporting evidence, can easily make a daunting prospect for parsing out the actual discussion. When discussions falter under such burden, it seems counterintuitive to celebrate a victory for free speech.

At Twitter, the question of free speech is its own sort of circumstantial contrast. Compared to everyone saying what they want, the fact that the company will select what you see changes the context of what constitutes free speech. In their way, the algorithms of social media, which are designed to trigger user engagement, amplify misinformation, bad faith, and wilful reprehensibility. Beyond a chronological listing of everything the people you follow posted, free speech at Twitter becomes a complicated question. But that's the thing: The people you followed? What about the subjects you followed? That's a lot of tweets, and we might wonder if they should simply dump it all on a user, or how will they decide which posts to exclude. At that point, we are beyond any naked assertion of general free speech. In any case, Twitter doesn't even organize the tweets in chronological order without being told explicitly. It actually gets kind of stupid, but the more important point is that if Twitter simply piled all the posts from people and subjects followed, in chronological order, users would get sick of all the free speech.

In the larger living encounter, well, there is a lot to it. For the moment, we might consider the notion of anti-establishment journalists who know how newsrooms work, but still make up fake claims of ever-escalating infamy that require an alternate reality. There is plenty wrong with news media, these days, so the coincidence of narratives requiring alternative realites to explain some unprecedented infamy about what is otherwise a mundane infamy of the newsroom with other politics requiring alternative facts often seems harder to miss than notice.

What is Twitter's purpose? Because we see now that easy projections were true: Musk's purchase of the site never really was about free speech, and anyone who ever thought it was might want to take a minute to consider why. The Twitter buyout is, and always was, about the free speech of deception, defamation, conspiracism, and supremacism.

Depending on Twitter's purpose, it can certainly be a den of excrement and infamy, but this question of purpose is extraordinarily colored by the prospect of finding its value by destroying its purpose. It's one thing if, in history, Twitter has shown particular living value; Elon Musk is disempowering that potential as this debacle goes on, and, sure, it is easy enough to project why, but none of that does anything to establish Twitter's purpose, which is clearly not the same as it ever was.

 

I wouldn’t consider Fred Phelps and his follower’s opinions reasonably accurate and expressed in good faith, but nevertheless, the Supreme Court ruled in his favor. Why? Because speech on public issues is entitled to special protection under the First Amendment because it serves the "the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open."

Until Musk, government officials rarely faced the blame for jawboned platform moderation.

 

I think that Elon is performing a search for somebody that he thinks is the right fit for the job. That means somebody with relevant management experience, somebody with ideas about Twitter's future direction that Elon likes, somebody that Elon trusts, and (very importantly) somebody that shares his free-speech vision.

When that person is found and agrees to take the job, Elon will step down.

That being said, Elon will continue as Twitter's owner, will occupy a position equivalent to the BOD in a publicly traded company, and the CEO will serve at his pleasure.

I think that Elon's motivation for doing this is that he is spread very thin between Twitter, Tesla and SpaceX. So he doesn't want to be be tied down with the day-to-day internal details of operating Twitter as he is right now. But he will remain the primary big-picture, strategic-direction guy.

 

Yes, I get his motivation. I was speaking to the wording of the headline.

 

Again, that is a different aspect of chaos and cacophony with its own known literary corpus; see Jackson's dissent in Terminiello.

There is a difference between whether or not I am allowed to force a bigot to stop speaking, and whether or not I am obliged to explicitly accommodate, facilitate, or propagate that bigotry.

Meanwhile, the Muskovite Twitter question does not so explicitly fall under the purview of the First Amendment. This isn't specifically a question of whether Twitter has the right, but how it defines free speech according to what purpose.

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There is also this.

The point I had made about an interesting subtext↑ is that Musk's behavior betrays and injures certain rhetoric about free speech: Suppress the new, protect the old, call it freedom.

Your response↑ was to remind: "The justification is that people will only be able to distinguish between truth and lies if they can hear a variety of different opinions. A clash of opinions in the marketplace of ideas is a good thing." And though I suggested it is something of a change of subject, it's possible I'm wrong: I do wonder if you could explain how Musk's suppression of what he finds inconvenient fulfills your point about people needing to "hear a variety of different opinions". If a "clash of opinions" is a good thing, how does Musk silencing his critics support your pretense of justification?

†​

Fourth-wall note: This is what happens when you hop on these trolleys. And if a related question is whether to throw the switch or not, we might observe a choice between two circular tracks with no explanation of why otherwise competent people would rush to throw themselves under regardless of your decision.

Ask yourself whether any given rhetoric matches its application. For instance, in this case, "the justification" was a platitude not in effect.