Thanks! I’ll check out the link tomorrow….after the Big Ten Championship game. 
Here’s a different narrative.
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The funny thing is the author keeps harping on the “handled” comment – so, what was “handled”? Nude photos of Hunter Biden. That is the exact Tweets which were being discussed regarding that “handled” content. Which were already against Twitter policy to post. The back channels he complains about also existed between the Trump campaign and Twitter. Taibbi even mentions that… he just alleges that more was done for “the left” than “the right” without actually showing that.
What I’d want to see, is exactly what tweets were requested to be deleted by the Biden campaign, and which tweets were requested to be deleted by the Trump campaign, and then what was actually deleted.
If we’re going to open up the books, go ahead and open them up all the way.
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Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson Don’t Understand the First Amendment
Sadly, they are not the only ones given the many messages I have received over the past 8 years saying, “You can’t tell me what I can and cannot post; have you never heard of the First Amendment?”
I’m always tempted to respond, “Yes, I have. And I wasn’t born or raised in the US. What’s your excuse for not understanding what it means?”
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Well said, ski.
I’ll go out on a limb and say that Musk grew up in apartheid South Africa and that may shape his perception and confusion about concepts like the First Amendment and “free speech”:
Sorry to be provocative, but Musk himself claims to be the champion of concepts he clearly has no clue about. I would be curious if he ever took a course at Penn involving the US Constitution or American political science.
Maybe he did, but he’s definitely not demonstrating it at the moment.
ETA: The little snippet of a picture in the NY Times article link sure makes Musk look like a very young Theodore “Beaver” Cleaver! In keeping with that theme, I think Elon sure could use a Ward, June, and big brother Wally Cleaver right now…
I’ve never been on Twitter…but have been cheap reading MT’s sub stack. Just signed up for an annual subscription (yes, I know the Twitter Files are free). Time to support some unbiased journalism.
Going to put Bari Weiss and Glen Greenwald subscriptions on my Christmas wish list.
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I will say I do have some sympathy for the idea of being fearful of information being controlled by a handful of oligarchs. It’s why I’m wary of the control of local news stations being dominated by the Sinclair group with mandated editorials. Or the dominance of talk radio by certain view points, and why I think it can be dangerous for google to dominate search engines or so on.
As a society we are not really good at sifting through data to determine credible information, and we seek confirmation bias. It’s a problem that should be solved.
So, from platonic ideal standpoint, I’d like to see if Twitter made value judgements based on politics (vs decency standards). And to see that, I’d need to see every tweet deleted as well as the process and internal review policies. Because if let’s say they were deleting tweets like “Anthony Fauci is a traitor and should be hanged”, and leaving up tweets like “Marjorie Taylor Greene is an idiot and she should be removed from office”… well I’ll say those were differentiated on a decency standard and not a political standard – and it’s my impression is that’s the sort of thing that went on… but if not, I’d like to see that.
From a political/law standard, it gets more complicated. Are we proposing more government regulation? In what way? Only on certain internet sites but not talk radio stations or cable news programs? Why or why not?
We’ve already established corporations are people with their own right to deeply held religious beliefs and freedom speech, so can the government regulate the speech of Twitter? Why or why not?
What standard is being applied and why?
We could bring back the Fairness Doctrine, but that was not popular with conservatives which is why they got rid of it, are they willing to bring it back now?
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Concur with the first sentence. But IMO, the problem is that we as a society don’t have much of any in the way of critical thinking skills. They just aren’t taught in high school, or much in college.
(One of the things of law school, is the they ‘teach you how to think like a lawyer’. That really just means that they teach you critical thinking skills, how to look at both sides of an issue. Students who ace 1L already possess those skills. Most of them do not – and these are college grads!)
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I think this gets at what social media is at its core. Social media groups are people getting together to talk and share information, but the makeup of the group is determined by moderation policies.
CC and the Parent Cafe have the users it does due to moderation policies. People that hate it leave, and people that like it stay. Likewise Facebook, Twitter, Truth Social, etc.
“Free speech absolutism” is itself a moderation policy and on social media it’s going to attract a certain group while driving away others. The effects of Musk’s moderation policies (many would say “the lack thereof”) are already altering his user base - he thought it would expand the user base but really it’s just changing the base by attracting some users while driving away others.
Advertisers follow their customers, and it’s not a leap to realize that if Twitter’s new user base is repelling customers that advertisers want, then those advertisers are going to walk away. Not because they “hate free speech” but because they love money.
Anyway, all of this is why it baffles me that Musk is surprised that advertisers are leaving. He’s smart enough to figure out that Apple doesn’t want an ad for an iPhone appearing next to a tweet with the N-word, therefore if you put neo-nazis back on Twitter you’re going to drive away Apple (and many other advertisers). He can go “thermonuclear” on his advertisers but it’s kind of a briar patch thing - “Oh no! Please don’t tell my customers we don’t support racism and nazis!”
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fwiw: Elon claims the advertisers, including Apple, have returned. (But then Elon claims a lot of things.)
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A NYT article suggests that’s not accurate: Twitter losing ad revenue during World Cup | Mashable
I cannot imagine why Pfizer and Moderna wouldn’t want to pay for tweets saying covid vaccines contain tracking chips. /s
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Musk’s brain implant company reportedly investigated over animal deaths https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/12/06/elon-musk-neuralink-animal-creulty/
Absolutely disgusting.
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Well, I didn’t want to bring it up because people wanted me to move on from Neuralink earlier in the thread… But yeah, that’s very bad. There are multiple major violation of animal research ethics.
I am an animal researcher and I can tell you that those behaviors are way out of the norm and are totally unacceptable. Animal researchers (with very few exceptions) have great respect for and feel a huge sense of responsibility to the animals that are sacrificed to give us medical advancements. They take it very seriously. I’ve watched seasoned researchers cry with grief when an experiment unexpectedly resulted in an animal death. The fact that multiple Neuralink employees were so concerned can give you a clue as to how egregious this was.
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So, basically this is what advertisers were worried about and why most are still keeping away.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/12/06/twitter-ads-elon-musk
Basically, advertisements are showing up on white nationalists tweets.
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This gives the old adage about “you made your bed; now lie in it” an Elon-esque twist:
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He’ll move them to Austin in the next year or so, anyway.
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He’s a piece of work…and not in a good way!
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