Censorship and deplatforming are ways of making the competition shut up. If someone has a different opinion than you do, they should have free speech to say it. Within reason of course, nobody wants Nazis or Pedophiles to spread their opinions because they are obscene.
This is why Musk is trying to buy out Twitter, and he is trolling them with his wealth.
Don't forget removal from the APP Store or blocked by proxies.
Information still wants to be free, not stifled by tyrants just for being different opinions than the shareholders have.
Remember there is a reason why people want to root their phone, they want the freedom to install any app they wish to install. The more it gets locked down, the more people are going to find ways to unlock it.
Instead of deplatforming and censorship, ratings should be used instead for people to decide what they are going to read.
> nobody wants Nazis or Pedophiles to spread their opinions because they are obscene.
I want both sets of people to expose their views to the public. Disgusting though these views may be, it is safer for society if individuals are able to check and decide that someone else's views are reprehensible. If the people are merely told such by authorities, with the "offending" content immediately removed, then the authorities have enormous power to expand the definition of "offending" when it pleases them to do so.
This doesn’t produce a good outcome because violent, indefensible bad actors shout down others and each one drives away 100 reasonable people. Yours is naive idea, though I recognize you are advocating for the good of all.
There’s an argument around growing / shrinking a market here. Have you ever experienced morbid fascination? Some people get addicted to the experience of horror (I don’t mean the genre). This arguably creates a new demand for something that even those demanding it would not otherwise have had any interest in.
I think you’re right about the dangers of giving authority over what does and doesn’t get censored, but there are also very real dangers on the other side of this. You don’t make consuming heroin normative, because you don’t want to make it easy to fall into an addiction by accident for those who are more prone to do so. The more harm the addiction causes to society as a whole, the more prerogative you have to protect people from accidentally becoming addicted.
People aren’t ironclad in their current views of right and wrong for all topics, its possible to convince people of really anything with enough exposure
>its possible to convince people of really anything with enough exposure
Not really. You can spend days, weeks, and months; millions of dollars; thousands of paid shill accounts; all geared towards selling a single lie. And that lie can be exposed to millions of people in 10 seconds for free. But only if there is free speech.
Agreed, the neo-nazis were fringe and people laughed at their marches. Now that they are taken entirely too seriously, the attention and victimization has empowered them to recruit and grow. The deplatforming has had the opposite of the intended effect, instead putting them in a spotlight.
Except that's not quite the sequence that occurred to my recollection. With the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, what was previously "unsayable" was being said by the highest voices, directly legitimising fringe voices and empowering many that previously self-regulated to an extend for fear of judgement. That fear proved unfounded as it turned out and media (both MSM and social) amplified all sorts of previously fringe content. It's only once the push-back began that companies, fearing for their bottom line in some form or other (customers moving, regulation, legal fights) began turfing people off their platforms. At least, that's how it seems to me.
Elon Musk is buying Twitter to increase his wealth, mindshare, and influence. He does not actually care about free speech, and its naïve to think that he is buying the platform for "altruistic" reasons.
He is also the lead of a company that has seemingly fired an employee for posting about their publicly available features, and is also facing one of the biggest labor lawsuits ever in the state of California.
He is a billionaire who has built huge amounts of wealth by exploiting people, and he wants to control the flow of information and build his wealth even more.
He built huge amounts of wealth by building rocket ships and electric cars because he's worried about the earth becoming uninhabitable and thinks we need to be an interplanetary civilization. This is a dude who's dedicated his entire life to (in his mind) save all of humanity from certain doom.
I think it's a bit disingenuous to say that it's all just exploitation.
Those goals are cool and all, but that doesnt change his poor worker treatment or his massive wealth hoarding, while still trying to change rules so he can have more.
Great goals, but in my opinion, a terrible ambassador for tech/engineering, and a completely ingenuine person. I do not believe he is buying Twitter to "restore free speech" at all, and I dont even think that itself is a particularly good goal without having laid out plans of what it means.
Him being in charge of companies that produce cool products does not make him a good person at all.
I haven’t worked for Musk, but I’ve heard he only hires fanatics who want to save the world. I expect that he expects things different from most employers.
>wealth hoarding
Most of his wealth isn’t in money or stocks, it’s in his companies. The money that is in stocks, well most of that’s in stock for companies that have actual assets and do actual things in the real world.
People always have power motives for doing things. But that doesn’t make them bad people. It makes them people who have objectives that require power, or perhaps power seekers who need to meet objectives (or claim they do). I trust the former far more than the latter.
I believe he built huge amounts of wealth because he's something like "genetically predisposed to"; he's not different from other billionaires, who I think have something like a mental defect that encourages them to rack up their score as high as possible.
It's just that he has more interesting hobbies (Space, EV, whatever) than the rest of them; but for any move he makes, first ask -- does this look like part of a play to just gain more money? And 9 times out of 10 the answer is yes.
I buy a broken down camaro. The windshield is gone. The sheetmetal is rusted. The frame is bent. The motor needs rebuilt. I patch/replace the sheetmetal, and paint it. I straighten the frame. I rebuild the motor, and put a supercharger on it to boot. It’s a pretty nice little hot rod, and it was busted before. But you tell me, did I buy it or build it?
You buy an already functioning camaro factory that restores camaros, you do basically nothing in terms of hiring or management, you shitpost on twitter all day and hire an army of twitter bots to promote the amazing work you're doing on building that camaro.
But you tell me, did you buy that camaro, or did you build it?
Eh, I'm equally suspicious of everyone who speculates about "what Musk is doing". I think your post is spot-on about what he's NOT doing, but as to what he IS doing… how can you possibly know, what his true intentions are? I, for one, strongly suspect he's not even buying Twitter at all: he's just playing with the share prices to dump his 9% with a nice profit (as he always does). But I also guess he has a solid plan whichever way it goes. What actually IS his plan, if he's going to make Twitter private? I have like 10 versions of what it might be, and I don't expect that even one is close. But then, again, I don't really expect he is going to buy it anyway, so…
He could make his own platform, but the users matter. With users, there is influence. In old times, you used to buy the news paper company to get influence.
> He is a billionaire who has built huge amounts of wealth by exploiting people, and he wants to control the flow of information and build his wealth even more.
I wonder if we find a billionaire from the top 20 wealthiest who hasn’t at some level
> I wonder if we find a billionaire from the top 20 wealthiest who hasn’t at some level
No absolutely not. Id even say that you wont find more than a handful of billionaires who havent built their wealth on exploitation.
Its such a massive amount of wealth to have, it is virtually always precluded by harming others. The only exceptions I can think of are company founders who got exceedingly lucky, and even then you could definitely stretch the definition of exploitation to include them too.
>Within reason of course, nobody wants Nazis or Pedophiles to spread their opinions because they are obscene.
Who decides what's reasonable? Who decides what constitutes a "Nazi" or a "Pedophile"? If someone tries to suggest that convicting a 14 year old girl as a sex offender for having nude photos of herself on her phone is preposterous that person can be effectively silenced by labeling them as a pedophile.
"But that's ridiculous. Nobody would do that." -Somebody who has never been on the internet.
Every idiotic position you can think of exists on the internet, and can be amplified to make it seem like it's a more popular opinion than it really is.
The only logical course of action is to allow all speech and let the reader discern for themselves.
> The only logical course of action is to allow all speech and let the reader discern for themselves.
The assumption being that most readers are discerning. Kind of reminds of the adage about markets working based on rational actors. In both situations, reality would like a word.
No, there's no such assumption. In fact, by virtue of ignoring the main point of his, your post is an example "of the adage about markets working based on rational actors", which doesn't go well with reality.
And the point is: "Who decides what's reasonable?" You? Well, yeah, I hope you do for yourself. But I don't want you to dare to even try to decide that for me. Nothing personal, of course: there's no single person on the planet I would trust to do that for me.
In other words, it's not about assuming anything about the most readers (it is rather about NOT assuming anything about them). And, in fact, I don't even expect any good outcome "for the most of readers". I am pretty positive most people will find a way to fuck themselves no matter what you do. The only assertion here is that it will be worse for everyone if you TRY to do something about it. I mean, it should be pretty obvious thing to say, as much as people like to tell stories about "how terrible it was when Stalin was in charge" — it is best for everyone if there's no individual or group of people who can enforce their ideas of what is right on the others.
(BTW, I don't believe that this is really avoidable too. It happes one way or the other. The only thing that makes me say anything about this, is that this is just scary that half of the society today doesn't even understand that they SHOULD TRY to prevent anyone from being able to control what they say or think. They WANT to be controlled. They WANT to fuck themselves and everyone around them.)
Perhaps I wasn’t being clear. Following the principle that your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins, the thing about free speech and an undiscerning audience is that there are often consequences that cross that line even when the speech itself doesn’t. Anyway, I’m pretty confident that I’m not going to cut the Gordian knot here.
For myself I’m happy for you to have all the freedom of speech you like. What I’d like enshrined is the right to freedom from speech. In my country we are in the midst of an election campaign and it is impossible for me (both legally and technically) to stop political parties from spamming my phone. I would rather they didn’t spam my phone. I don’t have an opinion about your phone.
This is why Musk is trying to buy out Twitter, and he is trolling them with his wealth.
Don't forget removal from the APP Store or blocked by proxies.
Information still wants to be free, not stifled by tyrants just for being different opinions than the shareholders have.
Remember there is a reason why people want to root their phone, they want the freedom to install any app they wish to install. The more it gets locked down, the more people are going to find ways to unlock it.
Instead of deplatforming and censorship, ratings should be used instead for people to decide what they are going to read.