Amid Twitter buyout, Musk says free speech is simply "that which matches the law."
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Elon Musk, Twitter’s next owner, provides his definition of “free speech”
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If he's such a 'free speech absolutist' then he should absolutely not have a problem with people trolling his account or saying nasty things about him, right?
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A million times this. They used their years in the majority to marginalize everyone else. Now that they're seeing their oncoming, inevitable demographic slide into the minority, they are scared shitless that these formerly marginalized people will seek payback.
And when they don't see them seeking payback, it will scare them even worse. The only thing worse than using the Oppression Playbook against them is to burn the Oppression Playbook outright. It would be as disorienting as someone changing the rules mid-game.
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I wouldn't be shocked if Musk wanted to sell the company within a year of taking ownership. And probably at a huge loss.
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"...except that we never pinned the day to day functioning of the political class to nutrition and then gave Pauling control of the biggest pill factory."
However, it would have been great if they gave Timothy Leary control of the biggest pill factory.
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Which country would that be? The US? The EU? Saudi Arabia? Iceland? You do realize Twitter operates in every region and most countries, right? Whose courts and whose laws get precedence when he determines exactly which free speech laws apply to whom?
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Hack-n-Slash
Ars Legatus Legionis
Everyone knows it's the purple one!
I have two and a half degrees myself, and I will stand by red being the best tasting until I die.
Wait, I missed something. If we are talking M&Ms, everyone knows the green ones are the best.
Would you be surprised to find we're actually talking about Crayons?
I told you I missed something.
My vote goes to Burnt Umber.
Wild Strawberry.
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Well but see he’ll make you dox your own name and location, so that makes it ok.
Everyone knows who Musk and Trump are, and see how well the system works for them.
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Everyone knows it's the purple one!
I have two and a half degrees myself, and I will stand by red being the best tasting until I die.
Wait, I missed something. If we are talking M&Ms, everyone knows the green ones are the best.
Would you be surprised to find we're actually talking about Crayons?
I told you I missed something.
My vote goes to Burnt Umber.
Wild Strawberry.
Philistines, the lot of you.
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Everyone knows it's the purple one!
I have two and a half degrees myself, and I will stand by red being the best tasting until I die.
Wait, I missed something. If we are talking M&Ms, everyone knows the green ones are the best.
If any brown M&M's are found in the Twitter HQ then the contract could be in violation
I've covered this before, but the reason those riders are in there is because it's a quick and easy way for the band's manager to walk into a venue and tell if the event planner read the whole contract. It's why they always bury it somewhere in the middle of the contract. If they don't see a bowl of M&Ms or there are brown ones in there, they know the person likely didn't read the contract and so they should start checking other things, such as those affecting the band's safety, and deciding if they want to go ahead with the performance.
Edit: Looks like OldLadyJose beat me to explaining this.
Yep, I was just having some fun. It's too early in the morning to get worked up
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Chemical Tribe
Ars Legatus Legionis
Whatever SecondFloor.
SecondFloor - Definition: Any poster (including the "real" secondfloor" who can't help but hate on Jon Brodkin for posting articles that paint his party in a bad light.
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This is a very convenient stance for him to take... basically what he is saying is "In the US I will let anyone Tweet anything they want, because if that isn't what the people wanted the laws would be different!" I am sure it has nothing to do with the SEC... what he is also saying is "In China, where free-speech isn't a thing, I can restrict what people say on Twitter because if the people of China wanted it any other way they would vote to make it so!" I am sure it has nothing to do with Tesla plant's in China that need to continue to operate and can't do so if China decides what Musk allows and says is inconvenient for them. Hypocrisy at it's finest under the guise of the enlightened tech bro.
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Chemical Tribe
Ars Legatus Legionis
Speaking of bots, it's fucking funny that there are about 20 different accounts all saying the same stupid shit about Musk could have given everyone $5 billion dollars instead of buying twitter. It's the second version of it, so either the first was an actual math mistake by a human, or made even worse to troll for replies to waste everyone's time.
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Woke wasn't always a stupid word, it was just coopted by stupid people.
If you first heard it come from the mouths of right wing pundits do yourself a favor and read up on the history. It's good to understand how language is co-opted.
In the meantime, if I see anyone else calling people here "woketards" they can go sit in the corner.
If you first heard it come from the mouths of right wing pundits do yourself a favor and read up on the history. It's good to understand how language is co-opted.
In the meantime, if I see anyone else calling people here "woketards" they can go sit in the corner.
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Hack-n-Slash
Ars Legatus Legionis
“Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder.
Elves are marvelous. They cause marvels.
Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies.
Elves are glamorous. They project glamour.
Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment.
Elves are terrific. They beget terror.
The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning.
No one ever said elves are nice.
Elves are bad.”
― Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies
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Every accusation is a confession. They really seem to lack empathy and some of them really seem to have a defect in theory of mind. They can only imagine that everyone else has the exact same motivations and desires they do.
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Chemical Tribe
Ars Legatus Legionis
He fits better with Homelander. Aka "I can do whatever the fuck I want."
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Anything that's not illegal where? Anything that's not illegal, posted by whom? Anything that's not illegal, according to which legal opinion?
It's not simple, it's basically impossible to implement, and once again, it's a pandora's box of complexity that isn't obvious on the surface.
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He's just riding the free speech train on his way to making crazy amounts of money. He doesn't actually care about free speech, as he has proven many times in the past.
I'm not sure how people don't seem to grasp that concept? Are that many people really so brainwashed?
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Musk's vision of Twitter I think amounts to a socio-political battlefield, where anyone can be as horrible as they want to be providing they don't actually break the law. But as we have seen over and over again with forums that try to enact that idea, this allows people to be very, very horrible indeed.
But the idea of social media as a pleasant place to spend time isn't the same as a battlefield of horrors. I've deactivated my Twitter account, not as a political statement or because I think will "hurt" Musk in some way, but because I've seen what Musk proposes played out before, and it isn't something I want to participate in. Because purely on a personal level, it is the kind of place that sucks large.
As a business model, I'm glad to not be an investor in Twitter. I don't think it Musk's plan sounds like good business. One thing Musk misses is that moderation in social media is very largely about protecting advertisers, who are typically very protective of their brands. They won't advertise where Nazis run free. Given that close to 100% of Twitter's revenue is ads, Twitter needs to be advertiser friendly above all, and I think Musk is unleashing posts that will poison the well of advertising revenue.
But the idea of social media as a pleasant place to spend time isn't the same as a battlefield of horrors. I've deactivated my Twitter account, not as a political statement or because I think will "hurt" Musk in some way, but because I've seen what Musk proposes played out before, and it isn't something I want to participate in. Because purely on a personal level, it is the kind of place that sucks large.
As a business model, I'm glad to not be an investor in Twitter. I don't think it Musk's plan sounds like good business. One thing Musk misses is that moderation in social media is very largely about protecting advertisers, who are typically very protective of their brands. They won't advertise where Nazis run free. Given that close to 100% of Twitter's revenue is ads, Twitter needs to be advertiser friendly above all, and I think Musk is unleashing posts that will poison the well of advertising revenue.
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The bots that Hammer develops with Vanko don't try to take over the world.
And put up a good fight against Iron Man and War Machine.
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What Musk doesn't seem to realize is that the courts have indeed hashed it out and their decision is pretty clear: what the law says, at least in the U.S., is that Twitter can moderate speech based on any rationale it likes, or no rationale at all. If it wants to say you can't tweet about fish on Fridays, it can. If it wants to block anybody who posts between 4 and 5 p.m. on Wednesday, it can. Neither of these are illegal and neither offends your free speech rights.
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Whether Donald Trump does or does not rejoin Twitter matters only in that it drives advertising revenue. In this case, allowing speculation to run wild serves the cause of free publicity better than actually allowing it to happen.
My argument is that Elon Musk is primarily driven by the desire to succeed and make piles of money. Any ideology he has is secondary. My guess is he figured out that he can monetize your outrage by pretending he is going impose his supposed ideology on Twitter. I find the naïve scenario unlikely, as it would almost certainly cause Twitter to lose participants and value.
The question is whether success has gone to Musk's head, and he is acting because he has an unfounded belief in his business acumen. It's a plausible explanation, but my money is that he realizes his days as a icon of tech utopianism are mostly played out, and he can stay in the headlines more by playing the tyrant at this point.
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It's almost a rule of thumb that cultural conservatives pine for a time period 40-60 years before present - a time when they were either sheltered children or just before their birth. It's the time period when they were too young and too ignorant to know about things like Jim Crow and the House Un-American Activities Committee and redlining and Henry Kissinger and so on. Of course it's the time they think was simple and idyllic and full of promise, because they had no concept of the complexity of the world.
And they managed to isolate themselves from the complexity of the world for long enough that they now feel entitled to a lack of it.
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So here is a question for you right wingers. Does allowing all legal speech mean not moderating content for kids and teens?
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If he is serious about intending to allow anything that doesn't break the law, he'd better also be serious about not caring about the economics, because I agree, advertisers will run away in droves.
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Assuming Twitter is ultimately profitable the decision will ultimately pay for itself. If profit is the motive bringing Trump back is something Musk will do. So he will.
Beyond that I think it's an intelligent strategic investment (there's that god-awful buzzword that sounds like it's coming from some dumb MBA, I know, but hear me out).
There's probably at least even odds the Republicans will have the presidency in 2024 and a good shot at controlling all of government.
At that point being the wealthy tycoon who's giving them access to a big megaphone is going to be far more useful to Musk in all his business endeavors than being the guy the administration is constantly implying it's about to handicap in all those endeavors because his newspaper's op-ed page said a bad thing about the president.
SpaceX could benefit immensely from Musk's Twitter ownership in the event of a future Republican presidency. All U.S. government satellite contracts should probably go to Musk because he is a decent businessman who stands for American values like Free Speech For Trump.
That alone doesn't justify the price tag but it sure sweetens the deal for Musk depending on which way you think the wind is blowing.
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Chemical Tribe
Ars Legatus Legionis
Thanks for the strawman, because only you and the "lurker" beneath and the other 32 losers don't like facts about my comment.
Cry harder.
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Pretty good analogy - the bots were good because Hammer hired someone that knew what they were doing, not because Hammer himself did.
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TheWerewolf
Ars Scholae Palatinae
One thing that does seem to be missed is that regardless of his "definition" of free speech, the exact same argument (that the first amendment is a restriction on the government, not on the individual) means he can choose to remove ALL content regulation and still be within the rule of law... mostly.
Section 230 was introduced not to protect or restrain free speech, but to protect content delivery services from legal consequences of their customers creating illegal content without burdening the content delivery service to the point of having to vet every single post and filtering them - which was deemed to be excessively chilling to an open conversation.
In essence, from a purely legal stand, Musk is correct (if not actually right about the consequences of being correct): Twitter does censor content more than is *required* by law. However, Musk (and of course, Trump) seem unaware or openly hostile to the question of a company's social obligations and the damage a company like Twitter can cause.
Unfortunately, it looks like the US is heading into four years of Republican dominance in Congress, so it seems unlikely this will be challenged.
Section 230 was introduced not to protect or restrain free speech, but to protect content delivery services from legal consequences of their customers creating illegal content without burdening the content delivery service to the point of having to vet every single post and filtering them - which was deemed to be excessively chilling to an open conversation.
In essence, from a purely legal stand, Musk is correct (if not actually right about the consequences of being correct): Twitter does censor content more than is *required* by law. However, Musk (and of course, Trump) seem unaware or openly hostile to the question of a company's social obligations and the damage a company like Twitter can cause.
Unfortunately, it looks like the US is heading into four years of Republican dominance in Congress, so it seems unlikely this will be challenged.
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There is no need to attempt to explain to us what Musk really meant to say. We can all read here what he did say. Surely he's a smart enough man to say what he means.
The current Twitter content policies already "match the law" and do not go "beyond the law," so they meet Musk's proposed standard exactly.
Anyhow Musk has already proposed controls on speech that go beyond the minimum necessary for Twitter to meet any legal responsibilities, namely his plan to require increased authentication in order to post and to ban people expressing themselves via bots, so your revised version of his speech is already obsolete.
That's an occupational risk for anyone who tries to apologize for the actions of the Trumps and Musks of the world. Save your integrity for something that actually matters.
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Currently he does, we'll see whether that changes. I wont bet on it however.
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Is he purely correct from a legal standpoint though even in the US? From a section 230 perspective there are alot of things that can legally be said that would be required to be removed in "good faith" for civil liability protections to apply.
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Leaving aside the "different countries have hashed this it in different ways" part, which others have already covered...
The US courts have been hashing out what speech the government should be able to restrict for more than two hundred years.
If you want to know what the courts say about something like Twitter, your best reference is Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck from 2019, where five justices said (paraphrasing), "This is a private medium, and they can exercise editorial discretion," and the other four said (again, paraphrasing), "They are literally operating this channel on behalf of a municipal government, so the First Amendment applies, but if they weren't (e.g. Twitter, which isn't acting on behalf of a government), the other five justices would be absolutely right."
That's the current state of the law in the US. There's a distinction between what you're legally allowed to say on a public street, and what people will allow you to say on their property without consequences (like being ejected from the premises).
And if Twitter wants to host any opinion that it isn't explicitly illegal to express, then that's their right. But I agree with the many others here who think that wouldn't make it a great place to visit.
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Yeah, that's basically the point Jon Stewart makes. He has Conservative talking heads mention when they think America was at its peak, then points out that they were literally children at the time and brings in someone who was an adult (or at least old enough to be aware) to talk about what living in that time was like.
And to a degree, I can see how that happens. What I truly don't understand is the inability to recognize that their childhood view of the time period is simply inaccurate. You can present them all of the historical information that you want and they'll just dig their heels in. Hell, they'll call your information "revisionism" just because it doesn't match their personal experience of the time. It's so frustrating. I don't get how someone can go through life like that without having the revelation that they're an ignoramus.
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