Friday, October 28, 2022

Twitter Now Has a New Master

Well, back in April a fellah by the name of Elon Musk was trying to buy his way onto the board of the publicly-owned Twitter company, but got stymied by the rules and then decided to waste $44 billion to buy the social media app outright.

Well, after months of Musk trying to weasel his way out of the deal - when it proved to hurt his overall net worth - only to have the Twitter board sue in Chancery court - yes, that is a thing - to force Musk to buy them out - hey, $44 billion ain't nothing to sneeze at - this week an arrangement was finalized and Musk now owns Twitter.

Well, what the FUCK happens now?

If we go with what Shirin Ghaffary says at Vox Recode

Until relatively recently, Musk’s primary business interests were in building electric cars, rockets, and underground tunnels. Now, he will have to figure out a new, very different business challenge: how to effectively run a social media platform that’s used by nearly 400 million people — including highly influential world leaders, journalists, and other public figures — and deal with the political speech moderation issues that come with that. Musk also needs to figure out a better business model for the company. Twitter has never made nearly as much money as its social media competitors like Facebook and YouTube, and along with other major tech companies, it has also seen a major decline in its stock value in the past year. According to a recent report in Reuters, the service’s most active and lucrative users have been leaving in droves since the pandemic...

That last part is kind of shocking to me. Social media like Twitter was the only way we could keep in touch during the COVID pandemic! Anyway:

Musk’s most consistent messaging about why he wants to buy Twitter is that he wants it to be an open digital town square of ideas, without intervention. He has said that he will allow anyone to say anything they want on the platform, as long as it’s legal...

The recent proliferation of “free speech”-themed platforms like Parler, Truth Social, and Gettr have shown that if you let anyone say whatever they want on a social media app, there’s a good chance that app could become a hate-filled, toxic place — which is why even these relatively more lax platforms have some basic content moderation policies.

There’s a lot of perfectly legal stuff you can say that is unpleasant to look at: racial slurs, graphic violent content, bullying, spam (more on that later). That type of content is generally bad for business because most users — and advertisers — don’t want to be around it...

It should be noted that after one day of crowing "free speech," Musk changed his tune and is "setting up a committee on content moderation" to set rules, hinting at the reality that the advertisers keeping Twitter afloat REALLY want moderation to work. But I can't see how Musk can establish a safe and working public forum if he goes through on his earlier calls to un-ban donald trump: 

...Musk’s comments about bringing back Trump, paired with his free speech mantra, has made him popular with conservatives who have long felt censored by Twitter and other social media companies, despite the fact that there hasn’t been tangible evidence of systematic anti-conservative bias and conservative influencers continue to have massive followings on platforms like Twitter.

While many conservatives would cheer Trump’s return to Twitter, it would simultaneously prompt major resistance from people, many of them liberal, who argue that his tweets pose a threat to a peaceful democracy. We’ll see how Elon is prepared to handle that blowback if he does reinstate the former president...

It won't be pretty. I know a handful of fellow Tweeters who will flee in protest if the Rioter-in-Chief is brought back without anything reining in trump's worst impulses, and I may jump off the platform myself if it happens.

The problem with trump isn't a matter of Free Speech, it's Hate Speech: trump is a prime example of how Hate Speech undermines the public discourse, and increases the risk of violence towards those regardless if they're on social media or not. I think I've argued before about the damage of Hate Speech, and that it shouldn't be given First Amendment protections. The foundation of any Hate Speech is lies - distortions and insults and defaming characterizations of people to dehumanize them - and every result of Hate Speech are acts of violence like mass shootings at churches, temples, schools, shopping malls, pretty much everywhere.

Elon Musk - who has never shown much understanding outside of marketing himself as a business genius and Futurist technophile - doesn't seem to understand the seriousness of the First Amendment debates. The constant struggle between allowing individuals the right to speak their minds but countering the civil right needs to protect other individuals who can get harmed by hateful rhetoric.

If Musk is buying into Twitter as a foothold into an effort to buy into social media to expand the app into a larger, life-dominating platform, he's going to have to come to terms with what's harmful and what's safe.

I honestly don't think he understands the pitfalls he's about to face.

I honestly think Twitter is going to get fucked up in a bad way.

1 comment:

dinthebeast said...

Elon Musk is a dick.
Twitter will suffer for a while as he figures out, issue by issue, why things have been the way they are on Twitter, and why they have to be that way for it to function, much less make money.
His learning curve will be slowed by his narcissism but the bottom line will prevail: it's all his money he's playing with now, and he won't stand for it to be fucked off in amounts that might endanger his other businesses, which I don't think are privately held and as such have boards and shareholders to answer to.
Perhaps he might do something good amongst the chaos, like allowing folks without accounts to freely read it again. That would put more eyeballs on advertising, so maybe?

-Doug in Sugar Pine