Twitter Begins Its Fight (vs) Elon Musk Takeover!
Written by Andi Bazaar
I’ve now been asked multiple times for my take on Elon’s offer for Twitter, so fine. This is what I think about that, I will assume the takeover succeeds and he takes Twitter private.
(I have little knowledge or insight into how actual takeover battles work or play out). I think if Elon Musk takes over Twitter, he is in for a world of pain and he has no idea.
There is this old culture of the internet, roughly Web 1.0 (late 90s) and early Web 2.0, pre-Facebook (pre-2005) that had a very strong free speech culture.
This "free speech," idea arose out of a culture of late-90s America where the main people who were interested in censorship were religious conservatives. In practical terms, this meant that they would try to ban porn (or other imagined moral degeneracy) on the internet.
Many of the older tech leaders today (Elon Musk, P. Marca, etc, GenXers basically) grew up with that internet. To them the internet represented freedom, a new frontier, a flowering of the human spirit and a great optimism that technology could birth a new golden age of mankind. I believe that too but I also ran Reddit.
Reddit was born in the last years of the "old internet," when free speech meant "freedom from religious conservatives trying to take down porn and sometimes first-person shooters," and so we tried to preserve that ideal. That is not what free speech is about today. It’s not that the principle is no longer valid (it is), it’s that the practical issues around upholding that principle are different because the world has changed.
The internet is not a "frontier," where people can go "to be free," it's where the entire world is now and every culture war is being fought on it. It's the main battlefield for our culture wars, it means that upholding free speech means you're not standing up against some religious conservatives lobbying to remove "Judy Blume," books from the library — it means you're standing up against everyone because every side is trying to take away the speech rights of the other side.
(It's also where Russia is fighting a real war against us, using free speech literally but that's another story too).
Free speech may be noble, but here's what's it's like these days:
All my left-wing woke friends are convinced that the social media platforms uphold the white supremacist misogynistic patriarchy and they have plenty of screenshots and evidence of times when the platform has made enforcement decisions unfairly against innocuous things they've said, and let far more egregious sexist or racist violations by the other side pass.
Woke friends: "it’s true, right?" you have lots of examples. All my alt/center-right/libertarian friends are convinced the social media platforms uphold the woke Black Lives Matter (BLM) / Marxist / LGBTQIA+ agenda and they also have plenty of screenshots and evidence of times when the platforms have made enforcement decisions unfair against them for innocuous things they’ve said merely questioning (in good faith) the woke orthodoxy and let far more egregious violations by the other side stand.
Right-wingers and libertarians: "it's true, right?" you can remember plenty of examples, neither side is lying. Mostly, it's really because enforcement is hard and there are lots of errors. There's a separate emerging problem (more Facebook than Twitter) where AI models make inhumane or dystopian judgments that can't be appealed but that's a separate issue. Both sides think the platform is institutionally biased against them.
"All the top executives and board members are men."
"Silicon Valley employees are overwhelming woke and left-wing."
I want you to pause for a minute and think about your political alignment and whether you’re on the left or right of this issue because you probably think one of those things and the old Gen X tech titans are right there with you vaguely left-wing but also center-right seeing their version of "censorship," and drawing all the wrong conclusions from it about what’s happening with the management of social platforms.
Elon Musk is one of those because he doesn’t understand what has happened to internet culture since 2004 or as I call it "just culture."
I know he doesn't because he was pretty late to Bitcoin and if he'd been plugged in to internet culture he would've been on Bitcoin way earlier.
Elon's been too busy doing actual real things like making electric cars and reusable rockets and fucking actresses or singers, so he has a pretty fucking good excuse for not paying attention but this is also something that's hard to understand unless you've run "a social network."
I'm now going to reveal the institutional bias of every large social network (i.e. FB, Twitter, Reddit): "are you ready?" here it is:
They would like you (the users) to stop squabbling over stupid shit and causing drama so that they can spend their time writing more features and not have to adjudicate your stupid little fights. That's all!
They don’t care about politics, they really don’t. Donald Trump was not de-platformed for being right-wing. Yes, the execs are (whatever demographic) and the employees are (whatever politics) but they don’t care about it "they don’t."
Facebook’s userbase has at various times been left-leaning, then right-leaning and then bifurcated. So has Reddit’s, Twitter’s also. The social platforms don’t care, they kind of care about money but mostly they wish you would shut up and be civil but that is impossible:
"they (we) made a platform where anyone can say anything, largely without consequence, so people are going to be their worst selves and social networking is now the Internet and everyone is on it saying whatever the hell they want."
The platforms have to be polite, they have to pretend to enforce fairness. They have to adopt "principles." — Let me tell you:
"there are no real principles, they are just trying to be fair because if they weren't. everyone would yell louder and the problem would be worse."
What happens is that because of the fundamental structural nature of social networks, it is always possible for a corner case to emerge where people get into an explosive fight and the company running the social network has to step in.
Again: "Omega Events," because human variability and behavior is infinite and when that happens, the social network has to make up a new rule or "derive," it from some prior stated principle and over time it's really just a tortured game of Twister.
"You really want to avoid censorship on social networks?" Here is the solution:
"stop arguing, play nice. the catch" — (everyone has to do it at once.)
I guarantee you, if you do that there will be no censorship of any topic on any social network because it is not topics that are censored. It is "behavior."
(this is why people on the left and people on the right both think they are being targeted)
The problem with social networks is the social (people) part, not the network (company).
"the best antidote to bad ideas is not to censor them, but to allow debate and better ideas." — How naive.
"Debate," is a vague term and what a social network observes that causes them to "censor," something is masses of people engaging in "debate," — that is to say: abusive volumes of activity violating spam and harrassment rules, sometimes prompting off-site real-world harm. This is what you think of when you hear "debate."
This is not what is happening on social networks today.
Example: the "lab leak," theory (a controversial theory that is now probably true; I personally believe so) was "censored," at a certain time in the history of the pandemic because the "debate," included massive amounts of horrible behavior, spam-level posting and abuse that spilled over into the real world — e.g. harrassment of public officials and doctors, racially-motivated crimes etc.
Here is what I think about Twitter:
I think the last few years of Jack Dorsey administration have been the best years of Twitter's history, I think Jack really matured as an exec his prior experience with Twitter then his success with Square (i.e. doing it wrong, then doing it right) really raised him to a world-class CEO level and Twitter finally got to be "pretty good," and "pretty good," is about as good as any social network can possibly be in my opinion.
(Jack Dorsey, if you are reading this, my hat's off to you.)
Saying this as one of the few people who have ever run a social platform: "you showed the world how it should've been done."
There is a reason why Jack's has a crazy meditation routine and eats one meal a deal and goes on spiritual retreats because it takes an inhuman level of mentality to be able to run something like this because the problems are not about politics or topics of discussion. They are about all the ways that humans misbehave when there are no immediately visible consequences, when talking to (essentially) strangers and the endless ingenuity they display trying to get around rules.
These last few years Jack Dorsey did a really good job and whoever the midwits were who didn't think so have kicked him out and now Elon Musk thinks he's going to come in and fix some problems.
Elon Musk is “not going to fix some problems,” — I am absolutely sure of this. He has no idea what the fuck he’s in for.
(He might hire back Jack, which might be ok but I don’t know if Jack wants the job. Who knows? All the tech titans are buddies: “kind of”)
Elon Musk is going to try like heck to "fix," the problems he sees, each problem he "fixes," will just cause 3 more problems and the worst part, the part that is going to hurt all of humanity is that this will distract from his mission at SpaceX and Tesla because it’s not just going to suck up his time and attention it will damage his psyche.
I mean, it's not like he isn't already an emotionally damaged guy. (Sorry Elon, it's pretty obvious) but he has overcome a lot and he does not need more trauma from running Twitter.
to be continued…
Written by Andi Bazaar
Co-wrote by Henrie Louis Friedrich
