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Twitter bought by Elon Musk

Sue Pertwee-Tyr said:
I hear that people think this will let Musk off the hook, too, as it broadly validates his excuse for backing out.
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It broadens Musk's lines of defense for the upcoming trial in October. Before, it was just about the bot count. Now, it's also about intellectual property rights, lack of disaster recovery capabilities, and so on.
 
May not be that clear-cut, suggestions a major funder of Musk is pulling out (Daily Beast). I don’t trust anything about Musk so there is a chance this is just more market manipulation or something.
 
I am not on Twitter, but definitely not signing up now. I suspect he will ruin it in short order.

prepare for Trump to be unbanned too.
 
It's a toy for him. He'll get bored in a few months and buy something else. But there's a real danger he'll break it in the meantime.
 
Somafunk said:
Musk has never been an innovator, he’s piggybacked his name onto innovations created by others
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True.

I'll stand by my messer bit though. He's getting worse. Media, etc. will turn on him soon enough and Tesla sales will not make targets with all the economic issues and EV competition landing.
 
“Aaaaand it begins: Immediately after taking over Twitter today, Elon Musk fired several top executives, including the chief financial officer, the head of legal policy, trust, and safety, and the general counsel.”

Caroline Orr Bueno (Twitter).

PS FWIW I couldn’t care less if he lets the fat orange narcissistic gangster back in, he’ll maybe dig his legal inevitability even deeper, plus he’ll get the piss ripped out of him at every stage. My concern is Musk’s own racism and transphobia. Twitter has way too much in the way of far-right bullying as is and I suspect some communities will end up leaving just due to the shitstorm of white religious fascism etc. That said Twitter is bound by the laws of the countries it operates in. Hate speech, cyber-stalking and libel are hate speech, cyber-stalking and libel no matter what idiot owns the place. Hopefully he’ll get held to legal account pretty fast. It certainly caught up with Alex Jones.
 
One line of thought is that no matter the bravado and his own ugly politics Musk’s hands are actually largely tied as it seems he has overpaid for Twitter, and borrowed heavily against his other businesses to do so. The very last thing he can afford is advertisers pulling out if he tries to turn it into some vile MAGA 8Chan/InfoWars/KiwiFarms type far-right shit. He’s the one $44bn into this, the rest of us have real choices!
 
Tony L said:
PS FWIW I couldn’t care less if he lets the fat orange narcissistic gangster back in, he’ll maybe dig his legal inevitability even deeper, plus he’ll get the piss ripped out of him at every stage. My concern is Musk’s own racism and transphobia. Twitter has way too much in the way of far-right bullying as is and I suspect some communities will end up leaving just due to the shitstorm of white religious fascism etc. That said Twitter is bound by the laws of the countries it operates in. Hate speech, cyber-stalking and libel are hate speech, cyber-stalking and libel no matter what idiot owns the place. Hopefully he’ll get held to legal account pretty fast. It certainly caught up with Alex Jones.
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On the one hand, I'd quite like to see Trump on Twitter again, because he's only likely to dig himself a deeper hole if he does; on the other hand, he'll rile up his base even more than he does already.

But as to the wider issues, this is what the, much maligned, Online Safety Bill is supposed to tackle. If it does what it says on the tin, it's a Good Thing; if it does what the civil liberties people say it'll do, it's not quite such a Good Thing. My, slight, problem with the civil liberties approach is that they're all or nothing. They sometimes seem prepared to throw out the protections baby with the civil rights bathwater. I'm glad they flag up the risks in the drafting, but the public conversation they've started is mostly stirring up angst about the civil rights, so the bill is seen as more government oppression, when IMV it has some very good parts which ought to get to the statute books.
 
Somafunk said:
Musk has never been an innovator, he’s piggybacked his name onto innovations created by others
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Isn't this how large companies work? The head honcho hires top talent and guides the overall direction. I'm no Musk expert but the advances in the space tech in particular are pretty amazing.

As for Twitter - it's a bin of all persuasions > left / right / middle / lunatics / boring / interesting / funny / dull etc. How you go about balancing 'free speech' and reasonable moderation is a problem I'm glad isn't mine to solve. If it was I think I might just pull the plug on the whole internet :)
 
Not sure why everyone is framing the departure of the various executives as "firings". These are the people who forced Musk into the deal once it was obvious he had got himself into a massive overpayment problem so he was always going to get rid of them or they were going to quit.

All the fired people will have trousered millions out of the whole thing of course.
 
tedmanzie said:
As for Twitter - it's a bin of all persuasions > left / right / middle / lunatics / boring / interesting / funny / dull etc. How you go about balancing 'free speech' and reasonable moderation is a problem I'm glad isn't mine to solve. If it was I think I might just pull the plug on the whole internet :)
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The thing Twitter at least tried to do even if it was often far too late was to remove the really damaging stuff e.g. Trump’s attempt to overthrow a democratic election result with lies and violence, Alex Jones’ endless persecution of Sandy Hook victims, ‘Libs of TikTok’ doxxing trans folk and associated care workers so they could be attacked in their homes and workplaces by Christian fascists etc etc. The moderation was usually over-cautious and too late to my mind. Musk looks set to reverse a lot of these bans, and I hope he faces an avalanche of legal action and a mass exodus of advertisers if that is the case.

To my mind Twitter is and always has been under-moderated. I understand the sheer scale and impossibility of the task, especially as it is an endless whack-a-mole with banned people returning with new accounts to spread the same hate. The idea relaxing already weak moderation fills me with dread, but I do trust the wider internet community to push-back. Nothing is too big to fail and there are alternatives.

The thing I do agree with Musk about is driving extremes off likely makes them more able to fester in echo chambers, e.g. Trump deluded ‘Truth Social’, the various incel and fascist 4Chans, Reddits etc. I’d like nothing more than everything Trump says being met with scrutiny and incredulity. Just rip the lying corrupt prick to bits.
 
The thought of Trump back on Twitter … don’t think I could take it, hope we don’t see that anytime soon .
 
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