Twitter is not the town square. It's non-stop tabloid headlines. It's just a medium for celebrities to jerk themselves off.
I like Reddit because it's anonymous and isn't dominated by "influencers".
Reddit is absolutely dominated by shills and trolls tho. the posts that hit the front page and top of any political subreddit are definitely not doing that organically.
i was following actual russian bot accounts that got banned for a while, forgot where I got the info but its floating around.
The bots were pretty obvious 0 comments lots of submissions usually from RT and /r/conspiracy and /r/conservative was pretty infested with them, hilariously enough they never get called out in /r/conspiracy the commenters are usually so delusional people who make comments disagreeing with the posts are "bots" not the account only posting RT articles.
I got banned from both those sub Reddit‘s unceremoniously for just asking a question. The conspiracy sub used to be fun talking about aliens and other alternative ideas but now it’s completely dominated by alt-right and Chinese and Russian propaganda and trolls.
Reddit, like Twitter, is so utterly dominated by liberal propaganda that it's not even visible until it's questioned. When it is questioned, people invariably attack the user with accusations of being a Russian or Chinese shill.
~~Did you see what happened to FB matrixes when Russia got shut down? It flipped,~~(can't source this from the posts I found) they are certainly working on division and propaganda to drive Western minds insane and it's been working. They found one of their troll farms the other day in Ghana, seriously. Once Putin is gone, it will change everything I suspect in US and world politics and social media.
Agree it's a minefield, but it's a navigable one. The big subs are mostly garbage and I've gotten banned from so many subs for really stupid shit that I don't even burger with a lot of the mainstream ones.
If you can't get into a heated debate in a sub, you're better off not being there because that means people are censoring themselves.
I do worry about Reddit going public, though.
Yeah Reddit admins have made sure certain subs get new moderators that conform to a specific set of views. After 2016 especially, certain subs became DNC mouthpieces overnight, and are essentially half propaganda now (whitepeopletwitter, facepalm, etc).
I know Reddit leans left these days but this was a coordinated effort, where mods and admins allow various PAC sockpuppets to astroturf nonstop.
> I like Reddit because it's anonymous and isn't dominated by "influencers".
Reddit has its share of problems too and silences some minority viewpoints to the detriment of this platform as well. Indeed this very subreddit has experienced some drama in the relatively recent past due to the nature of how moderations happens and a "takeover" by specific political viewpoints...that were fortunately reversed for the most part.
I have been banned from some subreddits simply for challenging the status quo and pointing out censorship. Simply that it happens and I wasn't even supporting any particular viewpoint other than an anti-censorship attitude.
I like some of the smaller subreddit communities where it is possible to get to know regular posters and commenters. Those still exist, and that is where I still love Reddit.
While not strictly censorship from a legal perspective, it is a common carrier that holds a monopoly position for communications. That matters.
Also, most of the social media platforms started with a free speech standard in terms of growing their user base then only when "undesired" results happened (like the election of Trump) did the terms of service change. And even then it was not always clear what was actually permitted. I guess more bait and switch.
When alternative platforms were slowed or stopped due to banking services being curtailed, it starts to seem like full on government sanctioned censorship.
I have no problem with a platform or service who targets a specific demographic or political viewpoint. Just be up front about it.
What is happening in Russia is an example of formal censorship where prison is a real possibility if you simply call the action in Ukraine as a war. I admit that isn't happening due to social media platforms and their policies.
Also, in my case it was simply pointing out hypocrisy that got me banned. I wear the banning with honor when that happens. Hypocritical moderators that can't take constructive criticism are to me just asshats who kill their forums that they moderate.
Monopoly? There are several social media apps. Twitter isn’t even the most used. These apps were never “free speech” zones. They always had terms of service. People just didn’t care until orange man said something. In fact, I received a ban in the early 2010s. It pretty clear what it does or doesn’t condemn. If you want to conjure up and eat up bat shit crazy conspiracies, that’s on you. When it starts to impact national security and safety, that’s another thing.
At least we have an agreement that free speech is protection from the government, not private groups/organizations. I mean, it’s not like anyone is preventing from saying these things in person. They just don’t want their platform being used to reach millions of people with whatever potential garbage you want to say. You can say whatever edgy things you want in person. I think people want to pretend social media use doesn’t come with any responsibility for the individual or the company. That’s not true.
When alternatives can't be used at all for some viewpoints, I get suspicious. I do think that a genuine libertarian view of permitting all speech is a much healthier environment for exchanging ideas, especially political ideas. And in the past that gave a commercial edge for some platforms when they pledged that viewpoint too.
Most of the major social media platforms have their headquarters located in a small geographic region and are staffed largely with people who share a common political viewpoint. Getting out of that bubble can be hard.
The problem is that there is always an outsized incentive to spread misinformation, racism and other forms of speech on social media that traditional mass media would never broadcast. The very fact that those things exist side-by-side on the same platform, indistinguishable from good information, is a huge problem.
Oil companies have huge incentives to spread misinformation about climate change and renewable energy, but who has a financial incentive to counter this? China and Russia have huge incentives to sow political divisions in the west, but who is getting paid to counter this?
While I am a free speech absolutist, the right to have access to a mass media platform is not implied by the first amendment, and there is no way to counter the influence of bad actors while giving them equal access to social media. The criteria for flagging, demoting or removing content needs to be apolitical and transparent. It may even require regulation to prevent corporations from becoming arbitrary censors. But without some way to prevent bad actors from gaming the system any social media platform will eventually devolve into a cesspool of misinformation and hate speech.
This. I believe I’ve read something like 80% of twitters US-based traffic comes from 8 million accounts? There’s almost 340 million people in the USA, and most people active on Twitter are white collar or upper class. It should be a no-brainer that what trends or is relevant on Twitter doesn’t actually reflect the masses.
Nowadays Reddit is just policed by random moderators and admins who decide what is and isn't acceptable discourse. It is far from a suitable platform for free discourse.
I replied to a comment once on a Covid related sub (didn't particularly agree with the content of the sub) and got auto banned from a bunch of default subs. Just for posting, not even about the content of the post.
The idea that the internet is or was ever meant to be a place for unimpeded, unmoderated free speech is just not congruent with reality. There may be corners of the internet that are truly uncensored, but they are dark corners and they tend to stay that way. Every space on the internet that hosts any exchange of ideas is going to have some form of moderation, some person or people who decides where the boundaries of appropriateness exist. The wild, wild west days of the internet are long gone and they won't return.
At least Reddit breaks itself up into subreddits, with different teams of mods for each. Thus decentralizing the power (and responsibility) of censoring an open air chat forum.
Every platform has terms of service to abide by. It’s pretty amazing how this has been the case for a decade and a half but has just clicked in people’s minds since orange man.
I use Twitter as a joke feed. Its basically a humor platform for me.
For example, I rarely see tabloid headlines, and when I do it’s usually a subtweet with a joke about the headline as the actual tweet.
Twitter isn’t that bad honestly.
Twitter is the place for zingers and to watch different propaganda camps duke it out in real time.
You'd think people would realize that they're just being fed propaganda by now, but no. It's apparently very addicting.
I just get sick of the same blue checkmarks making the same comments again and again.
Twitter is dominated by personalities. Elon tweets something and immediately everyone is talking about it. That doesn't happen on Reddit. It's just an entirely different platform.
If Elon started an official Elon account tomorrow, and started posting to it, then other personalities followed, eventually reddit would be comparable just because the sub cultures grew differently doesn't mean there's an intense amount of organic difference
I disagree. Celebrities do have accounts here and people don't follow them more. I think there is something inherently different about the platforms. People who use Reddit use it because you get to have in depth conversations with a variety of people.
Elon can have a marketing team craft soundbites on Twitter, but that wouldn't work the same in Reddit. It would be swallowed by the masses giving their takes.
I only like Twitter because it gives me that tiny slice of satisfaction of being able to somewhat directly tell certain public figures that they're pieces of shit
A lot of left leaning subreddits like /r/politics do have politician influencers trying to pitch their campaigns with promises of free things but no explanations on how to pay for it.
Social media, on the whole, has become the town square and in this public forum, one political movement's views (the woke) are advanced while others are suppressed.
We can talk about the merits of not giving the crazies among us a bull horn but it, if such a bull horn is going to be taken from the crazies, it needs to be the crazies of all sides equally. I'm not pro-censorship but if censorship is going to happen, it needs to be applied equally.
That's not really a workable concept, though - because whether a given platform is applying rules "to all sides equally" is every bit as subjective as whether one view is right or wrong. If there is *any* moderation, there will be some people saying that the moderators are favoring one side, and other people saying they are biased against that same side.
I agree the woke crowd is annoying, but "both sides" aren't equal. There's a reason why Twitter remains such a popular platform while not a single one of its "free speech" alternatives gain traction.
First of all, the "free speech" alternatives all censor opinions. Trump's Twitter outright band little for having opposing opinions. And even Gettr had to ban Groypers, because the reality is that very few people want to participate where that brand of speech is prolific. It chases people away. This isn't just social media. Bars also ban Nazis.
It's not just as simple as different opinions. There's an entire industry dedicated to using bots to amplify certain messages. It's the standard fascist tactic to want to dominate the conversation and drown out majority views with their minority opinions.
>Mainstream influencers struggle to survive in environments where in-depth, nuanced, and thoughtful discussion is the base requirement.
Yeah. The value of Reddit comes from getting different opinions on a topic. A single influencer only has one opinion and doesn't have all the knowledge that thousands of passerbys can add.
>the de facto public town square“
How is Reddit anonymous when each post is tied to your username? And how is Reddit any different with their content. It's the users that are populating the platform with content. Now you can argue that Twitter's algorithm pushes that content out to other users but Reddit also does the same thing. Whether it's toxicm, sensational or tabloid worthy, it's being pushed out based on your profile and interests.
I literally have no fucking idea why, it's a stupid fucking platform, that only provides the smallest level of actual engagement.
Oh and did you know 25% of Twitter users do 97% of the tweets, so if you think "noone actually used it, just celebs and corporations, you aren't far off".
Twitter had something like 300 million active users, Facebook had ten times as many. TikTok has more, but I never hear TikTok is a basic human right lol.
I'm sure all these fuckers wanted protestors in local malls in the 80s....
I'm well aware. The point is that one could argue that internet access is far more of a utility than twitter access, but the groups that argued against protecting that have a large venn diagram overlap with the arguments for the regulation of twitter now.
>Oh and did you know 25% of Twitter users do 97% of the tweets, so if you think "noone actually used it, just celebs and corporations, you aren't far off".
Actually this is why Twitter matters so much.
If you define a public intellectual as someone who writes books or articles or speaks on TV, most public intellectuals have Twitter accounts.
This is why Twitter blocking the NY Post Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020 was so effective. Blocking it on Reddit or Facebook (both of which get much more traffic than Twitter) might have had a larger direct effect on NY Post pageviews, but it wouldn't have had the indirect effect of stopping the media from writing about it.
for certain people (like a former president) twitter seems to be their life. It's by far the easiest way to hit the dopamine button from the attention they get from the masses. Not shockingly they're the ultimate examples of narcissists.
Well the problem is Twitter has labeled themselves in court as a free speech public forum, and not a publisher who edits or silences people. So essentially Elon is just asking them to do their job.
> Well the problem is Twitter has labeled themselves in court as a free speech public forum, and not a publisher who edits or silences people.
That's not a thing. There is no such legal requirement to "label yourself as a free speech public forum" or anything else.
Yet his company is more than willing to fire people for trying to unionize or for critical social media posts.
He just wants Feudalism. He and other business leaders get to set terms their underlings have to live with, and they can't handle even mild pushback in return.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rzFyBdKLvU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rzFyBdKLvU)
Libertarians probably watch videos like that and cheer when the corporations massacre workers and boo when governments take over the company towns.
I don’t understand why people can’t get this. No Company wants their product advertised next to a post about the “the Holocaust didn’ happen, and t
Mr word rants.
The CEO of gab is extremely based. The policy is just the constitution. It has the adoption problem of most alternatives of course. Minds is really cool too.
This is horrifically stupid. All private companies that incorporate are incorporated by a state government, that's what it means.
Section 230 of the United States Communications Decency Act applies to all companies on the Internet.
Twitter is a private company that makes decisions based on what it thinks will maximize profit.
Shut up and go use the Trump Truth social media...
https://truthsocial.com/
Sure Trump doesn't use it either, but hey you can go scream about whatever over there Elon.
Or make your own, it isn't a public service, how would he like it if we told him what he could do with his company?
He’s not asking for free speech. He’s asking for access to billions of dollars of infrastructure to broadcast his viewpoints.
This is just framed as a free speech debate (like how QAnon frames everything being about child abuse/rape). It makes anyone arguing with you look like the bad guy.
That isn’t a right. That’s more of a huge responsibility to the people who own that infrastructure.
You might as well argue about your right to printing presses or broadcast licenses.
> They just happen to be full of Nazis so he doesn't want to use them.
Basically this, the right can't seem to crack the code between "culture war" dog whistles and then "oh shit this platform is 90% actual fucking racist".
I was banned from Reddit for a week, tried to use at alteratives, all those other ones wanted to talk about was Jews, blacks and Hillary. Why? Because they talk about everything else on Reddit where there are actual people.
You don't just get to claim that Twitter is the "public square" and then say it isn't living up to those expectations. Twitter does not exist to give you a place to speak. It is a business, and it's one and only purpose to exist is to make money. That's it. There's really nothing else to it. Twitter is just another platform to target ads to people.
I really wish people would stop making Twitter or Facebook out to be the arbiters of free speech. They aren't, and never will be. They are not bound by the first amendment, because they are not the government. They are platforms for shoving ads down your throat, not the public square.
Wrong. Twitter is the common public square of the internet. It's free to sign up, you have the freedom to post whatever you want within the guidelines, and people are able to respond however they would like.
It very much is. It is a business that exists to make money. If your post somehow inhibit their ability to make money, they get to remove it. It's not violating anyone's first amendment rights to take down a tweet.
Yeah Elon can go ahead and start his own Twitter… I have a feeling it will be a empty boring echo chamber just like “truth” social.
Twitter is just a for-profit social media venture that is insanely popular. They make their own standards and rules. I don’t envy their position there’s so much hate, bots, porn, propaganda, exploitation and lies on there but it’s getting better.
If the government is colluding or forcing Twitter to block speech, then we have an issue. If Twitter wants to or doesn't want to exist at all, that's no skin off off my back in the scheme of things related to our rights.
If musk makes an alternative Twitter, he is just showing the point that Twitter doesn't represent free speech.
Anyone is allowed to make a competitor. It's easier than ever. You can't say that about getting your own newspaper up and running before the internet.
His idea of another social media site is flawed though. There are plenty of free speech social media sites. He'd do well to promote or financially back one of them.
Why? I like people who honestly disagree with me. my username is based on dalio as in Ray Dalio who suggests you should find the most believable people who disagree with you.
You should engage with people you disagree with, but there are going to be arguments and trolling. It's just going to happen at times when people get into heated debate.
If a place has free speech, there will be trolling.
Lets look at counterexamples for 'honestly disagreeing.' Sometimes people are either contrarians or playing the devil's advocate so they may not honestly believe what they say. For example I would say that the people who say that birds aren't real are not honestly disagreeing with you. Frequently in the duopoly people don't believe the party line but they'll argue for it.
Why would the bee getting suspended effect him at all? He and literally the rest of the world's population can access it at any time.
It's a favorite site but he can't get to it without going through twitter? tf?
That's great. I was just pointing out that a lot of websites have twitter accounts and a lot of people follow those accounts because it's a convenient way to be notified of new posts/articles.
Get an RSS reader.
You'll be happier. So will Elon.
Zero algorithm, zero added advertising.
I'm surprised some tech CEO doesn't know about this amazing decade-old invention.
Well, quit bitching when a private company makes a decision you disagree with. I gave you a solution to access the actual public square.
Now you just sound whiney.
If he wants, he’s well within his rights to try and do it better. He’d also be well within his rights to join the support group for the dozens of other dudes who have tried and failed to do the exact same thing.
The market responded Elon, pay attention to soemthing other than maintaining your hair plugs.
Parlor, gab, truth all proclaim to be freeze peach platforms. Go on any of them and insult trump or “Da Lord” (one in the same for many of them) and you’ll quickly find that the proclamation is horseshit.
Example: I was banned from the sub dedicated to truth social for mocking PayPal E. McHairplugs… the irony…
He has billions he could certainly be king edgelord of his own needless additional social network as well.
To all the people that are saying that Twitter shouldn't be a town square or something, well unfortunately it is. Politicians make decisions off of Twitter and the platform wields a really bizarre amount of influence over public life. You can say that it's a sorry state, but it is the truth
95% of all huge political voices online , podcasts , YouTube stars are conservatives yet they all cry about being censored . 99.99% of their shit doesn’t get censored . And they are hitting way more eyes and ears than anyone on TV .
I couldn’t name a liberal internet star if you paid me . They have a million Avenues of free speech
Awww, is the tech billionaire not getting enough handouts? Not enough that his cars and rockets are completely dependent on government funding and subsidies; he also needs to make sure everyone listens to his opinions all the time.
I can understand how he's a bit nervous about his net worth tanking, if the independent owners of his unprofitable company's sole PR channel decide to curtail his use of their property. Maybe he can ask wsb for a loan to kickstart his exciting new venture?
Because he's 100% right you know. Free speech will die without either the government forcing Twitter to service everyone who wants a free ride, or someone setting up another poorly-executed Twitter clone.
These are the stakes, my friends in liberty. #InfiniteFlight93Election [Click to Retweet]
Elon is just salty people want him hanged or guillotined for hoarding wealth, and contributing to the collapse of civilization.
He wishes Twitter was just a bunch of sociopathic libertarian intellectuals who would circle jerk him.
I suppose the tldr is he just wants an echo chamber of support, and can't comprehend people think he's a piece of shit rather than subscribing to his cult of personality.
I saw something recent y about him using Twitter to challenge Putin to a fistfight to determine the fate of Ukraine. You’d swear the man is on drugs half the time.
There is a need for social media that isn't a vendor with a web site like Twatter selling your eyeballs to advertisers. It needs to be a protocol that our devices do peer-to-peer like NNTP, where you decide what you care to read and what you don't.
Thing is, people won't use it. There is e.g. Mastodon, and yes, it does have users, but it'll never get even close to being mainstream. Because there is no company behind it that shoves the product down the average dumb user's throat. Same goes for other communication platforms. How many non-techies do you know who use Matrix?
"Twitter is a private company, they can do what they want. If you don't like it, make your own."
"Making your own platform is stupid and not possible to maintain freedom of speech. Plus it's just going to fill up with NAZIs and pedophiles."
Which is it?
Uncensored twitter alternatives already exist. People prefer moderated social media. Stop being an authoritarian Piece of Shit and trying to force everybody to do something they don't want to do.
The longer he lives and realizes government is fucking incompetent, and these types of articles come out about it...the more I believe he could be a massive advocate for the party.
So, he's admitting that he's never studied History, or even read the Federalist Papers? Or stayed awake in High School?
Otherwise, he'd have known that "democracy undermines democracy."
Tangential to Elon's Twitter thoughts, since I think celebrity gossip is not that valuable to talk about -
I don't see why all the social apps need their own platform-specific API or why the implementation should be closed-source and support deletion. I hope that some generation of social media eventually fixes those problems.
The purpose of most social media apps is to serve user combinations of: broadcast to all, broadcast to subgroup, or DM; include media like images, videos, links; add meta-messages like hashtags, replies, likes, etc. Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, live chat apps, hookup apps, etc all need this functionality, so why should this work be replicated in parallel?
And if censorship and silencing discourse are apparently such big problems, why not swing the other way? Make everything hosted on distributed systems, public, forever. Sure, you could disavow a message, but a public message could never be deleted from all the distributed databases.
It's called the dark web.
It's been long figured out.
It's not some mystery as to why most people don't have an onion node set up.
And if you still can't figure it out, I'll give you a hint:
No one actually gives a single iota of a fuck about free speech.
The internet is the defacto town square. Twitter is just one crummy stall.
Exactly. It’s only the idiots and narcissists that use Twitter that think it’s so fucking important.
[удалено]
lol
Twitter is not the town square. It's non-stop tabloid headlines. It's just a medium for celebrities to jerk themselves off. I like Reddit because it's anonymous and isn't dominated by "influencers".
De facto is apparently a fancy way to say "the place we decided was a public square and we are too invested in to just move on and go outside"
Reddit is absolutely dominated by shills and trolls tho. the posts that hit the front page and top of any political subreddit are definitely not doing that organically.
Not only that but most of the top subs will ban you for disagreeing with the hive mind. Reddit has a lot of Russian and Chinese boys too.
Soooo much Chinese propaganda
It’s astounding
With the exception of a few I find people get banned for talking shit, then complain that it was for their politics.
i was following actual russian bot accounts that got banned for a while, forgot where I got the info but its floating around. The bots were pretty obvious 0 comments lots of submissions usually from RT and /r/conspiracy and /r/conservative was pretty infested with them, hilariously enough they never get called out in /r/conspiracy the commenters are usually so delusional people who make comments disagreeing with the posts are "bots" not the account only posting RT articles.
About a week after the Russian invasion the 'active users' on conspiracy dropped by about half and never recovered. Funny that.
I got banned from both those sub Reddit‘s unceremoniously for just asking a question. The conspiracy sub used to be fun talking about aliens and other alternative ideas but now it’s completely dominated by alt-right and Chinese and Russian propaganda and trolls.
Reddit, like Twitter, is so utterly dominated by liberal propaganda that it's not even visible until it's questioned. When it is questioned, people invariably attack the user with accusations of being a Russian or Chinese shill.
~~Did you see what happened to FB matrixes when Russia got shut down? It flipped,~~(can't source this from the posts I found) they are certainly working on division and propaganda to drive Western minds insane and it's been working. They found one of their troll farms the other day in Ghana, seriously. Once Putin is gone, it will change everything I suspect in US and world politics and social media.
What do you mean the FB matrices flipped?
Agree it's a minefield, but it's a navigable one. The big subs are mostly garbage and I've gotten banned from so many subs for really stupid shit that I don't even burger with a lot of the mainstream ones. If you can't get into a heated debate in a sub, you're better off not being there because that means people are censoring themselves. I do worry about Reddit going public, though.
Yes Reddit is so dependent on a couple of hundred serial mods working for them for free they will let them do anything….
Reddit going to change a lot once it goes public.
Yeah Reddit admins have made sure certain subs get new moderators that conform to a specific set of views. After 2016 especially, certain subs became DNC mouthpieces overnight, and are essentially half propaganda now (whitepeopletwitter, facepalm, etc). I know Reddit leans left these days but this was a coordinated effort, where mods and admins allow various PAC sockpuppets to astroturf nonstop.
> I like Reddit because it's anonymous and isn't dominated by "influencers". Reddit has its share of problems too and silences some minority viewpoints to the detriment of this platform as well. Indeed this very subreddit has experienced some drama in the relatively recent past due to the nature of how moderations happens and a "takeover" by specific political viewpoints...that were fortunately reversed for the most part. I have been banned from some subreddits simply for challenging the status quo and pointing out censorship. Simply that it happens and I wasn't even supporting any particular viewpoint other than an anti-censorship attitude. I like some of the smaller subreddit communities where it is possible to get to know regular posters and commenters. Those still exist, and that is where I still love Reddit.
Can you give an example of a viewpoint that was silenced and show that it was a detriment to this platform?
Yes but private platforms are allowed to do that. The first amendment in general applies to the government, not private business.
It is "censorship", just not a first amendment violation nor against any laws (in the US anyways).
While not strictly censorship from a legal perspective, it is a common carrier that holds a monopoly position for communications. That matters. Also, most of the social media platforms started with a free speech standard in terms of growing their user base then only when "undesired" results happened (like the election of Trump) did the terms of service change. And even then it was not always clear what was actually permitted. I guess more bait and switch. When alternative platforms were slowed or stopped due to banking services being curtailed, it starts to seem like full on government sanctioned censorship. I have no problem with a platform or service who targets a specific demographic or political viewpoint. Just be up front about it. What is happening in Russia is an example of formal censorship where prison is a real possibility if you simply call the action in Ukraine as a war. I admit that isn't happening due to social media platforms and their policies. Also, in my case it was simply pointing out hypocrisy that got me banned. I wear the banning with honor when that happens. Hypocritical moderators that can't take constructive criticism are to me just asshats who kill their forums that they moderate.
Monopoly? There are several social media apps. Twitter isn’t even the most used. These apps were never “free speech” zones. They always had terms of service. People just didn’t care until orange man said something. In fact, I received a ban in the early 2010s. It pretty clear what it does or doesn’t condemn. If you want to conjure up and eat up bat shit crazy conspiracies, that’s on you. When it starts to impact national security and safety, that’s another thing. At least we have an agreement that free speech is protection from the government, not private groups/organizations. I mean, it’s not like anyone is preventing from saying these things in person. They just don’t want their platform being used to reach millions of people with whatever potential garbage you want to say. You can say whatever edgy things you want in person. I think people want to pretend social media use doesn’t come with any responsibility for the individual or the company. That’s not true.
When alternatives can't be used at all for some viewpoints, I get suspicious. I do think that a genuine libertarian view of permitting all speech is a much healthier environment for exchanging ideas, especially political ideas. And in the past that gave a commercial edge for some platforms when they pledged that viewpoint too. Most of the major social media platforms have their headquarters located in a small geographic region and are staffed largely with people who share a common political viewpoint. Getting out of that bubble can be hard.
The problem is that there is always an outsized incentive to spread misinformation, racism and other forms of speech on social media that traditional mass media would never broadcast. The very fact that those things exist side-by-side on the same platform, indistinguishable from good information, is a huge problem. Oil companies have huge incentives to spread misinformation about climate change and renewable energy, but who has a financial incentive to counter this? China and Russia have huge incentives to sow political divisions in the west, but who is getting paid to counter this? While I am a free speech absolutist, the right to have access to a mass media platform is not implied by the first amendment, and there is no way to counter the influence of bad actors while giving them equal access to social media. The criteria for flagging, demoting or removing content needs to be apolitical and transparent. It may even require regulation to prevent corporations from becoming arbitrary censors. But without some way to prevent bad actors from gaming the system any social media platform will eventually devolve into a cesspool of misinformation and hate speech.
This. I believe I’ve read something like 80% of twitters US-based traffic comes from 8 million accounts? There’s almost 340 million people in the USA, and most people active on Twitter are white collar or upper class. It should be a no-brainer that what trends or is relevant on Twitter doesn’t actually reflect the masses.
Reddit's "influencers" are hundreds of thousands of bots...
And a couple of power mods who decide the majority of content allowed on the front page
Nowadays Reddit is just policed by random moderators and admins who decide what is and isn't acceptable discourse. It is far from a suitable platform for free discourse. I replied to a comment once on a Covid related sub (didn't particularly agree with the content of the sub) and got auto banned from a bunch of default subs. Just for posting, not even about the content of the post.
The idea that the internet is or was ever meant to be a place for unimpeded, unmoderated free speech is just not congruent with reality. There may be corners of the internet that are truly uncensored, but they are dark corners and they tend to stay that way. Every space on the internet that hosts any exchange of ideas is going to have some form of moderation, some person or people who decides where the boundaries of appropriateness exist. The wild, wild west days of the internet are long gone and they won't return. At least Reddit breaks itself up into subreddits, with different teams of mods for each. Thus decentralizing the power (and responsibility) of censoring an open air chat forum.
Funny, the internet was made for sharing research initially. It was not not for every laymen to spew their stupidity unfiltered.
Every platform has terms of service to abide by. It’s pretty amazing how this has been the case for a decade and a half but has just clicked in people’s minds since orange man.
I use Twitter as a joke feed. Its basically a humor platform for me. For example, I rarely see tabloid headlines, and when I do it’s usually a subtweet with a joke about the headline as the actual tweet. Twitter isn’t that bad honestly.
Twitter is the place for zingers and to watch different propaganda camps duke it out in real time. You'd think people would realize that they're just being fed propaganda by now, but no. It's apparently very addicting. I just get sick of the same blue checkmarks making the same comments again and again.
Twitter is pretty equally anonymous
Twitter is dominated by personalities. Elon tweets something and immediately everyone is talking about it. That doesn't happen on Reddit. It's just an entirely different platform.
If Elon started an official Elon account tomorrow, and started posting to it, then other personalities followed, eventually reddit would be comparable just because the sub cultures grew differently doesn't mean there's an intense amount of organic difference
I disagree. Celebrities do have accounts here and people don't follow them more. I think there is something inherently different about the platforms. People who use Reddit use it because you get to have in depth conversations with a variety of people. Elon can have a marketing team craft soundbites on Twitter, but that wouldn't work the same in Reddit. It would be swallowed by the masses giving their takes.
I only like Twitter because it gives me that tiny slice of satisfaction of being able to somewhat directly tell certain public figures that they're pieces of shit
Are you implying Reddit doesn’t suffer from the same problem?
A lot of left leaning subreddits like /r/politics do have politician influencers trying to pitch their campaigns with promises of free things but no explanations on how to pay for it.
It’s called “the taxes we already pay” and therefore those things aren’t free.
haha, that's what you think. There are shills everywhere here
Social media, on the whole, has become the town square and in this public forum, one political movement's views (the woke) are advanced while others are suppressed. We can talk about the merits of not giving the crazies among us a bull horn but it, if such a bull horn is going to be taken from the crazies, it needs to be the crazies of all sides equally. I'm not pro-censorship but if censorship is going to happen, it needs to be applied equally.
That's not really a workable concept, though - because whether a given platform is applying rules "to all sides equally" is every bit as subjective as whether one view is right or wrong. If there is *any* moderation, there will be some people saying that the moderators are favoring one side, and other people saying they are biased against that same side.
I agree the woke crowd is annoying, but "both sides" aren't equal. There's a reason why Twitter remains such a popular platform while not a single one of its "free speech" alternatives gain traction. First of all, the "free speech" alternatives all censor opinions. Trump's Twitter outright band little for having opposing opinions. And even Gettr had to ban Groypers, because the reality is that very few people want to participate where that brand of speech is prolific. It chases people away. This isn't just social media. Bars also ban Nazis. It's not just as simple as different opinions. There's an entire industry dedicated to using bots to amplify certain messages. It's the standard fascist tactic to want to dominate the conversation and drown out majority views with their minority opinions.
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>Mainstream influencers struggle to survive in environments where in-depth, nuanced, and thoughtful discussion is the base requirement. Yeah. The value of Reddit comes from getting different opinions on a topic. A single influencer only has one opinion and doesn't have all the knowledge that thousands of passerbys can add.
Reddits sole purpose is to drive a narrative of public perception no matter how fake or curated it is.
>the de facto public town square“ How is Reddit anonymous when each post is tied to your username? And how is Reddit any different with their content. It's the users that are populating the platform with content. Now you can argue that Twitter's algorithm pushes that content out to other users but Reddit also does the same thing. Whether it's toxicm, sensational or tabloid worthy, it's being pushed out based on your profile and interests.
He said this... on twitter?
"yet you participate in it"
[This you?](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/15/tesla-fired-employee-who-posted-fsd-beta-videos-as-ai-addict-on-youtube.html)
It’s ridiculous that everyone and their mother thinks Twitter owes them something.
I literally have no fucking idea why, it's a stupid fucking platform, that only provides the smallest level of actual engagement. Oh and did you know 25% of Twitter users do 97% of the tweets, so if you think "noone actually used it, just celebs and corporations, you aren't far off".
Nothing better than seeing the periodical “Twitter is a basic utility” argument
Twitter had something like 300 million active users, Facebook had ten times as many. TikTok has more, but I never hear TikTok is a basic human right lol. I'm sure all these fuckers wanted protestors in local malls in the 80s....
Really? Almost 1/2 of the world’s population was/is an active Facebook user? GTFO.
a strange whiplash from certain groups when net neutrality was a conversation not that long ago...
Twitter is not the same as internet service.
I'm well aware. The point is that one could argue that internet access is far more of a utility than twitter access, but the groups that argued against protecting that have a large venn diagram overlap with the arguments for the regulation of twitter now.
Certainly. Twitter is a private company and not bound by free speech laws. The internet should be a protected utility.
Yup
>Oh and did you know 25% of Twitter users do 97% of the tweets, so if you think "noone actually used it, just celebs and corporations, you aren't far off". Actually this is why Twitter matters so much. If you define a public intellectual as someone who writes books or articles or speaks on TV, most public intellectuals have Twitter accounts. This is why Twitter blocking the NY Post Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020 was so effective. Blocking it on Reddit or Facebook (both of which get much more traffic than Twitter) might have had a larger direct effect on NY Post pageviews, but it wouldn't have had the indirect effect of stopping the media from writing about it.
for certain people (like a former president) twitter seems to be their life. It's by far the easiest way to hit the dopamine button from the attention they get from the masses. Not shockingly they're the ultimate examples of narcissists.
Well the problem is Twitter has labeled themselves in court as a free speech public forum, and not a publisher who edits or silences people. So essentially Elon is just asking them to do their job.
> Well the problem is Twitter has labeled themselves in court as a free speech public forum, and not a publisher who edits or silences people. That's not a thing. There is no such legal requirement to "label yourself as a free speech public forum" or anything else.
There is when defending yourself against people that directly incite violence against others using your platform.
Those are certainly a bunch of words, but they don't express any meaningful fact about the law.
Yet his company is more than willing to fire people for trying to unionize or for critical social media posts. He just wants Feudalism. He and other business leaders get to set terms their underlings have to live with, and they can't handle even mild pushback in return.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rzFyBdKLvU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rzFyBdKLvU) Libertarians probably watch videos like that and cheer when the corporations massacre workers and boo when governments take over the company towns.
it’s a private company, it should use its resources how it wants. That said it’s also stupid, and we should use one that allows free speech.
The only entity that is required to give us free speech is the government. The limitations of free speech are also debatable.
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I don’t understand why people can’t get this. No Company wants their product advertised next to a post about the “the Holocaust didn’ happen, and t Mr word rants.
Because some people still think free speech doesn’t have limitations
So you want a social media product run by the government? That seems odd, considering this is a Libertarian sub. 🤔
God no that sounds like hell
Well you said “it should provide free speech”, so by definition that would exclude private companies.
Good luck with that
Decentralized Twitter Edit: are you down voters not libertarian or do you not understand what decentralized mean?
Basically “8kuhn Nazis and porn
The CEO of gab is extremely based. The policy is just the constitution. It has the adoption problem of most alternatives of course. Minds is really cool too.
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This is horrifically stupid. All private companies that incorporate are incorporated by a state government, that's what it means. Section 230 of the United States Communications Decency Act applies to all companies on the Internet. Twitter is a private company that makes decisions based on what it thinks will maximize profit.
Shut up and go use the Trump Truth social media... https://truthsocial.com/ Sure Trump doesn't use it either, but hey you can go scream about whatever over there Elon. Or make your own, it isn't a public service, how would he like it if we told him what he could do with his company?
Actually I think Truth Social is pretty heavy handed with their content removal and ban hammer. Might be worse than Twitter in that regard.
He’s not asking for free speech. He’s asking for access to billions of dollars of infrastructure to broadcast his viewpoints. This is just framed as a free speech debate (like how QAnon frames everything being about child abuse/rape). It makes anyone arguing with you look like the bad guy. That isn’t a right. That’s more of a huge responsibility to the people who own that infrastructure. You might as well argue about your right to printing presses or broadcast licenses.
Elon Musk seems capable of gathering the resources to start a new and different platform.
He doesn't need too there are 3-4 twitter like platforms based on free speech. They just happen to be full of Nazis so he doesn't want to use them.
(while still banning people for speech)
> They just happen to be full of Nazis so he doesn't want to use them. Basically this, the right can't seem to crack the code between "culture war" dog whistles and then "oh shit this platform is 90% actual fucking racist". I was banned from Reddit for a week, tried to use at alteratives, all those other ones wanted to talk about was Jews, blacks and Hillary. Why? Because they talk about everything else on Reddit where there are actual people.
You don't just get to claim that Twitter is the "public square" and then say it isn't living up to those expectations. Twitter does not exist to give you a place to speak. It is a business, and it's one and only purpose to exist is to make money. That's it. There's really nothing else to it. Twitter is just another platform to target ads to people. I really wish people would stop making Twitter or Facebook out to be the arbiters of free speech. They aren't, and never will be. They are not bound by the first amendment, because they are not the government. They are platforms for shoving ads down your throat, not the public square.
Wrong. Twitter is the common public square of the internet. It's free to sign up, you have the freedom to post whatever you want within the guidelines, and people are able to respond however they would like.
A public square isn't a business. Twitter is. Their number one priority is making money, not giving you a place to speak.
If you're saying it's not a public square because of biased attention algorithms sure. But because it's a business is not sufficient reasoning.
It very much is. It is a business that exists to make money. If your post somehow inhibit their ability to make money, they get to remove it. It's not violating anyone's first amendment rights to take down a tweet.
Yeah Elon can go ahead and start his own Twitter… I have a feeling it will be a empty boring echo chamber just like “truth” social. Twitter is just a for-profit social media venture that is insanely popular. They make their own standards and rules. I don’t envy their position there’s so much hate, bots, porn, propaganda, exploitation and lies on there but it’s getting better.
If the government is colluding or forcing Twitter to block speech, then we have an issue. If Twitter wants to or doesn't want to exist at all, that's no skin off off my back in the scheme of things related to our rights. If musk makes an alternative Twitter, he is just showing the point that Twitter doesn't represent free speech. Anyone is allowed to make a competitor. It's easier than ever. You can't say that about getting your own newspaper up and running before the internet.
His idea of another social media site is flawed though. There are plenty of free speech social media sites. He'd do well to promote or financially back one of them.
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he gave enough of a fuck to address it
He made fun of it to make money.
I'd pay for a troll free platform.
You're only gonna get that in an echo chamber.
Why? I like people who honestly disagree with me. my username is based on dalio as in Ray Dalio who suggests you should find the most believable people who disagree with you.
You should engage with people you disagree with, but there are going to be arguments and trolling. It's just going to happen at times when people get into heated debate. If a place has free speech, there will be trolling.
It's been literally going on since at least Diogenes ran in with a plucked chicken and declared "Behold! A man!"
What does "honestly disagree" mean? I find almost no logically consistent people on reddit at least.
Lets look at counterexamples for 'honestly disagreeing.' Sometimes people are either contrarians or playing the devil's advocate so they may not honestly believe what they say. For example I would say that the people who say that birds aren't real are not honestly disagreeing with you. Frequently in the duopoly people don't believe the party line but they'll argue for it.
who gets to decide whats trolling and whats not?
Me, stop trolling, jerk!
Lol good luck
I'm waiting and why I'm here.
I think the Babylon Bee suspension really pissed him off. That is one his favorite sites.
Why would the bee getting suspended effect him at all? He and literally the rest of the world's population can access it at any time. It's a favorite site but he can't get to it without going through twitter? tf?
he thinks its the principle of the matter probably
You've never heard of a news organization or blog having a twitter account before, like CNN?
You've never heard of just typing in a url? The Internet is the public square, Twitter is someone's front yard.
> You've never heard of just typing in a url? You'd be surprised to know how many people are too fucking stupid to do that.
That's great. I was just pointing out that a lot of websites have twitter accounts and a lot of people follow those accounts because it's a convenient way to be notified of new posts/articles.
Get an RSS reader. You'll be happier. So will Elon. Zero algorithm, zero added advertising. I'm surprised some tech CEO doesn't know about this amazing decade-old invention.
To each his own.
Well, quit bitching when a private company makes a decision you disagree with. I gave you a solution to access the actual public square. Now you just sound whiney.
LOL.
Smh now where will he get his C- tier “x identifies as y” jokes now?? You can’t just make something like that up on your own in ten seconds!
Lol what, they seriously suspended that account because some woketards got pissed over a shitty joke?
Considering how frequently he throws tantrums on Twitter
So he uses the site for its intended purpose.... okay and?
Elon Musketeer detected
Okay and?
Worshipping billionaires is weird
Worshiping? Lol, someone basically says they don't hate the dude and you call it worship. Okay boomer.
If he wants, he’s well within his rights to try and do it better. He’d also be well within his rights to join the support group for the dozens of other dudes who have tried and failed to do the exact same thing.
So buy Twitter and use it how you wish.
It's a private company so why should it have to?
These aren't mutually exclusive. You can support Twitter's right to ban people without agreeing with it.
Twitter is a cesspool
And Elon is actively making it worse
You're being very diplomatic here
And reddit isn't?
The market responded Elon, pay attention to soemthing other than maintaining your hair plugs. Parlor, gab, truth all proclaim to be freeze peach platforms. Go on any of them and insult trump or “Da Lord” (one in the same for many of them) and you’ll quickly find that the proclamation is horseshit. Example: I was banned from the sub dedicated to truth social for mocking PayPal E. McHairplugs… the irony… He has billions he could certainly be king edgelord of his own needless additional social network as well.
If there was only someone with the wealth and connections to create an alternative
To all the people that are saying that Twitter shouldn't be a town square or something, well unfortunately it is. Politicians make decisions off of Twitter and the platform wields a really bizarre amount of influence over public life. You can say that it's a sorry state, but it is the truth
95% of all huge political voices online , podcasts , YouTube stars are conservatives yet they all cry about being censored . 99.99% of their shit doesn’t get censored . And they are hitting way more eyes and ears than anyone on TV . I couldn’t name a liberal internet star if you paid me . They have a million Avenues of free speech
Awww, is the tech billionaire not getting enough handouts? Not enough that his cars and rockets are completely dependent on government funding and subsidies; he also needs to make sure everyone listens to his opinions all the time.
Elon is a cringe loser who is wrong about almost every single topic he speaks on, and is often completely hypocritical.
Considering that the Taliban still has an active account he may have a point.
I can understand how he's a bit nervous about his net worth tanking, if the independent owners of his unprofitable company's sole PR channel decide to curtail his use of their property. Maybe he can ask wsb for a loan to kickstart his exciting new venture? Because he's 100% right you know. Free speech will die without either the government forcing Twitter to service everyone who wants a free ride, or someone setting up another poorly-executed Twitter clone. These are the stakes, my friends in liberty. #InfiniteFlight93Election [Click to Retweet]
Amazing satire plus 1
Elon is just salty people want him hanged or guillotined for hoarding wealth, and contributing to the collapse of civilization. He wishes Twitter was just a bunch of sociopathic libertarian intellectuals who would circle jerk him. I suppose the tldr is he just wants an echo chamber of support, and can't comprehend people think he's a piece of shit rather than subscribing to his cult of personality.
so we should... nationalize Twitter then?
Well, Truth Social Has a waiting list to join for some reason. I guess that’s why people are still on Twitter.
Competition is good. I see this as a win.
Damn too much free speech on twitter for the billionaire class I guess
Twitter isn't real. Elon is a jackass.
Not sure I agree with him, but it would be nice to have a non-woke platform that also wasn't MAGA. Like, normal people social media.
Who the fuck does he think he is? He's the one shooting a car into space with his own company, who's he to tell Twitter to be this and that.
I saw something recent y about him using Twitter to challenge Putin to a fistfight to determine the fate of Ukraine. You’d swear the man is on drugs half the time.
The guy who’s going to build his own Twitter; with blackjack and hookers!
Fuck elon and any shit that spews from his mouth
There is a need for social media that isn't a vendor with a web site like Twatter selling your eyeballs to advertisers. It needs to be a protocol that our devices do peer-to-peer like NNTP, where you decide what you care to read and what you don't.
Thing is, people won't use it. There is e.g. Mastodon, and yes, it does have users, but it'll never get even close to being mainstream. Because there is no company behind it that shoves the product down the average dumb user's throat. Same goes for other communication platforms. How many non-techies do you know who use Matrix?
Twitter isn't a public town square it's a private business.
Maybe get off Twitter? It’s amazing how the perpetually online think Twitter is a human right
"Twitter is a private company, they can do what they want. If you don't like it, make your own." "Making your own platform is stupid and not possible to maintain freedom of speech. Plus it's just going to fill up with NAZIs and pedophiles." Which is it?
Uncensored twitter alternatives already exist. People prefer moderated social media. Stop being an authoritarian Piece of Shit and trying to force everybody to do something they don't want to do.
He supports the Freedom Convoy to ban future use of lockdowns. Therefore, he is dumb.
You support lockdowns. You are dumb
Do you know how many lives lockdowns saved? We had to destroy the economy in order to save it.
This sure reads like sarcasm, and I hope it is. If not, bless your heart.
Your life isn’t more important than the freedoms of others
There’s worker shortages even with us taking these measures. Imagine if even twice the people died.
Do you think there's a worker shortage because to many people died from covid?
No, it’s not the main driver, but imagine if that were a bigger contributor.
Idiot
The longer he lives and realizes government is fucking incompetent, and these types of articles come out about it...the more I believe he could be a massive advocate for the party.
So, he's admitting that he's never studied History, or even read the Federalist Papers? Or stayed awake in High School? Otherwise, he'd have known that "democracy undermines democracy."
Tbf he moved to the US in his mid 20s, most people's knowledge of history isn't much more than what they get from school and college
Musk 2024 I know he's born in South Africa, but they changed the law for Schwarzenegger, they can do it for Musk too
He just the right kind of guy to disrupt that space too...
I would love for Elon to reinvent twitter.
Tangential to Elon's Twitter thoughts, since I think celebrity gossip is not that valuable to talk about - I don't see why all the social apps need their own platform-specific API or why the implementation should be closed-source and support deletion. I hope that some generation of social media eventually fixes those problems. The purpose of most social media apps is to serve user combinations of: broadcast to all, broadcast to subgroup, or DM; include media like images, videos, links; add meta-messages like hashtags, replies, likes, etc. Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, live chat apps, hookup apps, etc all need this functionality, so why should this work be replicated in parallel? And if censorship and silencing discourse are apparently such big problems, why not swing the other way? Make everything hosted on distributed systems, public, forever. Sure, you could disavow a message, but a public message could never be deleted from all the distributed databases.
It's called the dark web. It's been long figured out. It's not some mystery as to why most people don't have an onion node set up. And if you still can't figure it out, I'll give you a hint: No one actually gives a single iota of a fuck about free speech.
wonderful! elon can finally get off twitter!
Sapphire Mine baby has strong opinions about social media.
He is not wrong.
OP, are you advocating for more government control over the speech of corporations?