The Social Media Thread

The article for those who would like to read it here:

If Elon Musk is able to take over Twitter Inc., his biggest promise is to transform it into a platform for free speech with few restrictions — something he calls “essential to a functioning democracy.” But Musk, who is famously sensitive to criticism, has a mixed record on championing the cause.

The 50-year-old billionaire has donated over $6 million to the American Civil Liberties Union in the last five years, making him one of its most substantial donors, and he’s discussed free speech on numerous occasions with the organization’s executive director. But in his tweets, public remarks and policies at the businesses he runs, Musk shows little tolerance for speech that’s unflattering to him or his companies, or reflects employee criticism of the workplace.

At Tesla Inc. and Space "X", Musk has a long track record of silencing or punishing anyone who goes public with criticism of a project or practice. Workers must sign nondisclosure agreements and arbitration clauses that prevent them from taking their employer to court.

Meanwhile, Musk uses his Twitter account, where he has more than 80 million followers and a fan base he can ignite, to publicly mock others, from a local health official during the early days of the pandemic to Parag Agrawal, Twitter’s current chief executive officer.

Musk defined the goal for Twitter at a TED event last week: “A good sign as to whether there is free speech is: Is someone you don’t like allowed to say something you don’t like? If that is the case, then we have free speech.”

But those who have said things Musk didn’t like have seen their reputations publicly trashed. Vernon Unsworth, a British caver who helped rescue 12 boys trapped in Thailand, called Musk’s efforts to help a “PR stunt” in 2018. Musk retaliated by calling him a “pedo guy.” Then he paid $50,000 to a dubious private investigator to dig into Unsworth’s background in the U.K. and Thailand. He also attempted to depose a reporter, Ryan Mac, who was covering Unsworth’s defamation lawsuit against Musk.

That same year, Musk went after Martin Tripp, a worker at Tesla’s battery plant in Nevada. Tripp saw himself as an idealist trying to improve the company’s operations; Musk viewed him as a dangerous foe who engaged in sabotage and shared data with the press and “unknown third parties.”

Tesla’s PR department spread false rumors that Tripp was possibly homicidal and had threatened to “shoot the place up,” even though authorities had already determined that Tripp posed no immediate threat and wasn’t armed.

Read more: How Musk became fixated on destroying 2018 whistle-blower

Another employee was fired six days after he posted a You Tube video of his Tesla Model 3 running into a traffic pylon while using “FSD Beta,” an early version of software that Tesla has rolled out to roughly 100,000 people.

And then there’s the case of Jack Sweeney, a Florida teenager who tracks private jets. A few months ago, Musk reached out to him and offered $5,000 to shut down the “Elon’s Jet” account, Sweeney said. Musk viewed it as a security risk. Sweeney asked for $50,000, which Musk refused. The billionaire then blocked some of the social media accounts connected to Sweeney.

If Musk were in charge of Twitter policy, he said he believes that people should be blocked only as a last resort, according to his comments at TED. If it’s a gray area, his preference would be to leave the content up, he said.

It’s difficult to get clarity on the statements Musk makes on Twitter, in part because he largely disbanded Tesla’s communications team in the U.S. and rarely responds to inquiries from the financial press. Several journalists who cover Musk’s companies have been blocked by him on Twitter. Musk didn’t respond to a request for comment via email.

Musk called himself a “free speech absolutist” in March when he tweeted that Starlink — Space "X"’s satellite-based internet service that is now operating in Ukraine — wouldn’t block Russian state-run news sources, which were cut off by some social media platforms at the time.

“He and I have spoken on free speech issues on numerous occasions, and I know that he is quite passionate about defending free speech,” Anthony Romero, executive director of the ACLU, said in an email. Romero attended the TED conference in Vancouver last week, and he and Musk exchanged messages right after Musk’s on-stage conversation. “I believe Elon to be a true civil libertarian.”

Read more: Musk dispels weeks of doubts by lining up money to buy Twitter

But Musk has already cited some instances where he believes content on Twitter should be blocked. At TED, he said Twitter should continue to take down content on a geographic basis, as the company “is bound by the laws of the country that it operates in.” In Germany, for instance, it’s against the law to deny the Holocaust happened, so Twitter hides those tweets in that country.

Musk also said he would like to ban cryptocurrency scammers on the site. The billionaire’s persona — and his popularity with crypto investors — has been used to trick people in the past.

And on Thursday, he vowed to defeat spam bots “or die trying” if his Twitter bid succeeds.

If our twitter bid succeeds, we will defeat the spam bots or die trying! — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 21, 2022

“A social media platform’s policies are good if the most extreme 10% on left and right are equally unhappy,” Musk tweeted Tuesday, presenting a stance similar to past statements by Meta Platforms Inc. CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

The risk is discouraging some people from using a platform because it feels unsafe or prone to abuse.

Musk is focused on “the idea that free speech means not taking down anything,” said Emma Llansó, director of the Center for Democracy and Technology’s Free Expression Project. But if people stop speaking out of fear of bullying or harassment, “that can actually really end up excluding large groups of people and communities from participation in online discourse.”

While it’s unclear if any of Musk's tweets have been removed by Twitter, his account has come under intense scrutiny by third parties, including the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which sued Musk for fraud over his infamous “funding secured” tweet from August 2018. The wording was part of a message saying he was considered taking Tesla private, and it sent the shares surging.

Musk and Tesla ended that dispute by agreeing to pay $20 million apiece, without admitting wrongdoing. Musk also agreed not to tweet about specific topics without advance approval from a Tesla lawyer.

Another of Musk’s tweets drew scrutiny from the National Labor Relations Board. That post, also from 2018, threatened workers with the loss of stock options if they formed a union.

But it’s Twitter’s own efforts to moderate speech that has drawn recent scorn from Musk. He has said that the company should resort less frequently to banning users. That’s led to speculation that Musk could reinstate former President Donald Trump’s account if he became Twitter’s owner.

“It’s always hard when you put humans in charge of making decisions about what speech should be allowed or what speech should not be allowed,” said Clay Calvert, who directs the Marion B. Brechner First Amendment Project at the University of Florida. “The one answer for people who object to Twitter’s content moderation policies is forming your own company.”

Or, in Musk’s case, buying Twitter.

Edited by Redmess on Apr 25th 2022 at 3:27:55 PM

So the answer to you previous question is no.

Edited by Risa123 on Apr 25th 2022 at 6:39:28 AM

The acid test is whether Musk would subject himself to the same scrutiny as any other user when it comes to moderation. We don't have any way to know that yet, but he has said that he would not personally moderate any tweets. But using the platform to criticize people who criticize him is, if anything, consistent with principles of free speech.

There are actually several issues being conflated. The first is that people who have large voices in social media have outsize weight to their speech. If I want to say something, it goes out to all 139 of my followers. If Justin Bieber says something, it goes out to 114 million followers. So Bieber's speech is more "equal" than mine. I don't know of any way to solve this, and Musk owning Twitter has no direct relationship to it. It's not like he would have been banned for dunking on Martin Tripp either way.

Indirectly, the perceived need to protect high-profile accounts because of the possible financial impacts to the company could be significantly lessened if it were to be privately owned. This goes back to "fiduciary duty" — having a responsibility to make the best possible return to shareholders is fundamentally incompatible with making a platform that enforces its rules equitably.

If those reporters are being obnoxious, sure. There's nothing sacred about being a journalist that should let you get away with being horrible to people, and there's no reason why a high-profile figure should be required to accept harassment just because they're important. The door swings both ways. When Jen Psaki insults Fox News reporters, we don't yell that she's being unfair to their free speech rights.

Musk is not a politician; he is a businessman. He has no obligation to take questions. The same is true of anyone else, by the way, but Musk is fairly unique in that being a "bad look" has never bothered him.

I also have my doubts about whether he is the best person to run a social media platform, and I have major disagreements about many of the things he believes, but I strongly agree with him on the need to fix Twitter.

By the way, it looks as if the deal may be going through. Ars Techica: Twitter reportedly “set to accept” Elon Musk’s offer to buy the company

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 25th 2022 at 9:57:20 AM

My position here is that if he wants to block reporters, he should have a full dedicated PR and news outreach team at each of his companies and he should not be effectively doing the job himself. If he is serving as the PR and outreach team, he shouldn't block reporters. He's not doing the job properly. When he minimized the PR and outreach teams and effectively took over, he changed the equation himself.

Either he can be a private citizen who happens to own a bunch of companies with the right to block willy-nilly, or he can be the PR face of his companies and the main contact point for most of them and let reporters have access to him. He shouldn't be the PR face and block people willy nilly, it's counterproductive at best and absurdly disingenuous at worst and it's a very ethically questionable position to be in.

That's an interesting ethical question and one I do not feel qualified to have an answer to. In my opinion, journalists are not entitled to badger people with obnoxious questions just to make headlines, and the fact that we allow this is a serious problem.

Whether Tesla should have a PR department does not seem to be directly related to how Musk should or would operate Twitter.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 25th 2022 at 9:59:26 AM

This sounds like the tech executives looking at both the tightening of the screws on advertising and hate speech laws in Europe and the decreasing financial viability of their platform and going "wait he wants to buy the bird site after we already started torpedoing its credibility by buying into the craze where people sell links for fake money and burn more energy than Argentina in the process by rewarding people who buy into the Ponzi scheme with novelty account cosmetics that make them easier for people with a fraction of common sense to identify and bully? Sweet!"

I'd rather a platform like this weren't run by a delusional billionaire but my small comfort is that at least a fraction of that dosh might go to people who actually need it even if most of it's just going to sink into Silicon Valley suit pockets and never come back out. And maybe the terrible bird site will now finally die.

Question is what is his idea of fixing twitter.

I posted about it here. I'm not repeating it every page.

I know i was saying that your and his idea can be very different, and i was being somewhat sarcastic.

I am patently not Elon Musk, so I'm not sure what point you're making. My sense of intellectual integrity means that I feel the need to push back against dogpiling no matter what form it takes. Knowing the actual facts of a situation is important to being able to make proper decisions. If, after this information, you feel the same way, that's fine.

I think we are having a misunderstanding here.... What im saying is that people often agree that something needs to be fixed, but disagree on how thats all i apologize for insulting you

I for one do agree that Twitter needs to be fixed. Not quote-unquote "fixed", as I'm concerned Musk wants it to be.

He can say whatever he wants about his motivation, but knowing both his history and general behavior, I find I have no reason to take him at his word.

Seconded

Yeah, that's about where I'm at.

Twitter is broken, I highly doubt Musk is the one to fix it.

As that article points out, Musk's high flying rhetoric on free speech is rather undermined by his own actions. It seems that for Musk, absolute free speech stops once it involves him, personally. Then, it becomes a matter of "I can and should be able to say whatever I want, no matter how dishonest or untrue or malicious, and in turn no one can say anything bad about me, no matter how correct or justified it is".

In short, Musk is a huge hypocrite when it comes to free speech.

The article notes that his ideas about Twitter banning public persons too quickly also seems to support the idea of Trump's account being reinstated, although that is an implied consequence rather than any actual intention by Musk.

Agreed, "fixed" seems to mainly mean "fixed in my favour" here.

Edited by Redmess on Apr 25th 2022 at 4:42:35 PM

Again, it is difficult to objectively say one way or the other. This is a risk of putting such big platforms in the hands of individuals, but the alternative doesn't seem to be that much better. Twitter in the hands of the public stock market seems to have devolved into a festival of crypto spambots. Facebook in Zuckerborg's hands has been a haven for disinformation and has made an art form of selling personal information to the highest bidder.

Yes we cant know that. It just that we dont think Musk is going to make it better. Now i cant image how he cant make it worse, but that can be just a lack of imagination on my part.

Oh, by the way, that "Elon's Jet" thing was a safety issue. Making public announcements of the exact movements of someone as high profile as Elon Musk makes him vulnerable to violence directed at his person. If someone did that to me they could get arrested for stalking. It's amazing that the account was allowed to continue for so long.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 25th 2022 at 11:54:02 AM

The worst thing he could do right now with Twitter is getting Trump back on Twitter and enabling his re-election. That is a very real and present worst-case scenario right now.

Agreed, that was clearly crossing a line, especially with how people treat celebrity in general. I personally feel we could stand to get rid of a lot of this sort of celeb stalking.

Edited by Redmess on Apr 25th 2022 at 6:01:31 PM

FWIW, Musk tweeted just now: "I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means"

From the horse's mouth, as it were.

Talk is cheap.

I propose we end this here this is clearly going nowhere. I dont think we want this to become "Lets Argue about Elon Musk Thread". History will be the judge of our opinions on this matter.

I'm not buying it.

Stop trying to silence on-topic discussion. Elon Musk is the news topic for social media right now, so that's what we are discussing.

Edited by Redmess on Apr 25th 2022 at 8:38:36 PM

I not trying to silence anything it just seems that we are not going to agree and i have seen several arguments about Musk on this forum already.

Edited by Risa123 on Apr 25th 2022 at 11:50:06 AM

It's official.