If someone, either accidentally or out of pure desire for chaos, quickly manipulates stock prices in public via tweet and draws the wrath of the SEC; if he just suspects that lifesavers are branded pedophiles in front of millions of followers, then he has seen through the Twitter principle better than many others. Twitter made the troll type big - what am I saying, Twitter made the troll type president. And now the trolliest of Silicon Valley's grandees is taking over the institution: Elon Musk is buying Twitter. Finally, what belongs together in the village pond is growing together.
Musk sees himself as a major disruptor - he relishes in overthrowing existing systems, whether it's building cars or rescuing children from Thai caves. His many fans thanked him and thank him for it. Twitter is also a major disruptor, it has shaken up the media world and global politics. Now one disruption eats the other - the disruptor Twitter itself becomes the target of the creative destroyers. The fact that neither the huge, monetarily and culturally overrated platform nor the richest man in the world are even remotely underdogs gives the whole thing the absurd note, that of all revolutions made in Silicon Valleysuitable. Peter Thiel disliked what Gawker reported about him and helped sue the company from the world. Musk does the same with Twitter. Such kind of "disruption" used to be simply called the exercise of power.
 |
| Spied On With Pegasus |
But as it should be in Silicon Valley, such sheer power games have to be somehow philosophically embellished. Costumed as a free speech savior, Musk has been retweeting Joe Rogan memes for days, saying things like, "For Twitter to earn the public's trust, it has to be politically neutral, which means it enrages the far right and the far left equally got to." Above all, however, he seems to want to annoy the left at the moment. In general, the self-declared "freedom of speech absolutist" Musk seems to use the term freedom of speech primarily in the style of right-wing Twitter bubbles - he complains about shadow banning and claims that Trump's bizarre Twitter clone(on which the ex-president has previously sent a message) depends on Twitter "because Twitter censors freedom of expression".
Musk's "philosophy" is about as precise as a Tesla autopilot when turning left. But like autopilot, Musk makes up for a certain wobble with a confidence bordering on sleepwalking. For example, Musk wrote: "By 'freedom of speech' I mean simply what is within the law. I oppose censorship that goes far beyond the law."
which law?
If you ask the lawyers who advise the big companies in Silicon Valley, you will mostly hear amusement about such theses. And ask. For example: Which law? Musk seems to be thinking primarily about the US, but Twitter operates globally. Does Musk plan to censor tweets containing the word 'war' in Russia? In Thailand tweets with lèse majesty? And if not, how is it decided which law to obey?
 |
| Fire The Highest Paid Woman On Twitter? |
Daphne Keller, once Google's chief legal officer, said in a tweet that she would not comment on Musk - but at the same time referred to the Digital Services Act that the EU proposed this week. It shows pretty much where the limits of Musk's self-declared projects are. Musk's charisma always drew on his reputation as a lonely genius. Twitter's rules and algorithms can, indeed should, be criticized; Musk apparently allowed himself to be persuaded that they were just an expression of a "woken" ideology and not the answers of professionals to somewhat irreconcilable contradictions in Twitter's business model. To put it mildly, the problems Musk sees at the company aren't the problems that the people who have been running and providing legal advice to these platforms for years really struggle with on a day-to-day basis.
According to a lawyer specializing in the First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of expression, Musk's demand for maximum freedom of expression probably means something very ambitious, but completely immature: namely Twitter as a public service. In the US , freedom of speech is primarily a protection from one actor – the state. Private individuals or corporations are allowed to censor anything. This is because they have the freedom to choose which content they want to be associated with and which not. It is therefore within your right to freedom of expression to be able to say that we do not want this or that content.
 |
| The Most Scandalous Cases Of Espionage With Pegasus |
And, according to the lawyer, Musk seems to think "Twitter should behave as if it's run by a government." In other words, that Twitter is so important for forming public opinion that it should follow the rules of state organs, not those of private business. Indeed, Musk wrote, "Freedom of expression is the foundation of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital marketplace where the core questions about the future of humanity are debated." On the one hand, of course, that sounds really bold and not unattractive at first glance - a platform that is financed by a multi-billionaire, but basically works like a state institution.
Only: there is a good reason why governments do not build such a platform by the rules they should play by. Because it would be full of spam, bots, pornography, death threats, all of which are legal under the First Amendment, but which a functioning platform must somehow keep under control.
Musk wants to take action against bots. Rightly so, because they are annoying. But annoying speech has to be endured, as we are told again and again. Or else, Musk doesn't mean it quite so seriously with the full-bodied freedom of expression maximalism, and imagines a platform that maximizes freedom of expression, but still intervenes from time to time, depending on the discretion of its owners and legal advisors. If that's what he means, you could recommend Mr Musk a company that has been doing exactly that more or less successfully for a long time: namely Twitter.
Do You Know What We Have Posted on
twitter facebook instagram reddit tumblr
And if he should have a kind of absolutely open forum in mind - that already exists. Such a version of Twitter would be like 8Chan, 4Chan, or any other wild corner of the web where Holocaust memes and anime porn mix with political statements, and when in doubt, a police detail is sent to another user's address . It is anything but clear why the Walt Disney Corporation, a Hollywood starlet or a nice reporter for Wine Spectator Magazine should be romping about on such a platform.
Musk's claim on Twitter, and Twitter's claim on itself, is that it is "the marketplace," that it maps the public. The Twitter service also draws its financial perspective from this claim, but that may not matter to the richest man in the world. With even less supervision, Twitter would be even more annoying, especially for women and minorities, and is likely to lose such users quickly - and thus only represent certain parts of the public. If you look at his tweets over the past week, Musk shouldn't really care. But what Twitter just can't be: just another troll corner of the internet. Without content moderation, Musk runs the risk of running the world's most expensive subreddit.
 |
| Discover How To Know If WhatsApp Has Crashed |
As a result, his ingenious proposals of the past few days have tended to push both of two conflicting priorities for a platform like Twitter. For example, Musk's desire to disclose the algorithms doesn't sit well with his fight against spam and bots. Journalist Sarah Jeong pointed this out. Because Twitter didn't hide the algorithms that shape the user's feed to hurt conservatives or keep Elon Musk's tweets under two million likes, but so that spammers and bots can't exploit these algorithms to clutter up all user feeds.
Firm belief in your own genius
Another example: Musk wants real names. He wants to fight anonymous accounts and force the user to provide a real identity. The Electronic Frontiers Foundation immediately reported concerns: not out of do-gooderism, but in the name of freedom of expression, which Musk so celebrated. "Any free speech advocate (as Musk seems to see himself) who is willing to require users to produce ID to access a platform is likely unaware of the critical importance of pseudonymity and anonymity." For people in authoritarian regimes, anonymity is a prerequisite for freedom of expression on a platform like Twitter. And even in a constitutional state like the USA, there can be no question of freedom of expression,
In general, Musk does not seem to understand Twitter from the platform, but from the perspective of what is called "user experience" ("UX") in Silicon Valley. What's more, he only seems to analyze Twitter from the user experience of a single user - the Elon Musks.
In the Twitter building on Market Street in San Francisco, there have been signs of a storm since last week – on Slack channels and in private messages, the workforce is appalled by the new owner. All of these contradictions shouldn't be all that new to long-time Twitter employees. Musk's friend and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey had a similarly inconsistent philosophy when it came to free speech. But even he banned some ringleaders from his platform after the attempted coup on January 6, 2021.
 |
| The Best Alternatives To WhatsApp? |
But Elon Muskof course knows better. Two things are always part of Silicon Valley's gesture of disruption: a firm belief in one's own genius and an equally firm belief in the idiocy of the pre-existing. Ignorance is a prerequisite of the disruptor. It is not without a certain comedy that Twitter now falls victim to just such treatment. Only now, when the elephant is about to buy the china shop, does it become clear how complex and sophisticated the answers that Twitter has been to existential questions since 2006 actually were. It is clear that even the old answers were not always conclusive, that the old answers often expressed Silicon Valley's self-importance, greed and solipsism. But over the last 16 years they had become a systematic inventory of the digital age - a fact
0 Comments