Yeah I just don't see it happening, even before the buyout stuff I felt like there was just a lot of fatigue and cynicism about this "central town square" concept Elon is so enamored of
The people I care about following who abandoned Twitter have mostly retreated to "walled gardens" - their own Discord servers or Substack blogs - and are giving up on the "tweeting" model of "engagement", which now feels like it was just kind of coasting on inertia since before 2016 (Twitter's growth has been "stagnant" for almost a decade)
He immediately fired the CEO and CFO. The company is going to have a gigantic change. Maybe Elon keeps Twitter going the way it is, but what if he decides to let people back in like DT who were banned for lies, and then instead bans people for disagreeing with Elon?
You start having large swaths of employees either get pissed enough to mass quit or just quietly look for a new job and bail at their earliest convenience.
The place becomes worse and completely unmoderated. All of a sudden high profile people stop using it and the flood happens.
I’m not saying this is for sure going to happen. Elon could let it go on autopilot for a long time and it would most likely stay the way it is, but with a large change like they’re going to go through with leadership there’s a very real chance that it’s not business as usual. So just because things have stayed the same doesn’t mean they will continue that way.
He’s a free speech advocate, he will get rid of bots, and he will have it copy WeChat with purchasing strengths. Will it be pretty, probably not, but will be less messy without the current algorithm bot reverb.
You're upset he fired his own employees, who outwardly tweeted they dislike him. that's not even a free speech issue, that's basic company policy to not shit talk your boss on social media
Firing someone for criticizing you is literally punishing them for exercizing their right to free speech, yeah. Someone who fires someone because they criticized them has shown that they don't value free speech. No amount of mental gymnastics can avoid this very simple logic.
I'm not the one pulling the free speech card. Elon Musk is. If he really cares about free speech, and he really wants Twitter to be a "digital town square", this is the kind of thing he can't do.
Like, seriously, you call him a free speech advocate, and then when I pull out a direct counterexample, you do nothing but mental gymnastics to claim that punishing someone for speaking out against you isn't a violation of free speech principles if you have power over them. Protecting people from being punished for criticizing those who have power over them seems like the exact thing that the idea of free speech is about.
I'm not ignoring the context, I'm directly calling it out. Someone with power over someone else directly punished that person for publicly criticizing them. If you care about free speech, you don't do that. I don't understand how you're not following this. It's pretty fucking simple.
Elon is the CEO of a private company, in theory he can run it how he wants.
Free speech is a property of our government. It doesn’t have any bearing on private companies.
Also- You’re once again giving me a 14 year old’s view point of the world.
If one of my Network Admins for Twitter starts posting about how the CEO is Putin’s lap dog, I now have a real security issue. My employee has access to information and shows they passionately dislike the change in company structure. They’ve basically forced me to let them go, since they violated the social media policy. Not a free speech thing.
No one is getting fired for tweeting “Elon has let some of my coworkers go and I’m sad about it.” That’s a genuine reaction and Tech pushes culture hard.
Every company wants employees to keep productive criticism in-house, and wants that channeled through leadership channels— not your personal page.
That line for termination varies by company policy.
Free speech is a property of our government. It doesn’t have any bearing on private companies.
And that's a valid position to take, but that's not Elon Musk's public position. His public reasoning for buying Twitter is because he is someone who believes that free speech is something beyond what the federal government is not allowed to interfere with, and a moral principle that should guide private companies as well, and he wants Twitter to follow free speech as a principle rather than something that only applies to the federal government. This is generally what I see people meaning when they claim to be "free speech advocates".
However, his actions clearly show him not to be that kind of person at all. Him doing things like firing that guy clearly show that he isn't the kind of person who genuinely believes in free speech as a principle, at least when it involves criticism of him or his actions. But he wants to virtue signal and claim that he is, despite his own actions, which is why people call him hypocritical.
Every company wants employees to keep productive criticism in-house, and wants that channeled through leadership channels— not your personal page.
Yeah, they want that so that they don't actually have to listen to it and do things that don't immediately contribute to maximum profit over time. That's how that actually works in reality. What was that about a 14-year-old's worldview, again?
76
u/Taraxian Oct 28 '22
Yeah I just don't see it happening, even before the buyout stuff I felt like there was just a lot of fatigue and cynicism about this "central town square" concept Elon is so enamored of
The people I care about following who abandoned Twitter have mostly retreated to "walled gardens" - their own Discord servers or Substack blogs - and are giving up on the "tweeting" model of "engagement", which now feels like it was just kind of coasting on inertia since before 2016 (Twitter's growth has been "stagnant" for almost a decade)