It is interesting how much influence Peter Thiel has on the main players of social media: via Facebook as an early investor and ex-board member and via Twitter with his ex-coworker from Paypal days Musk. He’s very explicit in his book about the power of monopolies and now you see this consolidation of social media companies under a specific group of closed people. WSJ reported Thiel being involved with Musk on this twitter deal, that plus his recent political investments in certain figures, did he figure out that they are not getting the same bang for buck with this ban in play? Dorsey has a financial interest of this deal going through, last I heard was at least 1 billion. So he’ll start saying yes to whatever pops up to let this go through and even more incentive with the recent downturn of tech stocks that are not profitable.
I doubt Thiel is some kind of central master mind behind all this. Musk seems quite independently driven and probably found this a necessary move with only minor chats with thiel (if any). I'm not sure Thiel has any more or less influence than Sam Altman or Paul Graham.
You don't need any conspiracies theories to explain why Dorsey is a supporter of free speech.
Dorsey has always been part of the crop of Enlightenment-liberal tech CEOs, which includes Larry, Sergey, and Zuckerberg. It got memory-holed pretty quickly, but these guys were dragged kicking and screaming into the new illiberal consensus that it was their job to decide what users are allowed to talk about. At a certain point, they bowed to the emerging illiberal consensus, for fear of both political and employee-revolt consequences. It is business, after all.
(I was at Google for the first half of the last decade, and it was eerie to see the employee culture slowly get colonized by the culty illiberal-left perspective)
Culture is weird, and can shift dramatically between equilibria. Now that the conversation has shifted, a lot of these figures feel like they have cover to start expressing their beliefs again without those who disagree being able to gin up any financial consequences.
Is there just a different set of free speech rules for the rich and powerful? If I incited violence on the platform, I doubt Elon or Dorsey would be letting me come back after a ban.
If the president is publicly instigating toward North Korea on your platform, arguably you have the responsibility to allow people to witness what's being said. In the same way, CNN arguably has the responsibility to broadcast it if he was recorded by their cameras.
It's probably not in the public interest to broadcast every person's incitations of violence or bigotry, but the president? Yes. Certainly you're not implying you should be treated exactly the same as the president of the United States...
The great irony is that you can't really do much to incite violence, no matter how hard you try; the rich and powerful, with their large platforms and massive followings, can do it with very little effort.
> Is there just a different set of free speech rules for the rich and powerful?
Yes, just like there's one for left wing vs right wing. Trump was banned for violence for saying he won't attend the inauguration. Yet tweets calling for violence against the right are allowed. Many of them are years old.
> Is there just a different set of free speech rules for the rich and powerful?
Of course there is. Twitter's owner appoint managers who hire people to oversee censorship on the platform. These choices themselves are already biased towards the owners' interests and points of view. If you add to this ability of rich and powerful people/organizations to harass or influence Twitter, the bias is even stronger.
Having said that - the tweet Trump was suspended for:
It's not surprising that someone who sounds like a sort of free speech absolutist agrees that permanent bans are bad for the idea of free and accessible speech.
The problem I have with some free speech purists is that they give me a feeling that they are persons who are more often than not unaffected by speech that can be categorised as inciting hatred towards a people, and thus they see little to no problem with being able to spread harmful bad faith speech freely on an algorithmic social media site - or any place for that matter.
It's a tricky thing for which there are no real correct answers. What I do know is that socially and politically we have several unwritten rules about what, where and how to speak about things because not abiding by those rules results in things as minor as slight embarrassment to as severe as physical violence. That is to say, things can spiral out of hand and the usefulness of speech deteriorates if some standards are not kept.
Twitter shouldn't be the judge of what an American president can say, because the American people should have already filtered out a person of such low integrity from gaining a position in such a high public office. All this time I've felt amused by how much our American friends can talk about what should or shouldn't Twitter do, but seemingly never discuss how they can as a society make sure that the executive office doesn't get filled by someone who brought their entire democratic process to disrepute.
To conclude, I think if you aren't scared of what another Trump can do to your country or its societal fabric or your personal freedoms then I see no reason why a Dorsey doesn't think Trump should be allowed to come back. The women of his country already saw what one term of Trump did to the rights they thought they had. Not all political turmoil is scary for those who are safe from politics.
"The problem I have with some free speech purists is that they give me a feeling that they are persons who are more often than not unaffected by speech"
There's a mirror image problem though: people in favor of regulations on speech have little reason to fear that their speech will be limited, at least in the short term. Regulators are politically-correct, so if you are politically-correct, what's the problem? (Obviously: bad things can become politically-correct, too.)
I don't agree with government regulation of what should or should not be in a site's code of conduct. Requiring codes of conduct to be enforced equally on all users, however, merits some thought.
But then the entire business model becomes even less viable than it already is. Twitter and other social media have to rely on outsourced overworked and underpaid reviewers who will never have the time or training understand context (regularly receiving veiled threats[1] and not having anyone act on them made me quit twitter) and make thousands of decisions per hour. It doesn't scale any other way.
I think the other side of the argument has value though. If Twitter is large enough that it has such huge social impact rivalling that of governments, why should a single ceo or board be able to make these decisions.
We shouldn’t be expecting or perhaps even allowing twitter to make these calls at this scale. Twitter is beyond just a private company offering a product. It’s now a serious utility.
A ban on a web site is usually driven by one or more violations of Terms of Service. Some of those Terms of Service are linked to criminal laws and the company wants to protect itself from being prosecuted, liable to damages, etc.
I dislike the use of the words "freedom of speech" when it comes to social media/web sites because uneducated people seem to think a ban is a violation of the 1st US amendment. Which is even sillier when a website allows users globally. I doubt the conversations will suddenly change to "freedom to violate ToS" but I feel like there is a better wording than "freedom of speech".
If a camping website banned content about Bigfoot because they wanted to and you posted something about Bigfoot and got banned, its not a freedom of speech issue, its more like a "No Shirt, No, Shoes = No Service" issue.
Freedom of speech is just a loose concept. The first amendment is an implementation of freedom of speech. It’s still accurate for a business to say they support and implement freedom of speech even if they are not legally obligated to.
Honestly, this entire thing is ridiculous. The logic behind Dorsey's comment on this is essentially "I don't think Trump should've been banned for his actions but I didn't feel comfortable saying so at the time. So I banned him, waited for the fuss to die down, and now I'm going to change my mind because I've got political cover".
The only good thing I think that will come from this deal is that Musk will be direct about his absurd position where Dorsey was two-faced. It's absolutely wild to see Dorsey essentially publicly admit that he disagreed with most of his own decisions running twitter.
I mean that was the whole reason Musk bought twitter, you will never convince me otherwise.
But are there things that can get you banned on the "new" twitter?
Because then any concern about unbanning him and similar is a moot point because they will be banned again within a month or two as long as rules are enforced.
However I am dubious rules will be enforced. I think everything is going to be "nudge nudge wink wink".
Before this turns into a culture-war-fest consider this: if Twitter is to be a global platform, it probably should NOT take political sides and if it is to censor anyone permanently, it should mostly adhere to local courts and similar entities. It's not about Trump or United States. It's about everyone else.
World is a really messy place. It's not very easy generally to decided if in a political conflict one or other party has moral high ground. For instance we have several Nobel peace price winners now participating in plausible genocide (Aung Sang Suu Kyi and Abiy Ahmed). Who has the moral high ground? I have no frigging idea, but I don't think an unelected corporation should decide either.
If Twitter takes the side Trump is a crook and should be perma-banned, this creates a precedent for silencing the voices of opposition voices around the globe.
Edit: I mean in the context if Twitter is designed to be a fair medium for anyone to express themselves. Of course it does not have to be like that and can block anyone without infringing anyones rights as such.
On January 8, 2021, President Donald J. Trump Tweeted:
“The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!”
Shortly thereafter, the President Tweeted:
“To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.”
Those two tweets are perma-ban worthy? I'm glad nobody has paid attention to what I typed into region chat in MMOs for the past 20 years...
That blog post looks pretty bad here in 2022. The rationale to justify the suspension is vague enough that anyone could be suspended for just about any reason. There is a lot of weasel phrasing in it ("...may also serve as encouragement" [according to who?], "...is being received by a number of his supporters" [who?], "...also being interpreted" [again, by who?], "...is being interpreted..." [by who?]).
It reminds me of forums I was on in the early 2000s; moderators would ban unsavory folks. How that actually happens is not "a rule is broken leads to a ban", but rather, rules are combed through when a ban is desired.
Wow, I didn’t realize those were the tweets he was banned for. That blog post includes some pretty twisted mental gymnastics to try and explain how those tweets justify their decision.
You're leaving out the fact that those tweets were sent two days after an insurrection in which Trump used Twitter to target the Vice President with a mob. In the days thereafter, Trump was being urged to cool things down because tensions were still red hot. Instead, he refused to back off the very narrative that got people fired up enough to literally assault our democratic process. There was a legitimate worry that he was still using Twitter to signal to his supporters (who again, had just sacked the capitol) that they should attack the inauguration of Joe Biden next. That was the real and legitimate concern at the time.
How many insurrections are you willing to let Trump coordinate on your platform? Two? More?
Honestly, this whole "Elon Musk is the enemy" narrative has to take a self-reflection.
"Current Twitter" – the one that is supposingly the angel of protecting the will of the people – got Trump elected. Full stop. Trump's tweets were promoted by Twitter. So in the life time of Twitter, "Current Twitter" wants to take credit for the last 5 seconds? Good luck with that.
It is baffling that people think a person should be permanently banned from access to any "public forum", which Twitter has become.
To the people deriding Trump, you do recognize that no actual criminals are prevented from excersing speech? Even if you believe he is a criminal, the law of this country does not agree. You dislike him, great. You don't get to remove everything that you disagree with from a public forum.
To the ideologues believing that Republicans are destroying 'democracy', recall that this country is a constutional republic and the reason is because pure democracy, or majority rule, degrades to mob rule. To not make the mistake of equating freedom with democracy.
Not all votes are equal! What blasphemy! Not all people are engaged, informed and care about preserving the sovereignty of the nation. We have a system designed to keep those people from destroying our liberty.
The system allows the people to pick representatives who are sworn by oath to act as an informed and engaged agent on their behalf.
Our duty is to try our best to pick those agents that will put aside their interests and live by their oath.
Should there be a Penal/Criminal Code for Social Media violations rather than indefinite bans?
Edit: By the respective tech companies not something enforced by any branch of government.
In germany, there is. What the courts will make of those laws is still TBD.
Regimes do copy these laws to put anti state opinions behind bars, though.
It's hard to find a middle ground, mostly depending on culture and acceptable offenses by both believers in a message and feelings of people hurt by offensive proposals or hateful speech.
I think moderation is at the discretion of the content provider. I endorse banning Trump and I also endorse unbanning Trump. That's how the first amendment works.
So I guess Hitler would not have been banned from Twitter under Elon Musks rule? Because inciting violence is free speech as long as someone else does the bad deeds.
Seems like they're making slightly different arguments. Dorsey is saying it was wrong to permenantly ban, rather than suspend Trump.
He's also saying it was a business decision, and it shouldn't have been. Honestly I don't know what that means. Every decision Twitter makes is a business decision. He violated the rules repeatedly and got away with it, I think it was absolutely the right choice.
[+] [-] lalos|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] natly|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wutbrodo|3 years ago|reply
Dorsey has always been part of the crop of Enlightenment-liberal tech CEOs, which includes Larry, Sergey, and Zuckerberg. It got memory-holed pretty quickly, but these guys were dragged kicking and screaming into the new illiberal consensus that it was their job to decide what users are allowed to talk about. At a certain point, they bowed to the emerging illiberal consensus, for fear of both political and employee-revolt consequences. It is business, after all.
(I was at Google for the first half of the last decade, and it was eerie to see the employee culture slowly get colonized by the culty illiberal-left perspective)
Culture is weird, and can shift dramatically between equilibria. Now that the conversation has shifted, a lot of these figures feel like they have cover to start expressing their beliefs again without those who disagree being able to gin up any financial consequences.
[+] [-] jason-phillips|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] importantmsg|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] importantmsg|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ricardoplouis|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lkxijlewlf|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hbosch|3 years ago|reply
It's probably not in the public interest to broadcast every person's incitations of violence or bigotry, but the president? Yes. Certainly you're not implying you should be treated exactly the same as the president of the United States...
[+] [-] banannaise|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dhzhzjsbevs|3 years ago|reply
Anyhoo, what's that got to do with twitter? Since when did they become the police?
[+] [-] haunter|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xdennis|3 years ago|reply
Yes, just like there's one for left wing vs right wing. Trump was banned for violence for saying he won't attend the inauguration. Yet tweets calling for violence against the right are allowed. Many of them are years old.
You can search for yourself. Example:
* https://twitter.com/bobmorr32749439/status/15240565867375042... : "kill putin and trump and all the Republicans"
* https://twitter.com/gnarlyymarleyy/status/131111964852019609... : "can someone just assassinate trump so we can be done w this PLEASE"
[+] [-] einpoklum|3 years ago|reply
Of course there is. Twitter's owner appoint managers who hire people to oversee censorship on the platform. These choices themselves are already biased towards the owners' interests and points of view. If you add to this ability of rich and powerful people/organizations to harass or influence Twitter, the bias is even stronger.
Having said that - the tweet Trump was suspended for:
https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio...
does not seem like an incitement of violence.
[+] [-] arundi2|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] s1artibartfast|3 years ago|reply
“To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.”
Compare this "incitement to violence" against public posts calling for assassination of trump which were neither removed or resulted in bans.
[+] [-] originalvichy|3 years ago|reply
The problem I have with some free speech purists is that they give me a feeling that they are persons who are more often than not unaffected by speech that can be categorised as inciting hatred towards a people, and thus they see little to no problem with being able to spread harmful bad faith speech freely on an algorithmic social media site - or any place for that matter.
It's a tricky thing for which there are no real correct answers. What I do know is that socially and politically we have several unwritten rules about what, where and how to speak about things because not abiding by those rules results in things as minor as slight embarrassment to as severe as physical violence. That is to say, things can spiral out of hand and the usefulness of speech deteriorates if some standards are not kept.
Twitter shouldn't be the judge of what an American president can say, because the American people should have already filtered out a person of such low integrity from gaining a position in such a high public office. All this time I've felt amused by how much our American friends can talk about what should or shouldn't Twitter do, but seemingly never discuss how they can as a society make sure that the executive office doesn't get filled by someone who brought their entire democratic process to disrepute.
To conclude, I think if you aren't scared of what another Trump can do to your country or its societal fabric or your personal freedoms then I see no reason why a Dorsey doesn't think Trump should be allowed to come back. The women of his country already saw what one term of Trump did to the rights they thought they had. Not all political turmoil is scary for those who are safe from politics.
[+] [-] chmod600|3 years ago|reply
There's a mirror image problem though: people in favor of regulations on speech have little reason to fear that their speech will be limited, at least in the short term. Regulators are politically-correct, so if you are politically-correct, what's the problem? (Obviously: bad things can become politically-correct, too.)
[+] [-] causi|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sascha_sl|3 years ago|reply
[1]: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=join%20the%2...
[+] [-] Gigachad|3 years ago|reply
We shouldn’t be expecting or perhaps even allowing twitter to make these calls at this scale. Twitter is beyond just a private company offering a product. It’s now a serious utility.
[+] [-] matt_s|3 years ago|reply
I dislike the use of the words "freedom of speech" when it comes to social media/web sites because uneducated people seem to think a ban is a violation of the 1st US amendment. Which is even sillier when a website allows users globally. I doubt the conversations will suddenly change to "freedom to violate ToS" but I feel like there is a better wording than "freedom of speech".
If a camping website banned content about Bigfoot because they wanted to and you posted something about Bigfoot and got banned, its not a freedom of speech issue, its more like a "No Shirt, No, Shoes = No Service" issue.
[+] [-] Gigachad|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sascha_sl|3 years ago|reply
Trump got the white glove treatment of actually evaluating his compliance with the TOS, likely with an actual lawyer involved too.
[+] [-] belter|3 years ago|reply
"Permanent suspension of @realDonaldTrump":
https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio...
Jack Dorsey at the time:
"Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Calls Trump Ban After Deadly Riot 'the Right Decision'":
https://people.com/politics/twitter-ceo-jack-dorsey-addresse...
[+] [-] teekert|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dncornholio|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SilverBirch|3 years ago|reply
The only good thing I think that will come from this deal is that Musk will be direct about his absurd position where Dorsey was two-faced. It's absolutely wild to see Dorsey essentially publicly admit that he disagreed with most of his own decisions running twitter.
[+] [-] ajsnigrutin|3 years ago|reply
Seriously, web developers, stop it!
[+] [-] tomlin|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ck2|3 years ago|reply
But are there things that can get you banned on the "new" twitter?
Because then any concern about unbanning him and similar is a moot point because they will be banned again within a month or two as long as rules are enforced.
However I am dubious rules will be enforced. I think everything is going to be "nudge nudge wink wink".
[+] [-] fsloth|3 years ago|reply
World is a really messy place. It's not very easy generally to decided if in a political conflict one or other party has moral high ground. For instance we have several Nobel peace price winners now participating in plausible genocide (Aung Sang Suu Kyi and Abiy Ahmed). Who has the moral high ground? I have no frigging idea, but I don't think an unelected corporation should decide either.
If Twitter takes the side Trump is a crook and should be perma-banned, this creates a precedent for silencing the voices of opposition voices around the globe.
Edit: I mean in the context if Twitter is designed to be a fair medium for anyone to express themselves. Of course it does not have to be like that and can block anyone without infringing anyones rights as such.
[+] [-] NDizzle|3 years ago|reply
https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio...
On January 8, 2021, President Donald J. Trump Tweeted:
“The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!”
Shortly thereafter, the President Tweeted:
“To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.”
Those two tweets are perma-ban worthy? I'm glad nobody has paid attention to what I typed into region chat in MMOs for the past 20 years...
[+] [-] cityofdelusion|3 years ago|reply
It reminds me of forums I was on in the early 2000s; moderators would ban unsavory folks. How that actually happens is not "a rule is broken leads to a ban", but rather, rules are combed through when a ban is desired.
[+] [-] jwond|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ModernMech|3 years ago|reply
How many insurrections are you willing to let Trump coordinate on your platform? Two? More?
[+] [-] tomlin|3 years ago|reply
"Current Twitter" – the one that is supposingly the angel of protecting the will of the people – got Trump elected. Full stop. Trump's tweets were promoted by Twitter. So in the life time of Twitter, "Current Twitter" wants to take credit for the last 5 seconds? Good luck with that.
[+] [-] upsidesinclude|3 years ago|reply
To the people deriding Trump, you do recognize that no actual criminals are prevented from excersing speech? Even if you believe he is a criminal, the law of this country does not agree. You dislike him, great. You don't get to remove everything that you disagree with from a public forum.
To the ideologues believing that Republicans are destroying 'democracy', recall that this country is a constutional republic and the reason is because pure democracy, or majority rule, degrades to mob rule. To not make the mistake of equating freedom with democracy.
Not all votes are equal! What blasphemy! Not all people are engaged, informed and care about preserving the sovereignty of the nation. We have a system designed to keep those people from destroying our liberty.
The system allows the people to pick representatives who are sworn by oath to act as an informed and engaged agent on their behalf.
Our duty is to try our best to pick those agents that will put aside their interests and live by their oath.
[+] [-] sc90|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] a3w|3 years ago|reply
Regimes do copy these laws to put anti state opinions behind bars, though.
It's hard to find a middle ground, mostly depending on culture and acceptable offenses by both believers in a message and feelings of people hurt by offensive proposals or hateful speech.
[+] [-] stillbourne|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ljw1001|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thunkshift1|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] a3w|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vlunkr|3 years ago|reply
He's also saying it was a business decision, and it shouldn't have been. Honestly I don't know what that means. Every decision Twitter makes is a business decision. He violated the rules repeatedly and got away with it, I think it was absolutely the right choice.
[+] [-] s1artibartfast|3 years ago|reply
It means the decision was driven by which option drives higher profit, and not a moral position.
[+] [-] LightG|3 years ago|reply
The last couple of years have been a breath of fresh air ...
The only time I notice Trump now is from his loser supporters posting Shorts on Youtube believing he'll make a come back.
Anyone who believes that taking him off twitter didn't stabilise the political temperature is in la la land.