This was making me laugh so hard while reading it. I really want people to go more in depth on colonizing mars being stupid. I feel like someone (here’s looking at you, Matt) could come up with a very funny book on why colonizing Mars is stupid, or I wish someone would at least write a book on why colonizing Mars is not stupid, so I could understand. Every single time I hear about it, it makes my head hurt. Why not colonize the tundra? The North Pole? The Mojave desert?? We have so much empty “unusable” land on our own planet, where there are still things like water and AIR within reach! People like living in nice weather… Los Angeles, Hawaii, Fiji. Why would a billionaire who wouldn’t be caught dead hanging out in, say, Barstowe, CA, want to colonize a place that makes the tundra seem like Fiji??
Matt, there isn’t much I disagree with in your post, but one thing I’ve seen journalists and commentators say over and over again is “the First Amendment doesn’t apply to a private company like Twitter. It only applies to the government.” To be fair, you don’t reach as far as some: “ Twitter is also a private company (and absolutely not a monopoly), thus it has no legal or constitutional obligation to be neutral. There is a question of how free is the speech on the platform, but it’s not a question of the legal concept of Americans’ right to freedom of speech.”
It’s not nor has it ever been so black and white. There’s something called state-action doctrine that says, generally, only action by the state is circumscribed by the constitution. But as with anything else there are exceptions, and some are broad enough to drive a truck through them. Courts have held that the First Amendment applies to company towns, for example.
As much as tribal dynamics are discussed, I think they are still underrated. Most people are loyal to their tribes. Groupthink and punishing those that don’t go along is a big problem. I’m not shedding tears for Elon. He’s doing alright. But this isn’t great for free society. How do we deal with disagreement without turning it into tribal warfare? It’s hard.
So much of the media and political culture today reminds me of high-school, particularly Twitter. It's an insular vat of the worse kind of toxic peer pressure and, at the same time, there is no alternative because if you're in the media, journalism, politics or punditry, Twitter is the only place where all your peers are. I think it's illuminating that Twitter is the social media platform favored by media and political elites, yet it has failed to catch on generally and is dwarfed by just about every other social media platform. My theory is that normal people see it for the toxic and performative cesspool it mostly is and therefore prefer other options to engage with people. Hence why the actual userbase (those who do most of the tweeting) is small and unrepresentative of society.
Anyway, I would much prefer that Musk forget about Twitter and concentrate on his world-changing technologies. Taking over and managing a forum the promotes behavior akin to douchey teenagers likely won't end well. The football players and cheerleaders don't want a band geek running their little forum.
The one good thing in his proposals, though, is to increase the transparency of the platform. If I were to advocate for any piece of government regulation of social media companies, it would be this above all others. In my view it is well past time for the government to give individuals control over their information and how it is used, and to require transparency regarding how posts are manipulated to expose them to more viewers or fewer.
Perhaps this will help put an end to the big lie of social media companies, who try to have it both ways - they half-ass "moderate" some content that their algorithms and black-box polices promote. The want maximum engagement and do just enough content moderation to appease elite scolds. Insert a Wizard of Oz cliché' here.
> An information platform that pairs algorithmic amplification with zero-censorship will relentlessly promote insanity while eroding financial incentives for accurate journalism.
" Twitter’s decision to clamp down on Nazis while letting the hammer-and-sickle crew run wild does not strike me as providing the Democratic Party with any kind of concrete advantages in political competition." :-)
One topic you don't address is the possibility that Musk might get rid off, or at least alter, the algorithmic amplification. You just take it as a given that this is how the platform will work forever.
A really interesting possibility, as raised by Stretechery, is the debundling of the underlying data software from the user facing software making it possible to have various twitters with differing algorithms (or without them, or with the user directing it ...).
“An information platform that pairs algorithmic amplification with zero-censorship will relentlessly promote insanity while eroding financial incentives for accurate journalism.”
I understand the role that social media has played in the dissemination of misinformation and the related erosion of institutional trust. But am I the only person that thinks we aren’t placing enough blame on users of social media? Without a complicit user base, lacking in both the (meager) intelligence and morality required to recognize, and ideally reject, blatant insanity and hatred for what it is, none of this would be possible.
In some ways, this reminiscent of the financial collapse of 2008. Yes, bad actors on Wall Street tapped into human biases to deceive main street while immediately handing off a problem they knowingly (at least, at first) created to someone else. That many financial institutions were left holding the bag that they personally stuffed with the financial equivalent of human feces is still hilarious to me.
But we shouldn’t ignore the sizable roles of Main Street greed and stupidity, both of which allowed Wall Street’s practices to pervade. Taking on a ballooning loan that requires you to get a promotion soon in order to service the debt is both greedy and stupid. Main Street shirks all responsibility for the Mortgage crisis and places blame on Wall Street’s shady lending practices. Yet loan schedules are very easy to create and require only basic arithmetic to understand the underlying mechanics. It takes two to make a loan, after all. And from 2005 to 2007, the personal rate of savings was at its lowest mark since at least the 1960s.
At some point, Main Street needs to accept its share of responsibility and be better, both in terms of social and fiscal responsibility. Otherwise, the next crisis will always be right around the corner.
"free speech is fundamentally about neutrality with regard to content, and the fact is that Twitter is not a neutral platform, not a dumb pipe, and not a utility-type information-disseminator."
What's is so weird about these platform discussions is that in human history there has never been a "neutral platform", a "dumb pipe", a "utility-type information-disseminator". And it's not even clear why or how such a thing could exist.
And yet there are a lot of smart people engaging in this discourse as though such a thing could exist and that it is something we would want.
I don't really care about Elon Musk, but in light of (2), I don't find (1) especially surprising. Maybe that was Matt's point, but by ordering things as he did, he seems to imply that Musk's haters on twitter turned him into a right-curious edgelord, when the causal relationship probably went in the reverse direction.
I don't really care about Elon Musk, but in light of (2), I don't find (1) especially surprising. Maybe that was Matt's point, but by ordering things as he did, he seems to imply that Musk's haters on twitter turned him into a right-curious edgelord, when the causal relationship probably went in the reverse direction.
I think an underrated factor here is that Musk is annoying. He trolls people. He does stupid pump-and-dump stuff with crypto and even his own stocks. His business model relies a lot on being in-your-face and building media buzz. Does this have major policy implications? No, but it does make him the face of an ultra-wealthy class that much of Twitter and the left-leaning media dislikes and would like to seen taken down a notch or two.
I'm expecting a very Trump-esque "Who knew content moderation could be so hard?" tweet from Elon in a few weeks
I personally suspect that Elon Musk has paid $44 billion to exempt himself from Twitter's moderation rules.
This was making me laugh so hard while reading it. I really want people to go more in depth on colonizing mars being stupid. I feel like someone (here’s looking at you, Matt) could come up with a very funny book on why colonizing Mars is stupid, or I wish someone would at least write a book on why colonizing Mars is not stupid, so I could understand. Every single time I hear about it, it makes my head hurt. Why not colonize the tundra? The North Pole? The Mojave desert?? We have so much empty “unusable” land on our own planet, where there are still things like water and AIR within reach! People like living in nice weather… Los Angeles, Hawaii, Fiji. Why would a billionaire who wouldn’t be caught dead hanging out in, say, Barstowe, CA, want to colonize a place that makes the tundra seem like Fiji??
Matt, there isn’t much I disagree with in your post, but one thing I’ve seen journalists and commentators say over and over again is “the First Amendment doesn’t apply to a private company like Twitter. It only applies to the government.” To be fair, you don’t reach as far as some: “ Twitter is also a private company (and absolutely not a monopoly), thus it has no legal or constitutional obligation to be neutral. There is a question of how free is the speech on the platform, but it’s not a question of the legal concept of Americans’ right to freedom of speech.”
It’s not nor has it ever been so black and white. There’s something called state-action doctrine that says, generally, only action by the state is circumscribed by the constitution. But as with anything else there are exceptions, and some are broad enough to drive a truck through them. Courts have held that the First Amendment applies to company towns, for example.
You can read about it in this article that argues community associations should be subject to constitutional limits in the same way. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2089866
I agree with all the points but particularly #21. This is not the best use of Elon’s time.
As much as tribal dynamics are discussed, I think they are still underrated. Most people are loyal to their tribes. Groupthink and punishing those that don’t go along is a big problem. I’m not shedding tears for Elon. He’s doing alright. But this isn’t great for free society. How do we deal with disagreement without turning it into tribal warfare? It’s hard.
Well balanced.
So much of the media and political culture today reminds me of high-school, particularly Twitter. It's an insular vat of the worse kind of toxic peer pressure and, at the same time, there is no alternative because if you're in the media, journalism, politics or punditry, Twitter is the only place where all your peers are. I think it's illuminating that Twitter is the social media platform favored by media and political elites, yet it has failed to catch on generally and is dwarfed by just about every other social media platform. My theory is that normal people see it for the toxic and performative cesspool it mostly is and therefore prefer other options to engage with people. Hence why the actual userbase (those who do most of the tweeting) is small and unrepresentative of society.
Anyway, I would much prefer that Musk forget about Twitter and concentrate on his world-changing technologies. Taking over and managing a forum the promotes behavior akin to douchey teenagers likely won't end well. The football players and cheerleaders don't want a band geek running their little forum.
The one good thing in his proposals, though, is to increase the transparency of the platform. If I were to advocate for any piece of government regulation of social media companies, it would be this above all others. In my view it is well past time for the government to give individuals control over their information and how it is used, and to require transparency regarding how posts are manipulated to expose them to more viewers or fewer.
Perhaps this will help put an end to the big lie of social media companies, who try to have it both ways - they half-ass "moderate" some content that their algorithms and black-box polices promote. The want maximum engagement and do just enough content moderation to appease elite scolds. Insert a Wizard of Oz cliché' here.
> An information platform that pairs algorithmic amplification with zero-censorship will relentlessly promote insanity while eroding financial incentives for accurate journalism.
I found this very insightful.
" Twitter’s decision to clamp down on Nazis while letting the hammer-and-sickle crew run wild does not strike me as providing the Democratic Party with any kind of concrete advantages in political competition." :-)
One topic you don't address is the possibility that Musk might get rid off, or at least alter, the algorithmic amplification. You just take it as a given that this is how the platform will work forever.
A really interesting possibility, as raised by Stretechery, is the debundling of the underlying data software from the user facing software making it possible to have various twitters with differing algorithms (or without them, or with the user directing it ...).
“An information platform that pairs algorithmic amplification with zero-censorship will relentlessly promote insanity while eroding financial incentives for accurate journalism.”
I understand the role that social media has played in the dissemination of misinformation and the related erosion of institutional trust. But am I the only person that thinks we aren’t placing enough blame on users of social media? Without a complicit user base, lacking in both the (meager) intelligence and morality required to recognize, and ideally reject, blatant insanity and hatred for what it is, none of this would be possible.
In some ways, this reminiscent of the financial collapse of 2008. Yes, bad actors on Wall Street tapped into human biases to deceive main street while immediately handing off a problem they knowingly (at least, at first) created to someone else. That many financial institutions were left holding the bag that they personally stuffed with the financial equivalent of human feces is still hilarious to me.
But we shouldn’t ignore the sizable roles of Main Street greed and stupidity, both of which allowed Wall Street’s practices to pervade. Taking on a ballooning loan that requires you to get a promotion soon in order to service the debt is both greedy and stupid. Main Street shirks all responsibility for the Mortgage crisis and places blame on Wall Street’s shady lending practices. Yet loan schedules are very easy to create and require only basic arithmetic to understand the underlying mechanics. It takes two to make a loan, after all. And from 2005 to 2007, the personal rate of savings was at its lowest mark since at least the 1960s.
At some point, Main Street needs to accept its share of responsibility and be better, both in terms of social and fiscal responsibility. Otherwise, the next crisis will always be right around the corner.
"free speech is fundamentally about neutrality with regard to content, and the fact is that Twitter is not a neutral platform, not a dumb pipe, and not a utility-type information-disseminator."
What's is so weird about these platform discussions is that in human history there has never been a "neutral platform", a "dumb pipe", a "utility-type information-disseminator". And it's not even clear why or how such a thing could exist.
And yet there are a lot of smart people engaging in this discourse as though such a thing could exist and that it is something we would want.
“…there has never been a ‘neutral platform’, a ‘dumb pipe’, a ‘utility-type information-disseminator’”
I guess you didn’t use Yik Yak circa 2015.
I don't really care about Elon Musk, but in light of (2), I don't find (1) especially surprising. Maybe that was Matt's point, but by ordering things as he did, he seems to imply that Musk's haters on twitter turned him into a right-curious edgelord, when the causal relationship probably went in the reverse direction.
I don't really care about Elon Musk, but in light of (2), I don't find (1) especially surprising. Maybe that was Matt's point, but by ordering things as he did, he seems to imply that Musk's haters on twitter turned him into a right-curious edgelord, when the causal relationship probably went in the reverse direction.
I think an underrated factor here is that Musk is annoying. He trolls people. He does stupid pump-and-dump stuff with crypto and even his own stocks. His business model relies a lot on being in-your-face and building media buzz. Does this have major policy implications? No, but it does make him the face of an ultra-wealthy class that much of Twitter and the left-leaning media dislikes and would like to seen taken down a notch or two.