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Comment by Yizahi | Hacker News Reader

The best thing about Starship test is that Elon will (hopefully) shut up about Twitter and focus on the important things instead of garbage.

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Twitter files show that there's a MASSIVE disinformation and censorship industry in the US government. It looks like they use shady NGO's to push government sponsored disinformation and to censor civilians:

https://stanfordreview.org/stanfords-dark-hand-in-twitter-ce...

https://nypost.com/2023/03/24/malinformation-censors-excuse-...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/white-house-covid-censorship-ma...

That's only garbage if you believe democracy and liberty are garbage.

do you suppose that is the real reason Elon bought Twitter? To gain insight into that?

it's a bit fun to imagine that is the case. It is reminiscent of the "buy the whole farm" scam discussed in the film "Django Unchained". In which a huge outlandish performance is made with the stated intent to buy one seemingly desirable (in the eyes of the seller) item, but buyer's the real item of interest is disguised as just something that comes as part of the sale.

He's stated multiple times he bought it because of freedom of speech.

Whether or not he suspected NGOs were involved in the censorship on the governments behalf is uncertain, but the goal of a global communication medium that embraced freedom of speech were his main stated goals.

> He's stated multiple times he bought it because of freedom of speech.

Can we trust such a statement at face value? Should we?

That's a personal question that I can't answer for you.

I do, but I assume you don't. That's fine, carry on.

It sounds like you never saw Django. The stated goal of the heros was to buy a slave from his owner to use for brutal boxing matches, but what they really wanted to buy was the freedom of Django's wife. The purchase of the boxing slave was a ruse because there was no way the slaver would have even met with the heros if they just asked to buy the wife on her own.

My original comment was just to imagine if Elon Musk was running the same scam as in the movie when he bought Twitter. I'm not saying he did the scam, just that it would be fun if he did.

By way of support for my silly imagination: there was a bit of theatrics with the purchase and the law suit. And it's not impossible to imagine that he may have lied about the freedom of speech reason.

Yeah, that's why he has a Ukrainian "Crisis" category in his algorithm alongside misinformation, antivaxxers, criminals and porn. Amazing freedom of information, except when it is inconvenient for his alt-right friends like Trump, or himself personally.

I'm not quite aware about the govenment overreach, I'll check it later, but so far Shitter has been a dumpster fire of misinformation and spam, and Musk is keeping it that way.

> do you suppose that is the real reason Elon bought Twitter? To gain insight into that?

Or to gain control over it, therefore gaining political power as well.

This is how the US interfere in others countries' affairs through layers of NGOs, foundations, offering sabbaticals, fellowships, etc. Good to see that they can apply same techniques to their own population.

As person from "other-country" I'm all for USA so called "interference" in any form and size. Because alternative is an occupation by shitholes like China, Russia and so on. USA so called "interference" usually brings progress and civilization, while quite real interference of anti-americans brings conservatism, corruption, slavery and general degradation. This works like a clockwork, all across the globe.

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