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Comment by discardable_dan | Hacker News Reader

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I see a lot of conspiracy theories like this one but zero explanation of motive.

WHY would Musk act as a stooge for the Saudis in this way, at a cost of $44 billion? He's the richest man in the world, he doesn't have to do errands for anyone.

"Parag hurt his feelings, so he impulsively and vengefully made a buyout offer. He almost immediately came to his senses, and unsuccessfully tried for months to wiggle out of the deal" fits the fact pattern. Once he realized he actually had to try and run the thing, he failed. It's a lot simpler than the Saudi thing.

He's the richest man in the world partially because he's desperate for money. Being bottomlessly greedy is a necessary prerequisite to being a multibillionaire, any normal person would retire before they get there. And although he's one of the wealthiest people in the world, his wealth is dwarfed by that of the Saudi state.

How is Saudi Arabia paying him without anyone noticing?

I wonder if anyone is checking if they arent pushing Tesla stock price high.

Also who exactly financed the purchase of Twitter?

Morgan Stanley Bank of America Larry Ellison, (ORACLE co-founder) Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal

If Saudis wanted it why would they have to do it by proxy of Elon Musk. What a bizarre theory.

Maybe they promised him free rocket fuel and a launchpad where he doesn't have to care about safety. Complete speculation on my part.

Technically the Saudi PIF and the Saudi ownership of Aramco, which runs into trillions, is all property of the Saudi royalty, and increasingly the personal property of the current rulers, father and son. So no, Musk isn't the richest man on the planet.

Musk has been accused of bringing anti-Muslim content to the attention of his millions of followers (like Amy Mek's tweets about the France riots and other things[0]) and I'm sure that wouldn't sit well with Saudi Arabia.

I understand worries of Musk supporting the right, but your interpretation is a unique one that seems highly unlikely.

[0] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1671397462043512833

Saudi Arabia doesn't care about Muslims and Yada Yada. If they did, where's the outcry over Uighurs and what not? Saudi Arabia just cares about one thing and that's securing the interests of the royal Al Saud family.

It's Musk we're talking about here, so Hanlon's Razor probably applies. Unlike his other companies he doesn't have handlers to mitigate his poor decision-making.

I think his main issue here is that quickly trying lots of things to see what works works way better with cars than social networks.

Well, if you don't mind your cars randomly catching fire...

Is it really suppressing liberal discourse, or is the new Twitter balancing the sides by letting the conservative discourse run freely? It’s a common fallacy for folks to think that just because they are seeing tweets from the opposite side more that they think their side is being suppressed

Many have doubted Elon Musk during the early days of Tesla and SpaceX thinking he was incompetent in running those companies and the goals were lofty. People still doubt him with as much ferocity as his fans that adore him. It’s super fascinating IMO.

That being said, I do think Instagram will have some success with threads the same way Reels has been successful in fending off TikTok (as in not made completely irrelevant). People who share on TikTok also cross post on IG reels for more views and for eyeballs that are not on TikTok. I think the same thing will happen, where there will be some crossposting. Twitter still has a large audience - that will still make it relevant for some time.

From an Indian perspective, from the Twitter files, shadow banning 40k accounts 99 percent of them being conservative while all the while saying they aren’t doing anything like this was shady. Add to that there was no prep to the accounts too, it was just provided without any evidence by an online only news publisher who recently posted fake news about Facebook and got caught.

Why the down vote ? Reference from times of India https://m.timesofindia.com/world/uk/twitter-files-reveal-hin...

Article from 2019 Twitter denying any such shadow bans are occurring https://theprint.in/politics/new-allegation-against-twitter-...

Another reference from bbc that shows wire.in removing fake articles about Facebook/meta https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-63226111

If I’m missing something here let me know, I don’t want to be misinformed

Because twitter files are mostly a crock of shit.

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/06/06/tech/twitter-files-lawyer...

Do you happen to have a different source handy that presents the same content?

I read it 3 times, the headline and content do not match, and it doesn't negate anything about shadow banning Indian Twitter accounts

I think this is a different situation to Tiktok. What Reels did was slow the growth of tiktok, by creating the same product that 18 year olds loved, but for the more mature 25-30+ demographic of instagram.

But twitter isn't growing. There isn't an audience for a new twitter for people who haven't used twitter before, because everyone who is a potential user for twitter has already tried it.

So I don't see where the growth will come from, unless meta can force lots of instagram users to actually START using text only. But then they aren't actually destroying twitter, just creating a parallel product for a different audience.

When you say "conservative" do you mean "blatant hate speech"?

Why does conservative == hate speech? Hate speech isn’t allowed on Twitter - I have not seen that happen without swiftly being modded out. If anything, I am seeing both sides of arguments in topics. There has been more nsfw images and porn. Will be interesting to see how disinformation operates in the new Twitter and if Community Notes can mitigate that

I was asking. I was asking because that was the only way I could make good sense of your comment. Musk did not change Twitter to allow conservative voices: conservative voices were already perfectly welcome on Twitter. The big change to Twitter under Musk was that he allowed hate speech and targetted harassment. (Or, rather, allowed more hate speech: there was already quite a bit.)

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