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Comment by WinstonSmith84 | Hacker News Reader

> He’s taking an underperforming social network and trying to make it work.

Few would argue that it works better now than before

> Perhaps its just that people don’t like his personality, I suppose it's more complicated:

- he promised "freedom of speech" and Twitter has rather become "freedom of hate"

- he is taking constantly controversial political positions, usually favoring dictators, and this doesn't resonate very well in the western world

Maybe people just wish he would have stayed the way he was: a sort of fascinating "Doc Brown" rather than yet another average billionaire pushing political ideas through his wealth and popularity.

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> Few would argue that it works better now than before

Maybe in the social circles you stick to, but there are plenty of /other/ people (i.e. more than a "few") that are quite happy that the 80% of employees doing their jobs were let go. [1]

https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598822959866683394

Is Matt Taibbi implied to be one of those happy people?

'Matt Taibbi, a journalist who worked on the “Twitter Files” series of articles about old business decisions at Twitter, has said he’ll no longer use the social media platform. Taibbi is apparently frustrated by Twitter’s recent decision to heavily restrict all links and tweets about Substack following that company’s announcement it would be launching Substack Notes, a short form social network and potential competitor to Twitter. Any Twitter user who even tries to retweet a post from Substack is met with a notification, “some actions on this Tweet have been disabled by Twitter,” a move that has angered many users, including Taibbi.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattnovak/2023/04/07/twitter-fi...

> Is Matt Taibbi implied to be one of those happy people?

Not specifically. That's why I linked to content from him, and not his profile page.

It is better for favoring free speech over censorship. Dictators don't favor free speech whatsoever. You've been gaslight into believing the opposite. Tyrants censor people with any justification they can get their hands on, including "hate speech".

We accept speech we don't like to avoid this very trap.

Oh, bosh. Don’t be absurd. Elon demonstrably isn’t “favoring free speech over censorship.” He’s just choosing different speech to favor and to censor.

Oddly enough, he tends to favor hate groups and dictators: “Twitter’s compliance with government demands for censorship or surveillance has risen [during Musk’s tenure] to over 80%, from around 50%.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/04/elon-musk-...

https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/amp/rcna81961

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/06/elon-musk-free-speec...

https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7zm9q/elon-musk-twitter-naz...

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