What normies are fairly noticing in these corps is moderating not by the overton window of the normal consumer, but by the overton window of the managerial class who run the business.
Now the question is, why is the managerial class so weird and creepy? The Gemini images didn’t come out of left field—that’s what Hollywood movies look like these days too. Random non-white people in contexts where it makes no sense, or racially balanced friend/family groups that don’t map onto how people actually associate in real life.
My family looks like one of those Gemini images—my brother and I are south Asian, my wife is British American, her brother is Samoan/black/Asian, his girlfriend is Filipino, and my sister in law is Taiwanese. But it’s a fluke—you don’t see that much mixing organically pretty much anywhere. The overwhelming majority of people are in same-race marriages and have homogenous circles of friends. The world still looks like Friends or Seinfeld, not whatever Hollywood is showing recently. So it’s very creepy to me that there are a bunch of people in Hollywood deliberately making casting choices with these unrealistic representations—or, as in the case of Gemini, inserting hidden text into prompts to achieve that effect—as if somehow my family is better than one that’s all white or all Filipino. The contrived nature of it makes race seem like a big deal, instead of something irrelevant, and it’s creepy and weird.
What's weird and creepy is the discomfort with people's preferences and the imposition of their own in such a non-transparent way.
It's also clear for things to have gotten this bad they have to be repressing employees into not saying the emperor wears no clothes.
this isn’t new, isn’t hard, and isn’t limited to the context being discussed. (nor is it ubiquitous.)
you want paycheck? you say right things and not wrong things. you be right way and not wrong way. who decides right and wrong? who gives paycheck.
Seems to me he simultaneously put out a dogwhistle for one audience (far right commentators agree on this) and was openly hostile both to individuals and standard sensibilities among another audience (e.g. it’s distasteful to treat employees of your newly acquired company the way he did).
That could fully explain “the shift” without any “omg conspiracy Overton window biased moderation” mumbo jumbo.
Agreed on the general point, this stuff can’t really be disaggregated in a meaningful way, but of course it doesn’t need to be disaggregated: the overall set of Musk’s decisions have been extremely destructive to the company (so far).
I realize my poor grammar made it difficult to fully capture what I was trying to say.
My core argument is that I have now seen twice what looks like Yishan making excuses for moderation decisions that fall outside most people's discourse window.
I also am not making claims about what makes more money. It could possibly be true that people with a particular political pursuasion are more likely to convert.
Purely for revenue maximization, I think it would be optimal to give each user a view through their own personal Overton window. However, people in positions of power often find additional goals beyond merely maximizing revenue. Such as "moving" that Overton window.