It's frustrating that anything related to X/Twitter is such a predictably-partisan tinderbox because this is really interesting technical information. Thank you for sharing it!
We've been living in a fantasy land of "no political affiliation" in the tech world for decades, and now that the age of the hyper-rich has come once again, they are realizing the benefits of using the power they wield to shape the worlds they live in.
So now in the early stages of this century's great fight, we'll see our beloved tech giants join the political fray in full force, dragging their follower armies along for the ride.
And it works, too. Just look at the comments here.
When has the rich not been more or less 1:1 with The Powers That Be(tm)?
The form changes with the sands of time, but the essence is always the same.
Which "we" are you speaking for? That doesn't sound like the tech world, we've had a lot of explicitly political tech movements over the years. Off the top of my head some of the more successful and major ones were:
- Cryptography.
- Free Software.
- Cryptocurrency.
The Silicon Valley based companies have been politically active since at least 2016, there have been a couple of political exoduses by various groups to alternative platforms. The non-Silicon-Valley companies have been worse and generally suspect to the point where nobody expected political apathy (is anyone going to claim that Chinese social media are not politically subordinate to the state?).
"Political affiliation" is much narrower and comes with a specific named politician or political party — even if they're not going to get in, such as Lord Buckethead or the Green Party of America.
That was the tipping point. Before Trump, it was common to hear techies in the Bay Area proudly proclaim that they didn't concern themselves with politics. (Reminds me of the way aristocratic Europeans talk about commerce.)
Tech always had views on policy. But it wasn't outwardly opinionated on politics, certainly not partisan politics, in the overt (and influential) way that it is today.
Sure. But Elon changed teams. He used to be bipartisan. But he chose a champion in the aftermath of Covid and--by the looks of it--he's chosen a bad one.
(In an alternate universe where Musk stuck to what he's good at, I could see the entire Artemis programme being delegated to SpaceX and a bipartisan adoption of Tesla as America's EV standard bearer. Instead, there is real political capital in creating a rival to SpaceX. And Tesla is going to have to constantly be on the defence against cheap Chinese imports from the Democrats and establishment Republicans.)
He has always said, for many years, that he got into SpaceX to work towards the goal of making humans a multiplanetary species, and he got into electric cars to work towards the goal of having a sustainable energy society.
I think he legitimately believes that “the woke mind virus” is an existential threat to our society, and if that threat isn’t addressed then the other goals don’t matter because society will collapse before they can be realized.
From a near term business perspective his political actions are dumb, but from a personal motivation perspective they make total sense.
Or in other words, Musk is primarily driven by a savior complex, not greed (which is unfortunate for investors).
Sure. I don't think he's a hypocrite. He has, however, hyper fixated on a topic that's in vogue in tech circles but totally irrelevant elsewhere.
Unlike in technology, where one can credibly fail upwards, doing that in politics comes at the cost of influence. And in this block order we're seeing, tangibly, the consequences of Elon Musk's deteriorating influence.
Wokeism as it pertains to social media's discussion of the woke mind virus. Everyone has an opinion on it. But it's not of practical relevance to most people, certainly not most voters. Sort of like modern art.
Yes, like modern art. It’s talked about a lot. But it’s an obsession of a few and irrelevant to most Americans.
Yes, like modern art. It’s talked about a lot, especially by a particular core who gain money and influence from it. But it’s an obsession of a few and irrelevant to most Americans. It certainly doesn’t build one a national platform.
but – I do think that there are elements of the “woke mind virus” that are okay with censorship. I don’t think that censorship has any place in a democracy, and I do think it is a problem we need to address.
The executive branch asked Twitter to ban a NY Post story on the grounds that it was misinformation when it wasn’t. It was “malinformation”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malinformation
They didn’t correct the record, and Ro Khanna emailed Twitter to cut that shit out: https://www.businessinsider.com/khanna-emailed-twitter-free-...
I really don’t like Elon, but I fear the previous Twitter censors more. Media is supposed to keep the government in check and not the other way around.
The Twitter/X experiment seems to have primarily succeeded in demonstrating that nobody has good solutions for this problem, and just repeating words like “misinformation” and “free speech” doesn’t get us any closer to a solution.
Props to Bluesky for trying something else, at least.
Some friends have an ancap libertarian and they were targeted before.
Woke content is not censored and you can find it on X, it's just that most left-wing people left for alternatives.
I went to bluesky briefly and I was inundated by transgender explicit content. I didn't open it again.
That kind of monarch-like behavior didn’t exist on Twitter before Musk. Their protocols for hiding and removing content may have been very flawed, but at least there was a process.
Then let’s not focus on some made up boogeyman and ignore the fact that in 2020, the executive at the time was happily reaching out to Twitter and other platforms asking them to remove posts. The guy Musk is supporting was happily asking Twitter to remove posts.
But let’s be clear, they were asking Twitter to enforce its rules. And you can argue that the government asking like that is illegal, but I’ve yet to see a guilty verdict in court so, until that happens, Twitter enforcing its rules isn’t censorship. No one has been denied their first amendment rights.
More importantly, by Musks own yardstick, Twitter is no longer the bastion of Free Speech it was when he took control. So regardless of what you think, Twitter is worse off now.
The reason I moved country is because woke politics is making life worse. Crime is through the roof, kids can't go out in the cities by themselves because it's too dangerous. They started doing mandatory "gender identity" education in school, teaching crap to my kids.
I'm still in Europe and observing a progressive decline so I'm ready to move to Asia, the Caribbean, South America (Argentina maybe?) or maybe switch to the enemy and go to Russia or China, depending on how the situation evolves.
Dictatorship for dictatorship, I just want a low tax, safe place and governments to bother me as little as possible.
I can only think of two reasons:
1) Localised messages to and from the user. Not every language supports gender-neutral singular "you/they".
2) Demographic tracking e.g. for advertising: I've been given unskippable ads on YouTube for sanitary pads, and have forgotten which ad network presented me with one for dick pills.
85% is mainly how much I trust the sources: my experience has been kind of factoid is often true, but sometimes turns out to be "this source sounds like it means X, but actually it means Y" or worse "we made it up and you'll never check".
That said, I ought to have written "I can only think of two *good* reasons", because the third reason is "whenever anyone makes a database of people, we automatically add gender without even thinking about it".
By taking sides in a partisan culture war, he has made his core mission essentially non-partisan. Maybe he does really believe all of that stuff about "the woke mind virus", or maybe he realised that he can buy a priceless amount of political capital amongst people who would instinctively hate the goals of his project just by uttering the right incantations.
When was the last time you were in a red state? Driving an EV of any kind is a strong political statement.
> By taking sides in a partisan culture war, he has made his core mission essentially non-partisan
Not how partisan affiliation works--think of someone who flip flops from one side to the other. They aren't seen as above the fray or non-partisan. Just unreliable (albeit, usually, useful).
This surprises me (I believe you though!). I've read lots of articles and fun facts lately about how places like Texas go fastest at installing solar panels, because solar is now the cheapest source of energy and all. I'd blatantly assume that those new solar field owners would be charging their cars with their own electricity, also purely for money reasons and not climate/ideological ones.
It’s not only happening in the US but has also started to happen in other countries like Australia.
I found it weird tho, like fair, they were pissed about Twitter, but surely the planet is the bigger issue?
Musk has pissed off the left to the point where the left is not thinking clearly about him and his companies anymore. Regardless of what you think about Musk, Tesla is actually pretty great.
In any thread about EVs there is a typical HN commenter desperate to tell you that they drive a hybrid, not an EV like those silly virtue signalers.
For those who remember the vicious attacks on the Prius it's a wild shift in attitude.
In any thread about climate change they are desperate to tell you that you’re a climate denier when you point out inaccurate information.
For those who remember the vicious attacks on science, we called that the dark ages.
Those scientists believed they were asking reasonable questions and pointing out potential inaccuracies. But imagine you were an HIV positive patient in 1995 and you latched on to this scientific debate to conclude that probably you should just eat a lot of vitamins and things will work out fine, since the scientists can’t seemingly even agree on whether you’ll get AIDS…
This is not a theoretical example. AIDS denialism cost hundreds of thousands of lives during roughly 1995-2005. There was a Nobel prize winner (Kary Mullis) who supported the movement with his authority despite never having done any HIV research. The government of South Africa was also involved for their own political reasons.
It was a lot like today’s climate change denialism and needs to be remembered. The major difference is that the personal consequences of HIV denialism were felt within a few years on an individual level, so the matter was resolved within decades. With climate change, it’s going to take a century and today’s denialists won’t be around to feel the effects.
The thing that is so maddening is that we're already feeling the effects of climate change, but the denialists just claim those effects either aren't really happening, or are caused by something else (without bothering to define "something else").
This is how science works. Being right is not "science". Science is verb. If the questioners were right we would be calling them heroes.
The bad guys were the people who took this receding debate within the field as evidence of conspiracies and worse, and convinced thousands of people to treat their AIDS condition with quackery instead of effective drugs derived from the HIV-AIDS theory. The organized denialism killed people. That’s not science.
Fifty years ago, there was no shortage of funding for medical scientists who tried to prove that tobacco didn't cause cancer. (You can guess where that funding came from.)
There is a significant amount of people choosing to not purchase a Tesla because they don’t want to be associated with Mr. Musk.
SpaceX is more insulated because there is essentially no alternative. If Yspace existed, I’m sure a significant amount of people would choose to champion that instead.
I think you’re vastly underselling how much Mr Musk his communications and his association with the new hyperbigoted misinformation-hub Xitter has turned people to dislike him, powerful and influential one’s among them.
Yep, and I know people who have sold their Teslas because they don't want to be associated with Musk any longer.
Tesla's offered an experience in terms of pure acceleration off the line that actually made them cool, even people who might never buy one wouldn't mind experiencing one off the line.
Buying Twitter and wading into political debates isn't a depoliticization strategy, and if he'd wanted to pick a colour of his politics to optimize his business success (surprisingly unimportant when your product line is as far ahead of competition as SpaceX/Tesla have been) the correct choice would have been beige.
Imagine having to completely break contact with your own father because he hates who you are so much :'(
The issue is that many people who feel this way (seemingly Musk included) swing to the other extreme and embrace policy positions that only serve to further support and entrench systemic racism.
I'm not always comfortable with the methods and rhetoric of some social justice advocates, but I'm not going to present that as evidence that the movement they support is dangerous and we should strive for social injustice instead.
If “woke” involves an understanding that media is mostly filtered through large corporations and crafts narratives used to serve the interests of the ruling class, I’m not surprised a billionaire owner of a media company would consider that a problem.
Rather than identifying actual problems people are facing, media wastes our time with irrelevant distractions. Don’t worry about the opioid epidemic. Don’t worry about the fact that kids increasingly can’t even read after graduating high school. Don’t worry about corporate consolidation and monopolies. You should be worrying about “wokeism”.
Musk blames 'wokeness' for his daughter rejecting him after he didn't accept who she was. His entire conflict with the left and the 'woke' is centered around this one issue. He can't accept that he was rejected because of what he has done, so he needs someone else to blame and fight with. He bought X as his propaganda tool, he doesn't care about the consequences of his actions on society—he only wants to win.
> Musk is primarily driven by a savior complex
I don't think that's correct, it seems more likely that he was always driven by an inferiority complex.
Extreme doubt.
But that is probably the reason why he came out of the closet about his views.
I think a lot of people have similar views to his, they just keep quiet. Because, well, look at what happens to you if you don’t.
Right. And that is?
He is a man who owns an electric car company but has been pushing climate change denialism as his political position and supporting politicians who do.
There's competition because Tesla is not the dominant prime mover it's valuation implies it should be, and people have sensed - correctly - a market opening. No one I know recommends "buy a Tesla" anymore for your first electric car - they say buy a Hydundai Ioniq or wait for a Chinese brand to get cheaper.
People are actively embarrassed to drive Teslas, which in turn means there's a growing market for "anything but a Tesla...". And because of that all of the actual faults of a Tesla are paid that much more scrutiny.
He showed his true colors, there is no correction possible, people just don't rewrite their core personality. Support for puttin' and overall war in Ukraine, support for dictators, very bad stance on many societal topics, treats his employees like slaves, proper piece of shit as a parent, utterly childish reactions of an immature boy rather than Man - we haven't seen the worst yet.
Brilliance in some aspects means nothing if its dragged down into mud by rest of personality. I know some still worship him for the positives and ignore or even appreciate the rest, I can't and won't.
As for Musk, he's a weird one for sure. He made me realize that I don't know the politics of most CEOs (or even know who they are). Which is just as well, I don't want to ponder in the supermarket whether my bodywash is ideologically consistent with my shampoo.
I'm sure pre-Musk Twitter wouldn't have lost the entire market in the 7th most populous country.
So your explanation should be rewritten as “remove people from the way of legal consequences from breaking local laws they/Musk can’t control (buy) in their favor”.
It sounds like the same thing but it’s the difference between fleeing persecution and fleeing prosecution.
I'm not qualified to tell if the judge giving them is a partisan hack or not, just like I can't make that distinction with the judges that Musk appears to shop for in the US with what others describe as SLAPP lawsuits.
But obeying a judge isn't optional in either case.
To the individual representatives of a company? That's very rare, and not common like you make it sound.
"The company you're representing in this legal process hasn't complied with my orders so I will have you personally arrested".
Twitter refused the order, which means that Twitter is interfering with the legal process in Brazil. This sounds like "contempt of court" to me, which is a thing which results in a judge sending people to prison — no idea what it is in Brazil, but IIRC the maximum penalty in my country of birth is 2 years' imprisonment.
Brazil's legal system requires companies like Twitter to have an office in the country in order to receive such orders, which I think means it's literally her job to make those orders happen. Regardless, by closing the office Twitter was directly violating Brazilian law.
As companies cannot themselves be imprisoned, I do not see what alternative there would be than directing obligations onto a specific human. Buck has to stop somewhere, and while I know a lot of people who would celebrate if this judge decided that the correct somewhere was "international arrest warrant/request extradition of Elon Musk personally", I suspect this judge would have to go through a few more checkboxes before that doesn't get "major diplomatic incident" written all over it.
(Perhaps less of an incident if it's concurrent with the EU saying "We're issuing Twitter with a 6% fine on their global annual turnover for non-compliance with the Digital Services Act", which seems to be another battle Musk is Leeroy-Jenkins-ing himself into).
Effectively, the judge makes it impossible for X to defend itself in court because he'll just have anyone arrested who tries. That's not something you'll find in the developed world these days.
No, on two counts.
First, Twitter is free to seek out a lawyer to represent them in court. Most people hire lawyers for contract work rather than as a permanent employee, so this remains possible even with no assets within Brazil.
Second, there was nothing to be defended until they refused to comply with the lawfully given order within the required deadline.
That they chose to fire their staff member and close the office in order to prevent compliance with the lawfully given order, was an actual offence in its own right. To my limited understanding, it is also an offence in its own right to refuse a lawfully given court order. But in both cases, Twitter was not being punished until they actually broke the law.
Courts in the UK and the USA may issue an injunction, both to prohibit and/or to compel an action, and this may bind on people not directly before the court:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Injunction (note in particular that interim injunctions may be given prior to a ruling on the case itself)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Injunctions_in_English_law
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interim_order
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quia_timet
And, pertinently to Starlink: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asset_freezing
Compare and contrast Twitter in Brazil with Lavabit in the USA: Lavabit was ordered to provide certain information in secret (with an injunction to not talk about it); they protested, they first provided that information in an obtuse form that was considered contempt, they provided it in a form which was acceptable, then they closed their business in response and took further legal action in response to what they — and, to be clear, I — consider to have been a manner incompatible with the public view of American Democracy:
"""Levison said that he could be arrested for closing the site instead of releasing the information, and it was reported that the federal prosecutor's office had sent Levison's lawyer an email to that effect."""
and
"""Levison wrote that after being contacted by the FBI, he was subpoenaed to appear in federal court, and was forced to appear without legal representation because it was served on such short notice; in addition, as a third party, he had no right to representation, and was not allowed to ask anyone who was not an attorney to help find him one. He also wrote that in addition to being denied a hearing about the warrant to obtain Lavabit's user information, he was held in contempt of court. The appellate court denied his appeal due to no objection, however, he wrote that because there had been no hearing, no objection could have been raised. His contempt of court charge was also upheld on the ground that it was not disputed; similarly, he was unable to dispute the charge because there had been no hearing to do it in."""
The choice is have Twitter throttled in its entirety
or limit access to some tweets. Which one do you want?”
[1] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/05/twitter-musk-censors...
But HN seems to think that Brazilians are NPCs without politics or constitution of their own.
https://restofworld.org/2023/elon-musk-twitter-government-or...
Since Musk took ownership, the company has received 971 government demands, and fully complied with 808 of them. Before Musk, Twitter's full compliance rate hovered around 50%; since the takeover, it is over 80%.
Many US companies are now feeling forced to choose a side. At least I now know which to boycott..
But most of Europe is still sane, luckily.
Ps rather than blaming transsexualism it might be smarter to blame the Tories who have been skimming (and selling off to their own companies) the NHS until there was nothing left.
DEI was a political statement—one that you agreed with and felt was necessary. Abandoning DEI is also a political statement—one that you disagree with and think is not okay.
You're welcome to disagree with the people who disagree with DEI, but I'd hesitate to claim that these companies were "strongarmed" into it—the programs always existed as a political tool for the company to curry favor, not as something that was added for its intrinsic practical or moral value. The political climate has changed, which means they no longer serve their true purpose.
The important takeaway from this reversal is that the progressive theory of change that's been leaned on for the past few decades was a bad one. We thought that a lot of progress had been made, but it turns out it was all surface level and easy to undo when the pressure to keep up appearances went away or reversed. "We need to do this because it will look bad if we don't" is a very fickle tool for motivating real change.
You have to change hearts and minds within the broader population in order to bring lasting power towards change, but that's something that the modern crop of progressives entirely gave up on 10+ years ago in favor of racing to the finish line and declaring victory prematurely.
(Cue comments that the right can't be reasoned with so there's no point in trying.)
I can't speak for America as I've never been there, but here in Southern Europe it was pretty successful and at least LGBTIQ+ are really well accepted now <3 I know many clubs where people get banned if they make racial or gender slurs but in general it doesn't even happen.
I think part of the issue is that what is considered "left" in America (liberal/democratic party) is still very right-wing here in Europe, especially in economical terms, not as much in social ones. What the republican represent would be radical-right here.
So I just can't compare politics here.
I think that the fact that Europe leans further left than the US is actually part of the problem we have with moving at all— American progressives got impatient to join you and lost the discipline and patience that characterized previous generations' efforts towards change. The approach they've taken instead is entirely ineffective and, as bemoaned by the parent commenter, creates short-lived successes that quickly get rolled back.
Sorry pal, you're going to have to make it on merits, not your gender or skin color.
>See what happened to Ford, Jack Daniels, Harley Davidson, and many others. Decades of progress are being thrown out the window.
Racial quotas in the workplace is not progress.
>At least I now know which to boycott..
Oh, so your boycotts are fine? Classic leftist hypocrisy.
I'm not advocating for positive discrimination. Just no discrimination at all.
It's very important to have the proper procedures in place for when that does happen. That was part of the diversity programs. Programs against bullying, education for managers on gender identity and how to deal with the difficulties around them, how to pick up on bullying etc. It's this kind of thing that I do myself (not as a job but as a voluntary side assignment in my job). It's amazing what kind of sexism and racism you hear when you go on a company trip and have a few drinks with high-level managers. So clearly this work is still highly needed.
Don't forget these programs were started because things were going the wrong way, people who were different than the standard cishetero white male had less chance to a job and were making less money when they did get one. This is of course not acceptable.
I don't think quotas are the answer. But rather fines when a company goes too far askew. "We only hire white cristians here" just cannot be acceptable.
> Racial quotas in the workplace is not progress.
That was only one small part of the diversity programs, and not one I necessarily agree with.
> Oh, so your boycotts are fine? Classic leftist hypocrisy.
I never said boycotts are wrong anyway. If right wingers want to boycott companies like Apple, go ahead.
This is of course a thing in that nobody can hide their colors anymore, but I'm specifically talking about the rich now feeling empowered enough that they even have the hubris to challenge governments of the world for their own benefit, and in some cases even build their own empires to escape the limitations of governments by forming their own rich-people-only worlds.
For example: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/28/magazine/prospera-hondura...
So long as you continue fighting left vs right, you're fighting the wrong enemy.
But giving the "other team" a voice (my team, in some ways) is valuable, and we aren't going to give it up easily.
And please, don't point to the fact that there are right-wing loons on Twitter, because there are crazies from all sides all over the internet.
Sure, I get that. Just stop pretending that it's about principle, then!
> In India, he agreed with an order imposed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to take down accounts and posts related to a farmers’ protest that swept through the country in February, their demands including guaranteed prices for their produce and debt waivers.
(https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/8/31/brazil-moves-to-blo...)
And there are outside actors currently working hard to ensure that this happens, because they want a return to the old imperial world order (where powerful nations capture territory and expand, and weaker nations die at their hands and are colonized).
If you are in the U.S I am sorry you have this take on free speech, because it is distorted.
Free speech is defined by law and the law is clear. Freedom of speech means the free and public expression of opinions without censorship, interference and restraint by the government.
Musk isn't hard right. There is a lot of overlap positions between him and Bill Clinton (the original one from the 1990s, I do not know what he says now), except that Musk is anti-war and obviously talks like he was on Usenet.
I can't understand that software engineers, who vigorously defended free speech and also the somewhat trollish communication style up to at least 2010, came to be assimilated and reprogrammed by their employers.
Even Zuckerberg now backpedals and says that Covid censorship and suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story was a mistake.
It's easy to say with the benefit of hindsight what was a mistake and what was not. Some things need to be censored - that's how it's always been. The question, of course, is WHAT needs to be censored, HOW MUCH it needs to be censored, HOW it should be censored, and WHO decides.
In the old days, it was easy: If it wasn't on prime time (TV, major newspapers, syndicated radio), it didn't exist. And this cabal served us well, providing a small number of voices to tell people who they were and what to believe.
Now with a potentially unlimited number of voices going up and down in popularity with unprecedented speed and across nations, we're headed into unknown territory, so there are going to be a lot of mistakes, and nobody can know for sure if our nations can even survive it.
No. There are very few things that 'need to be censored' by the government (or corporations with almost government-level power), and it's hard to think of any beyond CSAM or legitimate threats to national security.
On the other hand, there are a lot of things that children should be protected from. But we're failing miserably at that. They're watching extreme porn and gore while the censors are focusing on silencing adults with the wrong political views.
For me, Musk/Trump is indeed fresh trollish air in all this seriousness and iam astounded, that no one else enjoys it. But i also have the feeling, it is a last breath before police state takes over. Because a state can not allow its citizen to go rogue.
Russia purportedly supports free speech right wing groups, though I think the problem is vastly overstated in order to discredit them. Most of this is organic,too.
Whatever is the case, left or right, we cannot let our own beliefs be dictated by whatever Russia supports or co-opts at any given time. Similarly, vegetarians should not abolish their beliefs just because a notorious 20th century dictator was also a vegetarian.
Obviously for people whose idea of freedom of speech begins and ends at actively promoting vice signalling in regimes which have some degree of speech protection whilst doing exactly what an autocrat like Erdogan asks because "you can't go beyond the laws of a country", Musk represents an improvement, but that doesn't have anything to do with promoting First Amendment ideology overseas.
Musk is not perfect by any means wrt free speech.
His version of being a free speech absolutist is that people who agree with him should absolutely have the right to free speech.
So he's merely an equal and opposite reaction to what the other tribe have been doing for ages?
He didn't fundamentally change Twitter. He bought a powerful propaganda tool/weapon and aimed it in the opposite direction.
(I suppose he's also using it as his own personal megaphone, whereas the previous owners would merely ensure that chosen voices were amplified/suppressed rather than using their own voices directly)
Not sure how we start to approach some sort of disarmament process when it comes to these propaganda weapons, though.
> He bought a powerful propaganda tool/weapon and aimed it in the opposite direction.
I'd say not. I don't think twitter itself wasn't aimed directly in any direction before Musk, other than “away from where firing may cause twitter problems”. They operated from a position of cowardice rather than political bias.
Sometimes this was towards the right because there was a fairly centrist or centre-left¹ bias online, but it often very much wasn't. For a clear case of them not aiming at the right, look at them leaving Trump and many like him alone at a time when they were flagrantly going against twitter policies, but slapping them for that would have caused too much grief back at them. It may be a complete coincidence², but Musk first started getting really serious about taking over around the time twitter started cracking down on that group (having joked about it prior to that IIRC, though it did take over a full year for his first actual takeover bid to happen).
----
[1] These definitions are difficult. Often what America seems to see as centre-left or even actually moderate left, is things that many over this side of the big pond would see as more centrist.
[2] Though I strongly suspect not.
I'll caveat this by saying I've never had a twitter account or any desire for one¹ meaning my views are those of an outsider and occasionally a passive reader – but from what I can see twitter acted from a position of cowardice² rather than any political machinations.
----
[0] One man's fair slapping of an arsehole, is another man's unfair restriction of speech.
[1] At first it was a daft novelty, then a novelty that had perhaps outstayed its welcome, then just a place far too full of people who thought twitter was a good idea, then the famous got hold of it and it became a tribal shit-show & soon after a political shit-show – all before Musk jumped in with both feet and a lot of other people's money.
[2] Hence not kicking Trump (and a few others close to him or relevant rhetoric) despite flagrant breaches of their stated policies, until such time as he was a lesser threat due to not getting a second term, and before that kicking people not because of any internal moral code but because of what advertisers might think.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/elon-musk-censors-twitter-in...
And he regularly bans journalists who don’t lick his boots.
https://newrepublic.com/post/177936/twitter-suspends-account...
Stop listening to what he says and pay attention to what he does. You’re being swindled.
> He is exporting the 1st amendment to us nations who don't get to experience such freedoms.
This is particularly absurd. “The first amendment” isn’t a paragon of freedom unique to the US. And it only applies to government censorship. You can’t “export it” to other countries by means of a social network.
I am paying attention to what he does. I use Twitter for hours every day.
The point is less about "free speech", because of course you're right, this is Musk's version of free speech.
But the real issue to the left is that he's allowing speech that, in recent history, has been considered "dissenting" or restricted. The fact that in the past week we have had Zuck come out and say Facebook was pressured to censor COVID19 materials and that we have mainstream politicians and bureaucrats calling to THROW MUSK IN JAIL is insane. Utterly insane.
The people behind this are getting found out, and there will be political consequences.
This is happening all over Europe as we speak. And even though it happens to be extreme-right atm, it doesn't have to be. We've seen extreme-left revivals in the past as well.
In the US, a populist just needs to win a primary, ie 50% of 50% of the American votes, and he is immediately at least nr2 in the run, and they get the support of one of the major parties.
Saying that populists / extremists also exist in Europe is just a bad comparison.
I don't think that the American election system holds any relevance to the problem.
The problem is fueling divisiveness to manipulate people with a "us vs them" mentality.
How else can you force working class people to vote against their best interests, such as taxing the rich fairly, ensuring access to affordable health care, uphold basic workers rights, without resorting to blatant fearmongering and moral outrage with bullshit like "they want post-birth abortions, impose sexual abuse in schools, import scary criminal gangs from distant foreign lands, etc"?
Not to mention the industrial level of propaganda dumped by foreign actors to destabilize democratic nations.
The UK is also a FPTP system, but has strong parties outside of the two main, for instance in the last general election over 42% of people voted for a party other than Labour or the Conservatives.
[admittedly that’s an outlier, but looking over the last few elections at least around 20% went to parties outside of the big two]
To be clear: FPTP is terrible, but the reason the UK system isn't as broken as the US one is because the correct functioning of the Legislature is much more vital to the overall system - i.e. 3 viable parties can exist because they're fighting over hundreds of seats, and then it's by the Legislature that the Prime Minister is chosen - rather then by direct vote.
One reasons out of ocean of reasons - number of actual votes for X or Y is irrelevant, its all about blocks based on some old history nobody should care about much anymore that decide winner. Freedom of choice is very limited, strong populists like trump have much bigger and long lasting effect than in more multipolar elections.
But for sure its a spectacle for masses for a good year and polarizes society for whatever bad reasons there are, that should be concerned about more serious topics than this.
The problem is that there seems to be a large overlap between that enemy⁰ and certain arguments on the right side of left/right political debates, so it is very difficult to separate the two even on those matters where that overlap isn't actually present.
The matter is made worse because right-leaning political groups are less ideologically opposed to being influenced by that enemy's main power: being able to buy stuff/opinions/people.
----
[0] I assume you are meaning the arsehole rich¹ here
[1] There are some nice hyper-rich out there, but they aren't as vocal as the others so we don't hear much from/about them – much like the more moderate people with right-leaning views, who aren't heard over the yelling of others.
Hopefully someone who isn't a hard libertarian bankrolls one soon so they don't get pigeonholed as places for exactly one ideology.
Meanwhile The New York Times is titling an article: "The constitution is scared, but is it dangerous?"
There's nothing more belonging to the rich than the mainstream media, including the NYT. They were the people selling you the FTX scam and explaining you SBF was the second coming of Christ.
Now that Harris wants to "force congress to ban guns in her 100 days, or take executive orders if congress doesn't do it", of course that the NYT is publishing about the constitution being potentially dangerous.
And the problem is... Prospera in Honduras?
As long as you keep reading The NYT, you're fighting the wrong enemy.
> congress to ban guns
This sounds desperately needed and like an exceptionally great idea to most people that don't live inside the US bubble.
Maybe broaden your horizons a bit?
You are definitely correct there. Twitter was a shit-show in this regard long before Musk came along and made it worse. They did far too little to enforce their own policies (let alone common decency) on things like bullying and hate content for far too long, for fear of losing users and therefore advertising money or being punished because some of those openly breaking those rules were in high power at the time, and this led to an “open season” feeling for all sides.
[for the avoidance of doubt: I've never had a twitter account, after the initial novelty stage it has always been far too full of the sort of people that think twitter is a good idea]
I don't think dr Eggman should be able to attack in that way.
There is no proof but there was a threat and retaliation which is a terrible precedent.
It is like Eggman attacking Sonic for something that Shadow did.