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Comment by LeifCarrotson | Hacker News Reader

For-profit media is definitely a problem, but Jeff Bezos didn't buy the Washington Post and Elon Musk didn't buy Twitter because they thought they were more profitable than any other investments they could have made.

I believe they did it because they wanted the power that owning a media outlet can provide in order to help protect their actually profitable businesses.

It certainly helps that they have their own revenue streams so that they're not just money down the drain. If the Post loses $100M per year, but Amazon keeps making Bezos $50B per year, that's fine, probably costs him less than the depreciation on his yachts or jets.

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Elon bought Twitter because his mouth got ahead of him.

Recall His brazen offer

Their initial refusal

Him suing to buy

Them relenting

Him trying to back out

Them suing to force the purchase

Elon was quite clear the he bought Twitter to make it a free speech forum where you could openly discuss things, even from non establishment standpoints.

And that's what it's become.

Aww, that’s sweet.

Only time I’ve been kicked off Twitter (permanently, no comebacks) was under Elon’s rule.

Do you want to share for what?

Are you going to judge whether or not he was using the right kind of speech?

Just curious. I'm even open to change my mind a bit about 2025 Twitter.

My display name looked a bit like his. Hadn’t logged in for a few days, bam. What a sad, sore rich boy he is.

OK, that's super annoying!

As someone overly prone to provocative wordplay, that could have been me...

Quite separate from the political censorship issues though.

And, of course, there was the blocking of federally protected ATS-B data, and the expulsion of journalists who had written critical stories.

Here's an incident from September 2024 where links were blocked to a newsletter containing a hacked document with potentially damaging information about JD Vance - and the journalist who published that newsletter then had their account suspended: https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/26/24255298/elon-musk-x-bloc...

> And that's what it's become.

Hilariously incorrect.

Has it? I’ve never actually engaged with twitter. I always thought it was an echo chamber. From the outside looking in though it seems like twitter is the same pre-Elon as post-Elon. The difference is just which views are the blessed ones.

I see people advocating all known political views. Pre Elon, any non progressive opinions were heavily weeded out by moderators.

Of course, most progressives have left now that they encounter opposing views (AKA "fascism"), so you could think of it as an echo chamber. But it's not forced to be one by the site.

> Pre Elon, any non progressive opinions were heavily weeded out by moderators.

This is 100% a lie. Open nazi advocating violence were suppressed, but back then there were people who claimed they are conservatives or right wing who were not nazi.

Funny enough, open communists advocating violence were suppressed too back then. In fact, left was policed more strictly then the right.

No, he never intended that nor done that. He wanted to make it more biased toward right wing then it already was (and it was already biased toward conservatives in its moderation). Twitter did not became more open for all point of view. It became exclusively more far right friendly.

Elon Musk censors and suppresses whatever speech he does not like whole his life.

Except if you post "cisgender" or if you track Elon Musk's jet.

Edit: oh, and if you want to block his account from your feed, you can't

"Non-establishment" is a funny way to spell "Nazi".

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