Elon Musk is now the largest Twitter shareholder
(reclaimthenet.org)
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Well, now we know what this was about.
He is obviously going to present this at the next shareholders meeting in hopes that he can get them to force the company to begin addressing its censorship problem.
Whether or not this will work ultimately depends on how much twitter's stock holders care about seeing RoI vs having control over the political discourse.
I think Elon is about to learn that ideology is more powerful than money.
Influence and control over who gets to speak in the 'public square' is something quite valuable when your ideology doesn't stand on it's own merits.
I wonder how much money Elon would have to spend to maintain a free corner of social media? I bet TPTB would rather destroy him than find out.
Because it's a containment site when compared to the reach of the main players?
The main virtue of Gab is that by building, owning, and maintaining it's own infrastructure it's free. It's also relatively isolated, because that freedom has been used to not bend the knee to the app stores-- the ones which the lion's share of tech illiterate normies use to access social media.
I do hope if Elon doesn't get his way, he'll just force his way in by buying out more of Twitter to where he has a majority stake.
Can he do anything with 9.2% while the company is being run by leftists?
Organize a shareholder vote to fire board members that support the garbage? Isn't that how things work?
I just do not see him pulling off purging the company of leftism.
He has a much better chance of setting up a base on Mars then cleaning twitter of leftists.
Twitter is threatened by the government to censor anyways.
Maybe, but if there's something he does well, it's getting people to go with his ideas.
Like everyone else I don't have much hope for saving twitter, even if he had 25% stock. The whole concept is unhealthy for society in the first place. Second you can't really run a global top down managed forum/platform like that today without some pozzed rules. Basically you need a blanket least-common denominator set of rules that offends everyone some of the time. That's one of the problems with consolidation. An open platform using a common protocol would be much better in this regard.
But choice of rules aside, here's a few simple steps to greatly improve the current situation:
Stop arbitrarily banning people over your stupid rules. Just delete the posts! Especially don't make people apologize or agree that they violated rules. Banning should be reserved for platform abuse, illegal content, and harassment. (Platform abuse could include repeated rule violations, but I think I'd save it for when it gets to the level of spamming.)
Still, why ban at all? Put them in isolation. Someone breaking X rules gets their content limited to followers only (who have to click to agree to see the content as with the mature content warning today) for some period of time. Transparently - no shadowbans. Their followers can't RT their posts and nothing they do affects the network. If someone is repeatedly offensive I stop following them. I don't care what they say after that. Offensive content is only an issue for the platform if it gets to some global home or trending page. (unless you're a leftist, then someone even thinking Ni.... is grounds for a ban) Isolation solves that without entirely removing someone's freedom to speak. Again, they will always know that they are isolated, why, and for how long.
Remove all algorithmic manipulation of trending hashtags. Don't even allow mods to edit the trending list. Just apply the above rules to delete posts that violate the rules. This means transparently deleting the post that included the hashtag. That will remove it from trending and everyone will know what's happening.
Same with the news sidebar. (which I think is completely unnecessary and only a way to inject subversive editorial content) Make it entirely user-generated too. When lots of users link to a news story then the story goes in the sidebar. This would be based on your personal follower network so I might see trending stories from Epoch Times while some dumbass far from my network sees MSNBC stories. Moderators could have a way to "merge" stories to keep the list clean. Or maybe let users do that themselves. Really all of these points can be sold to shareholders as a way to save money since you won't need to pay an army of moderators.
Don't employ or use "independent fact-checkers." I don't care so much about the stupid context links you use to editorialize posts as long as the content is there, but they should always be general and applied based on text pattern-matching, never applied manually by a moderator to a specific post.
Obviously I would also eliminate most of the rules you have in the first place. I wouldn't even know where to start. I suppose any rules you had when the platform began are good enough for today. Anything added after that to be "relevant" was clearly gaming the system to punish specific users for content you disagreed with.
I still won't use your empire of shit and I hope your stock tanks. But good luck setting things back on track if you actually care about free speech. At least, that's what I'd say to someone in Musk's position if they were reading this. They aren't, so thanks for listening to my rant I guess.
I agree with your suggestions. Lets also add: Algorithms used for determining recommendations & trending should be open sourced.
No more hidden algorithms. If it's presenting content, we have a right to know how that content was arrived at.
He should announce that he's petitioning the board to move Twatter's headquarters to Florida.
I'd be able to hear the "reeeeee'ing" all the way over here in the east bay.
Quickly followed by the sound of DeSantis erecting a border wall.
first, EM is the AC
second, on musk's twitter you'll probably still be banned for noticing the small hats
third, .win is more based
This board literally has a rule against pointing things out.