&gt; easily build a much better rivalBootstrapping a network the size of Twitter is nothing like easy, and might even be impossible this late in the game. Gold rushes of new users tend to wear off as new areas calcify into established concepts.(The same would be true for launching a modern day FriendFeed &#x2F; Bebo &#x2F; MySpace etc)

&quot;he could easily build a much better rival with different values.&quot;Steretypically of social media - I see Twitters greatest asset being it&#x27;s current network of influencers, analysts, thinkers, artists and colleagues. All the people I want to follow are already on twitter. I don&#x27;t care about the platform or the tech, I care about all of the interesting people posting there. I would claim that is the true power of the platform atm - it&#x27;s network.

&gt; This BBC article [1] posted a little earlier seems to indicate it&#x27;s not NFT&#x27;s that are slipping here so much as interest in Twitter.That’s not how I read the article at all, and Google trends confirms that NFT interest has trended down whilst Twitter holds steady.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;trends.google.com&#x2F;trends&#x2F;explore?geo=US&amp;q=Nft,Twitter" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;trends.google.com&#x2F;trends&#x2F;explore?geo=US&amp;q=Nft,Twitte...</a>

Nobody has yet been able to &quot;build a much better rival with different values.&quot;If there isn&#x27;t a good theory about why that is, reshaping Twitter to be more like those failed experiments is a not a likely path to success.

Musk realizing the difficulty of building a competitor vs just outright buying Twitter is the best argument in favor of his wisdom.

Musk may be about to make the biggest mistake of his career.This BBC article [1] posted a little earlier seems to indicate it&#x27;s
not NFT&#x27;s that are slipping here so much as interest in Twitter.He seems to be acquiring this for the wrong motives when he could
easily build a much better rival with different values.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.co.uk&#x2F;news&#x2F;business-61102759" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.co.uk&#x2F;news&#x2F;business-61102759</a>

&gt; You can&#x27;t start a trend comparing a democratically elected politician to Hitler andSee, in my opinion, you should be absolutely fee to do that&gt; expect no repercussions.The first &quot;repercussion&quot; that comes to mind is to block their account or something like that but I think this is the wrong course. When they do or say something stupid In real life, the repercussions are that they are judged as a stupid person and not simply silenced. I think, this must be the norm in social media too. Just make sure that whatever they say sticks to their identity and if later they change their mind, they can apologise and ask for forgiveness.I have this idea where your identity can be secret to the society but known to the platform. I.e. the platform knows you as a real person, you have just one account but you have an option to post anonymously too. You use your anonymous account to engage with the community about stuff that you normally wouldn&#x27;t dare(i.e. controversial political stance, your sexual orientation kind of stuff).If you post something very bad with your anonymous account(i.e. call for violence, hate speech etc), you get your anonymous posting rights revoked and your posts deleted. You can override the deletion by de-anonimization of the posts. If whatever you said is something criminal(plans to attack this, kill that, sell dirty bomb etc), the law enforcement takes care of it and the platform stops acting as a police.edit: Oh I missed the part where your identity is actually encrypted, not known to the platform in plain format. To challenge the platform censorship and put back your removed comments you decrypt your identity. If you are afraid of state actors coming after you, you simply move on and your identity stays secret.
The platform doesn&#x27;t need to be solving all the problems if the world. For example, if you are Russian dissident in Russia you first need replace Putin IRL, then you can use it as a westerner, challenging the politicians.

&gt; How can Twitter possibly get even more liberal in terms of free speech?They literally banned the President of USA. Are you seriously asking this question?

The problem is not if there is free speech on the platform but how it&#x27;s perceived you will always have an extrem loud minority (no matter what political orientation) that will drown out the rest of the platform just by crying about censorship. It will be interesting to see what will happen to them when there is nothing to cry about anymore.

Not banning and suspending people or hiding tweets for alleged violations of vague and arbitrary standards would be great, to start with.Go to any political tweet and you&#x27;ll see countless hateful messages, why aren&#x27;t they banned, yet others are? I&#x27;ve never seen any reason for it. Clearly they take a side or draw a line on some issues they consider important to control, but not others.It seems to me it would be far better in my opinion for twitter to foster strength rather than fragility by empowering users to take responsibility for their own feelings and have the tools and maturity to not read things they can&#x27;t cope with, rather than trying to police what people write centrally. It absolutely could be the modern town square and would be great if it supported real freedom of speech, in my opinion.

The problem with Twitter - and any social medium - is that moderation is very hard to scale. And that&#x27;s exactly the trade-off big platforms have made in order to grow their userbase. That&#x27;s just one problem.Centralization also generates other problems: authority and lack of partipation. These platforms lack proper affordances regarding discovery and curation. As a user, you&#x27;re automatically gravitating towards the loudest voices, the biggest or most active communities.For instance, on Reddit, there&#x27;s a canonical &#x2F;r&#x2F;sports subreddit. It has 20 million fans, but it&#x27;s mostly focussed on american &#x2F; UK sports. Searching for &quot;sports&quot;doesn&#x27;t yield anything comparable. Only a fraction of those 20 million fans is really active posting and commenting. There&#x27;s an &#x2F;r&#x2F;worldsports subreddit but has a grand total of 350 redditors.When it comes to Twitter, the net result is that only a fraction of users is responsible for the vast amount of tweets, while about 50% are basically lurkers. [1][2] In that regard, the &quot;free speech&quot; argument is only a real concern for a very small, yet extremely vocal fraction of Twitter users. The same applies to Reddit as well.The worrying part isn&#x27;t the &quot;free speech&quot; argument such as it is posited. It&#x27;s that all of this results in a lack of participation in any debate. The userbases of social media might be more akin to the placid crowd on a market place listening to someone ranting of a soapbox, and less a salon where everyone actively engages and interacts with each other.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pewresearch.org&#x2F;fact-tank&#x2F;2022&#x2F;03&#x2F;16&#x2F;5-facts-about-twitter-lurkers&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pewresearch.org&#x2F;fact-tank&#x2F;2022&#x2F;03&#x2F;16&#x2F;5-facts-abo...</a>
[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pewresearch.org&#x2F;internet&#x2F;2021&#x2F;11&#x2F;15&#x2F;2-comparing-highly-active-and-less-active-tweeters&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pewresearch.org&#x2F;internet&#x2F;2021&#x2F;11&#x2F;15&#x2F;2-comparing-...</a>

Are you joking? You can easily find a very long list of conservative&#x2F;right wing personalities banned from Twitter.

&gt; You can&#x27;t start a trend comparing a democratically elected politician to Hitler and expect no repercussions.You realize that Hitler was literally democratically elected?He and his party were democratically elected to the German parliament. They proposed to form a coalition government with some other parties, which was approved by the (separately democratically-elected) president. Then he proposed legislation which would give himself wide-ranged emergency powers, which was approved by the democratically-elected parliament. Everything he did was technically legal and constitutional.So ask yourself: When would you have blocked literal Hitler from Twitter?I think the take-away lesson from Nazi Germany is that we need to start fighting fascism and authoritarianism much earlier in the process.

&gt; Free speech absolutism is possible and is beneficialHow can Twitter possibly get even more liberal in terms of free speech? Just look at the trends occasionally, they are really, really stressing the boundaries of free speech and crossing into defamation territory without being censored in any way. You can&#x27;t start a trend comparing a democratically elected politician to Hitler and expect no repercussions.

So I want to spam the n word on twitter as replies to popular users that should be ok even if it causes users to leave and damage the business?

&gt; Platforms like Twitter have become de facto utilities.No, they have not.I cannot live without water or electricity; perhaps also a general Internet connection (in the modern world). I live my life just fine without Twitter.Twitter is an online service that some people find useful and others ignore completely. There is nothing utility-like about it.

I have a Twitter account but I&#x27;ve barely used it ever, and do okay for myself socially. I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s a utility. I have plenty of options, and use the ones that interest me most.

So the governments would pay Twitter for moderation and for subsidizing the platform, if advertisers leave in response?I think that the governments should treat social media platforms similarly to other addictive&#x2F;harmful substances, such as junk food, sugary drinks or tobacco... with a focus on prevention and education.And using these platforms for official communication (from elected officials and public services) should be either prohibited or heavily discouraged.

Platforms like Twitter have become de facto utilities. They should be prevented from censoring anything that is not breaking the law, which means filtering tweets on a per country basis to comply with national laws, nothing less, nothing more.

It’s not such a bad idea, and it was the initial intent of blue checks: proving that an account wasn’t impersonated. But they couldn’t roll out verification at scale, so they only verified high-ish profile accounts. As a result, over time, the blue check has come to be a sort of class signifier and lost its original purpose (I sometimes see verified anon accounts, what even was verified?)Rolling it out at scale could improve the rampant spam&#x2F;astroturfing problem, even if it would be imperfect.

Also makes it a lot harder to set up an army of bots.

&gt; he would be sued for enabling the NYC subway terroristThe problem with that is that yesterday it was swastikas, today is the letter Z, tomorrow who knows what else we might have in store?Also, putting in prison all the people who have displayed their swastika-love thingie online [1] would have meant Mariupol falling sooner to the Russians, a thing contrary to the beliefs of many who propose laws like that.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;tyengeni1954&#x2F;status&#x2F;1503955204059938817" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;tyengeni1954&#x2F;status&#x2F;1503955204059938817</a>

I think about Twitter occasionally and I&#x27;m always amazed that the company has thousands of employees.If he charged $2 &#x2F; month for an individual to get a blue check and $100 &#x2F; month for a company to get verified then eliminated ads, could he get the staff count down to under 100 people?I remember when Facebook bought Instagram. Instagram had something like 13 employees. Why does Twitter need two orders of magnitude more?

&gt; I hope we all agree that laws against libel, glorification of crime, threatening people are not exactly censorship.As far as I&#x27;m concerned, if you want to force a business to censor speech, get a court order.

&gt; glorification of crimeThis runs into a problem because of the inherent inequality of &quot;crime&quot;.The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges.

The assumption that cops in the US actually care about someone posting swastikas is questionable. We already have lots of people posting about crimes on twitter accounts under their real names, and the cops very frequently don&#x27;t do anything about it. A sizable number of the swastika posters are cops, too, as demonstrated by the periodic investigations into police departments that reveal those sorts of things.P.S. Requiring someone to have a credit card doesn&#x27;t feel like free speech absolutism to me. A pretty big number of people don&#x27;t have the ability to make credit card payments. Do their voices not matter?

&gt; I 
hope
 we all agree that 
laws
 against libel, glorification of crime, threatening people are not exactly censorship.No, this isn&#x27;t free speech absolutism, and adding a paywall to any conversation on twitter would kill the site.

&quot;Free speech absolutism is possible and is beneficial once you ensure that someone is not gaming the system, i.e. someone pretending to be more than one person.&quot;This is probably the core motivation behind the $2&#x2F;month blue checkmark fee proposed by him. You don&#x27;t need to moderate social media if you can just send the cops credit card details of the person spam-posting swastikas, agitating for violence or breaking other established laws. I hope we all agree that laws against libel, glorification of crime, threatening people are not exactly censorship.

Twitter totally missed the opportunity to turn Vine into Tiktok.

&gt; What unrealized potential does Twitter have left after 16 years of existence?How much potential communication was left in the human race have after the first 7,000 years since written script started appearing? The answer is, most potential was still unexplored.Everything in modern civilisation is still young. Especially new communication platforms.

It&#x27;s popular but it&#x27;s mostly garbage where people scream at each other, among the bots and scammers. You can improve the interaction modes, improve discoverability etc. thus improving its value per user instead of inflating total number of users.

And potential doesn’t have to translate to financial success.

Huge segments of the world don’t see value in Twitter (and they might have a point) and don’t use it. It’s the “public square” of a subset of people.I’m interested and a bit nervous in what changes Musk will usher in. But I definitely see the opportunity for him to make a lot of money.

&gt; What unrealized potential does Twitter have left after 16 years of existence?If there is unrealized potential, the &quot;free speech&quot; sites, like Gettr, etc. have not found much of it.

Financially, I think it&#x27;s pretty simple: charge more. There are core users who are addicted. It seems like something Musk would do?

&gt; He is absolutely right over its enormous potentialWhat unrealized potential does Twitter have left after 16 years of existence?Twitter is incredibly popular, but as Docker already showed, being incredibly popular doesn&#x27;t have to translate to financial success.

&gt; If he declines to do so, it will be damaging to his business with government.How would failing to reinstate Trump&#x27;s account be damaging to his business with the government? Wouldn&#x27;t it matter whether the Federal government is under a Democrat or Republican executive?

I was recently looking at the payment options for a M3 RWD and have actually paused everything last week when the first Twitter news came out, because that&#x27;s exactly where my mind went too.If this whole move ends up with trump reinstated, I just cannot support any of his companies with my money, ever. And I&#x27;ll do what I can to dissuade colleagues if their values align with mine.

This is quite interesting. Regardless of which way you vote when it comes election time, Trump would have a much better chance if he had social media access again. If Musk takes control of Twitter and gives Trump access again it could have an enormous impact on the outcome of that election and the future of America. It’s interesting (and terrifying) that someone could take Twitter private and exercise that level of power. I can’t imagine it would be long until the government regulated it at that point but given the US strong protections for free speech I’m not sure how much regulation can occur.

I hope he shuts it down.Literally the only people that care about any of that, are the ones deep lost in the Twitter funnel. Here&#x27;s the truth: Whatever happens on Twitter, it&#x27;s going to have zero effect on your personal life. All these 140 character blurps about politics, the virtue signaling, the constant anger, outrage and cancel culture, it has melted people brains. It&#x27;s all just an echo chamber, tightly kept in within bounds, and people will sell their soul, define their inner being, say whatever it takes, for bogus dopamine hits. Nobody has morals or ideology on Twitter, they are all just optimizing for likes.

You&#x27;d think the CEO of an electric car company, that was started to help the environment, would cater to a difference audience

Surely it depends on what Trump does with his account, right? Does Chick-Fil-A suffer from it&#x27;s decisions politically? If Trump incites insurrection with his account, why not just do what Twitter did? Everybody is unhappy with Twitter. Complaining about twitter is the engagement desired. It&#x27;s not political, extremists on both sides are upset.I suppose those who own stock are also upset, I just realized. I don&#x27;t think liberals will boycott Tesla and Starlink unless they become associated with their political opponents, enough that the environmental aspect would become secondary. If that happens... well, that&#x27;s a lot of sales regardless, right?

The consequences for politics are literally the only thing that matters here. Even if Musk doesn&#x27;t intend to reinstate Trump&#x27;s account (and certainly, nothing he&#x27;s said indicates he wouldn&#x27;t do that), the second he controls Twitter he will be under enormous pressure to do so. If he declines to do so, it will be damaging to his business with government. If he agrees to do so, there will be a huge amount of public discontent with Musk and his companies.Worse, from that point on everything that happens as a result will be on Musk and his companies. There won&#x27;t be any more repercussions for powerful politically-motivated speakers, even if they explicitly call for violence. This will motivate extreme behavior and extreme responses. Boycotts for Tesla and Starlink (whose customers almost certainly tip liberal) will absolutely be on the table.Even if you personally love Musk, the success of his consumer-facing businesses depends on broad adoption by consumers. That&#x27;s all at risk now. CEOs of this kind of business may have politics, but they traditionally avoid political firestorms because of these concerns. Musk is obviously rich enough that he doesn&#x27;t care, but his shareholders probably should.

Heavy moderation can potentially work. But it needs to try and be objective and politically neutral, not based on mobs of activists actively trying to get their opponents banned&#x2F;silenced.

Free speech absolutism and &quot;ensure that someone is not gaming the system&quot; are opposites. Having multiple accounts isn&#x27;t the only way to game the system. There are plenty of trolls out there and they are creative.Once you are large enough to attract some trolls, if you don&#x27;t have good moderation, comment quality goes to hell, and users care about that. Running a large social media site isn&#x27;t kind to people who aren&#x27;t willing to do what works for ideological reasons. You are fighting the trolls with a deliberate handicap and they will absolutely take advantage. So are you going to ban people who are disruptive or not?TikTok is heavily moderated. That&#x27;s why they became popular - the moderation was better than the competition.

Facebook blocking valid NY Post articles (just one last week) is not a content warning… it’s flat out censorship

&gt;A lot of the &quot;free speech&quot; complaints about social media amount to complaints about social media platforms adding content warnings about [alleged] sensational lies or penalising their reputation anyway.Exactly. And I would add, nobody who claims they are a &quot;free speech absolutist&quot; can stay consistent with that declaration after even one or two simple questions.Does free speech absolutism mean unmoderated ISIS and Al-Qaeda posts are fine? Because we need to expose them to healthy debate for the benefit of societal progress? The answer typically is &quot;well that&#x27;s not speech, that&#x27;s _____&quot;, and then it&#x27;s a debate over why there&#x27;s a special different word for the type of speech they want to prohibit.

&gt; Free speech absolutism is possible and is beneficial once you ensure that someone is not gaming the system, i.e. someone pretending to be more than one personYou can have free speech absolutism or controls to stop gaming the system. Pick one.After that it becomes a debate over which controls to have, and the argument that multiple accounts is worse than incitement to racial hatred or antivax nonsense isn&#x27;t a clear cut one.A lot of the &quot;free speech&quot; complaints about social media amount to complaints about social media platforms adding content warnings about [alleged] sensational lies or penalising their reputation anyway.

What if the loudest and nastiest voices are the only ones speaking the truth?

The problem is that the alternative is way worse… You have to create some authority that decides what constitutes a nasty opinion and what doesn’t.And the moral of the history is: in 2020 the COVID lab-leak hypothesis was considered a nasty idea, one that only uneducated, bitter conspiracy theorists could support. People have been banned from the effective monopolists of public discourse over this idea.Then sometime around 2021 the same idea became acceptable.Not surprisingly, this change in the public perception of this idea over social media followed the viewpoint of the major political party the owners of social media cheer for.This is bad, bad, bad for political discourse and rational thinking!!As far as I am concerned: long love the free market of ideas!

Yes. Just like an absolutely free market promotes warlords and cartels.Someone will ALWAYS try to game the system.

Atheism is probably considered very nasty in Saudi Arabia. Support for LGBT rights as well. Depicting Mohammad in a cartoon too.If anything, with a majority of the world population living in illiberal or semi-liberal regimes, we need free speech absolutism more than before.

The only way it works is if people have some skin in the game.To go the &quot;free speech&quot; route everyone should have to use their real identity. I realise this excludes people under repressive governments where free speech has really been lost, and you can be thrown in jail or worse for a seemingly mundane opinion.But for those living in a democracy make them use their real identity. Otherwise everyone is just trolling with zero consequences.

Free speech absolutism is a choice that does not promote the open discussion of ideas. It is a choice that promotes the loudest and nastiest voices and pushes out everyone else.

&gt; Free speech absolutism is possible and is beneficialThe jury is out for me, how can we say it&#x27;s automatically beneficial if it&#x27;s not sacred and only a mean to an end for society&#x2F;people, that end depending on your views (GDP, happiness, sustainability...)?Also IMHO like any liberal absolutism, the forces will inevitably make who has the more money own and game the system, it&#x27;s a proxy for Oligarchy. It can be good but only under certain philosophical positions and economic theories that not everyone agree on.

The only way I&#x27;ve dealt with this is, every couple of years, to unfollow everyone and carefully pick who I follow again in a niche community that is interesting to me at the time.

I&#x27;m not sure I really get the points you&#x27;re making here. You&#x27;ve said &quot;I don&#x27;t have an opinion over the consequences for politics over this&quot; but also &quot;free speech absolutism is possible and is beneficial&quot;. And &quot;Filter bubbles? Doesn&#x27;t have to be a thing&quot; but also &quot;degrade [bad actors] reputation and amplify the defence of the victims&quot;.I don&#x27;t (apparently controversially) think that a lack of &quot;free speech&quot; is anywhere near top of the list of Twitter&#x27;s problems. It&#x27;s way more pressing that the amazing content on it has become completely drowned out by a cacophony of bad actors. It&#x27;s not just the bot armies, but the legions of individual contributors posting and sharing obvious churnalism and outrage bait that it&#x27;s _impossible_ to escape from.I had to stop using Twitter regularly maybe a year or so ago for my own health. I could feel my blood pressure spiking every time I opened the app, and it wasn&#x27;t because of algorithms or filter bubbles or censorship – if anything, the opposite. It was just increasingly not possible to use it for the things I had always loved about it—breaking news, shared conversations, interesting updates etc. from people and organisations I was interested in—without having to wade through buckets of deliberately rage-inducing shit.Twitter itself might bear some responsibility for that. The obvious bot problem is out of control, and it was becoming increasingly user hostile to anyone who wanted to _avoid_ their attempts at &quot;bubble popping&quot;. But maybe the bigger problem is that it&#x27;s fundamentally hard to get people to behave respectfully in a a global public forum like that.

&gt; all the problems it has ... can be solved.I&#x27;m not sure I see much reason to share your optimism about this.

I guess the solution would be tying your identify to your account. If you do something illegal then you can be held accountable. The problem is, how many of twitters users would vanish if they suddenly needed to be identifiable?

What the right calls &quot;free speech&quot; has been tried by several investor-backed social media startups. In every case it has turned into a sewer of racism, misogyny, death threats, and non-monetizable yuckkyiness.Nobody has an answer to that problem, yet. If there is no answer, turning Twitter into a desolation for trolls will not help Twitter.These trolls want to go back to Twitter to torment everyone who rejected them. Good luck creating shareholder value that way.

&gt; once you ensure that someone is not gaming the system, i.e. someone pretending to be more than one personFor this to work you would need a worldwide government identity check protocol implemented by all participating countries, something like OAuth so you could register only one account connected to that real identity, it could still be anonymous from other users perspective. Problem here is that even if that would make bot problem less significant it would not eliminate it. You would have farms of hacked identities and then in countries with really low income you could buy those identities (digital access) for a few dollars per piece.

I think there is a huge distinction between the potential business opportunity and the potential social opportunity Twitter is offering.

&gt; Free speech absolutism is possible and is beneficialWhat?As it stands, free speech absolutism is being weaponized by those with the money to manipulate the crap out of it. It has no benefit in a society that is driven by the highest bidder writes the rules _and now the news_.

I think that&#x27;s alright. They lie, get sued, pay fines. That&#x27;s why we have regulations for food and drugs.I don&#x27;t advocate that speech shouldn&#x27;t have consequences. I advocate that speech shouldn&#x27;t be blocked. Twitter, or any platform, shouldn&#x27;t be doing the police work. They should be indifferent to the speech like a telephone company is indifferent on what people speak on the phone and those who create problems should be dealt with appropriately through relevant channels.If J&amp;J claims that their talc powder is good for you, their false claim shouldn&#x27;t be deleted by Twitter. Instead, the appropriate authority should take care of it and victims should collect damages. Their tweet should stay there as a relic.

&quot;Free speech absolutism is possible and is beneficial [once ...]&quot;I hope you know what free speech absolutism entails. I don&#x27;t think your statement is true at all.Absolute (really, absolute and complete) free speech would allow companies to lie about the efficacy of medication, lie about the ingredients of products, permit lying under oath, allow libel, insults, threats of violence etc. I am not sure I want that. I prefer clear, written rules for that.

&gt; I&#x27;m not sure why everyone is talking about this as though it&#x27;s on the horizon? The article doesn&#x27;t mention &quot;free speech&quot;Because if Musk said &quot;I have no problem with Trump or Nazis on the platform and would unban them&quot;, he wouldn&#x27;t have nearly the same support as he does now.Instead people&#x27;s reaction is &quot;yay, edit button! Go Musk Daddy!&quot;

&gt;Free speech absolutism is possible and is beneficialI&#x27;m not sure why everyone is talking about this as though it&#x27;s on the horizon? The article doesn&#x27;t mention &quot;free speech&quot; as a goal, it mentions:- selling account privileges- making HQ a homeless shelter- edit buttonIn other words, monetization and PR.The major free speech issue on Twitter is not whether certain people are allowed to be on Twitter. It&#x27;s whether Twitter enables its users in carrying out harassment campaigns against people whose speech they don&#x27;t like. These campaigns often feature unethical and fraudulent behavior, e.g. fake anonymous Yelp reviews complaining about an employee, encouraging&#x2F;performing vandalism of the business, phone calls in the middle of the night, borderline slanderous exaggerations sent through anonymous channels, etc. It&#x27;s quite misleading to characterize these internet mobs as &quot;people exercising their right to criticism&quot;, and they tend to rely on the ability of people to anonymously take action against someone who is not anonymous. Fixing it would require more controls on Twitter, not fewer.

&gt; Free speech absolutism is possible and is beneficial once you ensure that someone is not gaming the system, i.e. someone pretending to be more than one person.Regardless of whether or not it would be a good idea for Twitter to remove moderation, personally my feeling is that if someone says they&#x27;re a free speech absolutist and they oppose burner accounts and anonymity, then they&#x27;re not actually a free speech absolutist.It&#x27;s become more common in certain circles to say that free speech is fine as long as people have a persistent ID and reputation, and I do like reputation systems to a certain degree -- but I want to point out that &quot;a persistent ID and a reputation system&quot; is just &quot;social consequences&quot; with extra steps.I sometimes suspect that the people who propose those systems are (unintentionally) arguing for a world with even more self-policing about what people say online, and I have over time come to suspect that a world with lots of communities that have strict moderation policies and that are occasionally closed off entirely, but that generally allow more anonymous accounts -- is probably a world with more free speech (and hopefully less free speech of a harmful kind) than a world where everybody gets one voice and it&#x27;s tracked everywhere. Again that&#x27;s a separate conversation, but the point is that if your definition of free speech absolutism is that anyone can say anything they want wherever they are without social or political consequences, then (regardless whether or not that&#x27;s a good idea) persistent identifiers are a step backwards from that goal.

Completely agree. People who think unmoderated online platforms are equivalent to a flourishing state of nature have not really thought one or two steps ahead.No thought whatsoever about the fact that increasing automation makes astroturfing, propaganda, &quot;coordinated inauthentic activity&quot; possible in a way that was not easily practical before.Additionally, no one thinks about what filter bubbles really are in practice, or models what they imagine to be the healthy exchange of ideas, or whether our present choices to be selective about information have broader array of functional purposes than are captured by an oversimplifying term like &quot;filter bubble.&quot;I feel like this is a conversation about free speech on the internet that is due to mature, and that as it matures there will be a new inventory of 101-level fallacies broadly understood by everybody. One fallacy would be the idea that bots, trolls, harassment campaigns, mob mentality and coordinated state-based campaigns are the same as a &quot;free market of ideas&quot; that leads to the optimal state of exchange of ideas. Another fallacy would be the notion that any act of preferentially selecting sources is comprehensively analyzed and understood by labeling it a &quot;filter bubble.&quot;

&gt; Free speech absolutism is possible and is beneficial once you ensure that someone is not gaming the system, i.e. someone pretending to be more than one person.And how is one supposed to do that, especially against nation-state actors such as Russia and China, both of which have been caught or implicated multiple times now, or against ordinary criminals?&gt; Filter bubbles? Doesn&#x27;t have to be a thing, you have all the data to detect bubbles and pop them by introducing them to each other.Great idea, expose LGBT people to Christian fundamentalists, it&#x27;s not like harassment from these groups and their ideology isn&#x27;t one of the leading causes of suicide of LGBT people.&quot;Filter bubbles&quot; are the self-organized &quot;social mechanisms that we organically use in our daily lives to combat bad actors&quot; you were talking about.

Why do people use the word cult when it&#x27;s someone popular who they dislike? It&#x27;s inaccurate and a waste of connotation.He&#x27;s not a cult leader as he&#x27;s not doing cult things. Musk isn&#x27;t making a new religion, he just has fans. No less than Justin Bieber annoyingly had.He&#x27;s an activist as he&#x27;s trying (and succeeding) at affecting change according to his beliefs. He&#x27;s also certainly an opportunist as he&#x27;s an entrepreneur. What point are you trying to make with &quot;people&#x27;s best interests&quot;? He holds his interests to heart and that might happen to align with some people.

Musk is not an activist. At this point, I’d consider him a cult leader and an opportunist. He does not have people’s best interest at heart.

&gt; Free speech absolutism is possible and is beneficial once you ensure that someone is not gaming the systemThis is unbelievably naive. It’s like saying “a perfectly lassie-faire economy is possible, if no one is greedy”.Someone will ALWAYS be trying to game the system.

&gt; How do you define free speech absolutism?The ability for people to call a black Twitter user the N-word, a female user to &quot;fuck off and get raped,&quot; a liberal&#x2F;conservative user to eat a bullet, as well as spreading known falsehoods and toxic content (either as gospel or for the lulz) -- all without getting banned for having &quot;alternative views.&quot;

How do you define free speech absolutism? Is it literally anything goes? Anything legal? Is porn ok?

Tell me you&#x27;ve never worked on a team trying to address these issues without telling me you&#x27;ve never worked on a team trying to address these issues.

Advertisers don&#x27;t tend to like free speech absolutism.

END FREE SPEECH. We can&#x27;t possibly live in this world. Things must be controlled!  THINK of all the bad things we could hear!

Free speech absolutism means spam, child porn, revenge porn, death threats, sexual harassment and defamation are all allowed. You’re cool with all that?

&gt; Free speech absolutism is possible and is beneficial ..We (the internet) tried that with 8chan. Things kept escalating to the point where a bunch of people got murdered in a synagogue. Condoning violent echo chambers will always ALWAYS lead to significant violence.

&gt; TikTok successfully serves you new content - doesn&#x27;t think that just because you liked a cat you want cats and cats only.I agree with most of your comment - but tiktok might be a terrible example:&quot;One App – Two Worlds: This Is TikTok in Russia and Ukraine (nrk.no)&quot;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=30917474" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=30917474</a>

TikTok also figures out your racial identification and political orientation if you let either actively or passively

TikTok does have filter bubbles, they&#x27;re just geographic rather than profile specific. eg you wouldn&#x27;t find any content on the Ukraine invasion from a Russian IP.

I just despise Twitter for its double standard. It allows the tweet of Khamenei to call for “eradication” of Israel and its people, yet it blocks so many people in the name of “inciting violence”. It blocked people who called for wearing masks or SIP in early 2020, but later blocked people who cited Nature paper. If Twitter were in the middle ages, they would for sure ban Galileo, and if they were in 19th century, they would for sure ban Darwin — because one can’t be anti-science and science can’t be wrong, right?Twitter is a disgrace to the modern society. Their hypocrisy goes to no end.

&gt;Free speech absolutismMusk&#x27;s actions show he doesn&#x27;t support that.

&gt; Free speech absolutism is possible and is beneficial once you ensure that someone is not gaming the systemFirst and foremost gaming seems to be nigh on unavoidable.Secondly and most importantly, &quot;absolutism&quot; is not a good thing. I know I&#x27;ll get downvotes but it needs to be said: some speech is not healthy for society, primarily hate speech.And we have that today in Fox News -- actively promoting hate speech and helping to widen the divide in the US.edit: yes, much news is garbage (CNN et al), but my point remains that speech designed to foster hate of others is not healthy and welcome dialog in this regard.Divide and conquer for the win.

That’s all very nice sounding, but there’s a kind of gritty assembly language that this all compiles down to: “I want the high-speed electronic dissemination of information shaped like this.”It’s an open question whether or not it’s possible to avoid shaping the firehouse in a modern liberal democracy, but you could go your whole life and never meet a person truly disinterested in bending it towards their particular tribalism.The whole time I was at FB I had two groups of people, each screaming in one ear, that we were not doing enough to suppress the “other” people.How do you put shit on a global electronic network without “gaming the system”? Have no bias? You got that down we should make you king.

I don&#x27;t have an opinion over the consequences for politics over this, I&#x27;m just excited over the potential shakedown of the social media landscape that I grew to despise. Musk is an activist, can make it or break it.He is absolutely right over its enormous potential, all the problems it has - as a business or ones it creates for the society - can be solved.Free speech absolutism is possible and is beneficial once you ensure that someone is not gaming the system, i.e. someone pretending to be more than one person. Add some other social mechanisms that we organically use in our daily lives to combat bad actors, for example if someone is caught BS&#x27;ing degrade their reputation and amplify the defence of the victims(thus, solve the problem of sensational lie being viewed a million times and no one seeing the correction).Filter bubbles? Doesn&#x27;t have to be a thing, you have all the data to detect bubbles and pop them by introducing them to each other. &quot;More from the same&quot; algos are a choice, TikTok successfully serves you new content - doesn&#x27;t think that just because you liked a cat you want cats and cats only.

I doubt he will make it actually work, but at least it will be fun show to watch from outside. There will be some changes if he succeeds. And the effects of those should generate plenty of content to follow.

Yeah, he&#x27;s given a decent carrot to the current shareholders to sell, and an even bigger stick to beat them to do it as they will lose a lot if they don&#x27;t sell.

Why would the stock go lower than it was before Musk started buying?

&gt; 1. selling that much stock will dent investor confidence in twitter.I don&#x27;t understand this bit. It&#x27;s just Elon selling his own shares that he just bought, why would that affect investor confidence? Nothing&#x27;s changed about the company itself, so the price would just go back to where it was.

1. selling that much stock will dent investor confidence in twitter.2. Musk exiting twitter will again dent investor confidence.tldr there will be a huge sell-off if Musk&#x27;s offer is rejected and he follows-up with dumping the stock.

&gt; The takeover is unlikely to be a drawn out process. “If the deal doesn’t work, given that I don’t have confidence in management nor do I believe I can drive the necessary change in the public market, I would need to reconsider my position as a shareholder,” said Musk.Is he holding his own existing shares as hostage?

one has to wonder why those dumb old economy guys have never taken twitter apart and tried to turn it around like Musk proposes? they are probably too dumb

Activist investors almost never buy the entire company outright. The objective is to buy enough stock to have influence on the board, pressure them to make changes that they think would be beneficial and then sell. I think the last time twitter was targeted by actual activist investors, they never bought more than 5-6% of the stock but that was enough to force Dorsey to make changes.

Good old activist investing. Carl Icahn would be proud.

I don’t understand how [0] suggests Twitter is dying. Is a power law distribution of content production on a social network that strange? What % of HN comments come from the top N accounts? Is Twitter lying about growing user numbers?

Good. Twitter is actually dying [0] (and Musk knows it [1]). For its survival it needs to be saved from itself, by taking it private.Well done to Musk for doubling down.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pewresearch.org&#x2F;internet&#x2F;2021&#x2F;11&#x2F;15&#x2F;2-comparing-highly-active-and-less-active-tweeters&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pewresearch.org&#x2F;internet&#x2F;2021&#x2F;11&#x2F;15&#x2F;2-comparing-...</a>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=30973239" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=30973239</a>

And the only reason you would make it private is?

I think you only need the majority of shares to go private and then the rest will be payed out automatically for the set price.

when you own 100% you can make it private again.

We had the Bernanke Put now the Musk Put1) Buy 9 % of shares2) Announce intention to buy 100%3) Look share price rise4) Sell shares5) Profit!PS: Note to Musk -&gt; If you are looking to control a company 
you don&#x27;t need to buy 100% of shares. Just a majority 
of shares or special rights shares if they exist. Save 
your money and help the less lucky ones:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vanityfair.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;2022&#x2F;02&#x2F;mackenzie-scott-jeff-bezos-charitable-giving#:~:text=Last%20June%2C%20for%20example%2C%20she,million%20from%20the%20former%20first" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vanityfair.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;2022&#x2F;02&#x2F;mackenzie-scott-jeff...</a>

That is the thing. I would never bet against him but I don’t think he will pull this through

Once he&#x27;s taken it private, supposing he succeeds, you can&#x27;t short the stock anymore as there won&#x27;t be shares to borrow (or buy, or sell).

Interesting. I think Musk will be under tones of pressure. How would one play the market against him? Shorts?

And specifically without the board&#x27;s consent, or in active opposition to the board.

hostile takeover is a common way to describe the fact that you are taking over a company by buying back its public share. Nothing unusual if you read financial news.

Hostile takeover is an investment term.When you attempt to buy a company without the board’s consent, it is considered a hostile takeover.

[redacted comment complaining about the use of word &quot;hostile&quot; in title which apparently is a financial term]

&gt; Because in my view, it&#x27;s a cesspool of self-promoters, hate, corporate marketing and superficial populism.Isn&#x27;t this all social media?

Yeah. I mostly left Twitter about 9 years ago (!) for the same reasons.I wonder if a celebrity like Musk is overestimating how important Twitter really is. Because in my view, it&#x27;s a cesspool of self-promoters, hate, corporate marketing and superficial populism. I believe correcting that course is impossible. It&#x27;s been like that for 10 years with no change.

Elon Musk doesn&#x27;t seem to be a promoter of free speech when it affects him
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;2012&#x2F;02&#x2F;tesla-vs-top-gear&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;2012&#x2F;02&#x2F;tesla-vs-top-gear&#x2F;</a>

You are implying, that current staff of twitter is not effective. How do you get to that assessment?

The last one?Let&#x27;s go over the list:#1. Efficient at what? And how do you know the amount of chaff is 80-90%? And exactly how do you find &quot;effective&quot; workers. Like this bullet point alone is just so hand-wavy and vague. Might as well have just said &quot;Make twitter more gooder&quot;.#2. This kills the twitter. First of all, no one is going to pay to read Elon Musk&#x27;s tweets. Not for more than a month or two.#3. What would &quot;open[ing] the feed algorithm&quot; accomplish here? I assume you mean publish the source of the algorithm so we can see how it works. Why? So I can run my own twitter? And what do you mean by &quot;more control&quot;? Control of what?#4. I assume you mean fewer bans and removal of tweets. And I assume by &quot;reduce&quot; you don&#x27;t mean eliminate. And I assume you don&#x27;t want elimination because you recognize that some bans and deletions are necessary. That&#x27;s a sticky wicket. You don&#x27;t disagree with the action so much as the degree and&#x2F;or the conditions of the action. This comes down to the question of why should your standards be preferable to twitter&#x27;s?And ironically, it&#x27;s actually probably one of the easier ones to do. As I don&#x27;t think you have well-defined definitions for efficiency, effectiveness, or control. Which isn&#x27;t an uncommon phenomenon. It&#x27;s like having a really good idea for a story&#x2F;movie&#x2F;series&#x2F;book&#x2F;whatever. As long as you never actually have to make it, the idea gets to be as awesome as it could be. But execution is the bitch.

There are four goals.#1 make twitter efficient. firing 80-90% of the employees and replacing them with effective workers and management saves a ton of money.#2. Mitigate the bots and trolls by requiring payment and identification.#3. Open the feed algorithm and give people more control#4. Reduce the silencing of users.The last one is probably going to turn out to be harder than Elon expects. If Elon owned Youtube this week he would be sued for enabling the NYC subway terrorist. Same thing will happen on Twitter once he owns it.

Twitter (and Reddit, and Facebook) is like beans. Beans are a great nutritious tasty food of you know how to prepare them. But if you eat raw beans directly out of the package from the producer, you will get sick or die.

I&#x27;m always baffled about this as well. I keep the people I follow heavily curated, and I don&#x27;t follow more than 90 - 120 people at a time. Unfollowing and Refollowing is easy, why should I amass a list of thousands of follows like some people do?If I notice a negative pattern or drop in quality I simply unfollow, that&#x27;s it. It&#x27;s the big advantage over Facebook, the relationships are not bi-directional for me as an average user.In short: I get a quality experience and lots of useful information from Twitter because I only follow people that tweet quality content and useful tweets.However I do have to mention that the algorithmic timeline IS really bad, so I do feel like Twitter is constantly fighting me and trying to turn my feed into polarizing crap.

Twitter is completely unusable if you hadn&#x27;t joined years ago, or are a famous person.

I joined Twitter fairly recently and am mostly following journalists and thought leaders for subjects I&#x27;m interested in, and a few high quality creators. There&#x27;s an odd gem but there&#x27;s still a ton of noise per signal.I don&#x27;t think Dorsey has any idea what he&#x27;s doing and I think even less of Musk. The value to society that can be derived from a platform like Twitter is completely separate from the value it can bring to investors.

I feel like most people must use Twitter wrong. Despite how common a criticism it is, your description is not even remotely my experience.I don’t know why. Maybe most users follow people who they like or respect or think are good people not people who share content they care about or write interesting original tweets? Maybe they think the only recourse to not liking what they see on their timeline is to complain and wish people were better rather than unfollow? Or maybe some whole major topics&#x2F;spheres of interest are just entirely toxic to the core.Twitter is incredibly valuable to me as a source of news, insight, and discussion on a wide range of topics (from programming to space to politics to skiing and more). It’s been nothing short of revolutionary for my consumption of news and information.Twitter is actually better than RSS (though I do miss RSS being a thing) at what RSS was designed for, because curating your follows can give a better signal to noise ratio than taking everything from a given site, AND gives you a wider range of sources because you don&#x27;t personally need to discover a source to see articles from it.It also provides for some excellent debates, discussion, and interactions between really smart people.I do agree with Elon though. The direction of the product is poor and there are many baffling decisions. It sometimes seems like Twitter themselves don’t even know why their product is valuable or what it’s potential really is.I’d love to see some really radical changes. The kind that might not work and could be the end of Twitter if they fail. I’d love to see Twitter become really open, even open source, become a federated network, integrate privacy and anonymity tech, etc.We don’t know his plans and I doubt it’ll happen, but Elon is one of the few people who has demonstrated willing to risk everything on an outcome he thinks is important. I hope this is one of this cases, and his instincts are at least reasonable.

Same experience here. I interact quite a bit, though

&gt; For me Twitter has become full of people marketing themselves with lists, tweets that don&#x27;t make sense out of context, replies full of bile or inane comments and animated gifs.I&#x27;ve found twitter&#x27;s quality is a direct correlation to how discerning I am about who I follow. I don&#x27;t really tweet or reply, so for me it is a read-only exercise. As such, the people I follow tend to be really high-quality (I am not typically following &quot;regular&quot; people like friends, etc.). Journalists, experts in specific domains, etc. And I try to make sure I am following people that have views different than mine along with those I do agree with. As a result, I&#x27;ve noticed I read pretty detailed information well before I see it break in major news organizations, and it is surprising balanced on the whole.

I mean, what else can you ask for if you&#x27;re limited to 240 characters?

&quot;Twitterized&quot; - means you can no longer absorb anything but simple concepts that can be delivered in a few lines, due to too much time spent on Twitter. To quote some early 20th century propaganda monkey, &quot;The essence of propaganda is to take a complex subject, reduce it to a simple concept that a small child can understand, and then repeat, repeat, repeat.&quot;That&#x27;s what Twitter is ideal for, and that&#x27;s what political and media types use it for. Add in siloed echo chambers like Facebook groups and Reddit subreddits... I urge everyone to flush it all down the toilet.

Interesting if he manages to take over twitter. For me Twitter has become full of people marketing themselves with lists, tweets that don&#x27;t make sense out of context, replies full of bile or inane comments and animated gifs.But I&#x27;m not convinced Musk&#x27;s opinions of what is good for twitter is aligned with other content creators and consumers. Paypal, Tesla, SpaceX, Boring Company have clear goals - twitter is quite different.

I have NEVER seen an ad on Snapchat because all I do is send pictures and chat. Twitter has a user base that is a lot more engaged and can easily be captured by ads.

Twitter is where people who are or will be powerful, influential, or impactful get their information, form their opinions, and often debate really important topics.So I’d agree it’s undervalued in terms of utility if it’s not priced an order of magnitude or more higher than Snap.Whether that value can or should be captured as profit or is a public good, implying Twitter should operate more like a utility or non-profit is another question…

Twitter is literally the news breaking platform across the world. How much do you think that’s worth? I think it’s worth more than $100B under competent management.

Snap has been on borrowed time for a while. Both Tiktok and FB do what they do only better and with more users.

&gt; I mean it’s such a bizarrely undervalued company.Is it, though? Snap&#x27;s market cap is $56 billion right now, and they have more MAU than Twitter (~320 million vs ~220 million).

Twitter&#x27;s management has no say in whether or not they sell, except insofar as they get to vote with their shares like any other investor.

He actually dismissed Twitter’s management so I am guessing they’re slated to be demoted or fired if he takes over. Should they sell? I mean it’s such a bizarrely undervalued company. It’s like buying a plot of land on fifth avenue that’s owned by a convenience store and the store owner wants to charge for a skyscraper market rate.

I live in world where Mr. Musk have developed the two most amazing companies SpaceX and Tesla. So in what world do you live?

You live in a very different world than I if for you, the associating of Twitter with Mr. Musk improves Twitters image.

I don’t know what I worry about more, sinkholes swallowing my car whole on the way to work or needing to register on Gettr when it replaces Twitter.

Why not. Makes totally sense. Twitter gets a better image. Right now there is a real risk that something like gettr will take off.

Yes, but if they do not agree the price will:1. Go to above $54, in which case musk profits and he can try again later (headwinds are strong in tech generally right now)2. Go between $39 and $54 in which musk profits3. Drop under $39 in which musk can further solidify his stake, for much cheaper than his takeover offer.There’s basically no scenario in which musk loses assuming he’s serious and is willing to play the long game. Musk will either make a lot of money, or own Twitter.

I don’t see why he couldn’t buy more stock at the current selling price? As long as someone is willing to sell anyway.This takeover is aimed at people that wouldn’t ordinarily sell their stock at this point in time.

I think this is an offer to the board, proposing that it compel all shareholders to sell at $54&#x2F;share. The board can decide on the proposal without consulting the shareholders.In practice the board will do what management thinks best. The various directors probably have legal duties as fiduciaries and will want to act in a manner such that they can demonstrate they performed those duties in good faith, but they will have enormous latitude so long as they observe certain forms.There are likely procedures by which someone can force a shareholder vote on a proposal, but Musk isn&#x27;t using them here. These are probably structured by the company bylaws.

That&#x27;s not quite how it works if you make a formal takeover offer. It&#x27;s basically telling existing shareholders that he&#x27;ll buy their stock at $54. If enough of them don&#x27;t want to sell (depending on how it&#x27;s structured), the deal falls through. It&#x27;s a one-off purchase at $54 if it does go through. He can&#x27;t buy more stock in the interim (I think).

He&#x27;ll have to do it the same way he bought his current stake: slowly, over weeks and months, a little bit every day. A totally standard thing to ask your investment bank to do.

How would the price tank if he holds all the shares?

He can&#x27;t sell after a move like this, it would be illegal. He&#x27;s announcing his plans to not just hold but also to control the company, specifically to unlock value - means making some top level choices that makes Twitter stock move valuable. Had he dumped immediately after purchase he&#x27;d be prosecuted for market manipulation (realities of liquidity notwithstanding).

&gt; The moment he tries to sell billions of dollars of stock it’d tank.Hence the implied threat of doing so if they don&#x27;t agree to his terms.

&gt; Musk buys at $39 pumps all month to $54. He can either sell and easily make billions profit or take over the entire company at what can only be described as a discount compared to potential.He can’t sell his whole stake for a profit. There’s nowhere near enough liquidity. The moment he tries to sell billions of dollars of stock it’d tank.

Here&#x27;s one for $450, saw another for $375: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bizbuysell.com&#x2F;Business-Opportunity&#x2F;self-serve-laundromat-for-sale&#x2F;1887677&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bizbuysell.com&#x2F;Business-Opportunity&#x2F;self-serve-l...</a> - and they don&#x27;t even own the building.Machines alone are $1-3k each depending on how old and repaired they are.

400k is an insane amount for a laundry mat

It&#x27;s not an obvious good idea to buy Twitter though - and is especially risky if you&#x27;re not wanting to just continue to run the business as is without potentially de-stabilizing it and destroying it in the process.

It’s interesting to contextualize this with a regular persons life. This amount will present about 1&#x2F;7 of his net worth.However unlike a traditional purchase this will be n investment and depending on how it goes, he can get even more money.If an average person had a max net worth of 3 million this would be like them deciding to buy a 400K investment property, or a laundry mat.That aside, this is also a great example of how easy it is to become richer if you’re rich.Musk buys at $39 pumps all month to $54. He can either sell and easily make billions profit or take over the entire company at what can only be described as a discount compared to potential.Not to mention twitters stock hardly does well. He can just try again on the next dip if he likes.

wouldn&#x27;t be the first fine he got from the SEC... he&#x27;ll get the laws changed at some point if he keeps being himself, maybe that&#x27;s half the point?

Because he filed the takeover offer with the SEC (the regulator) today. This is the way it should be done.

How is that not market manipulation? Isn&#x27;t this sort of thing regulated?

He made the offer at a 40% premium on the April 1st close.Twitter is a dying social network - sounds like a pretty good deal.

What a clown. Probably made the offer knowing it won&#x27;t get accepted anyway. Then sells his shares at a nice profit and goes on with his day.That said, it would be interesting to see how Musk would destroy Twitter, instead of seeing Twitter continue to do it themselves.

Yeah, I get that, but for someone who talks a lot about his singular desire to do more space exploration, things like a tunneling company, a rocket company and an electric car company make sense. Twitter doesn&#x27;t fit in that group too easily.

Look at Oligarchs Yachts and that tells you everything about the ego of Billionaires.  It is not about the money.

This seems like a massive waste of money. 
Firstly, it will kill remaining trust in twitter and secondly the opportunity cost of spending that much money, like why not expand Telsa into India, or Asia in a big way.

The bots are necessary for the quarterly user counts to look good during the shareholder report.Once they&#x27;ve finished pretending the bot accounts have ad-watching eyeballs, they follow up a couple months later with a token crackdown of some small amount of them.

musks fee is proposed on blue checkmarks only, not all users.  Not sure it would dramatically reduce anything except blue checkmarks.

Musk already proposed a small fee per user to verify them. This would add a cost to bots, which would dramatically reduce the numbers. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techxplore.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;2022-04-musk-twitter-dogecoin.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techxplore.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;2022-04-musk-twitter-dogecoin.ht...</a>

I don&#x27;t think on Twitter we should be &#x27;free speech absolutists&#x27;. Its a private company, no need for lots of people.What I would actually like is seriously shooting down these idiotic bots. Like seriously, they have the exact same name and picture as the main account. How the fuck do we not have machine learning, fuck a bunch of bash-scripts to figure this out?It makes the platform borderline unusable how much crypto spam bots exist on it.That said, not a fan of Musk waste his time with Twitter. SpaceX, Tesla are plenty.

When I hear people bag on him I ask a few questions..Name one man who has done more for EV and by extension the environment?Name one man who has done more for SelfDriving, and by extension road safety?Space travel?He might fail at half what he does, but yeah..

The most American take possible, I guess.

Sometimes being reckless and a heretic helps society move forward.I&#x27;m starting to become a fan of Musk. Guy is sitting on $256B in net worth. That&#x27;s so rich it&#x27;s like trying to picture the distance from the earth to the sun, your brain struggles.I get the sense he&#x27;s going to be the Howard Hughes of our time. Weird ideas and a ton of money make for some interesting moves. Not everything he does will be positive, but his imprint will be one for the history books.

Nothing better than the CIA having a say on what tweets are allowed.

Standard terminology for when an acquisition is pitched directly to the shareholders against the wishes (or irrespective of the wishes) of the board.

americans. we had a discussion about that a few days ago

Non-hostile version of a takeover requires a board approval at least. Depending on the jurisdiction and the company bylaws certain amount of the shareholders (say 75%+) has to vote for the takeover to actually happen.Edit: Under normal circumstance, single entities cannot &#x27;easily&#x27; obtain a large share of the stocks even if they actively buy.

Well you should have nationalized it while you could&#x27;veBTW why is this called hostile?

&gt; price will tankmaking a subsequent buy&#x2F;takeover even more easier?

If the hostile takeover fails the price will tank before he exits.

It would make sense if he needed the money, but he doesn&#x27;t.

So he is pumping up the share price and, if he doesn&#x27;t get his way he will dump his shares.I wonder if there&#x27;s a name for this sort of behaviour?

This time last year he was the reason why Dogecoin skyrocketed. Look at where it is now.Don&#x27;t let him do this to Twitter.

Someone who:- is deeply dishonest- manipulative- narcissistic- is known to have outbursts of rage during which he shouts and insults employees- is known to publicly humiliate employees- has been reported to physically assault an employee- takes revenge against journalists, Twitter users or divers - the forms of revenge includes doxxing, personally asking the person&#x27;s employer to get them fired, publicly accusing the victim of pedophilia- is a narcissistic attention whore who has complained in leaked emails that the media don&#x27;t talk about him enough- has no empathy

A person “like” him? What does that even mean? You mean a successful entrepreneur? Or will we instead only focus on what you believe to be any negative characteristics? Do us a favour if you reply: list what is great about people like Elon Musk, and then list what is bad about people like him please.

He is more competent but also much more likely to use it as a political lever and to gather information and take revenge against people he doesn&#x27;t like.

Can&#x27;t be worse than current leadership or direction of Twitter...

This is terrible. A person like Elon Musk should not hold more power.

Isn’t that the current state of things?If musk makes this purchase it won’t centralize power any more, but it will draw attention to how centralized that power is. Which is a good thing

&gt; Oligarchs controlling every form of my mass communication can only make things worse, thoughHow can it make things worse when it has literally always been the case as long as there has been “mass communication”?

&#x27;Oligarchs&#x27; historically have gained influence and fielty to a nationstate. We are at a new form of Oligarchy, where the business magnates are able to operate internationally on a scale never seen before.Historically, taxation has been the most profitable form of revenue generation. But thats no longer the case. With globalism and multi-national product creation, a single person in a nation can be many times richer than any nationstate, with technology above and beyond any nationstate. What happens when musk has electric jets and fully-reusable ICBM&#x27;s, has remade the world power grid in his image, is one of few entitys even able to get to mars let alone command and control the resources of the astroid belt.

A media company having a legal obligation to maximize profits seems at least as bad for journalism as private ownership as there&#x27;s zero room for any sort of integrity.

Oligarchs controlling every form of my mass communication can only make things worse, though.

I&#x27;m wondering if this whole &#x27;buy twitter&#x27; idea is some sort of displacement activity from stressful problems in either spacex or tesla. I&#x27;m a fan of both companies but I know he drives them hard and takes lots of expansion risks&#x2F;gambles with them (innovation is a gamble at the end of the day).

It reveals that everything he ever said about Mars, or about global climate catastrophe, was just so much posturing.

Speaking about enlightenment, isn&#x27;t it strange that Elon Musk is into politics now? I mean he wants to go to Mars, his project was &quot;Flyin&#x27; mother nature&#x27;s silver seed to a new home in the sun&quot;, and now he goes right in the opposite direction. Did he have any major setbacks with his Starship?

That’s because they only hire staff who have the opinions that the people who own the organization want them to have. There’s nothing left-leaning about corporate censorship, which Twitter embodies. It’s all neoconservative war propaganda.

What other reason could the billionaires possibly have for owning these companies? I doubt it&#x27;s out of the goodness of their hearts and given the success of their other businesses probably isn&#x27;t about making money.This is just robber barons all over again and to believe otherwise one would have to be pretty ignorant of America&#x27;s history. Chomsky&#x27;s best insights are about how this kind of control actually works and it isn&#x27;t really that journalists are censored by owners (though this does occasionally happen).

Wapo is a smartly used puppet - if the bias was overt it wouldn&#x27;t be effective.

I realized that &quot;left-leaning&quot; is an inaccurate characterization. To me being left means being liberal. To quote wikipedia, &quot;Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed and equality before the law. &quot; And I subscribe to liberalism.Twitter and WaPo&#x27;s staff, sometimes, are nothing but liberal. A liberal wouldn&#x27;t call anyone who questioned Fauci nazi or anti-science. A liberal wouldn&#x27;t want to lock someone up or doxx someone just because they criticize Biden government. A liberal wouldn&#x27;t celebrate the illness of Justice Thomas just because he is a conservative. A liberal wouldn&#x27;t call someone who criticizes Sharia a xenophobic yet thinks it&#x27;s totally okay for Khamenei to call for &quot;eradicating&quot; an entire nation and its people. A liberal wouldn&#x27;t blatantly call Asian parents racists just because they support standard tests and entrance exams by popular schools. A liberal wouldn&#x27;t call a government Nazi who didn&#x27;t even try to consolidate power in the pandemic but celebrate another government for consolidating lots of power in the name of handling the pandemic.Those people do not appear to be liberals. They are radicals.

So you are saying that it&#x27;s a coincidence that WaPo, owned by Bezos, who was in a public fued with Bernie Sanders, ran 16 hit pieces on Sanders in less than a day?<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fair.org&#x2F;home&#x2F;washington-post-ran-16-negative-stories-on-bernie-sanders-in-16-hours&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fair.org&#x2F;home&#x2F;washington-post-ran-16-negative-storie...</a>

As much as I don’t like WaPo’s Opinion columns and Twitter’s double standards in content moderation, I don’t think the two companies are puppets of their owners. The staff there have their mostly left-leaning political view point and their own moral standard. I don’t necessarily agree with their view, but it’s their view and their voice nonetheless.

I don’t find it unprincipled. It is how it is, and we should all be okay with a company enforcing their TOS.Boycotting (the so called cancel culture by those it affects) is a fundamental and irreducible component of any “free” market.

This is a good point. Everyone that thought it was great twitter was centralized and saying &quot;it&#x27;s a private company, they can censor what they want&quot; and &quot;go make your own platform&quot; will have to contend with their once convenient unprincipled position.

This is not oligarchy. Using that term here makes no sense.

I mean by and large the success of first generation billions and the power they manage to control kinda show with enough money it doesn&#x27;t matter that he is explicit not part of the &quot;real oligarchic nature of the US political and societal life&quot;.

I personally think this is excellent, in the great scheme of things, maybe this will open a real discussion about the real oligarchic nature of the US political and societal life at the top.I mean, with tech titan (and second wealthiest man on the planet) Bezos owning the WaPo, the moment the tech titan (and the wealthiest man on the planet) Musk will put his hands on Twitter hopefully will also be the moment of some &quot;enlightenment&quot; for the educated masses. Or maybe I&#x27;m just day-dreaming.

&gt; I don’t think he’s an idiot though, so there must also be some other upside here.Maybe he&#x27;s just petty? There wasn&#x27;t an upside to calling that diver a &quot;pedo guy&quot;, but Musk was nursing a vendetta due to perceived slights in the past.

Complete speculation, but after seeing that and then the offer, i immediately thought “ok, they had some negotiation, Elon made demands, the board refused, he threatened to buy the company and fire them, the board refused… and now he is following through.”I don’t think he’s an idiot though, so there must also be some other upside here. Certainly there’s value to unlock in Twitter. Does he need the cash?

Ooooh, maybe this is what the&gt; &quot;There will be distractions ahead ... let&#x27;s tune out the noise and stay focused on the work and what we&#x27;re building&quot;from the other day (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=30984215" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=30984215</a>) meant...

Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private