Unaccountable\less accountable to who, though? Twitter being less accountable to the types of scummy mega-millionaires and speculators who basically ran the platform into the ground through both action and inaction (and I'm determining this based on stock prices and peoples general sentiment of the platform I have heard from people IRL) isn't a bad thing to me. Yeah, this is at worst a side-grade from one type of **** to another.
TaleWorlds News: New News Necessary for the OT Neophytes
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It cannot be a good product, the core idea is ****. Elon might change it from a wine aunt echo chamber to a soccer mom echo chamber, but that's just cosmetics.
Theres gotta be an ulterior motive here. Elons business decisions arent rash or impulsive but has thus far been very calculated. Hes a tool, but a sharp tool. What is he planning to do with the copious amounts of data that he can gather from Twitter users? Playing dictator over a social media platform isnt the endgame for him, he wouldnt cough up 44 billion just for that.
He will get leverage over anyone's ability to communicate, because there is the implicit threat of banning accounts he doesn't like or algoritming them down. Yes, he claims he's against this now, but give a man powers and he will abuse them if he's not accountable to anyone.
I'm amazed that it can be worth $44 billion. Perhaps he simply wants to be able to make baseless accusations of paedophilia without constraint.
Dude, that's free speech now! Everyone should do this to exercise their new rights and let lawsuits land where they may.
The free speech pledge is already kicking in 
www.hollywoodreporter.com
Twitter Suffers Mass Deactivations After Elon Musk Takeover
Follower numbers for high profile accounts, including Katy Perry and former President Barack Obama, dropped significantly in the last few days, while follower numbers for prominent right-wing figures like GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene saw huge increases.
www.hollywoodreporter.com
If his real goal was to destroy Twitter then I have to commend him for his service to humanity. Hope he goes after Facebook next.
Elon Musk Paid A Private Investigator $50,000 To Dig Up Dirt On A British Cave Rescuer He Called A "Pedo Guy"
“When I said ‘pedo guy,’ I didn’t mean that he was literally a pedophile; it was just an insult.”
www.buzzfeednews.com
Also
Elon Musk dares United Autoworkers to try to unionize Tesla
Unfair labor practice charges have previously been filed against Tesla, Musk and other company executives for allegedly blocking union organizing attempts at the company.
www.npr.org
The man's an idiot.
Honestly I hope he turns it into that, then the whole world can see how quickly Twitter will crash and burn and maybe other social media actors will realize that it's not a good business model. "Total free speech" Nazi land already exists, it's called 4chan, and it's not exactly a booming success.
I highly doubt that he will though. It's not like he's never lied before.
Agreed, it's not good business to alienate the majority of users by allowing assholes, and Musk loves money.
But Musk is a very public person that fronts his Tesla business interests, while trying not to get his products boycotted because of his politics.
As the new public face of Twitter, he may get any political fallout for whatever Twitter does or doesn't, and put Tesla in some trouble.
It would be interesting. I wish he would lose billions with this investment and become a loser meme.
I disagree. Back when Twitter was practically unregulated, it was a lot more popular with normal people and not the weirdos and groomed teenagers who now dominate the site. Most of the people I know irl, and most of the people I interacted with who felt like they had lives outside of twitter, began leaving the site in around 2014-2017. If you look at old accounts (from like 2011), most of them went inactive around that time. This also corresponds with data for worldwide users: https://www.statista.com/statistics/282087/number-of-monthly-active-twitter-users/
Back in the day, people with swastikas in their names would randomly find your account and start debating race statistics with you, or there would be completely unexpected interactions, like people bantering with ISIS members, celebrities on April 1 posting bait-and-switch videos that had loud sex noises, or Atlanta gang members tracking down an account that was openly posting child porn. There was an element of fun and chaos there that has been lost.
What really killed the site from my experience was the algorithmization of everything, leading to a greater proportion of lunatics, and less opportunity for them to be challenged. In 2015 or so they hid millions of accounts from ever seeing each other, even if they were following each other, based on the data Twitter had gathered over the years. Now you have "communities" as heinous as MAPs (euphemism for pedophile), and a vast mass of hateful edgelord """""communists""""" who can exist without ever being challenged. Nobody talked about twitter with the same kind of derogatory language back when the site was mostly unmoderated.
I actually think 4chan had the same problem during the same period, just without the intentional top-down regulation. Back in 2008 it was just a bunch of people mostly taking the piss. But as the first generation of users grew out of it, it left a greater proportion of people who had no life outside of it, and the general consensus became more and more unpalatable. Even when /pol/ started it wasn't nearly as bad as it is now.
The are other factors of course like the Obama-Trump transition making western media liberals and conservatives permanently lose their minds, taking all online discourse down with them, and the decline in the west of edginess as a political statement. But I don't think that alone explains why Twitter's reputation is so awful now.
If the choice is between corporations and billionares, the states are always a better choice since they have at least some accountability. I am not a fan of cyberpunk that much
Ok but what caused things to go downhill was not the moderation, it was the algorithm that exacerbated the tribalism and the cringe element. That genie is out of the bottle, if you remove the little moderation that is there (and honestly, there isn't much of it) this will just explode.
The algorithm *is* the moderation. 99% of the time if you get banned or whatever, no human being is involved.
We are talking about different algorithms here (as is normal since we are oversimplifying we are missing things). I am talking about the push to promote posts that generate reactions, auto moderation is definitely a thing and it definitely doesn't work. In fact I don't know that I would even call it moderation, it's pretty much white noise. I don't think anyone could really make a case that that's what is causing issues with social media though. Manual moderation is still present and it does work, the issue is that Facebook and similar are unwilling to put in the resources to do it at a larger scale because it isn't profitable.
/cloudfront-us-east-2.images.arcpublishing.com/reuters/IMHCUECLSNJHXEL2U7M55L4O6A.jpg)
UNICEF 'quite optimistic' after Taliban comments on girls' education, official says
The chief of field operations of the U.N. children's agency expressed cautious optimism about working with Taliban officials following their seizure of power in Afghanistan, citing their early expressions of support for girls' education.
www.reuters.com
Fast forward to reality
Taliban order all Afghan women to cover their faces in public
Decree forces male relatives to police law by making them liable to fines or prison for breaches
www.theguardian.com
Afghanistan: Taliban restrict women's rights as isolation looms | DW | 30.03.2022
By going back on girls' education and tightening restrictions against women, the Taliban are going against key conditions set by Western donors for much-needed economic assistance.
www.dw.com
To absolutely nobody's surprise. Contrary to the hopes of some who have been waiting in the wings salivating at the West's general failure in Afghanistan, there was never any real hope that the Taliban, who have never particularly enjoyed or even cared about things like popular support, would have ever implemented a government based on any principles that one would consider "humanitarian".
