![]() ![]() Content moderation changes will probably be modest But there’s a 30 to 40 percent chance that a new owner with a history of engineering success can pull it off. Dramatically reinvigorating a tech company as old as Twitter strikes me as somewhat unlikely. And I think on some level this really is more of an engineering problem than a political problem. ![]() I would like the software tools that Twitter gives its users to be better so that more people can get more out of it and build the value of the community. I interact with a wide range of people, have made a lot of virtual friends, and benefit from the wisdom of not only academic specialists and beat reporters, but also obsessive hobbyists and practitioners in a range of fields. Twitter is, despite its aggravations, a source of great delight for me. ![]() Selectively moderating some of the most extreme alt-right accounts while letting hammer-and-sickle Twitter fly makes the left look crazier than it is and the right look saner. Nobody in the Republican Party, including Elon Musk, is in a rush to get Donald Trump back on Twitter because his account is embarrassing to the GOP. What Musk wants is content moderation decisions that command broad consensus rather than reflect a niche progressive view.īut the actual partisan implications of these changes are often unclear. By the same token, Musk has vowed from the beginning of his Twitter saga to reduce the number of spam bots on the site, a straightforwardly speech-hostile stance. There are some perennial Insta controversies at the margin, usually stemming from the arbitrary convention that women’s nipples are naughty and men’s aren’t, but no apocalyptic battles are being fought over this because it has no partisan implications. My general sense is that abstract debates over free speech and social media tend to be overblown - there’s no big push to make Apple put porn apps on the App Store or for Meta to allow NSFW Instagram accounts. This won’t require ending all content moderation, but it will require acknowledging that content moderation isn’t the central solution to Twitter’s problems. And at that point, Twitter becomes an online services company with a proper flywheel of product improvements driving user growth, which drives network effects, which drives revenue, which drives product improvements. And if more people use it, the value of the network increases. If Twitter gets better, more people will use it. But if you think of Twitter as a product with tremendous value but also a lot of functional limitations, then Musk plausibly can make iterative improvements to the product. If you think of Twitter as a problem, then Musk almost certainly can’t solve the problem. As someone who really enjoys Twitter, part of what makes me relatively optimistic about the Musk Ascension is that Elon Musk enjoys Twitter, which didn’t seem to be the case for Twitter’s prior board or even its top executive team. My favorites in this genre are Nilay Patel’s “Welcome to Hell, Elon” and John Herrman’s “Twitter’s Day of Spite.”īut both pieces, like a lot of Twitter coverage, are written from the perspective of someone who kind of hates Twitter. Many of the responses to this promise emphasized the idea that there’s no amount of free speech nostrums that will eliminate the basic dilemmas of content moderation. Musk also penned an open letter to Twitter advertisers promising, among other things, that under his leadership the platform will not become a “free-for-all hellscape.” The Elon Musk Twitter saga ended as it began: with a very rich, right-of-center Twitter user buying a platform whose social influence exceeds its financial value, decapitating its top leadership, and adopting an antagonistic attitude toward the rank-and-file staff. ![]()
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