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Chief Twit Elon Musk says 'tyranny is all that lies ahead' if free speech is lost in America

By: Cactus Flower in ALEA | Recommend this post (0)
Tue, 29 Nov 22 3:55 PM | 16 view(s)
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You can only laugh at these grandiloquent abstract statements.

What is Musk's expertise in matters of speech? I thought he was a business guy trying to make a buck, not an ideologue trying to teach society how to behave.

Is twitter's speech policy defined by the government? Last I heard, it was a privately-owned platform and it sets its own rules within the boundaries of local law that apply to everyone. It is entitled to do what it wants within those parameters.

As a rule-setter, it gets to define internal rules on its platform while balancing the needs of different users: posters, readers and advertisers being the primary ones.

As a commercial enterprise, it wants to maximise its profit and to do that, it issues policies to make twitter user-friendly so that posters want to post, readers want to read and advertisers want to advertise. If he doesn't, his company, twitter, will be less profitable than it might be. And other platforms will eat twitter's lunch.

User-friendly policies and ruleless speech are not the same thing. We already know how ruleless speech works on a global scale. The shoutiest, most unpleasant people dominate the space. So other, more polite posters don't post, readers don't read and advertisers walk away.

One of these decades, Musk may figure it out. He's just a business guy trying to make a buck. Not a lawyer with expertise in speech rights or a philosopher with anything interesting to say about the relationship between peoples and their governments. It's altogether obvious he has no clue how to turn twitter into a successful business.

And just in case he hasn't noticed, the internet isn't only in America. Different rules apply in different places.


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