Elon Musk Is Doing One Heckuva Job
Free speech is an unalloyed good, right? Although it’s curious that OT, along with every other website whose comment section isn’t a sewer, feels the need to moderate them … …
Current and former federal officials are warning that a surge in hate speech and disinformation about Jews on Twitter is uniting and popularizing some of the same extremists who have helped push people to engage in violent protests including the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on Congress.
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Musk announced a broad amnesty for most previously banned accounts and has personally interacted with fringe activists and white nationalists on the site in the weeks since he assumed ownership. Other actors have experimented with racist and antisemitic posts to test Musk’s limits as a self-declared “free speech absolutist.”
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“This type of escalation and hate and dehumanization, the hatred of the Jewish population — it’s a really directed target. Violence is inevitable,” said Denver Riggleman, a former Air Force intelligence officer who later served as a Republican member of Congress and then on the staff of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
So, we all know the line about a bar that lets Nazis drink there becoming a “Nazi bar,” right?
I think a lot of Twitter users (including myself) at this point are debating whether they should find another bar, or keep patronizing the Nazi bar, but make ugly faces at the Nazis who drink there too because “that’ll show ’em!”
For whatever it’s worth: https://mstdn.party/@rufus_hickokReport
A traffic intersection that Nazis drive through doesn’t become a Nazi traffic intersection though. A bar with half a billion patrons and sound-insulated booths doesn’t, can’t, have a dominant theme unless it’s enforced by the bartender. Not permitted, enforced.Report
This is a good point. I can’t imagine how this site would have changed if we had even a million daily patrons, but the thought makes one shudder.Report
This analogy is Rick’s Cafe in Casablanca.
And as there, the Naz.is don’t just want to drink and converse peaceably.
Their entire purpose, the thing that makes them Naz.is, is to bully and intimidate the rest of the patrons. They insist on creating the dominant theme and enforcing it themselves.
And hey, maybe we can sing louder and drown them out. But history shows that bigots just grow ever more belligerent and use violence when their voices don’t do the trick.Report
Twitter has 500 million tweets per day and around 200 billion tweets per year.
That’s closer to the size of a planet than a bar.Report
yeah, that. I have a mstdn account now, and there are an awful lot of posts getting boosted into my timeline suggesting that if you don’t immediately close your birdsite account, you are no different from the fascists who hang out in the birdsite and….uh…..isn’t that kind of like living in a city where there might be fascists? I mean….you can decry people’s bad beliefs all you want but they’re still gonna exist and short of buying a private island and absolutely purity testing everyone who visits, you can’t be free of those people.
I mean, I get leaving the place if you are harassed or if you’re concerned about cybersecurity or if all your friends have left but…..I know I’m too susceptible to the whole “gee one of your friends kicked a puppy once, I guess that means you approve of kicking puppies and probably do it yourself” peer pressure stuff.
but really? There are terrible people everywhere and to get away from them 100% you have to be a hermit.Report
Maybe everyday users but journalists are addicted to twitter. So is a certain kind of terminally online personReport
Yeah, there’s also a sort of pressure on writers to build a presence there, which always seems ill-advised when you watch writers- who are used to writing as thinking aloud- get shouted down for not understanding that social media writing is more like broadcasting.Report
It is vitally critically important to keep debating if the Holocaust happened. How can we have freedom of speech if we aren’t still debating if jews are globalists who run the world. Unless you embarrass daddy elon like ye did which is fine and noble and not the stupidest bit of hypocrisy ever.Report
Musk doesn’t seem to realize that his product is the audience he can deliver to advertisers. What audience you deliver depends on your moderation policies. If Musk wants to run an unmoderated free speech dumpster fire, he has every right to do that, but the audience will reflect that, and the advertisers will stay away.
And he’ll probably whine about free speech.Report
Elon Musk has kicked Kanye West off Twitter: ‘He again violated our rule against incitement to violence’
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-suspends-kanye-twitter-account-2022-12
Ye has repeatedly made antisemitic comments in interviews over the past week and has shared a long string of controversial tweets, including an image of a swastika superimposed over the Star of David.Report
The very same day Ye was banned, open avowed Naz.i Andrew Anglin was reinstated.Report
If we’re going to be charitable, then he’s giving them a second chance (which West blew right out of the gate).Report
I thought I posted. Might be in mod.Report
Do you now see all of your comments? I don’t see anything pending.Report
I do. Thank you very much.Report
Well if anonymous federal law enforcement officials say something is happening it totally, absolutely must be true, and we should brace ourselves accordingly. And no doubt a former air-force intelligenceofficer turned politician is an expert on the matter as well.
The real question of course is whether changes to moderation make twitter a more fun product for more people, thereby increasing its ability to bring in revenue. Obviously turning the place into an unmitigated flood of racists and hard right reactionaries is very unlikely to succeed in that. Of course I think there is a great under assessment of the limitations previous management appears to have been setting, by allowing the flourishing of incendiary woke nonsense from academics or floods of tumblr style offense archeologists searching every tweet for signs of ever expanding theories of whatever ism is in style that day. Now, I’m not on twitter, and unlikely to ever be on twitter, but seasonal greetings from professor so and so about how he wants white genocide for Christmas are just as likely to make me avoid a site as debates about whether the holocaust is real or Jews are monitoring Kanye West from space or whatever.Report
That article is a horror show. The funny thing is, they had one piece of evidence in the whole thing, and they not just buried it, they put it in the last two paragraphs. It makes me wonder about the mentality of those who wrote it or read this kind of article regularly. They’re more persuaded by the intimation that there are experts on one side than evidence of a specific bad thing happening.Report
The site owner joking with white supremacists about 14 and 88 is not the best look.Report
This is the second time I’ve seen this comment without a link. Is there one?Report
On Saturday Musk responded to a random account with the username @Rainmaker1973 that tweeted that the unique biodiversity of Madagascar is the result of being isolated from other land masses for 88 million years,
Musk, who hadn’t been tagged in the post, responded by asking: “I wonder what Earth will be like 88 million years from now.”
While it’s unclear if Musk knows that in extremist circles, 88 is a well-known code for “Heil Hitler” (H being the 8th letter of the alphabet), his followers certainly took his use of the number as a sign he was speaking to them.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7zm9q/elon-musk-twitter-nazis-white-supremacy
“14” was other people replying to his use of the number 88.
Wiki has nothing connecting Musk to White anything (Musk is a libertarian). He has unusual views on the future of mankind (we must get off the planet) and the future of technology (AI is a serious threat to mankind) but they’re not race based.
Musk is correct, Madagascar was geologically isolated 88 million years ago (google)
IMHO This is seeing faces in the clouds level wishful thinking by both the Na.zis and the Left.Report
The fact that he is reinstating white supremacists strongly suggests he is supportive of them.
We’ve seen this before, the Pepe memes and oblique references and “shock the normies” smirking.
Popehats Rule of Goats comes into play here.Report
West’s ban suggests otherwise.
Previously twitter was run by people so far to the left that preventing Biden’s kid from embarrassing him during the election was important enough to find a reason to ban it.
Now it’s being run by a guy who described himself as “a free speech absolutist” before he purchased the company.
He’s going to draw the lines differently, however West’s example suggests that there are lines.
But since twitter is roughly the size of a planet, not a bar, there are going to be nasty parts of it.Report
If you have sex with half a billion things per day, probably some of them will be goats.Report
He has gone way out of his way to readmit open Naz.is and white supremacists.
A person whole tolerates them is an enemy of free speech.Report
Was the ACLU “an enemy of free speech” at skokie?
They took the Na.zis right to free speech all the way to the Supreme Court.
https://www.aclu.org/other/aclu-history-taking-stand-free-speech-skokieReport
The ACLU isn’t hosting Naz.is on their website.
And I’m not suggesting the government suppress them from marching in the street.
What I am saying is that it isn’t possible to have a platform which is welcoming and safe for both cats and mice, even if most of the the participants are dogs.
The bigots don’t want to be left alone to pursue their interests, because their interest is to seek out and inflict suffering on their hated targets. That’s what makes them bigots in the first place.
For example: Andrew Anglin, who is now welcome on Twitter, was convicted of instigating a pattern of anti-Semitic harassment against a Jewish woman, and several other harassment campaigns against minorities.
Or the Proud Boys, who have organized campaigns of threat and intimidation against drag shows, showing up in body armor and carrying guns.Report
So your view is criminals shouldn’t be allowed free speech?
So if a BLM protester is arrested and convicted, he can’t use Twitter?
Make up rules and apply them in a way that’s free from content.Report
BLM protestors don’t pose an existential threat to a marginalized group the way Anti-Semites do.
Sorry, try again.Report
I don’t see anything close to an “existential threat” in the US. That does sound close to one of the big accusations against MLK, “he threatens our way of life”.
If we’re going with anti-Na.zism as a justification for censorship, then the biggest anti-N in the world right now is Putin (at least on paper).
He’s gone to war with the stated aim of getting rid of Na.zis in the Ukraine. He’s even using strong censorship to shut down those same people and anyone who gets in his way.
We have more to fear from authoritarism than we do from a morally bankrupt and mostly dead ideology that attracts losers and failures.
It is possible Musk will need to revisit these lines after the idiots he’s letting back in create problems. However the previous lines before included protecting Biden’s corrupt son because it might negatively affect Biden’s election.
That hits the radar as a problem bigger than losers talking to each other about how they’re going to take over the world and putting out flame bait.Report
Tl:Dr
It Can’t Happen HereReport
My Jewish friends – and our resident Jewish commentors – take these folks seriously, as they do the rise in Anti-Semitic violence going along with the rise in rhetoric. People like Anglin represent a real threat to a historically oppressed group that BLM doesn’t.
That’s sick and twisted – but rooted in propaganda and not reality. Putin is not Fighting Naz.is – he’s trying to reassemble the Russian Empire because he wants to be a world leader not a back water tin pot guy. To even joke about this – which I can only hope you are doing – misreads modern history badly.
At the moment the most authoritarian politician in the US is entertaining that philosophy at dinner. So yes, we need to fear authoritarianism, but doubly so when it runs to this extreme.Report
Let’s do some math and see how serious this problem is.
Total violent crime rate in the US was about 400 per 100k.
The Anti-Defamation League, which tracks anti-Semitic behavior nationwide, found 2,717 incidents in 2021.
However that’s “behavior”, if we narrow that down to violence it was 88 incidents.
There are 5.4 million Jews in the US.
So that’s 1.6 violent crimes per 100k.
1.6 is a rounding error compared to 400. Literally a rounding error, the real number is 398.5 and I rounded.
These numbers don’t suggest “existential threat”.
I would say Putin himself is the closest thing we’ve seen to Hit.ler in a long time. I’m pointing out just how easily this accusation get used for all sorts of things, even when it’s obviously unreasonable.
I certainly don’t believe him, but his people seem to.Report
Whoops. I fat fingered that. Number isn’t 5.4m, it’s 5.8m.
So it’s 1.5 per 100k. And that’s adults only. Those crime stats are going to include children so this is even more lopsided than I presented.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/05/11/the-size-of-the-u-s-jewish-population/Report
Do that same math with 9-11 style terrorism, murder, shoplifting or any other sort of crime or security issue, and you arrive at the same result, i.e., its really not a problem, like, at all.
3,000 dead out of 330,000,000 people? Pfft! Its nothing, a rounding error not even worth discussing.
For that matter, what is the body count in Hong Kong right now? Or China itself? Or Venezuela or Cuba?
All just negligible rounding to zero.
By your reckoning, there really is nothing going on there that could be called an “existential threat”.
The “Existential threat” is to liberal democracy itself and civil society.
When a society shrugs and allows a disfavored minority to be harassed and intimidated, even if the body count is zero, liberal democracy no longer exists, for anyone.
What makes bigotry bigotry is that it assumes that no one has rights. Rights don’t exist for anyone. Instead there are only privileges belonging to the favored class, privileges which can be withdrawn at a whim.Report
Terrorism, yes… although we should probably make a difference between the lone wolf style terrorism and the 911 act of war.
Murder, it depends. Random violence against me? Yes, it rounds to zero. If you have a different risk profile then you probably know it.
Shoplifting is large enough to affect bottom lines and letting organized crime use it as a tactic is a problem.
What I pointed out is, from those numbers, if you are Jewish your risk profile doesn’t increase beyond that of a rounding error. So if you are Jewish and subjected to violence, odds are something like 99%+ that it will be because of reasons other than being Jewish.
Yes.(*)
If we’re going to lower the bar so much that a less than one percent increase in assault counts (increase in murders during that time frame, zero) then we also need to call school shootings an “existential threat”.
Words have meanings, calling something an “existential threat” should mean it’s a realistic threat to some group’s existence and not just that you find it vile.
(*) China’s slow motion genocide against some of it’s minorities is potentially the real deal and would be the exception but I’m not sure that’s what you meant.
If we mislabel “threats” in the US to be “existential threats” then we’ve got no way to describe what’s going on in China as anything worse. For that matter this also dumbs down the horror of the holo.caust.
If you’re objecting to crime, crime is already illegal and local police can handle that sort of thing.
If you’re objecting to Speech, then we’ve got the problem on what to do about our disfavored minority.Report
Again, the number of deaths in Cuba, Venezuela, Iran or Afghanistan all round to zero.
So by this logic, there is no oppression happening there.Report
“Oppression” is normally something the government does, or at a minimum the majority/powerful of society. If we want to measure that in those societies then we can use other metrics.
With the US, we have a tiny, highly disfavored minority (the Na.zis) who dislike another minority (Jews). Jews are more numerous, successful, law abiding, and has access to law enforcement.
I’m removing the “vile and evil” aspect to this because that’s an opinion.
The actual criminals are easy to handle, those we can just lock up (and their numbers are so small that we can). With that the usual rules apply so no big.
But what do we want to do with the non-criminals?
Tear up the idea of freedom of speech for Na.zis? Imprison the Na.zis for thought crimes?
You seem to dislike my solution (i.e. shunning) because you don’t want to ignore them.Report
I’m actually a very big advocate for shunning Naz.is.
Such as pressuring private companies like Twitter to not offer them services.Report
Some of these private companies are ubiquitous and are headed toward becoming public utilities.
Worse, that seems less like shunning and more like paying attention to them.
Now I do wonder if some of their speech crosses the line into illegality. I’m pretty sure advocating murder is a thing. However this isn’t my field.Report
I didn’t say anything about breaking the law.
Content moderation is difficult because speech and human relationships are complex.
Let’s use this very website as an example.
Is Andrew Anglin welcome to post here?
Why not?Report
I’m using an alias, how do you know I’m not him?
If I came out of the closet as him, would that invalidate everything I’ve posted here?
Arguments and logic are important in ways that specific people are not. Whatever I do in RL shouldn’t subtract from (or add to) the validity of my arguments.Report
If you posted comments like his, not only would your comment be deleted, but your IP address would be permanently banned.
Remember when I said that we should treat racial bigotry the same way we treat pedophilia?Report
Fair enough (and really good answer).
We’re a small private site, we can do content moderation. Twitter is close to a public utility. Musk is clearly aiming for “what is legal to say” atm.
I think we can’t do this while we don’t have boundaries for where “racial bigotry” starts.
Is it “bigotry” when I send my kid into the school with the highest test scores around even if that nocks out of the running all of the Black schools?
How about when the South wants to have the same level of segregation created the same way as the North has?
Or if the President is Black and you oppose his policies?Report
We don’t know the boundaries where pedophilia starts either.
And yet, we have no trouble enforcing the societal taboo against it.
The point that I’m getting at is that bigotry is currently seen as mere vulgarity, bad manners which is discouraged but not taboo.
it doesn’t carry with it the same horror that child abuse does.
So I’m asking why.
If Andrew Anglin suggests we murder Jewish children most people condemn him but otherwise strongly insist he be given a hearing.
If he suggests we have sex with the children he would be exiled and perhaps even arrested on some charge or another.
No one here would defend his right to say those things.
Does this make sense to anyone?Report
Because Team Blue insists on constantly running elections on Team Red being bigots. Blue does this for good reason, their most reliable sub-group is Blacks and this motivates them and keeps them unified.
But if you want a sense of horror then you can’t constantly the issue for naked political advantage in ways that redefine the terms to be things that are not horrifying.
I’ll repost those questions I asked to see where you draw the boundaries. My expectation is the answer to all three is “yes”.
Is it “bigotry” when I send my kid into the school with the highest test scores around even if that nocks out of the running all of the Black schools?
How about when the South wants to have the same level of segregation created the same way as the North has?
Or if the President is Black and you oppose his policies?
The problem with asking us to be horrified at Anglin is you’re also asking us to be “horrified” at the thought of sending kids into a school based on the test scores.
Further I’d never heard of him before this conversation and I see no reason to pay attention to some pseudo-crazy attention seeker. Ignore him, if we measure him and his ilk’s influence on society, I expect we’d get numbers that suggest zero.
He’s outrage-porn. He wants to be a lightning rod and Blue wants to use him to tar Red.Report
See, what you’re doing here is called spite.
You don’t like liberals so you defiantly refuse to shun avowed Naz.is.
You could choose to exile and shun people who want to slaughter children, but it’s more important to defy the liberals you despise.
This is a choice.Report
“Shun” means “persistently avoid, ignore, or reject (someone or something) through antipathy or caution.” (google’s dictionary)
I do shun/ignore avowed Naz.is. That’s easy to do with hundreds of Naz.is in a nation of hundreds of millions of people.
What I don’t do is view him as a reason to vote for Team Blue (which is what I think you mean) or view him as an “existential threat” to anything. That ideology has no spreading power beyond vile losers. We have bigger problems and more dangerous ideologies to worry about.
Having said that, I fully expect the next election will include Naz.i allegations by Blue against whoever runs for Red. I’ll be apathetic (as opposed to antipathic) to those too because that happens every election.Report
Yes. Yes it would. Though its more likely George Turner was him then you are.Report
Barring evidence to the contrary, that article makes me trust Musk completely, at least in regard to the accusation. I don’t think anyone could read that and consider the accusation to be in good faith.Report
Yes. They have to repeatedly say “they don’t know if he’s doing this deliberately” and judge him not by what he’s doing, but by how the alt-right reacts to it.
I’d never heard of “14”, nor “88”, or any of the other “signals” that they’re pulling out. You’d need to know a lot about the alt-right just to avoid these things.
It does say where Musk is going to draw the line:
Musk has said he will grant a general amnesty to banned accounts as long as they haven’t broken the law… 62,000 accounts with over 10,000 followers have already been assessed for reinstatement.
Some of those accounts are of white supremists, so if your world view swings that way that’s what you’re going to see.
On the other hand, one of those accounts was the guy who was trying to post true stuff about Hunter Biden’s laptop.Report
I’ve heard of those numbers used as code. I remember a conservative podcast I used to listen to got a lot of donations of $14.88. I think it was mostly to get a rise out of the host, but yeah I’m sure there were some people who had genuine feelings for goats. It didn’t make the host responsible though.
You show a South African billionaire obsessed with the future an article about Madagascar species 88 million years ago, you can’t speculate that he was interested in it primarily because of the number. That doesn’t pass the reasonable man (or unreasonable South African billionaire) test. Anyone who criticizes Musk for it without looking further into it is guilty of lack of research or confirmation bias, but anyone who read (or wrote) that article and treats it as a gotcha is demonstrating bad faith.Report
While I wouldn’t go quite as far as “makes me trust Musk completely,” I will say that Musk’s actions are described as innocuous, such that at worst, he got suckered into something about which he was seemingly oblivious. Which doesn’t mean Musk doesn’t have problems, it means this probably isn’t one of them.
The OP pulls a quote describing a rise of problematic (to use a light word) posting, some of which comes from formerly-suspended accounts. Lifting those suspensions was probably not a great idea and it’s not clear how much thought went into the purportedly case-by-case examinations leading up to them. This could signal a directional change for Twitter, in which case there’s cause to fret about the long-term culture; it could signal that Musk simply needs to learn the lessons that previous management had already learned, in which case, there’s cause to fret that he either won’t do this or will do it slowly enough that damage gets done to the product.Report
I was referring to the specific charge that Musk promoted white supremacist slogans. I can assume that the people who spread the 88 million thing were personally motivated and had no scruples, so this is the worst thing anyone could find. That gives me confidence.Report
I do not know what those things are and the context makes me very hesitant to google them. Suffice to say I am unable to achieve the head space necessary to become a Musk fanboy, and look at him with the same degree of skepticism I do any billionaire.Report
This seems like the sort of thing that would be susceptible of quantification and probably with data that can be mined from the site itself. How many “fringe activists and white nationalists” has Musk interacted with? Is his level of engagement with such types similar to his engagement with more innocuous users’? Or is it similar to the engagement that a typical Twitter user has? How many reinstated accounts have made problematic posts? How many of those have gone viral? Just because I might despair of figuring out how to come up with numbers for these or similar questions (I’m no techie), doesn’t mean it can’t be done. I suspect it can.
N.b. — I didn’t RTFA. Cancelled my subscription to the Post, for utilitarian rather than ideological reasons: I was only ever reading it in response to Twitter teasers of the articles, and I’m not on Twitter anymore, so don’t much need it. Maybe there is quantification in TFA.Report
The Post article has only one data point, but it’s concerning:
“On Friday, Twitter’s software recommended Anglin’s revived account under ‘who to follow’ to everyday users, including comedic writer K. Thor Jensen, who shared a screenshot with The Washington Post.”Report
Although, now I’m looking into it, and Jensen seems to be the only person to see this. Jensen claims he was fired from Newsweek about three years ago for left-wing tweets. So I’m skeptical.Report
I guess that counts as “concerning,” but it may just be the algorithm going all wonky. I used to get suggestions about who to follow based on what persons or statements got emotional rises out of me, meaning it was often someone who said things I found outrageous.
Being free of that is a good thing.Report
I retweeted a funny tweet. I did not look at the original author, I just saw the tweet and laughed.
Hours later, I saw the suggestion that I follow PERSON I WOULD NEVER FOLLOW IN A MILLION YEARS!!! NEVER EVER!!! WHAT THE HELL!!!
Oh, they were the person who originally tweeted the funny tweet that I retweeted.Report
I don’t use Twitter, but I have the impression that you have to work your way up the food chain to get noticed. If Anglin is already being recommended, that strikes me as pretty high-profile. That’s the source of my concern. If we want to be able to eat at our restaurant without overhearing the Nazis, that is.Report
For clarity, I was trying to address whatever you might have missed in the Post article. Nearly all of it was the musing of experts, vague but somehow uniform. A smoothie with one ingredient. Maybe watermelon: minimal nutritional value.Report
Something to keep in mind is Musk is a trans-humanist.
One of his companies is trying to upload human minds onto computers (we’re far away from that).
Trans-humanists seek to transform humanity. This will totally erase the concept of race.
Trans-humanism is the polar opposite of every movement that seeks to use race as part of humanity much less put one race on top.Report