Is Trump Coming Back to Twitter?
Photo by Excel23, CC BY-SA 4.0
The once-unthinkable has finally happened. On Monday, Elon Musk bought Twitter for $43 billion. All predictions that Musk was not serious, that he could not raise the capital, or that he would quickly grow bored with the project turned out to be short-sighted. Not surprisingly, the announcement set off waves of fear throughout the platform. Journalists, pundits, and other liberal Twitter users believed that the site would never be the same once Musk, a billionaire with many conservative views, started to implement his vision for the company. As Beth Daley noted in The Conversation,
Musk’s description of a platform free from content moderation issues is troubling in light of the algorithmic harms caused by social media platforms. Research has shown a host of these harms, such as algorithms that assign gender to users, potential inaccuracies and biases in algorithms used to glean information from these platforms, and the impact on those looking for health information online.
One of the fears among many Twitter users is that Musk will allow Donald Trump coming back to Twitter. The decision to ban Trump was part of the general effort towards content moderation that pushed Musk to make the purchase in the first place. Now, many journalists believe that letting the former president back on the website is inevitable. Trump makes too much money for journalists and is still beloved by half the country. Those who remember how every news day was defined by a Trump tweet are worried about returning to that toxic news environment.
The original ban of Trump from Twitter occurred for a number of reasons. A certain amount of moral calculus played a role. There were some executives at Twitter who believed the former president’s tweets helped lead to the insurrection on January 6th, an event that led to several deaths and an outright profane display in the halls of power. That day horrified much of the nation. The Republican Party was ready to abandon the president. Mitch McConnell talked about impeaching him. It is difficult to remember how universal the revulsion was for the next few weeks against the president. In that climate, Twitter and other social media companies felt a moral impulse to act and do whatever they could to strike back against the president.
But more importantly than morals, Twitter had a number of obligations at that time. The company was publicly traded, meaning that it had a duty to its shareholders. Thousands of these shareholders at all levels were horrified by Trump’s actions and had supported his opponent in the preceding election. Executives knew that their platform was viewed as contributing to Trump’s behavior and the riot. They wanted to avoid any potential negative financial repercussions from keeping the president on their platform. As a result, they waited until a careful review was conducted, picked some of the president’s most egregious tweets to respond to, and banned him from the platform.
Another factor that was certainly behind the decision to ban Trump was the continued fear at Twitter of governmental regulation. In early 2021, the Democratic Party was ascendant and had immense political power. Democrats looked poised to appoint a special committee to investigate and potentially bring criminal charges against the president. Lawsuits were inevitable. Tech companies such as Twitter live in constant fear of government regulation, believing that it will threaten their bottom line and revolutionize the way they do business. Striking out against Trump would be a way to placate the company’s critics and perhaps stave off the regulation drive that had been building for the previous several years.
All of these factors have changed considerably in the past year. The company is now led by a person whose focus is more on free speech than any moral culpability for what happens on the platform. Musk knows that Trump coming back to Twitter would please supporters of free speech while also driving attention and traffic from the significant percentage of users obsessed with the former president. His purchase has also removed much of the shareholder responsibility calculus. Twitter is now a private company, meaning that it does not have to appeal to owners on a stock exchange or navigate through public disclosure requirements.
A third clear factor in a possible reversal of the Trump ban is the hollow threat of Democratic oversight from Congress. It is clear that Democrats will not hold a trifecta after November of this year. They have proven unwilling and unable to pass major regulations of social media companies or properly punish the political leaders who inspired January 6th. Musk knows that he does not have to worry about being investigated or regulated for allowing unfettered speech and commentary on his platform. Congress is too divided to provide the adequate threat of punishment for bad behavior, meaning that Musk can do almost whatever he wants to improve his bottom line, including letting the former president back on the platform.
A handful of Republicans believe that Trump’s hold on the country is over. They think Trump will not run for a second term in 2024 and that their party has moved on. Trump coming back to Twitter would prove that this assumption is inherently wrong. It would bring about a return of the days when the former president’s tweets dictated every day of news. It would make non-Trump elections impossible, bolstering Democratic prospects while forcing every Republican to comment on the news of the day. Most Republicans seem excited to have Musk in charge of the company and given free reign to let their party leader back on his favorite platform. Will they end up regretting this position?
If the deal goes through, Twitter will be a private company, like most of Trump’s enterprises, and Musk will be unaccountable to anyone for any lawful decision he makes, however ill-advised, just as Trump was and is. He will have every right to do as he pleases. And the rest of us will have the right not to like it and to say so.Report
Anyone sweating that Musk will simply toss content moderation is wasting their effort. The EU is finishing up a new law that imposes moderation requirements on platforms like Twitter. Japan — the country with the second largest number of Twitter uses — is looking at similar steps, including some restrictions on anonymity in harassment cases. Even Musk doesn’t really talk about eliminating moderation, he more often talks about revealing the algorithms used to promote or demote content, or that flags content for potential moderation. Even that is likely to be less useful than people seem to think. For example, the code for a deep-learning AI tool is relatively useless. The values of the million coefficients is more helpful, and the most useful is the supervision and training data used to generate those coefficients.
Until Musk acts otherwise, I will continue to believe he thinks he’s buying a platform with an existing user base and valuable set of tools/expertise. His choice of platforms to buy was quite limited: Facebook is out of his price range; YouTube is safely in the hands of Google/Alphabet; TikTok is a operated by a privately held Chinese company.Report
I am gobsmacked by the reaction to Musk buying Twitter.
The fear of free speech, especially among groups and institutions entrusted with protecting it (the media, the left), is just something I never thought I’d live to see in this country.
First, there will be moderation of Twitter by Twitter. It just won’t be draconian and partisan as it is currently.
Second, what does it tell you that people have a problem with Musk owning Twitter but no issue with Bezos owning WaPo? Or that TikTock is owned by a “privately held” Chinese company?
Third, if anything should cause us to sweat, it should be how the Biden Administration – this week – created a “Disinformation Governance Board” within the Dept of Homeland Security. Oh, and it’s being led by Nina Jankowicz, who thought the Hunter Laptop story was Russian disinformation. Shocking.
This was her statement:
“One of the key reasons the Board was established is to maintain the Dept’s commitment to protecting free speech, privacy, civil rights, & civil liberties.”
Translation?
2+2=5Report
Translation – anyone will again be able to post anything, no matter how disassociated from facts the post may be. The flood of Ivermectin posts will no doubt overload the servers in a matter of days.
Many, many of us had and have problems with Bezos owning the WaPo. We aren’t ranting about that here because – in spite of OT’s amazing thread drift abilities – this isn’t a thread on general ownership of media by oligarchs – though if you want to write about that I’m sure we’d love to read it. As to TIk-Tok being owned by the Chinese, we might do well to remember it launched internationally in 2017, which means it would have been the Trump Administration’s job to deal with it in a regulatory setting. One wonders why they didn’t.
Given Musk’s well known penchant for lashing out at anyone he believes is critical of him, we don’t see him as a free speech absolutist. Our concern is that once Twitter is fully privately held, the content will morph into what Musk wants to see, not a robust free speech platform. Everyone should be worried about that.Report
I sense you’d rather restrict speech than trust people to decipher information for themselves. Even if many of those restrictions are unjust or flat out wrong, the people can’t be trusted.
You should just come out and say you are against free speech.
It’s an elitist view and not at all uncommon. You’d have a lot of prestigious company.
But I’d rather not hear any more lectures about democracy in peril by the side that is anti-free speech.Report
I’m against free speech that is also accountability free. The Ivermectin posts are a prime example. We have spent moths just here at OT debunking where and why Ivermectin is not a treatment for covid. Dozens of papers have been published adding scientific assessments also saying its not a treatment. And people taking it instead of getting vaccinated don’t have positive medical outcomes. In short its disinformation and doesn’t deserve a place in the public square. Twitter has seen that and moderated its content accordingly.
Musk’s record so far suggests that will end, and disinformation will again run amok, with little to no accountability being imposed for stuff that’s just lies. That’s a problem that imperils our democracy as much as the January 6th insurrection.Report
Well, luckily for you, the administration has dropped the charade of indirect violation of the 1st Amendment and now has installed its own Ministry of Truth for the sole purpose of keeping Mr Musk in check.
We should all sleep better now that our betters have seized back control of the public square. It was a stressful few days there.Report
“As to TIk-Tok being owned by the Chinese, we might do well to remember it launched internationally in 2017, which means it would have been the Trump Administration’s job to deal with it in a regulatory setting. One wonders why they didn’t.’
He banned them, albeit a little late in the game. The Biden administration overturned it.Report
One of the Trump silver linings (from my perspective) was willingness to accept and say that the Chinese really aren’t our friends. I have at times wondered whether or not TikTok isn’t being used as some kind of psy-op from a hostile government. If it is I’d say it’s way more insidious than Facebook or twitter bots. How to handle it if it is raises some challenges to my very pro free speech priors that I’m still not sure how to square.Report
How so? I might be missing something but it never struck me as dangerous outside of the information-tracking potential.Report
I could probably write a full post but my (admittedly limited) experience with it is that it’s way more visceral and the motivations of the algorithms more inscrutable. I also judge the anonymity factor to be much higher in that you really never know what you’re interacting with.
Now I’m opening myself up to being called a hypocrite given that I’m on the record here doing a lot of eye rolling about Russian Bots in 2016. But there’s a hard to put your finger on distinction with TikTok. Maybe it’s that with other social media you can have bad actors operating within it and flouting rules that we understand but with TikTok for all we know it’s a hostile foreign government making the rules and we don’t even know what the rules are.
Or maybe I’m just paranoid. But that’s my gut feeling about it.Report
It does feel like another step toward blipverts, doesn’t it.Report
He threatened to ban them (and did issue three executive orders to that effect), but once Microsoft and Oracle entered into a bidding war to buy them he backed off. The Courts then issued a series of injunctions back and forth that essentially allowed the platform to keep going.
Both the Biden administration and Congress have ongoing investigations into China’s ownership and direction on the platform.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump%E2%80%93TikTok_controversyReport
Did you not know that when you wrote:
“As to TIk-Tok being owned by the Chinese, we might do well to remember it launched internationally in 2017, which means it would have been the Trump Administration’s job to deal with it in a regulatory setting. One wonders why they didn’t.”Report
I knew what I meant – and I was spot on. Trump never actually enacted any ban on Tik Tok. He acted as if he was going to but like so much of what he did it was all for show.Report
His complaint was that they were owned by a foreign entity that may as well be a foreign government. When there was movement to sell it, he waited to see what happened. Then the election. Then when the purchase talks fell through, the Biden administration cancelled the executive orders.
Yes, the Trump administration should have acted sooner. Yes, the Biden administration is looking into the matter. But when you said the Trump administration didn’t deal with it, you left out all the things it did as well as the things that the Biden administration didn’t do.Report
Trump bloviated but took no meaningful or permanent action. Biden, so far, hasn’t bloviated and is actively continuing to investigate.Report
To my point, that means abandoning the EU and (probably) Japan. Or implementing filters good enough to keep such content from reaching those jurisdictions. And while the new Twitter may be private, ownership is by a mountain of debt — Musk will not be the only, or even a majority holder of that debt. All of that debt is going to have to be kept happy with the operation of the business. Saying, “We intend to abandon the EU and Japanese markets,” would not be a good start.Report
I fully suspect this will be the outcome. What galls me is the assumption that the US neither needs nor deserves the same level of consideration.Report
I suspect that the rest of the mountain of debt will also ask that, at least in the form of, “If the Germans can have a disinformation filter, why isn’t it an option for American users?”Report
First AM. We have it, they do not.Report
The First Amendment doesn’t apply to private corporations transacting corporate business, no matter how much you may want it to. That aside, that Amendment also come with responsibilities – and allowing repeated lying about things that endanger people or our democracy is not one of those responsibilities.Report
True but a thin reed to hide behind. These companies are darn close to public utilities.
How to police speech, especially political speech, is a thing.
Assume Trump believes the election was stolen, and what he’s saying is political speech.
The first AM expects the gov to have so little ability to prevent itself from misusing censorship that it has a flat ban.
If we have to choose between listening to Trump run his mouth and creating awkward polls (and yes, get a few people killed) vs giving a President Trump the ability to decide what speech is “dangerous”, then that seems like an easy choice.Report
Almost a million dead from Covid isn’t a few people killed – though how many dies due to lies about the disease may never be known.
Which some entity has to Hold The Donald – and others – accountable for their speech. The government is banned from doing so, which leaves private actors like Twitter.
And Elon Musk is not, based on his record to date, likely to be a free speech absolutist anymore then Trump is.Report
“Translation – anyone will again be able to post anything, no matter how disassociated from facts the post may be.”
You say this like it is inherently a bad thing.Report
How many people still believe the 202 election was stolen because the story persists on social media, including Twitter?
How many people refused Covid vaccines and exposed themselves to increased harm and death because of Twitter?
How many people have been recruited to various white nationalist causes because of twitter?
How many hours have you had to spend here explaining how education really works because of bad bills built largely on lies promulgated by Twitter?
The free flow of unfiltered disinformation and lies – under the guise of “free speech” is a bad thing. Musk intends to bury us in a torrent of bullsh!t so that we are no longer able to discern truth. Makes us easier to rule.Report
It seems like we have to cover this every time, like Groundhog Day.
That free speech can’t exist without some forms of speech being suppressed, or some form of time/place/manner controls.Report
“Little boys and little girls should love each other!”
Apaches 1977.
Your American ethno-chauvinism is showing.
Horror films are not photo-realistic because they would lead to vomiting in the movie theaters (It has been tried. Photoanalysts have a horrible job). We don’t actually need to ban what you think.
Besides, do you really think Canadian Flags need to be banned? Mr. Liberal, the sainted ACLU has them characterized as a symbol of hate speech.Report
There is a difference between “People spreading lies is bad” and “People being allowed to think and say what they want is bad.”
You’re saying the latter and then using the former to justify it. I don’t think you really mean the latter but if you do, we disagree very very much.Report
I am for people being allowed to think and say what they want but not in a consequence free environment. Most of the free speech “absolutists” seem to think there should be no consequences.Report
I’m honestly not able to see how “people should be allowed to say what they want” doesn’t logically include “people saying lies”.Report
The initial claim was this:
““Translation – anyone will again be able to post anything, no matter how disassociated from facts the post may be.””
I stated that this acts like people being able to say anything they want is INHERENTLY bad. I do not think that it is. It can lead to bad outcomes. It can also lead to good outcomes.
I am not arguing that speech shouldn’t carry consequences or making any specific argument about what Twitter (or any other platform) should or should not do.
But if the argument is that “Anyone being able to say whatever they want is inherently bad” I’m going to push back on that and push back on that hard. Is it not inherently bad. And it is certainly better than any of the alternatives, which mostly boil down to either “Anyone can only say certain things” or “Only certain people can say whatever they want.” Both of those are indeed inherently bad.Report
I agree, then, just to dourly note that humans “inherently” abuse freedom thus requiring boundaries to it.Report
How many people believe the Trump administration didn’t act against TikTok just because some people online are spreading misinformation?Report
I don’t know of anyone spreading false information about that. As someone who has to make Executive orders happen regularly as part of his career, there was no Tik Tok ban from the Trump white house. There was sabre rattling, followed by litigation, followed in this administration by investigations. But there was no ban.Report
Bezos has been, as far as I can see, entirely hands-off. It doesn’t seem in Musk’s character to be that; he enjoys the limelight too much, e.g. he’s posting on Twitter now about how he’s going to confound his enemies.Report
There are also quite different rules for how a newspaper must behave, and how a social media platform must behave.Report
What’s interesting to me is that there are people who have a problem with Bezos owning WaPo, but the overlap on the Venn diagram of “people who have a problem with Bezos owning the Post” and “people who have a problem with Musk owning Twitter” is very small indeed.
This tells me that “free” speech is not the issue. When it comes to reacting to this or that oligarch taking control of the private venue that one prefers to use, it’s about one’s subjective prediction of the degree to which said oligarch will tolerate speech one prefers, and a cognate predication about that oligarch’s anticipated interference with speech one dislikes.Report
An interesting overlap question might be between those who have a problem with Bezos owning the Post, and the Murdoch family owning the Wall Street Journal.Report
I don’t know anyone who has a problem with Bezos owning the WaPo. They’re just a newspaper. There’s no expectation that they’ll cover the news well, or do investigative journalism any more.
Newspapers have always been about very few people having free speech. I don’t mean that as an indictment. They’ve been important. But this goes back to the platform versus publisher debate. The US law (and who know, maybe EU law soon) has tried to reconcile the two models, but there’s a difference. I don’t think Twitter’s unique lane can lead anywhere good, but it’s certainly different from a newspaper.Report
That’s surely what sec. 230 addresses. One is edited, one is a bulletin board.Report
I know, I assumed everyone else here did too. Platform versus publisher isn’t a new conversation, and the law as written can’t make one into the other.Report
I don’t know anyone who has a problem with Bezos owning the WaPo.
The Pinky Rule again.Report
“The EU is finishing up a new law that imposes moderation requirements on platforms like Twitter.”
I was reading about this and it seemed like the EU law is less focused on moderation itself and more on transparency with regards to algorithms and the like. Would love to hear from someone more informed on what that these laws will likely mean in practice.Report
Probably another EU directive so broad and vague as to render all enforcement totally arbitrary and nakedly political from an American perspective. Signed someone who had to read the GDPR when it came out.Report
This certainly has the potential of increasing Trump’s chances. I’ve said before that I think DeSantis is in the driver’s seat, but Trump being back on Twitter would change the dynamics. Watch the PA Senate primary, and general. It’ll be an indication of whether the Trump name is still about winning and winning and so much winning.Report
“Trump coming back to Twitter would prove that this assumption is inherently wrong. It would bring about a return of the days when the former president’s tweets dictated every day of news. It would make non-Trump elections impossible, bolstering Democratic prospects while forcing every Republican to comment on the news of the day.”
Is this an exaggeration of Twitter’s importance?
If it’s not a exaggeration, what this means is that US media is incapable of paying attention to anything not on Twitter and, perhaps even scarier, incapable of ignoring anything that is on Twitter. If this is true, then Donald Trump is a second-order problem.Report
Trump has always been a second order problem.Report
I remember when cable channels started to produce their own entertainment programming, broadcast networks tried to cut off their momentum by getting racier. But there was no way they could outdo the cable channels, and they lost sight of what they could do better (except for workhorses like CSI and Law and Order). The US media that weren’t born on social media are going through the same kind of thing, attempting to be as instant and trashy as Twitter and the like. They still get bigger numbers but have lost any influence.
Of course (and this is not a unique observation on my part) to have Evans and Novak type deep dives with politicians, you not only need reporters of substance, but politicians of substance, and that’s a problem these days.Report
Anyone who is legitimately experiencing fear because of this development needs to see a psychiatrist.Report
Exactly. It’s fishin’ twitter. Just because every twit in media and the academy has their heads permanently inserted up twitters posterior doesn’t mean that everyone else does.Report
Indeed.Report
I’m one of those people who is not on Facebook, Twitter, or TikTok and so I frequently feel very smug and superior to all the idiots and fools all atwitter over Twitter.
But then I’m reminded that all my sources of hard news, the trusted outlets which inform my world, are those very same idiots and fools.
And the course of my country, my state, my city, is going to be decided very much by what happens on social media.
I would very much like to smirk and imagine I am outside watching all this from a distance but I’m not.
We are all inside this plane and social media is the cockpit where they are fighting over the controls.Report
“We are all inside this plane and social media is the cockpit where they are fighting over the controls.”
Ugh, you may not be on social media but social media is on you Chip. Yeah social media influences the voters who are the actual deciders on where this plane of a state is going but the conceit that fishin Twitter is even near the cockpit is, like, peak social media being up its own posterior. Twitter is more like the bird crap on the cockpit window. As demonstrated by it being collectively almost uniformly wrong about every electoral outcome we’ve had since, *checks watch* what, the advent of twitter?
It’d turn the twitts to stone to admit it but, Facebook probably influences the electoral masses more in a bad hour of a slow afternoon than Twitter does in a month.Report
The success of Joe Biden over Bernie demonstrates your point, that a lot of voters aren’t forming their opinions from social media.
But a lot are, especially the voters who also decide what gets covered and what does not, what is talked about and what doesn’t.
We can also look at QAnon as a demonstration of the power of social media to outflank the traditional media gatekeepers.
There are a lot of controls in the cockpit besides social media. But it’s definitely an important one.Report
Yes, though I interpret that less as a discourse on the power of social media and more as a symptom of the incredible decay and disarray of traditional media entities. If ever a sector was in need of a forest fire the media was one. And I say that uncomfortably considering that it’s my own side of the political spectrum that’s currently dominating it.Report
It all hangs together.
A diseased media is both cause and symptom of a diseased citizenry.
As I keep saying, when just under half of the voting public embraces an insane conspiracy theory, liberal democracy is in big trouble.Report
You know as much about QAnon as about Han supremacy.
Wash yourself in a clothes machine — maybe then I’ll kiss ya.Report
Han shot first.Report
Wrong Ad Campaign. The one I’m referencing won awards for “Best Ad of the Year” … in china.Report
I generally agree but that genie is out of the bottle. Plus Trump often did conduct policy via twitter so it was a bit important to follow his feed tragically.Report
Who actually uses Twitter? We have some pretty good ideas:
1. Only 22% of Americans have Twitter accounts at all.
2. 10% of Twitter accounts generate 80% of all tweets.
3. Two-thirds of all links on Twitter come from bots.
4. Twitter users skew younger, better-educated, and more politically liberal than the population as a whole, by about 3% from the general population means for each of those characteristics.
5. A disproportionate number of political and media figures use Twitter, attracting an audience that seeks news and political engagement there; about 70% of active Twitter users seek and engage in discussions of politics and current events.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/08/02/10-facts-about-americans-and-twitter/
That maths out to about 6.4 million Americans who use Twitter for engagement on news and politics in a given frame of time or on a given issue. That’s about 2% of all Americans.
So Twitter is very much not the real world. A lot of stuff gets circulated with great enthusiasm and passion by these roughly 6.4 million people, and some of it may make it on to Facebook in three or four days and some of it may make it into broadcast or print media but most of it is ignored by somewhere between 80% to 90% of the American public.
BUT there is a caveat: these 6.4 million people who do engage with the stuff on Twitter include what passes for the gatekeepers of those other news and politics forae. Within the 2% of Americans who are active Twitter users is a disproportionately high number of social influencers — possibly but not necessarily social media influencers, but also including other kinds of thought and information leaders either trusted within their communities or in media positions to disseminate information broadly.
This is not a massive concern, but because there is some disproportionate influence, it’s perhaps more than “2% of the American public.”Report
I don’t really care about it when it comes to myself, since I’m a white dude whose can take whatever on Twitter, but I do care about the people I know on Twitter who just in the few days since Twitter have already have seen in an uptick in racist and transphobic abuse since Musk announced his intent to buy, and considering Twitter is already bad enough, I feel little help is coming from the guy favorably retweeting stuff originally coming from a guy whose “cancel culture” shtick is coming from the anti-trans stuff he loves to write out and a right-wing conspiracy theorist.
But I get it, all those people who will be the victims of more attacks from the poor cancelled right-wingers are “woke” people who are trying to inject evil gender ideology into the schools, right, so they don’t matter, and it’s reasonable to worry about the evil left wing taking over schools, right?Report
I have a crazy idea, an idea so nuts it just might work. If you don’t like twitter, don’t be on twitter.Report
Unless or until Twitter becomes a de facto necessity, I’m okay with this mindset. I recognize things don’t need to be a basic human right or a life-or-death necessity to justify making universal accessibility a goal… but Twitter ain’t anywhere close to any type of necessity.Report
Musk has used the words “free speech” a lot. We’ll see his commitment to it when he has to deal with being heavily criticized on a platform he owns.Report
I think it is important that Dorsey also did not really want to ban Trump or anyone but had a revolt from many of his employees. Musk is likely to experience the same.Report
And also by a very large number of users, who are the people who, for free, imbue Twitter with value to offer its customers and shareholders. Hey, I’m one of them so I’m a fine one to talk.Report
A quibble: Musk has not yet bought Twitter. For approximately $1 billion, he has bought a $42 billion call option on roughly 91% of Twitter’s common stock. What matters is that a) Twitter’s existing board of directors has stopped resisting the takeover attempt, and b) Musk has demonstrated a credible ability to finance the call. So it now appears likely that should Musk obtain regulatory clearance from the various authorities (which are not all U.S. authorities, mind) and become legally able to carry on with the call, he can complete the manuever should he choose to do so. In other words, the two biggest barriers to his eventual purchase of Twitter several months hence are now removed. We may credibly proceed as if he will buy it. But he hasn’t yet.
And while a lot of the concerns raised in the OP and comments are credible, let’s remember that in fact no one, not even Musk, can really know what will happen. Musk may find himself subject to pressures he either has not yet anticipated or has to date underestimated. Twitter’s user base will react to things he actually does, and if he makes a misstep may well leave and not come back. So my posture is “wait and see.”Report
And my only feeling about Trump is that he wants to be back on Twitter very badly (we know this because he denied it) and that SOB should never again get anything he wants.Report
Musk is now pontificating on Twitter about which medical treatment are OK (Wellbutrin bad, Adderall good). He’s not recommending mainlining bleach yet, so there’s that.Report
wellbutrin is dope for adhd this guy is a terrible doctor. 🙂
more seriously, the twitter is dying thing might work out better for journalism and its relative public standing in the long run – nothing will discredit thoughts about media more than actually seeing how otherwise seemingly-solid journalists acting like complete nitwits on the platform. this would also cut down (eventually) on the “user johnny76765 said something on twitter” stories that are so common these days.Report