Twitter reportedly set to accept Musk's offer [Twitter accepts deal]

[poochyena]

Just now, Arika S said:

excluding a tweet from the algorithm and only allowing your followers to see it is not "telling the algorithm what to do"

thats.. exactly what that is...
If you have that power, then twitter isn't the publisher. A publisher would be the one who would have that power. The entire stance was that once you post a tweet, you have no control over what happens with that tweet, but you do.

[Blademaster91]

1 hour ago, Arika S said:

i wouldn't be so sure.

Discord is much more scummy than you might think.

I thought discord was bad for how much data they sell, but wow thats concerning to say the least.

1 hour ago, poochyena said:

My argument is that twitter is not a publisher, they just distribute tweets, not publish them.

There isn't any difference in the context of twitter, as others have explained there isn't any way to choose who sees your twitter posts, there should be a choice to limit posts to only the people that follow you.

[poochyena]

2 minutes ago, Blademaster91 said:

there should be a choice to limit posts to only the people that follow you.

there is, thats literally what I showed that there was...

[Arika]

6 minutes ago, poochyena said:

thats.. exactly what that is...
If you have that power, then twitter isn't the publisher. A publisher would be the one who would have that power. The entire stance was that once you post a tweet, you have no control over what happens with that tweet, but you do.

You are absolutely arguing in bad faith.

 

Lets use a car example, people people seem to love those;

Scenario: you decide you want to leave your house and go somewhere (you are deciding to tweet)

- you open your front door (you post the tweet)

 

1. actually you decide you are just going to walk to your next door neightbours house and spend some time with them (follower only tweet)
2. you get in your car, fire up a GPS and hit randomize destination every 5 minutes (non-follower only tweet, with the GPS acting as the algorithm)

you are 100% bypassing the algorithm by setting a follower only tweet. if you disagree, then i don't know what you think an algorithm is and we'll just leave it at that.

[Spotty]

Thread cleaned. Several comments arguing over politics and other such issues were removed along with arguments in bad faith and strawman arguments that were made to provoke & bait others in to arguments in an attempt to score a "Gotcha!" victory against the other side. This forum is not Twitter, if you want those types of arguments go to Twitter.

 

Some comments discussing the control Twitter users have over what content they see and how they can share that content were removed as they were too intertwined with the other arguments and it was not possible to restore those posts without heavily editing or altering them. You're welcome to continue that discussion or discussions relating to Twitter as a platform and the features it provides provided you do so in a mature manner and respectful of others.

 

The previous thread regarding Musk purchasing Twitter was locked due to discussion derailing with arguments over Left Wing vs Right Wing politics, including whether or not Twitter favours either side. Do not continue the same arguments here. If you cannot participate in a discussion about Musk's purchase of Twitter without bringing your political ideologies and grievances in to the discussion do not participate.

 

• Encourage the freedom of expression and exchange of information in a mature and responsible manner
• No trolling or flame-bait.
• No political content, regardless of your views.
  • If something spans politics and tech, the discussion must remain clearly within tech and must not descend into politics.

 

If any posts are trolling, baiting, or descending in to political arguments do not respond to them. Report the posts for the moderation team to deal with.

Edited April 26, 2022 by Spotty

[Noraax92]

As soon as I found out I deactivated my account. Now for the first time since MySpace I don't have a social media account.

[Sauron]

5 hours ago, idkwhat said:

This is such a trite argument. People in the U.S. advocating for "free speech rights" on social media platforms are largely aware that they do not have a constitutional right to free speech on private social media platforms.

Then they need to actually define what they're talking about, because the right to free speech is a very specific thing and forcing private entities to host content they don't want to is pretty close to violating it.

8 hours ago, wanderingfool2 said:

Well I mean in fairness both of those have more of a backstory to them.

 

Doesn't really matter when he claims to be an "absolutist", does it? Most social media bans people complain about have perfectly justifiable reasons behind them. If your stance is that all speech must be platformed no matter what then you can't really turn around and fire people for saying things you disagree with, think are lies or even violate the law - that's an admission that sometimes it's fine for your speech to have... consequences... on private platforms, particularly when it suits you personally I guess.

[wanderingfool2]

48 minutes ago, Sauron said:

Doesn't really matter when he claims to be an "absolutist", does it? Most social media bans people complain about have perfectly justifiable reasons behind them. If your stance is that all speech must be platformed no matter what then you can't really turn around and fire people for saying things you disagree with, think are lies or even violate the law - that's an admission that sometimes it's fine for your speech to have... consequences... on private platforms, particularly when it suits you personally I guess.

It's standard employer/employee contractual agreements.  It's not really censorship if as a company you fire someone who posted a video on a personal channel, identifying as an employee who is also knowledgeable about it's capabilities, and proceed to defend your driving (while not following the agreed upon safety precautions of being ready to take over the steering).  I think it's wrong to have all the articles portraying as though AI Addict was innocent and fire for something as simple as posting a video of a crash.  That to me is just manipulated journalism.

 

From what I've gathered from his tweets what he is championing is that people should be able to say what they want to say; but with obvious exceptions, such as things violating laws (although whether or not it's true/something that would happen is up for discussion).  Examples being the concept that it will be a war against the bots.  It's like what was said, the Elon haters and such won't be kicked from the platform; although I suspect that they will introduce features where the tweeter themselves gets to filter the messages they themselves see.

 

7 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

i read most shareholders are banks. Banks like money. This is a nobrainer for them.

Actually, it could be a lot more complicated than that.  Any investment group who purchased basically in 2021 might not want to...it would mean they would have to realize losses, which they might not be wanting to do for tax reasons.

[Arika]

2 hours ago, Noraax92 said:

As soon as I found out I deactivated my account. Now for the first time since MySpace I don't have a social media account.

now you are truly free!

[Sauron]

3 hours ago, wanderingfool2 said:

It's standard employer/employee contractual agreements.  It's not really censorship if as a company you fire someone who posted a video on a personal channel, identifying as an employee who is also knowledgeable about it's capabilities, and proceed to defend your driving (while not following the agreed upon safety precautions of being ready to take over the steering).

I could just as easily justify every social media ban. Musk and people cheering him on as some sort of free speech champion only use "censorship" to mean "deplatforming I don't like".

3 hours ago, wanderingfool2 said:

with obvious exceptions, such as things violating laws

Some figures he claimed he wants reinstated were banned for breaking the law. To me it's obvious that this is just the way social media works; it's the freeze peach whiners who seem to feel differently.

3 hours ago, wanderingfool2 said:

It's like what was said, the Elon haters and such won't be kicked from the platform

I mean... congratulations on doing the bare minimum? Twitter never banned people for criticizing the platform afaik.

[Master Disaster]

 

6 hours ago, Arika S said:

no it doesn't, and you know it. excluding a tweet from the algorithm and only allowing your followers to see it is not "telling the algorithm what to do" There is no computation to decide which groups of people get to see your tweet when you restrict it to only your followers, it's either a 1 or a 0.

OK, maybe I missed something (since the post your replied to has been purged) but it seems as though you're ignoring the fact that an algorithm is a human construct, it doesn't exist without a human and everything it does is governed by human interaction.

 

Even looking at something like AplhaGO that "trained itself" the rules of Go and managed to beat the human world champion 10 times out of 10 (even pulling off moves never seen before and that now exist as legit stats for human players), to say it trained itself is a misnomer since it required a human to tell it what to look at in the first place. It might have learned its strategies by playing itself but the rules of the game were given to it before it began learning. If Deepmind had simply given it a blank board with no rules and hadn't told it what its goal was it never would have reached that point.

 

AI is only ever as clever as the squishy meatsack sat in front of the keyboard since everything it does is as a direct result of what the meatsack tells it to do. If the human tells it to look for patterns in peoples behaviour and adjust its behaviour to give each person only the stuff they might actually be interested in then it will do just that (YouTube have been doing this for years, that's literally how recommended videos work).

 

Now Elon controls the algorithm he can adjust it to act however he sees fit, a prime example would be this...

Dim sTarget As String = "Elon", "Elon Musk", "SpaceX", "Tesla"
Dim cNegativity As Collection = Otherclass.NegativeTraining.Data

Public Sub Hide_Tweets()
  If User.Posts = sTarget > 10 & (Cstr(cNegativity(*)) Then
      Hide.Tweets From sTarget To User
  EndIf
End Sub

... which is an incredibly simplistic example but perfectly demonstrates how he can use the algorithm to affect who sees what (in this case anybody who posts more than 10 negative things about the 4 targets would never see any tweets from any target accounts) and they would have no idea it was even happening.

[Mark Kaine]

2 hours ago, wanderingfool2 said:

Actually, it could be a lot more complicated than that.  Any investment group who purchased basically in 2021 might not want to...it would mean they would have to realize losses, which they might not be wanting to do for tax reasons.

Maybe, but that wont be the majority,  and i was thinking about that, technically everyone is forced to sell under value, afaik realistically it should be ~$70 per share, but then theres also a lot of uncertainty and most will take the money as twitter probably wont be a good investment going forward. Just seems more likely to me to sell and cut their losses (if any)

[idkwhat]

1 hour ago, Mark Kaine said:

afaik realistically it should be ~$70 per share

Citation needed? There's no metric for calculating the "realistic" value of a share price, the closest you are going to get is book value (not a good metric) which for Twitter is nowhere near $70 per share.

[Mark Kaine]

12 minutes ago, idkwhat said:

Citation needed?

i read that it was higher before musks takeover attempts,  but i just checked,  and actually it has been around 50 or lower for the last 12 months or so? so obviously that wasn't true but some phantasy from self proclaimed financial forum poster experts  

Serves me right for not checking their "info" i guess.

[Taf the Ghost]

35 minutes ago, idkwhat said:

Citation needed? There's no metric for calculating the "realistic" value of a share price, the closest you are going to get is book value (not a good metric) which for Twitter is nowhere near $70 per share.

5 Billion revenue, average basically flat profit for 5 years with barely positive cash flow. 9x Revenue is a good deal for Twitter in a "hostile" takeover. Realistically it's a $20 Billion USD company before a close analysis of its IP Assets. But Value vs the overpay to push a sale, the price is "reasonable".  Considering it was agreed to, I'm going to assume the IPs weren't worth much.

 

For reference, AMD back during the $2 per share period and a company valuation under 8 Billion USD would have gone for at least 50 Billion. That's what IP Assets can be worth. (AMD functionally cannot be sold to anyone but Intel, but that's a different topic.)

[Vordreller]

Yeah, people are starting to compile all the time he used his position of power to try and get anything negative about him or his products removed from the internet:

 

[wanderingfool2]

4 hours ago, Sauron said:

I could just as easily justify every social media ban. Musk and people cheering him on as some sort of free speech champion only use "censorship" to mean "deplatforming I don't like".

Trying to call that it as an example of him trying to censor or block free speech though is a foolish en-devour though.  There's no point in trying to pin people to both extremes, as it's not the reality.

 

Like seriously, if you feel someone getting fired for representing themselves as an employee while showing themselves doing something reckless with the product and calling it safe is censorship and showing the censoring of free speech then I feel sorry for your employer.

 

 

[Taf the Ghost]

We'll have to see how a few things play out, but early reports already seem like they've either adjusted or turned a few things off. Will have to see if they just did it for a couple of days, but the potential for some hilarious secondary effects is on the table. This is far from over, haha.

 

Edit: Twitter would have some massive legal liabilities if certain realities could be proved with the server data. It's entirely possible current (soon to be former) Twitter Staff kicking off an FU cycle could have some amazingly unpredictable consequences. 

[Sauron]

8 minutes ago, wanderingfool2 said:

There's no point in trying to pin people to both extremes, as it's not the reality.

I didn't do that, he did. He called himself an "absolutist".

9 minutes ago, wanderingfool2 said:

Like seriously, if you feel someone getting fired for representing themselves as an employee while showing themselves doing something reckless with the product and calling it safe is censorship and showing the censoring of free speech then I feel sorry for your employer.

You're trying to shift positions Musk publicly said he holds onto me. I don't believe this, my whole point is that clearly he doesn't believe it either and yet he claimed he does and is getting praise from the freeze peach crowd precisely because of those claims.

[Kisai]

23 hours ago, RockSolid1106 said:

 

 

My thoughts

Of course, it will be interesting to see the changes that Twitter gets when acquired by Elon Musk. I don't use twitter much, if at all, but the meme guy owning a social media platform is interesting to me.

 

Realistically I don't expect anything. Just because you own a company doesn't mean you're free from repercussions when you stick your nose in things you don't understand.

 

At best, I see Elon just having the advertising ripped out of Twitter so that people can go back to discussing "anything" on the platform without being censored by advertisers or VISA (which is known for being responsible for all the censorship imposed on websites that accept payments, eg Patreon, Paypal, Square, Kickstarter, etc.)

 

At worst, I see Elon putting his nose too far up politicians rear ends. In a fair world, politicians wouldn't lie to get elected, they wouldn't jerrymander things to tilt voting in their favor, and wouldn't advocate for carving up their states/countries to give themselves more power. But they do these things, and need to be called out on it. Somehow these lies then get a  "pass" under being "free speech" instead of being labeled what it is, 'untruthful'

 

Like my worst fear from Elon is him using Twitter to push crypto, or even making Twitter a platform that acts acts as a cryptowallet. Thus chasing people off the platform.

 

When the owner fundamentally doesn't understand the thing they bought, that's when it's abandoned. That's what happened with myspace, and that's what happened with tumblr.

 

[Taf the Ghost]

1 minute ago, Kisai said:

Realistically I don't expect anything. Just because you own a company doesn't mean you're free from repercussions when you stick your nose in things you don't understand.

 

At best, I see Elon just having the advertising ripped out of Twitter so that people can go back to discussing "anything" on the platform without being censored by advertisers or VISA (which is known for being responsible for all the censorship imposed on websites that accept payments, eg Patreon, Paypal, Square, Kickstarter, etc.)

 

At worst, I see Elon putting his nose too far up politicians rear ends. In a fair world, politicians wouldn't lie to get elected, they wouldn't jerrymander things to tilt voting in their favor, and wouldn't advocate for carving up their states/countries to give themselves more power. Like my worst fear from Elon is him using Twitter to push crypto, or even making Twitter a platform that acts acts as a cryptowallet.

 

I actually expect things to change pretty wildly over the next year. Elon is more like a Feudal King than a micromanaging overlord. He really only cares about SpaceX, on the personal level, the rest is just interesting business and he attracts & empowers good talent. Generally. No one talks about SolarCity, lol. (Most don't understand how important SpaceX is to the entire Musk empire. The fact he's highly involved in Space Tech just attracts massively better talent than his companies otherwise would be able to. It matters.)

 

Twitter could easily move back to less General Algo Curation and more Things I Follow Curation. As I mentioned in a previous comment, Twitter is functionally two platforms and they've never balanced it well. A completely different management staff could affect the place a lot while also massively increasing revenue. (The fact Twitter has never gotten into the Micropayment game has always been strange. It keeps Reddit, Twitch and streaming platforms you've never heard of alive. They also could basically run a Patreon clone inside their system. I think I have a couple of years of comments on this forum pointing out Twitter Management is terrible? I was actually impressed, when I looked at the financials, that they only lost some money and not constant boatloads.)

 

As for the payment processors, there's two separate issues. The recent dust up around p**n was on the VISA side. The normal ones, that stretches over into politics, has been MasterCard. The MC stuff lead to the VISA stuff because some activists noted that it was basically just a couple of C-Suite MC people that caused all of the trouble, so they put pressure on C-Suite VISA people to achieve their own ends. I don't know enough about the details to really comment on them, but it's really not too surprising. (P**n content will always be pushed really far to the side with Payment Processors because it's a neutron star in their world. Really bright but a massive gravity well that profits get sucked into.)

 

It will be fascinating to watch. 

[spartaman64]

37 minutes ago, Kisai said:

Realistically I don't expect anything. Just because you own a company doesn't mean you're free from repercussions when you stick your nose in things you don't understand.

 

At best, I see Elon just having the advertising ripped out of Twitter so that people can go back to discussing "anything" on the platform without being censored by advertisers or VISA (which is known for being responsible for all the censorship imposed on websites that accept payments, eg Patreon, Paypal, Square, Kickstarter, etc.)

 

At worst, I see Elon putting his nose too far up politicians rear ends. In a fair world, politicians wouldn't lie to get elected, they wouldn't jerrymander things to tilt voting in their favor, and wouldn't advocate for carving up their states/countries to give themselves more power. But they do these things, and need to be called out on it. Somehow these lies then get a  "pass" under being "free speech" instead of being labeled what it is, 'untruthful'

 

Like my worst fear from Elon is him using Twitter to push crypto, or even making Twitter a platform that acts acts as a cryptowallet. Thus chasing people off the platform.

 

When the owner fundamentally doesn't understand the thing they bought, that's when it's abandoned. That's what happened with myspace, and that's what happened with tumblr.

 

im worried that elon is going to turn twitter into 4chan. full of hate speech and legally questionable pornographic content

13 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

lol

 

but then i can just use discord... 

 

as i said, its not the same thing, but similar enough in a way (and as far i can tell they dont moderate you, on your own server)

they do delete servers if you allow hate speech on your server or illegal content. i heard there was a server that got deleted for certain questionable hentai content 

[Taf the Ghost]

8 minutes ago, spartaman64 said:

im worried that elon is going to turn twitter into 4chan. full of hate speech and legally questionable pornographic content

they do delete servers if you allow hate speech on your server or illegal content. i heard there was a server that got deleted for certain questionable hentai content 

It won't become the Chans, but it also, hopefully, won't be stuck in the grip of the Tumblr Diaspora like it has for a while now. (It's really their influence on Corporate that's been the issue, among other things.)

[spartaman64]

13 minutes ago, Taf the Ghost said:

It won't become the Chans, but it also, hopefully, won't be stuck in the grip of the Tumblr Diaspora like it has for a while now. (It's really their influence on Corporate that's been the issue, among other things.)

i mean if you go by his words thats what hes advocating for. a platform with basically no moderation 

[Taf the Ghost]

1 minute ago, spartaman64 said:

i mean if you go by his words thats what hes advocating for. a platform with basically no moderation 

There's still legally required moderation. Also, their curation system was pretty good at hyper suppressing anything they didn't like, so it's not like that necessarily changes. What you should really read that message that Elon posted a rather unveiled warning for current Twitter staff not to do anything stupid.