Update: He has joined the Twitter board of directors (https://twitter.com/paraga/status/1511320953598357505) Update update: nevermind (https://twitter.com/paraga/status/1513354622466867201)
Matt Levine wrote today's column before Musk got a seat on the board, but he has things to say: [...]
Matt Levine wrote today's column before Musk got a seat on the board, but he has things to say:
I hope that if Elon Musk is going to do activism on Twitter, it will not be for tedious “free speech” advocacy. I hope it is like:
Twitter’s relatively new chief executive officer, Parag Agrawal: Welcome, Mr. Musk. We’re so glad that you are our biggest shareholder. We have prepared a presentation showing how we are executing on our strategy of being more technically nimble, building new products and growing revenue and active users. Here on slide 1 you can see—
Elon Musk: Make the font bigger when I tweet.
Agrawal: What?
Musk: I am your biggest shareholder, I want the font on my tweets to be bigger than the font on everyone else’s tweets.
Agrawal: That’s not really how we—
Musk: And I want 290 characters. Again, just for me.
[...]
For a while there was a broad consensus about what public companies were for. The goal of a public company, all the sophisticated people agreed, was to make as much money as possible for its shareholders. Sometimes managers got distracted from this goal, and then there was shareholder activism to get them back in line. “We want to replace management with other managers who will make more money for shareholders,” an activist would say, and if other shareholders agreed with her plans then she’d win a proxy fight and replace the managers and the system would move toward the perfect goal of maximizing profits.
When I started in corporate law and finance, this consensus had been dominant for decades and felt very, very stable. In 2022 it seems like a weird historical blip, a few decades (1980 to 2010?) when everyone fell into a radically oversimplified understanding of what companies are. Now everyone — even big-company CEOs — talks about “stakeholder capitalism,” the idea that companies don’t just answer to shareholders but have to optimize for lots of different constituencies [...]
But whereas the old consensus said that companies should maximize one thing, and identified what that thing was, the new theories do not. Now companies are for, you know, whatever someone with a lot of money wants them to be for. This is I think largely what they were for before the 1980s profit-maximizing consensus, too. This is not a particularly normative or predictive model, but it is a simple one.
I took a "Business 101" style class not too long ago, and one of the more interesting takeaways was that it defined stakeholders as anyone who has a business relationship with a company -...
Now everyone — even big-company CEOs — talks about “stakeholder capitalism,” the idea that companies don’t just answer to shareholders but have to optimize for lots of different constituencies [...]
I took a "Business 101" style class not too long ago, and one of the more interesting takeaways was that it defined stakeholders as anyone who has a business relationship with a company - including the people buying the product/service and everyone you employ. I rather liked this definition because there are so many examples where this comes into play.
If you are running an excellent business, you sell products or services that are so good that people don't necessarily care how much they cost because they don't just meet the minimum requirements, but they provide some sort of satisfaction on top of it. Good hand tools may be expensive, but they're worth it because they help me to do a better job with less effort. A good investor will be aware of that and can build a company that makes money by making people happy. A bad investor will find ways to cut down everything in order to save a buck and then pocket the difference. One keeps the rest of the stakeholders happy, and the other is essentially stealing from them.
Likely related article: Elon Musk seeks to end US restrictions on his tweets And likely related tweet: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1507777261654605828
Elon Musk has asked a federal judge to terminate his 2018 agreement with the top US securities regulator requiring some of his tweets to be vetted by a lawyer.
I have no idea what Musk has in mind, what "free speech principles" he means or why he things democracy is being undermined. Musk says stuff on Twitter, he doesn't explain, and it doesn't...
I have no idea what Musk has in mind, what "free speech principles" he means or why he things democracy is being undermined. Musk says stuff on Twitter, he doesn't explain, and it doesn't necessarily mean anything.
But, to make a technical point, freedom of speech is broader than the US first amendment. You also need a culture of free debate.
(It's easy to point to exceptions, but I think that culture is fairly robust on the Internet?)
Some elements in the US seem to think that they had invented freedom of speech and all other countries are devoid of it. Not so. Freedom of speech is not a supreme value, it lives within a mesh of...
Some elements in the US seem to think that they had invented freedom of speech and all other countries are devoid of it. Not so. Freedom of speech is not a supreme value, it lives within a mesh of sometimes conflicting values. When those values conflict, some have to take precedence and some have to be curbed to preserve more important values. e.g. life, other people's freedom, rights of minorites, etc'.
These people don't want free debate. They're just pissed their propaganda doesn't get traction. If you look at all the "free speech" alternatives out there, they censor a whole lot more than the platforms they criticize and are only really there to spread propaganda. Their only gripe with twitter is that their propaganda gets called out and and doesn't spread as effectively.
I don't know who you mean by "they" or what they believe, and I don't really want to get into it, but I think some people are concerned with things like accounts getting banned and people getting...
I don't know who you mean by "they" or what they believe, and I don't really want to get into it, but I think some people are concerned with things like accounts getting banned and people getting fired? This isn't just "getting called out" and it doesn't make sense to pretend it doesn't happen. Often, we think accounts getting banned is good.
I think of social media moderation (or censorship if you like) as mostly a matter of judgement calls and I have no principled reason to oppose it, but I think it can be done well or badly, and often people think it's being done badly and disagree with decisions that are against them or someone they like.
I'm also not sure if anyone has a principled stand against propaganda. For example, I think spreading Ukrainian propaganda is more or less fine with most of us? Some of it is pretty funny.
But people are often not that thoughtful about how they criticize moderation decisions. It's very tempting to make the debate a matter of high principle instead of case-specific judgement calls. But if you look at what people support or oppose, it's very much not about abstract principles.
The "they" are often the same people as the "some people" you refer to. That's why you can't take "some people" at their word of being victims of overzealous moderation without the specifics and...
The "they" are often the same people as the "some people" you refer to. That's why you can't take "some people" at their word of being victims of overzealous moderation without the specifics and context of the situations.
For example, in this situation, Musk criticizing Twitter for "failing to adhere to free speech principles" is a crock of shit considering how much he's violated those same principles when it comes to people he doesn't like. Someone like him should not be listened to about free speech principles since clearly he has selfish double standards. He is exactly the "some people" that would complain about the lack of free debate a day after he goes on a tirade against someone and tries to get them fired for speaking against him.
No, logically there's no reason to believe that your "they" and my "some people" are the same. We've been exposed to different things on the Internet, so we could be and probably are thinking of...
No, logically there's no reason to believe that your "they" and my "some people" are the same. We've been exposed to different things on the Internet, so we could be and probably are thinking of different articles, different incidents, and different complaints by different people.
(Though, some of them could be the same! Who knows?)
This is a problem with discussing people in the abstract. If we talked about specific incidents then it's more likely we would be talking about the same thing.
That's why I bee-lined right back to the full context of this situation, I feel the abstraction above has totally lost the plot of this situation. Elon Musk is both "they" and "some people" and...
That's why I bee-lined right back to the full context of this situation, I feel the abstraction above has totally lost the plot of this situation. Elon Musk is both "they" and "some people" and always has been. He complains about being held to standards all the time, and has a history of double standards in his benefit. He is perpetually the victim, even when he's throwing around baseless pedophilia accusations because someone said something he didn't like.
He is not the person who a grander conversation about free speech principles and philosophy should be launched from because he clearly does not believe in those himself unless it's to his own benefit. He has quite a way to go before any claims he makes about free speech principles deserves anything more than immediate derision.
I agree that there's not likely to be any broader principles in play here. I think he's just going to ask for Twitter features he wants. (For example, an edit button.)
I agree that there's not likely to be any broader principles in play here. I think he's just going to ask for Twitter features he wants. (For example, an edit button.)
Update: He has joined the Twitter board of directors (https://twitter.com/paraga/status/1511320953598357505)
Update update: nevermind (https://twitter.com/paraga/status/1513354622466867201)
Oh, to be a fly on the wall in that board room.
Matt Levine wrote today's column before Musk got a seat on the board, but he has things to say:
[...]
I took a "Business 101" style class not too long ago, and one of the more interesting takeaways was that it defined stakeholders as anyone who has a business relationship with a company - including the people buying the product/service and everyone you employ. I rather liked this definition because there are so many examples where this comes into play.
If you are running an excellent business, you sell products or services that are so good that people don't necessarily care how much they cost because they don't just meet the minimum requirements, but they provide some sort of satisfaction on top of it. Good hand tools may be expensive, but they're worth it because they help me to do a better job with less effort. A good investor will be aware of that and can build a company that makes money by making people happy. A bad investor will find ways to cut down everything in order to save a buck and then pocket the difference. One keeps the rest of the stakeholders happy, and the other is essentially stealing from them.
LFTL: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-04-04/elon-musk-bought-some-twitter
Likely related article:
Elon Musk seeks to end US restrictions on his tweets
And likely related tweet:
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1507777261654605828
Someone should tell him that the first amendment is there to protect the public from governmental regulation of free speech.
I have no idea what Musk has in mind, what "free speech principles" he means or why he things democracy is being undermined. Musk says stuff on Twitter, he doesn't explain, and it doesn't necessarily mean anything.
But, to make a technical point, freedom of speech is broader than the US first amendment. You also need a culture of free debate.
(It's easy to point to exceptions, but I think that culture is fairly robust on the Internet?)
Some elements in the US seem to think that they had invented freedom of speech and all other countries are devoid of it. Not so. Freedom of speech is not a supreme value, it lives within a mesh of sometimes conflicting values. When those values conflict, some have to take precedence and some have to be curbed to preserve more important values. e.g. life, other people's freedom, rights of minorites, etc'.
These people don't want free debate. They're just pissed their propaganda doesn't get traction. If you look at all the "free speech" alternatives out there, they censor a whole lot more than the platforms they criticize and are only really there to spread propaganda. Their only gripe with twitter is that their propaganda gets called out and and doesn't spread as effectively.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/enriquedans/2020/12/04/parler-the-last-bastion-of-free-speech-on-the-internet-hintno/?sh=409fc46c4e47
https://www.engadget.com/trumps-free-speech-app-truth-social-is-censoring-content-and-kicking-off-users-023153584.html
I don't know who you mean by "they" or what they believe, and I don't really want to get into it, but I think some people are concerned with things like accounts getting banned and people getting fired? This isn't just "getting called out" and it doesn't make sense to pretend it doesn't happen. Often, we think accounts getting banned is good.
I think of social media moderation (or censorship if you like) as mostly a matter of judgement calls and I have no principled reason to oppose it, but I think it can be done well or badly, and often people think it's being done badly and disagree with decisions that are against them or someone they like.
I'm also not sure if anyone has a principled stand against propaganda. For example, I think spreading Ukrainian propaganda is more or less fine with most of us? Some of it is pretty funny.
But people are often not that thoughtful about how they criticize moderation decisions. It's very tempting to make the debate a matter of high principle instead of case-specific judgement calls. But if you look at what people support or oppose, it's very much not about abstract principles.
The "they" are often the same people as the "some people" you refer to. That's why you can't take "some people" at their word of being victims of overzealous moderation without the specifics and context of the situations.
For example, in this situation, Musk criticizing Twitter for "failing to adhere to free speech principles" is a crock of shit considering how much he's violated those same principles when it comes to people he doesn't like. Someone like him should not be listened to about free speech principles since clearly he has selfish double standards. He is exactly the "some people" that would complain about the lack of free debate a day after he goes on a tirade against someone and tries to get them fired for speaking against him.
Yep. See: Despite calling himself a 'free speech absolutist,' Elon Musk has a history of retaliation against employees and critics
No, logically there's no reason to believe that your "they" and my "some people" are the same. We've been exposed to different things on the Internet, so we could be and probably are thinking of different articles, different incidents, and different complaints by different people.
(Though, some of them could be the same! Who knows?)
This is a problem with discussing people in the abstract. If we talked about specific incidents then it's more likely we would be talking about the same thing.
That's why I bee-lined right back to the full context of this situation, I feel the abstraction above has totally lost the plot of this situation. Elon Musk is both "they" and "some people" and always has been. He complains about being held to standards all the time, and has a history of double standards in his benefit. He is perpetually the victim, even when he's throwing around baseless pedophilia accusations because someone said something he didn't like.
He is not the person who a grander conversation about free speech principles and philosophy should be launched from because he clearly does not believe in those himself unless it's to his own benefit. He has quite a way to go before any claims he makes about free speech principles deserves anything more than immediate derision.
I agree that there's not likely to be any broader principles in play here. I think he's just going to ask for Twitter features he wants. (For example, an edit button.)
As I have heard it put, freedom of speech is not the same as freedom of reach.
Archived.