I do think Elon being closely involved with running Twitter is a net good. We’ve tried a lot of different approaches to social media, now perhaps it’s time to try laissez faire.
The unfortunate side effect of experimentation is that if Elon succeeds in a Twitter takeover, Twitter is both more likely to become much more successful, _and_ more likely to die. Right now Twitter is floating in between, a solid offering with few prospects for growth and unlikely to be superseded in the near future.
Bots can be shut off in a pretty easy way. Detect and prevent any kind of automation (something that randomly mangles the javascript/html to prevent scraping for example) and also completely delete the Twitter API that allows automated tweeting. Tweeting should only be done by humans.
Also auto IP bans of any "rapid" tweeting coming from any IP.
Twitter is dying, and could probably use a fundamental revamp which Elon would provide. However Elon really has more important things to worry about.
If Musk, or anyone, has solutions to the problems with freedom of speech that have existed since civilization, let's hear them. If the ideas are good and he's the best person to implement them, then there's a good chance that people will want to do it.
Although not guaranteed to solve the issue of "free speech", I would be interested to see the results of a social media service that is not designed to maximize engagement to drive the most ad dollars.
Huh? What's wrong about this?
The goal in the US Constitution is to prevent the government from abridging people's right to free speech. Twitter is not the government.
Maybe he could control much more twitter stock through friendly shareholders. e.g. I buy $1B of Twitter stock with money I borrow from Elon and pledge those shares to elect Elon's board members and what not. He'd just need 4 friendlies, and they don't even have to be billionaires.
What can we collectively do to help Musk take control of twitter? Are there are any GameStop short-squeeze strategies here?
There may be some kind of WallStreetBets technical maneuver around it. But it doesn't sound like it will be easy
"Rupert Murdoch plans to 'poison' News Corp takeover bids" [1]
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/may/24/news-corp-rupe...
It's a quixotic artifact of power that plays some stakeholders against others, but it's not new.
I don't think it's a headline, but it's definitely relevant.
It kind of bothers me that this would receive down-votes.
There may be common sense solutions to mitigate those problems. but I haven't heard them from Musk
Preventing the government from abridging people's right to free speech is the strategy, not the goal. Preventing large corporations from dictating what political views can effectively be expressed is another strategy towards the same goal.
How about when the US Govt asks Twitter to "lean" on certain viewpoints?
Does the answer depend on which viewpoints and who's president?
That's why Elons attempting to buy it.
To provide a more fair less propaganda filled platform to the world.
The founding fathers believed a free and private press was essential to a healthy democracy.