It was never much of a driver of traffic outside news and most news consumers that click have already left. And most news sources you'd want to click are behind paywalls The users that remain are more likely to watch Twitter videos and read those long-ass tweets, out of loyalty to Papa Elon.

If they ban Signal links, a competitor platform, that’s a shame, but whatever you say on Signal you can say on X instead.

Seems like some people think a “free speech platform” would be some sort of moderated debating space where opinions you dislike are silenced on your behalf and the downstream political ramifications are things that you personally enjoy, or else it’s not free speech but “fascism” (lol).

For example, keeping a Twitter account in case someone wants to contact you seems pretty harmless.

Pre-Musk Twitter was indeed bad, a sign of it’s time and dying. Now it’s even worse and quite pathetic.

I'm mildly curious to see how X tries to justify this, but I suspect they've reached the stage where they don't even need to pretend to pay lip service to their notional values.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43077124

In terms of moderation, you also get to flag/vouch posts, so moderation isn't entirely binary.

I remember as a teen how much of a pain it was to find a good forum. Too few users and it'd feel like a graveyard, not worth checking in on often enough to build up a habit. Too many and it was impossible to keep track of anything or gain enough of an understanding of the regulars to know how to read their posts. Even the sweet spot in the middle would be frequently torn to shreds by one troll or mentally ill poster spamming the forum in a frenzy. Far preferred it to the reddit tree based vote setup but I can understand how this is what most people have settled on.

Which thankfully when it's a platform it doesn't take long to find out which it is.

Unfortunately, in American culture any kind of regulation is seen as negative inherently, whereas in continental European cultures, regulation is seen as a vital and fundamental part of ensuring a place where everyone can thrive.

But if we abolish the state the way libertarians currently define it—meaning abolishing the state but not private property (which paradoxically forces the state to persist in order to determine who owns what, such as businesses, housing, etc.)—then it's an entirely different project. We would be abolishing the so-called oppression of the state only to replace it with an even worse and unchecked oppression by corporations and the billionaires who own them, with no means of voting (since "voting with your wallet" is a myth).

And yet, when you listen to them, it sounds as if they are liberating us from something, when in reality, they are freeing themselves from all control so they can better enslave us.

In my mind, the failure on the democracy side has been the rise and rise of managing the message, and the fall of free speaking politicians - modern political comms is positively Orwellian - in part in response to the overwearning power for certain media groups to run a negative campaign to get what they want. Politicians were cowed.

If you look back at historic TV footage of politicians from 50 years ago - the level, subtlety and honesty of debate is much better.

Not sure how you fix it - the money+internet allows anybody to try and control the democratic process - but part of it has to be politicians being braver in speech and deed.

In speech, for example, Bernie Sanders didn't shy away from owning the word socialist - when he first came to prominence it was used as an unthinking label that the media thought should instantly disqualify him - but instead he took the opportunity to re-define it.

In deed - rather than clamp down on the voices of the many, the government should be looking to curtail the power of the few - Elon Musk is currently dismantling government and while I'm sure there is lots to fix, the reason democratic governments and laws exist is to challenge and constrain the power of the few ( every one is equal before the law ).

2- X is full of people arguing about DOGE, positive and negative, and Elon is constantly attacked on his own platform by both small and large accounts. These posts are not censored.

3- Elon routinely talks about the importance of free speech, and yet I keep reading claims he’s against it from people advertising bsky and mastodon, which absolutely do not (by any reasonable definition) represent free speech platforms. They are more heavily moderated than even old Twitter was.

4- I have seen no evidence of Elon having a “propensity for authoritarianism and censorship”. Every time he gives a speech he specifically talks about being pro 1st amendment, regularly responds to his detractors, and actively defends the constitution.

I do not know what version of Elon you see, but from my perspective you are talking about a cartoonish media caricature that is the opposite of the reality that I see. We appear to be see the same person, same events, and are drawing opposite conclusions. Hence my point about sense making no longer seems possible, even when we actually appear to agree. (If anybody comes out as pro-censorship, I would be the first to call it out.)

I wouldn't let that stop you from signing up for bluesky -- in my experience it is definitely the best of the options for a twitter alternative -- but you should know exactly what it is you're getting into before you get into it.

And if you want to know exactly what you're getting into with bluesky, you should read this, which tells you more than you really want to know: https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/

Mastodon has failed to show any signs of hitting a critical mass so I kind of feel like it's a different level of social network altogether. A lot more durable and worth making an effort with but unlikely to ever become much more significant than it currently is.

There can be only one winner I presume.

1. Inherited rich kids like Elon often have a strong feeling that they are better then the rest of humanity.

2. But it turns out if you are a leech on society like that sooner or later people stop accepting that (remember: he pays less in taxes and gains more in government subsides than most people)

3. So in order for people not to turn against you sooner or later you need to keep them split into subsections that are in conflict with each other. The more split they are, the more wealth you can extract.

That is the age old strategy of divide and conquer and if you ever wondered why your political system seemed to be split down the middle 50:50, that is your answer: people with money profit from it being so.

Minorities with loud voices always wins because people don't want to deal with bullshit

X, through Musk, is now a quasi-governmental platform - as can demonstrated by actions like this.

I don't believe either of those ended up positive either. The Taliban waited out the US; they may have been overthrown, but given that he Taliban are back in power it seems like the entire effort was waste. In Iraq, Saddam was the only force holding back the Shia majority. Iraq has largely devolved into another proxy for Iran, and I don't believe it can be argued that Iraq is any better off with Saddam gone. I'm not supportive of Saddam, either; he was truly evil in ways that people don't always understand. My point would just be that populism and revolution do not necessitate positive outcomes.

I presume the grandparent was being rhetorical and trying to say Twitter was always a net negative for society as a whole.

Even today, its a net positive for plenty of people (myself included).

Would that change your view?

Well, no -- you're conflating "freedom of speech" as a general concept with the first amendment as a legal principle. The first amendment is specifically the mechanism of law we use to ensure that freedom of speech is respected in our interactions with the political state.

The first amendment doesn't apply to our interactions with each other outside of the political sphere, but that doesn't mean that we don't also have expectations of conduct and cultural norms that uphold freedom of speech via other means in non-government contexts.

[0] https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1499976967105433600

That is a complete lie. Musk "updated" twitter rules to ban the tracking of private jets (namely his) despite that being public information, and immediately proceeded to suspend accounts having relayed that public information, and accounts which had mentioned or linked to such, or to aviation tracker websites.

Musk also routinely singles out individuals of companies or administrations he dislikes e.g. https://futurism.com/the-byte/elon-musk-bullying-federal-wor...

Musk is fine with censorship with his Chinese CCP friends, anyway, so the hypocrisy is as big as his Melon.

> Wikipedia’s political bias confirmed

The simple existence of a page that documents an event is not evidence of political bias, and that accusation says more about your own biases than it does Wikipedia editors.

This is clearly not true. X represents Elon’s politics. Best example: Elon has X officially blocked any usage of the term cis as part of his crusade against his trans daughter - and I don’t say that lightly, he was not anti trans until she came out.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91126082/elon-musk-x-cisgender-c...

No, because people acting with hate as motivator don’t care if they are within a social minority. They will cease any opportunity to use every aggression tool they have at their disposal to express loudly their will to oppress whoever looks like unaligned with their mindset.

This is in sharp contrast with minorities whose only wish is to live in a way that is aligned with with their own aspirations that perfectly fit in a specter of harmonious social differences even if it doesn’t fall right in the middle of the median mainstream stereotype.

Everybody is part of some minorities. But not everyone think that because they are a member of this or that minority they should be given some hegemony over everything and the rest in the political matter of their society.

Difference without distinction in this case. The left actually polices its luminaries to some degree (not perfectly but still) which makes it incompatible with the grifter class Musk is chief president of. He’s never going to drift leftward because we’re not going to metaphorically suck his balls because he promotes basic human decency. Figures like him only go rightward.

As for if he bought twitter explicitly to make it a greater hotbed for racism, I think you’d have a hard time proving it in court, but at the same time, he’s unbanned a lot of prominent alt-right figure heads, and boosted tons of their tweets to the financial detriment of the platform. Can’t say he bought it to do that but the huge drops in value because of it hasn’t deterred him so…

Moreover, it’s not that simple. Racists can express themselves. I was talking about racist discourse, not racists themselves. Racism is a hate speech, which has nothing to do with, for example, the right to enjoy one's body and have an abortion as a woman or the ability to express one's gender identity—something that, according to all scientific studies and meta-analyses on the subject, clearly improves the well-being of trans people.

I know very well that racists are experts at playing the victim and making it seem like they are the ones facing repression, but who runs the country? Who are the journalists on television? Are they women or men? White? Rich?

It’s outrageous to claim that the richest man in the world—Elon Musk, a racist, antisemitic, misogynistic white supremacist—is supposedly "censored" and unable to express himself freely! Remind me of a time in American history when a woman had as much power as Elon Musk over the country, or even over other countries (as we see with ALD in Germany)?

Maybe (if it's about black or white), but anti-Semites have a pretty loud and public voice in the "Western" world.

The attacks on Musk are almost always that he doesn’t support freedom of speech, without any qualification.

If you’re trying to attack the much narrower position that he’s not a free speech absolutist you need to do it at the time your make the criticism, not retrospectively after you make the allegation.

Have you actually tried creating articles on Wikipedia? I've seen some pretty notable projects have pages that they wrote for Wikipedia be rejected as being "not noteworthy enough". Specifically Pleroma (a Fediverse application similar to Mastodon) comes to mind.

They were penalized only 24 hours after the ban took effect, but the penality was minor.

Another part of the issue is that especially among young people, words have lost their meanings. Everything is toxic, a genocide, sexual assault, rape, cultural appropriation, god knows what else - the room for nuances in discussion has been entirely lost because large parts of society lack the vocabulary to talk about it, 1984 says hello.

The combination of hyper-social media, ever shorter dopamine feedings / gamification and a complete lack of awareness for the importance of basic education and history are disastrous.

In private you have severe restrictions on speech and expressions. Workplaces, stores, and schools have codes of conduct, dress codes, etc. to restrict expression.

What you call "extremely taboo subjects" is relative, based on your own biases and beliefs. "Woman should be more active in public life" is not an "extreme" view, even in more conservative sections of society. But in Ultra-orthodox jewish communities, or isolationist muslim communities, or even many christian sects, this would be controversial statement.

If a member faces social consequences for these statements, it is not a violation of their right to free speech. Nobody is obligated to tolerate you, no matter how in the right you may be. You can't force society to be on your side.

You might say, "But these social norms are repressive and harmful." Well then change them through activism. Stop whining about "free speech violations". That is, again, ass backwards.

It's the pot calling the kettle black.

Journalists get suspended from social media platforms for doxing all the time.

These events are not newsworthy, and wikipedia articles are not written about them.

The problem isn't the content of this article, it is that the article exists at all. It only exists because wikipedia editors apply different notability thresholds to one side of politics than the other.

Free speech and equal rights in a legal sense, meaning staying out of jail? Sure, with caveats about threats and abuse.

Free to use a private platform? No, nobody's entitled to the support of someone else's private platform. Equal rights are about protection from the state, not from others' opinions.

Platforms themselves also have speech-based rights. Even if one portrays itself as a neutral 'town square,' it puts its own rights to work as soon as it implements an algorithmic feed, implicitly deciding what content to promote or hide.

You are entitled to your opinion: good, bad, or irrelevant. You are entitled to your words. You are not entitled to an audience.

Regardless of whether someone is entitled to free speech, is a private company bound to the constitutional protection?

My understanding has always been that its specifically the government that can't censor me, a private company or citizen can. The NY Times isn't required to write an article I submit to them for example, that's no different than Twitter deciding not to keep a post a write.

Calling for the eradication of people with certain sexual preferences or skin color for example.

Even in his dissenting opinion in Abrams vs the United States, Holmes valued not free speech, but the market place of ideas - the competition of ideas that underlies the search for truth.

Slavishly sticking to free speech, and destroying the market of ideas - creating a monopilist propaganda force, with a symbiotic political party is NOT free speech.

Today we have far more information than any of the founders had anticipated. Monopolies of ideas, far more content than fact, the race to the bottom due to advertising - a source of stress in every pocket?

Yeah, your network is going to have a very specific signal to noise ratio. Your market place of ideas is going to be selling junk food, because its cheap and easy to make.

The idea of counter speech works, if counter speech is heard in the first place. If your message never gets to the other side, or the other party is completely enraged and unable to think past their fears - you have no market place of ideas.

I think that's reality, not cynicism

I disagree. In this context they are 2 groups of people who disagree about something, everything else is irrelevant. It is your opinion to colour one side or the other 'hateful', 'racist' or any other word. You are applying your opionin and bias to other people arguments to paint one side better than the other.

Take this same opinion and apply it to Israel/Palestine, and suddenly it becomes not so clear cut. Both sides claim something about the other side, and both are killing each other because if it. In this instance, who would you call hateful and racist? It completely depends on who you sympathise with as there is no correct answer here. It is no different to any other groups of people who you are not part of.

Slander and death threats are harder to define. You have to show an active plot to commit the crime, not just a statement. At that point the plot, the action you took, is the crime rather than your words.

They also feel like they should be allowed to shut down other people's speech, because that is part of their idea of free speech. They should be allowed to tell you that you're not allowed to talk.

The more people understand that when people talk about "absolute free speech", it isn't a serious position, and is mostly held by people with this view, the better. I'm sure there are actual "free speech purists" out there, but they are few and far between. Instead it is mostly people using the guise of free speech so they can say and do what they want without consequences.

Yes we do, we disagree on that statement.

> Would you tolerate a discussion around somebody who said they personally wanted to do something like that to you?

Yes of course, why wouldnt I? Trying to understand that opinion and maybe bring us closer to agreeing on the underlying issues would be my first aim, not just to cry foul on free speech and expect them to be locked up just for saying something I dont like. That is barbaric.

You can say anything you want, acting on it is what turns that into illegal activity.

What you are saying is actively happening right now.

Certain people dont like that another certain group of people have been allowed back onto Twitter, and so they are going in droves to Mastodon/Bluesky/Threads/TruthSocial etc.

Twitter has received an 87% drop in revenue since reinstating previously blocked accounts.

Id say people are flocking to alternatives.

This is creating an extremely fragmented society, all creating their own bubble of what they want to see. History has shown that where this happens it increases aggression and intense reaction, where people are not used to seeing things they disagree with and so when they do they react more violently.

> Firms have a right to their property, and the choices of how they maximize revenue on it.

Of course they do, but what this generally turns into in the modern age is 'The left doesnt like what the right have to say, block them plz". Then this turns into a political argument, when in fact one group of people just dont want to hear what a different group of people have to say because 'it offends them'.

> I mean, should the head of a media firm be threatened by the Government or President, and forced to comply with their preferred style of gatekeeping?

We have rules and laws to prevent this as it is recognised as being a threat.

I mean, ok you have this right. What do you think was the INTENTION of this right? Do you think they intended for people to freely mumble to themselves or to tell their ideas to others?

If someone takes you up on that offer and you pay them, that crosses from free speech into illegal activity and you will be put in jail. But you are totally fine to talk about if you want.

It does not matter how politely you formulate your opinion if it legitimizes racism by reduction to a "two sides" argument. Merely existing as a religious or ethnic group is not the same as expressing an opinion, and it doesn't legitimize the expression of unqualified hatred towards the same group. We should tolerate the expression of opinions which we disagree with, but I think there is a limit, and we should not tolerate intolerance.

Your abridged definition is your cartoonish admission that you're aware that you're wrong.

With just a little more cleverness you could have easily avoided that reveal and actually challenged me.

>You seem very quick to label...

Ah yes, the old, "labeling the labelers is the real problem here" routine.

I'm seeing now that you're just kind of a lazy troll—boring and unimaginative. This is where I exit. Feel free to carry on with yourself!

> Ultimately, whether it is legal in the United States to falsely shout "fire" in a theater depends on the circumstances in which it is done and the consequences of doing it. The act of shouting "fire" when there are no reasonable grounds for believing one exists is not in itself a crime, and nor would it be rendered a crime merely by having been carried out inside a theatre, crowded or otherwise.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...

Incitement to violence is also permitted as long as it isn't immediate and/or likely. This is known as the Brandenburg Test:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imminent_lawless_action

Neither do you, unless you redefined it to be the super narrow description that you gave. So you can freely be censored but keep believing you have freedom.

You're the poster child of how europeans imagine usa citizens.

It doesnt though, thats the point.

Its the same as competition in a capitalist marketplace. A company can sell terrible products and what should happen is people see they are terrible products and vote with their wallet to stop buying. Then the company goes out of business.

With free speech if somebody is saying something that other people think is terrible, they should stop listening to that person. They are still allowed to say anything they want, but their reputation is tarnished and hardly anybody listens to them and they loose their platform/influence.

In reality, people are weak and do not do these things. They keep buying the terrible products because they dont want to have to think about looking for a better alternative. They keep listening to the hate speech because its easier to respond in anger than to ignore the person. The solution to all these things is education and people spending more time thinking about how they respond to things in the world. Again in reality this wioll never happen, and so people will keep shouting and shouting about what they dont like until the world ends up destroying itself through hate and anger.

Your position:

>Your position:

>… t and 'protect' their audience from it. That IMO is anti free speech, as the 'protect' part of the term is abiguous/subjective and depends on the beliefs/opinions of the gatekeepers.

Your position ignores the rights given to firms to run their business, and the choice of their speech via citizens united.

Firms have a right to do what they please, as long as it is legal.

You dont like what firms do.

You want to make them behave a certain way. You are asking the government to force them to do so.

This kills free speech.

——- The position that you set up, is inherently in contradiction to the norms of reality. I am a policy person and understand the trade offs here intimately, which is leading to me playing fast and loose, resulting in confusion.

And yes - you matter to me. Why shouldn’t you? You seem intelligent, or if not, you value looking intelligent.

It would be interesting to see how you resolve the contradiction that your position throws up.

———

I think all of them are pretty crap for today’s environment.

But yes - the operating definition of Free speech, the one enforceable in courts, the one you have lived under, is the one I outlined.

Namely - no government over reach in speech. Not that people can’t do what they want as private individuals, and now corporations.

So you can in theory, have a corporation buy up all the local news channels, and then have them share one kind of point of view. It’s perfectly free speech.

You could stream porn, and the courts would side by you for your right to free speech.

This doesn’t mean you wont get sued for piracy, or actually earn money through your project - you still need a service people want.

I’m dead serious, you can check if you like - but these are the rules you live under even right now.

So, from the opposite direction, I have the same issue as the other commentator but with the divergent use of the word "woke" by those mostly on the right (and sarcastically by those on the left) — if the person hearing/reading it doesn't know what to expect, it's not a useful word.

Therefore, while I know what I mean by "hate speech" (demonising/dehumanising a group), I tend to avoid using the term as it doesn't successfully replicate my thoughts into the heads of other people.

With regard to falsely shouting fire, there are no common misconceptions. The common understanding of the saying is identical with the understanding in the judgment, and that part of the judgment remains good law.

However, there is a modern meme that strives to obscure this reality by pointing out that the judgment reached conclusions that modern people generally disapprove of. This has no relevance to the issue.

> Claiming "The purpose of a system is what it does." is like claiming that software bugs do not exist.

It's more like claiming that there is no meaningful difference to any outside observer between a bug that is not eradicated over an extended time window and an intentional feature.

I do agree with you in cases where the system is being continually refined, but I don't think the quote talks about changing systems, only about constant ones.

Q: Given two engineers, one incompetent and one malicious, how can you tell the difference between the incompetent engineer and the malicious engineer?

A: It doesn't matter.

That's a good point.

> If we voted with {+1, +0.5, -0.5, 0, 0, 0...} weights, without duplication of non-zero values

Are you describing range/score voting?

I don't think avoiding duplicated values is necessary but it's pretty well known that score voting is the best system: https://rangevoting.org/

See the diagram at the bottom of the page describing voter regrets. Everybody at least somewhat interested in voting systems would prefer this, especially over plurality/FPTP which is the stupidest system possible. But a lot of people are clueless or willingly supporting a broken system.

There's also an explorable explanation by Nicky Case: https://ncase.me/ballot/

Sidenote: the fact you need to explain that expressing more information in one vote is still one vote shows how clueless people are. Obviously every vote has the same power to influence the result but some people will try to wear you down through misunderstood technicalities.

So you think you can’t damage people’s psyche through words?

"Election".

Action very easy. They do it a lot. Did it this time, even, despite what they say.

> He didnt.

He did.

Here's the lawsuit that X Corp. filed: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.txnd.38...

That is him doing the thing.

FTFY :)

I find their ranking highly suspect because they put the Netherlands at number #4, one of the highest rankings, while in reality the press in the Netherlands is in a dire state: literally all newspapers of record are collectively owned by just two Belgian (not even Dutch) mega-corporations. Is this really one of the most free countries? It's like Rupert Murdoch and Michael Bloomberg together owned all newspapers in the US.

And the US is ranked suspiciously low, at #55, below a country like Belize. Belize! Look at what RSF itself writes about Belize:

> With no daily newspapers, the pool of media outlets is small, and of those considered mainstream, some are supportive of political parties, even when privately owned. Independent media are scarce and access to funding is limited. Most of the advertising funds that media publishers rely on come from the government and their distribution are often dependent on the party in power.

Am I supposed to take it seriously that this is better than the US? That Belizeans have access to a more free press than Americans do? It seems more plausible the ranking is bogus.

> You overestimate the power of your mind

No I dont. I am fully aware of mine and everybody elses weakness and bias.

> But it doesn’t matter because free speech over all?

Exactly!

I think you are overestimating your opinion, you come across as if you know everything thats right and wrong and everybody should have the same opinion as you.

Luckily for myself and free speech, opinions are subjective. Here you are trying your hardest to offend me and back me into a corner about what I think. Yet my overarching opinion is that you are free to say anything you like about me. I have no issue with your opinions, and if you didnt have issue with mine this would be a much nicer world to live in.

Try tolerence of other peoples opinions sometime, even if you dont agree with them. Its actually quite refreshing and liberating.

which is pretty absurd and you would need to have a really corrupt court IMHO for this to hold up

During Trump 1 there was quite a habit of ripping up papers by the president. So there were some dudes hired to go take the ripped up papers and tape them back together. Really looking forwards to seeing some of those next year! https://www.politico.com/story/2018/06/10/trump-papers-filin...

I suspect that what's happening is flagrantly incredibly evil & immoral, is a heinous crime against democracy. The people need to be ae to see what governments do and are, need to have some chance to learn and see what their governments really do. My dear is that the Presidential Records Act is being thrown out the window by these folks, that we will have nearly no record of so much of what this administration & it's "advisors" (Musk) do.

Yeah fair enough, I am not a laywer and so am not knowledgable on exact legal definitions. However you argued your point as if he was successful, which he is not, and so your point is moot until a ruling.

No need to go off on other tangents that I have not mentioned anything about, then again you have the right to free speech so feel free to rattle on about whatever you want!

If you are one of them or want to see the mainstream US right-wing zeitgeist, X is where it’s at. That alone is a massive reason for people to keep the app and an account.

Otherwise I agree, all of its utility as a general platform is gone otherwise.

A narcissist wants to be the center of attention, by definition, and you are actually playing his game here. A "legitimate f-up" is the worst for a narcissist, as it would show he is nothing special, and incompetent.

That's why I go with the "legitimate f-up" explanation. There is no clear intent, it lacks flair, and it can just cause a mild controversy at best. Though I am still pissed that it turned out to be something about Elon Musk again and not Twitter/X. As much as a "nanomanager" he likes to call himself, he is not the only one working at Twitter/X, there are still people with some responsibilities there. It is not all a masterplan by Elon Musk.

As for banning links to other platforms like Mastodon, it was mentioned explicitly on the Twitter Support account that "we will no longer allow free promotion of certain social media platforms on Twitter", followed by a list of platforms that included Mastodon, but not Signal. I don't think it is still the case, and I am not aware of anything similar regarding a ban on signal.me links.

- They reject outrage and cancel culture and refuse to engage in performative posturing that ultimatively achieves nothing.

It's a mix of indie artists, old friends, and a few people who still think it's worthwhile to try and do outreach, fight against disinformation, etc.. I'm really not sure why you feel such an urge to insult people you've never met, but it's extremely rude and does nothing productive.

> nothing political about using X

I use an ad-blocker, don't have a paid account, and have 0 followers. What benefit do you think Elon Musk is getting here?

I dare say your grocery bill is responsible for supporting far more evil than anything I'm engaged in here.

My point is that this _shouldn't_ have been purely automated, but having fewer people to review things forces more things to be automated.

And rightfully so. Despite being discussed a lot here, Signal is not very popular or well-known. Even TFA felt the need to start by explaining what Signal is. TFA then adds:

“This request looks like it might be automated” reads another prompt. “To protect our users from spam and other malicious activity, we can’t complete this action right now. Please try again later.”

And if signal.me is being used for automated spam, automated attacks require automated solutions.

> The real problem then is that even if it was deliberate (conspiracy theory: Mark messaged Elon: Pls help me curb the growth of the biggest competitor of Whatsapp?) twitter can easily hide behind "overzealous automation, sorry".

That would indeed be concerning. (And maybe illegal?) But is it anything more than an unfounded accusation?

In practice, the law not taking this seriously is how a lot of women in abusive relationships die

While I appreciate your free speech maximalism, I can't help but feel you're shutting the door after the horse has bolted.

My feeling is that someone should be allowed to say that they hate me, and that they'd like to kill me. All the same, if I think they'll actually attempt to do so then I'm ok with the law trying to prevent it.

I'm fact I'm glad that they're allowed to express themselves like this because then I know who not to stand near cliff edges with.

For real though I think a lot (but not all) of opposition to things like hate speech is really an opposition to the feeling being expressed, rather than the expression itself. I'd prefer someone didn't have hatred in their heart, but once they do I prefer that they're open about it.

(You might say that that will only encourage others to become hateful, I don't necessarily agree, but it's a fair concern.)

We have Reagan to thank for it.

And it's not like this is a one-sided conflicts. Governments are actively working to suppress their citizens from standing up to them - by restricting free speech that would allow those citizens to organize, by trying to shape the thoughts of their citizens through various forms of propaganda and ultimately by doing everything they can to retain the state's monopoly on violence.

You might also look into things like the French ban on hijab in sporting events, and how that played out at the 2024 Olympics.

There's a lot of results concerned with religion - Germany has been using it's anti-semitism laws to crack down on anyone that's pro-Palestine, the French hijab thing I just mentioned, etc..

The UK also has some remarkable issues with libel laws.

This is just off the top of my mind - I'm not trying to say any particular issue is super important, just threads you can investigate. But I think even a few examples like that should make it clear that there's something systemic going on.

Even in North Korea, people are allowed to freely express their love for their Dear Leader. Those who express a different view are swiftly disposed of. If you love Dear Leader you could live your entire life believing that you and everyone else has free speech, simply because you have never encountered evidence to the contrary.

I think the French might have some quibbles about how free their speech is.

Not quite

From your link: "the prosecutor must prove that the threats placed the victim in reasonable fear and that the fear was sustained"

You cant just be prosecuted for saying something. You always need to back it up and prove it was a real threat where harm was a real possibility or the victim was in sustained genuine fear of their life.

> You might well say...

Well indeed I do say who is going to pay. If we had a society where you could get your own police escort or phone block just by saying that someone threatened you, I feel that service would be open to abuse and would end up costing the taxpayer a whole lot.

> I have a most marvellous answer to those

Please retort your answer, I am intrigued :)

Trump approval ratings are at a high. His supporters are clearly happy with what’s going on.

The question was quite simple, it was about why anyone would use X.

There are at least 60 million people that are happy with what is going on and like to be on X, which is an echo chamber of what they like.

Nothing about what I said is dishonest. This is exactly the type of outcome Trump supporters were looking for. Approval ratings don’t lie.

I don’t like what’s going on either, but this constant hand-wringing of “nobody supports this, I don’t understand, crisis crisis crisis” is unproductive and ignorant of the reality of the political landscape in the US right now.

If you want to interact with the right wing people or read what they are thinking, that’s effectively what X is for right now.

Musk was far, far less political (at least regarding his public persona) even 10 years ago; his persona was more heavily futurism oriented. Electric cars to help mitigate climate change, colonizing Mars, that kind of stuff. It wasn't really a "liberal" or "conservative" thing then. Would've been nice if he stuck on this path IMHO.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

when a system's side effects or unintended consequences reveal that its behavior is poorly understood, then the POSIWID perspective can balance political understandings of system behavior with a more straightforwardly descriptive view

Systems thinking is much more nuanced and productive IMO. Drift Into Failure by Sidney Dekker is a good introduction.

E.g. the "purpose" of fascism is nihilistic violence and the "purpose" of communism is rule by a bureaucratic elite that is somehow more equal than everyone else. All the sophistry is bullshit.

https://extremismterms.adl.org/resources/backgrounder/altern...

AFAIK they don't terribly mind what Israel is doing in Gaza, and even the ADL has that page about them.

There is a lot more if you are not convinced. At any rate Alice Weidel being lesbian means as much as some of the original Nazi leadership being homosexual, nothing. Homosexuality isn't a taboo anymore, holocaust revisionism is. Those to whom it isn't are anathema to those to whom it is.

It’s bonkers to me.

Free speech eh.

There are more than 1 million 150-159 year old Americans that receive social security and America is funding trans comic books for children in Peru. Do you think the OIG was doing a good job?

The parent is correct, these systems should be automated. Automated systems can respond faster and more accurately than humans. Humans should only be involved to improve the system and correct any mistakes it makes after the fact.

Personally, I think that the full accusation of Nazism should be reserved for when it's really needed. But I assume that Germans know better than I do how to go about keeping Nazis out of their country.

That's pretty funny. I can assure you that as someone who spent 40 years working in the oil and gas industry your insult looks really green to me.

Thanks for jumping on the recycling initiative.

In our work profanity is a tool wielded by everyone for any situation whether it seems appropriate or not. We invent new insults and epithets instead of recycling all these ancients. We're at the forefront of insult technology every time a new worm shows up at the wellsite or a situation goes from rosy to catastrophic.

It makes the day go by, and so here I just made it through another 15 minutes with a chuckle.

Thanks.

EDIT: The more I think about it, reminiscing about all those glory days out in the oil patch, with that simple insult you may have just qualified as a potential friend. You're gonna need to up your game a bit though since most of my friends have multi-syllable nicknames for me, and I for them.

If you're in Texas maybe we could go get some ribs somewhere sometime and talk about things unrelated to right-wing jesus and his disciples.

In the meantime, since I know you must be bored from reading all this, here's a comic for you to enjoy. [0]

[0]https://www.scribd.com/document/825254795/The-Power-of-Educa...

Of course it's the one the DoS spent $32000 on. I figured you were unlikely to follow any of the links in the references I gave.

It's like a art review where a writer - completely unaware of what they're doing - talks only about the work, but says nothing about the work and opens a window into their soul. A lot of people don't even recognize when it happens in that context. It's even easier for a speaker to deceive a listener (and themselves) in the context of speaking on systems. Systems thinking is hard and almost everyone is terrible at it.

I think the part that tells the real story here that I forgot to add in that wall of text most won't read is that each of those links came up in the first 5 results for the simple searches I ran on DDG.

If any effort had been expended at all in attempting to understand whether anything in musk's post was accurate then they would easily have been able to find several high quality breakdowns from non-partisan sites.

Instead they made a choice to echo something, incorrectly too, that they thought they read somewhere. Didn't even provide a link.

I think if HN was to modify any rules that would improve the quality of discussions on contentious subjects that frequently devolve into unproductive political arguments then the posting rule could be changed to require posting of links to arguments that you are trying to make so that everyone can see the supporting data behind your beliefs and judge for themselves whether they should change their own beliefs or poke fun at the poster for believing nonsense.

Back when reddit was still a one-pager they tried to maintain a standard of backing up claims with data to support the claims. Over the years it has devolved into the site we have today where most posters do as this guy did and post simple one line replies to everything.

It's a hit and run way of trying to bring someone around to your way of thinking without giving them a reason to do so.

For similarly newly enlightened people it's a feature of MediaWiki (which Wikipedia runs on) and there are five (plus two) themes selectable with ?useskin= values:

- timeless (as seen above): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Skin?useskin=timeles...

- monobook (default 2004-2009): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Skin?useskin=monoboo...

- vector (default 2010-2021): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Skin?useskin=vector

- vector-2022 (desktop default 2022-): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Skin?useskin=vector-...

- minerva (mobile default): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Skin?useskin=minerva

- modern (delightedly dated, deprecated): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Skin?useskin=modern

- cologneblue (also ancient and anti-favored): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Skin?useskin=cologne...

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Preferences#mw-prefsec...

And please don't link to X. I don't have an account so I cannot read X threads, which is very surprising because the owner said he really wanted to make it so logged-out users could read X easily, but then changed his mind because he wanted to make more money. Sounds like a really untrustworthy person to me!