This is good for Twitter, and good for the world. Musk's misguided approach to free speech, which says anything that is not explicitly illegal is allowed, would have made Twitter an open forum for spreading lies and hate.
My guess is Musk never intended to buy Twitter. He needed an excuse for dumping billions of dollars' worth of TSLA at its peak (while at the same time faulting Bill Gates for shorting TSLA), and his proposal to buy Twitter provided a convenient cover.
> Musk's misguided approach to free speech, which says anything that is not explicitly illegal is allowed, would have made Twitter an open forum for spreading lies and hate.
Twitter is of course currently known as a source of Truth and Harmony.
"anything not illegal is allowed" sounds decent to me; if you want stuff illegal, make it illegal. If you want unwritten laws dreamt up by anonymous elites and enforced for random reason, go talk to Tipper Gore and the PMRC.
Have you spent much time on "anything not illegal is allowed" forums?
Try to talk about popular movies are TV shows and you get things like this on such sites [1]. Want to discuss an episode of PBS Space Time such as this one [2]. Don't be surprised if this is the discussion you get [3].
What almost always happens on such forums is that the people there who aren't racists, sexists, antisemites, inane conspiracy theorists etc., leave, and the forum ends up being largely just such people.
Voat suffered from a flood of toxicity caused by Reddit banning toxic behaviors. From what I could tell, it was practically uninhabited before.
Reddit itself was largely "anything not illegal is allowed" at the time (in part due to lax enforcement of the few rules they had), and was largely fine. The toxic communities sequestered themselves for the most part.
Twitter would probably be much the same. The greater issue they'd have is the same Reddit had; it's hard to sell any advertising on a site where you can't guarantee ads won't show up next to racist/sexist/etc diatribes.
So when you say anything not illegal is allowed, do you mean that I can post porn anywhere? That spammers and bots can't be banned?
Any remotely reasonable approach here has the state deciding which attributes can be used for moderation decision and which can't, which also isn't feasible.
>"anything not illegal is allowed" sounds decent to me; if you want stuff illegal, make it illegal.
Twitter is based in the US, the 1st Amendment protects hate speech such as explicit support for genocide. I don't consider a social network full of genocide promotion to be a good thing.
The argument GP is making is that if the government can't make it illegal, private companies shouldn't disallow it; the person you're replying to is pointing out that the First Amendment sets that bar far higher than GP probably realized.
This is not historically the reality of 1a jurisprudence. Before the Internet, the ruling was that private companies cannot restrict your speech in public view. See Marsh v. Alabama for this -- a company town was prohibited from barring picketing and pamphleting on private sidewalks.
The exceptions to this were carved out in a court case regarding Compuserve, which was a subscription-only service. The stare decisis in this instance is on far shakier ground than Roe was.
You have to register to use twitter. Marsh v Alabama had nothing to do with compuserve. That would matter if a website was truly a de facto public square, but given the whole registration thing, they're not.
The compuserve case led to section 230 of the CDA being created, but again that doesn't have to do with Marsh v Alabama. To have that apply, you'd need to make the argument that Twitter both is, and intends to be a public square, and well, the fact that they have posted moderation policies makes it clear that they don't.
Marsh was not the public square. It was the sidewalks of random streets. The company that owned them explicitly did not intend for them to be a public square.
In contrast, the historical statements of Twitter make it very clear that they intended to be the public square, e.g. "free speech wing of the free speech party." Additionally, the assertions and decisions of the state in regards to social media indicate massive influence over politics that far exceeds any city street. They say people are denied their rights of free expression because Trump blocked them on Twitter, and that Russia successfully manipulated our elections because a few Russians bought a tiny amount of Facebook ads.
> It was the sidewalks of random streets. The company that owned them explicitly did not intend for them to be a public square.
Sidewalks of random streets are considered to be "the public square" in US law (broadly because random streets are usually publicly owned. You need things like gates and signs and such to revoke such an assumption). The Marsh v. Alabama ruling relied on the fact that the town didn't try to make its streets un-square like, and in fact encouraged public square-like use!
> In contrast, the historical statements of Twitter make it very clear that they intended to be the public square, e.g. "free speech wing of the free speech party."
You will be hard pressed to take a single statement, made by a minor executive who acts outside of US jurisdiction, in 2012, as superior to the actual user agreements that Twitter has (and had at the time) in the US.
> Musk's misguided approach to free speech, which says anything that is not explicitly illegal is allowed
What is free speech but that.....
> would have made Twitter an open forum for spreading lies and hate.
Like it isn't now. Twitter lets pretty much anything and everything except hate against specific subgroups they've decided are "protected". It really doesn't help there choices are entirely arbitrary with no internal consistency.
> Musk's misguided approach to free speech, which says anything that is not explicitly illegal is allowed
Genuinely interested, and not just trying to argue: how would you otherwise define free speech? It sounds like you think free speech should have defined limits - which surely means it's not free speech any more?
I am going to let Sacha Baron Cohen, of all people, answer your question [1]:
Voltaire was right when he said "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." And social media lets authoritarians push absurdities to millions of people. President Trump using Twitter has spread conspiracy theories more than 1700 times to his 67 million followers.
Freedom of speech is not freedom of reach. Sadly There will always be racists, misogynists, anti-Semites, and child abusers. We should not be giving bigots and pedophiles a free platform to amplify their views and target their victims.
Zuckerberg says people should decide what's credible, not tech companies. When 2/3rds of millennials have not heard of Auschwitz how are they supposed to know what's true? There is such a thing as objective truth. Facts do exist.
Unless I'm misunderstanding the quote, that's very much not answering my question: it discusses limiting reach (i.e. ability to disseminate one's views widely and easily) and explicitly not free speech itself?
Free speech doesn't have a single meaning. Freedom is relative. There is no right to absolute free speech anywhere. For example, you can't yell "fire" in a crowded theater. On social media owned by private corporations, "fire" isn't the only thing you aren't allowed to yell. Subverting democracy, inciting violence, propaganda from foreign governments pretending to be grassroots movement inside the US, etc., are all banned, and yet I would consider Twitter a free platform, albeit with sensible limits. But you're right, that's not absolute freedom.
Fire in a theatre came up in the context of squashing a protestor against the draft, from a judge who thought eugenics may have something going for it.
How can you separate speech and reach in this specific case? Twitter could allow all speech but limit reach, ie shadow ban. Would that satisfy your notion of free speech?
Communication, as the atomic element of networking, requires both transmission and receipt to be said to have happened.
Speech is transmission.
Reach is landing at a receiver.
Substituting /dev/null in place of a human being does not satisfy speech having occurred. A concordance must be reached between the speaker and at least one other individual.
I am so tired of seeing this overplayed urban myth. The precedent you mention was set by Schenck v. United States in 1919, but it was partially overturned later in Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969 [0]. Which is the part that people who bring up this myth every time conveniently forget about.
So no, you can yell "fire" in a crowded theater or whatever else you want, as long as it doesn't meet the legal standard for imminent lawless action (e.g., a riot). And the legal standard for imminent lawless action is much higher than you think it is.
> as long as it doesn't meet the legal standard for imminent lawless action
So there is no absolute free speech then. Which is the point of bringing up the "fire" example.
If you're a visitor in my house there is no free speech at all. If you say something I don't like I'll legally kick you out. Private companies such as Twitter and Facebook have the same right. Their platform, their rules.
If someone is a visitor in your house, you can kick them out for literally any reason you want or no reason at all.
No idea how this is relevant to your claim that "yelling fire in a crowded theater isn't allowed under free speech". It is legally allowed under free speech, it isn't a crime, despite what a lot of people claim. The theater might kick you out or ban you, but that has nothing to do with free speech.
The other part of the myth people forget is that the metaphorical fire-yellers were socialists distributing anti-draft pamphlets. It's hardly a good thing to cite today on freedom of speech.
imo this is pretty bad for twitter the company. they’ve been flat for years, they’re current valuation is less than in 2013. they’ve lost the plot a while ago and seem to have been in a managed decline, probably because they were looking for buyers.
> and good for the world
you are overestimating how many people care about twitter outside of the US.
Why does he need a cover to sell his stock? He sold $10B+ last year without the twitter excuse. Also TSLA stock in March was at least 40% below it's peak
So, you don't see a conflict if Musk criticizes Gates for shorting TSLA (because Gates thinks it is overvalued) and then turning around and selling billions of dollars' worth of TSLA? I do. I think that qualifies has hypocrisy.
The headline is: "Elon Musk Sells $8.5 Billion of Tesla Shares After Deal to Buy Twitter"
The deal to buy Twitter gave Musk an excellent cover for selling billions of dollars' worth of TSLA. He doesn't need to sell all of TSLA. He sold a massive amount. If he didn't have this cover it would have looked like he thinks TSLA is overvalued (which in fact it is).
Both Gates and Musk sold TSLA. Gates sold borrowed shares, Musk sold shares he owned. That's the only difference. Of course Musk still has tons of TSLA remaining. But that doesn't change the fact that both Gates and Musk did the same thing (sell TSLA) and yet Musk criticized Gates for it. What a hypocrite!
My guess is Musk never intended to buy Twitter. He needed an excuse for dumping billions of dollars' worth of TSLA at its peak (while at the same time faulting Bill Gates for shorting TSLA), and his proposal to buy Twitter provided a convenient cover.