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Automaker CEO Elon Musk Strips UAW Twitter Verification as Union Strikes Against Big Three
(theintercept.com)
this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2023
238 points (94.4% liked)
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I must say it is amusing watching the same people who cheered Twitter censorship the last few years suddenly realise why giving companies the power to sensor is a bad idea. Eventually the gun gets turned on you. Always resist censorship. Especially speech you disagree with. Free speech is useless unless you can say things which people disagree with.
That’s the "American and legal" version of free speech. Was there no free speech before they wrote the constitution?
Correct, there was not. For example, see the case of Zenger and the New York Weekly Journal.
Even today, the UK does not have the same freedom of speech as the US. For example: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/abolish-the-monarchy-protesters-king-proclamation-b2165294.html
You’re confusing the U.S. Constitution with free speech. The Constitution only protects some kinds of speech, and only for American citizens. I’m not American. Most people are not American. Surely you realise there are many others countries out there, and other kinds of speech?
You say “harmful” speech has no place in the public square. Who adjudicates that? Right now it’s Elon Musk. Are you really happy with that?
What government purchased X? Surely you're mistaking that with a private entity purchasing it. No part of X is public, it is and has always been a private site with membership requirements.
Again, "free speech" doesn't apply to what companies allow on their platforms.
I listed examples of harmful speech.
The constitution is there to protect us from the government. Other laws are there to protect us from each other.
The "censorship" from before Musk took over was mostly banning hate speech, death threats, and calls for violence. Sometimes all three were in the same tweet.
Now it's banning union organizing and people wanting to be paid a fair wage for a day's work. Totally the same.
Most people agree with censoring hate speech and death threats. The problem is they expanded well beyond that, all while people cheered. The chants of, “it’s a private company!” were deafening. So now they can lie in the bed they made.
Even before Musk, twitter amplified right-wing nonsense.
Now it's openly full of Nazis, because Musk unbanned them.
But you're right, it is a private company, and thus not subject to any definition of free speech.
Here's the thing. People do have free speech and can publicly say that they think the new twitter is a Nazi fulled dumpster fire run by a racist man-baby who got rich off of an Apartheid era emerald mine.
Private companies moderating content != censorship.
And I think you have a wrapped few of how it went down.
Pre-musk moderation was a necessary evil to combat spam, fake news and hate speech. Nobody was cheering, except when some notorious idiots got the boot. Then we were just laughing at the idiots. Fine, call it cheering if you want.
Now, we are mostly just all laughing at Musk destroying his investment.
I don't care if he censors the UAW or whatever. Go ahead and censor everyone except dogecoin evangelists.
And yeah, people can say stupid shit I disagree with. But I reserve the right to laugh.
I'm not going to hang out in a bar that allows Nazis to hang out. You can if you like, but people are going to call you a Nazi supporter, and they will be right. If you don't allow Nazis in your bar, they can still stand outside and freeze peach as much as they want, you are not curtailing anyone's freedom. So, yes, I cheer businesses that don't allow Nazis and I am critical of businesses where the management trolls unions (and allows Nazis), and that's not hypocritical in any way because there's a difference between good things and bad things. Anyway, enjoy your Nazi bar, weirdo.
Can I follow you around with a siren that I turn on every time you attempt to speak?
Using a siren to silence me is just another form of censorship.
Stopping someone from using a siren is just another form of censorship as well.
You telling me to silence my siren is censorship. I'm using it to voice my opinion.
I thought you said that you were against all forms of censorship.
Do you think it's possible for a Twitter version of this drowning-out siren to exist? What would it look like?
I think exceptions need to be made for obvious propaganda, disinformation, gaslighting, and hate speech. Dangerous lies and calls for violence do not need a platform, that's quite different from silencing people for merely having a different opinion.
I agree with the spirit of what you're saying, but it seems too easy for those definitions to get spun off into just "things the majority dislikes" which isn't great. I would hope that dangerous lies could be countered in the comments, and the platforms are then setup to always include this conversation rather than letting the first poster hog the megaphone
I used to believe the free marketplace of ideas worked this way, then the Trump years and the pandemic happened. It became clear to me that many people cannot and/or do not care to know the difference between evidence-based conclusions & obvious and dangerous lies, provided it supports their preexisting biases. Just look at the hostility many harbor for fact-checking.
First, twitter removing a post/banning a user/enforcing a policy is free speech. The government preventing it is anti-free speech. The government cannot tell the New York Times what to publish or not to publish, and it likewise cannot force twitter to do so. I cannot force the Washington Post to publish my op-ed on how bananas should be banned because they’re phallic and make me uncomfortable. Twitter has the right to suspend the UAW account, or delete all of its posts, or whatever it wants to do.
People are upset because Elmo uses his right to suspend and so on as personal vendettas. He’s erratic, unstable, and impulsive. Again, it’s his company and it’s his right. Hell, given that he’s destroyed between 70% and 90% of a $44B company’s value by indulging in his idiotic whims, I wouldn’t expect anything different. A literal dart-throwing chimp would be a better manager. It’s obvious why Jack Dorsey got a guaranteed buyout at $54.20 when he agreed to hold onto his $1B holdings during the transition. He could now technically shut down twitter by removing up to 25% of its remaining valuation. If the Saudis got a similar deal, that’s another $1.5B. So Elmo isn’t just paying $1B per year servicing the debt he took on to stupidly buy a company in an industry he knows less than nothing about, those guaranteed buybacks are like additional loans that can be called in at any time If he did end up tanking the value of the company down into the $4B range, it is closing in on being worth less than $0.
So this is to be expected, just like him fucking with the NYT and anyone else he disagrees with is to be expected. People can still call it out as indicative of who he is.
And you know this is nothing like censoring hate speech or dangerous disinformation. You’re just making a bad faith argument.
That's right. You should ban bananas because people are peeling them wrong