> Our chattering class claims Musk is a supervillain. The truth is simpler: He wants free speech. They don't.
I say this as someone with middling thoughts on the guy: Elon Musk is not doing this to promote freedom.
Twitter is not a free system. It fundamentally cannot be free: even when owned and operated by a single majority stake, running the site will consistently be at-odds with the ideals of free speech and privacy. There's always a new lowest-common-denominator to filter, another extremist voice to cancel or another objectionable take to demonize. The internet is always this race to the bottom, and platforms at Twitter's scale simply can't host everyone. It's simply not going to happen. Elon can talk a big game, but I remain adamant that there is no way to keep Twitter "free" as in speech. Especially so if the current monetization scheme is still around.
There are free Twitter alternatives out there; Mastodon, Pleroma and Misskey have solved this by absolving the responsibility of moderation from a centralized party, and putting it into the hands of multiple federated site owners. This gets much closer to the idyllic world of free speech. There is no mob mentality, centralized authority or "right way" of doing things, just a few hundred nodes that all need to learn to live with each other. It works, too: it really is a win-win situation for everyone involved. It refutes the idea that microblogging can never be free, and makes Twitter look fairly silly in comparison.
So, I don't really care. Let Musk own Twitter, it's a private company and now he bought it. Anyone thinking that Twitter was some invulnerable public asset deserved to be bought and traded like that, anyways.
And for anyone who holds out hope that Musk can save Twitter, I'd love to talk about this in 3-6 months when nothing has changed except the MAU slowly declining.
This is just chock full of unexamined assumptions (Elon Musk "explicitly opposes censorship"), Musk's critics "are themselves explicitly in favor of censorship". It's also full of undefined terms: I don't think that "censorship" and "free speech" as used in this article mean what Mike Solana thinks they mean.
As such, it's bound to be wet garbage, and it is. Not worth a read.
I say this as someone with middling thoughts on the guy: Elon Musk is not doing this to promote freedom.
Twitter is not a free system. It fundamentally cannot be free: even when owned and operated by a single majority stake, running the site will consistently be at-odds with the ideals of free speech and privacy. There's always a new lowest-common-denominator to filter, another extremist voice to cancel or another objectionable take to demonize. The internet is always this race to the bottom, and platforms at Twitter's scale simply can't host everyone. It's simply not going to happen. Elon can talk a big game, but I remain adamant that there is no way to keep Twitter "free" as in speech. Especially so if the current monetization scheme is still around.
There are free Twitter alternatives out there; Mastodon, Pleroma and Misskey have solved this by absolving the responsibility of moderation from a centralized party, and putting it into the hands of multiple federated site owners. This gets much closer to the idyllic world of free speech. There is no mob mentality, centralized authority or "right way" of doing things, just a few hundred nodes that all need to learn to live with each other. It works, too: it really is a win-win situation for everyone involved. It refutes the idea that microblogging can never be free, and makes Twitter look fairly silly in comparison.
So, I don't really care. Let Musk own Twitter, it's a private company and now he bought it. Anyone thinking that Twitter was some invulnerable public asset deserved to be bought and traded like that, anyways.
And for anyone who holds out hope that Musk can save Twitter, I'd love to talk about this in 3-6 months when nothing has changed except the MAU slowly declining.