Posted on by mathewi

Has Twitter reached a turning point now that Elon has banned several journalists?

I haven’t written much about Twitter here, because it’s exhausting even trying to keep up with what’s happening, to be quite honest. I suspected that Elon’s ownership might be a train wreck, but I didn’t expect what happened — a train wreck in which each car of the train is a dumpster, and they are all on fire. And Elon is standing on top of the train, laughing maniacally and pouring gasoline everywhere. Is he a chaos agent, like Donald Trump, where he just enjoys watching things burn? Perhaps. Or it’s possible that he — like a number of tech bros, including Marc Andreessen — believes that everything, including journalism and morality, needs to be torn down and rebuilt by technology.

An Elon fanboy scoffed at criticism of his handling of Twitter recently, and said it would be easy as pie for a guy who puts rockets into space, etc. But the reality is that putting rockets into space or building an electric car is light-years easier than running a social network like Twitter, especially if you choose to rewrite the rules of public behavior and reinvent moderation at the same time as you are trying to convert the platform from advertising to subscription revenue. It’s not that it’s hard technically, but it involves all kinds of tradeoffs, and all of these have to do with human beings, the most complex mechanisms ever.

After saying he wanted to protect free speech and that Twitter was a public square that was so important it had to be protected, and after saying he would create a content moderation council before making any moderation decisions, Elon quickly restored accounts like Trump’s based on a Twitter poll (how many bots voted in that one?) and then brought back some of the worst right-wing accounts, tweeted that Fauci should be prosecuted, and then banned several journalists for reporting on an account that tracked his private jet — an account that he bragged about leaving up in the interests of free speech.

Here’s something Reed Albergotti wrote in his Semafor newsletter that I thought was perceptive:

“I sympathize with Musk’s frustration at people posting the location of his private jet in real time. Private jet data should be public and it’s a legitimate source of information for reporting. But there’s no reason to post it in real time, other than to mess with Musk. If somebody in a mask followed the car my son was in and tried to intimidate the driver, I’d be angry. If I saw journalists continuing to draw attention to the real-time private jet account the day after my son was threatened, I’d be pissed off.

I think it’s hypocritical to voice concern for victims of online harassment but to think it’s fine when it happens to Musk, even if he is one of the world’s richest men. But Musk’s decision to disable those accounts is a huge turning point, regardless of whether it was justified under his newly-implemented “anti-doxxing” policy. It’s now clear that Twitter is not an open forum for ideas. It’s a site that Musk controls according to his whims and emotions. Free speech can’t exist if users know, in the back of their mind, that they could be silenced nonchalantly by the emperor.”

For now, I remain on Twitter, but I have reduced my use of it significantly, and am trying out alternative such as Mastodon, where you can find me as [email protected]. I’m also on Post.news. I’m also on various Discords, and on Reddit, and Tumblr, and pretty much every other social platform. But you can always find me here. Wouldn’t it be great if Twitter’s decline somehow got everyone to go back to good old blogging? 🙂

211 Replies to “Has Twitter reached a turning point now that Elon has banned several journalists?”

  4. @mathewi looks like you DDOS’ed your own site by posting the link 🤣and yes, I love the great visual to explain what is happening.Now we need a talented graphical artist to create a nice meme-worthy cartoon to illustrate the visual…

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  8. @kevinrsours @mathewi I should clarify! I think the original troll was the purchase offer — I don’t think he ever intended to go through with it, but was unsophisticated enough to sign a deal with a “no due diligence clause.” But yeah. One hell of a thing!

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  10. I wrote something about Twitter, God help me. I suspected Elon’s ownership might be a train wreck, but I didn’t expect this: a train wreck in which each car of the train is a dumpster, all of them on fire. And Elon is laughing maniacally, pouring gasoline mathewingram.com/work/index.php…

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  11. I wrote something about Twitter, God help me. I suspected Elon’s ownership might be a train wreck, but I didn’t expect this: a train wreck in which each car of the train is a dumpster, all of them on fire. And Elon is laughing maniacally, pouring gasoline mathewingram.com/work/index.php…

    Reply

  13. Just curious, how has your Twitter experience changed since Elon took over. In what way(s) have these “dumpsters” impinged on your daily Twitter experience. Honest question … no snark in my voice at all. I just haven’t experienced a change myself. Maybe I’m just a light user.



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  19. More to Musk and Twitter than this, Mathew.

    Before December 31, 2023, and the end of third-party cookies, Twitter was the only ‘last big thing’ left to buy.

    With Alphabet market cap as of December 09, 2022 at $1201.5B, Meta Platforms at $307.31 B, etc, the $44B may end up being more than historic.

    This is what I’m watching: there is only twelve months left to get ready.

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  21. Ok. I also have concerns about broader implications like “free speech absolutism” & partisan arguing as opposed to a free exchange of ideas (Twitter was never good at this), but I just haven’t seen anything manifest yet. Am I just not looking in the right places?



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  28. I wrote something about Twitter, God help me. I suspected Elon’s ownership might be a train wreck, but I didn’t expect this: a train wreck in which each car of the train is a dumpster, all of them on fire. And Elon is laughing maniacally, pouring gasoline mathewingram.com/work/index.php…

    Reply

  29. If somebody in a mask followed the car my son was in and tried to intimidate the driver, I’d be angry.

    Sure, but connecting that to the position of his jet is a huge “citation needed” moment. Musk just asserted, without evidence, that knowing where his jet was enabled someone to find out where his son was in real time, and everyone has accepted that framing as true.

    To be honest, I don’t buy it. Have you ever been to LAX? I lived in LA for a while, the idea that someone was able to track down Musk’s car purely or largely based on the fact that his plane had arrived is laughable.

    Much more likely are:

    It didn’t happen. Musk is a serial liar, we should give his words less credence given his loose relationship with the truth. This is the guy whose company called in an active shooter threat on a whistleblower to discredit him.
    It happened, and the stalker used other sources of data other than twitter to find him. Maybe they tracked all of the license plates Musk owned or something
    It happened and it had nothing to do with Musk. Shit happens in LA.

    The idea that Twitter itself is key to this is laughable. ADS-B data is public for a good reason, and if Musk thinks public policy should be tailored for him and him alone, he can pound sand.

    No, he’s been pissed at that account for a long time because it makes him look bad, everything else is a lie. Also, he’s banning journalists for pointing out all the times he’s doxed someone else, I see no reason to take his claims as serious.

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  30. @mathewi I need journalists to stop taking his “someone stalked me via the twitter account” claim at face value, and actually investigate that before repeating it. Musk is a serial liar, and all we have is his claim. He didn’t even file a police report.

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  32. I wrote something about Twitter, God help me. I suspected Elon’s ownership might be a train wreck, but I didn’t expect this: a train wreck in which each car of the train is a dumpster, all of them on fire. And Elon is laughing maniacally, pouring gasoline mathewingram.com/work/index.php…

    Reply

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