The Ballad of Twitter and that Billionaire Bumpkin, Elon Musk

There's one other thing I'd like to note. I've discussed this subject with you before and I've never heard you say anything that sounded like "I revere free speech very much but I must make an exception for this restricted set of cases." It sounds to me like you don't revere free speech at all even as an abstract idea.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

First of all, I'd like to clarify that I never said I'd ban invocations to violence. I referred to "imminent violence." I think I even said something like "note especially the word imminent." It seems to take a lot to make you process what I say.

The fact that you are able construct lists of examples where I might restrict something doesn't alter the fact that I wouldn't ban the things that you would ban. I wouldn't ban opinions because they're disgusting. I wouldn't label statements "misinformation" and ban them because I thought they were probably false. I wouldn't ban things because I thought they might have a negative effect on the community. My philosophy is to allow everyone to speak and let the community sort out good and bad.

In a report released Friday, the Center for Countering Digital Hate said that since Musk has purchased Twitter, there have been nearly 3,900 posts a day that include a slur against Black people — more than triple the 2022 average of 1,282. Tweets using a slur against gay people rose 58%, from 2,506 to 3,964 a day, and posts that included a transgender slur jumped by 62%, from 3,159 to 5,117.

There was also a 33% increase in posts using a disparaging term about women, according to the report.

Separately, the Anti-Defamation League said Friday that it found there was a 61% spike in antisemitic tweets referencing “Jews” or “Judaism” — excluding retweets — in the two weeks following Musk’s takeover compared to the two weeks prior. Last month, the group also reported that Twitter has taken action on about half the number of antisemitic posts as before.

...You have already agreed that the free speech protections in the Constitution do not apply to Twitter as a private company. I take that further and say that Twitter exercising their Constitutional rights to run their site as they see fit is their business (and it is a business). There are other sites that choose different priorities.

Actually, I was giving you the benefit of the doubt, but thank you for clarifying. So, were you to have control of a social media platform, you would absolutely permit invocations to violence such as calling for a politician's rape or death or the extermination of a minority, as long as it wasn't "imminent". Yes, I disagree with that and would not do so on a site I controlled.

The fact that I am able construct lists of examples where you might restrict speech shows that your blanket approach doesn't work, even for you.

You say you wouldn't label statements as "misinformation", so I assume you take issue with those sites that do that. That is them expressing their free speech rights. You say, as I have, that the best answer to noxious free speech is more free speech. Labeling misinformation is an example of "more free speech". Given your stated position, you should be applauding sites that publish opinions they disagree with and then label them.

It's almost like the man is having a mental health problem.

Musk has endorsed some existing moderation tools that the Twitter Files cast as censorship, like its longtime, publicly stated policy of limiting the visibility of some tweets and accounts that break its rules. "New Twitter policy is freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach," he tweeted last month.

At the same time, he's reinstated thousands of accounts that had been banned for breaking the rules, including Trump, neo-Nazis, white nationalists and QAnon promoters — but won't allow conspiracy theorist Alex Jones or Kanye West, who's been vocally antisemitic, to tweet. How that squares with Musk's purported embrace of free speech principles is unclear.

Researchers at the DFR Lab have suggested that tweeting over 72 times a day is bot-like behavior. NPR identified over 3,500 accounts that have done so and mentioned China's three largest cities at least once a day from Nov 21, 2022 to Nov. 30. The data shows an uptick in the number of these accounts, peaking on Nov. 28.

Twitter's chaos could make political violence worse outside of the U.S.
The seeming surge in spam accounts also comes as Twitter's new owner, billionaire Elon Musk, has slashed the company's teams that worked in non-English languages and monitored the site for disinformation, manipulation and government-sponsored propaganda campaigns. Musk dissolved Twitter's outside Trust and Safety Council on Tuesday.

If Tesla shareholders were already worried that Elon Musk was too distracted by his new chief executive position at Twitter, they now have more reason to be upset: Mr. Musk disclosed on Wednesday that he had sold another $3.6 billion worth of Tesla stock, possibly to prop up his embattled social network.

Mr. Musk has now sold $23 billion worth of Tesla stock this year, much of it after he pledged in April to stop selling shares to finance his Twitter deal.

He hinted at what he was up to on Tuesday, saying on Twitter, “Beware of debt in turbulent macroeconomic conditions, especially when Fed keeps raising rates.” That suggests he either plans to buy back some of Twitter’s billions in debt — including the $13 billion it took on as part of his takeover — or, perhaps less likely, buy back some of the company’s shares.

None of this will reassure Tesla shareholders, who are fretting over the roughly 61 percent drop in the carmaker’s stock price from its peak in late 2021 — and a chief executive who has admitted to spending nearly all of his time at Twitter nowadays. On Wednesday, Leo KoGuan, one of Tesla’s biggest individual investors, said on Twitter, “Tesla needs and deserves to have working full-time C.E.O.”

The slump in Tesla’s stock is a sharp break from the days when its ascent lit up the stock market and gave the company a market value of well over $1 trillion. This year, the stock has not only lagged the wider market but also more established automakers that are competing more aggressively with Tesla in the fast-growing electric vehicle business. Some investors and analysts are concerned that the competitive challenges Tesla faces are coming at a time when Mr. Musk appears to not only be distracted but also possibly selling Tesla shares to shore up his purchase of Twitter.

Tesla stock was up about 1 percent on Thursday morning after falling for three straight days.

“The Twitter nightmare continues as Musk uses Tesla as his own A.T.M. machine to keep funding the red ink at Twitter,” Dan Ives, a stock analyst at Wedbush, wrote in a note to clients on Thursday. Some investors are also worried that Mr. Musk’s divisive and incendiary statements on Twitter could be damaging Tesla’s brand and putting off customers, especially people who are buying electric cars to reduce the emissions responsible for climate change.

Some corporate boards will intervene if a chief executive appears to be distracted or overly focused on other ventures, but Tesla’s directors, some of them longtime friends of Mr. Musk, have been widely criticized by corporate governance experts for doing little to admonish or restrain him.

At the same time, Mr. Musk has been busy suspending accounts at Twitter. Most notable among them was @ElonJet, the brainchild of Jack Sweeney, a 20-year-old college student who drew on public data to track Musk’s private jet.

The move signifies a shift in Mr. Musk’s approach to Mr. Sweeney, after the billionaire — a self-proclaimed free-speech absolutist — initially pledged not to suspend the @ElonJets account. Twitter justified suspending the accounts based on a change in its rules that appears to have been put in place in the last 24 hours.

A new poll suggests some chief executives remain wary of what Mr. Musk is doing at Twitter. At the invitation-only Yale C.E.O. Summit held this week, attendees were asked to weigh in on top business topics. Here’s where those leaders came down on some of them:

56 percent of respondents said companies should stop advertising on Twitter (though a majority later said their own companies had not).

69 percent said they believed Twitter’s best days were behind it, while 79 percent said Mr. Musk had become a detriment to the value of his companies.

Its owner Jack Sweeney, 20, used publicly available flight-tracking information to tweet every time Mr Musk's jet took off and landed

New York
CNN
—
Elon Musk’s Twitter on Thursday banned the accounts of multiple journalists covering the technology industry without explanation.

Accounts belonging to CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, The New York Times’ Ryan Mac, and The Washington Post’s Drew Harwell and several other tech journalists were all abruptly suspended.

“Elon says he is a free speech champion and he is banning journalists for exercising free speech. I think that calls into question his commitment,” Harwell told CNN.

The account of progressive independent journalist Aaron Rupar was also banned. Rupar told CNN he has received no communication from Twitter about the ban. “Nothing,” he said in a phone call.

CNN has reached out to Musk and Twitter for comment.

Calvinball

A lot of serious things are happening in the world: economic uncertainty, war, a pandemic. What’s happening on Twitter isn’t even close to those issues in importance or impact. But the continued reign of Elon Musk as Twitter’s chief jerk could, in fact, affect your life, in ways you might not realize. But first, let’s review the events of the past 24 hours or so. If you haven’t been on Twitter, you’ve been missing something like the tech version of Desperate Housewives, but it’s important to understand the claims Musk is making and why major news outlets are pushing back on them.

This entire drama is probably rooted somewhere in Musk’s privileged youth or his bloated psyche, but the immediate spur to this most recent mini-drama was that Musk does not like people knowing the location of his private jet. Jack Sweeney is a college student who used public data to track the location of Musk’s jet and many others, including some owned by Russian oligarchs. He then posted this information on Twitter through a variety of different accounts—all now suspended—including one dedicated to Musk, @ElonJet. Musk disliked this so much that almost a year ago, he offered Sweeney $5,000 to stop doing it.

Sweeney declined. Musk took ownership of Twitter in late October and, in a flurry of Calvinball rule changes, declared this week that revealing the whereabouts of his jet was the same as doxxing (that is, publishing personal data about private citizens), decreed this a violation of Twitter’s terms of service, and banned the account.

Musk claims that a stalker used the location of his jet to attack a car that his son was in. He has not presented any evidence that this event happened or, it seems, filed any police reports. And in a karmic plot twist, the founder of the investigative journalism site Bellingcat tweeted that his team ascertained that the event did not take place near an airport. But Musk used this story to go after yet more accounts. None were sharing the real-time location of his jet, but some were reporting on the ban of @ElonJet and the Musk Twitter tantrum that went with it.

A stalker used the information to track Elon's plane and attack his automobile with his kid inside.

A stalker used the information to track Elon's plane and attack his automobile with his kid inside.

How about discussing the psychopath that was attempting to attack Musk and his family?