On 4/26/2022 12:35 PM, bfh wrote:
George.Anthony wrote:
These liberal toddlers don’t know what to do when they can’t >> dictate and
control the narrative.
“…Musk would undo censorship mechanisms they had worked to
implement over
the years…â€
https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/twitter-employees-distraught-over-musk-acquisition-too-in-shock-to-speak-report
If there's a company building safe spaces, we probably should invest in it.
lol Congratulations. You've found someone more excited about
Twitter than yourself. Some portion of their 7,000+ employees. I was
wondering how many people this would be and found this.
"After years of leadership squabbles, demands for change from activist investors and the boundary-testing tweets of Mr. Trump, Twitter’s more
than 7,000 employees are accustomed to turmoil. But some of them say the takeover by the mercurial billionaire has hit them in ways other company
crises have not.
Employees said they worried that Mr. Musk would undo the years of work
they had put into cleaning up the toxic corners of the platform, upend
their stock compensation in the process of taking the company private
and disrupt Twitter’s culture with his unpredictable management style
and abrupt proclamations.
But Mr. Musk also has fans among Twitter’s rank-and-file, and some
employees have welcomed his bid. In an internal Slack message seen by
The New York Times that asked if employees were excited about Mr. Musk,
about 10 people responded with a “Yes” emoji. A Twitter spokesman
declined to comment."
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/25/technology/twitter-employees-elon-musk.html#:~:text=After%20years%20of%20leadership%20squabbles,employees%20are%20accustomed%20to%20turmoil.
People being people I tend to suspect that for most folks, most of
the time, most of their serious unease centers around compensation and
"stock compensation" now that there isn't going to be any stock. Many of
the employees are some of the people Mr.Musk is buying out. Do you think
it might feel a bit different if you no longer own part of the company
you're working for? For many of the modern technology companies it's a
big deal.
Those "toxic corners" will remain a problem for the new owner. When
you get right down to where the rubber meets the road those free speech "absolutists" aren't as absolute as you might think. You're merely one
local glaring example of this.
"Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, is spending $44 billion to acquire Twitter with the stated aim of turning it into a haven for “free
speech.” There’s just one problem: The social platform has been down
this road before, and it didn’t end well.
A decade ago, a Twitter executive dubbed the company “the free speech
wing of the free speech party” to underscore its commitment to
untrammeled freedom of expression. Subsequent events put that moniker to
the test, as repressive regimes cracked down on Twitter users,
particularly in the wake of the short-lived “Arab Spring”
demonstrations. In the U.S., a visceral 2014 article by journalist
Amanda Hess exposed the incessant, vile harassment many women faced just
for posting on Twitter or other online forums.
"Over the subsequent years, Twitter learned a few things about the
consequences of running a largely unmoderated social platform — one of
the most important being that companies generally don’t want their ads running against violent threats, hate speech that bleeds into
incitement, and misinformation that aims to tip elections or undermine
public health.
With Musk, his posturing of free speech — just leave everything up —
that would be bad in and of itself,” said Paul Barrett, the deputy
director of the Center for Business and Human Rights at New York
University. “If you stop moderating with automated systems and human
reviews, a site like Twitter, in the space of a short period of time,
you would have a cesspool.”
Google, Barrett pointed out, quickly learned this lesson the hard way
when major companies like Toyota and Anheuser-Busch yanked their ads
after they ran ahead of YouTube videos produced by extremists in 2015.
Once it was clear just how unhealthy the conversation had gotten,
Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey spent years trying to
improve what he called the “health” of the conversation on the platform.
The company was an early adopter of the “report abuse” button after U.K. member of parliament Stella Creasy received a barrage of rape and death
threats on the platform. The online abuse was the result of a seemingly positive tweet in support of feminist campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez,
who successfully advocated for novelist Jane Austen to appear on a
British banknote. Creasy’s online harasser was sent to prison for 18 weeks.
Twitter has continued to craft rules and invested in staff and
technology that detect violent threats, harassment and misinformation
that violates its policies. After evidence emerged that Russia used
their platforms to try to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential
election, social media companies also stepped up their efforts against political misinformation.
The big question now is how far Musk, who describes himself as a
“free-speech absolutist,” wants to ratchet back these systems — and whether users and advertisers will stick around if he does.
[snip]
https://apnews.com/article/technology-business-elon-musk-facebook-fc2598d6409997d4d5bccd09592eca98
"A decade ago, Twitter executives, including the chief executive, Dick
Costolo, declared that the social media site was the “free-speech wing
of the free-speech party.” The stance meant Twitter would defend
people’s ability to post whatever they wished and be heard by the world.
Since then, Twitter has been dragged into morasses over disinformation peddlers, governments’ abuse of social media to incite ethnic violence
and threats by elected officials to imprison employees over tweets they didn’t like. Like Facebook, YouTube and other internet companies,
Twitter was forced to morph from hard-liner on free expression to speech
nanny.
Today, Twitter has pages upon pages of rules prohibiting content such as material that promotes child sexual exploitation, coordinated government propaganda, offers of counterfeit goods and tweets “wishing for someone
to fall victim to a serious accident.”
The past 10 years have seen repeated confrontations between the
high-minded principles of Silicon Valley’s founding generation of social media companies and the messy reality of a world in which “free speech” means different things to different people. And now Elon Musk, who on
Monday struck a deal to buy Twitter for roughly $44 billion, wades
directly into that fraught history.
Successive generations of Twitter’s leaders since its founding in 2006
have learned what Mark Zuckerberg and most other internet executives
have also discovered: Declaring that “the tweets must flow,” as the
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone wrote in 2011, or “I believe in giving
people a voice,” as Mr. Zuckerberg said in a 2019 speech, is easy to say
but hard to live up to.
Soon, Mr. Musk will be the one confronting the gap between an idealized
view of free speech and the zillion tough decisions that must be made to
let everyone have a say.
His agreement to buy Twitter puts the combative billionaire, who is also
the chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX, at the white-hot center of the
global free-speech debate. Mr. Musk has not been specific about his
plans once he becomes Twitter’s owner, but he has bristled when the
company has removed posts and barred users, and has said Twitter should
be a haven for unfettered expression within the bounds of the law.
“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is
the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity
are debated,” Mr. Musk said in a statement announcing the deal.
Mr. Musk is a relative dilettante on the topic and hasn’t yet tackled
the difficult trade-offs in which giving one person a voice may silence
the expression of others, and in which an almost-anything-goes space for expression might be overrun with spam, nudity, propaganda from
autocrats, the bullying of children and violent incitements."
[snip]
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/26/technology/twitter-elon-musk-free-speech.html
I need more popcorn. I'm expecting a fun show.
TB
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