DiscussMormonism.com

For one brief and shining moment, we lived in a blue checkmark world....








...it was fun while it lasted.

People think they're owning Musk with these fake accounts, meanwhile he's getting paid $8 bucks a pop before banning them.

I watched nearly an hour of Ben Shapiro on Lex the other day. 95% of what I know about him comes incidentally from Ajax's Breitbart posts. The guy has the voice of an ice pick, but he is bright and quick on his feet. At the end of the day, he's an apologist for his side, and so what he has to say is pointless. However, he does a better job of feigning objectivity than most right-wingers and so I can see why he's a real asset for the right. A couple of times it took of few seconds to figure out his angle as he was talking, but it always became clear.

Anyway--

Twitter came up. Ben was optimistic about Elon fixing Twitter for the better. Now, I'm a huge skeptic of Elon's Twitter. As a manager, it's a question of if he's spread too thin or not, and if his heart is really in it -- I have no doubt he can make Twitter profitable if he has the drive to see it through. My skepticism regards his stated objectives that the future needs free speech and his apparent belief that Twitter will crowd-source truth for the world. Okay, maybe he doesn't actually believe that and just uses it as a pretense for his own secret agenda.

Assume the goal is to make Twitter the free market of speech that optimizes truth content. A great argument against all that is exactly what MeDotOrg has posted here. Lex's example was the false tweet about Pelosi's husband that Musk ended up deleting. Ben's counter was that he deleted it, and so that was the corrective mechanism in action.

I about spit out my drink. I used to go through the same thing on a daily basis with my right-wing friend. He'd send an email filled with B.S. I'd do the fact-check and show it's BS. On most points he had to admit his information was bad. What never happened, however, is the constant corrections improving the quality of what he'd send me. Maybe during that entire time one or two things were partly true, most was false or purely fabricated and quite honestly, didn't even rise to the level where you'd bother fact-checking.

I'd say there's basically 3 alternatives here.

1) information quality gets better
2) information quality never improves
3) information quality gets worse

I'm at a 2.3 for Twitter, with the "corrective mechanisms" being reputation damage, lawsuits, and that sort of thing. In the face of those kinds of headwinds, Twitter will try to be as intellectually bankrupt as possible.

When a tweet is voluntarily corrected and taken down for being over-the-top, the person who sent it cared zero if it was true or not. Maybe even better if it's not true. Looking at the case for > 2, what a taken-down tweet means is a barrier to get past. Maybe today you can't say that, but keep the nonsense on rapid fire, and maybe expectations lowered and in 6 months it will fly?

I guess if you yell FIRE! in a crowded theater, the 'corrective mechanism' is the Fire Department discovering that there is no fire.

MeDotOrg wrote: ↑

Fri Nov 18, 2022 8:46 pm

I guess if you yell FIRE! in a crowded theater, the 'corrective mechanism' is the Fire Department discovering that there is no fire.

That's probably the best way anyone could put.

Musk invited Trump back on Twitter.

Moksha wrote: ↑

Mon Nov 21, 2022 11:10 pm

Musk invited Trump back on Twitter.

And apparently, Trump is giving Twitter the silent treatment. What he doesn't realize is that's a blessing for most of the country.

If he wants to spend 44B to have Trump back so be it, it's his platform now.

I don't know how these deals work, but it's clear Elon tried to back out and the (board of directors?) held him to it. Presuming those running things at Twitter prior were liberal, and given Elon was vocally Trump friendly and tried desperately to get out of the deal, and if it's our collective civic duty to prevent social media from causing insurrections, then the liberals who were so all-in on selling (at the top for money) to Elon that not only did they accept his offer, the furiously prevented him from getting out of it are also guilty.

I'm not upset that Trump had his account restored, but then, I don't give a crap about Twitter. I've never registered an account and never will.

But the larger issue here is one of personal responsibility. If people read Trump's tweets and believe him, that's on them, not him. They're the dumbasses giving him oxygen. I kind of like knowing who likes or defends Trump, because it's a clear sign they shouldn't be taken seriously.

The NBA exists, and I have no interest in it. Doesn't mean I think it should be cancelled. Trump is an American stupidity thermometer, taking the temperature of American idiocy. The more people are listening to him, the hotter the ignorance gets. It's worth noticing.

Some Schmo wrote: ↑

Mon Nov 21, 2022 11:16 pm

Moksha wrote: ↑

Mon Nov 21, 2022 11:10 pm

Musk invited Trump back on Twitter.

And apparently, Trump is giving Twitter the silent treatment. What he doesn't realize is that's a blessing for most of the country.

He’ll be back on Twitter. Give him a little time. He craves the attention.