[julianeon]

I'm surprised I haven't seen the 'steelman' argument for Musk and free speech on Twitter, made as faithfully as I can to emulate Musk's perspective. I'm going to make it (disclosure: I don't personally believe it).

When Trump was booted from social media, it was censorship. We tend to overlook this, because Twitter & FB agreed on it; but another perspective is possible, that Trump should be able to speak freely as the leader of the country supported by half its population (no less than 40%, anyway). Trump should be able to make statements that aren't censored because, when he makes them as President, they are inherently newsworthy & worthy of circulation.

But to take this even further, this isn't simply about one guy's Twitter takes; it's much larger than that. Because under Trump we were starting to see the emergence of something that is probably inevitable: the full hybridization of popular culture, technology, and media, in the form of a perpetually on engine of user engagement. This is probably the model of the future, and Twitter is uniquely positioned to not just bring it to the people (as it was under Trump), but to monetize it (which they didn't do, really).

What are the upsides of this? A more engaged voter population. A move of politics back towards the center of cultural life, where it should be. A closer integration of politics, culture and ecommerce. And, if done in a principled way, an end to the perception that people can be suppressed for saying the wrong thing (see: Trump).

That's the value that Musk could unlock. That's what could conceivably make Twitter as important as FB, and even more central to American life. That, combined with some aggressive product delivery, and a shakeup away from the product doldrums, could be transformative for Twitter. If Musk gets his way, that's the change he could make.

[zuminator]

> another perspective is possible, that Trump should be able to speak freely as the leader of the country supported by half its population

Arguably Trump would've been banned under Twitter rules a whole lot quicker if he hadn't been the leader of the country supported by half its population.

> people can be suppressed for saying the wrong thing (see: Trump).

People are lying to themselves if they think they are in favor of unfettered speech. Otherwise your favorite online forum would be chock-filled with Viagra links, crypto, nft and forex spam, multipage crank proofs of the coming singularity, race-baiting rants of the worst sort, ASCII art, Base64 encodes of Blu-Rays, etc. We all want limits on speech, we just differ in where those lines should be drawn.

> What are the upsides of this? A more engaged voter population. A move of politics back towards the center of cultural life, where it should be. A closer integration of politics, culture and ecommerce.

People become strongly politically engaged because there is something they strongly dislike about current public policy. Politics being the center of cultural life is a sign of bad things going on. So I don't see fighting angrier and more hypercharged online wars as an upside. If anything it just primes people for fighting angrier and more hypercharged offline wars, which is where we seem to be headed.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Politics being the center of cultural life is a sign of bad things going on

I was going to disagree. But then the historical examples that come to mind at the tail end of democracies and republics is this sort of populist (versus civic) engagement.

[xapata]

Indeed. I wish we had more data to analyze good ways to survive this crisis. Sadly, the predominant result seems to be reversion to dictatorship.

[sjg007]

A dictatorship only resolves things be basically by “cleansing” the heretical thoughts of the others. Not a very good solution nor is it respectful of free speech.

[JumpCrisscross]

> nor is it respectful of free speech

Argument is there are certain modes of free speech that are unstable. They create social harmonics that empower populists who tear down the liberal order and destroy the rights that brought them to power (and could now threaten to topple them).

Classical case for this, with respect to democracy (not free speech), is Athens.

[sjg007]

The classics and antiquities were well studied in England and liberal arts but are lost amongst Americans and HN sophists.

[chubot]

Trump should be able to make statements that aren't censored because, when he makes them as President, they are inherently newsworthy & worthy of circulation.

FWIW this isn't really adding something to the conversation, not that I've been paying very close attention.

I believe Facebook and Twitter already had a "heads of state" clause in their policy that recognizes this.

Yup: https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/3/22474738/facebook-ending-p...

In other words, heads of state were already allowed to say things that normal users aren't, based on the reasoning you state.

According to executives that made a one-off decision, Trump crossed those more relaxed lines.

Of course a lot of it had to do with the transfer of power in the US -- he would soon no longer be a sitting president.

As Yishan says, these decisions aren't really based on "principles". They are based on "shitstorms that are brewing and that we want to avoid", of which January 6 was a perfect example.

[someguydave]

Why doesn’t the telephone company need to deplatform people to “avoid shitstorms”?

[chubot]

Not an expert, but how would you incite a riot with the telephone? It just doesn't work.

TV is a closer analogy, but back in the days of broadcast TV, you had to get airtime with one of a dozen networks. (And Trump did this! He had the number 1 show on TV for awhile in the early 2000's. He continued building his brand as a "rich guy who makes deals" there.)

You can't just come back the next day and broadcast another message, i.e. testing what works and iterating. It takes a whole team of people to make a broadcast. Also, the audience would watch TV at home; they didn't have a device to consume the message anywhere. It was fundamentally slower.

Even blogs are slower, although you can definitely get deplatformed for a blog. Blogs lack discoverability; they don't broadcast to followers. In the heyday of blogs most people weren't reading them on their phone.

So social media, and Twitter in particular, is a really effective communication technology for broadcasting sharp messages.

Telephones do have similar issues -- there is a reason that wiretaps exist and that traditionally the phone company was a monopoly with close ties to the government. But they're not a "platform" for broadcast.

[someguydave]

so, "social networks" are a "very special" kind of webpage that uniquely require suppressing "bad ideas"?

[dageshi]

I think the point of Yishan's post is that social networks are not the equivalent of telephone companies, they're their own thing and can't really be compared to what came before or treated as such.

[sjg007]

Nah, you can't incite a mob which is what did Trump in and Twitter should regulate the speech of foreign officials per US law. Trump has many other ways to communicate with the people including and not limited to Press conferences. Heck, Trump could email people.

Twitter has no moral requirement to broadcast anything he says. It ain't a utility and it ain't news.

[pm90]

> That, combined with some aggressive product delivery, and a shakeup away from the product doldrums

This argument seems to be that Musk is a hero and he will transform Twitter which is currently being mismanaged. That isn’t a very good argument unless you’re a Musk fanboi. Just to state one reason: actively transforming Twitter while also leading both SpaceX and Tesla just isn’t gonna work, and he hasn’t put forth anything serious so far to explain how he intends to make this change.

[mensetmanusman]

Musk clearly knows how to delegate a vision.

[madeofpalk]

You're making the exact argument Twitter made for not banning Trump during the first 3.8 years of his presidency. Like literally "Trump is newsworthy" is word-for-word the reason Twitter used for keeping him on.

Then, they thought that they were, or could be, complicit in a violent domestic attack, and made a call.

[sjg007]

Sweet sweet ad revenue.

[tigershark]

They actually were complicit in a failed coup. They are lucky that nobody had the balls to prosecute the organisers of the coup and only the rubes that actually participated are somewhat paying.

[jimbob45]

The steelman is that they still allow the Taliban on Twitter but not Trump. The literal Taliban. The one that throws gays off buildings and stones women for allowing themselves to get raped. The one that thinks that, if the Holocaust didn’t happen, then it should have. The one that celebrates 9/11 as a national holiday. There is no logical rationale for which you can claim that Trump is worse than the Taliban unless you hate Trump and want him gone.

The actual steelman is simple - if you’re going to have a platform, then you should only be able to boot people off for legal reasons. Picking and choosing winners in any other fashion is too prone to human bias. The argument that some are too stupid to recognize misinformation from the truth is exactly the argument used by totalitarian regimes in the past.