[incomingpain]

>We used to fund distributed disruptive technologies to subvert Soviet censorship. Chinese censorship was seen as proof of our superior freedom 20 years ago. Now it is viewed with envy by those in power. What moral high ground do we hold now?

The bigger point to discuss. If twitter is under control of the US government. I have no idea if it is or not, it just seems to be the case.

You dont get to make the comment 'twitter is private, free speech only applies to government' because twitter == government.

The other consideration I had. What if the us government doesnt explicitly own twitter. They simply dont realize the us government has hacked access to moderate and censor things in a clandestine way? Now it's an even more complicated subject but wouldn't justify the stock market situation that brings me to the point.

[bryanrasmussen]

>You dont get to make the comment 'twitter is private, free speech only applies to government' because twitter == government.

it's true, twitter == government but not twitter === government. Meaning that the conversion happens in the underlying JIT engine where government hacks twitter to do what it wants.

So the idea is that you could make a first amendment complaint against the government for hacking twitter if it infringed your free speech with that hack, but you could not say twitter cannot just turn off my account because while twitter == government it does not === government.

[andrewclunn]

> it's true, twitter == government but not twitter === government.

Let's not start coding political documents in JavaScript now. (Insert additional joke about the interpreter engine running on 9 robed meat processors).

[bryanrasmussen]

Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!

[incomingpain]

I get the complication of the position. Occams razor puts me back to the plain option that twitter is simply controlled by us gov.

[nemothekid]

I don’t understand how “Twitter is controlled by the government” is the simplest explanation. Do you actually use Twitter?

I feel like Twitter had an outsized representation along social media giants. It’s one of the smallest by MAU; and has a history of management problems. Isn’t occans razor here that is just a poorly run company?

[incomingpain]

>I don’t understand how “Twitter is controlled by the government” is the simplest explanation. Do you actually use Twitter?

I don't use twitter. Because of Elon I wanted to test and do have an account right now. I connected to my canadian political folks and chess people. I liked lots of things, but I never commented or retweeted. I then commented on a chess person with a positive tweet and I was quietly censored. Absolutely no way should have my account been treated this way.

>I feel like Twitter had an outsized representation along social media giants. It’s one of the smallest by MAU; and has a history of management problems. Isn’t occans razor here that is just a poorly run company?

If you're listed on the S&P500, you can't say that's poorly run. Poorly run would never have gotten there.

[nemothekid]

>I then commented on a chess person with a positive tweet and I was quietly censored.

This is no different than HN's shadowbans but I don't see people complain about free speech on HN to the same frequency on Twitter. Further still, the fact that you are only just now creating an account further reinforces to me that most people don't actually use Twitter and their entire perception of the platform comes from news headlines. Twitter has the least amount of moderation of all the social media giants. Try posting porn on Facebook and seeing how long that lasts.

When you say your tweet was censored, you mean it's no longer on your timeline? If your tweet was deleted Twitter would have sent you an email about it. If you are complaining that that you can't see it in the user's replies, well any large twitter user is going to have many replies, and a message from a new account will likely not make the top of the fold.

>If you're listed on the S&P500, you can't say that's poorly run. Poorly run would never have gotten there.

Enron??? The many dot coms?? Lehman Brothers?? There hasn't been a major stock market correction in nearly 15 years; there are plenty of companies out there that are swimming naked. Twitter management is no stranger to public executive issues with it's board + CEO.

[incomingpain]

So I just typed this up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31110938

I retract my comment that US gov owns Twitter. It's not that, it's way way worse. I had an incorrect assumption.

[notacoward]

Occam's Razor has nothing to do with this, and its improper invocation is fallacious. Literally it means "do not multiply entities beyond necessity"; in practice it's also called the principle of parsimony, meaning that one should not assume a more complicated explanation when a simpler one will do. Positing a connection between Twitter and the US government, without supporting evidence but just because it "makes sense" - is anything but parsimonious. That remains true even if such a connection does eventually turn out to exist. "Do not attribute to malice that which is explained by incompetence" is likely to be the more applicable principle here.

[incomingpain]

>ccam's Razor has nothing to do with this, and its improper invocation is fallacious.

My mistake. Maybe I can't think of the one I'm trying to think of. I don't need a name or rule really.

Philosophically speaking, if you have a few competing ideas and no way to come to a conclusion. The simplest explanation is the best one to go with.

> Positing a connection between Twitter and the US government, without supporting evidence but just because it "makes sense" - is anything but parsimonious. That remains true even if such a connection does eventually turn out to exist. "Do not attribute to malice that which is explained by incompetence" is likely to be the more applicable principle here.

I did provide evidence in my original post. Perhaps you dont accept my evidences for some reason?

I believe I should consider a rebuttal to my evidences. Are the other S&P500 companies so tremendously undefended from takeover?

WBD recently joined S&P and they are pretty undefended, not as bad as twitter.

CPT is worse than WBD.

MOH is worse than CPT.

NDSN is about WBD.

CEG is worse than all of them.

Woah. I kind of disproved myself? I haven't considered this. Tesla is like the only defended stock I can find? I haven't checked them all.

https://www.multpl.com/s-p-500-pe-ratio

Haven't checked on this in awhile. It's high but is trending down post covid recession.

The S&P500 is full of zombies? Is this seriously happening? wow. I haven't seen anyone talking about this. What the hell happened?

Just checked TSX60 for Canada. AEM, AQN, ATD, BCE, BMO, BNS, ABX, and they are all good. BHC is the first one that looks maybe questionable but nowhere near problematic.

Just checked a random selection of FTSE 100. BP, BATS, BLND. All healthy.

I feel like disproving myself wasn't a good thing though. I need to go spend some time on questrade.

[nemothekid]

>The S&P500 is full of zombies? Is this seriously happening? wow. I haven't seen anyone talking about this. What the hell happened?

People have been talking about it[1]; it's just that Elon hasn't so it doesn't end up in the media hype cycle. The S&P 500 is really just the 5 big megacap stocks.

That's what makes this Twitter so weird, as a company it's relatively unremarkable; it's not larger than Snapchat both in terms of marketcap and MAU, but in the media you would think it's the primary competitor to Meta.

Twitter gets a lot of flack about censorship and free speech; but it's by far the most libertarian platform - it still has a chronological timeline! If you had followed Donald Trump on Twitter, you would see all his tweets whenever he tweeted them. If you followed him on Facebook, Facebook would hide most of his posts on your feed! And yet Twitter is the boogeyman, the enemy of free speech.

Twitter the company, and Twitter the boogeyman are two seperate entities. If you read about Twitter from NYT headlines, maybe it makes sense they are government controlled. If you actually spend time on the platform you will find a platform that largely hasn't changed in the past 10 years, but still trying to wrangle it's political influence since the Arab spring days.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/10/investing/sp-500-tech-stocks/...

[incomingpain]

>People have been talking about it[1]; it's just that Elon hasn't so it doesn't end up in the media hype cycle. The S&P 500 is really just the 5 big megacap stocks.

This isn't it. I follow financial news, primarily financial post and economist, I havent seen anyone talk about this at all. It's crazy that I even thought to check on this. Obviously twitter being undefended was quite unusual, why would they all be this way?

In fact when I look at Microsoft and Apple... holy shit I haven't seen the problem that bad.

Meta isn't bad, but then again 500 billion market cap and pe ratio of 13? wtf? different problem altogether. People are clearly predicting huge crash on meta. No idea if that's coming.

Amazon isn't bad at all. Bezos is defending just as Musk is defending Tesla. I probably should go through all the S&p. I wonder if other stock markets are seeing this. UK and Canada obviously arent.

>Twitter the company, and Twitter the boogeyman are two seperate entities. If you read about Twitter from NYT headlines, maybe it makes sense they are government controlled. If you actually spend time on the platform you will find a platform that largely hasn't changed in the past 10 years, but still trying to wrangle it's political influence since the Arab spring days.

No that's not the problem. I dont think that the us gov is controlling anymore. When I checked tsx60 and ftse1000 there's no examples for at least the ones I checked. I admittedly didnt check them all.

I have never seen this before, it's not natural. I don't know what the terminology would be. Zombie is the wrong word. Of all my positions, Tyson is the only 1 that is bad like this; though I'm not exposed to the USA that much.

Arab spring days? Yes.

I expect it may even start the same way. Will it be a Nicholas McCrary?

Will it be food scarcity? Biden publicly said this will be the case.

Elon is way ahead of me in understanding the situation.

[JKCalhoun]

Controlled how?

I ask because I'm pretty sure real (non-US government) people post to Twitter and get real retweets. How is the US government controlling it?

I imagine this would have blown wide open a long time ago if true. (Also Occam's Razor?)

[dgb23]

Social control and power is never complete and absolute. Even very direct coercion can often be ignored, worked around or endured except for very extreme cases.