[smbullet]

This argument seems tautological.

- If he's charging for the service now then he'll clearly do anything to maximize profits.

- If the service remains free then he clearly needs to sell granular user data to stay above water.

Perhaps I'm missing the point you're trying to make but I don't think you can conclude anything from this.

[woodruffw]

You’re confusing the conditionality of these: they’re not in conflict. They’re both means to the same unavoidable end: Twitter needs to make money, probably even be profitable, in order to not pose a rise to Musk’s other ventures.

He can make people pay, or not, or jack up tracking, or not. It doesn’t matter to me! The point is solely that he needs to do something.

[chrisco255]

> Twitter needs to make money, probably even be profitable, in order to not pose a rise to Musk’s other ventures.

Twitter needs to earn a profit, sure. That has always been true though. One way to make the company profitable is to increase revenue, which the $8/month blue check fee aims to do. The other way to make the company profitable is to cut overhead, which the mass layoffs aim to do.

I still don't get the concern trolling about data mining Twitter data: it's been done since the platform began.

The only unethical thing about the original article is selling location and movement data that is individually trackable, which is what this article is talking about from years ago when they worked at Twitter, which upper management was in favor of until Dorsey allegedly stepped in to halt.

Nevermind that there are other social media apps likely doing this already and selling better, more fine-grained data than Twitter can. Twitter is not as personal or intimate as other social media apps are with regards to insight into personal, private data. Everything shared on Twitter is understood to be public. They don't have access to private TikTok videos, 'destructible' Snapchat messages, text message data between couples, personal health search engine queries, etc.

Companies such as Facebook didn't need to sell super private mineable data to data mining firms to manipulate public opinion on election day, they were maximally profitable when they did, but they did it anyway. Twitter didn't need to shadow or outright ban doctors and politicians, or inject state-sponsored context alignment messaging (propaganda) into the newsfeed that disagreed with their internal company political alignment, but they did it anyways.

Nothing at this point, could be worse than the status quo for social media companies.

[matwood]

> maximize profits

Elon/Twitter isn't even in the ballpark of maximizing profits yet. They are just trying to make the 1-1.5B debt payment that's going to come due. That's going to require huge cuts we just saw, plus advertisers to stay on board, plus Twitter blue, plus whatever else he can cook up. And, it still might not be enough.