Elon Musk Overhauls Twitter
Author: Bill Chapman: email
A year ago, Musk was pretty widely perceived as a wunderkind. Democratic Socialists hated him, because they have zero understanding of how wealth is created, leading them to believe that the only way to get rich is at the expense of others, leading to a vehement hatred of all of the most productive people in society.
But in the last 6 months he's given offense to a wider audience in two new ways:
Since Musk started identifying as a "conservative" in these polarized times, half the country has leapt to discredit anything he says or does.
Because questioning woke dogma on Twitter is a good way to attract a cancellation mob of millions of idiots sending vicious emails to the HR department of your employer, resulting in total career ruin, most conservatives have been scared off Twitter and it is mostly a far-left, woke cesspool where liberal tweets greatly outnumber conservative ones.
Musk has been really, really vague about what his vision for the future of Twitter is. He's said things about "free speech", and bear in mind that the Wokerati who rule Twitter don't believe in free speech -- they believe in punishing people who disagree with them. So they are deeply threatened by his unknown desires on the platform.
Video: Musk Discusses Twitter 11/4/22
It's really clear that getting the bots off Twitter is very important. The Russian government wants the American experiment of free speech and democracy to fail, so that Russians will embrace Putin's model, where the government controls TV news and kills reporters it doesn't like, and elections are a sham.
Malicious Russian trolls will have armies of tens of thousands of bots to pose as Americans and amplify problematic voices like Nazis, assorted lunatics, conspiracy theorists, and rioters of any persuasion. At a penny per bot, this is affordable, but at $8 per bot it will be prohibitive, and potentially (I am speculating here, I haven't heard this from Musk) if the verification process investigates the payment method and, for example, requires each Twitter account to be funded by a unique credit card, that will make it even harder to assemble a bot army.
The Wokerati who rule Twitter don't want the platform changed. I see it as a fundamentally broken platform -- I have an account that I use to read other people's tweets, but never personally say anything there -- too dangerous. Musk has said he wants it to become a "Town Square" where all points of view are heard.
Musk really should have made more of an effort to communicate what his vision for the platform is, and what problems he is going to fix. I'm not aware of anything he's doing to stop the left-wing cancellations, and until that is fixed I'm not going near the platform.
Right now (November 8th) Facebook and Twitter are going nuts with outrage and malicious disinformation about what Musk is doing. He's got an interesting personality, where he knew he was going to be widely hated for what he's doing, and it doesn't bother him at all. He says one of his goals with Twitter is to eventually be hated as much by the far right as the far left hates him now.