Elon Musk offers to buy Twitter for $54.20 per share.

What are you saying Mussolini agrees with?

Or maybe you can directly answer the question:

Do you believe that a company like Twitter should be able to run its platform essentially how it wants (as long as it obeys its own terms of service and violates no laws)?

Who are you saying is exhibiting hypocrisy? UA for saying that if you don't like it people are free to start their own Twitter even though he had been echoing complaints about the leftist bias of ol Twitter management?

MikeH for pointing out that under that philosophy what was done by Old Twitter management should be OK?

To quote a famous investor, you provide weapons of mass destruction.

UA's point is just meant to shut down the discussion. You can complain how Twitter is run, and who it is run by while not leaving it. I am sympathetic to the idea that no platform like twitter offers the user base of twitter. Even in smaller scale, you can leave a place like trekBBS because you don't like it's rules, but you are not going to drag everyone with you for many reasons.

It is not really safe to say you could create a better product and replace twitter. That is a statement made by a person so ignorant of business and how things work that that only shows UA is low intelligence and experience. You do not just build it and they will come. That is because there is a sort of inertia to the sheeple moving platforms. People, in general, will put up with OMG levels of bullshit rather than altering their habits. Really, with twitter the people facing most of the hardships are someone else and not the general user.

Look at the political parties and how their people are horrible, and there is no meaningful third party competition.

People will leave twitter only when there is something much more attractive, and even then there will still be people on the service for a long time to come.

There's also the case that many people on Twitter do actively use it as a useful community. I've made a bunch of connections there through extended networks that have led to interesting professional opportunities.

The overwhelming number of people probably do not use twitter in any way that would be effected by this political bullshit. The only thing most twitter users probably see is any technical instability of the platform. Considering it is only indirectly monetized because it is more of an advertising network for many people to increase traffic to their monetized channels, or this is how the audience connects with their performer off of monetized performances this is not effecting a lot of people unless they are political commentators.

For all the damage elon is doing to certain political people, he really isn't effecting the mass of people using the platform to a level it becomes worthless. Really he has to make sure it is up and running because downtime forces people off the platform to alternatives.

The point is more that people who say users should just immediately leave the platform and try alternatives aren't recognizing the fact that Twitter as it is/was fills a unique niche.

I am in complete agreement with you. I have a little aggravation with not doing anything about the toxicity, and I hope it gets destroyed, but it does serve a use for many, and Elon is keeping it running. I do not think he will kill it. It still does what it did for 99 percent of users before elon bought it. Movement off the platofrm does mean loss, so it is going to be harder to kill than some of us hoped, and in honesty that is good for those who get value out of it. I do not have to like it for others to get value from it.

It is an interesting view on why regulation and consumer protection is needed because people really need to rely on these platforms for a number of reasons once the platform becomes the dominant one. We see that despite tryi9ng the right cannot make a new twitter, and neither can the left. That is because twitter got the mass of people and for a social app that is the value. So now elon can abuse his power in many ways simply because the inertia to shift platforms for the purpose of tweeting is a high value. The same thing can be said about youtube where they are abusing their content creators while there is not a replacement for the platform that can remove the need to deal with them simply because they have a hold of a mass of the population.

https://twitter.com/williamlegate/status/1608579223673008128?s=46&t=ARa91Au-iVAC22NlmqvjYQ

Bouzy's working on one, I've a hunch he'll pull it off - but you still need the mass migration of creators to make any such rival work.

also...

"So now, you're okay with what they did according to the "Twitter Papers"?"

Fuck yes.

Put in another context: it's now fully disclosed that Facebook favored right wingers as a reaction to propagandists "working the refs"

I think that was a dumb and gullible choice, because the right's whole identity is that they are never not the victim.
I think that ethically they were wrong to hide that choice but I understand why they would find that necessary.

BUT
Did they have the RIGHT to imbalance their policies to favor the right?

Fuck yes they did.

A reporter friend of mine notes that a site like Twitter, or whatever supplants it, is invaluable to local journalism around the world and for those people if it just crashed one day it would be a massive and critical loss

and it doesn't have to be "professional"

What brought me to Twitter?
Baseball.

I wrote a Toronto Blue Jays fan blog, one of a dozen or so fairly prominent ones at the time (~2010) and we all interacted with each other and platformed each other via Twitter, plus I could follow all the beat writers.

Secondarily I discovered a lot of trans-specific activists and activist groups and I now follow, I guess, 20 or so such.

I followed a handful of celebrities (Nathan Fillion, Jewell Staite, Adam Baldwin for a time) comic writers, authors and so forth

2 or 3 politicians - maybe Gary Johnson was the first one? Now there are probably around a dozen of those

By now I've accumulated a list that includes a healthy group of great historians, several good journalists and journalism critics, and more.

The point for me is that I use Twitter as an interactive (yesterday I recommended a show to a friend that I'd been watching and the actual creator of the show liked my tweet, actor Kirk Acevedo was a participating member in our Warren Democrats private group in 2019-20... can get that kind of direct interaction between rando and creator most places and certainly not before social media was a thing) RSS feed, and it has value for me as long as the content creators I want to hear from are still mostly there.

That doesn't mean I'm unaware of the shit slinging, or of the folks with a thinner and more vulnerable skin than who really do suffer from the abuse of the reactionary keyboard warriors, it's ugly and gross and damages the brand - it's just that I'm rando enough that they see no value in going after me IRL about anything and I'm impervious to attempts to hurt me via the keyboard.
(my philosophy is that only those I respect and care about have the ability to hurt me - the rest of them are just noise)

Anyway, yes it has value for me and yes I'll stay until it explodes or the preponderance of creators I'm interested end settle on a collective new home.

I'll have to disagree about not being able to win hearts and minds with the messages of "freedom for me" and "fuck you, I've got mine." There's an awful lot of cognitive dissonance that's in there. and prettying up the "fuck you, I've got mine" as fiscal responsibility and dog-whistling parts of it. But roughly half the electorate is down with those messages.

The amazing part is how many people are drawn in by "fuck you, I've got mine" when they barely have anything.

Twitter janitors strike-->Elon fires them--> so-->

"the smell of leftover takeout food and body odor has lingered on the floors...bathrooms have grown dirty...and some workers have resorted to bringing their own rolls of toilet paper from home."

https://twitter.com/kenbensinger/status/1608612982921252866

Genius. Dude spent $44B to get grown ass men (he’s fired most of the women) to recreate a freshmen boys dorm.

In the boy's defense he is from nowhere VA. Subway chef money is probably pretty good when you are one of the hill people.

really is remarkable (to me) that the single wisest observation anyone has made (on the record) about American politics in at least a century came from LBJ of all people.

My hate aside I do agree it is a tool that is valuable for many people despite the human trash heap that uses it. However, any organization that is worthwhile should have multiple tools that can take the place of twitter. Twitter should not be the primary communication point of your organization in the 2020's. It is also not irreplaceable.

The idea that it will go down quickly is only one that can come with complete technical failure. Without "turning it off" elon cannot completely crash it in a year. By turning it off I mean something that stops the service from working.

I am pretty sure my livejournal is still somewhere out there. There might even be usenet servers out there. AOL/netscape messenger might still be a thing as far as I know. Even if twitter itself crashed there might be a free tech version of it.

I am happy to watch elon run it into the ground.

No, they turned that off some years ago.

Yeah, almost as if working folk don't appeciate having the product of their labor "redistributed" by those who did nothing to earn it.

UA really hates Firemen and road pavers.

Nope. They do plenty to earn it. Try again.

Oh, that's right.
Single mothers.
Especially black ones.

Fun story, the woman who was called the first "Welfare Queen" wasn't a welfare lay about, she was a fucking black widow who bumped off a couple husbands.
That all black single moms on welfare got called "welfare queens" by the Republican party, especially Reagan, is a testament to their seething, roiling, boiling racism.
And Libertarians are just Republicans who want to smoke dope.

I assume the idea behind his comments is similar to what I was saying from my seat as a "rando"- that the key to replacing it is the coalescence of the creator class in the same place. It's true that it would be fairly difficult to use Instagram, or Facebook, or Mastodon even, to function in the same way as Twitter has (in the areas he is speaking of) but the major obstacle is that basically everyone you'd want to follow for that kind of content is active on Twitter - a central locus of information across a wide variety of fields. Amassing that kind of talent level, together, in ONE new site (even if they also use Post or Mastodon or whatever - in the same way that many of them also use Instagram or LinkedIn or whatever now) - it's crucial to have that ONE place where (virtually) EVERYONE can be found...and until that happens somewhere else, Twitter will survive (barring technical failure) until it's no longer true for it, either.

But as I've said, Bouzy will launch the Beta of Spoutible next month and I'm betting that he's nailed it (in terms of the interface and all that) and then what remains is the word of mouth provoking sufficient migration. I'm not smart enough to predict human behavior on that scale.