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

If that place is open and up-front about enforcing policies for one political affiliation to the exclusion of all others, they are at least more honest than Twatter.

Both could be true. Twitter’s algorithm could (and very much appears to) amplify right-wing content while their manual processes and/or management (which are not the subject of any study) favor left-wing.

Elon Musk says Twitter deal 'temporarily on hold'

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Elon is just manipulating the market because he can. It is nothing but a giant casino to him. I am realizing he is not actually ever going to buy twitter, but he is making shitloads of money on the radical ups and downs. He can just tweet and make market fluctuation which he can and will capitalize on because he is so rich. This has nothing to do with twitter, trump, free speech, or anything other than he is capitalizing on market activity up and down.

It is all just a giant money game to him. He is that powerful he can make his own waves.

If anything in the planet earth should scare you to fucking death, it is that we allow the words of this person to effectively destroy millions of lives with his tweets. But human society has always been a cruel bitch that is powered by a mob of village idiots reacting to some popular rich asshole. I hope someday society evolves beyond this, but I do not think I will ever see it.

I agree with your first two paragraphs. Who are the millions he's killing, though?

Good thread. Here’s the start:


And here’s the end:

A right-winger that still doesn't understand the 1st amendment even after he's had it explained 25 times?
Color me shocked.

I'm not. His worldview is built around not understanding it.

Do you realize how stupid this makes you look? The concept of free speech isn’t just confined to the constitution. You can still believe in the concept even on a private forum. From what I’ve heard, and correct me if I’m wrong, that kind of was the founding principal upon which Wordforge was founded. One which you should be familiar with since you’ve been here since the beginning. Perhaps you’ve forgotten that since so many right wingers either left or were driven away and you’ve been stuck in your little echo chamber for so long. Now should the government be involved in a private forum, no, but that doesn’t mean that people can’t believe in free speech. See the difference between the two? There’s free speech and there’s freedom of speech, it’s a tiny distinction, but makes a huge difference. Now mark this dumb, facepalm, tl;dr, GFY or do your clown routine and make shot up, I really don’t care because I’m getting quite sick of it.

I understand it just fine thanks.

No, but most people who use it outside of the constitution are dummies who misuse it.
Like you.
And the dummies you get memes from.
And the libertarian liars who ruined early WF.

How can I misuse it when I’m the one who just explained what it means and you just agreed with that?

Even free speech has its limits.
The oft cited "fire in a crowded theater" example.
"Free speech absolutists" don't even acknowledge that limit.
They're fine with Trump inciting a riot.
Those people are dumb.
Those people make your memes.
You're dumb for passing them along.
Clearer now?

I think you’re mischaracterizing the free speech absolutists. I haven’t seen anyone saying you can yell fire in a movie theater. I’m pretty sure everyone knows there are limits. Suggesting that Covid came from a lab leak shouldn’t be that controversial, but people got banned from social media for doing so. I also think you’re painting with a broad brush.

Telling a foaming at the mouth mob of cretins to go "fight like hell" to keep "their" government isn't a bit like yelling "fire" in a crowded theater. One only risks the lives of everyone in the theater. The other risks the overthrow of our government. Not the same at all.

I don't.

You can still find threads from the early days of WF on archive.org, if you went and had a look through you'd probably be surprised to discover that we've lost just as many on the left as the right. Such is the nature of an internet BBS heading into it's third decade.

One interesting thing is that WF started off as a German board, which means right from the start there were rules such as no posting of Nazi content.

The board outside the Red Room also had basically the same rules as it does today.

When WF was founded it was the early 2000s, when the internet for many was still a new exciting thing that was largely considered separate from the real world, with people's identities and personas on here being safely isolated. Hell, in those early days we had a Blue Room style sub forum where many members (both male and female) shared nude images of themselves because they saw the internet as a place of no consequences, where everyone here was ultimately good spirited and trustworthy, even if they disagreed on some political things.

The prevailing wisdom around the time of WF being founded was that most people were good faith actors, and that the best disinfectant was sunlight. Give people enough rope to hang themselves.

That idea did somewhat work, however the unfortunate flipside was that some instead saw it as a challenge and set about learning just how much rope they could swing from without getting facing consequences.

• They chased a Jewish member around the board, slinging horrific ethnic slurs.
• They repeatedly told a 17 year old girl how much they wanted to have anal sex with her (in much cruder terms).
• They posted Nazi imagery.
• They made threads talking about how they loved sitting on their porch shooting uppity coons.
• They repeatedly complimented some of our black members on being among the "Good ones".
• They repeatedly made threads with titles like "N*GGER F*GGOT!!!".
• They posted lynching photos in response to black members posts.
• They talked explicitly about the sexual things they would do to the children of other members.
• They posted blatantly neonazi content and many of us brushed right past it because they were clearly just joking or trolling (until we discovered they were deadly serious).
• In discussing the middle East they repeatedly said how policy should just be to glass the sand n*ggers.

We lost countless members because of those incidents and many more. And each time they would either go unpunished because there was no rule against it, or when they were warned there would be a massive backlash because but their free speech!

It's very easy to criticise restrictions (both official board policies and the shifting acceptance of things by the boards members in general) and I have done it as well in the past if I felt a rule went too far.

So I ask you, in all honesty. Which of those above situations do you think should still be acceptable on WF?

I don’t think any of it is acceptable.

Pretty much every move away from the free speech mentality of early WF was in response to situations like those. And while we have have lost many members through natural attrition, those who were "run off" were mostly the targets or perpetrators of them.

Elon’s not wrong, there. Jack is full of shit.

Once I noticed what Twitter was doing, it didn't take anything other than a single click to fix it. Contrast this with Facebook where I had to install the Social Fixer plug-in to ensure that every time I went to FB I got to see the Most Recent posts, instead of what FB said was the "Most Popular."

Why are you showing us your high school yearbook photo? Weird flex.

That's a lot of words trying to distract from the fact that you just wanna shout the N-word at Denny's without getting kicked out.