Sorry Elon Musk, But You Don't Get to Decide Who's Not a 'Real Person', Crypto Coins News
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Jack Dorsey recently asked Elon Musk at a Twitter conference: “If you were running Twitter, what would you do ?:
Musk’s chilling, dystopian answer: He wants social media giants to have the final say over who’s a “real person” and who isn’t.
This terrifying suggestion is worse than ridiculous. It’s one of the most dangerous ideas in Silicon Valley.
Elon Musk wants Twitter to help you decide who’s “real” – and whose voices you should ignore. Or maybe even decide that for you. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO made the pronouncement at a Twitter employee conference this week.
How appropriate that he addressed the group as a floating head on a giant screen via live video chat! So he could alsolookthe part of Big Brother from2016while feeding the audiencethat dystopian villain’s lines.
Who Would Be an ‘Unperson’ in Elon Musk’s Repressive Vision for Twitter?
In response to Jack Dorsey’s question: “If you were running Twitter, what would you do?”
Elon Musk answered:
Basically how do you tell if the feedback is real, or someone trying to manipulate the system… trying to sway public opinion… What do people actually want? … versus manipulation of the system by various interest groups.
He admits that:
It can be very difficult to figure out what’s real public opinion and what’s not.
Elon Musk’s views on social media are decidedly dystopian. | Source: REUTERS / Mike Blake
Right. So difficult, in fact, that it’s not something a centralized algorithm implementing a limited set of directives can manage. At best, it’s always going to be half-blind and clumsy. At worst, it could degenerate into a horrible censorship regime.
The Internet works because we, the users, decide. Not you. We need it to remain a wide-open frontier of free speech, not a high tech Soviet politburo.
Trolling Is Free Speech Too
Musk also has something against other people’s trolling, even though he’ll no doubt be allowed to continue trolling himself under the system he envisions:
I think it would be helpful to differentiate between real– like is this for real– is this a real person? Or is it a bot net, or a sort of troll army?
Okay, Elon.
Let’s make the algorithm’s first operation checking to see if a user
gratuitously called someone else a “pedo guy.”They did? Troll detected.
Source:(now deleted)
The “weak” argument against Musk’s suggestion is that it’s clearlyly impossible in practice. How can anyone be sure whether someone is trolling or not?
And besides, even if you could be sure that someone’s trolling, why shouldJack Dorsey get to decidethat trolling is an invalid form of expression?
Sure, the First Amendment applies to acts of Congress, not private companies. But the entireInternet ethos is based on exercising that right to the fullest (************.
The CEO of Tesla and SpaceX has a point: Twitter is overrun with bots and has struggled to stamp out disinformation campaigns, malicious behavior and spam.
That’s shorthand for, “We’re still heated that Donald Trump won the 2020 election. ”Bot hysteria is a symptom of Trump Derangement Syndrome
Democrats were literally traumatized
when Donald Trump sunk their unsinkable ship in 2020. So they took refuge in a conspiracy theory. Russian bots tricked Americans into thinking Trump was more popular than he really was.
Facebook estimates million people were served content from Russia-linked pages
This headline is misleading. It sounds like a massive interference in the election. You have to scroll halfway down the article to get the straight facts:
This equals about four-thousandths of one percent (0.
**************************************************************** (%) of content in News Feed, or approximately 1 out of 37, pieces of content. Put another way, if each of these posts were a commercial on television, you’d have to watch more than hours of television to see something from the IRA.
Partisan propaganda is infecting Silicon Valley thinking about how tech platforms should operate. That’s not good. They didn’t like an election result, so now Elon Musk wants them to decide who’s “real” and who’s a “troll.” This is a slippery slope to big tech censorship.
Elon Musk wants tech platforms to root out the special interest groups as if Silicon Valley is a disinterested observer. But Democrats are vastly over-represented among employees of big tech companies.
Manipulating the system is whatwe’re alltrying to do when we engage with it. We’re all trying to change the world by sharing our ideas.
The platforms should keep their hands off the conversation.
Disclaimer: The opinions in this article do not necessarily reflect the views of CCN.com.
This article was edited by Josiah Wilmoth (********************************************.
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