Good news for X alternative Social Media, if pay to post for X I’m exit form X.
That’s not what free speech is, and there never has been free speech on Twitter, and that’s mostly a good thing. Jesus.
Elon and his sycophants have been the idiots talking about free speech on Twitter. It’s perfectly fine to use that talking point as criticism. If he’s not interested in free speech then what was he doing allowing banned Nazi accounts back on?
Elon Musk said free speech like once and then immediately threw a bunch of journalists off the site. And apparently every news article for the rest of my life is going to be about how he was hypocritical instead of whether he wants power or influence or has power and influence or the meaning of giving him those things.
Don’t trust every industrialist you meet even if they invested in one company where competent people make cool space ships. He’s clearly on Ket and some uppers. Grimes divorced him and her music isn’t even good. He’s not that complicated.
That’s not what free speech is
Well yeah, obviously. It’s just wordplay based on the two common definitions of free.
Everybody knows what free speech means. It’s just a bit of wordplay that you’ve taken very literally.
Everybody knows what free speech means.
i really dont think so.
free speech is a pretty complicated thing and i feel like many people dont have a solid grasp on it. i think a good number of people think they know what free speech means because they know “it only applies to what the government can do to you”, but there’s quite a bit more to it than that. like how to deal with hate speech, threats, misinformation, disinformation, etc.
and this is directly related to the problems twitter is facing: elon musk started out by saying hes a “free speech absolutist”, but twitter has been slowly rediscovering why “free speech absolutism” doesnt work. and you can see those discoveries in real time with twitter reintroducing moderation policies (among other things)
Ok then. People know enough about what it means to know it doesn’t refer to not having to pay a fee to open your mouth.
It’s very clear that the headline is a little wordplay joke. It doesn’t literally convey that the journalist thought free speech means you don’t have to pay to make a twitter post. You’re taking it way too literally.
elon musk started out by saying hes a “free speech absolutist”, but twitter has been slowly rediscovering why “free speech absolutism” doesnt work.
I’m in agreement that it doesn’t work.
But it should also be called to attention that Musk never tried free speech absolutism on his platform (not that I think he actually should). He has been willing to bend over backwards in assisting dictatorships in censoring content, and he culled a lot of left-leaning and anti-Musk accounts/comments on day one. It’s always been a lie to pander to the freeze peach crowd.
Would not give him 56 cents
That’s 56 too much
Free speech, now only $9.99 per month
Upgrade your free speech to premium speech now for only $17.99
or 0.99/post.each retweet would cost you an additional 0.49. you pay less,you get less.
You don’t know what free speech means.
This is like claiming Blizzard is infringing on your free speech because they banned you from world of Warcraft for saying racist shit.
Better yet. This is like claiming blizzard is infringing on your freedom of speech because they deactivated your account as a result of you not paying your subscription.
Do better.
Corporations should be allowed to own vital services so they can ban people from them at will. This is a good thing somehow. I love monopolies that suppress activists and organizers because it would only be bad if the government is doing it.
That’s the thing about private property and private services. They can terminate your involvement at will for any reason. It’s in the user agreement you consent to when you sign up.
You’re not entitled to these services. They aren’t your god given right or any other bullshit you’re imagining.
Comparing this to freedom of speech is laughable.
We could stop thinking of Twitter, Facebook, etc. as “essential services”.
They can both fuck right off and most people’s lives will not be negatively impacted.
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Well, you can invest money to get rid of bots, or you can try to make money to get rid of bots. He tries the latter, and will kill the platform doing that.
We’re going to be 🤑 rich! Rich I tell you!
They should do that for meeting people for dating…like a love tax or something… Pay some random so you can talk to people of your interested sex.
Keep digging Musk. Lmao
OPs title is misleading, there’s a difference between free speech as in expressing your free speech and the one that OP is referring to is complaining about paying to express your free speech.
That’s not misleading, that’s sarcasm.
Yes! sarcasm that implies on what I already said.
But no one is being misled, it’s very obvious sarcasm.
Free speech? More like free* speech
*Only $4.99/month, yeah, definitely “free”
Fee speech
Why didn’t I think of putting this in my comment?
Welcome to the death spiral
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You have to pay him so that you can do the work of creating content for his platform? No thanks
“This is going to make so much easy money”, Musk thinks, delusionaly, as he further alienates the former core user base of the site he bought for literal billions of dollars and yet has never made any money. “They are going to be lining up to pay for this”, he imagines, forgetting that paid checkmarks was a huge ass failure and twitter still has never turned a profit.
This is, I think his train of thought. He thinks Twitter is a utility that people need. Meanwhile, many of us never had an account and moves like this will just move people away. Before twitter there was other social media, and before social media we also got on fine.
There are literal alternatives to this service, I cannot believe people are still using it now. But surely this kills it?
I work in bot protection and it’s a sound idea but doesn’t really work in practice. As long as there’s more than 1$ of value to be gained it’s worth it for the bot makers.
This also makes it so that botting is only accesible to select few actors that have the required resources i.e. russian troll farms or large bot networks from china, in turn this increases their value. This is very good for them.
Reality is that the only way to stop bots is to constantly change up the detection system. This is called a “cat and mouse” sort of problem and it really is the only way to do it. The attacker always has to catch up and it can be trivial that takes them couple of hours to do but it also reveals behavior patterns for marking bot accounts. This actually works really well in practice but requires a lot of dev resources and many companies low-key like bots which is another thread entirely.
This also makes it so that botting is only accesible to select few actors that have the required resources i.e. russian troll farms or large bot networks from china, in turn this increases their value. This is very good for them.
I’d bet that is explicitly part of the funding model. Pay to influence consensus, cuz this is a publicly traded stock and numbers need to go up, regardless of who is paying.
Twitter is private. Musk took it private when he bought it.
Yes only Russia and China do bad things with technology!
Never had to deal with attacks originating from US or Europe so thats kinda true actually :)
Go to r/worldnews and r/europe on reddit
The amount of bots is….
As long as there’s more than 1$ of value to be gained it’s worth it for the bot makers.
That’s what I was coming in here to suggest, so I’m glad someone in the field was able to back that idea up. I think it’s unlikely many bots that aren’t made for fun are being put on Twitter unless they are generating a lot more than $1 for whoever is putting them up.
Bot protection? Call me ignorant but what exactly do you do?
develop systems that can identify unwanted users like bots, spammers, people who abuse the product and break ToS etc. Most bad actors are very dumb but fighting this at scale is actually very interesting. Also most bots (like 90%) are just scrapers (data collectors) especially when it comes to Twitter which has absurd API pricings but cost almost nothing to scrape lol
people who abuse the product and break TOS
You’re welcome.
Hey man it gets me employed and I even get to work on foss on work hours sometimes. Thanks! :)
Oh my god I’m a fuckin idiot. Granted, I’ve had a couple drinks tonight but I thought you were protecting bots… not protecting against them lol
Protect the bots!!!
yeah sorry “protection against bots” just doesn’t roll of the tongue as easily lol
I’ll ask anyway. Why do companies like bots?
As Kungen already answered - stats! You can sell bot traffic as real traffic which inflates your numbers.
For stuff like social media, bots increase engagement too. Many new products and networks actually generate a lot of fake content to attract organic growth. I.e. if bot likes your comment you’re likely to engage more. If it likes your product review you’re likely to review more stuff etc.
Tracking bots can also generate reverse analytics. For example if you know that your competitors are scraping fishing equipment data from your store it could mean they’re working on a competing fishing related product.
Lastly, you can feed fake data to bots to manipulate competitors. This is somewhat illegal (no real legal precedent yet afaik though its a clear intent to harm other businesses) but it can really powerful in the wrong hands.
Edit: worth nothing that a lot of bot traffic is good. Sometimes you want to be scraped as it is a form of organic engagement and increases the value of your data and often backlinks growth (e.g. indexers like Google etc)
More eyeballs.
Enough updoots or retweets and other algos pick up on it. Some random twitter discussion ends up on BuzzFeed, YTers start making influencer vids, and Reddit / Lemmy repost bots.
Do this enough and it’ll gain traction. Now everyone is talking about your stupid fuckin Stanley mug, corporate rumor,or political talking point.
And this can be automated end to end, 24/7, by market and keyword, will real time feedback as to how well it’s doing via upvotes, shares, likes, or even data mining emails and convos via Gmail or WhatsApp.
Perpetual growth/engagement statistics?
How true is the dead internet theory, in your view?
Er du måske en robot??
Nei, jeg er kjøtt og blod og stål og smøreolje som deg
Hmm, jeg tror desværre jeg består af et 100% syntetisk keramisk bomuldsprodukt…
