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Anyone really surprised by this? Musk is buddy with Peter Thiel who’s now full-time pushing MAGA agenda.

Regardless of politics, I think this is the beginning of the end for Twitter. Most people will leave the company and I wouldn’t be surprised if they start hiring people directly from Truth Social to replace them.

I think there will be a big opportunity for someone to step in and replace Twitter in the next couple of years.

That isnt what is happening at all:

https://www.androidheadlines.com/2022/05/twitter-job-interes...

The source is a data analyst at Glassdoor and the data wasn't made public. I'd like to see confirmation from various sources before believing it.
We shall see once the deal goes through and his true intents are revealed over time.
I think the opposite. Musk owning Twitter makes it a much more appealing company to work for.
I’d never work for a company promoting violence, insurrection, and stupidity. I am sure most people feel the same way.
You're right, most people would not work for a company that promotes those things, however I'd wager that most people also don't think Twitter promotes those things even with Trump as an active user.
I guess they made a deal Thiel gets to be king of Earth and Musk gets Mars. The whole surplus people talk is scary asf.
> “If there are tweets that are wrong and bad, those should be either deleted or made invisible, and a suspension—a temporary suspension—is appropriate, but not a permanent ban,” Mr. Musk said.

Isn't this in direct opposition to what he has been saying? He's going to censor wrong and bad tweets? I thought he wanted free speech?

even 4chan does not have literal free speech
He’ll just hire the Truth Social censors.
Unlocked link for WSJ: https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-would-reverse-twitter...

And for additional coverage Washington Post: https://wapo.st/3LYOZe6

One egomaniac and narcissist supports another egomaniac and narcissist. Who would have thought.
Not a surprise at all. Trump was a major presence on twitter. His account being restored means more user engagement, more ad views and clicks. Also, Elon and Trump fans have large overlap.
Direct source, with his full response: https://youtu.be/VfyrQVhfGZc?t=1520
Would he also go over and reverse any bans of "regular" people or does that mean Elon Musk will just introduce more special treatments on Twitter? If not the only difference Musk would make is that this time it's his friends, instead of people he doesn't like. Which means he isn't different than the current leaders of Twitter.
He said he talked with Jack Dorsey and they both are not a fan of permanent bans. I assume this means he would unban others as well, but as far as I know he didn't explicitly state it.
life is not fair. favoritism is real.

maybe there will be a form in which previously banned user can apply to be reinstated.

> Would he also go over and reverse any bans of "regular" people

Musk has implied that he would; Trump's ban in particular is extremely notable and he had evaded that particular question for awhile.

Free speech is an interesting animal. On one hand, the definition and scope of free speech is an interesting philosophical topic with many nuances, viewpoints, arguments and counter-arguments. On the other hand, unlike many philosophical topics, free speech's implementation has very real impacts on our world. Get it wrong and the results could be disastrous.

I've heard everything from 'all speech should be protected' to the full 'only decent speech about allowed topics should be protected', and everywhere in between.

How do we apply free speech in a pragmatic way to approximate a good balance point between safety and freedom?

I don't have an answer. I do have an analogy I use, camp fires.

If I am in the forest I can have a campfire, but only if I follow certain rules. Unrestricted, my campfire could burn down the entire forest. Here are those rules, with their social network analogs.

* I can't use accelerant, only natural fuels. In the same vein, no sock puppets, no Twitter bots, and no one that uses them.

* I have to make a safe isolated space - I can have my campfire in a fire ring with brush cleared around it. Similarly, if I am going to have provocative speech I need to do it in set aside areas for it, and not share the speech outside of those areas - especially if sharing allows parts of the speech to be quoted out of context.

* I should not try to hide the fire I am building, because then it can't be policed. In the social web this means that hiding speech behind a barrier allows that speech to be more vitriolic, whether that barrier is anonymity or a private whitelisted chat.

* I shouldn't make the fire too big. In the same vein, a controversial thread that goes on forever has it's own context, and the negativity in it will be remembered by later posters more than the positivity (this is how our brains are wired). Also, I shouldn't try to make my conversation viral.

* My fire should be the size I need, and nothing more. This analog is a stretch, but I take this as social web conversations should not embellish the truth. I have a duty to tell the truth when making statements that fire people up, perhaps to the point of violence.

It is hard to enforce these net-wide without a digital reputation system, which I would like to see (not China's, that is something else). But shunning is a great tool, even without a reputation system.

Should Trump et al be socially 'shunned' by all social networks? If you are left of center you may say yes, right of center you may say no. So I leave that up to others. My personal yardstick is whether a person's comments engendered real physical harm to others through the actions they inspired, or real mental anguish through the insults they slung. If you use that yardstick too, then I think the answer is clear.

Does “anonymous speech is not free speech” work? You can be a shit-posting hate-monger but your full, real identity must be known. Put up or shut up.

The anonymous web would become a whole lot more pleasant.

The ability to organise and publish anonymously is crucial to small groups that are unpopular.

Imagine if political campaigners or advocates on something like abortion or LGBT rights, pro- or anti-, or some other controversial issue, could publish whatever fliers or pamphlets they like - just so long as they put their name and address on it to ensure accountability. The chilling effect on perfectly legitimate if unpopular speech would be extreme.

The problem here is the effect, not the cause. The cause is abuse by some other group of this controversial minority. If we prosecuted to the fullest extent anyone bullying or discriminating based on such things, then anyone who wished to speak could do so without anonymity.

I don't believe we will ever solve the hate speech problem without doing away with anonymity, or at the very least have anonymous speech have much less protections and reach.

For example, Twitter might only allow retweets of tweets tweeted by people with verified accounts and their primary identities in the profile.

There are people for whom a non-birthname is their primary identity, through role, gender change, etc. So I'm not talking birthname, I'm talking the name you identify yourself to the world with.I