A Harbinger of the Return of 'Fair' Speech to Twitter?
 

Elon Musk offers to buy Twitter, offering $54.20 per share of outstanding common stock: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1514564966564651008

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/d...8d1_sc13da.htm

Yes, I read that too. People probably won't comment because they think it is a political topic.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/14/elon...e-company.html

https://www.bloombergquint.com/busin...ver-of-twitter

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...-20-share.html

I have never understood the importance of Twitter, nor of "social media" in general. I have never participated in any such services, nor do I ever intend to do so. If Elon Musk thinks that it's worth millions of dollars, well, he has the money to spend.

Having said that ... there is also no television in my house. Haven't had one for thirty years. But every room is filled with bookshelves. When I want to watch a movie or a television show in my house, I simply buy a download ... commercial-free.

Took me a while to understand the phrasing of the title... boooo!

Anybody. People who view the forum. Why did you think you? Were not suppose to talk about political stuff. So just articles about it.

You aren't the only one. Close as I get, is a few forums like this one :) . But I know people that feel Facebook, etc. are the 'greatest' thing on Earth for sharing their personal/family life with everyone..... Don't get it and I guess I don't need too :) .

That's fair enough. I don't necessarily see any 'importance' in Twitter but by 'following' people in many divergent fields of science and tech I do find links to articles that I almost certainly would never run across if I only frequented this and the 4 or 5 other forums I visit regularly.

Though I participate in Facebook, but not Twitter, et. al., I agree with you. It's a trap. I became a FB member back around 2014, after finding a long-lost cousin, and desiring to maintain contact. As would be, influence spread and more family and friends found me. These days, while I still maintain connection with people, I primarily like to use it for tech and science groups. Has it enriched me? Maybe ... somewhat.

But I feel the pull (addiction?) to it, and find myself blindly using it at random times when my hands are idle. Pretty ridiculous of me, for sure. I know it.

I am appalled by the rise of "cancel culture" in our society. And the worst offenders seem to be colleges and universities. What ever happened to academic freedom and free speech? What happened to the attitude of "I disagree with what X said but I defend his right to say it."? So I think that the censorship on twitter and other social media is horribly wrong. Whether Elon Musk will make the situation better or worse is anybody's guess.

I expect that if anybody cleans the free speech mess up it will be the Supreme Court.

From an economic standpoint: Elon Musk became one of the richest men in the world with Tesla. He found himself with almost all of his assets tied up in Tesla. To insure that he remain wealthy for the rest of his life he decided to diversify his holdings. He sold several billion dollars worth of Tesla stock and paid a large tax bill on his gains. Now he is investing in twitter. What are his intentions with twitter? I suspect that his foremost objective is investment diversity. I can't hazard a guess as to what else he may intend.

He should just make his own instead of buying that. If his is superior then that one will go into the dustbin of history.

which explains why you are free to think your own thoughts.

... yeah, even though I have directly contributed source materials to many "media projects" over these many years, my evenings typically consist of herbal tea and books.

Sounds nice.

It's a strategic move:

1) They now have to hold a vote among shareholders
2) If they do not hold a vote then the CEO/BOD are in violation of their fiduciary responsibilities to the shareholders and would face SEC fines/charges, also would be removed from their positions.
3) Only way they can stop what Elon is proposing is to hope or arrange for another bid from another company/individual etc... and choose that option.

Either way Elon's move just set the stage for Twitter to be bought out or have their stock crash. Keep in mind that if he were to sell all of his Twitter stock, let's say by the end of next week, that would/could also crash the shares.

Even companies cannot outrun Karma for long.

PS: I also have no interest in Social Media outside of fora like LQ et al.

I have only one thing to say: "social" media isn't.

"A Harbinger of the Return of 'Fair' Speech to Twitter?"

LOL No.

https://www.protocol.com/elon-musk-flight-tracker

https://www.inputmag.com/tech/elon-m...-plane-twitter

"Cancel culture" indeed.

lol, people hating on twitter.
Probably because they had the gall to block a Reality TV personality who wouldn't stop rage-baiting and generally spouting nonsense despite several warnings.

In the age of broadband Internet this is a pointless statement, at least in the context of media consumption.

https://i.redd.it/1r95vi1qqkt81.jpg

https://i.redd.it/uxby27lx1nt81.jpg

Heh.

Saw a discussion of the flight tracker issue this morning on, wait for it, ... Twitter. :)

Totally agree. Regardless of one's opinion of Musk he is bright, bold and up to now, incredibly lucky.

Remember when there were 3" floppy disks and AOL was the best place to get them? Well, it turns out that AOL was counting every disk that they mailed as a "subscriber," thereby vastly (and fraudulently) over-stating their business value and subscriber base, which was actually lackluster. It is said that when Ted Turner figured that out at a board meeting, a murder almost took place then and there. :)

Ted had built his media empire out of the remnants of the billboard-company that he had inherited, and he did it the right way: "it actually existed."

Twitter has very likely been doing the same thing that AOL did. They count "millions of subscribers" and you can have "millions of followers," but there is a very good chance that this isn't true. You buy an advertisement – and they're not cheap – believing that it will be exposed to "millions of eyeballs," and indeed they will present you with a report that shows that it ostensibly did. But there are now many who believe that Twitter has been lying about this for a very long time. And, for a publicly traded company, that's a Federal crime known as "fraud on the market."

sundial: :party:

"Twitter Adopts ‘Poison Pill’ to Ward Off Musk Takeover
Rights plan forces negotiation, buys time, source says
Poison pill triggered after investor accumulates more than 15%" https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...r%20situations.

This must be all very interesting for people who use twitter.

AOL ... MySpace ... Twitter ... Facebook ... I see a distinct pattern here. If you want to ride any of these trains, you'd better know when to get off. :D

Facebook, Twitter, fora and other 'social media' are tools. You either know how to use them to your advantage/satisfaction, or you don't.

You over state the importance of these things.

That aside, it astounds me that people living in the country which is supposedly the exemplar of freedom and democracy would be happy to see these things fall under the control of one man.

"Absolute power corrupts absolutely." Attributed to someone intelligent.

I never understand how some people get all high and mighty about not using "social media" when they hang out on this and possibly other fora, daily - which is just an older form of social medium; the very name forum suggests a gathering of people.

Exactly!

Neither Twitter nor any other social media online has ever had free or fair speech. Free speech, as a right under the US Constitution, prevents the GOVERNMENT form moderating speech except in certain circumstances, but PRIVATE moderation has never been and will never be controlled by the government BECAUSE of that guarantee. Twitter is not run by the government. Perhaps it should be, but that is unlikely to ever happen and would not be better if it did.

Every social media platform is bent from either the outside or the inside (or both, see Twitter and Facebook as examples). Blindly passing along everything said with equal weight would not be profitable, and they must make a profit. Anything CLOSE to openly passing everything said has turned out to be easy to manipulate by criminals and foreign bad actors to corrupt business, politics, and society and has proven to be a threat that requires additional moderation.

Were someone to purchase Twitter, it would really only change what KIND of moderation, filters, and bent Twitter would have: it would not really improve the situation.

A "social media forum," as far as I can tell from a very-deliberate distance, is merely a manifestation of the "IRC = Internet Relay Chat" chat-room. Even back in the day when all of this was new, and when a University colleague of mine was the actual person(!) who added "Relay" to that term, the whole idea quickly bored me. I never saw the value in it, and I still don't.

(But: full disclosure ... I also haven't had a television in my house for more than thirty years. I buy any video that I want to watch from the Internet ... commercial-free. And I have a "Sirius XM®" commercial-free radio in my car.)

An "old-fashioned forum," such as this one, is very different in a number of key ways. First of all, this site is: "Linux® questions." In other words, there is a specific reason for you to be here. There is something purposeful that attracted you here, and that "purposeful thing" is that "you need an answer, specifically about Linux®, right now!" :eek:

And the odds are very excellent that you will get it. Right away. On target.

The "General Forums" are simply an added attraction. :)

If you want to observe the pragmatic value of this "topic-specific forum model," you need only visit any of the "StackExchange® branded" forums – of which there are many. There are literally "hundreds of postings per minute," which must of course be a delight to their internet advertisers, but there is no taxonomy. Your "message in a bottle" has just been tossed into a white-water river, and within ten minutes (literally ...) it will be gone. No one will ever see it again. So, from my personal point of view as someone who has tried to find answers there – "useless." Within less than an hour, your entire exchange will be "many miles down-river."

This is why all of us who also like to hang out in "General" first spend our daily visits looking at "Newbie," "Programming," "Containers," and other places. Because, these are the real reasons why this entire web-site is here ... and has been here, now, for decades.

The "signal-to-noise ratio," if you will, of "a conventional forum," is very low. But this is exactly what makes it efficient. I have a nice bookmark-list of the "conventional forums" that I know that I can turn to when I need to :banghead: "find an answer very quickly." LQ is one of several.

(P.S.: thank you, all!!) :D I can only hope that you think I'm upholding(?) my little part of the bargain . . .

I've never posted anything to those forums but search often leads me there. If I see something of interest, I bookmark it. If I type 'stack' into my bookmarks search tab more than 150 results turn up. I should add that I use a batch file(s) to date virtually every daily interaction with my computer since 2019. Every d/l, every file I create, every post I make to this and 4 other forums, every post to Facebook and Twitter and last but not least - I add a date to every page I see fit to bookmark.
First thing in the morning I create a folder with date and topic specific folders within the 'daily' folder and then move it at the end of the day.
As an example, of the 150 'stack' results above, typing 'stack 2019' cuts the result down to about 35, typing, for instance, 'stack grep' yields 9 bookmarks. As my tag line indicates I am a fan of our historic past - I don't find it terribly difficult to type (Subject) site:https://history.stackexchange.com/ into my browser and, of course, you can modify 'history' to any of the other branded forums.

^ as a social platform stack/exchange/ask sites are probably useless or even horrifying, but I get excellent results from them, time and again. Sure, some of it is just SEO, but there's something to be said for their voting and editing system.

Anyhow:
https://xkcd.com/1357/
Somebody probably already posted this.

I once had a sobering moment:
The manager of a supermarket told me that I am forbiden to enter it ever again, for no legal reason (I didn't do anything out of the ordinary or forbidden).
I then asked a lawyer if the manager could even do that, and they told me Yes, because a supermarket isn't public space, the supermarket owns it.

That said, if you open your space up to the public you also have to adhere to certain rules - something folks tend to ignore when they say "if you don't like it you can leave".

(That was long ago. Don't judge me on that.)

If you are on a site that is the private property of some other person or company operating within the letter of the law, and you do not like the rules or decisions there, leaving may be your ONLY valid, reasonable, and legal option.

Furthermore, they are free to forcibly remove you, and there is nothing you can do about it... That's the other side of the double-edged sword.

There was a brief time that I hosted "a forum for my customers" on my website ... which forced me to be "a moderator." I absolutely hated it, and it was a tremendous (almost daily ...) waste of time. Eventually it dawned on me that my customers were not actually calling for "a forum," and that most of them never used it. So, one day, I ditched the whole thing and never looked back. Nobody complained. Sales didn't suffer. I was relieved.

But ... in any public forum like this one, let's hear it for the Moderators! :hattip: In a well-run forum like this one you usually do not perceive their daily efforts, simply because they do them so well. But you would very quickly and very unpleasantly come to realize it if they didn't. It is a thankless, ongoing task that I'm very glad that I don't have to do. They are the "quality-control officers" of the entire thing.

This is not true. You have a lot of other options, many of them valid, reasonable and/or legal.

If, however, they tell you to leave that is ultimately their right, and one has to go.

But, again, let's not forget that a business opening its premises (be they physical or digital) to the public has to follow additional rules, compared to private premises.

BTW, the story above was half a lifetime ago.

Done deal!

Details are slowly coming to hand, but my understanding is that approximately 49% of the stock will be paid for by Mr Musk, with approximately another 25 to 31% financed via some type of loan instrument.

I've also read that Mr. Musk's intention is to leave 20 to 25% of the company's stock on the market, and that the company will continue to have it's own Board. I guess we'll find out Mr. Musk's true opinions about free speech when (not if) he encounters a dissenting director.

Musk has all the money he could possibly wish to spend, but for the life of me I have no idea why he ... or anyone ... took an interest in Twitter.

Here's one suggestion: SEC dodging

Well, that article is more-than-slightly misleading. As an executive officer of Tesla, he is responsible under SEC rules for public things that he says – no matter where or how he says them. That won't change.

I heard on the news yesterday that he "took it private" - does this means it's not a shareholder company anymore?

They also said "anyway, he just gave himself a gigantic headache with this" :D

I don't know why there's so much attention on this particular transaction. We've had "media moguls" and "media barons" for generations.

Come to think of it, aren't most "media" privately owned (or government-owned)?

In case someone cites Facebook or Google, aren't most shares owned by the public without voting rights?

Musk isn't really a media mogul.

He uses Twitter a lot himself and got into trouble for some controversial tweets. Instead of taking no for an answer he just bought the whole thing...

I suspect Musk may have discovered the one and only way to contact twitter Customer Support: buy it!!

Yes, that was my impression as well. Maybe taking Tesla private could help him with this, but the status of Twitter seems irrelevant (but if anyone knows otherwise, please correct me).

And this is such a strange statement. Twitter the Platform has been under immediate control of Twitter the Corporation the whole time...

It remains to be seen how he envisions the idea of social media amidst the intolerant, A rated supersnowflakes on the far- left & potentially closed-minded & often dangerously tilted far-right baboons.

If you are an executive – particularly if you are part of the "C-team" (CEO, CFO, CxO ...) or the Board of Directors – then, unlike an ordinary employee, you do not have legal immunity from lawsuits or criminal prosecution over "what the corporation does." Even if the company is privately held. Because you are one of the people who ultimately control "what the corporation does," you can be individually sued or prosecuted for the perceived wrongdoings of "the corporation," whereas an ordinary employee is shielded. Shareholders have rights and the corporation has legal scrutiny even when the shares are not available to the general public.

An interesting, IMO, blog post from Prof. Jonathan Turley - "The First Amendment Option: An Easy Way For Musk To Restore Free Speech on Twitter." "Below is my column in the Hill on one way for Elon Musk to re-introduce free speech values on his newly acquired social media platform. Pro-censorship advocates like former President Barack Obama may have given Musk a roadmap for restoring free speech on Twitter."
https://jonathanturley.org/2022/04/2...ch-on-twitter/

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. Follow him on Twitter @JonathanTurley. https://twitter.com/JonathanTurley