This is entirely consistent with free speech. Impersonation and parody are still allowed on Twitter.
Musk was just offering to add a blue check mark to accounts that agreed to certain terms, including identifying impersonation and parody as such.
Why should making an agreement and honoring it be so hard?
Of course he should have known that there are a lot of trolls who wouldn't honor the agreement, and that's on him, but it's disconcerting to see so many people cheering the trolls on.
A lot of people were doing a lot of work on hard things, Musk showed up insisting they were actually easy and those people were incompetent for not having solved them before, or maybe weren't even really trying. ("just ask people to make an agreement and honor it" is your solution, really?) So people are pleased to see Musk get a comeuppence there.
> ("just ask people to make an agreement and honor it" is your solution, really?)
It's not my solution, it's Musk's, and I agree it was naive. (But to be fair, that was only part of his solution - the other part was that Twitter was enforcing the agreement.)
I'm just saying that getting service terminated for failing to honor the agreement is not a free speech issue.
Impersonating someone in order to defraud is a crime. Even if supposed to be funny or revelatory, you can be jailed. Look at the David Daleiden case in California
Who's being defrauded? How are the parody accounts taking receipt of anything that is intended for the people they are parodying? And David Daleiden did a whole lot more than just make a parody Twitter account[1]
Daleiden was charged with impersonating someone. Not on twitter. In real life. Twitter is real life too, last I checked. It's still subject to the law.
I don't hate Musk, I criticize his actions. Especially when he proclaims a strict ideological reason for those actions and vacates that strict ideology whenever it's inconvenient.
Free speech absolutism does nothing to fight spam, impersonation for sake of parody, or bots. So whatever he says, this ain't free speech absolutism.
We won't stop criticizing Musk. It's our right to criticize him. With great power comes great responsibility, and he's completely failing at responsible stewardship of the alleged "town square" that he just bought. I've lost count of how many times he's changed course on verification in the, what, two weeks since he bought it? He's earned heaping disdain and ridicule.
And two of my friends are getting fired because they live in cities without a twitter hq to drive to. Yeah. People hate that for some reason. Weird.
Are you speaking for Elon? He's made it pretty clear what his intentions are for Twitter, which is much closer to free speech absolutism than "being reasonable", which is what Twitter was before he bought it. If anything you should be asking Elon to "be better".
Spammers and bot writers are real people. Parodists are real people. I wonder if Musk hasn't really thought very deeply about what he means by free speech.
Yes, they are. You can distribute flyers, solicit donations, panhandle, parody, and impersonate in a physical town square. You can also hire agents to do all of that for you. And thanks to the (highly questionable) doctrine of corporate personhood, you can even do all that as a corporation and it's all protected speech.
Here's a whole gallery of people exercising free speech through impersonation in physical town squares across the country:
The bots are real people, and the parody accounts are backed by real people too. This isn't a hate boner, but more of me acknowledging that what's happening is what everyone said would happen. Which is absolute free speech on such a platform would run head long into reality and require the business to pull back. Which is exactly what they are doing.
Perhaps less whining about being “cancelled” when what is really happening is that a person is being a tool, then complaining that THEY are the real victim here, and then immediately doubling down on detestable behavior.
You might be forgiven for thinking that Musk, who arguably incorporates the Silicon Valley spirit like no one else, is taking a 'fail fast' approach to his Twitter adventure.
I don't understand what is so difficult about this.
Allow anybody to get verified, they just need to present their passport and then their display name is fixed to that name, or if its a company you verify that.
Just letting anybody be verified while claiming to be 'Coca Cola Company' make no sense what so ever.
Honestly, I think mortising that feature isn't a bad idea, specially for companies, politicians and so on. But just letting anybody pay for a check mark is kind of crazy.
Why bot fighting is such a problem is also a mystery. I mean so often these bot account use literally the same picture, the same name and a username like @EIonMusk22525. How fucking hard is it to write some machine learning to recognize stuff like that? Having protection from bots that impersonate would seem to be a feature worth paying for, given how often the replies of somebody are full with impersonators that promote crypto schemes.
I thought it was incredibly stupid for Musk to buy twitter, a never ending pit of problems unlikely to ever make money and basically nuking his reputation even more. Literally jumping head first into culture war issues. Guaranteed to make everybody on all sides angry.
> IT IS ORDERED that respondent, directly or through any corporation, subsidiary,
division, website, or other device, in connection with the offering of any product or service, in or affecting commerce, shall not misrepresent in any manner, expressly or by implication, the extent to which respondent maintains and protects the security, privacy, confidentiality, or integrity of any nonpublic consumer information, including, but not limited to, misrepresentations related to its security measures to: (a) prevent unauthorized access to nonpublic consumer information; or (b) honor the privacy choices exercised by users.
> IT IS FURTHER ORDERED that respondent, directly or through any corporation, subsidiary, division, website, or other device, in connection with the offering of any product or service, in or affecting commerce, shall, no later than the date or service of this order, establish and implement, and thereafter maintain, a comprehensive information security program that is reasonably designed to protect the security, privacy, confidentiality, and integrity of nonpublic consumer information. Such program, the content and implementation of which must be fully documented in writing, shall contain administrative, technical, and physical safeguards appropriate to respondent’s size and complexity, the nature and scope of respondent’s activities, and the sensitivity of the nonpublic consumer information, including: ...
I'm going to draw attention to the last sentence of the second one. For any new product (like "Twitter Blue") it must be documented in writing, with a comprehensive security information how it is designed to protect the customer.
> Allow anybody to get verified, they just need to present their passport and then their display name is fixed to that name, or if its a company you verify that.
It's not quite that simple; there are plenty of individuals whose public name is not the same as their legal name. Some examples:
My understanding from listening to his podcast is that CGP are the initials of his legal name and Grey his legal surname, although he only uses the initials as a moniker online and uses his not publicly disclosed first name in his private life.
As panick21_ mentioned, I don't understand what's so hard about this. Those people should move away from aliases (which are not used in a real town square in any format) and instead change to their real name. You see this all the time in conservative circles, where there is now an implicit level of trust and authenticity between all participants who do this.
``The Federalist Papers is a collection of 85 articles and essays written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay under the collective pseudonym "Publius" to promote the ratification of the Constitution of the United States.''
Aliases are most definitely used in a real town square... nicknames are common, shortened versions of names are used. Rarely do people go by their full name or sometimes use their middle name instead of their first name.
That's fine that you have this opinion, but I honestly don't think this is a factor that would stop most people. People on HN have a much different perspective on personal data then most people in the real world. And for companies it not really an issue either.
If my passport says my name is the same as a famous person then should I still be verified? This whole anyone can be verified for $8 a month had zero chance at success.
Yes of course. As long as you don't claim to be that person with your picture its of course not a problem.
Also, it isn't very common problem that people with the same name try to pretend to be that other person. It cuts the potential people who would want to impersonate from 10s of millions to like a couple.
This same name issue is a tiny marginal problem dismissing the idea of paid verification based on that is crazy.
A technical issue with that is that names are not unique. I have the same name (from birth) as a famous person, and I've known a couple people who have the same issue.
It also doesn't handle people who legally change their name (e.g. afaik there's nothing stopping someone from legally changing their name to "Elon Musk"). That's a much smaller threat vector, but it wouldn't surprise me if a few people did it.
I would also imagine that it's trivial to create a fake passport that passes inspection once it's been passed through a scanner, stripping all the holograms and stuff off. That might be illegal, though I'm not sure if it's only the context of using it for Twitter.
As I mentioned in my other comment, that cuts down the potential of impersonates from 10s of millions to a tiny number. Or incredibly motivated people.
And it easily solved by taking it in the verification process. If you are getting verified and you have the same name as an existing verified account, its not that hard to verify that they are not trying to impersonate the other person.
You are cutting down amount of cases by 100000x.
> I would also imagine that it's trivial to create a fake passport that passes inspection once it's been passed through a scanner, stripping all the holograms and stuff off. That might be illegal, though I'm not sure if it's only the context of using it for Twitter.
I mean if a country doesn't have working system of identification its not for twitter to fix.
Could a straightforward UX change stop the bleeding re: impersonation: Swap the prominence/styling of the "name" (which is, inexplicably, editable) with the handle (which is by definition unique). Display handle in all-lowercase.
Twitter implemented verification to resolve the issue of impersonation, and give users confidence that they were interacting with the public entity they thought they were (likely among other reasons). In that sense, “verified” meant “they are who they claim to be”, which is great for building trust in the platform. (The additional moderation tools provided for verified accounts made them attractive even to relatively minor public entities.)
Musk either deliberately reinterpreted or misunderstood “verified” to mean “they are a legitimate non-bot account”. That _could_ be another useful thing to know about an account, but it’s misaligned from its original purpose. _That’s an easy mistake to make if you don’t understand well the problems around account impersonation_, like if your experience is all in domains other than running a content platform.
From there he envisions promoting messages from “real” accounts, and implicitly sinking messages from bots, scammers, spammers, and trolls — a fair enough conclusion. But when he then anticipates that will be valuable enough to most folks to pay $100/year, he overestimates what most people feel is disposable income, what most people would pay to have a “well-moderated” public forum, how people would feel about being asked to pay for a previously free service, how people feel about supporting him personally (especially at this point in his arc), and how people feel about being treated as “less than” by default.
Between his admitted emotional awareness impairment and the fact that his “market research” was likely limited to asking his echo chamber, it’s not hard to imagine _why_ he’s learning lessons the hard way now.
There is no such thing as 'business acumen' running SpaceX and running Twitter are not at all the same thing. It requires totally different skill sets.
Remember that a lot of the "business acumen" for both SpaceX and Tesla has been politics and behind the scenes deals to get billions of dollars of government subsidies to prop up what would otherwise be a business that is hemorrhaging cash.
Not sure if Twitter will be able to get government subsidies to prop it up.
This 'its all subsidies' is just nonsense that isn't true. Its history written by people who people who hate Musk.
The claim that SpaceX and Tesla are only relevant because of govenrment subsidies is just bad business history, its simply not accurate. Or at least its not accurate unless you take the position that all cooperation only exist because of government.
SpaceX got saved in 2008 by getting the COTS contract from NASA, that is clear true however, it wasn't billions and that money was not paid to them directly. They had to achieve checkpoints to get the money. Getting that contract only allowed them to raise the money.
The government certainty has been a big costumer of SpaceX but they got these contracts because they beat the competition and offered far lower prices, not because Musk is good with behind the scenes politics. They competed successful both in the domestic and the international market.
And for Tesla its just false. Tesla got the same tax exemptions any large company gets when investing in a region that just how it works in the US and that's not cash in Tesla account, but rather lower operating cost for the next 20 years. To even attempt to make the claim, you have to basically look at the fuel credit system. But that system isn't a direct subsidy for Tesla, its just the rules for the car industry as a whole. Any company can profit from that system if they want to, some did others didn't. For a few years there was a EV tax credit but only for a very limited number of vehicles that Tesla quickly blew past, but again that was for all car companies and it was a tax credit for people who buy cars, so it wouldn't help Tesla as they were hemorrhaging cash.
Tesla got a loans from the DoE for Model S production. This loan was specifically to set up Model S production, and by that point Tesla had a few options to finance production it was not a bail out because they were running out of cash. Tesla paid this loan back and the govenrment made profit. Under the same program Ford and GM also got much bigger loans and have still not paid them back, they had to ask the govenrment multiple time to extend the loan period).
And the claim that Musk business constantly hemorrhage cash is also mostly false. If you sit down and compare SpaceX to all the other rocket companies before and since, you will discover that SpaceX is was incredibly low cash operation. To give you some comparison, Virgin Orbit spent something like 400M to get to Orbit with a small rocket. SpaceX had something like 100M. RocketLab spent about the same amount as SpaceX but for a smaller rocket with less potential for upgrades. Other companies like Relativity have received billions in funding before they ever launch a rocket. Firefly went bankrupt and then got 300M of millions of investment to launch their first rocket.
What SpaceX did and with how little cash they did it, in a political situation way less friendly then what it was a decade later is astonishing.
We can make the same argument for Tesla. Compare Tesla to the EV Boom that happened in the last 4-5 years, all these other companies like Nikola, Lordstown, Rivian, Lucid and so on were swimming in cash often getting 100s of millions and sometimes 10s of billions in cash. In hindsight and what we are seeing now is that Tesla was incredibly cash and capital efficient.
I never said that it was all subsidies. I said that his other successful businesses have been propped up by government cash, which is objectively true. If it hadn't been for government contracts or tax exemptions there wouldn't be a SpaceX or a Tesla, or they would have struggled way more and been a fraction of the size. It's not necessarily a bad thing that his businesses were enabled by big government help, as there is a clear national interest in having more space travel and electric car options.
The problem is if Elon has become too overconfident in entering difficult business areas because his companies have been saved multiple times by government contracts and deals. Does he start to think he can save any business in any difficult space because he pulled off SpaceX and Tesla? Is the government going to bail out Twitter for national security interests if he messes up?
I remember some statements around pricing for Tesla models by him that made me wonder (I think it was something like 'a Tesla model should cost the same amount everywhere on earth', which struck me as both admirable and naive), but having built up multiple billion-dolllar companies it's hard to deny that he must have made a lot of good decisions.
I think there may very well be such a thing as business acumen, I know several people who were succesful building multiple businesses in different industries (nowhere near a scale that you'd have heard of them, but still). Some skills like negotiation, sales/marketing/PR, motivating employees, being good with numbers,... are universally useful for all kinds of business.
Business acumen seems to be a pretty broad term. There is a subset of skills useful in many situations and for many business but maybe for some business some specific skills that are outside of 'business acumen' were the trigger for success.
Maybe Musk has bad 'business acumen' but is good at coordinating engineering teams and that lead to the success of SpaceX and Tesla but doesn't work for Twitter because its not really an engineering problem.
Sure there is. A business is a business, obviously you have to know how bring in experienced people (or not fire the ones that are experienced), that's a basic part of business, any business of a large size.
Ah the old hater line. Always good to see that the classics never go out of style.
Gwynne Shotwell herself of course wouldn't agree with this line of argument, go listen to interviews with her.
Shotwell makes no claim that she was driving force behind Falcon 1 or Falcon 9, she just took over company management when Falcon 9 was already started flying and Musk was in full control of Falcon 9 development.
As she herself said, its easy to sell a rocket that beats competition by a huge margin, has incredibly high reliability and a high launch rate.
The same goes for govenrment contracts, if you bid almost 40% lower because you just have better technology and better engineering processes, something Shotwell was never responsible for, you have a huge advantage.
Shotwell is of course great, a fantastic operator, and of course she was hand picked by Musk for that roll. He put here in position to manage day to day operations so he could focus on the most important engineering projects.
So even if your claim is true that Shotwell runs SpaceX, Musk would still get a lot of credit.
That makes no sense. This isn't some 4d chess move that requires grandiose speculation to understand. Elon made a huge mistake and is now floundering in a panic. I'm sure he thought David Sacks would come in with a bunch of brilliant ideas to fix the company, but as is almost always the case things are a lot more complicated in reality than sideline shit-talkers like Elon and Sacks make it out to be.
Because the reality is that he helped basically destroy the Russian space industry and 100s of millions that would have gone to Russia is now going to SpaceX. Not to mention that making human flights possible allowed the US to remove a major political problem of being depended on the Russians to operate ISS.
Calling them 'buddy buddy' because he doesn't believe the maximalist Ukraine position is the right one is a bit ridiculous?
And what are you referring to with the Saudis? The Saudis are the main funders behind Lucid, a car company that is basically directly targeting and attempting to challenging Tesla.
The position that war is bad and that reconquering some land isn't worth 10000s of people to die over. Most war in history end in negotiated peace treaty, that's just reality.
Its not helping them in Crimea. Communications have been cut off there.
If the Ukrainians can't trust their communication systems, then its worthless. Starlink was a big mistake, the USA should have never gifted it to the Ukrainians.
An alternate conspiracy is that what Musk is doing is working. He signals to the company that the era of "move fast and break things" has arrived, he creates a ton of drama and attention which may drive, he tests a personal theory about what would work, and he starts to build understanding about the limits of the business.
I have no idea what's really going on - but I'm interested in the results. I think 3-5 years will reveal whether this was a catastrophic mistake, a brilliant plan, or something in between. "Launch a new feature, observe the problems, throttle the new feature while you resolve the problems" doesn't seem obviously insane to me.
Twitter needs to generate roughly a billion dollars a year in additional cashflow just to service the debt Musk saddled it with. They already weren’t profitable, but let’s say that they were breakeven and that ad revenue would be sufficient to cover non-debt costs.
There’s absolutely no way that 100,000,000+ people are going to sign up for twitter blue; they would be exceptionally fortunate to get a tenth of that figure. His other ideas are chickenfeed, so how does he get to an extra billion in revenue? How does he do that when he seems to be actively antagonizing twitter’s only meaningful source of revenue?
I'm not saying that it will work or that this is a good plan or anything. I really have no idea. I'm saying that it might be part of a plan and one way to know is to wait and see if it works out.
If someone is playing a video game you've never played, and you see them mashing the controls in a random way, it's possible they have no idea what they're doing. If you wait a bit and watch you can see if they lose, which would validate the theory they didn't know what they were doing, or if they win - which would suggest they did know what they were doing.
I think we have already waited long enough with Twitter to conclude that the emperor, in this case, has no clothes.
Twitter isn't like SpaceX or Tesla: there aren't enormous government contracts, subsidies, or climate credits to prop up its finances. There is no plausible replacement for the advertising revenue his style of leadership is actively alienating, and there is a real risk that his strategy is exposing Twitter to enormous FTC sanctions given that they are already under a consent decree.
It is much more likely that he's deeply in over his head and floundering than it is that he has a master plan he can only execute by taking a blowtorch to Twitter's current business structure. How much worse does it have to get before that theory is validated?
It's been a week or two, hasn't it? How is that possibly long enough to arrive at a judgement. Twitter under Elon is just getting started and there are no quantifiable results yet. Reaching a conclusion now, before there is any real data, is unreasonable.
Suppose shedding 4k employees saves about a billion dollars a year, and the increased attention and activity brings in more users, and the increased users attract more advertisers? If Twitter Blue reaches 10 million subscribers there is another billion in revenue - and maybe more if you can more profitably sell ads targeted to people who pay for Twitter.
Again, I am not saying the above is what I think will happen. I genuinely have no idea. I'm saying the above seems at least like a plausible path that is still open to Twitter becoming stable and/or profitable. It's also possible that the chaos and losing so many employees will cause Twitter to break apart and crash - but we haven't seen that yet. Or that the place will become so toxic advertisers will refuse to advertise there and it will never be able to make money and die. Or many other negative possibilities.
It is simply premature to be writing the death certificate for a patient who is still alive and screaming.
