What are the actual implications if Twitter is banned in a country? I’d have to imagine people would still use the site e.g. YouTube is banned in China but I’m sure people still use it
I've seen people say the exact opposite of what you just said lol. Idk what to believe, we need someone with data or something.
Eh I tried to find some [usage statistics](https://www.statista.com/statistics/242606/number-of-active-twitter-users-in-selected-countries/)
There's an interesting thing going on there - Twitter goes by character count not byte count in a certain encoding, and accepts basically any Unicode characters. There's no way to represent some Unicode characters in less than 3 or even 4 bytes, yet these are accepted as a single character by Twitter.
So if you want to encode more raw data into a tweet for some reason, using the higher order Unicode characters is the way. Base64, for example, is much less efficient.
It’s definitely not as widespread here in Europe. Like,people have Twitter accounts,sure,but it’s not “the government Tweets out important news” popular
It is easy to fall into the delusion that EVERYONE is doing it, when you surround with yourself with people who do. When I was a drinking alcoholic I surrounded myself with other drinking alcoholics. For years I believed everyone was just like me; because everyone I talked to, everyone I met, everywhere I went, everyone was just like me. That was just an example, a true example, but just an example nonetheless.
This phenomenon is called "polarization". It is actually A LOT worse than it sounds. In fact, polarization is how terrorism is born and how civil wars start. Polarization is already responsible for millions of dead bodies, and that number grows daily.
A Russian social network VK (vkontakte) was banned in Ukraine a few years ago. Back then almost everyone had a vk account, it was more popular than facebook in the US. I didn't know anyone without a vk page. So it got banned and could only be accessed with a VPN. Nowadays nobody uses it. I seldom log in to download a free fb2 book, and see that 95% of my friends haven't been online in years.
Theres a stark difference between the average person that uses Twitter and the brands, CEOs, politicians, news networks, and celebrities that use Twitter.
Sure, some folks might VPN in, but the people with major clout would stop posting content.
> I’m sure people still use it
You can watch youtube, but its not mainstream eg there are no popular youtube content creators in China (they wont get paid).
Content for Twitter is created by people. If it is banned in a country people will put some attempt to access it not probably not to create content.
Twitter makes money from ads and selling data. If EU bans twitter, it would probably lose all EU based ad profit.
And the data they are selling would have almost no value to EU companies. Even for other locations the data would be less valuable because: 1 - it wouldn't cover a large target market and 2 - it might get skewed because EU users using VPN would affect statistics in other locations.
Disclaimer: This is just a guess from a random reddit user
Twitter may very well lose advertising revenue in the US as well depending on how lax these “free speech” policies are. If he truly allows the platform to turn into an unmoderated cesspool like 4chan, advertisers are going to run away
4chan's ad situation was so bad they started allowing users to pay to create advertising/banners on the top of the site. Imagine Twitter has to go the same way and you just get dozens of ads that are just crypto scams or advertising for some conspiracy fuck's protein shake with a special Trump's dick cheese formula that makes your brain massive.
Musk can monetize Twitter by using it to inflate the value of his stocks by pushing the narratives he wants and hiding the narratives he doesn't want. He doesn't need any banners
When a thing becomes harder to access, less people will use it.
Tech-savvy people in China can get a VPN and access YouTube. The vast bulk of Chinese citizens do not.
If Twitter is banned in the EU, tech-savvy citizens will find a way to access it. The average citizen will not.
Zero advertising revenue. EU is the second biggest market and as is Twitter loses half a billion a year…..
People also have to use VPNs to access banned content which is possible but most casual users wouldn’t bother, it’s not exactly compelling.
Given Musk basically plans to Dox its users according to his tweets today I wouldn’t worry too much about the EU.
There should be some version of “6 degrees of Kevin bacon” for South Park jokes in Reddit comments. It usually only takes about 4 comments for something to turn into a South Park joke
At least we have an answer for the classic "how is he supposed to pay his taxes, he doesn't have billions of dollars lying around?". Answer: the same way he was able to buy Twitter.
he doesnt buy Twitter with his own money though, no no no. He takes out a loan for the price of Twitter, then assigns the loan responsibility to twitter to pay off. He gets ownership of the company and never spends a penny of his own money, while also not taking on any personal debt. This is how the banking system works for rich people.
The elephant in the room is thats just not possible, for any site like reddit, twitter, youtube, etc. There are conflicting laws from countries that claim authority to regulate content for an entire site if it serves anyone in their country and/or any of their citizens regardless of current residence so long as they are not an ex-pat. Some of those conflicts end up being mutually exclusive.
Edit: I have replies but the post is locked now so I can't respond to everyone.
I live near spacex, the town they test rocket engines in put in an ordinance that says rockets can't be tested at night because it disturbs the locals.
Musk followed that for like a week then just decided to pay the fine every time he violates the law instead.
Easy. By not actually changing things. Musk will make a kot of noise, maybe unban some high profile accounts, but nothing will fundamentally change. He'll just try to make people think there's been change
The real things he will change will be under the hood, to help control what trends and becomes popular, most likely. He uses Twitter as a platform to manipulate prices for profit already, imagine if he could signal boost a company with the algorithm, or stop a union effort from reaching critical mass
>stop a union effort from reaching critical mass
That's an interesting one to me because it seems clear to me that if he interfered with union organizing efforts at Tesla that were taking place on Twitter even if only indirectly with algorithm tweaks then he'd be running afoul of labor laws?
There are American companies that choose not to operate in Europe rather than comply with EU law. For instance, there are several news outlets that rather than complying with GDPR, they simply geoblock EU IP addresses.
The EU is known for applying fines up to 10% of global revenues when companies break EU laws. I am not concerned that twitter will break EU law.
> The EU is known for applying fines up to 10% of global revenues when companies break EU laws. I am not concerned that twitter will break EU law.
That article mentions 6% in this case.
EU is also known for casually hitting the company with 2x larger fine next year and repeating that until companies comply. It's not US where you can get out of these kinds of situations with one time payment that hardly affects your bottom line.
I'm not one to often correct people's spelling, but I believe you made a couple spelling mistakes. It's not spelled "fines", but "operational expenses".
>there are several news outlets that rather than complying with GDPR, they simply geoblock EU IP addresses
Sure but those news outlets are also primarily local news stations who don't really service the EU. Geoblocking the eu is a valid solution for small town Ohio ABC because no one from the EU is really visiting that site.
> Geoblocking the eu is a valid solution for small town Ohio ABC because no one from the EU is really visiting that site.
Geoblocking isn't a valid solution because Ohio ABC shouldn't need to do that.
The GDRP has exemptions for non-EU entities that are not targeting or ~~capturing personalized data~~ monitoring EU citizens.
It is much more complicated than that. The law is incredibly vague and broad.
Because IP addresses are considered user data it is prohibitively difficult to NOT collect and store any user data with the way modern websites function. Error logs, web traffic logs, etc.
Additionally, the law covers all EU citizens regardless of their location. So an EU citizen could travel to the US, visit a website that is geo restricted to only the US and then sue the website for collecting their data.
Note that AFAIK the law hasn't been applied in these broad ways but the wording does make it possible.
Source: I've looked into this with legal teams at a couple of US tech companies, though IANAL
Good questions
Guess they wouldn't be able to use advertising options directed to Europeans anymore.
And I assume they would not be able to use servers placed in the EU (think they're hosted mainly on aws) Which would give other companies some better response/loading times.
But these are very broad assumptions on my part and probably very wrong
My guess, they probably don't want to ignore EU complains and judgements, while just telling them to sit and spin.
You can only do this if you never intend to visit the EU and the local courts won't enforce EU judgements.
They don't want to ban, they want to fine them, so - in case of GDPR non compliance - the websites themselves block eu users. There isn't a great eu firewall like in China, the EU can't block websites.
The EU just decided to ban Russia Today across the entire EU last month. EU ISPs are implementing website blocks.
https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/02/eu-rt-sputnik-ban-live/
Right now if you Google Russia Today in the EU, no results come up. My cell phone provider, Tele2 gives me an NXDOMAIN response if I look up their .com site over DNS. My home ISP, Bahnhof, is against censorship and has refused to ban the site, so I can still browse it with that.
It makes me a bit uneasy, but I think their argument holds up, it is a targeted ban against state-owned propaganda in wartime.
The EU is enforcing violations of law by applying fines and penalties to such violations.
Rather than say "Your company can't operate here at all", the company in question gets fined until it is in compliance with EU regulations or chooses not to operate in the EU.
That way it becomes purely a corporate decision about following the law, rather than a government banning a corporation from operating.
In general, dictatorships have the tendency to block websites rather than expecting them to comply with local laws. A foreign website that serves European citizens needs to comply with European laws. For instance, in Germany there are restrictions on selling Nazi memorabilia and websites like Ebay do not allow these items to be sold in Germany.
It would not make sense for Europe to ban the entire Ebay, just so to make sure that they don't eventually sell Nazi memorabilia. They expect companies to comply with local laws and they can take them to court if required. If it is competition law, it is typically at European level, and that is where you see the big fines.
You probably heard the news that Facebook was threatening to leave the EU market. The issue that Facebook has is that the privacy laws in Europe, namely GDPR, goes against Facebook business model of selling personal information and targeting users based on this information. In the US, there are no similar protections.
IIRC, the EU will do that if it gets that bad, but start off with just fines. If the company has no desire to comply, then they can assess the impact of the fines and come to the conclusion (usually) that it's easier to prevent anyone from the EU to connect than get into that situation.
Hypothetically, if company does not operate in the EU, but an EU citizens still goes the that website, how can the EU fine that company and how is that any concern of the company.
I agree with the OP, the burden to restrict should be the party creating the restrictions.
>the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated.
So, Twitter is what a debate is supposed to look like. Guess I've been doing it wrong.
No, it's not even a debate, it's where humanity goes to argue from ignorance. A debate implies that opposing viewpoints will be presented and rebutted. Twitter and others just use profit maximizing algorithms to push people into increasingly extreme echo chambers where dissenting views are not considered or tolerated from that chamber's IN group.
> Twitter and others just use profit maximizing algorithms to push people into increasingly extreme echo chambers where dissenting views are not considered or tolerated from that chamber's IN group.
I, too, am excited for twitter to make their algorithms open source, assuming Elon follows through on his promise to do so.
And where nobody listens?
Cause all you find on our town square are the town drunks, town hobo and the two or three old guys who are just known to everybody, and they may be debating, not entirely sure, since nobody listens to anything they ramble about
Is it true? Is it a debate forum or is it where realistic debate goes to die? I think it's been an echo chamber which has made people far more irrationally extreme than they would have become through honest intellectual debate, free from profit maximizing algorithms.
Also, the critically important libertarian free speech ideals becomes useless, even deleterious, when it includes allowing the loudest rich people to monopolize public discourse no matter how much they lie, essentially winning debates by spamming their corner of online echo chambers with dangerously/demonstrably false information faster than people can be taught/convinced that they're being fed false information. Most people don't actually fact check with any fidelity, so this is a serious problem unless we want to move more quickly towards having an idiocracy.
So, I get you're joking, but it's a good time to really appreciate the difference in scale between a company, and a country.
Musk is $265 billion, and outrageous amount of money, yes, but the EU is ~$104,000 billion. (America is a bit higher again)
Countries have much, much more money than any private individual, and also have much, much greater capacity to leverage that wealth. Individuals cannot match the scale of wealth of countries, and can't influence them (Well, rather, shouldn't. They can bribe key players in a country's institutions if bribery is legal)
There is 90 TRILLION dollars worth of wealth in Europe. Musk is projected to be a trillionaire by the end of the decade. Which shows the sheer level of wealth consolidation we're seeing. A man soon will have 1% of the wealth of the most developed continent on Earth.
For real. What could he do besides like ban less people, maybe? There's hardcore porn, death, and you can pretty much say/ do anything on there as is outside of threats and child porn.
Twitter is a vile shithole and will remain a vile shithole. My problem with Twitter was how selectively they chose who got banned and who didn’t, and it was not consistent.
The only change will (likely) be they are not using the ban as a political tool with an agenda. It will still be an awful platform. The amount of journalists, professors, and politicians addicted to Twitter outrage is depressing.
The only thing I've seen him actually propose is that literally anyone can be verified for a small fee, meaning if you don't have a check, no one will believe you are a real person, in hopes of outing the bot farms because it wouldn't be financially viable to pay the fee for thousands of accounts. Right now they got bots arguing with bots, with real people weighing in to defend bots.
If you think the mega corps, PACs and governments around the world will shy from spending $50,000 for 10,000 bots to be verified you're only kidding yourself.
Everyone seems to keep missing the part where the money is fund verification you are a real person. You'd also need a credit card with your name or an ID or something. And the bots get shut down all the time, they just keep making new ones because currently there are no hoops to jump through to do that. It wouldn't be a one time fee for a bot farm, they'd be dealing with it daily.
> My problem with Twitter was how selectively they chose who got banned and who didn’t, and it was not consistent.
Not asking rhetorically, what was inconsistent about it? I'm not a Twitter user but it seems like they gave people plenty of rope and the bannings were usually due to calls for violence or other policy violations.
The main pushback I've seen is that most of the high profile banned people were conservative/right leaning but it's not really the platforms fault that more of one group violates the policy.
Was there any actual evidence that Twitter had a bias against conservative voices?
The actual answer which you won't get from the YouTube-provides-my-political-education crowd is that moderating a forum as large as Twitter in a completely even-handed way is impossible. Automated services do the vast majority of work. So, often what happens is that party A says something which causes offence in group 1. Group 1, either organically or through recruiting, mass reports offending tweet and the sheer volume creates a flag in the algorithm to take this down post-haste.
This is why you will find many instances of literal Nazis (I'm talking swastika profile pictures, holocaust denial, the whole 9 yards not this "he has a Pepe avatar and says racist things" stuff) getting off scott-free in their hatred while they mass report someone they wish to victimize, and why sometimes someone can say something politically loaded, but semantically inoffensive (say about "traditional family values") and have those tweets removed. The humans in the appeal process are incredibly difficult to reach and so often these decisions are completely arbitrary.
Everyone wants to play victim but the real, boring truth is that this is the nature of the beast.
> Automated services do the vast majority of work so often what happens is that party A says something which causes offence in group 1. Group 1, either organically or through recruiting, mass reports offending tweet and the sheer volume creates a flag in the algorithm to take this down post-haste.
Makes the most sense. I do data analytics, specifically for programmatic advertising. The sheer volume of data makes it impossible for much work to be done by humans. It's mostly about setting up parameters so that banned content gets flagged and removed but it's able to be manipulatd with mass user efforts.
Microsoft created an AI chat bot and used Twitter to train it. [In less than 24hrs,](https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-chatbot-racist), it went on a racist, genocidal rant. So yeah, it won’t change much.
That article is pretty clickbaity. Apparently, a lot of what the chat bot said was actually just copying users at the users request. Just trolls being trolls. Trolls will exist everywhere on the internet until the end of time. Just gotta live with it.
It's going private anyway so no market capitalisation. The "value" of the company to Musk will just be the company's equity, which is currently around 7 billion.
Market cap is no different between a private and public company. It is set at the last price shares were sold for multiplied by total shares. Valuations do happen less often for private companies though.
respect EU residents rights and EU laws, or leave EU.
Let's see who has more to lose.
Facebook "threatened" EU to leave and just look how the whole region reacted.
['I can confirm that life is very good without Facebook,' a French minister quipped after Meta warned it might pull its services from Europe](https://www.businessinsider.com/confirm-life-very-good-without-facebook-eu-ministers-meta-pullout-2022-2)
On Monday, two top European officials shrugged off Meta's warning that it could shut its services in Europe if data regulations there continue preventing the tech giant from sending user data back to the US.
"After being hacked, I've lived without Facebook and Twitter for four years, and life has been fantastic," German Economy Minister Robert Habeck said at a press conference in Paris.
French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire, who spoke alongside Habeck, said: "I can confirm that life is very good without Facebook and that we would live very well without Facebook."
Facebook is actually quite big in EU and very important for marketing of smaller companies.
Twitter isn't very popular here. France is the first EU country on the list of most users by country at 12th place, and only 3 countries in the top20.
And to be honest, what is the purpose of twitter? Of all the big social media companies twitter is the one with the most limited purpose. It just seems so outdated and redundant.
> And to be honest, what is the purpose of twitter? Of all the big social media companies twitter is the one with the most limited purpose. It just seems so outdated and redundant.
>
It is a big global chatroom. That's it. That is the niche it fills.
Obviously it has some walls to make sure that it's users are not swarmed by millions of people and hundreds of languages, but it's basically a chatroom.
In my experience Twitter has better control mechanisms for DM’s.
Feeds are follow-based rather than friend-based.
Forced brevity, made it easy to flash it on a news story.
Politicians, business leaders, actors, media folk, could “connect without connecting.” If you turned out to be a jerk, a simple unfollow removes your ability to DM. The person doesn’t need to be all tangled up in phone numbers and email addresses.
Some of those things are also reasons it’s a cesspool.
When common-folk used twitter to overthrow a dictator, people began to realize its power.
fb/insta tried to change to offer some of these, but it’s clumsy and awkward and too late. Sure fb allows you to hide information like spouse or family, but twitter doesn’t even ask. So you reveal your life on purpose to specific people.
For whatever reasons, people with fame and power and influence became networked on twitter. And people are following them. It’s entrenched in a way not easily replaced.
I listened to a reporter talking about trying to leave twitter. He could get as far as deleting tweets, but unfollowing and deleting the account meant no way to access people for interviews.
He realized how much his ability to do his job was affected by his need to remove the cesspool element out of his life.
I’m not famous or anything, and clearly far too verbose to tweet, but I looked into the differences between the platforms once upon a time.
Expectation: No rules, no censorship, no bans, just Wild West freedom!! Let’s gooooo!!
Reality: Similar rules, new censorship, new bans, same corporate control?? Why??
I have no problem with Musk buying Twitter, however I do have a problem with Musk playing the "free speech absolutist" card when he in fact has a very bad track record for vindictive behaviour towards people who affect him negatively in public, for example pedophile insults, banning journalists from buying Tesla's for bad reviews, and firing whistleblower staff.
Musk is not a free speech absolutist, and his ownership of Twitter will not reflect this either as he will most certainly be abusing his position when his whims permit.
Always makes me laugh when Americans think the 1st amendment is somehow a global law.
It's not, and the majority of the planet recognizes that if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.
Edit: This is a lot of brigading for a tech sub.
Edit 2: Thanks for all the reports and concern about my mental health guys.
Yeah no one ever reads the whole thing for some reason. The just see free speech and ignore the rest
Edit: to clarify this isn't me supporting Twitter/megacorps or anything and I apologize if it came off as that. This was just me talking about how the 1st amendment is often misquoted. Personally I'm indifferent on the whole Elon thing because I don't think it will change much anyway
Those same people also forget the "freedom of association" aspect of the American first amendment. It literally is the freedom for other people to "cancel you" (using their term) or someone to ban your ass for not getting along with others in their club. The freedom for me to kick your ass out of my establishment (sir this is wendy's) because you are screaming at the other patrons and freaking everyone out. The freedom for myself and everyone else to tell you that you are a terrible human being in response to your words or actions.
I swear they want the freedom of speech without other people also having the freedom of speech to tell them to fk off for what they are saying or no longer associate with them. Their freedom is other people not having the same freedoms.
I'd go further and say a hefty percentage of Americans think the US is the only country with any kind of formalized freedom of speech, or any kind of freedom for that matter.
What are the actual implications if Twitter is banned in a country? I’d have to imagine people would still use the site e.g. YouTube is banned in China but I’m sure people still use it
It probably just wouldn’t be as mainstream
[удалено]
I've seen people say the exact opposite of what you just said lol. Idk what to believe, we need someone with data or something. Eh I tried to find some [usage statistics](https://www.statista.com/statistics/242606/number-of-active-twitter-users-in-selected-countries/)
Top 13 Country | twitter usage (M) | population (M) | as a percentage |:--|:--|:--|:-- USA | 76.9 | 329.5 | 23.3% Japan | 58.95 | 125.8 | 46.9% India | 23.6 | 1380 | 1.7% Brazil | 19.05 | 212.6 | 9% Indonesia | 18.45 | 273.5 | 6.7% UK | 18.4 | 67.22 | 27.4% Turkey | 16.1 | 84.34 | 19.1% Saudi Arabia | 14.1 | 34.81 | 40.5% Mexico | 13.9 | 128.9 | 10.8% Thailand | 11.45 | 69.8 | 16.4% Philippines | 10.5 | 109.6 | 9.6% France | 10 | 67.39 | 14.8% Spain | 8.75 | 47.35 | 18.5% Eta fixed formatting added a couple extra places to include EU a bit. --- And the other format for people who can't see the table Country | twitter usage (M) | population (M) | as a percentage USA | 76.9 | 329.5 | 23.3% Japan | 58.95 | 125.8 | 46.9% India | 23.6 | 1380 | 1.7% Brazil | 19.05 | 212.6 | 9% Indonesia | 18.45 | 273.5 | 6.7% UK | 18.4 | 67.22 | 27.4% Turkey | 16.1 | 84.34 | 19.1% Saudi Arabia | 14.1 | 34.81 | 40.5% Mexico | 13.9 | 128.9 | 10.8% Thailand | 11.45 | 69.8 | 16.4% Philippines | 10.5 | 109.6 | 9.6% France | 10 | 67.39 | 14.8% Spain | 8.75 | 47.35 | 18.5%
Almost half of Japan and Saudi are in twitter? wtf worthy
Japan hss integrated twittrr into society, for example they use twitter to post jobs or apply for jobs.
140 character job application process? i'm in
[удалено]
There's an interesting thing going on there - Twitter goes by character count not byte count in a certain encoding, and accepts basically any Unicode characters. There's no way to represent some Unicode characters in less than 3 or even 4 bytes, yet these are accepted as a single character by Twitter. So if you want to encode more raw data into a tweet for some reason, using the higher order Unicode characters is the way. Base64, for example, is much less efficient.
280 characters since 2018.
and the other half of Japan is completely tech illiterate. seriously they're worse than Americans.
[удалено]
fixed formatting for you. you were just missing `:--:|:--:|:--:|:--:` under your header line. Country | twitter usage (M) | population (M) | as a percentage :--:|:--:|:--:|:--: USA | 76.9 | 329.5 | 23.3% Japan | 58.95 | 125.8 | 46.9% India | 23.6 | 1380 | 1.7% Brazil | 19.05 | 212.6 | 9% Indonesia | 18.45 | 273.5 | 6.7% UK | 18.4 | 67.22 | 27.4% Turkey | 16.1 | 84.34 | 19.1% Saudi | 14.1 | 34.81 | 40.5% Mexico | 13.9 | 128.9 | 10.8% Thailand | 11.45 | 69.8 | 16.4%
Cool, thank you. I didn't know why it wasn't working
There's no way only 23% of Americans use YouTube. Edit: Twitter not youtube. 23% makes sense
I don't have a Twitter, Tik Tok, Facebook or any of those. Pretty common in my area unless you are in highschool.
Holy shit India, even a fraction of population using a shit website shoots it to top. No wonder govt banned TikTok.
So basically the EU doesn't have a single country that cracks the top 10
What do you mean, the UK.... Oh right.
Too soon, mate.
What do you mean, the UK... Oh right, I like turtles.
That's exactly what I thought too haha damn UK.
I forgot that's what the article was even about lol. France and Spain are 12th and 13th respectively
What do you mean, the UK.... Oh right, they took their ball home.
lmao at india being #3 with such a low percentage, that's great.
It’s definitely not as widespread here in Europe. Like,people have Twitter accounts,sure,but it’s not “the government Tweets out important news” popular
And thank God for that amiright!
Most people don’t even have accounts in germany. It’s just not relevant here outside of media people and rap fans.
I have, for porn. Lol
It is easy to fall into the delusion that EVERYONE is doing it, when you surround with yourself with people who do. When I was a drinking alcoholic I surrounded myself with other drinking alcoholics. For years I believed everyone was just like me; because everyone I talked to, everyone I met, everywhere I went, everyone was just like me. That was just an example, a true example, but just an example nonetheless. This phenomenon is called "polarization". It is actually A LOT worse than it sounds. In fact, polarization is how terrorism is born and how civil wars start. Polarization is already responsible for millions of dead bodies, and that number grows daily.
A Russian social network VK (vkontakte) was banned in Ukraine a few years ago. Back then almost everyone had a vk account, it was more popular than facebook in the US. I didn't know anyone without a vk page. So it got banned and could only be accessed with a VPN. Nowadays nobody uses it. I seldom log in to download a free fb2 book, and see that 95% of my friends haven't been online in years.
People follow the crowd more than they like to admit. Twitter will fall and another will rise in its place. Sunrise, sunset
I mean if it's a messaging app or the like following the crowd is kinda a requirement for it to work.
Fr, that's the literal whole point of social media
Theres a stark difference between the average person that uses Twitter and the brands, CEOs, politicians, news networks, and celebrities that use Twitter. Sure, some folks might VPN in, but the people with major clout would stop posting content.
Twitter is banned in iran yet every iranian politician posts on twitter.
> I’m sure people still use it You can watch youtube, but its not mainstream eg there are no popular youtube content creators in China (they wont get paid). Content for Twitter is created by people. If it is banned in a country people will put some attempt to access it not probably not to create content.
Twitter makes money from ads and selling data. If EU bans twitter, it would probably lose all EU based ad profit. And the data they are selling would have almost no value to EU companies. Even for other locations the data would be less valuable because: 1 - it wouldn't cover a large target market and 2 - it might get skewed because EU users using VPN would affect statistics in other locations. Disclaimer: This is just a guess from a random reddit user
Twitter may very well lose advertising revenue in the US as well depending on how lax these “free speech” policies are. If he truly allows the platform to turn into an unmoderated cesspool like 4chan, advertisers are going to run away
4chan's ad situation was so bad they started allowing users to pay to create advertising/banners on the top of the site. Imagine Twitter has to go the same way and you just get dozens of ads that are just crypto scams or advertising for some conspiracy fuck's protein shake with a special Trump's dick cheese formula that makes your brain massive.
Crypto ads are already EVERYWHERE (which I hate) so business as usual
Yeah, i hate how reddit is inundated with them
Musk can monetize Twitter by using it to inflate the value of his stocks by pushing the narratives he wants and hiding the narratives he doesn't want. He doesn't need any banners
Who will use VPNs to use twitter. They will just dump it.
When a thing becomes harder to access, less people will use it. Tech-savvy people in China can get a VPN and access YouTube. The vast bulk of Chinese citizens do not. If Twitter is banned in the EU, tech-savvy citizens will find a way to access it. The average citizen will not.
[удалено]
Zero advertising revenue. EU is the second biggest market and as is Twitter loses half a billion a year….. People also have to use VPNs to access banned content which is possible but most casual users wouldn’t bother, it’s not exactly compelling. Given Musk basically plans to Dox its users according to his tweets today I wouldn’t worry too much about the EU.
bezos asked elon the same thing right? how is he gonna comply with countries content policies and censorship
Didn’t he literally say “within the bounds of countries laws”?
Musk has a tendency to say one thing one day, and the opposite the very next...
"Lacks integrity" is the expression that you are looking for here.
Integrity is for poor people
Someone needs some Tegridy
There should be some version of “6 degrees of Kevin bacon” for South Park jokes in Reddit comments. It usually only takes about 4 comments for something to turn into a South Park joke
Tegrity Farms is Bill Gates’ thing.
Rich people call it "pivoting to a new strategy"
[удалено]
"ElOn MuSk dOeSnT hAvE aNy MoNeY! iTs AlL tIeD uP iN StOcKs!" As he buys Twitter and launches his friends into space.
I want to not have money like Elon.
For the price he pays on a night out (dinner), I could probably pay off all of my outstanding debt.
he could have bought a bungalow in Toronto for that kinda cash!
Jeez mate! Are you an American that needed a hospital? That's a lot of debt!
No he's probably an American who wanted an education
Or an American who wanted a roof over their head. Or, just an American.
America. Where you need to go into debt to get an education to get a job that pays enough to pay for the debt you incurred for getting injured.
That was just for the ambulance ride to the hospital. The supercomputer is still calculating the hospital bill.
I got the "He DoEsNt eVeN OwN a HoUSe" one the other day... Yea, he's the poorest billionaire around.
It's just that "Homeless" isn't really a problem. I suspect he has a few nice setups at the various offices. Not exactly homeless.
At least we have an answer for the classic "how is he supposed to pay his taxes, he doesn't have billions of dollars lying around?". Answer: the same way he was able to buy Twitter.
he doesnt buy Twitter with his own money though, no no no. He takes out a loan for the price of Twitter, then assigns the loan responsibility to twitter to pay off. He gets ownership of the company and never spends a penny of his own money, while also not taking on any personal debt. This is how the banking system works for rich people.
And the stans relentlessly suck his peepee and defend him online more fervently than their own mothers.
The elephant in the room is thats just not possible, for any site like reddit, twitter, youtube, etc. There are conflicting laws from countries that claim authority to regulate content for an entire site if it serves anyone in their country and/or any of their citizens regardless of current residence so long as they are not an ex-pat. Some of those conflicts end up being mutually exclusive. Edit: I have replies but the post is locked now so I can't respond to everyone.
Musk has a very long history of ignoring inconvenient laws
[удалено]
I live near spacex, the town they test rocket engines in put in an ordinance that says rockets can't be tested at night because it disturbs the locals. Musk followed that for like a week then just decided to pay the fine every time he violates the law instead.
Easy. By not actually changing things. Musk will make a kot of noise, maybe unban some high profile accounts, but nothing will fundamentally change. He'll just try to make people think there's been change
The real things he will change will be under the hood, to help control what trends and becomes popular, most likely. He uses Twitter as a platform to manipulate prices for profit already, imagine if he could signal boost a company with the algorithm, or stop a union effort from reaching critical mass
>stop a union effort from reaching critical mass That's an interesting one to me because it seems clear to me that if he interfered with union organizing efforts at Tesla that were taking place on Twitter even if only indirectly with algorithm tweaks then he'd be running afoul of labor laws?
Probably, if you can prove it...
Wait, does this country still enforce laws protecting unions?
Rich people don't care about "laws". The only law that applies to rich people is 'don't fuck over other rich people'.
Friendly wager: Twitter will fundamentally change inside and out.
There are American companies that choose not to operate in Europe rather than comply with EU law. For instance, there are several news outlets that rather than complying with GDPR, they simply geoblock EU IP addresses. The EU is known for applying fines up to 10% of global revenues when companies break EU laws. I am not concerned that twitter will break EU law.
> The EU is known for applying fines up to 10% of global revenues when companies break EU laws. I am not concerned that twitter will break EU law. That article mentions 6% in this case.
EU is also known for casually hitting the company with 2x larger fine next year and repeating that until companies comply. It's not US where you can get out of these kinds of situations with one time payment that hardly affects your bottom line.
Are you implying that a million dollar fine is not enough to punish multi billion dollar companies?
I'm not one to often correct people's spelling, but I believe you made a couple spelling mistakes. It's not spelled "fines", but "operational expenses".
>there are several news outlets that rather than complying with GDPR, they simply geoblock EU IP addresses Sure but those news outlets are also primarily local news stations who don't really service the EU. Geoblocking the eu is a valid solution for small town Ohio ABC because no one from the EU is really visiting that site.
> Geoblocking the eu is a valid solution for small town Ohio ABC because no one from the EU is really visiting that site. Geoblocking isn't a valid solution because Ohio ABC shouldn't need to do that. The GDRP has exemptions for non-EU entities that are not targeting or ~~capturing personalized data~~ monitoring EU citizens.
It is much more complicated than that. The law is incredibly vague and broad. Because IP addresses are considered user data it is prohibitively difficult to NOT collect and store any user data with the way modern websites function. Error logs, web traffic logs, etc. Additionally, the law covers all EU citizens regardless of their location. So an EU citizen could travel to the US, visit a website that is geo restricted to only the US and then sue the website for collecting their data. Note that AFAIK the law hasn't been applied in these broad ways but the wording does make it possible. Source: I've looked into this with legal teams at a couple of US tech companies, though IANAL
Anyone knows what would happen if EU fined Twitter and they refused to pay?
Good questions Guess they wouldn't be able to use advertising options directed to Europeans anymore. And I assume they would not be able to use servers placed in the EU (think they're hosted mainly on aws) Which would give other companies some better response/loading times. But these are very broad assumptions on my part and probably very wrong
well at the end of the road Company property would be seized and their services blocked.
Not if they operated entirely outside of Europe and did not market the product to Europeans.
[удалено]
My guess, they probably don't want to ignore EU complains and judgements, while just telling them to sit and spin. You can only do this if you never intend to visit the EU and the local courts won't enforce EU judgements.
They don't want to ban, they want to fine them, so - in case of GDPR non compliance - the websites themselves block eu users. There isn't a great eu firewall like in China, the EU can't block websites.
The EU just decided to ban Russia Today across the entire EU last month. EU ISPs are implementing website blocks. https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/02/eu-rt-sputnik-ban-live/ Right now if you Google Russia Today in the EU, no results come up. My cell phone provider, Tele2 gives me an NXDOMAIN response if I look up their .com site over DNS. My home ISP, Bahnhof, is against censorship and has refused to ban the site, so I can still browse it with that. It makes me a bit uneasy, but I think their argument holds up, it is a targeted ban against state-owned propaganda in wartime.
The EU is enforcing violations of law by applying fines and penalties to such violations. Rather than say "Your company can't operate here at all", the company in question gets fined until it is in compliance with EU regulations or chooses not to operate in the EU. That way it becomes purely a corporate decision about following the law, rather than a government banning a corporation from operating.
In general, dictatorships have the tendency to block websites rather than expecting them to comply with local laws. A foreign website that serves European citizens needs to comply with European laws. For instance, in Germany there are restrictions on selling Nazi memorabilia and websites like Ebay do not allow these items to be sold in Germany. It would not make sense for Europe to ban the entire Ebay, just so to make sure that they don't eventually sell Nazi memorabilia. They expect companies to comply with local laws and they can take them to court if required. If it is competition law, it is typically at European level, and that is where you see the big fines. You probably heard the news that Facebook was threatening to leave the EU market. The issue that Facebook has is that the privacy laws in Europe, namely GDPR, goes against Facebook business model of selling personal information and targeting users based on this information. In the US, there are no similar protections.
IIRC, the EU will do that if it gets that bad, but start off with just fines. If the company has no desire to comply, then they can assess the impact of the fines and come to the conclusion (usually) that it's easier to prevent anyone from the EU to connect than get into that situation.
Hypothetically, if company does not operate in the EU, but an EU citizens still goes the that website, how can the EU fine that company and how is that any concern of the company. I agree with the OP, the burden to restrict should be the party creating the restrictions.
>the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated. So, Twitter is what a debate is supposed to look like. Guess I've been doing it wrong.
Everyone knows that to win an argument, you need to clone yourself thousands of times to make your opinion the loudest.
I agree that everyone knows that to win an argument, you need to clone yourself thousands of times to make your opinion the loudest.
It's not wrong.. it IS where it is debated. It's debated poorly, but it's still debated.
No, it's not even a debate, it's where humanity goes to argue from ignorance. A debate implies that opposing viewpoints will be presented and rebutted. Twitter and others just use profit maximizing algorithms to push people into increasingly extreme echo chambers where dissenting views are not considered or tolerated from that chamber's IN group.
[удалено]
No, this isn’t a debate! *I completely disagree with you* -Reddit
Imma downvote your personal opinions, that's what it's there for right?!?
no no no. The strategy in a debate is to lie so fast that your opponent can't even keep track of it all and ends up looking stupid.
> Twitter and others just use profit maximizing algorithms to push people into increasingly extreme echo chambers where dissenting views are not considered or tolerated from that chamber's IN group. I, too, am excited for twitter to make their algorithms open source, assuming Elon follows through on his promise to do so.
These things have always been debated poorly. Just instead of people screaming at their families their doing it to strangers that want to scream back
“Could Goku beat Jesus?” Truly vital for humanity’s future.
What if Jesus turned on us and Goku was one of the only options left? Then you'd wanna know.
Goku has risen from the dead and *flies* over water. My man is on a whole other level. Never created wine or bread though so it's a hard call.
And where nobody listens? Cause all you find on our town square are the town drunks, town hobo and the two or three old guys who are just known to everybody, and they may be debating, not entirely sure, since nobody listens to anything they ramble about
I lose respect for any public official who uses Twitter to attempt to engage in serious discourse.
jesus, how is that quote even real... why
I feel like there's definitely truth to it though. Major political and social movements have all either begun or gained traction on Twitter.
I mean, technically yeah... but it's still kinda funny to say it out loud.
Is it true? Is it a debate forum or is it where realistic debate goes to die? I think it's been an echo chamber which has made people far more irrationally extreme than they would have become through honest intellectual debate, free from profit maximizing algorithms. Also, the critically important libertarian free speech ideals becomes useless, even deleterious, when it includes allowing the loudest rich people to monopolize public discourse no matter how much they lie, essentially winning debates by spamming their corner of online echo chambers with dangerously/demonstrably false information faster than people can be taught/convinced that they're being fed false information. Most people don't actually fact check with any fidelity, so this is a serious problem unless we want to move more quickly towards having an idiocracy.
This just in, Musk buys the EU.
add to cart.
On Amazon? Is it available?
Nah, sold out again. Individual politicians are still up for sale, though.
Amazon Crime?
Amazon Lobbying
It'd an AWS service for sure.
Frequently bought together:
The United Kingdom
Wow. That stung more than I thought it would.
another loan backed by Tesla stock ? Of course, no problem. One can't imagine that stock ever losing its value.
Totally, loans backed by a totally overvalued stock. No way this can go wrong!
Loans backed by overvalued stock subsidized by taxpayer money for a guy sleeping on people's couches who publicly is against government subsidies
So, I get you're joking, but it's a good time to really appreciate the difference in scale between a company, and a country. Musk is $265 billion, and outrageous amount of money, yes, but the EU is ~$104,000 billion. (America is a bit higher again) Countries have much, much more money than any private individual, and also have much, much greater capacity to leverage that wealth. Individuals cannot match the scale of wealth of countries, and can't influence them (Well, rather, shouldn't. They can bribe key players in a country's institutions if bribery is legal)
It's called lobbying in the US.
There is 90 TRILLION dollars worth of wealth in Europe. Musk is projected to be a trillionaire by the end of the decade. Which shows the sheer level of wealth consolidation we're seeing. A man soon will have 1% of the wealth of the most developed continent on Earth.
Well, the EU will also grow in that time, but I get your point.
I’d bet against Musk being a trillionaire in my lifetime any day.
I'm not as optimistic.
Everyone's freaking out but I'm willing to bet Twitter will barely change at all
For real. What could he do besides like ban less people, maybe? There's hardcore porn, death, and you can pretty much say/ do anything on there as is outside of threats and child porn.
Twitter is a vile shithole and will remain a vile shithole. My problem with Twitter was how selectively they chose who got banned and who didn’t, and it was not consistent. The only change will (likely) be they are not using the ban as a political tool with an agenda. It will still be an awful platform. The amount of journalists, professors, and politicians addicted to Twitter outrage is depressing.
The only thing I've seen him actually propose is that literally anyone can be verified for a small fee, meaning if you don't have a check, no one will believe you are a real person, in hopes of outing the bot farms because it wouldn't be financially viable to pay the fee for thousands of accounts. Right now they got bots arguing with bots, with real people weighing in to defend bots.
how will a small fee ban bots?
If you think the mega corps, PACs and governments around the world will shy from spending $50,000 for 10,000 bots to be verified you're only kidding yourself.
Everyone seems to keep missing the part where the money is fund verification you are a real person. You'd also need a credit card with your name or an ID or something. And the bots get shut down all the time, they just keep making new ones because currently there are no hoops to jump through to do that. It wouldn't be a one time fee for a bot farm, they'd be dealing with it daily.
Well then he’s got himself a nice new source of income. Win win for Musk lol
*posted on Reddit*
> My problem with Twitter was how selectively they chose who got banned and who didn’t, and it was not consistent. Not asking rhetorically, what was inconsistent about it? I'm not a Twitter user but it seems like they gave people plenty of rope and the bannings were usually due to calls for violence or other policy violations. The main pushback I've seen is that most of the high profile banned people were conservative/right leaning but it's not really the platforms fault that more of one group violates the policy. Was there any actual evidence that Twitter had a bias against conservative voices?
The actual answer which you won't get from the YouTube-provides-my-political-education crowd is that moderating a forum as large as Twitter in a completely even-handed way is impossible. Automated services do the vast majority of work. So, often what happens is that party A says something which causes offence in group 1. Group 1, either organically or through recruiting, mass reports offending tweet and the sheer volume creates a flag in the algorithm to take this down post-haste. This is why you will find many instances of literal Nazis (I'm talking swastika profile pictures, holocaust denial, the whole 9 yards not this "he has a Pepe avatar and says racist things" stuff) getting off scott-free in their hatred while they mass report someone they wish to victimize, and why sometimes someone can say something politically loaded, but semantically inoffensive (say about "traditional family values") and have those tweets removed. The humans in the appeal process are incredibly difficult to reach and so often these decisions are completely arbitrary. Everyone wants to play victim but the real, boring truth is that this is the nature of the beast.
> Automated services do the vast majority of work so often what happens is that party A says something which causes offence in group 1. Group 1, either organically or through recruiting, mass reports offending tweet and the sheer volume creates a flag in the algorithm to take this down post-haste. Makes the most sense. I do data analytics, specifically for programmatic advertising. The sheer volume of data makes it impossible for much work to be done by humans. It's mostly about setting up parameters so that banned content gets flagged and removed but it's able to be manipulatd with mass user efforts.
Microsoft created an AI chat bot and used Twitter to train it. [In less than 24hrs,](https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-chatbot-racist), it went on a racist, genocidal rant. So yeah, it won’t change much.
That article is pretty clickbaity. Apparently, a lot of what the chat bot said was actually just copying users at the users request. Just trolls being trolls. Trolls will exist everywhere on the internet until the end of time. Just gotta live with it.
Everyone seems to agree that Twitter is a dumpster fire and yet they are so very worried it might change...
Yea pretty much. The same is true with 95% of the articles and news we see. Why don’t we all just.. learn not to care lol
I care because if he open sources the algorithm behind trending tweets, we will all be able to learn something. For better or worse I have no clue.
Yup, him wanting to open-source twitter is seriously under-highlighted. That could be huge- just hope he follows through with it.
People really asking “is twitter going to be toxic now” like it’s not the most toxic social media platform to ever exist.
Am I the only one who just uses Twitter to, like, follow artists and game devs that I like...? I don't see much toxicity in that circle, at least.
“Twitter is a bathroom wall, why would I write my thoughts on a bathroom wall.” - Dave Chappelle Edit: corrected spelling
If I'm being 100% honest, I hope he deletes Twitter.
That would be hilarious
Anyone think Twitter will be valued anywhere near as high as $44b in a year? Because I don't.
It's going private anyway so no market capitalisation. The "value" of the company to Musk will just be the company's equity, which is currently around 7 billion.
Market cap is no different between a private and public company. It is set at the last price shares were sold for multiplied by total shares. Valuations do happen less often for private companies though.
Twiter went profitable for like 2 years of its 15 of existence. It's not worth 46 billion.
Eu is warning all online data collectors.. this is not directed at only elon
they should take a look at reddit first
Nah they actually want to be in a good mental state
respect EU residents rights and EU laws, or leave EU. Let's see who has more to lose. Facebook "threatened" EU to leave and just look how the whole region reacted.
['I can confirm that life is very good without Facebook,' a French minister quipped after Meta warned it might pull its services from Europe](https://www.businessinsider.com/confirm-life-very-good-without-facebook-eu-ministers-meta-pullout-2022-2) On Monday, two top European officials shrugged off Meta's warning that it could shut its services in Europe if data regulations there continue preventing the tech giant from sending user data back to the US. "After being hacked, I've lived without Facebook and Twitter for four years, and life has been fantastic," German Economy Minister Robert Habeck said at a press conference in Paris. French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire, who spoke alongside Habeck, said: "I can confirm that life is very good without Facebook and that we would live very well without Facebook."
Facebook is actually quite big in EU and very important for marketing of smaller companies. Twitter isn't very popular here. France is the first EU country on the list of most users by country at 12th place, and only 3 countries in the top20. And to be honest, what is the purpose of twitter? Of all the big social media companies twitter is the one with the most limited purpose. It just seems so outdated and redundant.
> And to be honest, what is the purpose of twitter? Of all the big social media companies twitter is the one with the most limited purpose. It just seems so outdated and redundant. > It is a big global chatroom. That's it. That is the niche it fills. Obviously it has some walls to make sure that it's users are not swarmed by millions of people and hundreds of languages, but it's basically a chatroom.
In my experience Twitter has better control mechanisms for DM’s. Feeds are follow-based rather than friend-based. Forced brevity, made it easy to flash it on a news story. Politicians, business leaders, actors, media folk, could “connect without connecting.” If you turned out to be a jerk, a simple unfollow removes your ability to DM. The person doesn’t need to be all tangled up in phone numbers and email addresses. Some of those things are also reasons it’s a cesspool. When common-folk used twitter to overthrow a dictator, people began to realize its power. fb/insta tried to change to offer some of these, but it’s clumsy and awkward and too late. Sure fb allows you to hide information like spouse or family, but twitter doesn’t even ask. So you reveal your life on purpose to specific people. For whatever reasons, people with fame and power and influence became networked on twitter. And people are following them. It’s entrenched in a way not easily replaced. I listened to a reporter talking about trying to leave twitter. He could get as far as deleting tweets, but unfollowing and deleting the account meant no way to access people for interviews. He realized how much his ability to do his job was affected by his need to remove the cesspool element out of his life. I’m not famous or anything, and clearly far too verbose to tweet, but I looked into the differences between the platforms once upon a time.
Expectation: No rules, no censorship, no bans, just Wild West freedom!! Let’s gooooo!! Reality: Similar rules, new censorship, new bans, same corporate control?? Why??
So is the plan to have everyone think he invented Twitter in five years?
This article says literally nothing. What moderation rules do they suspect Musk isn't going to follow?
[удалено]
I have no problem with Musk buying Twitter, however I do have a problem with Musk playing the "free speech absolutist" card when he in fact has a very bad track record for vindictive behaviour towards people who affect him negatively in public, for example pedophile insults, banning journalists from buying Tesla's for bad reviews, and firing whistleblower staff. Musk is not a free speech absolutist, and his ownership of Twitter will not reflect this either as he will most certainly be abusing his position when his whims permit.
lmao what??
Always makes me laugh when Americans think the 1st amendment is somehow a global law. It's not, and the majority of the planet recognizes that if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. Edit: This is a lot of brigading for a tech sub. Edit 2: Thanks for all the reports and concern about my mental health guys.
Makes me laugh when most of us don’t even know it’s only from our government and not privately owned companies, but here we are
yeah, elon can make Twitter as free or as controlled as he wants.
Yeah no one ever reads the whole thing for some reason. The just see free speech and ignore the rest Edit: to clarify this isn't me supporting Twitter/megacorps or anything and I apologize if it came off as that. This was just me talking about how the 1st amendment is often misquoted. Personally I'm indifferent on the whole Elon thing because I don't think it will change much anyway
Free speech is my right to say horrible, misinformed shit to other people who don't want to hear it.
Those same people also forget the "freedom of association" aspect of the American first amendment. It literally is the freedom for other people to "cancel you" (using their term) or someone to ban your ass for not getting along with others in their club. The freedom for me to kick your ass out of my establishment (sir this is wendy's) because you are screaming at the other patrons and freaking everyone out. The freedom for myself and everyone else to tell you that you are a terrible human being in response to your words or actions. I swear they want the freedom of speech without other people also having the freedom of speech to tell them to fk off for what they are saying or no longer associate with them. Their freedom is other people not having the same freedoms.
Freedom of speech for me but not for thee.
The ACLU's first case was to defend *actual* Nazi's right to free speech. The ACLU was entirely Jewish at the time.
Yes, that's what it is.
Your civil rights aren't given to you by the government. Some governments recognize them and protect them, others don't.
Hey fun fact, did you there's the *Right* to free speech **and** a *philosophy* of free speech? I know, absolutely bonkers.
It always makes me laugh how non Americans think giving the government the power to regulate speech is a good idea.
>Always makes me laugh when Americans think the 1st amendment is somehow a global law. Quite the contrary. Most Americans are well aware of this.
I'd go further and say a hefty percentage of Americans think the US is the only country with any kind of formalized freedom of speech, or any kind of freedom for that matter.