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randomthin2332 ,

Free speech, now only $9.99 per month

hornedfiend ,

or 0.99/post.each retweet would cost you an additional 0.49. you pay less,you get less.

RamblingPanda ,

Upgrade your free speech to premium speech now for only $17.99

Coreidan ,

You don’t know what free speech means.

This is like claiming Blizzard is infringing on your free speech because they banned you from world of Warcraft for saying racist shit.

Better yet. This is like claiming blizzard is infringing on your freedom of speech because they deactivated your account as a result of you not paying your subscription.

Do better.

Larry ,

Corporations should be allowed to own vital services so they can ban people from them at will. This is a good thing somehow. I love monopolies that suppress activists and organizers because it would only be bad if the government is doing it.

Coreidan ,

That’s the thing about private property and private services. They can terminate your involvement at will for any reason. It’s in the user agreement you consent to when you sign up.

You’re not entitled to these services. They aren’t your god given right or any other bullshit you’re imagining.

Comparing this to freedom of speech is laughable.

kent_eh ,

We could stop thinking of Twitter, Facebook, etc. as "essential services".

They can both fuck right off and most people's lives will not be negatively impacted.

tsonfeir ,
@tsonfeir@lemm.ee avatar

People still use Xwitter?

Burn_The_Right ,

Only fascists and those who support fascists do.

IWantToFuckSpez ,

Unfortunately the entire games industry is still on Xitter and nobody wants to leave it completely for Bluesky or Mastadon.

Pra ,

I use it because I follow a lot of Japanese artists and mangakas. It's nice because ya know Twitter is English so getting around is pretty easy. Stuff like pixiv seemed intimidating because it's made for a Japanese audience, even if they have English stuff. Plus I just know how to use Twitter after making my account in 2009.

circuitfarmer ,
@circuitfarmer@lemmy.world avatar

When will people stop supporting this clown?

Remember when some people were like "well, I don't support him, but I've had this Twitter account forever, so I'm not leaving." This is what happens. Things just get worse until you gain plausible deniability for continuing to support the bullshit.

index ,

Perhaps when his name/companies will stop being on the headlines every single day multiple times. Unless it's something really big that could actually harm his reputation people should restrain from posting and upvoting news about him. This article is about shit that hasn't happened yet, this guy is tricking you all around.

soba ,

"This is going to make so much easy money", Musk thinks, delusionaly, as he further alienates the former core user base of the site he bought for literal billions of dollars and yet has never made any money. "They are going to be lining up to pay for this", he imagines, forgetting that paid checkmarks was a huge ass failure and twitter still has never turned a profit.

r00ty ,
@r00ty@kbin.life avatar

This is, I think his train of thought. He thinks Twitter is a utility that people need. Meanwhile, many of us never had an account and moves like this will just move people away. Before twitter there was other social media, and before social media we also got on fine.

There are literal alternatives to this service, I cannot believe people are still using it now. But surely this kills it?

nikita ,

This seems like further confirmation of that theory that I saw posted on here that the Saudi oil barons funded Elon’s purchase of Twitter for the sole purpose of destroying it. They want to silence online discussions of climate change and other left wing topics.

Combined with Reddit being owned by Tencent, Facebook being eternally evil, and TikTok being unconducive to any form of coherent dialogue, there are not many places for left wing discourse on the internet anymore.

exscape ,
@exscape@kbin.social avatar

"climate change and other left wing topics"... I know that's basically how it works in some countries, but it's insane to consider certain scientific facts left wing, and we really shouldn't support such statements.

nikita ,

Thanks for pointing that out. It’s just so normal to think that way here that they’ve even corrupted me into framing climate change that way. It’s not a left wing topic; it’s a reality.

I just hope young people who are thinking of voting conservative here keep in mind that those assholes literally don’t believe in climate change and by extension science and facts. That alone should automatically disqualify conservatives from anyone’s consideration.

reev ,

It's not a lack of belief, it's just an abundance of "fuck you, I got mine".

datavoid ,

Of course they believe in it, they just refuse to acknowledge it publically as that would affect the bottom line

stellargmite ,

Politicising climate change was yet another distraction from dealing with it in a cohesive and unified manner. Divide and conquer.

WhatsThePoint ,

The reason it’s overwhelmingly called “climate change” instead of global warming now is because of language change pushed by billionaire foundations. The Koch network specifically focus grouped and created the term change. Whether we want it considered left wing or not, the billionaire backed right has made such statements left wing.

loobkoob ,

The reason it’s overwhelmingly called “climate change” instead of global warming now is because of language change pushed by billionaire foundations.

I do think "global warming" struggles to convince some more simple people anyway, unfortunately. Because while the average temperature of the globe is increasing and causing the changes in climate that we're seeing, I've come across far too many comments from people saying things like "global warming must be a myth because it snows more than it used to" and things themselves smarter than all climate scientists combined for that observation.

Of course, those same people probably think global warming is good because they like their summer holidays so perhaps their opinions shouldn't matter much either way!

fine_sandy_bottom ,

Is this really true?

Idiots would walk around on cold days saying "see - this global warming stuff is bullshit".

Climate change describes the danger much more aptly.

WhatsThePoint ,

You should read “Dark Money” by Jane Mayer. Goes into it and a lot of other very eye opening stuff about how the billionaire foundations changed this country.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27833494-dark-money

TWeaK ,

Climate change was adopted because global warming doesn't intuitively line up with winters being much colder on top of the average temperature being higher.

Justas ,
@Justas@sh.itjust.works avatar

Yes, in Europe, most political parties, both left and right, have their own climate change mitigation policies, because if they don't, they risk just not being elected.

Tja ,

Also no mainstream political party in Europe dares to touch Universal Healthcare.

Amaltheamannen ,

Well, they have privatised it and made it worse and worse, with longer queues and worse quality of care.

Tja ,

That strongly depends on your country.

Amaltheamannen ,

The access is universal, but its run by private companies now.

Tja ,

That strongly depends on your country.

Hackerman_uwu ,

Found the round-earther.

TWeaK ,

Reality has a left-wing bias.

PiratePanPan ,
@PiratePanPan@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

In 2024, anything that makes sense is un-conservative.

WhatsHerBucket ,
@WhatsHerBucket@lemmy.world avatar

And yet, here we are :/

WhatsThePoint , (edited )

I’ve had the same theory for a while. They saw the Arab Spring and other populist movements. With their vast oil wealth, tanking Twitter was a small price to pay to re-fracture descent and silence the left. The concentration of wealth has given insane power to wealthy who skew overwhelmingly on the side of themselves. The rise of the right is a direct result of billionaires funding across numerous avenues. The right aligns best with their self interest. They played the long game because they only have to pay people and let them do it for them. Regular folks have to stay engaged in the battle after working to support themselves. Billionaires are the matastasized cancer of capitalism.

moup ,

Why would they spend billions for this when they could (and still can) just block the website? It’s not like you can sue the King in Saudi Arabia (lest you think you have too many heads)

Diabolo96 , (edited )

Twitter is really big there. It's basically the most used social media by a vast majority compared to other ones. It's way more plausible that some 'too much rich to know what to do with all the money' Saudi princes decided something like a few percent of their wealth to own the biggest social media on their country for bragging rights and admin privilege to be worth it. Plus, they probably thought Twitter was too big to fail and die, They didn't expect Elon would fuck it up so bad.
I don't think anybody expected Elon to fuck it up so bad.

nikita ,

Yeah that’s possible too. It’s all speculation until the Netflix documentary comes out years later lol

Syntha ,

This seems like further confirmation of that theory that I saw posted on here that the Saudi oil barons funded Elon’s purchase of Twitter for the sole purpose of destroying it.

Then why does it still exist? Musk took Twitter private, they could've just pulled the plug if they wanted to.

NeptuneOrbit ,

That terse action would have made mastodon flourish. It had to be gradual.

TWeaK ,

The purchase itself was a leveraged buyout, they didn't pay the entire $44bn as Twitter took out a loan to cover $13bn. Like all leveraged buyouts (eg Toys R Us) the purchase itself is meant to kill the business. Even before Musk started screwing the revenue there was little hope Twitter could pay the interest, let along the principle. Now, Twitter is worth less than the debt, by some estimates.

Larry ,

Conservatives are desperately trying to force TikTok to sell because even though its format is garbage, it's gathered a large leftwing userbase

baru ,

This seems like further confirmation of that theory that I saw posted on here that the Saudi oil barons funded Elon’s purchase of Twitter for the sole purpose of destroying it.

Then why did Twitter needed to sue him to get him to abide by the deal? Musk often promotes stuff in a pump and dump scheme. One of the many examples is when he briefly promoted bitcoin. He made loads of money off that.

I'm guessing he thought he could make a lot of money quickly in some way. But then interest rates rose quickly and whatever he was planning fell through.

nikita ,

It’s possible it was a initially pump and dump that turned into a Saudi funded venture. He’s a useful idiot from the Arabs’ perspective.

PiratePanPan ,
@PiratePanPan@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Holy shit you might be right

Kalysta ,

Reddit’s owned by tencent now? When did this happen?

nikita ,

My bad, Reddit is still owned by an American company but Tencent has a large stake in it since 2019, at least enough to influence the platform into complying with pro-CCP censorship and etc

shortwavesurfer ,

Also, it very much depends on what you mean by "free". If you mean free as in free beer, then absolutely it is no longer going to be free speech. However, if you mean free as in freedom to say what you want, I don't know as I am no longer on the platform.

shortwavesurfer ,

I wonder if introducing an artificial delay, like hitting post, and it taking a minute before it actually goes live, would help. Because then something could scan incoming posts, and if something looked like a bot, it could be pulled before it ever actually went out.

joewilliams007 ,
@joewilliams007@kbin.melroy.org avatar

what would an artificial delay do? Litteraly nothing. Also they can scan posts after they have been uploaded. And a scan shouldnt take even a second.

shortwavesurfer ,

An artificial delay should discourage flood attacks. Either that or do some sort of thing where you figure out how many posts per day the average user does and then not let people post above that limit.

baru ,

An artificial delay should discourage flood attacks.

You didn't explain how. It doesn't matter to wait a little bit. It's not like they're using only one connection and one account.

It's also not clear to me how waiting longer suddenly charged how easy it is to detect bots.

shortwavesurfer ,

Well, you have to limit the number of accounts they can possibly have by whatever method possible, either by charging per account or some sort of proof of work or phone number verification or something that limits the amount of accounts that they can have. Once you have done that, what you need to do is cost them something such as how proof of work costs computing resources. If it takes 10 seconds to post a tweet, then sending out 1 million tweets takes 1 million times 10 seconds or 10 million seconds, or 166,666 minutes or 2777 hours or 115.7 days And that's all from a 10 second Proof of work requirement. For a regular user, that's not a problem. For a spammer, that's a huge problem.

joewilliams007 ,
@joewilliams007@kbin.melroy.org avatar

What your talking about is rate limiting. And pretty much every social media already does that. The issue with adding requirements like phone number etc, is that it also makes it more difficult and annoying for regular users. Besides, bot account owners litteraly have large amounts of fake valid mobile phone numbers they can use to "verify" their bot accounts. Then they also use change their ip addresses, so rate limiting can't be enforced. Instagram also has a massive bot issue, but its just an endless amount of bot accounts, not just one that is spamming all over the place.

Adding a fake 10 second delay would stop absolutely nothing and make the experience even worse for regular users.

Brkdncr ,

For the love of god Elon, stay out of my news feed.

TWeaK ,

There are extensions for that.

shortwavesurfer ,

Well, if nothing else, it does reduce some load on their servers because less people will be posting.

otp ,

Paid speech? Lol

phoneymouse ,

It’s the American way. Aligns with the Supreme Court ruling on Citizen’s United.

dragontamer ,

I stole this line from someone else, but its great.

Elon Musk has invented fee speech, not free speech.

grue ,

It's a clever line, but Musk hasn't invented a single goddamn thing in his life.

solomon42069 ,

Hey that's not fair - he invents his own narrative about reality all the time.

meeeeetch ,

Yeah, pay to post was Something Awful founder lowtax's idea.

canis_majoris ,
@canis_majoris@lemmy.ca avatar

SA used to be great. That move actually made the forums a pretty good place for a while because it kept out a few demographics including bots and kids.

Something Awful, YTMND and Newgrounds were basically the comedic engines of the internet back then.

Good 'ol pre-YouTube internet.

hperrin ,

That’s not what free speech is, and there never has been free speech on Twitter, and that’s mostly a good thing. Jesus.

ShittyBeatlesFCPres ,

Elon Musk said free speech like once and then immediately threw a bunch of journalists off the site. And apparently every news article for the rest of my life is going to be about how he was hypocritical instead of whether he wants power or influence or has power and influence or the meaning of giving him those things.

Don’t trust every industrialist you meet even if they invested in one company where competent people make cool space ships. He’s clearly on Ket and some uppers. Grimes divorced him and her music isn’t even good. He’s not that complicated.

TheGrandNagus ,

That’s not what free speech is

Well yeah, obviously. It's just wordplay based on the two common definitions of free.

Everybody knows what free speech means. It's just a bit of wordplay that you've taken very literally.

affiliate ,

Everybody knows what free speech means.

i really dont think so.

free speech is a pretty complicated thing and i feel like many people dont have a solid grasp on it. i think a good number of people think they know what free speech means because they know "it only applies to what the government can do to you", but there's quite a bit more to it than that. like how to deal with hate speech, threats, misinformation, disinformation, etc.

and this is directly related to the problems twitter is facing: elon musk started out by saying hes a "free speech absolutist", but twitter has been slowly rediscovering why "free speech absolutism" doesnt work. and you can see those discoveries in real time with twitter reintroducing moderation policies (among other things)

TheGrandNagus ,

Ok then. People know enough about what it means to know it doesn't refer to not having to pay a fee to open your mouth.

It's very clear that the headline is a little wordplay joke. It doesn't literally convey that the journalist thought free speech means you don't have to pay to make a twitter post. You're taking it way too literally.

elon musk started out by saying hes a "free speech absolutist", but twitter has been slowly rediscovering why "free speech absolutism" doesnt work.

I'm in agreement that it doesn't work.

But it should also be called to attention that Musk never tried free speech absolutism on his platform (not that I think he actually should). He has been willing to bend over backwards in assisting dictatorships in censoring content, and he culled a lot of left-leaning and anti-Musk accounts/comments on day one. It's always been a lie to pander to the freeze peach crowd.

jkrtn ,

Elon and his sycophants have been the idiots talking about free speech on Twitter. It's perfectly fine to use that talking point as criticism. If he's not interested in free speech then what was he doing allowing banned Nazi accounts back on?

voracitude ,

My sides

Please

eestileib ,

If this dude had any experience running an online site he would know how many stolen credit cards are out there.

X is a fly-coated chum bucket.

SturgiesYrFase ,
@SturgiesYrFase@lemmy.ml avatar

Hey now....that's really rude! If fly-coated chum buckets could read they would be very very upset!

UltraMagnus0001 ,

Or PayPal accounts.

PiratePanPan ,
@PiratePanPan@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Was just about to say this.

You know how easy it is these days to get credit card dumps? Legally, I don't know the exact answer, but...

autotldr Bot ,

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Elon Musk confirmed Monday that X (formerly Twitter) plans to start charging new users to post on the platform, TechCrunch reported.

Back when X launched the "Not-A-Bot" program, Musk claimed that charging a $1 annual fee would make it "1000X harder to manipulate the platform."

In a help center post, X said that the "test was developed to bolster our already significant efforts to reduce spam, manipulation of our platform, and bot activity."

X Support confirmed that follower counts would likely be impacted during that purge, because "we're casting a wide net to ensure X remains secure and free of bots."

Musk's plan to charge a fee to overcome bots won't work, experts told WSJ, because anyone determined to spam X can just find credit cards and buy disposable phones on the dark web.

And any bad actor who can't find what they need on the dark web could theoretically just wait three months to launch scams or spread harmful content like disinformation or propaganda.

The original article contains 798 words, the summary contains 165 words. Saved 79%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

IcePee ,

I think the real solution is he wants money. If it was solely to reduce spam/bot activities, then there are other ways to do that. Maybe a Bitcoin-style proof of work scheme where evey post needs to show a hash of the message with a nonce. The difficulty needn't be that hard to make mass posting computaionally unfeasible.

In fact, Bitcoin appropriated this proposal to reduce email spam. It never took off with email as it was an open system and network effects and a catch 22 meant that it floundered. But X, née twitter is a closed off dictatorship. They could force it through edict.

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