If he starts Tweeting again, then Truth Social will have no value for him. I think that’s the reason it doesn’t matter if he’s let back on.

Content moderation is nearly impossible at that scale anyway.

Technically impossible but a good deal of the bad stuff can be filtered out: twitter’s team was making good progress. Of course, that team is now gutted to the point of being useless.

But even FB, which is arguably worse simply because of its scale, can do a good job. The case of the shooter some years ago live streaming his horror to FB was dealt with amazingly fast by the FB team, but it kept popping up in ‘reruns’ because all people who had recorded parts of it had to do was make a small change and re-upload their version and the barriers designed for previous versions wouldn’t stop it.

The more serious problem is that he now seems hell bent on releasing all the right-wing scum — given the results of the recent ‘poll’ about whether people who had been removed be allowed back in. For all of his claimed concerned about bots, he still used something that is fundamentally perfect for domination by bots. (Of course, internet “polls” like that are worthless anyway, so any result would be indicative of nothing serious.)

I’m simply asking people to note that there is a very small chance that your particular decision as to what to do with Twitter is the absolutely correct decision, and that the argument you are making to justify your choice is the best possible argument.

Obviously you need a metric. Since “free speech backer unless someone is mocking me” musk has been dismantling the content moderation group there and more of the right-wing fascists and scum of the republican party are appearing, along with anti-vaxx disinformation groups, the question for me is “how much of the lies and hatred from the right can I block before the effort becomes too much?” Twitter’s engineers were making progress on content, but that no longer seems to be important.

I wonder how much musk’s realization that he greatly over-payed for twitter and is now on the hook for $1+ billion in interest per year has to do with this. There’s no way that the $8 per person “blue check name tag” thing will generate enough to pay that, so he must (more likely “may”) have some other plan to generate revenue. Creating his “system X” — the US version of the Chinese do everything app — as he’s hinted he wants to have will take time to develop and even if it can be, I wonder whether folks here will want to rely on one app that does everything and hoovers up all the data associated with that everything.

Lots of things to think about for something like that — and since he’s a libertarian, thinking is not a strong point,

I wasn’t implying you were – I didn’t get that from your post.

I don’t think people who paid attention ever thought he was a brilliant businessman. He has a long history of failed promises for his businesses.

He did do a great job hiring people and letting them work with his space program. Tesla – not so much. The satellite internet service? Probably too early to judge but trending to a low quality high cost service for the affluent.
Twitter – the shit show everyone expected it to be (what is the status of the “pay for a name tag and we’ll call it verification” system now?).

If he would have gotten out of the way and let the engineers who knew what they were doing work things might have begun to turn around, but he didn’t and they haven’t.