So "X" - nothing to see here. Elon's in control - Part XXX

timmyntc

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119075306#Comment_119075306

Who decides what is or isnt disinformation?

Thats the problem - as soon as you add in some kind of censor or editor you will be curating content based on that person's bias. It is the case with every newspaper, media channel, and social media. There are plenty of things in the world that are neither definitively true or false, or at least are highly contested.

Most scientific discoveries and philosophical ideas come out of a healthy discourse - shutting opinions down because you take a questionable hardline on the subject is not a healthy discourse, and is ultimately regressive in nature.

Tony EH

People who think that Twitter under Musk's ownership is going to be some sort of mecca for free speech are really going to get a rude awakening one way or the other.

Case #1 It will be an absolute shitshow akin to 4Chan. (Although I'm sure some on here will love that because it seems that's where they get their info from anyway)

Case #2 It won't be anything near a free speech platform, which renders all the yap from certain quarters as the usual hot air.

Potatoeman

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119075306#Comment_119075306

Man last seen holding copper rod on hilltop during lightning storm found electrocuted. Cause of death unknown.

Statistically what are the odds of the virus not coming from that lab but surfacing so close to it?

Tony EH

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119075441#Comment_119075441

Twitter isn't anywhere close to being a platform for "healthy discourse" though, is it. It was never designed for discourse. It was designed for quick shout outs and to find out what your mates were doing. It doesn't have the scope to allow for actual discourse, unlike a platform like Boards for example.

Twitter is a load of mic drops in 150+ characters. There's no ability for nuance. No ability for expansion on an idea. No ability to construct a decent, logical, argument. It's people shouting soundbites and, in some cases, merely spreading propaganda that they know to be false. Which is the very reason that there needs to be some kind of moderation there.

Otherwise you'll have idiots believing shite like the Democrats have pedo rings in the basements of pizza joints and then deciding to take matters into their own hands because some guy on Twitter said it was true.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119075541#Comment_119075541

Not really, it's a region that receives food etc from remote areas of China. Remote areas are also where deadly viruses tend to originate. Plus I'd suspect it's advantageous for such a lab to be in such an area since it's where viruses do surface.

Cordell

Otherwise you'll have idiots believing shite

Such is life. You also have idiots believing shite like given that Twitter is censored and curated and fact checked all there is there is the truth.

Tony EH

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119075747#Comment_119075747

Just the other day some idiot shot up a load of people because he believed the "great replacement" conspiracy lie.

There's people's lives at stake here. That supersedes a silly desire to read baseless nonsense in the name of "free speech".

"Such is life" indeed. 🙄

Dohnjoe

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119075441#Comment_119075441

Expert consensus is a key example.

There is constant normal and healthy debate between scientists, historians, academics, etc. That bears no relation to false or unsubstantiated information. So when it comes to a situation of judging information, the expert consensus is the best guideline.

Of course there are grey areas, but for the more black/white stuff the above applies.

If anyone could post anything on Twitter tomorrow, it would be consumed with fringe views, hate speech, everything, because extreme views thrive in any completely unfettered scenario. The volume of nonsense one fanatic can produce is extraordinary, often producing it far faster than it can be debunked/addressed. Just to pull stats, something like 12 individuals/groups are responsible for over 60% of global anti-vaccine disinfo.

Cordell

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119075837#Comment_119075837

I would rather have the danger of that than having some twit deciding what is true and what is not true based on his personal opinions thank you very much.

Also I think that lunatic was more into violent racist stuff which is clearly illegal and not a matter of opinion. This is where you are confused, I'm not against filtering out illegal content, I'm only against filtering out opinions that don't align with the opinions of the people doing the filtering, or the ones paying them.

Tony EH

I would rather have the danger of that than having some twit deciding what is true and what is not true based on his personal opinions thank you very much.

You'd rather have people getting murdered than have a social media platform regulate lies.

Fuckin hell.

timmyntc

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119075902#Comment_119075902

Expert consensus is a key example.

If you've worked in any academic field you will know that "expert consensus" suffers from the very same problem. Getting research funding and published in journals is largely based on your willingness to make your research and opinions line up with those of your funders.

There is a reason that a 'replication crisis' exists in academia - people will adjust their scientific conclusions and findings to align with their own biases or those of their funders.

Cordell

Yes because before social media there was no murder. Fuckin hell indeed.

Tony EH

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119076051#Comment_119076051

Bloody hell 🙄

Give your head a wobble there. It badly needs it.

Cordell

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119076132#Comment_119076132

Do you remember how before social media they blamed videogames? And how before videogames they blamed heavy metal? And yet do you still trust them?

Dohnjoe

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119076021#Comment_119076021

I addressed this. There is normal, healthy debate and disagreement in any field. That's the basis of academia. Out of that academic debate we have come to understand universally accepted facts and consensus. The world is round, vaccines are safe, etc.

Cranks and charlatans and contrarians need to attack those facts to project their false or extreme narratives. One of the first steps is to cast doubt on the academics themselves, another step is to exaggerate or distort normal academic debate. As mentioned there are many techniques to cast doubt on facts/consensus in order to project a disingenuous narrative. Hell, sometimes people don't even care about an alternative narrative, they are just happy to attack science/history/whatever. Sometimes just out of pure spite.

I highlighted the word "exaggerate". It's important for grifters to project that there is debate where in reality there is little or none. For example, with vaccine safety. The grifters produce a high volume of disinfo, and even if that is all countered by a high volume of debunking and fact-checking - it doesn't matter. The grifters have successfully made it seem there is a significant debate where there is none.

This is why many private platforms opted to de-platform the grifters rather than have to rely on users to tackle all the disinfo, which, as I've mentioned usually comes out at a far faster rate than it can be tackled.

RobbieTheRobber

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119076151#Comment_119076151

Who are "they"?

Cordell

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119076221#Comment_119076221

The ones that think they have the right to decide what is the truth.

RobbieTheRobber

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119076270#Comment_119076270

Oooooooo very conspiratorial.

Cordell

Ooooooooooo no it's quite in the open, look, even here there are people calling for it. But yeah, my mistake, I should have said "you". I don't trust you people to decide what is the truth. Better?

timmyntc

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119076281#Comment_119076281

Hardly. Back in the day when the church were the supreme authority, sure didnt they decide that there were no kiddy fiddlers, and that you would be deplatformed for disinformation then too. People in power will always use censorship for their benefit.

Those Hunter Biden laptop files were banned from Twitter as disinformation - despite multiple news outlets later verifying their authenticity.

Closer to home, the likes of redacted and his business dealings were not permitted to be discussed on any of the media outlets he had a stake in, for years journalists were shut down around the discussion of certain sensitive topics, whereas other outlets would run with them freely*

Throughout history centralisation of information has always been a bad thing - its a symbol of authoritarian regimes, Russia, Nazi Germany, Communist China. Bringing in strict "disinformation" controls for social media in the west will inevitable lead to abuse by those the so called experts must answer to.

*Subject to Irelands awful libel laws

Dyr

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119076170#Comment_119076170

Healthy debate and disagreement doesnt exist in most of these fields anymore, which is why people lose faith in them. We were supposed to believe that there was no possibility that Covid 19 came out of a lab and that anyone who said otherwise was so wildly and dangerously wrong that they needed to be banned from social media.

Dohnjoe

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119076361#Comment_119076361

I remember certain politicians and so on claiming that e.g. video games were to blame for violence, do you support their right to claim this?

Cordell

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119076526#Comment_119076526

Of course I do. Having an open and healthy conversation about this have lead to the current age rating system and parent awareness that there are games out there that are not suitable to young kids.

Of course I don't believe it to be true and it was proven false by the very fact violence existed before videogames but still discussing the subject is better than burring it by censorship.

Dohnjoe

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119076599#Comment_119076599

Indeed. Having an open and healthy conversation about anything is usually a positive.

So why do you think discussion about e.g. the "great replacement" theory or Qanon on unfettered social media sites seems to turn into an open sewer and instead acts as a breeding ground for extremists?

Cordell

I don't know but let's have them discuss all their crazy theories in the open and hopefully everyone will see them for what they are. Because banning them helps nobody.

Dohnjoe

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119076475#Comment_119076475

There's nothing wrong with scientific method. Lay-people have just discovered they can baselessly trash scientists and experts via social media, and sadly an increasing number of people are falling for that.

Cordell

TIL that the Darth Putin account (yes, that one) is much older than I thought and it was actually banned by Twitter around 2016.

Please explain me again why this was a good thing.

Dyr

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119076895#Comment_119076895

Why are you quoting my post when your response has nothing to do with it?

Dohnjoe

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119076898#Comment_119076898

Didn't know so just looked it up, they just to suspend the account due to a rule they had regarding parody accounts. Basically if you ran a parody account pretending to be some figure you had to have some blurb that it was a parody account. Possibly for legal/slander reasons. They reinstated the account later.

Dohnjoe

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119076938#Comment_119076938

Maybe I misunderstood, I thought you were claiming that healthy debate/disagreement in most academia didn't exist anymore, when by definition they do. Academia is a method, that's unchanged, e.g. peer review by science. What has changed is the sharp rise (or reappearance) of woo, quackery and pseudo-science that attempts to undermine it. Often spread by social media.

"We were supposed to believe that there was no possibility that Covid 19 came out of a lab and that anyone who said otherwise was so wildly and dangerously wrong that they needed to be banned from social media."

I don't know where you got this notion from, many scientists and experts said accidental lab leak couldn't be ruled out. What was widely dismissed was the notion that it was deliberately leaked (or man-made), for which there was little or no credible evidence.

Quin_Dub

I used to think that "Sunlight is the best disinfectant" as it were in terms of allowing public debate and opinion and that people would logically see through the fallacies and incorrect information and ultimately make decisions based on fact and reason.

My views have changed however in recent years.

The "let them speak and the truth will rise to the top" used to mostly work when the platforms were TV Channels and the Print media and the conversation was between friends in the pub or families around the dinner table.

It's an entirely different world now and that "dinner table conversation" is now a global one involving millions and it's almost impossible to tell who is speaking from a position of knowledge/authority on a subject and who is just a loon.

As such , moderation and control of who and what can be posted has to exist.

There should be greater clarity as to why information or people are being blocked etc. but the ability to filter out the nonsense is critical for actual facts and information to get out there.

There is a far greater risk in allowing unfiltered dangerous rhetoric to flow unimpeded than there is for "bad actors" to suppress information.

Of course there will be mistakes made and again visibility and clarity of the decisions will help to fix those mistakes , but that is absolutely worth the risk in my view.

Tony EH

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119077213#Comment_119077213

Noam Chomsky once said, "You are either for free speech, or you're against it", which at its heart is an admirable enough expression. However, that's based on a situation where people are discussion a subject using facts and arguing from a position of relative honesty. And it's from a time when trivial, but potentially dangerous, social media platforms didn't exist.

These days, it's very clear that there are people willing to use all sorts of malicious and mendacious conspiratorial gibberish to merely push something and the internet is their conduit. Case in point being Trump's conspiratorial lie about a stolen election. A lie which led to people's deaths and a lie which he still continues to use in spite of what it led to on Jan 6th last year.

When you reach that point it's clear that, at least, some sort of checks and balances need to be in place to tackle the most egregious examples of liars and their lies. Because they have a very real life and death effect, as the people who want to believe these lies have no interest in what the facts actually are. They have their beliefs and that's all that matters. But when you have bad actors come along a feed those beliefs (often ones they don't have themselves) it can create a very serious situation. A situation where people can be killed...and it doesn't get more serious than that.

Potatoeman

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119077347#Comment_119077347

Who watches the watchmen?

Tony EH

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119077427#Comment_119077427

...and other assorted cliches.

Snake Plisken

Oh Biden not going to be happy about this

https://youtu.be/T_yxkcK8zJk

Cordell

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119077282#Comment_119077282

And it doesn't say that I'd rather see people murdered, this was something out of your imagination and I'm not interested in discussing it any further.

Ten of Swords

Mod - Thread is starting to go off on some very abstract tangents, can we get back to the core topic please?

Tony EH

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119078422#Comment_119078422

In response to...

"Just the other day some idiot shot up a load of people because he believed the "great replacement" conspiracy lie.

There's people's lives at stake here. That supersedes a silly desire to read baseless nonsense in the name of "free speech".

"Such is life" indeed."

you, literally, said...

"I would rather have the danger of that than having some twit deciding what is true and what is not true based on his personal opinions thank you very much."

Enough of this nonsense. We're done here.

..

As for the Twitter deal itself, Musk saying the offer was based on SEC filings and he's putting Twitter on the spot now to release information on bots. If this turns out to be some calculated attack on Twitter, it's pretty genius. Apparently it's the worst thing in the world now so everyone should be happy.

Quin_Dub

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119078874#Comment_119078874

Musks problem is that he agreed to the deal "without due diligence".

He's stuck in a "sold as seen" situation , so he can't now back out on the basis of something that comes to light like the % of Bot accounts or whatever.

It seems clear that Musk really doesn't want to the deal at this point , certainly not at anything close to the price he agreed and he's pulling every stroke he can think of to wriggle out of it.

If he backs out , he pays the $1B break fee , don't think there's any way around that for him.

Bass Reeves

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119079090#Comment_119079090

I was always a bit dubious about this deal. Musk was going to have to raise over 40 billion. I know that technically he is worth 270 billion. It hard to see how he would raise those sort of funds to take Twitter private

Quin_Dub

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119079170#Comment_119079170

Exactly - The vast majority of his wealth is tied up in Tesla stock so actually getting his hands on 40B+ isn't straight-forward.

He has found it hard to get any major institutional investors to bite and the Tesla stock price has taken a hammering as well so this is ending up looking like an extremely expensive vanity project.

His behaviour in recent days definitely suggests that he's trying to get out of the deal either by breaking enough rules that the SEC block it or by trying to claim that the bot issue is a deal breaker , but as I said his lack of a "due diligence" escape clause hurts that angle badly.

The confidence levels in the market on the deal going through as currently framed are well below 50% at present.

There's almost no way that Musk pays full whack now if he buys it at all.

Not sure if he can legally do this but he might look to break the deal , pay the 1B penalty and then go back in with a much much lower offer in the mid 20's range.

But it's looking more and more likely that he walks away here to be honest.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119079090#Comment_119079090

Is that for definite? If a company is publishing falsified numbers, wouldn't a buyer have some recourse?

Surely if a company is reporting something to the SEC and it turns out to be lies, a potential buyer could argue in court that the company misled them with their legal documents. How could anyone buy anything if they had to first buy the company or nearly complete the deal in order to have access to internal documents to find the truth, because their SEC filings were falsified? And then when they find out that truth, they're bound to buy it anyway?

I've seen the articles and posts about this "due diligence" thing and it sounds like tabloid nonsense. People saying he didn't do his due diligence by asking for what is already published to the US government.

If anything, this is a way to renegotiate the deal and was planned all along. We've heard in this thread about how all he his is is the most successful buyer and seller of companies in history. No engineering skills and no businessman skills. Just buying and selling. So are we meant to just sit here and assume the man doesn't have any skills when it comes to buying and selling companies?

Quin_Dub

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119079290#Comment_119079290

They didn't "falsify the numbers - The "bot" report that he is referencing came out before he announced his intention to buy.

He's have to prove that they knowingly lied as well - The fact that the methodology used to gauge the level of Bots was pretty crappy ( they only looked at 100 random accounts apparently) doesn't make it a lie , just crappy data.

This is also why buy-outs like this take 6-9 months plus to complete normally, because once you agree to the deal in principal you then send in the auditors who pull everything apart to confirm the specifics - This stage takes a LONG time.

Musk decided he didn't need any of that so now it's a whole "Caveat Emptor" kind of thing - He explicitly said that he didn't need due diligence so he's buying "as seen".

It's like buying a house , if you sign the deal and you don't have a clause in there about "Subject to engineers report" or similar then you can't back out of the deal if you discover subsidence or rising damp after the fact.

You can chose not to buy , but you aren't getting your deposit back , and in Musks case he can choose not to go through with the deal , but it will cost him the $1B break fee to do so.

Bass Reeves

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119079290#Comment_119079290

Due diligence is going in and looking at the complete books of a company. This is totally different to looking at published accounts. Published accounts are those submitted to revenue where tax avoidance measures are often hiding some of the story.

This thing on bit accounts. What is and is not a bot account. Musk may be trying to argue that all anon accounts are dual accounts. This would not be a fact. Twitter gives a best estimate of the number of multiple accounts it has. Will this be totally correct unlikely. Due diligence would have shown this to him.

However it's only a side issue. The reality is that I suspect he cannot finance the deal, he is in already for 3+ million. He will probably need 2-3 billion on top of the 44 billion for extra costs in the acquisition. He may already have borrowed for to buy the present stock he owns.

Lack of due diligence is his own problem nobody bids for a publicly quoted company that size without due diligence

Well we'll see what happens I guess. I wouldn't rush to claim the man is so stupid, he doesn't think things through. I'm sure he has legal teams as part of these things.

Quin_Dub

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119079373#Comment_119079373

He's clearly not stupid , but he is most definitely arrogant and full of hubris and that can lead to the smartest of people making very poor decisions.

Boggles

When push comes to shove, handing over 44 billion for a "website" starts to get the arséholé going, even for this clown.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119079394#Comment_119079394

Fact is both Twitter and Musk know that it would be up to Musk to convince a judge that the valuation was based on inaccurate data. This isn't a fake Rolex and buyer beware.

Twitter will have an obligation to protect shareholder value, and will both not want to release damaging proof of bot numbers, and will not want to lose in court trying to get the one billion. They would be sued by shareholders for losing the deal, crashing the value, and reporting previously hidden damaging data.

Musk if he wants to buy it could very possibly leverage all of the above into getting the deal for cheaper. The board would have to weigh what is good or bad for the shareholders with this new information. Or he might be able to simply walk away from it and the one billion obligation uncontested. Twitter would have to legally pursue it and open themselves up to all the above.

If his idea is to damage Twitter or just get it cheaper, he is on the right track. His potential downside is losing 0.5% of his net worth if Twitter "wins", but even then, a win for Twitter is still a loss. Musk loses money if Twitter wins what would be a media spectacle of a court case laying open the entire company to the world.