I see (today) where Elon Musk has filed with the Security Exchange Commission (SEC) to terminate the deal for his take over of Twitter, on the basis that Twitter lied.
Well… they’re a corporation, of course they lied. But in fairness (sort of) it’s possible they (i.e., Twitter) didn’t see it as lying. It’s possible that they saw it simply as “standard business negotiation” à la 21st century business mentality. <Make your favorite “raspberry” sound here.>
It took a bit of digging to get some details on what Mr. Musk might be(2) upset over. His motivation for getting into Twitter in the first place was that he was upset over the apparent censorship happening on Twitter (and other major platforms on the Internet) and he wanted to help preserve a platform for True Free Speech.
Well… yeah, so do I! But…
Ok, dig, dig, dig, went the Research Assistant [me, that is], and now I see some of the issue (6)
Twitter claims they have technology to control spam.
They have stated quite clearly that they block over a million spam accounts a day. … in a system that claims only 450 million active users. Shutting down a million accounts a day… those numbers don’t add up. So they catch and close 1 million a day — how many are they not catching? Or how many did their spamming work for several days (weeks, months) before being shut down? How many non-spam accounts are shut down? Just people with off-beat opinions or with genuine enthusiasm in a world that’s made “enthusiasm” into nothing more than a nasty bit of the sales cycle.
One’s left wondering if any of those 450 million accounts are legitimate. (Not really, just making a point 🙂 )
I suspect an unholy amount of Twitter’s operating expenses go to attempting to control spammers. Ultimately it takes people to spot whether an account is really spam or not(3). And that is probably also something twitter lied about to him. Undoubtedly that also is where the violations of Freedom of Speech come in, that he was originally wanting to correct and protect. You say something “officially unpopular” on Twitter but you really are just voicing your own opinion, and guess what happens? Twitter shuts you down.
So, yeah… Mr. Musk is upset, appropriately so, I would say.
Except, *I* could have told him there is no technology to effectively block spamming and spamming only without also shutting down a lot of legitimate voices — he didn’t ask me though, the silly guy(4). A lot of technologists could have told him. It’s simply not possible with the current Internet framework, the current global infusion of Western Culture nor with what passes in this bizarre 21st Century for a business mentality among most corporations. To fix spam, fake news, infomercials, fake science, fake history, and all the other run-away fraud on the Internet we would have to change the Internet’s most fundamental infrastructure and entire philosophy.(1) Spamming in general can’t be controlled, with the current technological base. It can be limited a little, but in the long run that’s counterproductive, like antibiotics: eventually all you’ll have done is to create stronger and better spammers, fakers and takers.
The shortest explanation (not complete, by any means) is this: Since there is no absolute ID or proof of identity possible, especially on computers, you can’t enforce honest behavior, nor can you even protect copyright and intellectual property rights on the Internet(5). If every single thing on the Internet can not be traced back to a specific, absolutely identifiable individual (or, in a limited capacity, to a legal entity such as a corporation that is accountable), then eventually it has to go the way it, in fact, has gone: sewer time!
But you can’t enforce “honest behavior” anyway. This is the central failure of mainstream religion and law enforcement both; they create their own problems by saying “thou must and thou must not or else.” The moment you say such things you’ve defeated yourself. In this culture at least. Honesty and Ethical Behavior are things that come from inside a person or from nowhere. Upbringing helps, societal imprint harms, but ultimately it has to be the person’s most inner choice. Expecting anything else is equivalent to passing a law requiring everyone to have an IQ of at least 140. Or saying that, since “red” is an offensive color to some people, from now on all apples must be blue. Silliness… you can’t change the laws of Nature, nor can you override the imprints our society places on the very young and very impressionable before they are old enough to judge for themselves by just passing a law saying to do so anyway. Won’t work.
Can’t work!
Twitter is a 21st Century Corporation (ooh… that word!) with 20th Century roots. Elon Musk is a 22nd Century Visionary. It was bound to be an unhappy marriage.
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(1) Friend of mine back in the early 90’s had a proposal that would have made it all impossible, while simultaneously protecting everyone’s property rights on the Internet. Alas… it would have taken another 18 months (more or less) of technological development and the Investors (those silly, greedy slobs) were in a hurry to start getting their supersized profits from the infant Internet. So it didn’t happen. Now we have to live with it. It would be many trillions of dollars of re-engineering to make it right at this point.
(2) Might be upset about. This all comes in from the various news services (to use the term loosely), so it’s impossible to know if any of it is real or not.
(3) And maybe that is also part of the problem — maybe Twitter really is allowing their “bots” the right to close down accounts. That would be very nasty, very rude and completely insupportable from just about any view point.
(4) He’s not a silly guy (just a figure of speech). He’s one of the very few folks on this planet that has my total respect. Brilliant, ethical, a visionary and a business man. Tough combination. Angela Merkel would be another one. There are others… different topic, though.
(5) The moment the big Internet search engines came online, copyright ceased to be anything except a lawyer’s fantasy. But, again, that’s because of the way the Internet was engineered; it could have been set up differently.
(6) Undoubtedly many other things are also the issue. The funny thing about the last straw is that it’s one that gets all the attention, and not the 623,414 straws that came before. Why is that?