In short, no one’s tweet is untraceable to the public without the poster knowing about it: If they get suspended or banned, of course they will know. De-amplification—affecting one’s ranking in search results and the like—is quite different. Some may call it “free speech but not free access.”
The players The semantic game is Musk and his propagandists, performing a pantomime about transparency while addressing a wide range of issues. Matt Taibbi revealed that the Trump administration has always made requests to Twitter — but we have no idea what they are, how they’ve been done, and why. Weiss revealed that TikTok’s Libs transgender account has actually been given preferential treatment: No account moderation decisions can be made without consulting their superiors, a privilege that is available to only a very few people on the platform and is certainly done to avoid messing up the ever-changing online rights. Why?
But, more than that, there is absolutely no transparency about musk decision-making since he arrived. Where his email? When can we better understand how he single-handedly made many content moderation decisions? When will it be permissible to verify that his public statements are consistent with his private reasoning? When will we know how important HR decisions have been made? The answer is: probably never, without effective legal action.
Musk’s Potemkin transparency is only intended to flatter him by launching false scandals about Twitter’s former leadership (who, it should be noted, he’s made quite a bit of. money for their purchases). It paints a fictional image of Twitter as a dictatorship that Musk unleashed to the cheers of the cheering crowd. That. For populists, it presents a Zeno paradox of a conspiracy, which ultimately reveals just how another viral Twitter thread.
it’s hard take people seriously when they complain about Twitter being led by a Coporation, group of individuals with titles with management responsibilities making management decisions while they promote the consolidation of those duties into the hands of a man. What Musk offers isn’t transparency: It’s capricious. His idiosyncratic whims, which we can just follow him without any appeal or accountability mechanism, to be content moderation policy. It leads the beggar to believe that anyone can see this as an improvement.
This reflects the broader fiction of the takeover spread by Musk fans: that he’s somehow freed the company and made it more democratic and accountable. But in terms of corporate governance, he’s simply transitioning from the oligarchic democracy of a publicly traded company – which is required by law to reveal so much to the public – for no good reason. for nothing – to an individualist dictatorship.
What he dreams of is freedom from any accountability. He’s not liberating “everyone,” he’s liberating himself: leaving Twitter private to make sure he’s not accountable to shareholders or the board and that he He can only reveal what he wants. In a typically brazen move, after granting ideologically captured stenographers free access to Twitter’s tools to promote a message he espouses, he sent a sending emails threatening its employees with legal action if they reveal anything. Real transparency. Musk dreams of a world where no one says “no” to him. It was a solipsistic dream shared by too many of his fans.
