لنستخرج كنوزا من المعرفة و الإبداع و العلم و الأفكار
On Monday, Musk got what he wanted. Within the next few months, if all goes as expected, Twitter will become a private company under his control. Musk, arguably the most successful living entrepreneur, may well be able to convert his hazy free-speech principles into a solvent business, but he insists that this is beside the point. “I don’t care about the economics at all,” he said in Vancouver—a strange pitch from a guy who was still trying to secure investor financing, but possibly a sincere one. Rather, he claimed that bolstering “the trust of Twitter as a public platform” would be a way to decrease “civilizational risk.” As of now, Twitter is pretty awful. It’s certainly possible that Musk will make it better. Nor is it unprecedented for a tycoon to control a de-facto town square—much of the Internet is already controlled by billionaires, faceless corporations, or entities under the influence of the Chinese security state. “I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means,” Musk tweeted on Monday. One problem with this is that it’s not what free speech means. Another is that, even if it were, Musk doesn’t have an unblemished https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/25/elon-musk-and-free-speech-track-record-not-encouraging.html"}" href="https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/25/elon-musk-and-free-speech-track-record-not-encouraging.html" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank" data-uri="84c5e26cfaa4dfdc906cb8728af57642" style="box-sizing:border-box;background-color:transparent;cursor:pointer;--color__token-name:colors.interactive.base.light;color:rgb(0, 0, 0);transition:color 200ms ease 0s;line-height:inherit">record of following his own advice. On Tuesday, Musk subtweeted said critics, writing, “The extreme antibody reaction from those who fear free speech says it all.” This is a straw-man maneuver, a way of shifting the debate: you say that you disagree with me, but what you actually mean is that you fear free speech. Musk, or one of his many besotted reply guys, might argue that free speech isn’t rocket science. This is true, not in the colloquial sense but in the literal sense: rocket science is a domain in which Musk has demonstrated some expertise.
At one point, Anderson asked about hate speech, and Musk replied that “Twitter should match the laws of the country.” The United States doesn’t have laws against hate speech. On the contrary, the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that almost all hate speech is protected by the First Amendment. It’s my personal view—and not a particularly edgy one—that there are some kinds of speech that should not be prohibited by the government, but that Twitter basically has to prohibit if it wants to flourish as a business. You’re currently allowed, as you should be, to stand in a public park and shout, for example, that all synagogues should be burned to the ground. You’re currently not allowed, as you shouldn’t be, to tweet the same opinion. There are thousands of hypothetical examples like this, and new ones arise every day. I also think—again, not controversially—that the question of whether social networks should be designed to reliably incentivize and algorithmically amplify incendiary lies is distinct from the question of whether “misinformation” should be “censored,” and that those two questions will often, albeit not always, yield different answers. What does Musk think about any of this? We don’t know, and, it seems, neither does he. “If Elon takes over Twitter, he is in for a world of pain,” Yishan Wong https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1514938557927854082"}" href="https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1514938557927854082" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank" data-uri="a867708ccf0f13a29aea57ef5213cd2e" style="box-sizing:border-box;background-color:transparent;cursor:pointer;--color__token-name:colors.interactive.base.light;color:rgb(0, 0, 0);transition:color 200ms ease 0s;line-height:inherit">wrote, earlier this month, in a long tweet thread. “Elon is going to try like heck to ‘fix’ the problems he sees. Each problem he ‘fixes’ will just cause 3 more problems. . . . it’s not just going to suck up his time and attention, IT WILL DAMAGE HIS PSYCHE.” Ten years ago, when Wong was the C.E.O. of Reddit, he was something like a free-speech absolutist. He seems to have learned the hard way that, if absolutism was ever intellectually defensible, it’s not a tenable way to run a platform.
In his 1989 book “https://www.amazon.com/Liars-Poker-Norton-Paperback-Michael/dp/039333869X"}" href="https://www.amazon.com/Liars-Poker-Norton-Paperback-Michael/dp/039333869X?ots=1&tag=thneyo0f-20&linkCode=w50" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank" data-orig-url="https://www.amazon.com/Liars-Poker-Norton-Paperback-Michael/dp/039333869X?ots=1&tag=thneyo0f-20&linkCode=w50" data-ml-id="0" data-ml="true" data-xid="fr1651215216974ghe" data-uri="b413badb0660ee8fc2aa44d46603f190" style="box-sizing:border-box;background-color:transparent;cursor:pointer;--color__token-name:colors.interactive.base.light;color:rgb(0, 0, 0);transition:color 200ms ease 0s;line-height:inherit">Liar’s Poker,” Michael Lewis famously referred to greed-is-good Wall Street bankers as “Big Swinging Dicks.” Elsewhere, I’ve argued that today’s tech titans—who privilege the cerebral over the corporeal, who claim to disdain hedonism in favor of intellectual hubris, who think of themselves as epochal figures with civilization-bestriding legacies—should instead be called Big Swinging Brains. Musk, in many ways, is the biggest of them all—so big that he apparently can’t be bothered to read a Wikipedia article on free speech before mansplaining the concept to the world. It’s one thing to magnanimously promise that you won’t silence your critics; it’s another thing to have enough humility to listen to them.
