"A Harbinger of the Return of 'Fair' Speech to Twitter?"

LOL No.

https://www.protocol.com/elon-musk-flight-tracker

https://www.inputmag.com/tech/elon-m...-plane-twitter

"Cancel culture" indeed.

lol, people hating on twitter.
Probably because they had the gall to block a Reality TV personality who wouldn't stop rage-baiting and generally spouting nonsense despite several warnings.

In the age of broadband Internet this is a pointless statement, at least in the context of media consumption.

https://i.redd.it/1r95vi1qqkt81.jpg

https://i.redd.it/uxby27lx1nt81.jpg

Heh.

Saw a discussion of the flight tracker issue this morning on, wait for it, ... Twitter.

Totally agree. Regardless of one's opinion of Musk he is bright, bold and up to now, incredibly lucky.

Remember when there were 3" floppy disks and AOL was the best place to get them? Well, it turns out that AOL was counting every disk that they mailed as a "subscriber," thereby vastly (and fraudulently) over-stating their business value and subscriber base, which was actually lackluster. It is said that when Ted Turner figured that out at a board meeting, a murder almost took place then and there.

Ted had built his media empire out of the remnants of the billboard-company that he had inherited, and he did it the right way: "it actually existed."

Twitter has very likely been doing the same thing that AOL did. They count "millions of subscribers" and you can have "millions of followers," but there is a very good chance that this isn't true. You buy an advertisement – and they're not cheap – believing that it will be exposed to "millions of eyeballs," and indeed they will present you with a report that shows that it ostensibly did. But there are now many who believe that Twitter has been lying about this for a very long time. And, for a publicly traded company, that's a Federal crime known as "fraud on the market."

sundial:

"Twitter Adopts ‘Poison Pill’ to Ward Off Musk Takeover
Rights plan forces negotiation, buys time, source says
Poison pill triggered after investor accumulates more than 15%" https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...r%20situations.

This must be all very interesting for people who use twitter.

AOL ... MySpace ... Twitter ... Facebook ... I see a distinct pattern here. If you want to ride any of these trains, you'd better know when to get off.

Facebook, Twitter, fora and other 'social media' are tools. You either know how to use them to your advantage/satisfaction, or you don't.

You over state the importance of these things.

That aside, it astounds me that people living in the country which is supposedly the exemplar of freedom and democracy would be happy to see these things fall under the control of one man.

"Absolute power corrupts absolutely." Attributed to someone intelligent.

I never understand how some people get all high and mighty about not using "social media" when they hang out on this and possibly other fora, daily - which is just an older form of social medium; the very name forum suggests a gathering of people.

Exactly!

Neither Twitter nor any other social media online has ever had free or fair speech. Free speech, as a right under the US Constitution, prevents the GOVERNMENT form moderating speech except in certain circumstances, but PRIVATE moderation has never been and will never be controlled by the government BECAUSE of that guarantee. Twitter is not run by the government. Perhaps it should be, but that is unlikely to ever happen and would not be better if it did.

Every social media platform is bent from either the outside or the inside (or both, see Twitter and Facebook as examples). Blindly passing along everything said with equal weight would not be profitable, and they must make a profit. Anything CLOSE to openly passing everything said has turned out to be easy to manipulate by criminals and foreign bad actors to corrupt business, politics, and society and has proven to be a threat that requires additional moderation.

Were someone to purchase Twitter, it would really only change what KIND of moderation, filters, and bent Twitter would have: it would not really improve the situation.