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Dec 1, 2022 Antara Haldar

كمبريدج - في شهر أبريل/نيسان عام 2022، تساءل إيلون ماسك، أغنى رجل في العالم، "هل تويتر يحتضر؟" بعد خمسة أيام، أطلق عرض غريب ظاهريًا لشراء منصة التواصل الاجتماعي تويتر. استغرق الأمر شهورًا من الجدل القانوني لإتمام الصفقة، ولكن في السابع والعشرين من أكتوبر/تشرين الأول، أكد ماسك عرضه الذي بلغت قيمته 44 مليار دولار، وحصل على لعبة جديدة: حرية التعبير.

ومن الناحية المالية، كان استحواذ ماسك على منصة تويتر خطوة غريبة. على الرغم من قاعدة مستخدمي الموقع التي تشمل حوالي 200 مليون مستخدم - بما في ذلك السياسيين والصحفيين والمشاهير - لم تحقق منصة تويتر أرباحًا في السنوات الثمانية العشر الماضية. ولم يكتفِ ماسك بهدر جزء كبير من ثروته الشخصية في عملية الشراء؛ كما اقترض 13 مليار دولار من مجموعة من المقرضين - قروض ستكلف 9 مليارات دولار في مدفوعات الفائدة على مدى السنوات السبع إلى الثماني المُقبلة.

ووفقًا لتصريحات ماسك، لم يكن المال هو الهدف أبدًا. إنه يسعى إلى "مساعدة البشرية" من خلال الاستثمار في الصالح العام: ساحة المدينة الرقمية في العالم. في الواقع، اكتسب ماسك الآن نفوذًا كبيرًا على هذه الساحة. من خلال جعل تويتر موقعًا خاصًا، يضمن الرئيس التنفيذي - أو الرئيس تويت، كما عرّف ماسك نفسه - أنه يستطيع أن يفعل ما يشاء، مع غياب المساهمين الذي يتعين عليه أن يستجيب لهم.

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PS Events: What Economics is Missing

Neglect the insights of women, particularly in economics, and society suffers. At PS’s next virtual event, What Economics Is Missing, Minouche Shafik, Dani Rodrik, Vera Songwe, and others will debate how to create the conditions for achieving genuine inclusivity in economics.

Antara Haldar

Writing for PS since 2019
18 Commentaries

Antara Haldar, Associate Professor of Empirical Legal Studies at the University of Cambridge, is a visiting faculty member at Harvard University, a former fellow at Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and the principal investigator on a European Research Council grant on law and cognition.

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Jose Oyola Dec 7, 2022

Musk paid +$40 billion to promote free speech? Don’t fall for his ruse. He bought Twitter to gain access to the remaining icloud asset that will allow him to install his Alexa in millions of homes (and Teslas). Twitter will be transformed into another marketplace, like Facebook and Amazon, where commodities and services will be offered to you based on your Twitter responses.
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Dawood Mamoon Dec 7, 2022

What is the twitter business model. Is it a chatting platform or it is where people share their opinions with a word limit or it is a platform where information is put. Ideally twitter is where people share their opinion that is retweeted or liked by people. If more people have a similar opinion a trend is constructed and people would note it locally, regionally or globally. In contrast advertisement depends upon traffic. More people delve in controversies based less on rational and objective opinion but a biasness to ignite the emotions of people with other point of view, more traffic would happen and most of the time the debate is hardly objective. And thereby fake news and propaganda flourishes. The first thing is to solve it to verify every account and best is if people pay so less reliance on advertisers. There can be new experimentations with twitter towards a decent debate going as it happens when the accounts of known academics generate, or global leaders generate or for example media accounts generate. Twitter can do wonders to the world to make it a place for every one towards a civilised digital world. Unfortunately unguided social media has created for the younger users full of hate as an outcome of unverified religious bigotry and their minds tell that this is what the world is about.

I am all with Elon Musk for a good business model by taking all seriousness out of the directed point of views shared at twitter that are not objective. The largest twitter concentration is the US and India, and this part I would agree that Elon Musk should understand clients and users at these destinations. A proper plan by twitter team should be formulized with the context ELon already has and that is to make twitter less interesting for advertisers who flock based on traffic. Verify all accounts and then it would be a matter of a good thought how would these accounts behave knowing their id is public and are accountable to their opinions.

Elon has a chance to give new meanings to social media. Twitter is already a unique place by its very own design of services and it is ideal for constructing a positive society. For example every person in US, India, EU go to school. Most in all developing countries go to school. Let twitter become synonymous to knowledge sharing that it already does with most of the verified accounts. The accounts who blabble bigotry are mostly un verified. Let us say in one year time, all school going children above 13 have a twitter account and is duly verified for free for being students. The trends would start like different areas of education and entertainment surrounding issues of the youth with a balanced views of thought leaders on all subject areas including religion and what have you. Younger among the students follow trend setters among the older ones among the students and follow media accounts, academics, leaders, sports stars, movie stars etc.

The most relevant staff at twitter be that of the moderators that direct each and every debate to positive outcomes. Revenues come from verified accounts and there is no advertiser in the world that brings about controversial advertisements. There is always an underlying learning outcome in most of the occasions by the ads advertisors run. For twitter there is a possibility for even constructing a peculiar kind of advertisements. Youth are in billions and let twitter be the place that trains amongst the youth an interstellar civilisation and its foundations based on youth across the globe and that would perfectly fit the vision of who Elon is. To become a global and better to prepare for a multiplanetary civilisation, there so much to understand about unfamiliar cultures that these youth should be familiarised with. Many twitter accounts from South Korea do that. Even ELon's girl friend (wife) has a fascinating twitter account. Why cant she have millions of followers from Africa. Is multiplanetary elitist as Tesla is thought to be. In next 5 years to 10 years the world is going to change with respect to technology. Elon should allow twitter followers and accounts to be part of 2030 and beyond in year 2023.

Instead of encouraging political or religious bigotry, the billions of youth would be more fascinated by the worlds in the interstellar world to conquer. Every young in the billions of youth looks at the night sky with fascination. Twitter should become a universe for them to explore further that fascination and what it requires from humans both young and old.

Should I charge a fee for what I have written. I guess I have given Elon the best reason to be proud of his 44 billion dollar acquisition that can become bigger than face book and its fake meta verse. Elon through his access to Space X can create a closer expression of multiverse through twitter.
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Y. K. Dec 5, 2022

There's also something the author doesn't understand about Musk: Musk doesn't care all that much if Twitter goes under.

Musk has money and fame, he can easily afford to lose a bit. His 'problem' is too strict moderation. If Twitter falls, people will naturally gravitate to Mastodon (the only close alternative right now). Mastodon's shape means moderation can only be less strict, since the free volunteer server admins will never have the resources of Twitter Inc. nor their legal responsibility.

There's no technical way to prevent 'undesirables' (so to speak) from having their own servers speaking the same protocol, and you can't ban the client since it also connects to 'normal' resources. Once these people have their servers, they can lure people in, and banning any such servers would be a game of wack-a-mole. Not completely impossible to moderate, but the field is much more tilted in his favour.

Since Musk is content to see Twitter fall, he can be free to push his agenda to the max and see if anything breaks.
- Aaron Parker Dec 6, 2022
  
  Since Musk tried to back out of the original deal, and then only agreed to purchase Twitter at the compulsion of one of the country's most significant courts, I think you might be wrong about Musk's principles and motivations.
  
  What kind of a business person waives their right to due-diligence in a merger worth around a fifth of your total net worth? Musk is looking like a fool in all of this and now so do the other people, like Larry Ellison and Alwaleed bin Talal, who threw their lot in with him in the financing deal to buy Twitter. I bet potential investors in Musk's next "brilliant" idea won't have such short memories.
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Curtis Carpenter Dec 4, 2022

"Radical free speech" could be a noble goal if it were linked to some form of "radical responsibility" that held free speech abusers accountable for the harm they do. But the internet has no tools to hold people to account, and indeed sponsors irresponsibility by its promise of anonymity.

Being banned from a social media platform is pretty weak gruel when compared to the death of someone who dies after drinking Lysol on the medical advice of a Twitter celebrity.
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Sascha Grabolus Dec 4, 2022

As a consumer, I don’t mainly need free speech. I need good information. Why should I listen to thousands of exclamations of free-speech? Most of these exclamations are similar to each other anyway.
I am still waiting for a practical approach to do political discussions while keeping the overhead low. Discussions are not everything, we need good solutions.
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