Honestly, let people say whatever lies and nonsense they want and let relevant parties deal with them with libel laws if they want to, or liars destroy their own credibility if they want to.
Problem there is that Twitter's revenue comes from advertisers.
And corporate advertisers aren't looking to have their brand associated with 4chan 2.0.
So if Musk believes in this unfettered free speech concept then it will destroy Twitter. Because what many people don't know is just how dominant Facebook and Google are in the advertising space. It's > 95% of total ad spend for many brands. So dumping Twitter because it's harming their brand will be a trivial decision.
"Advertisers" advertised on Rush Limbaugh. They keep advertising on Fox News. It'll just draw different advertisers.
Advertisers are going to go where the money is. Will the changing demographics make the platform more money for advertisers, or less? That's all they care about.
Incidentally, if it means there's even a chance that we stop seeing even a small percentage of )(&@(#& Liberty Mutual ads, I'm all for whatever that takes.
Oh, I get it, but your conjecture was that Twitter wouldn't make enough money from advertising to stay in business. If these kinds of ads make enough money for Rush (in the old days) and Fox to stay at the number 1 spots in their category, then what do they care?
In 1991, the Information Council for the Environment was founded by the National Coal Association with the expressed purpose of fabricating uncertainty around climate science.
They provided multiple scripts to Simmons Advertising for Rush Limbaugh to read and pass off as his personal dark horse take on climate policy.
Refer to pages 9 and 12 in the PDF linked below [2].
Would you say the coal industry wasn't a very profitable group? Do you think this is the only group who leveraged Limbaugh's voice to deliberately spread misinformation?
Fauci and the CDC have used the networks and elite newspapers to sell the idea that the vaccine prevented transmission of COVID, which has now shown to have been a known lie. How far down this rabbit hole do you want to go? I mean, this kind of media manipulation has been going around since doctors endorsed smoking as good for your health on TV ads. My personal take -- RE: Twitter -- is that this sort of thing needs sunlight and fresh air to sanitize it, not the government or corporations trying to filter it out.
The claim was: "the types of advertisers on Rush Limbaugh etc. [were] Not nearly as profitable as say Nike, GM, Sony, Apple etc."
That claim is false and I provided evidence to show it.
As for your whataboutism: that's patently untrue and you know it. Transmission rate and vaccination rate are very clearly inversely related no matter what dataset you're referencing.
But you're correct, misinformation knows no bounds, be it right wing radio or the comments section of a tech forum. The best we can do is vet sources sufficiently, or otherwise learn to disregard unfounded claims as random noise.
You may not recall, but 4chan was one of the greatest disseminators of information and a huge spawning ground for all kinds of content prior to the emergence of more mainstream platforms. It was also fucking disgusting.
I think so too. He will have to rehire all those content moderators that he is currently firing to keep the ad base alive. He will have to have people monitor and delete Trump and Kanye tweets when they come back online as well as probably 90% of whatever Alex Jones posts but I think he will stop short of closing their accounts; maybe he will have to block them for EU countries I would guess, because that's the law. I don't know how EU could force anything beyond that.
> (1) this is, by the way, something that Musk did to that diver he didn't like.
It also should be noted that Musk __won__ that libel case. So that's "acceptable speech" according to our laws and courts.
So no. Libel laws are _NOT_ the answer. Its too difficult to actually sue someone for libel today. You can apparently call someone a pedophile, advertised to dozens-of-millions of followers, and not be considered "libel" or "defamation".
If there's one thing I learned from that event, its that our libel laws / defamation laws are not strict enough. Its not worth going to the courts on this kind of thing because you'll lose.
Yes, do that. There's absolutely no second order effects that could possibly happen. We'll just go to the courts for everything. I'm sure it's easy and inexpensive to sue someone for libel in different jurisdictions.
> let relevant parties deal with them with libel laws if they want to
"Paul Pelosi was attacked by a gay liberal" doesn't fall into libel laws.
> Liars destroy their own credibility
And Elon Musk owns Twitter. So that destroys the credibility of the platform, does it not?
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There's also organizations that explicitly peddle in misinformation. See "Russia Today" (or RT), who are trying to say that Ukrainians are gay Nazis, and were banned on Twitter because of it. There's no libel law that covers this case either (no one in particular is getting defamed). Its just war propaganda and is actively harmful misinformation.
> let relevant parties deal with them with libel laws if they want to
Falling for 2016 trap. If it’s unverified info then it should be treated as such. Except majority of the people read it and consider it a true statement. Then it’s too late to debunk it.
I guess my point is that there's more kinds of harmful speech out there than just libel / slander.
> COVID19 can be cured by drinking bleach and/or Ivermectin and/or hydroxyquinoline.
These "cures" range from useless to harmful. But no one is getting defamed, so there's no one who will take the matter to court. What do you want, for COVID19 to take Joe Rogan to court over the Ivermectin statements?
I don't think people realize how useless libel laws are in today's social networks.
But, telling you that nothing works, go home and wait, is not factual. Many things are helpful, especially in combination.[0] This information should not be suppressed.
Monoclonal antibodies and Dexamethasone are effective treatments for COVID19 (depending on a lot of details of course. BA.5 and other variants are showing resistance to many Monoclonal Antibodies)
Dexamethasone studies, even in April 2020, showed a 50% reduction in death rates. This is why the death rate in the USA was so much lower than Italy, because doctors studied the crap out of COVID19 and we begun to find effective treatments.
Instead of spreading information about treatments, a large group decided it was best to spread misinformation about horse dewormers.
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In either case, I think I can safely say that the hoopla about IVM and all that was bullshit. It never worked, but people wanted to believe for... some reason? It got to the point where people were rejecting legitimate treatments (ie: Dexamethasone + Monoclonal Antibodies) and asking doctors for IVM. I know, my sister is a doctor and had to deal with this bullshit.
I'm talking about prophylaxis. Dexamethasone is used for critically ill COVID cases only. There is no approved prophylactic drug or even early treatment drug. It's use an off-label drug or nothing.
The link I referenced includes monoclonal antibody studies, and also paxlovid studies. It happens that I'm fully vaxx'd, got COVID, took paxlovid, and recovered (slowly). You might take a look at the link.
I'm not interested in "large groups", I'm interested in scientific evidence.
You may know that IVM is a Nobel prize winning drug that has been administered in billions of doses world wide for decades. It's on the WHO Essential list and is safer than aspirin.
The FDA staffers really enjoyed their "horse de-wormer" propaganda campaign. Yes, some people were using veterinary grade IVM, because they were denied the pharmaceutical grade prescription.
It's disingenuous, like saying don't drink water, because it's a chemical used in sewage treatment plants.
Here in NH, the legislature passed a bill to allow OTC dispensing of IVM. The Governor vetoed it (rightly, I think). His comment, when he signed the veto, included the remark that the measure was unnecessary, because any doctor can legally prescribe IVM for COVID. Except, most are actually not allowed to do that by their administrators.
As an experiment, my wife asked the local Walgreen pharmacist what he would do, if she gave him an IVM prescription for COVID. "We can't get any," he lied.
With all due respect, IVM has been proven to be a scam treatment with no benefits to COVID19.
If you're still on the IVM hype-train, you've been left behind in this discussion. It is known not to work on COVID19. Its efficacy in treating parasites may be well known, but COVID19 isn't a parasite, its a virus.
As Mark Twain has stated: "It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled". But hopefully it gives you some perspective on the matter. You have been fooled, and you will remain fooled as long as you're holding onto IVM illogically.
If I see "TrumpIsDead" in the Trending box, that doesn't tell me who the liar is. So does that destroy the credibility of the source, or does it destroy the credibility of Twitter's trends feature?
