Musk literally changed his platform so that his content was boosted and all the people he replied to was boosted. He is driving all the non-musk content off the platform. Enjoy your echo chamber.
I use X mostly for breaking news. Bluesky - I may delete my account and start with a new anon account and not post my stuff. Coz frankly Bluesky's looking worse than the XTwit.
A goal this year is to find a way to promote my Substack without social media.
Who's Scott Wiener? The senator? Did anyone ever do anything besides make a death threat? I wonder as I suspect a lot of these people say a lot of stuff but don't act on it. Which doesn't make it less scary but....something to think about.
“Luigi Mangione has outed the ‘progressive’ left (once again) as being every bit as vicious, malicious, and pro-hate speech as any uni-browed MAGA who wanted to rape Nancy Pelosi and hang the Vice President.”
Well…the guy he targeted was a real monster. He literally kidnapped a government official and kept her in some secret location that took many rescue attempts to find. We were lucky to find her staff, but they only had vague details on her whereabouts. You’d be amazed at how many obstacles the team had to jump up and run through to get to each place we even suspected of holding her.
It was a hell of search, and sometimes i’m amazed it ever succeeded. Skin of our teeth. Not sure i can shed too many tears for this spiky-shelled, big-fanged CEO.
There's an illuminating video snippet of Don Lemon (late of CNN) and Elon Musk (currently of Earth) discussing online moderation/censorship. You should watch it and think about it. At around 30 minute mark of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhsfjBpKiTw
That was an interesting portion of the interview, thank you for sharing it. I left a comment about how Musk is confusing moderation with censorship and failing to refute Lemon's points about how he isn't sticking to his own community standards. Although Lemon didn't do a great job of interviewing him either. His skills seem to be seriously eroding (and I think the fuss that kicked off his dismissal marked the beginning of the end for him - I don't think he should be fired, but maybe suspended for a few weeks or something for saying something that stupid). "Moderation is a propaganda word for censorship' is sheer bullshit. Websites and online fora moderated their comments section for years without much fuss until social media made it everything-goes.
Musk ALWAYS takes things down to the elemental and then (re)constructs from there. If content is legal under a country's laws, it goes up. From there it can then make its way to acceptance, rejection, celebration, or ignominy as the "marketplace of ideas" sees fit. If the post is found to be problematic due to mis- or disinformation, it can be tagged with a "Community Note" warning others of its issues with both specificity and opportunities for rebuttal, thus making its shortcomings as well as those of its critics public and open for debate. On its operations all over the world, Musk has said if a country's laws themselves require censorship, Musk follows those laws and leaves it to the citizens of that country to seek political solutions to issues of policy with which they disagree. Elemental.
I do understand how X ‘moderates’ but it’s still pretty uneven and seems pretty subject to Musk’s whim du jour. I remember when he was threatening to ban people for ‘misgendering’ when before he’d said it was okay an reinstated Murphy’s and other’s accounts banned by the Dorseywokenati for calling a man a man. I consider him fairly unstable. He’s a bright guy for sure and I don’t blow him off entirely. But he really wasn’t prepared for Lemon to push him on hate speech that clearly violated their own Community Standards. “hate speech” is something that seriously needs to be very clearly defined and drilled down on because it means an ocean of speech today that is still, technically, covered by the First Amendment, but no one wants to spend the time or money to take it on.
No such thing as "hate speech" until and unless the speech is actionable under standard First Amendment exceptions: "fighting words," incitement, violation of national security, credible threats, and other specific cases that pass American constitutional muster. Musk gets that, seems like you don't.
And those who care more about the one rich person who was killed rather than the thousands of people who thought they had insurance but were killed that's revealing too.
The right cares more about money and status hierarchy. They don't think death is tragic, they think the death of rich people is tragic.
Doesn't matter. It's still wrong. The 'well, healthcare murders more people than Mangione did,' is a false equivalency. For one, healthcare fatalities are high because Americans are so out-of-shape and unhealthy, often due to unhealthy lifestyles. COVID picked off the obese at higher rates than thinner people, for example. Also, CEOs don't decide who gets denied coverage, actuaries do, and I'm against shooting them too. And finally, we recognize that American healthcare is in shitty shape, is overpriced for consumers, and is in desperate need of fixing. One needs to look at all the politicians and political parties who fought reform for decades. And finally, one of the biggest reasons American healthcare is so expensive, kludgy, and inadequate is because of all the administration required for it. It's *insane*. It's like academia, which is burdened by hugely expensive administrative staff it really doesn't need if its core mission was to provide a good, balanced education to young people (clearly they lost that mission a long time ago).
I think the death of *anyone* at the hands of a vigilante, without all the protections American citizens are granted in the Constitution, is always tragic. And undemocratic. and uncivilized.
Right wing people, AFAIK, aren’t going around killing poor and middle class people with guns. “Well, their policies perpetuate it,” isn’t murder. They contribute to the deaths but no court of law would hold them responsible.
What they’re doing isn’t illegal, and accepted by most. If we don’t like it we’re going to have to change it.
I objected to abortion doctor assassins back in their heyday.
I objected to Trump’s attempted assassinations. I would have to Harris’s or Biden’s too. It’s just wrong and there’s really no justification for it. You’re kinda right-wing, at least sometimes, would I be justified in killing you if I knew who you were because “He’s evil”? What if I killed a known pedophile and said, “Well, he harmed more people than me”?
It’s why we have a justice system with due process.
One can understand Luigi's motivations without suggesting he be freed from prison. Honestly I think the process of going through the courts will keep this issue in American minds for most of this year. Especially since he pled not guilty.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts, but I believe your post oversimplifies the complexities of free speech, hate speech, and accountability. While I agree that violent threats and incitements are serious issues, I’d argue that conflating these with offensive speech or “hate speech” creates more confusion than clarity.
First, let’s address the concept of hate speech. In the U.S., hate speech isn’t a legally defined category—it’s protected under the First Amendment unless it directly incites violence or constitutes harassment. Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind explains that morality binds and blinds. This means we’re often so entrenched in our moral tribes that we fail to see where our own principles (like defending free speech) might contradict our emotional reactions to offensive content. If we’re serious about protecting free discourse, we must acknowledge that tolerating speech we find reprehensible is the price we pay for protecting speech we value.
Your argument also reflects what Greg Lukianoff and Haidt call one of the “Three Great Untruths” from The Coddling of the American Mind: “What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.” By treating offensive speech as an existential threat rather than an opportunity for debate or resilience-building, we risk creating a culture that prioritizes safety over the free exchange of ideas. This paradoxically stifles the very progress and accountability you seem to advocate for.
Furthermore, the proposal for stricter user accountability, such as identity verification, raises serious concerns. Anonymity isn’t just a shield for bad actors—it’s also a tool for whistleblowers, activists, and marginalized groups to express themselves without fear of retaliation. Sacrificing their safety for the sake of catching a few trolls would be a dangerous trade-off.
Finally, your post is peppered with hyperbole and moral equivalences (e.g., comparing social media issues to Hitler’s era or equating keffiyehs with swastikas). While I understand the frustration behind these analogies, they undermine your credibility and distract from the valid points you’re trying to make. If we want to tackle the challenges of content moderation, we need to move beyond inflammatory rhetoric and focus on actionable solutions.
In summary, I share your concern about violent threats and the lackadaisical enforcement of platform standards, but we need a nuanced discussion that respects the delicate balance between freedom and accountability. As Haidt suggests, embracing intellectual humility and acknowledging the limits of our own perspectives is key to finding sustainable solutions.
Regarding hate speech: We need to seriously re-define what it means, because it once meant pretty clear hate speech: "Kill all the gay Lilliputians for Jesus!" The far-left redefined it to mean "Anything *we* find offensive, and we find *everything* offensive." Where things get very fuzzy on social media is that middle ground the haters have quickly found where you're not quite sure if it's a real threat or not, because you can't know its real intent. There are no easy, quick answers to this. I think showing someone's photo with a bullseye might be pushing it; showing the same, with photos of his house or children or address *I* think is a clear threat.
I don't think the trade-off to reducing anonymity is 'catching a few trolls'; for starters, there are plenty of them online, but if they have to be held accountable for their words, if they might face real trouble or legal trouble, they might think twice about it. I agree with your Jon Haidt quote; I've read The Righteous Mind twice and will surely do so again. I am reminded of what a skeptic said on an old BBS thirty years ago: Hate speech and bad ideas should be held up to the light for public critique. The problem is, we're no longer allowed to do that because criticizing transactivists, feminists, Black Lives Matter, etc. results in real threats to reputation, career, and sometimes personal or familial safety. I think front-facing accounts should be anonymous - I can still be Grow Some Labia - but if someone complains I just called for killing a senator or a CEO or a transactivist, I should be held to account. Like, the SM platforms should be required to turn over real identification if it's requested through a specific channel and process (which we have not defined so far). Some of those very accounts and groups you mention - especially the 'marginalized' ones - are some of the worst offenders, being not nearly as marginalized as advertised or using anonymity as a bully pulpit.
I do actually think the keffiyeh is becoming, or perhaps has become, the new symbol for the left-wing antisemite. And they are espousing some views pretty similar to the Nazis of yore.
I totally agree with your call for actionable solutions. I don't have any, and the article evolved as it did because I tried, and realized I was getting far too mired in legalities that created more research because I just don't have the legal background for it. So I thought, well, my main idea is that we need to do something about violent threats and the hate speech that comes pretty close to violent threats (or maybe i shouldn't preface that last with 'hate speech'). And I realized, this is a subject we have barely begun to broach. So I put it out there to get the conversation started and was amazed to see like four comments enter my Inbox in about an hour. Clearly I've touched some nerves, and I know my article is highly imperfect. But it's getting the conversation started and I'm happy to have folks like you troubleshoot my ideas! Thank you!
Musk literally changed his platform so that his content was boosted and all the people he replied to was boosted. He is driving all the non-musk content off the platform. Enjoy your echo chamber.
I use X mostly for breaking news. Bluesky - I may delete my account and start with a new anon account and not post my stuff. Coz frankly Bluesky's looking worse than the XTwit.
A goal this year is to find a way to promote my Substack without social media.
I got hundreds of death threats DMed to me on Twitter and no one did anything about it. It was all right wingers who hate Scott Wiener.
Who's Scott Wiener? The senator? Did anyone ever do anything besides make a death threat? I wonder as I suspect a lot of these people say a lot of stuff but don't act on it. Which doesn't make it less scary but....something to think about.
Yeah I am an armed Vet with a rescue pitbull who is a good guard dog. I didn't think much of it.
“Luigi Mangione has outed the ‘progressive’ left (once again) as being every bit as vicious, malicious, and pro-hate speech as any uni-browed MAGA who wanted to rape Nancy Pelosi and hang the Vice President.”
Well…the guy he targeted was a real monster. He literally kidnapped a government official and kept her in some secret location that took many rescue attempts to find. We were lucky to find her staff, but they only had vague details on her whereabouts. You’d be amazed at how many obstacles the team had to jump up and run through to get to each place we even suspected of holding her.
It was a hell of search, and sometimes i’m amazed it ever succeeded. Skin of our teeth. Not sure i can shed too many tears for this spiky-shelled, big-fanged CEO.
What...? What are you talking about?
Sorry. That was a Nintendo joke.
There's an illuminating video snippet of Don Lemon (late of CNN) and Elon Musk (currently of Earth) discussing online moderation/censorship. You should watch it and think about it. At around 30 minute mark of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhsfjBpKiTw
That was an interesting portion of the interview, thank you for sharing it. I left a comment about how Musk is confusing moderation with censorship and failing to refute Lemon's points about how he isn't sticking to his own community standards. Although Lemon didn't do a great job of interviewing him either. His skills seem to be seriously eroding (and I think the fuss that kicked off his dismissal marked the beginning of the end for him - I don't think he should be fired, but maybe suspended for a few weeks or something for saying something that stupid). "Moderation is a propaganda word for censorship' is sheer bullshit. Websites and online fora moderated their comments section for years without much fuss until social media made it everything-goes.
Musk ALWAYS takes things down to the elemental and then (re)constructs from there. If content is legal under a country's laws, it goes up. From there it can then make its way to acceptance, rejection, celebration, or ignominy as the "marketplace of ideas" sees fit. If the post is found to be problematic due to mis- or disinformation, it can be tagged with a "Community Note" warning others of its issues with both specificity and opportunities for rebuttal, thus making its shortcomings as well as those of its critics public and open for debate. On its operations all over the world, Musk has said if a country's laws themselves require censorship, Musk follows those laws and leaves it to the citizens of that country to seek political solutions to issues of policy with which they disagree. Elemental.
Glad you found the exchange worthwhile.
I do understand how X ‘moderates’ but it’s still pretty uneven and seems pretty subject to Musk’s whim du jour. I remember when he was threatening to ban people for ‘misgendering’ when before he’d said it was okay an reinstated Murphy’s and other’s accounts banned by the Dorseywokenati for calling a man a man. I consider him fairly unstable. He’s a bright guy for sure and I don’t blow him off entirely. But he really wasn’t prepared for Lemon to push him on hate speech that clearly violated their own Community Standards. “hate speech” is something that seriously needs to be very clearly defined and drilled down on because it means an ocean of speech today that is still, technically, covered by the First Amendment, but no one wants to spend the time or money to take it on.
No such thing as "hate speech" until and unless the speech is actionable under standard First Amendment exceptions: "fighting words," incitement, violation of national security, credible threats, and other specific cases that pass American constitutional muster. Musk gets that, seems like you don't.
This made me think. Thanks.
Thanks. That's my purpose.
And those who care more about the one rich person who was killed rather than the thousands of people who thought they had insurance but were killed that's revealing too.
The right cares more about money and status hierarchy. They don't think death is tragic, they think the death of rich people is tragic.
Doesn't matter. It's still wrong. The 'well, healthcare murders more people than Mangione did,' is a false equivalency. For one, healthcare fatalities are high because Americans are so out-of-shape and unhealthy, often due to unhealthy lifestyles. COVID picked off the obese at higher rates than thinner people, for example. Also, CEOs don't decide who gets denied coverage, actuaries do, and I'm against shooting them too. And finally, we recognize that American healthcare is in shitty shape, is overpriced for consumers, and is in desperate need of fixing. One needs to look at all the politicians and political parties who fought reform for decades. And finally, one of the biggest reasons American healthcare is so expensive, kludgy, and inadequate is because of all the administration required for it. It's *insane*. It's like academia, which is burdened by hugely expensive administrative staff it really doesn't need if its core mission was to provide a good, balanced education to young people (clearly they lost that mission a long time ago).
I think the death of *anyone* at the hands of a vigilante, without all the protections American citizens are granted in the Constitution, is always tragic. And undemocratic. and uncivilized.
Right your focus on the assassination is the entire problem.
Right Wing people think it's wrong to kill rich people. They don't think it's wrong to kill poor or middle class people.
That's why they focus on the assassination and not to more important issue that kills more people.
Right wing people, AFAIK, aren’t going around killing poor and middle class people with guns. “Well, their policies perpetuate it,” isn’t murder. They contribute to the deaths but no court of law would hold them responsible.
What they’re doing isn’t illegal, and accepted by most. If we don’t like it we’re going to have to change it.
I objected to abortion doctor assassins back in their heyday.
I objected to Trump’s attempted assassinations. I would have to Harris’s or Biden’s too. It’s just wrong and there’s really no justification for it. You’re kinda right-wing, at least sometimes, would I be justified in killing you if I knew who you were because “He’s evil”? What if I killed a known pedophile and said, “Well, he harmed more people than me”?
It’s why we have a justice system with due process.
One can understand Luigi's motivations without suggesting he be freed from prison. Honestly I think the process of going through the courts will keep this issue in American minds for most of this year. Especially since he pled not guilty.
Yes, the policies perpetuate it. And as long as people are powerless to change these policies that are harmful there will be blood.
Those who learn from history are doomed to watch others repeat it.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts, but I believe your post oversimplifies the complexities of free speech, hate speech, and accountability. While I agree that violent threats and incitements are serious issues, I’d argue that conflating these with offensive speech or “hate speech” creates more confusion than clarity.
First, let’s address the concept of hate speech. In the U.S., hate speech isn’t a legally defined category—it’s protected under the First Amendment unless it directly incites violence or constitutes harassment. Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind explains that morality binds and blinds. This means we’re often so entrenched in our moral tribes that we fail to see where our own principles (like defending free speech) might contradict our emotional reactions to offensive content. If we’re serious about protecting free discourse, we must acknowledge that tolerating speech we find reprehensible is the price we pay for protecting speech we value.
Your argument also reflects what Greg Lukianoff and Haidt call one of the “Three Great Untruths” from The Coddling of the American Mind: “What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.” By treating offensive speech as an existential threat rather than an opportunity for debate or resilience-building, we risk creating a culture that prioritizes safety over the free exchange of ideas. This paradoxically stifles the very progress and accountability you seem to advocate for.
Furthermore, the proposal for stricter user accountability, such as identity verification, raises serious concerns. Anonymity isn’t just a shield for bad actors—it’s also a tool for whistleblowers, activists, and marginalized groups to express themselves without fear of retaliation. Sacrificing their safety for the sake of catching a few trolls would be a dangerous trade-off.
Finally, your post is peppered with hyperbole and moral equivalences (e.g., comparing social media issues to Hitler’s era or equating keffiyehs with swastikas). While I understand the frustration behind these analogies, they undermine your credibility and distract from the valid points you’re trying to make. If we want to tackle the challenges of content moderation, we need to move beyond inflammatory rhetoric and focus on actionable solutions.
In summary, I share your concern about violent threats and the lackadaisical enforcement of platform standards, but we need a nuanced discussion that respects the delicate balance between freedom and accountability. As Haidt suggests, embracing intellectual humility and acknowledging the limits of our own perspectives is key to finding sustainable solutions.
Regarding hate speech: We need to seriously re-define what it means, because it once meant pretty clear hate speech: "Kill all the gay Lilliputians for Jesus!" The far-left redefined it to mean "Anything *we* find offensive, and we find *everything* offensive." Where things get very fuzzy on social media is that middle ground the haters have quickly found where you're not quite sure if it's a real threat or not, because you can't know its real intent. There are no easy, quick answers to this. I think showing someone's photo with a bullseye might be pushing it; showing the same, with photos of his house or children or address *I* think is a clear threat.
I don't think the trade-off to reducing anonymity is 'catching a few trolls'; for starters, there are plenty of them online, but if they have to be held accountable for their words, if they might face real trouble or legal trouble, they might think twice about it. I agree with your Jon Haidt quote; I've read The Righteous Mind twice and will surely do so again. I am reminded of what a skeptic said on an old BBS thirty years ago: Hate speech and bad ideas should be held up to the light for public critique. The problem is, we're no longer allowed to do that because criticizing transactivists, feminists, Black Lives Matter, etc. results in real threats to reputation, career, and sometimes personal or familial safety. I think front-facing accounts should be anonymous - I can still be Grow Some Labia - but if someone complains I just called for killing a senator or a CEO or a transactivist, I should be held to account. Like, the SM platforms should be required to turn over real identification if it's requested through a specific channel and process (which we have not defined so far). Some of those very accounts and groups you mention - especially the 'marginalized' ones - are some of the worst offenders, being not nearly as marginalized as advertised or using anonymity as a bully pulpit.
I do actually think the keffiyeh is becoming, or perhaps has become, the new symbol for the left-wing antisemite. And they are espousing some views pretty similar to the Nazis of yore.
I totally agree with your call for actionable solutions. I don't have any, and the article evolved as it did because I tried, and realized I was getting far too mired in legalities that created more research because I just don't have the legal background for it. So I thought, well, my main idea is that we need to do something about violent threats and the hate speech that comes pretty close to violent threats (or maybe i shouldn't preface that last with 'hate speech'). And I realized, this is a subject we have barely begun to broach. So I put it out there to get the conversation started and was amazed to see like four comments enter my Inbox in about an hour. Clearly I've touched some nerves, and I know my article is highly imperfect. But it's getting the conversation started and I'm happy to have folks like you troubleshoot my ideas! Thank you!