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Showing posts from December, 2022

Elon Musk and the Problem with Termites

 Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter at the end of October and stated desire to transform it has sparked a growing conversation on free speech. This conversation has revealed the contradictions in the positions of those both in favor of and opposed to censorship, including his own. Musk's stated goal has been to increase free speech on Twitter, seeing it as the digital commons, and free speech in that commons as vital to a healthy democracy . The clamor against this change and the direction from which it has come has illuminated precisely why it is needed, and displayed the hurdles to its success. While external economic pressures from governments and advertisers make the transformational task difficult, the greatest dangers may prove to be internal. Despite a massive staff reduction of ideologically driven workers, there seems to remain resistance to the change by some staff and automatic algorithmic functions acting as termites in the house undercutting the stated goals of increa