So much for free speech on X; Musk confirms new users must soon pay to post

My sides

Please

If this dude had any experience running an online site he would know how many stolen credit cards are out there.
X is a fly-coated chum bucket.
- Hey now....that's really rude! If fly-coated chum buckets could read they would be very very upset!

This seems like further confirmation of that theory that I saw posted on here that the Saudi oil barons funded Elon’s purchase of Twitter for the sole purpose of destroying it. They want to silence online discussions of climate change and other left wing topics.

Combined with Reddit being owned by Tencent, Facebook being eternally evil, and TikTok being unconducive to any form of coherent dialogue, there are not many places for left wing discourse on the internet anymore.

"climate change and other left wing topics"... I know that's basically how it works in some countries, but it's insane to consider certain scientific facts left wing, and we really shouldn't support such statements.
- Thanks for pointing that out. It’s just so normal to think that way here that they’ve even corrupted me into framing climate change that way. It’s not a left wing topic; it’s a reality.
  I just hope young people who are thinking of voting conservative here keep in mind that those assholes literally don’t believe in climate change and by extension science and facts. That alone should automatically disqualify conservatives from anyone’s consideration.
- Yes, in Europe, most political parties, both left and right, have their own climate change mitigation policies, because if they don't, they risk just not being elected.
- The reason it’s overwhelmingly called “climate change” instead of global warming now is because of language change pushed by billionaire foundations. The Koch network specifically focus grouped and created the term change. Whether we want it considered left wing or not, the billionaire backed right has made such statements left wing.
I’ve had the same theory for a while. They saw the Arab Spring and other populist movements. With their vast oil wealth, tanking Twitter was a small price to pay to re-fracture descent and silence the left. The concentration of wealth has given insane power to wealthy who skew overwhelmingly on the side of themselves. The rise of the right is a direct result of billionaires funding across numerous avenues. The right aligns best with their self interest. They played the long game because they only have to pay people and let them do it for them. Regular folks have to stay engaged in the battle after working to support themselves. Billionaires are the matastasized cancer of capitalism.
The purchase itself was a leveraged buyout, they didn't pay the entire $44bn as Twitter took out a loan to cover $13bn. Like all leveraged buyouts (eg Toys R Us) the purchase itself is meant to kill the business. Even before Musk started screwing the revenue there was little hope Twitter could pay the interest, let along the principle. Now, Twitter is worth less than the debt, by some estimates.
Twitter is really big there. It's basically the most used social media by a vast majority compared to other ones. It's way more plausible that some 'too much rich to know what to do with all the money' Saudi princes decided something like a few percent of their wealth to own the biggest social media on their country for bragging right and admin privilege to be worth it. Plus, they probably thought Twitter was too big to fail and die. They just didn't expect Elon would fuck it up so bad, I don't think anybody expected Elon to fuck it up so bad.
This seems like further confirmation of that theory that I saw posted on here that the Saudi oil barons funded Elon’s purchase of Twitter for the sole purpose of destroying it.
Then why does it still exist? Musk took Twitter private, they could've just pulled the plug if they wanted to.

It's completely absurd that he's saying this as an anti-bot measure. The bots exist because they generate revenue for the scumbags behind them, a small fee is just going to be part of doing business for them. He's not trying to stop bots, he's trying to monetize them and use them as an excuse to charge everyone. "The bot problem" will never be fixed and will be used as an excuse for every anti-user measure they put forward.

Anti-user measures on a social media platform

WHY THE FUCK IS ANYONE ON TWITTER ANYMORE.

I went to check it out yesterday and I think I actually got dumber in 5 minutes I spent there.
- So you'll be returning there tomorrow?
- Find any good witch hunts? We cancelling Markiplier because he totally blinked a desire to oppress women and minorities in morse code? That sounds like Twitter

I genuinely have to wonder if Musk is intentionally trying to kill Xitter, because if he's actually trying to recoup his "investment" he's going about it completely the wrong way

There was a theory that he was paid by a country like Saudi Arabia to take it down, sinces it's a powerful tool for a repressed population. Twitter was very important during the Arab Spring.
I scoffed at it before but it's starting to seem very plausible.
Maybe he's just trying to make it cheap enough for Dorsey to buy it from him.
- If he's not careful he's going to make it cheap enough for me to buy it from him.

No, stop, please, don't kill your platform, no, stop. Eh, nevermind.

Part of me really buys into the idea that Musk is pulling an evil mastermind move with his other billionaire pals, destroying one of the biggest social media sites to keep users fractured. End goal keeping any community small and unable to organize at scale. Then the voice of reason tells me this just another egotistical nepo baby trying to staunch the hemorrhaging of money from his last bad investment.
This is still my opinion. I hated shitter before boy wonder musk took over. It sucked before and it sucks worse now. Just kill it.

You have to pay him so that you can do the work of creating content for his platform? No thanks

Meanwhile, everyone will bitch about the absurdity of this and how shitty Musk and his followers are, then continue to use the platform daily as though it's an essential service. Anyone who hasn't jumped ship my now is either complacent or wholly supportive.

What’s the alternative for one-to-many communication? I don’t use the platform anymore, but I miss a massive amount of news related to most of my hobbies due to it, normally relying on Reddit users to repost them. It’s incredibly annoying to have to search through 10+ social media pages to check for updates about a race team during a race or an ongoing gaming event.
Mastodon doesn’t have anywhere near the adoption necessary, bluesky still hasn’t taken off.
- That's the rub, every social media service with any uptake is bad from a privacy perspective because the only real way to make them profitable is to sell ads.
  So, what are you looking to get out of it? RSS is still a thing, services like lemmy are decent at aggregating links (post the content you want, and hopefully others will help), and bookmarks work well if you just need a dozen or so sites.
  I honestly never use Twitter, Facebook, etc, and I feel like I'm about to keep tabs on things reasonably well.

Who would have thought that Twitter would become the new Somethingawful forums, and that Musk would take the role of Lowtax.

I’ve seen web writers claim that the original brain trust of Weird Twitter started from a Something Awful clique
aoh man. So apt and too soon.
Is SA still around?
- Yes, and it still kicks ass. Come home, goon.
  If you do your browsing on mobile, check out the Awful app.

Anyone who still uses Twitter/X is an actual fucking moron.

That’s not what free speech is, and there never has been free speech on Twitter, and that’s mostly a good thing. Jesus.

Elon Musk said free speech like once and then immediately threw a bunch of journalists off the site. And apparently every news article for the rest of my life is going to be about how he was hypocritical instead of whether he wants power or influence or has power and influence or the meaning of giving him those things.
Don’t trust every industrialist you meet even if they invested in one company where competent people make cool space ships. He’s clearly on Ket and some uppers. Grimes divorced him and her music isn’t even good. He’s not that complicated.
Elon and his sycophants have been the idiots talking about free speech on Twitter. It's perfectly fine to use that talking point as criticism. If he's not interested in free speech then what was he doing allowing banned Nazi accounts back on?

Musky: Hmm, how else can i drive away actual human users?

This is not going to stop bots.

here's hoping it stops site growth
- Most people don't get out of bed for a dollar so no, it won't outside the usual 10-30% pareto ratio, which is probably already getting impacted by Xitter being run into the ground.

Who is going to pay to post on twitter? Not only has he destroyed what was there but he's stopping any route for growth with new users. Most people won't bother.

He really has managed to destroy that company with his knee jerk decisions.

I work in bot protection and it's a sound idea but doesn't really work in practice. As long as there's more than 1$ of value to be gained it's worth it for the bot makers.

This also makes it so that botting is only accesible to select few actors that have the required resources i.e. russian troll farms or large bot networks from china, in turn this increases their value. This is very good for them.

Reality is that the only way to stop bots is to constantly change up the detection system. This is called a "cat and mouse" sort of problem and it really is the only way to do it. The attacker always has to catch up and it can be trivial that takes them couple of hours to do but it also reveals behavior patterns for marking bot accounts. This actually works really well in practice but requires a lot of dev resources and many companies low-key like bots which is another thread entirely.

I'll ask anyway. Why do companies like bots?
Yes only Russia and China do bad things with technology!
- Never had to deal with attacks originating from US or Europe so thats kinda true actually :)

I stole this line from someone else, but its great.

Elon Musk has invented fee speech, not free speech.

It's a clever line, but Musk hasn't invented a single goddamn thing in his life.

I never got the appeal of twitter/x, and I never will. I get other social networks, some more, some less, but Twitter's just stupid IMO. I hope that shit'll die sooner than later.

I can’t get past the og twitter which was everyone blogging minutiae of their life. What they ate for lunch. What street they’re walking down. What they thought of the music on the radio.
Somewhere along the way people tried to make it legit, but also it was people trying to claim firsties for any event worth mentioning.
It’s just a crap platform. Too much bs to wade through to find anything good.
twitter is for food trucks to tell me where they'll be today, and anything else is a misuse of the service
- Twitter was great for watching Jan 6 unfold, there's no replacement for the kind of unfiltered crowd sourced information gathering it enabled

Please. I truly want to see my favorite people on Twitter get driven to a better platform.

Unfortunately, they’re going to Threads. Although I guess that’s technically better. But better in the sense that drinking piss is better than eating shit.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Elon Musk confirmed Monday that X (formerly Twitter) plans to start charging new users to post on the platform, TechCrunch reported.

Back when X launched the "Not-A-Bot" program, Musk claimed that charging a $1 annual fee would make it "1000X harder to manipulate the platform."

In a help center post, X said that the "test was developed to bolster our already significant efforts to reduce spam, manipulation of our platform, and bot activity."

X Support confirmed that follower counts would likely be impacted during that purge, because "we're casting a wide net to ensure X remains secure and free of bots."

Musk's plan to charge a fee to overcome bots won't work, experts told WSJ, because anyone determined to spam X can just find credit cards and buy disposable phones on the dark web.

And any bad actor who can't find what they need on the dark web could theoretically just wait three months to launch scams or spread harmful content like disinformation or propaganda.

The original article contains 798 words, the summary contains 165 words. Saved 79%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Paid speech? Lol

Free speech, now only $9.99 per month

Upgrade your free speech to premium speech now for only $17.99

I'm not a fan of him, nor a twitter user, but as far as free speech is concerned, that should mean your opinion is not censored, but the platform doesn't have to be free to use, but if it doesn't discriminate opinions, and everyone is allowed to make an account, and everyone has to pay the same

That's equal treatment, and isn't going against free speech.

Hopefully more people change to mastodon now

Didn't he say this like 5 times already

I hate that twitter has the seo that it does. I always accidentally click on a link to see the "log in or get fucked" screen.

Its staying power is really annoying TBH.
I guess it could be worse (AKA everyone just going to Discord instead).
Add -twitter to your search queries.

This isn't useful or sufficient. You have to consider how many bots get banned and cost to determine efficacy. If you want 10,000 fake people to manipulate real people $10,000 doesn't seem a high price if you make the fake people act organic enough that they largely aren't banned.

It would be more useful if a singular service verified sufficient credentials to prove you were an authentic human and allowed you to auth to various sites. This in turn creates the problem that verifiers now know a LOT about your online life.

If the verification involved site -> verifier -> government held public key I think you could arrange so that none of the parties had enough info to identify users.

Well, if nothing else, it does reduce some load on their servers because less people will be posting.

tfw the free speech isn't even free monetarily

This is just another attempt at establishing a new status quo for other social media before Twitter dies a death due to the insurmountable debt that Musk's purchase saddled it with. We've had a bunch of things tried, so far the only thing that stuck was charging for API access (which reddit soon adopted). Let's not have this as well, please.

Money is speech? This is clearly in-line with current US legal definitions so what's the problem?

\s

People still use Xwitter?

When will people stop supporting this clown?

Remember when some people were like "well, I don't support him, but I've had this Twitter account forever, so I'm not leaving." This is what happens. Things just get worse until you gain plausible deniability for continuing to support the bullshit.

Perhaps when his name/companies will stop being on the headlines every single day multiple times. Unless it's something really big that could actually harm his reputation people should restrain from posting and upvoting news about him. This article is about shit that hasn't happened yet, this guy is tricking you all around.

I wonder if introducing an artificial delay, like hitting post, and it taking a minute before it actually goes live, would help. Because then something could scan incoming posts, and if something looked like a bot, it could be pulled before it ever actually went out.

Good news for X alternative Social Media, if pay to post for X I'm exit form X.

Meanwhile, the neuralink patient zero gave a beautiful presentation of what has been happening with that project and it isn't news because it goes against the Elon Bad narrative