[ExI] Review - TED interview with Elon Musk re Twitter takeover

BillK pharos at gmail.com
Sun May 1 16:50:44 UTC 2022


This article is an analysis of Musk's interview comments. The article
claims that the interview demonstrates how little Musk understands
about content moderation. (Not surprising really, as it is not a field
Musk has been involved in).
Many good points made in this article!

<https://www.techdirt.com/2022/04/15/elon-musk-demonstrates-how-little-he-understands-about-content-moderation/>
Quotes:
Indeed, what struck me about his views is how much they sound like
what the techies who originally created social media said in the early
days. And here’s the important bit: all of them eventually learned
that their simplistic belief in how things should work does not work
in reality and have spent the past few decades trying to iterate.
------
Simply saying that moderation should follow the law generally shows
that one has never actually tried to moderate anything. Because it’s
much more complicated than that, as Musk will implicitly admit later
on in this interview, without the self-awareness to see how he’s
contradicting himself.
--------
There’s then a slightly more interesting discussion of open sourcing
the algorithm, which is its own can of worms that I’m not sure Musk
understands.
First of all, it’s often not the algorithm that is the issue. Second,
algorithms that are built up in a proprietary stack are not so easy to
just randomly “open source” without revealing all sorts of other
stuff. Third, the biggest beneficiaries of open sourcing the ranking
algorithm will be spammers (which is doubly amusing because in just a
few moments Musk is going to whine about spammers). Open sourcing the
algorithm will be most interesting to those looking to abuse and game
the system to promote their own stuff.
We know this. We’ve seen it. There’s a reason why Google’s search
algorithm has become more and more opaque over the years. Not because
it’s trying to suppress people, but because the people who were most
interested in understanding how it all worked were search engine
spammers. Open sourcing the Twitter algorithm would do the same thing.
-----
Indeed, to get to the spot that we’re in now, basically all of these
companies started with that same premise, realized it wasn’t workable,
and then iterated. And Musk is basically saying “I have a brilliant
idea: let’s go back to step 1 and pretend none of the things experts
in this space have learned over the past decade actually happened.”
--------
The problem is not “someone I dislike saying something I dislike” the
problem is spam, abuse, harassment, threats of violence, dangerously
misleading false information, and more.
--------

BillK



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