KK wrote:The promise to “eradicate fake accounts” is a good thing, but the relaxing of content rules is just going to lead to it becoming more of a Wild West than it is currently (unless governments themselves get more involved in demanding moderation).
I guess this also means Donald Trump will return soon and shutter his own failing venture…which will actually give him the perfect excuse to close it down.
I think the key misconception is that anonymity doesn't create misinformation, ego-stoking bullshit creates at least as much, that is then disproportionately amplified by influencers' reach. So when you relax content rules, and disallow anonymity, you merely end up with a different sort of the same problem; the trouble is that everyone takes it seriously depending on how much clout/following that person has.
It'll simply become a utopia for edgelords and shitlords like Musk, who don't care about privacy because they
want everyone to know about their insane opinions and to become
Internet famous, while those grounded in reality are like, how the strawberry float is this guy so obscenely rich when he's a giant knobber.
Regarding real profitability / value, GD already made that point. It's hard to imagine, yet so many of the big tech firms are funded by endless streams of venture capital, and to a lesser extent, advertising, betting on futures/speculation that they'll somehow take over the world / replace the social fabric of society in its entirety. Yet the beauty of this is, when you look at the numbers, these giant firms are cash and salary/dividends vehicles, make no real money, and sometimes arguably have little to no intrinsic value. The valuable thing is their userbase and brand. Twitter obviously does have value and utility in how its used for social change... Not sure about most of Facebook's functionality given how its geared at the minute, and they are all heading in that direction of polarising political debate and the users unwittingly leveraging misinformation to pay out massive profits on associated advertising.
It's largely for this reason that I care much less about a loss making business if it provides me with a job, when I look at these giant "success stories" and realise, they are literally worse off financially, and at quite the ineffable scale. As long as somebody is willing to keep pumping in money it'll never reach its conclusion of collapsing outright. There are people in society like Musk who will just pour money into something they treat as a toy, because they don't really have much else they're interested in spending their money on - that's because it seldom exists.
