We move on to Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, and the resulting thoughts on free speech. Things have twists and turns, we talk from near to far. Here’s the situation: Elon Musk has made a strong case for Twitter’s fake user count and made it a condition of the acquisition. On May 13, he suddenly proposed that the acquisition of Twitter is temporarily on hold, asking Twitter management to provide details, and the proportion of fake Twitter accounts should not exceed 5%.
This sudden change caused Twitter’s stock price to drop by 10% that day. We don’t know what the private communication between management and Musk said. Management was stumped and could not produce a detailed report. Musk then relented, and then tweeted that his team would randomly pick up 100 accounts from his fan base to verify that a few were fake, and invited others to do the same research. Although Musk reiterated that the acquisition will continue, he made a big thunder. On May 17, the New York Post and Business Week reported the audit results of a software company called SparkToro, saying that the current president of the United States Half of Biden’s 22 million followers is fake followers; among Musk’s 94 million followers, fake followers even account for more than 70%.
SparkToro’s definition of a fake account is an account that has no access and cannot see tweets in the account. They are either bot accounts, spam accounts, accounts based on political propaganda, or bot accounts that have been inactive for a long time. The current CEO of Twitter, Agrawal, is also anxious. On May 16, he sent 14 tweets in a row to justify, saying how Twitter is serious and responsible for cleaning up fake accounts. He has to deal with 500,000 spam accounts and review millions of accounts suspected of spam every day, but he did not explain in detail how no more than 5% of active users are spam users, how to calculate this number, but he said that a week This evaluation process has been shared with Musk before. It means Musk, you almost got it, don’t make it difficult for us.
Musk bluntly replied with a “Baba” emoji. Why did Musk suddenly take a fake account? A common estimate is that he has some financial problems. According to the tender offer price at the end of April, the total price is 44 billion US dollars. Brother Xiao Ma feels that it is not worthwhile and must lower the price. In Musk’s overall acquisition plan, about $46.5 billion is needed. The $12.5 billion is a personal margin loan, a loan that requires him to pledge his equity in Tesla to the bank. It also requires $21 billion in cash, which he will need to get by selling part of his stake in Tesla, as well as other assets such as bitcoin. That is to say, most of the huge sum of more than 30 billion US dollars comes from his equity in Tesla.
The day after he made the tender offer, Tesla’s stock price tumbled, wiping $30 billion off Musk’s assets. As a CEO, reducing holdings and cashing out gives the impression of running away, which is very detrimental to investor confidence. The risk that the stock price continues to fall is that Musk’s collateral with the bank has also depreciated, and the bank will require him to make up the margin, and in extreme cases will force liquidation and sell the stocks he used for collateral, which will drive a new sell-off panic. , dragging Tesla’s stock price even lower. Tesla’s board is worried, and Musk is feeling the pinch. Musk also lost a lot of money investing in cryptocurrencies. Therefore, to slow down Twitter’s acquisition process, and to find a reason, you have to find trouble with Twitter’s management and embarrass them.
The trouble with the number of fake accounts on Twitter is that it directly involves the question of whether the acquired company is honest, and whether the value of the company is real. As a public company, Twitter is required to provide quarterly reports to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The proportion of fake users is one of the contents to be disclosed, and Musk’s “fake investigation” claim is also in the interests of advertisers. It wouldn’t make any sense if the ad viewing data Twitter gave them included a ton of fake accounts.
Therefore, the anti-counterfeiting campaign is in line with the interests of several major groups: investors, ordinary users, and advertisers. Only the Internet navy and the management who are afraid of the exposure of the matter are troubled by this. I think a very likely consequence of this round of competition is that the Twitter management will not be exposed to the fact that they have been condoning fake accounts for a long time, which will expose them to accusations of falsified performance and fraud, and will also cause Twitter’s stock price to crash. , they had to renegotiate with Musk, and they had to convince the board and shareholders to accept Musk’s offer at a lower price than in April.
After Musk completes the acquisition, new management will be appointed, and the software architecture and platform rules will be redesigned to reduce fake accounts, but the responsibility of the previous management will not be mentioned, and they will be spared. In this way, everyone gets what they need, and Twitter shareholders get a decent price, but a little less, and Musk’s financial pressure is not so great.
Musk is not purely for public welfare. His enthusiasm for checking fakes is related to his financial situation, but at this level of the game, if such actions lead to such actions can be implemented: screening out fake accounts, adopting open-source algorithms to eliminate the secret operation of the platform, and compromising real people User verification and the addition of content editing functions by topic initiators are of great benefit to improving the speech environment. So people don’t have to get into an uphill battle over how to amend Section 230 (the US Communications Decency Act) or pass new laws that circumvent Section 230 to impose restrictions on platforms. Functional problems should be solved at the functional level as far as possible, and after the possibilities in this respect are exhausted, the stage of structural transformation will be entered. At least the transformation of the platform to reverse the public opinion environment can make great progress at the capital level, and no new legislation is needed. We are optimistic about it.
Recently, I found that many people have similar feelings to me. Ms. Chen Weiyu, the keynote speaker of the YouTube channel “Wei Yu Seeing the World”, said on Twitter a few days ago: “The CCP bandits Wumao Shuijun’s external propaganda is mostly active on Twitter. Because Twitter is easier to exert influence than YouTube. Twitter’s rules don’t protect tweeters, fifty cents can run around everywhere, and the threshold is low and easy to get started… With low thresholds, big fish and small shrimps have come in, and the language is so low that there is no threshold, showing the world the most despicable and despicable side of Chinese, so many people blame the Chinese culture, it is the tactic of these CCP bandits to divert the target of hatred: it is not the CCP that has ruined China, but the Chinese culture has ruined the Chinese people. The Twitter Chinese circle is the shithole outside the wall.”
This description is accurate and says what I want to say. I had an experience this year. At the beginning of the year, a Canadian truck driver launched a campaign against the mandatory vaccination order, which disrupted people’s livelihood in downtown Ottawa and caused a lot of complaints. Some viewers and netizens also mentioned to me that I proposed the participants in the YouTube program. Suggestions to reduce nuisance. I am in favor of opposing vaccine coercion and exercising constitutional rights, but I have always advocated that since you oppose coercion, do not use coercion to do things. Only in this way can the logic be self-consistent, the morals be complete, and more support is obtained. Because of this, there was a month-long siege of fifty cents on Twitter. The siege mainly comes from fake accounts, most of them are not ordinary people who support truck drivers, because the attackers do not have any real will to care about the problem, they are all taken out of context and used to extremes, quoting a sentence or two of you, and then adding seven or eight others. Something fabricated out of thin air. The typical practice of Wu Mao fighting a bad battle is the same as the cesspit described by Ms. Chen Weiyu.
The organizers of the Ottawa Big Truck Drivers event later did exactly what I suggested on the YouTube show, they honked their horns less often and moved the camp to a location with less traffic…Ontario High Court injunction against truck drivers rallying in Toronto: No high-pitched horns. The judge’s verdict was: “Of course, the truck drivers’ freedom of speech must be respected, but not honking their horns does not harm their freedom.” The 80-110 decibel truck horn is called freedom of speech. In a noisy environment of 100-120 decibels, a person can cause hearing damage without protection for one minute. Do you have to do this for free speech?
But some people may don’t care about this. What they do everything they can to provoke is the conflict within the international politic and the conflict between the society in which they live. Little potatoes have problems, and so does Biden, but then they have their plans.
Just like in some places in the natural environment that are low-lying, humid, and not exposed to the sun, it is easy to breed mosquitoes and flies, and then spread bacteria everywhere. The Twitter platform has several flaws that make it the most foul-smelling garbage dump in overseas Chinese-language circles. The first is the limitation of space. It is difficult for anyone to express a complete point of view and describe one thing accurately. The characteristic of the Internet is that one more action will reduce followers by 90%.
The tweeter didn’t finish saying one thing in the main post, and he continued to write it below, and few people continued to read it. Therefore, the most suitable expressions on Twitter are simple emotions and various plausible “golden sentences”, such as Hegel’s often quoted comment on Chinese history: “Chinese history is essential without history, it is only The fall of the monarch is repeated over and over again, and no progress can arise from it.” Hegel’s view of history was centered on Europe, and the information about China that he could obtain in the first half of the 19th century was very limited. In fact, since the birth of “Sinology” in the West, no serious sinologist would repeat the black Gerr’s words. Hegel’s assessment of the United States of his day was also rather superficial. In the book “Philosophy of History”, Hegel believes that “the general purpose of the American nation’s existence has not yet been fixed, and a need for solidarity has not yet arisen”. The reason is that he believes that the class division in the United States has not yet formed, and it is necessary to fabricate the sense of national mission, our vision, the stars, and the sea because of the need for one class to rule other classes.
Hegel’s “class differentiation” is not complete in today’s America either. He understands America is tens of thousands of kilometers away from the Prussia of the era he lived in. However, Tocqueville, a Frenchman of a similar era, has personally visited the United States to understand the public sentiment in the United States and wrote the book “On American Democracy”. In historical research, Hegel is not credible, and there are very few scholars citing his views in this field, but no one on Twitter will tell you this. Twitter is not the place for this kind of communication.
In addition, Twitter’s rule of not protecting Twitter owners is also very strange, limiting the Twitter owner’s authority to manage replies and edit topics. They use the loopholes in this rule to harass repeatedly. I believe many people have encountered this situation.
It is precise because of these loopholes that Wumao is like a duck to water, and the ecological environment is suitable for it, so it reproduces in large numbers. Just like the outsourcing contract that was exposed in the past two years, domestic internet companies promised in their bidding documents that they would create accounts with more than 100,000 fans within the contract period… Most of them targeted the Twitter platform…
Therefore, it can be ruled out that someone in the current management of Twitter can open the back door to the CCP’s cyber army and allow loopholes in the rules to breed the 50 cents, such as the Twitter director Li Moufei with a rather suspicious background. Due to several factors, Wumao has a great influence on Twitter, often calling himself a mainstream Chinese user, attacking others as a traitor, not worthy of speaking Chinese, etc., which has provoked another strong rebellion against Chinese traditions. Extremely disgusting with the culture. This creates a vicious custom that is full of extreme emotions and attacks each other without a bottom line. It has indeed seriously poisoned the overseas Chinese circle. It’s not an exaggeration to say it’s a cesspool.
My concern is this: When this thing becomes a habit, it’s not appropriate to advocate either a completely laissez-faire free speech or a restriction on speech. And many people will easily jump to how to restrict and change the state system to solve the problem. I thought the same way for a while, but then I realized that the so-called omnipotence of the system is another manifestation of superstition in the state, and I also need to be vigilant. The problem lies in Twitter. On this kind of platform, the state does not intervene, and it is the best solution to transform this platform into the existing rules. It is better to let the state do less and make progress in creating healthy customs.
Regarding Musk’s acquisition of Twitter case, we will continue to talk about it when there is any progress or update, please keep following and visiting our website regularly.
