Remember this?

Let’s see how X promotes truth rather than click-baiting:

Of course you can’t have explicit, public rules for what regulates a declared free-speech, public space (because it’s not actually public, it’s private). You need “scoops” and privileged access to inside employees.

A number of semi-hidden rules like this one:

Nice graph without numbers, btw. Those were all the rage during COVID and Nvidia presentation slides.

Wait, what is this “reach” and “deprioritization” on a FREE SPEECH platform? But let’s expand the one we started with:

“Reply like a madman”, X rule to MAXIMIZE TRUTH.

Or maybe it’s the opposite and farming for engagement maximizes inflammatory action? What is the most likely outcome?

One of Elon’s groupies still a “crybaby” tho:

(thread with some actual data)

(or this, despite it’s quite superficial. But the bottom line is that people don’t simply leave X to send a message, but also because it doesn’t fucking work anymore. Objectively broken and a waste of time.)

But all this stuff is beside the point.

The platform is bent for political exploitation. The moment your “reach” to the “world town square” is regulated by a fee, a fee that however small is under the control of a political party, creates a feedback loop so that those who participate are already themselves filtered. Filtered out, because I’d rather starve to death than give a dollar to Elon Musk. And like me obviously many others.

So what is “free speech”? (without even going into “truth-seeking”)

We used to say, the medium is the message. Who controls the medium, controls the message.

Elon Musk’s magical trick has been to make people focus on the message: you can say everything you want! Free speech absolutism!

He wants to distract you, like magicians, while the substitution happens: he doesn’t need to control the message, because he has the control of the medium. The darkness that comes before. He shapes the discourse uphill, where you aren’t looking. He doesn’t need to censor the single, when he controls the statistically meaningful.

What you write is not what people see.

He gives you illusions, while he seizes the real.