You fucked up actual good, kiddo.

Twitter is a catastrophe clown automotive firm that’s profitable regardless of itself, and there’s no attainable strategy to develop customers and income with out making a collection of monumental compromises that may in the end destroy your fame and probably trigger grievous injury to your different corporations.

I say this with utter confidence as a result of the issues with Twitter are not engineering issues. They’re political issues. Twitter, the corporate, makes little or no attention-grabbing expertise; the tech stack is just not the dear asset. The asset is the person base: hopelessly addicted politicians, reporters, celebrities, and different individuals who ought to know higher however preserve posting anyway. You! You, Elon Musk, are hooked on Twitter. You’re the asset. You simply purchased your self for $44 billion {dollars}.

The issue when the asset is folks is that persons are intensely sophisticated, and making an attempt to control how folks behave is traditionally a depressing expertise, particularly when that authority is vested in a single highly effective particular person.

What I imply is that you’re now the King of Twitter, and other people assume that you just, personally, are liable for every thing that occurs on Twitter now. It additionally seems that absolute monarchs normally get murdered when shit goes sideways.

Listed here are some examples: you may write as many well mannered letters to advertisers as you need, however you can not fairly anticipate to gather any significant promoting income if you don’t promise these advertisers “model security.” Meaning it’s a must to ban racism, sexism, transphobia, and all types of different speech that’s completely authorized in the US however reveals folks to be complete assholes. So you can also make all the guarantees about “free speech” you need, however the uninteresting actuality is that you just nonetheless must ban a bunch of authorized speech if you wish to earn a living. And whenever you begin doing that, your creepy new right-wing fanboys are going to viciously activate you, similar to they activate each different social community that realizes the identical important reality.

Truly, there’s a step earlier than making an attempt to get the advert cash: it seems that most individuals don’t need to take part in horrible unmoderated web areas stuffed with shitty racists and not-all-men fedora bullies. (Because of this Twitter is so small in comparison with its friends!) What most individuals need from social media is to have good experiences and to really feel validated on a regular basis. They wish to stay at Disney World. So if you would like extra folks to affix Twitter and truly put up tweets, it’s a must to make the expertise a lot, rather more nice. Which implies: moderating extra aggressively! Once more, each “different” social community has realized this lesson the exhausting manner. Like, over and over and over once more.

Additionally, everybody crying about “free speech” conveniently ignores that the largest menace to free speech in America is the fucking authorities, which appears fully bored of the First Modification. They’re out right here banning books, Elon! President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump have similar coverage positions on Part 230: they each wish to repeal it. Have you learnt why? As a result of the First Modification prohibits them from making specific speech rules, in order that they preserve threatening to repeal the legislation that enables social networks to even exist with the intention to exert oblique stress on content material coverage. It’s not delicate!

State governments are even much less delicate: each Texas and Florida have handed speech rules that overtly inform social media corporations the best way to reasonable, in open hostility to the First Modification. Determining the best way to adjust to these legal guidelines is just not an engineering drawback (not least as a result of compliance is perhaps unimaginable). It’s a authorized drawback as a result of these legal guidelines are blatantly unconstitutional, and the one acceptable response to them is to inform the federal government to shut up and go away. (An enormous drawback right here is that the courts are fairly silly concerning the web!) A problem to those legal guidelines, partially funded by Twitter, is headed to the Supreme Court docket, which is the polar reverse of a predictable system: it’s a group of uncool weirdos with lifetime appointments that may radically reshape American life nevertheless it needs. You possibly can’t deploy AI at this drawback: it’s a must to exit and defend the precise First Modification towards the dangerous legal guidelines in Texas and Florida, whose taxes you want and whose governors you appear fairly keen on. Are you prepared for what that appears like? Are you able to sit earlier than Congress and politely decline to interact of their content material seize periods for hours on finish? Are you able to do any of this with out the extremely revered coverage consultants whose chief you first harassed and then fired? That is what you signed up for. It’s far more boring than rockets, automobiles, and rockets with automobiles on them.

And it will get worse the second you permit the US! Germany is a big marketplace for Tesla. Are you going to flaunt Germany’s speech legal guidelines? I’d wager not. The Indian authorities mainly calls for social media corporations present potential hostages in order to function in that nation; you may’t engineer your manner out of that shit. Are you able to expertise the stress Twitter faces within the Center East to dam and prohibit accounts? Are you prepared for the truth that the Iranian authorities will fucking homicide folks over their social media posts? (Are you prepared for a way Twitter is being utilized by Iranians protesting that authorities proper now?) Are you excited for the Chinese language authorities to search out methods to threaten Tesla’s big enterprise in that nation over content material that seems on Twitter? As a result of it’s going to occur.

The important reality of each social community is that the product is content material moderation, and everybody hates the individuals who resolve how content material moderation works. Content material moderation is what Twitter makes — it’s the factor that defines the person expertise. It’s what YouTube makes, it’s what Instagram makes, it’s what TikTok makes. All of them attempt to incentivize good things, disincentivize dangerous stuff, and delete the actually dangerous stuff. Have you learnt why YouTube movies are all eight to 10 minutes lengthy? As a result of that’s how lengthy a video must be to qualify for a second advert slot within the center. That’s content material moderation, child — YouTube needs a sure sort of video, and it created incentives to get it. That’s the enterprise you’re in now. The longer you combat it or faux which you can promote one thing else, the extra Twitter will drag you into the deepest attainable muck of defending indefensible speech. And in case you activate a dime and settle for that progress requires aggressive content material moderation and pushing again towards authorities speech rules across the nation and world, nicely, we’ll see how your followers react to that.

Anyhow, welcome to hell. This was your thought.