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Franklin Carroll's avatar

I don't believe he will be able to change Twitter that much: Too much of the moderation is in the hands of low-level employees who just hit "yes" when the AI flags something.

1) The human reviewers have a leftist bias.

2) The human reviewers have an incentive to agree with the algorithm since they are likely judged by how quickly they carry out reviews. Elon, being a car and rocket guy, is unlikely to even question "turnaround time" metrics. Also, agreeing makes their jobs easier.

3) The AI's while impressive in many ways, cannot pick up on subtlety---and the companies that train them build in a leftist bias. You should see how the AI's The DailyWire uses perform. While DailyWire is good about overturning bad flags, they still happen. And if Twitter builds theirs in house, it will still reflect the preferences of the designers.

4) He is just one man. He is not the CEO, and he cannot plausibly threaten to take over the company or to vote out the CEO.

I wouldn't hold my breath. My guess, he uses the optimism about his joining the company to get the stock price to sore and then he is out---easily in less than a year---once that optimism begins to fade.

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Amy Peikoff's avatar

All of what you say is, I think, true or plausible. The next few months to a year should be interesting.

Parler uses Hive, with human review as a check. I believe they’re generally unbiased, but still there are plenty of errors. All of this is imperfect, which is one reason I believe the tools for filtering all legal speech should be in the hands of the individual user. This is what decentralization could do, but a moral social media company can do the same, given the right legal and cultural climate.

Perhaps at least Musk’s foray into Twitter will get people thinking more about these issues.

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