My take on Musk's trajectory over the last four weeks. https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/elon-musk-and-the-narcissism-radicalization-maelstrom/sharetoken/Zs4zc5BXA9Et
@joshtpm You know what matters much more than the psyche of Elon Musk is the fact that we allow one forum to be so large that it really matters than an Elon Musk can buy it. To my view, we have to downsize Twitter (my route is repealing Section 230 https://cepr.net/repealing-section-230-giving-mark-zuckerberg-what-he-wants/) but the fact a single platform can have such importance is the real problem.
@DeanBaker13 @joshtpm I do think that Musk's ability to buy Twitter in the first place demonstrates a huge problem with having centralized sites like Twitter being run by publicly traded companies, but repealing Section 230 is a terrible idea that would have serious knock-on effects and would probably lead to huge swathes of the modern Internet closing simply due to legal liability, including a huge number of Mastodon instances, blogs, comment sections...
@mmasnick has written extensively on techdirt.com on why Section 230 repeal would cause huge issues.
@mathlover @DeanBaker13 @joshtpm Dean and I have discussed this at length. He has a massive blindspot in which he refuses to recognize that both Facebook and Google are now happy to sell out Section 230, because they know that it does WAY more harm to small companies and will lock in the giants.
He refuses to understand this and I do not understand why.
Section 230 protects the small guys. The big guys barely need it.
@mmasnick
Intellectual blindspots are weird. While a number of people I know of have minor, often transient ones, from time to time, I expect to see major ones like this from people who think they've found out how to square a circle with a compass and straightedge, not educated people like Dean.
@DeanBaker13 @joshtpm
