“The bird is freed”, says Elon Musk after buying Twitter.
“In Europe, the bird will fly by our 🇪🇺 rules”, replies Thierry Breton, the EU Commissioner for Internal Market.
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Where the birds do not fly freeOctober 28th, 2022 |
 22 comments to Where the birds do not fly free |
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It would be funny if Musk just posted Breton’s home address as a reply.
Thank Goodness for Brexit!
The disinformation comes from the European Union and other such organisations – where the state decides what the truth is, lies rule. The European Union is open in its hatred for freedom, but in practice the British and American bureaucracies (government and corporate) are not better.
As for Elon Musk – I agree with Peter Schiff and Donald Trump that Mr Musk overpaid (the price was too high), but he has still done a great thing.
Twitter continues to be source of amusement – for example all those people (such as Mary Trump) who claim to support Ukraine, and have Marxist BLM in their bios. The looters, burners and murderers of BLM – who reduced wide American cities to ash, and who stole the money that fools (and worse) gave to them.
No one seems to have told them how many millions of Ukrainians the Marxists murdered.
In the Ukraine, unlike Putin’s Russia, political parties that support Marxism are banned – they are illegal.
In short, the Twitter leftists, who say they support Ukraine, would be in prison in the Ukraine.
I am NOT saying that is a good thing – it is just a thing.
In Germany openly National Socialist (Nazi) political parties are banned – because they murdered millions of people, in the Ukraine Marxist parties are banned – for the same reason.
Should Musk decide to not abide by EU ‘rules’ what is the EU going to do? Demand the authority to force an internet filter to keep Europeans from accessing it?
As a practical matter, I doubt we’re far from the point where the internet becomes many unconnected internets.
On a technical note, Internet Protocol Version Six (IP v6) was designed to allow the internet to be segmented, mostly for better performance, but also for possible political reasons.
Bureaucrats can demand many things, but like King Canute’s courtiers , they can’t always make them happen.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Canute_and_the_tide)
Just a side note, but I am having so much fun getting back on Twitter and re-following all the old lists!
Yes indeed bobby b.
And then in the next breath he’ll return to moaning about the internet being dominated by American companies. Do Eurocrats ever listen to themselves?
JohnOfEnfield: Oh, in this week’s Spectator, Matthew Parris tells us that “everyone knows” that “Brexit isn’t working”. To think I actually used to enjoy his Times column.
Dear Europe:
Nice Starlink coverage you’ve got there. Be a shame if anything happened to it.
Elon
Would be funny if the new Twitter management decides to publish all communications Twitter has had with the EU, and all censorship imposed on behest of the EU.
Thierry’s remark was revealingly needless. Obviously, Elon was referring to rules formerly imposed by the company’s own prior controllers – by Parag et al. Thierry could have waited until some actual occasion for invoking EU law arose but he could not restrain himself from revealing that he will seek one.
I wonder how much the custom of Europe means to Twitter?
At the first hint of censorship/sanctions from M. Breton, Elon could comply with the law by cancelling all accounts registered in the EU.
Then watch the turmoil!
I joined Twitter today, mostly to see what the fuss is about. I hear Elon is bringing in his engineers to check the Twitter code. What if he can prove that they lied about how many bots there were. Can he sue them for fraud?
I’m guessing he wants the code examined more to search for trojans, backdoors, viruses, etc. with which disgruntled employees or former employees might have sabotaged the IP.
It would be slightly humorous if someone could log on, type in the correct characters to trigger something, and then start banning people on their own. And it does seem to be in character for the twits to do that.
Re: bots, I believe Musk waived any future claims. (Just from what I’ve read, which is likely third or fourth hand.)
Best meme of the situation:
https://i0.wp.com/theothermccain.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/i-bought-what.jpg?w=500&ssl=1
I beg to disagree: there are 2 memes that i found more hilarious:
Elon the Barbarian
Parag’s next job
H/T Not-the-Bee (via Instapundit).
–Incidentally, it seems that Elon and Thierry are actually good pals.
It seems to me that Thierry mis-spoke in what is after all not his first language. That’s all.
I’ve grown with the Internet, having had my first computer back in 1980, an Atari ST1040, and a Commodore 64, both glorious examples of 8 bit technology. When the Internet began, forums of various interests were commonplace, and I frequented many of them. In terms of how these forums and chat rooms were, the Wild West comes to mind, but the overall attraction for someone like me was that anyone could say anything they wanted.
There was also the quality of real time, live communication with people all over the world, about any subject they chose. I weep for the loss of this phenomenon.
Today, we have various controls of all sorts in place to keep people from open communication, from the free expression of ideas. You can ask why, but the answer is only that there are some who think control and censorship are preferable to wild west communication.\
It’s my opinion that the future of the Internet is another lesson in Balkanization, where it is broken into fragments, each under control of various entities, all dedicated to the purpose of keeping the narratives going. Censorship is the murder of truth.
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/megan-fox/2022/10/29/its-happening-elons-twitter-just-fact-checked-joe-bidens-official-presidential-account-n1641157
This is going to escalate extremely quickly.
I’ve seen a fact check on a tweet of a video where Biden claimed petrol[1] prices were $5 when he took office rather than in the $2.30 range. Leaving aside the Twitter change of heart angle, I can’t help wondering what the media reaction to the Donald making an assertion like that would have been…
[1] Sensible British making convention used in place of the draft Left-pondian one as the volatility of natural gas (which is actually a gas) is very much in the news too.
I think that there is a lot of excitement about this change in ownership. I’m less excited than most, though I think Musk is surely an upgrade. Musk seems to have a more solid commitment to free speech than the rest of the social media organs, but I doubt he has the same view as me “anything goes as long as it isn’t actually illegal”. We see this in @John’s comment above — apparently Twitter in the new regime “fact checked” POTUS. I’m not fan of POTUS and what he said was plainly untrue, but twitter should be a forum not a participant. Fact checking is for the participants to do.
Moreover, in the past we have heard a lot of objections to the standard libertarian response “if you don’t like it start your own.” There are chokepoints often due to government monopoly that prevent this from happening, and Twitter is no more immune to them than Truth Social, for example. What happens if, as with Truth Social, it gets banned from the Google App Store for insufficient content moderation? Or what happens if credit card companies won’t take charges from them for being insufficiently woke?
I hope Twitter’s momentum will carry it past that, but I am less optimistic than the right seem to be.
I am deeply disturbed by the announcement of a “Moderation Council” on Twitter – and the statement that people will not be reinstated till this council meets.
Mr Musk still seems to think that people of “wildly different opinions” can work together – he is mistaken, they cannot. The left are totally committed to totalitarian collectivist censorship (in the name of “Diversity and Inclusion” and “Equity” and “Social and Environmental Governance”) one can not “work with” them.
Nor can there be any “dialogue” or “civilised debate” with them – as anyone who really knows Twitter, understands.