Yeah the whole thing is pretty weird. I'm never the type to join a cult of personality or jump to the support of billionaires--and Musk is definitely one of the biggest at both of these--but it will be interesting to see how this all shakes out. Will Musk really open this up for free speech or will this be yet another false prophet and broken promises? Will it be attacked and sabotaged? Is he controlled opposition?
Either way, much butthurt and triggering will be had, and it will be entertaining.
The largest thing that concerns me about Musk and Twitter right now is that he's said multiple times that he wants to verify the identity of every human on there as a way to kill the bots. Free speech on social media isn't necessarily a good thing when it's directly tied to your full name. If journos have been able to consistently destroy lives on anon accounts by doxing them, imagine what would happen when the doxing is already done for you.
yup, that part of the plan sounds like it was cooked up by an alphabet agency committee and designed to fool all the conservative "patriots" into cheering as their freedom is stolen. Sadly an all too familiar tactic.
There are technical ways to ensue a post comes from a verified identity while at the same time not keeping the identity permanently tied (some cryptocurrencies or voting systems use these techniques, for example). So you're right, if we see this being an even more intrusive data mining operation than FB with ID uploads and "posting passes" to go with your covid passes, then we'll know pretty quickly Musk is full of shit and in league with the State. I think I'm giving it 60% chances right now, personally.
What's odd about this is that a lot of left-leaning accounts are losing tens of thousands of followers in very short periods of time, but right-leaning accounts are gaining tens of thousands of followers in the same short periods of time. For example, Trump Jr. showed a screenshot of his engagement page where he'd consistently get 4k new followers/day, then suddenly he got 85k the other day. Lots of similar reports from both sides.
It seems like the bot network shutdown is a "hide the evidence" thing from Twitter employees, but maybe they're repurposing them to make 'the other side look bad'. That or they released some valves on restricted accounts or undid some follower fuzzing or something