Twitter preps poison pill to preclude Elon Musk's purchase plan Twitter on Friday said its board of directors had unanimously approved a plan to prevent a hostile takeover, something that became a distinct possibility after billionaire Elon Musk offered $43 billion to buy the social media network. The poison pill, or "Rights Plan," the biz said, "will reduce the likelihood that any entity …
> If you're in that position you're left with a choice between selling (at an undervalued prices), or holding out and hoping that not enough other shareholders sell to leave you holding the baby.
I don't follow this logic - if you hold out and the hostile buyer *does* find enough other buyers to gain control and force the company private then all that means is you are forced to sell your shares to them at that point - you don't just lose your shares.
> and force the company private then all that means is you are forced to sell your shares to them at that point - you don't just lose your shares.
No, you don't just lose your shares.
But, you also won't usually get the.... ahem.... generous price that was offered at the start.
So your choice is between selling at an undervalued price, or holding out (and hoping that others do) with the potential of ending up having to sell at an even worse price.
"When someone with a big pulpit starts making overtures directly to shareholders, there's a reasonable chance that a significant number of them will go for it despite its being underpriced. When that happens, the 40% or whatever who wanted to hold out - are screwed. They have no recourse but to go along with it, whether they like it or not."
You just described how Governments and Presidents are elected
"When that "someone" has a reality distortion field of Musk's calibre, the risk is much higher."
Trump (A card game reference :-)
"Content moderation is necessary for social media platforms to function."
The crux of the matter is that Elon, like Zuck, doesn't think it's necessary. He might want to get rid of the bots but he doesn't want to get rid of the trolls (like himself). Flame wars draw eyeballs and that is Elon's goal. If the world ends up misinformed or polarized, that's the world's fault, not Elon's.
He believes in Aleister Crowley's saying "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law,"
> If the world ends up misinformed or polarized, that's the world's fault, not Elon's.
Worse, he'll claim that the best way to address fake/false statements is more speech telling the truth.
Which is true, in principle, but tends to fail when you've got someone setting their millions of followers on anyone who points out that they're spreading bullshit and/or putting lives at risk for their own commercial gain.
"Which is true, in principle, but tends to fail when you've got someone setting their millions of followers on anyone who points out that they're spreading bullshit and/or putting lives at risk for their own commercial gain."
This sounds like everything the does! Selling the BS of Climate Change, Racism, Vaccines will stop the spread of covid, etc, etc.
All BS lies!
SOME moderation, such as for harassing, pejorative, and libelous/slanderous posts, is needed. These should be "moderated" (or even deleted) with the possibility of banning repeat offenders. "Trolls" in other words, whose goal is simply to be a pain in the ass, need to be "gleaned" (more or less), sorta like a bouncer ejecting them from a bar.
And of course, harassment lawsuit information (like who to serve with the paperwork) needs to be readily made available so that INDIVIDUALS who have been harassed or libeled can have a legal remedy, especially if being stalked. That would be CRIMINAL in some jurisdictions. (I am never against moderating against criminal activity)
However, In My Bombastic Opinion, everything ELSE (whether accurate or not according to their standards, approval, or "liking") needs to be ALLOWED and NOT FILTERED nor FLAGGED nor in ANY other way HINDERED.
This should be OBVIOUS. Otherwise, speech is not "free", nor can it be.
(Why is "the extreme" always inflated to become the alleged intent of free speecdh advocates? because THE LEFT FEARS FREE SPEECH, that's why!)
[it is a fair bet that THIS is what Elon wants, and I'm 100% supporting his efforts to TAKE OVER TWITTER]
Sooooo....
Holocaust Denial?
In quite a few countries that is criminal.
In other countries criticism of the ruler is criminal.
Advocating that 6 year olds can consent to sex? Not criminal...
What is deemed to be criminal is merely a matter of your lords and masters deciding what is criminal.
> because THE LEFT FEARS FREE SPEECH, that's why!
Sorry but, Free speech isn't a left-right issue.
There are people on either end of the spectrum who want to stop others saying things they disagree with. So rail against the left all you want, but you might want to pay mind to the people standing around you on the right.
The problem with political tribalism is that it's incredibly simple minded. The spectrum isn't so much a straight line as a donut - the extremes on either "side" are often far more aligned than they'd ever willingly admit - they just tend to disagree on technicalities.
Seeing someone go on about THE LEFT is normally a sign of someone who's failed to actually absorb much about politics and instead thinks they're routing for a football team.
So tell me, Your Bombastic Heinous [sic], why can't I say "Fuck" in primetime on NBC, CBS, ABC, CBC, et al? Isn't that free speech? Why aren't you railing on about that, Mr. Free Speech Purist?
Or more to the point, why can't I say ,"tRump is a motherfucking lying asshole (or arsehole)" on those same outlets?
This reminds me of when Yahoo rejected a takeover offer from Msft. Msft's offer was way more than they eventually fire sailed it off for. It almost seemed like Musk woke up one morning bought 9% of twitter on robinhood and _then_ discovered that despite all of the noise... twitter isn't really that central to that many people's lives. Take the money and run fools.
Mastodon (a decentralised version of Twitter) has been enjoying an influx since all the Musk malarkey.
Both Gab and Truth.social (Trumps own network) are copies of the Mastodon code (the latter in a bit of a shady fashion) but with interaction with other servers blocked to turn them into walled gardens.
The most infuriating aspect of US takeovers. The first thing Directors and senior management do is rush to check their service contracts. Then they figure out the way to maximise their own returns. In a perfect world the Board would recuse themselves since in no way are they giving independent recommendations to shareholders.
As an earlier poster said shareholders can say yes or no; or do nothing. There is a plethora of sources of information today; and advising shareholders has not been a closed shop for decades. Yet the second thing the Board does is ask the lawyers to drop in a poison pill, no more than a form of blackmail, a way to say **** you to the (temporarily) hostile party which benefits neither the company nor the shareholders.
At least this on isn't completely due to greed!
Look at the take over of Cabellas! Cabellas had no intention of selling their company, yet some hedge fund asshole who owned a considerable amount of both Cabellas and Bass ProShop forced a hostile buy out of Cabellas by Bass Proshop! Once the takeover was done the Cabellas HQ in a small Midwestern town (the primary employer in this town) was closes down costing hundreds of jobs!
You’re not a great fan of Elon Musk, Thomas [Claburn in San Francisco] ...... thinking him to be too much of a cowboy and/or rogue trader rather than genuine rough diamond geezer?
Love him or loathe him though, he certainly loves to field and play the Joker and play with moribund and entrenched markets creating waves.
Bravo, Elon. Encore with those breaths of fresh air into stagnant positions.
this is the part ive never understood. I used facebook and twitter with a disposable account for times I have no choice - ive needed ot to pull information on companies, speedier support (!) and contacting long lost friends for their proper contact information.
What always amazed me was the amount of personal information people voluntarily put on there for the world to see, moat of it fairly "look at me and what ive done" or worst still their kids (who have had no say bit will now have their info put on the net for them).
Broken a rule, or broken a law?
Either way, the lack disclosure about his acquisition is undeniable, and is going to get him into some sort of trouble. The only real question is, how much? Furthermore, there's now at least two federal authorities unhappy with his attitude (the FAA, SEC). At some point the authorities are going to have to teach him a lesson. I'd be intersted to know just how big a book the SEC can theoreticaly throw at him for this one. A fine? Jail? Disqualification?
Another thing worth mulling is, where would the $43billion come from. He's not got that as cash. For Twitter shareholders, I can't see the attraction of a stock swap for Tesla shares. He'd still be in an influential position over their value, and they wouldn't be. And if they all decided to bail out of Tesla shares ASAP the current price would drop. That sounds like an unappealing lose-lose situation, so I don't see why they'd accept that sort of offer.
"Another thing worth mulling is, where would the $43billion come from."
Debt. If he's got that value in assets he can use that as collateral against a loan. Once he's got the company he lumbers it with the loan. Even better is the possibility that he finds someone else to sell it to; after a few cycles the amount of debt sinks the company and Twitter has tweeted its last. Normally I'd think that's a bad thing (e.g. Maplin) but I'm prepared to make exceptions.
Yup.
I'm a bit curious how that would work though. Musk's worth is based on his Tesla stock, and he's been borrowing against to fund his other ventures. So not sure how easy it'd be to transfer debt secured by Musk's Tesla stock to Twitter. Or how easy it'd be to raise $43bn to make a vanity purchase of a company with no real revenues.
But economics has become strange. Valuations used to be 3-5x revenue, now they can be 1,000+. Tesla having a price correction is going to lead to the mother of all margin calls when it's share price falls. I'm suprised that hasn't happened already, and there's been growing competition, a list of factory recalls, commodity price pressure. And the big on, either an end to EV credit sales, or just a reduction as other automakers crank up their own EV production.
There's also the risk of Musk's reality distortion field failing. The Cybertruck urban assault vehicle was announced years ago, deposits taken, but no trucks. And no semi either. Now, Frod's launched the EV version of one of America's best selling trucks, the F150, and GM is following. So Tesla's behind the market, and it'll be interesting to see how many truck buyers are willing to pay a premium for Tesla's... distinctive styling.
He needs to turn Twitter into a non-profit and reimplement the website as a WASM version of a P2P-driven microblogging service with support for filesharing using magnet links. At that point, anything/everything should be allowed indiscriminately with users being able to control what they're exposed to based upon who they choose to follow. The rule of "once posted, content cannot be removed" would become the norm online once again. No moderation team would be necessary, as Twitter would no longer host any content nor could it be accused of profiting from any copyright infringement. Users with real computers would install a properly transpiled (or perhaps even a reimplemented) native application, while those without one would simply use the web version.
Non-profit funding for the service could be obtained through bounties for new extensions (e.g. forum/BB, wiki etc.) or by offering ancillary services on a subscription basis (like formal identity verification, key escrow and content caching/distribution). Plus, by allowing anything and everything, it would maintain the popularity of existing Twitter, while taking on folks who'd be right at home with The Pirate Bay. In a worst case scenario, Elon could do a Jimmy and put up big donation banners every other month, assuming he ever became too poor to fund it himself through tax write-offs. As Musk is a gigantic fan of open source, he could open up everything as GNU AGPL, preventing it from ever being banned outright, while also guaranteeing freedom for everyone forever more.
> He needs to turn Twitter into a non-profit and reimplement the website as a WASM version of a P2P-driven microblogging service with support for filesharing using magnet links. At that point, anything/everything should be allowed indiscriminately with users being able to control what they're exposed to based upon who they choose to follow
Well done, you've just reinvented Freenet with less encryption.
Now, what's Freenet most known for? Oh yeah, Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM). I wonder what you'd start finding on Twitter if it became truly censorship resilient? Remember that CSAM isn't a purely darknet problem - 8kun came into being because CSAM was banned from 4chan. Most CSAM lives on the web rather than the darknet too.
> No moderation team would be necessary, as Twitter would no longer host any content nor could it be accused of profiting from any copyright infringement.
Siri, show me someone who's never watched the US legal system at work.
This claim is beyond naive - it's the same defence that The Pirate Bay, other torrent sites, and streaming site have used, and basically all of them lost their respective cases. And that's just for copyright. If CSAM starts being passed about, you can be damn sure someone is going to be held responsible.
> Well done, you've just reinvented Freenet with less encryption.
and fewer hops, since anonymity isn't a priority, unlike I2P/freenet.
> Now, what's Freenet most known for? Oh yeah, Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM). I wonder what you'd start finding on Twitter if it became truly censorship resilient?
I wouldn't be following paedophiles and nor would you or any other normal user. As exposure to content would require you to follow them neither of us would encounter CSAM. This line of reasoning would be far stronger if we were talking Gnutella, where searches are decentralised and where you don't need to follow people to connect with them.
> This claim is beyond naive - it's the same defence that The Pirate Bay, other torrent sites, and streaming site have used, and basically all of them lost their respective cases.
You can perform "DMCA takedowns" by providing a blocklist with the official client, this is what LBRY does and that puts them in compliance with the law. It's up to end users whether they choose to accept the filtering though. All you need do is replace the response to 'https://api.lbry.io/file/list_blocked' and boom!
Besides, if the product is open-source, anyone can make a fork at any time. Funny enough, when prosecutors discovered anyone could fork TPB (along with its database) they just gave up and took the loss. Only 3 people ended up in prison but everything was still functional as if nothing happened. They knew it was game over at that point and that no amount of prosecutorial aggression could put the genie back in the bottle. The same happened with LimeWire (now called WireShare) where the prosecution "took down" the service only to find a fork in the form of LimeWire Pirate Edition; at which point there were no further prosecutions.
Were Musk to open-source Twitter and rearchitect it as a P2P service, the exact same thing would happen. As long as he followed the approach LBRY currently takes he'd be fine, however, let's assume he doesn't. The key difference is that Musk would likely encourage forks from the get-go, stripping the feds of any public benefit justification for trying to go after him in the first place. That, plus his big bank and huge ego, would be enough of a deterrent!
> I wouldn't be following paedophiles and nor would you or any other normal user.
That, however, isn't likely to be nearly enough to stop the legal repercussions that censor-resistant-twitter would run into. If it becomes a widely used distribution mechanism, it's fucked.
It also ignores that Twitter bubbles up content from people you don't follow (both algorithmically as well as in the form of retweets etc), but I assume you'd knock that on the head (and nothing of value would be lost)
> You can perform "DMCA takedowns" by providing a blocklist with the official client, this is what LBRY does and that puts them in compliance with the law. It's up to end users whether they choose to accept the filtering though. All you need do is replace the response to 'https://api.lbry.io/file/list_blocked' and boom!
I'm not sure it does put them in compliance with the law. I'm even less sure that a media company's legal department would feel that way if there was an org with deep pockets on the other end.
As a general rule, the law doesn't concern itself too much with how you've implemented something - if your platform is being used to distribute something, the reasoning tends to be that you're responsible for making sure your platform provides the means to comply with the law.
Saying "sorry, it's decentralised, I can't block it" isn't likely to be much of a defence.
Even if it *is* a valid defence now (which I doubt), as soon as it's successfully used by a large org, you'll see lobbying start for "modernisation" of the law to address the new-fangled distribution approach.
> Besides, if the product is open-source, anyone can make a fork at any time.
Indeed, which is a big part of why it's a bad idea to build your product in the way you've described. You want your own defences against infringement to be robust - no being able to do much about 3rd party forks is defensible, but only if your initial implementation didn't start out with similar flaws
> Funny enough, when prosecutors discovered anyone could fork TPB (along with its database) they just gave up and took the loss.
You're talking about a criminal investigation here - the prosecutors aren't going to keep pissing public money up a rope for no good reason.
What you'd be looking at with decentralised-twitter would be a civil suit, with the *AAs of the world bringing the claim. You're probably right in that they wouldn't pursue forks (or many of them), but you can be sure they'd be working to push Twitter into bankruptcy.
> Were Musk to open-source Twitter and rearchitect it as a P2P service, the exact same thing would happen. As long as he followed the approach LBRY currently takes he'd be fine,
I disagree. What LBRY have done is sufficient for an org of their size and profile - it's not likely to be nearly enough for one like Twitter. Even if Twitter ultimately won the ensuing legal action, there's a significant cost to defending and no guarantee of costs being awarded. They'd also very likely face action in multiple legal systems too (BREIN would almost certainly pursue them too, for example)
> The key difference is that Musk would likely encourage forks from the get-go, stripping the feds of any public benefit justification for trying to go after him in the first place
It would also strip Twitter of any real value, so he'd spend $9bn (or whatever) to buy Twitter and immediately devalue it. I'm not saying he definitely wouldn't, but that's not the kind of behaviour that keeps one rich, and remember that he's likely funding the acquisition via leveraged debt.
> That, plus his big bank and huge ego, would be enough of a deterrent!
His big bank isn't a deterrent to a civil suit, if anything it puts an even bigger target onto Twitter.
Where exactly does "Free Speech" come in?
You write a letter to the editor of your newspaper of choice, and if it is within range of their agenda, chances are that they will publish it. If it's somehere in between deranged and psychotic, there are sufficient outlets to disseminate yourself (many of them Murdoch-owned, but not all of them). And if you are totally off the wall, you can always start your own website.
In short, if Twitter decides that your contributions don't quite cut it, this can hardly be considered as a curtailment of Free Speech.
Elon Musk is of course perfectly free to relaunch the Weekly World News - where, I believe, he'd feel perfectly @home.
As someone else posted here a few days ago, why does he not just start his own blog?
As long as he stays clear of too much manipulating stock prices, too much inciting hatred or inspiring acts of terrorism he can say whatever he want and doesn’t need to rely on third parties.
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