“In a meeting with staffers on Saturday… he clarified what was really going on. ‘We are going to do a [content moderation] council,’ he said. ‘But it’s an advisory council.’ At the end of the day, he said, ‘it will be me deciding it.’ To extinguish any doubt about who is in charge, he clarified, ‘Obviously I could choose who is on that content council, and I don’t need to listen to what they say.’… Twitter is still a company, sure, with employees and creditors and advertisers, millions of users, producing a breathtaking range of externalities. But, also, it’s just a guy.”

‍John Herrman, New York Magazine

“Musk’s vision for Twitter, never entirely coherent, cracked at first contact with economic reality. His disdain for advertising meant that the companies purchasing ads would view him warily. Moreover, his lifting of bans on Twitter’s most truculent users inspired understandable fear from advertisers that their products would appear next to homophobic, racist, sexist or generally misanthropic tweets. Musk’s desire to replace lost ad revenue with subscriptions—while simultaneously reducing content moderation—made even less sense. He, effectively, asked people to pay for membership in a community where they were now more likely to be abused.”

‍Jelani Cobb, New Yorker

“For most of human history, communities were formed within strong geographic constraints, but the internet, more than any other human technology, untethered socialization from geography. In the somewhat utopian vision of its earliest builders and users, the internet would be a place where people across every line of difference and place could find one another to build community, to talk and debate and to pursue common interests…

“But another foundational aspect of the internet turned it into a commercial juggernaut: It was a never-ending, all-you-can-eat attentional buffet. Never before had people had access to so much to pay attention to. In the hands of clever engineers and ambitious entrepreneurs, the ability to capture our attention was maximized, commodified and monetized to give us what we have now…

“Whatever happens to Twitter, watching Mr. Musk’s reign over it should force us to rebuild the dream of the internet’s founders of a digital commons… [and] create a collective digital life that doesn’t depend on mining every nanosecond of our attention for profit.”

‍Chris Hayes, New York Times