Andrew Torba has this weird notion. OK, he might have several, but whatever. But this one sticks out.
Andrew Torba believes free speech is defined by the applicable jurisdiction's legal framework.
Which, for his GAB, is the United States. And thereby amendment #1 to that country's constitution.
What's permitted by 1A is permitted. End of.
What is not permitted by 1A is subject to prosecution. Andrew has legal eagles to call in if anything's found to be possibly in violation of the law.
And he knows, and everyone knows, he has to do that. He himself can be prosecuted if he doesn't.
But that's the limit. If something is legal, no matter how distasteful, it's allowed. End of. It's protected by 1A. By law.
Now consider the curious case of Flashback, Sweden's monster forum with a membership rivaling that of the Swedish-speaking population.
Flashback likes to boast about Sweden being first in the world with 'free speech', as of 1766. So why then is the site run out of New York City?
Because of censorship in Sweden.
Denmark abolished censorship in 1968. Abolished. Sweden? Their minister for immigration and justice summoned the five of Big Tech a few years back. Each of those companies had been getting considerable perks - low or nonexistent taxation, free electricity, etc - to set up local affiliates.
The minister now laid out the new 'rules'. There would indeed be censorship, and it would be according to his whims. He'd be requiring a 'hot line' to each of those companies, so he could be assured that anything he found offensive on social media would immediately be taken down.
News of this caused a flood of refugees from Twitter to GAB. They have their own user group today with 13.5 K members.
A lot of the first refugees did little more than open accounts and see how many followers they could get. And then return to Twitter.
Flashback today employs 101 'moderators'.
https://www.flashback.org/moderatorer
This seems to be contrary to the spirit of free speech, so we created and ran a secret forum (literally out in the open yet secret) for the 100 or so Flashbackers who wanted real free speech.
Some of the most prolific Flashbackers admitted they were afraid to join, as the Flashback moderators might ban them from the real Flashback if they were found to also be in our secret forum. These were invariably people who valued their reputations higher than free speech itself.
Moderating forums was a big deal in the early days of the 1995 'web revolution'. People had to be 'protected', sometimes from themselves. Moderators had routines for contacting authorities for potential 'suicides'. Forum logs would contain sender IPs and, given the timestamp, ISPs could determine the identity of the user, even with DHCP in play, so hopefully people could be rescued. There seemed to be a valid humanitarian reason for at least inspecting what was posted online.
But the leap from that to Twitter-style 'curation' is wider than the Grand Canyon.
What's amazing is that the freaks who took over Twitter seemed to really believe that the 'alternate reality' they created was somehow viable, even as it became more and more apparent that their system was falling apart at the seams.
But it's this, beyond all else in the Twitter Files, that strikes the hardest in cold hearts.
Let's go back a bit down Memory Lane.
Years ago - many many many years ago - we were called on to start a new media organisation. That organisation is still up and running to this day.
We hired a CMS expert to put things together. We worked against a harsh deadline. Operational within a week. We made it.
Right before the grand opening, when everything seemed to be in place, we opened the floodgates. We welcomed in potential contributors.
Most of those potential contributors came from Twitter.
Several years later we were asked to step back in and rescue the site. Once back inside, and once more in complete control, we could see what a mess things were. It took four people, working full time, eight months to clean things up. And that's nowhere near the mess Elon has to deal with.
'Twitter will soon start freeing the name space of 1.5 billion accounts. These are obvious account deletions with no tweets & no login for years.' - Elon Musk
How many active users does Twitter have? A few hundred million?
The Life of a Twitter Employee
If your face looks like a hardware store shop window, if your armpits aren't the same colour as the hair on your scalp, if you're not sure about the gender of who you think your parents are, if you've never had to work hard for anything in your life: Twitter must have been the perfect employer.
Safe spaces at work. Unless your domestic drug den was even safer. No requirement to ever turn up for work. Cuddling rooms. Juice dispensers full of red wine. Gourmet meals on the house. The web is littered today with videos of what things were like before Elon took over.
And when had Twitter ever turned a profit?
Who was running that monstrosity?
His name is Jack Dorsey.
Jack Dorsey is one of the founders of Twitter. He's one of the original programmers.
It was Jack Dorsey's code that led to the infamous 'fail whale'. Once Dorsey was ousted and real programmers came in, the fail whale disappeared.
Haunting images return. Of our own startup over a decade ago. Looking into the innards and seeing what a right mess the others had made of it.
Contributing Editors Who Insisted On Capitalising Every Word. Desk editors who let pieces through without a proofread or a copyedit. Contributors feuding with each other, then coming to the 'new bosses' (us) and asking for our support.
And thousands upon thousands of bogus accounts.
Who'd been managing. Had anyone?
Someone long before Elon understood the pivotal importance of a site like Twitter. They invested in it. Billions poured in.
We published a dozen articles over the years about the 'sophomoronic' technologies in place at Twitter. What no one realised was that all those signs were not exceptions but faithful representations of just how bad things were.
Elon let a few thousand so-called 'employees' go the other week. Two things are notable here.
First: Elon didn't sack them. They were only told they had to physically show up for work and do something. They refused. They opted out. They must be made of money, or have saved so much whilst in Twitter's employ, or just be plain stupid, or all of the above.
Second: This should come as no surprise, but Twitter's running even better today with them all gone. This is a company that's been in the red all along, and still is in the red, and yet, with half the supposed workforce finally gone, things work better than ever.
That should tell you something.