 Hello, hello, hello and welcome. I'm Meroen Kellele. We are DM25, a radical political movement for Europe. And this is another live debate with our coordinating team featuring subversive ideas you won't hear anywhere else. And today, we're talking Elon Musk and Twitter. Six weeks ago, the world's richest person took over the social media platform in a $44 billion deal. He promised to turn the digital town square into a haven for free speech and make its content moderation rules less arbitrary, more transparent. Since then, though, there's been chaos and confusion on both the business and the tech side of the platform. Half of the company's staff have been fired, prominent accounts banned and unbanned, internal documents from the previous Twitter team been published suggesting government actors urging the platform to censor their political opponents or legitimate news stories. And regulators and even other big tech companies like Apple have threatened to clamp down on Twitter due to concerns about hate speech. Now, some argue that these are just the platform's growing pains and that oligarchs who support open debate are preferable to those with opaque moderation or censorship policies. Others say that Musk's free speech commitment is actually hiding a right-wing agenda or that he's just a mercurial billionaire with no grand plan at all. Still others argue that this debate over what's happening on the platform is missing the point and that Musk is actually the latest member of a new ruling class, eager to turn us all into 21st century serfs using the power of crowd capital. So what's the truth? What shall we be thinking about this? Six weeks after Musk's takeover of Twitter, our panel investigates and debates including Janis Faroukakis, Aaron Janis Faroukakis and the rest of our team of activists and policy people and you. You out there, if you've got thoughts, comments, questions, concerns, rants, opinions on this topic, then please put them into the YouTube chat and we will put them to our panel. Janis, let's start with you, Flo is yours. Thanks, Meran. Okay. Two basic narratives have been competing, neither of which is the one that I adopted regarding Elon Musk and Twitter. The first narrative is that Meran already said it, but I will repeat it once again much more slowly than Meran did. A more leisurely re-take on what we've already heard. He's a spoiled brat. He's a tech billionaire, like all powerful toaster on full young men or youngish men who suddenly found themselves in the position of ultra power. He wants to control what we think in the same way that Rupert Murdoch when he inherited a few newspapers from his dad or Citizen Kane in the famous movie by Austin Wells, a fictional character based on a real character that, you know, power breeds a tendency, a propensity to dominate the debate, the conversation to force people to think what you're thinking, brainwashing. That's one narrative. The other narrative is that this is another business opportunity for him. He spent 44 billion purchasing it and he's yet another big tech operator trying to make a mint out of a very risky investment. So he walked into Twitter, he fired half of the personnel to reduce costs, which is what, you know, every takeover of the last 30 years has been based on the idea that you boost the share price and the capacity to financialize your investment by firing people and steamrolling over the personnel that you inherit after such a purchase. Then there is the inevitable debate about free speech. Now I get bored by all these contributions. I don't think any of them hit the nail on the head while each one of them has an element of truth. Yes, he's a brat. It's clear that Elon Musk is a brat. Well, at the same time, he's a lot more than that. He's somebody who created SpaceX from nothing. He's somebody who has been, according to people that I trust and know and who know this business, he's an engineering genius, whatever his detractors may say. There is an element of truth about his libertarian propensity and the fact that he wants to let people speak freely without thinking of what that means in terms of hate speech. All that is the small truths that are contributing to nothing much of a broad picture. I think what is far more interesting to discuss is the manner in which the purchase of Twitter was the last purchase, something like Elon Musk make. The last thing that was available at the marketplace for billionaires was that would allow him to enter a very special group, a tiny group of big tech owners of key owners of what Meron refers to, this is a term that coined outcapital. Allow me to say a few more things about this. But before I do, and let me continue with the preface. We know that Twitter and Facebook, in particular, have been highly, highly sensorials. Here, for instance, in Greece, I know the building in which the moderators of Facebook and of Twitter are deciding who in this country amongst activists, politicians, opinion makers, journalists in Greece get blocked and who don't get blocked. And they have nothing to do with people in Silicon Valley. This is an office comprising people who are very close to the Greek oligarchy, who run the Greek moderation of both Twitter and Facebook. And I have friends who have been blocked for years by Twitter, by Facebook for telling the truth, while the Nazis and the fascists are roaming freely. So I reject wholeheartedly the notion that Elon Musk took over Twitter and now suddenly we have a problem, we've always had a problem. Concentrated corporate power when it comes to opinion making and behavior modifying big tech algorithms that has always been a problem. And I don't believe that Elon Musk has made it worse personally. Okay, end of the preface going straight to my hypothesis. Jeff Bezos with Amazon, Bill Gates with Microsoft, the good people in Google with the various platforms that they have. Mark Zuckerberg with Meta and Facebook and WhatsApp and all that and Instagram. They have had something that Elon Musk lacked until he purchased Twitter. In other words, they had a form of capital in their ownership, which are called cloud capital, which unlike machines of yesteryear, diesel engines and the industrial robots, other kinds of capital in other words. The run of the mill capital, physical capital, which is nothing more than produced means of production. So an industrial robot means of production that has been produced. That's what the definition of capital is. But the platforms that I mentioned belong to Jeff Bezos and Google and so on. And the reason why I call it cloud capital is because it is not just a produced means of production, but it's also produced means of modifying behavior. There were always capitalists who invested in modifying behavior. So advertising, the advertising agencies and marketeers who were employed by Henry Ford and a General Electric and General Motors and Barclays Bank and Deutsche Bank and so on. For decades, they were employed in order to modify people's behavior and to modify it in a way which is creating more monopoly power or oligopoly power for the conglomerates that employ them. Anybody who has watched Madman, the magnificent American television series knows what I'm talking about. Don Draper is the epitome of that human capital, the purpose of which is to modify people's behavior to create higher price cost margins for the people who employ this human capital like Don Draper, the great advertisers and marketeers. But what is happening with the algorithms that I mentioned, the platforms, cloud capital, is that this is automated. Don Draper has become automated. Don Draper has become part of the cloud. So cloud capital is a produced means of behavior modification, not a human that is hired as a salaried worker to modify behavior. So you've got, suddenly you've got this machine version, machine learning and reinforcement learning, version of Don Draper, the advertiser who's incorporated in the same algorithm and the same infrastructure which takes the form of optic fiber of cell phone towers and so on, together with the algorithm, the purpose of which is to modify our behaviors so that we can buy what the owner of that cloud capital wants and also so that we actually do work unpaid unwage labor, writing reports and posting photographs and videos and so on that replenish cloud capital itself directly, not through the exploitation of wage labor. The only person who didn't have any of that was a richest man on earth in the mask. He had Tesla, Tesla, very, very successful company, very high tech, it uses the cloud itself. So every time, when Tesla cars move about, they upload automatically to the cloud location data, data about conversations that people have within the car. So this is very, it's part of cloud capital but it has no capacity to modify behavior because Tesla does not have the the the Alexas, the series, the various mechanisms that all the other big tech companies had. SpaceX, fantastically important, it litters space with thousands of satellites that are part of the cloud but again, SpaceX did not give Elon Musk an opportunity to use this cloud capital as a automated capitalized behavior modification instrument. The only platform which was up for sale and which Elon Musk could claim, could purchase that would give him that capacity was Twitter. And if you look at one of his own tweets before he purchased Twitter, he responded to a question as to what he is planning to do with Twitter when it was being discussed that he might be purchasing Twitter. He said, I wanted to turn it into an everything app. And that's in my estimation, what he meant. He meant that he wants to acquire the cloud capital facility, the capacity ownership of produce means of behavior modification that all the other big tech moguls had and which he didn't have. And I think it's important to look at it from that perspective. Free speech versus moderated speech, boring. There's never been free speech. There's never been properly moderated speech. Hate speech is all over, has always been part of big tech. There is no way you can have the right balance between free speech and avoidance of hate speech as long as you've got so much concentrated corporate big tech power, whoever it happens to be the owner, Elon Musk or somebody else. For me, the major question is this. Do we understand that once we have cloud capital taking over as the major, the main form of capital from the rest of capital and the owners of cloud capital have exorbitant power even compared to capitalists? Do we understand that as we are shifting into a society ruled by cloud capital, that there's no government and no regulation, no intervention that politics can affect which is going to create a semblance of civilization and the semblance of democracy? Do we understand that? I think that most people don't understand it. People still think that it is possible to regulate cloud capital. I don't think it is possible to regulate cloud capital. Either we take it over as society and to socialize cloud capital or we end up in a situation where it's either Elon or somebody else who's going to be doing whatever it is that they're doing and the rest of us are going to be indulging and engaging and being consumed by pointless, boring conversations. Thanks, Marilyn. Thanks, Yanis. Judith, Maya. Thank you. Of course, I fully agree with Yanis. This is a really worrying, well, situation. It's not just a takeover, but especially after the takeover. Twitter is the number one place, in my opinion, is the number one place on the internet. If you want to politically influence people who are not yet your friends, on Facebook, you're basically just interacting with friends and broader friends and same on other platforms, which give you even less of an audience. Twitter is where you're going if you want to start a political movement or where a political movement might start by itself. If a father writes about the horrible conditions that his child just experienced in some hospital, this is where such voices get amplified and that is why we should care very much about who owns it. Now, in this case, it's not just Elon Musk buying Twitter. I mean, this is a general tendency. Whenever Elon Musk does something, it's always reported as Elon Musk does this, but in fact, there is an alliance of different investors who bought Twitter, which includes the Saudi government, the Qatari government, Larry Ellison also, some several banks and so on. Larry Ellison, you may know from the campaign to claim that the Biden election was not legitimate and to try to overthrow the results of that. So I'm really uncomfortable with him being involved in our online marketplace of ideas now, but in the end, whether Twitter is owned by people leaning Democratic Party or whether it's owned by people leaning Republican Party or Trump, neither side is going to be very friendly to radical leftists like us. We can argue which one is most more likely to censor us, but they are both worse. What I would like to draw your attention to is really what this, where this is placed in the context of the internet wars, this power struggle that is going on between these large companies, social media companies and national and European legislators, because that is something that has been underreported right now. They are trying to regulate these big companies and they are having some amount of success. And this is also a part of who is going to finally control what we can say on Twitter and how friendly it will be to independent voices finding traction, the regulation of algorithms and so on. So to allow me to quickly situate us. So let's say that, okay, let's take the least controversial case that is of clearly criminal material like child sexual abuse material. Let's say this kind of material is found on your computer or your magazine prints this before the internet. So independent of who placed this material in your home or who, which author contributed it to your magazine, you go to prison. Your liable, your magazine is liable and the same rule was initially applied to the early internet. Your liable, if child sexual abuse material is found on your blog or if it's found on your forum and this liability rule prevented the creation of giant social media because they just couldn't afford to have random strangers post whatever criminal stuff they wanted on a large platform and possibly get a lot of traction like on Twitter or on Facebook. But then in the 2000s, the legislators decided that there must be an exemption from this liability at least for say phone companies or web hosting companies which may have users downloading stuff that they don't actually know and they don't have the means to check to control. So there was this 2000 e-commerce directive which granted an exemption from this general liability at least for companies like phone companies and web hosting companies. And then with social media and so on, basically national, okay, this e-commerce directive was at the EU level. Now there came national laws like in Germany, the NetzDG and the French law avia which are trying to extend this directive and make it clear what happens in the case of social media or really, really large forums and chats if someone posts a criminal material there and this created like a real patchwork of different rules which makes it really difficult for any company to survive, especially the small companies that don't have dozens of lawyers in each country. That is why there is now this Digital Services Act, the EU's Digital Services Act, which just got passed. There was a big debate up until November and it will finally be applied next year, which is bound to make things clearer at least for providers of such huge forums. And the basic assumption is that there is a liability exemption for anyone who doesn't know that they are hosting others illegal content, assuming that only if they act immediately to remove it as soon as they are made aware of that. And I think that's quite a reasonable approach. I mean, if you're hosting, I don't know, a million different blog posts a day, you cannot just read it all. But if someone tells you that there is some child porn among it, then yes, of course you should remove it and if you don't remove it, then you're liable. It sounds pretty reasonable to me. In addition, the Digital Services Act also grants greater user rights. There are no more upload filters. There is a ban on general content monitoring. The platforms have to explain to users where they remove content. Also, there is a greater power for the national parliaments. For example, national parliaments and even independent researchers from academia, civil society are now allowed to check the algorithms to see how they work, to see the code, to see the data so that it is possible to possibly get some access and to see who is really running our digital spaces and how. Also transparency on advertising, limits on advertising and something that's also important. And most of the rules only apply to platforms with more than 45 million users in the EU. This protects mom and pop sites. Like if you're running a forum for your local golf club then you're not going to have all these reporting duties and disclosing whatever. So the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is the primary authority when it comes to new net legislation and online free speech, they're in favor of this. The Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International are in favor of this. This could be a good law. I mean, even if it comes from the EU, sometimes we have to recognize that it's a good initiative. The bad thing is of course that the EU commission will have the direct supervision and enforcement powers over the largest platforms and search engines and not the national authorities. The national authorities can only impose much smaller fines and they're generally not responsible anymore for Facebook and Twitter and so on. And we at DM25 know that the EU commission is a terrible undemocratic institution. They should not be the ones to make the final calls. So we need to democratize the EU, but the good news is once we have democratized the EU, we will have the power over this marketplace of ideas. And in the meantime, we have empowered national authorities and empowered users. So I'm relatively optimistic. I mean, it's terribly difficult to run online services without having a global federation with global laws and global authorities. But it's a step in the right direction, I would say. And well, we'll see whether it succeeds in placing some regulation on this Wild West that currently exists. Thank you. You did a couple of questions and comments from the chat. Bayram says, I think Elon Musk will start the rise of Web 3.0. So Elon will integrate Twitter into blockchain. Epatios asks, what do we think about the Twitter poll that Musk conducted about pardoning Assange and Snowden, which resulted in 80% of 3.3 million votes in favor of pardoning them? And David Baum, a question more for Yanis, says, yes, behavior modification, but to what end? What does a cloud capital oligarch want, ultimately? Let's give the floor to Lukas Febrau-Roch, comms director, Lukas. Thanks, Madan. I'll sidestep a bit the question of free speech versus content moderation, because I think other people here have more interesting things to say on that in particular. And try to go back to the main question in the title of this video, which is what does Elon Musk want with Twitter to begin with, and whether he even has anything to do with any of that. I think Yanis' analysis is extremely pertinent and it's something that, for me personally, I've been concerned with it for a long time, which is the ownership of cloud capital and what does that mean for us, not just today, but in the future as it evolves, because obviously it's technology-based and it advances at sometimes a frightening pace, which is why, when we had the discussions in the past, I've always been for not ignoring, for example, the metaverse, even though the early days of the metaverse have been extremely rocky, not to disregard it and assume that it's going to fail, because if we do, the consequences could be terrible, essentially. So I think we need to assume that it is not going to fail and if it doesn't fail, what is it that we do? What are the paths that we have towards making it public, making it social, and making sure that Mark Zuckerbeck is not going to be the sole owner of this potentially very important space far into the future? To turn to Musk specifically, I find him a really fascinating character. If you look at his biography, of course, his story is not one of rags to riches. He comes from South Africa. His father is a successful South African businessman with ties with the apartheid regime. He owns a mine in the zombie, I believe, and Elon, when he emigrated, I believe to Canada first into the U.S. He will tell you that he founded Tesla, but he didn't. He purchased a stake in it and eventually pushed out the original founders with PayPal as well. He was involved with PayPal, but he was, my understanding is that the company what he brought into PayPal wasn't what became the essence of the business. Eventually, he was pushed out of it because he was found to be too difficult to work with. That's how he made his personal fortune initially anyway. From there, it has grown quite a bit, of course, now he's the richest man on earth. I don't think he's a complete buffoon. But there's also this side of him that is really difficult to pin down in the sense of what is the rationale behind some of the things that he does if there is any. That has been in full display since he acquired Twitter, but even before that, I remember a few years ago, he smoked marijuana live on Joe Rogan's podcast and Tesla's stock crashed that day, I believe a senior executive also resigned. When he purchased Twitter, included in the share price, there's the marijuana joke in the number for 20, which he rounded up the number essentially and ended up costing himself more money in order to do that. Of course, as you mentioned in the intro, Madden and everybody really knows because it's been all over the headlines. Since he acquired Twitter, it's been really chaotic. He downsized the staff severely. This is the key of what I wanted to actually finish this with a question. The consequence of what the chaos that he created was that advertisers fled the platform. They might be slowly coming back, but there's been a huge flight of advertisers from Twitter. This is where I have this question that maybe Giannis could answer it not necessarily now, but further on into our discussion when he comes back in. How do we reconcile Musk, if we assume that his plan is to acquire the only source of cloud capital that was available to him, which I think makes a lot of sense rationally. How do we reconcile this with how the past few weeks have been since he acquired Twitter and the actions, the fact that the actions that he has taken have actually driven away some of the source of the profits of what makes it attractive to own this cloud capital, sorry, to begin with. This is sort of what I kind of have a difficulty in sort of joining the two dots in my mind. Thanks. Lukas, Giannis, can I bring you back in to respond to him? Yeah, sure. Lukas, he doesn't care about the advertising revenues of Twitter. They were not that great to begin with, and he bought Twitter because he rejects the model based on advertising. He doesn't mind advertising revenue, but that's not the point. The idea of cloud capital, I mean, if you think about it, and this is also an answer to the question that came from the chat. I mentioned, I refer to cloud capital as produced means of behavior modification and somebody said, okay, to what end? Why does the cloud capitalist or cloud the list want to modify behavior? Well, for two reasons. Firstly, because they want to make us buy stuff from them. Okay? That's obvious, isn't it? That's what Amazon does. This is what Facebook does. This is what Google does. Twitter has never been very successful in that. That's why advertising revenues have been so low. This is why Mask wants to turn Twitter into a subscription service by pushing for verified status and as a product where you pay eight euros for that. It's also much the money that he's going to get from the membership fees, from the subscription. It is the fact that you will be identified. He will kick out, he doesn't care about bots and anonymous ones. He wants you to, in the same way that when you go into Amazon.com and you get an Amazon Prime account, you give your credit card, the algorithm knows who you are. Exactly who you are. You're completely anonymous. You're as anonymous as you would be in the Chinese Big Tech where the state insists that people register with their ID cards and passwords and so on. So this is what he wants. He wants Twitter to become the equivalent of Amazon somewhere where you express opinions and at the same time you use it in order to convey not just opinions and views but also products and also reports on products. He wants to integrate the square, as he called it, the village square or the town square with the market. And if he loses his advertisers today, he doesn't care. This is not his issue. But since I have the floor. Lucas and comrades, I think it's a huge mistake to question the engineering brilliance of Elon Musk. Yes, he had some money from his dad. He started three major companies with $150 million. I don't have $150 million. You don't have $150 million, but I can tell you, if I gave you $150 million or if I had $150 million, I would not be able to take Tesla from where it was when he started with it and SpaceX. And New Orleans and the boring company and all that and make them what they are. Because let's face it, he's managed to do something that NASA has never succeeded in doing. And this is his own engineering brilliance. Of course, he's got brilliant engineers with him. But I have done good authority that the engineering solutions that Elon Musk personally came up with at three o'clock in the morning, where there was that gave a magnificent value to those companies. Let's not underestimate him. Yes, he has been erratic. He made that statement back a few years ago that he was going to take Tesla public, sorry, private, remember that he was going to, he had the funding to buy all the Tesla shares to take it out of the stock exchange. In the end, he didn't manage to do it. And the Securities Exchange Commission in the United States slapped him with a huge fine and stopped him from being forced him not to be chairman of the board anymore. So he's done things like that. He's erratic and he's a problem child. But at the same time, he's absolutely brilliant. Tesla, hundreds of thousands of business people imagined or envisioned an electric car company. He actually made it work. And it was not the people that he inherited when he purchased Tesla. It was his own fantastic brilliant idea of incorporating the battery and the chassis. Nobody had thought of that before. It's like the Columbus egg. Once we know it, it's really very straightforward to imagine thinking of that innovative idea. But nobody had thought of it until he did. Remarkable innovations when it comes to brain-computer interfaces that he, as I said, I'll say this once more. I have inside information of how he came up with ideas that the best bio-computer engineers had not thought of on how to make a computer speak to a human mind. So the guy is brilliant. He doesn't deserve the billions that he's got. Nobody deserves those billions. In the same way that I keep saying that Jeff Bezos is a fantastic businessman and I am not. And he deserves to be much richer than I am. But he doesn't deserve 240 billion. That's another matter. This has to do with a way in which cloud capital begets cloud capital and how wealth begets wealth. And that's nothing to do with the brilliance of these people. It's got to do with the capacity of concentrated power to amass values that others people are creating. But let us not go from that critique of capitalism and of cloud capital of all sorts of capital to questioning the calibre of the thinking of what is a highly problematic person like Elon Musk. Thank you. Janis, Amir. Amir Kiay, a policy coordinator. Bonjour. Thank you. And good afternoon. Good evening to everybody on this live stream. Of a new ruling class eager to turn. So of course, something that's on this debate, we have to also remind ourselves that the issue goes beyond, you know, Elon Musk and Twitter for that matter, Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook and so on. It's about, and as we discussed this in our technological sovereignty policy paper, it's about the ability for mass democracies to actually exist. Since the technological monopolies are affecting what we see, what we hear and author our opinions in that sense. So on this issue, it's about, it's important to reconsider democratic control over public policy and thus then democratic control over these platforms because regulation is not possible. And the only alternative would, as Janis also mentioned earlier, would be socializing these platforms. And the one model of course we've had and we've talked about is for workers to own the platform and the model of one worker, one share, at the very least. Then something else that you also touched upon earlier was the global laws and regulations. And this would essentially mean moving a significant chunk. And I mean, this is an illegal sense of these platforms away from Silicon Valley and away from US jurisdiction. So there's been some discussion globally on how best this can be done, of course, primarily at the Internet Governance Forum. The 17th edition of it actually just finished in Addis Ababa last week. However, this UN conference continues to be a talking shop and hasn't really been effective in pushing this idea of democratizing public policy and democratizing these platforms. There's also the potential for the international telecommunications union to take this role, but there's been lots of wrangling within that body and it's also hasn't been effective within the UN itself. Cyber space falls within the first committee of the UN. And that's the issue of disarmament and international security and not democracy. So there isn't really much space except the international mechanism of common heritage of humankind, which applies at the moment to international seafloors and elements of outer space and so on. So there's some potential areas where through concerted effort, it's possible to, from a regulatory point of view, take out these platforms out from US jurisdiction and into like a multilateral framework in trust for all of humanity. Thanks. Thank you, Amir. Johannes, Johannes Fair. Our volunteer director in Germany. Go. Thank you to all of you. Very insightful discussion so far. I want to share something that Elon Musk wrote on Twitter on July 24th in 2020. He wrote that the second US government stimulus package is not in the best interest of the people. Someone responded to Musk soon after, you know, what wasn't in the best interest of people. The US government organizing a coup against Evo Morales in Bolivia. So you could obtain the lithium there. Musk wrote in answer to that, we will cook whoever we want, deal with it. That happened two years ago. That someone's account is still banned today. Musk later deleted his tweets and he answered below. Also, we get our lithium from Australia. This is of course just, you know, one tweet. It's fastly written. It can be, you know, mistaken, taken back. But with that, I'm a little bit skeptical of people, you know, put him like his political stances in terms of free speech. And yeah, the equality of everyone a little bit into question. Do I think that he is worse than the previous owner of Twitter's? I don't think so necessarily. I think also before it was owned by international capitalist. Yeah, different international capitalist fractions. And I think, you know, free speech was certainly not there. As it is not on other privately on come platforms like YouTube, the one we are speaking on today. And I think in the end, it is about ownership to the, to the means of communication. And others have mentioned it already. So I don't need to repeat much so that, you know, we have to work on actually taking over the platforms. And with the end goal of possibly them not being owned by anyone. So by all of us and therefore not by anyone. I think that should be the goal. It is also interesting to look into alternatives to experiment with decentralized platforms. Although, like mastodon is, is one, but I think we cannot shy away from also being on the big platforms fighting for our right to, to have, you know, communication here as we are doing today on YouTube. And yeah, speaking about Twitter. And then on the comments that was put about his, the Musk's poll about Julian Assange and Edward Snowden if they should be pardoned. I think if this Twitter takeover at least helps a little bit with Julian Assange and Edward Snowden to, yeah, to be pardoned and to get the freedom they deserve. Then at least it had something good coming out of it. So let's hope for that. Thank you. Thank you, Johannes. If I may, a couple of comments that I have on this. I think there's a fascinating debate because it shows the kind of multi, multi multiple layers of this, of this issue. You've got the business issue, you've got the censorship issue, you've got the hate speech issue, which we haven't really delved into. And I think it's totally fair that the, the idea of Musk being the first of a new generation of cloud capitalists is probably the most concerning. And we should definitely organize against that. But I'm interested in what we can do right now, what can be changed right now. And that's why the issue of speech on the platform and how it has been moderated to date is really something that jumps out at me. And I'll explain why. I mean, I'm interested in activism as a pursuit. I'm interested in how people can influence the world around them. And like it or not, Twitter is the prime domain in which elite opinion is influenced online. It's not the only domain, but it's a key part of that. So, I mean, let's rewind a couple of years ago to the COVID lockdown times. Now, I don't necessarily subscribe to any of the views I'm going to explain here that I'm going to air here. But when there were people that queried the efficacy of vaccines, they were downgraded. Their speech was shadow banned, sometimes banned entirely. When there were people who would question the origin of COVID, the idea that it leaked from a lab, this was that they were banned. There were messages that were appended to their tweets that said that this was disinformation. And now that's a theory which is widely accepted to be plausible. We still don't really have the origin story correct. But whether or not you accept these things, we should be able to debate them. And that's an urgent issue. And what's happened since Musk has taken over Twitter is quite fascinating because you see the establishment of the media, the legacy media clashing very brutally with Musk. You see that the stories about Musk are incredibly negative. And every time there is some kind of a leak or information that comes out about how the old Twitter regime was censoring posts colluding with the Democrat Party, with the FBI, with the CIA, maybe other governments in order to suppress the speech of their political opponents or sometimes legitimate news stories, it's poo pooed. It's like, oh, it's a nothing burger. And it's very telling. And I think that is something which we need to keep a very close eye on because if the landscape is not free, then we're in big trouble in terms of what we can influence and what we can't. So that's the part that really gets to me. That's all I'm going to say on that. Who else? Oh, yes, Eric. Eric Edmund next, you have the floor, political director, the M25 government. I hope you can hear me. I live with a strong Moroccan minority in my neighborhood and I hear they just beat Spain on penalties in the World Cup. So if there's a lot of background noises because of that. Congratulations to any Moroccan viewers who might have although I assume most of you are watching the World Cup instead of this. Although you shouldn't this year. So what I wanted to say ties in a little bit with what the Mechran and Yanis have been saying. First of all, there is, you know, the bias of false prior and agent detection and all of these things. And, you know, just because Musk is a brilliant engineer does in no way make him a brilliant manager of people or in any way a person who should have any kind of power in society. And even if he was, even if he was gifted with both of these gifts, brilliant engineer, brilliant mind, and also a fantastic leader of people. That does not mean that he should be in a position to be given the kind of power on the basis of his mythical riches. So the story, one of the stories here and one of the issues that we have when we try and push back against this bias against Elon Musk, which I agree exists and is problematic and leads a lot of people to think that, you know, somehow Twitter before Musk was some kind of liberal utopia, which in no way was, it was in a way. At the same time, that does not mean that we should paint a high geography of Elon Musk, which is what a lot of people do. They go too far in the other direction. And I think that is also problematic because at the end of the day, what this all is, it's a capitalist story. It's a story of profit. And that means that the bi-over of Twitter is a story of profit. And we stand to benefit from it only if Elon Musk can make money off us or if somehow he is some kind of enlightened despot, which is exactly the same kind of foundation on which people hoped to benefit from their overlords back in the Middle Ages. You know, you either hope that they stood to profit from defending you and your life in your lands or that they had had, you know, Melachthon or Erasmus as their teacher growing up in some palace in Europe and therefore were some kind of humanist blimp to the overall authoritarian story of rulers. And we are going in a direction where we are basically becoming once again beggars to these kinds of power structures. And we need to push against that. That is the bigger story that it's not whether or not Elon Musk will make Twitter better. It is the fact that Twitter was terrible to begin with. Whether or not Elon Musk will make it better is neither here nor there because he shouldn't have the ability to influence public... Well, it's not even a public space, is it? I mean, it's a public space that we are allowed to use in order to make money for others. But we fall under the illusion that these spaces are public, indeed, because they should be. And they need to be spaces where we have the ability to speak freely and to compete with our ideas freely. But not because we are allowed to do so because it's making somebody money or because Elon Musk was good enough to let us. And this is the part of the story that we need to stick to and remember to underline. And I'm really sorry if I'm not being very coherent or eloquent right now. But I think that is the part of the debate that also needs to be highlighted that whether or not Elon Musk buying Twitter is good or not is neither here nor there. The biggest story is that none of this should be happening in the first place and these kind of pseudo-public spaces need to become truly public if we're going to have a freedom of speech in them. Thank you, Eric. You did. Can I bring you back in? Yeah, since we just mentioned the issue of freedom of speech, it's a very tricky topic when you start thinking about it given the difference between national hate speech legislation. I mean, obviously when it comes to really criminal acts like offering to assassinate people, I think basically every country in the world can agree to remove such content. But let's say inciting a riot against the government or using Nazi slogans. Using Nazi slogans is illegal in Germany but not in many other countries. Then there is insulting the profit in a lot of Muslim countries is illegal. So what is Twitter going to do is going to ban all the obvious stuff, ban Nazi content, ban insulting the profit. Then if America gets a radical Christian theocratic government, which is a possibility, they will suddenly have to remove all the Muslim content and add Christian ones, which may be banned in Egypt but not banned in America and suddenly you get these national versions of Twitter in the best case. I really don't think, and of course you may say, okay, Twitter is an American company, they don't have to do it, but that is what I tried to highlight with my rant earlier about liability. Liability laws means that if someone is publishing a newspaper in your country and they're breaking the law or one of their authors is breaking the law, then that newspaper can be held liable for that. And the same applies to social media companies and that is also how European countries have gotten a lot of money from Facebook, Twitter and so on and have forced them to comply with national laws including programming extra features just for Germany and so on and so on. So I'm really worried that we're going to have these national silos of Twitter would be completely different based on national laws but even that is still a better outcome in my opinion than having a Twitter that is only run according to the ideals of the Republican Party in America and that worldwide because it's not going to be a nice place. Ideally we would have a global consensus of what kind of content should be moderated and what shouldn't but that is a long way off and in the meantime we only have these imperfect solutions. Thank you. You did. Andreas, Andreas, we're a web editor for yours. Thanks man. I just wanted to make a brief point more about media freedom and freedom of speech and how it's altered so drastically particularly since the rise of Trump since he announced his candidacy back in 2015 I think it's almost become normalized to have a certain type of censorship as long as it fits in with certain goals. I'm under no illusion that Elon Musk is this saviour but I do believe he is a necessary antidote to the wide-tweeping ideological censorship that's taken place in the last seven years or so and normalized by social media platforms, mainstream media outlets and it's always got a pleasant sounding justification but it's made us kind of lose sight of very important principles such as free speech and yeah I find it quite ironic if not humorous that the sudden panic has been unleashed now particularly from the left about how misinformation has now flourished and hate speech has flourished now that Musk has taken over when very few were really talking about the core principle of freedom of speech because I think his purchase of Twitter arrives as sort of a wake-up call a day of reckoning at least for a large portion of the online population that kind of lost sight of this value in place of short-term gains and let's say those who are very against the likes of Trump or anyone who kind of has similar views I still think there should be the battle of information and humans should be at least classed at least mature enough to be able to solve those issues through discussion rather than someone who clearly like these platforms who are invested into the tune of millions if not billions by very powerful people to tell them what's right or wrong and the value of free speech was one typically associated with the traditional left but social media has tribalized almost fueled a lot of tribal behavior that's particularly amid this like post-Trump hysteria and it's created a very different left where principles are no longer fundamental and as long as our side is winning kind of it's justifiable but then there's very dangerous narratives that have taken place on social media that have been in favor of the establishment and therefore they've just brushed past like Russia gate the idea that Russia helped Trump get elected that was something that was allowed to be said for years algorithms of Google, Facebook and Twitter changed on the so-called fact that Russia had helped Trump win the election and even when that was disproven in the Supreme Court those algorithms stayed the same to benefit mainstream outlets so it's not about left versus right or Trump versus someone else it's about the value of free speech because these things can be corrupted in any way the establishment wants at any point in the future off some kind of scary sounding boogeyman so I think it's a good wake-up call for the left of kind of lost sight of principles because it could come back to haunt you Thank you, Andreas When just going past the top of the house and very quick comments from the chat Adam B says if Twitter is truly the public square it must be owned by the people in it Team Janssen says did he must not just buy Twitter to be able to influence the price of his shares without getting interrupted and Lynn Barnes adds that censorship is unnecessary because laws are in place to deal with illegal acts Yanis if I can bring you in to conclude floor is yours Well briefly if somebody were to ask me so what should be done already 50% of the answer has been offered has been tabled it's a view that many of us share that there should be no share markets and ownership should be on a cooperative basis so every company however big medium sized or large should be run on the basis of a one employee one share one vote if you have that then you wouldn't be possible for anyone to actually buy a company right there would be no share market you wouldn't be able to buy shares and you could and you can work for a company and then you would have one share in it and you would be one of N where N is the number of employees and if you and I didn't like that company we could start our own with N equals to you and me and then we could bring other people in so that's 50% of the answer but there isn't the other 50% to stop the silos that you did was talking about interoperability right so the reason why I will never leave Twitter however good master don or whatever it is is I've got a million vote followers and I'm not going to leave them behind and I cannot carry them with me even if I know who they are I cannot persuade them even if most of them wanted to follow me in some other platform they wouldn't have the time to do it they wouldn't be bothered so the reason why we stay in certain platforms is because there is no interoperability imagine if telephone companies mobile phone companies were like that and you could only speak to people you know if you were with Vodafone you could only speak to people people had Vodafone accounts okay yeah then again that would be great for Vodafone if it was the first mover the one with the first mover advantage because nobody would I mean even if another company offered us much better terms and better service and faster connections and so on we wouldn't go there because we wouldn't be able to talk to anyone of our friends who are with Vodafone right cell phone companies mobile phone companies would love to do that but they were not allowed to do it they were forced to operate on the base of interoperability similarly with the European Union one of the good things that the European Union has done is forced companies to offer free roaming across the European Union so there are no national silos anymore you know I can call Yudit in Berlin from my Greek operator and I'm not going to pay more than I would pay if I were to call than I hear in Athens so the combination of one share one vote and interoperability forced interoperability would deal with the problem but of course this would require a revolution and this is why we need a political movement one last thing this is my personal view I know it's not a view of the M25 nobody should take what I'm going to say now as a view of the M25 I warn you I'm hopelessly relaxed on hate speech I don't mind hate speech I'm all in favor of it I receive a lot of hate speech through Twitter every day there are millions of you know hundreds of thousands of bots here in Greece that are shitting on me 24 hours a day personally I believe in the right of Nazis to express Nazi views on Twitter in newspapers in there I think that it is a gross error of the Federal Republic of Germany to ban Nazi views I think that what we need to do is we need to to suck the oxygen around from around them the oxygen of people willing to listen to them not to ban them this gives them a certain degree of queues amongst the marginalized I don't even mind disinformation flat earthers coming up with huge three thesis on Facebook and you know against vaccines against the notion that the earth is not flat against Darwin but that's my view I understand there are legitimate arguments against this but for me I wouldn't waste one ounce of my energy trying to censor anyone thank you Yannis great well that concludes our chat tonight I really appreciate how we tackle this debate from many different angles and if you would like to be part of the M25 to get stuck in on campaigning on these issues there's one address it's dm25.org slash join and in a few seconds you can be a member so thank you again to my panel thank you to you guys out there for your comments and questions and the chat is still going strong right now as I was speaking and we will see you again at the same time