"the fact that Musk is doing this now and here in the United States, you are going to hear the censorship industry howl all over this, 'He's destroying democracy.'"

Wow. Musk has no idea the DARPA rattlesnake he just stepped on by this doing this…

My take on @elonmusk’s new rate limit policy, from the lens of the censorship industry: https://t.co/AZ5SPIgHiz pic.twitter.com/Rw4KBZsT9O

— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) July 1, 2023

00:40  He mentions his website, Foundation for Freedom Online.  His Twitter feed is here.

04:00  Twitter is by far and away the intelligence agency, the State Department, the Defense Department, and the NGO-plex, social media platform par excellence.  They much prefer the intel they can scrape from Twitter than from any other social media company.  And there's good reason for this, other than LinkedIn, I would say, and they would say.  And part of that is because Twitter is not a walled garden like Facebook.  Facebook is also a social media platform, obviously, but most private accounts you can only access if you are friends with that person or friends of a friend.  Twitter did not have that.  And YouTube there's a giant divide between producers and consumers.  Consumers on YouTube are not content creators.  That's not the case on Twitter.  Every Twitter user is a content creator when they click the retweet button.  And so you can map real-time narrative emergence on Twitter in a way that you can't do on any other social media platform.  And that has been used by the CIA, the State Department, the Defense Department, hundreds of censorship, government-funded NGOs, centers, non-profit foundations, "university research centers," and the works.  In order to build their social media censorship Death Star, they need to be able to scrape hundreds of millions of tweets.  And what Musk is doing here is very interesting, because on the one hand, you could argue it's a sort of, kind of form of, I wouldn't say censorship necessarily, because it's not like a particular person is singled out, but you are limiting the openness of the internet by doing this.  But on the other hand, you are actually, potentially preserving the openness of the internet by preventing the construction of this censorship Death Star that is getting more and more refined every day and is getting funded by your tax dollars to the tune of tens of millions of dollars from DARPA and the National Science Foundation to say nothing about the State Department and USAID, and National Endowment for Democracy grants.  so it's all very interesting.  That's just one thing to keep in mind on top of the fact that this is obviously going to be a revenue generator for Musk as he sees it.  He drew a distinction between verified accounts and unverified accounts, where you can sort of have normal Twitter if you have a verified account because that 8,000 rate limit is pretty substantial.  But 800 is not a lot, so it's highly incentivized for people to get Verified Accounts, so obviously this could . . . I'm not sure that Elon Musk is doing this to throttle the AI Censorship Death Star constructed out of the censorship industry.  He may just be doing this for cynical business reasons in order to pump up the subscription base, or a privacy reason independent of censorship.  But whether he knows it or not, there are going to be hundreds of censorship operatives housed in the University research centers this week, howling at the moon that this is an attack on democracy for Musk to limit their access because it has been for years now a big bugaboo for all of the university censorship operatives who cloak themselves as "researchers" when what they are is operatives.  That if they lose access to the underlying data on which their AI censorship models are built, then they will not be able to do their jobs as effective as fast, precise, and comprehensive as social media censors.  So they've been having a big fight about this exact issue in Europe because of Europe's GDPR laws, their data privacy laws, and other sovereign European state restrictions on 3rd party access to social media user-level data.  And so they tried to get around that by having certain journalists and researchers they've sort of designated "privileged class" to get so that only they can be sort of the trusted keepers of this information that used to be public but now is not.  So the fact that Musk is doing this now and here in the United States, you are going to hear the censorship industry howl all over this.  Whether Musk knows this or not, he has stepped on a rattlesnake.  We'll see how it plays out, but I am very curious to see how this rattlesnake reacts to this new boot.  And in a weird way, even though the boot may be cutting off some amount of openness of Twitter, it may also represent, in some way, the boot of freedom. 8:52