U.S. billionaire Elon Musk has agreed to sell a portion of Starlink assets to the U.S. Department of Defense, removing himself from decision-making regarding geofencing Ukraine’s access to the satellite internet service

  • Tylerdurdon@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Why doesn’t he trade them X for some of Starlink? The value of Twitter X is in the negatives now, right?

    Then maybe as a government run social media it can be stable and boring again.

        • Deadeyegai@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Never thought of it remotely even being possible like that. With some good support & security in place, it might even be a pleasant place!

        • ThuglasAtoms@lemmy.sdf.org
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          1 year ago

          All of the bad faith arguments about free speech and the first amendment become real arguments about free speech and the first amendment if the government is operating the social media site. You couldn’t ban someone for offensive speech or delete their post.

          • mateomaui@reddthat.com
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            1 year ago

            They could probably get around that by outsourcing the moderation to some public group overseen by some other public ethics group, etc, and otherwise the gov’t just provides the funding to keep it all employed, running and maintained.

            Not that I’m recommending it. It would have to be better than X though.

          • MataVatnik@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            True, the thought has crossed my mind cause I thought of it before. Honestly I’m not sure how it would be handled. On the one hand, calls to violence would definitely be stamped out more thoroughly. On the other hand, I could see certain problematic speech run rampant because of the first amendment. But I think you can still have a certain idea of decorum, like they do in congress, where certain behavior is frowned upon if not completely banned. I think you can also get away with pseudobanning people kind of how it’s done with fact checking where certain posts are hidden behind a warning banner. Maybe also leave it up to the community like in lemmy where certain things are downvoted. It would still get spicy tho. My guess is that ultimately government run social media would be super stale and attract only the most boring conversations, like cspan.

      • Deceptichum@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Eh the EU and some (or one) Euro country has started their own Mastodon/Fediverse instances—The idea isn’t terrible if your country isn’t shit.

    • Thorny_Thicket@sopuli.xyz
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      1 year ago

      The value of Twitter X is in the negatives now, right?

      It’s a private company and you can’t buy their stocks.

    • cooljacob204@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      It will be the opposite. The government will not be able to sensor or moderate anything but illegal stuff because of the first amendment.

    • XTornado@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Because they want Starlink satellites for Ukraine probably (and other uses but now this at minimum). X doesn’t provide them with shit.