I have no horse in this race — I'm not on Twitter — but does anyone know if the blue checkmark boosts your posts in the feed/recommendation engine?

I'd expect it does implicitly at least because people must interact with those users differently.

Too many people think that checkmark = free speech and all us peasants using Twitter without it aren't worthy of the mark.

> Huh

Before you let that cynicism build up too much, for the record, not all of us Elon+Twitter skeptics have a problem with the $8 thing. You're just not going to hear from any one who didn't have an issue with it.

Related: Is there a quippy term or a fallacy for the (very natural!) habit of treating a random sample of a million voices and expecting a coherent message from them? I feel like it's related but distinct from a strawman.

> Before it was that private companies could do whatever they wanted,

No, it was that “free speech” means private actors are free to make decisions about what content to relay.

Not that everything they choose on that (or any other) is equally good, nor that they shouldn’t be punished in the marketplace (not by the state) for their bad choices.

Private companies explicitly shouldn’t do whatever they want at all. They don’t even get to decide totally whom to serve, as doing so against a protected class will quickly lead to a really bad outcome for the company.

And that’s a good thing. It is frankly ridiculous that private companies get to decide the public opinion by tweaking their algorithms, it should be managed in a similar way how we don’t allow food companies to put cocaine into their products.

In what delusional world could private companies ever 'do whatever they wanted'? We have huge legal tomes filled with laws to prevent this sort of sociopathic thinking from becoming reality for the sake of profit.

If you think the bannable offenses on Twitter only gave enough room for the left, you are not just to the right of that, but more like far right extremism. Twitter did and does, in fact, tolerate right-wing and conservative views. It is full of them.

Don't mistake hate speech, disinfo, racism or whatever you think twitter was violating 'free speech' for as being the right wing. It is not.