The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 164 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 5 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Musk: Almost every conspiracy theory about Twitter turned out true
“Almost every conspiracy theory that people had about Twitter turned out to be true. So far, they've all turned out to be true, and if not, more true than people thought.”
Sacks: Twitter's undisclosed moderation is an FTX-level free speech fraud
“This is an FTX level fraud, except that what was stolen here was not customer funds, it was their free speech rights.”
Musk refuses to pay agreed Twitter price if public filings are inaccurate
“So, in, in making the Twitter offer, I was obviously reliant upon the truth and accuracy of their public filings, and if those filings are not accurate. It's simply not, that's, that it's not, you can't pay the same price for something that is much worse than …”
Elon Musk estimates at least 20% of Twitter accounts are bots
“I think it's some number that is probably at least four or five times that number. I'd say at if you did sort of the lowest estimate would be probably 20%. And this is a bunch of quite smart outside firms have done analysis of Twitter and looked at the sort of…”
Elon Musk: Twitter has a very far-left political bias
“The reality is that, that Twitter at this point, you know, has a very far left bias.”
Sacks: Biden FTC would allow Big Tech to buy Twitter over Musk
“I think this administration does not want to see Twitter become a free speech company again. And so the political winds will blow towards letting, I think, Twitter be acquired by a big tech company, even if it means big tech gets bigger. Wait a second. So I th…”
Calacanis: Musk will buy Twitter at a lower price by year-end
“My prediction is the Board tries to fight it. Stock collapses. Nobody thinks it's going to get done. Elon lowers his offer, and he wins it by the end of the year, and gives him a lower offer.”
Sacks predicts elites and media will stop Musk from acquiring Twitter
“Elon is gonna be thwarted by these folks. He's not gonna get control of this company. They're, the vested interest in stopping him by the board, by the new CEO, and by the corporate media and the political elites is too great. They will find a way to stop him.”
Sacks: Twitter censorship principles exist solely to suppress opposing political views
“These censorship principles only exist so the employees of the company can censor one side of the debate that they don't agree with.”
Chamath: Arbitrary tech platform bans are as dangerous as the Capitol attack
“I know that you may think banning him from Twitter is so much lower than this attack on the capital, and I'm telling you it's not, because the slippery slope of event, event number one is so obvious. The prosecution of that is so obvious. The law is so complet…”
Rogers: Leaked emails show NGO's top priority was killing Musk's X
“We have emails that have leaked from some of these NGOs. So one of them, the Center for Countering Digital Hate, Which is a British NGO whose leader was the target of some of our visa sanctions. There are emails exchanged with Democratic politicians in the Uni…”
Musk: Other social platforms reduced censorship after Twitter changed policy
“Once Twitter broke ranks, the others had to it became very obvious what the others were doing. And so they had to mitigate their censorship substantially as because of what Twitter did.”
Sacks: Pre-acquisition Twitter admin tools had checkboxes to shadowban accounts
“So anyway, he calls, and basically what he told me was that all the conspiracy theories are true, that we've now gone into the admin tools that the trust and safety team was using, and they literally have check boxes to throttle accounts based on, exclude them…”
Sacks: FBI used 'Teleport' tool to transmit instructions to Twitter
“The FBI had their own tool called teleport, which would allow them to transmit secret instructions to the trust and safety team at Twitter.”
Sacks: Twitter Files showed 80 FBI agents sending platform takedown requests
“Once that censorship power was created, It attracted powerful entities from our government who wanted to co-opt and use that power. That's what we saw in the Twitter files with the 80 FBI agents sending takedown requests.”
Musk: Old Twitter suppressed right-wing voices at 10x the rate of left-wing voices
“You know, the suspensions of Candidates, or interests, or voices, was really at least 10 times the rate of suppression of left-wing voices on, you know, on old Twitter.”
Sacks: Over 50% of Twitter engineers hadn't checked in code in months
“The first question he asked in the engineering department is who's checked in code. And they looked at the code repository and over 50% of the engineering department had not checked in code in months.”
Calacanis: AI could let tech companies run with 98% fewer employees in 3-5 years
“We can be sitting here in three or four or five years, and instead of running a company like Twitter with 80% less people, maybe you could run it with 98% less people.”
Shellenberger: FBI constantly pushed legal boundaries requesting Twitter user info
“FBI was constantly pushing the boundaries of what is legally and ethically acceptable in terms of requesting information.”
Friedberg: Elon Musk Suffered Major Reputational Damage From Buying Twitter
“I think his reputation has gotten really hurt because of, you know, that role. He's not making a lot of friends, and he's not, he's causing a lot of reputational damage.”
Friedberg: Musk suspending jet-tracking account shows deep hypocrisy
“I think it was a bad decision, and I think that it represented on the least generous statement would be that it represents deep hypocrisy in that not just a few weeks ago did he say he would never delete that account, but he also said he was buying Twitter to …”
Sacks: Musk's free speech mission at Twitter is vital for humanity
“If you define what he's doing in the larger sense as restoring free speech to the most important town square social network, hopefully thereby inspiring other tech companies to move in the direction of opening things up, then I actually think it's a pretty goo…”
Calacanis: Twitter Files confirm secret blacklists tagged conservative voices
“We now have confirmation that what the right thought was happening all along, which is a secret silencing system built into the software. Of blacklists was tagging right-wing conservative voices in the system.”
Sacks: Twitter suppressed Hunter Biden laptop story before 2020 election
“What he did was confirm that a completely true story by the New York Post about Hunter Biden that came out a month before the election was suppressed by Twitter executives, including at the behest of, you know, of FBI agents and former security state officials…”
Sacks: FBI warned social networks to suppress authentic Hunter Biden laptop story
“A very important piece of this was the pre-bunking that the FBI went to Facebook and Twitter and social networks and said, be on the lookout for a story about Hunter Biden. It is Russian disinformation. And they primed these social networks to suppress that st…”
Sacks: Twitter execs maintained hack framing despite internal pushback
“Jim Baker and Vijaya Gotti said, okay, that there were a lot of internal questions about whether that, that Hunter Biden story could be justified under the hacked policy. And there were many legitimate questions raised internally about whether they could maint…”
Sacks: Twitter Files prove executives lied about shadowbanning political viewpoints
“You had statement after statement by Twitter executives like Jack Dorsey, like Vijaya, Gadi, like, you know, Yoel and others saying we do not shadow ban. And then they also said, we certainly, this is their emphasis, do not shadow ban on the basis of political…”
Sacks: Twitter suppressed Libs of TikTok despite admitting no policy violation
“There are conversations in the Slack that Barry Weiss exposed where, for example, Libs of TikTok, they admit in the Slack that we can't suppress Libs of TikTok based on our hate policy. Libs of TikTok hasn't violated it. We're going to suppress that account an…”
Calacanis: Twitter placed Jay Bhattacharya on a trends blacklist
“And then there were people who were banned from the trends blacklist, including a Stanford professor, Jay Bhattacharya.”
Sacks: Twitter's racist post surge was a 4chan bot attack
“What happened is that within hours of Elon taking over the company on Friday, there was a four Chan attack where basically people from this message board created bots to post hundreds of thousands of spam messages that contained Racist words and epithets.”
Friedberg: Elon Musk's Twitter cuts set a new standard for tech layoffs
“This is what I think the Elon action this week really sets a standard. He shows the entirety of Silicon Valley that you can cut deep and you can turn a profit and you can do it fast. And it could set a new standard for how folks are managing this.”
Sacks: Donald Trump should be reinstated on Twitter
“Do I think that Trump should be allowed back? Yeah, I do.”
Chamath: Journalism is irrelevant because raw facts propagate instantly online
“It's irrelevant, and I'll tell you why. Because the facts are known instantaneously on Twitter and through the internet. We don't need people to relay facts. We need people to wrap facts in context and allow us to come to our own conclusions.”
Rabois: A flipped Congress will subpoena Twitter over foreign government influence
“But the government, if the U.S. Congress is turned over, there's gonna be a lot of subpoenas flying over to Twitter, because there are absolutely foreign governments influencing some of those decisions at Twitter.”
Palihapitiya: Musk will eventually donate Twitter to a foundation and trust
“I think he's going to donate it into a foundation and a trust.”
Calacanis: Tesla AI engineers could solve Twitter's bot problem in days
“If he took one of the AI people working on self-driving and dropped them into Twitter, one, they would solve the bot problem, the spam problem in 30 days with one. And if, God forbid, he sent three. They would solve it in the weekend.”
Palihapitiya: Free speech Twitter could be Elon Musk's biggest societal contribution
“I think if he does get a control of Twitter, and there is A strong, reliable moral force for free speech. I think that's actually going to be his biggest contribution to society”
Calacanis: Twitter avoids eliminating bots to prevent a 20% activity drop
“The problem is they don't want the bots to go because the only sign of life in that business Is spammers and, you know, all these fake accounts being created, so they're just scared to take that 20% hit.”
Sacks: Twitter could fire 50% of staff with no operational impact
“You could fire half those people or more, there'd be absolutely no impact to the business. In fact, they probably run better because right now they probably got too many meetings happening with too many people.”
Palihapitiya: Twitter free speech impact could exceed Tesla and SpaceX
“I think that if he is able to make free speech cool again, he'll, he'll actually do more doing that than potentially through SpaceX and Tesla, and that's already saying a lot.”
Palihapitiya: Trump will likely be allowed back on Twitter after three years
“I think all roads will probably lead to a conclusion that after three years, it's probably okay to let this guy back and be able to tweet.”
Friedberg: Internet platforms are de facto publishers, not neutral access tools
“And in all these cases, from Google, to YouTube, to Twitter, and now to Spotify, the idea of being just an access, a platform for access is proving to be wrong. All of them are de facto publishers.”
Sacks: Deplatforming by Facebook and Twitter strips citizens of speech rights
“The town square is now owned by Facebook and Twitter. The town square got privatized and our speech rights are now in the hands of Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey as a practical matter. I mean, you do not have speech rights in the modern world if you get depla…”
Chamath: Facebook, Twitter, and Medium suppressed facts and science in 2020
“The amount of people that have been muzzled, stifled, the amount of fact and science that literally just gets judged willy-nilly by our distribution points like Facebook and Twitter and Medium. It's really scary. So censorship made a roaring comeback in 2020.”
Sacks: Twitter and Jack Dorsey will be political scapegoats post-election
“I think this time around it's going to be Twitter because they have been so arrogant and their assertion of their right to censor viewpoints they don't lock. And if the Republicans hold on to the Senate and or the presidency, I think you're going to see Jack D…”
Chamath: Section 230 protections for major tech platforms are numbered
“But if I was a betting man, which I am, I think that section two 30 is, their days are numbered, and Facebook, Twitter, Google, all these companies are going to have to look more like newspapers and television stations.”
Sacks: Consistent moderation rules would have blocked Trump tax return coverage
“Because if they were to apply these standards evenly, they would have blocked the Trump tax returns for the exact same reason.”
Sacks: Facebook is like cigarettes, but Twitter is like fentanyl
“Twitter is a Sewer of political diatribe and polemical hate, you know, it's, I don't know anyone who feels better you know, after spending time on Twitter, you know, if Facebook is like cigarettes, you know, I don't know what Twitter is. I mean, it's like fent…”