UPDATED: More Slime in the Swamp
UPDATED:
TFG is back. One of Elon’s first moves upon taking over Twitter yesterday (after stupidly carrying a bathroom sink into Twitter’s offices and firing the entire senior management team) was to restore TFG’s twitter account, effective as early as Monday. He did it after announcing a new “content moderation council”, adding that no changes would be made until the council convenes. So much for that strategy. In classic style, TFG is already gloating through a surrogate.
https://twitter.com/altnavigation/status/1585812009094119424?s=20&t=NQIprbgbvmxM8yoxWvZGqg
After the announcement, Musk backtracked, saying that “no decisions will be made until the council convenes”. Right. I can predict how THAT will turn out.
To be super clear, we have not yet made any changes to Twitter’s content moderation policies https://t.co/k4guTsXOIu
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 29, 2022
General Motors has already suspended all advertising on Twitter in response to Musk’s takeover.
Apparently, Musk’s “free speech” ideology extends to defamation, insurrection, and getting people killed. So the shitstorm begins.
UPDATE:
Twitter is now being flooded by MAGAt trolls, spewing the same racist hate and misinformation they were before the insurrection on January 6, 2021. One watchdog has reported that racist tweets are up 500% since Musk took control of Twitter.
Evidence suggests that bad actors are trying to test the limits on @Twitter. Several posts on 4chan encourage users to amplify derogatory slurs.
For example, over the last 12 hours, the use of the n-word has increased nearly 500% from the previous average. pic.twitter.com/mEqziaWuMF
— Network Contagion Research Institute (@ncri_io) October 28, 2022
Welcome to the cowardly new world aided by the world’s richest man. When’s he going to Mars?
I deactivated mine today and permanent deletion will follow. I refuse to support Musk. He’s disgusting.
1Deactivated mine today, too. Didn’t use it that much anyway, but that motivated me to cut it.
2I’m confused— Musk is white South African — what did T**** write? African American company? I know Lynnseeyy G. just called Herschel a “black African American”, so maybe I’m missing the new GQP identifiers of race?
3Dang it. I bid $39 billion to buy Twitter, but Musk outbid me.
4It’s taken so dang long I forgot where I hid MY $39B for Twitty!
5Trump gets it wrong again. Musk is not an African-American; he is a native-born South African.
6Musk is a child dressed up in man clothes. That sink thing did it all! If he ever goes into outer space, he should stay there!
7I have a feeling Musk is going to be sorry he ever did this.
8Absolute must read is this essay “Welcome to Hell, Elon.”
https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/28/23428132/elon-musk-twitter-acquisition-problems-speech-moderation
There simply is no better description of the problem that Musk faces at Twitter at this point. It fully explains why content moderation will stay at Twitter much the way it has regardless of what Musk thinks about it, unless he is just willing to throw away $44B to make a point.
I happen to be a fan of Musk. He has achieved so many positive things that have never been done before but I am fully aware he makes mistakes. If his Twitter takeover is a mistake then it will be his biggest one ever.
If he destroys Twitter, then nothing of value will be lost and Patel’s point will be amply proven.
But Musk has a pattern of seeing further than everyone else does and pulling off what the experts say cannot be done. I’ll wait and see.
9Noooooooo, Holly Hell Batman, Rapture Ready I ain’t. This could be Fox ‘Hate’ News on steroids. You know the only reason this Corporate fascist bough it was to help tRump.
10This is more proof we are living in the new Medieval times, Control by the most $$$ Richest $$$. Welcome to the new Darkest Age. Corporate Fascism, a poisonous blend of White Supremacy, Religious Extremism, and Greed.
“so proud to support an African-American business.”
Braying jackass thinks he’s sooooooo clever. And he just looks like…a braying jackass. And millions love him. SMDH (over and over again).
11Definite proof that Twitter is for Twits.
12Love that GM is pulling their advertising. Suspect that made him backtrack for the moment on allowing TFFG back on. However, I think that will be short lived. I think he did this buyout partly to affect current and future elections (i.e. for trumpf (a fellow narcissist) and the like). Twitter will now be “owned” by the radical right. I can only hope more advertisers will bale and those that don’t get boycotted. Money drives him so we’ll see.
13I’d have liked to see Musk’s face when he read that he’s an African American.
14The Young Folks (TM) on campus have told me
1. Facebook is for the old, angry, and ignorant
2. Twitter is people screaming and cancelling each other
3. TikTok and Insta are still kinda ok.
For alternatives, Discord, WhatsApp, Signal, and maybe CounterSocial, cohost, and Bluesky are possibilities. I must also point out that the creatures in middle school and high school regard my college-age informants as antiques, well on their way to senescence. [Me, I’m regarded as a stegasaurus, amusing to regard but with 3 out of 4 feet, and most of my spines, in the grave]
15The story Friday was that the Twit software engineers were required to print out (on paper!) the last 50 pages of code they’ve written, for a meeting with Musk and a code review. That was latter retracted and they were told to shred the printouts so competitors would not steal them.
The whole idea was so ridiculous that at first, nobody believed it. But somebody had the bright idea to put up the Elon Code Review web site: https://eloncodereview.com/
A few years ago there was a brief incadescent moment in software engineering where companies offered bug bounties, X dollars to find a bug in their code. It did not take long before the MBAs realized that it was not a good idea to offer to bounties to the people writing the code. As one Dilbert character put it, “I’m writing myself a yacht this afternoon!”
Alan’s must-read link above is a great one.
16I pointed out elsewhere that Musk cannot help running his stupid mouth. It will be falling-down easy for someone to goad him into boasting, unambiguously, gleefully, and on tape, that he means to silence any viewpoints he doesn’t like.
17Surly: I am not saying that I am a dinosaur, but when I first took a programming class in college we handwrote the programs, then sat down at a card punch machine the size of a percheron and entered the code, 80 characters per card.
We then carried those stacks of punched cards over to another huge machine, put a weight on top of the stack, and attempted to run the cards through the card reader. Card jam about 1 in 10 runs.
Then we waited half an hour until the line printer whopped it out on paper and we could see the results.
And all this time we were assured that this was the wave of the future, and that we were the cutting edge.
18Wait, didn’t Trump say that Elon’s mother was an ugly, something or other?
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