ah yeah, we’re at “rasengan k-lines channel operators for saying the word “libera”” stage. Great, the fork is almost over!
Twitter applies 7-day suspension to half a dozen journalists
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Re: Twitter applies 7-day suspension to half a dozen journalists
#242So this is how Twitter goes out: not with a bang but with a seemingly endless stream of stories about the little ways Elon is ruining the service each day. Just staggers me that Elon could have just… not done any of this. And yet here we are. He’s had to sell billions in Tesla stock to finance this ongoing mayhem, this is surely going to be up there as one of the greatest examples of hubris in modern business.
Quoted post unavailable.
I mean this is an intriguing rationalization, but I don’t buy it.
Buying votes simply doesn’t cost this much, by orders of magnitude. Burning your empire to ashes as a loyalty test doesn’t hold water either: It’s politicians that partake in loyalty tests, not donors.
Re: Twitter applies 7-day suspension to half a dozen journalists
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think he was legit shaken by the incident with the kook stalker and his son. Which is certainly understandable. People need to dial the hate way down. Way, way down. And the rule change was quite clear that linking to the jet tracking was prohibited. That all said, he's gone too far here. And it's an unwinnable fight anyway.
So what would banning a jet tracking account have to do with a stalker (for which no police report was filed)? And why ban journalists? In addition, the rule change was just to enable the banning of the jet tracking, not because it was it came from some higher sense of duty.
> So what would banning a jet tracking account have to do with a stalker
From what I can gather and infer, a couple of days ago Musk's son got off the jet and into a car, then that car was attacked by a stalker looking for Musk himself. Musk believes that the stalker got the information from the ElonJet Twitter account.
Re: Twitter applies 7-day suspension to half a dozen journalists
#244Quoted post unavailable.
What's your definition?
I can make a stab at that looking from that list. We're not looking at free speech here, we're looking at protected speech for nazis.
Our latest batch of nazis seem to think that people objecting to things like inciting violence, encouraging hate of minorities, white supremacism and all the anti-science nonsense they use to recruit new cult members should be protected speech in safe spaces. A very different idea to free speech.
Let Elon set fire to Twitter, it is a hard rule of the internet that any forum invaded by nazis is doomed to failure.
Re: Twitter applies 7-day suspension to half a dozen journalists
#245Collectively, I wonder how many tens or hundreds of millions of hours are burned, scrutinizing Musk, Twitter, Tesla, and every move Musk makes. Don’t like Twitter? Don’t use it. It’s like a Twitter/Musk addiction. I don’t care for for social media or Musk. Don’t understand why he lives in everyone’s mind, rent free.
Facebook matters even if I’m not on it. Twitter matters even if I’m not on it. What billionaires do with the public square matters to our future.
I really want to encourage people to recognize, as I did just as strongly when Musk didn't own Twitter, that it isn't by itself "the public square". The site is designed to make you feel like you have to be on Twitter, that no other site could replace them in your daily life, that you'd better go check your feed right this second or you might miss out on some major world event. But none of that is true! It's an illusion they've constructed in order to keep your engagement metric high.
If there's a Twitter exodus, the public square will survive it, just as well as we survived the Myspace and Digg and Tumblr and Friendster and Livejournal exodii. Hopefully most communities will relocate to sites with healthier engagement models.
Re: Twitter applies 7-day suspension to half a dozen journalists
#246The wave of bans from the muskjet thing has been quite dramatic. It'll be interesting to see if the people who've been lauding musk for his supposedly pro free speech attitudes will reckon with what's been happening in actuality, or if they'll just accept this as "freedom for me but not for thee".
Doxxing adds nothing to the conversation. It’s not an opinion, an argument, or an artful expression — forms that free speech laws are designed to protect. Rather, doxxing is merely harassment and adds nothing substantive. Same argument can be made for racial slurs and the like. Anyone pretending otherwise is being disingenuous.
Re: Twitter applies 7-day suspension to half a dozen journalists
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
To note, he didn't pay the whole forty-five billion dollars, investment banks have a part of that and are also eating dirt. I have no sympathy for them either, but it brings more flavors to the whole thing. [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/05/banks-financing-musks-twitte...
Secured as debt against his Tesla shares as collateral, which with the slide, means he has to put up more Tesla shares, causing a very nasty snowball effect
That’s not true. Most of the debt was leveraged against Twitter, it’s a classic LBO.
The investment banks have been attempting to change that to a margin loan against TSLA shares, because of course they are. They are holding effectively unsellable debt now.
Re: Twitter applies 7-day suspension to half a dozen journalists
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was excited to see his pro free speech approach and this ban wave disappoints me. I'm actually okay with bans, suspensions and all the rest. But only if there is the following - A redemptive path back - Due process - Transparency - Fair application of the rules. These recent bans have had none of that. The rule change should have been announced before the bans. There should have been warnings to remove the tweets b…
You don't find it telling that you have to rope in child exploitation to add weight to the scales in favor of Elon Musk?
Yes, I had hoped that was evident in my post. If he had not done that I would not have had anything good to say about his work at Twitter so far.
Re: Twitter applies 7-day suspension to half a dozen journalists
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think Twitter was long dead. It just had no prospect of making money, but slowly degrade into more “heavy VF” propaganda machine it had been for years, and recent series of events is its heart attack at Leviathan timescale.
I don’t understand why people say this: Twitter wasn’t lucrative in the way that Facebook is, but they made a healthy profit in 2019 and probably would have made a small profit in 2021 had it not made settlement payments. Their revenue per employee was close to $1M, which is about 2/3rds of Google’s. It’s not clear, either then or now, that Twitter “had no prospect of making money.” By most metrics, it was a potentia…
Twitter was already struggling with right wing nutjobs and banana republics before El Muskrat got into the mix. Beyond that, Twitter was absolutely struggling to monetize eyeballs. While it wasn't about to implode in the short-term I don't think anyone expected Twitter to stick around long-term without significant changes. El Muskrat just doused the whole thing in acetone and dropped a big fat blunt on it.
Re: Twitter applies 7-day suspension to half a dozen journalists
#250One possible effect of his craziness is that the banks that helped finance the buyout, thinking that Musk is driving the value of Twitter down to zero, will agree to sell the loans back to him at a big loss. Better to get 50% of their money back than nothing at all.
Or the bonesaw Saudi crown prince asks Musks to come to Dubai for a weekend.