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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

#261

Earlier 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

IFAIK the loans are secured by Twitter equity. Trouble is the loans add up to more than what Twitter is worth. The banks will have to write down the value of those loans. But the equity investors, including Elon, will get what scraps, if any, are left after creditors get paid.

Re: Twitter applies 7-day suspension to half a dozen journalists

#262
post #211

It's because they linked to the ElonJet site. He said as much; https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603573725978275841 >Same doxxing rules apply to “journalists” as to everyone else

Except they said the opposite yesterday, in the policy they hastily put together to explain the @elonjets ban.

https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/personal-info...

"For media, the following are not in violation of our policy..."

Re: Twitter applies 7-day suspension to half a dozen journalists

#263
post #29

The 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".

As one of those people: yeah, this is pretty terrible. I don't think being allowed to share the exact location of individual private jets is nearly as important for the public discourse as some of the other stories Twitter has censored in the past (pre-Elon), but this still represents a significant departure from what Musk was promising before the buyout (that basically anything legal to say would be allowed). I'd much rather he have erred on that side of things.

Hopefully this makes more people aware of just how much power social media companies have, and have always had, over the public discourse and that results in the institution of legal and/or technical measures that limit that power across the board. I'm not optimistic though, given how much of the public attention right now seems to be focused on admonishing Elon personally rather than on the overall system that makes this kind of censorship possible.

Re: Twitter applies 7-day suspension to half a dozen journalists

#265
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elon is certainly awful for all that he’s doing, but couldn’t Twitter have simply told him to buzz off when he proposed buying the company instead of taking legal action to ensure he did it? People up top were eager to cash out at the expense of all the employees under them. That’s equally disgusting to me.

> couldn’t Twitter have simply told him to buzz off when he proposed buying the company There are very few accounts here on HN that will sympathize with such an extremely uncapitalist, anarchist take.

It was a public corporation, so their options were limited. They did try a poison pill. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/15/twitter-board-adopts-poison-...

Re: Twitter applies 7-day suspension to half a dozen journalists

#266
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elon's slide into max doucheness is a real shame. I used to tell my kids he was one of the most admirable people around for jump starting the EV industry (yes, I know he didn't do it all). Then came the pedo guy comments. I cut him slack, he must be tired/strung out, he'll apologise. He never did. Now he's become like a meme of himself, or perhaps just himself as he always was but now right out there, and it's not go…

Maybe three or four years ago I thought that musk was basically something like the second incarnation of Howard Hughes. Some sort of eccentric high tech aerospace industry misunderstand genius. Now I can clearly see he's just some guy who is both smart and also a raging narcissistic asshole who came from daddy's apartheid era emerald mine money. Turns out that shitposting your way through life like an edgelord 14 yea…

>Turns out that shitposting your way through life like an edgelord 14 year old boy on the internet is not an admirable lifestyle

Unless you do it to the outgroup. Then it's fine! Laudable even!

Same as shutting down journalists and other accounts. It was nothing to fret about when the opposite side used to do it, "they were misinforming or borderline bad anyway, and they could always start their own blog or something, so it wasn't censorship" and so on.

Re: Twitter applies 7-day suspension to half a dozen journalists

#267
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elon's slide into max doucheness is a real shame. I used to tell my kids he was one of the most admirable people around for jump starting the EV industry (yes, I know he didn't do it all). Then came the pedo guy comments. I cut him slack, he must be tired/strung out, he'll apologise. He never did. Now he's become like a meme of himself, or perhaps just himself as he always was but now right out there, and it's not go…

Maybe three or four years ago I thought that musk was basically something like the second incarnation of Howard Hughes. Some sort of eccentric high tech aerospace industry misunderstand genius. Now I can clearly see he's just some guy who is both smart and also a raging narcissistic asshole who came from daddy's apartheid era emerald mine money. Turns out that shitposting your way through life like an edgelord 14 yea…

> came from daddy's apartheid era emerald mine money

This doesn’t appear to be true

https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/11/17/elon-musk-emerald-min...

Re: Twitter applies 7-day suspension to half a dozen journalists

#268
post #64
post #22

So 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.

Elon's slide into max doucheness is a real shame. I used to tell my kids he was one of the most admirable people around for jump starting the EV industry (yes, I know he didn't do it all). Then came the pedo guy comments. I cut him slack, he must be tired/strung out, he'll apologise. He never did. Now he's become like a meme of himself, or perhaps just himself as he always was but now right out there, and it's not go…

Tinfoil hat on: the dude is a foreign asset and now has to pay dividends.

Tinfoil hat off: all the admiration and money he received turned him into whatever it is that we are seeing today.

Re: Twitter applies 7-day suspension to half a dozen journalists

#269
post #166
post #22

So 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.

I feel like the media determined they were going to report it as a failure regardless of what the facts are. Remember all the stories about how Twitter was definitely going to fall apart during the world cup?

The World Cup isn't over. The final is France v Argentina on Sunday morning US time.

Re: Twitter applies 7-day suspension to half a dozen journalists

#270
post #22

So 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.

It might also be how Tesla goes out. A lot of people have lost a lot of money on Telsa lately: https://www.investors.com/etfs-and-funds/sectors/tesla-stock...

It's hard to overstate what a crucial time this is for Tesla. They had early-adopter success when they had the field to themselves. But now every major car company plus a bunch of other people (possibly including Apple) are coming for them. Pivoting to the mainstream market and fending off all the competition is going to take both dedication and gobs of capital. Capital that is going going to be harder to raise with a distracted CEO and a bunch of investors who've had their fingers burned.

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