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Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

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Re: Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

#841
post #738

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is the first time I disagree with you. Bot problem, perhaps not. Spam problem, definitely. https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1487022342630957062?s=21&t=... https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1496549841912094733?s=21&t=... https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1485588476057825290?s=21&t=... and https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/1473752736537657349... https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/139902863019023…

For those blindly downvoting that, here's what Paul Graham said: "Either (a) Twitter is terribly bad at detecting spam or (b) there's something about Twitter that makes detecting spam difficult or (c) they don't care. Based on my experience detecting spam, I'd guess (c)." "Twitter engineering: If you're going to do such a bad job of catching spam, how about at least giving us a one-click way to report a tweet as spam…

Gotta get those engagement KPIs up somehow. This is the simplest and most obvious explanation.

Also see reddit, with most small Reddits being spam/porn. These are in many ways Potemkin websites. The emperor is naked.

Re: Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

#842
post #184

Even before the poison pill was adopted, the evidence is the market wasn't taking Musk's offer seriously. That's because he was offering $54.20 per share (ha ha, 420), but the stock price never closed higher than $48.36. So almost $6/share was left on the table. Part of it is that Musk doesn't have $43B in cash, he'd have to raise it or borrow it. He's worth more than that but it isn't liquid; as an officer of Tesla…

It’s important to also note that one of Musks strengths is marketing. He makes bold claims that makes headlines. We should be all used to his charade by now. A lot of the stuff he claims that actually works has teams of people supporting him. Those weren’t one man efforts like this.

> one of Musks strengths is marketing

I don’t deny that, but it is not what he is doing here.

I am not sure why people shy away from the obvious: another of Musk’s strengths is market manipulation.

On 4 April, the announcement[0] of his becoming the largest shareholder jumped his Twitter stock[1] from a 73486938×33.03 = $2.4B purchase to a $3.7B asset, a $1.2B gain.

He sold 371900 stocks, for a $6M gain.

His 14 April announcement[2] of his offer to purchase Twitter was likely intended to boost the price further before the expected poison pill would justify him divesting everything as he stated he would do in the SEC filing[3], thus netting an even bigger gain.

It didn’t boost as he expected, but the value has remained higher than it started at. He will still make half a billion and his actions, this time, are hard to sue, since he did not lie on anything but intent, which is impossible to prove.

[0]: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/04/twitter-shares-soar-more-tha...

[1]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/000110465922...

[2]: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1514564966564651008

[3]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001418091/000110465...

Re: Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

#843

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not insult. It is malicious intent. Weeks later someone talked to musk about it, and he replied "Bet ya signed dollar it's true". Elon also hired private investigator to dig dirt on the diver but found nothing. https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/15/elon-musk-tweets-hell-bet-... Musk also emailed BuzzFeed reporter suggesting that the diver was a child rapist. Source: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/el…

Quoted post unavailable.

Oh no you are right. I am in so much pain right now lmao.

Re: Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

#844

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s important to also note that one of Musks strengths is marketing. He makes bold claims that makes headlines. We should be all used to his charade by now. A lot of the stuff he claims that actually works has teams of people supporting him. Those weren’t one man efforts like this.

> one of Musks strengths is marketing I don’t deny that, but it is not what he is doing here. I am not sure why people shy away from the obvious: another of Musk’s strengths is market manipulation. On 4 April, the announcement[0] of his becoming the largest shareholder jumped his Twitter stock[1] from a 73486938×33.03 = $2.4B purchase to a $3.7B asset, a $1.2B gain. He sold 371900 stocks, for a $6M gain. His 14 April…

> On 4 April, the announcement of his becoming the largest shareholder jumped his Twitter stock[0] from a $2.9B purchase to a $3.7B asset, a $779K gain.

You mean a $779m gain

Re: Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

#845
post #767

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A large part of the problem for twitter Google and Facebook is their ever shifting goals for content moderation to appease their politically activist employees and media critics. Something tells me Elon would have different goals that should be less of a moving target and easier to accomplish. Less subjective target like "hate speech" and more objective target like true threats of violence, illegal activity, actual b…

No. Not relevant to the discussion. Gmail has no content moderation, but spam still gets through occasionally.

It is relevant actually. I worked on spam fighting on Gmail for a while and when I quit Google, I was invited to Twitter for lunch and (though somehow I wasn't actually told about this) to give an impromptu talk to their spam teams.

Because the guy who invited me sort of sprung the talk on me I had no slides or anything, so it became a collection of vague thoughts + discussions with their team (vague because I didn't want to discuss any trade secrets). One thing that became very clear was that they weren't thinking about bots a whole lot compared to the Google abuse teams, because they'd been re-tasked at some point to consider abuse as primarily meaning "humans being mean to each other". A significant amount of their effort was going on this instead, although there is really little overlap in technologies or skills needed between problems.

This was pre-2016 so the whole Russian-social-bots-gave-us-trump hysteria hadn't started yet, instead Twitter was being declared toxic just due to the behaviour of its users. Thus the term bot still meant actual spam bots. Since then various groups, primarily in academia but activist employees too, realized that because deleting bot accounts was uncontroversial they could try and delete their political enemies by re-classifying them as "bots". For example this Twitter developer in 2019:

https://reclaimthenet.org/project-veritas-twitter-hidden-cam...

“Just go to a random Trump tweet, and just look at the followers. They’ll all be like guns, God, Murica, and with the American flag and, like, the cross. Like, who says that? Who talks like that? It’s for sure a bot.”

Clearly any abuse team that uses a definition of bot like that won't be able to focus on the work of actually detecting and fighting spam bots. If Musk bought Twitter and re-focused their abuse teams on classical spam fighting work it'd almost certainly help, given that Twitter didn't seem to be keeping the ever-shifting overloads of the "abuse" clear in their org structure.

Incidentally, trying to find the above quote on Google is a waste of time. Search "project veritas twitter for sure they are bots" on Google and the links are almost all irrelevant. DuckDuckGo/Bing gets it right on the first result, no surprise. I don't believe for one second that's a result of incompetence on the part of the Google web search teams.

Re: Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

#846

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> one of Musks strengths is marketing I don’t deny that, but it is not what he is doing here. I am not sure why people shy away from the obvious: another of Musk’s strengths is market manipulation. On 4 April, the announcement[0] of his becoming the largest shareholder jumped his Twitter stock[1] from a 73486938×33.03 = $2.4B purchase to a $3.7B asset, a $1.2B gain. He sold 371900 stocks, for a $6M gain. His 14 April…

> On 4 April, the announcement of his becoming the largest shareholder jumped his Twitter stock[0] from a $2.9B purchase to a $3.7B asset, a $779K gain. You mean a $779m gain

Yes, sorry. I also updated the information, since I found the SEC purchase filing, which indicates a much bigger gain.

Re: Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

#847

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... wouldn't that imply the ETF was 15% of the market or market segment overall?

Yes, which is excessive, I agree, but there’s nothing mechanically preventing it.

So you do agree with me that this is not going to happen.

Re: Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

#848
post #808

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The elites have somehow inverted history so they now believe that it is not censorship that is the favored tool of fascists and authoritarians, even though every fascist and despot in history used censorship to maintain power, but instead believe free speech, free discourse, and free thought are the instruments of repression. At which point in history could any person blurt out a brainfart and have thousands of peo…

Quoted post unavailable.

> That's a false dichotomy and the exact argument one would expect from a proponent of censorship. That puts you in the wrong camp, the fascist authoritarian camp, sadly.

Sadly you don't really elaborate on how my comment reveals the authotarian position you do falsly assume I hold.

There is a position between no censorship and full authotarian style censorship and it is a common rethoric vehicle to first talk about the extremes to show that the reasonable area is somewhere inbetween (and then we can talk about trade offs and priorities).

My main point as someone who studied media science is that we cannot treat modern social media with the exact same rules we treated other speech with, because ultimatly it is a different place to speak in. The social distance is lower than anything we ever had in history, the audience bigger than ever in history, it feels private but you are in the spotlight at the same time (and people tend to act like this). It is a place where a rural person communicating a rural opinion will be directly next to a city person communicating a city opinion. Before social media you had natural borders of which people could actually hear (and/or react to) each other. So it is fundamentally different place than anything we ever had before it.

And different places have different rules. Someone who speaks loudly in a library will be thrown out (because the place has a certain function and them speaking loudly interferes with that function). Someone who repeatedly and loudly farts in a restaurant might be thrown out. Someone who listens to music in church might be thrown out. A bare-breasted women in a mall might get thrown out etc. Different places, different rules.

The question now is: what kind of place is something like twitter? What behaviour shall be accepted or restrict there and with what goals?

If our goal is the equivalent of a verbal bar brawl where people can let out their innermost emotions we might end up with different rules than if our goal is rational and fact-oriented discourse with the goal of moving discourse forward (these places have typically stricter rules of which speech is acceptable, as can be seen for example here on HN).

With twitter a lot of the emerging behavior that can be observed is a direct result of or a direct reacrion to the systemic structure of the place. If this shall be seriously changed you have to either establish a new culture how one has to behave in such a place (hard) or you change the systemic variables itself (easier).

But one point I want to stress is: by allowing most speech one might involuntarily prevent other, more nuanced speech from ever emerging.

Re: Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

#849
post #767

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A large part of the problem for twitter Google and Facebook is their ever shifting goals for content moderation to appease their politically activist employees and media critics. Something tells me Elon would have different goals that should be less of a moving target and easier to accomplish. Less subjective target like "hate speech" and more objective target like true threats of violence, illegal activity, actual b…

No. Not relevant to the discussion. Gmail has no content moderation, but spam still gets through occasionally.

How is spam blocking not content moderation?

Re: Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

#850

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even aclu doesn’t believe in free speech anymore, at least not like they used to

ACLU has been gutted out and running on fumes off of donor class. I'll leave you with guessing who these people are. Btw, I've never seen my comment go from 6 votes to 0 in a matter of 30 mins. Insane.

There's nothing conspiratorial about pointing out the close ties between organisations like the ACLU and HRC and the Democratic party, if that's what you mean.

Sad truth is, the moment an advocacy group and a political party become too close, the advocacy group ceases to be effective. This has nothing to do with Democrats in particular; cozying up to the Republicans is no different (e.g. the NRA).

I'm heartened by the emergence of organisations like FIRE that are picking up the baton for free speech in some of the contexts where the ACLU has completely dropped the ball, but still feel a pang of sadness at the hollowing out of the old, bad-ass ACLU.

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