How's it going over at Twitter?

On his first day as owner, Musk reportedly demanded that Twitter’s software engineers make printed copies of their programming code so that he and a team of engineers from Tesla could review it. Besides being a total Grandpa Simpson move, the idea that Tesla’s engineers are qualified to review Twitter’s code is absurd: Tesla’s driver assistance code is written in a programming language that Twitter’s codebase doesn’t use. Even worse, the concepts, challenges, and techniques of driver assistance software and social networking software are fundamentally different from each other as well.

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Musk has also made it clear that he doesn’t understand why social media sites have developed elaborate content moderation systems. Massive sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Tiktok exist solely to make money and they’ve realized over time that trolling, bigotry, and spam are poison for advertisers, none of whom is interested in having their products or services displayed next to pornography or racial slurs. The vast majority of people who use mainstream social media sites also don’t want to see that stuff on the regular either.

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[Musk] has completely bought into false claims from Republican politicians that right-wing views are “censored” on social media. Far from being censored, however, right-wing viewpoints are actually promoted more by social media algorithms. That’s true on Twitter, as well, as the company admitted following a comprehensive 2021 study.

But Musk, who has no research background of his own, had other ideas. “Twitter obv has a strong left wing bias,” he wrote on the site in May.

  TYT

This is a point that I wish were pointed out regularly, everywhere. It has been true of even mainstream print, radio and TV outlets for years. All you hear is whining about the "liberal media", when most media have a conservative lean. But that's the magic of the right wing "flooding the zone" with bullshit. Thank you, Karl Rove.

Musk further proved his Republican bona fides on Sunday when he promoted a false claim about the home invasion attack on the husband of Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA).

“There is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye,” Musk wrote in a tweet which he later deleted that cited a conspiracy website known for publishing fake stories, including the absurd claim that former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had been replaced by a body double.

Given Musk’s recent record of promoting and defending far-right propaganda and his claims to be a “free speech absolutist,” far-right activists flooded into the platform after his purchase became imminent, dramatically increasing Twitter’s volume of words favored by racists and conspiracy theorists.

According to analysis done by TYT, Twitter posts containing a racial slur for Black people increased by 361% on Sunday compared to last Wednesday, the day before news of Musk’s acquisition broke.

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Yoel Roth—the company’s head of safety and integrity and one of the few top executives Musk hasn’t yet fired—announced that the torrent of racial slurs was the work of about 300 different accounts, which he said had been banned. Both Musk and Roth have said that Twitter has not changed any of its rules against “Hateful Conduct.”

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Posts mentioning ivermectin, an anti-parasite drug that became popular in anti-vaccine circles, increased 271% on Friday before declining on Saturday and Sunday. [...] Trump supporters also raged at Musk on Monday after Mark Finchem, a far-right conspiracy theorist running to be Arizona’s top election official, announced that his Twitter account had been suspended.

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Instagram, YouTube, and Tiktok pay their biggest content creators. Elon Musk wants to charge Twitter’s biggest content creators.

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Currently, Twitter does not charge for verification, but it only makes the feature available to accounts the company deems notable. Musk wants to change that, initially saying he’d charge $20 per month to allow anyone to receive verification but then backing down to $8.

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In a Twitter poll set up by Musk associate Jason Calacanis that received nearly 2 million votes as of this writing, an overwhelming 82% of registered Twitter users said they would not pay anything to receive a blue checkmark.

Buying a "verification" badge defeats the purpose of the badge in the first place, which was to assure people the account is from who it says it's from.

The more you learn about Musk’s history in his other companies, however, the more you realize that half-baked and poorly conceived ideas are actually his specialty. He’s never delivered fully autonomous driving in Tesla vehicles, despite promising he’d have it done by the end of 2017. In 2016, Musk promised that his SpaceX company would land two different rockets on Mars by the end of this year, something that obviously is not going to happen in the next two months.

The much-hyped Tesla Semi, Cybertruck, and “Hyperloop” have also failed to materialize. Even more mundane products that Musk has announced, like solar roof tiles and electric vehicle battery swapping, have similarly failed to launch.

So, very Trumpy. Only actually rich.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

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d

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Not sure if Trump is still banned or just not logging back on yet.  But you get the idea.

And Musk is going to turn Twitter into another conspiracy bullshit social network, which will lose even more advertisers.  Very Trumpy.

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My guess is all the other firings were cover for firing the fair elections people.

A feature, not a bug.

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Too bad that blue check doesn't mean anything any longer.

UPDATE 11/6:

JFC.

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I just never imagined it could be this bad.

UPDATE 11/12:

Twitter Blue was not available on the platform’s online version, which said signup was only possible on the iPhone version. But the iPhone version did not offer Twitter Blue as an option.

Twitter also once again began adding gray “official” labels to some prominent accounts. It had rolled out the labels earlier this week, only to kill them a few hours later.

They returned on Thursday night, at least for some accounts – including Twitter’s own, as well as big companies like Amazon, Nike and Coca-Cola, before many vanished again.

  Guardian

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