Muskovite Birds of a Feather: Notes on the Great Twitterpation

I agree that ignoring this kind of behavior is probably the most effective course of action. Ignoring Musk, Trump, little kids having a temper tantrum, is best since attention is really what they crave and why the are acting this way in the first place.

We don't need to create any more "too big to fail" entities. It Tesla and Twitter were to both fail, so what? Something better and more robust would be the result.

Ultimately FTX failing, even though it was based on a scam, just makes the rest of the crypto world strong in the long run, for example.

 

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Yes, Parler.

Of course. There's no such thing as bad publicity. And if people perceive a huge Twitter war between Twitter and Apple, they will check . . . Twitter.

 

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My bold
Is that like learning something after ever school mass shooting and so making it harder for the next mass school shooting. Move along chaps, nothing to do with guns here, it's not that simple blah blah blah.

 

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Parler and Gab both ran into app store trouble for being bad software. It's also true that even yesterday, when I wrote about thresholds, I didn't yet know that Elon had already found a line to cross.

When footage from the Christchurch terror hit circulated in its time, Twitter's staff and software ably managed the circumstance in realtime. Yesterday, someone tested the system, and eventually someone had to take it down by hand; the system itself could no longer do the job.

This will inevitably create certain exposure for Apple, of the sort neither attorneys, insurance adjustors, nor basically decent people would wish for.

Writer Jelena Woehr↱ recounted her own work experience with Apple pulling an app, explaining:

This isn't actually an ideological stance by Apple, it's 1) brand protection, 2) compliance, and 3) CYA.

Their primary motivation is discouraging Congress from regulating app marketplaces any further than it already has, by convincing legislators they can self-regulate.​

Nonetheless, I think we're starting to see a sketch of what passes for a Muskatonic business plan: Inasmuch as he might wreck Twitter and then try to capitalize on the drama of its recovery, that plan, if it really exists, now involves the possibility of an Elon-branded mobile phone.

Meanwhile, Twitter's market cap is off, now worth slightly to significantly less than Musk paid for the company; I'm seeing estimates between $32-41 billion. Musk himself has taken up easy banter with Nazis and in the last couple days started pushing Pepe psyop paranoia.

†​

Someone else keeps coming to mind. An expatriate American attorney and journalist, a congressional spouse and populist former media CEO who considers himself oppressed because he quit his job after lawyers told him the company would not be able to withstand libel complaints if he went forward with a story. For him, it wasn't even a matter of tailoring the language back within indentifiable boundaries; ever since taking the right-wing money, the Jewish defender of Nazis either fell or leapt into an abyss of rightist misinformation strikingly different from what had been his usual histrionics. But when he cancelled himself as CEO, it was because he wanted to do something, and saying or doing it is one thing, but staking a company on it is a different question, and he just could not abide those obligations.

Elon Musk has already fallen into this a little bit. So much for free speech. So much for verification. And it's gone so well that, compared to the idea that revenue is irrelevant↑, we're now hearing the sort of preliminary chatter about a new mobile phone that ought to be mere puffery, except this is Elon Musk.¹

Following his Twitter takeover, he is learning a crash course in business reality while insisting on his fantasy. Imagine the mobile device, and much akin to European regulatory woes that Musk apparently thinks he can work around, he will find the basic concerns of business more complicated than his heroic imaginings of himself appreciate.

Imagine your phone, secured by Elon Musk's idea of how software should work.

Anyway, we'll worry about the tyranny of data security when Elon gets around to complaining that the FCC hates free speech because it says the phone shouldn't be so easily hacked. Right now, the tyranny of brand safety seems to exceed his comprehension.

• • •​

The richest man in the world is trying to pick a fight with a market cap giant. It's not that your line doesn't make sense, but it just isn't really applicable on this occasion.
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Notes:

¹ The jokes nearly write themselves. It will be called the emPhone, and will have a Twitter edition, called EMT-88, running a slapdash opensource operating system called Yakoub 1.4.​

@jelenawoher. "This isn't actually an ideological stance by Apple, it's 1) brand protection, 2) compliance, and 3) CYA. Their primary motivation is discouraging Congress from regulating app marketplaces any further than it already has, by convincing legislators they can self-regulate." (thread) Twitter. 28 November 2022. Twitter.com. 29 November 2022. http://bit.ly/3ihC78V

 

Elon and the Frog: Adventures of a Tinfoil-Hatted Cat

The brief thread↱ from Caroline Orr Bueno:

So, I did a few reverse image searches to see where Elon Musk is getting his "psyop" memes from, and the answer appears to be three primary places:
1) Crypto Twitter
2) QAnon forums
3) Pro-Trump forums ....

The other meme's history was interesting/disturbing. It appeared in both innocuous places (like @ animalscaptions, pictured below), but also in some really disturbing places, including at least two "schizoposting" accounts, one of which is pictured below (a TikTok account).

If you're lucky enough to be unfamiliar with "schizoposting," it's a sort-of nihilistic, edgelord style of posting that often has crossover with accelerationism & extremism. You might've heard of it b/c we've seen it in the social media profiles of several recent mass shooters.

So yeah, "watching Elon Musk live-tweet getting blackpilled" wasn't really on my 2022 bingo card, yet here we are.​

Bingo cards are as they will, but what about hindsight: Are we really so surprised?
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Notes:

@RVAwonk. "So, I did a few reverse image searches to see where Elon Musk is getting his 'psyop' memes from, and the answer appears to be three primary places: 1) Crypto Twitter 2) QAnon forums 3) Pro-Trump forums Here are four of the early appearances of this meme:". (thread) Twitter. 29 November 2022. Twitter.com. 29 November 2022. http://bit.ly/3gI6EfV

 

I wouldn’t call it a lie. Each developer obviously knew when choosing to list their app on the App Store, but Elon isn’t addressing the developers. He’s addressing the consumers.

"Did you know Apple puts a secret 30% tax on everything you buy through their App Store? —Musk"

 

No, there is no relationship between what I wrote and what you wrote. I guess you just wanted to talk about school shootings?

 

It’s not just the richest man in the world. As you and everyone else should know, there’s been several companies, e.g., Spotify, Epic Games, Tile, Basecamp, and Proton Mail, etc. Regulators around the world have been dissecting the Apple Tax. Thirty percent is extremely high, and it’s passed onto the consumer.

"They are judge, jury, and executioner on their platform, and you can take it or leave it. You can't get any sort of fair hearing to determine whether it's justifiable or not justifiable, anything they say goes."—Andy Yen

But it was squashed.

"Good conversation. Among other things, we resolved the misunderstanding about Twitter potentially being removed from the App Store. Tim was clear that Apple never considered doing so."—Elon Musk

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1598090996281413638?s=20&t=JIYMiuucXRY3UfmpypVEXQ

 

Crackpottery. It's not a tax. You want to argue with Apple about how they do business, do so. But making shit up? Leave that to Elon: Look, it's a "tax" in the same way not being allowed to censor someone else is "censorship", i.e., it's a "tax" because some crackpot wants to call it that, and other crackpots fall in line.

Moreover, Elon pretends this is a "secret" tax. If everybody knows about it and other capitalists are complaining and regulators are dissecting, then it most assuredly isn't secret. If "each developer obviously knew", the one thing it is not, is secret.

So, yes, the "secret tax" is a lie.

 

It’s a popular slang term for the commission fee, and the I highly doubt that the average consumer was aware of it, but the cost is passed onto the buyer.

 

Well, we now get to call Musk the ''pedo guy'', given that he's making money via the pedo stuff on his twitter.

Remember back in 2018 and the Thai cave rescue.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-50695593

 

Twitter has a history of mismanagement and hasn’t turned a profit in years. Compared to its rivals, it has invested far less in user safety. The battle to suppress child exploitation predates Musk’s takeover. In September, Dyson and Forbes suspended advertising after their ads appeared alongside child abuse content. Executives were well-informed about the issue, but the company did little to fix it. The report found that the process was largely manual, too labor-intensive, and insufficient at a time when larger companies were using automated systems.

Good for him. Out with the old, in with the new.

https://transparency.twitter.com/en/reports/rules-enforcement.html#2021-jul-dec

 

You would say that wouldn't you. Blah blah blah.

 

And in that weird way that it's all a matter of definitions, we might simply observe that such outcomes are easily within the range of Musk's intentions. This is what his "free speech" attitude actually does, and while he didn't invent the argument, the point that he spent forty-four billion dollars in order to do this reminds that what it brings is what Elon Musk wants.

What ends well? I don't know what hyperbole to put here. The difference between your sarcasm and Elon Musk's delight is what you or he mean by ending well.

This isn't a new phenomenon; the socmed sector has been aware for years. It's hard to imagine Twitter stumbling into this by accident. Per the Jezebel↱ article:

Even before Musk took over Twitter and gutted its staff—disproportionately in online safety, security, and content moderation teams—the company conceded back in April that it struggled to rein in child exploitation posts. The platform formerly considered starting an OnlyFans-esque program allowing users to monetize adult content, but nixed this plan because, per an April 2022 internal report obtained by The Verge, "Twitter cannot accurately detect child sexual exploitation and nonconsensual nudity at scale."​

And, really, "Last week, Musk tweeted that his followers should 'reply in the comments' to flag any child abuse content they witnessed"? Is he taking content moderation notes from backwater discussion boards?

Further, Musk's callous gutting of child safety professionals aside, essentially tweeting out, "Please share all the child porn here, thank you," is… a choice. Recall that the noted businessman of the year want us to pay him $8 per month to perform the labor of content creation, and also, apparently, the labor of tracking down child abuse material.

Meanwhile, as some Twitter users say they're reporting content promoting pedophilia and being told no violations were found, Musk is busy cracking down on 15-year-olds who tweet, "maybe if elon musk didn't buy avocado toast he wouldn't be asking us for $8."​

The toast line is its own discussion, but, well, priorities. For instance, it's one thing if the would-be champion of free speech is a thin-skinned, insecure wannabe tyrant. But, more importantly, we consider at Musk's priorities. Child abuse and exploitation, racism, disinformation, all good; turning a right-wing joke about liberals back on a rightist advocate, though, is apparently verboten. Elon Musk's priorities are on display.
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Notes:

Cheung, Kylie. "Elon Musk Guts Twitter Team Handling Child Sexual Abuse After Claiming Child Safety Is 'Priority #1'". Jezebel. 2 December 2022. Jezebel.com. 2 December 2022. https://bit.ly/3upp8ok

 

There was no hope that Twitter was going to tackle the issue. They weren’t even making a profit and they’re idea to increase revenue by allowing adult porn certainly wasn’t going to work if they lacked the tools to verify legal age.

At least there’s some hope with Elon.

 

He does seem to have a habit of that. Many on the right have switched from "everything I don't like is socialism" to "everyone I don't like is a pedophile" - looks like he's following suit.

 

"The 2021 report found that the processes Twitter uses to identify and remove CSE are woefully inadequate — largely manual at a time when larger companies have increasingly turned to automated systems that can catch material that isn’t flagged by PhotoDNA. Twitter’s primary enforcement software is “a legacy, unsupported tool" called RedPanda, according to the report. "RedPanda is by far one of the most fragile, inefficient, and under-supported tools we have on offer," one engineer quoted in the report said."

"Ghost Data conducted an investigation in September 2022 to discover how widespread the child exploitation problem is on Twitter."

"A startling finding from the report is that Twitter only took action against just over 25% of the accounts that they identified as sharing explicit child abuse content, during the period of research covering the first twenty days of September 2022."

https://www.searchenginejournal.com...s-because-of-child-exploitation/466456/#close

If developing new AI-powered algorithms is needed to detect illegal content, Musk is your guy.