Elon's Twitter

[Dave_LF]

He's probably been advised by counsel that he needs to keep his mouth shut to avoid further legal jeopardy. Of course, he's no doubt received that advice many, many times before, and it hasn't stuck yet.

[River]

Keeping quiet isn't Trump's style. I bet it's something stupider, like he deleted the app and can't get it back because the person who helps him with that is out. Or he forgot his password and Twitter's recovery system is broken and the people who can fix it no longer work for Twitter.

Trump is tweeting again.

He has been unbanned, but he says he is not going to return. It remains to be seen how long that will last.

Trump Cites Twitter ‘Problems,’ Says He’ll Stick to Own Platform

Oh goodie, can this become a Musk-Trump cat fight? Maybe it will end with Musk buying Truth Social. Or maybe Truth Social will buy Twitter. One thing is for certain, neither of them is going to come out looking good.

[Frelga]

Someone pointed out that the last thing GOP wants right now is for Trump to go making a spectacle of himself.

Personally, I'm muting his name and going on with my day.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

The real reason that Trump is not returning to Twitter is that he has an agreement with Truth Social that any post that he makes has to be made there first and can't be made any place else for six hours. I kid you not.

[RoseMorninStar]

For the record, I change an "m" to a "b".

The real reason that Trump is not returning to Twitter is that he has an agreement with Truth Social that any post that he makes has to be made there first and can't be made any place else for six hours. I kid you not.

Six hours for an impulsive person (like Trump, or Elon for that matter) is like an eternity.

Often the Twitter feeds update faster than the OEM websites so I suspect the emergency communications folks are aware of the power of the platform and have protocols for using it. I wonder what will fill the gap if Twitter fails or is just operating so poorly it can't be relied on when the creeks are rising or the flames are spreading or there's an active shooting or something else is brewing.

I (along with many others) are not on twitter. Don't most people get emergency notifications on their phones for such things?

[River]

Depends, Rose. Evac or shelter in place orders go out over phones, but the system has some gaps. It works out for me because my cell number used to be my landline and that affects how I come up in databases. But if you just want to know what's up with the huge cloud of smoke over Boulder and if your friends are in peril, or if there's an open route into the next town...that's not going to come to you through the emergency system.

[Frelga]

You also don't have to post on Twitter to subscribe to your local emergency services, although you do need an account.

I subscribe to county-wide alerts, because it also warns me if something goes on near my parents.

Twitter is also great for breaking news outside of my backyard. When something happens somewhere, I go to the trending tweets and follow local reporters on the scene. That generally gives me the best mix of timeliness and accuracy. Or it did, before the blue check just said that you paid melon husk for it.

[N.E. Brigand]

Elon Musk has also ended Kanye West's suspension from Twitter, which happened because West had shared anti-Semitic propaganda. One of West's very first tweets upon being reinstated read simply, "Shalom." So it's unlikely he's learned his lesson.

[N.E. Brigand]

Well now. About an hour ago, Elon Musk tweeted the words "And lead us not into temptation" accompanied by an image of a monk praying while a woman exposes her bottom to him. The label "Donald Trump" is superimposed on the monk; the Twitter logo is superimposed over the woman's derriere. Not sure this is a good way to win back advertisers.

[RoseMorninStar]

Well now. About an hour ago, Elon Musk tweeted the words "And lead us not into temptation" accompanied by an image of a monk praying while a woman exposes her bottom to him. The label "Donald Trump" is superimposed on the monk; the Twitter logo is superimposed over the woman's derriere. Not sure this is a good way to win back advertisers.

I'm not on Twitter, but how big/open was this poll Musk took asking whether Trump should be allowed back? And really.. that's the criteria we should be using?

[N.E. Brigand]

A previously unreleased text reveals that in May, in support of his plan to buy Twitter, Elon Musk sought and received $100 million from Sam Bankman-Fried, the now infamous CEO of the crypto-currency exchange FTX, a firm which recently filed for bankruptcy as Bankman-Fried's net worth, once estimated to be $26 billion, plummeted 94% on November 8 -- "the largest one-day drop in the [Bloomberg Billionaires] index's history" -- and has him now being assessed as having "no material wealth."

Bankman-Fried's financial advisors had subsequently proposed to Musk that Bankman-Fried would contribute anywhere from $3 billion to $10 billion to the deal. As with the many Democratic campaigns that Bankman-Fried said he would bankroll this year but didn't (something Democratic candidates were grumbling about a monthy ago but for which they now realize they should be grateful), that larger investment in Twitter didn't happen.

[N.E. Brigand]

Less than four weeks ago, Elon Musk tweeted that no suspended accounts (like Donald Trump's) would be reinstated until a "content moderation council with widely diverse viewpoints" was convened to review such cases.

Confronted with that claim today, Musk tweeted that a "large coalition of political/social activist groups agreed not to try to kill Twitter by starving us of advertising revenue if I agreed to this condition" but they "broke the deal."

There is no such coalition. There was no such deal. And there was no effort by activists to kill Twitter after he purchased it. He deliberately drove advertisers away.

Is he just lying? Or is he mentally deranged?

[RoseMorninStar]

Yes.

[Frelga]

I think this post, supposedly by a former SpaceX intern, explains it.

https://www.tumblr.com/numberonecatwinn ... 6/elon-wyd

Back when I was at SpaceX, Elon was basically a child king. He was an important figurehead who provided the company with the money, power, and PR, but he didn’t have the knowledge or (frankly) maturity to handle day-to-day decision making and everyone knew that. He was surrounded by people whose job was, essentially, to manipulate him into making good decisions.

Managing Elon was a huge part of the company culture. Even I, as a lowly intern, would hear people talking about it openly in meetings. People knew how to present ideas in a way that would resonate with him, they knew how to creatively reinterpret (or ignore) his many insane demands, and they even knew how to “stage manage” parts of the physical office space so that it would appeal to Elon.

The funniest example of “stage management” I can remember is this dude on the IT security team. He had a script running in a terminal on one of his monitors that would output random garbage, Matrix-style, so that it always looked like he was doing Important Computer Things to anyone who walked by his desk. Second funniest was all the people I saw playing WoW at their desks after ~5pm, who did it in the office just to give the appearance that they were working late.

People were willing to do that at SpaceX because Elon was giving them the money (and hype) to get into outer space, a mission people cared deeply about. The company also grew with and around Elon. There were layers of management between individual employees and Elon, and those managers were experienced managers of Elon. Again, I cannot stress enough how much of the company culture was oriented around managing this one guy.

Twitter has neither of those things going for it. There is no company culture or internal structure around the problem of managing Elon Musk, and I think for the first time we’re seeing what happens when people actually take that man seriously and at face value. Worse, they’re doing this little experiment after this man has had decades of success at companies that dedicate significant resources to protecting themselves from him, and he’s too narcissistic to realize it.

There's more at the link.

[RoseMorninStar]

Frelga, that does not surprise me and, it's exactly what I suspected all along. Such persons capitalize off of the energy, dedication, talents, hard work and persistence of others (very much like Trump) and take all of the credit.

[N.E. Brigand]

A previously unreleased text reveals that in May, in support of his plan to buy Twitter, Elon Musk sought and received $100 million from Sam Bankman-Fried, the now infamous CEO of the crypto-currency exchange FTX, a firm which recently filed for bankruptcy as Bankman-Fried's net worth, once estimated to be $26 billion, plummeted 94% on November 8 -- "the largest one-day drop in the [Bloomberg Billionaires] index's history" -- and has him now being assessed as having "no material wealth."

Bankman-Fried's financial advisors had subsequently proposed to Musk that Bankman-Fried would contribute anywhere from $3 billion to $10 billion to the deal. As with the many Democratic campaigns that Bankman-Fried said he would bankroll this year but didn't (something Democratic candidates were grumbling about a monthy ago but for which they now realize they should be grateful), that larger investment in Twitter didn't happen.

Semafor, the new media outlet where that story was published, disclosed in that article that they had themselves received a donation from the discgraced cryptocurrency CEO Sam Bankman-Fried.

On Twitter today, Elon Musk asked Semafor's editor, Ben Smith, "What percentage of you does he own?" Naturally, Musk says nothing about Bankman-Fried having given him $100 million. That's $60 million more than Bankman-Fried gave to Democratic campaigns, and yet Musk also recently wrote two weeks ago that Bankman-Fried would escape scrutiny because: "SBF was a major donor, so no investigation."

[Voronwë the Faithful]

From Marc Elias, and election law specialist who has helped protect voting rights.

[N.E. Brigand]

Musk ran another poll, the result of which, he says, is that all banned accounts except for those shut down for a few specific reasons (including legal violations) will be restored. That probably means a lot of racist former posters will be returning.

Musk wrote "Vox populi, vox Dei" -- Latin for "The voice of the people is the voice of God" -- when announcing the results of both this poll and the one that restored Donald Trump's account. In response, someone pointed out that the Latin phrase may be best known for its use in this statement: "Nec audiendi qui solent dicere, Vox populi, vox Dei, quum tumultuositas vulgi semper insaniae proxima sit," which Wikipedia translates as "And those people should not be listened to who keep saying the voice of the people is the voice of God, since the riotousness of the crowd is always very close to madness." The source may be familiar to some Tolkien fans: it's an eighth century letter to Charlemagne from the English priest and scholar Alcuin, whose scornful comments on the legendary northern hero Ingeld have been cited by many Tolkien scholars and indeed by Tolkien himself in his writings on Beowulf.

[N.E. Brigand]

In this article, the former security chief at Facebook explains why Twitter hadn't collapsed despite the workforce being cut so drastically. He also thinks Twitter is unlikely to collapse in the near future. Instead, he says what's likeliest to happens is the continued degradation of services. Twitter's two-factor authentication was one of the first services to fail, and others will follow in time. He adds:

"One of my big worries is that the team that stopped government influence ops is decimated. It’s pretty much open season on Twitter for Iran, China, Russia, and anybody else who wants to run large networks of fake accounts to manipulate opinion."

[Frelga]

The Intercept reports

Elon Musk's Twitter just suspended the account of antifascist researcher @chadloder likely to suppress reporting on right-wing extremists. As I reported, Loder's painstaking research identifying a Proud Boy who attacked police on Jan 6 was cited by the DOJ

The tweet links to the Loder's Intercept article

Meanwhile Twitter Reportedly Leaves Brussels—Europe’s Regulatory Hub—Amid Concerns About Musk’s Content Moderation Plans (Forbes)