Elon's Twitter

[Voronwë the Faithful]

It gets worse.

Twitter Says Parts of Its Source Code Were Leaked Online

[River]

Oops.

[Frelga]

That seems bad.

Meanwhile, Twitter announced that it will cancel what Musk calls "legacy" checkmarks, which were handed out after a supposedly rigorous process to confirm that the poster was who or what they said they were, such as for instance a celebrity, scientist, or police department. Instead, any schmuck can get a checkmark for $8/mo.

The checkmark system was implemented in part due to a court case over impersonation that Twitter settled pre-musk.

When the paid check program first came out earlier this year, Ely Lilly lost almost 5% of stock value after a prankster changed the name of his blue checked account to impersonate the company and tweeted that insulin is now free.

Musk's current solution to that problem is to shake down companies for $1,000 a month to be verified. I'm sure that this will go over well.

In other news, Twitter is now worth about half of the 44 billion Musk paid for it.

[Frelga]

No comment.

Screenshot_20230328-005006.png (303.21 KiB) Viewed 1964 times

[Sunsilver]

Frelga, well I guess that says it all!

[Dave_LF]

There's a lil puppy in the corner now for some reason. Clicking it is functionally equivalent to clicking Home (for now?)

puppy.png (11.79 KiB) Viewed 1806 times

Edit: Looks to be more Musk/Webro silliness:

[RoseMorninStar]

Yeah, it's his dogecoin symbol.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

[Dave_LF]

Lord save us from stupid people with money

[N.E. Brigand]

As others have noted, that doggy icon is the symbol for Dogecoin, a kind of cryptocurrency. After Twitter added the icon earlier today, the market value of Dogecoin skyrocketed. Some people think this is connected to Musk's court filing Friday asking a judge to dismiss "this lawsuit" against Musk that was filed in September and alledged that Musk made public statements (mostly on Twitter) to drive "up Dogecoin's price more than 36,000% over two years and then [let] it crash."

[Voronwë the Faithful]

The dog is gone.

[N.E. Brigand]

I'm still seeing it. (Perhaps it makes a difference that I read Twitter posts on a desktop browser, and I don't have a Twitter account.)

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Yeah, it's back again. Weird!

[RoseMorninStar]

Doggone (it)!

[N.E. Brigand]

Apparently the dog whose face became the meme that was then used by Dogecoin is still living in Japan at the ripe age of 17.

[RoseMorninStar]

I believe the dog in question is an Shiba Inu. They are very popular in Japan/originated there. They are similar to a Akita but smaller. One of our Japanese students had Shiba Inu (at home).

[N.E. Brigand]

Until today, Twitter's policy pages listed the BBC and NPR as examples of government-supported outlets that are not labeled as "state-affiliated media"; the latter label has previously appeared on the accounts for such government-controlled media as Russia Today or Xinhua.

But starting today, Twitter labels NPR as "state-affiliated media," and the policy page was updated today (after Twitter starting labelling NPR this way) so that NPR is no longer listed as a counter-example. And yet the BBC is not so labeled and continues to be used on the policy page as an example of government-supported media that isn't "state-affiliated." This is despite the fact that the BBC receives about 70% of its funding from the British government, while NPR receives less than 10% of its funding from the U.S. government

(I also appreciate this note that Elon Musk's company SpaceX "gets quite a bit more public funding" than NPR.)

[N.E. Brigand]

Marcy Wheeler notes here that while the curators of the "Twitter files" fail to grasp the import, the most recent series in their project of releasing some of that company's internal communications reveal that in 2020, Twitter declined to provide the United States' National Security Agency with confidential data the NSA requested that, per this article published two days ago in the Washington Post, Elon Musk is obligated to provide to his Saudi and Qatari investors: by virtue of their having invested more than $250 million each in Musk's purchase of the company, they are entitled to "confidential company information" -- something the Biden administration has flagged as worrisome.

There has been a lot of ink spilled over the past day about the "Twitter files" project after its lead reporter, Matt Taibbi, was interviewed yesterday on MSNBC by Mehdi Hassan. You can watch the entire 25-minute interview here. Unsurprisingly, Hassan identified some errors and inconsistencies in Taibbi's writing on the project. In the interview, Taibbi was rather subdued and even open to some challenges -- he even made a few corrections to his Twitter files reports just after taping the interview -- but within a few hours, he doubled down on his mistakes -- like his conflation of CISA (the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, a government entity which is part of the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security) with CIS (the Center for Internet Security, a non-profit organization) and his claim that "CIS[A]" (he wrote it that way with the brackets because he himself didn't know the difference between them and assumed "CIS" without the A was a mistake!) alerted Twitter in 2020 to 22 million tweets that might be disinformation: in fact CIS only informed Twitter about fewer than 3,000 such tweets at the time (actually only about 20% of that; the other tweets were flagged by different non-profits), although researchers analyzed some 22 million tweets in the course of identifying those 3,000. Correcting those two mistakes seriously undermines Taibbi's claims that the U.S. government censored Twitter, so he undid the corrections and spun some creative arguments about how the facts don't really matter.

(I am reminded of a collection of essays about Tolkien's work that I read last year -- a review will be published soon! -- in which the author conflated the events of the Battle of the Pelennor Fields with the events of the Battle of the Morannon. It appears that the book's editor flagged that as a concern, because that page has an otherwise inexplicable footnote in which the author says: sure, those were two different battles, but they happened in so short a span of time that it's OK to treat them as the same incident.)

Moreover, the specific ways in which Taibbi responded to Hassan's questions indicates something else about the Twitter files investigation. As David Frum writes, "if you are left stammering and baffled when a mistake is pointed out, when you seem to have no idea how it happened -- or don't even seem to appreciate the mistake even after it's explained to you -- that strongly suggests to me that you did not do your own work." A lot of people have speculated about Taibbi acting more as Elon Musk's mouthpiece and stenographer than reporter on this project. His reactions in this interview make that appear all the more likely.

James Surowiecki notes that Taibbi essentially invited himself onto Hassan's show two weeks ago to discuss Twitter's activity in India but then wouldn't answer Hassan's questions on that subject. On March 23, Twitter "blocked the accounts of several high-profile Canadians — including NDP leader Jagmeet Singh and poet Rupi Kaur — from internet users in India." This was apparently done at the request of the Indian government because those Canadians had criticized India's prime minister, Narendra Modi. Noting this, Hassan tweeted sarcastically that surely Taibbi, champion of free speech rights on Twitter, would have something to say about how Twitter was censoring people to benefit the Indian government. Taibbi did have something to say: he publicly asked Hassan to invite him onto his program to talk about that subject. Yet when Hassan specifically asked Taibbi about this yesterday, Taibbi dodged a bit and then said, "I'll have to look at the story first" and "I'd have to ask him [Musk] about the particulars of it."

This was after he had two weeks to prepare for a discussion on the very subject that he said he wanted to be interviewed about!

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Meanwhile, T[w]itter* today starting blocking links to the subscribed blogging site Substack ... including links to Taibbi's own page there.

*Yesterday, at the company's headquarters and apparently with official approval, the "W" on the company's name was blocked out in order to make a juvenile joke.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Meanwhile, T[w]itter* today starting blocking links to the subscribed blogging site Substack ... including links to Taibbi's own page there.

And then Taibbi himself announced on Twitter that he was leaving Twitter.

[N.E. Brigand]

Meanwhile, T[w]itter* today starting blocking links to the subscribed blogging site Substack ... including links to Taibbi's own page there.

And then Taibbi himself announced on Twitter that he was leaving Twitter.

As one observer astutely noted:

Yesterday Matt Taibbi told Medhi Hassan that -- unlike Joe Biden campaign in 2020 when they asked Twitter to take down stolen pictures of Hunter Biden's penis -- he (Taibbi) doesn't have the ability to reach out directly to anyone at Twitter to make requests for assistance.

But today Taibbi reports that when he learned today that Twitter was blocking links to Substack, he "asked what was going on" and "was given the option of posting articles on Twitter instead." In other words, he absolutely has the ability to make requests of Twitter (even if he like their answers): he lied to Hassan.

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Also, "Senior Twitter Lawyer Resigns, the Latest in a Series of Executive Departures ... The lawyer had been closely involved in the company’s talks with the Federal Trade Commission over promises it had made on privacy" (New York Times).

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Edited to add: I'm still shaking my head at this exchange between Hassan and Taibbi just yesterday:
--Taibbi: "I like Elon Musk."
--Hassan: "Would you like to criticize Musk now?"
--Taibbi: "No I don't particularly want to."

But less than 24 hours later, Musk and Taibbi had apparently split up their act.