Elon's Twitter

[Frelga]

That wasn't even the worst part. He also "predicted" that UK returns to EU in 2023, which I'm pretty sure is logistically impossible. And then the EU will collapse and Germany go to war with France #NoIDontKnowEither, etc.

Medvedev's drunken rants are nothing new. But he isn't the recipient of the US government contracts for some very important projects, like SpaceX.

[Inanna]

Please note he has written “US, California.” Nothing further needs to be said.

[N.E. Brigand]

Twitter today "disabled the stock price view widget for Tesla and *just* Tesla." As shown at that link, you can easily see how other stocks are doing on Twitter, but you can't see directly that Tesla's value has fallen another 10% just today: it's now at $113 per share, having peaked at $407 per share in November 2021.

(Edit: At some point after those images were captured, the Tesla stock widget on Twitter was reactivated. I wouldn't rule out incompetence.)

(Further edit: Tesla finished the day at $109 per share.)

[Dave_LF]

There has been a definite uptick in the number of bat-guano tweets appearing in my feed over the last day or three (antivax, zero-COVID, pro-Russia, pro-MAGA). The underlying cause seems to be that the algorithm has gotten aggressive about promoting second-order tweets; i.e. from those followed by your follows. I've spent almost two years curating a list of rational people to follow and dropping anyone who goes off the deep end, but now it appears I'll need to start pruning sane people who follow crazy people. Not sure there will be anyone left.

[N.E. Brigand]

I think Matt Yglesias makes a decent point here: Elon Musk seems to believe that the Covid-19 pandemic was likely caused by a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology of a virus that had been the subject of gain-of-function research -- which Musk says is "just another way of saying 'bioweapon'" -- but Musk's ire is directed at Dr. Anthony Fauci rather than at China's president, Xi Jinping, even though under Musk's theory, the Chinese government would have been working on the "bioweapon" and then covered up the truth.

Some folks responding to Yglesias appear to think they are defending Musk by pointing out that he needs Chinese support for Tesla.

[Eldy]

Intelligencer recently ran a piece about Musk's lack of comment on China and Covid, which I think I posted a link to, noting among other things that Tesla's largest factory is in China.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/12 ... tesla.html

[N.E. Brigand]

Per this report in the New York Times, because Elon Musk fired a large part of Twitter's custodial staff, the office space and restrooms aren't getting cleaned and stink. Some employees are bringing in their own toilet paper from home.

[RoseMorninStar]

Per this report in the New York Times, because Elon Musk fired a large part of Twitter's custodial staff, the office space and restrooms aren't getting cleaned and stink. Some employees are bringing in their own toilet paper from home.

Musk is encouraging workers to be 'hard core'. Sleep at the office. 24/7 if need be! No cleaning, no toilet paper, etc.. This is a return to horrific labor practices of the past.

A comparison popped into my head.. Putin invaded Ukraine to prevent influence from 'The West'/EU/UN expansion, but what he actually did was strengthen the resolve of and prove the need for nearby countries to join the UN.

Unions have eroded over the years but employers like Musk will prove that Union protections are very much still needed.

[Eldy]

Per this report in the New York Times, because Elon Musk fired a large part of Twitter's custodial staff, the office space and restrooms aren't getting cleaned and stink. Some employees are bringing in their own toilet paper from home.

Musk's divorced dad energy keeps getting stronger.

[N.E. Brigand]

Less than a month agao, Elon Musk responded to criticism of the law firm Perkins Coie by tweeting: "Twitter isn’t using Perkins Coie. No company should use them until they make amends for Sussman’s attempt to corrupt a Presidential election." However:

(1) It's true that Special Counsel John Durham charged attorney Michael Sussmann, who represented the Democratic National Committee in 2016, for lying to the FBI when he brought them information about possible communications between servers owned by the Trump Organization and the Russian company Alfa Bank. But in May 2022, following two weeks of testimony and one day of deliberation, a jury found Sussmann not guilty.

(2) Twitter today filed a response to a lawsuit brought against the company by far right activist Laura Loomer. Who is representing Twitter? Perkins Coie.

[Eldy]

Twitter's purported "manual authentication" of "verified" Twitter Blue accounts is going just great.

Twitter said it fixed ‘verification.’ So I impersonated a senator (again). - Washington Post

For Blue 2.0, Twitter added two additional hurdles that could help slow people and bots from making fakes. To test it, I needed a Twitter account that was at least 90 days old — new accounts are not eligible. A colleague had one he hadn’t used in years, so he dedicated it to the cause. After we changed the name of the account to @SenatorEdMarkey, Twitter made us wait 7 days before we could sign up for Blue.

Second, I also had to link the account to a phone number before I could sign up for Blue. To do that, I visited the T-Mobile store at the mall, and got a 1-month temporary number for $15 — no name or ID required.

Once I had all of those pieces in place, I signed up for Twitter Blue on the web, paying with a credit card. At that point, I expected Twitter would ask me to prove my identity, such as uploading a snapshot of a drivers’ license. I thought Twitter might be suspicious that the account was owned by a random Gmail address, not one ending in senate.gov. I assumed its verification system might challenge me after scanning for the word “senator” or maybe even the names of the notable people with legacy verification status.

But no. After 7 days, a blue check mark appeared on the faux Markey account, no questions asked.

The impersonation was done with Markey's consent, and he's tweeted about it from his real account (thread):

[N.E. Brigand]

"On Musk's Twitter, users looking to sell and trade child sex abuse material are still easily found." (NBC)

Twitter accounts that offer to trade or sell child sexual abuse material under thinly veiled terms and hashtags have remained online for months, even after CEO Elon Musk said he would combat child exploitation on the platform.

“Priority #1,” Musk called it in a Nov. 20 tweet. He’s also criticized Twitter’s former leadership, claiming that they did little to address child sexual exploitation, and that he intended to change things.

But since that declaration, at least dozens of accounts have continued to post hundreds of tweets in aggregate using terms, abbreviations and hashtags indicating the sale of what Twitter calls child sexual exploitation material, according to a count of just a single day’s tweets. The signs and signals are well known among experts and law enforcement agencies that work to stop the spread of such material.

If it was priority number one, it's odd that Elon Musk has cut the staff of Twitter's "Trust & Safety" department by half.

[N.E. Brigand]

Dr. Scott Gottlieb was two years was Donald Trump's appointee as head of the Food & Drug Administration, left to write for conservative think tank, and advised multiple Republican governors during the Covid-19 pandemic, was also the subject of much online vitriol from anti-vaxxers and other Covid denialists.

Gottlieb is the latest victim of the "Twitter files," which in this instance have been published by Alex Berenson, a former New York Times reporter whose commentary in the past several years has taken some rather strange paths. Berenson shares communications that show Gottlieb sent requests for Twitter to remove Covid misinformation. In response, Gottlieb notes that Berenson's report is highly selective in publishing his personal emails, since it omits numerous requests to Twitter concerning tweets that put his family in danger.

- - - - - - - - - -
Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports that after Elon Musk purchased Twitter, the company fired all of its staff in Brazil except for some salespeople, meaning that no one was responsible for moderating Twitter content in Brazil over the past couple months, like you know, content urging an attack on the Brazilian capitol.

[RoseMorninStar]

This thread isn't about Musk's other products/endeavors but the 'brand' is affected by what Musk's behavior and what he has done with Twitter. I'm curious, how has this affected how people feel about his other products, most specifically Tesla? River, I'd be specifically interested in what you think. Now that you've had your Tesla awhile, what is your opinion of the vehicle (in an of itself) and has Musk's behavior changed your view of the company overall? I also cannot help but wonder if Musk's behavior/actions affect national security, as with SpaceX.

[N.E. Brigand]

Rolling Stone: "Secret Video Reveals Twitter Team Warned of ‘Shooting in the Streets’ Ahead of Jan. 6."

Somehow Elon Musk's crack team of "Twitter files" journalists missed this item.

[Dave_LF]

All versions of the app now include a toggle between "For You" and "Following" modes. In Following mode it shows you what you've chosen to see, in "For You" mode it shows you what they think you should see. And it's pretty aggressive about switching you back to "For you" when you reload, etc. This is sort of similar to the old "Top Tweets" vs. "Latest Tweets" division, except "For you" is even further divorced from your following list.

[Frelga]

I haven't updated my Android app in years, so I still get my chronological timeline undisturbed. I've heard people complain that their For You pages are full of rage bait. I've spent enough time judiciously following and muting that Twitter barely raises my blood pressure these days.

Re: electric cars - I saw my first electric Mustang in the wild. It was a hatchback, hardly a midlife crisis dream fodder. Neither is Tesla, TBH, but it had a different kind of glamor to it before Elon went on his drunk tweeting spree. If Ford made a classically styled Mustang in Vintage Burgundy, I'd be very tempted to put solar panels on my roof and the Mustang in my garage.

[narya]

I learned to drive in a '69 Mustang. A very solid, powerful car.

I used to monitor Twitter in a job related capacity, but now I just poke my head in occasionally and shudder. Facebook is doing that "picked for you" garbage, about every third post, which is so irritating. I just want to see my friends' posts.

[RoseMorninStar]

I learned to drive in a '69 mustang too but it was an old beater and all the paint had worn off so one couldn't even tell what color it had been. It was a dull, dark, gun metal shade. I have a photo of it around here.. somewhere. It's wasn't so solid or powerful at that point. In fact, I think the passenger side had a hole in the floorboard.

[N.E. Brigand]

Some of the far right figures who were most enthusiastic about Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter are now complaining that their tweets are not being as widely shared as they were before Musk took over, but the moderate conservative David Frum conducted an an experiment and found that weird changes recently made to the platform mean it's probable that all users are getting less of the content they want: "It's as if, in the days of the old newspaper, my subscription were delivered with random stories scissored out by the publisher itself, for some capricious whim of the publisher's own."