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Posted

(You need to visit the site; the graphics illustrating their findings are outstanding)

https://news.sky.com/story/the-x-effect-how-elon-musk-is-boosting-the-british-right-13464487#

HOW ELON MUSK IS BOOSTING THE BRITISH RIGHT 

For nine months, Sky News' Data and Forensics team has been investigating whether X's algorithm amplifies right-wing and extreme content. It does.

 

Quote

"Elon Musk is a great leader," says Amy, a British woman outside the Britannia Hotel in London at an anti-immigration rally in August. She was there to vent her frustrations at migrants housed in the hotel and says X owner Musk's platform is the only social media she trusts.

"We don't want sanctions. We want freedom of speech." Amy's view is one resonating with a growing number of British people.

A month after we met Amy, thousands chanted Musk's name at the Unite the Kingdom march - a political rally organised by the anti-immigration activist Tommy Robinson. Musk dialled in from America, his face appearing on a screen above a huge crowd in Westminster.

 

Quote

His speech was also live-streamed on X.

The image of Musk in front of a sea of adoring fans was symbolic of the tech tycoon's increasingly prominent role in British politics. 

He's one of the world's richest men, and most powerful. And over the past year, he has weighed in on many contentious issues dominating debates in the UK.

He has used his social media platform X to encourage British people to fly English flagsand has endorsed fringe right-wing politicians. In a recent post, he compared illegal immigrants to monstrous fictional characters in JRR Tolkien's Lord Of The Rings, and suggested all English people would die if they did not support Mr Robinson.

 

Quote

With these comments, Musk is flexing his ability to influence the political debate in a country where he holds no formal authority. He does, however, have power to control narratives on X, formerly Twitter. 

And now, a Sky News investigation can reveal the platform is boosting right-wing content, extreme content, and politicians Musk favours.

 

Spoiler

THE X-FILES

It has been over three years since Musk walked into what was then Twitter's headquarters with a sink and a promise: to turn the platform into a haven for free speech. 

He has criticised other social media companies for being "controlled by far-left activists", with the content "filtered through a far-left San Francisco Berkeley lens". 

In an effort to run things differently, he renamed the company, fired roughly 80% of the staff, and promised to make the algorithm's code open source. That code was posted to the website Github in 2023, and was last updated in September 2025. 

An X spokesperson told Sky News that the algorithm will soon be fully AI-powered, at which point X "will open source the algorithm every two weeks or so". By December, they say users will be able to adjust their feeds "dynamically", by asking X's AI tool Grok.

As it stands, the open source code gives an insight into how the algorithm behaves, but experts say it is far from a full picture.

"They [X] do have a version of the algorithm online, but it doesn't really tell us how decisions are being made about what content gets amplified and what doesn't," says Dr Jen Golbeck, a computer science professor who studies social media and extremism at Maryland University. 

One of the only ways to audit the algorithm today is to create new accounts and see what content surfaces. 

The 'X-periment'

We created nine new X users, each one emulating a British person with a particular political leaning: three were left-wing users, three were right-wing and three were neutral, designed to show no interest in politics.

Over the course of two weeks in May, we collected posts from the users' For You pages - essentially their homepage for recommended content - twice a day. That gave us a database of around 90,000 posts from roughly 22,000 accounts.

Tap to read how Sky News avoided bias in our new users' accounts.

We worked with independent academics and researchers, including Dr Golbeck, to categorise the political leanings of around 6,000 accounts whose posts showed up most in our dataset. Analysing that data helped us understand what content the algorithm prioritises.

 

 

There's a lot more at the link.  

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Posted (edited)

Sky news saying this is like Fox saying this, or Newsmax.  Normally not credible, pretty credible on this.

Oh, damn, wrong about this.  Thought it was Brit version of Sky AU, which it is/was, but has escaped the clutches of Murdoch and is now legit.

Edited by TwiceHorn
Posted (edited)
2 hours ago, Longhorn_Fan68 said:

lol jfc. more than ever that company needs to go tits up
Tesla shareholders approve Elon Musk’s $1 trillion pay package

Serious question; do you understand that Elon Musk is not being given $1T dollars?

He's being given 12% of the company, which today is worth (before AHT) somewhere in the neighborhood of $1.54T. That means it's worth $180bn today.

If he can, somehow and someway, grow Tesla to $8.33 trillion valuation (60% larger than Nvidia at it's most bubbliest, by the way), then by that miracle he would have a $1 Trillion dollar package.

The framing of this narrative is silly.

That's all, I'll see my way out.

Edited by Vegas64
Posted
25 minutes ago, Vegas64 said:

Serious question; do you understand that Elon Musk is not being given $1T dollars?

He's being given 12% of the company, which today is worth (before AHT) somewhere in the neighborhood of $1.54T. That means it's worth $180bn today.

I think everybody knows that nobody was waiting to write him a check for a trillion.

But we are hoping that what he gets out of Tesla, he uses to prop up his other interests, leading to

Find Out Art GIF

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Posted
13 hours ago, Vegas64 said:

Serious question; do you understand that Elon Musk is not being given $1T dollars?

He's being given 12% of the company, which today is worth (before AHT) somewhere in the neighborhood of $1.54T. That means it's worth $180bn today.

If he can, somehow and someway, grow Tesla to $8.33 trillion valuation (60% larger than Nvidia at it's most bubbliest, by the way), then by that miracle he would have a $1 Trillion dollar package.

The framing of this narrative is silly.

That's all, I'll see my way out.

$1T or $180B, he still needs to meet the business end of a guillotine.

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Posted
17 hours ago, Vegas64 said:

Serious question; do you understand that Elon Musk is not being given $1T dollars?

He's being given 12% of the company, which today is worth (before AHT) somewhere in the neighborhood of $1.54T. That means it's worth $180bn today.

If he can, somehow and someway, grow Tesla to $8.33 trillion valuation (60% larger than Nvidia at it's most bubbliest, by the way), then by that miracle he would have a $1 Trillion dollar package.

The framing of this narrative is silly.

That's all, I'll see my way out.

ok, thanks elon

  • Haha 3
Posted

Seeing the approval of an insane compensation package for Elon at Tesla, it's shades of this:

zuul-there-is-no-dana-only-zuul.png

 

Because this shows that there actually is no "Tesla," just a brand called "Elon."  

Here's a nice little exercise: imagine that Elon OD's on ketamine tomorrow and dies.

....

....

 

Yeah, I know, it's nice to think about.  But anyway, imagine that.  What happens to Tesla's stock price?  Because it's not based on "their cars are great." It's not based on "sales are going up."  Nope.  It's based entirely on....."Elon is the CEO."  Owners of Tesla stock don't have stock in Tesla, they have stock in Elon.  Which is in turn, really just stock in "the image and persona of Elon that Elon has managed to sell."  The moment that goes away -- and death will do that to a personal brand -- what the fuck is propping up the stock price?  Nothing.  So....

 

abgpz3.jpg

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Posted
18 hours ago, HenryJames said:

 

Never forget.  The world's richest Nazi took a chainsaw to the most Christian, soft-power-advancing thing that the US government did.  He personally funded Trump's second term with amounts that eclipse the largest political donations our system has ever seen.  His sweepstakes to set up a lottery for lucky Trump voters was as illegal as fuck. 

He is a reverse Alfred Nobel, using his riches not to benefit all mankind, but to benefit himself without giving one second of thought to the wreckage he has caused.  Just mere months after he chain sawed his way through our system of competent governance, he has moved on and assumes his reputation will recover.  Not in my eyes.  Anyone who runs on a platform of nationalizing SpaceX and Starlink and revoking that evil dipshit's US citizenship gets my vote.  And Big Balls and every other DOGE cocksucker can go join Elon in exile.

  

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Posted

The man literally laughed and performed with a chainsaw to celebrate....cutting off food aid, the loss of which has KILLED hundreds of thousands of children (even if this model is off by 50%....it's still hundreds of thousands):

577034764_1237517821582072_7076233968814

And this is how he celebrated doing that:

Musk_Chainsaw.jpg

 

People....that's absurd, over-the-top comic book villain shit.

Anyone who thinks that Elon should be celebrated -- fuck, anyone who thinks that his existence is in any way a positive for the world -- is either a fucking irredeemable moron, evil, or both.

 

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Posted
22 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

The man literally laughed and performed with a chainsaw to celebrate....cutting off food aid, the loss of which has KILLED hundreds of thousands of children (even if this model is off by 50%....it's still hundreds of thousands):

577034764_1237517821582072_7076233968814

And this is how he celebrated doing that:

Musk_Chainsaw.jpg

 

People....that's absurd, over-the-top comic book villain shit.

Anyone who thinks that Elon should be celebrated -- fuck, anyone who thinks that his existence is in any way a positive for the world -- is either a fucking irredeemable moron, evil, or both.

 

To be clear....a fucking evil fucking villain, with a net worth of FIVE HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS, danced around on stage celebrating like a fucking child who just scored a stuffed animal from a claw machine, because he cut SIXTY BILLION (that is...an amount he could have ponied up and only lost 12% of his net worth) in aid to human beings who were literally going to die without it.

Fucking hell.  Imagine dancing around on stage like a fucking clown celebrating "I just did something that is going to directly lead to hundreds of thousands of humans dying."

He's among the most evil human beings to have ever walked the earth.  His existence is quite literally a plague on humanity (that's what you call something that kills hundreds of thousands of people).

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Posted (edited)
25 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

To be clear....a fucking evil fucking villain, with a net worth of FIVE HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS, danced around on stage celebrating like a fucking child who just scored a stuffed animal from a claw machine, because he cut SIXTY BILLION (that is...an amount he could have ponied up and only lost 12% of his net worth) in aid to human beings who were literally going to die without it.

Fucking hell.  Imagine dancing around on stage like a fucking clown celebrating "I just did something that is going to directly lead to hundreds of thousands of humans dying."

He's among the most evil human beings to have ever walked the earth.  His existence is quite literally a plague on humanity (that's what you call something that kills hundreds of thousands of people).

Agreed, I'm just saying can we be honest about "They are paying him ONE TRILLION dollars!" in that it seems like that there are astronomically low odds he will ever get to the milestones required to unlock those 12 traunches. To wit and from NYT this AM:

Quote

 

The shares will be awarded in 12 parts, and for Musk to receive them, Tesla must hit financial and operational targets. Unlocking the first chunk alone requires that Tesla’s market value rise to $2 trillion and that the company do one of the following:

Deliver its 20 millionth vehicle

Put one million robotaxis on the street, or

Sell one million humanoid robots.

Ultimately, Tesla has to reach $8.5 trillion in market value and all the operational goals for Musk to earn the full compensation award.

Some context: 

Tesla’s current market value is $1.4 trillion.

The company has delivered about 8.5 million vehicles to date (needs 20 million)

Its robotaxi program is currently being tested in just two cities (needs 1 million taxis), with a few dozen cars. Its Optimus robots aren’t for sale yet. (needs to sell one million)

 

I get that the overwhelming stench of Elon is nauseating but we ought to leave room for honestly framing these things IMO rather than the clickbait "TRILLIONAIRE!" headlines that 99% of people don't dig into.

Edited by Vegas64
Posted
2 minutes ago, Vegas64 said:

Agreed, I'm just saying can we be honest about "They are paying him ONE TRILLION dollars!" in that it seems like that there are astronomically low odds he will ever get to the milestones required to unlock those 12 traunches. To wit and from NYT this AM:

I don't give a fuck whether Tesla hits those target or not.

Elon Musk is one of the most evil, murderous humans to ever walk the planet.  And he is walking on it right now, and a fuckload of people CELEBRATE HIM.  Imagine being a fan of someone who murdered hundreds of thousands of people for no good reason, and fucking JUMPED AROUND FOR JOY BRAGGING ABOUT IT.

If you celebrate or support Elon in any way, shape, or form, you are an evil piece of shit.

Posted (edited)
6 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

I don't give a fuck whether Tesla hits those target or not.

Elon Musk is one of the most evil, murderous humans to ever walk the planet.  And he is walking on it right now, and a fuckload of people CELEBRATE HIM.  Imagine being a fan of someone who murdered hundreds of thousands of people for no good reason, and fucking JUMPED AROUND FOR JOY BRAGGING ABOUT IT.

If you celebrate or support Elon in any way, shape, or form, you are an evil piece of shit.

I think Elon sucks too.

I think truth in reporting the financial details and business aspects of the ordeal is a separate peace from Elon and in zero way, shape or form is an endorsement or support. 

The only "support" you can point to is the 75% of votes in favor of the pay package which is made up of a bunch of scared to death shareholders and 4chan stonk bro youtubers who make up his rather large retail shareholder base.

If anything, I'm trying to throw cold water on Elon and his supporters pronouncing his trillion dollar pay package a win as it's not even close to that (and as a byproduct throwing cold water on those who want to be offended he got a [fake] trillion dollar pay package, I guess).

Edited by Vegas64
Posted
2 hours ago, Disco Strangler said:

The world's richest Nazi took a chainsaw to the most Christian, soft-power-advancing thing that the US government did. 

Have you even read the Bible? God smote the fuck out of children all the time. This is as Christian as it gets.

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