Elon Musk: Officially a fraud and piece of shit. Official or unofficial war criminal?

[Captainant 26861]

2 minutes ago, Chopper said:

"Experienced software engineers leaving should be worrying because of the complexity of Twitter. Talking with long-time Twitter engineers, they told me the site has a complex architecture for a very good reason. It was built to allow for safe and fast tweaking of any part of Twitter, making it easy for developers to iterate.

However, Twitter was not built to make architectural changes easy, and structural changes are admittedly difficult and so need to be done with caution. Twitter has on-premise data centers and I’m told that deploying Kubernetes on top of this was already a massive undertaking thanks to all the custom infrastructure.

Twitter is unique in how configurable the infra team has made infra-level tweaks. There are multi-level feature flags used at the infra layer, which is highly unusual as feature flags usually live within the application layer."

A very salient quote from a conference I picked up is "it's easy to make things complex, and hard to make things simple". In this case, twitter chose a microservices standardized architecture to minimize the opportunity cost of trying new ideas, which enabled them to move significantly faster with basically zero cost for failure - at the cost of the potential for a non-optimal solution getting deployed that still meets business requirements.

Building on K8s seems incredibly complex if you're not familiar with container orchestration and modern microservice architectures, but it's really the only way to gracefully and scalably manage an on-premise datacenter. It handles the failover and rescheduling of jobs as hardware fails and is rotated, and is completely portable and can be lifted whole-cloth to basically any hosting context.

But if you aren't a technical person (meaning web and datacenter ops), it certainly could just look like a bunch of overhead with marginal gain. He just hasn't been around long enough to see why his naïve solution on paper (big computer go brrrr) isn't actually the best solution in reality.

[Chopper 15889]

Screenshot below from an internal slack that NYT obtained. This is the kind of guy (due to seniority) who still has a job there.

Fascinating how much he tells about himself in 3 posts. "I need to rehire people who I found lacking as employees even though I did nothing about them when I was their manager. I'll use them and then fire them again. He also politicizes it as "Elon Twitter."

[immamac 41337]

Just now, Captainant said:

A very salient quote from a conference I picked up is "it's easy to make things complex, and hard to make things simple". In this case, twitter chose a microservices standardized architecture to minimize the opportunity cost of trying new ideas, which enabled them to move significantly faster with basically zero cost for failure - at the cost of the potential for a non-optimal solution getting deployed that still meets business requirements.

Building on K8s seems incredibly complex if you're not familiar with container orchestration and modern microservice architectures, but it's really the only way to gracefully and scalably manage an on-premise datacenter. It handles the failover and rescheduling of jobs as hardware fails and is rotated, and is completely portable and can be lifted whole-cloth to basically any hosting context.

But if you aren't a technical person (meaning web and datacenter ops), it certainly could just look like a bunch of overhead with marginal gain. He just hasn't been around long enough to see why his naïve solution on paper (big computer go brrrr) isn't actually the best solution in reality.

I think twitter made a lot of really shitty technical decisions when it comes to it's frontend. The backend is not slow, but could be complex and make front-end implementation inefficient/slow/bloated.

It's actually ridiculous how twitter embeds work even on this site for instance. Natively it relies on a JS plugin that is an enormous payload, then it fucking iframes each tweet, then it actually uses a bunch of different calls to render the tweet, which is why sometimes you see the unformatted text pop up before the tweet itself. 

https://ikartik.co/code/static-tweets

Look how fast this "static" tweet loads, I bet by the time you scroll to it it's already rendered, because spoiler alert it's not bloated as fuck and twitters backend is actually fast as shit - the renderer is whats a bloated piece of shit and it constantly is making calls that are stupid and make no sense so twitter can track all kinds of other shit in the browser that it's rendering in. 

[GenXer 2470]

25 minutes ago, Chopper said:

Perhaps engineering teams are different than non-engineers but from my experience 9 direct reports is about ideal. Depending, of course, how competent your own manager is and how much time you have to spend "managing" them. I would add, most engineers are notoriously poor managers and require a lot of coaching to make them at least competent. Seems doubtful twitter will offer that type of individual development.

In software development, a team of 6 devs is the sweet spot.

[atomheartbevo 88750]

5 minutes ago, Captainant said:

He just hasn't been around long enough to see why his naïve solution on paper (big computer go brrrr) isn't actually the best solution in reality.

And that publicly tangling with and then firing employees kind of works against that whole stability thing that big advertisers want.

[atomheartbevo 88750]

4 minutes ago, immamac said:

t's actually ridiculous how twitter embeds work even on this site for instance. Natively it relies on a JS plugin that is an enormous payload, then it fucking iframes each tweet, then it actually uses a bunch of different calls to render the tweet, which is why sometimes you see the unformatted text pop up before the tweet itself. 

Yep, in the Ukraine thread, we had to go down to 1-2 tweets/comments per post because it was killing the browsing on certain devices when there were too many tweets on a single page.

Edited November 14, 2022 by atomheartbevo

[Viking 295]

20 minutes ago, Chopper said:

Is he going to get people to re-code the entire site, with at least 50% of the engineering staff exited?

From the article linked above.

"Experienced software engineers leaving should be worrying because of the complexity of Twitter. Talking with long-time Twitter engineers, they told me the site has a complex architecture for a very good reason. It was built to allow for safe and fast tweaking of any part of Twitter, making it easy for developers to iterate.

However, Twitter was not built to make architectural changes easy, and structural changes are admittedly difficult and so need to be done with caution. Twitter has on-premise data centers and I’m told that deploying Kubernetes on top of this was already a massive undertaking thanks to all the custom infrastructure.

Twitter is unique in how configurable the infra team has made infra-level tweaks. There are multi-level feature flags used at the infra layer, which is highly unusual as feature flags usually live within the application layer."

I'm sure he'd love to but yes it'll be impossible given the staff he's let go. Moving from monolith -> microservice or vice versa is an enormous undertaking.

[Chopper 15889]

didn't realize how easy it would be to find the thread discussing that slack thread

 

 

 

[G650 13063]

Dude every tech bro on that planet should be sent to Devil's Island like Papillon just for their wardrobe choices. I physically flinch every time a picture of one of them pops up.

[NoName 16196]

1 hour ago, atomheartbevo said:

And that publicly tangling with and then firing employees kind of works against that whole stability thing that big advertisers want.

very seriously, that guy has to have a legal case right?

also this should officially end the "Elon is a free speech absolutist" chapter, forever.

Edited November 14, 2022 by NoName

[NoName 16196]

58 minutes ago, G650 said:

Dude every tech bro on that planet should be sent to Devil's Island like Papillon just for their wardrobe choices. I physically flinch every time a picture of one of them pops up.

i don't think of myself as a stylish person at all, but even i know not to combine cap toe dress shoes with dark? black? denim, a dress belt and a casual shirt with a messed up collar.

also, having your name tag on your belt does shit when it comes to actually identifying *anyone* morons. there is a reason it goes up high in any company worth a damn or where you care about actually identifying people.

[Pig Bellmont 8637]

11 minutes ago, NoName said:

very seriously, that guy has to have a legal case right?

Probably not, but I guess it depends on if he had an employment contract. 

[NoName 16196]

8 minutes ago, Pig Bellmont said:

Probably not, but I guess it depends on if he had an employment contract. 

fair enough, thanks

[Sawbonz 26735]

 

[chainsaw 9440]

what the fuck does SpaceX even sell and why would any twitter user want it?

[Chewbacca 7612]

3 minutes ago, chainsaw said:

what the fuck does SpaceX even sell and why would any twitter user want it?

Starlink.

That said, I have to think the investors in SpeceX and Tesla are not happy about all the 'sharing' arrangements he's coming up with to help Twitter.

[chainsaw 9440]

1 minute ago, Chewbacca said:

Starlink.

That said, I have to think the investors in SpeceX and Tesla are not happy about all the 'sharing' arrangements he's coming up with to help Twitter.

People on twitter already have internet don't they? Why would anyone give Elon the keys to their internet activity?

[Francisco 2.0 31567]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/11/14/twitter-fake-eli-lilly/

 

Quote

The nine-word tweet was sent Thursday afternoon from an account using the name and logo of the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and Co., and it immediately attracted a giant response: “We are excited to announce insulin is free now.”

The tweet carried a blue “verified” check mark, a badge that Twitter had used for years to signal an account’s authenticity — and that Twitter’s new billionaire owner, Elon Musk, had, while declaring “power to the people!” suddenly opened to anyone, regardless of their identity, as long as they paid $8.

 

Quote

But the tweet was a fake — one of what became a fast-multiplying horde of impersonated businesses, political leaders, government agencies and celebrities. By the time Twitter had removed the tweet, more than six hours later, the account had inspired other fake Eli Lilly copycats and been viewed millions of times.

Inside the real Eli Lilly, the fake sparked a panic, according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly. Company officials scrambled to contact Twitter representatives and demanded they kill the viral spoof, worried it could undermine their brand’s reputation or push false claims about people’s medicine. Twitter, its staffing cut in half, didn’t react for hours.

 

Quote

The aftermath of that $8 spoof offers a potentially costly lesson for Musk, who has long treated Twitter as a playground for bawdy jokes and trolls but now must find a way to operate as a business following his $44 billion takeover.

By Friday morning, Eli Lilly executives had ordered a halt to all Twitter ad campaigns — a potentially serious blow, given that the $330 billion company controls the kind of massive advertising budget that Musk says the company needs to avoid bankruptcy. They also paused their Twitter publishing plan for all corporate accounts around the world.

 

Spoiler

“For $8, they’re potentially losing out on millions of dollars in ad revenue,” said Amy O’Connor, a former senior communications official at Eli Lilly who now works at a trade association. “What’s the benefit to a company … of staying on Twitter? It’s not worth the risk when patient trust and health are on the line.”

Eli Lilly, which declined to respond to questions about the episode or how much money it has spent on advertising with Twitter, is one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical manufacturers, known for the anti-depression drug Prozac and the diabetes treatments Trulicity and Humalog.

It maintains a robust Twitter presence. In addition to its main corporate account, @LillyPad, it runs stand-alone accounts devoted to diabetes care, European health policy, clinical trials, rheumatology and the distribution of health information in Spanish, Italian and French. It spends more than $100 million a year on TV commercials and digital-ad campaigns in the United States, according to MediaRadar, a marketing data firm.

When Twitter failed to react quickly to its entreaties about the fake account, Eli Lilly took to its official account in the late afternoon Thursday to apologize to its 130,000 followers for the “misleading” fake. When the fake account still was active five hours later, a Twitter ad-sales rep in New York publicly pleaded with Musk for the fake account to be removed.

Musk did not respond, but the account was suspended late Thursday night. The next morning, Musk tweeted that the launch of Twitter’s new $8 verification regime was “overall proceeding well.”

Musk did not respond to requests for comment for this article. Twitter’s communications team also did not respond; many of its employees were fired in the massive layoff that Musk imposed on Nov. 4.

In a short statement Friday, Eli Lilly said it was “working to correct this situation.”

Musk has said the sweeping change to Twitter’s “verified” system, first unveiled in 2009, would shake up the establishment journalists he routinely criticizes by breaking their “oligopoly on information.”

Twitter is not checking the identity of anyone who pays $8 for the check mark, which looks identical to the current “verified” badge. Musk has said spammers and impersonators would be dissuaded by the fact that their $8 would not be paid back if their accounts were suspended.

The sudden shift, however, has decimated some of the last lingering bits of trust among advertisers in the platform, said Jenna Golden, who ran Twitter’s political and advocacy ad-sales team until 2017 and now runs Golden Strategies, a D.C. consulting firm.

Twitter, she said, has never been a “must buy” for advertisers. Though a popular way to reach influential political figures and news junkies, it has never had the scale and performance of digital juggernauts like Google and Facebook.

Now, with its verification system in shreds, “it’s making it really easy for advertisers to say: ‘You know what, I don’t need to be here anymore,’ and walk away,” Golden said. “People are not just providing inaccurate information but damaging information, with the ability to look legitimate. That is just not a stable place for a brand to invest.”

Compounding the issue, Golden said, is Musk himself, who has pushed tumultuous changes to the company that have stunned paying customers, confused industry observers and led Twitter’s power users to head for the exits.

“People see the leader of this company who is erratic and unpredictable, who is making very knee-jerk decisions and rolling them back quite quickly,” she said. “He claims he wants to create a successful business, then does everything he can to turn off the advertisers that are its main revenue stream. … I just don’t see a world in which advertisers are going to be excited to come back and willing to commit dollars to his experiment.”

 

As fake accounts multiplied on the site Thursday, Musk responded to a sexually explicit tweet from a fake President Biden with two cry-laughing emoji and tweeted that Twitter users had shared “some epically funny tweets.”

By Friday morning, however, Twitter had paused its blue-check program, known as Twitter Blue, due to “impersonation issues” and began attaching “official” labels to Eli Lilly and other major corporate accounts.

On Friday evening, Musk tweeted Twitter would begin adding a “parody” tag to fake blue-check accounts. He also defended Eli Lilly, tweeting at Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) — who had used the fake to call attention to high prices for insulin, a lifesaving drug — that the “price question is complex.”

Few of the nation’s most prominent businesses and political figures have escaped viral Twitter impersonations in recent days: Former presidents (Donald Trump, George W. Bush) and giant companies (the defense contractor Lockheed Martin, Musk’s automaker Tesla) have all been retweeted widely, with fake-but-verified badges attached.

That shift has led some major advertisers to also pull back. Omnicom Media Group, an ad firm that represents corporate giants such as Apple and McDonald’s, recommended clients pause all Twitter activity, saying in a memo first reported by The Verge that the “risk to our clients’ brand safety has risen sharply to a level most would find unacceptable.”

 

For Eli Lilly, the $8 fake account represented a disastrous and high-profile surprise. The Indianapolis-based conglomerate employs more than 37,000 people across 18 countries and brings in $28 billion a year in revenue.

Sanders and many others used the parody to shine a spotlight on insulin costs, a common point of company criticism. When Eli Lilly’s share price sank 4 percent on Friday — in line with a drop in other health care stocks — many Twitter users credited the fake account: The “tweet just cost Eli Lilly billions,” said one tweet with more than 380,000 likes. “The most consequential $8 in modern human history,” said another.

Some Twitter users celebrated the accounts as modern satires or expressed excitement at the idea that Musk’s move could backfire, exposing Twitter to legal threats. Other fake-but-verified Eli Lilly spoofs have proliferated, gaining their own broad audiences before they, too, were suspended: One tweeted, “Humalog is now $400. We can do this whenever we want and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

To health care companies such as Eli Lilly, the change offered not just a reputational threat but the risk that other fakes could threaten people’s well-being. Eli Lilly’s Twitter accounts routinely field medical questions and work to correct misinformation about side effects, health issues and long-term care.

Twitter’s change, O’Connor said, has shaken not just Eli Lilly but many other companies now worried about the risk of participating in a platform where an account’s legitimacy is no longer guaranteed.

“This isn’t just about Twitter, this is about patients’ health,” O’Connor said. What if a public health group was “spoofed and shared information that made people’s diabetes worse? Where does it stop? It feels like this is literally just the beginning, and it’s only going to get worse.”

 

[Francisco 2.0 31567]

https://www.garbageday.email/p/one-giant-slow-motion-fail-whale

 

Quote

Elon Musk over the weekend apologized for Twitter being “super slow in many countries” and then blamed it on “poorly batched RPCs [remote procedure calls].” First, let’s get this out of the way now: According to many former Twitter engineers, still on Twitter, this is bull shit. “As the former tech lead for timelines infrastructure at Twitter, I can confidently say this man has no idea wtf he's talking about,” former Twitter engineer Ben Leib wrote.

 

Quote

But the fact is that Twitter is breaking and, as someone who has spent the last two weeks outside of the US, it is breaking down in different ways depending on how and where you access it — I’ve seen upside down threads, disappearing tweets, my spam filters are broken, and I’ve seen links being incorrectly blocked for malicious content. But it’s not just falling apart on a structural level, it’s also creating a cascade of bizarre sociopolitical effects across the world.

 

Quote

In Japan, the lack of curated news topics has turned the site into 4chan. There are reportedly about a dozen people left working for Twitter in India, where the company is still actively suing the country’s right-wing government over content removal. Twitter Mexico is shut down completely, much to the excitement of Mexico’s left-wing populist president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who celebrated that the “snakes” were gone. Twitter’s entire operation in Africa is also gone. And there are only two people left working for the company in Brussels, literally days before the European Union enacts the Digital Markets Act, which will, among other things, force interoperability between app stores and messaging apps. It’s also possible the site has already begun violating the EU’s GDPR.

 

Spoiler

As Musk continues to fire employees and contractors and the site falls further into disrepair, we will start to see exactly how reliant many of the world’s democracies and media ecosystems have become on the platform. Because more so than Facebook, Twitter is what created the global social internet. For all the platform’s faults when it comes to context collapse, nuance, and abuse, it had several attributes that made it the easiest and best app for global communication:

It’s still mostly text, which means it’s basically the only social app that you can reliably use on 2G

It has a non-algorithmic global search

Its content can be easily read and cited by people who don’t have an account, giving it a news ticker-like quality

Its single unit of content — the tweet — can be screenshot and, for the most part, will contain enough information to communicate a single idea, which means you can share it simply and easily inside messaging apps like WhatsApp

It, also, crucially, acted as an important lifeline for both content creators in the Global South, activists around the world, and diasporic minority communities such as Black Twitter, which, at one point, was the majority of the users on the app. Also, it all happened so quickly over the last decade it’s hard to remember, but Twitter not only connected journalists across continents, but also freed a lot of reporters from the confines of an editor. This is not always a good thing, but it does mean that a lot of younger writers in more rigid journalism environments could get an idea out into the world without having to jump through the hoops of a traditional newsroom. This is doubly, if not triply true for women writers, writers of color, and queer writers. Twitter, for as much as it is maligned as a drama machine, was an app built by mass shootings, natural disasters, terror attacks, wars, and uprisings, as much as it was with memes and trends. And as Twitter suffers one giant slow-motion fail whale, all of this is at risk of being snuffed out.

The narrative right now is that Musk’s egomania drove him to buy and inevitably ruin Twitter because he hoped to transform it into X, his totalitarian “everything app” WeChat clone he wanted to send us to space with. But there is another, simpler narrative here. A man who grew up in apartheid South Africa, whose family owned a diamond mine, who made his name helping cyberlibertarians bypass banking laws, manipulating the US tax system to build faulty self-driving cars, and shooting rockets into space in the hopes of establishing debt slavery on Mars, bought an app built by activists and Black Americans, and that is relied on by the Global South as a valuable democratic tool, and is used by journalists around the world as a free and open source of information, and tried to turn it into his personal country club. This is just the mundane nightmare of watching a wealthy man wreck his new plaything — an imperfect, but vital communication system for some of the most vulnerable and marginalized communities in the world. This is a colonialist doing what colonialists do. And I hope that when this embarrassing circus is over, we can figure out how to build something back that someone like Musk can’t turn into his new diamond mine.

Twitter users don’t click on links. In all my time working in digital media, this has been the rule. Unlike Redditors or Pinterest users, Twitter users have no intention of leaving the site to read something — with one interesting wrinkle. Twitter users will click on Substack links. At one point Twitter was the second biggest source of traffic for this newsletter, just behind direct traffic. And in the weekend edition yesterday, I wrote that I had a theory as to why.

I think every once in a while, a platform, on a macro level, becomes curious about another. It used to be that if you put “tweet” or “Twitter” in a headline, Facebook users would click on it. And the opposite was also true. Twitter users would retweet anything with Facebook screenshots in it. This also happened to Reddit and Tumblr for a while. These quirky little relationships have all but collapsed nowadays, with screenshots of tweets and uploads of TikToks being basically 95% of all content online. But these dynamics usually occur when one website offers something the other doesn’t have. Facebook users were curious about the drama of prominent people and Twitter users love to gawk at small town America. Redditors can’t communicate as well as Tumblr users and, thus, can’t make their own memes as easily. And Tumblr users can’t ever find or organize anything.

The dynamic between Substack and Twitter is the same kind of deal. Substack’s team actively went after big Twitter users, got them to launch newsletters, and, many of those writers now just write about stuff that’s happening on Twitter. I mean, that’s basically my strategy. And it turns out Twitter users will click to read that.

The question I have is if Substack can hold as a Twitter replacement. I think of all the platforms it has a better chance than, say, Mastodon, even if the latter resembles the bird site more closely. But I also think the real test will be what Substack is like if Twitter gets unplugged. Right now, Twitter is the battlefield and Substack is the announcer box. Can it be both?

 

[Captainant 26861]

Lol twitter turning into 4chan within a month of Elon buying it sounds like a bad punchline. I am tired of our current timeline

[kevwun 15190]

Fucking up the check mark system is the one thing that makes me seriously consider if Elon is destroying Twitter on purpose.  It's such a fundamental part of Twitter functioning that I'm not sure how anyone could have been dumb enough to stop doing it.

Edited November 14, 2022 by kevwun

[Chopper 15889]

seems very lol

 

[GenXer 2470]

34 minutes ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/11/14/twitter-fake-eli-lilly/

 

 

 

 

  Reveal hidden contents

“For $8, they’re potentially losing out on millions of dollars in ad revenue,” said Amy O’Connor, a former senior communications official at Eli Lilly who now works at a trade association. “What’s the benefit to a company … of staying on Twitter? It’s not worth the risk when patient trust and health are on the line.”

Eli Lilly, which declined to respond to questions about the episode or how much money it has spent on advertising with Twitter, is one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical manufacturers, known for the anti-depression drug Prozac and the diabetes treatments Trulicity and Humalog.

It maintains a robust Twitter presence. In addition to its main corporate account, @LillyPad, it runs stand-alone accounts devoted to diabetes care, European health policy, clinical trials, rheumatology and the distribution of health information in Spanish, Italian and French. It spends more than $100 million a year on TV commercials and digital-ad campaigns in the United States, according to MediaRadar, a marketing data firm.

When Twitter failed to react quickly to its entreaties about the fake account, Eli Lilly took to its official account in the late afternoon Thursday to apologize to its 130,000 followers for the “misleading” fake. When the fake account still was active five hours later, a Twitter ad-sales rep in New York publicly pleaded with Musk for the fake account to be removed.

Musk did not respond, but the account was suspended late Thursday night. The next morning, Musk tweeted that the launch of Twitter’s new $8 verification regime was “overall proceeding well.”

Musk did not respond to requests for comment for this article. Twitter’s communications team also did not respond; many of its employees were fired in the massive layoff that Musk imposed on Nov. 4.

In a short statement Friday, Eli Lilly said it was “working to correct this situation.”

Musk has said the sweeping change to Twitter’s “verified” system, first unveiled in 2009, would shake up the establishment journalists he routinely criticizes by breaking their “oligopoly on information.”

Twitter is not checking the identity of anyone who pays $8 for the check mark, which looks identical to the current “verified” badge. Musk has said spammers and impersonators would be dissuaded by the fact that their $8 would not be paid back if their accounts were suspended.

The sudden shift, however, has decimated some of the last lingering bits of trust among advertisers in the platform, said Jenna Golden, who ran Twitter’s political and advocacy ad-sales team until 2017 and now runs Golden Strategies, a D.C. consulting firm.

Twitter, she said, has never been a “must buy” for advertisers. Though a popular way to reach influential political figures and news junkies, it has never had the scale and performance of digital juggernauts like Google and Facebook.

Now, with its verification system in shreds, “it’s making it really easy for advertisers to say: ‘You know what, I don’t need to be here anymore,’ and walk away,” Golden said. “People are not just providing inaccurate information but damaging information, with the ability to look legitimate. That is just not a stable place for a brand to invest.”

Compounding the issue, Golden said, is Musk himself, who has pushed tumultuous changes to the company that have stunned paying customers, confused industry observers and led Twitter’s power users to head for the exits.

“People see the leader of this company who is erratic and unpredictable, who is making very knee-jerk decisions and rolling them back quite quickly,” she said. “He claims he wants to create a successful business, then does everything he can to turn off the advertisers that are its main revenue stream. … I just don’t see a world in which advertisers are going to be excited to come back and willing to commit dollars to his experiment.”

 

As fake accounts multiplied on the site Thursday, Musk responded to a sexually explicit tweet from a fake President Biden with two cry-laughing emoji and tweeted that Twitter users had shared “some epically funny tweets.”

By Friday morning, however, Twitter had paused its blue-check program, known as Twitter Blue, due to “impersonation issues” and began attaching “official” labels to Eli Lilly and other major corporate accounts.

On Friday evening, Musk tweeted Twitter would begin adding a “parody” tag to fake blue-check accounts. He also defended Eli Lilly, tweeting at Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) — who had used the fake to call attention to high prices for insulin, a lifesaving drug — that the “price question is complex.”

Few of the nation’s most prominent businesses and political figures have escaped viral Twitter impersonations in recent days: Former presidents (Donald Trump, George W. Bush) and giant companies (the defense contractor Lockheed Martin, Musk’s automaker Tesla) have all been retweeted widely, with fake-but-verified badges attached.

That shift has led some major advertisers to also pull back. Omnicom Media Group, an ad firm that represents corporate giants such as Apple and McDonald’s, recommended clients pause all Twitter activity, saying in a memo first reported by The Verge that the “risk to our clients’ brand safety has risen sharply to a level most would find unacceptable.”

 

For Eli Lilly, the $8 fake account represented a disastrous and high-profile surprise. The Indianapolis-based conglomerate employs more than 37,000 people across 18 countries and brings in $28 billion a year in revenue.

Sanders and many others used the parody to shine a spotlight on insulin costs, a common point of company criticism. When Eli Lilly’s share price sank 4 percent on Friday — in line with a drop in other health care stocks — many Twitter users credited the fake account: The “tweet just cost Eli Lilly billions,” said one tweet with more than 380,000 likes. “The most consequential $8 in modern human history,” said another.

Some Twitter users celebrated the accounts as modern satires or expressed excitement at the idea that Musk’s move could backfire, exposing Twitter to legal threats. Other fake-but-verified Eli Lilly spoofs have proliferated, gaining their own broad audiences before they, too, were suspended: One tweeted, “Humalog is now $400. We can do this whenever we want and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

To health care companies such as Eli Lilly, the change offered not just a reputational threat but the risk that other fakes could threaten people’s well-being. Eli Lilly’s Twitter accounts routinely field medical questions and work to correct misinformation about side effects, health issues and long-term care.

Twitter’s change, O’Connor said, has shaken not just Eli Lilly but many other companies now worried about the risk of participating in a platform where an account’s legitimacy is no longer guaranteed.

“This isn’t just about Twitter, this is about patients’ health,” O’Connor said. What if a public health group was “spoofed and shared information that made people’s diabetes worse? Where does it stop? It feels like this is literally just the beginning, and it’s only going to get worse.”

 

This can’t be true. @Humble Beast assured me that Eli Lilly’s board didn’t give a shit.

[Homercles 10162]

2 minutes ago, kevwun said:

Fucking up the check mark system is the one thing that makes me seriously consider if Elon is destroying Twitter on purpose.  It's such a fundamental part of Twitter functioning that I'm not sure how anyone could have been dumb enough to stop doing it.

That’s what I’ve wondered, including in this thread.  Is he burning it down because he got his fee fees hurt in the spat with their prior leadership?  Make it a massive 4chan for continued obfuscation of the truth in pursuit of further chaos and disinformation?  
 

Or is the simplest explanation, an outsized explosion of his ego fueled by autism and cocaine, the right one.  

[Chopper 15889]

This morning Elmo seemed so optimistic

 

 

but I'm beginning to think it was unwarranted.

 

Edited November 14, 2022 by Chopper

[Pods 7426]

37 minutes ago, Homercles said:

That’s what I’ve wondered, including in this thread.  Is he burning it down because he got his fee fees hurt in the spat with their prior leadership?  Make it a massive 4chan for continued obfuscation of the truth in pursuit of further chaos and disinformation?  
 

Or is the simplest explanation, an outsized explosion of his ego fueled by autism and cocaine, the right one.  

It's the latter. He's used Twitter for  years to massively over-inflate his companies and crypto investments. It was far too valuable to him for him to intentionally destroy it.  

Also, Twitter has lots of data that's valuable to his authoritarian dickhead friends, many of which are now also Twitter co-owners with him. Past data is valuable, but breaking information and identities/locations of opposition groups is far more valuable. No way they would shut that spigot off on purpose. 

The simplest solution is the correct one. He's an authoritarian dickhead who bought the site thinking he could control conversation and what people talked about globally, while outing people that opposed him or his dictator cabal of buddies. 

[kevwun 15190]

You could also make an argument that the Saudis, Russians and Chinese would be very happy if Twitter didn't exist because it causes them a lot of headaches.

[Chopper 15889]

10 minutes ago, kevwun said:

You could also make an argument that the Saudis, Russians and Chinese would be very happy if Twitter didn't exist because it causes them a lot of headaches.

After elmo's claim about how huge twitter's user base is was immediately shot down, I noticed telegram has a higher user base and drives more traffic. I dl'd it once but haven't spent any time to figure out how to add users to my feed, etc. Not sure if it's worth it, anyway. Podcasts, sponsored pods, nyt, wapo, a couple substacks and Surly are probably more than enough.

Edited November 14, 2022 by Chopper

[atomheartbevo 88750]

 

4 hours ago, NoName said:

very seriously, that guy has to have a legal case right?

also this should officially end the "Elon is a free speech absolutist" chapter, forever.

Reddit was making him job offers in the Twitter thread before Musk fired him, so he’ll be fine, but would be funny if he gets a nice payout.

[atomheartbevo 88750]

1 hour ago, Chopper said:

seems very lol

Removing the bit about what device a tweet was written on was something desired by quite a few people who had publicly sworn off of this or that company (say Apple or Google) and then we’re busted using said company’s hardware.

[Francisco 2.0 31567]

1 hour ago, atomheartbevo said:

Removing the bit about what device a tweet was written on was something desired by quite a few people who had publicly sworn off of this or that company (say Apple or Google) and then we’re busted using said company’s hardware.

 

 

 

And on and on...

[Francisco 2.0 31567]

 

 

 

[Chopper 15889]

2 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

Removing the bit about what device a tweet was written on was something desired by quite a few people who had publicly sworn off of this or that company (say Apple or Google) and then we’re busted using said company’s hardware.

Yes but their stated policy claims it's there for a good reason: their ad partners. Maybe their policy justification was bs. IDK.

Edited November 15, 2022 by Chopper
clarify policy justification

[Chopper 15889]

The hits keep coming

Edited November 15, 2022 by Chopper

[Pods 7426]

2 hours ago, kevwun said:

You could also make an argument that the Saudis, Russians and Chinese would be very happy if Twitter didn't exist because it causes them a lot of headaches.

For sure, but dissidents and opposition groups would find another platform if Twitter disappears. The dictators would only be buying some time and they'd have no ability to peer inside that new platform.

Saudis flat out own Twitter now, so they can dive into the data to identify specific users and locations and use these to crack the networks. The Chinese and Russians are just an arm twist away from the same access. 

Setting aside even the Cambridge Analytica type applications, that data is one of the most valuable things in the world to these authoritarian governments. No way they'd want to give up real time access to that data, just for another application to pop up they had no influence on. 

[F250 28379]

Like the Trump flavor of populism this latest shit show has a lot of blue collar troglodytes rooting against thousandaire tech workers on behalf of a billionaire.

It's like those miserable fuck holes just want everyone to share in their misery.

[Chopper 15889]

Just a random thought. Elmo's invasion of twitter is going as well as Russia's invasion of Ukraine except the only death has been Elmo's (and friends') dignity.

TECH CRUNCH this afternoon:

Is Elon Musk’s Twitter about to fall out of the GDPR’s one-stop shop?

Next stop: Regulatory hell?

Helmed by erratic new owner Elon Musk, Twitter is no longer fulfilling key obligations required for it to claim Ireland as its so-called main establishment under the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a source familiar with the matter has told TechCrunch.

Our source, who is well placed, requested and was granted anonymity owing to the sensitivity of the issue — which could have major ramifications for Twitter and for Musk.

Like many major tech firms with customers across the European Union, Twitter currently avails itself of a mechanism in the GDPR known as the one-stop shop (OSS). This is beneficial because it allows the company to streamline regulatory administration by being able to engage exclusively with a lead data supervisor in the EU Member State where it is “main established” (in Twitter’s case, Ireland), rather than having to accept inbound from data protection authorities across the bloc.

However, under Musk’s chaotic reign — which has already seen a fast and deep downsizing of Twitter’s headcount, kicking off with layoffs of 50% of staff earlier this month — questions are being asked over whether its main establishment status in Ireland for the GDPR still holds or not.

Quote

....snip

Under the EU’s GDPR, meanwhile, Twitter is obliged — in just one very basic requirement — to have a data protection officer (DPO) to provide a contact point for regulators.

Hence the departure of Kieran, its first and only DPO since the role was created at the company in 2018, has not gone unnoticed by its data protection watchdog in Ireland — as we also reported Friday. But the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC)’s concerns are already spiraling wider than Twitter’s compliance with notifications about core personnel: Last week, the authority — currently Twitter’s lead EU DPA under the GDPR’s OSS — put the social media firm on watch by signaling public concern when it said it would be putting questions to the company about the status of its main establishment in Ireland at a meeting scheduled for early this week, to discuss all the recent privacy changes since the Musk takeover.

Twitter has not commented publicly on the DPC’s warning nor on the departures of senior regulator-facing staffers. Indeed, since Musk took over, its communications department appears to have been dismantled and the company no longer responds to press requests for comment — so it was not possible to obtain an official statement from Twitter about these departures or on the substance of our report. (We’re happy to add a response if Twitter or Musk wants to send us one.)

For Twitter’s business itself, there are a number of potential consequences in play if its ability to meet regulatory requirements falls.

If the DPC assesses (or is informed by Musk) that it no longer has its main establishment in Ireland, the company will crash out of the OSS — opening it up to being regulated by the data protection authority across the bloc’s 27 Member States, which would become competent to oversee its business.

In practice, that means any EU data protection authority would be able to act directly on concerns it has that local users’ data is at risk — with the power to instigate their own investigations and take enforcement actions. So Ireland’s more business-friendly regulator would no longer be leading the handling of any GDPR concerns about Twitter; probes could be simultaneously opened up all over the EU — including in Member States like France and Germany where data protection authorities have a reputation for being quicker to the punch (and/or more aggressive) in responding to complaints compared to Ireland.

If Twitter loses its ability to claim main establishment in Ireland, it would therefore drastically amp up the complexity, cost and risk of achieving GDPR compliance. (Reminder: Penalties under the regulation can scale up to 4% of annual global turnover — so these are not rules a normal CEO would ignore.)

...snip

The structure Twitter was relying upon to participate in the GDPR’s OSS includes a system of mandatory privacy and security reviews for new products — to enable the Irish entity to insert its feedback and exert influence over product development.

Under this framework, the board of the Irish company was able to raise concerns about planned new features ahead of launch, with input then fed back to U.S. product development teams to be incorporated into products before launch — thereby, assuming the protocol was correctly followed, empowering a local decision-making capacity inside the EU.

However, per our source, the situation at Twitter since Musk took over is that no information is being provided about what products are being worked on in the U.S. to the Irish entity’s management — nor is the Irish entity’s management able to provide any input into any product Musk is working on since it is not being kept apprised of what’s being developed.

Products in development at Twitter are not even being submitted into review pipelines anymore, much less getting reviews before being shipped, according to our source, who told us the system has essentially stopped operating.

“Solving for the OSS is going to be a nightmare because that was already a complicated dance for Twitter’s old management — because it was a situation where you had two employees, effectively, who were lower down the pecking order of the company, the directors of the Irish entity, who are directing the US entity what to do,” this person said, adding: “But in a world where Elon is sole king, dictator, everything, you want some employees based in Dublin to try and give feedback to this guy? Who? That’s never going to work.”

Our source’s account of abandoned review processes aligns with the Verge‘s reporting of normal security and privacy reviews being thrown into turmoil on Musk taking over.

...snip

That said, other EU watchful DPAs may not sit on their hands waiting in the meanwhile. Under the GDPR, all these bodies have powers to make emergency interventions in certain circumstances that lets them derogate from the OSS — such as if they feel there is a pressing risk to local users’ data. So we could see other DPAs reaching for Article 66 powers and implementing their own urgency procedures against Twitter in their own markets.

...snip

On the GDPR side, if Twitter gets exposed to decentralized oversight across the EU by falling out of the OSS, it could lead to major headaches as it could be hit with multiple GDPR fines by watchdogs all over the region — each of up to 4% of its annual turnover. So a pipeline of such fines could quickly start to add up for Twitter (which Musk has already claimed could face bankruptcy).

On top of that, the administrative drain for Twitter’s business of having to deal with multiple EU regulators would scale the cost and complexity of GDPR compliance, swaddling what is a shrinking (and already creaking) resource in reams of additional red tape — in a way that could tip the platform further over the edge into total business breakdown.

Alarm bells should thus be blaring very loudly indeed that Twitter’s new owner appears too spaced out to understand — or care — about maintaining critical structures that exist to ensure the business can operate in a way that’s, up til now, kept regulators at a watchful distance, avoiding a whole world of regulatory pain falling on and crushing the life out of the bird.

 

 

[Humble Beast 258]

3 hours ago, GenXer said:

This can’t be true. @Humble Beast assured me that Eli Lilly’s board didn’t give a shit.

No. I actually said we’d look back in a few weeks and think it wasn’t that big of a deal. Time will tell. 
 

5 hours ago, Chewbacca said:

Starlink.

That said, I have to think the investors in SpeceX and Tesla are not happy about all the 'sharing' arrangements he's coming up with to help Twitter.

 

5 hours ago, Sawbonz said:

 

Tesla might be one thing, but I don’t think SpaceX shareholders are going to cause many problems. They’re way up on their investments because he’s managed, in spite of his below average business acumen, to build SpaceX into one of the largest private valuations in the world. Over $100B. Also, they have very limited opportunities to send a messsge by selling their stock.

 

Y’all underestimate Elon’s ability to leverage everything at his disposal and blur the lines to accomplish what he wants.  “funding secured”

[kevwun 15190]

8 minutes ago, Pods said:

For sure, but dissidents and opposition groups would find another platform if Twitter disappears. The dictators would only be buying some time and they'd have no ability to peer inside that new platform.

Saudis flat out own Twitter now, so they can dive into the data to identify specific users and locations and use these to crack the networks. The Chinese and Russians are just an arm twist away from the same access. 

Setting aside even the Cambridge Analytica type applications, that data is one of the most valuable things in the world to these authoritarian governments. No way they'd want to give up real time access to that data, just for another application to pop up they had no influence on. 

Also true, but that's going to cause said groups to stop using it so it's really only going to be useful a few times.  I think both options are shortsighted because like you mention, something else will replace it.  There is a need for something like Twitter, but it doesn't have to be Twitter.  It's been mentioned many times by others, but Shaggy/Surly is a really good analogy for how this is going to be play out.  Twitter is gonna die, whether is was killed by Elon being an egomaniac or intentionally won't really matter in the long run.

[Brisketexan 103143]

2 minutes ago, kevwun said:

Also true, but that's going to cause said groups to stop using it so it's really only going to be useful a few times.  I think both options are shortsighted because like you mention, something else will replace it.  There is a need for something like Twitter, but it doesn't have to be Twitter.  It's been mentioned many times by others, but Shaggy/Surly is a really good analogy for how this is going to be play out.  Twitter is gonna die, whether is was killed by Elon being an egomaniac or intentionally won't really matter in the long run.

A good bit of this.  There is clearly something out there that the public wants: a global bulletin board on which to post shit.  If the current one goes away, are all of you champions of the free market telling us that the market won't have numerous suitors vying to fill that role?  The VC dollars will flow to the most attractive candidates, and one of them will win -- it will be VHS v. Betamax all over again, one site/format will win, because there's demand for one, but only one.

[GenXer 2470]

29 minutes ago, Humble Beast said:

No. I actually said we’d look back in a few weeks and think it wasn’t that big of a deal. Time will tell. 

You responded to my post where I said Eli Lilly is paying attention to the changes at Twitter. Your response was condescending. Stop being disingenuous.

I really don’t give a shit if Musk is successful or a failure with twitter or his other endeavors.

I fucking hate pharmaceutical companies for their decades-long gouging of us type 1’s for profit’s sake. My endocrinologist has patients that ration their insulin because of its cost. Any pain inflicted on Eli Lilly is pure unfiltered schadenfreude. Some sleepless nights for the Eli Lilly board are well deserved; there’s parents suffering sleepless nights trying to figure out how to buy insulin for their kids.

 

 

[Pods 7426]

50 minutes ago, kevwun said:

Also true, but that's going to cause said groups to stop using it so it's really only going to be useful a few times.  I think both options are shortsighted because like you mention, something else will replace it.  There is a need for something like Twitter, but it doesn't have to be Twitter.  It's been mentioned many times by others, but Shaggy/Surly is a really good analogy for how this is going to be play out.  Twitter is gonna die, whether is was killed by Elon being an egomaniac or intentionally won't really matter in the long run.

Agreed. This same situation has now played out twice for this fanbase. Hornfans->Shaggy->Surly.  

If anyone should understand that the value of Twitter is the users and their trust, it's us. 

[Francisco 2.0 31567]

A tale in four parts:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Francisco 2.0 31567]

 

 

[Wally Fairway 5465]

46 minutes ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

 

 

Nothing Elon hasn't done before, when Solar City was in deep financial trouble and E and his brother were looking at a huge loss, all of the sudden Tesla's buys Solar City. 

Problem solved

[Francisco 2.0 31567]

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/11/elon-musk-twitter-comedy-public-square/672088/

 

Quote

Recently, comedy clubs have begun doing this thing that seemed, when I first encountered it, both wildly hypocritical and more than a little sad.

I first noticed this new phenomenon at the Comedy Cellar, in Manhattan’s West Village. The Cellar, which was more or less my second home during my early 30s, is a warm and intimate-to-the-point-of-claustrophobia club that I have loved unconditionally. So it was particularly distressing the first time I saw a bouncer distributing padded envelopes and insisting people seal their phones inside them before entering.

 

 

Quote

The club’s rationale had to do with Twitter, and with YouTube, and with the rest of the social web. Comics were worried about being taped surreptitiously, going viral against their will, and then getting canceled. I understood that the stakes seemed ferociously high, but the idea that the answer to this challenge was to literally bubble-wrap people’s iPhones seemed absurd.

My view was simple: If you don’t want people to hear your jokes, don’t tell them. Comedy is, at its core, about revealing truths—all truths, including nasty, taboo truths. And many comedians share the view that no topic is off-limits so long as it can be made funny. Why would comedians, of all people, accept such defeat? That they would tolerate turning the Cellar into some kind of SCIF struck me as not only somewhat pathetic but a dire threat to the art of comedy itself.

 

 

Quote

I was not above mocking the comics I know about this new practice. But I did come to understand the complexity: Like everyone else, comedians must assume that, when in public, they are being recorded for internet distribution. They were accustomed to having the time and space for their art to ripen while performing in private clubs, and suddenly found themselves exposed before a global audience. Just the way the social web has flattened and homogenized culture, it has warped the purpose of the comedy club.

This is what I’ve been thinking about as I’ve watched Elon Musk treat Twitter as a comedy club on the one hand, and the universal town square on the other. What he doesn’t seem to realize is that it is neither.

 

 

Spoiler

A comedy club is the dojo of stand-up. It is where comics get their reps, where they go to test their jokes—and very often their most objectionable and least-developed material—in front of a live audience. Stand-up in this setting is not meant to scale. Just the opposite: Its intimacy and ephemerality are its magic. Save the polished material for your Netflix special. The Cellar is where you can get dark and experimental. You might know something is funny intellectually when you write it, but you don’t really know without the reaction of a live audience. It’s where you feed off the energy of the room, and develop a feel for the exact moment when the crowd will turn on you. And the audience is self-selecting—the people who show up are likely to understand the purpose and value of stand-up in the first place. Drunks and hecklers pop up now and again, but you know they’ll either be chastened by the crowd or get kicked out.

Almost needless to say, this is not how the internet works.

I eventually came to understand that the Cellar, with its padded envelopes, was not just treating its comics like snowflakes, but actually trying to do something honorable by clearly defining its purpose to everyone who walked in the door. The comedy club exists for the comics, not the customers, and it prioritizes protecting artists. (One famous comedian who performs regularly at the Cellar talked with me at length about what the social web has done to comedy, but only on the condition that I wouldn’t quote him. He said he’d rather have me quote what he’d said about the subject in one of his streaming specials, as if to underscore the point.)

A platform like Twitter is the opposite of a comedy club. It is always on, overflowing with material, agnostic (at best) about quality, and designed for scale. The people hanging out there are disaggregated geographically. Instead of laughter, you get retweets—silent and ambiguous, deployed to convey both appreciation and disgust. And despite the impression of fleetingness that an endless stream of tweets might suggest, you should always assume that what you do on the social web is being widely seen, magnified immediately, and documented forever. Most stand-up routines age poorly because they are made for the moment. Most stand-up is not supposed to age well. That is because it’s not supposed to age at all.

Musk sometimes appears to believe that he bought a $44 billion dojo, a place where the funniest person in the room wins the day through force of provocation and charisma. Musk is a self-described free-speech absolutist, so I can see why he would make this mistake. Twitter may be the anti–comedy club, but it is not without humor. The platform has been a wonderful nursery for rising comics, and for irreverence generally. Twitter has launched a not-insignificant number of careers in comedic writing, and plenty of weirdos with decent jokes have found and entertained new and niche audiences there. Twitter has its own in-group language, and has inculcated numerous new joke formats, for better and for worse. Most jokes aren’t for everyone, but that’s what the “unfollow” button is for.

Musk clearly likes trying to make people laugh. His own presence on the platform is often puckish. One of the first things he tweeted after finalizing his acquisition of the company was this: “Comedy is now legal on Twitter.” In the days that followed, Twitter became noisy with people impersonating Musk, mocking him for his idea of a new pay-to-play identity-verification system. Twitter users changed their display names to “Elon Musk,” some adopting his profile photo, in many cases intending to show how easy it would be to imitate someone and spread disinformation if a blue checkmark meant to authenticate someone’s identity could simply be purchased. It took less than two weeks for “Comedy is now legal” to morph into: “Going forward, any Twitter handles engaging in impersonation without clearly specifying ‘parody’ will be permanently suspended.”

People are rightly calling out Musk for how easily he folded on his free-speech absolutism. Comedy purists scoff at the idea that satire should ever be labeled. What all this reveals, though, is not just that Musk is a hypocrite, or that he is in over his head, but that he hasn’t decided what Twitter actually is. If a comedy club is a dojo for comics, and Twitter is the anti–comedy club, what and who is Musk’s social platform for?

After announcing his crackdown on unlabeled comedy, he tweeted this: “Twitter needs to become by far the most accurate source of information about the world. That’s our mission.” By that definition, Twitter is a news organization, I suppose, but one led by someone antagonistic to the idea that journalists are members of a trained, skilled professional class. Musk also tweeted on Sunday night that “journalists who think they are the only source of legitimate information” are engaged in perpetrating “the big lie.” For what it’s worth, I don’t know any journalist who believes that they are the only source of legitimate information. In the past, Musk has floated the idea of having people upvote their perception of what is true as a way to assess news outlets, launching a “credibility-ranking site for people to rate journalists and news organizations.” He once dismissed my criticism of this idea by suggesting that he had more journalism experience than I do. (He does not.) “Spent years in newsrooms starting 23 years ago,” he tweeted at the time, “back when some reporters were still babies w poopy diapers.”

All this from a man who repeatedly uses Twitter to distribute conspiracy theories in earnest, including as recently as last month. Cynics will tell you that Musk has decided exactly what Twitter is—primarily a vehicle for advertising revenue—and they’re most likely right. It’s no coincidence that as soon as it became clear that doubling down on free speech was scaring off big advertisers, Musk hyped aggressive moderation tactics instead. Then again, he also tweeted out a meme featuring a Nazi soldier. So who really knows.

One of the most nefarious aspects of the social web is that the major platforms do such a good job of approximating our idea of the public sphere that people sometimes forget that walled gardens are not actually public spaces. Twitter users may feel like they’re in a digital town square, engaging in civic conversation, and you can understand why. The utopian ideal of the social web is indeed captivating; the internet was supposed to be a global force for democratization, a place where every individual could exercise the right to free expression without friction. Musk himself has put it this way: “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated.”

In fact, Twitter is more like a casino—a private establishment where everyone is mingling, including the billionaire owner. And yet culturally, and because of how people actually use Twitter, the lines between “comedy club” and “town square” and “room full of monetizable user data that drives advertising revenue” aren’t always apparent. This disconnect ends up feeling most pronounced when the values of Twitter-the-casino bump up against the values, like freedom of speech, that Americans typically associate with public life and its attendant constitutional protections against government overreach.

But Twitter is not an adequate town square, most obviously because the world’s centers of public discourse should not be run by businessmen. Musk is, of course, free to run his platform however he wants. But Twitter is not a public good. No one has a right to it. Musk can and should kick out whomever he chooses, just the way a casino owner can. And if people don’t like how he’s running things, they are free to leave. Musk wields tremendous power as the person shaping the future of a hugely influential global self-publishing platform. But he’s not a head of state, and we should be wary of acting like he is one. Cracking down on comedy only makes him culturally—not actually—like the police going after Lenny Bruce. Because all he can do is kick people out of his casino. He can’t throw anyone in jail.

Bruce was first arrested for obscenity in San Francisco in October 1961, for having used “a ten-letter word onstage,” as Bruce later referred to it in his autobiography. (That word, by the way, was cocksucker.) Bruce kept getting arrested and kept performing anyway. He would be arrested several more times for obscenity before eventually being sentenced to four months in a workhouse in 1964. This is what an actual fight for free speech entails—risking your livelihood, and maybe your life, no matter how many times the government tries to stop you. Bruce died of a drug overdose in 1966, before he could fully appeal or serve his sentence.

We can only ever imagine what a mind like Bruce’s (or Rod Serling’s or George Carlin’s) would have made of the social web. But I’m fairly certain that Bruce would have found Twitter both amusing and horrifying. Amusing, because he found chaos to be irresistible. “Confusion was entertainment for me,” he once wrote, waxing nostalgic about “a freezing blizzard that would stop all traffic and mail; toilets that would get stopped up and overflow and run down the halls; electrical failures—anything that would stop the flow and make it back up and find a new direction.”

Bruce was also, like so many comics and so many journalists, inescapably optimistic and deeply cynical at the same time, or as the theater critic Kenneth Tynan once put it, “a tightrope walker between morality and nihilism.” Bruce loved that comedy was an antiestablishment craft—neither a skill for which you could be accredited, nor a formula that just anyone could follow. He also relished telling uncomfortable truths—sometimes about pissing in the sink or Eleanor Roosevelt’s breasts, the latter being the impetus for one of his arrests—but always in the face of society’s most powerful, deceptive, and hypocritical figures and forces. Consider the testimony of the jazz critic Ralph J. Gleason, then a columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle, in defense of Bruce at his San Francisco obscenity trial: “Mr. Bruce attacks the fundamental structure of society and these other comedians deal with it superficially.”

Bruce had a way of cutting straight to the heart of the thing, and one can only assume he would have seen through Musk instantly. Here he is, the richest man in the world, trying to convince people that his newly acquired virtual casino is actually the people’s town square. Here he is trying to monetize civic participation. Here he is telling people what they can and can’t say for a laugh. Here he is charging them $8 a pop for the privilege. There is most definitely a 10-letter word for that.

Sometime between Bruce’s obscenity trials in Los Angeles and New York, a group of novelists, actors, artists, and journalists—including Bob Dylan, James Baldwin, Lillian Hellman, Elizabeth Taylor, George Plimpton, John Updike, and many more—signed a letter arguing for the protection of satire in the United States. They placed Bruce in the tradition of Jonathan Swift, François Rabelais, and Mark Twain. “Whether we regard Bruce as a moral spokesman or simply as an entertainer,” they wrote, “we believe he should be allowed to perform free from censorship or harassment.”

Theirs was a simpler world, in the sense that this all took place before the existence of the web, before most of us carried around pocket computers that have to be bubble-wrapped before they’ll let you hear a joke at a comedy club. But it was a more complicated world, too. Comedians faced actual censorship. Police officers threw Lenny Bruce in jail for schoolyard humor. Back then, a filthy joke got you arrested, not just kicked off of some billionaire’s vanity project for mega-nerds.

Musk now decides what Twitter is, and who it is for. And why wouldn’t he? He owns the place. People can decide for themselves whether they want to hang out there anymore, whether it does more net good or net harm for individuals and for society. Lenny Bruce once wrote that his inspiration in comedy was only every second of his entire life, nothing more and nothing less. What he meant, I think, was that he lived with eyes wide open. He tried to see things as they actually were, and avoided clouding his vision with good-sounding intentions or empty promises or the hypocrisy of the powerful. “There is only what is,” he wrote. “The what-should-be never did exist, but people keep trying to live up to it.”

 

 

Edited November 15, 2022 by Francisco 2.0

[Humble Beast 258]

30 minutes ago, Wally Fairway said:

Nothing Elon hasn't done before, when Solar City was in deep financial trouble and E and his brother were looking at a huge loss, all of the sudden Tesla's buys Solar City. 

Problem solved

Exactly.  I’m not saying it’s right, but Elon will do ANYTHING to make this work. He’s done it in the past. Y’all are underestimating that. 
 

 

[F250 28379]

24 minutes ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

 

 

Back in the day, I used to pull that shit when it was a normal practice in the industry. I once went to work at 6 AM on a Monday and didn't stop until 4 PM on Tuesday. Before I left for the day, I wrote an incident report from all the notes I had been collecting over the previous two days.

LOL that thing was complete jibberish. It made no sense, it was as if someone tried to write a technical document after downing a bottle of vodka and a sheet of acid. People were shedding tears from laughing when they read it out loud when I returned. Lots of "ask fuckity fuck, oranges, and months of the year" typed into metric fields.

I was in my mid-twenties, Elon is fucking 51 years old having a manic episode that's been going on for days. That freak is probably saying some bat shit crazy things over at Twitter HQ at the moment.

Soon he is going to Tweet out "Maybe having an annual purge is a good idea, it would reduce unemployment."

 

[aggie08 20211]

1 minute ago, Humble Beast said:

Exactly.  I’m not saying it’s right, but Elon will do ANYTHING to make this work. He’s done it in the past. Y’all are underestimating that. 
 

 

Maybe. 

But close your eyes and go back to 2 weeks ago:

In your wildest dreams, what was the worst, mismanaged, completely out-of-touch outcome that you could have possibly envisioned for his first weeks on the job?

How does that compare to the reality?

[Homercles 10162]

19 minutes ago, F250 said:

Back in the day, I used to pull that shit when it was a normal practice in the industry. I once went to work at 6 AM on a Monday and didn't stop until 4 PM on Tuesday. Before I left for the day, I wrote an incident report from all the notes I had been collecting over the previous two days.

LOL that thing was complete jibberish. It made no sense, it was as if someone tried to write a technical document after downing a bottle of vodka and a sheet of acid. People were shedding tears from laughing when they read it out loud when I returned. Lots of "ask fuckity fuck, oranges, and months of the year" typed into metric fields.

I was in my mid-twenties, Elon is fucking 51 years old having a manic episode that's been going on for days. That freak is probably saying some bat shit crazy things over at Twitter HQ at the moment.

Soon he is going to Tweet out "Maybe having an annual purge is a good idea, it would reduce unemployment."

 

So you’re the reason Tapatalk is such a flaming pile of shit