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

[Captainant 27727]

2 hours ago, MrBig said:

So is the algorithm strictly for paid ads? Are ad buyers promised they will reach certain users with targeted content based on their likes and retweets?

Along with other user data and their own profile that was derived from your collected and sold data.

I've been saying it in other threads, but the best way to address all this is to not regulate or attempt to control the speech. We need to remove what fuels the algorithm that steers the discussion. We need to protect our user data and have some recourse to it being used against us. We need a general data protection order to starve the beast

Edited April 27, 2022 by Captainant

[BLKNSTY 289]

the worlds richest man basically bought all our DMs and took the company private. Twitter doesn’t use end to end encryption on DMs so that shit is wide tf open to anyone who has access. 100% private company with minimal oversight.

yeah yeah I know, what about Zuck? I don’t think that’s exactly the same - it’s a public company with a board and Zuck has at least some track record. Shareholders and fiduciary responsibility etc. yeah yeah companies are already making bank off my data but that’s keywords or some dude making $35k a year who has no beef with me reading about how I’d eat my coworkers ass on a silver plate. yeah yeah what about Bezos? I dont DM on Amazon and I could give two fucks about WP as I’ve never even visited their website.

I have absolutely no doubt this shit is going to end badly. Some real sensitive DMs bout to get leaked. Genuine question, what’s stopping Elon from busting open all the DMs of anyone who’s looked at him sideways/his competitors/governments and politicians capable of being blackmailed and fucking up their shit? This some NSA level access but at least we can chalk that up to terrorism.

I know the legal system is there but this mf really called a guy a pedo on Twitter and still one the defamation suit.

I’m in for the ride though baby, crank up that simulation shit baby

[Francisco 2.0 32416]

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-04-26/elon-got-his-deal

 

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I guess it is worth saying that Elon Musk does not own Twitter Inc. He did not buy Twitter Inc. yesterday for $54.20 per share in cash. He did sign an agreement yesterday to buy Twitter for $54.20 in cash. That is a big step! It means that he probably will end up owning Twitter within a few months or so. (The deal “is expected to close in 2022”; it might take up to six months.) But he does not own it yet.

 

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So, for instance, he cannot change anything about Twitter yet; he can’t change moderation policies or open-source the algorithm or bring back Donald Trump, or whatever you are excited or worried about, until the deal closes. Employees who are unhappy about Musk’s plans for Twitter can quit, but he can’t fire them yet. Reuters notes:

 

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Bret Taylor, chair of Twitter's board of directors, aimed to reassure employees that the agreement with Musk prioritized "operating continuity" until the deal was closed.

"I think we feel very comfortable that (the deal) gives this team the ability to continue to make the company successful in between signing and closing the transaction," Taylor said.

 

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On that same employee call, CEO Parag Agrawal said “Once the deal closes, we don't know which direction the platform will go.” Twitter — Agrawal and his team and the board — are in charge of Twitter from now until the deal closes, with little or no meddling by Musk, and they “told employees on Monday that the social network will keep operating as usual” until the closing. After the deal closes, it’s all Musk.

 

Spoiler

Why does it take so long? Well, some things need to happen between now and when the deal closes. Most notably, Twitter’s shareholders have to vote on the deal. Twitter will have to write a proxy statement explaining the deal, run it by the Securities and Exchange Commission, send it to shareholders and give them some time to read it before voting; this can take months. Also there are regulatory approvals — under antitrust laws, etc. — that Twitter and Musk need to get before closing the deal. Also when the deal closes Elon Musk will need to have about $46 billion in cash 1 ; he has agreements — with banks and with himself — to get the cash, but actually getting it can take time. 

In the next couple of days, Twitter will publicly file its merger agreement with Musk, laying out what needs to happen between signing and closing. (I was sort of expecting it to be filed by now, but technically they get four days and they have been busy; I suppose we will talk about it when it is filed.)

And then it will get to work on the proxy statement, which will probably be filed within a few weeks. The proxy will be interesting. One interesting part will be the “Background of the Merger” section, describing the history of Musk’s negotiations with Twitter, Twitter’s consideration of his offer, Twitter’s efforts to find other bidders, etc. Probably some mention will be made of various tweets. Probably the lawyers will have to finesse a bit how Musk characterized his Twitter stake as a passive investment with no intention to change control of the company on April 4, and made a takeover offer — saying that “it’s simply not a good investment without the changes that need to be made” — nine days later. It has been a busy month, for Elon Musk and Twitter, and the proxy statement will detail how they negotiated this deal and also how little their lawyers slept.

Another interesting section will be the “Opinion of Twitter’s Financial Advisers,” which will describe the fairness opinion that Twitter’s board got from its bankers concluding that Musk’s price of $54.20 per share is fair to Twitter’s shareholders. I think it probably was not too hard for the banks to reach that conclusion. Bloomberg’s Michelle Davis and Liana Baker report:

The third catalyst that led to a deal was the role of the price, $54.20, and how it compared with Twitter’s own growth prospects. The company’s advisers, which included Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co., did a valuation analysis and presented it to the board last Friday, one of the people said. Musk’s camp didn’t get a look at those materials, though, given the decision to bypass reviewing Twitter’s books.

Twitter’s shares were trading well below Musk’s bid, with the stock closing at $47.08 the previous day, and far from their $70-plus highs of a year earlier. But the question was whether the stock could recover without taking the deal. The analysis didn’t paint an optimistic picture. 

Twitter’s board concluded from the presentation that, based on where peers were trading, its shares wouldn’t reach Musk’s bid price anytime soon.

I joked yesterday that the bankers would have to “tweak the model until it makes a horrible clattering noise and bolts start popping off” to get up to a $54.20 valuation for Twitter, and that was probably too harsh, but the proxy statement will give you some sense of (1) Twitter’s management projections for its business for the next few years and (2) what its bankers think the company is worth, given those projections. The short answer will be “less than $54.20 per share.”

So they’ll put out the proxy, they’ll schedule a meeting, they’ll work to line up financing and regulatory approvals, there’ll be a shareholder vote; a lot has to happen before this deal closes. Will it close? Sure, yeah, probably; the stock trading apparently implies an 84% probability that the merger closes.  But let’s take a quick tour of what can go wrong, just in case.

First: Musk could change his mind. This is, you know, frowned upon in high-level mergers and acquisitions, but he is Elon Musk and he is not necessarily beholden to traditional rules. He has signed a contract, which doesn’t allow him to change his mind without a good reason, but what if he does? There is a range of possible remedies in this sort of M&A; the main choices are:

The seller can get specific performance: If the buyer refuses to close the deal without a good reason, the target can sue and a court can make the buyer put up the money and close the deal.

A limited “reverse termination fee”: If the buyer refuses to close the deal without a good reason, it has to pay the target a fixed breakup fee (often around 3% of the deal size) rather than fight over closing or damages.

Historically, it was more common in leveraged buyouts for the remedy to be limited to a reverse termination fee, and private equity sponsors could not be forced to close deals if they got cold feet, but now most LBOs allow the target to get specific performance as long as the buyer gets its debt financing. Here, the merger agreement is not public yet, but Musk’s equity commitment letter does say that, “subject to the terms and conditions of the Merger Agreement and this letter agreement, the Company [Twitter] is hereby made a third party beneficiary of the rights granted to Parent hereby for the purpose of seeking specific performance of Parent’s right to cause the Aggregate Equity Commitment to be funded hereunder, or to directly cause the Equity Investor to fund the Aggregate Equity Commitment hereunder.”

That is: Twitter has signed a merger agreement with “an entity wholly owned by Elon Musk,” which is on the hook to pay $46 billion to buy Twitter, but that entity — it is named X Holdings I Inc., I guess after his son? — doesn’t have any money. X Holdings has an agreement with Elon Musk to put up $21 billion when the deal closes, and Musk does have that money (or can get it), but that agreement is between X Holdings and Musk. But Twitter has a limited right to make X Holdings enforce that agreement, and to make Musk put up the money so the deal can close.

The letter also contemplates a “limited guarantee” in which, if the deal doesn’t close and Musk is not forced to fund, he will also guarantee to Twitter “the performance of certain payment obligations of” X Holdings. I assume that that refers to a reverse termination fee if he can’t close due to a lack of debt financing. The size of the fee is not specified in the commitment letter — presumably it is in the merger agreement — but I assume it will be, like, $1,420,690,000. Davis and Baker report:

During the talks, Twitter’s advisers didn’t succeed in getting a higher price or a so-called go-shop period -- where the company could solicit other offers. But they did secure a higher-than-average reverse breakup fee, giving Twitter’s board the confidence that Musk wouldn’t scrap the agreement on a whim.

So maybe $1,690,000,000.

Incidentally, while Musk might be on the hook for $21 billion, that doesn’t mean he will end up funding all of it himself. He is still talking to potential equity partners who might take some of that $21 billion, and in a letter to Twitter’s board on Sunday he wrote:

In order to provide further value and choice to shareholders (within the legal boundaries of a private, unlisted company), we are willing to explore options that allow existing shareholders (including convertible securities and other related instruments) to invest all or a portion of their proceeds into the proposed transaction. Any such rollover transaction would be structured as a separate negotiated transaction consistent with laws and regulations and not be a public offer, and would not affect the proposed $54.20 cash offer transaction.

So one possible set of equity partners for his Twitter buyout are existing Twitter shareholders. 

Second: Twitter could fall apart. Musk can’t really change his mind for no reason, but merger agreements generally let the buyer walk away — without paying a fee — if there is a “material adverse effect” at the target company after the deal is signed but before it closes. These provisions tend to be extremely limited, though; if Twitter underperforms because of a general stock-market slump or a broad recession or changes in social-media regulation or anything that is not specific to Twitter, that probably does not count as an MAE. And, on the other hand, if Twitter underperforms because of this deal — if users or employees abandon Twitter because they don’t like its future under Musk — then that also probably does not count as an MAE. It is hard to thread that needle, and you don’t see a lot of buyers getting out of deals due to MAEs.

It is worth noting that Elon Musk’s offer to buy the company was not contingent on customary due diligence, and given the timeline he basically didn’t do any. Davis and Baker report that “the transaction came together at breakneck speed in part because Musk waived the chance to look at Twitter’s finances beyond what was publicly available.” Also, Twitter announces first-quarter earnings on Thursday. So it is possible that Thursday’s earnings will be a disappointment both to the market and to Musk, which is not usually how M&A works. (Usually you buy a company knowing a bit more about it.) It would be very funny if Twitter announced earnings Thursday and Musk said “these earnings are terrible, I did not sign up for this.” But realistically that risk is on him.

Third: Musk’s financing could fall through. He has commitment letters from banks to fund $13 billion of classic leveraged buyout debt (term loans, a revolving credit facility, bridge loans to be taken out by high-yield bonds) and another $12.5 billion of margin loansagainst his Tesla Inc. stock. The banks’ commitment to the LBO debt is fairly strong — basically they can only get out of funding that debt if Musk can also get out of the merger   — but the margin loans are margin loans; they are contingent on his posting enough stock as collateral, and Tesla’s stock price is volatile.   In rough numbers, if Tesla’s stock price drops below about $740 before this deal closes, Musk might have some trouble finding enough collateral to take out the full margin loan.   Tesla closed at $1,084.59 on April 1, the last day before Musk announced his Twitter stake; it was trading at $905 as of 11 a.m. today.

The financing falling through seems like a low-probability outcome. “There are no financing conditions to the closing of the transaction,” says Twitter’s merger announcement, which implies that if the financing falls through Musk is still on the hook. But, again, it is the norm in LBOs for the buyer to be on the hook only for a reverse breakup fee if the financing falls through: If his debt financing isn’t funded, Musk can’t walk away with no penalty, but he doesn’t have to come up with $46 billion on his own either.

Fourth: There could be a higher bidder. This is not especially likely, given that Twitter has gone through an extremely public sale process and has probably been hunting desperately for another bidder for a while now. But not for that long, given the speed of the Musk deal; I suppose it’s possible that someone out there wants to buy Twitter, can afford it, will pay more than $54.20 and just hasn’t gotten its act together yet to make a bid. Some merger agreements include a “go-shop” provision, allowing the board to drum up higher bidders even after the deal is signed; others include a “no-shop” provision saying that they can’t. This deal is the second kind; Bloomberg’s Kurt Wagner reports that “the deal does not include a ‘go-shop provision,’ meaning Twitter isn’t allowed to solicit offers from other potential bidders.”

But even without a go-shop, other potential bidders are aware that Twitter is for sale. And if Twitter gets an unsolicited higher bid from another potential buyer, it will have to consider it, and if the board concludes that it is a better deal for shareholders, it will have to abandon Musk and take the better deal. (It will probably have to give Musk a chance to match, a “last look,” etc., before terminating its deal with him.) Again this is pretty unlikely but I guess it could happen. If it does happen, then Twitter will owe Musk a breakup fee for his trouble. Again the customary amount is around 3% of deal value, so probably $1,420,690,000, but we’ll see.

Fifth: Twitter’s shareholders could say no to the deal. I think this is unlikely; my guess is that the board did not especially want to sell, and decided to sell because it heard from shareholders saying “take the deal.” My guess is that Twitter and Musk have a pretty good idea of the shareholder support here. And generally what happens when deals are signed is that regular shareholders sell their stock to merger arbitrageurs, who plan to capture the deal premium — buy stock at $50.20 (the price as of 11 a.m. today) and sell at $54.20 (the deal price) in a few months — and will vote in favor of the deal.  But the deal will be contingent on a shareholder vote, and the shareholders could in theory say no. 

One question is whether Musk’s own shares — he owns about 9.1% of Twitter — will count. Legally they do, but sometimes a board will ask for a “majority of the minority” provision where the deal only goes through if a majority of the non-Musk shares are voted in favor, in order to ensure that shareholders really want this deal. 

Sixth: Twitter’s board could change its mind? Musk’s letter on Sunday says:

I have attached a merger agreement that is “seller friendly” and that does not require you to recommend in favor of my offer. This will provide all shareholders a voice, and allow for a democratic decision consistent with Twitter’s ethos.

Presumably, as of now, the board plans to recommend the deal to shareholders — yesterday’s rather lukewarm press release quotes board chairman Bret Taylor saying that “the proposed transaction will deliver a substantial cash premium, and we believe it is the best path forward for Twitter’s stockholders” — but if they change their minds they can’t tell shareholders to vote against it. Even if they change their minds, though, the deal has to go to a shareholder vote; it will just go to the shareholders in a proxy statement saying “the board recommends that you vote against this deal,” but shareholders are free to ignore that. A change in recommendation only makes sense if Twitter’s business does incredibly well in the next few months, and the board (and shareholders) conclude that it is better off on its own. But the odds of Twitter wildly outperforming its own board’s expectations, after signing this deal and facing all the disruption of a new incoming owner, nervous employees, etc., seem pretty low.

Seventh: Regulators could block the deal. But probably not. Often, in U.S. mergers and acquisitions, “regulators” means mostly “antitrust regulators”: When a big company buys another big company in the same industry, that is often cause for antitrust concern, and there is a long back-and-forth with antitrust regulators. Here it is some guy buying a big company, and while the guy owns a number of other companies, they do not really compete with Twitter. There will be antitrust filings, because there always are, and Musk will be limited in how much he can talk with Twitter while he awaits antitrust approval, but there are unlikely to be any issues that block the deal. 

Meanwhile, as I have said before, Twitter is both “the town square,” an enormously important venue for speech and politics and human interaction, and also a fairly lightly regulated tech company. If Elon Musk were buying a casino, casino regulators would carefully assess his suitability before letting him close the deal. But he’s buying Twitter, so nobody really has jurisdiction to do that:

 

There are a lot of countries with a lot of regulators, though, and the European Union takes regulation of social media a bit more seriously than the U.S. does, so it is possible that some regulators will scrutinize this deal or impose some conditions.  I would not bet on it though.

Oh, one other small thing. The shareholder vote is probably months away, and Twitter’s communications with its shareholders about that vote are pretty regulated. In public-company M&A it is customary to file more or less every public statement about the deal with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission as “additional definitive proxy soliciting materials and Rule 14(a)(12) material.” Sometimes this is, like, Powerpoint presentations to investors promoting the deal, but often it is just random corporate ephemera that some lawyer thought might have to be filed. There’s gonna be so much of that here! Here, already, is an SEC filing with some tweets. Eventually Elon Musk is going to, like, tweet a Face With One Eyebrow Raised emoji, and Twitter is going to retweet it, and some highly paid law-firm associate is going to make exactly that face while filing it with the SEC as proxy soliciting material.

Free speech, etc.

One thing to maybe look out for in the merger agreement is any sort of social provisions, any sort of binding or even symbolic commitment by Musk to do anything in particular with Twitter’s service. I would not expect this: As I said yesterday, Twitter’s board seems to have treated this as a pretty straightforward shareholder-value-maximizing M&A transaction, negotiating for standard stuff (price, deal certainty, a go-shop) that public-company boards want and not seeming particularly concerned with the unusual social importance of their product. This is in keeping with the general impression that Twitter’s board gives, of being a bunch of people who have never used Twitter and find it somewhat distasteful.

You could imagine Twitter’s board saying, look, this company that we run has built a product that is very important for society, that people use as a means of political communication and as a “town square” and also as a direct messaging service. We want to maximize price for our shareholders, but we also view that product as something of a public trust, and if you want to buy it you have to commit to treating it that way. You have to agree not to publicize the direct messages of people you don’t like. You have to agree not to whimsically ban your personal enemies without any review. You have to hire some reasonably acceptable head of trust and safety. Stuff like that.

I mean, you could imagine that, but I wouldn’t. I can’t imagine Twitter’s actual board actually thinking of its product that way or insisting on those sorts of protections, and I certainly can’t imagine Musk saying yes. I think the odds of the merger agreement committing Musk to anything like this — any restrictions on what he does with the product — are low.

I don’t know what that means! It seems likely that Musk cares about free speech and wants to make Twitter better. Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s founder and the only board member who seems to like Twitter, is happy to be getting it out of the board’s hands and into Musk’s, tweeting stuff like:

The idea and service is all that matters to me, and I will do whatever it takes to protect both. Twitter as a company has always been my sole issue and my biggest regret. It has been owned by Wall Street and the ad model. Taking it back from Wall Street is the correct first step.

In principle, I don’t believe anyone should own or run Twitter. It wants to be a public good at a protocol level, not a company. Solving for the problem of it being a company however, Elon is the singular solution I trust. I trust his mission to extend the light of consciousness.

Elon’s goal of creating a platform that is “maximally trusted and broadly inclusive” is the right one. This is also @paraga’s goal, and why I chose him. Thank you both for getting the company out of an impossible situation. This is the right path...I believe it with all my heart.

Sure I dunno. And Musk has tweeted that “I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means.” 

Still I worry a little that Musk seems to conceive of “free speech” in mostly standard American billionaire terms. Yesterday Jeff Bezos pondered, on Twitter, whether the government of China will gain leverage over Twitter because Musk is buying it. The idea is that Twitter has no particular commercial ties to China (where it has been banned since 2009), so it is free to host criticism of the Chinese government. Other American businesses with lots of commercial ties to China — Hollywood, basketball, etc. — often do not tolerate criticism of China, to avoid angering its government and endangering their businesses. Tesla is an American business with deep commercial ties to China, where it makes cars, sells cars and buys parts; it is run by Elon Musk and makes up the bulk of his net worth. If he owns Twitter, criticism of China on Twitter is potentially his problem, and Tesla’s, and he might face pretty explicit pressure to censor critics of China on Twitter. This seems like a complicated set of issues for him to navigate. But soon he will own the company, and then I guess he’ll navigate them all by himself.

  

 

 

[Biff Tannen 45712]

3 hours ago, MrBig said:

So free speech is free,

Also needs clarification.  Short answer is no.

[workswithseed 2110]

3 minutes ago, Biff Tannen said:

Also needs clarification.  Short answer is no.

So restricted speech is free.

[MrBig 5428]

13 minutes ago, Biff Tannen said:

Also needs clarification.  Short answer is no.

Freedom of Speech is guaranteed to be free as long as it’s housed on a platform driven by ad-based revenue?

[Biff Tannen 45712]

1 hour ago, MrBig said:

Freedom of Speech is guaranteed to be free as long as it’s housed on a platform driven by ad-based revenue?

I think the distinction needs to be made that freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences.

[StruggleBus 3922]

5 minutes ago, Biff Tannen said:

I think the distinction needs to be made that freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences.

[Cajun 11722]

6 hours ago, clapclapclap said:

Getting back to the thread topic of Elon Musk, a majority of American's approve of his most recent venture:

 

 

So hold on just one second?  Was Vajayjay just defeated?

UNPRECEDENTED!!!!

[Cajun 11722]

6 hours ago, clapclapclap said:

 

Fooking double post

Edited April 27, 2022 by Cajun

[Surly Bevo 25139]

26 minutes ago, Biff Tannen said:

I think the distinction needs to be made that freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences.

The Bill of Consequences has a nice ominous ring to it.  Let's do this shit.

[F250 28814]

18 minutes ago, Surly Bevo said:

The Bill of Consequences has a nice ominous ring to it.  Let's do this shit.

The principle of FAFO doesn't require government intervention. It's just a simple law of nature, causality.

To test the theory. Tell your wife or girlfriend she is fat and needs to be more attractive like a frenemy of hers.

 

[workswithseed 2110]

28 minutes ago, F250 said:

The principle of FAFO doesn't require government intervention. It's just a simple law of nature, causality.

To test the theory. Tell your wife or girlfriend she is fat and needs to be more attractive like a frenemy of hers.

 

Hey, you also have the right to remain silent. Do you just hate the 1st amendment or something?

[Buzzrock 14936]

Visionary

[bluto 4942]

4 hours ago, BLKNSTY said:

the worlds richest man basically bought all our DMs and took the company private. Twitter doesn’t use end to end encryption on DMs so that shit is wide tf open to anyone who has access. 100% private company with minimal oversight.

yeah yeah I know, what about Zuck? I don’t think that’s exactly the same - it’s a public company with a board and Zuck has at least some track record. Shareholders and fiduciary responsibility etc. yeah yeah companies are already making bank off my data but that’s keywords or some dude making $35k a year who has no beef with me reading about how I’d eat my coworkers ass on a silver plate. yeah yeah what about Bezos? I dont DM on Amazon and I could give two fucks about WP as I’ve never even visited their website.

I have absolutely no doubt this shit is going to end badly. Some real sensitive DMs bout to get leaked. Genuine question, what’s stopping Elon from busting open all the DMs of anyone who’s looked at him sideways/his competitors/governments and politicians capable of being blackmailed and fucking up their shit? This some NSA level access but at least we can chalk that up to terrorism.

I know the legal system is there but this mf really called a guy a pedo on Twitter and still one the defamation suit.

I’m in for the ride though baby, crank up that simulation shit baby

Went back through that defamation lawsuit, jaw nearly dropped when I saw the plaintiff attorney was Lin Wood. Simulation be crazy 

[52-80 19226]

7 hours ago, MrBig said:

I’m an old. Why does Twitter need an algorithm? If it’s all free speech, why can’t it be free of algorithms? Why can’t it let every search term come through without “enhancing” feeds based on what you like or dislike? 

Its all algorithms nowaday

[Nice Guy Eddie 13521]

Almost any search result has an algorithm behind it. It has to prioritize what it thinks you want to see based on your past experience. 

Twitter has a method that once you search, you can select Latest, and you see "everything." I'm sure there is still some type of filter applied such as not seeing tweets in other languages with your word being the only one in English.

Search results are not about helping you, they're about keeping you on the platform. doesn't everyone know this? 

[BabaYaga 15305]

10 hours ago, MrBig said:

Freedom of Speech is guaranteed to be free as long as it’s housed on a platform driven by ad-based revenue?

The algorithm feeds your own biases.  Every tech engine has them, from Google to FB.  If all you search for are puppies, you'll be saturated with animal posts and puppies for the most part.  Now ratchet that up by a factor of ten for political posts.  They learned early on that outrage/anger fuels time on the platform a lot more than happy posts.  

[52-80 19226]

28 minutes ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

Search results are not about helping you, they're about keeping you on the platform. doesn't everyone know this? 

Why does this have to be mutually exclusive or even antagonistic?

If someone searches for pegging, theyre very explicitly interested in pegging, and the probability that they want to see more stuff about pegging is as close as 1 as possible.  “Keeping them on the platform” to see pegging is already implicit in the request - they wanted it. 

[Cheeseweasel 26438]

1 minute ago, 52-80 said:

Why does this have to be mutually exclusive or even antagonistic?

If someone searches for pegging, theyre very explicitly interested in pegging, and the probability that they want to see more stuff about pegging is as close as 1 as possible.  “Keeping them on the platform” to see pegging is already implicit in the request - they wanted it. 

Reminder to self: Delete Cookies.

[52-80 19226]

6 minutes ago, Cheeseweasel said:

Reminder to self: Delete Cookies.

[workswithseed 2110]

10 minutes ago, Cheeseweasel said:

Reminder to self: Delete Cookies.

NowThis?

[TXSG8R 3362]

15 hours ago, MrBig said:

I’m an old. Why does Twitter need an algorithm? If it’s all free speech, why can’t it be free of algorithms? Why can’t it let every search term come through without “enhancing” feeds based on what you like or dislike? 

Ads are part of it, but generating traffic is as well. More traffic = more ads = more revenue. Controversial topics generate a lot of traffic, both pro and con, so the algorithm will favor them.  Machines don’t know if shit is true or not, it doesn’t matter as long as the numbers go up and ad revenue increases. The AI can be manipulated by bots boosting bullshit trends, which the AI will signal boost to the masses, which is how disinformation can spread. Hence the human intervention up to this point. 

[Cheeseweasel 26438]

4 minutes ago, TXSG8R said:

Controversial topics generate a lot of traffic, both pro and con, so the algorithm will favor them.

This is why social media will be the demise of our great nation. Creating "rage" where little exists to drive revenue is fucking evil. 

[Wulaw Horn 19147]

1 minute ago, Cheeseweasel said:

This is why social media will be the demise of our great nation. Creating "rage" where little exists to drive revenue is fucking evil. 

It really is bad conceptually. 

[TXSG8R 3362]

Just now, Cheeseweasel said:

This is why social media will be the demise of our great nation. Creating "rage" where little exists to drive revenue is fucking evil. 

As captainant has said before, it’s the data stupid. It would be one thing if this was being used purely to drive ads, but it’s not. They are using the data to drive traffic, and it can be easily manipulated to signal boost crazy shit to people that are predisposed to be manipulated by it. It creates the rabbit holes for people to follow, they think they are “doing their research” but in reality they are being led by the nose to more fringe shit so they will keep generating traffic. 

[Longhornlove 4875]

11 minutes ago, Cheeseweasel said:

This is why social media will be the demise of our great nation. Creating "rage" where little exists to drive revenue is fucking evil. 

I've said for years that social media is a detriment to society and still believe it yet here I am, mostly for the football talk though. I have seen so many people lose their jobs just over social media it is insane. It is like a drug for some people. Just wander over to the CR and you will see countless examples.

Edited April 27, 2022 by Longhornlove

[MonkeyDoughnut 10352]

2 minutes ago, Longhornlove said:

I've said for years that social media is a detriment to society and still believe it yet here I am, mostly for the football talk though. I have seen so many people lose their jobs just over social media it is insane. It is like a drug for some people. Just wander over to the CR and you will see countless examples.

I don't know how parents of girls handle it. I've only heard how destructive it is to teen girls from stories my boys share. It's incredible the power it has over their happiness.

[Brisketexan 105273]

43 minutes ago, 52-80 said:

Why does this have to be mutually exclusive or even antagonistic?

If someone searches for pegging, theyre very explicitly interested in pegging, and the probability that they want to see more stuff about pegging is as close as 1 as possible.  “Keeping them on the platform” to see pegging is already implicit in the request - they wanted it. 

Look, I was searching for a giant rooster, okay?

[BabaYaga 15305]

4 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

Look, I was searching for a giant rooster, okay?

Brisket was "looking for recipes"......;)

[Laxtonto 12090]

15 minutes ago, TXSG8R said:

Ads are part of it, but generating traffic is as well. More traffic = more ads = more revenue. Controversial topics generate a lot of traffic, both pro and con, so the algorithm will favor them.  Machines don’t know if shit is true or not, it doesn’t matter as long as the numbers go up and ad revenue increases. The AI can be manipulated by bots boosting bullshit trends, which the AI will signal boost to the masses, which is how disinformation can spread. Hence the human intervention up to this point. 

This here is why attacking the bots, which Twitter really has been hesitant to do because it will crush their published user numbers, should be the first major task.

If there are not bots influencing the discussion towards conflict to generate engagement, for whatever reason, you should get a more muted and dynamic discourse in aggregate. The issues with twitter and discussion are that they center around initial volume to then decide the direction to which group would find this topic useful/interesting. If bots are designed to provide a structured response "X" as soon as big national following person "Y" tweets, the algorithm will then push it to a certain subset of users. The problem is that you have 1000 tweets that are instant automated designed replies and it pushes the tweets to a polarized group instead of a legitimate discussion back and forth.

I do text mining research as one of my primary areas for publications, and the number of times I see word for word the exact same tweet for 100+ accounts with all the same or similar timestamps is frustrating, to say the least. Now they are using in essence something like Grammarly to subtly change the tweets to not get instantly swept up by the filter, but bots are noticeably driving the discussion.

 

Until you kill the bots, or at least make them ineffective, there is no real discussion on twitter because those running the bots know how to overwhelm and therefore manipulate twitter to push tweets to certain segments.

 

[Moby Ric 2058]

12 minutes ago, Longhornlove said:

I've said for years that social media is a detriment to society and still believe it yet here I am, mostly for the football talk though. I have seen so many people lose their jobs just over social media it is insane. It is like a drug for some people. Just wander over to the CR and you will see countless examples.

Yep.  I have a FB account but barely use it.  No twitter, insta, snapchat or any other social media stuff.  Everyone is somebody now, or trying to be, living their fake made up lives and posting it to see how many likes they get.  I don't see the draw.  I post here and read other boards but this is not real life, this is the internet.  I do not post every damn thing I do every day on SM.  I go on my trips and don't post about them, I do cool stuff, don't brag about it.  So many moths to the flame.

Wife and I have a theory that the more people post about how awesome their lives are, the more miserable they are in real life.  There are some examples here, but they are all over FB etc.

[Laxtonto 12090]

14 minutes ago, Longhornlove said:

I've said for years that social media is a detriment to society and still believe it yet here I am, mostly for the football talk though. I have seen so many people lose their jobs just over social media it is insane. It is like a drug for some people. Just wander over to the CR and you will see countless examples.

I have a doc student working on that area for his dissertation. The work from home push during COVID has made this a problem that has become much more of a "big issue" vs when it was just dealing with mobile devices at work or limiting access on company devices.

It is terrifying how similar to some people the reaction to a "like" or retweet is to in essence cocaine. The dopamine release that a segment of the population gets from social media is a very scary problem that many people do not consider. 

 

[Cheeseweasel 26438]

2 minutes ago, Laxtonto said:

I have a doc student working on that area for his dissertation. The work from home push during COVID has made this a problem that has become much more of a "big issue" vs when it was just dealing with mobile devices at work or limiting access on company devices.

It is terrifying how similar to some people the reaction to a "like" or retweet is to in essence cocaine. The dopamine release that a segment of the population gets from social media is a very scary problem that many people do not consider. 

 

Yup, we are all just rats in a Skinner box. 

[TXSG8R 3362]

6 minutes ago, Laxtonto said:

This here is why attacking the bots, which Twitter really has been hesitant to do because it will crush their published user numbers, should be the first major task.

If there are not bots influencing the discussion towards conflict to generate engagement, for whatever reason, you should get a more muted and dynamic discourse in aggregate. The issues with twitter and discussion are that they center around initial volume to then decide the direction to which group would find this topic useful/interesting. If bots are designed to provide a structured response "X" as soon as big national following person "Y" tweets, the algorithm will then push it to a certain subset of users. The problem is that you have 1000 tweets that are instant automated designed replies and it pushes the tweets to a polarized group instead of a legitimate discussion back and forth.

I do text mining research as one of my primary areas for publications, and the number of times I see word for word the exact same tweet for 100+ accounts with all the same or similar timestamps is frustrating, to say the least. Now they are using in essence something like Grammarly to subtly change the tweets to not get instantly swept up by the filter, but bots are noticeably driving the discussion.

 

Until you kill the bots, or at least make them ineffective, there is no real discussion on twitter because those running the bots know how to overwhelm and therefore manipulate twitter to push tweets to certain segments.

 

I posted this in the twitter thread in CR, because I thought that was where twitter specific stuff was supposed to be discussed, but Ill repost here.  

Quote

To expand on this now that I’ve had some coffee, this is a simple trap for Elon’s free speech rhetoric. How do you filter people from bots? Twitter was filtering speech that caught bots and people, but the goal was to stop disinformation, so baby with the bath water and all that. Elon wants to avoid infringing on people, which I think he will find is close to impossible. Plenty of people repeat the same shit bots are saying (see yesterdays ivermectin trend). So he can’t do a simple filter on “ivermectin works” because he will catch plenty of people in the same dragnet. 

He is going to find it extremely hard to filter bots without targeting speech. Any smart bot operator will intentionally include “live” accounts that mirror their bots so they can cry foul when the filter pulls based on metrics. The idea of validating people based on anything technical is laughable. They aren’t going to verify accounts via IP, because that’s easy to defeat, and not everyone gets a public IP anyway. Elon’s baby Starlink runs on CGNAT for fucks sake. It’s also difficult to imagine them using govt IDs considering the global footprint of Twitter. 

Killing bots will be a lot harder than Elon and the GP thinks.  

[BabaYaga 15305]

1 minute ago, Laxtonto said:

I have a doc student working on that area for his dissertation. The work from home push during COVID has made this a problem that has become much more of a "big issue" vs when it was just dealing with mobile devices at work or limiting access on company devices.

It is terrifying how similar to some people the reaction to a "like" or retweet is to in essence cocaine. The dopamine release that a segment of the population gets from social media is a very scary problem that many people do not consider. 

 

Oh, it's very, very real.  It's also an outlet for the disenfranchised who can sit in their parents basements and "be somebody" online.  It's an addiction like any other.  It taps into the lizard part of our brains that need purpose and conflict as well as exploiting vulnerabilities.  

[BabaYaga 15305]

3 minutes ago, Cheeseweasel said:

Yup, we are all just rats in a Skinner box. 

Love me sum Skinner'

[wildcat09 29376]

10 hours ago, workswithseed said:

Hey, you also have the right to remain silent. Do you just hate the 1st amendment or something?

That's based on the 5th amendment.

[Moby Ric 2058]

Social media has also launched new careers that require no actual talent or hard work to achieve.  The millionaire youtube stars, and influencers that have made a shit ton and have inspired tons of young people that they can do this as well.  Now the world is overflowing with wanna be social media stars that are somewhat pathetic.  Clever to use SM to make a great deal of money but in many cases it is acquired with no actual sweat and blood.

[texasdago 7577]

Don't get me started on TikTok and how kids are addicted to it.  I personally L O A T H E it.

[TXSG8R 3362]

I also question why people believe Elon would have any real incentive to kill the bots and/or change how the AI works.  It will kill what little money Twitter makes.  Unless he really intends to throw 44 billion down the drain, his proposed cures will likely kill revenue.  Removing bots = removing a fuck ton of ad revenue.  Stopping the AI from pushing people into fringe shit = reduced traffic, which will lower ad revenue.  

[Laxtonto 12090]

1 minute ago, TXSG8R said:

I posted this in the twitter thread in CR, because I thought that was where twitter specific stuff was supposed to be discussed, but Ill repost here.  

Killing bots will be a lot harder than Elon and the GP thinks.  

This line of thought only works if all users are treated the same and all are counted the same. Musk has already hinted on more than one occasion that he thinks users would prefer a cheap subscriber-based system to make everyone verified and only use those in user counts for followers and so it would follow that you then also use that in your topic dispersion algorithm.

So say the cost of a bot army of 100k followers is now 200k a month if you want to astroturf a topic. Yes, they can push multiple messages a day, but this will be cost-prohibitive for most smaller foreign operations and will limit the total number of bots in the paid space. So now it becomes a much easier process to hunt, track, and eliminate bots from the verified pool and use the harshest penalty mechanisms possible.

 

This is also true of limiting the spam by bots for reporting tweets and accounts in general. This will once again reduce the overload on twitters side for verifying these reports.

 

In addition, now Musk has a revenue stream as well to help push the Twitter bottom line and still can streamline moderation and the number of employees needed.

 

Twitters issue was that they let the bots run amock so much that no one trusted the outcome of the algorithm and therefore everyone sees it as biased. 

[BabaYaga 15305]

3 minutes ago, Moby Ric said:

careers that require no actual talent or hard work to achieve.

[Cheeseweasel 26438]

10 minutes ago, TXSG8R said:

Killing bots will be a lot harder than Elon and the GP thinks. 

Baby steps. There are smart people out there who can work on it but they have to have someone at the top who wants it gone. I don't have faith that the current leadership at Twitter (et al) wants the bots stopped.

[Moby Ric 2058]

Just now, TXSG8R said:

I also question why people believe Elon would have any real incentive to kill the bots and/or change how the AI works.  It will kill what little money Twitter makes.  Unless he really intends to throw 44 billion down the drain, his proposed cures will likely kill revenue.  Removing bots = removing a fuck ton of ad revenue.  Stopping the AI from pushing people into fringe shit = reduced traffic, which will lower ad revenue.  

I do recall seeing Elon in an interview that AI is the biggest threat to mankind.  So the removal of all the AI on twitter might have something to do with his revamping plans.  But who the fuck knows what Musk is going to do.  He is a wildcard that is actually pretty entertaining to watch.

[TXSG8R 3362]

1 minute ago, Laxtonto said:

This line of thought only works if all users are treated the same and all are counted the same. Musk has already hinted on more than one occasion that he thinks users would prefer a cheap subscriber-based system to make everyone verified and only use those in user counts for followers and so it would follow that you then also use that in your topic dispersion algorithm.

So say the cost of a bot army of 100k followers is now 200k a month if you want to astroturf a topic. Yes, they can push multiple messages a day, but this will be cost-prohibitive for most smaller foreign operations and will limit the total number of bots in the paid space. So now it becomes a much easier process to hunt, track, and eliminate bots from the verified pool and use the harshest penalty mechanisms possible.

 

This is also true of limiting the spam by bots for reporting tweets and accounts in general. This will once again reduce the overload on twitters side for verifying these reports.

 

In addition, now Musk has a revenue stream as well to help push the Twitter bottom line and still can streamline moderation and the number of employees needed.

 

Twitters issue was that they let the bots run amock so much that no one trusted the outcome of the algorithm and therefore everyone sees it as biased. 

A subscription model will be the end of twitter.  People dont want to pay for shit on the internet.  

[Cheeseweasel 26438]

6 minutes ago, wildcat09 said:

That's based on the 5th amendment.

[Laxtonto 12090]

1 minute ago, TXSG8R said:

A subscription model will be the end of twitter.  People dont want to pay for shit on the internet.  

I bet there are many more that would be willing to pay for "free speech" than to move off of twitter to find an alternative.

Twitter has a niche that will be almost impossible to replicate. It is not incredibly technical, it can quickly push links, and it can provide rapid discourse. 

The beauty is that it doesn't have to be a subscription-only model. You just need to subscribe to be verified to be pushed by the algorithm or counted in the follower count of others for their influence metrics.

Musk's genius might be him selling something to the massive that in itself is already free.

[BabaYaga 15305]

1 minute ago, Laxtonto said:

I bet there are many more that would be willing to pay for "free speech" than to move off of twitter to find an alternative.

Twitter has a niche that will be almost impossible to replicate. It is not incredibly technical, it can quickly push links, and it can provide rapid discourse. 

The beauty is that it doesn't have to be a subscription-only model. You just need to subscribe to be verified to be pushed by the algorithm or counted in the follower count of others for their influence metrics.

Musk's genius might be him selling something to the massive that in itself is already free.

Twitter's value is in it's influence, not it's P&L.  It's use by the elite in govt., media, entertainment, news, etc. isn't going anywhere....who will themselves now be facing the age old trope of "just build something else" or "start your own site then".  

[Cheeseweasel 26438]

3 minutes ago, Laxtonto said:

I bet there are many more that would be willing to pay for "free speech" than to move off of twitter to find an alternative.

Twitter has a niche that will be almost impossible to replicate. It is not incredibly technical, it can quickly push links, and it can provide rapid discourse. 

The beauty is that it doesn't have to be a subscription-only model. You just need to subscribe to be verified to be pushed by the algorithm or counted in the follower count of others for their influence metrics.

Musk's genius might be him selling something to the massive that in itself is already free.

Paid subscribers get a lottery ticket for a free Space-X ride every quarter.