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

Bozo_Casanova · October 10, 2023

50 minutes ago, Doc Sam Beckett said:

Elon is such a piece of shit

Concerning

Bozo_Casanova · October 10, 2023

3 hours ago, FirstTimeCaller said:

Not sure is srs. Rivan's are fine from the sides and back... until you see the front of it. It looks like a bad Japanese cartoon character

atomheartbevo · October 10, 2023

2 hours ago, Brisketexan said:

No, see, that's just "citizen journalists," and it's the surest way to get the truth. People will fact-check for themselves, and totally will NOT bite on misinformation.

I'm sure that Elmo's citizen journalists will be more than happy to chip in if Twitter gets hit with billions in fines.

Parliament · October 10, 2023

Please tell me those are fake.

MonkeyDoughnut · October 11, 2023

I like the look of the Rivians, but didn't realize how small they are

cmontexas · October 11, 2023

This man is a real life supervillain orchestrating World War 3

F250 · October 11, 2023

4 hours ago, NoName said:

NoName when Elon starts trolling from space.

Schulz2.0 · October 11, 2023

4 hours ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

Seen better fight challenges on TexAgs.

NoName · October 11, 2023

this guy really thinks he is out here and funnier than Chappelle. dude has no sense of humor and shows it daily.

"cybertruck can have any color you want as long as it's nothing" is not funny. also it's a reply to yourself?!

also Boring Company is having TCEQ issues.

https://observer.com/2023/10/elon-musks-boring-company-faces-new-environmental-violations-in-texas/

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The Boring Company could be a boon for Bastrop, but according to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), Musk’s company has repeatedly failed to comply with environmental regulations. New violations filed by the agency in August allege it has been discharging concrete truck washout water inappropriately while failing to minimize the discharge of pollutants. The Boring Company also received notices for its lack of stabilization measures and its release of stormwater associated with industrial activities.

These issues are having a “direct impact” on the people of Bastrop County, according to Chap Ambrose, a local software engineer. “There are farmers in the area who have ponds and their surface water is affected by this stormwater control, absolutely,” he told Observer. “The pH level of the water is important because they’re using it on plants.”

Ambrose, 39, has followed the development of both the Boring Company and SpaceX, which has also introduced development sites in the county, in videos and images posted to his Twitter. In addition to chronicling the Boring Company’s activities, he has submitted complaints to TCEQ over concerns that its dirt excavations could lead to water contamination. “They will continue to be delayed and continue to have stronger opposition until they realize the impact of what they’re doing and take responsibility to do things the right way,” he said. The Boring Company did not respond to requests for comment.

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These are far from the first warnings cited against Musk’s activities in Bastrop County. During its tenure in the county, Boring has received several TCEQ violations over issues like pollution control systems and design erosion controls. Musk’s tunneling company has additionally attracted the attention of the Texas Department of Transportation for an unpermitted driveway and received a notice from Bastrop County over unauthorized sewage tanks. In March, a public meeting was convened to address the Boring Company’s permit request to discharge treated wastewater into the nearby Colorado River. “Seeing it repeatedly over time, from all these different sources, it’s becoming more frustrating,” said Ambrose.

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“There is a lot of optimism still,” said Ambrose, noting the economic growth and job opportunities the Boring Company is bringing to Bastrop. But Musk’s work “needs to be done well and right and legally, so that we can all be safe here,” he said. “We’re not just tools and background pieces—you moved to a community and you’re part of it whether you want it or not because the people who live here are part of it.”

Pig Bellmont · October 11, 2023

What authority does the county agency actually have here for enforcement? Some angry letters and fines won’t cut it.

NoName · October 11, 2023

1 hour ago, Pig Bellmont said:

What authority does the county agency actually have here for enforcement? Some angry letters and fines won’t cut it.

TCEQ doesn't really fuck around and they hold grudges

atomheartbevo · October 11, 2023

2 hours ago, Pig Bellmont said:

What authority does the county agency actually have here for enforcement? Some angry letters and fines won’t cut it.

30 minutes ago, NoName said:

TCEQ doesn't really fuck around and they hold grudges

Not to mention that Bastrop farmers/ranchers, their friends/family and supporters, vote and will be raising hell both in Bastrop and in Austin if Elmo is fucking up their water (especially with all of the dry patches they've endured the past few years). Musk doesn't know how to read a room, and I doubt he understands the dynamics of rural Texans. Water is kind of one of their biggest concerns.

Chopper · October 11, 2023

On 10/10/2023 at 9:07 AM, atomheartbevo said:

So after her last interview went so well, she's discovered she has other stuff she needs to be doing .

Translation: "Between now and the end of the year I will be working hard with my public relations and legal team to disembark the X train in a peaceful manner that guarantees the safety of me and my family. I am redoubling my efforts because 'Mama' is about to have a full-scale nervous breakdown."

atomheartbevo · October 12, 2023

So the whole thing about trying to force you out of the browser and into the twitter app is not a fuckup, apparently they are trying to get people away from browser-based tweeting/reading, because of ad-blockers and other browser extensions and the like, as they control everything within the twitter app.

It may have started when Elmo forced them to ditch headlines, not sure, but yeah, I hope he keeps these annoying little fucking changes up, and makes even more people flee. Meta keeps updating Threads (I've been watching build numbers and even if I don't have a Changelog handy, it's pretty easy to see that they are grinding away at the stuff people are begging for).

The Atlantic covered how Elmo and Yac don't understand social media.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/10/twitter-x-decline-negative-user-experience/675570/

Quote

The focus on the user metrics at all, though, belies a bigger problem. A social platform needs to provide a positive user experience. People have to like it. Yaccarino and especially Musk continuously fail to understand this.

You can’t hold users hostage and force them to endure a subpar experience, to consume content they don’t want, and then expect them to return. The socialin social media isn’t an empty adjective: History has shown that social platforms that antagonize their own users don’t last long. Yet Musk continues to dismantle and alienate the precise communities that gave the platform its power. He has continued to misunderstand this dynamic, and his hostility toward his own user base shows why X will ultimately fail.

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Musk appears to be unable to understand X outside the bounds of his own direct experience of it, and that has resulted in users abandoning the platform in droves. “Elon has these really strongly held personal views on what the internet should look like, which aren’t really shared by most internet users,” Rocky Cole, a former online-harm researcher at Google in New York City, told me. “He forces his worldview on the Twitter community, and I think the result is why you’re seeing people leaving.”

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Musk’s bitterness toward long-standing Twitter users and refusal to learn lessons from platforms past has sent X into a death spiral. In May, Fidelity marked down the value of its equity stake in the company, declaring the platform worth roughly one-third of what Musk had paid for it. Last month, Musk alluded to a further decrease, claiming a loss in advertising revenue that, by his own math, means Twitter could be worth just $4 billion, a 90 percent drop in value since he purchased the app. He has attempted to cater to a small faction of political extremists, doling out tens of thousands of dollars to figures such as Andrew Tate, but he has yet to introduce any meaningful features that serve the broader user base. Meanwhile, he’s suggested that he may make the majority of the platform’s users actually pay to use the app, and this week rolled out a confusing new change that ruins how links are displayed.

atomheartbevo · October 12, 2023

And fake videos like the one below that somebody posted in response to a story about a family being slaughtered, that are meant to stir mentally ill people and/or gaslight them, a "truther" video that denies the Hamas attacks happened, they aren't being pulled down like they were pre-Elmo.

atomheartbevo · October 12, 2023

This was mentioned last week (I think same article even), and ties into the headline removal and them trying to force everybody into the app (because they know ad blockers will adapt)

https://mashable.com/article/twitter-x-new-clickbait-ad-format

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Mashable has confirmed this ad format with numerous users from across X and have seen a variety of different ads running this bizarre new format that just consists of written copy text, a photo, and a fake avatar that's sole purpose is to make the ad look like an organically posted tweet.

The type of content being promoted in the ads that Mashable has viewed appear to be consistent with ads found in spammy, low quality "chumbox" advertising – typically defined as those clickbait ads found at the bottom of posts on content farm sites – made popular by native ad networks like Taboola.

Meanwhile, Mastodon had 400,000+ more monthly users than they thought

https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/09/mastodon-actually-has-407k-more-monthly-users-than-it-thought/

Quote

Open source and decentralized social network Mastodon has more users than it thought. The service, which competes with X (formerly Twitter) and other newcomers like Threads, Bluesky, Pebble and Spill, had been undercounting its users due to a network connectivity error, according to founder and CEO Eugen Rochko, and actually has 407,814 more monthly active users than it had been reporting previously. The adjustment also included a gain of 2.34 million registered users across an additional 727 servers that had not been counted due to the error.

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The issue was impacting the metrics reported on Mastodon’s statistics aggregator on its joinmastodon.org/servers page, which had been undercounting users between October 2 and October 8. This issue has now been resolved, Rochko said. That leaves Mastodon with a total of 1.8 million monthly active users at present, an increase of 5% month-over-month and 10,000 servers, up 12% — a testament to Mastodon’s current upward swing at a time when the nature of X continues to remain in flux.

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The latest disruptive move by X owner Elon Musk has seen the company remove headlines from link previews on the platform for aesthetic reasons and to keep users on the site instead of clicking away. The move has angered publishers, some of which suggested they would scale back on posting to X given the declining traffic the network was sending their way as of late. Prior to that, Musk announced he was planning to charge all users a small fee to use X, though it’s unclear how serious his statements were as CEO Linda Yaccarino didn’t seem to be aware of his ideas when asked during an interview. Later, Yaccarino told X debt holders that the company would introduce three tiers of payment plans for the network in an effort to grow revenues. And now, X has been discovered to be running clickbait ads that users can’t block.

Not surprised, given the decentralized nature of Mastodon.

Neonmoon · October 12, 2023

EU not happy

Brisketexan · October 12, 2023

EU not happy

Hell say fuck you, get Twitter blocked in the EU, and then complain that they’re silencing him.
His incel fanbois will be by his side to the very end.

NoName · October 12, 2023

Six Months Ago NPR Left Twitter. The Effects Have Been Negligible

https://niemanreports.org/articles/npr-twitter-musk/

Quote

Six months later, we can see that the effects of leaving Twitter have been negligible. A memo circulated to NPR staff says traffic has dropped by only a single percentage point as a result of leaving Twitter, now officially renamed X, though traffic from the platform was small already and accounted for just under two percent of traffic before the posting stopped. (NPR declined an interview request but shared the memo and other information). While NPR’s main account had 8.7 million followers and the politics account had just under three million, “the platform’s algorithm updates made it increasingly challenging to reach active users; you often saw a near-immediate drop-off in engagement after tweeting and users rarely left the platform,” the memo says.

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On Instagram, KCUR’s strategy is less about driving clicks and more about sharing information within the app. “Instagram doesn’t drive traffic, but frankly neither did Twitter,” Rosenberg says. NPR, meanwhile, has been experimenting with Threads, a new app built by Instagram that launched in July, where NPR is among the most-followed news accounts. Threads delivers about 63,000 site visits a week — about 39 percent of what Twitter provided. But NPR’s memo notes that clicks aren’t necessarily the priority, and the network is “taking advantage of the expanded character limit to deliver news natively on-platform to grow audiences — with enough information for a reader to choose whether to click through.”

text

Spoiler

Six Months Ago NPR Left Twitter. The Effects Have Been Negligible

The numbers confirm what many of us have long suspected — that Twitter wasn’t worth the effort, at least in terms of traffic

Article by

Gabe Bullard

@gbullard

Tagged with

Elon Musk NPR Twitter

In April, NPR left Twitter after Elon Musk labeled the outlet as "U.S. state-affiliated media." Six months later, the effects have been negligible Graeme Sloan/Sipa USA via AP Images

A lot of people threaten to leave Twitter. Not many of them have actually done it.

This was true even before Elon Musk’s purchase of the platform a year ago. But the parade of calamities since — cutting back on moderation, unplugging servers, reinstating banned accounts, replacing verified check marks with paid subscription badges, throttling access to news sites, blaming the Anti-Defamation League for a decline in advertising — has made stepping away more appealing, either because the timeline is toxic or because the site simply doesn’t function the way it used to.

Last April, the company gave NPR a reason to quit — it labeled the network “U.S. state-affiliated media,” a designation that was at odds with Twitter’s own definition of the term. NPR stopped posting from its account on April 4. A week later, it posted its last update — a series of tweets directing users to NPR’s newsletters, app, and other social media accounts. Many member stations across the country, including KUOW in Seattle, LAist in Los Angeles, and Minnesota Public Radio, followed suit.

Six months later, we can see that the effects of leaving Twitter have been negligible. A memo circulated to NPR staff says traffic has dropped by only a single percentage point as a result of leaving Twitter, now officially renamed X, though traffic from the platform was small already and accounted for just under two percent of traffic before the posting stopped. (NPR declined an interview request but shared the memo and other information). While NPR’s main account had 8.7 million followers and the politics account had just under three million, “the platform’s algorithm updates made it increasingly challenging to reach active users; you often saw a near-immediate drop-off in engagement after tweeting and users rarely left the platform,” the memo says.

There’s one view of these numbers that confirms what many of us in news have long suspected — that Twitter wasn’t worth the effort, at least in terms of traffic. “It made up so little of our web traffic, such a marginal amount,” says Gabe Rosenberg, audience editor for KCUR in Kansas City, which stopped posting to Twitter at the same time as NPR. But Twitter wasn’t just about clicks. Posting was table stakes for building reputation and credibility, either as a news outlet or as an individual journalist. To be on Twitter was to be part of a conversation, and that conversation could inform stories or supply sources. During protests, especially, Twitter was an indispensable tool for following organizers and on-the-ground developments, as well as for communicating to the wider public. This kind of connection is hard to give up, but it’s not impossible to replace.

The week after NPR and KCUR left Twitter, the Ralph Yarl shooting happened in Kansas City. Rosenberg says it was “painful” to stay off Twitter as the story unfolded. “We had just taken away one of our big avenues for getting out information, especially in a breaking news situation — a shooting, one that deals with a lot of really thorny issues of racism and police and the justice system. And a lot of that conversation was happening on Twitter,” Rosenberg says. Instead of rejoining Twitter, KCUR set up a live blog and focused on posting to other social networks. NPR’s editors worked with the station to refine SEO and help spread the story. Even though the station itself wasn’t posting to Twitter, Rosenberg says the story found an audience anyway because very engaged local Twitter users shared the piece with their networks. And while the station informed these users through its website, it also reached new users on Instagram, where Rosenberg says KCUR has “tripled down” its engagement efforts.

On Instagram, KCUR’s strategy is less about driving clicks and more about sharing information within the app. “Instagram doesn’t drive traffic, but frankly neither did Twitter,” Rosenberg says. NPR, meanwhile, has been experimenting with Threads, a new app built by Instagram that launched in July, where NPR is among the most-followed news accounts. Threads delivers about 63,000 site visits a week — about 39 percent of what Twitter provided. But NPR’s memo notes that clicks aren’t necessarily the priority, and the network is “taking advantage of the expanded character limit to deliver news natively on-platform to grow audiences — with enough information for a reader to choose whether to click through.”

NPR posts less to Threads than it did to Twitter, and the team spends about half as much time on the new platform as it did on the old. Danielle Nett, an editor with NPR’s engagement team, writes in the staff memo that spending less time on Twitter has helped with staff burnout. “That’s both due to the lower manual lift — and because the audience on Threads is seemingly more welcoming to publishers than on platforms like Twitter and Reddit, where snark and contrarianism reign,” Nett writes.

These strategies move publishers further away from seeing social media as a source of clicks. This could be a risky pivot away from traffic sources, given that NPR and many member stations have laid off staff or made other cuts due to declining revenues. But the social media clickthrough audience has never been guaranteed; a Facebook algorithm change this year also tanked traffic to news sites. Instead, recognizing that social media is not a key to clicks seems like a correction to years of chasing traffic through outside platforms.

There were signs of social media’s waning importance before the Twitter sale as well as predictions that the era of social media-driven news is coming to an end. But changes to X in the last year have only accelerated these trends, underlining that social media is less rewarding to publishers and less fun for users than it used to be. “The quality of our engagement on the platform was also suffering” before April, Nett wrote in a followup email. “We were on average seeing fewer impressions and smaller reach on our tweets, despite keeping a similar publishing cadence. And I know this is anecdotal, but as someone looking at the account every day, spam replies were getting much more frequent — starting to overpower meaningful feedback and conversation from audiences.” Musk’s now-retracted relabeling of NPR could be seen as a last straw, or as an open door to leave a platform that had lost its utility.

By many estimates, active daily users on Twitter/X are in decline. Not everyone who leaves does it like NPR, in a flurry of headlines and with a final post pinned to their timeline. Instead, it’s more mundane. They check less and less often, finding it less useful, less compelling. It’s not easy to decide to back away; there’s still a fear about leaving — a fear of missing out on a great conversation or a new joke. But as a platform becomes less reliable — either editorially or technically — staying becomes more fraught. And as NPR has demonstrated, you may not be giving up all that much if you walk away.

Bozo_Casanova · October 12, 2023

2 minutes ago, NoName said:

Six Months Ago NPR Left Twitter. The Effects Have Been Negligible

https://niemanreports.org/articles/npr-twitter-musk/

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text

Hide contents

Six Months Ago NPR Left Twitter. The Effects Have Been Negligible

The numbers confirm what many of us have long suspected — that Twitter wasn’t worth the effort, at least in terms of traffic

Article by

Gabe Bullard
@gbullard

Tweet

Share

Email

Print

Tagged with

Elon Musk NPR Twitter

In April, NPR left Twitter after Elon Musk labeled the outlet as "U.S. state-affiliated media." Six months later, the effects have been negligible Graeme Sloan/Sipa USA via AP Images

A lot of people threaten to leave Twitter. Not many of them have actually done it.

This was true even before Elon Musk’s purchase of the platform a year ago. But the parade of calamities since — cutting back on moderation, unplugging servers, reinstating banned accounts, replacing verified check marks with paid subscription badges, throttling access to news sites, blaming the Anti-Defamation League for a decline in advertising — has made stepping away more appealing, either because the timeline is toxic or because the site simply doesn’t function the way it used to.

Last April, the company gave NPR a reason to quit — it labeled the network “U.S. state-affiliated media,” a designation that was at odds with Twitter’s own definition of the term. NPR stopped posting from its account on April 4. A week later, it posted its last update — a series of tweets directing users to NPR’s newsletters, app, and other social media accounts. Many member stations across the country, including KUOW in Seattle, LAist in Los Angeles, and Minnesota Public Radio, followed suit.

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Six months later, we can see that the effects of leaving Twitter have been negligible. A memo circulated to NPR staff says traffic has dropped by only a single percentage point as a result of leaving Twitter, now officially renamed X, though traffic from the platform was small already and accounted for just under two percent of traffic before the posting stopped. (NPR declined an interview request but shared the memo and other information). While NPR’s main account had 8.7 million followers and the politics account had just under three million, “the platform’s algorithm updates made it increasingly challenging to reach active users; you often saw a near-immediate drop-off in engagement after tweeting and users rarely left the platform,” the memo says.

There’s one view of these numbers that confirms what many of us in news have long suspected — that Twitter wasn’t worth the effort, at least in terms of traffic. “It made up so little of our web traffic, such a marginal amount,” says Gabe Rosenberg, audience editor for KCUR in Kansas City, which stopped posting to Twitter at the same time as NPR. But Twitter wasn’t just about clicks. Posting was table stakes for building reputation and credibility, either as a news outlet or as an individual journalist. To be on Twitter was to be part of a conversation, and that conversation could inform stories or supply sources. During protests, especially, Twitter was an indispensable tool for following organizers and on-the-ground developments, as well as for communicating to the wider public. This kind of connection is hard to give up, but it’s not impossible to replace.

The week after NPR and KCUR left Twitter, the Ralph Yarl shooting happened in Kansas City. Rosenberg says it was “painful” to stay off Twitter as the story unfolded. “We had just taken away one of our big avenues for getting out information, especially in a breaking news situation — a shooting, one that deals with a lot of really thorny issues of racism and police and the justice system. And a lot of that conversation was happening on Twitter,” Rosenberg says. Instead of rejoining Twitter, KCUR set up a live blog and focused on posting to other social networks. NPR’s editors worked with the station to refine SEO and help spread the story. Even though the station itself wasn’t posting to Twitter, Rosenberg says the story found an audience anyway because very engaged local Twitter users shared the piece with their networks. And while the station informed these users through its website, it also reached new users on Instagram, where Rosenberg says KCUR has “tripled down” its engagement efforts.

On Instagram, KCUR’s strategy is less about driving clicks and more about sharing information within the app. “Instagram doesn’t drive traffic, but frankly neither did Twitter,” Rosenberg says. NPR, meanwhile, has been experimenting with Threads, a new app built by Instagram that launched in July, where NPR is among the most-followed news accounts. Threads delivers about 63,000 site visits a week — about 39 percent of what Twitter provided. But NPR’s memo notes that clicks aren’t necessarily the priority, and the network is “taking advantage of the expanded character limit to deliver news natively on-platform to grow audiences — with enough information for a reader to choose whether to click through.”

NPR posts less to Threads than it did to Twitter, and the team spends about half as much time on the new platform as it did on the old. Danielle Nett, an editor with NPR’s engagement team, writes in the staff memo that spending less time on Twitter has helped with staff burnout. “That’s both due to the lower manual lift — and because the audience on Threads is seemingly more welcoming to publishers than on platforms like Twitter and Reddit, where snark and contrarianism reign,” Nett writes.

These strategies move publishers further away from seeing social media as a source of clicks. This could be a risky pivot away from traffic sources, given that NPR and many member stations have laid off staff or made other cuts due to declining revenues. But the social media clickthrough audience has never been guaranteed; a Facebook algorithm change this year also tanked traffic to news sites. Instead, recognizing that social media is not a key to clicks seems like a correction to years of chasing traffic through outside platforms.

There were signs of social media’s waning importance before the Twitter sale as well as predictions that the era of social media-driven news is coming to an end. But changes to X in the last year have only accelerated these trends, underlining that social media is less rewarding to publishers and less fun for users than it used to be. “The quality of our engagement on the platform was also suffering” before April, Nett wrote in a followup email. “We were on average seeing fewer impressions and smaller reach on our tweets, despite keeping a similar publishing cadence. And I know this is anecdotal, but as someone looking at the account every day, spam replies were getting much more frequent — starting to overpower meaningful feedback and conversation from audiences.” Musk’s now-retracted relabeling of NPR could be seen as a last straw, or as an open door to leave a platform that had lost its utility.

By many estimates, active daily users on Twitter/X are in decline. Not everyone who leaves does it like NPR, in a flurry of headlines and with a final post pinned to their timeline. Instead, it’s more mundane. They check less and less often, finding it less useful, less compelling. It’s not easy to decide to back away; there’s still a fear about leaving — a fear of missing out on a great conversation or a new joke. But as a platform becomes less reliable — either editorially or technically — staying becomes more fraught. And as NPR has demonstrated, you may not be giving up all that much if you walk away.

Interesting!

Francisco 2.0 · October 12, 2023

10 hours ago, Brisketexan said:

Hell say fuck you, get Twitter blocked in the EU, and then complain that they’re silencing him.
His incel fanbois will be by his side to the very end.

That probably will spur him to lanch X VPN, which will be offered alongide your X Blue or Premium or Pro or whatever the hell it is called subscription in order to get around any future geo IP blocking.

Hefeweizen · October 12, 2023

35 minutes ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

Interesting!

There are so many things to dislike about the guy, the attempts at pithy one liners are the runny diarrhea topping on the Elmo shit sundae.

atomheartbevo · October 12, 2023

Hey guys, Musk is doing something amazing:

atomheartbevo · October 12, 2023

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/twitter-elon-musk-free-speech-x-documentary-excerpt/

Quote

In the documentary, former Twitter employees, including Yoel Roth, former head of trust and safety at Twitter, share firsthand accounts of Musk’s consequential and at times discrepant choices on issues including free speech and hate speech. Roth tells FRONTLINE that in the early days of Musk’s tenure at the social media company, he was initially instructed to stop all content moderation on the platform.

“I explained that that wouldn’t be a viable approach because there’s lots of types of moderation that are simply non-negotiable — around combating terrorism, around protecting children,” Roth says in the above excerpt from Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover. “I suggested that we not shut down those lines of work, and he agreed.”

Musk would soon be tested.

“There was a trolling campaign that was supposedly testing the waters of the new Twitter,” Roth says in the excerpt. “The idea was that trolls should come to the platform and post racist content as proof that Elon was now allowing racism in a way that the previous administration didn’t. And so, there was a surge in racism.”

Faced with calls for major advertisers to pause their ad spending on the platform, Musk then changed course, pushing the team to take a more aggressive approach to content moderation than under Twitter’s previous owners, Roth tells FRONTLINE.

“My directions from Elon directly were: shut it down. Get rid of all of it,” Roth says. “He actually even wanted us to go further than we had previously and said, it’s not just about targeted hateful conduct, attacks on somebody. He’s like, just take all of this stuff down. Get rid of the slurs. Get rid of all of it. And he pushed us to take a more aggressive position, shutting down free speech. He was doing it out of a recognition that advertisers objected to this content and were judging him and the new Twitter by our ability to effectively moderate it.”

As the documentary recounts, though, when advertisers continued to stay away and revenue plummeted, Musk began pushing back: “Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation and we did everything we could to appease the activists,” Musk tweeted at the time. “Extremely messed up! They’re trying to destroy free speech in America.”

That’s when, the documentary recounts, Musk made a choice that seemed antithetical to his stated position as a free speech absolutist: Inside Twitter, he asked Roth and his team to block posts supporting the advertising pause.

It was a “very hypocritical” decision, according to Musk biographer Walter Isaacson.

“You had people urging boycotts because they thought Twitter was allowing too much hate speech, and Musk decided he wanted to shut down some of these people who were advocating a boycott,” Isaacson, author of Elon Musk, says in the excerpt. “Well, that goes against free speech principles. That’s pure political speech.”

Roth pushed back, Isaacson says; Twitter ultimately did not block the posts. But Roth says he found himself “spending more and more of my time each day dealing with impulsive and erratic questions and decisions.”

“I managed to push back on some of Elon’s requests to ban users outside of our policies, but I was sort of left wondering, at what point does that not work anymore? At what point does he not listen to me? At what point do I get fired for this?” Roth tells FRONTLINE. “And I realized that pushing back on individual bad decisions wasn’t going to be enough. And so, I quit.”

Nivek · October 12, 2023

Not to mention that Bastrop farmers/ranchers, their friends/family and supporters, vote and will be raising hell both in Bastrop and in Austin if Elmo is fucking up their water (especially with all of the dry patches they've endured the past few years). Musk doesn't know how to read a room, and I doubt he understands the dynamics of rural Texans. Water is kind of one of their biggest concerns.

What do you mean? He put on a cowboy hat.

NoName · October 12, 2023

8 minutes ago, Nivek said:

What do you mean? He put on a cowboy hat.

HE'S HAD IT FOR 20 YEARS!

Celery Man · October 12, 2023

On 10/10/2023 at 3:23 PM, texasdago said:

Those are going to look awesome after a ding or two... or better yet, a Central Texas hail storm.

tomahawk dunk · October 12, 2023

On 10/11/2023 at 9:50 AM, atomheartbevo said:

Not to mention that Bastrop farmers/ranchers, their friends/family and supporters, vote and will be raising hell both in Bastrop and in Austin if Elmo is fucking up their water (especially with all of the dry patches they've endured the past few years). Musk doesn't know how to read a room, and I doubt he understands the dynamics of rural Texans. Water is kind of one of their biggest concerns.

I really hope he is held accountable in regards to the water issue but I don't have high hopes.

Edited October 12, 2023 by tomahawk dunk
typo

Chooky · October 12, 2023

14 hours ago, Brisketexan said:

Hell say fuck you, get Twitter blocked in the EU, and then complain that they’re silencing him.
His incel fanbois will be by his side to the very end.

He'll do all of that but he won't say "fuck you." He'll post a picture of a turd or something and then awkwardly post nine crowbarred jokes where either "schwing" or "a sphincter says what" is the punchline to each joke. And when nobody but his direct minions laugh, he'll convince himself that he's too abstract and deep to be understood. Then he'll fire one of his minions out of misdirected resentment that twitter didn't think his jokes were fire.

Fudge Nuggets · October 13, 2023

22 hours ago, Neonmoon said:

EU not happy

💩💩💩💩💩

atomheartbevo · October 13, 2023

Quote

Twitter has never been the most popular social media platform. It’s never been the coolest, it’s never had the most features, and it’s never been the biggest moneymaker. It has, at times, been the weirdest, and many groups given to high-velocity posting have maintained valuable communities there over the years. But Twitter’s X factor—sigh, pun intended—has always been its strength as a platform for news.

In moments of crisis, Twitter has been essential—no more so in times of bloody conflict. Not only do professional journalists relay on-the-ground realities, but so do eyewitnesses and citizen journalists. War being war, the fruits of Twitter’s role as an information funnel have never been perfect. But they’ve been a helpful first draft of the news.

Quote

In contrast, under the ownership of Elon Musk, who bought the platform for $44 billion last October, the platform now called X has become a vortex of false claims and doctored footage. It’s a fog-of-war machine.

That’s been the unmistakable reality in the days after Hamas’ deadly terrorist attack on Israeli civilians—a land, air, and sea operation that has killed at least 1,200 people in Israel and led to another 900 deaths in Gaza following Israel’s military retaliation.

Quote

Musk’s changes to the foundation of how Twitter works have not only rendered Twitter useless as a means of making sense of the conflict as (or even hours after) it unfolds, but made it actively counterproductive for users trying to figure out what’s going on. As Musk and Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino have rolled back the platform’s rules of engagement and rid their ranks of the content-moderation teams and tools that actually keep X trustworthy, they’ve also put in place a system that fundamentally incentivizes the spread of misinformation during times of mass panic and confusion, in part because X is now a platform that pays for viral content.

Basically, if you can take old photos and videos and post them as current info, and they take off virally, you get paid.

Brisketexan · October 13, 2023

Twitter has never been the most popular social media platform. It’s never been the coolest, it’s never had the most features, and it’s never been the biggest moneymaker. It has, at times, been the weirdest, and many groups given to high-velocity posting have maintained valuable communities there over the years. But Twitter’s X factor—sigh, pun intended—has always been its strength as a platform for news.
In moments of crisis, Twitter has been essential—no more so in times of bloody conflict. Not only do professional journalists relay on-the-ground realities, but so do eyewitnesses and citizen journalists. War being war, the fruits of Twitter’s role as an information funnel have never been perfect. But they’ve been a helpful first draft of the news.

In contrast, under the ownership of Elon Musk, who bought the platform for $44 billion last October, the platform now called X has become a vortex of false claims and doctored footage. It’s a fog-of-war machine.
That’s been the unmistakable reality in the days after Hamas’ deadly terrorist attack on Israeli civilians—a land, air, and sea operation that has killed at least 1,200 people in Israel and led to another 900 deaths in Gaza following Israel’s military retaliation.

Musk’s changes to the foundation of how Twitter works have not only rendered Twitter useless as a means of making sense of the conflict as (or even hours after) it unfolds, but made it actively counterproductive for users trying to figure out what’s going on. As Musk and Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino have rolled back the platform’s rules of engagement and rid their ranks of the content-moderation teams and tools that actually keep X trustworthy, they’ve also put in place a system that fundamentally incentivizes the spread of misinformation during times of mass panic and confusion, in part because X is now a platform that pays for viral content.

Basically, if you can take old photos and videos and post them as current info, and they take off virally, you get paid.

It’s taken the one thing that Twitter was actually relatively good for (breaking news events)….and made it fucking useless for that thing.
Elmo is a super brain genius for sure.

NoName · October 13, 2023

https://jalopnik.com/tesla-misses-its-own-cybertruck-launch-date-again-1850891571

Tesla Misses Its Own Cybertruck Launch Date, Again

Quote

How many promised delivery dates have we had since the Cybertruck was first unveiled by Tesla back in 2019? By my count, the planned launch date of Q3 2023 was deadline number five and, guess what, it’s come and gone with no sign of the Cybertruck being any closer to hitting the highway.

According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, Tesla boss Elon Musk had promised to hold a special delivery event for the all-electric pickup truck at the end of the third quarter in 2023. The third quarter concluded with the end of September and despite a few test cars being spied last month after crash testing, we’re no closer to an actual delivery of the angular monstrosities. As the WSJ reports:

Originally due out in 2021, the Cybertruck has undergone multiple delays, ratcheting up pressure on Tesla to sustain its sales growth with an aging lineup and as electric-vehicle demand is showing signs of weakness.

In April, on the company’s first-quarter earnings call, Musk said a delivery event for consumers would likely be held in the third quarter to mark the start of sales.

Seemingly as soon as he announced the delivery event was coming, Musk began making up excuses for why it might actually be missed. According to the WSJ, this included citing the truck’s angular design, which Musk says is much harder to manufacture, and the amount of tech that must be refined before the truck can hit the road.

Despite missing his Q3 deadline, Musk now has another date to aim for on Cybertruck deliveries: the end of 2023. According to the WSJ, the end of the year is when Musk says his company will begin delivering trucks to customers. So, eyes on the highway reader, let’s see if I have to write another one of these posts on January 1.

CooterBrown · October 13, 2023

Can I assume that the electric 4-wheeler that was originally announced as a Cybertruck option isn't happening?

Chopper · October 13, 2023

Muscovy invented a new ad where you can't tell it's an ad let alone who the advertiser is. The legality is in doubt.Their existence may be because Muscovy has no paid ad inventory available to display.

https://mashable.com/article/twitter-x-new-clickbait-ad-format

Excerpts below. click the article for examples.

Quote

X, the Elon Musk-owned platform formerly known as Twitter, has begun serving its users with a weird new ad format and it's one of the company's least transparent products yet. The rollout of these ads also provides the public with a hint regarding just how much the company is struggling to attract advertisers.

Multiple X users have reached out to Mashable over the past few days to report seeing a new type of ad in their For You feed that they had not previously come across on the platform. These new X ads don't allow users to like or retweet the ad posts. In fact, the new ad format also doesn't disclose who is behind the ad or that it is even an advertisement at all.

Mashable has confirmed this ad format with numerous users from across X and have seen a variety of different ads running this bizarre new format that just consists of written copy text, a photo, and a fake avatar that's sole purpose is to make the ad look like an organically posted tweet.

...

Quote

So, what does that mean? Users are likely seeing these ads because X no longer has any direct ad inventory to serve them. This could mean that these particular users seeing these ads are not being targeted by any brands that are running ads at the moment. Or brands that are advertising on X and targeting these users have exhausted their ad spend for the moment. It's also possible that these users have blocked brand accounts that would've targeted them with ads otherwise.

...

Quote

Without a display name or handle, it's also unclear to the user exactly who is behind the ad. The new ad format also doesn't disclose that it is an advertisement at all. There is no "promoted" or "ad" label on any of these types of ads that Mashable has seen. And, unlike most other websites that run chumbox clickbait advertising, X doesn't even disclose the ad network associated with these ads.

Pig Bellmont · October 14, 2023

“The National Labor Relations Board issued a complaint Friday against X — formerly known as Twitter — alleging the company illegally fired a worker over a tweet that challenged its return-to-office mandate.”

More at the link: https://www.axios.com/2023/10/13/labor-relations-board-twitter-x-musk

956 Worldwide · October 15, 2023

Parliament · October 15, 2023

I'm totally not defending the man, but YouTube's ads have been nearly as bad for years. Some dangerous health and fitness stuff out there.

Captainant · October 16, 2023

8 hours ago, Parliament said:

I'm totally not defending the man, but YouTube's ads have been nearly as bad for years. Some dangerous health and fitness stuff out there.

Qanon grew in large part thanks to the YouTube conspiracy hole. The late twenty teens saw some incredibly effective manipulation of social media algos by bad actors to amplify conspiracy and propaganda.

Francisco 2.0 · October 18, 2023

And there it is. Twitter is no longer free for new users in two countries:

https://help.twitter.com/en/using-x/not-a-bot

Quote

As of October 17th, 2023 we’ve started testing “Not A Bot”, a new subscription method for new users in two countries. This new test was developed to bolster our already significant efforts to reduce spam, manipulation of our platform and bot activity. This will evaluate a potentially powerful measure to help us combat bots and spammers on X, while balancing platform accessibility with the small fee amount. Within this test, existing users are not affected.

Here’s how this new test will work for new accounts on web in New Zealand and the Philippines:

Quote

Step One: Phone Verification

New accounts created on X, in these two countries, will first be required to verify their phone number.

Step Two: Select Your Subscription Plan

$1 USD Annual Fee (prices vary by country and currency). New users will be able to perform certain actions on the web version of the platform: post content, Like posts, Reply, Repost and Quote other accounts’ posts, Bookmark posts.

Quote

New users who opt out of subscribing will only be able to take “read only” actions, such as: Read posts, Watch videos, and Follow accounts.

This new program aims to defend against bots and spammers who attempt to manipulate the platform and disrupt the experience of other X users. We look forward to sharing more about the results soon.

Edited October 18, 2023 by Francisco 2.0

Ted Lange · October 18, 2023

Just erase every account that is name and a bunch of numbers, problem solved.

Hornius Emeritus · October 18, 2023

My view may be different from that of the rest of you because I have a significant Twitter presence, but I think that anything they can do to keep spam / advertising bs out of their Network will ultimately result in positive engagement.

Fudge Nuggets · October 18, 2023

Oooooooh, look at Mr. Big Shot here.

Pig Bellmont · October 18, 2023

9 hours ago, Hornius Emeritus said:

My view may be different from that of the rest of you because I have a significant Twitter presence, but I think that anything they can do to keep spam / advertising bs out of their Network will ultimately result in positive engagement.

Charging everyone to tweet is going to kill the platform for good

wildcat09 · October 18, 2023

10 hours ago, Hornius Emeritus said:

My view may be different from that of the rest of you because I have a significant Twitter presence, but I think that anything they can do to keep spam / advertising bs out of their Network will ultimately result in positive engagement.

C'mon man, this is silly. Spambots are on twitter because it's pretty profitable to run spambots on twitter. Most are operated by relatively sophisticated operations and adding $1 per bot is an infinitesimally small cost of doing business for them.

locodos · October 18, 2023

this move is not to minimize bots, it's to monetize bots... think of it as a bot medallion.

DefinitelyNotHollywoodColt · October 18, 2023

lol $1 annually.

That'll fix it.

Pancho · October 18, 2023

MonkeyDoughnut · October 18, 2023

2 hours ago, DefinitelyNotHollywoodColt said:

lol $1 annually.

That'll fix it.

It's the expense and difficulty in setting up tens of thousands of verifiable payment accounts that is the purpose of it, not the actual $1 amount. I have to think it will indeed have an impact.

texasdago · October 18, 2023

13 hours ago, Hornius Emeritus said:

My view may be different from that of the rest of you because I have a significant Twitter presence, but I think that anything they can do to keep spam / advertising bs out of their Network will ultimately result in positive engagement.

I love your account and have followed you on Twitter, Threads, FB... you name it. Its good stuff (except when you cross the line and post something that has aggies. Completely unacceptable). Anyhoo... He's killing Twitter. Lots of us who loved pre-Elron Twitter and were heavily engaged have straightup deactivated our accounts and deleted it. There are more people doing it. Each move he makes is another nail in the coffin. Soon the coffin will look like Pinhead.

And LOL giving that dude my CC number. Nope.

Edited October 18, 2023 by texasdago

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

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Six Months Ago NPR Left Twitter. The Effects Have Been Negligible

Six Months Ago NPR Left Twitter. The Effects Have Been Negligible

The numbers confirm what many of us have long suspected — that Twitter wasn’t worth the effort, at least in terms of traffic

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Six Months Ago NPR Left Twitter. The Effects Have Been Negligible

Six Months Ago NPR Left Twitter. The Effects Have Been Negligible

The numbers confirm what many of us have long suspected — that Twitter wasn’t worth the effort, at least in terms of traffic

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