Twitter C/D

lately it's been all boner pills and weed gummies, tbh I'm kind of considering combining them

gummie boners

Basically podcast ads

Vince Bevins is such a mensch

At least in his reporting— The Jakarta Method is a must read book

https://www.wsj.com/tech/elon-musk-twitter-x-takeover-walter-isaacson-5f553fa

niedermeyer on bsky: "Just read this entire excerpt from the upcoming Walter Isaacson book on Elon Musk, and am gratified to report that no amount of friendly spin can keep him from coming across as an incredibly off-putting, unhealthy, vindictive weirdo. The punchline is that Elon couldn't get out of overpaying for Twitter by tens of billions of dollars so he made up for it by screwing Twitter execs out of $200m in severance and stock options and called it a W. You know, real Ben Franklin, Albert Einstein, Leonardo DaVinci shit. Good going, Walter."

That led Bankman-Fried to call Musk in May. “My bullshit detector went off like red alert on a Geiger counter,” Musk says. Bankman-Fried began talking rapidly, all about himself. “He was talking like he was on speed or Adderall, a mile a minute,” Musk says. “I thought he was supposed to be asking me questions about the deal, but he kept telling me the things he was doing. And I was thinking, ‘Dude, calm down.’” The feeling was mutual; Bankman-Fried thought Musk seemed nuts. The call lasted a half hour, and Bankman-Fried ended up neither investing nor rolling over his Twitter stock.

lol

game recognize game

gotta sign up for that

Update: X will only collect biometric data from Premium users w/ @EdLudlow https://t.co/U9rW1lHKZK

— aisha counts (@aishacounts) August 31, 2023

time to roll out what i call "soylent blue"

that logo looks like an aeroplane next to two vertical structures

this shit makes the gilded age look like the New Deal

Gilded Age work week was six days, workdays were 12 hours, child labor was rampant and life expectancy under 60. I'd still prefer this era, bad as it is.

wow checkmate

just due diligence

produces stagnation

twitter or whatever it's called requires ongoing child labour to function so what are we doing here

thank god it's them instead of you

me so chastened

how could I not see that the Gilded Age should be viewed as the good old days compared to now?

Let's wait and see how many striking actors and writers get gunned down by Pinkertons

sign me up for the saudis getting my DNA

solidarity to the actors & writers but they're not exactly mining cobalt are they

assassination of union leaders, like child labour, mostly outsourced to the global South these days

news flash: the late nineteenth century also had colonialism

The Gilded Age was fantastic if you were a robber baron or a corrupt politician.

nothing in my statement to make anyone think there wasn't colonialism in the 19th century but sure aimless fume away

my comment was not solely directed at your post, Daniel, but more toward multiple posts that imply that the persistence of capitalism and colonialism in the present day somehow negates my dissent to the idea that ex-twitter's new policy "makes the gilded age look like the New Deal"

things bad then things bad now different but also same

pedantic nitpicking of rhetorical statements uncool

sometimes hyperbole overshoots into just plain silliness

most of us could stand to be sillier

sometimes it does feel like this pic.twitter.com/towU6yBIcU

— katy (@gewittrderrosen) August 31, 2023

Something went wrong, but don’t fret — it’s not your fault.

Never noticed this laughable message before.

That's my attitude towards the world in general.

Because Twitter is no longer a publicly traded company with a public stock price there’s no straightforward way to assess its current value. But most market analysts estimate the company is now worth no more than a third of the $44 billion Musk paid for it a year ago. To be fair, Musk clearly overpaid for the company. He paid a premium over the company’s current stock price and even that price was probably inflated. But there’s no question Musk’s erratic and destructive reign has dramatically damaged the company, torching its public reputation and leading to a catastrophic decline in ad revenues which Musk and independent press reports have pegged at between 50% and 60%.

But Musk has found a new scapegoat: the Jews. Or rather, the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish community’s largest and oldest organization dedicated to fighting not only anti-Semitism but all forms of racial and religious bigotry and other forms of discrimination. But I suspect the “rather” or the distinction in general might be lost on Musk’s 155 million Twitter followers. Over the past several days Musk has gone on a tear claiming that the catastrophic decline in his company’s value since he purchased it is mostly or entirely the fault of the ADL and churning up Twitter debates that at least big time anti-Semitic accounts think is clearly boosting their cause.

As is often the case, Musk’s attacks have evolved out of tag teaming with notorious anti-Semitic accounts on the platform. It kicked off on Friday when Musk responded to a tweet by Keith Woods, an Irish white nationalist and self-described “raging anti-Semite.”

“ADL has tried very hard to strangle X/Twitter,” Musk told Woods.

From here, Musk went on to gin up support for the #BanTheADL hashtag while alternately claiming that he should ban the group but might not, before rolling into claims that the ADL was responsible for tens of billions of dollars of Twitter losses. This all culminated with Musk announcing he was being forced to sue the ADL “to clear our platform’s name on the matter of anti-Semitism.”

Discussing the defamation suit, Musk claimed the ADL could “potentially be on the hook for destroying half the value of the company, so roughly $22 billion.” Later he said that “giving them the maximum benefit of the doubt,” the ADL might only be responsible for $4 billion in damages.

Along with these claims of monetary damages came a storm of what can only be called the bullying hate speech we associate with … well, rabid anti-Semites. This included claiming that the ADL is actually “the biggest generators of anti-Semitism” on Twitter. That was in response to another Woods tweet calling the ADL “the most pro-Hitler organization I’ve even seen.” Indeed, most of Musk’s five day tear was made up of jumping into the comments of notorious anti-Semites and toasting or agreeing with their attacks. He chimed in approvingly when alt-righter Mike Cernovich suggested that many anti-Semitic accounts are run by the DNC to justify advertiser boycotts of Twitter.

As is often the case with Musk he claims he positively absolutely isn’t anti-Semitic at all. But self-professed anti-Semites don’t seem to agree. When Musk angrily declared that since purchasing Twitter “the @ADL has been trying to kill this platform by falsely accusing it & me of being anti-Semitic” the anti-Semitic owner of the far-right Gab social media site chimed in, “Welcome to my daily life for the past seven years.”

Of course, it’s worth noting that even the narrow claims of monetary losses are absurd on their face. Musk bought Twitter on a self-declared crusade for his version of “free speech.” That meant welcoming back tens of thousands of accounts which had been banned for a mix of anti-Semitism, racism and various forms of harassing behavior. This rather predictably spurred a wave of hate speech and headlines which scarred off most advertisers. Again, it’s little more than 2+2 equalling 4 but Musk not liking the results. Various other controversies and firing half the company’s employees haven’t helped, either in reputation terms or keeping the site online. That was uncomplicated and predictable. Musk’s response is basically to sue math.

As a factual matter, U.S. courts have consistently ruled that calling someone or some thing an “anti-Semite” is subjective and protected 1st Amendment free speech. The same applies to racist, white supremacist and other related labels. Of course, there are other ways to get into court. And a bottomless bank account gives an almost endless number of ways to explore them.

But the key here is not really about lawsuits or the ins and outs of defamation. It’s that the richest man in the world who holds a commanding position in near-earth-orbit space delivery, electronic cars and global communications spent the weekend churning up hate against Jews as the source of his financial losses. Musk is sometimes compared to the innovator Henry Ford, founder of Ford Motor Company. And the comparison seems increasingly apt, if not in the way many have intended.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/musks-epic-antic-labor-day-weekend-against-the-jews

Whoa, I saw some Musk tweet the other day about ad revenue and the ADL, and I thought he must mean some other ADL, where the A stood for Advertising.

wow sounds like the adl... controls the media

I like how Elon's denial of anti-semitism removes all doubt

The five minute research version:

At least two coalitions, Stop Hate for Profit (which includes the ADL and appears to just have blurbs on the associated groups' websites) and Stop Toxic Twitter (who have their own site which is still live) have run campaigns calling for advertiser boycotts. Reportedly, the ADL started advertising on twitter/X again this year

Unless there's some specific momentum behind the ADL's campaign, which there does not appear to be, it's definitely... at least weird... to specifically call out that group.

thought the same "surely he's not going full Kanye" but nope

shit is idiotic for so many reasons but if this somehow actually does go to trial it seems real easy for the ADL to prove all the ways the platform has gotten more Nazi-friendly

Elon seems to be doing the Trump thing where it's like "well I didn't explicitly say Hitler was right about everything so calling me a Nazi is defamation", seems like a bad PR strategy

my guess is that someone specifically mentioned the ADL to Elon (for reasons) and he has absolutely no idea who is or isn't boycotting him and is happy to do some casual anti-semitism

ya it's deeply funny that he's calling out one of the few remaining advertisers that actually isn't boycotting him right now

although I actually question how much of the lost ad revenue is really because of that, when it comes to ad buys it's all about the bottom line and I suspect the real story is just that it's not profitable to advertise on Twitter right now

this isn't going to trial the intent is to explicitly make anti-semitism a-ok on "x"/Twitter

This all culminated with Musk announcing he was being forced to sue the ADL “to clear our platform’s name on the matter of anti-Semitism.”

Discussing the defamation suit, Musk claimed the ADL could “potentially be on the hook for destroying half the value of the company, so roughly $22 billion.”

this thought process is amazing

not remembering who is boycotting you is kind of an object permanence issue, which he's very prone to. you throw one thing in front of him ("the current thing!") and that's all he can think about

he probably didn't think about trans people at all until his kid publicly disowned him and now everything's about that, too

he follows some of the most hatefully wrong people in the world and interacts with them and promotes them every day

imo it really comes down to anti-hate groups saying "you can't do that" to him which he sees as adversarial whereas hate groups are actively saying "they can't do that" which gives him a target for his ire

As is often the case with Musk he claims he positively absolutely isn’t anti-Semitic at all. But self-professed anti-Semites don’t seem to agree.

reminds me of this burn

“Now, I’m not calling Mr. DeSantis a racist, I’m simply saying the racists believe he’s a racist,” Gillum said.