But he is an idiot. His perpetual inability to stick to his agreements with the SEC agreements point to that. He just has sufficient wealth to insulate himself from the effects.
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He was smart enough to be born to wealthy parents. Not many have that kind of foresight. /s
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I’ve seen this meme a lot, seriously I do not think that “world hunger” can be ended with $6bn. The estimates I’ve seen of the number of malnourished people on Earth run from 600 million to 1 billion, and no, a one time expense of $6-$10 a head is not gonna get the job done. Even if Musk gave 95% of his wealth to this end, we’re talking $200-$500 a head, which might last what, six months?
Is there a source for this “UN figure of 6 billion” with details? Did Musk pull that number out of his ass, or did someone else give it to him?
I’m in a comedy class of my own on Twitter.
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EU warns Elon Musk over Twitter moderation plans
Brussels has warned Elon Musk that Twitter must comply with the EU’s new digital rules under his ownership, or risk hefty fines or even a ban, setting the stage for a global regulatory battle over the future of the social media platform.
Thierry Breton, the EU’s commissioner for the internal market, told the Financial Times that Elon Musk must follow rules on moderating illegal and harmful content online after Twitter accepted the billionaire’s $44bn takeover offer.
Breton said: “We welcome everyone. We are open but on our conditions. At least we know what to tell him: ‘Elon, there are rules. You are welcome but these are our rules. It’s not your rules which will apply here.’”
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A good in-depth look at what is known today about Elon and Twitter and where things could potentially go
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Aww, they missed Slashdot and digg. 
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I kind of miss StumbleUpon from 15 years ago.
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If you read the article in The Verge I wouldn’t even qualify that post as “trolling” (I wish I could include that word without triggering automatic review by a moderator. Hello there!) because he was actually raising a very legitimate concern: Musk has significant business interests in China, which is a country that has shown very little tolerance for tweets they don’t like. They threatened to kick out the NBA because one person made a statement in support of Hong Kong. Having the ability to shut down Tesla operations in China gives them huge leverage.
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I wasted so much time clicking “next” on that. It was like the Internet K-hole but with more options.
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Welp, that happened to Murdoch with MySpace, let’s see if history likes repeating itself again for shits & giggles
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Seems this is driving up activity on Mastodon, even if users there are still a fraction of what it is on Twitter.
Mastodon has its own moderation, too, but at least it seems to be less corporate/personality driven type of moderation like it can be/will (?) be on places like Twitter. Since Mastodon is hardly my first rodeo (cut my teeth on BBSes, Qlink, Compuserve, then USENET, and onto the commercialized/centralized 'net that led to today, so I’ve seen all kinds of moderation from none to extremely heavy-handed that is capricious and arbitrary) I tend to be very generous with the block feature with fascists, concern trolls, bandwagoners, mean people enforcing a clique, and self-appointed tone police, etc, too, so…
As I’ve seen others say elsewhere, I think the edgelords and Nazis will be very disappointed in the outcome of Elon’s Twitter, in the end. Assuming the sale happens.
I suppose there have always been options for people to go if Twitter is blown up by Elon and turned into 8chan, but the problem will be getting the traditional media to stop carrying it as if that version of Twitter (EMT) is “the news”.
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Well, and all that came before something as late to the game as geocities - which is quite a lot. Also, Slashdot is still a thing - not so sure about Digg, but I see Slashdot on aggregators and it’s still in my RSS reader.
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Mastodon has plenty of issues.
Apparently admins can read your DMs so that’s a no go for many folks. Obviously the question then remains can Twitter admins or devs read your DMs too? Either way, this is a going to be a show stopper for many users. On top of that, Mastodon instance owners can just wipe out your account info including the history of messages you published, meaning Mastodon isn’t a good alternative to Twitter.
I hope this spurs more development toward P2P self-hosted applications despite consumer facing ISPs actively discouraging/banning such applications from usage. People need to push back even if it means pissing off Comcast.
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I had a hard time even opening the “browse directory” on several Mastodon instances at some points today due to traffic. I’m sure this is well-trodden territory, but having “first select a community that will host you, it doesn’t really matter and you can change it any time, but it’s also a permanent part of your identity…” is such an immediate and paralyzing stumbling block.
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AFAIK, yes. Not encrypted.
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Oof, well that’s another sucky thing to be honest. But honestly I’m not surprised.
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Theoretically, this would mean that Elon can read Jeff’s mail now.
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Without actual end-to-end encryption, the default assumption I have is “anyone at said company/server instance can read your ‘personal’ messages”. That goes for so many platforms (Slack, Teams, Discord), with maybe XMPP/Jabber and Riot/Matrix as the few exceptions I can think of. As far as nuking your entire history, nothing says that cannot happen on something like Twitter. I don’t personally know of someone that has had that, but I hear how they arbitrarily block leftists from the platform with no explanation (driftglass, for example).
Yes, it’s really rather sad that many people take the view (not just ISPs, but they are certainly a key player) that peer to peer should not really be a thing, and even viewed with suspicion (threatening to block ports, arbitrary data caps, and so on ), and instead the assumption is that all things must be centralized for our own good or something to that effect.
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The cryptocurrency people have the saying “not your keys, not your coins”. The can be retroactively applied to the same assumptions people had about PGP/GPG and email for decades - email is basically on a postcard as far as privacy goes, unless you own the keys.
Same for “private” messages on virtually any platform but one that makes that a prominent feature (and I don’t know of any commercial ones that do this?). Slack, for example has no plans to add it… admittedly, doing encryption + convenience such as searching (as they point out in the article) are often orthogonal goals.
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