Dang. Guess I’ll just wait until they get discounted down to $8.
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Free range rats!
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That’s a really good point. If a foreign power wanted to run, say, 10,000 bots on Twitter, it’s almost like they’re paying Musk for the privilege of hosting their propaganda.
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This information on what they retain is easily available if you download your archive. They appear to be doing GDPR style recordkeeping for everyone, even if they’re not compling with the removal parts anywhere but the EU. Your archive (or an archive) will show all the information they keep and harvest.
For me, it was enough personal and private information I didn’t supply to them for me to come to the clear conclusion that were I a Saudi dissident I would absolutely be murdered for it and they have the information available to track me down from my metadata and twitter held / harvested / ingested data.
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Deactivated your Twitter account but wish there were more you could do? Check out Twitter app reviews on your respective app store and answer “Was this review helpful - Yes” to all the one-star reviews, and, “Was this review helpful - No” to all the five-star reviews. And feel free to screenshot this and post it on Twitter!
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Damn it Tami! I have enough trouble with insomnia already.
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No rodent cuddle-buddy for you, gotcha.
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Sadly, I think you are correct. John Scalzi has been making thin excuses for staying on Twitter that basically boil down “I have a huge audience and I like to sound clever to all of them”. I really like Scalzi and he’s among the most left-leaning and progressive-action-oriented people you’ll find. If he won’t leave, I don’t think anyone of consequence will.
What changed is wealth inequality. We suddenly have to care because these people run our lives in ways they never did before. Often more than governments. Furthermore, the press made them into celebrities because of the US myth of meritocracy. Believing that wealth is a measure of competence combined with extreme wealth inequality has naturally led to the very wealthy being spotlighted in media as icons of competence.
Here in Canada it’s still like it was in the US before the extreme inequality. I couldn’t tell you the name of a single CEO here. We do have billionaires, but not many and I couldn’t tell you any of their names.
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That’s disappointing…
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He even riffed on Musk by name in his recent novel The Kaiju Preservation Society. There was a bit where the protagonist tells off a wannabe supervillain talking about “your buddy Elon’s satellites…” and the villain is obviously offended by the implication that the two would be friends.
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If Elon Musk is sincere about wanting to make the platform better (as opposed to actually wanting to create chaos and confusion) i think he’s making two very big incorrect assumptions: that only well meaning real people will buy the blue checkmarks (seems prime opportunity for internet trolls and bad state actors and other groups with money to buy more prominence on the site) and that the problem with the content was always too many bots… I’m not denying there could be a bazillion bots on there but i know for a fact living through the Trump era that there are very real people with very awful viewpoints who are determined to promote and spew those ideas. Hell after all we’ve been through Trump loving republicans are still polling better than democrats in much of this country (whether they are representative of actual populations is another question but you cant deny there are a LOT of them)… those aren’t all bots being polled.
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… morphed into? I’m surprised so many are just now realizing this. Musk has always been a “hard core Right Winger”. People just weren’t paying attention before because he was making expensive cars people wanted and doing space things. He’s always shown himself to be a narcissistic right-wing neoliberal asshole.
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Is that “@ChrisWarcraft” identity actually Elon, or a clever hack/manipulation of software that no longer has support staff?
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I’m actually kind of excited to see what happens next. I seriously doubt this guy’s plan was $7.99 checkmarks. Nobody would have backed his buy with that business plan.
He’s Chris Kluwe, former punter in the NFL whose career was basically ended because he came out pro gay.
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What do you mean? He has no viable plan. He has no viable plan for Starlink and people support him there. He has no viable plan for the Boring company, yet people support him there too. Arguably he’s gotten lucky with Tesla, but that company is exceedingly overvalued and long term will likely have its lunch eaten by Hyundai, GM, Toyota, etc. What on earth makes you think that against all patterns in the past, he has a viable plan for Twitter to make money? He isn’t even doing a good job of boiling the frog to make it a believable disinformation tool, no, he’s just randomly engaging in “creative destruction” out and hoping it makes this famously unprofitable company worth more than the $44 billion dollars he paid into it.
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