Originally published at: Xitter fined $380k over failure to respond to child exploitation concerns | Boing Boing
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On the one hand, $380,000 doesn’t even amount to a rounding error compared to the purchase price of Twitter.
On the other hand, Elon Musk has done such a terrible job running the place that $380,000 may now represent a significant chunk of Twitter’s current annual revenue.
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for a company whose path to profitability seems to be reduce headcount faster than we churn advertisers, I think every penny counts. As Musk is famously not paying bills or meeting contractual obligations around severance – with the NLRB getting up and in his stuff – I would think the bell is tolling for he.
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My question about these fines (including the pending EU one), is what mechanism the state has to collect these? Elno doesn’t like to follow laws or pay what he owes, and is closing offices - and probably pretty willing to cease operating in given countries - to avoid bills. I could see Elno simply refusing to pay fines, and there being a fight to try to force Xitter to pay up.
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No business operations in Australia also means no revenue from Australia.
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Multibillionaire fined the equivalent of a penny, with threats that it could end up costing him the equivalent of a couple dollars if he balks.
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Does anyone else pronounce Xitter as “shitter”? I forget who joked about treating “xi” like the Chinese pronunciation, but I can’t get it out of my head now.
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Reboing:
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It’s a BoingBoing tradition since August. Be there or be square. 
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I suspect it’s more likely he’ll just ignore it (as much as he can), but how much revenue is Twitter getting from Australia? It’s less than six million active users there - in theory, I don’t know how many are bots, etc. - so in balance, losing out on that revenue to not pay a $380k fine might be worth it. And would they necessarily need to lose all revenue? If they’re not operating there, it wouldn’t stop people from having accounts, and could they not keep selling ads on those users’ accounts? (Though then we’re back to the issue of the ads not making money, but it sounds like Australian Twitter users aren’t in the demographic likely to be subscribers, so ad revenue is probably all he’s getting out of Australia.)
And sure, cutting out Australia would undermine his whole attempt to turn Twitter into an “everything app,” but so does everything else he’s been doing to the site, so… (The issue will really be magnified in the case of the EU fines - in both the amount of money and size of the market. He may not be able to afford to stay, but he can’t afford to leave, either.)
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Australia could just block Xitter entirely if the company refuses to operate in compliance with the country’s laws.
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I’m good with SHITTER…
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Using rough back-of-the-napkin math,if Musk is fined $380k every day for Xitter misbehavior, he’d run out of cash in the year 3825.
The only thing that will inflect his behavior is shutting off these offending services in territories where he flagrantly violates the law, or jail time.
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ELON MUSK BUSINESS GENIUS! /S
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