𝕏 / Twitter / X, the Social Media Platform Formerly Known as Twitter / "MUSK OWNS TWITTER"

[Pee Cola]

This thread needs moar satire.

--

Elon Musk: worse than Hitler

Woke World
By Titania McGrath
December/January 2023
[ original | archive ]

It is no exaggeration to say that Elon Musk’s annexation of Twitter is the most terrifying development in recent history. Only a fascist would seek to impose free speech on humanity.

This is why there has been such a chorus of execration from left-wing commentators, celebrities and influencers. On the day that Musk seized control of Twitter, Washington Post columnist Taylor Lorenz noted that it was “like the gates of hell opened on this site tonight”. Charlie Warzel in The Atlantic wrote that there was “an apocalyptic feel to the ordeal”.

But it was the Independent that really grasped the full gravity of this moment. Its headline read — “RIP Twitter, 2006-2022: Dead at the Hands of Elon Musk”. It is a testament to the cool-headed stoicism of left-wing journalists that they have managed not to overreact.

I also am trying my best to keep matters in perspective, but Musk’s takeover of Twitter is far worse than anything Hitler ever did. I do not approve of mass genocide, but it pales in comparison to providing a social media platform where Eddie Izzard might be misgendered.

The whole point of Twitter is to ensure that the masses aren’t exposed to wild conspiracy theories. If tweets aren’t censored, people might start to think that Covid-19 could have originated from a lab in Wuhan, or that there was something dodgy on Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Musk has argued that Twitter ought to be a place where all political viewpoints can be aired. But keeping people informed can have dire consequences. Democracy has no chance of working properly if people keep insisting on voting for the wrong candidates.

Like many on the left, I have decided to delete my Twitter account in protest. Musk won’t know what hit him. Without my wisdom on the platform, the company will soon collapse into oblivion. There will be an outcry, share prices will plummet, and Musk will come begging for me to return. But I shall stand firm.

Come to think of it, maybe I should wait until next week to delete my account. I’ve got a book to sell.

 

[Keystone]

This thread needs moar satire.

--

Elon Musk: worse than Hitler

Woke World
By Titania McGrath
December/January 2023
[ original | archive ]

It is no exaggeration to say that Elon Musk’s annexation of Twitter is the most terrifying development in recent history. Only a fascist would seek to impose free speech on humanity.

This is why there has been such a chorus of execration from left-wing commentators, celebrities and influencers. On the day that Musk seized control of Twitter, Washington Post columnist Taylor Lorenz noted that it was “like the gates of hell opened on this site tonight”. Charlie Warzel in The Atlantic wrote that there was “an apocalyptic feel to the ordeal”.

But it was the Independent that really grasped the full gravity of this moment. Its headline read — “RIP Twitter, 2006-2022: Dead at the Hands of Elon Musk”. It is a testament to the cool-headed stoicism of left-wing journalists that they have managed not to overreact.

I also am trying my best to keep matters in perspective, but Musk’s takeover of Twitter is far worse than anything Hitler ever did. I do not approve of mass genocide, but it pales in comparison to providing a social media platform where Eddie Izzard might be misgendered.

The whole point of Twitter is to ensure that the masses aren’t exposed to wild conspiracy theories. If tweets aren’t censored, people might start to think that Covid-19 could have originated from a lab in Wuhan, or that there was something dodgy on Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Musk has argued that Twitter ought to be a place where all political viewpoints can be aired. But keeping people informed can have dire consequences. Democracy has no chance of working properly if people keep insisting on voting for the wrong candidates.

Like many on the left, I have decided to delete my Twitter account in protest. Musk won’t know what hit him. Without my wisdom on the platform, the company will soon collapse into oblivion. There will be an outcry, share prices will plummet, and Musk will come begging for me to return. But I shall stand firm.

Come to think of it, maybe I should wait until next week to delete my account. I’ve got a book to sell.

This guy's original twitter account should be unbanned. Granted he probably doesn't have any use for it since he rather successfully built up his current satire persona Titania, but still.

 

[The Lawgiver]

In other news, Kanye West opines that Elon Musk may be a genetic hybrid of a chinaman and a south african supermodel, and that there could be an entire clone army of these hybrids out there.

View attachment 4001397

Oh god this reminds me of the guy fieri "mass produced antichrist" shitpost conspiracy theory plotline. Thank you kanye, very cool!

 

[George Lucas]

Some guy on kiwifarms.net has a complete meltdown/goes schizo over Musk's drop:
https://kiwifarms.net/threads/what-...twitter-at-5pm-et.137364/page-5#post-13627827
https://archive.ph/ekkPJ

NOTHINGBURGER! BLACK PR! DICK PICS! AAAAAAAAAAAAAHH!!

 

[Tree]

Is there a more active Elon thread or do not many people care? Can't say I blame them, though.

I mean look at this shit:

What a headline, by fox news no less, for a statement I imagine every average person who doesn't view Drumpf as an existential crisis would agree with if there was "massive and widespread fraud and deception", even say violations of the constitution to keep Trump out of office.

But Elon just agrees and amplifies it because he's conveniently a good ol constitutionalist now, quoting from the bible and everything. Accountability and justice? What are those? Just forgive your enemies without having them return what they stole. That way Elon gets to use it as leverage while he and his tech bro orbiters all magically become conservatives who support gays, rootlessness, and transhumanism.

It's all so very fake and gay. I hope I'm just being impatient.


Also they appear to have found the optimal level of mk-ultra juice to have Kanye alienate himself.

Some guy on kiwifarms.net has a complete meltdown/goes schizo over Musk's drop:
https://kiwifarms.net/threads/what-...twitter-at-5pm-et.137364/page-5#post-13627827

Says some dumb shit, but he sounds frustrated like me. Powerful people are far too nice to each other.

 

[WhiteNight]

Some guy on kiwifarms.net has a complete meltdown/goes schizo over Musk's drop:

This kiwifarms.net website looks like a real cesspit.

 

[ロボ﹏§¤r﹏h¶rœ]

EU've got to be joking! Elon has surprise meeting with Macron in New Orleans - as French President ominously warns Twitter boss to 'comply with European free speech regulations'​

Archive

Elon Musk claims his risk of his assassination is ‘quite significant’ following release of first installment of 'Twitter Files' that focused on Hunter Biden coverup​

Archive

 

[Zbk3VmLfujjzjxBd43tL]

What a headline, by fox news no less, for a statement I imagine every average person who doesn't view Drumpf as an existential crisis would agree with if there was "massive and widespread fraud and deception", even say violations of the constitution to keep Trump out of office.

No, I think a lot of people would agree it sets a bad precedent to overturn the Constitution just because someone found a glitch to cheat the election system, even if it benefits the guy you like. If Trump had his civics brain screwed on tight, he'd know the only way he could legally overturn the election is by Constitutional amendment or Supreme Court decision, not making some dumb statement about how election fraud justifies overturning the Constitution.

But you are right that here Elon gets to pretend he's a "reasonable" voice, never mind he openly said he's not unbanning a harmless weirdo like Alex Jones (but Andrew Anglin was okay lmao).

 

[6MillionCoofs]

If the Constitution was greater than a Presidant it would not have been able to so clearly be fucked with in the last several years and the last Election. It does in fact seem like the constituation is only important when it can be used to keep Trump out of power, either by ignoring it or saying you can’t ignore it, whichever is needed at the time.

 

[Celebrate Nite]

If the Constitution was greater than a Presidant it would not have been able to so clearly be fucked with in the last several years and the last Election. It does in fact seem like the constituation is only important when it can be used to keep Trump out of power, either by ignoring it or saying you can’t ignore it, whichever is needed at the time.

What was it that Biden said? "no amendment to the Constitution is absolute"?

Yea I think at this point they only use those document as toilet paper. Our forefathers must be rolling in their graves so hard they probably reached the other side of the globe by now.

 

[draggs]

Twitter is banning cheese pizza accounts at double the rate it was before Elon according to some cybersecurity guy

Is this the real reason the Yoel Roths of the world have such a hate boner for him? Can't get their usual boners now? Or is it that they're getting shown up by Elon doing double the work they did with a quarter of the employees?

 

[Dixieland Buckaroo]

Twitter is banning cheese pizza accounts at double the rate it was before Elon according to some cybersecurity guy

Is this the real reason the Yoel Roths of the world have such a hate boner for him? Can't get their usual boners now? Or is it that they're getting shown up by Elon doing double the work they did with a quarter of the employees?

For a chunk, it's both. But for most (I hope), it's the latter.

An issue a lot of tech companies have is they transition from agile start-up to monolothic megacorp that can't do anything. This is largely due to the build up of the middle-management and HR classes in an organization. The movie Office Space touched on this with the "I have eight different bosses," bit, only by some accounts at Twitter, it was ten managers to a coder, and the ratio of fat to effective coder was likely even higher. I wouldn't be shocked if they could lose 95% of their headcount and still run Twitter effectively.

In fact, Elon taking over Twitter feels like a direct call to Office Space and the issues raised in that film, 20+ years ago. Hopefully they accounted for all the red staplers...

 

[moocow]

I wouldn't be shocked if they could lose 95% of their headcount and still run Twitter effectively.

They absolutely could. That'd still leave what, a few hundred employees? You just need a few competent devops to keep the lights on and prep for expansions and ops-side feature deployments, a handful of developers for front- and back-end, graphic designers and marketing wankers to handle look & feel and the inevitable advertiser handjobs, a few data scientists to keep their analytics useful (to sell to clients, of course) and maybe a couple ML guys to fuck around with intelligent agents (genuinely) distinguishing actual, real "rule-breaking" threats from obvious piss takes and harmless chest-thumping.

Add Legal and a skeleton HR staff (with explicitly-mandated hair style, makeup and clothing restrictions to keep the dangerhairs and trannies out -- they'd never abide those kinds of restraints on their self-expression) and you might approach 200 people. Tack on some jannies and "blue checkmark verifiers" and you should be good to go. I'd be surprised if they even need 500.

 

[Near]

Where's the "amnesty"? Memory-holed already?

 

[Lord of the Large Pants]

For a chunk, it's both. But for most (I hope), it's the latter.

An issue a lot of tech companies have is they transition from agile start-up to monolothic megacorp that can't do anything. This is largely due to the build up of the middle-management and HR classes in an organization. The movie Office Space touched on this with the "I have eight different bosses," bit, only by some accounts at Twitter, it was ten managers to a coder, and the ratio of fat to effective coder was likely even higher. I wouldn't be shocked if they could lose 95% of their headcount and still run Twitter effectively.

In fact, Elon taking over Twitter feels like a direct call to Office Space and the issues raised in that film, 20+ years ago. Hopefully they accounted for all the red staplers...

So Darla Dangerhair, what would you say... you do here?

 

[TheNazgulKing]

No, I think a lot of people would agree it sets a bad precedent to overturn the Constitution just because someone found a glitch to cheat the election system, even if it benefits the guy you like. If Trump had his civics brain screwed on tight, he'd know the only way he could legally overturn the election is by Constitutional amendment or Supreme Court decision, not making some dumb statement about how election fraud justifies overturning the Constitution.

But you are right that here Elon gets to pretend he's a "reasonable" voice, never mind he openly said he's not unbanning a harmless weirdo like Alex Jones (but Andrew Anglin was okay lmao).

We've always known that politics is a dirty business and that both sides engage in ballot shenanigans. Kennedy stole the 1960 election by having mobsters stuff ballot boxes in Illinois; Dubya only won the 2000 election because of "hanging chads" and chicanery in Florida. While there was grumbling in both cases, the candidates accepted the results because they (a) did not want to weaken trust in American elections and (b) didn't want people looking into their illegal activities.

In 2016 Trump defeated Hillary Clinton, a notoriously uncharismatic and unpopular candidate who screwed Bernie Sanders to get the nomination and who was widely disliked within her own party. Instead of taking the loss and learning from it, we had four years of RUSSIA STOLE THE ELECTION FOR TRUMP. This opened the floodgates. In 2020 nobody was going to trust the election results no matter who won, and if 2022 was any indication we can expect the same in 2024.

Trump has always been an entertaining buffoon, and Biden was always a laughable dimwit. What happens when we get a charismatic candidate who convinces his followers that since the voting process is irredeemably corrupted and we should get rid of it until we can build something better? Right now a significant chunk of Americans not only won't accept the results of an election if their candidate loses; they would cheer happily if their political opponents were rounded up and put in jail or shot in their homes.

 

[draggs]

We've always known that politics is a dirty business and that both sides engage in ballot shenanigans. Kennedy stole the 1960 election by having mobsters stuff ballot boxes in Illinois; Dubya only won the 2000 election because of "hanging chads" and chicanery in Florida. While there was grumbling in both cases, the candidates accepted the results because they (a) did not want to weaken trust in American elections and (b) didn't want people looking into their illegal activities.

In 2016 Trump defeated Hillary Clinton, a notoriously uncharismatic and unpopular candidate who screwed Bernie Sanders to get the nomination and who was widely disliked within her own party. Instead of taking the loss and learning from it, we had four years of RUSSIA STOLE THE ELECTION FOR TRUMP. This opened the floodgates. In 2020 nobody was going to trust the election results no matter who won, and if 2022 was any indication we can expect the same in 2024.

Trump has always been an entertaining buffoon, and Biden was always a laughable dimwit. What happens when we get a charismatic candidate who convinces his followers that since the voting process is irredeemably corrupted and we should get rid of it until we can build something better? Right now a significant chunk of Americans not only won't accept the results of an election if their candidate loses; they would cheer happily if their political opponents were rounded up and put in jail or shot in their homes.

Bush won Florida. They did like 4 separate privately funded recounts in 2001, including one by a joint venture of the NYT, LAT, and WaPoop, and Bush won every one. The only chicanery in Florida was Al Gore wanted to do a recount in only Miami-Dade and Broward and not the full state

There is no evidence that a significant chunk of Americans would cheer for death squads. Stop thinking the internet is the same thing as touching grass

 

[Dixieland Buckaroo]

They absolutely could. That'd still leave what, a few hundred employees? You just need a few competent devops to keep the lights on and prep for expansions and ops-side feature deployments, a handful of developers for front- and back-end, graphic designers and marketing wankers to handle look & feel and the inevitable advertiser handjobs, a few data scientists to keep their analytics useful (to sell to clients, of course) and maybe a couple ML guys to fuck around with intelligent agents (genuinely) distinguishing actual, real "rule-breaking" threats from obvious piss takes and harmless chest-thumping.

Add Legal and a skeleton HR staff (with explicitly-mandated hair style, makeup and clothing restrictions to keep the dangerhairs and trannies out -- they'd never abide those kinds of restraints on their self-expression) and you might approach 200 people. Tack on some jannies and "blue checkmark verifiers" and you should be good to go. I'd be surprised if they even need 500.

The permanent staff count was around 7500 at time of purchase, so my loose number was around 375. 500 is reasonable as well. This assumes that Twitter just goes as is, without jumping back into video, jump into banking, maybe federating, and some of the other interesting ideas thrown around by Elon.

And with the counts about, who knows how many contractors they had. My understanding is a huge contractor pool for facebook and google is "moderation", but for whatever reason, Twitter did most of the censoring in-house. (Now given what we have seen since, maybe it was to help control the message?) But no doubt they have a pool of contractors doing whatever limited term crap needs to be done.

Above said, I am most likely grossly underestimating the legal and compliance issues for running a business like Twitter around the world. Just the GDPR is a nightmare from what I have heard.

Will be interesting to see how the business moves ahead, as well as the drama.

 

[teriyakiburns]

Bush won Florida.

It shows the power of the media, that so many people don't know this. The popularly accepted narrative story is that Bush lost and challenged the result in court until he found enough broken ballots to win, but that's what Gore tried to do. Boxes of ballots were mysteriously found in car boots for days after the recounts started. There were stories of manual counters lining up a dozen ballots at a time, then forcing a probe through the gore spot so that all the bush ballots would end up with a gore vote as well, which was then used as an excuse to either discard the ballots, or to claim that they were actually gore ballots.

I watched it all go down in real time, pretty much, from my comfy little corner of the internet. It was an amazing insight into so many aspects of American politics, from the way elections are conducted, to how candidates behave when they face unexpected opposition, and how corrupt the whole system appeared to be. It was also an education into how quickly a media narrative can form in the aftermath of an event. They were universally claiming Gore won, and Bush used the courts to cheat, by the middle of December..

Just the GDPR is a nightmare from what I have heard.

GDPR is difficult, but generally not as difficult as some people have claimed. Most of the whining comes from the big data silos, like google and facebook, who want to grab as much data about everyone as possible and hold on to it forever. As long as you only collect what's absolutely necessary to run a service, inform the user what you're collecting, and give them a way to delete it without hassle, you're pretty much compliant. Obviously the devil is in the details (and he's mighty sneaky, that GDPR devil), but that's the gist of it.

KF is obviously an exception to this, due to the site's unique nature. GDPR compliance would be an absolute nightmare for Null, because the entire site is built around collecting information.

 

[TheNazgulKing]

There is no evidence that a significant chunk of Americans would cheer for death squads. Stop thinking the internet is the same thing as touching grass

How loudly do you think left-wing Americans would protest if they heard today that Trump was being brought up on obviously shaky treason charges, or was shot by an assassin?

How many tears do you think would be shed in MAGA country if Hillary Clinton was taken out by a car bomb or arrested on financial charges that left-wing fact-checkers insisted were entirely false?