So "X" - nothing to see here. Elon's in control - Part XXX

Bass Reeves

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119932747#Comment_119932747

We had one here in Ireland. He was called Sean Quinn.

Quite simply he cannot make money out of Twitter. First there is three structures to the money he put into Twitter. A bit less than 1/3 was debt added into the company I think 12-14 billion.

The next is a few super wealthy individuals and the Saudi Sovereign wealth fund put in about 5 Billion.

The smartest man in the world put up 20 billion. This and the Saudi/wealthy individuals is outside the company. The banks being the banks have first call on any value in Twitter.

At this stage it looks like even the banks may not get there money back. It will take a very fortunate run of events at present for Musk to see anything back of his own personal investment

pixelburp

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119936102#Comment_119936102

We'll see. These alternative apps can get bumps that go nowhere. Remember Vero? The Instagram killer?

Dohnjoe

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/11/29/tech/twitter-covid-misinformation-policy/index.html

Twitter no long enforcing Covid misinformation policy

The telling part: "On a Tesla earnings call with Wall Street analysts in April 2020, Musk went off script to rail against Covid policies. “I would call it, ‘forcibly imprisoning people in their homes’ against all their Constitutional rights, in my opinion, and breaking people’s freedoms in ways that are horrible and wrong and not why people came to America or built this country,” Musk said on the call. “It’s an outrage.”

Once again, something happens at the new Twitter which is coincidentally in line with Elon's own views and selective interpretations of free speech.

McFly85

The xkcd on free speech sums it up pretty well:

The idea that people being banned for airing their opinions while being total arseholes to others is some sort of threat to free speech is utter nonsense.

Twitter has allowed people to post their opinions, virtually any opinions, without censorship, as long as it’s done in a respectful manner(and this moderation only really applies to high traffic accounts with multiple instances of policy breaches required before anything happens).

If you have had your account suspended and think it’s just for posting your opinions, then you need to take a long hard look at yourself.

Dyr

Great to see people siding with a company that has a yen for slave labour and is helping a dictatorship crack down on protests.

The people who think that they're on the right side of history. Absolutely mental

Penn

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119936452#Comment_119936452

He annoys lefties.

That's all the justification some people need.

pixelburp

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119936493#Comment_119936493

Who's siding with Apple anyway? It's always effin' factions with these people, anything to validate this anti woke/lefty tedium.

one armed dwarf

Considering Musk has opened a Tesla showroom in the region where Uighur minorities are being persecuted he himself is not quite a champion for human rights either

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/tesla-criticised-opening-showroom-chinas-xinjiang-region-2022-01-04/

All I would say is if you are going to make a move to somewhere like Mastodon, open a presence there now and start re-connecting with your Twitter followers. I would suspect that he's probably going to just close the APIs or the ability to download your data.

You might as well have one foot in either place.

kowloon

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119936452#Comment_119936452

Are people actually siding with Apple, or do they just know that Musk has picked a fight with a bigger dog? If Foxconn's suicide netting didn't seriously hit Apple's bottom line I'm not sure picking on a poor defenceless man-child billionaire is going to tug at people's heartstrings.

pjohnson

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119936452#Comment_119936452

What fanfiction caused this ramble?

AndrewJRenko

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119936157#Comment_119936157

There's a serious gap all right, a no-adverts gap, and a no-algorithm gap, so you don't get interrupted with ads, and you see the stuff YOU want to see, not the stuff that Musk thinks you want to to see.

The entire electronics supply chain is just utterly rotten.

Without any exceptions you’re dealing with exploitative practices at some point, be it at assembly or component level, they all have horror stories behind almost every brand you pick up and it is likely far worse for cheap consumer goods and clothing that you don’t think about very much.

Those Rare Earth elements for motors and lithium for batteries don’t mine themselves either.

All we’ve really done is move exploitation and environmentally damaging processes out of sight and out of our own backyards.

Claiming Musk is taking on Apple for moral reasons is frankly beyond the realms of fantasy though. Most people are just looking on at the sheer futility of what he’s doing and the attempt to build a narrative that isn’t there.

It’s being reported as a “feud” but there’s only one active party involved. A feud would require two feuding parties. Apple is just ignoring him.

It’s very much

Podge_irl

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119937191#Comment_119937191

From far, far, far, far fewer people.

Which if you don't care is fine, but its absolutely not taking over from Twitter or anything akin to that.

VinLieger

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119936452#Comment_119936452

LOL what a binary view of the world you subscribe to. It is possible to think Musk is an idiot and at the same time think that Apple are a terrible company, the two opinions arent mutually exclusive just because they are now fighting.

What many are simply saying is Musk has picked a fight he cannot win. If he gets kicked off the Apple store twitter is dead in its current form at least, Epic Games got kicked off the Apple store for having a similar problem with the 30% cut which they tried to get around, it went to court and they lost quite badly, luckily Epic can afford to not be on Iphones as they have an actual product they sell that people want on other devices and platforms, twitter cannot and do not have either of these things. Thanks to that case there's already a very recent precedent set thats if Musk tries to somehow get around the 30% cut on iphones, for which Apple will immediately boot from from the app store, he wont have a leg to stand on legally.

Twitter could dump the app, but it would mean no notifications, no ability to trigger interactions, more complicated steps for end users and way less useful data to mine.

Cordell

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119936406#Comment_119936406

The xkcd on free speech sums it up pretty well:

Yes, it does. And that's also exactly what Elon wants to do: provide everyone the equal chance of facing those consequences.

Kermit.de.frog

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119936493#Comment_119936493

There is a backlash against "libs" in America, the ones trying to force some of the most decadent, destructive and uncompromising views down people's throats even to the extent of maneuvering it in to the education of children. Ideas where basic biological fact doesn't matter, where you can be whatever you want regardless. Places where you dare not speak truth or risk being 'cancelled'. Places where there is no punishment for crime.... They've been at it for years, it's getting worse, and Trump was part of the start of the pushback, a warning shot if you like. Musk may be weird but his views are echoed by a hell of a lot of people including many democrat voters.

Gold post, Kermie. All the bingo words used.

Quin_Dub

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119937679#Comment_119937679

Except for when they say mean things about him of course.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119937763#Comment_119937763

"basic biological fact" which doesn't recognise the basic biological fact that there are three sexes in the animal world male, female, intersex. Or that doesn't recognise the fact that gender is entirely a social construct and it is a spectrum, not binary.

Or the likes of people that do interviews on Fox, home to millions of viewers where they go on to complain about being cancelled? Or where people talk about how they're being cancelled daily because of their views, in their weekly columns in rags like the Daily Mail?

Pushback? Of course they're pushing back from the rejection of their regressive views, designed to push down and keep down people that don't fit their version of the world.

I always laugh at these millionaires and billionaires railing at "the elite". How is Trump with his gold walls, column and lifts not one of the "elite"? Could you imagine him or any of his Fox buddies being treated like normal Joe Soaps?

I feel sorry for the rubes that continuosly fall for that schtick.

I saw a quote recently that said something like, "America never got Socialism because most Americans think they'll be millionaires some day."

The American dream is the American curse for the majority of the population.

pixelburp

Anyone who thinks Elon Musk, or anyone else in his financial bracket, is "one of us", is an idiot. Simple as. They're not one of us. Maybe they started that way, ruby mines notwithstanding, but appropriating Musk as some great white hope cos he hates the same things you do? Hahaha. Just idiocy.

And yessssssss, before the whatabout paratroopers descend. That includes Bezos', Gates, Jobs, Trump etc etc. They'd all see us starve and work to our deaths if it meant just a few more millions.

Eat the motherfúckin' rich guys. They ain't on our side.

And if Musk truly believed in Free Speech, he'd make Twitter a Back Box app. He's not and intervening - but of course it annoys the people others hate so that's ok. Imagine defining yourself based on the reactions of others. As if the world doesn't have enough troubles.

Sanctimonious? Yeah probably, but maybe the great unspoken truth are these anti woke types mistaking our liberal tears for sorrow - rather than laughter.

VinLieger

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119937679#Comment_119937679

Got it, free speech means its mandatory for everyone to purchase advertising on twitter

ohnonotgmail

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119937679#Comment_119937679

Except for those that annoy him.

McFly85

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119937679#Comment_119937679

Except the evidence from his tweets point to the opposite. He wants Trump back but not Alex Jones. In both cases he didn’t point to some terms of service or anything, he used a twitter poll on his own account for one and his own personal opinion for the other. I really don’t understand how anyone can argue that Musk is striving for an equitable service when so many these types of decisions are down to what he thinks at the time.

Twitter before Musk was actually much more consistent. It had a terms of service that if you broke then you would be banned. They would announce exceptional circumstances(Trump keeping his account because he’s in the public interest as President). Contrary to the belief of some, there was no conspiracy to silence people from any particular political leaning - there’s literally zero evidence of this, because extreme accounts on both sides are still tweeting away. The only people being consistently banned on Twitter prior to Musk were, as was the point of the xkcd comic, the arseholes.

Penn

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119938135#Comment_119938135

There was a snippet of an interview someone did going round on Twitter yesterday, unfortunately I can't remember who posted it or who gave the interview. But the general jist of the point they were making was that if a monkey was hoarding bananas and making other monkeys go without and starve from hunger, scientists would study that monkey to find out what was wrong with it. With billionaires, they're put on the cover of Forbes magazine.

kowloon

I wonder how many people are still willing to throw money at Tesla now that the CEO is losing his status. A lot of Tesla's money comes from people putting deposits on the likes of their electric truck. I'm not sure I'd be what is effectively an interest-free money lender to Tesla with the risk of losing my entire deposit on a product that might never see the light of day by a company that might be run into the ground.

Quin_Dub

Twitter have fully restored the Irish based VP following court action.

Twitter has told the High Court it has restored Irish-based senior executive Sinead McSweeney to her position with the company.

Last week, Twitter’s global vice president for public policy, Ms McSweeney, secured a temporary High Court injunction preventing the social media giant from terminating her employment.

Tony EH

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119938135#Comment_119938135

Emerald mine Pixel. An Emerald mine. Surely you have one of those right.

Right?

Cordell

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119938135#Comment_119938135

He's not one of us. And just like Jobs, Bezos, Gates and Trump he's a grade A arsehole. But he's also a visionary and a disruptor and we like these types. They shake things up, they change the world and they make it more interesting and from these evolution (and sometimes revolution) happens. Social media giants were going in the wrong direction and he disrupted that, and that's good. Even if it means more things we don't like to see.

Quin_Dub

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119940343#Comment_119940343

Musk may have been a "disruptor" in Tesla and SpaceX but he's not acting in that role in Twitter.

He's simply feeding his own internal troll and petty grievances - The entire purchase has been an act of spite and hubris.

He's doing absolutely nothing innovative nor are any of his plans for "Twitter 2.0" anything more than a luke-warm re-hash of things that have been tried before with little to no success.

Cordell

We'll see. He reverted some high profile bans and he promised to publish details about how those bans came to be. He got rid of those content moderators that were too invested to be objective. Also he might just use Twitter to create his own cult. That could be interesting :)

Quin_Dub

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119940550#Comment_119940550

But none of that is transformative , it's just him doing as he pleases because he bought the place.

It's his so he can do what he likes but he's not making it any "better" for anyone other than himself - For as long as the money lasts that is.

ohnonotgmail

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119940550#Comment_119940550

and refused to remove bans for people he didn't like.

VinLieger

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119940550#Comment_119940550

LOL hes not gonna publish the details about the bans. Also you've no clue as to what the content moderators were like or their opinions as you dont even know their names, that's a completely made up theory to suit your "owning the libs" bias.

AndrewJRenko

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119940550#Comment_119940550

Could be VERY interesting

The EU needs Twitter more than Twitter needs the EU or something.

VinLieger

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119941071#Comment_119941071

LOL, me arse hes read the legislation

Five minutes after the meeting ended, he was searching Twitter for stuff about The Digital Servers Act.

Tow

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119941316#Comment_119941316

Read it! He just accessed the act directly using his Brain Chip.

https://youtu.be/Gv_XB6Hf6gM

pjohnson

Europe is too woke to appreciate Musks brilliance.

Rjd2

Musk is a berk and twitter has long been a mess, but that doesn't sound great at all from the EU.

ohnonotgmail

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119941604#Comment_119941604

What, comply with the law or face the consequences? What is your issue with that?

Rjd2

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119941611#Comment_119941611

I want to see how the disinformation angle breaks down , the reinstatement of the banned users is obviously a concern.

I don't really care about Elon here unlike the vast majority here who idolise or loathe him so will wait and see how it unfolds.

ohnonotgmail

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119941681#Comment_119941681

You haven't explained why it doesn't sound great.

Billy Mays

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119941112#Comment_119941112

He'll just buy the EU and sack all the staff 👍🏻

bokale

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119941604#Comment_119941604

Is it the Digital Services Act you don't like the sound of?

ancapailldorcha

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119941604#Comment_119941604

Why? Media is regulated so why not do the same for social media?

L1011

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119940550#Comment_119940550

He already has his own cult. There are hundreds of thousands of weirdos who would take up arms (and those in the US already own them, I'd expect) for him, his shoddily assembled cars and explodey rockets.

Apple one day, the EU the next...

Elon's got enemies in high places.