...Blackburn, however, says researchers will continue to find a way to scrutinize what’s happening on Twitter. “We’ve been mostly cut off from Facebook for years and we’ve continued to make progress,” he says. “It’s not like science is going to be held hostage by a guy that played himself into burning $44 billion on a website that makes no money, just so he could force all its users to read his shitposts.”
AdObserver is a project of Cybersecurity for Democracy at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering. This extension was originally developed by researchers from the Algorithmic Transparency Institute, Quartz, New York University, and the University of Grenoble. Technical advice was also provided by ProPublica, WhoTargetsMe, and The Globe And Mail.
To be clear, people should not be using this thing that has no limits on what data it could be consuming. The CA thing people were upset about was that one user could give CA permission to read their FB data and that meant that CA had access to anything that that user had access to (like data that their friends shared with them). This is the same, without it even pretending to be limited by the restrictions that CA was limited by.
Nope. But he seemed afraid if it, whatever it was. Maybe something that would lead to jail instead of financial losses? That would make sense I guess.
The number everyone threw around was that $1 billion penalty he agreed to. People here on HN said it would never be that high.
$1 billion seems cheap compared to what he’s lost by now.
The only other explanation that makes sense to me is he was so far down the conspiracy rabbit hole he was willing to lose billions to prove an imaginary conspiracy because… it would make him more famous and popular?
I’d love to know the truth of all of this some day.
I don’t think that the FBI recommending that Twitter look into posts that both break Twitter rules and were suspected of being generated by foreign operatives counts as illegal collusion.
I also don’t think Twitter was the deciding factor in Biden winning, and the election certainly wasn’t rigged.
“Twitter was used to rig an election” is just another instances of Twitter users not realising that nobody outside of Twitter cares about it. Musk is very evidently far from immune to this.
Media outlets will share what some famous people say on Twitter. Let’s not conflate that with Twitter mattering. It’s just a press release website.
If we want to look at social networks that actually decide elections, let’s look at Facebook.
FBI was actively monitoring a place identified as being a primary location for foreign operatives to influence our election.
They met weekly with Twitter during the time leading up to election when it was most critical that communication was open and often.
I don’t see a problem with that. Now, if FBI made threats or used other underhanded tactics to force Twitter to censor the speech of Americans, I would see an issue. I’ve seen nothing to indicate that.
No, he spent the money so people would think that’s what he’s doing. All we need to know he’s not actually doing this is to see that his handpick journalists are ignoring evidence of the Trump White House asking Twitter to remove posts.
If the FBI flagging posts to be removed is government weaponization of Twitter, then the White House doing the same must be as well, to an even more egregious degree. And yet crickets from Musk.
If he’s only releasing and reacting to one side, then we must conclude the entire “Twitter Files” is simply a right wing, partisan messaging campaign.
The white house wasn't even doing the same. The fbi was pointing out tweets that violated Twitter's rules and suggesting that they evaluate them but that it was totally up to Twitter about what to do. The white house was pointing out tweets that embarrassed or otherwise hurt Trump's feelings and demanding that Twitter take them down
James Baker worked for the DOJ and FBI directly before becoming high up counsel at Twitter. He was fired for selectively edited the documents and disclosures that became the Twitter Files.
It is possible to criticize Musk and his management of Twitter for completely apolitical reasons. You have to be a sycophant to describe his management style as anything other than chaotic. There are literally employees at the company who don't have any work because there is no one to assign them to a department or team. There are people who don't even know if they work there anymore because the layoffs were handled so poorly. It goes way beyond Musk's opinions on free speech or whatever political opinion you want to blame. The whole purchase has clearly been a train wreck up until this point.
Yes, it's possible. But saying "guy that played himself into burning $44 billion on a website that makes no money, just so he could force all its users to read his shitposts" isn't the way. It just reveals their biases.
I don't know, that seems to be the apolitical reading of the situation. Is there something specific you object to in that quote?
>guy that played himself into burning $44 billion
That seems unquestionable. Twitter wasn't worth that price when he actually took control or he wouldn't have tried so hard to get out of the deal. It is impossible to put an accurate value on Twitter today, but it seems obvious that its value has gone down even further under Musk's leadership.
>a website that makes no money
Maybe hyperbolic depending on your definition of "makes no money", but it hasn't turned a profit in years so it is fair to categorize it as "a website that makes no money".
>just so he could force all its users to read his shitposts
Maybe you object to the "just" there and he had other reasons to make the purchase, but this general accusation seems true[1]. He is at least partially motivated by vanity and getting other people to read his weird jokes.
Is it? I'm not on Twitter and I'm Danish so I'm not really caught up on American identity politics, outside of what you hear online, but is that really revealing any bias of that sort? It sounds like someone who has a dislike for Musk, but really, I think this could be said about most of the billionaires running social media platforms from a certain point of view.
I think we should still put a lot of the blame on ourselves, but really, our political institutions shouldn't be on these centralized social medias if you ask me. They should be running their own instances of something like mastodon, so that it's not an American tech company that gets to moderate Danish politicians. Which isn't really a right or left leaning point of view where I come from.
Frankly saying that Musk burnt $44 billion on a website that makes no money could also just being laughing at the whole situation. I think it's been sort of hilarious to follow, but being Danish, we do have a nice tradition for enjoying watching successful people fail. That being said, you may also be right, but I think it's a bit of stretch to boil this down to political bias of the sort, because there is frankly a bunch of reasons to laugh at twitter right now that have nothing to do with politics.
Other then the term "shitposts" what's wrong with that statement? They did make updates to give him and only him a broader reach and more views. The only reason I say "shitposts" may be an issue with the statement is because I don't feel like seeing if there's a definition for shitposts and if there is cross referencing it with the last couple months of his posts.
