Social Media & Big Tech news and discussions

[wjfox]

[Xyls]

I mean Twitter has always been a cesspit. I don't have a Twitter account and am a better person for it. Nice for meteorology and war information but that's all I use it for.

[raklian]

I mean Twitter has always been a cesspit. I don't have a Twitter account and am a better person for it. Nice for meteorology and war information but that's all I use it for.

Reddit is far worse but yeah I get your point.

[Xyls]

Honestly, I don't use Reddit much anymore either, except for my local sub mostly. I still think Twitter is worse because it is more likely to give you overly simple hot-takes where at least on Reddit nuance can be added to arguments. Although both usually result in echo chambers of stupid for their users.

[Time_Traveller]

Thats why Mastodon is much more relaxed and hardly a cesspool of hatred unlike the bird.

[ººº]

Thats why Mastodon is much more relaxed and hardly a cesspool of hatred unlike the bird.

Give them time (and luck).

[Time_Traveller]

Thats why Mastodon is much more relaxed and hardly a cesspool of hatred unlike the bird.

Give them time (and luck).

They are owned by the community and if theres hatred, the account gets instantly blocked.

[weatheriscool]

Elon Musk has reportedly stopped paying rent on Twitter offices and told staff not to pay vendors
Source: Market Watch

Elon Musk seems to be squaring up for some legal battles at Twitter, which he bought in October for $44 billion, as the Tesla chief executive has stopped paying rent on its offices and has told employees not to pay vendors, the New York Times reported Wednesday.

Citing people familiar with internal conversations, Musk has also revamped Twitter’s legal department, has refused to pay a $197,725 bill for private charter flights made the week of his takeover — and is considering denying severance payments to thousands of people who have been laid off since his deal, the Times reported.

Musk has threatened employees with lawsuits if they talk to the media or ““act in a manner contrary to the company’s interest,” according to an internal email sent last Friday that the Times obtained.

Musk set about cutting costs at the social-media platform immediately on closing his deal. In his first week, he was hit by a wave of resignations, implemented massive layoffs and reversed suspensions on certain accounts. Advertisers have responded by cutting ties with the company.

Read more: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/elon- ... 1671019938

[caltrek]

Elon Jet, the Twitter Account Tracking Elon Musk’s Flights, Was Permanently Suspended
by Amanda Siberling
December 14, 2022

Introduction:

(TechCrunch) The Twitter account @ElonJet, which uses publicly available data to track the whereabouts of Elon Musk’s private jet, has been permanently suspended from Twitter.

“My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk,” Musk tweeted on November 6. Over the last month, it seems Musk changed his mind.

Jack Sweeney, the University of Central Florida student who created @ElonJet, also operated similar bots that track private jet activity of tech moguls like Mark Zuckerberg. Yet none of Sweeney’s other accounts have been affected, including an account that tracks the travel of Elon Musk’s brother, Kimbal Musk.

Update, 12/14/22, 2:30 PM ET: Jack Sweeney’s personal account has been banned from Twitter, along with the accounts of the other automated flight trackers that he operated.

The account has been a sore spot for Musk for a long time. In January, Musk DMed Sweeney on Twitter and offered the student $5,000 to delete @ElonJet, but he turned down

Read more here: https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/14/elon- ... uspended/

[Xyls]

Apparently he is taking legal action again him? For what exactly? Reposting publicly available information? This is literally a first amendment right...

Elon is such a fuckin' tool.

[raklian]

Apparently he is taking legal action again him? For what exactly? Reposting publicly available information? This is literally a first amendment right...

Elon is such a fuckin' tool.

Elon just proven what we've been saying all along that Twitter is a private entity that can set its own rules when it comes to expression of speech... exactly what it was doing before Elon bought Twitter. How is this any different from suspending Trump's account?

[Xyls]

Mr Free Speech has done it again!

Twitter suspends accounts of several journalists who had reported on Elon Musk

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... lists-musk

I mean Twitter is junk anyways, not sure why anyone actually uses that site.

Hopefully, people start using social media less and less.

[erowind]

.

[ººº]

Huh, it's almost like the alt-right doesn't care about free speech or something, they only care about their speech.

Absolute free speech is an utopian aim, at least for now.

[wjfox]

[wjfox]

[caltrek]

Mr Free Speech has done it again!

Twitter suspends accounts of several journalists who had reported on Elon Musk

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... lists-musk

I mean Twitter is junk anyways, not sure why anyone actually uses that site.

Hopefully, people start using social media less and less.

...and the beat goes on.

Elon Musk’s Twitter Journalist Purge Has Begun
by Shirin Ghaffary
December 15, 2022

Introduction:

(Vox) Twitter has suspended the accounts of several high-profile journalists, many of whom have been reporting on Elon Musk’s controversial takeover of the company.

So far, the journalists who have been suspended include Donie O’Sullivan from CNN, Drew Harwell of the Washington Post, Ryan Mac of the New York Times, Matt Binder of Mashable, and Micah Lee of The Intercept. The sudden purging seems to contradict Musk’s stated commitment to protecting freedom of speech on Twitter.

“I was very baffled. I thought people were trolling,” said independent journalist and former Vox reporter Aaron Rupar, recounting when he started getting messages from other journalists telling him he’d been suspended. Overnight, Rupar lost access to his 790,000 followers. He said he received no warning before being booted. “You basically have to comply with the whims that change day by day of the owner of the platform, that seems pretty unsustainable. It almost seems kind of spiteful.”

Several of the journalists who have been suspended, including Rupar, had recently posted about the debate over @ElonJet — a Twitter account that tracked the whereabouts of Musk’s private aircraft using publicly available flight data. Musk has argued that the account was jeopardizing his physical safety and changed Twitter’s rules to ban the sharing of “live location information” in order to suspend the account. @ElonJet’s 20-year-old account owner, Jack Sweeney, argued that the information about Elon Musk’s jets is already public. “If someone wanted to do something, they could do it without me,” he told the New York Times. Some journalists, such as Rupar, had recently tweeted out links to @ElonJet’s alternate Facebook account.

Twitter’s head of trust and safety Ella Irwin told The Verge’s Alex Heath that Twitter “will suspend any accounts that violate our privacy policies and put other users at risk” and that “we don’t make exceptions to this policy for journalists or any other accounts.”

Read more here: https://www.vox.com/recode/2022/12/15/ ... has-begun

caltrek’s comment: “You basically have to comply with the whims that change day by day of the owner of the platform…” That strike me as suffering from a climate of textbook totalitarianism. Another reason to flee Twitter in favor of more stable platforms.

[Time_Traveller]

This sounds like pure petiness from Musk, just because ex-tweeters have moved to Mastodon because it better than the bird.

[caltrek]

Why the Twitter Files Actually Matter
by Andrew Prokop
December 15, 2022

Introduction:

(Vox) Big surprise: The Twitter Files — the reports based on internal Twitter documents and messages that the company’s new owner Elon Musk provided to journalists — have landed as a polarizing salvo in the culture war.

Many inclined to distrust what they see as Big Tech’s liberal leanings have cried vindication. The documents show in detail how Twitter made key content moderation decisions that disadvantaged Trump, conservatives, and people who broke with the public health consensus on Covid-19. They say the evidence proves that, again and again, Twitter intervened to squelch speech that the liberal establishment didn’t like.

Meanwhile, others — including most liberals and many mainstream journalists — are unimpressed. They say Twitter’s policies here were already known and that the specific decisions in question — blocking a story they feared stemmed from a foreign hack, banning the account of President Trump after he incited an insurrection, and deboosting accounts spreading public health misinformation — generally seem at least defensible.

The discourse has quickly become one of us versus them — perfect for Twitter. The journalists to whom Musk gave the documents — most prominently, Substackers Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss — are outspoken, unsparing critics of what they believe is the “woke” liberal groupthink that pervades mainstream American media institutions, making them now effectively allies of the right in the culture war. Musk’s behavior since buying Twitter has made him a villain to the left, too.

So liberals have been inclined to view anything they say with deep skepticism, an instinct that was seemingly vindicated quickly after Taibbi posted his first report. He spotlighted an email stating that in October 2020 the Biden campaign had sent along requests to delete certain tweets, writing that an executive responded: “Handled.” Musk responded to this revelation with outrage: “If this isn’t a violation of the Constitution’s First Amendment, what is?” But internet archive sleuths soon established the deleted tweets were pornographic or nude images of Hunter Biden that violated Twitter’s ban on nonconsensually posted sexual material, something Taibbi seemingly had not known.

Read more of the Vox article here: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politic ... iss-covid

Read an article in the The Bulwark concerning the Hunter Biden dust-up here: https://www.thebulwark.com/no-you-do-no ... -twitter/

[caltrek]

Elon Musk Restores Journalists' Twitter Accounts Following Poll
by Herb Scribner
December17, 2022

Introduction:

(Axios) Elon Musk brought a number of journalists back to Twitter after suspending their accounts earlier this week, using a Twitter poll to decide their fate.

The big picture: Musk has repeatedly said he supports free speech and intends to use Twitter to promote it, Axios' Sara Fischer writes. However, he has been inconsistent with content moderation decisions.

Details: Musk asked Thursday night if the "accounts who doxxed my exact location in real-time" should be unsuspended from Twitter.

• This was a reference to a number of prominent journalists, who were kicked off Twitter Thursday night, Axios reports.
• The poll, which had more than 3.6 million votes, showed the majority of voters (58.7%) wanted the accounts brought back "now."

Read more here: https://www.axios.com/2022/12/17/elon- ... suspended