To the surprise of not very many, it appears that bigotry and outrage fabrication isn't a recipe for commercial success for a social media company. This is of course about Twitter, now renamed to X, and owned by controversial tech entrepreneur Elon Musk.
The latest news is that the banks who lent Musk the money to take over Twitter are left carrying the can for the loans. At least that's what The Wall Street Journal reported, that there are US$13 billion in "hung loans" on the balance sheet of Bank of America, Morgan Stanley and Barclays et al, for nearly two years.
They represent "the worst buyout for banks since the financial crisis" WSJ suggested. The banks are being paid interest on the loans but they're not able to offload them to other investors, who are wary of Musk's adversarial management of "TwitterX" which is annoying users and advertisers alike.
Accumulated losses are in the hundreds of millions of dollars for each bank.
Musk paid US$44 billion for Twitter, in a leveraged deal two years ago. The social network is now only worth US$19 billion, and Musk is angrier than ever after telling advertisers to go and f**k themselves, which they did, so he's suing them.
As someone who was dragged kicking and screaming into Twitter, but who grew to appreciate its amazing ability to connect people everywhere and be a source of real-time news, the slow-moving train wreck under Musk's management is sad to behold.
For convenience, I set up a throwaway Twitter account to view tweets linked to newsletters and other messages arriving via the work email account. The account has not been used for anything else, but I accidentally tried to share a story on it. Oh dear. Sad trombone:
Thou shalt not engage on a social network without paying first! It really illustrates how not to run a company that trades on... engagement between users.
Sure, it may seem like a good idea at first, because TwitterX has a colossal spam problem nowadays. Particularly after the account verification was subverted into a subscription, allowing botherders to amplify their dross cheaply.
If the experience with the throwaway account is anything to go by, the annual charge doesn't do anything to keep away the spam and bots.
The above is a selection of sleazebots following the throwaway account automatically. In fact, I don't think there's a single real account follower, not that there should be one because, you know, no engagement.
Meanwhile, it's grimly amusing to see convicted felon and United States presidential candidate Donald Trump's own social network tanking in value after he started posting on TwitterX again, having had his account restored by Musk.
That's part of a "free speech" agenda, which has seen Musk get into trouble for fanning the flames of the UK riots. It's also the thinking behind the Grok AI on TwitterX which is apparently uncensored.
Anything goes on TwitterX, as long as it doesn't annoy Musk who will block users who... criticise him wanting to remove the ability to block users.
43 Comments
Too late.
Apart from space x his businesses (X and Space X) are toast.
i sold my tesla shares ages ago. Before either he lost its 'first to market' advantage to the Chinese.
Tesla is the priority and he is betting it all on generative AI. Which is still struggling to get off the ground.. and he needs a fast result to get traction in self driving taxis before the Chinese catch up.
X is not a focus and will either be sold or die.
I like X. It feels like the only safe space left on the Internet where you can have an opinion and not risk being shut out of your account. Everywere else censors content on whatever whim the Governments of the day insist on. Take the latest Facebook cancellations of pro-nuclear energy proponents.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/politics/facebook-removes-pronu…
Does that include child abuse material
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/musk-twitter-elon-child-abuse-ma…
Tesla was also pinged for employees taking video footage from inside people's homes through the vehicle cameras and sharing it around the office including videos of children, (clothed and naked) and intimate adult moments. Normally the children footage was used and shared for open mockery by Tesla staff rather then their budding collection of illegally collected home porn. But lets remember the owners of a Tesla did not sign up to have their private home moments & videos of their children at home shared with a bunch of strangers online and in office spaces. They did not sign up for cameras they could never turn off that would collect their private data, openly share it with no controls and leak it publicly. If anything if you have a Tesla in your home just assume by default the systems managing it have less ethics & safety then tech that needs to be hacked first.
Park it outside and cover it with a very dark car cover so the cameras and mics cannot pick up your private home info for sharing.
Seems like everything is a shitshow these days: https://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/episodes/takedowns/104215276 & https://reneweconomy.com.au/we-published-an-analysis-from-a-leading-eco… (anti-nuclear energy posts removed from Facebook, TikTok...and X, apparently). It's probably something to do with all of these companies spending too little on moderation, for financial not ideological reasons(*), and getting everything wrong as a result. (See: Enshittification).
If you don't want moderation, by the way, then you'll have spam, abuse and the on-line equivalent of people shouting 'fire' in a crowded theatre.
(*) Or maybe Musk does have ideological reasons: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/aug/18/inciting-…
Unless that opinion pokes fun at Eion Musk, then the ban hammer comes down very quickly. In fact there is far more nepotism and attacks on free speech on X now then there was before. However the amount of fraud and scam bots have increased massively so swings and roundabouts. You can now get hooked into an investment scam with a honeytrap but hey so long as you stay away from anything that might bruise the leaders thin skin ego, (an even talking about how non discrimination of people by race or sex is a good thing can push his buttons for the ban hammer if he gets an eye of it) then sure you can share your photos with as many bots as you please.
Lets be honest, Musk is about as much for free speech as he is for paying his bills and employer responsibilities. He does not even pay his lawyers who he engaged to argue cases about not paying his rent, employee pay & redundancies or main bills. So his idea of free speech is only that which strokes his ego, aligns with him and does not mock his complete ineptitude at managing companies.
Absolutely.
One has to give Musk credit for not bowing to the EU demands to (covertly) start censoring the content.
As for the algorithm, the feeds do have to be curated - I have managed to get mine to a state where the far-left and far-right trash is pretty much non-existent.
As an aside, I must admit that the opening sentence of the article is quite disappointing - this kind of rubbish usually appears on Stuff. Juha - be better.
The lawsuit against advertisers ....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IUHMuBH788
Legal opinion by a lawyer who points out various problems with the lawsuit.
Additionally the judge Elmo hoped to get has recused himself ( he own's Tesla shares )
https://www.npr.org/2024/08/13/nx-s1-5073997/tx-judge-recuses-himself-m…
I'm a fan of X, but indirectly a sparring partner through a business relationship that was sued by Elon himself.
A federal judge in California dismissed a lawsuit filed by Elon Musk’s X against Israel’s Bright Data, in a case that involved the scraping of data.
X had claimed that Bright Data scrapes its data, “using elaborate technical measures to evade X Corp.’s anti-scraping technology.”
Meta previously filed a suit against Bright Data and was similarly unsuccessful.
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/10/elon-musks-x-loses-lawsuit-against-brig…
My X feed has become a sewer, mainly of trump spruiking. Maybe its the algorithm?
Used to quite like it, was great during Kaikoura earthquake I can remember RNZ floundering around trying to contact reporters, meanwhile twitter users were reporting in real time.
Looking for an alternative now.
In reality this article is all about US politics. These attacks will continue on Musk and X until November's presidential election. Nothing will happen to Musk or X including anything financially related to them.
It's thinly veiled Democrat agitprop supplied by the WSJ.
I literally said 'Musk is the new Murdoch' IRL this morning. I was thinking that: (A) they both use media for narrative control and power, and (B) Musk is supplanting Murdoch, as social media has greater reach than print media and is subject to fewer controls. If you accept those premises (and obviously, some do not) the remaining question is whether politicians will kowtow to Musk in the way that they did to Murdoch? It'll certainly be interesting watching what Keir Starmer does next. He did not suck up to Murdoch in the same way that Tony Blair did in order to get elected. But was that just because Murdoch's power has so waned, and that the opposition party had so self-immolated, that he simply didn't have to? What he does in response to Musk's fanning the flames of civil unrest in the UK will be a big clue. Don't expect an announcement, of course. Anyway, I don't find it healthy for democracy that the media sets the agenda rather than reports on it, so I hope he takes him on right now whilst he's freshly elected and Musk's bad behaviour is sufficiently recent. It won't be easier later.
They said Tesla wasn't possible. Space X were amateurs, rockets would never land backwards, Starship is never going to happen, broadband from satellite couldn't be done in the next 4 years and Bill Gates said physics prevents electric trucks driving 400+ mile, and Boeing and Nasa will have those stranded Astronauts down in no time. Hits on X are increasing while other social media companies and traditional media are dying. Most of his court cases including against governments have gone pretty well. Doing the impossible - Late. But i'm sure the experts are right this time!!!!
Please provide a source for your claim "hits on X are increasing". Data I just looked up said that the number of new users has stalled whilst mobile and web visits have declined since 2022. Also...who are the they who said Tesla wasn't possible and when did they say that?
Yeah so the guy who can take people reliably into space for the USA is going to fail?
So many know so little about how the US really works...
like alphabet was two guys in a garage , try scaling that up, that fast without deep state help, its just like china only different
As have other car manufacturers and Nasa / Boeing... The electric car grants were for any manufacturer - but only one in the US can now make an EV and have a positive margin. The grants were to help establish EVs to help solve the climate emergency - Tesla have achieved everything we wanted by becoming the biggest selling model now competitive with fossil fuels without support. But we are not happy with the outcome we wanted and got because ... Elon = bad.
If I recollect correctly, Tesla received a $465m loan from the US Government in 2010 and repaid it in 2013. SpaceX has commercial contracts with NASA. Last time I looked, that sort of arrangement isn't considered a "subsidy". Lastly, you can check out the Federal Communications Commission site that rejected Starlinks application (start with #FCC-23-105) for $900m of subsidies (twice).
If you're criticising X, then what you're actually doing is cheering on the rise of a modern dark age where uniformity of opinion is global, and human progress ceases just like it did in Soviet Russia. The insidiousness of the growing orthodoxy is evidenced by the multitude of organisations that are specifically designed to shut down free speech. The global government funded GDI (global disinformation index), US funded Disinfo Cloud, Open Society Foundation – (whose name offensively references one of Karl Popper’s great works), This organisation gives money to the GDI and other speech suppressing organisations, Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH).
From a broader perspective, mankind had a thousand years of dark ages where progress stalled due to religious orthodoxy. That ended in the enlightenment period, when conjecture and criticism translated into progress. But we're slipping back. There are already topics causing widespread damage to mankind, and for which no progress can be made, due to blanket censorship and propaganda. Soon, the boundaries of those forbidden topics will metastasise.
I see Elon Musk as one of the most important people on the planet. No other single person has the ability to shape our future for the better. But that's only evident if you acknowledge the epistemological principle that knowledge comes from conjecture and criticism.
Mixed feelings on X as a platform, but name one other social media platform where you can freely say things that run against the dominant political narrative.
I don't know why Interest is posting stuff like this. Looks like click-bait or comment-bait to me (yes - shame on me for clicking and commenting). The author says nothing new or interesting about the topic.
It's simply the best social media platform by a country mile. There is some censorship there, but it's way less than FaceBook or YouTube.
Did you read the Twitter Files? No? You might like to brush up on them. The US security services were basically deciding what got published and what didn't. For our safety of course.
I have personally had my account on FaceBook frozen a couple of times. One was for saying some dogs mauling sheep needed to be shot on a rural page. But the real worries are around covid, trans, climate change or anything else. There's only 1 set of opinions allowed and they're all left wing.
The legacy media are in trouble as most of them don't seem to know how to respond to the web, and we wind up with (present company excepted) poorly written, partisan, semi-edited, largely innumerate reportage that relies on advertising and click-bait-alike headlines, while intelligent journalism is moving behind paywalls and subscription restrictions.
Meanwhile, the toxic, spammy, scammy, biassed, censored - but free - torrent of direct-to-consumer content keeps growing as it's seen as more authentic(!) than what is produced by the news outlets.
Our ideas about news are wrong, but no useful model is replacing it, unless you want to pay. However, that last is as it's always been, when you used to buy your morning paper, and hoped for balanced, intelligent reporting from people who knew something about what they were reporting on.
The exception should be public broadcasting, but what RNZ has become is a bit heartbreaking.
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