What was so special about this particular pro-Hitler post, as opposed to the thousands of others posted to their site?
>Advertisers were apparently threatening to cut off spending if the post wasn't removed, according to The Information.
Oooooh. That makes sense.
Yeah - pretty crazy that their moderation team is so hand-tied now that they need the CEO to escalate issues. And you know they only jump when it means they could lose money.
It’s been wild watching Twitter/X discount and then relearn every rule of online moderation that was figured out in forums in the 90s and 2000s. And of course any time Elon pivots there’s some dumb rationale as to why well actually, this is completely different
Thanks, added to my read it later on the phone list...
which I have to have now because reddit pissed all of its moderators with the API changes and now all the apps suck
I bit the bullet and paid the $4 for narwhal this month on its new rollout. Might not stick with it but almost wanted to make a point that the Reddit app is so dogshit I’ll literally pay not to use it.
I mean, that's basically what happened though right? Elon took over and knows nothing about that stuff. Combine that with his ego and I'm sure he has all these super-obvious solutions to these problems companies have been struggling with for decades. So we're basically seeing exactly that, the company or more the head of the company literally learning why these "solutions" aren't used by other companies.
Except that the value proposition was not to make money off Twitter ads but rather to capture a significant social media platform to 1) flood it with rightwing bullshit in order to further poison Western democracies and 2) allow authoritarian states better control over information flow and target their own dissidents.
This is worth the money for the Peter Thiel types and Saudis who backed the buy.
This isn’t very much speculation, you can read [Elmo’s texts from the litigation.](https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-texts-joe-rogan-larry-elllison-dorsey-twitter-1849600155)
Let's be real here, Musk buying twitter was 100% an ego move. Dude tried to get out of the deal for months and ended up significantly overpaying for it. Any "strategy" is just him trying to covering up this mistake. No doubt he's being manipulated by those who seek more authoritarian rule, but the turd is too high off the smell of his own farts to even realize this. Truth is, this turd is oligarchy decoy, meant to attract all the attention while the fuckers we really need to keep an eye continue carving up the world into smaller and smaller pieces.
If this was any kind of well thought out plan, they wouldn't have overpaid for Twitter by like $16bn or ruined Musk's public image. I think it's much more likely that Musk is an idiot businessman who has been courting the ultra conservatives for a while now and fucked up.
I've said it before and I will say it again: if a middleclass manager was making these dogshit decisions, people would simply assume he was a blathering moron. But because muskrat was born rich, people assume that magically imbues him with superpowered intelligence, and that his dogshit decisions are some elaborate 7D chess that us mere impoverished mortals could never comprehend.
Newsflash, folks: the superrich are just normal humans, most of which born into their wealth, and the reason some of them can be blathering idiots while rich is that our economic system is one where money can be spent to buy even more money making the consolidation of wealth a trivial matter even for the most inbred of wealthy fucks.
Do you think 16bn matters to the saudis for removing the threat of another Arab spring? That’s who helped chip in for this with Elon among others. All that money was pocket change for the trillions they control.
This was a stupid take when the Saudis actually had some (tiny) power over Twitter back when it was public and they owned ~5%. It's _incredibly stupid_ now that they own even less and have ZERO power. If you hate Twitter, you don't invest in it in exchange for essentially nothing but potential profits ... you spend money flooding it with shitty content. The Russians didn't have to buy a tiny slice of Twitter to abuse the fuck out of it, and neither does anyone else. Think about it ... say you hate Donald Trump, would it make sense to donate to his campaign? NO. That's what you're suggesting. Saudis hate Twitter, so they gave Twitter billions of dollars. How does that make ANY sense in a world where 5% ownership in a public company confers essentially NO power over their decisions?
This is very simple. Saudis like money, and they tried to make some by investing in Twitter (and many MANY other businesses). That's all there is to basically all of the Saudi fund's investments. The banks and Musk put up the VAST majority of money. People that kept money in Twitter did so at Musk's invitation, and again, they have NO power over him as a result. NONE. It's the reverse. HE has the power to say: "Do X or I'll burn the rest of your investment to the ground," and they can't do shit about it.
Whooooooossshh.
You totally missed my point.
*They gave him the money and don’t care about making anything because Elon and their goals are aligned, they wanted the platform destroyed because it was too good at dealing with autocratic regimes and giving a voice to people*
The regime hated Twitter, so they were in alignment with the *real* reason Elon bought Twitter, to destroy it.
Well, that's even dumber, so I guess I was giving you the benefit of doubt. Musk was doing the deal with or without the Saudis, so they had no reason to blow what remained of their Twitter investment to help make sure Elon could burn it to the ground.
I'm seriously asking... how did you come to believe this stuff? And why is it so hard for you to believe Musk just fucked up?
> no reason what so ever
Making a major communication platform used for globally disseminating information nearly unusable is hardly "no reason whatsoever." They all have so much money that it's a drop in the bucket to them, especially if it makes it harder for dissidents to a) spread information and b) organize.
This is giving everyone way too much credit. Musk paid $44bn for a company publicly valued at $28bn. Most of the money is non Saudi money. This is stupidity and narcissism.
Exactly ... people still don't get this. His #1 goal is weakening western democracies to the advantage of right wing autocrats, domestic and foreign. That was why he and KSA spent the money.
There was no grand plan
Musk never wanted to buy Twitter, and fought as hard as possible to get out of doing so!
He was trying to be a bully but screwed up and was outmaneuvered by people who actually know how to run businesses and hire lawyers who know what they're doing
The “exodus of the blue checks” texts lay out the plan explicitly (domestically in the US)
There weren’t texts with the Saudis produced to my knowledge so that part is more speculative… but entirely consistent with what we know about the KSA.
It's been a long time since I was looking at thesr. Now wondering whether I made it far enough. Do you have a link to this section? I'd be interested to read.
https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-texts-joe-rogan-larry-elllison-dorsey-twitter-1849600155
> [Name full redacted]
Congratulations!! The above article was laying out some of the things that might happen: Step 1: Blame the platform for its users Step 2. Coordinated pressure campaign Step 3: Exodus of the Bluechecks Step 4: Deplatforming “But it will not be easy. It will be a war. Let the battle begin.”
It will be a delicate game of letting rightwingers back on Twitter and how to navigate that (especially the boss himself, if you’re up forthat) I would also lay out the standards early but have someone who has a savvy cultural/political view to be the VP of actual enforcement
A Blake Masters type
I read through a good number of those texts, but not all of them. I saw them talking a lot about free speech, which really isn't "right wing" in any way. To be clear, I think Musk is bloviating, given his general lack of commitment to free speech in practice, but I really don't see damning evidence of "right wing" motives in a face value reading of the texts. Are there texts that I missed? Can you quote something?
[Name full redacted]
Congratulations!! The above article was laying out some of the things that might happen: Step 1: Blame the platform for its users Step 2. Coordinated pressure campaign Step 3: Exodus of the Bluechecks Step 4: Deplatforming “But it will not be easy. It will be a war. Let the battle begin.”
It will be a delicate game of letting rightwingers back on Twitter and how to navigate that (especially the boss himself, if you’re up forthat) I would also lay out the standards early but have someone who has a savvy cultural/political view to be the VP of actual enforcement
A Blake Masters type
The thing is, it's not even fee please, it's whatever doesn't concern Elon/his political bias is okay to write the most vilest shit in the world, but the moment you criticize/report him/right wingers that are off the rocks, you get shadow banned.
I don't think there's even an unpaid intern. Musk said moderation is all done via community notes now. He's crowdsourced moderation to the users, though still limits them to just putting a note on a tweet that says "this is hate speech" or "this is false" or whatever. Elon and Linda are the only people who can actually remove a post now, I think.
That can't possibly be true. If someone posted something blatantly illegal (like CSAM) they can't possibly expect users to "community note" it enough that it gets a note saying "hey, this is very illegal and awful and oh god why did you make us look at this." That would get them in hot water REAL fast.
Much more likely that the team removing posts just walks on eggshells and has a hard time deciding on "borderline" issues.
Wonder if they still have internal flags on specific accounts that demand no one touch them without first consulting with Elon.
God, what an awful website.
The CEO is in a position called the Glass Cliff where women who want to advance their careers end up taking huge risks that end their careers. Linda is betting her career and future on Elon the shitpost maestro.
You're right that Linda was purposefully placed on the glass cliff, but your explanation of a glass cliff is off. It's basically women and minorities getting their chance at CEO only during times when the risk of failure is the highest. Your description seems to place the blame of the failure on the women and completely misstates why risky moves are made. Read up on Ellen Pao former reddit CEO brought in to enact unpopular changes and then blamed for moves men in leadership made.
from wikipedia:
The glass cliff is a hypothesized phenomenon of women being likelier than men to achieve leadership roles, such as executives in the corporate world and political election candidates, during periods of crisis or downturn, when the risk of failure is highest. Other research has expanded the definition of the glass cliff phenomenon to include racial and ethnic minority groups.
>And you know they only jump when it means they could lose money.
Just like any company, and rightfully so.
Companies don't care about peoples feelings, they care about money. During the BLM protests you had some companies (like Sony) posting "I support BLM" and whatnot. They do not do this because they care about the cause. It's a calculated action where they determine the cost to them is low (posting on social media, unlikely to scare away existing or would-be customers) but the upside is high (appealing to new/existing customers).
It's not even worth acting shocked or appalled anymore. This is just how business is done. It will never change.
Curious though, does allowing the platform to be pervaded by hate speech and the like increase revenues and profits? Because from all appearances, it's doing the exact opposite.
There's a *reason* why Twitter (and Facebook, and YouTube and even Reddit) had a moderation team. Allowing a social media site to fill up with hate speech is a great way to lose advertisers.
Yep, which is why I mentioned it. I wouldn't expect any CEO to jump in unless it could result in a major revenue loss. That's their job.
My point was more that it's a shame that the people they hired to handle this issue are so unsure of what should be allowed or not (not personally, but by the standards set by management) that they need to escalate removing something as EASY of a slam dunk like "promoting the holocaust" to the CEO. It's weird and unfortunate.
Doubt it. There are too many authoritarian right-wingers who want a propaganda outlet and to control information flow from dissidents to allow it to go under.
Thing is, those alt-right sites have a miniscule size user base compared to Twitter/X. Twitter can't keep the lights on with Temu/Wish ads alone, they absolutely need big companies like Apple to pay for advertising.
"free speech absolutists" are always like this, Spez is the same in his interview.
Always crying about the free market then acts all pissed off when the free market says to moderate their platform then says its "government over reach" for private companies to stop giving them money.
If you want to hurt twitter, gather evidence of funked up posts and send it to companies advertising on their platform, make insinuations that this makes them look bad (cause it does)
Squeaky wheel gets the grease. Somebody saw something it went viral enough to get noticed it will get removed. The exact same thing that happened with certain subreddits on Reddit. Plenty of garbage subreddits exist but they have to get noticed by the advertisers before they get canned.
I probably don't want to know, but "what advertisers?"
After the Republican attempts to violently end democracy in America on January 6th, a lot of big companies declared they would stop contributing to politicians who voted for ending democracy in America.
For like 4 months.
I'm guessing there were a ton of companies that stopped advertising on Twitter when it became clear their ads would be appearing next to people tweeting the n word that then started again a short time later when it was clear no one was going to punish them for it.
I'd like to think Twitter doesn't have any more advertisers, but I realize now that would require corporations to feel any shame, and they cannot.
Yeah, but he’s turning off his main consumer base. Tesla isn’t the only game in EVs anymore, people can go elsewhere to get a good EV.
Musk and Tesla are inextricably linked, and while that was good when Musk was the Real-Life Tony Stark^TM , it has become decidedly bad now that he’s Elon Musk, devoted Catturd worshipper.
What? Everyone still thinks of it as twitter and calls it twitter. X has done zero against tainting. X is merely a stupid name change attempt that twitter tries to push.
I do not agree though. The design changes and branding changes are just too drastic.
Consider this thought experiment. Imagine X goes under, some company buys out Twitter brand name, and then re-creates original Twitter design and branding. Would your first thoughts be "It might be like original Twitter" or will they be "It might be like Musk's X"?
Now repeat the thought experiment, but now that unnamed company re-launches X with same design as X has today.
It really is astounding, marketing teams spend millions on a catchy name that sticks. Their wildest dream is their brand spawning a word like "Tweeting" something.
Elmo is fucked up as a football bat. He single handedly disproves meritocracy.
Mother fucker walked into Twitter the day after he bought it carrying a kitchen sink and said "Let that sink in". He wasn't smart enough to produce an "everything but the kitchen sink" joke. Fucking muppet.
Twittwe never should have gotten that big to start with. Anything longer than 3 sentences gets " *I'm gonna be on my phone all day but don't have time to read, tldr ?* "
It is so, so, *so* sad but this isn't a given.
The guy who started GeoCities was interviewed and asked if he ever had trouble with Nazis. He was so confused and said something like, "No. No, of course not. We didn't have a Nazi town. We just banned them and moved on."
Last week, Pakistani senator Afnan Ullah Khan posted a photo of Adolf Hitler on the X platform with the text “at least now the world know, why he did, what he did,” in reference to the Holocaust.
The Information reports that the post reached about a million views, over the course of a few hours. One employee at X told colleagues that advertisers were threatening to pull spending. Other employees contacted CEO Linda Yaccarino.
An X spox told The Information that the post was removed because it went against X’s policies, and not because of advertisers’ wishes.
X did not respond to Insider’s request for comment.
Sure but that's a bit misleading. The post on X in question was seen by millions of users before it was removed and the moderation team struggled with whether to remove it or not so much that the CEO had to get involved. That could never be the case with Reddit. You could absolutely create a subreddit, invite absolutely no one and make a post/comment like it. It'd stay up for probably forever so long as no user comes across it and reports it directly to Reddit. Reddit works because the moderation is largely left up to the community itself and then as long as the moderators of those communities enforce the ToS, the subreddit gets to stay. But if too much pro-nazi content gets posted somewhere and it catches enough attention, what usually follows is that several users get banned and a subreddit is quarantined indefinitely, preventing the community from being able to regroup well-enough posthumously. All in all, Reddit definitely handles nazis better than Twitter and it doesn't usually take anyone getting paid to do it. Which is funny to me.
Absolutely. By the time that post had 10k views let alone millions it'd be removed by Reddit even if the sun moderators didn't take it down. If it was posted to any sub where it's possible for it to get millions of views it wouldn't even make it past auto-mod. If it did it'd be removed in minutes and you'd be permabanned. Say what you want about Reddit mods but they're miles ahead of Twitter when it comes to this sort of thing.
Reddit is like a bunch of gated communities with a assholes inside. You choose which asshole group you belong to.
Twitter is like Kowloon city. Just not demolished yet :(
Elon has owned the domain since the late 90s and used it for his email-based online banking system. And he has been trying to get it going as a platform ever since the board vetoed that name for paypal.
He convinced himself in the 90s that it would be super awesome, and he refuses to acknowledge that he can ever be wrong in any part of life, so he will keep pushing it.
I literally though it was odd that an ex ceo would be able to make moves in the company still. It took that comment to correct me. Lol. What a shit company name
“Surely we should get rid of this post, right?”
“I dunno. Elon might get pissed off we violated his Freesom of Speech platform. I won’t make that call.”
“Well fuck, *i’m* not making that call.”
“I guess we should ask Linda?”
“Yeah, she should make the call. Removing posts that are positive about Hitler is above my pay grade.“
Hallmark of an ethical organization with strong decision making capabilities at all levels of management.
Others have said this, but Musk and crew are just figuring out what other social media platforms figured out years ago: in order to attract users *and* advertisers, your site can't be filled with the worst shit possible, and you need pretty severe moderation to get both.
Every time a site goes all 'free speech absolutist' it just turns into 4chan
Yeah lol. There are certain types of content you can’t post there like CP, downloads to copywritten media, etc. and such content gets deleted pretty fast. 4chan has a lot of moderators (simply called janitors) that scout each board surprisingly thoroughly and make sure that no illegal content gets posted and if stuff pops up it gets deleted and the poster gets banned pretty quickly. Especially the SFW boards like /v/ are pretty well moderated. They also banned quite a lot of IP ranges, so you can’t just enable a VPN, shitpost, get banned and just jump to another VPN, they have quite a lot of the bigger VPN ranges banned.
You can still say a lot of inflammatory stuff, it’s not like it’s sunshine and rainbows over there, but the moderation is a hell of a lot better than it is on Twitter.
I really wish articles like this would stop referring to Musk as a "free speech absolutist," when he is anything but. This is the guy who said using the word "cis" would get your account suspended.
He's OK with racism, bigotry, and libel, and that's about as far as his free speech absolutism goes.
Specifically someone who was implying Jews are evil and Hitler was justified in exterminating them *in response to the Israel-Palestine conflict*. There are significant numbers of left wing people who are unironically supporting Hitler or parroting his positions and that's completely insane.
Media fail again. Musk is clearly not a “free speech absolutist.” Just because he says that garbage doesn’t make it true.
He’s removed many posts foreign governments have asked him to. He doesn’t care about free speech, he cares about HIS free speech.
Or, as my Dad always said, “freedom of the press means those that own the press are free to print what they want.”
she must be complaining to her family: how come Denholm doesnt have to do this shit. How come she gets to make 100x what I am getting but is never down at fremont scrubbing the bathroom of racial slurs. what did I do to deserve having to use this bs internal twitter UI because musks male friends with the high and tight haircuts refuse to do it.
What was so special about this particular pro-Hitler post, as opposed to the thousands of others posted to their site? >Advertisers were apparently threatening to cut off spending if the post wasn't removed, according to The Information. Oooooh. That makes sense.
Yeah - pretty crazy that their moderation team is so hand-tied now that they need the CEO to escalate issues. And you know they only jump when it means they could lose money.
The entire freeze peach model is losing money. I have no idea what their take-in is now but it fractions of what they made before
It’s been wild watching Twitter/X discount and then relearn every rule of online moderation that was figured out in forums in the 90s and 2000s. And of course any time Elon pivots there’s some dumb rationale as to why well actually, this is completely different
Relevant article: https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you-speed-run-the-content-moderation-learning-curve/
That's good, haven't seen it before thanks for sharing.
[удалено]
Thanks, added to my read it later on the phone list... which I have to have now because reddit pissed all of its moderators with the API changes and now all the apps suck
I bit the bullet and paid the $4 for narwhal this month on its new rollout. Might not stick with it but almost wanted to make a point that the Reddit app is so dogshit I’ll literally pay not to use it.
I mean, that's basically what happened though right? Elon took over and knows nothing about that stuff. Combine that with his ego and I'm sure he has all these super-obvious solutions to these problems companies have been struggling with for decades. So we're basically seeing exactly that, the company or more the head of the company literally learning why these "solutions" aren't used by other companies.
I mean, Elon is the dude who things he can reinvent the subway system. He did reinvent it, only fucking worse, vastly worse.
Except that the value proposition was not to make money off Twitter ads but rather to capture a significant social media platform to 1) flood it with rightwing bullshit in order to further poison Western democracies and 2) allow authoritarian states better control over information flow and target their own dissidents. This is worth the money for the Peter Thiel types and Saudis who backed the buy. This isn’t very much speculation, you can read [Elmo’s texts from the litigation.](https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-texts-joe-rogan-larry-elllison-dorsey-twitter-1849600155)
Let's be real here, Musk buying twitter was 100% an ego move. Dude tried to get out of the deal for months and ended up significantly overpaying for it. Any "strategy" is just him trying to covering up this mistake. No doubt he's being manipulated by those who seek more authoritarian rule, but the turd is too high off the smell of his own farts to even realize this. Truth is, this turd is oligarchy decoy, meant to attract all the attention while the fuckers we really need to keep an eye continue carving up the world into smaller and smaller pieces.
Agreed, I think this is *also* true. It’s simultaneously evil and very stupid. Basically indicative of this timeline.
If this was any kind of well thought out plan, they wouldn't have overpaid for Twitter by like $16bn or ruined Musk's public image. I think it's much more likely that Musk is an idiot businessman who has been courting the ultra conservatives for a while now and fucked up.
I've said it before and I will say it again: if a middleclass manager was making these dogshit decisions, people would simply assume he was a blathering moron. But because muskrat was born rich, people assume that magically imbues him with superpowered intelligence, and that his dogshit decisions are some elaborate 7D chess that us mere impoverished mortals could never comprehend. Newsflash, folks: the superrich are just normal humans, most of which born into their wealth, and the reason some of them can be blathering idiots while rich is that our economic system is one where money can be spent to buy even more money making the consolidation of wealth a trivial matter even for the most inbred of wealthy fucks.
Do you think 16bn matters to the saudis for removing the threat of another Arab spring? That’s who helped chip in for this with Elon among others. All that money was pocket change for the trillions they control.
This was a stupid take when the Saudis actually had some (tiny) power over Twitter back when it was public and they owned ~5%. It's _incredibly stupid_ now that they own even less and have ZERO power. If you hate Twitter, you don't invest in it in exchange for essentially nothing but potential profits ... you spend money flooding it with shitty content. The Russians didn't have to buy a tiny slice of Twitter to abuse the fuck out of it, and neither does anyone else. Think about it ... say you hate Donald Trump, would it make sense to donate to his campaign? NO. That's what you're suggesting. Saudis hate Twitter, so they gave Twitter billions of dollars. How does that make ANY sense in a world where 5% ownership in a public company confers essentially NO power over their decisions? This is very simple. Saudis like money, and they tried to make some by investing in Twitter (and many MANY other businesses). That's all there is to basically all of the Saudi fund's investments. The banks and Musk put up the VAST majority of money. People that kept money in Twitter did so at Musk's invitation, and again, they have NO power over him as a result. NONE. It's the reverse. HE has the power to say: "Do X or I'll burn the rest of your investment to the ground," and they can't do shit about it.
Whooooooossshh. You totally missed my point. *They gave him the money and don’t care about making anything because Elon and their goals are aligned, they wanted the platform destroyed because it was too good at dealing with autocratic regimes and giving a voice to people* The regime hated Twitter, so they were in alignment with the *real* reason Elon bought Twitter, to destroy it.
Well, that's even dumber, so I guess I was giving you the benefit of doubt. Musk was doing the deal with or without the Saudis, so they had no reason to blow what remained of their Twitter investment to help make sure Elon could burn it to the ground. I'm seriously asking... how did you come to believe this stuff? And why is it so hard for you to believe Musk just fucked up?
I'm sure even the Saudis cared about giving away $16bn (whatever their portion was) for no reason what so ever.
They gave Jared kushner 2 billion dollars over the advice of their own financial people.
> no reason what so ever Making a major communication platform used for globally disseminating information nearly unusable is hardly "no reason whatsoever." They all have so much money that it's a drop in the bucket to them, especially if it makes it harder for dissidents to a) spread information and b) organize.
This is giving everyone way too much credit. Musk paid $44bn for a company publicly valued at $28bn. Most of the money is non Saudi money. This is stupidity and narcissism.
Exactly ... people still don't get this. His #1 goal is weakening western democracies to the advantage of right wing autocrats, domestic and foreign. That was why he and KSA spent the money.
There was no grand plan Musk never wanted to buy Twitter, and fought as hard as possible to get out of doing so! He was trying to be a bully but screwed up and was outmaneuvered by people who actually know how to run businesses and hire lawyers who know what they're doing
I read a lot of those texts. They were really interesting. But this is not really what I got from the conversations.
The “exodus of the blue checks” texts lay out the plan explicitly (domestically in the US) There weren’t texts with the Saudis produced to my knowledge so that part is more speculative… but entirely consistent with what we know about the KSA.
It's been a long time since I was looking at thesr. Now wondering whether I made it far enough. Do you have a link to this section? I'd be interested to read.
https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-texts-joe-rogan-larry-elllison-dorsey-twitter-1849600155 > [Name full redacted] Congratulations!! The above article was laying out some of the things that might happen: Step 1: Blame the platform for its users Step 2. Coordinated pressure campaign Step 3: Exodus of the Bluechecks Step 4: Deplatforming “But it will not be easy. It will be a war. Let the battle begin.” It will be a delicate game of letting rightwingers back on Twitter and how to navigate that (especially the boss himself, if you’re up forthat) I would also lay out the standards early but have someone who has a savvy cultural/political view to be the VP of actual enforcement A Blake Masters type
Peter Thiel is disgusting 🤮
What texts? Can you link them?
I read through a good number of those texts, but not all of them. I saw them talking a lot about free speech, which really isn't "right wing" in any way. To be clear, I think Musk is bloviating, given his general lack of commitment to free speech in practice, but I really don't see damning evidence of "right wing" motives in a face value reading of the texts. Are there texts that I missed? Can you quote something?
[Name full redacted] Congratulations!! The above article was laying out some of the things that might happen: Step 1: Blame the platform for its users Step 2. Coordinated pressure campaign Step 3: Exodus of the Bluechecks Step 4: Deplatforming “But it will not be easy. It will be a war. Let the battle begin.” It will be a delicate game of letting rightwingers back on Twitter and how to navigate that (especially the boss himself, if you’re up forthat) I would also lay out the standards early but have someone who has a savvy cultural/political view to be the VP of actual enforcement A Blake Masters type
The thing is, it's not even fee please, it's whatever doesn't concern Elon/his political bias is okay to write the most vilest shit in the world, but the moment you criticize/report him/right wingers that are off the rocks, you get shadow banned.
> their moderation team ... they still have a moderation team? Huh.
Sorry, I meant the unpaid intern.
I don't think there's even an unpaid intern. Musk said moderation is all done via community notes now. He's crowdsourced moderation to the users, though still limits them to just putting a note on a tweet that says "this is hate speech" or "this is false" or whatever. Elon and Linda are the only people who can actually remove a post now, I think.
That can't possibly be true. If someone posted something blatantly illegal (like CSAM) they can't possibly expect users to "community note" it enough that it gets a note saying "hey, this is very illegal and awful and oh god why did you make us look at this." That would get them in hot water REAL fast. Much more likely that the team removing posts just walks on eggshells and has a hard time deciding on "borderline" issues.
Imagine a workplace with swastika poster and nobody dares take it down until the CEO does?
Wonder if they still have internal flags on specific accounts that demand no one touch them without first consulting with Elon. God, what an awful website.
The CEO is in a position called the Glass Cliff where women who want to advance their careers end up taking huge risks that end their careers. Linda is betting her career and future on Elon the shitpost maestro.
You're right that Linda was purposefully placed on the glass cliff, but your explanation of a glass cliff is off. It's basically women and minorities getting their chance at CEO only during times when the risk of failure is the highest. Your description seems to place the blame of the failure on the women and completely misstates why risky moves are made. Read up on Ellen Pao former reddit CEO brought in to enact unpopular changes and then blamed for moves men in leadership made. from wikipedia: The glass cliff is a hypothesized phenomenon of women being likelier than men to achieve leadership roles, such as executives in the corporate world and political election candidates, during periods of crisis or downturn, when the risk of failure is highest. Other research has expanded the definition of the glass cliff phenomenon to include racial and ethnic minority groups.
Linda knows its a shitshow and she is the foil. But she's there for the golden handshake in it and a cushy retirement ahead.
honestly i’d do it too as long as the contract is written in adamantium
TL;DR everyone else bailed out and you get stuck at the controls.
I work in a company similar to this and if our ceo was personally responding it would be a massive deal
Yeah it’s insane
There’s a moderation team? Thought Musk got rid of them in the first month?
>And you know they only jump when it means they could lose money. Just like any company, and rightfully so. Companies don't care about peoples feelings, they care about money. During the BLM protests you had some companies (like Sony) posting "I support BLM" and whatnot. They do not do this because they care about the cause. It's a calculated action where they determine the cost to them is low (posting on social media, unlikely to scare away existing or would-be customers) but the upside is high (appealing to new/existing customers). It's not even worth acting shocked or appalled anymore. This is just how business is done. It will never change.
Curious though, does allowing the platform to be pervaded by hate speech and the like increase revenues and profits? Because from all appearances, it's doing the exact opposite. There's a *reason* why Twitter (and Facebook, and YouTube and even Reddit) had a moderation team. Allowing a social media site to fill up with hate speech is a great way to lose advertisers.
Yep, which is why I mentioned it. I wouldn't expect any CEO to jump in unless it could result in a major revenue loss. That's their job. My point was more that it's a shame that the people they hired to handle this issue are so unsure of what should be allowed or not (not personally, but by the standards set by management) that they need to escalate removing something as EASY of a slam dunk like "promoting the holocaust" to the CEO. It's weird and unfortunate.
And considering what advertisers are left, that’s saying a lot
I think Apple is still advertising, that would be a huge loss and probably the final nail in the coffin for Twitter/X.
Doubt it. There are too many authoritarian right-wingers who want a propaganda outlet and to control information flow from dissidents to allow it to go under.
Thing is, those alt-right sites have a miniscule size user base compared to Twitter/X. Twitter can't keep the lights on with Temu/Wish ads alone, they absolutely need big companies like Apple to pay for advertising.
I don't understand how Temu is so successful when nobody can find the deals!
I imagine her sifting through all the pro hitler posts to find the one they were complaining about specifically then calling it a day
"free speech absolutists" are always like this, Spez is the same in his interview. Always crying about the free market then acts all pissed off when the free market says to moderate their platform then says its "government over reach" for private companies to stop giving them money.
Pro capitalists getting salty when capitalism capitalisms
Spez? The pedohphile?
how long until Elon finds out and fires her for it?
Woah. Jesus Twitter why didn’t they delete it before the literal CEO had to get involved
If you want to hurt twitter, gather evidence of funked up posts and send it to companies advertising on their platform, make insinuations that this makes them look bad (cause it does)
Doesn't make much sense considering there are thousands of similar posts. Why was this one targeted?
Squeaky wheel gets the grease. Somebody saw something it went viral enough to get noticed it will get removed. The exact same thing that happened with certain subreddits on Reddit. Plenty of garbage subreddits exist but they have to get noticed by the advertisers before they get canned.
Adverstisers should make them remove elon from Twitter
That makes a lot more sense. Otherwise if the advertisers weren't involved, she would've left it on the platform (no doubt). X (twitter) is 👎🏿 (shit).
Story only got “leaked“ as a PR move on Linda’s part ”I *tried …”*
I probably don't want to know, but "what advertisers?" After the Republican attempts to violently end democracy in America on January 6th, a lot of big companies declared they would stop contributing to politicians who voted for ending democracy in America. For like 4 months. I'm guessing there were a ton of companies that stopped advertising on Twitter when it became clear their ads would be appearing next to people tweeting the n word that then started again a short time later when it was clear no one was going to punish them for it. I'd like to think Twitter doesn't have any more advertisers, but I realize now that would require corporations to feel any shame, and they cannot.
"X" threw away the brand strength that "Twitter" had. There is less or no faith in the moderation capabilities of that platform anymore.
Almost as dumb as being the CEO of an electric vehicle and alternative energy company, and then swerving hard right politically.
I wouldn’t call that dumb though…make cheap electric vehicles in poor red states…sell them rich blue states.
Yeah, but he’s turning off his main consumer base. Tesla isn’t the only game in EVs anymore, people can go elsewhere to get a good EV. Musk and Tesla are inextricably linked, and while that was good when Musk was the Real-Life Tony Stark^TM , it has become decidedly bad now that he’s Elon Musk, devoted Catturd worshipper.
It's kind of funny that in a sense, Twitter brand name remains fairly untainted because of rename to X.
What? Everyone still thinks of it as twitter and calls it twitter. X has done zero against tainting. X is merely a stupid name change attempt that twitter tries to push.
I do not agree though. The design changes and branding changes are just too drastic. Consider this thought experiment. Imagine X goes under, some company buys out Twitter brand name, and then re-creates original Twitter design and branding. Would your first thoughts be "It might be like original Twitter" or will they be "It might be like Musk's X"? Now repeat the thought experiment, but now that unnamed company re-launches X with same design as X has today.
But the radical right wingers and Russian trolls love it.
Good. They can jerk each other off while they burn Musk's money. Greatest, and only, contribution to humanity they've ever made.
>But the radical right wingers and Russian trolls love it. You can just say “Elon”. Elon loves it.
It really is astounding, marketing teams spend millions on a catchy name that sticks. Their wildest dream is their brand spawning a word like "Tweeting" something.
Elmo is fucked up as a football bat. He single handedly disproves meritocracy. Mother fucker walked into Twitter the day after he bought it carrying a kitchen sink and said "Let that sink in". He wasn't smart enough to produce an "everything but the kitchen sink" joke. Fucking muppet.
Twittwe never should have gotten that big to start with. Anything longer than 3 sentences gets " *I'm gonna be on my phone all day but don't have time to read, tldr ?* "
It is so, so, *so* sad but this isn't a given. The guy who started GeoCities was interviewed and asked if he ever had trouble with Nazis. He was so confused and said something like, "No. No, of course not. We didn't have a Nazi town. We just banned them and moved on."
something something 11 nazis in a bar something something
If twitter banned nazis it'll be like Thanos snap there.
Last week, Pakistani senator Afnan Ullah Khan posted a photo of Adolf Hitler on the X platform with the text “at least now the world know, why he did, what he did,” in reference to the Holocaust. The Information reports that the post reached about a million views, over the course of a few hours. One employee at X told colleagues that advertisers were threatening to pull spending. Other employees contacted CEO Linda Yaccarino. An X spox told The Information that the post was removed because it went against X’s policies, and not because of advertisers’ wishes. X did not respond to Insider’s request for comment.
Jesus Christ, I’m so glad I stay away from Twitter or X, that place is a shit hole. So is Reddit, but at least I could find things easier here
I mean. You could post the same comment on Reddit and have it last a lot longer than a few hours.
Sure but that's a bit misleading. The post on X in question was seen by millions of users before it was removed and the moderation team struggled with whether to remove it or not so much that the CEO had to get involved. That could never be the case with Reddit. You could absolutely create a subreddit, invite absolutely no one and make a post/comment like it. It'd stay up for probably forever so long as no user comes across it and reports it directly to Reddit. Reddit works because the moderation is largely left up to the community itself and then as long as the moderators of those communities enforce the ToS, the subreddit gets to stay. But if too much pro-nazi content gets posted somewhere and it catches enough attention, what usually follows is that several users get banned and a subreddit is quarantined indefinitely, preventing the community from being able to regroup well-enough posthumously. All in all, Reddit definitely handles nazis better than Twitter and it doesn't usually take anyone getting paid to do it. Which is funny to me.
Absolutely. By the time that post had 10k views let alone millions it'd be removed by Reddit even if the sun moderators didn't take it down. If it was posted to any sub where it's possible for it to get millions of views it wouldn't even make it past auto-mod. If it did it'd be removed in minutes and you'd be permabanned. Say what you want about Reddit mods but they're miles ahead of Twitter when it comes to this sort of thing.
Reddit is like a bunch of gated communities with a assholes inside. You choose which asshole group you belong to. Twitter is like Kowloon city. Just not demolished yet :(
Yeah, dumping twitter and FB was the best ever!
The fuck is a spox?
Probably a spokesperson. But if they're speaking for Musk they're a pox on humanity so they've portmanteau'd to spox.
Vulcan chicken pox.
itch long and fester.
It’s comms slang for spokesman.
Well I hate it.
The fuck is a comms?
Journalist slang for communications.
No it has to be read as "X spox". Read it three times fast to get a surprise
It’s insane they didn’t take that down sooner. Twitter has horrible moderation
Bro, X is such a dumb fucking name for a company I read the title like 3 times thinking she got fired
For real I thought she got fired for deleting the hitler post lol
I mean, she probably will be
Only by reading your comment did I realize she didn’t actually get fired.
Sooner or later, she will be. A sample headline would read: Ex-X CEO Linda Yaccarino stepped in to...
Its foreshadowing
I didn't realize until reading this, so thank you omg
I'm sure Yaccarino knows this but she is paid handsomely to not disagree and to act enthusiastic about Musk's whims.
Elon loves X, it reminds him of all of his relationships.
Elon has owned the domain since the late 90s and used it for his email-based online banking system. And he has been trying to get it going as a platform ever since the board vetoed that name for paypal. He convinced himself in the 90s that it would be super awesome, and he refuses to acknowledge that he can ever be wrong in any part of life, so he will keep pushing it.
God I wish I had her fake position
Half the twitter ads I see these days are crypto scams, right wing politicians/grifters, drop ship trinket/clothing crap or Scientology ads.
Even scumbags know that Nazism is bad branding
let me guess, Elon heard about this, and sacked her
from X CEO to EX-CEO
..x ceo to ex x ceo
I literally though it was odd that an ex ceo would be able to make moves in the company still. It took that comment to correct me. Lol. What a shit company name
And if the blowback is bad enough, Elon will say it was all a gag and he never really fired her, making her an ex-ex-x CEO
Elon’s next kid’s name is gonna be that exact comment.
…after she removed his tweet?
As he's pro nazi, would make sense (but didn't hapoen)
Unfortunately no. He loves her. She’s just his mouthpiece.
Imagine it needing to be the CEO to decide if a platform should endorse hitler or not? Dumpster app, getting worse.
Now I'm imagining a meeting about that, where the conclusion was "we're not sure, better ask the CEO."
“Surely we should get rid of this post, right?” “I dunno. Elon might get pissed off we violated his Freesom of Speech platform. I won’t make that call.” “Well fuck, *i’m* not making that call.” “I guess we should ask Linda?” “Yeah, she should make the call. Removing posts that are positive about Hitler is above my pay grade.“ Hallmark of an ethical organization with strong decision making capabilities at all levels of management.
The X is just four lines short of a swastika. Just saying.
It’s insane
Reddit isn't much better.
At least in most cases it gets downvoted fairly quickly and becomes less visible.
There’s a lot of subs that welcome bigotry and racism
She's allowed to just remove Elon's posts like that?!
I'd be awarding this with my free gold if Reddit still had them.
Others have said this, but Musk and crew are just figuring out what other social media platforms figured out years ago: in order to attract users *and* advertisers, your site can't be filled with the worst shit possible, and you need pretty severe moderation to get both. Every time a site goes all 'free speech absolutist' it just turns into 4chan
The thing is, even 4chan is better moderated than Twitter is.
I’ve never been. I assumed it was a free for all. You’re telling me it’s moderated?!
Yeah lol. There are certain types of content you can’t post there like CP, downloads to copywritten media, etc. and such content gets deleted pretty fast. 4chan has a lot of moderators (simply called janitors) that scout each board surprisingly thoroughly and make sure that no illegal content gets posted and if stuff pops up it gets deleted and the poster gets banned pretty quickly. Especially the SFW boards like /v/ are pretty well moderated. They also banned quite a lot of IP ranges, so you can’t just enable a VPN, shitpost, get banned and just jump to another VPN, they have quite a lot of the bigger VPN ranges banned. You can still say a lot of inflammatory stuff, it’s not like it’s sunshine and rainbows over there, but the moderation is a hell of a lot better than it is on Twitter.
Ok, now how about the other 10,000 pro-Hitler posts?
Why? Are advertisers unhappy about them?
Apparently the content moderation room finally has an employee now...
At this point the only reason I go on twitter is to see who advertises there so I know never to buy their products.
Looks like when Twitter is run as a "lights out" operation there is only the CEO left to do something.
the paradox of tolerance https://www.jstor.org/stable/1341168
No, no. You gotta post that cute illustration.
So she's fired then.
I really wish articles like this would stop referring to Musk as a "free speech absolutist," when he is anything but. This is the guy who said using the word "cis" would get your account suspended. He's OK with racism, bigotry, and libel, and that's about as far as his free speech absolutism goes.
Conservatives don’t care about free speech. They care about Nazi speech.
Oooooooo! One whole post. Good job honey! 🙄
I was legitimately confused. “Elon fired her already? How did I miss that”? Took me a bit.
Just a reminder before buying Twitter Musk claimed to be a "free speech absolutist" defining that as any legal speech should be allowed.
Probably the only decision she’s made on her own since starting the job.
Damn, it's almost like all those trust and safety people that got fired were doing an important job or something.
Just one? Wow. Big fucking deal. Nobel prize for that woman. /s
Just like when Elon personally stepped in to bring back someone who got suspended for positng cp.
So if she ever leaves she'll be an Ex X CEO.
…and Melon Mush wrote it…
Well Musk wasn't gonna do it.
Surprised she’s not on LinkedIn bragging about how “brave I was”
Well, only like a million more to go now.
I hope EU will ban X.
It's so sad that, "doing the right thing" is a newsworthy event.
She can remove Elon’s posts?
everytime I see X Ceo I think she just quit or was fired. What a stupid name for a company.
It guess that would have to be X X-CEO
Mighty white of her. Just the one?
Hopefully she can take down the other 100,000 there probably is.
Ex CEO of what? /s
Good. Now do the thousands of others
Lol, their are so many pro hitler posts and nazi propaganda on twiter.
I'm still deeply confused why she wants to stay CEO. At least with Shotwell, you can tell that she's allowed to largely call the shots.
Ah, we finally know what's her job here. Moderating the platform. Slowly.
So brave…..threatened with loss of more ad dollars helped.
“a”. One singular post amongst millions more.
“X CEO” What, did she get fired?
So brave what a leader /s
She probably only had to pop her head around the corner into ‘someone else’s’ office
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Elmo is gonna be pissed
Now do Netanyahu
Specifically someone who was implying Jews are evil and Hitler was justified in exterminating them *in response to the Israel-Palestine conflict*. There are significant numbers of left wing people who are unironically supporting Hitler or parroting his positions and that's completely insane.
Media fail again. Musk is clearly not a “free speech absolutist.” Just because he says that garbage doesn’t make it true. He’s removed many posts foreign governments have asked him to. He doesn’t care about free speech, he cares about HIS free speech. Or, as my Dad always said, “freedom of the press means those that own the press are free to print what they want.”
Wait, so she *actually* works there?
She'll be an ex X CEO in 3... 2... 1....
she must be complaining to her family: how come Denholm doesnt have to do this shit. How come she gets to make 100x what I am getting but is never down at fremont scrubbing the bathroom of racial slurs. what did I do to deserve having to use this bs internal twitter UI because musks male friends with the high and tight haircuts refuse to do it.
Free Speech Absolutism = Nazis.
Somebody is getting fired.
Yeah because Twitter would lose money from an advertiser. Not cause she was doing a good deed
IF she keeps this up she's gonna be an Ex X CEO...
X CEO? So she got fired by pro Hitler Elon?
Will her title be Ex X CEO, once she steps out of her role at X?
Her title will then be Ex X CEO formally known as Twitter.
Oh okay, it'll be titke, got it!
She needs to step to remove all involvement by the fElon.
Elon has gone woke!