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

A bit stupid to send a letter via x a few hours before Musk's chat, no idea what the point of mentioning Trump was at all.

@brickster69 Thanks for confirming my post (from politico) with a more reputable source (ft.com). Wondering if both spoke to the same EU Commission personnel?

Main take away: - "On Tuesday the European Commission denied that Breton had approval from its president Ursula von der Leyen to send the letter."

I wonder what position he will now be getting in the EU Commision now, or is he a scapegoated for not well planned out timing of the issuing of the letter, given the amount of feedback they got?

@Harika I will try that the next time it happens, but reported in 'Bugs' thread, it happens to other threads as well. I'm not the only person to experience the bug. When threads cross the new page it takes at least 4 new posts in the page for the thread to unlock the page. On very active threads it probably goes unnoticed.

Elon Musk has clearly made Twitter immeasurably worse with his hands off approach to the racists and conspiracy theorists. It's actually worse than that though. It's not just the case that people are allowed to post pretty much whatever vile and false content that they want, Musk's Twitter actively incentivizes them to do so. That's because when people sign up to Twitter Blue they can become eligible to receive payments from Twitter if they "drive engagement".

In other words if they can get a lot of viral tweets or tweets with a lot of comments then they can earn money. What drives engagement more than anything on social media? Anger, fear and resentment. What we now have is a cottage industry of grifters who are making it their business to post inflammatory things in the hope that they get lots of angry replies and quote tweets. If you go to any tweet on pretty much any topic you will see that the comments underneath (which show Twitter Blue accounts first, by design) will feature accounts that have very few actual followers tweeting out awful things. These people are basically on a fishing expedition.

Essentially he has monetised trolling. The only bright spot is that apparently the actual payments have fallen off a cliff from the early days. You can actually see some of these accounts complaining about how their monthly payments have dropped off severely.

In terms of cash flow, Twitter are unlikely to be making much cause their owner is using it as his political playground.

Meanwhile there's been an FEC complaint that the interview was a violation of campaigning laws. Their comments on unions has also resulted in the teamsters turning on him which is great. 😂

https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-trainwreck-elon-musk-interview-140431231.html

Trump is still posting his rants on Truth Social whereas his Twitter account appears to have ceased posting again (apart from a couple of posts linking to his talk with Musk yesterday).

Here's a fresh rant from this morning

I suspect that he doesn't even have Twitter on his own personal phone.

Don’t forget the porn. All the porn. First 50 replies to every half-interesting post is essentially a mass of porn bots posting stupid **** like “interesting”, “good”, etc. to generate clicks…kinda how that bellend of an owner posts actually…

Define 'Hate Speech'!

https://www.euronews.com/next/2024/08/15/ireland-to-clamp-down-on-social-media-companies-refusing-to-remove-hate-speech

• “Most of the tech companies probably will honour this new code of conduct from Coimisiúin na Mean because they will have to and it’s backed up by the Digital Services Act which is an EU-wide law with very large fines," Adrian Weckler, Technology Correspondent at the Irish Independent, said.
• “There a few outliers which local politicians here in Ireland and across Europe up to and including European Commissioners have taken aim at. The notable one is X,” he added.

If the UN can't decide https://www.un.org/en/hate-speech/understanding-hate-speech/what-is-hate-speech

However, to date there is no universal definition of hate speech under international human rights law.

Are we to believe Ireland and EU Commision can finally put a definition on it? Concerning if they do, they will also be ones to enforce censorship and moderation of the platforms.

Disclaimer: - Shared a tweet, not an endorsement of the 'X' account.

Also could 'X' work without 'recommender systems'/algorithms?

https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-41456017.html

In January, a survey by the Irish Council for Civil Liberties found that 82% of Irish people want “big tech’s toxic algorithms switched off”.

The NGO ICCL lobbying our politicians.

Is this attack on social media by our and UK politicians, just a deflection from more serious matters?

In relation to recommender systems, there's been huge demand for greater transparency on the underlying algorithms and how such feeds are determined. That's not just limited to civil rights groups. That's not just limited to social media, it includes Netflix, Spotify, Google etc. It's also a pretty important part of the DSA. Given the fact a recommender system on any platform can influence everyone so drastically means people should be allowed to gain a level of understanding of how it's determined.

And you can say that all you want but legally everything from Tesco to Spotify to Twitter will be expected to be far more transparent on the underlying decision making. It's an ethical issue and the EU are playing catch up ultimately. I'm guessing the likes of California will follow suit with similar laws and all platforms will be expected to follow them. And guess what, they all have to follow the laws in the locations they're operating in...

Rogan is a hack, he still thinks Alex Jones is some reputable source of information, he more or leas tried to rehabilitate him after the Sandy Hook publicity. He should be on every anti-drug advertisement going. There should be a bullibility scale named after him.

https://www.sportskeeda.com/mma/news-joe-rogan-talks-authenticity-joe-biden-s-state-of-the-union-address-amid-allegations-pre-recorded-speech

Elon Musk is attempting to sue advertisers for not wanting to advertise on his platform.

Accounts like this one (with 95k followers) pumping out pro-Hitler propaganda are the reason that no reputable company wants their adverts appearing there:

And don't fool yourself into thinking that Musk's Twitter isn't aware of this account, after all it's one of millions on the platform right? Wrong. This account posted the following tweet

Twitter users reacted collectively and added a Community Note

Somebody in Twitter decided to remove that Community Note.

So somebody in the company had a look at that account and thought "This all seems fine, and I'm actually going to side with them on this and effectively encourage them to push out even more Nazi-loving content".

Cause Elon Musk is fine with the recommender system actively promoting Nazis. Most platforms would be actively banning Nazis but Twitter is actively receiving subscriptions from such individuals and seems to be happy to do so. That's more than simply vile content being present.

Not to mention the time he said his friend's wife was a teacher in a school where they had to put a litter tray in the girls bathrooms because a student there identified as a cat.

Which turned out to be something Fox News were trying to claim was happening in numerous schools but turned out to actually be schools having littertray-type stuff in their classrooms in case people are trapped there for an extended amount of time in the event of a school shooting (because America). So Fox News backtracked and stopped mentioning it, and when Rogan was asked about it he mentioned he was trying to get clarification from his friend's wife but she actually no longer worked at that school and couldn't get in contact with anyone who still worked there.

Rogan is an absolute idiot. The trouble is he used to know that and could actually have decent conversations with people where he tried to learn more about something. But the more popular he got the more he thinks he's the smart one, and his research (aka google until you find something interesting and already aligns with your own opinion) is comparable to actual facts.