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X (twitter) is now worth 9.4 billion

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FunkMiller

Member
When he gets an official position then we'll talk, afaik you have to give up a lot to be part of the government so I kind of doubt it'll happen

Agree on that. But I do believe you naivety is showing a little 😉

he will have a huge influence on the administration openly, so talking Elon = talking politics.

He was on an official call with Trump to Ukraine, remember.
 
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Kraz

Member
When he gets an official position then we'll talk, afaik you have to give up a lot to be part of the government so I kind of doubt it'll happen



Twitter files proved otherwise, keep denying reality. Their moderation "standards" only applied to the side they wanted to mass censor as per usual with these hypocritical corporate fucks
Twitter files didn't prove anything of the sort.
Moderation standards reflected the community and advertiser standards. There is nothing hypocritical about leaving once the standards aren't met.
 

Zathalus

Member
When he gets an official position then we'll talk, afaik you have to give up a lot to be part of the government so I kind of doubt it'll happen
Musk is worth $300 billion, owns companies critical to the US military industrial complex, owns an extremely influential social media platform, and is in the inner circle of the Trump administration that controls the Senate, the House, the Supreme Court, and the White House. He will get what he damn well pleases. The US has been shifting to a Oligarchy over the years, this is just the end result of that.
 
The government is the solution to the rich and powerful authoritarianism and greed, always has been. Obviously they're doing a shitty job but it would be even worse without someone accountable to the people running some interference. I don't see how you don't understand how a power vacuum is created every time the government gives up and lets corporations take over or how that screws people over, health care in America is a prime example
Sonik Sonik , I think you misunderstand me. When you say I "don't understand", I think I do, in theory. In theory, the government should be running interference. In practice, it serves private corporate interests and might as well be an arm of the corporations they're supposed to be running interference for.

Take agricultural subsidies, for instance. They're sold to citizens as a win, but in practice, it puts mandates in place that benefit large-ag corporations.

Government provides direct payments and price supports on specific crops>>Those subsidies are based on previous production levels rather than market demand>>so the way to make money is not by cleverly serving the market and strategically deciding what to produce, but by producing in bulk, which the "big guys" can do, and the "little guys" can't compete with.

The "big guys" can then undercut prices via their larger influence and force the "little guys" out, knowing that, as a "big guy", they can fill the vacuum left by the "little guy" once they've forced them out of the market (i.e., a [small] power vacuum).

Had the government never stuck their finger in the pie, the corporations wouldn't have benefitted in the way they do now. So what power vacuum would be left if agricultural subsidies were rolled back, and the government no longer had the ability to pass legislature like that?
 
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T-0800

Member
Natalie Portman Politics GIF by Star Wars
 

SF Kosmo

Al Jazeera Special Reporter
Musk is only in the position with Twitter that he's in now because the government threatened repercussions and regulations of publicly owned companies if they refused to censor legally protected speech, and you think Musk is the bad guy here?

Boy there's a lot of wrong to unpack in these few sentences, I almost don't know where to start.

1) Trump was the one threatening loudly to end Section 230 DMCA protections, and it wasn't over free speech, it was just pettiness because he thought they were against him.

2) Elon actively worked with the Trump campaign to censor speech he didn't like this year, and also regularly bans anyone criticizing him in his platform.

3)"Legally protected speech" refers to protection from being prosecuted or sued, not Twitter access.

You think him standing up to that is "against the common good?" You think electric cars, providing high speed internet to hurricane victims, not wanting to be involved in wars, and picking up where NASA left off is "against the common good?" Even in the last few days, you have the women on the view crying that they weren't able to censor people. It's absurd.
No, what I think is against the common good is dumping untold hundreds of millions of dollars in dark money into political graft in order to transfer money into his own pockets and keep a bootheel on the neck of democracy.

Musk and Thiel are followers of Mencius Moldbug, they literally believe that democracy and people having power in their government is bad, and that we should have an authoritarian state designed to serve the interests of the extremely wealthy. It's the shit these people don't often speak about publicly.

Also, except for Twitter, Musk's businesses are mostly government subsidized. None of them would be profitable on their own, he gets all these government payouts and then uses it to buy a president so he can slash the government so they have to privatize more shit to government contractors like him... You get how that's broken, right?
 
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natjjohn

Member
You're just playing semantics so let me do it your way, Elon Musk will just be "co-operating" with the government just like other billionaires were "co-operated" with the government before him. You think that Blackrock and Vanguard that controlled twitter before him didn't bribe or had their dirty hand in every single branch of the government? The difference is that twitter isn't mass censoring the population now to influence democracy and sway elections like they did

Oh sweet child. Twitter definitely censors and does propaganda efforts today
 

Twinequinox

Neo Member
Musk is worth $300 billion, owns companies critical to the US military industrial complex, owns an extremely influential social media platform, and is in the inner circle of the Trump administration that controls the Senate, the House, the Supreme Court, and the White House. He will get what he damn well pleases. The US has been shifting to a Oligarchy over the years, this is just the end result of that.

If that is what it takes to counter the combined power of all other big tech firms + mainstream media + Democrats + Blackrock + WEF + other globalist entities, so be it.
 
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1) Trump was the one threatening loudly to end Section 230 DMCA protections, and it wasn't over free speech, it was just pettiness because he thought they were against him.
It doesn't matter if it was about Trump, or his followers, or people who share his opinions. Trump threatened twitter with ending section 230 (which I think is a bad idea, but that's a different discussion) because by removing content they didn't like and making up new rules to deal with content they didn't like, they were selectively enforcing their own rules. The argument is that they're no longer platforms at that point, and instead they're acting as publishers. Little did anyone know that a lot of this was due to his own government and the next administration telling twitter what content they wanted removed, especially when it came to covid. This was in the twitter files, and it honestly made twitter look a whole lot better. They even had internal conversations where they knew what they were doing was wrong.

2) Elon actively worked with the Trump campaign to censor speech he didn't like this year, and also regularly bans anyone criticizing him in his platform.
I've seen Elon post some really dumb things lately, usually in the form of believing something he should have looked into himself before retweeting it. And I've seen several of those posts get community noted, basically saying that Musk is wrong. I've also seen loads of criticism of Musk and Trump in the last several days, weeks, months, years, etc. Nothing seems to have changed, so you'll have to provide some receipts there. I will say that if Musk is doing the same sort of selective enforcement that old twitter did, I would disagree with that, but I haven't seen anything like that.

3)"Legally protected speech" refers to protection from being prosecuted or sued, not Twitter access.
If you're fine with the idea of the government removing people from the internet who question the government or current administration, then I'm just going to say I'm not. I find it blatantly authoritarian, and I feel the same no matter who it happens to, or who is doing the censorship. Before Musk took over, there were leftists on Twitter who were removed as well, btw. That didn't get reported much either. Do you really believe that whoever is in power at the time in government should be able to remove their critics from the internet and that isn't a violation of the first amendment? Can't we all agree that is an abuse of power that shouldn't happen?

I know we don't agree on much, Kosmo, but as we're about to enter the next four years, can't we find common ground that it's not a good thing for the government to decide who gets removed from social media?
 
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FunkMiller

Member
I know we don't agree on much, Kosmo, but as we're about to enter the next four years, can't we find common ground that it's not a good thing for the government to decide who gets removed from social media?

I don't know about Kosmo, but I'll certainly agree with you on that, which is why I'm more than a little twitchy about Musk being part of the next government.
 

SF Kosmo

Al Jazeera Special Reporter
It doesn't matter if it was about Trump, or his followers, or people who share his opinions. Trump threatened twitter with ending section 230 (which I think is a bad idea, but that's a different discussion) because by removing content they didn't like and making up new rules to deal with content they didn't like, they were selectively enforcing their own rules.

Section 230 has nothing to do with any of that, and removing it doesn't solve it, it just essentially ends the ability for social media to exist without being sued into oblivion. Your entire narrative you have constructed here makes no sense.

Stop acting like Trump acts on a principle other than "You did something that was detrimental to me and I want revenge."

I've seen Elon post some really dumb things lately, usually in the form of believing something he should have looked into himself before retweeting it. And I've seen several of those posts get community noted, basically saying that Musk is wrong. I've also seen loads of criticism of Musk and Trump in the last several days, weeks, months, years, etc. Nothing seems to have changed, so you'll have to provide some receipts there. I will say that if Musk is doing the same sort of selective enforcement that old twitter did, I would disagree with that, but I haven't seen anything like that.

The point is not that all anti-Elon or Anti-Trump speech is suppressed, just as I'm sure you will admit not all pro-Trump speech was suppressed before the buyout, but if you're going to cry foul that the FBI had a part in suppressing the Hunter laptop story, then you have to be equally upset that Trump called Elon to ban Ken Klippenstein.

I know we don't agree on much, Kosmo, but as we're about to enter the next four years, can't we find common ground that it's not a good thing for the government to decide who gets removed from social media?
When the owner of a social media company buys a president I'm not sure how possible it is to keep these things separate, man.

That's my whole point, the incestuous relationship between business and government has been getting worse and worse for decades, and we're pretty much dealing with gilded age robber barons again.
 
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chakadave

Member
Section 230 has nothing to do with any of that, and removing it doesn't solve it, it just essentially ends the ability for social media to exist without being sued into oblivion. Your entire narrative you have constructed here makes no sense.

Stop acting like Trump acts on a principle other than "You did something that was detrimental to me and I want revenge."



The point is not that all anti-Elon or Anti-Trump speech is suppressed, just as I'm sure you will admit not all pro-Trump speech was suppressed before the buyout, but if you're going to cry foul that the FBI had a part in suppressing the Hunter laptop story, then you have to be equally upset that Trump called Elon to ban Ken Klippenstein.


When the owner of a social media company buys a president I'm not sure how possible it is to keep these things separate, man.

That's my whole point, the incestuous relationship between business and government has been getting worse and worse for decades, and we're pretty much dealing with gilded age robber barons again.
The US was better before central banks and corporations being protected by government.

Give me free market monopolies and boom and bust cycles over central control any day.

Learn to swim. And not depends o. The social safety net nanny state.
 
you have to be equally upset that Trump called Elon to ban Ken Klippenstein.
He's not banned: https://x.com/kenklippenstein

And I'm glad he's not, because I've enjoyed hearing his reporting in the past. And even if I didn't, he's a journalist. And even if he wasn't, he's an American citizen who should be protected by the constitution.

I see why he was banned, and while I'm not going to get into that subject here, I have to wonder how long he was banned. If he was given a temp ban for going against the rules of the site, I can understand that. If it was selective enforcement, I'm against that. I've also always thought these things should be handled by banning the post or content, rather than banning the person, especially for an extended or permanent amount of time. At least I think that should be true when it comes to people who haven't repeatedly violated the rules.

Either way, I'm glad to see he's still on the platform.


[edit] I looked into things a bit more. He posted personal contact details and identity information in a leaked document that he could have easily redacted before publishing. I can see why he was banned, I agree with the ban, and I'm still glad it wasn't a permanent ban.
 
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EviLore

Expansive Ellipses
Staff Member
I've been critical of some of Elon's decisions with X, but it's clear that there are second order effects emerging now that are probably a good thing for the internet in the long run.

Discussion has been increasingly consolidated onto a few centralized corporate platforms that have all been taking on the same censorship and information control policies, in full alignment with emerging ideological trends of the past 10 years. This empowered a small minority of sociopathic perma-online people, journalists, and content moderation teams to bully everyone else into submission on the basis of those policies' legitimacy, creating a reality distortion bubble that didn't accurately reflect society's values but everyone paid tribute to anyway.

X going in a different direction, and proving its cultural influence, may help us wake up from the collective fever dream and return to normalcy. Or maybe things will just get crazier. We'll see.
 
I've been critical of some of Elon's decisions with X, but it's clear that there are second order effects emerging now that are probably a good thing for the internet in the long run.

Discussion has been increasingly consolidated onto a few centralized corporate platforms that have all been taking on the same censorship and information control policies, in full alignment with emerging ideological trends of the past 10 years. This empowered a small minority of sociopathic perma-online people, journalists, and content moderation teams to bully everyone else into submission on the basis of those policies' legitimacy, creating a reality distortion bubble that didn't accurately reflect society's values but everyone paid tribute to anyway.

X going in a different direction, and proving its cultural influence, may help us wake up from the collective fever dream and return to normalcy. Or maybe things will just get crazier. We'll see.
I think things are definitely going to get crazier, at least for a while. Asmongold just put out a reaction video concerning where the war for free speech might be going next. The title refers to "This War on Free Speech." It's quite political though, so I won't be discussing it here. But for those interested in the subject, it's definitely worth watching, or just watching the original video.
 
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Mistake

Member
I've been critical of some of Elon's decisions with X, but it's clear that there are second order effects emerging now that are probably a good thing for the internet in the long run.

Discussion has been increasingly consolidated onto a few centralized corporate platforms that have all been taking on the same censorship and information control policies, in full alignment with emerging ideological trends of the past 10 years. This empowered a small minority of sociopathic perma-online people, journalists, and content moderation teams to bully everyone else into submission on the basis of those policies' legitimacy, creating a reality distortion bubble that didn't accurately reflect society's values but everyone paid tribute to anyway.

X going in a different direction, and proving its cultural influence, may help us wake up from the collective fever dream and return to normalcy. Or maybe things will just get crazier. We'll see.
I'm quite optimistic in this regard, especially since people rarely jump ship to different platforms and gravitate to whatever is popular. The town square has evolved, and laws need to reflect it. For myself, I actually do the opposite in terms of popular stuff, but I still had to make a concentrated effort to switch sources and try things out. The average person probably wouldn't do that unless forced to. Anyway, focusing more on content that is actually illegal instead of ideological bs will be better for society, not to mention the actual victims...
I think things are definitely going to get crazier, at least for a while. Asmongold just put out a reaction video concerning where the war for free speech might be going next. The title refers to "This War on Free Speech." It's quite political though, so I won't be discussing it here. But for those interested in the subject, it's definitely worth watching, or just watching the original video.
The pendulum of life is now swinging in the other direction. Soon the shoe will be on the other foot, just enjoy the time we get to walk forward
 
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YCoCg

Gold Member
X going in a different direction, and proving its cultural influence, may help us wake up from the collective fever dream and return to normalcy. Or maybe things will just get crazier. We'll see.
Is it though? It just seems like which party it favours has now switched, all this talk about free speech falls flat when the platform is being manipulated still but just for another team.

For example if I look on my twitter trends it's:
Trump
Your body, MY choice
Civil War
etc

Where as on Blue sky it looks like my old twitter with things like:
Weird shit in Japan
Retro Gaming
Old computer stuff
...and weird furry art shit I dunno why that one is there but at least it's not politics.
 

SF Kosmo

Al Jazeera Special Reporter
He's not banned: https://x.com/kenklippenstein

And I'm glad he's not, because I've enjoyed hearing his reporting in the past. And even if I didn't, he's a journalist. And even if he wasn't, he's an American citizen who should be protected by the constitution.

I see why he was banned, and while I'm not going to get into that subject here, I have to wonder how long he was banned. If he was given a temp ban for going against the rules of the site, I can understand that. If it was selective enforcement, I'm against that. I've also always thought these things should be handled by banning the post or content, rather than banning the person, especially for an extended or permanent amount of time. At least I think that should be true when it comes to people who haven't repeatedly violated the rules.

Either way, I'm glad to see he's still on the platform.


[edit] I looked into things a bit more. He posted personal contact details and identity information in a leaked document that he could have easily redacted before publishing. I can see why he was banned, I agree with the ban, and I'm still glad it wasn't a permanent ban.
The issue is more that the ban was done specifically at the request of the Trump campaign, that they specifically targeted the only person who was reporting this dossier, and when they got caught and that was reported on Musk reversed the decision.

The US was better before central banks and corporations being protected by government.

Give me free market monopolies and boom and bust cycles over central control any day.

Learn to swim. And not depends o. The social safety net nanny state.
This just shows a poor understanding of history. We had this, we called it the Gilded Age (a sarcastic play on Golden Age because it was actually garbage underneath), it corrupted our government, led to an age of child labor, dangerous work environments, and massively rich robber barons who could do things like flood cities and massacre workers and never face any accountability.

We pulled out of this because of Teddy Roosevelt's anti-corruption reforms, the labor movement, and New Deal. This led us to the post WWII boom in the middle class where you could go to work in a factory and still buy a home for your family in your 20s.

That has been eroding since Reagan and Clinton who fully embraced neoliberalism and deregulated financial institutions, and now we are seeing the same kinds of wealth gaps and middle class struggles that we had in the 1910s.

We know the solution and it isn't just doubling down on neoliberalism (or even worse Anarcho-capitalism), it's restoring balance to the system through regulation and labor protections that makes these systems work for everyone.
 

EviLore

Expansive Ellipses
Staff Member
Is it though? It just seems like which party it favours has now switched, all this talk about free speech falls flat when the platform is being manipulated still but just for another team.

For example if I look on my twitter trends it's:
Trump
Your body, MY choice
Civil War
etc

Where as on Blue sky it looks like my old twitter with things like:
Weird shit in Japan
Retro Gaming
Old computer stuff
...and weird furry art shit I dunno why that one is there but at least it's not politics.
Yes, FYP is dominated by partisan politics and appears to be right-leaning, at least on my feed. The algo is open source though and not set up in an inherently partisan way, afiak, other than signal boosting Elon's tweets, which are of course fully partisan.

Kosmo is getting into his socialist manifesto now or something, so we do need to hit the brakes.
 


I am a Tesla investor who lived through this apocalypse and I can confirm the historical accuracy of this. He literally got cold feet and tried to back out, Twitter literally sued him to force him to buy them, and the court was going to rule in their favor. Pretty hilarious and ironic today I guess, though I and the many other investors who lost a lot of money were not amused at the time
 
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Yes, FYP is dominated by partisan politics and appears to be right-leaning, at least on my feed.
As a third data point: that's what the "For You" tab on my Twitter is like.

Weirdly, it was like 90% right-leaning until the week before the election. Then it flipped majority left-leaning. Now it's back to right.

Kind of funny when the flip happened because unless someone explicitly mentioned something that left- or right-signaled, it could've been from and about either side. E.g., broad "These people are our enemy..."; "Can you believe these idiots actually believe..." statements.
 

FunkMiller

Member
The pendulum of life is now swinging in the other direction. Soon the shoe will be on the other foot, just enjoy the time we get to walk forward

It's not a pendulum. It's a rubber band. Culture swings far too far in one direction, and then snaps back in the other direction too far to compensate. That's the problem across most of western society at the moment. And it happens, because the extremes are given far too loud a voice - stretching that rubber band far enough so that when it snaps back it goes too far.

Normalcy only returns when the rest of us ignore the extremes and seek to prevent them dominating the discourse.
 

IntentionalPun

Ask me about my wife's perfect butthole


I am a Tesla investor who lived through this apocalypse and I can confirm the historical accuracy of this. He literally got cold feet and tried to back out, Twitter literally sued him to force him to buy them, and the court was going to rule in their favor. Pretty hilarious and ironic today I guess, though I and the many other investors who lost a lot of money were not amused at the time

What in the world does “the left” have to do with any of that? He bought the company, you can’t just back out, as was ruled by courts not “the left.”
 

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member

Mainstream media is good for covering topics at a very broad level. To me, their job is more about telling people what hot topics there are going on in life.

But if you want more detail, stats, discussion and analysis from the spectrum, you go to streamers, blogs, or specialized writers who do 100x the depth coverage than random news anchor X reading a teleprompter or being pushed to a narrative by the company because they purposely lean a certain political way when you'd think big corporations would be more neutral.

Its like sports. Mainstream media does the barebones. Some stats and replays. If you want detailed analysis, you need people who know sports can talk about it for hours going over details of player X or team Y. Of course individuals can be biased too, but at least people understand it's normies like them gabbing politics or sports or games etc.... And not highly paid suit and tie mainstream media people commentating a biased narrative like corporate shills.

Good luck watching a sportscast of the regional home team and having the announcers or TV crew grill the team for a bad game. You'll only get that from post game guys on radio who arent on the team's or TV channels payroll, independent sports writers, or avg joes talking sports.
 
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SF Kosmo

Al Jazeera Special Reporter


I am a Tesla investor who lived through this apocalypse and I can confirm the historical accuracy of this. He literally got cold feet and tried to back out, Twitter literally sued him to force him to buy them, and the court was going to rule in their favor. Pretty hilarious and ironic today I guess, though I and the many other investors who lost a lot of money were not amused at the time

Did "the left" force him to buy it, or did the law (as adjudicated in the lawsuit filed by Twitter) force him to buy it? The framing here is just plain bizarre.
 

AJUMP23

Parody of actual AJUMP23


I swear I heard one of the newscaster sigh off camera. :D

William Randolph Hearst was far more influential then Musk because there was not really any competition. With Modern media there is lot sand lots of media sources. When Hearst ran the news industry he was close to being the source. It was how the NY Times was able to suppress NAZI Concentration camps for so long. We are in a different era. There is so much information we do not know what is true, and in the end we believe what we read though test and our own Bias.

2 Timothy 3:7 - Ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.

I like this verse about encapsulating the modern age. We are always learning, but we never learn the truth, or recognize it. The truth here is about coming to the knowledge of the need of a savior. But applied to a society we are regularly deceived by ourselves, our media, our government, our scientist and those around us.
 

violence

Gold Member
Did "the left" force him to buy it, or did the law (as adjudicated in the lawsuit filed by Twitter) force him to buy it? The framing here is just plain bizarre.
They said they’d rather die than sell to him (poison pill)… till he tried to pull out. Then they sued him to buy it because it was a tremendously good deal. They chose the money.
 
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SF Kosmo

Al Jazeera Special Reporter
They said they’d rather die than sell to him (poison pill)… till he tried to pull out. Then they sued him to buy it because it was a tremendously good deal. They chose the money.
I mean yeah, but "They" is the people who own Twitter.

Elon got fucked in the deal, too, because he borrowed the money for it. Now he is essentially stuck with a mortgage on a house that is worth a quarter what he paid for it.
 

Brucey

Member
I'm guessing Elon really doesn't care if his $40 billion turns into $0. It was worth it to remove Twitter from the liberal safe space it had become. This time around no banning of sharing of ny post links or other things that "the authorities" deemed to be dangerous (questioning the Rona vaccine, lockdowns etc).
 

violence

Gold Member
I'm guessing Elon really doesn't care if his $40 billion turns into $0. It was worth it to remove Twitter from the liberal safe space it had become. This time around no banning of sharing of ny post links or other things that "the authorities" deemed to be dangerous (questioning the Rona vaccine, lockdowns etc).
Somethings are priceless
 
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Cyberpunkd

Member
I'm guessing Elon really doesn't care if his $40 billion turns into $0. It was worth it to remove Twitter from the liberal safe space it had become. This time around no banning of sharing of ny post links or other things that "the authorities" deemed to be dangerous (questioning the Rona vaccine, lockdowns etc).
If you think about it - if he bought Twitter because of his belief of being able to shape the public opinion much better than traditional media, then $40 billion was absolute pennies. Hell, even $400 billion would have been a great deal.
 

Brucey

Member
Agree on that. But I do believe you naivety is showing a little 😉

he will have a huge influence on the administration openly, so talking Elon = talking politics.

He was on an official call with Trump to Ukraine, remember.
Well let's see what actually happened on that call, personally it doesn't seem like anything related to policy was discussed, Elon happened to be there when Zelensky called, they shot the shit. MSM picked up the ball and ran with it.

"CNN —
Tech tycoon Elon Musk joined a call between US President-elect Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky the day after the presidential election, according to a source with knowledge of the situation.
According to another source, Trump was with Musk at Mar-a-Lago when Zelensky called to congratulate the president-elect for what a source briefed on the call described as a positive and cordial conversation.
Trump put the call on speaker and Zelensky thanked Musk for his help with providing communications through Starlink to Ukraine in the ongoing war with Russia. The call was roughly seven minutes long, and no policy was discussed, the source said."

 

NickFire

Member
Gut feeling is the value of twitter is going back up. When the owner is as public facing as he was during the last few months and his work succeeded I have to believe more people are spending time on the platform.
 

DragoonKain

Neighbours from Hell
Twitter does drive the news, I'll give it that. That's one thing it does that other platforms don't. People talk about Bluesky and its cool features, but Bluesky is like a gaming console with cool features that has no games to play. No one goes to it for news. The few that go to it to begin with. It's basically an echo chamber for people who can't handle the newfound push back on Twitter they're getting that they never used to get for their crazy ideas, and for people who are tired of being called 'Jew' by 1000 people every time they post something. Which, the latter I can't blame people. That's the one thing holding Twitter back. If it had the new culture and new discourse but got rid of all the malicious people who only use it to harass and denigrate others, then it would be great. But that is a pretty big negative. But that's the reason no one ever truly leaves Twitter. Some may stop posting. They may even deactivate their accounts(after creating burners). But they stay for the news drip into their veins that you just don't get on other platforms.

One thing that I think a lot of people get wrong though: people say all everyone needs to do is leave Twitter and society's sanity will be restored in due time. I disagree. If Twitter vanished tomorrow, the next spawn of it would take its place as the new "Hellsite." Twitter enables the worst in people, but the worst in people has to already exist for Twitter to be able to do that. Abbreviated texts that encourage no nuance, viewing someone as an account rather than a person, and a platform driven by peoples eyeballs on it... these are things not unique to Twitter.

But I will say this: I think people are starting to build up a tolerance to it. Not everyone, but more people than just a few years ago. I don't know how or why it took this long, I guess most people are just weak willed or cowards, but people are finally realizing that if you say something to piss of social media mobs, that the only way it can affect your life is if you let it. Never reading the comments and ignoring the mobs takes care of 95% of the problems. And not just individual people ignoring them. Companies ignoring them, institutions, etc. We're seeing more of that now than ever before. So maybe if we can't get rid of social media, maybe the solution is within ourselves we just evolve to develop a tolerance to it and are no longer influenced by it as much. Maybe that's the way out of the hysteria.
 
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FunkMiller

Member
Well let's see what actually happened on that call, personally it doesn't seem like anything related to policy was discussed, Elon happened to be there when Zelensky called, they shot the shit. MSM picked up the ball and ran with it.

"CNN —
Tech tycoon Elon Musk joined a call between US President-elect Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky the day after the presidential election, according to a source with knowledge of the situation.
According to another source, Trump was with Musk at Mar-a-Lago when Zelensky called to congratulate the president-elect for what a source briefed on the call described as a positive and cordial conversation.
Trump put the call on speaker and Zelensky thanked Musk for his help with providing communications through Starlink to Ukraine in the ongoing war with Russia. The call was roughly seven minutes long, and no policy was discussed, the source said."


It’s the president elect of the United States on a call with another state leader. The fact Elon was on the call was a massive deal, policy discussions or not. No point in underplaying his influence here.
 

FunkMiller

Member


Might be time to change that thread title, the correct title is "X (twitter) is now worth the entire US Government"


State run social media platform! Yay! This is absolutely what everyone wanted, right?!

Can you imagine if Jack Dorsey had announced ten years ago he was joining the Obama administration? The hissy fits would have been astronomical.
 
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