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How much longer is Twitter going to last?
A few weeks
A few months
A few years
About as long as the rest of humanity
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Dick Trauma
Nov 30, 2007

God damn it, you've got to be kind.
https://twitter.com/MattBinder/status/1705404216674508922?s=20

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AsInHowe
Jan 11, 2007

red winged angel

evilweasel posted:

i mean I'm not giving Elon my credit card number no matter how little he promises to charge it

At the end of it all, this is the biggest thing. Why would I give the fraudulent charge idiot my banking info for anything at all?

Captain_Maclaine
Sep 30, 2001

Every moment that I'm alive, I pray for death!

AsInHowe posted:

At the end of it all, this is the biggest thing. Why would I give the fraudulent charge idiot my banking info for anything at all?

Particularly given the number of times Tesla has "accidentally" charged a bunch of its customers' on-file accounts coincidentally just in time to juice its end-of-quarter numbers, issuing refunds after those numbers come out.

small butter
Oct 8, 2011


Does he want an alleged rapist to push Twitter?

Guavanaut
Nov 27, 2009

Looking At Them Tittys
1969 - 1998



Toilet Rascal
He was one of the people to come to Brand's defense, so probably.

Republicans
Oct 14, 2003

- More money for us

- Fuck you


It's funny how long this has been my only reference for Russell Brand.

Main Paineframe
Oct 27, 2010

small butter posted:

Does he want an alleged rapist to push Twitter?

Based on his tweets, Musk appears to think that the Brand allegations were faked by the government and media in order to get him canceled as retaliation for Brand's political views. He would probably very much love to have Russell Brand repping Twitter, to prove his commitment to resisting "cancel culture" at all costs.

Guavanaut
Nov 27, 2009

Looking At Them Tittys
1969 - 1998



Toilet Rascal
Yeah, it was him, Andrew Tate, Tucker Carlson, Alan Sugar, and George Galloway, all suddenly coming out of the woodwork with nonsense like that.

Strong "MRAs of conspiracy culture" line-up there.

Goatse James Bond
Mar 28, 2010

If you see me posting please remind me that I have Charlie Work in the reports forum to do instead

evilweasel posted:

he just looks vaguely better than elon musk

how did you get your hands on my resume


Captain_Maclaine posted:

Particularly given the number of times Tesla has "accidentally" charged a bunch of its customers' on-file accounts coincidentally just in time to juice its end-of-quarter numbers, issuing refunds after those numbers come out.

Did any legal consequences come of that (yet)? I guess one option would be to issue slightly larger refunds and call it the cost of defrauding investors doing business. I know that if I got a "we're very sorry we charged you five thousand dollars, here is an additional one thousand dollars in your pocket" I'd seriously consider leaving my card on file. :v:

Wayne Knight
May 11, 2006

I think it’d be tough to know how widespread it was. A few people complaining on the internet probably weren’t charged enough to swing the difference in a financial report. How many people would have to have been impacted for it to make a difference?

Captain_Maclaine
Sep 30, 2001

Every moment that I'm alive, I pray for death!

Google Jeb Bush posted:

Did any legal consequences come of that (yet)? I guess one option would be to issue slightly larger refunds and call it the cost of defrauding investors doing business. I know that if I got a "we're very sorry we charged you five thousand dollars, here is an additional one thousand dollars in your pocket" I'd seriously consider leaving my card on file. :v:

As best as I know, nothing much has come of it because they still love car.

duz
Jul 11, 2005

Come on Ilhan, lets go bag us a shitpost


small butter posted:

Does he want an alleged rapist to push Twitter?

Hardly the first one he's promoted.

Dick Trauma
Nov 30, 2007

God damn it, you've got to be kind.
https://twitter.com/lawfulspice/status/1706406131847885219?s=20

cumpantry
Dec 18, 2020

first being blocked by elon and now this. poor turd

FlamingLiberal
Jan 18, 2009

Would you like to play a game?



“That’s false, he was never popular”

Dessel
Feb 21, 2011

What does a catturd livestream even look like? Like he hasn't voluntarily even revealed his face has he?

Absurd Alhazred
Mar 27, 2010

by Athanatos
Sometimes cats have the runs I guess

haveblue
Aug 15, 2005



Toilet Rascal

Dessel posted:

What does a catturd livestream even look like? Like he hasn't voluntarily even revealed his face has he?

Indistinguishable from pointing the camera at a litterbox for three hours

Clarste
Apr 15, 2013

Just how many mistakes have you suffered on the way here?

An uncountable number, to be sure.

Dessel posted:

What does a catturd livestream even look like? Like he hasn't voluntarily even revealed his face has he?

vtuber

AsInHowe
Jan 11, 2007

red winged angel

Captain_Maclaine posted:

Particularly given the number of times Tesla has "accidentally" charged a bunch of its customers' on-file accounts coincidentally just in time to juice its end-of-quarter numbers, issuing refunds after those numbers come out.

EXACTLY.

IUG
Jul 14, 2007


Instagram stopped showing how old posts were for me. I suspect it is to better hide how little content has been lately. They’ve been recycling the posts from my accounts I follow whenever there isn’t anything new, hoping I wouldn’t notice. But something being “12 hours old” (for example) was always a give away if I didn’t remember the post. I don’t know why else they would suddenly take away post age.

OgNar
Oct 26, 2002

They tapdance not, neither do they fart
"Who wouldn't want Elon Musk at their side"
Hands go up and laughs start.

https://twitter.com/RubSchreurs/status/1707525545729098031

Full interview (38m) here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYymRU-bfpQ

Weatherman
Jul 30, 2003

WARBLEKLONK

OgNar posted:

"Who wouldn't want Elon Musk at their side"
Hands go up and laughs start.

https://twitter.com/RubSchreurs/status/1707525545729098031

Full interview (38m) here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYymRU-bfpQ

Such a smarmy and poo poo-filled response she makes, too.

OgNar
Oct 26, 2002

They tapdance not, neither do they fart
For non Twitter social media info...

Discord seems to be having problems with cloudfare and is telling people they are blocked for the last few hours.

https://twitter.com/discord_support/status/1707723388481929704

LifeLynx
Feb 27, 2001

Dang so this is like looking over his shoulder in real-time
Grimey Drawer

OgNar posted:

For non Twitter social media info...

Discord seems to be having problems with cloudfare and is telling people they are blocked for the last few hours.

https://twitter.com/discord_support/status/1707723388481929704

I was playing a game and a big unclosable You Have Been Blocked message covered 8/10ths of the top of the screen. Finally figured out I had to force close Discord to make it go away.

Absurd Alhazred
Mar 27, 2010

by Athanatos

OgNar posted:

"Who wouldn't want Elon Musk at their side"
Hands go up and laughs start.

https://twitter.com/RubSchreurs/status/1707525545729098031

Full interview (38m) here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYymRU-bfpQ

If you didn't start out being a disingenuous piece of poo poo when working for narcissistic rear end in a top hat, you end up becoming one.

Shooting Blanks
Jun 6, 2007

Real bullets mess up how cool this thing looks.

-Blade



This one's kinda funny - Kia and Hyundai Blame TikTok and Instagram For Their Cars Getting Stolen

From the filing here, Kia/Hyundai are essentially claiming that thefts involving their vehicles were less common than their competitors prior to videos of them going viral. As a result, the blame for the thefts should clearly fall on social media, and not the car companies for stopping the installation of anti-theft devices (engine immobilizers) that exist in almost every other vehicle sold in the US.

I normally wouldn't side with social media companies in a lawsuit, and I get that Kia/Hyundai are just trying to avoid financial damages - but this is a bit of a reach.

Barrel Cactaur
Oct 6, 2021

They are looking to recoup a loss off a company that directly profited from activities that worsened the loss (promoting, hosting ,and advertising on videos explaining in detail how to steal these vehicles). They probably expect a fairly limited recovery but when your throwing that much money around it makes sense to try anyway.

Absurd Alhazred
Mar 27, 2010

by Athanatos
Do they expect to do better piercing Section 230 than when this was tried with anti-terrorism laws?

Ponsonby Britt
Mar 13, 2006
I think you mean, why is there silverware in the pancake drawer? Wassup?
The car companies don't have to win the lawsuit. They just have to make the lawyer bills cost more than the amount social media companies are making off this kind of content. Then there's a financial incentive for the social media companies to voluntarily change their policies even though they're not legally required to.

Absurd Alhazred
Mar 27, 2010

by Athanatos

Ponsonby Britt posted:

The car companies don't have to win the lawsuit. They just have to make the lawyer bills cost more than the amount social media companies are making off this kind of content. Then there's a financial incentive for the social media companies to voluntarily change their policies even though they're not legally required to.

Won't help if the ruling goes against them and they're required to pay defendant's expenses and attorneys fees.

Discendo Vox
Mar 21, 2013

This does not make sense when, again, aggregate indicia also indicate improvements. The belief that things are worse is false. It remains false.
From the Washington Post:

Under India’s pressure, Facebook let propaganda and hate speech thrive

The whole thing is worth a read- it's got excellent internal links to additional sources, and I've not got time atm to copy them all in. Of note, the propaganda campaigns under discussion passed into other countries and userbases. Gosh, if only there was some sort of media literacy thread to discuss how to handle this sort of thing.

quote:

Nearly three years ago, Facebook’s propaganda hunters uncovered a vast social media influence operation that used hundreds of fake accounts to praise the Indian army’s crackdown in the restive border region of Kashmir and accuse Kashmiri journalists of separatism and sedition.

What they found next was explosive: The network was operated by the Indian army’s Chinar Corps, a storied unit garrisoned in the Muslim-majority Kashmir Valley, the heart of Indian Kashmir and one of the most militarized regions in the world.

But when the U.S.-based supervisor of Facebook’s Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior (CIB) unit told colleagues in India that the unit wanted to delete the network’s pages, executives in the New Delhi office pushed back. They warned against antagonizing the government of a sovereign nation over actions in territory it controls. They said they needed to consult local lawyers. They worried they could be imprisoned for treason.

Those objections staved off action for a full year while the Indian army unit continued to spread disinformation that put Kashmiri journalists in danger. The deadlock was resolved only when top Facebook executives intervened and ordered the fake accounts deleted.

Facebook’s cautious approach to moderating pro-government content in India was often exacerbated by a long-standing dynamic: Employees responsible for rooting out hackers and propagandists — often based in the United States — frequently clashed with executives in India who were hired for their political experience or relationships with the government, and who held political views that aligned with the BJP’s.

Interviews with more than 20 current and former employees and a review of newly obtained internal Facebook documents illustrate how executives repeatedly shied away from punishing the BJP or associated accounts. The interviews and documents show that local Facebook executives failed to take down videos and posts of Hindu nationalist leaders, even when they openly called for killing Indian Muslims.

In 2019, after damning media reports and whistleblower disclosures, Facebook’s parent company, now named Meta, bowed to pressure and hired an outside law firm to examine its handling of human rights in India. That probe found that Facebook did not stop hate speech or calls for action ahead of violence, including a bloody religious riot in Delhi in 2020 that was incited by Hindu nationalist leaders and left more than 50 people, mostly Muslims, dead. Meta never published the document, strictly limited which executives saw it and issued a public summary that emphasized the culpability of “third parties.”

Social media companies today do not lose much when they call out the Russian or Chinese governments for propaganda or dismantle networks of fake accounts tied to those countries. Most U.S. social media platforms are banned in those countries, or they do not generate significant revenue there.

[Vox sez: I think we can think of a few exceptions here!]

But India is at the forefront of a worrying trend, according to Silicon Valley executives from multiple companies who have dealt with the issues. The Modi administration is setting an example for how authoritarian governments can dictate to American social media platforms what content they must preserve and what they must remove, regardless of the companies’ rules. Countries including Brazil, Nigeria and Turkey are following the India model, executives say. In 2021, Brazil’s then president, Jair Bolsonaro, sought to prohibit social networks from removing posts, including his own, that questioned whether Brazil’s elections would be rigged. In Nigeria, then-President Muhammadu Buhari banned Twitter after it removed one of his tweets threatening a severe crackdown against rebels.

The day before May’s tight election in Turkey, Twitter agreed to ban accounts at the direction of the administration of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, including that of investigative journalist Cevheri Guven, an Erdogan critic.

[...]
In public, Indian officials argued that Kashmir’s Muslims would benefit from closer integration with India. Meanwhile, the Chinar Corps covertly spread its messaging. Jibran Nazir, a Kashmiri journalist working in central India, said he was “shocked” to one day find his photo adopted as the avatar of two anonymous Twitter accounts spreading the #NayaKashmir, or “New Kashmir” hashtag, which touted Kashmir’s prosperity under New Delhi’s control.

“They were recently created accounts that had more than 1,000 followers each,” Nazir recalled. “The accounts wanted to show Kashmiris are doing well, which they’re not.”

The Chinar Corps’ stealth operation kept pushing that line — but also went further. It singled out independent Kashmiri journalists by name, disclosing their personal information and attacking them using the anonymous Twitter accounts @KashmirTraitors and @KashmirTraitor1, according to Stanford’s analysis and The Post’s review.

One target was journalist Qazi Shibli and his publication, the Kashmiriyat.

“@TheKashmiriyat posts #fake news on the various operations conducted by the #IndianArmy causing hate amongst people for the #Army,” @KashmirTraitors wrote in a series of tweets. “Even the positive things like ration distribution that are happening in #Kashmir are shown in a negative prospect in posts of @TheKashmiriyat.”

“The #traitor behind this account and website is @QaziShibli (born in 1993) who has been detained numerous times under various charges for cybercrimes and posting content against national security.”

Shibli’s home was raided, and he was jailed repeatedly on charges including violation of the Public Safety Act, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. The pressure online was crippling, Shibli said.

These problems were systemic- I've not copied in the material, but it was driven by politically connected execs who, even when replaced, were replaced by people even closer to Modi.

quote:

After U.S. Facebook employees in 2020 warned that Indian Hindu nationalist groups were spreading the hashtag #coronajihad, implying that Indian Muslims were intentionally spreading the coronavirus in a conspiracy to wage holy war, a content policy staffer for the region pushed back, arguing that the meme didn’t amount to hate speech because it wasn’t explicitly targeting a people, two former employees recalled. (Facebook eventually barred searches for that hashtag, but searching for just “coronajihad” returns accusatory posts.)

In late 2019, Facebook data scientist Sophie Zhang tried to remove an inauthentic network that she said included the page of a BJP member of Parliament. She was repeatedly stymied by the company’s special treatment of politicians and partners, known as Xcheck or “cross check.” Facebook later said many of the accounts were taken down though it could not establish that the BJP member of parliament’s page had been part of the network.

The following year, documents obtained by Facebook employee-turned-whistleblower Frances Haugen show, Kashmiris were deluged with violent images and hate speech after military and police operations there. Facebook said it subsequently removed some “borderline content and civic and political Groups from our recommendation systems.”

In one internal case study on India seen by The Post, Facebook found that pages with ties to the Hindu nationalist umbrella organization Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) compared Muslims to “pigs” and falsely claimed that the Quran calls for men to rape female family members. But Facebook employees did not internally nominate the RSS — with which the BJP is affiliated — for a hate group designation given “political sensitivities,” the case study found.

Facebook knew the problems were severe and chose to bury the results.

quote:

As the controversy over its handling of hate in India grew in 2019, Facebook hired the law firm Foley Hoag to study and write about its performance there in what is called a human rights impact assessment. Some rights groups worried that the firm would go easy on Facebook because one of its human rights lawyers at the time, Brittan Heller, was married to Gleicher, Facebook’s head of security policy.

But the firm interviewed outside experts and Facebook employees and found that dozens of pages that were calling Muslims rapists and terrorists and describing them as an enemy to be eliminated had not been removed, even after being reported.

Foley Hoag cited multiple underlying issues, including the lack of local experts in hate speech, the application of U.S. speech standards when Indian laws called for greater restriction of attacks on religion, and a legalistic approach that, for example, withheld action if a subject of threats was not explicitly targeted for their ethnicity or religion.

Foley Hoag found that the company allowed incendiary hate speech to spread in the lead-up to deadly riots in Delhi in 2020 and violence elsewhere, according to people briefed on its lengthy document. It recommended that the company publish the report, name a vice president for human rights and hire more people versed in Indian cultures.

Instead of releasing the findings, Facebook wrote a mostly positive four-page summary and buried it toward the end of an 83-page global human rights report in July 2022. That readout said the law firm “noted the potential for Meta’s platforms to be connected to salient human rights risks caused by third parties.” It said the actual report had made undisclosed recommendations, which the company was “studying.”

These problems are ongoing and in all countries.

quote:

Facebook executives similarly downplayed problems reported by outside groups. The London Story, a Netherlands-based human rights group, reported hundreds of posts that it said violated the company’s rules. Facebook asked for more information, and then asked for it in a different format, then said it would work to improve things if the group stayed quiet. When nothing happened, the group succeeded in getting a meeting with the company’s Oversight Board, created to handle a small number of high-profile content disputes.

It took more than a year to remove a 2019 video with 32 million views, according to the London Story’s executive director, Ritumbra Manuvie.

In the video, Yati Narsinghanand, a right-wing cleric, says in Hindi to a crowd: “I want to eliminate Muslims and Islam from the face of earth.” Facebook took it down just before the London Story released a report on the issue in 2022.

Versions were then posted again. One remained visible as of Monday, but on Tuesday, after Facebook was asked for comment, it was no longer available.

Oh hey did you think this was just a facebook thing?

quote:

When Facebook’s investigators brought their Kashmir findings to the India office, they expected a chilly response. The India team frequently argued that Facebook policies didn’t apply to a particular case. Sometimes, they argued that they didn’t apply to sovereign governments.

But this time, their rejection was strident.

“They said they could be arrested and charged with treason,” said a person involved in the dispute.

[...]


Blocked by their own colleagues, Facebook’s U.S. threat team passed the Chinar Corps information to their counterparts at Twitter. Facebook employees said they had been hoping that Twitter would follow the leads and root out the parallel operation on that platform. The team’s members also hoped that Twitter would do the first takedown, giving Facebook political cover so it wouldn’t have to face government retribution alone and its internal dispute could be resolved.

Twitter, which had been more forceful in pushing back against the Indian government, took no action. It told Facebook staff that it was having technical issues.

In truth, the San Francisco company was changing direction.

The Indian police raids and public comments from government officials criticizing the company had scared off firms that Twitter had planned to use for promotion, former Twitter employees said. “We saw a very obvious slowdown in user growth,” one former policy leader said. “The government is very influential there.”

The former executive added: “We had just promised [Wall] Street 3x user growth, and the only way that was going to be possible was with India.”

Another former policy staffer said Twitter’s bigger problem was physical threats to employees, while former safety chief Yoel Roth wrote in the New York Times this month that Twitter’s lawyers had warned that workers in India might be charged with sedition, which carries a death penalty.

In any case, Twitter was tired of leading the way with takedowns, and it changed how it treated the government overall. The company did not respond to a request for comment.

As has been reported elsewhere, the nonprofit groups trying to investigate and stop this stuff have limited ability, and are now under legal threat:

quote:

As Facebook’s India team delayed acting on the Chinar inauthentic network, the propaganda investigators in Washington and California worked on less controversial subjects.
“You have only so much time in the day, and if you know you are going to run into political challenges, you might spend your time investigating in Azerbaijan or somewhere else that won’t be an issue. Call it a chilling effect. That dynamic is real,” said Fishman, the former senior Facebook executive.

Even after the India campaign was addressed, the execs continued to gently caress with it. Note this is after the campaign had been allowed to spread and get socialized, maximizing this effect:

quote:

The impasse continued until the U.S. team demanded action from Nick Clegg, then Meta’s powerful vice president of global affairs, who had been put in charge of India public policy. Clegg was later named president of global affairs.

Finally, after discussions with Facebook’s top lawyers, Clegg ruled in favor of the threat team, employees said.

But the India executives had a request: They asked that Facebook at least break with past practice and not disclose the takedown.

Since coming under fire for failing to spot Russian propagandists using its platform during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, Facebook has routinely announced significant removals of disinformation. It often describes what the campaign was trying to do and how it did it, and there is frequently direct attribution to a national government or enough detail for readers to guess.

The idea is to increase transparency that could help disinformation hunters and deter its spreaders from trying again. Smaller takedowns are described more briefly in quarterly summaries.

This time, the India side argued that it would be unwise to embarrass the Indian military and that doing so would increase the likelihood of legal action.

Clegg and Facebook chief legal officer Jennifer Newstead agreed, staffers said. At their direction, Facebook changed its policy to state that it would disclose takedowns unless doing so would endanger employees.

[Vox sez: Why yes, this does incentivize governments conducting propaganda operations to threaten social media employees.]

Following standard practice, Facebook removed the fake accounts, and the official Chinar Corps pages they had been working with on Facebook and Instagram, on Jan. 28, 2022. (After the Indian army publicly complained about the takedown of the official pages, they were reinstated.)

That March, Twitter followed Facebook and quietly removed the Chinar Corps’ parallel network on its platform and shared it with researchers. In private meetings with Facebook and Twitter executives, the army defended its fake accounts and said they were necessary to combat Pakistani disinformation.

Facebook didn’t disclose the takedown, and Twitter hasn’t issued what had been twice-yearly summaries of its enforcement actions since one for the period that ended in December 2021.

A month later, Facebook issued a quarterly “adversarial threat report” that listed takedowns of inauthentic networks targeting users in Iran, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Brazil, Costa Rica, El Salvador and the Philippines.

It said nothing about India.

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 21:33 on Sep 30, 2023

koolkal
Oct 21, 2008

this thread maybe doesnt have room for 2 green xbox one avs
No one in the US says much about the Modi government so you get dumb crap like Biden hiring a Modi supporter to join his campaign staff or Facebook feeling free to do whatever the BJP wants.

PT6A
Jan 5, 2006

Public school teachers are callous dictators who won't lift a finger to stop children from peeing in my plane
Modi already had a Canadian citizen killed in Canada for some made up bullshit, gently caress him and his idiot government, I don't know why everyone's been ignoring them for so long.

Nidhg00670000
Mar 26, 2010

We're in the pipe, five by five.
Grimey Drawer
You *know* why. India is going to help numbers go up.

OgNar
Oct 26, 2002

They tapdance not, neither do they fart
https://twitter.com/clearing_fog/status/1710042019840799103

FlamingLiberal
Jan 18, 2009

Would you like to play a game?



So Elon just hates Twitter, right

https://twitter.com/popcrave/status/1710167130186879071?s=46&t=BHs6Pl38GJXGN2Y4xeriNA

Xand_Man
Mar 2, 2004

If what you say is true
Wutang might be dangerous


Ratioed so hard he killed the feature

haveblue
Aug 15, 2005



Toilet Rascal
Just assume all posts have been ratioed from now on

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Tree Reformat
Apr 2, 2022

by Fluffdaddy
Musk is just doing his part to free people from the tyranny of metrics.

Destroying Twitter will probably be the most net good he's ever done in his entire life, lol.

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