The ongoing Elon Twitter saga: "insert demographic" melts down

Status
Not open for further replies.
Raymond Lin said:
Like you, me too…and honestly up until last year, i thought he was just some rich guy doing tech things but instead of like Zuckerberg who sell user data, he actually makes real life products, the cars, Space X, even that crappy fake flamethrower thing. The guy memes and is good at it and seems to be quite funny at times…then one day i heard on LTT Podcast where Linus said something about Elon that stuck with me. He didn’t go into much detail and i am sure he knows more about Elon than I. Linus mentioned something about the lines of that how a man treats his family is a reflection of the kind of man he is. And Elon has like 9 kids…from several different women, and many of which is a female worker of companies he recently acquired.

Office romance happens…whatever but the bit about how a man treats his family is a reflection of a man he is…that line stuck with me and from that point i looked at Elon with a more sceptical eye.

Since his Twitter takeover he has really start showing his true colours.
Click to expand...

Yeah I'm getting the feeling Linus doesn't like Elon that much.

 
technology.ie

Twitter turmoil could be exploited by terrorists, experts warn

The ongoing upheaval at Twitter could pose a threat to the national security of countries around the world as terrorists exploit staff cuts and content
technology.ie technology.ie
UN-backed safety group Tech Against Terrorism has now warned this is causing an erosion of content moderation capabilities that could allow terrorists to return more freely to online platforms.
Adam Hadley, executive director of the group, said: “I urge Elon Musk and Twitter’s senior leadership to reaffirm their commitment to tackling the terrorist use of the internet.
“We recognise that moderation of terrorist content is a significant challenge even for the most sophisticated tech platforms.
“We are concerned that any real or perceived erosion of content moderation capability on the larger social media platforms threatens reverse years of progress and could further embolden terrorists and violent extremists to return.”
Click to expand...

Effectiveness of disruption measures​

In 2015, Twitter were made aware of how their platforms were being used by pro-IS users to recruit followers. The company eventually began removing posts and closing down accounts – and have continued to do so for many far-right, conspiracy and extremist networks.
Two years later, Lakhani led a consortium of academics from Sussex and from Dublin City University for a UK Home Office-funded project that analysed the effectiveness of these disruption measures.
Working with Sussex computer scientists Professors David Weir and Jeremy Reffin, and Professor Maura Conway at Dublin City University, Lakhani and his co-researchers were able to draw on mass data to check how much pro-IS content on Twitter was being removed.
“It was thanks to the fantastic software developed by David and Jeremy that we were able to do this,” says Lakhani, on using the Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools developed by the Text Analysis Group (TAG) Laboratory. “The more data we fed into the system, the more it became aware of what an IS account looked like. This was based on profile names, hash tags, and connections they might have to other known accounts. The system would then continually monitor those accounts and log when they were taken down.”
From the data, they saw that Twitter was more effective at shutting down IS accounts than other pro-jihadists groups, such as Hayat Tahir al-Sham (HTS), Ahrar al-Sham (AAS) and the Taliban.
Lakhani says: “It was evident that, while Twitter were disrupting IS because it was seen as posing the greatest threat, other groups continued to exploit the platform.”

hmmh - does/can the UK government legitimately intercept and view all tweets. ?
 
Good listen, Chris Hayes interviews Kara Swisher who has covered Silicon Valley for years. She’s interviewed Musk several times.

Amongst other things she said she’d worked with Twitter and bought in advertisers to Twitter Spaces but when he started tweeting crazy **** like the Pelosi stuff the advertisers all pulled out. She doesn’t think the acTIvIstS had anything to do with Twitters advertising problem, it all goes back to Twitter not being able to answer their questions at the ad sale events and then when he started sacking everyone in safety and compliance that was the final nail in the coffin.

She says nothing is too big to fail, bigger platforms that Twitter have gone down and apparently she’s tried an alternative that is coming out soon. I wonder if it’s Jack Dorsey’s app? (not that she said it’s going to fail, just that it could if things keep going in this direction)



podcasts.apple.com

Why Is This Happening? The Chris Hayes Podcast

News Podcast · 365 Episodes · Updated fortnightly
podcasts.apple.com podcasts.apple.com
 
Musk questioned it publicly anyway so the tech was right to reply publicly and factually. It just highlights how bad a manager Musk actually is. The tech will get hired elsewhere with better management no problems.

The world has seen that musk was in the wrong here and has thrown toys out of the pram.

He's just turned off the 2FA service backend for example so expect that to uturn soon in another public display of mismanagement.
 
Last edited:
arknor said:
ever heard the phrase "keep your head down and get on with your work"

Workers these days think they are equal partners or something
Click to expand...
And that's a great way for a company to go bust, or get in real legal trouble because the workers are too scared to comment when their bosses are making obvious mistakes because they don't know about the company, or telling staff to break the law because they don't know how the law/previous court cases have turned out.

Workers may not be "equal partners", but you ignore their knowledge of how your company works, or their specific specialist part of their job at your own risk, and the risk of your company because no matter how good a boss you may think you are, or how great a genius you may be it's extremely unlikely you know everything about the company once it gets past quite a small size, let alone something like Twitter where you've got dozens/hundreds of highly specialised areas of tech, and dealing with dozens of different legal jurisdictions in the US alone.

I remember an old, possibly apocryphal tale supposedly from Russia that reminds of Musk and his decisions, where as part of a government project they'd created the first Russian made motherboard for a then modern computer, and one of the senior political in charge decided as Mother Russia was Metric there was no way they would use the decadent capitalist/imperialist Imperial system of measurements for this great new Russian feat of engineering, so they made the CPU socket to a nice metric measurement as after all 2.5mm is 0.1", As the story goes they made huge numbers of these boards whilst waiting for the first shipment of the CPU's before the political in charge (who had some theoretically scientific qualification) found out that in fact 0.1" pitch connectors on a CPU do not in fact work well in a 2.5mm pitch socket.

On another note, it's turning out that before Musk started selling blue ticks the internal teams inside Twitter highlighted exactly the issue everyone with any understanding of the real world said would happen, and did happen, in a risk assessment for the new system that had as it's highest risk the near certainty that people would abuse a paid for verified tick and that it would affect safety of the users and advertising income. A report that I suspect the plaintiffs lawyers may find quite handy in court cases that may well happen as it would show that Musk had been informed of the risk but went ahead regardless.
There is also apparently the rather amusing fact that there is no way to automatically remove a blue tick verification, which was fine when they were applied to public figures etc, not great when your money making idea is to sell millions of them and you've got rid of most of your staff.
 
Last edited:
It's quite hilarious. Everyone inc myself for a short stint thought Musk would be this super likeable guy who sticks it to the system and does what he wants and would take humankind to Mars before NASA but what we end up with is a trump supporting egomaniac.

oh how expectations are shattered.
 
Colonel_Klinck said:
She doesn’t think the acTIvIstS had anything to do with Twitters advertising problem, it all goes back to Twitter not being able to answer their questions at the ad sale events and then when he started sacking everyone in safety and compliance that was the final nail in the coffin.
Click to expand...

But that was in part the activists and tbh.. the activist groups knew full well those questions were unable to be answered.

Essentially how can *any* employee of some company facing a takeover provide assurances or guarantees re: what a new owner may or may not choose to do.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top Bottom