He's only handing off the fiduciary duty. Basically he'll do what he wants with the platform and make someone else figure out how to make money with what he does.
Advertising and product are not separate concerns. Advertising _is_ the business. If he doesn't take orders from her, the business will just get worse. His vision of "free speech" is in direct antagonism to the kind of brand-safe content that advertisers want.
He's not going to take orders from her. That's not her role. And him being a lightning rod of controversy is the only thing that hurt the company. They are grinding out features faster than ever, the got rid of a ton of staff but are moving faster than at any time in the past.
You, and others like you want to paint Twitter as some huge failure because you dislike Musk, and that's fine, but in reality the biggest advertisers have come back and with her at the helm even more will.
First of all, if you want to see some real crazy racist stuff go on LinkedIn or Facebook. People there are even worse than Twitter.
All advertising companies took a hit, and Twitter is actually almost profitable at this point, so if she improves things it WILL be profitable. As soon as he can start paying down that 12 billion loan things will get even better.
I thought I liked Musk. Fwiw. Space, mars, pushing the automotive industry towarss electrical vehicles faster than they would otherwise. I mean that stuff was awesome. I don't care whether he had or had not some initial seed money from his personal inheritance, that's just bullshit, plenty of rich people just sit on their asses. That guy was doing cool stuff; useful stuff.
Then I saw what he did to twitter, the way he stirred everybody up creating chaos for reasons that were quite explicitly personal motivations.
I used to follow a few people and topics I care about. I now get a lot of unrelated stuff I don't care about. The system is tuned so I have to see the outrage even if I don't care about it.
This is either intentional or non intentional (a bug). In either case it's a mistake that Mr. Musk bears direct responsibility for.
Why? What happened? Was it COVID that drove him mad? That he had to close the factories and offices and whatnot? Was he already like that but I wasn't aware because I don't care about celebrities unless they literally appear in my timeline even if I unsubscribe and mute them?
Maybe you are purposely ignoring many data points of how badly things are going. Musk instituted blue checkmarks that are purchased by a subset of customers with particular views. If you question this, look at the responses to Biden tweets and see the positions of anti- vs pro-Biden comments.
Because of this, Twitter is ridiculously partisan on my feed. I’ve limited my consumption of it to very small subject matters and will likely jump ship totally to BlueSky with some Mastodon thrown in. I know a lot of people in science who have completely abandoned Twitter.
Yes and even if the motivation of all the people leaving Twitter were futile, it still happened. I no longer see the content I once saw and that is an objective measurable effect which not only happened during Musk's watch but arguably happened in direct reaction to what he said and did.
Should that be taken at face value? The man has repeatedly lied through his teeth, exaggerated, and misled the public for reason ranging from making money selling stock, inflating a meme coin's valuation because the mascot is the same breed of dog that he owns, hyping tech fantasies, up to petty rivalry.
I know that every business leader lies and or stretches truth, but his reputation for outright deception on all levels, especially when it comes to his businesses, is fairly established.
About as much as the word of any billionaire. The issue is we’ll only ever have his word, since Twitter is private, and being honest about financials when poor is bad for business.
I’m willing to believe it’s closer to the truth than not, though. For one cutting out ~5,700 employees, or around ~75% of your work force, is a massive cost reduction. According to Payscale[0] the average salary at Twitter was ~$117,000/yr. A quick calculation shows that annually he shaves off $666.9M (which is hilarious). Alongside decommissioning unneeded offices and removing all the completely unnecessary and expensive time-wasters I can imagine he’s at least saved $1B or more annually.
In true leveraged buyout fashion however, those cost savings are going straight back to the banks that provided Musk with financing. Twitter has paid $600m in two interest payments this calendar year.
Ok let’s assume your numbers are in the ballpark and he’s saving $1b annually on salaries and ancillary expenses.
Problem is he’s also loaded Twitter with significant debt to take it private. Estimated interest payments alone total to over $1.2b annually - so… we are actually losing an additional $200m annually even after firing 75% of the staff.
He's said in a Twitter spaces that he's reduced the expenditures down to basically the interest payment and another billion and a half on top of that. A large part of the reduction was shutting down a lot of the unused servers.
So 2.5 billion in expenses. In 2021 Twitter had Revenue of 5 Billion. So obviously they have lost a lot of revenue, as Elon himself has admitted. But between the cuts they are close to breakeven.
Now with a new CEO who is much more advertiser friendly they are going to get a lot more advertisers back. She will be the new face of the company. Then, likely they will start paying down that debt. Each time they do their burden will be less.
Tesla is the most profitable car company per car. Musk isn't going to have a problem making Twitter profitable, though he put himself behind the 8 ball.
Way behind the eight ball. He managed to take an already toxic platform and make it worse (somehow). When I visit it, not logged in, all I see are promoted Musk tweets and stupid memes totally unrelated to the content I just viewed. Makes it entirely unpalatable for me.
As they say, at least it’s not rocket science. Except in this case apparently running a social media site is actually more difficult than rocket science.
but in reality the biggest advertisers have come back and with her at the helm even more will.
I would bet advertisers like Apple got a huge sweetheart deal. The majority of advertising I see is (by volume), crappy "As Seen On TV" type products fronted by MANY different accounts (I can't block them fast enough), accounts promoting whatever thought leader angle they are working (also insta-blocked), and finally large brands that Twitter probably would like a lot more of.
> And him being a lightning rod of controversy is the only thing that hurt the company.
Even if I take as granted the advertiser problem is solved, it seems like Twitter has still been hurt by much more than having a controversial CEO:
1. Musk took on significant debt in order to buy a company already slightly losing money. Because of this, it's not good enough for advertisers to just "come back", they need to greatly increase their ad spend on twitter.
2. Twitter's attempt to find an alternative revenue source (the significant changes to Twitter Blue) seem to have largely failed.
3. The disaster with verification is driving away some of Twitter's most important posters that generated content on the website for free.
4. Twitter's reputation as an employer has plummetted and they are presumably not attracting anywhere near the amount of talent they previously did.
1. This would be true if he didn't massively axe the staff. So they are almost profitable now as he said. He has a lot of debt but even with the debt he's nearly break even.
2.First of all you don't really know the numbers, it's a guess at best.
3. They are getting bohemoth players who are going to be running shows on Twitter now. This is a huge deal and wasn't even possible on old Twitter.
4. People are desperate for jobs in tech right now. Besides they haven't been struggling to hire, they've been mostly laying off people.
As they run a profit they will pay that debt down (or refinance if rates go lower).
They are launching a lot of new stuff and the future looks way brighter
If they add 1000 new features but continue to roll back content moderation the platform will be unequivocally worse. Doubly so if the new features are as poorly thought out as the blue checkmarks. That guy Halli that he got into a public spat with is probably the most brilliant designer I've ever worked with and Musk treated him like shit while whining about API calls. He also treated the head of Trust and Safety like shit.
This is a great listen to see both the intellectual might and capricious irrationality of Musk's leadership:
Twitter is a failure because of Musk. It’s ‘you’ who want to make it into something other than that.
The ‘new features’ are basically irrelevant and much of it has been chaos or failure. The fact is there’s not much in terms of basic feature churn that’s going to make Twitter much better.
Brand Trust is incredibly hard to build easy to lose and incredibly hard to rebuild.
Musk is a stain on Twitter there is no avoiding it. He could have accomplished faster feature dev without losing half of revenue and also could have done a better job rolling out verified and blue. In fact most CEOs probably could have done that.
It’s a pretty big fail he needs to replace himself and go do something else.
We don't know what "advertisers want", because there is no objective advertiser milieu. It has been ruined by pressure campaigns from political groups that are propped up by an extremist media. The only significant drama originates from these pressure campaigns, from groups who are upset that Twitter no longer acts as their de facto partisan agent.
The way to seek even ground is for corporations to stop responding to media pressure, and for the press to abandon that role once society rejects it for them. Until then, the pendulum is going to swing too heavily in both directions.
Advertisers on cable can't be local car dealers and the rest; it's the nature of cable after all. This leaves national US companies, and most of those have global operations and must tread carefully.
Here's an example: Carlson is calling for an invasion of Canada. Think advertisers with business there don't see a potential risk with advertising on his show? They're one grassroots movement away from having to vouch they'll stop advertising on his show. Better to steer clear anyway.
If you watch the video, it's clearly said in rhetorical jest. Some media outlets don't seem to understand this concept, which is why their hysterics are not taken seriously by many people.
"We are spending all this money to liberate Ukraine from the Russians, why are we not we spending all this money to liberate Canada from Trudeau?"
Tucker Carlson is objectively worse than anyone on the left. He advocates blatant racism and fascism, got served with an $800M lawsuit over being caught red-handed telling deliberate lies intended to weaken democracy and got fired for relentlessly abusing his staff. And that comes from Fox and his own text messages. The entire Fox org (and OAN and Newsmax) are now all thoroughly and completely exposed as selling coverage to advance a political and financial agenda. Hannity was coordinating his show with the Trump White House. They are about as corrupt and untrustworthy as any fascist state media.
You absolutely cannot in any semblance of seriousness say anything remotely equivalent of MSM or left wing media. There's plenty to critique but it's marginal compared to right-wing media. And Elon has aligned himself squarely with the propagandists.
Tucker needs advertisers like Blac Chyna needed them on OnlyFans. Millions of people pay for cable news largely to watch Tucker. If he gets 2M people to pay him $1 a month, he can make his $20M salary plus $4M for production team to run his operation. All without ads. I bet he can do much much better than this. I would think he could get 5M paying $5 in first 6 months with election approaching. That would be $300M a year in subscription revenue and no ads.
> We may be seeing a quiet struggle set up where the views of the advertising execs are so far out of line with mainstream beliefs that it becomes a material issue.
I mean this makes sense when you look at who goes into advertising as a career.
Tucker had a big pull but it’s still niche and controversial. He doesn’t represent mainstream anything. The recent releases of some of his behind the scenes actions pretty much put him out of range of mainstream advertisers.
That said I am surprised some execs don’t go for him as being in their brand zone.
Yes, and the 'most watched cable show' just isn't that big.
Radio personalities in 1950 used to get 50 million listeners nightly.
In the 1970's almost everyone watched 'Walter Cronkite'
And as 'old timey' as it seems, 'Network TV' is still much bigger than Cable.
He's the king of a very, very wide field and it's still a narrow audience, and a much more narrow core.
Throw in the negative public bits and the toxic behind the scenes bits and that leaves out a lot of brands.
I can't really see any major brand buying in - not really even a beer or a truck, because there are other parts of the product line they have to protect.
Cars, drugs, consumer apparel, electronics, gas, retail, energy, entertainment, internet/mobile ... seriously which brand is going to go with him? Probably not even Under Armour.
And by the way, in the US advertisers have incredibly influence, and the 'Pillow Guy' who was a major advertiser pulled Tucker into saying things he wouldn't have otherwise said in terms of coverage - which is a serious credibility problem.
I think Tucker is going to be the new Rush Limbaugh - big audience, nice paycheque, influential, but not really mainstream.
He had a big piece of a small pie. Cable TV is peanuts for advertisers. It is a dwindling market, and even being thoroughly dominating in is not relevant if it means you'll lose out in more relevant markets (such as FB or YT advertising).
Fox earns exorbitant carriage fees from cable companies because they are one of the most watched among the demos that still cling to cable TV. They could practically run their business without ads and still stay afloat. Tucker will be 100% dependent on ads. And the advertisers will have to be willing to directly associate with his brand. More likely he'll have a small number of dedicated sponsors from ideological partners.
That's just not a good argument. Pineapple on pizza can be one of the most popular toppings but still niche and controversial. Right wing media is relatively consolidated: there's one major cable channel that markets to their interests, and they have room for ~one opinion show in a daily primetime slot. Obviously whatever goes in that slot is going to be hugely popular.
Or to put it more boring, mathematical terms, the mode is not the same as the median. Even if somehow one in three people were huge fans of Carlson, that would still count as relatively niche - and strongly controversial - because that would be the 1/3 most hard right of the US population.
I didn't argue that Carlson should or should not be cut. I argued that Carlson being niche and controversial was compatible with also being one of the most popular television shows.
He’s no where close to “one of the most popular television shows”.
He was one of the most popular cable, non-sports shows (his show and The Five, also on Fox News, swapped to the top spot back and forth recently), but cable-specific shows other than sports are (individually) niche.
That's fine. I'm responding to people who are making an argument along the lines of "Carlson had one of the most popular television shows, therefore he is not niche or controversial". My point is that this is pure non sequitur. The consequent does not follow from the antecedent.
If it turns out that Carlson's popularity is so tenuous that the truth of the antecedent in the argument is doubtful, that's great. But the argument is completely bogus regardless.
> Even if somehow one in three people were huge fans...
This definition would make eating pizza itself a niche thing, topping or otherwise. 33% of the population is mainstream and it isn't an option to claim otherwise. Less popular? Yes. Fringe? No. Fringe is something like Linux on the desktop at sub-1% of the market. It is not feasible to ignore or marginalise 1 person in 3.
I'm certainly impressed by the position that the most popular show is the fringe one. In theory it is possible, but practically that is a hard sell.
Not mainstream, but not fringe; he's popular on Cable but not popular overall, especially in a world where people under 50 don't even watch cable news. If you combine with the lack of integrity and the personal toxicity, he locks himself in that small category. Everyone in the US knew Rush Limbaugh but he didn't get GM sponsorships.
Tucker absolutely represents Mainstream public opinion, better than most other pundits for roughly half of the country. To believe otherwise is harmful self-delusion. With the caveat that no pundit is going to be on-beat all of the time.
I think it's delusional to suggest that Tucker represents mainstream public opinion more than other entities.
In fact, I suggest a lot of Tucker fans believe that, and that's partly what's wrong with them.
That said, Tucker does represents a bigger chunk of America than his naysayers would like to admit.
Importantly - it's not fair to say he 'represents' anything. He lies and spins, and says whatever will get him clicks. The SMS releases during the Fox trial very clearly highlighted that they have completely different perspective on-camera than off, and that they are obsessed with both advertiser revenue and throwing red meat to their audience, willing to say things that are completely at odds with reality, and even their own conscience, in order to garner ratings, which has the negative effect of spreading disinformation or lies, such as for example that the 'election was rigged or stolen' - a falsehood which about 1/3 of Americans have come to believe because supposedly legitimate sources such as POTUS and 'News' have been completely corrupted, liked a 3rd world country.
Tucker has morphed into a cross between ranting right wing antagonist, Rush Limbaugh, and Alex Jones - taking the 'Hard Alt' position on basically every issue. The difference is that classical right wing were ultra nationalist, Tucker is Alt Nationalist.
One of the most interesting revelations is the extent to which he embraces the ultra antagonist perspective, even for the smallest inane things - he was doing it behind the scenes, in meetings, with interns, almost like he was practising his shtick.
Note that Tucker didn't used to be like this, and that if you watch Russia One channel right now the main propagandists are uttering some truly fascist stuff on a daily basis (aka 'We should nuke Berlin', or about some government guy 'we should have shot him' etc.) - but almost all of them, less than 20 years ago, would have been considered 'strong reformer liberals'. Even Medvedev was the same - big time liberal reformer - now he's the Tucker of Russia.
It's fake, it's a game.
Finally, they are all playing characters, even Musk, even Linda, it's a matter of the degree to which the character is legit.
Remember that while democrats are a slight majority (most of the time—right now they’re a slight minority by self-identification) only half of democrats identify as liberal. My mom votes democrat because she’s an immigrant—on race, gender, policing, sexuality, etc. issues she’d be somewhat to the right of Carlson.
That data data does not support your argument aka "Tucker is not niche because his audience has more political balance" than we'd otherwise expect.
Except - Cable News audiences are small, and 25-54 Cable News audience is a tiny fraction of that already small audience, not very representative of much.
'TV' is a minority of viewership: Streaming is now bigger than TV.
'TV News' is a small segment of TV and is mostly a 50+ type of program.
'Cable News' is a small tranche of news, compared to local/broadcast.
'25-54 Cable News' is a small tranche of Cable News.
'Wheel of Fortune' gets considerably more viewers than Tucker - that show is 'mainstream' and is going to reel in advertisers for obvious reasons.
He'll carve out a 'Ruch Limbaugh' type audience on Twitter. In 2005 everyone knew who Rush was, that didn't make him mainstream or appealing to advertisers. I should note that I'm doubtful many even remotely controversial Cable TV personalities are big with advertisers.
Also, maybe notable, is that 'empathy and inclusion' is not going to be generally harmful to ad buyers whereas 'concern and judgement' probably are. I'm not saying one of those
ethos has moral superiority, rather, one is just an easier thing to ride a message on.
Look at LinkedIn: it's all 'happy happy happy, you can do it, go for it, that person is amazing' - there's hardly any criticism.
I think it's a mistake to treat Tucker (similarly Trump) as the center of a personality cult. There's a great deal of popular support for low-level conservatism that corporate media owners won't tolerate and aren't interested in, so a vacuum builds up and the only thing that's left for that half of Americans to support is bombastic blowhards. "Vote red, no matter who" looks hideous because there's nobody constantly covering up the blemishes.
Sorry to be obtuse here, but does "killed it" mean that she brought in great revenues or did it mean that she sent it headed to oblivion? Slang can be kind of dangerous sometimes.
Who knows, but the question is more of unit economics than company profitability. Falcon could be profitable on a per-launch basis, and all the profit gets shuttled back into R&D.
"Our widgets are profitable, but all of the R&D, sales people, back-office people, etc. etc. required to actually run a business makes us unprofitable"
So ummm who's gonna pay all of those people to make sure the robots and people make the widgets every day?
SpaceX has the vast majority of the worldwide private launch market. It's the only company with a reusable first-stage booster. The cost-per-KG is 10-20% of the competition.
This isn't me speculating wildly, everyone with even passing familiarity with the industry knows this.
> This isn't me speculating wildly, everyone with even passing familiarity with the industry knows this.
I never questioned their market dominance, I questioned their overall company profitability. The cost of building a rocket can be easily fudged to create whatever financial picture you want. Not to mention Elon Musk is notorious for doing this. Unless you have access to their financial statements, all of this conjecture.
> The cost-per-KG is 10-20% of the competition.
Uhh might wanna check your source, from Wikipedia: "These varying cost and requirements makes market analysis imprecise."...
Elon Musk said in his Twitter Space interview right after Starship test launch that SpaceX doesn't need to raise money for a while, other than letting employees cashing out some shares twice a year.
Not that I disagree, but what Elon Musk says about financials of his companies, is 100% driven but the picture of it he wants to paint, and can have 0% relation to the reality.
I believe he borrowed a big chunk of the cash. So he owes these folks something for funding it. It might be kind of limited but he can't just treat it like his own fiefdom.
He owns the majority of the company, but not all of it. There are other partial owners as well (Qatar, A Saudia Prince, Larry Ellison, Jack Dorsey, a venture capitalist or two, etc).
I can't see how that could be correct. Firstly, if he runs product then there needs to be deep strategic alignment and he can't leave it to the CEO to "figure out how to make money", secondly, it's not just fiduciary duties for the CEO (or at least that is a gross simplification) - my bet is Elon is thrilled to hand over some of the organisational structure, marketing, sales, people and finance operational and strategic aspects that aren't directly related to the unique vision of Twitter and the product and engineering processes itself. And as the owner and chair he'll still be very much involved with things at a high level too.
What change "destroyed" it for you? Was it extending the tweet length limit? Opening up verification for individuals? Organization labels? Bringing back a "following" timeline?
From my POV, it's gotten objectively better at a rapid clip over the past 6 months and I've been seeing less off-topic stuff in my feed (which is basically anything not programming-related) or a few other accounts I follow.
You can fix that by not clicking on things you don't like, because it shows you more of what you click. You can end up with a feed with fascists or communists or both because free speech applies to all. But again, you can choose what you want to see by training the algo or by using the feed of who you are following.
The problem with those assertions is that it didn't use to show me any of this content. It used to show me content I was reasonably happy with. Then the content showing up for me very rapidly changed towards including a huge amount of extreme right-wing content and bigotry over a period that I was hardly active, and only used the "Followers" tab and clicked on content I enjoyed from people who don't in any way fit the profile of the type of accounts I complained about earlier.
At best the quality of their recommendation system has dramatically declined. At worst they're intentionally favouring different stuff. In between there are slightly more palatable (than the worst case) options, such as that they're favouring overall popularity of content more over your individual preferences, but in any case all I know is that it's turned from a relatively pleasant experience to pushing content in my face that disgusts me.
I've also written recommendation systems. In fact, I've written one I used to run on top of Twitters API. And so I know from first-hand experience that it's trivial to get better quality recommendations more aligned with what I click on than what I'm currently getting. Something is seriously wrong, whether accidentally or intentionally.
The complete destruction of content moderation and his personal beefs with users. He has been preaching "free speech" but he is enabling the worst people in the world while laying dishonest criticism on anyone he doesn't personally like.
Three of those four changes (tweet length, paid checks, timeline changes) have made Twitter substantially worse to use. Now every reasonably popular tweet's replies are drowning in irrelevant novel-length screeds and emoji-laden nonsense from paying users.
My feed is no longer related to my interests and I don’t know how to get it back on track. That and losing the confidence that the blue check posting is actually someone relevant. Really kills the enjoyment for me.
I get pushed openly Nazi content. Like Nazi symbology (the obvious ones, not the deep cut pseudo ambiguous ones) memes and art and quote accounts. I used to report but they get turned down or only suspended for some days.
I also now get pushed a lot of fight and public freak out videos specifically of black people with pages of replies talking about eugenics
The app pushes me back to “for you” repeatedly where this stuff mostly is, or I get a push notification, or it shows up in following feed sometimes for people I don’t follow
I hadn't realized how lost Sam had gotten until I saw his Triggernometry interview [0]. I had a lot of respect for him once but he's clearly lost the plot.
>I've never been under any illusion that he is Orange Hitler.
>I supported censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story because it helped Biden
>I’ve said on several occasions that I think Donald Trump is a worse person than Osama bin Laden
>Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement, I would not have cared. There’s nothing, it’s Hunter Biden, it’s not Joe Biden. Whatever the scope of Joe Biden’s corruption is…it is infinitesimal compared to the corruption we know Trump is involved in. It’s like a firefly to the sun.
That's sounds like a radical leftist to me with a severe case of TDS.
I'm having trouble finding another one I saw yesterday he tweeted basically implying black women were an order of magnitude more violent than white women.
Edit: ah, found it, along with a couple inane conspiracies to boot, which has become standard for him these days:
The links you posted are inflammatory nonsense that try to draw a line between concern over mainstream media coverage of race and crime and "fascism". It's contrived at best.
Are the statistics wrong? Is it wrong to say that media coverage is slanted and focuses on the minority of racist white-on-black crime while ignoring the reverse? Seems like this is all fairly well documented. Slapping slurs on the posts that point that out and calling for the posters to be "cancelled" or suppressed by calling them "dangerous" - that, if anything, strikes me as fascistic.
They have been purposefully stripped of context and misrepresented to imply that black people are more violent than white people. The author literally worked backwards from the originally expressed percentages to deceive! It's not the statistics that are wrong, it's the way they've been presented.
Over the last 10+ years on this site, I have mostly found this to be one of the higher quality places for discussion on the internet, but occasionally over the last few years I have questioned whether this is the right place for me. The responses to this have once again made me rethink whether this community is one I want to be a part of.
Having looked up what that means: am I missing something or is it the case that you don't want to interact with people who mention facts that can be used to support unpleasant narratives?
Because if so, that seems like a way of ending up with a very biased view of the world... while the murder ratio fact might be old news to you and something that shouldn't be dwelled on, there's bound to be one of the 10,000[1] just learning it for the first time and sometimes you'd be one of those 10,000 unless you cut yourself off from it.
You are missing that this is one of many racist signalers and memes white supremacists and nazis use to justify their hatred. They're based on incomplete and misleading statistics designed to manipulate people without critical thinking skills.
The best solution there seems to be teaching people critical thinking, statistics and how to look things up tbh... rather than cutting them off from these sorts of figures.
(I've personally been advocating that for a decade to anyone who'll sit still for a minute)
It looks like you've been using HN primarily for ideological battle. That's not allowed here and we ban accounts that do it, regardless of what they're battling for or against, so please don't.
Could you please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN? and please not use HN for ideological battle, regardless of what you're battling for or against? You've unfortunately been doing these things a lot lately. They're not what the site is for, and they destroy what it is for.
It's pseudoscientific bunk (in this case, statistics manipulated to deceive) designed push a narrative of a specific race being more violent. It is no more moral, intelligent, or useful than phrenology.
I think saying that it amounts to phrenology is a manipulation designed to push a narrative. I expected something completely different than what you’ve presented. I think you aren’t better than Elon Musk in that regard.
If the worst racism possible is complaining about disproportionate media focus on white on black crime then I think we can safely declare the problem of racism solved. :)
To be a bit more constructive: looking at those links it seems obvious to me that the main point is about media focus, not the actual crime statistics.
Complaining about "disproportionate media coverage" is a thin veil for the delivery of the more insidious message the dishonest graphic is conveying: why aren't they covering the real problem of all these black people committing violence.
And I didn't say it's the "worst" racism. It's cheap, low effort, dishonest, unintelligent, and designed to manipulate morons, which brings me back to my original comparison to phrenology.
Well, from my somewhat uninformed un-american perspective, the question of "how can we fix the problem of violence in black American communities?" does indeed seem much more important than the one of "how can we fix the problem of white Americans doing violence against black ones?" due to its relative size. So I'm unclear on why the message you claim is being delivered is bad.
It's completely removing intra-racial statistics that would make the problem much more apparent, which is that there are far more white people in America than black people, and thus, there are far more white victims of crime than black victims. Expressing absolute numbers rather than percentages is a bald faced misrepresentation, and the creator of the graphic went out of their way to represent it that way (the cited source has the data correctly expressed as a percentage and includes intra-racial statistics too).
The fundamental problem: this is designed to mislead people like you and it works. And I'm struggling not to be rude here, but it is really hard for me not to see how someone with even the most rudimentary critical thinking skills couldn't look at a graphic like that and immediately see the red flags.
Uh... the big media narrative that Elon seems to be pushing back against is that there's a big inter-racial thing making white people attack and kill blacks. Showing that there is 10x more violence going the other way seems to directly address that by making people notice that they're being shown a non-representative slice of reality.
Also, if violence was randomly targeted irrespective of race you still wouldn't expect 10x as many black on white as white on black, you'd expect approximately the same absolute numbers (10x as many white violent people but only 0.1x as many victims being black cancelling out to 1x). This even holds true in a segregated society as long as black Americans and white Americans are equally segregated (e.g. 70% of whites only being around whites and 70% of blacks being around blacks).
Let’s disregard the comparison to phrenology, now it’s clear it was done in bad faith. But what exactly is your position? Do you think it is impossible to not be racist and believe in racial media bias at the same time? Is it an obvious dog whistle that someone has to be either stupid or autistic to misunderstand?
It would be really interesting to meet you and see what you're actually like in person, the people who display this sort of incurious, black and white, us and them attitude I encounter online aren't possible to talk to and have an extended conversation with.
But I'd really like to know how you guys think... do you genuinely only look at the everything through the lense of "which political views does this fact support?" and "what type of people repeat this sort of fact? Are they outgroup?"?
You said he promotes "what amounts to phrenology" and then linked to a tweet where someone calls Musk a white supremacist for commenting "wow" on a post about illegal immigration. That whole chain of justification looks to me like a total non sequitur.
That doesn't seem like phrenology to me. Yes, there's a lack of context, but the fundamental points about media (both traditional and social) amplifying certain things (to get more shares mostly) seems sound... I certainly have been exposed to at least 10x as many reports of USA whites killing blacks than the reverse.
I'm skeptical given how often I've seen people be accused of being nazis and upon investigating discovering to my disappointment some rather milktoast views that would have been mainstream in 1990.
He brought back anyone previously banned for open naziism such as Andrew Anglin and more recently Patriotic Alternative. And some suspicious several “14 88” referencing tweets. There’s also the Nazi meme he posted. Then the Nazi with several huge Nazi tattoos that he defended as unlikely to be a Nazi. Or the groyper memeing. Then the Angelicism / Milady Maker memeing, an nft project made by crypto neonazis with anime swastika homepages
I checked just now and Andrew Anglin's account is suspended.
I wasnt able to find a Patriotic Alternative account and when I searched on it, the overwhelming majority of the tweets were critical.
And the content of the so-called nazi meme appears to have nothing to do with Nazism other than the shape of a helmet. It's actually about the speed of technology change. And from what I can tell Nick Fuentes/Groyper thing was on twitter for 24hrs before being suspended.
So I dunno....it looks like you are providing a distorted view to support a narrative.
If I wanted to I'm sure I could find all kinds of other hate content on the fringes that is equally nasty but sits outside the "narrative" we are constantly being force-fed.
you haven't looked much. those are also people who were let back and again suspended after obvious and newsworthy pressure from advertisers. lmk if you want more detail... or if you're unserious about this
I didn’t say he’s very effective so far at whatever he’s doing. He caves to pressure and material realities like anyone and covers ass
Sure if you have some links although Im assuming itll be some leftwing news outlets doing what you appear to be doing, which is dressing up supposition and hearsay as fact.
Generally for me I mostly ignore the media as I find its largely distortions and half-truths.
Not to mention Twitter is increasingly their competitor so unlikely to be objective anyway.
I just go on what I see with my own eyes and it seems pretty clean to me.
ok my experience is very different.
Here's a short video on this exact topic of an interview with Elon Musk and a BBC "journalist" (I use that label very loosely).
It always makes me laugh how, for years, we mocked journalists because of their inflated blue check egos, and now every "free thinker" out there is eager to pay to be just like them. Verification is meaningless for most individuals since there's no real need to verify if @ronny2938742 is indeed Mr. Ron Whatever.
However, it's crucial to know if an account claiming to be a big company, government agency, journalist, politician, etc. is legitimate. Opening verification to subscribers is absolutely scammy, just a way to make a couple of bucks off the victims of culture war brainwashing.
At least in my circles blue check marks were mocked because they became a symbol of endorsement of certain viewpoints by Twitter rather than a symbol of verified identity.
And yet the process to grant bluecheck was to literally check personal id, and grant it to whoever had media presence. For years, you could request verification, send a couple of links citing you, provide a government-issued ID and that was it.
Twitter verified literally every public figure it could - regardless of politics - even those who didn't seem to need verification. However, being a niche contrarian blogger does not make you a public figure, and that's where I feel the resentment is located.
Funny. I see it differently. I pay for the blue check because it adds legitimacy. If I'm replying and having conversations with people with similar blue checks then I know I'm talking to real humans not hiding behind fake usernames. Also, any threats or anything from bad actors could otherwise be tracked based on payment method.
When having conversations in HN does it bother you that you have no way to know if you're talking to a real human, not hiding behind fake usernames? What do you think underlies this feeling you seem to have?
EDIT: what I do think was a tremendous success is the publicity stunt. I've never seen any platform where people felt they should pay to let people know they were who they claimed to be. Kudos to the people doing the whole "twitter is filled with bots" psyop, it worked.
> When having conversations in HN does it bother you that you have no way to know if you're talking to a real human, not hiding behind fake usernames?
On HN, I'm not bothered at all. If I see the username "dang" for example, I know it's YC moderator dang also same with "patio11". I see HN as more of a private group discourse vs Twitter where it's public and where blue makes more sense. Akin to a forum, where I frequent like home-barista, the community is smaller and more focused so I don't see why having blue makes sense.
The accounts of companies, government agencies and people linked to those two have a different color of check or a special icon. This seems like an actual improvement on everyone being blue to me.
I acknowledge they're shipping changes to the frontend - some of which are not bad at all - but it sounds surreal to me that we keep talking about UI changes as if they were major features, and pretend twitter circles aren't broken, that notifications are as in near real time as they were, etc. There were major losses of service quality in basically everything backend related, and no amount of frontend tweaking can compensate that.
Likewise, especially because (1) he still owns it and (2) he can revert this at the drop of a hat and (3) he will likely be one heck of a backseat driver while she takes all the heat for his fuckups.
Not going back either, but mostly because it gave me the impetus to get off and discover what a useless timesink it was for me from the start. So Elon does get my thanks for that. I don't miss it just like I don't miss FB since dropping off that ~10 yrs ago.
