Bad Crow Review: Elon's An Enormous Twit
and he's set to smother his dream
Links are at the end.
That’s a white-rumped shama there. Lovely bird, quite the songster, not indigenous but not really invasive. They were imported as song birds and enough of them escaped or were released to form sustainable colonies.
This will be a short post, although longer than 280 characters. Elon Musk bought an unprofitable company for way more than it’s worth with the intention of turning it into a free speech paradise, which is to say bringing back all the racists, Nazis, disinformation generators, and cheerleaders for violence who have been kicked off the platform over the years.
At the same time, he appears to have believed that he could placate advertisers wary of the possibility that their brands could once again become associated with racists, Nazis, and etc., by assuring them that he would not turn Twitter back into the hellsite free-for-all that it was for a while. He even used the word “hellsite” in his open letter to advertisers.
The advertisers responded by suspending or canceling their ad buys and tanking the company’s revenue.
Musk responded to advertisers by blaming them for capitulating to anti-free speech activists.
Twitter then autonomously flagged that tweet with its “additional context” function.
Musk then had the flag removed and the additional context function disabled.
That there is funny.
People are writing stuff about the acquisition. Jon Schwarz, long one of our favorite writers, wrote about it at The Intercept last week.1 The photo in the story makes Musk look like a skinsuit on a giant bag of meatballs.
This [Musk-specific dystopian] future is obviously not foreordained. Possibly Musk will do what no human has ever been able to do before and invent 1) content moderation that everyone likes at an enormous scale, and 2) a way to make huge amounts of money off Twitter. Maybe Tesla will become so profitable that he can use it to subsidize Twitter until 2090. But the most likely outcome is that he’s just asked the monkey’s paw to grant him his greatest wish. Now look as the paw crooks its gnarled finger, and Musk’s love for Twitter ends up obliterating the Twitter experience for one specific user: Elon Musk.
It’s a lovely short read, so you should read it.
Elsewhere, it seems Musk has bought a company which is facing intense scrutiny from the only class of people he dislikes more than woke activists and advertisers: government regulators.2
For the next 20 years Twitter will be operating under the close eye of the Federal Trade Commission, after a May settlement stemming from poor privacy and data security protections for its users before Musk bought it.
Twitter was also fined $150 million in May for violating the terms of a 2011 agreement with the FTC over the company’s improper use of phone numbers to target ads. Former agency officials who spoke to POLITICO said the commission will be on high alert for anything that violates the settlement.
The commission is also continuing to investigate a whistleblower claim by its former security chief, Peiter ‘Mudge’ Zatko, that the company misled the agency over its privacy and data security practices.
Musk is laying off something like half of Twitter employees, while assuring everyone that all of the company’s functions, like content moderation and innards, will continue with no degradation.
He’s also decided to charge for the blue checkmarks associated with Twitter accounts that are verified to be who they say they are, and who have some degree of value as content generators that attract users who are exposed to the advertisers who are not for the moment buying ad space.
In other words, he’s decided to charge the people who make money for the site while at the same time making their mark of distinction available to anyone who wants to pay $8/month for it, turning it from an indicator of possible value into an indicator of some loser paying $8/month for a blue checkmark.
Musk has an extraordinarily loyal cult following, much like Trump, whom we are now calling “psychophants.” A lot of his psychophants will probably rent the checkmarks for a while, which will, again, devalue their use for advertisers. 3
Under the guise of bringing “power to the people” and overhauling a “bullshit” system, Musk announced on Tuesday that Twitter may soon charge users $8 a month for a Twitter Blue subscription in order to gain or keep their verified status and the blue check badges that come with it. And if that sounds like a lot of money, it could be worse: Author Stephen King inadvertently bargained Musk down from $20. It’s a bold plan, one that ignores the reasons the existing system was put in place and potentially undermines the overall trust in Twitter that it’s supposed to provide.
As far as we know, you’ll still get free Twitter. Musk says paid users would get a verification badge, and their tweets would get priority in replies, mentions, and searches; they’d also get to post longer videos, and they’d see fewer ads (but they’d still see ads). It probably shouldn’t even be called a “verification” badge anymore, either, as identity verification reportedly may not be necessary to get one (the money, it seems, is plenty and enough). And the blue check would no longer be a way to mitigate the spread of disinformation, as it was originally designed to be. Depending on who is willing to give Elon Musk $96 a year and what they have to say, it may well amplify it.
To review: Musk bought a money-losing company for twice what it’s worth, immediately scared off a bunch of big advertisers and announced plans to render one of the presumed quality control features of the site into a stew of stupid.
Broken Social Scene: “Forgiveness Rock Record.”
That, comrades, is all we got. Take care, be well.
Kind of fun to see capitalism (advertisers) doing something useful.