Elon's Twitter

[Jude]

Speaking of Meta, for all the (highly credible) talk about the shady tricks they pull to hoover up as much of your personal data as they can get, based on the suggested posts it shows me, Facebook believes I'm really into classic cars, car repair, country living, and farming. All the info they have on me, and they're still basing their decisions on a/s/l...

And glurge. Evidently the average person with my demographic info is a huge fan of glurge. I am not happy to learn this.

Does this mean you've successfully blocked all data-harvesting, so they're just serving up generic ads?

Also, what is a/s/l? When I tried looking it up, it seems to mean American Sign Language, or ASL Paving.

[Dave_LF]

Does this mean you've successfully blocked all data-harvesting, so they're just serving up generic ads?

I very much doubt that, but it's possible I've limited how much of it they use for building my timeline. Yay?

Also, what is a/s/l? When I tried looking it up, it seems to mean American Sign Language, or ASL Paving.

age/sex/location

[Dave_LF]

And I must say that sometimes the things they suggest "for you" are downright insulting

suggestedforyou.png (181.87 KiB) Viewed 3959 times

[RoseMorninStar]

[Inanna]

Giggle.

[Frelga]

Today Twitter hid a gif from me and said it's sensitive media. It was the gif of the four Hobbits applauding at the coronation.

[Inanna]

That *is* sensitive. It displays a pro-monarchy mindset with an aim to overthrow our current overlords.

[N.E. Brigand]

That site I mentioned earlier today, nitter.net, that seemed to be mirroring Twitter posts and thus made it possible for me to again read that content without having a Twitter account -- which became impossible on Twitter as of June 30th -- now shows no recent posts by the people I generally read, like Marcy Wheeler, and the posts it does show are in no clear order with huge gaps. For instance, turning to Wheeler, nitter.net/emptywheel now has these as the ten most recent posts, in this order from top to bottom: 14 May 2022, 29 Jun 2022, 24 Jan 2021, 13 Sep 2017, 23 Mar 2020, 23 Mar 2022, 15 Nov 2020, 11 Oct 2020, 18 Apr 2019, 27 Jul 2020.

So my best guess was something changed at Twitter to undermine nitter's ability to show recent content there. Ah well.

But then I tried looking at twitter.com/emptywheel. I can't get there directly: Twitter still takes me to a generic home page, as has happened for the past three weeks. (And that home page now isn't even functional.) But if I find a specific emptywheel Twitter post via a search engine, I can click on that, and I can go from there to Wheeler's timeline on Twitter.

And there I find that nitter is in fact mirroring what is currently on Wheeler's timeline: the same posts in the same order. So actually the content on Twitter is suddenly random and full of gaps? It's not just emptywheel; I tried five other journalists whose work I've read in the past:

https://twitter.com/jonathanchait
https://twitter.com/joshtpm
https://twitter.com/MuellerSheWrote
https://twitter.com/mattyglesias
https://twitter.com/darth

All of those now show a random selection of old posts. And some other accounts I've frequently read in the past now show as "haven't tweeted," i.e., ever, including David Frum, Tom Nichols, and Anna Bower -- even though Bower's tweets have been quoted here just in the past couple days.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

The New York Times
@nytimes
Elon Musk said Twitter's widely recognized bird logo will be replaced with an X as early as Monday.

[RoseMorninStar]

A person on the autism spectrum/Asperger's running a social media company. A fine example of an oxymoron.

[Dave_LF]

What is it with alt-right orgs using single letters to identify their “products?” And how long before the whole Alphabet feels dirty?

Edit: Lake Superior has an opinion:

[N.E. Brigand]

That site I mentioned earlier today, nitter.net, that seemed to be mirroring Twitter posts ...

And now I can again read Twitter posts on nitter.net.

[Frelga]

Because irony is dead, Musk, the inspiration for the character in Knives Out: Glass Onion, actually built himself a glass mansion. In Texas, to maximize the hothouse effect. Rian Johnson, who directed the movie, was having a laughing fit about it on Twitter.

Excuse me. On X.

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[RoseMorninStar]

It somehow seems a sinister (cultish?) re-branding. Racist? Authoritarian? I am not sure, but a big black X feels a more threatening (like a swastika) and a lot less friendly than a little blue bird. Xcrement indeed.

[N.E. Brigand]

As a few people have noted in the past couple days, Musk just seems to like the letter X. I didn't realize that PayPal was created in 2000 by the merger of two online financial firms, one of which Musk co-founded. The other firm, Confinity, was co-founded in 1998 by Peter Thiel. Musk's firm, founded in 1999, was called X.com, and after the firms merged, he tried pretty hard to have the combined company stick with that name rather than go with PayPal.

As you may know, Musk and the experimental pop singer Grimes are the parents of two children. Their son, born in 2020, is named X AE A-XII Musk (X is his first name), and their daughter, born in 2021, is nicknamed Y, but note that her given name is Exa Dark Sideræl Musk. (My emphasis.)

Also, Twitter was replacing the logo on its building yesterday but failed to first get permission from San Francisco to block the street, so the police temporarily stopped that project:

[N.E. Brigand]

Here's an excerpt from the 2021 book Liftoff by Eric Berger:



It burns.

[RoseMorninStar]

Elon has a total of 10 children.

That X is so closely linked with Musk is what makes it feel cultish/a bit creepy.

From Wikipedia, in part:

X.com and PayPal
Main articles: X.com, PayPal, and PayPal Mafia

Later in 1999, Musk co-founded X.com, an online financial services and e-mail payment company with $12 million of the money he made from the Compaq acquisition.[61] X.com was one of the first federally insured online banks, and over 200,000 customers joined in its initial months of operation.[62] Even though Musk founded the company, investors regarded him as inexperienced and replaced him with Intuit CEO Bill Harris by the end of the year.[63]

In 2000, X.com merged with online bank Confinity to avoid competition,[55][63][64] as Confinity's money-transfer service PayPal was more popular than X.com's service.[65] Musk then returned as CEO of the merged company. His preference for Microsoft over Unix-based software caused a rift among the company's employees, and led Peter Thiel, Confinity's founder, to resign.[66] With the company suffering from compounding technological issues and the lack of a cohesive business model, the board ousted Musk and replaced him with Thiel in September 2000.[67] Under Thiel, the company focused on the money-transfer service and was renamed PayPal in 2001.[69][70]

I'd say there is more than a little history with inexperience and instability. The full Wikipedia article discusses further issues in his other companies.

[Sunsilver]

Okay, it's finally starting to make a glimmer of sense as to why he chose that particular logo. Still, I think it's butt-ugly, and a horrible choice!

Laughed SO hard at this - had to share!!

[RoseMorninStar]

[Frelga]

This is a very interesting thread on Musk's obsession with X.com. It goes back to his attempt to create a financial services site with that name, the merger with PayPal, and Musk's eventual ouster.

I can't no longer see Twitter threads in the browser if I'm not logged in, so here it is in Thread Reader.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1683 ... 37472.html