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Three Things: This Week’s Massive Dickhead Award Goes To…

[NB: check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]

This last week was bad. We were swamped with dickheads, more so than usual, and some of them bigger dickheads than the usual fare.

There are so many it’s worth assessing who was the champion dickhead this week.

Below are my top three. Tell us in comments who you’d have picked for this week’s Massive Dickhead Award.

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WINNER: Rep. Patrick McHenry (R, NC-10)

This asshat became the Acting House Speaker after the ultra-fascist faction of the GOP House Caucus led by Matt Ephebophile Gaetz forced the feckless Kevin McCarthy out of the speaker’s role.

McHenry chose to come out swinging rather than settling calmly and rationally into the speakership.

Within hours of McCarthy’s removal, McHenry booted Nancy Pelosi out of her office while she was out of D.C. escorting Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s body back to California. She was not accorded a reasonable amount of time to attend the funeral service and return to D.C. to clean out her office.

He then blew off the Congressional delegation in need of air transportation to California for Feinstein’s funeral.

…the House Republican leadership did not allow a plane to transport the late Senator’s colleagues from DC to SFO. After the late Senator passed, Rep. Zo Lofgren contacted former Speaker Kevin McCarthy to request air transportation for colleagues to attend the memorial service.

This is a courtesy any delegation is traditionally afforded to allow members to travel together to honor a member who passed away. But, Rep. Lofgren, who’s the delegation representative, never heard back from McCarthy. According to Thompson, she made the same request of Speaker Pro Tem Patrick McHenry but also didn’t get a response.

“It’s just sad commentary on the House Republican leadership where they wouldn’t allow a plane to come back so her colleagues can pay tribute to this great legislator, great Senator remarkable leader,” Thompson said. “I’m assuming some people will not be able to make it because of that.”

Sloppy if not arrogantly thoughtless. A slap at the state which is the fifth largest economy in the world, with the largest congressional delegation, as if McHenry doesn’t think anything of winning Democratic seats in California.

There have been 39 representatives and senators who’ve died in office since 2000, and at no time has there been such a pointed dickishness toward the congressional delegation traveling to funeral services, regardless of the political party in control of the House or Senate.

But this is McHenry’s SOP, has been since at least 2008. He demonstrated his sloppy thoughtless arrogance then:

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon told a North Carolina lawmaker Tuesday that he couldn’t re-air a video he’d shot in Baghdad after accusations surfaced that he breached operational security in detailing enemy rocket attacks.

Rep. Patrick McHenry, a Republican, traveled to Iraq with other lawmakers for the first time on March 22. The video was the second incident stemming from that trip that has drawn unwanted attention to McHenry. Earlier, he was criticized for berating a guard in Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone for not allowing him into a gym there because the congressman did not have the proper identification credential.

The new criticism stems from a video that was featured on his Web site last Friday. Shot in the Green Zone, it showed McHenry gesturing to a building behind him and saying that one of 11 rockets “hit just over my head.” Then he named two other places struck by the rockets.

As in 2008, his unthinking reflexive behavior is a sign McHenry is not capable of governance, only peevish pettiness which pisses on the American public and their needs for rational effective government.

Our country deserves and needs better than massive dickheads who believe owning the libs is the job for which the American public pays them. It’d be nice to think the GOP thinks so, too, but they actually allowed McHenry to pull this bullshit and spit on congressional comity at a time when it’s most needed to negotiate a budget. Thanks to North Carolina’s persistent partisan gerrymandering, the GOP ensures both NC-10 and the country are stuck with this prize-winning jerk, at least through the 2024 election.

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SECOND PLACE: Vladimir Putin

Killing 50 civilians including a child with a missile, wiping out half the village of Hroza while its residents interred a loved one is both a war crime and the height of dickishness.

Way to win hearts and minds, Pooty, you kidnapper and murderer of children.

You’d think he’d have learned something from U.S. errors in places like Iraq and Afghanistan but nope. He just doubles down on his criminality.

Added asshole-ishness: this agitprop trying to stir up shit between the U.S. and Israel immediately after the attack by Hamas.

Unlike Putin, POTUS can walk and chew gum, isn’t hiding in their ill-gotten fortress of solitude, and isn’t obsessed with toxic nostalgia for the past like the decades-plus effort to restore the USSR.

The U.S. also has a defense budget larger which makes Russia’s look like nothing – we can manage more than one challenge.

But that’s the point, isn’t it? All Russia has in its arsenal is cheap influence operations amplified by cringelords?

Speaking of cringelords…

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THIRD PLACE: Elon Musk

Why this guy bothers with American citizenship is beyond me given his reluctance to respect its government.

The Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday sought to force Elon Musk to sit for a deposition as part of an ongoing investigation about his purchase of Twitter, now known as X.

The SEC said Musk failed to appear for testimony as required by a May subpoena despite agreeing to show up last month at the SEC’s office in San Francisco.

Musk waited until two days before the scheduled date to notify the SEC he would not appear, regulators said. They’re now seeking a court order to force Musk to comply.

Musk’s response this week was pure DARVO:

Elon Musk called for an overhaul of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Thursday, the same day the agency sued him in an effort to compel him to testify about his purchase of Twitter, the platform now known as X.

“A comprehensive overhaul of these agencies is sorely needed, along with a commission to take punitive action against those individuals who have abused their regulatory power for personal and political gain. Can’t wait for this to happen,” Musk wrote on X in response to news of the SEC suing him.

So predictable: deny the abuse, reverse victim-abuser order. Poor Musk is the victim, won’t somebody deal with the mean old SEC?

The acquisition of Twitter by this narcissistic git very much needs investigation. As noted previously, Musk was so desperate to avoid Delaware’s Chancery Court after he sued to stop his acquisition last year that he threw in the towel and proceeded to buy Twitter.

What is it that Musk doesn’t want revealed in public record?

An alleged proponent of free speech, Musk appears to have shrugged off an egregious persecution of civil rights though it’s his platform which has been at the heart of the Saudis’ charges and death sentence against Saudi citizen Mohammad Alghamdi for their tweets.

Besides blowing off the SEC’s subpoena and blowing off free speech, Musk also managed to both screw up his own company’s product and spit in the face of media outlets which have continued to bolster the sagging social media platform.

Musk decided headlines make tweets look bad so he’s had them removed. Before the change if a news outlet included a link to a news article in their post, the article’s headline would appear next to an image served from the link so that users would know what the link was about and the tweeter could add a prefacing blurb in the tweet’s body.

Now the user must allocate their post’s text to adding a headline. Jay Peters at The Verge does a better job of explaining the problem (red markup mine on image below):

In short, Musk stiffed news media the most with this move which he claims improves the platform’s aesthetics.

Ri-ight. Because all the white supremacists and TERFs and other haters don’t damage the platform at all.

Bloomberg’s finally coming around about the moral argument against the former bird app, but it’s infuriating they can’t see the business argument is right there, too, thanks to Musk’s constant degradation of service.

What happens when journalists are targeted by intelligence operatives because Musk has decided maintaining privacy of personal data shared with the former Twitter is now an inconvenience, or that data is just another fungible to be harvested without regard to users’ privacy and security and the FTC’s consent decree?

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Honorable Mention:

Matt Gaetz, because a pumpkin has more smarts and savvy than this shit stirrer who launched the ouster of Kevin McCarthy thereby setting McHenry loose to be a bigger dick than usual.

At some point we need to call Gaetz and his wrecking crew anarchists because that’s what they are – they don’t give a fuck about the republic and keeping it, they just want to destroy it.

Let’s hope this next week we run into fewer dickheads.

Who’s on your list of Massive Dickheads from this past week? Who has screwed over more people and undermined democracy in a big way? Share your nominees in comments.

This is an open thread.

Elon Musk’s Machine for Fascism: A Tale of Three Elections

Since the spring (when I first started writing this post), I’ve been trying to express what I think Elon Musk intended to do with his $44 billion purchase of Twitter, to turn it into a Machine for Fascism.

Ben Collins wrote a piece — which he has been working on even longer than I have on this post — that led me to return to it.

Collins returns to some texts sent to Elmo in April 2022, just before he bought Twitter, which referenced an unsigned post published at Revolver News laying out a plan for Twitter.

On the day that public records revealed that Elon Musk had become Twitter’s biggest shareholder, an unknown sender texted the billionaire and recommended an article imploring him to acquire the social network outright.

Musk’s purchase of Twitter, the 3,000-word anonymous article said, would amount to a “declaration of war against the Globalist American Empire.” The sender of the texts was offering Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO, a playbook for the takeover and transformation of Twitter. As the anniversary of Musk’s purchase approaches, the identity of the sender remains unknown.

The text messages described a series of actions Musk should take after he gained full control of the social media platform: “Step 1: Blame the platform for its users; Step 2: Coordinated pressure campaign; Step 3: Exodus of the Bluechecks; Step 4: Deplatforming.”

The messages from the unknown sender were revealed in a court filing last year as evidence in a lawsuit Twitter brought against Musk after he tried to back out of buying it. The redacted documents were unearthed by The Chancery Daily, an independent legal publication covering proceedings before the Delaware Court of Chancery.

The wording of the texts matches the subtitles of the article, “The Battle of the Century: Here’s What Happens if Elon Musk Buys Twitter,” which had been published three days earlier on the right-wing website revolver.news.

Collins lays out that the post significantly predicted what has happened since, including an attack on the Anti-Defamation League.

The article on Beattie’s site begins with a baseless claim that censorship on Twitter cost President Donald Trump the 2020 election. “Free speech online is what enabled the Trump revolution in 2016,” the anonymous author wrote. “If the Internet had been as free in 2020 as it was four years before, Trump would have cruised to reelection.”

The author said that “Step 1” after a Musk takeover would be: “Blame the platform for its users.” He or she predicted that “Twitter would be blamed for every so-called act of ‘racism’ ‘sexism’ and ‘transphobia’ occurring on its platform.”

After Musk’s purchase of Twitter was finalized in October 2022, he allowed previously suspended accounts to return. Among them, he restored the account of Trump, whom Twitter had banned after the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, as well as the personal accounts of far-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., and the founder of a neo-Nazi website, Andrew Anglin.

The article predicted that “Step 2” would involve a “Coordinated pressure campaign” by the ADL and other nonprofit groups to get Musk to reinstate the banned accounts. “A vast constellation of activists and non-profits” will lurch into action to “put more and more pressure on the company to change its ways,” the article reads.

The next step, the revolver.news article predicted, would be the “Exodus of the bluechecks.” The term “bluechecks” refers to a former identity verification system on Twitter that confirmed the authenticity of the accounts of celebrities, public figures and journalists.

Musk experimented with and ultimately eliminated Twitter’s verification system of “bluechecks.” As the article predicted, the removal resulted in a public backlash and an exponential drop in advertisers and revenue. Other developments, including Musk’s drastically reducing the number of staffers who monitor tweets and a rise in hate speech, also contributed to the dynamic.

The article predicted that a final step, “Step 4,” would be the “deplatforming” of Twitter itself. He said a Musk-owned Twitter would face the same fate as Parler, a platform that presented itself as a “free speech” home for the right. After numerous calls for violence on Jan. 6 were posted on Parler, Google and Apple removed it from their app stores on the grounds that it had allowed too many posts that promoted violence, crime and misinformation.

Collins notes that the identity of the person who wrote the post on Revolver and sent the texts to Elmo has never been revealed. He seems to think it is Darren Beattie, the publisher of Revolver, whose white supremacist sympathies got him fired from Trump’s White House.

I’m not convinced the post was from Beattie. Others made a case that the person who texted Elmo was Stephen Miller (not least because there’s a redaction where his name might appear elsewhere in the court filing).

But I think Collins’ argument — that Elmo adopted a plan to use Twitter as a Machine for Fascism from the start, guided in part by that post, a post that has some tie to Russophile propagandist Beattie — persuasive.

Then again, I’ve already been thinking about the way that Elmo was trying to perfect a Machine for Fascism.

2016: Professionalizing Trolling

One thing that got me thinking about Elmo’s goals for Twitter came from reading the chatlogs from several Twitter listservs that far right trolls used to coordinate during the 2016 election, introduced as exhibits in Douglass Mackey’s trial for attempting to convince Hillary voters to text their votes rather than casting them at polling places.

The trolls believed, in real time, that their efforts were historic.

On the day Trump sealed his primary win in 2016, for example, Daily Stormer webmaster Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer boasted on a Fed Free Hate Chat that, “it’s fucking astonishing how much reach our little group here has between us, and it’ll solidify and grow after the general.” “This is where it all started,” Douglass Mackey replied, according to exhibits introduced at his trial. “We did it.”

After Trump’s November win became clear, Microchip — a key part of professionalizing this effort — declared, “We are making history,” before he immediately started pitching the idea of flipping a European election (as far right trolls attempted with Emmanuel Macron’s race in 2017) and winning the 2020 election.

By that point, the trolls had been working on–and fine tuning–this effort for at least a year.

Most chilling in the back-story presented in exhibits submitted at trial is the description of how Weev almost groomed Mackey, starting in 2015. “Thanks to weev I am inproving my rhetoric. People love it,” Mackey said in the Fed Free Hate Chat in November 2015. He boasted that his “exploding” twitter account was averaging 300,000 impressions every day, before he mused, “I just hope all this shitlording goes real life.” Two days later Weev admired that, “ricky’s audience expands rapidly, he’s now a leading polemicist” [Mackey did all this under the pseudonym Ricky Vaughn].

Weev and Mackey explained their ideological goals. “The goal is to give people simple lines they can share with family or around the water cooler,” Mackey described to Bidenshairplugs in September 2015. When Weev proposed in January 2016 that he and Mackey write a guide to trolling, he described the project as “ideological disruption” and “psychological loldongs terrorism.” The Daily Stormer webmaster boasted, “i am absolutely sure we can get anyone to do or believe anything as long as we come up with the right rhetorical formula and have people actually try to apply it consistently.” And so they explained the objectives to others. “[R]eally good memes go viral,” Mackey explained to AmericanMex067 on May 10, 2016. “really really good memes become embedded in our consciousness.”

One method they used was “highjacking hashtags,” either infecting the pro-Hillary hashtags pushed by Hillary or filling anti-Trump hashtags with positive content.

Another was repetition. “repitition is key. \’Crooked Hillary created ISIS with Obama\’ repeat it again and again.” Trump hasn’t been repeating the same stupid attacks for 8 years because he’s uncreative or stupid. He’s doing it to intentionally troll America’s psyche.

A third was playing to the irrationality of people. HalleyBorderCol as she pitched the text to vote meme: people aren’t rational. a significant proportion of people who hear the rumour will NOT hear that the rumour has been debunked.”

One explicit goal was to use virality to get the mainstream press to pick up far right lines. Anthime “Baked Alaska” Gionet described that they needed some tabloid to pick up their false claims about celebrities supporting Trump. “We gotta orchestrate it so good that some shitty tabloid even picks it up.” As they were trying to get the Podesta emails to trend in October 2016, P0TUSTrump argued, “we need CNN wnd [sic] liberal news forced to cover it.”

Microchip testified to the methodology at trial.

Q What does it mean to hijack a hashtag?

A So I guess I can give you an example, is the easiest way. It’s like if you have a hashtag — back then like a Hillary Clinton hashtag called “I’m with her,” then what that would be is I would say, okay, let’s take “I’m with her” hashtag, because that’s what Hillary Clinton voters are going to be looking at, because that’s their hashtag, and then I would tweet out thousands of — of tweets of — well, for example, old videos of Hillary Clinton or Bill Clinton talking about, you know, immigration policy for back in the ’90s where they said: You know, we should shut down borders, kick out people from the USA. Anything that was disparaging of Hillary Clinton would be injected into that — into those tweets with that hashtag, so that would overflow to her voters and they’d see it and be shocked by it.

Q Is it safe to say that most of your followers were Trump supporters?

A Oh, yeah.

Q And so by hijacking, in the example you just gave a Hillary Clinton hashtag, “I am with her,” you’re getting your message out of your silo and in front of other people who might not ordinarily see it if you just posted the tweet?

A Yeah, I wanted to infect everything.

Q Was there a certain time of day that you believed tweeting would have a maximum impact?

A Yeah, so I had figured out that early morning eastern time that — well, it first started out with New York Times. I would see that they would — they would publish stories in the morning, so the people could catch that when they woke up. And some of the stories were absolutely ridiculous — sorry. Some of the stories were absolutely ridiculous that they would post that, you know, had really no relevance to what was going on in the world, but they would still end up on trending hashtags, right? And so, I thought about that and thought, you know, is there a way that I could do the same thing.

And so what I would do is before the New York Times would publish their — their information, I would spend the very early morning or evening seeding information into random hashtags, or a hashtag we created, so that by the time the morning came around, we had already had thousands of tweets in that tag that people would see because there wasn’t much activity on Twitter, so you could easily create a hashtag that would end up on the trending list by the time morning came around.

In the 2016 election, this methodology served to take memes directly from the Daily Stormer, launder them through 4Chan, then use Twitter to inject them into mainstream discourse. That’s the methodology the far right still uses, including Trump when he baits people to make his Truth Social tweets go viral on Twitter. Use Twitter to break out of far right silos and into those of Hillary supporters to recodify meaning, and ensure it all goes viral so lazy reporters at traditional outlets republish it for free, using such tweets to supplant rational discussion of other news.

And as Microchip testified, in trolling meaning and rational arguments don’t matter. Controversy does.

Q What was it about Podesta’s emails that you were sharing?

A That’s a good question.

So Podesta ‘s emails didn’t, in my opinion, have anything in particularly weird or strange about them, but my talent is to make things weird and strange so that there is a controversy. So I would take those emails and spin off other stories about the emails for the sole purpose of disparaging Hillary Clinton.

T[y]ing John Podesta to those emails, coming up with stories that had nothing to do with the emails but, you know, maybe had something to do with conspiracies of the day, and then his reputation would bleed over to Hillary Clinton, and then, because he was working for a campaign, Hillary Clinton would be disparaged.

Q So you’re essentially creating the appearance of some controversy or conspiracy associated with his emails and sharing that far and wide.

A That’s right.

Q Did you believe that what you were tweeting was true?

A No, and I didn’t care.

Q Did you fact-check any of it?

A No.

Q And so what was the ultimate purpose of that? What was your goal?

A To cause as much chaos as possible so that that would bleed over to Hillary Clinton and diminish her chance of winning.

The far right is still using this methodology to make the corrupt but not exceptional behavior of Hunter Biden into a topic that convinces half the electorate that Joe Biden is as corrupt as Donald Trump. They’ve used this methodology to get the vast majority of media outlets to chase Hunter Biden’s dick pics like six year old chasing soccer balls.

Back in 2016, the trolls had a good sense of how their efforts helped to support Trump’s electoral goals. In April 2016, for example, Baked Alaska pitched peeling off about a quarter of Bernie Sanders’ votes. “Imagine if we got even 25% of bernie supporters to ragevote for trump.” On November 2, 2016, the same day he posted the meme that got him prosecuted, Mackey explained that the key to winning PA was “to drive up turnout with non-college whites, and limit black turnout.” One user, 1080p, seemed to have special skills — if not sources — to adopt the look and feel of both campaigns.

And this effort worked in close parallel to Trump’s efforts. As early as April, Baked Alaska invited Mackey to join a campaign slack “for more coordinated efforts.”

And there are several participants in the troll chatrooms whose actions or efforts to shield their true identities suggest they may be closely coordinating efforts as well.

Even in the unfettered world of 2016, Twitter’s anemic efforts to limit the trolls’ manipulation of Twitter was a common point of discussion.

For example, as the trolls were trying to get Podesta’s emails trending, HalleyBorderCol complained, “we haven’t been able to get anything to trend for aaaages … unless they changed their algorithms, they must be watching what we’re doing.” Later in October as they were launching two of their last meme campaigns, ImmigrationX complained,”I see Jack in full force today suppressing hashtags.”

Both Mackey and Microchip were banned multiple times. “Microchip get banned again??” was a common refrain. “glad to be back,” Microchip claimed on September 24. “they just banned me two times in 3 mins.” He warned others to follow-back slowly to evade an auto-detect for newly created accounts. “some folks are being banned right now, apparently, so if I’m banned for some reason, I’ll be right back,” Microchip warned on October 30. “Be good till nov 9th brother! We need your ass!” another troll said on the day Mackey was banned; at the time Microchip was trending better than Trump himself. Mackey’s third ban in this period, in response to the tweets a jury has now deemed to be criminal, came with involvement from Jack Dorsey personally.

Both testified at trial about the techniques they used to thwart the bans (including using a gifted account to return quickly, in Mackey’s case). Microchip built banning, and bot-based restoration and magnification, into his automation process.

2020: Insurrection

The far right trolls succeeded in helping Donald Trump hijack American consciousness in 2016 to get elected.

By the time the trolls — some of whom moved into far more powerful positions with Trump’s election — tried again in 2020, the social media companies had put far more controls on the kinds of viral disinformation that trolls had used with such success in 2016.

As Yoel Roth explained during this year’s Twitter hearing, the social media companies expanded their moderation efforts with the support of a bipartisan consensus formulated in response to Russia’s (far less successful than the far right troll efforts) 2016 interference efforts.

Rep. Shontel Brown

So Mr. Roth, in a recent interview you stated, and I quote, beginning in 2017, every platform Twitter included, started to invest really heavily in building out an election integrity function. So I ask, were those investments driven in part by bipartisan concerns raised by Congress and the US government after the Russian influence operation in the 2016 presidential election?

Yoel Roth:

Thank you for the question. Yes. Those concerns were fundamentally bipartisan. The Senate’s investigation of Russian active measures was a bipartisan effort. The report was bipartisan, and I think we all share concerns with what Russia is doing to meddle in our elections.

But in advance of the election, Trump ratcheted up his attacks on moderation, personalizing that with a bullying attack on Roth himself.

In the spring of 2020, after years of internal debate, my team decided that Twitter should apply a label to a tweet of then-President Trump’s that asserted that voting by mail is fraud-prone, and that the coming election would be “rigged.” “Get the facts about mail-in ballots,” the label read.

On May 27, the morning after the label went up, the White House senior adviser Kellyanne Conway publicly identified me as the head of Twitter’s site integrity team. The next day, The New York Post put several of my tweets making fun of Mr. Trump and other Republicans on its cover. I had posted them years earlier, when I was a student and had a tiny social media following of mostly my friends and family. Now, they were front-page news. Later that day, Mr. Trump tweeted that I was a “hater.”

Legions of Twitter users, most of whom days prior had no idea who I was or what my job entailed, began a campaign of online harassment that lasted months, calling for me to be fired, jailed or killed. The volume of Twitter notifications crashed my phone. Friends I hadn’t heard from in years expressed their concern. On Instagram, old vacation photos and pictures of my dog were flooded with threatening comments and insults.

In reality, though, efforts to moderate disinformation did little to diminish the import of social media to right wing political efforts. During the election, the most effective trolls were mostly overt top associates of Donald Trump, or Trump himself, as this table I keep posting shows.

The table, which appears in a Stanford University’s Election Integrity Project report on the election, does not reflect use of disinformation (as the far right complains when they see it). Rather, it measures efficacy. Of a set of false narratives — some good faith mistakes, some intentional propaganda — that circulated on Twitter in advance of the election, this table shows who disseminated the false narratives that achieved the most reach. The false narratives disseminated most broadly were disseminated by Donald Trump, his two adult sons, Tom Fitton, Jack Posobiec, Gateway Pundit, Charlie Kirk, and Catturd. The least recognized name on this list, Mike Roman, was among the 19 people indicted by Fani Willis for efforts to steal the election in Georgia. Trump’s Acting Director of National Intelligence, Ric Grenell, even got into the game (which is unsurprising, given that before he was made Ambassador to Germany, he was mostly just a far right troll).

This is a measure of how central social media was to Trump’s efforts to discredit, both before and after the election, the well-run election that he lost.

The far right also likes to claim (nonsensically, on its face, because these numbers reflect measurements taken after the election) that these narratives were censored. At most, and in significant part because Twitter refused to apply its own rules about disinformation to high profile accounts including but not limited to Trump, this disinformation was labeled.

As the Draft January 6 Social Media Report described, they had some success at labeling disinformation, albeit with millions of impressions before Twitter could slap on a label.

Twitter’s response to violent rhetoric is the most relevant affect it had on January 6th, but the company’s larger civic integrity efforts relied heavily on labeling and downranking. In June of 2019, Twitter announced that it would label tweets from world leaders that violate its policies “but are in the public interest” with an “interstitial,” or a click-through warning users must bypass before viewing the content.71 In October of 2020, the company introduced an emergency form of this interstitial for high-profile tweets in violation of its civic integrity policy.” According to information provided by Twitter, the company applied this interstitial to 456 tweets between October 27″ and November 7″, when the election was called for then-President-Elect Joe Biden. After the election was called, Twitter stopped applying this interstitial.”* From the information provided by Twitter, it appears these interstitials had a measurable effect on exposure to harmful content—but that effect ceased in the crucial weeks before January 6th.

The speed with which Twitter labels a tweet obviously impacts how many users see the unlabeled (mis)information and how many see the label. For PIIs applied to high-profile violations of the civic integrity policy, about 45% of the 456 labeled tweets were treated within an hour of publication, and half the impressions on those tweets occurred after Twitter applied the interstitial. This number rose to more than eighty percent during election week, when staffing resources for civic issues were at their highest; after the election, staff were reassigned to broader enforcement work.” In answers to Select Committee questions during a briefing on the company’s civic integrity policy, Twitter staff estimates that PIIs prevented more than 304 million impressions on violative content. But at an 80% success rate, this still leaves millions of impressions.

But this labeling effort stopped after the election.

According to unreliable testimony from Brandon Straka the Stop the Steal effort started on Twitter. According to equally unreliable testimony from Ali Alexander, he primarily used Twitter to publicize and fundraise for the effort.

It was, per the Election Integrity Project, the second most successful disinformation after the Dominion propaganda.

And the January 6 Social Media Report describes that STS grew organically on Facebook after being launched on Twitter, with Facebook playing a losing game of whack-a-mole against new STS groups.

But as Alexander described, after Trump started promoting the effort on December 19, the role he would place became much easier.

Twitter wasn’t the only thing that brought a mob of people to DC and inspired many to attack the Capitol. There were right wing social media sites that may have been more important for organizing. But Twitter was an irreplaceable part of what happened.

The lesson of the 2020 election and January 6, if you care about democracy, is that Twitter and other social media companies never did enough moderation of violent speech and disinformation, and halted much of what they were doing after the election, laying the ground work for January 6.

The lesson of the 2020 election for trolls is that inadequate efforts to moderate disinformation during the election — including the Hunter Biden “laptop” operation — prevented Trump from pulling off a repeat of 2016. The lesson of January 6, for far right trolls, is that unfettered exploitation of social media might allow them to pull off a violent coup.

That’s the critical background leading up to Elmo’s purchase of Twitter.

2024: Boosting Nazis

The first thing Elmo did after purchasing Twitter was to let the far right back on.

More recently, he has started paying them money that ads don’t cover to subsidize their propaganda.

The second thing he did, with the Twitter Files, was to sow false claims about the effect and value of the moderation put into place in the wake of 2016 — an effort Republicans in Congress subsequently joined. The third thing Elmo did was to ratchet up the cost for the API, thereby making visibility into how Twitter works asymmetric, available to rich corporations and (reportedly) his Saudi investors, but newly unavailable to academic researchers working transparently. He has also reversed throttling for state-owned media, resulting in an immediate increase in propaganda.

He has done that while making it easier for authoritarian countries to take down content.

Elmo attempted, unsuccessfully, to monetize the site in ways that would insulate it from concerns about far right views or violence.

For months, Elmo, his favored trolls, and Republicans in Congress have demonized the work of NGOs that make the exploitation of Twitter by the far right visible. More recently, Elmo has started suing them, raising the cost of tracking fascism on Twitter yet more.

Roth recently wrote a NYT column that, in addition to describing the serial, dangerous bullying — first from Trump, then from Elmo — that this pressure campaign includes, laid out the stakes.

Bit by bit, hearing by hearing, these campaigns are systematically eroding hard-won improvements in the safety and integrity of online platforms — with the individuals doing this work bearing the most direct costs.

Tech platforms are retreating from their efforts to protect election security and slow the spread of online disinformation. Amid a broader climate of belt-tightening, companies have pulled back especially hard on their trust and safety efforts. As they face mounting pressure from a hostile Congress, these choices are as rational as they are dangerous.

In 2016, far right trolls helped to give Donald Trump the presidency. In 2020, their efforts to do again were thwarted — barely — by attempts to limit the impact of disinformation and violence.

But in advance of 2024, Elmo has reversed all that. Xitter has preferentially valued far right speech, starting with Elmo’s increasingly radicalized rants. More importantly, Xitter has preferentially valued speech that totally undercuts rational thought.

Elmo has made Xitter a Machine for irrational far right hate speech.

The one thing that may save us is that this Machine for Fascism has destroyed Xitter’s core value to aspiring fascists: it has destroyed Xitter’s role as a public square, from which normal people might find valuable news. In the process, Elmo has destroyed Twitter’s key role in bridging from the far right to mainstream readers.

But it’s not for lack of trying to make Xitter a Machine for Fascism.

What Is The Sound of a Dead Bird Xitting?

[NB: check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]

This post contains observed and speculative material following the reported loss of content circa 2011-2014 at the former bird app.

~ ~ ~

Observed:

August 9, 2023 – D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the D.C. district court’s earlier finding holding Twitter in contempt and assessing a $350,000 fine for failure to fully comply by the district court’s subpoena deadline.

August 16, 2023 6:41 a.m. ET – Marcy posted about Xitter’s sketchy behaviors in its response to a DOJ subpoena approved on January 17, 2023. Xitter has been held in contempt and assessed a $350,000 fine for failure to comply with the subpoena.

August 16, 2023 1:59 p.m. ET – Marcy posted about the importance of attribution related to January 6 tweets which could have gotten former VP Mike Pence killed. Twitter data could reveal the account login information and device used for the purposes of threatening Pence.

August 17, 2023 6:23 a.m. ET – Marcy posted about Elon Musk’s meetings with with Jim Jordan and Kevin McCarthy while Xitter’s internal and external legal team tap danced about the subpoena it had failed to comply with fully and on a timely basis. This dancing may have been an effort to protect Musk and his political network including certain members of Congress.

August 17, 2023 3:26 p.m. ET – Brazilian Xitter user Danilo Takagi posted,

Acabei de confirmar aqui. O Twitter/X removeu todas as mídias e imagens postadas de 2014 pra trás. Eles não tem dinheiro nem pra armazenamento mais. Artistas e criadores de conteúdo, vocês realmente ainda querem continuar usando esta rede?

[Translation from Portuguese: I just confirmed here. Twitter/X has removed all media and images posted from 2014 onwards. They don’t even have money for storage anymore. Artists and content creators, do you really want to continue using this network?]

August 19, 2023 11:31 a.m. ET – Xitter user Tom Coates confirms Danilo Takagi’s earlier observation:

More vandalism from @elonmusk. Twitter has now removed all media posted before 2014. Thats – so far – almost a decade of pictures and videos from the early 2000s removed from the service. For example, here’s a search of my media tweets from before 2014. https://twitter.com/search?q=From%3Atomcoates%20until%3A2014-01-01&src=typed_query&f=media

Xitter Birdwatch contributors added context:

Images before/around 2014 are still saved on Twitter/X’s servers, however, the t.co links appear to be broken at the moment.

The famous Ellen DeGeneres selfie from the 2014 Oscars is currently missing from her tweet. https://twitter.com/EllenDeGeneres/status/440322224407314432
But the original file is still available on their servers.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BhxWutnCEAAtEQ6?format=jpg&name=large
thttps://twitter.com/Accountabilabud/status/1693026133191819518?s=20

Each of the links above in the Birdwatch context field have not been available consistently; they have been converted by Xitter’s t.co link shortener when the tweet is shared but the shortened links may not work properly.

The erasure appears to be related in part to a “failure” of the t.co link shortener which eliminates accessibility to content, but this doesn’t explain why graphic media circa 2011-2014 is no longer available.

What the actual fuck is going on at Xitter?

~ ~ ~

Here are several prominent theories about the loss of media on Xitter:

Musk is cutting costs, some say, by refusing to host media content.

It’s possible, but why 2011-2014 and not ALL of the former Twitter’s media content? Is this explanation consistent with the “failure” of the t.co shortener and loss of graphics in that date range?

Musk is trying to damage social networks within Xitter for his personal political agenda, others say.

Again, why that specific range and not from the former Twitter’s inception?

Musk is erasing cultural history, engaging in ethnocide or cultural genocide, noted by minority groups.

True. Erasing key parts of the Black Lives Matter movement’s inception and the social response to deaths which preceded it is one example targeted by this date range.

Also the erasure of Arab Spring-related content may be ethnocide.

You’re going to see folks making these points across social media, but there’s at least one more possible factor driving Musk’s erasure.

~ ~ ~

Speculative:

What if Musk is eliminating access to evidence?

How do we know for sure whether Xitter the former dead bird platform is simply running into the operations problems expected since Musk canned 75-80% of staff, or whether he’s actively obstructing investigations which rely on former Twitter content by screwing with data accessibility?

How do we know Musk isn’t doing the bidding of his fossil fuel financiers from Qatar and KSA by suppressing access to content critical of leadership in those countries? Perhaps even hiding what it was spies for KSA employed by Twitter had been doing, or hiding possible foreign interference in democracy here and abroad?

Ponder this bit of dead bird xit for a while.

As Xitter’s Lawyer Stalled DOJ, Elon Musk Met with Jim Jordan (Twice!) and Kevin McCarthy

Elon Musk has been eerily quiet about being held in contempt by Beryl Howell since the DC Circuit opinion was first released on August 9.

It’s not like him to pass up the opportunity to make an obnoxious comment.

Which is why I’m interested in what Musk was doing during the period when Xitter’s counsel was stalling on the DOJ request — including a visit to Kevin McCarthy on January 26.

Beryl Howell approved the warrant on January 17. After several failed attempts, the government served it to the official portal on January 19. But then Xitter’s senior-most legal person stalled for 12 days, until she told DOJ that Xitter was going to make a First Amendment challenge so Trump could invoke executive privilege.

The government’s initial service attempts on Twitter filed twice, with the government’s receipt both times of an automated message indicating that Twitter’s “page [was] down.” Gov’t’s Mot. at 2 (alteration in original). On January 19, 2023, the government was finally able to serve Twitter through the company’s Legal Requests Submissions site. Id

Twitter, however, somehow did not know of the existence of the Warrant until January 25, 2023—two days before the Warrant returns were due. That day, the government contacted Twitter about the status of the company’s compliance with the Warrant, and Twitter’s Senior Director of Legal, JN [redacted], indicated she was not aware of the Warrant but would consider it a priority.” Id; see also Decl. of [redacted], Senior Director of Legal for Twitter (“[redacted] Decl”) 2 (SEALED), ECF No. 9-1. The government indicated that they were looking for an on time production in two days time” to which [J redacted] responded, “without knowing more or taking any position that would be a very tight turn around for us.” [Jl Decl. ¶ 2. The government sent the six pages of the Warrant and the NDO directly to [J redacted] later that evening Meanwhile, [J redacted] directed Twitter’s personnel to preserve data available in its production environment associated with the Target Account, and “have confirmed that the available data was preserved.” Id. ¶ 4.

Twitter notified the government in the evening of January 26, 2023, that the company “would not comply with the Warrant by the next day, “Id. 5, and responded to the government’s request for more specific compliance information, by indicating that “the company was prioritizing the matter and taking it very seriously” but that [redactedl had the Warrant and NDO only “for two days,” id. ¶ 8, even though the government had tried to submit the Warrant and NDO through Twitter’s Legal Requests Submissions site nine days earlier. The Warrants deadline for compliance makes no exception for the provider’s failure to have a fully operational and functioning system for the timely processing of court orders.

On January 31, 2023, Twitter indicated for the first time that the company would not comply with the Warrant without changes to the NDO, stressing as “essential to Twitter’ business model including [its] commitment to privacy, transparency, and neutrality) that [Twitter] communicate with users about law enforcement efforts to access their data.” 1d. 10.

The Legal Director’s declaration is more obnoxious than that. She made no mention of DOJ’s attempts to serve the warrant before she got involved and makes much of a claim that it took the AUSA two efforts to email a separate copy to her. Her assurances that everything was preserved — made as of January 25 — don’t rule out any deletions before that.

It wasn’t until February 1 that WilmerHale was officially involved.

And in the meantime, Elon Musk had made a widely covered trip to DC. He met with Jim Jordan on Thursday January 26, Kevin McCarthy that evening, and then Jordan (again) with James Comer the next day (Axios, NYT, CNN)

As of now, at least, Jordan and McCarthy are two of the just 51 people that Trump follows, who could have sent him DMs.

The next week, Comer formally announced his dick pics hearing, which (as Allison Gill observed yesterday) took place the day between two hearings on the warrant, as contempt fees started piling up. In that hearing, Republicans spun Musk’s willful violation of the consent decree against Xitter as an assault on the First Amendment.

As it was happening, Musk posted a tweet with nothing more but a period.

This was happening in the period when Xitter was doing more intensive searches to get — for example — the second preservation of Trump’s account from January 12, 2021 and all other accounts associated, via common device, cookie, or IP, with Trump’s own.

In the February 7 hearing, then-Chief Judge Beryl Howell questioned whether Xitter was stalling on this production because Musk “wants to cozy up with the former President, and that’s why you are here?”

But it may be more than that.

Musk is solidly part of the far right culture that might have been involved in any DM lists organizing the insurrection. One of the main reasons he started considering buying Xitter is because of the efforts Xitter took in the aftermath to crack down on violence.

And in the lead-up to Musk’s purchase of Xitter, someone — there’s reason to believe it might be Stephen Miller, who had been interviewed by Jack Smith’s prosecutors in November, before he was interviewed in a privilege-waived interview in April — texted Musk personally to raise the sensitivities of restoring Trump to Xitter.

And one of Musk’s phone contacts appears to bring Trump up. However, unlike others in the filings, this individual’s information is redacted.

“It will be a delicate game of letting right wingers back on Twitter and how to navigate that (especially the boss himself, if you’re up for that),” the sender texted to Musk, referencing conservative personalities who have been banned for violating Twitter’s rules.

The anonymous texter then offers up a suggestion for “someone who has a savvy cultural/political view to be the VP of actual enforcement.” That suggestion: “A Blake Masters type.”

Any delays and obstruction may not just be an effort to protect Trump.

It could be Musk’s effort to protect his own network — and people in DC like Jim Jordan.

Beryl Howell Held Elon Musk’s Xitter in Contempt

One of my favorite lines in the Trump January 6 indictment described how, when everyone left Donald Trump alone in the dining room on January 6, he tweeted out a tweet that might have gotten Mike Pence killed.

At 2:24 p.m., after advisors had left the Defendant alone in his dining room, the Defendant issued a Tweet intended to further delay and obstruct the certification: “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!”

It’s just one of 19 Tweets included in the indictment:

  1. On November 25, anticipating Sidney Powell’s lawsuit invoking Dominion voting machines
  2. On December 3, magnifying Rudy’s false claims about Georgia
  3. A Tweet from Gabriel Sterling on December 4 debunking Rudy’s attack on Ruby Freeman
  4. A December 4 attack on PA’s GOP legislative leaders after they refused to reject the popular vote
  5. The December 19 Tweet announcing the January 6 protest that launched the insurrection
  6. A December 21 Tweet falsely claiming vote fraud in WI
  7. A December 23 Tweet attacking Cobb County officials verifying signatures
  8. Trump’s December 23 retweet of Ivan Raiklin Operation Pence Card Tweet
  9. Trump’s January 1 reminder about the January 6 event
  10. A January 5, 11:06 AM Tweet claiming Pence could reject the vote certifications
  11. A January 5, 5:05PM Tweet announcing “we hear you (and love you) from the Oval Office
  12. A January 5, 5:43PM Tweet reminding that the rally opened at 11AM the next day
  13. A January 6, 1AM Tweet claiming that Pence could “send it back”
  14. A January 6, 8:17AM Tweet repeating that all Pence had to do was “send them back to the States, AND WE WIN.”
  15. The famous 2:24PM Tweet targeting Pence
  16. The January 6, 2:38PM Tweet calling on rioters to “Stay peaceful!”
  17. The January 6, 3:13PM Tweet calling for “No violence!”
  18. The January 6, 4:17PM Tweet releasing the video asking people to leave the Capitol
  19. Trump’s January 6, 6:01PM Tweet about a victory “viciously stripped away”

Before DOJ could unroll the indictment in its current form, it had to have proof about who actually Tweeted out each of these.

Aside from the dining room Tweet, it’s not entirely clear he did: Several times the indictment describes Trump “issuing” a Tweet, which might involve others.

That’s probably just one of the reasons why, on January 17, Jack Smith’s team obtained a warrant to provide, “data and records related to the ‘@realDonaldTrump’ Twitter account,” with a nondisclosure order.

Elon Musk’s Twitter not only didn’t have any lawyers home to accept the request, but they balked at providing the data, which was originally due on January 27, because they wanted to tell Trump about it first.

Ultimately, then Chief Judge Beryl Howell had to hold Twitter in contempt for 3 days before it turned over all the requested data on February 9. The DC Circuit just upheld Howell on all counts — the imposition of the gag, the contempt and the fine.

We shall see, going forward, whether DOJ asked for more than that — including any DMs that Trump might have sent to the Stop the Steal crowd, whose efforts were exploding on Twitter at the time.

Update: The warrant may also have asked for information that would be useful to measure Trump’s fundraising; that’s one thing DOJ was focused on in that period (and remains focused on). The warrant also came close to the beginning of the Proud Boys trial, which DOJ kicked off with Trump’s “Stand Back and Stand By” comment.

I Did Nazi Crustpunk Bar Fail, Redux [UPDATE-1]

[NB: Check the byline, thanks. Updates to appear at bottom of post. /~Rayne]

Because you people will NOT stop whining about the bird-logoed crustpunk Nazi bar sinking even further below the waterline, I am putting up a dedicated post for that subject.

RULE NUMBER ONE: Nothing but Twitter and social media related comments allowed in this thread.

RULE NUMBER TWO: Do NOT take your comments about Twitter and other social media platforms to other threads.

RULE NUMBER THREE: See the first two rules, and don’t expect this site to have any power to do anything to change the crustpunk Nazi bar or other similarly centralized social media failures like Reddit and that scofflaw Meta (home of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp).

~ ~ ~

UPDATE-1 — 8:30 P.M. ET —

Here’s a rough tick-tock leading to today’s huge uptick in new Mastodon account sign-ups —

Wednesday, May 24 — Ron DeSantis’ live campaign launch via Twitter Spaces was an utter disaster; DeSantis’ supporters try desperately to put a positive spin on it.

Thursday, May 25 — Twitter’s chief engineer resigned.

Friday, May 26 — Apparently Twitter had not paid the software company which provided service for live video feeds used in Twitter Spaces.

Sunday, June 11 — Engadget reports there may be problems ahead for Twitter:

More platform instability could be in Twitter’s near future. In 2018, Twitter signed a $1 billion contract with Google to host some of its services on the company’s Google Cloud servers. Platformer reports Twitter recently refused to pay the search giant ahead of the contract’s June 30th renewal date. Twitter is reportedly rushing to move as many services off of Google’s infrastructure before the contract expires, but the effort is “running behind schedule,” putting some tools, including Smyte, a platform the company acquired in 2018 to bolster its moderation capabilities, in danger of going offline.

Thursday, June 29 — Some folks observe difficult sporadically with accessing Twitter links.

The New York Times reported new Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino ordered Google to be paid after she spoke with the head of Google’s Cloud division.

Friday, June 30 — Persons attempting to access any Twitter page are unable to do so unless they are a logged-in registered user.

Elon Musk later confirmed access has been deliberately cut off for all outside users, claiming Twitter is being scraped aggressively.

There is a lot of speculation the service is degrading because Twitter didn’t pay Google, but NYT’s report suggested otherwise.

Saturday, July 1 — Twitter users note Twitter is down. Musk also tweets that users will be rate limited on the amount of tweets they can read each day.

Before the widespread outage, observers noted Twitter had been DDoS-ing itself:

Twitter and Mastodon user Sheldon Chang offered more detail:

Sheldon Chang 🇺🇸 @[email protected]
This is hilarious. It appears that Twitter is DDOSing itself.

The Twitter home feed’s been down for most of this morning. Even though nothing loads, the Twitter website never stops trying and trying.

In the first video, notice the error message that I’m being rate limited. Then notice the jiggling scrollbar on the right.

The second video shows why it’s jiggling. Twitter is firing off about 10 requests a second to itself to try and fetch content that never arrives because Elon’s latest genius innovation is to block people from being able to read Twitter without logging in.

This likely created some hellish conditions that the engineers never envisioned and so we get this comedy of errors resulting in the most epic of self-owns, the self-DDOS.

Unbelievable. It’s amateur hour.

#TwitterDown #MastodonMigration #DDOS #TwitterFail #SelfDDOS

Jul 01, 2023, 11:03 · Edited Jul 01, 13:02

You can see the videos he shared at the link above.

Techdirt’s Mike Masnick offered his opinion about the rate limiting:

I don’t have words for this clusterfuck except to say I expected this level of fail and worse to come, even with a new CEO on board. Good luck, Yaccarino. I hope you got a guaranteed payout.

~ ~ ~

Meanwhile, at Mastodon:

Mastodon Users @[email protected]

12,916,975 accounts
+4,614 in the last hour
+34,484 in the last day
+108,119 in the last week

[Graphic alt text: Four time-based charts

Upper blue area: Number of Mastodon users
Upper cyan area: Hourly increases of number of users
Lower orange area: Number of active instances
Lower yellow area: Thousand toots per hour

For current figures please read the text of this post]
Jul 01, 2023, 19:00

~ ~ ~

If there is more news in the next 12-24 hours about Twitter, I will update this post.

Three Things: Crustpunk Nazi Bar Update, $42K Extortion Edition

[NB: Check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]

It’s been a while since we had a chat about the crustpunk Nazi bar known as Twitter. The dead-ending bird decided press the issue for us.

~ 3 ~

Community members have been asking in comments about the now-empty widget in the right-hand vertical navigation zone.

It’s dead, Jim.

The widget in the right-hand navigation column which featured latest tweets by emptywheel contributors no longer works because Elon Musk changed the business model at Twitter yet again, requiring users of Twitter’s API to pay $42,000 to continue to do so.

That kind of money can buy a lot of original reporting as well as platform updates and hosting.

The original developers of that widget also stopped servicing it years ago.

It will be replaced at some time in the near future with a Mastodon or Fediverse-friendly widget though we don’t have an estimated time to completion.

Bear with us on this matter, please and thanks.

You can continue to follow Marcy, bmaz, Ed Walker, and Jim White on the bird app without having to log in –- just click on the embedded links. Unfortunately this will also count as engagement at the crustpunk Nazi bar which Musk will use to continue to claim the bird app is a going concern.

Whenever the major news outlets and U.S. officials both elected and appointed – yes, taxpayer-funded persons are using the crustpunk Nazi bar – get their heads out of their asses and migrate from the Nazi bar, more of Team emptywheel will move as well. But as long as the media and government entities continue to use the Saudi-funded right-wing mouthpiece the bird app has become, some of the team will tweet there.

As for the exorbitant and extortive fee Musk wants for API access, the damage is not just emptywheel readers being unable to read tweets through this site.

Now academic researchers and NGO monitors of hate speech, illegal activity, disinformation, and foreign influence may no longer be able to access bird app content. That’s not a bug but a feature.

~ 2 ~

Speaking of hate speech and illegal activity and other content typically moderated by reputable social media platforms, Mike Masnick at Techdirt created and shared an excellent game in which players can experience what moderators must do to boot crap out of comments and still keep their jobs:

(Side note: Techdirt left the bird app this past week because of the $42K fee. Good for them.)

Moderation here at emptywheel is not as strenuous as Masnick’s Moderator Mayhem game because this site’s traffic simply isn’t a big factor 95% of the time. We can also predict most traffic spikes which lead to trolling upticks based on news events and specific posts as well, unlike most Big Tech social media platforms.

But the fuzzy nature of some comments which moderators must screen can be challenging and is likely to be more so over time here and at the big platforms as influence operations incorporate AI to weasel around moderation.

Unlike the Big Tech social media platforms this site doesn’t demand community members provide a cell phone number or verifiable email address or other personal data which links them personally to content they share in comments. It’s a careful balancing act between recognizing legitimate human participants commenting in good faith and assuring them privacy. Moderation at Big Tech socmed platforms compromises privacy to eliminate the necessity of validating legitimate community members.

Balancing community members’ privacy and site security means we spend a bit more obvious effort asking community members who want to comment to create and maintain a username which can be readily recognized over the history of their comments. The emergence of AI will make this more important to prevent spoofing of established community members.

All of which means emptywheel community members will continue to be nagged for a unique username consisting of a minimum 8 letters which they will use every time they comment, or risk moderation.

For more perspective on moderation, it’s worth reading Vanity Fair’s article about new socmed platform Bluesky’s problematic approach (or lack thereof) to moderation. You’d think Jack Dorsey would have had this nailed down before launch given his experience at Twitter but no – he’s proven he’s another “free speech absolutist” which is just code for crustpunk Nazi bar owner/operator.

~ 1 ~

Aside from how the bird app and moderation affects emptywheel’s site, the bird app continues to find out about its fucking around.

Or rather, certain persons foolish enough to trust Elmo and the bird app after he fired ~85% of its employees are finding out about Elmo’s fuckery.

In a debacle rivaling SpaceX’s 4/20 Starship launch explosion, we’ve all heard by now about Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis’ spectacular implosion on soft launch last Wednesday when Twitter Spaces failed to work as expected during his presidential campaign launch announcement.

One of Twitter’s top engineers, Foad Dabiri, quit on Thursday, amid much speculation the exit was due to the Twitter Spaces failure and not a resignation but a separation.

You’ll note the first comments at that Yahoo News piece are Elmo fanboi trolls who blame the Twitter Spaces’ failure on sabotage.

The other shoe dropped Friday: it seems Elmo didn’t pay the bill for the Redis Labs software which handled audio streaming traffic.

The best engineers in the world can’t turn a deadbeat into a viable production platform. No wonder the engineer left; one might wonder if Dabiri was a green card employee who had no choice to stay until it was obvious it would damage his personal cred.

The failure reflected badly not only on Elmo and Twitter but on DeSantis. Why would any sentient being risk their next desired job on a platform which has been riddled with problems since Elmo bought it, let alone a platform run by a guy who has twice tweeted supportive comments about a rival candidate Sen. Tim Scott and is in part funded by another major campaign contributor, Larry Ellison?

That’s just begging for an opportunity to find out.

~ 0 ~

As with all social media platforms, your mileage may vary. Engage wisely.

All Around the Chancery Court Elmo Chased to Weasel [UPDATE-1]

[NB: check the byline, thanks! Update(s) will appear at bottom of post. /~Rayne]

This isn’t going to be a very long post because others have already covered the news that Twitter, Inc. is no more having been subsumed by its successor, X Corporation.

See Slate’s coverage which has one of the earliest and more thorough reports, or TechCrunch’s report.

Elmo has been stuck on name X for decades; he named his online bank business launched in 1999 x.com. That business merged in 2000 with rival Confinity, an online bank founded by Peter Thiel and others. The merged entity became PayPal.

Before Elmo closed on the purchase of Twitter, he’d said that Twitter was a path toward a new online business based on an application.

The intention was to create an “everything app” as popular as TikTok and as encompassing as WeChat — both of which are Chinese apps.

The X naming convention is in head-to-head competition with Google’s X company founded in 2010 — “X, the moonshot company” as Google styles and tags the entity. Funny, that; both Musk and Google wanting off-world exploration.

It’s possible the move to dissolve Twitter, Inc. and reconstitute it under X corp is merely consolidation of Musk-helmed businesses in Nevada where parent organization X Holdings is already incorporated. Twitter was already a subset of a Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC) under the April 25, 2022 terms of sale.

The dissolution of Twitter as a Delaware corporation is merely the next step of the acquisition process.

However it’s an open question why Musk moved the entire corporation to Nevada instead of leaving Twitter in Delaware as Tesla, Inc. remains.

Could it be that Elmo is so afraid of Delaware’s Chancery Court and discovery should a lawsuit be filed against Twitter that he chose to weasel the corporation into Nevada to avoid it?

Here’s a list of advantages to incorporating a business in Nevada as compared to other states:

• Nevada law protects both directors and officers from individual liability for any acts committed by or on behalf of the business (with the exception of fraud).
• Jurisdiction for legal suits is in the state where the business incorporated.
• Nevada has significant privacy rights and doesn’t share any company information with the IRS. Therefore, no one will know the owner’s name of the corporation.
• You don’t have to identify the shareholders of the corporation.
• Unlimited stock is allowed.
• Nominee shareholders are allowed.

Could it be that Elmo is so concerned about his own personal liability that he moved the corporation to Nevada to avail himself of protections for owners/principals?

Or is one of these other advantages paramount — like the privacy rights which may be extended to investors like Prince Al Waleed bin Talal Al Saud or Marc Andreesen‘s a16z?

How will we know if/when the microblogging platform formerly known as Twitter becomes the agent of a foreign government should ownership shift even more substantially to foreign entities through a combination of equity and debt?

Whatever Musk has up his sleeve he certainly didn’t tip in his interview this week with the BBC,  which the Beeb summarized in six points:

1. He denies hate speech on Twitter has spiked
2. He voted for Joe Biden
3. He says Twitter is beating the bots in war on disinfo
4. He’s against banning TikTok
5. He would turn down $44bn for Twitter
6. He will back down on how BBC is labelled

I don’t know about you but I don’t believe most of this; it reads like the Liar’s Paradox.

Whatever this corporate shell game is about, I know Elmo is still burning Twitter down a bit more each day, including his labeling NPR as a “state-affiliated media” outlet after the GOP has ensured for decades public broadcasting must be starved of funding. Receiving but 1% of its annual revenues from the federal government, NPR has now left Twitter.

The departure of NPR and its 52 feeds makes this revenue forecast appear more reliable:

Oops, I mean this forecast:

Though it still looks like gambling, yes?

~ ~ ~

UPDATE-1 — 2:30 P.M. ET 13-APR-2023 —

And there it is, the birth of X Corp’s “everything app.”

CNBC: Twitter partners with eToro to let users trade stocks, crypto as Musk pushes app into finance

Who in their right mind would trust their financial information to Elon Musk’s latest Rube Goldberg machine?

Knowing the exposure this business has to foreign investors located in countries which have questionable affinities with the U.S., why would anyone do this if they weren’t a crackpot Elmo fanboi?

When Techbros’ Circle Jerk Becomes a Circular Firing Squad

[NB: check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]

I have been meaning to write a longer post about this topic but the events of the last 48 hours have forced me to stop snickering long enough to put up this post.

Here is a chart depicting Twitter’s current investors comparing their relative amount of commitment:

Here is a list of the investors’ names and the amount they’d committed at the time Elon Musk closed the deal to acquire Twitter.

In both graphics from Reuters above I’ve noted in red one name in particular — that of AH Capital Management, LLC.

A as in Andreesen, H as in Horowitz. As in the venture capital firm behind a16z.com.

As in the venture capital firm behind Substack.

Elmo is pissing on one of his investors because his investor’s investment decided to launch a competing platform.

Let that sink in, as Elmo so eloquently tweeted as he dragged a bathroom fixture into Twitter’s offices last October.

~ ~ ~

Axios beat me to making the observation about the financial relationship between Elmo’s Twitter and AH Capital in their article yesterday about Substack’s recent fundraising effort relying on crowdfunding.

Substack announced the offer to sell equity to writers on March 28, with its own writers’ investments prioritized over others who might choose to participate.

The fundraising effort followed an aborted fundraising attempt last year.

As Axios’ Dan Primack noted, the crowdfunding prospectus didn’t report this year’s financials, only the previous two years as required by law.

Substack’s founder Chris Best apparently believes Substack “doesn’t actually need the money,” forecasting profitability ahead.

This makes little sense to me.

What does make sense, though, is that the VC funding well may have run dry.

Take a look at the Form ADV – Uniform Application for Investment Adviser Registration and Report by Exempt Reporting Advisers, filed on March 31 this year with the Securities and Exchange Commission by AH Capital Management (hereafter a16z).

Caveat: it’s more than 400 pages long, might take a bit to browse.

I regret not downloading a copy when I first read this document in mid-March. I’d lost count as I scrolled through the form back then while counting the number of times SILICON VALLEY BANK and SVB appeared in the document as a second custodian for private funds.

You’ll recall SVB collapsed on March 10 this year.

The version of a16z’s Form ADV now shows SILICON VALLEY BANK, A DIVISION OF FIRST CITIZENS BANK reflecting the post-crash acquisition of SVB as part of a rescue plan. This new identity appears 84 times, with other financial management firms like J.P. Morgan, Merrill Lynch, and Raymond James each appearing in tandem but fewer times as fund custodians. None of the others appear as frequently as SVB.

While these financial managers are custodians, the frequency with which SVB is mentioned in a16z’s filing suggests a repeated relationship with SVB apart from fund custodian.

Is Substack’s renewed fundraising effort due to tightening of a16z’s financing capacity, possibly due to losses at SVB?

The Substack financials provided to potential crowdfunding investors certainly won’t shed light on their funders’ conditions.

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What’s much more obvious about Substack’s recent launch of a microblogging platform “Notes” to complement its blog/newsletter format is its potential to draw down users from Twitter.

Substack Notes must also have cost some cash to develop and now going forward to administer.

It’s not clear whether the new microblogging platform will eventually offer an alternative source of monetization. It’s possible that Substack longform could remain subscription based as one revenue stream while Substack shortform could sell promoted Notes or advertisement space (Tumblr users will understand the advertising possibilities using scroll over content).

With advertisers abandoning Twitter causing its advertising revenue to tank by 89%, there’s money on the table out there somewhere waiting to be chased by a microblogging platform which isn’t a crustpunk Nazi bar. Is Substack positioning itself to sweep up some of the cash?

They may need to if Substack can’t go back to the VC well. Offering equity may be a way to ensure their longform writers stay on board with a change in business model since they may be happy to increase their earnings without having to hump more subscriptions.

There’s a limit to the subscription market, after all. How many subscriptions can the average reader afford?

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It’s not just the possibility that the VC well has been affected by SVB’s crash; it’s the rolling damage to funding capacity caused by cryptocurrency ventures.

You’ll note in the Twitter financing graphics that cryptocurrency exchange Binance is a financier to Musk’s Twitter. Binance has been under investigation by the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Justice; the latter has been split over whether to file criminal charges against Binance.

Fallout from the collapse of cryptocurrency exchange and hedge fund FTX also figures into the mix; it’s difficult for the public to readily determine which investment managers were exposed and how deeply unless the investment manager was so deeply over their heads in FTX that they are obviously failing — like Silvergate Bank which folded on March 9.

At that point it becomes an ourobouros eating itself since Silvergate’s collapse preceded and helped precipitate SVB’s collapse.

How much of Elmo’s desperate and sloppy flailing after cash through half-assed approaches like his new Twitter Blue is tied to the inability to seek more financing through non-traditional sources?

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The stupidest part of all of this is that techbros did this to themselves through their own stupid hubris. Stupid, in that they didn’t bother to do their homework early enough to prevent this financial Jenga.

Hubris, in that they’ve acted like the rules don’t apply to them, as if they’ve got enough money they can throw it around endlessly without any concern they may be held accountable, as if rubbing their shoulders with people like themselves in their own circle is all they really need to assure their ongoing success.

Peter Thiel decided it was all about him and his immediate best buddies related to the Founders fund when he set off the bank run at SVB.

Never mind how this might affect the rest of the tech sector ecosystem, or the other non-technology businesses which had been persuaded to use SVB for their banking needs.

The PayPal Mafia-spawned techbro-hood finally failed its acolytes and the damage has yet to be fully realized.

I had $50m of my own money stuck in SVB,” Thiel told the Financial Times, omitting what you might imagine as the natural follow-on, “I can’t help it if I could run faster than the rest of you ahead of that grizzly bear gaining on us after I tweaked its nose.” But $50 million is loose change stuck in the cushions to a guy who made a billion on cryptocurrency, fortunately before the crypto-tulip mania began to crater.

Marc Andreesen and Ben Horowitz at a16z should have noticed much earlier that far too many of their investments overlapped either in the other financing on — like cryptocurrency exchanges — which they relied, or in the personalities of the techbros’ involved.

Did they buy into the hype about Elmo like so many Muskian fanbois? They could have done the legwork and discovered for themselves quite inexpensively what it is that Elmo didn’t want revealed in DE’s Chancery Court so badly that he scrambled out of exposure and simply closed on Twitter.

And then the others who have relied on a16z for funding like Chris Best at Substack, and all the writers who’ve signed up with Substack, all now hanging on to whatever it was that sold a16z about Elmo’s Twitter and the techbro ecosphere which banked at SVB…

Including Noam Bardin and Post.Media (Post Media, Inc.) which also received funding from a16z to launch as a Twitter competitor. The platform has not taken off as anticipated, its Terms of Service seen as stultifying and its flat excessively polished effect discouraging to building out social networking.

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One other thing all these techbros who are pulling rugs out from under each other have in common: their age. The oldest are in their mid-50s and the youngest in their mid-40s. They’re old enough to have adult children, old enough not to want to sleep on the floor in their offices amidst pizza boxes and empty soda cans. Perhaps all of this bullshit circular firing squad among the techbros which leave us as collateral damage is really just a nasty mid-life crisis.

We should worry when they finally begin to clue into their mortality — one of them has already been eyeing the blood of teenagers for infusions as a fountain of youth, out of some sort of sick techbro vampirism. As if our social media environment and our nation’s economic welfare aren’t enough blood to siphon off.

The entire technology environment from social media to apps to network to cloud is ripe for a generational shift, a generation which won’t see the current techbros as the end-all-be-all of financing and development.

A generation used to being told to suck it up by guys who were born into wealth, hung out with wealthy tech dudes, and blinded by their own wealth, a generation used to screaming for relief while billionaire techbros blithely look to their own backsides is coming of age.

Elon Musk “Censors” Matt Taibbi’s Post about Twitter “Censoring” the “Hunter Biden” “Laptop” Story

Back in October 2020, #MattyDickPics Taibbi wrote a post on his Substack about the great scandal that Twitter throttled the dodgy NYPost story.

The incredible decision by Twitter and Facebook to block access to a New York Post story about a cache of emails reportedly belonging to Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s son Hunter, with Twitter going so far as to lock the 200 year-old newspaper out of its own account for over a week, continues to be a major underreported scandal.

The hypocrisy is mind-boggling. Imagine the reaction if that same set of facts involved the New York Times and any of its multitudinous unverifiable “exposes” from the last half-decade: from the similarly-leaked “black ledger” story implicating Paul Manafort, to its later-debunked “repeated contacts with Russian intelligence” story, to its mountain of articles about the far more dubious Steele dossier.

[snip]

The flow of information in the United States has become so politicized – bottlenecked by an increasingly brazen union of corporate press and tech platforms – that it’s become impossible for American audiences to see news about certain topics absent thickets of propagandistic contextualizing.

That makes the effect of Elon Musk’s decision yesterday to block links to Substack (as well as WordPress, on which this site is built) all the more tragicomic.

Here’s how that tragicomedy unfolded, in four five acts (note: Mehdi made the same joke I made yesterday at about the same time):

One:

Two:

Three:

Four:

Just days ago, as Mehdi Hasan shredded his false claims, #MattyDickPics squirmed as he explained that he had no criticism to make of authoritarian narcissist Elon Musk because he believed Musk intended to reverse what, #MattyDickPics claimed to believe, amounted to censorship from Twitter, including the throttling for 24-hours of one story from the NYPost.

Almost immediately after that, Elmo throttled not just #MattyDickPics’ own posts about “Hunter Biden’s” “laptop,” but scores of other such posts as well.

Update, Five: