Turns out that when you tell advertisers to go fuck themselves, sue the advertisers who did so, and then promise you won’t do anything to stop the worst people in the world from spewing hate and bigotry on your platform, it might not be great for business.

Who knew? Elon, apparently.

Last week we noted that ad execs were saying that Elon’s latest antics were only making them even less interested in advertising on ExTwitter, but there hasn’t been as much talk lately about the financial situation the company is in.

In the first year after Elon took over, there were a number of reports suggesting ad revenue dropped somewhere between 50% and 70%. Elon has admitted that the company’s overall valuation of the company is probably down by nearly 60%.

But most of that was all talking about where it was in that first year post Elon. Since then, there’s been little data on how things were actually going. Linda Yaccarino has insisted that many of the advertisers who left came back, though when people looked at the details, it looked like a few that had come back only dipped their toes in the ExTwitter waters, rather than fully coming back.

And indeed, all we’ve been hearing this year is that Musk and Yaccarino are trying to woo back advertisers. Again. And again. Though, suing them isn’t doing them any favors.

However, buried in a recent Fortune article is the first time I’ve seen any data showing how badly the second year of Elon has gone. While the main focus of the article is on how Elon may have to sell some more of his Tesla stock to fund ExTwitter, it notes that ad revenue has continued to drop and was 53% lower than it was in 2023 (i.e., already after Elon had taken over, and many advertisers had bailed).

And the article says that ad revenue is down an astounding 84% from when Elon took over, based on an analysis by Bradford Ferguson, the chief investment officer at an asset management firm:

Ferguson based his assessment on internal second-quarter figures recently obtained by the New York Times. According to this report, X booked $114 million worth of revenue in the U.S., its largest market by far. This represented a 25% drop over the preceding three months and a 53% drop over the year-ago period.

That already sounds bad. But it gets worse. The last publicly available figures prior to Musk’s acquisition, from Q2 of 2022, had revenue at $661 million. After you account for inflation, revenue has actually collapsed by 84%, in today’s dollars.

Ouch.

A separate report from Quartz (pulling from MediaRadar research) suggests the numbers aren’t quite that dire, but they still see a 24% decline in 2024 compared to 2023. And when the 24% decline is the better report, you know you’re in serious trouble.

Advertisers apparently spent almost $744 million on X, formerly known as Twitter, during the first six months of 2024. That’s about 24% lower than the more than $982 million advertisers dropped on the platform in the first half of 2023, according to ad-tracking company MediaRadar.

No matter how you look at it, it appears that in the second year of Elon’s control, advertising revenue remains in free fall.

No wonder he’s resorted to suing. Platforming more awful people and undermining each deal that Yaccarino brings in hasn’t magically helped turn things around.

Anyway, for no reason at all, I’ll just remind people that Elon’s pitch to investors to help fund some of the $44 billion takeover of Twitter was that he would increase revenue to $26.4 billion by 2028. And, yes, the plan was to diversify that revenue, but his pitch deck said that ad revenue would generate $12 billion by 2028. This would mean basically doubling the ~$6 billion in ad revenue the company was making at the time Elon purchased it. But now that’s been cut to maybe $1.5 billion and probably less.

I’m guessing that Elon and Linda might fall a wee bit short of their target here.

Apparently, Judge Reed O’Connor doesn’t think that owning a massive amount of Tesla stock constitutes a conflict of interest when it comes to judging Elon Musk’s legal battles.

Last week, we were briefly surprised when infamously partisan Judge Reed O’Connor recused himself from Elon’s nonsense SLAPP suit against GARM and some advertisers.

As we had reported back in June, Media Matters had raised the issue that Judge O’Connor owns a ton of Tesla stock, which arguably is a conflict of interest in ExTwitter’s lawsuit against Media Matters (which Judge O’Connor had refused to dismiss despite its obvious problems). That matter had still been pending last week when O’Connor surprised lots of people (almost certainly including Elon’s lawyers) by recusing himself from the GARM suit.

We had wondered if it was a sign that Judge O’Connor realized how bad it looked for him to hold Tesla stock while repeatedly ruling on behalf of Elon. But, no, it quickly came out that the issue was almost certainly that O’Connor also owned stock in Unilever, one of the firms that Elon was suing in the case.

And then, just days later, it was made clear that Judge O’Connor sees no conflict in owning Tesla stock. He not only rejected Media Matters’ request that Elon be forced to list Tesla as an interested party, but he also made Media Matters pay Elon’s legal fees over this matter.

Judge O’Connor insists it’s just crazy to suggest that Tesla is somehow an interested party:

First, there is no evidence that shows Tesla has a direct financial interest in the outcome of this case. Tesla neither directly nor indirectly holds equity in X, Tesla is not a director or advisor, and it does not participate in the affairs of X. In other words, there is no indication that Tesla has any control over X or any financial ties to X, and Defendants do not claim as much. The question for disclosure is whether Tesla has a “legal or equitable interest” in X. Defendants merely point to news articles that report some blurred lines between Tesla and X that do not rise to the level of financial interest. These articles do not amount to evidence of a financial interest. Tesla is a publicly traded company, with tens of thousands of stockholders, its own board of directors, and external auditors. X is a privately owned company. The mere assertions that Musk owns a constellation of companies, some former Tesla employees now work at X, and that Tesla leased workspace from X do not support a finding that Tesla and X are not separate legal entities or that they share a financial interest.

Later, in response to points about Tesla stock fluctuating in direct connection to Elon doing stupid shit on ExTwitter, O’Connor notes in a footnote: “Musk, who is neither a plaintiff nor defendant in this suit.”

C’mon. None of us were born yesterday.

Elon is totally driving this lawsuit. He was the one who announced that this lawsuit would be coming based on a tweet that he saw. And, obviously, Tesla’s stock is tied to nonsense going on at ExTwitter. He sold a ton of Tesla stock to do the deal, and there are constant reports that he’s almost certainly going to need sell more to keep ExTwitter afloat.

None of this is that big of a surprise, though. Talking to lawyers, I didn’t find one who thought that O’Connor would buy this argument (which is partly why his recusal in the GARM case took me by surprise, before it was revealed that that was due to the Unilever stock).

But just to add absolute insult to injury, O’Connor said that Media Matters, a small non-profit, has to cover ExTwitter’s legal fees over this motion, despite it being owned by the world’s richest man:

Defendants’ Motion to Compel does not have a basis in law. It lacks a reasonable basis in law because the motion is motivated by an effort to force recusal, as opposed to disclosure of unknown information. Compelling disclosure is proper only when a party lacks necessary information. Carr, 2024 WL 1675185, at *1 (compelling disclosure of unknown LLC members); Steel Erectors, 312 F.R.D. at 677 (compelling disclosure of an unknown parent corporation). The information Defendants seek to compel was not unknown to them.

A Motion to Compel Corrected Certificate of Interested Persons when that information was known appears to be unprecedented. Indeed, Defendants did not cite a single case in which a motion to compel a corrected certificate of interested person was brought under this posture, much less one in which the effort was successful under the Local Rule 3.1 “financially interested” standard. Additionally, Defendants’ motion has no basis in fact. Local Rule 3.1’s clear incorporation of “financial interest” requires “legal or equitable interest.” 28 U.S.C. § 455(d)(4). Defendants failed to show facts that X’s alleged connection to Tesla meets this standard. Instead, it appears Defendants seek to force a backdoor recusal through their Motion to Compel. Gamesmanship of this sort is inappropriate and contrary to the rules of the Northern District of Texas.10 Accordingly, Defendants’ Motion is not substantially justified and attorney’s fees are appropriate.

Already, Judge O’Connor’s ridiculous decision to order discovery in this case, rather than properly dismissing it for lack of jurisdiction (among many other reasons), has resulted in layoffs at the non-profit. The impact of this ruling and the fee shifting is likely to do even more damage.

From the beginning, it has been clear that this was a SLAPP suit by Elon, angry that Media Matters (accurately) called out how ads on ExTwitter were appearing next to literal neo-Nazi content. The complaint from ExTwitter admitted that Media Matters accurately reported what it found. The only purpose of this lawsuit is to try to bleed Media Matters dry and to warn away other critics from doing similar reporting.

There’s a reason that most anti-SLAPP laws include fee shifting going the other way (making the wealthy vexatious plaintiffs pay the legal fees of the weaker defendants). Seeing O’Connor basically flip the script here is yet another reason why anti-SLAPP laws are so important.

Having Judge O’Connor let the case move forward to discovery in the first place was already a travesty. Now awarding fee shifting over Media Matters for calling out the potential conflict regarding Tesla’s connection to the case just feels like O’Connor, somewhat gleefully, twisting the knife that Elon plunged into the non-profit.

Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw.

Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed.

IIn this week’s round-up of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Mike and Ben cover:

• Jim Jordan Demands Advertisers Explain Why They Don’t Advertise On MAGA Media Sites (Techdirt)
• TikTok Has a Nazi Problem (Wired)
• NazTok: An organized neo-Nazi TikTok network is getting millions of views (Institute for Strategic Dialogue)
• How TikTok bots and AI have powered a resurgence in UK far-right violence (The Guardian)
• Senate Passes Child Online Safety Bill, Sending It to an Uncertain House Fate (New York Tmes)
• The teens lobbying against the Kids Online Safety Act (The Verge)
• Social Media Mishaps Aren’t Always Billionaire Election Stealing Plots (Techdirt)
• X suspends ‘White Dudes for Harris’ account after massive fundraiser (Washington Post)
• Why Won’t Google Auto-complete ‘Trump Assassination Attempt’? (Intelligencer)
• ‘Technical glitch’ is no longer an excuse (Everything in Moderation from 2020)
• A message to our Black community (TikTok from 2020)

This episode is brought to you with financial support from the Future of Online Trust & Safety Fund, and by our sponsor Discord. In our Bonus Chat at the end of the episode, Mike speaks to Juliet Shen and Camille Francois about the Trust & Safety Tooling Consortium at Columbia School of International and Public Affairs, and the importance of open source tools for trust and safety.

Remember last month when ExTwitter excitedly “rejoined GARM” (the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, an advertising consortium focused on brand safety)? And then, a week later, after Rep. Jim Jordan released a misleading report about GARM, Elon Musk said he was going to sue GARM and hoped criminal investigations would be opened?

Unsurprisingly, Jordan has now ratcheted things up a notch by sending investigative demands to a long list of top advertisers associated with GARM. The letter effectively accuses these advertisers of antitrust violations for choosing not to advertise on conservative media sites, based on GARM’s recommendations on how to best protect brand safety.

The link there shows all the letters, but we’ll just stick with the first one, to Adidas. The letter doesn’t make any demands specifically about ExTwitter, but does name the GOP’s favorite media sites, and demands to know whether any of these advertisers agreed not to advertise on those properties. In short, this is an elected official demanding to know why a private company chose not to give money to media sites that support that elected official:

Was Adidas Group aware of the coordinated actions taken by GARM toward news outlets and podcasts such as The Joe Rogan Experience, The Daily Wire, Breitbart News, or Fox News, or other conservative media? Does Adidas Group support GARM’s coordinated actions toward these news outlets and podcasts?

Jordan is also demanding all sorts of documents and answers to questions. He is suggesting strongly that GARM’s actions (presenting ways that advertisers might avoid, say, having their brands show up next to neo-Nazi content) were a violation of antitrust law.

This is all nonsense. First of all, choosing not to advertise somewhere is protected by the First Amendment. And there are good fucking reasons not to advertise on media properties most closely associated with nonsense peddling, extremist culture wars, and just general stupidity.

Even more ridiculous is that the letter cites NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware, which is literally the Supreme Court case that establishes that group boycotts are protected speech. It’s the case that says not supporting a business for the purpose of protest, while economic activity, is still protected speech and can’t be regulated by the government (and it’s arguable that what does GARM does is even a boycott at all).

As the Court noted, in holding that organizing a boycott was protected by the First Amendment:

The First Amendment similarly restricts the ability of the State to impose liability on an individual solely because of his association with another.

But, of course, one person who is quite excited is Elon Musk. He quote tweeted (they’re still tweets, right?) the House Judiciary’s announcement of the demands with a popcorn emoji:

So, yeah. Mr. “Free Speech Absolutist,” who claims the Twitter files show unfair attempts by governments to influence speech, now supports the government trying to pressure brands into advertising on certain media properties. It’s funny how the “free speech absolutist” keeps throwing the basic, fundamental principles of free speech out the window the second he doesn’t like the results.

That’s not supporting free speech at all. But, then again, for Elon to support free speech, he’d first have to learn what it means, and he’s shown no inclination of ever doing that.

Update: About 14 hours after Rittenhouse shared his video explaining his support for Ron Paul, declaring that "you must stand by your principles," he announced that he spoke "with members of the Trump's [sic] team" and that he is now "100% behind Donald Trump."

"A lot of people are upset that I said I'm going to be writing in Ron Paul for president of the United States, and that is true. I will be writing in Ron Paul." So said Kyle Rittenhouse in a recent video posted to X. A lot of people, it appears, are indeed upset. Should they be?

Rittenhouse catapulted to national attention in 2020 when, at age 17, he armed himself, traveled to Kenosha, Wisconsin, during a night of riots and civil unrest, and shot three men, killing two. It was always Rittenhouse's contention that he'd acted in self-defense, and his arrest galvanized many in the conservative movement who said the prosecution was motivated not by justice but by the political moment. Supporters helped raise $2 million for Rittenhouse's bail, and he ultimately attracted the attention of former President Donald Trump, who defended him while in office and who hosted Rittenhouse at Mar-a-Lago after leaving the White House.

So one of the primary reactions to Rittenhouse's choice for president is that he's guilty of betrayal. Trump and the MAGA movement had his back when his life took its most dire turn, the thinking goes, so Rittenhouse owes them his loyalty at the ballot box. That general sentiment is summed up aptly by the one-and-only Catturd: "I can stomach a lot of things—but backstabbing millions who supported you at your lowest point. Then turning on Trump right after he got shot," he said in a viral post. "Can't stomach it—won't put up with it—forgotten forever."

In other words, Rittenhouse is allegedly in debt to Trump and his followers for supporting his claims of innocence. He was acquitted in 2021 of all charges, including first-degree reckless homicide, two counts of first-degree recklessly endangering safety, first-degree intentional homicide, and attempted first-degree intentional homicide. That was the right decision. And it was the one the jury came to because that is what the evidence clearly supported. The right to self-defense is not selectively available to people with certain views. Rittenhouse owes no one a thing for not getting convicted of charges that prosecutors should not have brought to begin with.

So why did Trump fail to gain Rittenhouse's support? "Unfortunately, Donald Trump had bad advisers making him bad on the Second Amendment, and that is my issue," he said in his video. "If you cannot be completely uncompromisable on the Second Amendment, I will not vote for you." Trump's record includes a bump stock ban, which Reason's Jacob Sullum noted turned "peaceful gun owners into felons by fiat," and his support for red flag laws. Those moves may not be deal-breakers for many people, including other staunch supporters of the Second Amendment. They apparently are for Rittenhouse. It's his one vote, and he can do with it what he wants.

Yet his announcement also elicited what has become the predictable response, on both the left and the right, to similar defections from the mainstream: You're helping elect the other guy. For one, that vastly overstates the power of a vote—an unpopular thing to say, sure, but true nonetheless. And it's particularly true for Rittenhouse, who lives in the Dallas–Fort Worth area; if he's casting his vote there, I'm going to go out on a limb and assume it will not derail Trump's electoral victory in Texas, which is almost assured.

But even if it were true that Rittenhouse's vote would have some sort of Earth-shattering effect on the outcome of the 2024 election, a vote is earned. It's an expression of support. If neither mainstream option can produce a platform that is sufficiently palatable to someone, they certainly have the prerogative to make that known—by supporting someone else or, gasp, not voting altogether.

After all, no one is entitled to your vote. They're not entitled to it simply because they're a member of a particular political party, and they're not entitled to it for supposedly being less bad than the other side. And they're certainly not entitled to it just because they said supportive things about you in a time of need.

The post Nobody Owes Trump Their Vote. Not Even Kyle Rittenhouse. appeared first on Reason.com.

A "White Dudes for Harris" Zoom call reportedly raised $4 million in donations for Vice President Kamala Harris' presidential campaign. After the call, the @dudes4Harris account on X was briefly suspended.

Is this election interference?

If we remain in reality, the answer is of course not.

Even if X CEO Elon Musk ordered the account suspended because of its politics, there would be no (legal) wrongdoing here. X is a private platform, and it doesn't have any obligation to be politically neutral. Explicitly suppressing pro-Harris content would be a bad business model, surely, but it would not be illegal. Musk and the platform formerly known as Twitter have no obligation to equally air conservative and progressive views or give equal treatment to Republican and Democratic candidates.

But there's no evidence that X was deliberately trying to thwart Harris organizers. The dudes4Harris account—which has no direct affiliation to the Harris campaign—was suspended after it promoted and held its Zoom call and was back the next day. That's a pretty bad plan if the goal was to stop its influence or fundraising. And there are all sorts of legitimate reasons why X may have suspended the account.

The account's suspension is "not that surprising," writes Techdirt Editor in Chief Mike Masnick (who, it should be noted, is intensely critical of X policies and Musk himself on many issues). "Shouldn't an account suddenly amassing a ton of followers with no clear official connection to the campaign and pushing people to donate maybe ring some internal alarm bells on any trust and safety team? It wouldn't be a surprise if it tripped some guardwires and was locked and/or suspended briefly while the account was reviewed. That's how this stuff works."

If we step out of reality into the partisan hysteria zone, however, then the account's temporary suspension was clearly an attempt by Musk to sway the 2024 election.

"Musk owns this platform, has endorsed [former President Donald] Trump, is deep into white identity grievance, and just shut down the account that was being used to push back against his core ideology and raise money for Trump's opponent. This is election interference, and it's hard to see it differently," posted political consultant Dante Atkins on X.

"X has SUSPENDED the White Dudes for Harris account (@dudes4harris) after it raised more than $4M for Kamala Harris. This is the real election interference!" Brett Meiselas, co-founder of the left-leaning MeidasTouch News, posted.

Versions of these sentiments are now all over X—which has also been accused of nefariously plotting against the KamalaHQ account and photographer Pete Souza. Some have even gone so far as to suggest that Musk is committing election interference merely by sharing misinformation about Harris or President Joe Biden, or by posting pro-Trump information from his personal account.

We're now firmly in "everything I don't like is election interference" territory. And we've been here before. In 2020, when social media platforms temporarily suppressed links to a story about Hunter Biden or suspended some conservative accounts, it was conservatives who cried foul, while many on the left mocked the idea that this was a plot by platforms to shape the election. Now that the proverbial shoe is on the other foot, progressives are making the same arguments that conservatives did back then.

Musk himself is not immune to this exercise in paranoia and confirmation bias. For whatever reason, Google allegedly wouldn't auto-populate search results with "Donald Trump" when Musk typed in "President Donald." So Musk posted a screenshot about this, asking "election interference?"

Again, in reality: no.

As many have pointed out, Google Search does indeed still auto-populate with Trump for them. So whatever was going on here may have simply been a temporary glitch. Or it may have been something specific to things Musk had previously typed into search.

Even if Google deliberately set out not to have Trump's name auto-populate, it wouldn't be election interference. It would be a weird and questionable business decision, not an illegal one. But the idea that the company would risk the backlash just to take so petty a step is silly. Note that Musk's allegation was not that Google was suppressing search results about Trump, just the auto-population of his name. What is the theory of action here—that people who were going to vote for Trump wouldn't after having to actually type out his name into Google Search? That they somehow wouldn't be able to find information about Trump without an auto-populated search term?

"Please. I beg of people: stop it. Stop it with the conspiracy theories," writes Masnick. "Stop it with the nonsense. If you can't find something you want on social media, it's not because a billionaire is trying to influence an election. It might just be because some antifraud system went haywire or something."

Yes. All of that.

But I suspect a lot of people know this and just don't care. Both sides have learned how to weaponize claims of election interference to harness attention, inspire anger, and garner clout.

Just a reminder: Actual election crimes include things like improperly laundering donations, trying to prevent people from voting, threatening people if they don't vote a certain way, providing false information on voter registration forms, voting more than once, or being an elected official who uses your power in a corrupt way to benefit a particular party or candidate. Trying to persuade people for or against certain candidates does not qualify, even if you're really rich or famous and even if your persuasion relies on misinformation.

Also, content moderation is impossibly difficult to do correctly. And tech companies have way more to lose than to gain by engaging in biased moderation.

So if you feel yourself wanting to fling claims of election interference at X, or Google, or Meta, or some other online platform: stop. Calm down. Take a breath, take a walk, whatever. This is a moral panic. Do not be its foot soldier.

More Sex & Tech News 

• The Kids Online Safety Act passed the Senate by a vote of 91-3 yesterday. Sens. Rand Paul (R–Ky.), Ron Wyden (D–Ore.), and Mike Lee (R–Utah) were the only ones who voted against it. (See more of this newsletter's coverage of KOSA here, here, and here.)

• A federal court has dismissed a case brought under the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) against user-generated porn websites that allegedly allowed the publication of videos featuring a teenager. The person bringing the case said the sites were guilty of "receipt" of the videos. But "receipt of materials or content is, as it were, simply the first step in any publishing regime; if so, then mere receipt of illicit material is not sufficient to preclude immunity under Section 230," the court held.

• An expansive definition of "child sex trafficking" is being wielded to suggest that dating websites and apps should check IDs.

• The AI search wars have begun.

Today's Image

The post Elon Musk's 'Election Interference' appeared first on Reason.com.

Nintendo’s big June Direct showcase delivered the biggest headlines of the week, with its reveal of Echoes of Wisdom, a new Zelda game in which you actually play as the titular princess, as well as a new Mario & Luigi RPG and, yes, Metroid Prime 4. Read on for all the reveals from that event as well as some of the…

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Sometimes all it takes to grab my attention is one trailer. One good teaser. And that’s exactly how I discovered Blud, a newly released 2D Zelda-like action game about vampires, evil tech bros, and high school. I saw its release trailer on Twitter, thought “Wow that looks cool!” and started playing it. The game, with…

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The long-awaited and well-reviewed Elden Ring DLC, Shadow of the Erdtree, is out very soon on all platforms. However, if you’ve been playing Elden Ring on Valve’s portable PC, the Steam Deck, you might have to wait for an upcoming hotfix to check out the new expansion as the game appears unplayable for many.

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I will now admit that Twitter is dead.  I have reached the acceptance stage of my grief.

I still refer to X.com as Twitter out of habit, but the spirit of my refusing to call it X.com… despite the obvious ridiculousness of the name… lived in the hope that Elon was running a business and would make sound business decisions, that perhaps he wouldn’t be a complete tool and ruin a good thing just to stroke his own ego and promote his favorite flavors of white nationalist rhetoric… or possibly just to stop that one guy from tracking his private jet.

There is no going back.  That particularly racist white toothpaste isn’t going back into the tube.

So that brings me back to another episode of how things are going in the land of things that once were, or would like to be, Twitter.  For Twitter is still the ideal, the archetype, the goal for all of them, though the road to getting there looks very different for each.

Anyway, I looked at Twitter alternatives a year ago, let’s see how I feel about them today.

• X.com – Now Actually Rated X!

Elon previously suggested in a post that Instagram was like a strip club… and he’s not wrong on that at least.  But suggesting that our family photos belong on his site then turning around and changing the rules to allow porn?  All in a day’s work for Chief Hypocrite and King of the Incels Elon Musk!

Yes, X.com is now a strip club by design.

I am told Elon picked this logo so he could wear his jacket with it

X.com does keep booming, at least relative to its chief rivals.  Or so it seems.  Both Elon and Zuck fudge their numbers, so it is hard to tell.  Meanwhile Elon stooge Linda Yaccarino has to keep claiming progress for the site so has gone all 1984 on us and has started posting about how before Elon the site could only be accessed via Gopher and all messages were in Morse code so X.com can look good via the false comparison… I mean, when she can stop promoting Tesla.  You might wonder who is paying her… but then they aren’t looting Twitter to fund Elon’s AI venture the way they are Tesla.

If I could get maybe 15-20 accounts to move to another service… and halt the flow of people wandering back… I could leave X.com behind.  Yes, I have 10x more followers on X.com than any competitor, and I get more every day.  But most of my old followers are inactive accounts and most of the news ones have *N*U*D*E*S**I*N**B*I*O*.

Though I guess with the rule change they can just say “NUDES IN BIO” without trying to dodge the censors.  As Kurt Vonnegut repeated so often in Breakfast of Champions, “Wide open beavers”… or whatever it was.  I read it back in the 80s, leave me alone.

On my desktop, in Firefox, with uBlock Origin running, and staying strictly in the Following tab, X.com is usable and gets me the info I am looking for.  I even see people I follow who have sworn off X.com back and posting, because it is hard to give up the level of engagement and followers.  And in that state I can pretend it is still Twitter if I squint my eyes and stay away from replies by Blue Checkmarks.

And then I am sitting on the couch and look at it on my iPad in Elon’s app and… Good Lord, what is going on in there?!  Ads for crypto, white nationalism, and Trump have supplanted Cheech & Chong edibles, block no longer blocks people but is just a soft mute that lets them continue to harass you, you can no longer block noxious advertisers at all, and the algorithm pushes all the most noxious content straight at you, with Elon the king of the shit pile.

I mean, followers and engagement are cool and all, and it is fun to watch Liam Nissan troll the Nazis… oh, and Tom Nichols is back… but it has also broken some people.  There are a few people I had to unfollow because they clearly felt X.com was reality and had to fight every battle.  The block button is there for a reason people… oh, wait, they broke that, didn’t they?

Anyway, the grand unifying conspiracy theory about X.com right now is that Elon, already an emerald mine racist nepo baby, is going all in on Trump support on the site to woo Trump’s favor in the hope of getting pardons when the time comes… for things like looting Tesla to fund his AI venture.  The one thing that is for sure is that the only speech Elon was ever interested in was his own.

In spite of all that, some pundits have declared X.com is still the center of the debate, and it is hard to gainsay their point.  Plus… you know… porn.  Porn always wins in the end.

• BlueSky  – As Bad as 2010 Twitter?

Perpetual pedantic grump Tom Nichols, who as noted above has been spotted back on X.com, suggested the other the day that BlueSky was as bad as Twitter… but specifically 2010 Twitter, which is one of those very Tom Nichols things where he has an extremely narrow and specific meaning and context in his head that he won’t share, that nobody else could possibly understand, and that becomes a hill he plans to die on.  This habit was probably best exemplified when Tom spent several years fighting against calling Trump a Fascist because real Fascism must come from the Fascismo-Romagna region of Italy, otherwise it is merely Sparkling Totalitarianism.  But I digress.

Bluesky?  I don’t think this is the logo anymore…

I wish BlueSky was as bad as 2010 Twitter, because 2010 Twitter was pretty fun in my memory… a lot more fun than BlueSky.  Even Jack Dorsey says BlueSky is making all the same mistakes as early Twitter… we should be so lucky… but it just can’t quite become Twitter.

Also, Jack left the BlueSky board and is also on X.com buying in on whatever Elon is selling because whatever worm was eating RFK Jr.’s brain has apparently afflicted him as well.

Instead BlueSky is where the very serious people have gone to escape the other sites, but where they all can’t stop talking about those other sites.  Seriously, I swear if mentioning or posting pictures from X.com was banned, half the posts would disappear and we’d be left with complaints about Threads and Mastodon.  Nobody takes Threads seriously on BlueSky and everybody apparently was stridently lectured once too often about some aspect of Fediverse etiquette on Mastodon and left in a huff because… their sarcasm and wit were not up to the challenge?  They couldn’t figure out how to block people?  They too have feet of clay?  Anyway, they seem to be universally upset at not being welcomed by a cheering crowd for having deigned to join.

Still, for the slim thread of content that isn’t complaining about or reacting to content on the other sites, BlueSky is pretty good.  It is can go very heavy on politics with very little interest in entertainment, so lacks the diversity of topics that made Twitter great somewhere between 2010 and Elon, but it could get there.

And some people are trying to help get it there… though I am not sure their efforts are all that effective.  I call this the “Neil Gaiman Problem.”  I like Neil Gaiman.  He is interesting and on BlueSky, so I followed him.  Neil Gaiman would very much like BlueSky to succeed so is putting in the effort by interacting with his followers.  That means I can look at BlueSky and see 47 messages in a row that are Neil Gaiman replying with a bland pleasantry to every person who responded to something he posted.  That, I fear, does not make BlueSky very interesting.

Basically, BlueSky could be good at some point, but it is still getting there.

• Threads – Ending is better than mending

Happily news free content since May 2024!

I know this isn’t the Threads logo anymore

Threads is not being taken seriously for good reason.  To start with, it is very much Instagram for words, with the same sort of algorithm where you see something in you feed, but if you somehow refresh you’ll never find it again unless you are following the person who posted it and go to their profile.  But most of the stuff in your feed is from randos that the algorithm throws at you… and all of it is brands and cat pictures and light, happy fare.

None of it is news, however.  The head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, is on Threads telling people that they are actively suppressing news content, and especially politically focused news content, because it makes people unhappy and distracts from the capitalism and the absolute need to foster desire for luxury goods and expensive vacations.  He much prefers content from creatives and you should too!  (Also, this might be Zuck’s trying to duck the election influence issue since that would cost money he could otherwise be throwing at the Metaverse or AI or whatever he is on about lately.)

Just to make things even more banal, Threads is planning a swipe left/right option for content… Tinder for cat pictures and luxury goods… though I can’t remember which way means what and it likely won’t work correctly in the browser for another year if history is any guide.

But my greatest issues with Threads is that they only have a phone app that scales up badly to my iPad and that they took the adequate initial web version and forced it to look like and behave like the phone app so it is freaking awful to use now.  JFC, these people.

• Mastodon – Still the Linux of Social Media

Still the refuge you’re looking for if you want no algorithm and a quiet little silo of people to interact with.  Is that social media though?  Is there such a thing as anti-social media?  Limited social media?  Siloed social media?

This can’t possible be the Mastodon logo, can it?

The reputation it has for being filled with strident rule makers who will lecture you about how you violated their internal belief system with something you did or did not do is overblown, but not entirely undeserved.  I find that the block button works… in both directions… so that takes care of you intruding on somebody else’s curated reality.

It is the site where, as a percentage, I interact with more of my actual followers… once we pare down the count from all the multiple follows from people who have changed servers… than any other of the Twitter pretenders.

But that number seems to be about six.  Six people make for a pretty quiet Discord server, much less a social media experience.

Yeah, I follow other people, lots of people, often people I follow on the other sites because I am not alone on spreading my bets in the hope of finding the Twitter replacement that best suits me.  That means I see a lot of things on multiple sites… and my followers who do the same see my stuff in multiple locations.  You know who you are.  I like your stuff here and then over on BlueSky and sometimes again on X.com.

This situation stops at Threads because, as noted, nobody takes Threads seriously.  Well, nobody who follows me elsewhere does.  Molly Jong-Fast is trying to take Threads seriously for all of us… but it isn’t working.  It is cat pictures and luxury goods and stolen memes all the way down.

And it probably says something about Mastodon that in the middle of writing about it I went off on Threads again.  It is also dull, in its own special algorithm free way.  If that is what you like, you have found your place.

• Spoutible – When One Topic is Enough

As a site Spoutible has some technical issues… I could never stay logged in and the site totally started breaking in Firefox, another victim of the “everybody uses Chrome” mentality of so many developers… so I eventually gave up on it.

One of these must have been the logo at some point, right?

But my persistence there for about 8 months was not rewarded by very much in the way of engagement.  There was no room for video games, or entertainment in general, on Spoutible.

Instead it was all political… which wouldn’t be bad, but it was all very much anti-Trump memes.  And, while I can very much get behind the sentiment, believing as I do that another term as president would be the end of democracy in the United States, I am not sure that goal is moved forward by participating in an echo chamber.  An echo chamber with the right message is still an echo chamber, and I am already on board so don’t need constant reinforcement and reassurance.

• Post.news – Ex Post Facto

Post News is dead, having failed to make the cut.  It will be remembered as more dull than Mastodon and falling over literally any time Elon sneezed and half a dozen people tried to jump ship.

The logo is in there somewhere I think…

It was not ready for prime time and now it never will be.

• Other Outliers

At one point Automattic was trying to promote Tumblr as a possible inheritor of the Twitter crown.  I feel like anybody suggesting that had either never used Twitter or never used Tumblr.  Also, one follower on Mastodon also follows me on Tumblr where my post go automatically because the same people who own WordPress own Tumblr as well… a fact which might point to the third alternative explanation; lack of a grip on reality.

Substack Notes… well, my opinion there hasn’t changed in a year.  It sucked then, existing only as a way to promote your substack and I suspect it sucks now.

So that gets me through the options and… I feel like the only appropriate response is a standard internet meme.

I too do not know what I expected

I just wanted one platform to win out… one that wasn’t run by a horrible racist.  But you don’t always get what you want.  So it goes.

There’s a type of marginally frustrating reporting where a reporter searches social media for [insert bad thing], finds some examples of said [bad thing], and writes a story about “This Platform Allows [Bad Thing]” followed by lots of public commentary about how the platforms don’t care/don’t do enough, etc. etc.

Let me let you in on a little secret: there are more [bad things] on the internet than you can reasonably think of. If you come up with a big enough list of [bad things] to block, people will just come up with more [bad things] you haven’t thought of. People are creative that way.

These stories are a mixed bag. They are accurate but not particularly enlightening. In our latest Ctrl-Alt-Speech, former Twitter Head of Trust & Safety Yoel Roth and I discussed these kinds of stories a little bit. He noted companies should do more internal red teaming, but solely to prevent such negative PR hits, rather than as an actual trust & safety strategy.

However, I’m reporting on the latest from NBC because it’s about ExTwitter allowing ads on hateful hashtags like #whitepower, #whitepride, and #unitethewhite.

Elon Musk’s social media app X has been placing advertisements in the search results for at least 20 hashtags used to promote racist and antisemitic extremism, including #whitepower, according to a review of the platform. 

NBC News found the advertisements by searching various hashtags used to promote racism and antisemitism, and by browsing X accounts that often post racial or religious hatred. The hashtags vary from obvious slogans such as #whitepride and #unitethewhite to more fringe and coded words such as #groyper (a movement of online white nationalists) and #kalergi (a debunked theory alleging a conspiracy to eliminate white people from Europe).

Elon could make a reasonable response: that while this looks bad, the simple reality is that it is simply impossible to figure out every possible awful hashtag and prevent ads from running against them.

It’s easy to see a few hashtags and say “gosh, that’s awful, how could that happen,” without realizing that millions of hashtags are used every day. Even if ExTwitter came up with a blocklist of “bad” hashtags, some would still get through and eventually some reporter would find it and report on it.

But Elon or ExTwitter never gives that response, as it would involve admitting the truth about how content moderation works. Musk and his supporters have long denied this truth as part of their willful misunderstanding of trust & safety work.

In this case, it’s still noteworthy, given that Elon has publicly promised that no “negative/hate tweets” will be monetized.

Even worse, when organizations like the Center for Countering Digital Hate and Media Matters for America pointed out similar failures to live up to that policy, Musk sued both of those organizations. This now means that whenever anyone else reports on such things, it’s worth calling it out, because the clear intent of Musk suing CCDH and MMfA was to scare off more reporting.

That said, suing small non-profits with limited resources is one thing, but taking on NBC (where ExTwitter’s “official” CEO used to work) is another. NBC had called out similar failings months ago and ExTwitter didn’t sue then. So, either Musk is learning, or someone at the company realizes NBC might be tougher to sue.

Some of this style of reporting is a bit silly and show-offy, but if Elon promises no such ads and sues those who point out it’s still happening, no one should be surprised that more reporters call this out and highlight Musk’s failures.

In a welcome development for people who care about liberty, Australia's government suspended its efforts to censor the planet. The country's officials suffered pushback from X (formerly Twitter) and condemnation by free speech advocates after attempting to block anybody, anywhere from seeing video of an attack at a Sydney church. At least for the moment, they've conceded defeat based, in part, on recognition that X is protected by American law, making censorship efforts unenforceable.

A Censor Throws In the Towel

"I have decided to discontinue the proceedings in the Federal Court against X Corp in relation to the matter of extreme violent material depicting the real-life graphic stabbing of a religious leader at Wakeley in Sydney on 15 April 2024," the office of Australia's eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, announced last week. "We now welcome the opportunity for a thorough and independent merits review of my decision to issue a removal notice to X Corp by the Administrative Appeals Tribunal."

The free speech battle stems from the stabbing in April of Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel and Father Isaac Royel at an Orthodox Christian Church by a 16-year-old in what is being treated as an Islamist terrorist incident. Both victims recovered, but Australian officials quickly sought to scrub graphic video footage of the incident from the internet. Most social media platforms complied, including X, which geoblocked access to video of the attack from Australia pending an appeal of the order.

But Australian officials fretted that their countrymen might use virtual private networks (VPNs) to evade the blocks. The only solution, they insisted, was to suppress access to the video for the whole world. X understandably pushed back out of fear of the precedent that would set for the globe's control freaks.

Global Content Battle

"Our concern is that if ANY country is allowed to censor content for ALL countries, which is what the Australian 'eSafety Commissar' is demanding, then what is to stop any country from controlling the entire Internet?" responded X owner Elon Musk.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) also argued that "no single country should be able to restrict speech across the entire internet" as did the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). The organizations jointly sought, and received, intervener status in the case based on "the capacity for many global internet users to be substantially affected."

In short, officials lost control over a tussle they tried to portray as a righteous battle by servants of the people against, in the words of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, "arrogant billionaire" Elon Musk. Instead, civil libertarians correctly saw it as a battle for free speech against grasping politicians who aren't content to misgovern their own country but reach for control over people outside their borders.

Worse for them, one of their own judges agreed.

"The removal notice would govern (and subject to punitive consequences under Australian law) the activities of a foreign corporation in the United States (where X Corp's corporate decision-making occurs) and every country where its servers are located; and it would likewise govern the relationships between that corporation and its users everywhere in the world," noted Justice Geoffrey Kennett in May as he considered the eSafety commissioner's application to extend an injunction against access to the stabbing video. "The Commissioner, exercising her power under s 109, would be deciding what users of social media services throughout the world were allowed to see on those services."

He added, "most likely, the notice would be ignored or disparaged in other countries."

American Speech Protections Shield the World

This is where the U.S. First Amendment and America's strong protections for free speech come into play to thwart Australian officials' efforts to censor the world.

"There is uncontroversial expert evidence that a court in the US (where X Corp is based) would be highly unlikely to enforce a final injunction of the kind sought by the Commissioner," added Kennett. "Courts rightly hesitate to make orders that cannot be enforced, as it has the potential to bring the administration of justice into disrepute."

Rather than have his government exposed as impotently overreaching to impose its will beyond its borders, Kennett refused to extend the injunction.

Three weeks later, with free speech groups joining the case to argue against eSafety's censorious ambitions, the agency dropped its legal case pending review by the Administrative Appeals Tribunal.

"We are pleased that the Commissioner saw the error in her efforts and dropped the action," responded David Greene and Hudson Hongo for EFF. "Global takedown orders threaten freedom of expression around the world, create conflicting legal obligations, and lead to the lowest common denominator of internet content being available around the world, allowing the least tolerant legal system to determine what we all are able to read and distribute online."

But if the world escaped the grasp of Australia's censors, the country's residents may not be so lucky.

Domestic Censorship Politics

The fight between eSafety and X "isn't actually about the Wakeley church stabbing attacks in April — it's about how much power the government ultimately hands the commissioner once it's finished reviewing the Online Safety Act in October," Ange Lavoipierre wrote for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

"The video in dispute in the case against X has been used, in my opinion, as a vehicle for the federal government to push for powers to compel social media companies to enforce rules of misinformation and disinformation on their platforms," agrees Morgan Begg of the free-market Institute of Public Affairs, which opposes intrusive government efforts to regulate online content. "The Federal Court's decision highlights the government's fixation with censorship."

That is, the campaign to force X to suppress video of one crime is largely about domestic political maneuvering for power. But it comes as governments around the world—especially that of the European Union—become increasingly aggressive with their plans to control online speech.

If the battle between Australia's eSafety commissioner and X is any indication, the strongest barrier to international censorship lies in countries—the U.S. in particular—that vigorously protect free speech. From such safe havens, authoritarian officials and their grasping content controls can properly be "ignored or disparaged."

The post Australian Censors Back Down, Highlighting the U.S. as a Free Speech Haven appeared first on Reason.com.

Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw.

Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed.

In this week’s round-up of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Mike and Ben cover:

• EU Explores Whether Telegram Falls Under Strict New Content Law (Bloomberg)
• Too Small to Police, Too Big to Ignore: Telegram Is the App Dividing Europe (Bloomberg) 
• NIST Reports First Results From Age Estimation Software Evaluation (NIST) 
• Supersharers of fake news on Twitter (Science) 
• Digital town square? Nextdoor’s offline contexts and online discourse (JQD:DM) 
• The first social media babies are adults now. Some are pushing for laws to protect kids from their parents’ oversharing (CNN) 
• TikTok offered an extraordinary deal. The U.S. government took a pass. (Washington Post) 
• Q&A: Ireland’s Digital Services Coordinator On 100 Days of the DSA (Tech Policy Press)

This episode is brought to you with financial support from the Future of Online Trust & Safety Fund.

Enlarge (credit: Apu Gomes / Stringer | Getty Images News)

After months of loudly protesting a subpoena, Elon Musk has once again agreed to testify in the US Securities and Exchange Commission's investigation into his acquisition of Twitter (now called X).

Musk tried to avoid testifying by arguing that the SEC had deposed him twice before, telling a US district court in California that the most recent subpoena was "the latest in a long string of SEC abuses of its investigative authority.”

But the court did not agree that Musk testifying three times in the SEC probe was either "abuse" or "overly burdensome." Especially since the SEC has said it's seeking a follow-up deposition after receiving "thousands of new documents" from Musk and third parties over the past year since his last depositions. And according to an order requiring Musk and the SEC to agree on a deposition date from US district judge Jacqueline Scott Corley, "Musk’s lament does not come close to meeting his burden of proving 'the subpoena was issued in bad faith or for an improper purpose.'"

Read 18 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge (credit: Alistair Berg)

Misinformation is not a new problem, but there are plenty of indications that the advent of social media has made things worse. Academic researchers have responded by trying to understand the scope of the problem, identifying the most misinformation-filled social media networks, organized government efforts to spread false information, and even prominent individuals who are the sources of misinformation.

All of that's potentially valuable data. But it skips over another major contribution: average individuals who, for one reason or another, seem inspired to spread misinformation. A study released today looks at a large panel of Twitter accounts that are associated with US-based voters (the work was done back when X was still Twitter). It identifies a small group of misinformation superspreaders, which represent just 0.3 percent of the accounts but are responsible for sharing 80 percent of the links to fake news sites.

While you might expect these to be young, Internet-savvy individuals who automate their sharing, it turns out this population tends to be older, female, and very, very prone to clicking the "retweet" button.

Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Have you been playing Fortnite recently and been absolutely hating the influx of mythical weapons that keep killing you instantly? Well, I’m happy to report that you may have a new fearsome champion on your side, and her name is Doja Cat. Yes, everyone’s favorite alternative rap girlie is a certified hater of…

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Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Kirill Kudryavtsev)

Twitter.com links are now redirecting to the x.com domain as Elon Musk gets closer to wiping out the Twitter brand name over a year and half after buying the company.

"All core systems are now on X.com," Musk wrote in an X post today. X also displayed a message to users that said, "We are letting you know that we are changing our URL, but your privacy and data protection settings remain the same."

Musk bought Twitter in October 2022 and turned it into X Corp. in April 2023, but the social network continued to use Twitter.com as its primary domain for more than another year. X.com links redirected to Twitter.com during that time.

Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw.

Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed.

In this week’s round-up of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Mike and Ben cover:

• Stack Overflow bans users en masse for rebelling against OpenAI partnership (Tom’s Hardware)
• Tech firms must tame toxic algorithms to protect children online (Ofcom)
• Reddit Lays Out Content Policy While Seeking More Licensing Deals (Bloomberg)
• Extremist Militias Are Coordinating in More Than 100 Facebook Groups (Wired)
• Politicians Scapegoat Social Media While Ignoring Real Solutions (Techdirt)
• ‘Facebook Tries to Combat Russian Disinformation in Ukraine’ – FB Public Policy Manager (Kyiv Post)
• TikTok Sues U.S. Government Over Law Forcing Sale or Ban (New York Times)
• Swiss public broadcasters withdraw from X/Twitter (Swissinfo)
• Congressional Committee Threatens To Investigate Any Company Helping TikTok Defend Its Rights (Techdirt)

This episode is brought to you with financial support from the Future of Online Trust & Safety Fund.

Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw.

Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed.

In this week’s round-up of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Mike and Ben cover:

• Stack Overflow bans users en masse for rebelling against OpenAI partnership (Tom’s Hardware)
• Tech firms must tame toxic algorithms to protect children online (Ofcom)
• Reddit Lays Out Content Policy While Seeking More Licensing Deals (Bloomberg)
• Extremist Militias Are Coordinating in More Than 100 Facebook Groups (Wired)
• Politicians Scapegoat Social Media While Ignoring Real Solutions (Techdirt)
• ‘Facebook Tries to Combat Russian Disinformation in Ukraine’ – FB Public Policy Manager (Kyiv Post)
• TikTok Sues U.S. Government Over Law Forcing Sale or Ban (New York Times)
• Swiss public broadcasters withdraw from X/Twitter (Swissinfo)
• Congressional Committee Threatens To Investigate Any Company Helping TikTok Defend Its Rights (Techdirt)

This episode is brought to you with financial support from the Future of Online Trust & Safety Fund.

Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw.

Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed.

In this week’s round-up of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Mike and Ben cover:

• Stack Overflow bans users en masse for rebelling against OpenAI partnership (Tom’s Hardware)
• Tech firms must tame toxic algorithms to protect children online (Ofcom)
• Reddit Lays Out Content Policy While Seeking More Licensing Deals (Bloomberg)
• Extremist Militias Are Coordinating in More Than 100 Facebook Groups (Wired)
• Politicians Scapegoat Social Media While Ignoring Real Solutions (Techdirt)
• ‘Facebook Tries to Combat Russian Disinformation in Ukraine’ – FB Public Policy Manager (Kyiv Post)
• TikTok Sues U.S. Government Over Law Forcing Sale or Ban (New York Times)
• Swiss public broadcasters withdraw from X/Twitter (Swissinfo)
• Congressional Committee Threatens To Investigate Any Company Helping TikTok Defend Its Rights (Techdirt)

This episode is brought to you with financial support from the Future of Online Trust & Safety Fund.

Enlarge (credit: Apu Gomes / Stringer | Getty Images News)

A US district judge William Alsup has dismissed Elon Musk's X Corp's lawsuit against Bright Data, a data-scraping company accused of improperly accessing X (formerly Twitter) systems and violating both X terms and state laws when scraping and selling data.

X sued Bright Data to stop the company from scraping and selling X data to academic institutes and businesses, including Fortune 500 companies.

According to Alsup, X failed to state a claim while arguing that companies like Bright Data should have to pay X to access public data posted by X users.

Read 22 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Elon Musk continues to run X (formerly Twitter) in a variety of questionable ways, and surely one of the oddest is the decision to charge vast amounts of money for access to the site’s API. As such, major firms are dropping integration with the hellsite, the latest being Nintendo. From June 10, you will no longer be…

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NBC News reports that carmaker Hyundai has paused its ads on Twitter, citing the presence of neo-Nazi material alongside its own posts.

"We have paused our ads on X and are speaking to X directly about brand safety to ensure this issue is addressed," Hyundai said in the statement. 

— Read the rest

The post Hyundai suspends advertising on Twitter after Nazi material runs with ads appeared first on Boing Boing.

It is a cold Friday in March, I turned a year older this week, and I am in a bit of a mood for no good reason besides being a cranky old guy.  So perhaps it is time for some bullet point bile, broken up into three categories.  Can you put each in its correct place?

• The New York Times to Impose Its New Wordle Order

The self-proclaimed “paper of record” took a bit of time from its nearly non-stop headlines about President Biden’s age to go after anybody who was out there peddling any games that seemed even Wordle adjacent.

A bit on the nose, eh Wordle?

The New York Times bought the game from its creator about two years back.  The game wasn’t original, the concept wasn’t original, and even the name had been used before.  But it became a hit during the pandemic and the Times wanted to expand its word games.  One does not live by the Sunday crossword alone I guess.

This week their lawyers began sending out copyright based take down notices to “hundreds” of Wordle-like titles.

This should have been no surprise.  The Times has a long history of sending its lawyers after any hint of what they consider infringement.  I remember back in the 80s when Infocom‘s company newsletter was called the New Zork Times.  They too received a cease and desist letter threatening legal action and had to change the name lest somebody mistake it for a product of the New York Times, which might cause confusion in the marketplace and tarnish the brand of the paper.

None of the regular sites I hit has gone down yet, but I will keep an eye out.

• Nintendo Shuts Down Yuzu

Elsewhere out on the legal front, Nintendo won its lawsuit against Switch emulator creator Yuzu, who acceded to the mounting pressure from the video game giant who had been framing Yuzu’s intent as being to circumvent DRM, which would put it in line for violating the DMCA.

In addition to ceasing all development and support of its emulator, Yuzu also had to agree to pay all of Nintendo’s costs, which totaled up to $2.4 million by their calculation.

Nintendo has long been as fierce as the New York Times in sending its lawyers after anybody using their intellectual property, including some innocuous fan projects, and vigorously stomping out anything that might cause one less hardware unit to sell.

Anyway, I am kind of sad I missed out on Yuzu because, for me at least, the worst thing about playing games on the Switch is actually being required to play them on the Switch.  I’d much prefer them on my PC.  Alas, no longer and option.

• Apple and Epic at it Again

Epic went spoiling for a fight with Apple and Google a few years back because… well, Tim Sweeney wants to be as rich as possible I guess.  As with his fight with Steam, he just wants to be the person collecting the tax and resents other who got there first.

The fight with Apple has gone back and forth since then and it had looked like things had settled down with Epic getting some of what it wanted, including the ability to have its own storefront.  And then Apple banned Epic’s developer account in the EU.

Sweeney was immediately out with histrionics, but Apple was also declaring that Epic was “verifiably untrustworthy” and would not live up to the developer agreement they had signed.  This will all draw the attention of EU regulators again, who will be wielding their Digital Markets Act, it “tax the US tech companies” regulations.

How do I feel about this?

Survey say… let them fight!

It is hard to feel sad when rich people are fighting to be incrementally more rich.

A follow up about how Apple is embracing the drama and that the EU is its real foe in this battle.

• Elon Invents Blogging

Having chased away all serious, paying advertisers on the Twitter platform… we have Cheech & Chong, Crypto scams (still!), and nazi ads left, and I block all of them besides Cheech & Chong… Elon has been thrashing around trying to find SOMETHING that will make money for his $44 billion boondoggle.  And so they have announced Articles.

From the @write account

You can have BOLD, ITALIC, and STRIKETHROUGH text.  And images!

Freaking amazing, right?  RIGHT?!?

Oh yeah.  Who needs quote blocks or inline links, just give us money and we’ll let you do long form and give them a special icon and tab on your profile.  We totally won’t change our mind in three months and disappear the whole thing the next time Elon has a brain fart, we promise!

I am just waiting until he finally gets around to re-inventing Twitter… a version without him on it.

• EA Jumps on the AI Bandwagon

I mean, EA has a long tradition of being dumb, or at least not being able to read the room.  And they are ramping up to lay off 5% of their staff.  So they have to give the investors SOMETHING to be positive about, and AI is the magic wand currently.  Just say that and Wall Street will love you, right?  So how did EA CEO Andrew Wilson do on that?  Let’s go check over at PC Gamer… and… oh my!

Truth in Headlines

I am not positive the bong hit was verified, but Andrew did ramble on about 3 billion people using EA tools to make games while he painted a picture of a future where EA simply didn’t have to pay any of those pesky creative or technical people who actually make literally everything they sell today.

There was some law of hiring I recall where bad managers only hire people dumber than they are, so when we’re at a point where the CEO of EA wants to fire everybody and I am starting to suspect that we are seeing this in action.  Dumb guy achieves life goal, promoted to CEO and fires everybody.

That is probably being too hard on him.  As we all know by this point, as a public company you must meet the infinite growth demands of Wall Street, and when you’ve got nothing you have to make shit up.  This is a classic “making shit up” performance.  He’ll probably get a huge bonus and lay off even more staff.

• Cataclysm Classic Closed Beta Begins

Finally, Blizzard announced that Cataclysm Classic, which will remake the WoW Classic progression servers now lingering in Wrath of the Lich King into a new world, has started its closed beta test.

Can you re-run a cataclysm?

I’ve actually been waiting for this to show up, having worn out on Wrath Classic after five characters.  However, closed beta doesn’t mean we’re close to actually getting it, and the roadmap that Blizzard put out at the beginning of the year made it seem like we would be into summer before the cataclysm hit.  Still, it is nice to see it is finally in motion.

And on that bit of upbeat news, it is off to get through the day and to the weekend.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 is dropping on March 22 for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S, and in advance of that, Capcom has released the game’s character creator so folks can already enjoy the age-old tradition of spending hours tinkering with their in-game appearance. As is customary with these tools, players are having…

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We have pointed out just how ridiculous Elon Musk’s SLAPP lawsuit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate is, so much that I supported the filing of an amicus brief in support of CCDH, even as I find CCDH’s positions and research to be generally problematic and misleading. But, even if their research methods aren’t great, they still deserve their right to speak out, and they should not face ruinous litigation from a petulant CEO who only pretends to support free speech.

On Thursday, there were oral arguments in the case, and to say they did not go well for Elon would be an understatement. The judge appeared to openly mock the company for its terrible legal arguments. And, most importantly, he (correctly) pointed out how “antithetical” to free speech this lawsuit appeared to be:

“You put that in terms of safety, and I’ve got to tell you, I guess you can use that word, but I can’t think of anything basically more antithetical to the First Amendment than this process of silencing people from publicly disseminated information once it’s been published,” Breyer said.

“You’re trying to shoehorn this theory by using these words into a viable breach of contract claim,” the judge added.

This was exactly the point that was raised in the amicus brief (brilliantly put together by Harvard’s Cyberlaw clinic). That the claims of “breach of contract” were a nonsense attempt to stifle speech, and hoping that by not including a defamation claim it would somehow avoid First Amendment scrutiny. The judge, Charles Breyer, seemed to have figured out ExTwitter’s sneaky plan pretty easily.

Near the end of the hearing, the judge noted that if something is proven to be true a defamation lawsuit falls apart. Why, he said, didn’t Musk’s X bring a defamation suit if the company believes X’s reputation has been harmed?

“You could’ve brought a defamation case, you didn’t bring a defamation case,” Breyer said. “And that’s significant.”

Yeah, because everyone knows that there was no actual defamation.

The judge appeared also to see through the nonsense of the breach of contract claims directly. ExTwitter claims that CCDH should be liable for the loss of ad revenue of advertisers leaving the platform in response to CCDH’s research report. But, the judge pointed out how tenuous this was, to the point of calling the argument “one of the most vapid extensions of law I’ve ever heard.”

But in order to make this case, X had to show the group knew the financial loss was “foreseeable” when it started its account and began abiding by Twitter’s terms of service, in 2019, before Musk acquired the site.

X lawyer Hawk argued that the platform’s terms of service state that the rules for the site could change at any time, including that suspended users whom the group says spread hate speech could be reinstated.

And so, Hawk said, if changes to the rules were foreseeable, then the financial loss from its reports on users spreading hate should have also been foreseeable.

This logic confused and frustrated the judge.

“That, of course, reduces foreseeability to one of the most vapid extensions of law I’ve ever heard,” Breyer said.

There are times, in a courtroom, where you shouldn’t read very much into things a judge says. And then there are times where it’s pretty clear the judge understands just how how wrong one side is. This is one of the latter cases.

According to a friend who attended the hearing (virtually, since it was on Zoom), these quotes don’t even get to how bad the hearing was for Elon. Apparently, at one point the judge asked ExTwitter’s lawyer “are you serious?” which is never a good thing. ExTwitter’s lawyer also had to walk back a few arguments in court, including when the company tried to apply the wrong terms of service to a separate non-profit they had tried to drag into the case. And, finally, towards the end of the hearing, apparently ExTwitter’s lawyer tried to claim that they had pled actual malice (which, you know, is kind of important), only to have CCDH’s lawyer point out that they had not. CCDH is right. You can look at the amended complaint yourself.

None of that is likely to go over well with this judge.

Earlier this week, the official Runescape Twitter/X account got banned. It’s since returned, but the reason behind its temporary ban was that someone at the social media company thought the account was created by an eight-year-old kid, which would be a violation of Twitter’s rules.

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Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto)

It looks like Elon Musk may lose X's lawsuit against hate speech researchers who encouraged a major brand boycott after flagging ads appearing next to extremist content on X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter.

X is trying to argue that the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) violated the site's terms of service and illegally accessed non-public data to conduct its reporting, allegedly posing a security risk for X. The boycott, X alleged, cost the company tens of millions of dollars by spooking advertisers, while X contends that the CCDH's reporting is misleading and ads are rarely served on extremist content.

But at a hearing Thursday, US district judge Charles Breyer told the CCDH that he would consider dismissing X's lawsuit, repeatedly appearing to mock X's decision to file it in the first place.

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Twitter abides still despite Elon Musk’s best efforts to tank the place.  I summed up the story so far at the one year mark back in October, and it hasn’t gotten any better since… but neither has it gotten that much worse.

Sure, he has driven the valuation down to $12.5 billion from the $44 billion he paid for it… and evidence has come out that the real reason he bought the place was to shut down the Elon Jet Twitter account that tracked the movements of his private jet via publicly available data, announcing how much pollution he was discharging into the atmosphere….  Musk banned the account when he took control of Twitter…  but it remains more alive and popular than any of its competitors and I am still hanging around because groups there that I follow and interact with remain.

Yes, Musk is a nazi supporting, great replacement theory spouting nut case who went as far as turning off community notes on his posts as the community took great joy in pointing out what an ignorant shitheel he really is.

Here is the thing; blocking people liberally and sticking to the “following” tab on Twitter… and nobody ever calls it “X” except in an apologetic “my editor made me call it that” sort of way… makes it a reasonably tolerable experience.  I can still read posts from the game devs and companies I follow, still stay tuned into the arms control and entertainment feeds I enjoy, and Elmo…. oh, poor Elmo.

Elmo checking in…

That tweet seemed to tap into the universal angst and elicited a storm of responses, not all kind, in something a cathartic knee-jerk reaction to arguably the most annoying muppet, enough so that Elmo’s tweet ended up with mainstream media coverage.  That, in turn, led to a muppets-wide set of responses supporting emotional well being since we’re all pretty wound up it seems.

As for Elon, more annoying than even peak cloying Elmo, I blocked him long ago… him and his fan boys and much that was objectionable in an attempt to cleanse my little corner of that site.  I have to work at it.  I remember a time when I felt it was slightly uncouth to block accounts, but now I do so with abandon.  It works for me.

Honestly, if I want to read about what Elon is up to I have to go to BlueSky or Threads, both of which have loud groups there that pick apart his foibles with glee… only taking time out to shame people still on Twitter even as they can’t stop going on about Twitter.  And you can find some classics on those sites.

I never thought he was the first… but I knew people at PayPal so had the inside scoop

I mentioned the ongoing dominance of Twitter… and I think that the fact that it is a prime topic on other services serves as evidence towards that, along with the large number of people who still cross post to Twitter and one of the pretenders to the Twitter throne… but there are arguments to be made that Threads is approaching for sheer numbers of users.  Threads fans on Threads are always there to let us all know that Threads was in the top ten downloaded apps in the Apple Store or wherever (though Twitter topped the charts again on news of Drake nudes being posted there… a moderation error or not?) and the user/traffic numbers seem impressive.

But it also seems like the most likely place show up at accidently.  When I am on Istragram with my personal account, scrolling through classic cars, cats, airplanes, and model trains, it will stick posts from Threads in there… and then I find out I have an account there because if you have an Instagram account you have a Threads account.  I guess, on the plus side, you can now at least access Threads via a web browser.

And Threads could get even more reach through integration with ActivityPub, which will link it to the Fediverse, previously the domain largely dominated by Mastodon.

Mastodon server admins natually greeted this validation of their vision of a unified yet independent network of social media domains with enthusiasm and rolled out the welcome mat for Threads and its users!

Haha, just kidding.  The universal reaction seems to be to pull up the drawbridges and premptiely block any Threads content from polluting the purity of their vision.  I have said that Mastodon is the Linux of social media sites, and here they are rejecting Threads the way the core Linux community rejects anything beyond a command line interface when it comes to UI.

Which brings us back to something I have mentioned before, which is that if there is something partisans of the new sites seem to hate more than Twitter, it is the other sites trying to be Twitter.

So when this past week, when BlueSky finally lifted its “invite only” policy on new users… I guess nobody needs my invite codes now… the joy of that unleashing was not universal.  So, for example, the avacado toast lady, between posts asking people to subscribe to her YouTube channel, had words.

BlueSky bad, posted on Threads

Saying that BlueSky is the worst on security features… and people on Mastodon have been vocal on that front… seems to have some basis in fact.  At least somebody there had a long list of grievences to fling at me when I mentioned having access keys.

Having any sort of monopoly on insufferable users however… hooo boy.  Each of what I think of as the “big three” outside of Twitter has that issue, and nobody is more likely to call out that sort of thing than those who have moved from one of those services to another.  Lectures, gate keeping, shaming, and a ceaseless obsession with Twitter seems par for the course.

Meanwhile over at Spoutible, which I am not sure why I bother posting to as literally nobody who followed me early on seems active any more… well, their external API was happy enough to cough up all the information you would want about accounts if you asked nicely.  This would probably be a big deal if somebody cared.  I went and changed my password.

It is enough to make one wish a plague on all of their houses.  But then what would be spend our time scrolling through?

I, for one, would not mind somebody other than Twitter being the top of the heap, to see one of the pretenders to the throne surpass Elon, if only to see Elon taken down another notch or two.

But the reality is that content is king.  I go where my interests are best served, something that Twitter has a decade advantage on over the other sites.  Looking at ManicTime, it is clear which site holds my eyeballs.  Here is my breakdown of time spent on social media sites over the last six months:

• Twitter – 62.28%
• Mastodon – 11.79%
• Reddit – 10.45%
• BlueSky – 9.36%
• Threads – 2.37%
• Spoutible – 2.18%
• Facebook – 1.57%

I will say that my BlueSky time has been trending up some… though there is still a lot of cross posting… and Threads wasn’t even available in a browser for that whole period of time.  But, in the end, Twitter is where I go.

And at least the Cheech & Chong edibles ads are back on Twitter.

Calling out Idaho

They might be the least objectionable advertiser on the site some days.  But, like Elon, you can just block those noxious ads and move on.

If you use X (formerly known as Twitter), you've seen the "potentially sensitive content" warnings on some posts. It's not surprising on a platform used worldwide, where anyone can post anonymously from a budget mobile phone. X lets you choose what you want to see on the platform, whether it's adult content or nudity.

Next week, the Supreme Court will hear oral argument in NetChoice v. Paxton and Moody v. NetChoice. The cases are about a pair of laws, enacted by Texas and Florida, that attempt to force large social media platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, and X to host large amounts of speech against their will. (Think neo-Nazi rants, anti-vax conspiracies, and depictions of self-harm.) The states’ effort to co-opt social media companies’ editorial policies blatantly violates the First Amendment.

Since the laws are constitutional trainwrecks, it’s no surprise that Texas’s and Florida’s legal theories are weak. They rely heavily on the notion that what social media companies do is not really editing — and thus is not expressive. Editors, Texas says in a brief, are “reputationally responsible” for the content they reproduce. And yet, the state continues, “no reasonable observer associates” social media companies with the speech they disseminate.

This claim is absurd on its face. Everyone holds social media companies “reputationally responsible” for their content moderation. Users do, because most of them don’t like using a product full of hate speech and harassment. Advertisers do, out of a concern for their “brand safety.” Journalists do. Civil rights groups do. Even the Republican politicians who enacted this pair of bad laws do — that’s why they yell about how “Big Tech oligarchs” engage in so-called censorship.

That the Texas and Florida GOP are openly contemptuous of the First Amendment, and incompetent to boot, isn’t exactly news. So let’s turn instead to some delicious ironies. 

Consider that the right’s favorite social media addict, robber baron, and troll Elon Musk has single-handedly destroyed Texas’s and Florida’s case.

After the two states’ laws were enacted, Elon Musk conducted something of a natural experiment in content moderation—one that has wrecked those laws’ underlying premise. Musk purchased Twitter, transformed it into X, and greatly reduced content moderation on the service. As tech reporter Alex Kantrowitz remarks, the new approach “privileges” extreme content from “edgelords.”

This, in turn, forces users to work harder to find quality content, and to tolerate being exposed to noxious content. But users don’t have to put up with this — and they haven’t. “Since Musk bought Twitter in October 2022,” Kantrowitz finds, “it’s lost approximately 13 percent of its app’s daily active users.” Clearly, users “associate” social-media companies with the speech they host!

It gets better. Last November, Media Matters announced that, searching X, it had found several iconic brands’ advertisements displayed next to neo-Nazi posts. Did Musk say, “Whatever, dudes, racist content being placed next to advertisements on our site doesn’t affect X’s reputation”? No. He had X sue Media Matters.

In its complaint, X asserts that it “invests heavily” in efforts to keep “fringe content” away from advertisers’ posts. The company also alleges that Media Matters gave the world a “false impression” about what content tends to get “pair[ed]” on the platform. These statements make sense only if people care — and X cares that people care — about how X arranges content on X.

X even states that Media Matters has tried to “tarnish X’s reputation by associating [X] with racist content.” It would be hard to admit more explicitly that social-media companies are “reputationally responsible” for, because they are “associated” with, the content they disseminate.

Consider also that Texas ran to Musk’s defense. Oblivious to how Musk’s vendetta hurts Texas’s case at the Supreme Court, Ken Paxton, the state’s attorney general, opened a fraud investigation against Media Matters (the basic truth of whose report Musk’s lawsuit does not dispute).

Consider finally how Texas’s last-ditch defense gets mowed down by the right’s favorite Supreme Court justice. According to Texas, social-media companies can scrub the reputational harm from spreading abhorrent content simply by “disavowing” that content. But none other than Justice Clarence Thomas has blown this argument apart. If, Thomas writes, a state could force speech on an entity merely by letting that entity “disassociate” from the speech with a “disclaimer,” that “would justify any law compelling speech.”

Only the government can “censor” speech. Texas and Florida are the true censors here, as they seek to restrict the expressive editorial judgment of social-media companies. That conduct is expressive. Just ask Elon Musk. And that expressiveness is fatal to Texas’s and Florida’s laws. Just ask Clarence Thomas. Texas’s and Florida’s social-media speech codes aren’t just unconstitutional, they can’t even be defended coherently.

Corbin Barthold is internet policy counsel at TechFreedom.

Enlarge / Elon Musk at the New York Times DealBook Summit on November 29, 2023, in New York City. (credit: Getty Images | Michael Santiago )

Twitter employees prevented Elon Musk from violating the company's privacy settlement with the US government, according to Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan.

After Musk bought Twitter in late 2022, he gave Bari Weiss and other journalists access to company documents in the so-called "Twitter Files" incident. The access given to outside individuals raised concerns that Twitter (which is currently named X) violated a 2022 settlement with the FTC, which has requirements designed to prevent repeats of previous security failures.

Some of Twitter's top privacy and security executives also resigned shortly after Musk's purchase, citing concerns that Musk's rapid changes could cause violations of the settlement.

Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Madame Web, the new Sony film about the titular Marvel comics character starring 50 Shades of Grey’s Dakota Johnson, just released on Valentine’s Day. As if Johnson’s press tour (where it seemed very clear that she does not like the movie) wasn’t enough, the reviews are pouring in—and according to them, the film is…

Read more...

Twitter abides still despite Elon Musk’s best efforts to tank the place.  I summed up the story so far at the one year mark back in October, and it hasn’t gotten any better since… but neither has it gotten that much worse.

Sure, he has driven the valuation down to $12.5 billion from the $44 billion he paid for it… and evidence has come out that the real reason he bought the place was to shut down the Elon Jet Twitter account that tracked the movements of his private jet via publicly available data, announcing how much pollution he was discharging into the atmosphere….  Musk banned the account when he took control of Twitter…  but it remains more alive and popular than any of its competitors and I am still hanging around because groups there that I follow and interact with remain.

Yes, Musk is a nazi supporting, great replacement theory spouting nut case who went as far as turning off community notes on his posts as the community took great joy in pointing out what an ignorant shitheel he really is.

Here is the thing; blocking people liberally and sticking to the “following” tab on Twitter… and nobody ever calls it “X” except in an apologetic “my editor made me call it that” sort of way… makes it a reasonably tolerable experience.  I can still read posts from the game devs and companies I follow, still stay tuned into the arms control and entertainment feeds I enjoy, and Elmo…. oh, poor Elmo.

Elmo checking in…

That tweet seemed to tap into the universal angst and elicited a storm of responses, not all kind, in something a cathartic knee-jerk reaction to arguably the most annoying muppet, enough so that Elmo’s tweet ended up with mainstream media coverage.  That, in turn, led to a muppets-wide set of responses supporting emotional well being since we’re all pretty wound up it seems.

As for Elon, more annoying than even peak cloying Elmo, I blocked him long ago… him and his fan boys and much that was objectionable in an attempt to cleanse my little corner of that site.  I have to work at it.  I remember a time when I felt it was slightly uncouth to block accounts, but now I do so with abandon.  It works for me.

Honestly, if I want to read about what Elon is up to I have to go to BlueSky or Threads, both of which have loud groups there that pick apart his foibles with glee… only taking time out to shame people still on Twitter even as they can’t stop going on about Twitter.  And you can find some classics on those sites.

I never thought he was the first… but I knew people at PayPal so had the inside scoop

I mentioned the ongoing dominance of Twitter… and I think that the fact that it is a prime topic on other services serves as evidence towards that, along with the large number of people who still cross post to Twitter and one of the pretenders to the Twitter throne… but there are arguments to be made that Threads is approaching for sheer numbers of users.  Threads fans on Threads are always there to let us all know that Threads was in the top ten downloaded apps in the Apple Store or wherever (though Twitter topped the charts again on news of Drake nudes being posted there… a moderation error or not?) and the user/traffic numbers seem impressive.

But it also seems like the most likely place show up at accidently.  When I am on Istragram with my personal account, scrolling through classic cars, cats, airplanes, and model trains, it will stick posts from Threads in there… and then I find out I have an account there because if you have an Instagram account you have a Threads account.  I guess, on the plus side, you can now at least access Threads via a web browser.

And Threads could get even more reach through integration with ActivityPub, which will link it to the Fediverse, previously the domain largely dominated by Mastodon.

Mastodon server admins natually greeted this validation of their vision of a unified yet independent network of social media domains with enthusiasm and rolled out the welcome mat for Threads and its users!

Haha, just kidding.  The universal reaction seems to be to pull up the drawbridges and premptiely block any Threads content from polluting the purity of their vision.  I have said that Mastodon is the Linux of social media sites, and here they are rejecting Threads the way the core Linux community rejects anything beyond a command line interface when it comes to UI.

Which brings us back to something I have mentioned before, which is that if there is something partisans of the new sites seem to hate more than Twitter, it is the other sites trying to be Twitter.

So when this past week, when BlueSky finally lifted its “invite only” policy on new users… I guess nobody needs my invite codes now… the joy of that unleashing was not universal.  So, for example, the avacado toast lady, between posts asking people to subscribe to her YouTube channel, had words.

BlueSky bad, posted on Threads

Saying that BlueSky is the worst on security features… and people on Mastodon have been vocal on that front… seems to have some basis in fact.  At least somebody there had a long list of grievences to fling at me when I mentioned having access keys.

Having any sort of monopoly on insufferable users however… hooo boy.  Each of what I think of as the “big three” outside of Twitter has that issue, and nobody is more likely to call out that sort of thing than those who have moved from one of those services to another.  Lectures, gate keeping, shaming, and a ceaseless obsession with Twitter seems par for the course.

Meanwhile over at Spoutible, which I am not sure why I bother posting to as literally nobody who followed me early on seems active any more… well, their external API was happy enough to cough up all the information you would want about accounts if you asked nicely.  This would probably be a big deal if somebody cared.  I went and changed my password.

It is enough to make one wish a plague on all of their houses.  But then what would be spend our time scrolling through?

I, for one, would not mind somebody other than Twitter being the top of the heap, to see one of the pretenders to the throne surpass Elon, if only to see Elon taken down another notch or two.

But the reality is that content is king.  I go where my interests are best served, something that Twitter has a decade advantage on over the other sites.  Looking at ManicTime, it is clear which site holds my eyeballs.  Here is my breakdown of time spent on social media sites over the last six months:

• Twitter – 62.28%
• Mastodon – 11.79%
• Reddit – 10.45%
• BlueSky – 9.36%
• Threads – 2.37%
• Spoutible – 2.18%
• Facebook – 1.57%

I will say that my BlueSky time has been trending up some… though there is still a lot of cross posting… and Threads wasn’t even available in a browser for that whole period of time.  But, in the end, Twitter is where I go.

And at least the Cheech & Chong edibles ads are back on Twitter.

Calling out Idaho

They might be the least objectionable advertiser on the site some days.  But, like Elon, you can just block those noxious ads and move on.

Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino must be thrilled by the advertising revenue being generated by this pro-slavery tweet that has 2.9 million views so far:

The tweet reads, "White people forget that black people make good slaves. When blacks know their place, their strong bodies are well-suited for manual labor in the field and household. — Read the rest

The post Pro-slavery hate tweet with 2.9 million views generates ad revenue for Musk appeared first on Boing Boing.

My son Cole, pictured here as a goofy kid many years ago, is now six feet six inches tall and in college. Cole needed a letter of recommendation recently so he turned to an old family friend who, in turn, used ChatGPT to generate the letter, which he thought was remarkably good. As a guy who pretends to write for a living, I read it differently. ChatGPT’s letter was facile but empty, the type of letter you would write for someone you’d never met. It said almost nothing about Cole other than that he’s a good kid. Artificial Intelligence is good for certain things, but blind letters of reference aren’t among them.

The key problem here has to do with Machine Learning. ChatGPT’s language model is nuanced, but contains no data at all specific to either my friend the lazy reference writer or my son the reference needer. Even if ChatGPT was allowed access to my old friend’s email boxes, it would only learn about his style and almost nothing about Cole, with whom he’s communicated, I think, twice.

If you think ChatGPT is the answer to some unmet personal need, it probably isn’t unless mediocrity is good enough or you are willing to share lots of private data — an option that I don’t think ChatGPT yet provides.

Then yesterday I learned a lesson from super-lawyer Neal Katyal who tweeted that he asked ChatGPT to write a specific 1000-word essay “in the style of Neal Katyal.” The result, he explained, was an essay that was largely wrong on the facts but read like he had written it.

What I learned from this was that there is a valuable business in writing prompts for Large Language Models like ChatGPT (many more are coming). I was stunned that it only required adding the words “in the style of Bob Cringely” to clone me. Until then I thought personalizing LLMs cost thousands, maybe millions (ChatGPT reportedly cost $2.25 million to train).

So where Google long ago trained us how to write queries, these Large Language Models will soon train us to write prompts to achieve our AI goals. In these cases we’re asking ChatGPT or Google’s Bard or Baidu’s Ernie or whatever LLM to temporarily forget about something, but that’s unlikely to give the LLMs better overall judgement.

Part of the problem with prompt-engineering is it is completely at the spell-casting / magical incantation phase: no one really understands the underlying general principles behind what makes a good prompt for getting a given kind of answer – work here is very preliminary and will probably vary greatly from LLM to LLM.

A logical solution to this problem might be to write a prompt that excludes unwanted information like racism while simultaneously including local data from your PC (called fine-tuning in the LLM biz), which would require API calls that to my knowledge haven’t yet been published. But once they are published, just imagine the new tools that could be created.

I believe there is a big opportunity to apply Artificial Intelligence to teaching, for example. While this also means applying AI to education in general, my desired path is through teachers, who I see as having been failed by educational IT, which makes their jobs harder, not easier.  No wonder teachers hate IT.

The application of Information Technology to primary and secondary education has mainly involved scheduling and records. The master class schedule is in a computer. Grades are in another. And graduation requirements are handled by a database that spans the two, integrating attendance. Whether this is one vendor or up to four, the idea is generally to give the principal and school board daily snapshots of where everything stands. In this model the only place for teachers is data entry.

These systems require MORE teacher work, not less. And it leads to resentment and disappointment all around. It’s garbage-in, garbage-out as IT systems try to impose daily metrics on activities that were traditionally measured in weeks. I as a parent get mad when the system says my kid is failing when in fact it means someone forgot to upload grades or even forgot to grade work at all.

If report cards come out every six weeks it would be nice to know halfway through that my kid was struggling, but current systems we have been exposed to don’t do that. All they do is advertise in excruciating and useless detail that the system, itself, isn’t working right.

How could IT actually help teachers?

Look at Snorkel AI in Redwood City, CA for example. They are developing super-low-cost Machine Learning tools for Enterprise, not education, mainly because for education they can’t identify a customer.

I think the customer here is the teacher. This may sound odd, but understand that teachers aren’t well-served by IT to this point because they aren’t viewed as customers. They have no clout in the system. I chose to use the word clout rather than power or money because it better characterizes the teacher’s position as someone essential to the process but also both a source of thrust and drag.

I envision a new system where teachers can run their paperwork (both cellulose-based and electronic) through an AI that does a combination of automatically storing and classifying everything while also taking a first hack at grading. The AI comes to reflect mainly the values and methods of the individual teacher, which is new, and might keep more of them from quitting.

Next column: AI and Moore’s Law.

I first arrived in Silicon Valley in 1977 — 45 years ago. I was 24 years old and had accepted a Stanford fellowship paying $2,575 for the academic year. My on-campus apartment rent was $175 per month and a year later I’d buy my first Palo Alto house for $57,000 (sold 21 years later for $990,000). It was an exciting time to be living and working in Silicon Valley. And it still is. We’re right now in a period of economic confusion and reflection when many of the loudest voices have little to no sense of history. Well my old brain is crammed with history and I’m here to tell you that the current situation — despite the news coverage — is no big deal. This, too, shall pass.

But what about the layoffs at Meta and Twitter? Elon is crazy! WTF???

On February 25, 1981, Apple Computer CEO Mike Scott fired 40 percent of the company’s engineering staff at a time when sales were doubling month-over-month and the company had no budgets because there was no way they could spend money fast enough to need budgets. Scott, who left Apple, himself, two months later, said he fired all those engineers and support staff because he feared four year-old Apple was becoming “complacent.” People were gone by the end of the day, when Scott held a companywide beer bust.

Cataclysmic change is par for the course in both startup culture and high tech. If there is going to be a next wave the previous wave has to die. Above is a chart I found from 2015 that shows the Silicon Valley economy starting in 1976. If we were to update this chart there would be a more recent boom, post social media, that I would label Artificial Intelligence, not to be confused with the late-1980s Artificial Intelligence bust that we’ve all forgotten about.

That original AI debacle is significant because it was caused by over-enthusiasm. The idea of AI made perfect sense in 1987 — the exact same sense it makes today — but nobody really understood how much computing power would be required to make those dreams come true. If AI was impractical in 1987 but is practical today thanks to Moore’s Law, how bad was our aim, exactly?

Our aim was pathetic and fortunes were lost on that pathos.

Let’s do the math. The original AI funding boom began in the late 1980s. Implicit in the VC model at the time was it taking no more than two Moore’s Law cycles from initiating the wave to launching real products. If VCs were funding companies in 1987, they expected big things from one or more of those startups by 1990. Moore’s Law said the cost of computing drops by 50 percent every 18 months so that implies that VCs in 1987 and the founders who were pitching to those VCs thought that AI would be technically practical by 1990 at which point a basic unit of computing power that cost one 1987 dollar would cost 25 cents in 1990.

IF AI is indeed economically practical today (some people still aren’t convinced that it is) mid-2021 marked 23 complete Moore’s Law cycles, meaning the computing power that cost $1 in 1987 had been reduced to $0.00000006.

Venture capitalists who bet several hundred million 1987 dollars that AI would have some chance of being economically practical at $0.25, were wrong by 48 million X.

It’s easy to look back, make these calculations, and feel smug, but that’s not even close to my point. My point is that the very VCs who lost all that money are generally zillionaires today. They kept betting on what was, for the most part, a growing tech economy.

The most important part of being a successful venture capitalist in the last 40 years has been maintaining some dry powder for future investments and staying in the game.

I could easily argue that AI in 1987 looks very similar to the metaverse in 2021. Meta (formerly Facebook) is losing $10 billion per year betting on its metaverse strategy. Recent layoffs suggest that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is reevaluating his expected timeline for success.

How long can Zuckerberg afford to continue dumping billions into metaverse development? Given Meta’s corporate structure giving Zuckerberg personal voting control of the company, that question comes down to how long Meta will have enough excess cashflow to cover the costs. IF Meta is cutting its burn rate in half with these layoffs (a good argument I think) Zuckerberg can continue spending at this rate… forever. This assumes Meta continues to make lots of money with current products, but it also identifies Zuck as probably the only person in the history of tech who could make this bet pay off IF the meta verse actually becomes the next big thing.

It will be interesting to see what happens with Meta. Zuck might just run out of energy or — more likely — some competing next big thing may come along to distract him. I’m not sure it really matters much.

What does matter is that in high tech change is the norm, flux is nearly constant, and what we are seeing in the current weakness is probably change that should have happened years ago but for all the cheap money.

Silicon Valley relies on startups for ideas and growth. Startups require cheap office space and engineers looking for work. Boom and bust is not a bad thing for Silicon Valley it’s how Silicon Valley evolves.

This too shall pass.

Ever since he first started to make moves to purchase Twitter, Elon Musk has framed his interest in “rigorously adhering to” principles of free speech. As we’ve noted, you have to be ridiculously gullible to believe that’s true, given Elon’s long history of suppressing speech, but a new book about Elon’s purchase suggests that from the very start a major motivation in the purchase, was to silence accounts he disliked.

According to an excerpt of a new book by reporter Kurt Wagner about the purchase (and called out by the SF Chronicle), Elon had reached out to then Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal to ask him to remove student Jack Sweeney’s ElonJet account (which publicly tracks the location of Elon’s private plane). It was only when Agrawal refused, that Elon started buying up shares in the site.

The excerpt slips in that point in a discussion about how Jack Dorsey arranged what turned out to be a disastrous meeting between Agrawal and Musk early in the process:

The day after, Dorsey sent Musk a private message in hopes of setting up a call with Parag Agrawal, whom Dorsey had hand-picked as his own replacement as CEO a few months earlier. “I want to make sure Parag is doing everything possible to build towards your goals until close,” Dorsey wrote to Musk. “He is really great at getting things done when tasked with specific direction.”

Dorsey drew up an agenda that included problems Twitter was working on, short-term action items and long-term priorities. He sent it to Musk for review, along with a Google Meet link. “Getting this nailed will increase velocity,” Dorsey wrote. He was clearly hoping his new pick for owner would like his old pick for CEO.

This was probably wishful thinking. Musk was already peeved with Agrawal, with whom he’d had a terse text exchange weeks earlier after Agrawal chastised Musk for some of his tweets. Musk had also unsuccessfully petitioned Agrawal to remove a Twitter account that was tracking his private plane; the billionaire started buying Twitter shares shortly after Agrawal denied his request.

In other words, for all his posturing about the need to purchase the site to support free speech, it appears that at least one major catalyzing moment was Twitter’s refusal to shut down an account Elon hated.

As we’ve pointed out again and again, historically, Twitter was pretty committed to setting rules and trying to enforce them with its moderation policies, and refusing to take down accounts unless they violated the rules. Sometimes this created somewhat ridiculous scenarios, but at least there were principles behind it. Nowadays, the principles seem to revolve entirely around Elon’s whims.

The case study of Sweeney’s ElonJet account seems to perfectly encapsulate all that. It was widely known that Elon had offered Sweeney $5k to take the account down. Sweeney had counter-offered $50k. That was in the fall of 2021. Given the timing of this latest report, it appears that Elon’s next move was to try to pressure Agrawal to take down the account. Agrawal rightly refused, because it did not violate the rules.

It was at that point he started to buy up shares, and to present himself (originally) as an activist investor. Eventually that shifted into his plan to buy the entire site outright, which he claimed was to support free speech, even though now it appears he was focused on removing ElonJet.

At one point, Elon had claimed that he would keep the ElonJet account up:

But, also, as we now know, three weeks after that tweet, he had his brand new trust & safety boss, Ella Irwin, tell the trust & safety team to filter ElonJet heavily using the company’s “Visibility Filter” (VF) tool, which many people claim is “shadowbanning”):

Less than two weeks later, he banned the account outright, claiming (ridiculously) that the account was “doxxing” him and publishing “assassination coordinates.”

He then also banned Sweeney’s personal account, even as it wasn’t publishing such info. Followed by banning journalists who merely were mentioning that @ElonJet had been banned.

At this point it should have been abundantly clear that Musk was never interested in free speech on Twitter (now ExTwitter), but it’s fascinating to learn that one of the motivating factors in buying the site originally — even as he pretended it was about free speech — was really to silence a teenager’s account.