Elon Musk, the CEO of Twitter/X, is floating an idea that he's had before to remedy the problem of social media bots: charging people to use social media.
I don’t think he hated Twitter, I think he was persuaded to destabilize it and make it a ghetto so that people using it to coordinate against authoritarian regimes wouldn’t be taken seriously. If you just shut it down you forfeit power as people instantly move to other platforms.
Elon clearly isn’t a great person, but he has been involved in some relatively successful projects - the idea that he genuinely couldn’t hack it at Twitter is just absurd.
yeah, muks’s doing a wreck-it-ralph. before, twitter was a singular place for entities of all kinds to actually communicate with their stakeholders and the public. To countries like Saudi Arabia, that’s no good. Russia too, but also twitter is incredibly useful for wartime journalism and just tracking the conflict (see OSINT etc).
take something good and gradually shittify it until the advertisers, journalists and critical thinking audience are gone.
Musk turned to his security guard and asked to borrow his pocket knife. Using it, he was able to lift one of the air vents in the floor, which allowed him to pry open the floor panels. He then crawled under the server floor himself, used the knife to jimmy open an electrical cabinet, pulled the server plugs, and waited to see what happened. Nothing exploded.
These are not the actions of someone trying to dismantle Twitter, otherwise he would have gotten someone else to do it. These are the actions of an idiot who believes he is the smartest person in the room and everything he thinks is the best way to do things.
This is about a decade after the Arab Spring though, where Twitter was instrumental in coordinating the grassroots movements that took down governments. Seems a little late?
I don’t think he hated Twitter, I think he was persuaded to destabilize it and make it a ghetto so that people using it to coordinate against authoritarian regimes wouldn’t be taken seriously. If you just shut it down you forfeit power as people instantly move to other platforms.
Elon clearly isn’t a great person, but he has been involved in some relatively successful projects - the idea that he genuinely couldn’t hack it at Twitter is just absurd.
yeah, muks’s doing a wreck-it-ralph. before, twitter was a singular place for entities of all kinds to actually communicate with their stakeholders and the public. To countries like Saudi Arabia, that’s no good. Russia too, but also twitter is incredibly useful for wartime journalism and just tracking the conflict (see OSINT etc).
take something good and gradually shittify it until the advertisers, journalists and critical thinking audience are gone.
then get the stupids to pay for the privilege.
https://www.techdirt.com/2023/09/12/the-batshit-crazy-story-of-the-day-elon-musk-decided-to-personally-rip-servers-out-of-a-sacramento-data-center/
These are not the actions of someone trying to dismantle Twitter, otherwise he would have gotten someone else to do it. These are the actions of an idiot who believes he is the smartest person in the room and everything he thinks is the best way to do things.
This is about a decade after the Arab Spring though, where Twitter was instrumental in coordinating the grassroots movements that took down governments. Seems a little late?
Oh, all of the governments are gone? Not sure, then…