#Elon Musk

[gamechangershow]

He would do anything for points, but he won't do that!

[ukraineblr]

This is seriously a new level of being a douchebag.

- You directly undermine Ukraine's defense effort by turning Starlinks off for the Ukrainian military right in the middle of important operations and letting the Russian military use it despite U.S. sanctions

- You spread the most idiotic "nuclear war" takes whispered to you in the ear by the Russian ambassador in the U.S. and even Putin himself

- You give voice and listen to the most insane conspiracy theorists talking about "proxy war", "biolabs", "deep state", and "money laundering", as well as blowhard demagogues and media con artists openly praising Putin and his regime

- You use your multimillion-stong global audience to directly propagate the Ukrainian surrender to Russia's war of aggression and publicly ridicule Ukraine's calls for international defense aid in its war against one of the world's largest military powers

- You directly undermined U.S. aid to Ukraine and publicly called for "killing" a long-belated aid at the U.S. Congress despite Ukraine running critically low on air defense and munitions because you and your arrogant yes-men had decided that "Putin just can't lose"

And when the situation deteriorates, particularly due to months-long delays in the most essential and urgent defense aid, this shameless douche says "I did predict it" (while again completely ignoring the fact that POLITICO makes it perfectly clear that Ukraine is 'heading for defeat' due to the West's failure to send weapons to Kyiv).

No, Elmo, you did not 'predict' anything.

You precipitated this.

This war started with Ukrainians praising you as the free world's techno hero and naming streets after you.

Now you have degraded yourself to being one of Russia's key useful idiots amid the most terrible and the largest European war of aggression since Adolf Hitler.

Keep listening to the likes of Ian Miles Cheong and David Sacks and dive deeper into your delusions and absolute moral bankruptcy.

We in Ukriane have seen our share of smartasses giving us between 48 and 72 hours two years ago.

In this war, we've been through so many impossible things that you can't even imagine, let alone "predict".

We will overcome this too -- and will get the aid, will survive as an independent nation and a democracy, and will bring peace back to Europe by derailing Russian aggression.

(c) Illia Ponomarenko

[animentality]

[odinsblog]

“To fix the bot problem” 🙄

👉🏿 https://www.gadgets360.com/social-networking/news/elon-musk-x-new-users-fee-write-posts-like-bookmark-reply-5455589

[quasi-normalcy]

*Sees a thoroughly rusted Cybertruck abandoned by the side of the road*

Me: "Wow, how far in the future did we go?"

My time-traveller friend: "About two weeks."

[justinspoliticalcorner]

David Ingram at NBC News:

Elon Musk’s X is a thriving hub for Nazi support and propaganda, with paid subscribers sharing speeches by Adolf Hitler or content praising his genocidal regime.  NBC News found that at least 150 paid “Premium” subscriber X accounts and thousands of unpaid accounts have posted or amplified pro-Nazi content on X in recent months, often in apparent violation of X’s rules. The paid accounts posting the content all consistently posted antisemitic or pro-Nazi material. Examples included praise of Nazi soldiers, sharing of Nazi symbols and denials of the Holocaust.  The pro-Nazi content is not confined to the fringes of the platform. During one seven-day period in March, seven of the most widely shared pro-Nazi posts on X accrued 4.5 million views in total. One post with 1.9 million views promoted a false and long-debunked conspiracy theory that 6 million Jews did not die in the Holocaust. More than 5,300 verified and unverified accounts reshared that post, and other popular posts were reshared hundreds of times apiece. 

X’s policies ban glorifying violence — a broad prohibition that X has sometimes used to take down pro-Nazi content and accounts. The rules also ban “praising violent entities” and say the platform will apply labels to hate imagery like swastikas. But NBC News found that X does not appear to be enforcing those policies consistently.  The findings are the latest evidence of a flourishing Nazi network on X under Musk’s ownership. Previous investigations by news organizations and anti-hate watchdogs have documented many examples of antisemitism, white supremacy and support for Nazism on X. 

NBC News found the Nazi propaganda posts by browsing the platform: scrolling through replies, clicking on user profiles and looking through the engagements on viral posts. NBC News conducted its review during one week in late March. The number of verified subscribers posting pro-Nazi material may be significantly more than 150. When NBC News conducted its review, Premium subscribers had the option to hide their verification check marks from the public. The verified users sharing the pro-Nazi content have entered into a mutually beneficial relationship with Musk’s X, paying $8 a month or more for premium services that are available to all premium subscribers. In exchange, they get “prioritization” when they reply to posts and the opportunity to monetize their content through ads, according to the subscription terms.  The result is that X is bringing Nazi sympathizers in from the dark corners of the internet to a massive platform where they can pay to amplify their content. X had 174 million daily active users worldwide on its mobile app in February, according to the research firm Sensor Tower. X claims to have many more than that. 

NBC News conducted its research in March, before X implemented a change to provide free premium subscriptions to accounts with more than 2,500 verified followers. That move has made it more difficult to determine who is a paid subscriber.  A welcoming social media environment can make Nazi sympathizers feel validated in their views and recruit others to their cause, said Patrick Riccards, executive director of Life After Hate, a Milwaukee-based organization that helps people disengage from violent extremist groups.  “For those who are already driven by hate, it is a big warm hug,” he said.  Online hatred can also contribute to violence offline, he said, citing the racist massacre at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, where 10 Black people died in 2022. The gunman wrote in a document that he supported neo-Nazism. He later said in court that he “believed what I read online and acted out the hate.”  “They’re wanting to find individuals to take physical action when the time comes,” Riccards said. 

In most cases, Nazi material on X is about spreading hate, said Megan Squire, deputy director for data analytics at the Southern Poverty Law Center, an anti-hate group founded in 1971. “It’s not like historians are on there talking about Hitler’s speeches,” she said.  Squire said that in her research she has found that accounts posting Nazi material are run by “known white supremacist groups that are attempting to normalize their ideas, gain followers and shuffle those followers into platforms” elsewhere online where their organizing work continues.  By failing to act against many pro-Nazi accounts, X continues to earn income from their activity in at least two ways: by collecting monthly subscription fees from those posting pro-Nazi content and by running advertisements on those accounts or adjacent to the pro-Nazi content.

[...] Many of the 150 premium accounts have put links on their X profiles directing people to their websites, books and other media, where they sometimes push Nazi sympathy and antisemitism. One such account, using the name The Impartial Truth, posts recycled and remixed Nazi propaganda content, and its X profile links out to a donation site. The account did not respond to an emailed request for comment.  One of the premium accounts belongs to Stew Peters, a Florida-based host of an internet talk show who has praised Nazi book-burning in 1930s Germany. Last month, a post of his denying the Holocaust went viral on X with 1.9 million views. Peters has more than 574,000 followers on X, where his posts often include antisemitism, and his account links to his website charging $10 a month for videos. In response to a request for comment, Peters said NBC News was using “ad hominem arguments to create narratives out of whole cloth.” 

Some of the accounts posting Nazi propaganda are unabashed in their praise of the Nazis. At least two verified X subscribers recently praised Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister. One said it used artificial intelligence to generate fake audio of Goebbels reading his writing aloud, bringing in more than 23,000 views.  X’s policies require a “sensitive media” label for “hateful imagery,” which includes “symbols historically associated with hate groups, e.g., the Nazi swastika.” Musk cited a related “incitement to violence” policy when he suspended the rapper Ye, formerly Kanye West, after Ye praised Hitler in an interview and posted an image resembling a swastika. 

Some viral Nazi content stops short of praise and instead drives engagement to accounts with no clear ideology. Two examples came in March from the account @dom_lucre, a conspiracy theorist. It posted two Hitler speeches that together received more than 15 million views. The speeches were translated with artificial intelligence, Lucre said. He, unlike others, included a warning that the speech was graphic and antisemitic, though he did not express disapproval.  “I am simply sharing what is news as I always do,” he wrote in a post. Lucre, who also goes by Dominick McGee, according to his Facebook page, did not respond to an emailed request for comment.  Lucre and other similar posters who stopped short of praising Nazis were not included in the NBC News count of the 150 premium subscribers posting pro-Nazi content. Those 150 accounts were more explicit in their pro-Nazi ideologies. 

NBC News has a report on the explosive growth of antisemitism and Neo-Nazi content on X (formerly Twitter) from X Premium accounts.

[whydidisavethistomyphone]

[theabstruseone]

I slept in and just woke up, so here's what I've been able to figure out while sipping coffee:

Twitter has officially rebranded to X just a day or two after the move was announced.

The official branding is that a tweet is now called "an X", for which there are too many jokes to make.

The official account is still @twitter because someone else owns @X and they didn't reclaim the username first.

The logo is 𝕏 which is the Unicode character Unicode U+1D54F so the logo cannot be copyrighted and it is highly likely that it cannot be protected as a trademark.

Outside the visual logo, the trademark for the use of the name "X" in social media is held by Meta/Facebook, while the trademark for "X" in finance/commerce is owned by Microsoft.

The rebranding has been stopped in Japan as the term "X Japan" is trademarked by the band X JAPAN.

Elon had workers taking down the "Twitter" name from the side of the building. He did not have any permits to do this. The building owner called the cops who stopped the crew midway through so the sign just says "er".

He still plans to call his streaming and media hosting branch of the company as "Xvideo". Nobody tell him.

This man wants you to give him control over all of your financial information.

Edit to add further developments:

Yes, this is all real. Check the notes and people have pictures. I understand the skepticism because it feels like a joke, but to the best of my knowledge, everything in the above is accurate.

Microsoft also owns the trademark on X for chatting and gaming because, y'know, X-box.

The logo came from a random podcaster who tweeted it at Musk.

The act of sending a tweet is now known as "Xeet". They even added a guide for how to Xeet.

The branding change is inconsistent. Some icons have changed, some have not, and the words "tweet" and "Twitter" are still all over the place on the site.

TweetDeck is currently unaffected and I hope it's because they forgot that it exists again. The complete negligence toward that tool and just leaving it the hell alone is the only thing that makes the site usable (and some of us are stuck on there for work).

This is likely because Musk was forced out of PayPal due to a failed credit line project and because he wanted to rename the site to "X-Paypal" and eventually just to "X".

This became a big deal behind the scenes as Musk paid over $1 million for the domain X.com and wanted to rebrand the company that already had the brand awareness people were using it as a verb to "pay online" (as in "I'll paypal you the money")

X.com is not currently owned by Musk. It is held by a domain registrar (I believe GoDaddy but I'm not entirely sure). Meaning as long as he's hung onto this idea of making X Corp a thing, he couldn't be arsed to pay the $15/year domain renewal.

Bloomberg estimates the rebranding wiped between $4 to $20 billion from the valuation of Twitter due to the loss of brand awareness.

The company was already worth less than half of the $44 billion Musk paid for it in the first place, meaning this may end up a worse deal than when Yahoo bought Tumblr.

One estimation (though this is with a grain of salt) said that Twitter is three months from defaulting on its loans taken out to buy the site. Those loans were secured with Tesla stock. Meaning the bank will seize that stock and, since it won't be enough to pay the debt (since it's worth around 50-75% of what it was at the time of the loan), they can start seizing personal assets of Elon Musk including the Twitter company itself and his interest in SpaceX.

Sesame Street's official accounts mocked the rebranding.

[gamechangershow]

BRENNAN YOU BROGGLE ****! 🤬

[etakeh]

[animentality]

[featheredpheonix]

idk if elon will kill his new chatbot grok when he finds out its woke, but he'll definitely kill it once he discovers it's funnier than him

[mysharona1987]

[sebdoesnothing]

She saw her moment and got glossed up for it

[the-alpine-glow]

fuck elon and fuck x, formerly twitter