“Yeah, they’re gone”: Musk confirms cuts to X’s election integrity team — “‘Election Integrity’ Team… was undermining election integrity,” Musk writes::“‘Election Integrity’ Team… was undermining election integrity,” Musk writes.
I have a hunch that in the terrifyingly near future, we’re going to see the internet absolutely dominated by enshitification.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s bad now …because like the frogs in hot water, we collectively just tolerate changes for the worse. But it used to be small incremental changes over a long period.
Then this Musk asshole comes along, looks at the frogs ever so slowly cooking… and cranks the stove to max, pisses in the frog-pot, supplements the heating element with a welding torch, and flips the frogs off as he pours gasoline all over the kitchen.
And the frogs JUST FUCKING TAKE IT.
What message does that send to the rest of the internet?
Here’s a bit of good news. The idea that frogs just wait to get boiled is proven false. Every animal has a limit to what they will tolerate due to self preservation. The from will jump out when it gets too hot.
That being said, I just recently watched Idiocracy… I’m a bit worried.
You should be worried, in the movie they recognized their stupidity and made way for the smarter character to lead.
our timeline is worse than idiocracy
It is not a real phenomenon, though a useful tale for expressing a concept.
I’ve been reading more books.
Most everyone I know doesn’t have a Twitter or Instagram. Obv I deleted my reddit. What are people supposed to do except just not use the platform? Most authors I want to follow are on substack or mastodon.
I think that as the platforms further enshittify, people will realize there are no intelligent conversations happening on platforms like X, Instagram, Facebook, etc. Ragebait content can only captivate audiences for so long before they either abandon it or are brainwashed by it. If everyone on X is a musk dickrider right wing lunatic then it makes it easier for sane people to stay off of it. Honestly it might be better to give them their safespace echo chamber as long as Democrats, liberals and libertarians mobilize and make their arguments where it matters.
There never was intelligent conversation. People mostly used Twitter to talk about the news. Twitter has gotten worse, but it’s always been full of L takes.
What message does that send to the rest of the internet?
You know… it would be funny but also sad and believable if he’s doing all of this just to spite the internet because we wouldn’t let that one emo leather longcoat pic die.
Edit: the pic
It’s like Trump running for president because Obama and Seth Meyers roasted him in front of the world… So much awful shit in our world is a direct result of rich, whiney narcissists making things worse for everyone as collateral damage in whatever petty feud they’ve mostly invented in their heads.
But for real, I am actually fully convinced that that was the inception point in Trump’s head for the idea of going for the presidency.
well now you have to share this picture and keep it going
Let’s hope the FCC and whatever other agencies applicable, get teeth and clamp down hard on how these social media giants. the way they operate its damn near treasonous at this point how open they are with allowing other governments to influence their policies. Especially with advertising and to children.
It has been predicted for years that the Internet would split and I’m all for it at this point.
That’s an interesting take. I’m kind of curious what you mean by the split. It seems like it’s already split a few times, and I sort of see Lemmy as another split. I think the biggest craziness that will get thrown into the mix is serious amounts of AI content, which I know people are tired of hearing about now, but it’s a huge deal. I think people are underestimating its power.
Your point still stands, but as far as I can tell in my city, no one really cared about or used Twitter. Even more so after Elongated Muskrat took over. Twitter was always an echo chamber for the most part when it came to mainstream stuff. Sure, there are a few niche cases, but with those cases there was usually already an alternative. Twitter was never as popular to normal people as it is to influencers, celebs, and for some weird reason government personnel or groups. That’s just my experience with the platform at least. I do not know a single person who even used Twitter once in my entire life.
Don’t panic until it smells like butter and garlic?
Incredible. He bought Twitter just to turn it into Truth Social.
That’s been apparent since about a month or two after the sale was final. One of the very first things he did was invite Trump back
It should have been obvious before the deal even went through. The regulator position on that was fucked, focusing on “you made an offer, can’t back out now!” instead of how bad it would be for a billionaire to take Twitter private.
It was either that or let Musk get away with stock market manipulation. Hard to tell which is worse at this point but I personally think him losing billions of dollars of investor money will hopefully cause then to think twice about giving him money in the future. That is, if Trump loses in 2024.
I have a growing suspicion that the goal was to intentionally delegitimize Twitter to the extent that one of the major social networks becomes an unmitigated misinformation factory - moreso than it was before. That seems like something billionaire investors might be willing to dump some serious cash into.
conservative doesn’t like being treated like an equal, decides to abolish the group that produced evidence suggesting equality
Sounds about right
Aside from conservatives, what fascist dipshits still use Twitter? It’s just a cesspool of disinformation and bigotry, so I just assume anyone who uses it is a lying bigot.
Most businesses and institutions still use twitter as their primary communication and support channels. My “wokest” friend still uses it every day, while constantly bitching about Elon. Convenience and habit are a hell of a drug…
I walked past an ambulance the other day and noticed that my city’s ambulances have the little bird logo along with the local EMS twitter handle (I live somewhere with publicly funded healthcare). I found myself wondering, “are they going to switch their fleet to use the X logo?” It’s funny how much we allowed this private company’s little bird logo to worm its way into every aspect of our world. People took for granted that it would always exist and always be something people had a positive association with.
The only good thing about it being renamed to X is that at least we can now keep a bit respect for this ‘loved’ little bird and link it to “remember when it was called Twitter and still functional?” 😅
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My God. A 1-letter dot-com address! That must have cost so much…
“Public Squares” should never be privately owned.
I’ve heard about this bizarre behavior. I have decided to not cut slack to users.
It is inappropriate to conduct business with bigots and fascists. It is perfectly reasonable for me to label those who use fascist-owned platforms as fascists.
I think it still requires some cross-over time to make that distinction. It’s probably a ‘big decision’ to change social media for businesses and will undoubtedly take time,… And for individuals the Fediverse (however improved it’s gotten already) still is a higher tech-difficulty than twitter. Plus the choice between servers (even though a feature) also discourages many too as they don’t know what to choose or hold off until the right instance comes along. I myself had been planning to transfer to the Fediverse for a few years already, but it eventually took Facebook banning me for a hack on my account, with no supportline or real working contact what-so-ever to eventually get me to do the effort. Lost 14 years of journaling my life there in 4 minutes time… 😕
I have decided to not cut slack to users.
It is inappropriate to conduct business with bigots and fascists.
Life is analog, not digital.
And the “owned by a fascist” dial is all the way to 10.
It is perfectly reasonable for me to label those who use fascist-owned platforms as fascists.
Life is analog, not digital.
Hey, this is fun!
That much extremest hate will burn you up.
Convenience and habit are a hell of a drug…
Twitter, Reddit, World of Warcraft, etc., etc.
If people could just put in the minimal amount of effort to affect positive change, the World would be such a different place.
My wife used it because she has s community of friends she has made there and knows in real life. The same way we both still use Facebook.
Is this the reason people still go to church? What will it take for people to migrate? I personally wouldn’t use a bridge that rots my brain to save 10 min on my commute. I wouldnt regularly going to and supporting a toxic infastructure to see freinds, id be inviting them to better locals. Not judging you, just wondering why be a frog in a boiling pot of water… then again you are here so maybe I just need my bubble or something to feel safe idk…
Ehhh, church is more practical cuz it tends to provide sunday daycare for a couple hours
I totally get what you’re saying and for what it’s worth I don’t feel judged by your statements. For platforms where I didn’t have that sort of personal connection with “real life” people I am more willing to swap. Here I am on Lemmy, after all lol.
There’s just no way I can convince the friends I have on Facebook that I still keep up with there to jump ship with me to join a different platform. Sure, I might convince some, and I might even be the seed of doubt that convinces another person to leave months or years later but by then I’d be gone and they couldn’t find me if they even remembered me. Because once you’re gone you’re just gone. There are a handful of people I know that I think deleted their accounts or otherwise just don’t have a presence on social media at all. I have no way to contact them. If they don’t want to be contacted that’s fine, I’m not saying people have some obligation to be found lol. But the idea of old friends reaching out to me is an appealing feeling and also being able to watch them from a distance and be seen from a distance is an appealing one. Facebook has a level of critical mass (at least in my friend group and I guess age group) that other social media platforms don’t have. I think for folks a little younger than me Instagram has that.
And what if I stay? I know I’m getting data mined. Do I like it? No. But I’m not really getting mined so hard that it’s really a bad thing. Leaving would be more of an idealogical thing to do than a practical one. Short of some massive boycott it wouldn’t change anything.
In short, the negatives of my specific usage of Facebook is extremely minor and the benefits are too much for me to give up.
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Unfortunately, there are still functions that Twitter serves that nothing else does. For breaking news, it’s still unmatched. For celebrities, influencers, politicians, journalists, etc there’s no other platform that has the same microblogging function with the user numbers and clout that Twitter does.
Until that changes, its still useful. It gets less and less useful, but as long as the site is up, allows users to post up to the minute updates and allows users to follow posters, there’s only so far it can fall without real competition.
Iirc Amber Alerts ( not the ones notifying Amber Heard’s coming to town ) are issued over Twitter. There were cases of people not being able to check, because now a login is required?
I never used Twitter. Here in Germany it has never gotten so far, that it would be the only place you would get some of the important government announcements that can save lives.
Edit: no hate for Amber Heard from my side. I liked to play this stupid joke in my head, long before The Shitshow happened.
Seriously though,what has really changed? It’s always been a cesspool
Funny that the worse the Republicans are doing the more some people want to take the filters off of social media.
Right Wingers have always gotten preferential treatment and soft touch moderation on social media, because…
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Their user base is fucking morons who click every ad, and buy tons of stupid shit (specially if it has their team name on it) bringing in disproportionate income
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They know the bulk of their moderation problems are from Right wingers, and don’t want to look biased and drive them away by holding them to the same standard they hold everyone else, So they just let the right wingers get away with shit that would get cracked down and account bans handed out for anyone else.
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Their own algorithms have been proven to amplify right wing tweets, thus making it easier to find hate messages than it is to find anything else, because they are in bed with the right.
The commercial platforms had a dilemma: (1) They had existing policies against hate propaganda, incitement of violence, and harassment. (2) They wanted to seem at least mostly neutral on matters of partisan politics. And then (3) happened: one of the major parties started doing a lot of hate propaganda, incitement of violence, and harassment.
If Facebook, Twitter, etc. had been following their own stated policies, they would have taken down Trump much earlier. However, those policies were never obligations enforceable against the platform, and would have required those platform companies to explicitly state that they were taking down one of the major parties for not following the platform’s rules on hate, violence, and harassment.
Eventually, advertisers communicated with their dollars, that they were not seeing a benefit to their brands from having their ads appear beside the increasingly deranged, criminal, and traitorous Trump.
Maybe that was the plan all along.
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Turn Twitter into a turd soup
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Educated people who don’t click ads stop using Twitter
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Save unproductive bandwidth
By quitting twitter I’ve gone along with Musk’s plan. Damn it.
Musk isnt that smart.
Besides, a lot of those big advertisers don’t mind advertising to racists/fashies/terrorists, as long as they have the plausible deniability of “Oh, we advertise on twitter, it has a vibrant user base, lets not let the unsavory types ruin it for everyone”.
A deniability that goes away now that its been bought by a fashy white supremacist who is actively purging the site of anyone critical to fashy white supremacism.
No one but scummy companies like MyPillow and some asshole selling “gold” trump coins (totally legal tender!*) want to advertise to the creme of that crop.
⁽*ᶜᵒᶦⁿˢ ʰᵃᵛᵉ ⁿᵒ ˡᵉᵍᵃˡ ᵗᵉⁿᵈᵉʳ ᵃⁿᵈ ᵃʳᵉ ᶦⁿᵗᵉⁿᵈᵉᵈ ᶠᵒʳ ᶜᵒˡˡᵉᶜᵗᶦᵒⁿ ᵒⁿˡʸ⁾
I’m gratified that you thought my dumb idea was smart…
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2024 is going to be a bad, bad year.
As will be every year after that. It’s all downhill from here folks.
Pessimism literally helps nobody, it just makes people more depressed and less likely to do anything about a bad situation. Don’t forget that last election had one of the highest young voter turnouts ever recorded, and was by far a huge swing to liberal. Since then the Republican party hasn’t even been close to as organised as they were during 2016 and 2020.
Change can and will happen. It already is, albeit slowly and with bumps along the road, just like any progression in society.
Pessimism literally helps nobody, it just makes people more depressed and less likely to do anything about a bad situation.
Change can and will happen. It already is, albeit slowly and with bumps along the road, just like any progression in society.
Yep. Seriously, keep the faith. And fight the good fight.
You got through to me and changed my perspective. Ty
Pessimism is so addictive. I’ve struggled with it a ton throughout my life.
Like most bad habits, it’s the easier option
I’m glad you have some optimism left in you. I don’t.
Trump or that clown Sunak winning your election will have catastrophic effects for my country who’s been in full scale war for almost 2 years. All the while the “allies” drag this war out by giving bullshit reasons to not send long range missiles and aircraft (uwu 5-8 months basic proficiency for fighter pilots proficient on a different platform , also known as “if they started even last year, f16s would be flying at least SEAD by now and not relying on a jank adaptor to launch HARM”), and decide that sending 31 Abrams tanks is good enough for a 1200km long frontline.
I had some optimism in March 2022, despite how bad everything looked at the time, it slowly diminished to what it is now by Spring of 2023 when it became clear that goal #1 for our “allies” is NOT to end this war, as quickly as possible, but to bleed russia out, death by a thousand cuts, all with our lives.
rant (cont.)
I can even understand unwillingness to give ATACMS, you don’t have a lot of them and need them all to fight Mexican drug cartels or whatever you would use ballistic missiles for in 2023.
You don’t even use f16 anymore, and just sold some to Vietnam recently.
There’s at least few hundreds Abrams tanks sitting in the desert in dry storage. But no, 31 is all we get.
And the total clownery of political debate where at least two candidates build their platform on being friends with russia and china and stopping all support to Ukraine.
And the total clownery of passing a lend lease act in 2022 and then not using it - trusting Ukraine to win so as to not burden us with returning leased hardware, but not trusting enough to give enough to win.
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Straight into that false dichotomy. Pessimism isn’t a straight in to critical thinking. I’d say a pessimist is doing the exact opposite really. By not even wanting to try and think of a positive situation they’re going full head in the sand instead of working to fix problems.
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Nobody’s getting shoved into boxcars. Well, unless you’re trans, or gay, or the wrong skin color that day (I’m guessing brown first), or if you say something the president doesn’t like, or if you’re associated with a terrorist organization (by showing up to the wrong protest).
I get your statement but it’s really overly violent, and honestly sounds kind of libertarian. More guns & more violence really will not solve anything. If you get violent all you do is justify violent means for your oppressors. In this day and age, there’s no winning a fight of violence against the government and groups you disagree with. There’s far better alternatives that we have. The benefit of capitalism is that it means the only fucking thing that works against the power structure is to scare them from losing control of their capital. I guarantee en-mass “voting with your wallet”, and literal voting, will have a much better effect than arming up.
Also, you’re free to call Nazis, Nazis. Nobody is stopping you.
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Normally I would agree with you, but with the rise of violent rhetoric being espoused by the likes of Marjorie Taylor Green and Lauren Boebert. There is a consistent rise on both sides, though one definitely has a markedly larger proportion, saying that violence against voters from the other side of the aisle is justifiable. https://carnegieendowment.org/2022/03/31/rise-in-political-violence-in-united-states-and-damage-to-our-democracy-pub-87584
It would likely be imprudent to think that a social group who can condone the beliefs and behaviors of the likes of neo-Nazis, the KKK, and the Proud Boys, as well as support the active dismantling of historical education that is based in fact and objectivity would be incapable of they themselves succumbing to a mob mentality that led to mass violence. All you have to do is look at the Stanford Prison Experiment to understand just how fast a select group in control of messaging and communication can lead normally rational people down a path of wonton violence for a cause that was not actually their own.
“Voting with your wallet” barely even works anymore with most of the consumer goods being produced by 1 of like 12 companies that form corporate oligopolies over virtually every industry. Voting in the booths “works”, but the trend of conservative candidates just refusing to accept that they lost and whipping that same aforementioned group of voters into a tizzy could easily lead to some rather problematic situations that can easily snowball beyond where the unprepared are, well, prepared for.
It probably isn’t a bad idea to arm up, whether it is with actual weapons or weaponized knowledge. Knowing how to utilize incendiary devices or kitchen chemistry defensively is not a bad thing for rational, level-headed people to know. I’m not saying “arm up, a war is coming”, more like “the Boy Scouts have the motto ‘Be Prepared’ for a very good reason.”
but there well be a brief period where we can swim in late autumn and early spring. so won’t that be nice.
No, I’m banking on the younger generations coming out of the woodwork. They’ve dealt with so much and really hoping they realize their vote could really send these dinosaurs into extinction.
Taylor Swift seems to be doing a good job with that.
Didn’t she get like 150k people to register in a day with an Instagram story or something
The fact that Republicans are already going after her about it shows how scared they are of the impact Gen Z is going to have in 2024
Register where? What’s the story?
Register to vote. Americans have to register or they cannot vote.
Ah ok. Didn’t know she did that. Kudos to her.
I agree, I have some hope as common folk get more and more tuned in, especially as obscure runs like the Wisconsin Supreme Court judgeship and votes against the Ohio constitutional amendment process change result in overwhelming positive outcomes.
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The truth and facts have left leaning bias. The right has no choice but to lie. Their policies are unpopular and unsupported.
When you’ve lived a life of privilege, equality seems like oppression.
Goverments should have their own fediverse instances and delete all their twitter accounts 🤷
I think they will and the history books will say “In retrospect, having politicians use a privately owned platform to speak to their constituents was a bad call, as Traitor and Child Murderer Elon Musk demonstrated.”
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That’s an interesting way to say you don’t know what the fediverse is.
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It literally has all the federation features removed. By definition it isn’t part of the fediverse, because it’s not federating anything
If I set up my own mastodon server, but blocked literally all federation, then my server wouldn’t be part of the fediverse. It’s a bit odd that this has to be elaborated on
It’s not…? It’s literally just another social media site, it doesn’t hook into ActivityPub or any cross-broadcast protocol. I don’t know why you’re throwing around the word “fediverse” here.
It is a fork of Mastodon though, iirc. But I don’t think it federates with anything.
This is a very strange comparison, considering Truth Social is not owned by any government.
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I don’t think @onlineperson meant this as “host their own social network”, but as “host their own micro-messaging platform to release news which is part of the fediverse”. This would make them resilient against PoS like Musk, while making their news accessible to a wide variety of users.
Exactly what I mean. The Netherlands has one, Germany too, and even the European Union, but it isn’t their major presence and IMO, it should be.
Nah, more like this https://social.network.europa.eu/
Same for news organizations. Give the option for reporters that leave or join the organization to migrate their account (aka keep their followers).
That way they provide a proof of authenticity for their reporters by being hosted on their Mastodon instance. Obviously, the instance shouldn’t let the public create an account there, only follow from another instance.
That does make a lot of sense!
If 4chan made Trump win in 2016, Twitter might make Trump win in 2024. Which is a scary thought. Just imagine the level of control one rich man can have over the information highway, Twitter, one of the biggest social media sites in the world, used still by many politicians, journalists and reporters on both sides. It’s happening.
Twitter made Trump win in 2016. Like, did people seriously forget about „Trump tweeted“ headlines that dominated daily news for years? The same news that would then claim a small obscure website like 4Chan made Trump president single-handedly. I mean I almost can‘t blame you for memory holing those years, but claiming Twitter wasn‘t absolute dog water before Musk is simply wrong.
In a documentary made during the 2016 election cycle Trump talks about how much better his PR team is because he doesn’t have to use traditional channels to reach his base, he can just tweet it when ever he wants to tell the world something.
He was very much using twitter as a primary communication channel from the begining, and this time around, he has both twitter and truth social as his basically his own.
Mueller has me convinced Russian social media farms made Trump win.
James Fucking Comey certainly didn’t help.
Just imagine the level of control one rich man can have over the information highway.
Rupert Murdoch 2: Information Highway to Hell.
This American Life had a good segment about a content moderator at Twitter
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/797/what-i-was-thinking-as-we-were-sinking/act-two-7
Like the main content moderator who quit.
Note it’s 30+minutes and takes a little while to get to Twitter, but it includes reported interactions with Musk.
It talks about the election group of moderators.
This week’s On with Kara Swisher has back to back interviews with Yoel Roth (the guy in the TAL ep) and the new CEO of Twitter, Linda Yaccarino and it’s worth a listen.
The juxtaposition of the two interviews is something. Roth comes across as a smart, serious person trying to (and admittedly sometimes failing) be a good steward of the internet and tackles the challenges using facts and data. Yaccarino follows up by literally being the definition of a stooge. Very clearly not attached to reality, doesn’t know things that Musk has tweeted in spite of saying at the top of the interview they’re 100% attached and in the loop with everything Elon’s doing. Absolute clown show.
So yeah, expect literally everyone to have a hand in the cookie jar come the '24 election. There isn’t enough competence in the company to fill a thimble at this point, and leadership at the company probably is either entirely ignorant of the problem(Yacco), or actively engaging in sabotage in tandem (Musk.)
Fucking hate this man.
Wait, so the team in charge of misinformation got misinformed about getting fired instead of expanded?
Guy sure loves his irony…
The people in charge of sacking the people responsible for the credits have been sacked.
A moose once bit my sister.
My hovercraft is full of eels.
Guess they should have fact checked it.
He fired the current people to hire new people to the team for what I’ve heard. It’s not a removal but a replacement.
People who will help him spread election misinformation for Trump’s next attempt at a coup.
Just proves yet again why an instance with authority to judge against a company should never be paid by that company… 😅
looks at governments 😅
Says a lot about “regulators” 👀
I’m going to be so happy when Musk gets brought up on election charges.
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Meh. You worry too much. According to your narrative they were telling us the truth before this…. Haha
Governments have been lying to people since before time was a concept. Its no different now than 400 years ago, we’re just all screaming into the same digital boxes now.
That might never happen if Twitter becomes as obscure as myspace or tumblr.
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The Russian misinfo version: ℤ
