Showing posts with label Twitter fail. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Twitter fail. Show all posts

Saturday, January 21, 2023

Cancel Me

 

Album cover by the Japanese-American ska punk band Kemuri.

This is kind of hilarious but also important, from a team at Washington Post: the January 6 committee found, in extensive interviews with social media employees, according to a memo prepared by committee staffers but not among the things the committee made public (the Post has posted it here), that, far from censoring rightwingers, the companies worked really hard at not doing it, violating their content moderation rules to avoid offending Trump and his supporters:

Congressional investigators found evidence that tech platforms — especially Twitter — failed to heed their own employees’ warnings about violent rhetoric on their platforms and bent their rules to avoid penalizing conservatives, particularly then-president Trump, out of fear of reprisals. The draft report details how most platforms did not take “dramatic” steps to rein in extremist content until after the attack on the Capitol, despite clear red flags across the internet.

“The sum of this is that alt-tech, fringe, and mainstream platforms were exploited in tandem by right-wing activists to bring American democracy to the brink of ruin,” the staffers wrote in their memo. “These platforms enabled the mobilization of extremists on smaller sites and whipped up conservative grievance on larger, more mainstream ones.”

Friday, December 23, 2022

For the Record: The Twitter Files


There's just so much news flooding in before I can absorb it, I'm thinking maybe I just have to resign myself to being a week or so behind on everything. I don't want to let go of the efforts of Mr. Musk's Kancelculture Kids to expose the woke leftist FBI's brutal censorship efforts at Twitter, where they succeeded in silencing the entire NewsCorp organization for [checks notes] a full day before Twitter changed its mind and its policy, in October 2020, nearly spoiling Rupert's special October Surprise revelations of Shirtless Hunter. 

Installment #7 of "The Twitter Files", by noted plastic straw advocate Michael Shellenberger, showed up on Tuesday to defend the story he, Weiss, and Taibbi have been developing: 

I mean, for one thing, the story of the blind computer repairman John Paul Mac Isaac turning the laptop over to the FBI was dodgy enough, the way Mac Isaac told it:

Saturday, December 10, 2022

Narratology: From the #TwitterFiles


 The Republican noise machine, including this putz, a former reporter who got fired from BuzzFeed in 2014 after 41 of his stories were busted for plagiarism, now reinvented aa a podcaster for "God, Family, America", with gigs on NewsMax, Parler, and Charlie Kirk's Turning Point USA (coincidentally I just removed him from my Twitter yesterday in my #ProjectMute program, which is why I know all this at the moment), is shocked! shocked! to learn that Twitter's Trust and Safety officers were meeting regularly with the FBI during the 2020 election campaign. 

This from the #TwitterFiles "investigation" being carried out by famous independent journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss ("investigation" in scare quotes because the investigating seems to consist basically of reading the stuff Mr. Musk gives them and trying to squeeze it into some kind of narrative arc).

Pretty sinister, huh? And Twitter's deputy general counsel at the time, Jim Baker, used to be

Wednesday, November 30, 2022

Wretched Excess

 


All right, you guys, just stop it right now.


Saturday, November 19, 2022

Twitter Is People




Chicago.


Note the presupposition, now that he's the proprietor, that it's some kind of extension of his self, like a puppet in his hands, or a pet. "What trick should I teach it?"

But it really isn't his; I mean, I guess the proprietary software is, but the community isn't. That's something that's assembled itself over the years, and can't be owned.

Monday, November 7, 2022

Checkmark

 



If you haven't got a sawbuck for an
Impoverished billionaire,
Then you really don't belong at all
In Elmo's "public square
".

Tuesday, November 1, 2022

Freedom Isn't Cheap

 

The funniest part, said Checkmark @shannonrwatts, "is that Elon Musk thinks the issue is that Stephen King is balking at the $20 per month fee." Indeed.

Hi, I'm Elon Musk, Twit-in-Chief here at National Public Cheerio, and with me in the studio is some anonymous tool who will cheerfully nod assent to everything I say and let me do all the talking, the Silk to my Diamond or Diamond to my Silk as the case may be, and we're interrupting your doomscrolling, as we do two or three times a week, to ask you all for your support.

Because Twitter isn't like all the other platforms selling your eyeballs at a profit, though we do sell quite a lot of them of course, but just not enough to make a profit, and indeed not enough to pay expenses, which have gone up a bit since I took on $13 billion in debt to acquire the site and those interest payments won't pay themselves! Will they?

Instead, Twitter has a unique membership model, where I may own it but you are all members, taking advantage of all the freedom of speech I generously offer you, freedom you can rely on to let you say whatever you want without intrusive monitoring, or at least not very much monitoring, or at least as long as our very few advertisers don't mind, and all I ask is that you think about sending me a little money from time to time, not that you have to do it, Twitter is a public square open to all who wish to speak their minds and will always remain so, but it would still be nice if you'd send me some money, is all I'm saying.

By which I mean you're much more of a member if you pay in a little more than the treasure of your unique and freely expressed opinions and exotic beliefs. Whatever you can afford, but let's say $60, which would make you a Basic Twit, that's just $5 a month for a year of Twitter membership, and all the rage and misinformation you can communicate, without any need to interact with the people you went to high school with, unlike that other platform. Isn't that alone worth the price? 

And to show my appreciation I'll send you a high-quality canvas Twitbag you can take along when you're shopping, to the beach, or any of the other activities you might perform when you're not sitting at the screen.

Or for $240, only $20 a month, I'll make you a Checkmark, my guarantee that you're an at least moderately famous person, a key to thousands of Follows, Likes and Retweets, Quote Tweets and Responses, that will in fact demonstrate how famous and influential you are to anybody who needs to know. With discounts of up to 60% (just $8 a month!) if you're really really famous.

Or any amount at all. And now is the best possible time, because I'm in a matching period where every dollar you pledge will be matched by an anonymous donor who is definitely not from Saudi Arabia, so your $1,000 pledge will be worth $2,000, your $,5000 pledge worth $10,000, and so on. You'll be doing so much more for the public square and for freedom of speech this way!


Act now during this special matching period, and as an extra-special gift the algorithm will let you cut into lines, allow you to post long videos, and show you 50% fewer ads. Membership has its privileges!

Call me today, at 1-866-CHEERIO, or visit me at twitter.com and press that "DONATE" button! Operators are standing by! 

Actual Twitbag, by Tabitha Maud, $21 (on sale!) from Society6.


Thursday, October 21, 2021

Stop Trying to Make Fetch Happen

 


Former U.S. president Donald Trump launches 'TRUTH' social media platform

Says some of the more measured coverage, from Reuters. Well, not exactly. Actually, it's that he will launch it, as soon as the company that's going to create it exists, after the finalization of a merger between the Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG) and a company called Digital World Acquisition Corp, a "special acquisition company", the singular purpose of which is to buy TMTG for $293 million and list it on NASDAQ. Unless some shareholder in the acquisition company, run by former investment banker Patrick Orlando decides to take their shares back, and Orlando's track record in setting up special acquisition companies or SPACS is not a long or hope-inspiring one:

Orlando, who has worked at Deutsche Bank and BT Capital Markets, has launched at least four SPACs and has plans for two more, according to his firm's website and regulatory filings.

But none of the SPACs have completed a deal yet. A China-based SPAC that Orlando led failed last month to complete a merger with Giga Energy Inc that would have valued the transportation solutions provider at $7.3 billion, because it could not deliver the cash required, according to regulatory filings.

My bold. Also, TMTG, or as Trump Jr. called it yesterday in a Fox News interview,

Sunday, July 19, 2020

Honored to Know Him But Didn't Know Him Too Well

Stop me if you've heard this—

Would have been an even greater honor to know which great bald African American congressman who's died in the past year he was.

Not Rubio's profile pic any longer, of course, and he's come up with a correction featuring an actual shot of Lewis


Though he still couldn't do it without a typo "My" for "May").

A valuable lesson from one tweep:



Saturday, August 31, 2019

First they came for the obscenely wealthy Times pundits, and I said...

Drawing by Eli Valley. Please do not explain in the comments what "awoke from uneasy dreams" refers to. Those who don't recognize the phrase can refresh their memory here.

Shorter Bret Stephens, "World War II and the Ingredients of Slaughter", New York Times, 30 August 2019:
In commemoration of the German invasion of Poland 80 years ago on Sunday, I would like to note, as I often do, how frighteningly similar to those dark days our situation is now: with our rising dictatorships, failure of international organizations to stop them, and Twitter, which is practically the same thing as the Reichs-Rundfunk over which Hitler's propaganda was broadcast to 60 million Germans. Among the more haunting parallels is the dehumanizing rhetoric of infestation, in which people are associated with disease, or compared to bedbugs, of which all the examples I can enumerate seem to come from right-wingers, but I happen to know that the left is even worse.
Or, more precisely,

Saturday, August 25, 2018

Tell Laura


Laura Ingraham telling better than two and a half million viewers about the plot that has silenced her and all her friends.

I took a look at the Federalist piece Ingraham links, "Despite Twitter’s Protests, The Stifling of Conservative Speech On The Platform Is Real", by David Reaboi and Nick Short, and was taken aback by the opening graf:

Wednesday, February 15, 2017

Trump Twitter Fail of the Day: #FakeQuotes

So it wouldn't be the first time.


Yet once again the reading disability is going to be the banana peel on which he slides toward his doom. And his own personal fake news suppliers at Breitbart, perhaps, or Ms. Hicks and her pile of clippings ready for him to circle phrases he likes with his Sharpie [Update: It was Fox News Twitter feed, see Comments.].

If you read Lake's piece on "The Political Assassination of Michael Flynn", as Trump clearly didn't, you'll wonder why the servants allowed him to call attention to it. A couple of points:

1. That Lake calls Trump a liar, with some detailed exemplification—

Monday, February 13, 2017

Trump Twitter Fail of the Day

Via.


The Post doesn't have a number for the supporters, but they seem to have consisted mainly of the knot of eight or nine you see briefly on the video (which I originally posted here, but I find it's an autoplay, so I killed it; you should be able to see it here) on the north side of Southern Boulevard in front of a Cuban restaurant, led by a man in a yellow shirt waving an old-regime Cuban flag; the camera operator pans back and forth and zooms, working really hard to do it justice. The protest crowd, on both sides of the street, wasn't exactly huge either, but it did have well over a hundred people. Maybe as the emperor rode by he thought the "NO DAPL" signs were attacking Obama's immigration policy (Deferred Action for Parents of Legals?).

Some corroboratory material just came on at Addicting Info.