Elon vs Twitter update: Elon helped America win , Tesla stock through the roof

Gaslighting is a made up word.

 

Apparently he worked for R Street, a right-center leaning think tank, between his time with the FBI and joining Twitter. From his wikipedia article:

Baker's government service was interrupted twice by stints in the private sector. Baker was assistant general counsel for national security at Verizon Business from 2008 to 2009.[3] He was associate general counsel with Bridgewater Associates from 2012 to 2014.[13] He worked as director of National Security and Cybersecurity for the non-partisan, right-center leaning think-tank R Street Institute between January of 2018 and June of 2020.[14][15]
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Also: Twitter Hires Former FBI General Counsel Amid Trump Fight (1) (bloomberglaw.com)

 

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/t...o-negative-territory-survey-finds-11670602596

“It seems like Tesla is on its way to becoming a partisan brand,” Morning Consult’s Jordan Marlatt told the Wall Street Journal.

Morning Consult’s numbers also reinforce the political divide. Among self-described Democrats, 24.8% saw Tesla positively in October. Just 10.4% said the same at the end of November. Self-described Republicans saw their opinion of the company rise, from a favorable 20% to 26.5%, over the same period.

 

The irony about this is this is literally the entire right wing playbook for the past 6 years. b****ing on social media platforms that they are being censored on social media platforms and returning to them constantly.

And not only Twitter but Facebook, reddit etc.

 

They were being censored. We all knew it was happening - the left called it a "conspiracy theory" - but it is proven now.

 

Did you revert back to being under 25 or something?

You know these talking points don't work. We all know right wing talking points get moderated more. We just disagree on WHY.

You will create a fake narrative of amoral behemoths that are these publicly traded companies actually have opinions on these stupid culture war topics.

And I believe these amoral behemoths are amoral due to their inherent structure and motivations and that any content moderation comes purely from a place of being as brand safe as possible to maximize ad revenue therefore maximizing return on investment.

 

You own right-righteousness makes a mockery of your post, and of you.

 

WaPo slowly coming around

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...iles-shadow-banning-conservatives-bari-weiss/

Opinion: I defended Twitter to other conservatives. I was wrong.
By Hugh Hewitt
Contributing columnist
December 13, 2022 at 1:45 p.m. EST

From shock to anger to outrage: That describes my arc of reaction to “The Twitter Files,” especially Bari Weiss’s revelatory installment, #TwitterFiles2.

Using Twitter’s own internal files, released with the blessing of new owner Elon Musk, Weiss demonstrates that Twitter was indeed censoring conservatives, despite vigorous and repeated denials from company brass over the years.

“I want to read a few quotes about Twitter’s practices, and I just want you to tell me if they’re true or not,” Rep. Mike Doyle (D-Pa.), asked the company’s then-CEO Jack Dorsey in a 2018 hearing. Bear in mind: Dorsey was under oath.

Doyle’s first quote: “Social media is being rigged to censor conservatives. Is that true of Twitter?"

“No,” Dorsey responded.

“Are you censoring people?” Doyle asked next.

“No,” Dorsey answered.

“Twitter’s shadow-banning prominent Republicans ... is that true?” Doyle followed.

“No,” Dorsey said.

Those may not have been lies in Dorsey’s mind. But they are deceptive, to say the least, when read in light of the Weiss revelations. Verified accounts of such prominent conservatives as activist Charlie Kirk (who like me hosts a radio show for Salem Media Group), radio host Dan Bongino and many others were flagged so that Twitter algorithms would not highlight their tweets.

Dorsey’s smoke screen masked other kinds of deception, too. Conservatives were led to believe that they had equal access to the Twitter audience. People and organizations on the right invested time, effort and sometimes money to craft messages in the belief that the results could be read on a level playing field. In truth, any message out of favor with Twitter management — or somehow offensive to lower-level content moderators — might find only a small fraction of its intended readership.

The Twitter reporting has met with ferocious pushback, including on the app itself, in part because the company handpicked the journalists it wanted for the task: independent-minded iconoclasts Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger and Weiss. We don’t know what terms may have been imposed or agreements made with the company. So, sure, it’s fair to read with a radar for opinion and bias — as one should with all journalism. I would prefer it if Musk made every document available to everyone. Like his tweets.

But don’t let the attacks stop you from considering the reporting. Imagine the hours you would invest in preparing a lecture, a sermon or simply an advertisement if you were told it might be heard by 1,000, 10,000 or 100,000 people. Only after you have finished do you discover that your time has been wasted and you can never get it back, because your message was blocked or filtered.

Digital communication is still young. I understand that the promise sometimes exceeds the reality. Fans of the Cleveland Browns saw our NFL Sunday Ticket feeds crash two weeks in a row earlier this fall.

That’s not what happened at Twitter. Producers of company-approved tweets enjoyed a fair shot at reaching the platform’s audience. Conservatives were singled out, secretly muffled, as Twitter robbed them of the one thing that cannot be made good: time.

Meanwhile, Twitter was happy to have the large crowds of followers some conservatives have built. These numbers helped Twitter hit the levels of “engagements” they sold to advertisers — advertisers who might be rethinking their investments on a platform they were assured would have full-spectrum reach. Has the Securities and Exchange Commission begun a hard look into the investor statements of this formerly publicly traded company?

Another apparent deception targeted Twitter users who counted on the platform for breaking news or bubbling debates. They relied on Dorsey’s promise of neutrality. When former president Donald Trump's account was canceled, and information about Hunter Biden was tightly rationed, at least the decisions were public, and Twitter users could factor them into their perceptions of the world. Not so with secret protocols.

Finally, there are the folks — I raise my hand here — who defended Twitter to our conservative friends and followers. Over and over, I and others on the center-right knocked down talk of behind-the-scenes activists busy silencing dissidents from the approved party line. We were trying to contain what political scientist Richard Hofstadter famously called “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” But the folks paranoid about Twitter have been proved right, and those of us who dismissed their concerns: wrong, wrong, wrong. Try getting anyone on the right to believe assurances of good faith from Big Tech again.

The most damaging result of this scandal will be the further erosion of faith in elections in the social media era. The Twitter Files license an endless series of counterfactuals that cannot be proven or disproven. “If Twitter hadn’t tipped the scales, then [fill in the blank] wouldn’t have happened.” Once again, conservatives have been told to trust a public square that turns out to be rigged against them. Each time it happens, more damage is done. “Russia, Russia, Russia” is going to be supplemented by “Twitter, Twitter, Twitter.”
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This struck me as odd:

But don’t let the attacks stop you from considering the reporting. Imagine the hours you would invest in preparing a lecture, a sermon or simply an advertisement if you were told it might be heard by 1,000, 10,000 or 100,000 people. Only after you have finished do you discover that your time has been wasted and you can never get it back, because your message was blocked or filtered.​

What is this lecture/sermon/advertisement that someone spent hours working on that ended up being wasted effort due to censorship by Twitter? A tweet takes 10 seconds to compose, doesn't it?

The response on Twitter's end is that they didn't have a policy to target conservatives, specifically. There are plenty of conservative viewpoints on Twitter. Very easily found, on every issue one can think of. Their policy was to limit violations of their policies, but the people in charge of doing that had a left-leaning implicit bias. So, non-compliant (or borderline non-compliant) conservative viewpoints were probably disproportionately affected. This might be a scandalous revelation for some, but I think the majority of people recognized that this was likely what was happening.

 

I don't even think it's implicit bias. The C-suites at Twitter probably know what type of content is more brand safe and hire organizations and people that reflect that market.

 

"The problem should be understood as gov-tech censorship."

https://www.wsj.com/articles/is-soc...speech-11670934266?mod=hp_opin_pos_2#cxrecs_s

Is Social-Media Censorship a Crime?
If tech execs cooperated with government officials, it might be a conspiracy against civil rights.
By Philip Hamburger
Dec. 13, 2022 12:24 pm ET

Amid growing revelations about government involvement in social-media censorship, it’s no longer enough to talk simply about tech censorship. The problem should be understood as gov-tech censorship. The Biden White House has threatened tech companies and federal agencies have pressed them to censor disfavored opinions and users. So it’s time to ask about accountability.

Will there be legal consequences for government officials, for the companies, or for their personnel who cooperate in the gov-tech censorship of dissent on Covid-19, election irregularities or other matters? Cooperation between government officials and private parties to suppress speech could be considered a criminal conspiracy to violate civil rights. The current administration won’t entertain such a theory, but a future one might.

Section 241 of Title 18 of the U.S. Code provides: “If two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person . . . in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or because of his having so exercised the same, . . . they shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.”

This post-Civil War statute responded to the depredations of the Ku Klux Klan and similar private organizations. Then as now, government officers sometimes relied on private allies to accomplish what they couldn’t—sometimes violently, sometimes more subtly. Whether for government officers or cooperating private parties, Section 241 makes conspiracy to violate civil rights a crime.

Section 241 was long applied cautiously—for instance to protect against involuntary servitude and abuses of detained persons. But now it is being applied more expansively. Last year a federal grand jury indicted Douglass Mackey under Section 241 for allegedly interfering with the right to vote by coordinating with four unindicted co-conspirators to distribute memes claiming that voters could cast ballots for Hillary Clinton via text message or hashtag. (Mr. Mackey protests that his memes were satire and thus constitutionally protected speech.)

Because the First Amendment doesn’t bar private parties from independently suppressing speech, Section 241 would apply to tech censorship only if government officers, acting as part of a conspiracy, have violated the Constitution. Doctrine on Section 241 requires this underlying constitutional violation to be clear. But clarity isn’t elusive. The type of suppression most clearly barred by the First Amendment was the 17th-century English censorship imposed partly through cooperative private entities—universities and the Stationers’ Company, the printers trade guild.

Government remains bound by the First Amendment even when it works through private cutouts. There would be no purpose to a Bill of Rights if government could evade it by using private entities to do its dirty work. As the Supreme Court put it in Frost & Frost Trucking Co. v. Railroad Commission (1926), “It is inconceivable that guaranties embedded in the Constitution of the United States may thus be manipulated out of existence.”

The First Amendment’s text confirms the unconstitutionality of such workarounds. Any “prohibiting” of the free exercise of religion violates the amendment. In contrast, a mere “abridging” of the freedom of speech is unconstitutional. The government thus violates the latter merely by abridging or reducing it.

Little coercion or even economic pressure is necessary for a free-exercise violation. But free-speech violations, at least according to the text, don’t need even a gentle prohibition.

The history, logic and text underscore the unconstitutionality of returning to 17th-century-style censorship through private cooperation. The violation is all the clearer because tech cooperation often occurs in the shadow of explicit or hinted government threats—say, to tighten tech’s regulatory framework.

The other main issue in prosecutions under Section 241 is specific intent. But most of the tech companies seem to have the specific intent to work with the government in suppressing speech. A prosecutor wouldn’t have to show that private participants self-consciously understood the unconstitutionality of what the government was doing. Yet it would be relevant that some private participants recognized they were helping the government accomplish what in the government might be an unconstitutional act. As Renee De Resta of the Stanford Internet Observatory acknowledged on video, private assistance was necessary because there were “very real First Amendment questions” about what the government could do by itself. The observatory is part of a consortium, the Election Integrity Partnership, that developed government expectations of censorship into specific requests.

None of this is to predict what courts will do with criminal charges under Section 241. Nor is it to say that the next administration would or should bring conspiracy prosecutions. That will depend on the administration and the particulars of each case. But at least some those involved in the censorship—whether in government or the private sector—may eventually face sobering legal issues.

Such accountability is constitutionally desirable—not for reasons of retribution but because without accountability, the censorship will persist. The platforms probably will reassure their directors, officers and censorship review-board members that there’s little to worry about. That may turn out to be correct. Section 241 is sufficiently broad that prosecutors should hesitate to pursue it in marginal cases.

But there’s nothing marginal about the most massive system of censorship in the nation’s history. If the gov-tech partnership to suppress speech isn’t a conspiracy to interfere in the enjoyment of the freedom of speech, what is?

Government officials have little excuse. And after this fall’s revelations—ranging from the portal for Homeland Security censorship requests to the FBI’s role in suppressing information about the Hunter Biden laptop—company employees can no longer plead ignorance about government involvement. As for the companies, they have been saying the censorship is their editorial choice—so can they now avoid the problem by saying they buckled under threat?

The companies and individuals involved in the censorship need to decide where they stand. Perhaps it is time for them to distance themselves from the censorship. Are they comfortable with a conspiracy to violate civil rights? Even if that doesn’t bother them, are they willing to risk prosecution? They may assume, with some justification, that the Justice Department will hesitate to prosecute, even in a future administration. But would you bet the farm on that?

Mr. Hamburger teaches at Columbia Law School and is CEO of the New Civil Liberties Alliance.

Appeared in the December 14, 2022, print edition as 'Is Social-Media Censorship a Crime?'.


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https://www.getrevue.co/profile/jackjack/issues/a-native-internet-protocol-for-social-media-1503112

 

Slowly but surely the TSLA are turning on him.

 

Very good read.

 

Jack strikes me as a pretty good guy.

 

Elon following in Trump's footsteps in every way.

https://www.axios.com/2022/12/14/twitter-elon-musk-paying-bills-rent

Elon Musk's Twitter isn't paying its bills

Twitter has stopped paying the rent on some of its office leases and hasn't paid numerous other vendors since Elon Musk acquired the company in late October, Axios has learned from multiple sources.

Why it matters: One of the world's richest men isn't honoring financial obligations made to those with far fewer resources.

What to know: Twitter had offices all over the world before Musk acquired it, and many of them remain in use. But it leases the space, rather than owns it.

• Since Musk took over, the monthly bills haven't been getting paid.

Axios has obtained emails between Twitter employees and several frustrated landlords, who could be best described as getting the run-around.

• In some cases, the landlords offered lease termination deals whereby Twitter wouldn't owe the full amount, but were rebuffed.

One major issue seems to be that many of the landlords' contacts at Twitter have either been fired or quit, leaving behind junior staffers who are trying to catch up.

• But the delinquency is so widespread that some believe it's de facto policy under Musk, as suggested in a New York Times report about how the company's new owner is seeking to cut costs.

What they're saying: Bill Reynolds, a Colorado landlord who leased Twitter around 40,000 square feet in Boulder, tells Axios: "If you don't pay, you don't stay. They aren't paying, so they aren't staying."

• Another source who claims Twitter owes them hundreds of thousands of dollars notes that there is a human cost to these business disputes: "They owe me the money, but then those dollars would go out to nearly 25 other people."
• Twitter no longer has a communications team or other spokespeople for Axios to contact for comment.

 

hit piece, already posted

 

not finding coverage of this anywhere else. so NY POST HATERS GO HOME

https://nypost.com/2022/12/14/my-fault-alone-jack-dorsey-takes-blame-for-twitter-failures/

‘My fault alone’: Jack Dorsey takes ‘blame’ for scandals revealed in ‘Twitter Files’
By Lee Brown
December 14, 2022 7:59am

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has taken full responsibility for the social media platform’s many failings — admitting he “completely gave up” pushing back against powerful activists in the company.

The site’s former CEO took full “blame” in a blog giving his “take” on the “Twitter Files,” which have exposed a series of extraordinary behind-the-scenes maneuvers buckling to political pressure, starting with censoring The Post’s exclusive exposes on Hunter Biden’s laptop.

He now believes that Twitter should have stuck to three core principles, including keeping the company out of controlling posts and algorithms spreading them — and being “resilient to corporate and government control.”

“The Twitter when I led it and the Twitter of today do not meet any of these principles,” Dorsey admitted.

“This is my fault alone, as I completely gave up pushing for them when an activist entered our stock in 2020,” he wrote.

“I planned my exit at that moment knowing I was no longer right for the company,” he wrote of hisresignation just over a year ago.

Dorsey did not identify the activist, but the timing matches when investor Paul Singer’s Elliott Management took a $1 billion stake and started moves to oust him as CEO.

In his confessional — which he admitted was too long to share in full on the platform he founded — Dorsey decried the “dangerous” attacks on his “former colleagues.”

“If you want to blame, direct it at me and my actions, or lack thereof,” he wrote, saying he is now “supportive of” the site “needing a fresh reset.”

He said his “biggest mistake” was helping to build tools for Twitter to “manage the public conversation” rather than “tools for the people using Twitter to easily manage it for themselves.”

“This burdened the company with too much power, and opened us to significant outside pressure,” he conceded.

“I generally think companies have become far too powerful, and that became completely clear to me with our suspension of [then-President Donald] Trump’s account” in January last year, he said.

That suspension — only recently overturned by new owner Elon Musk — was “the wrong thing for the internet and society.”

Still, he put it down to “mistakes” being made, still claiming that he believes “there was no ill intent or hidden agendas” in blocking the president.

“Again, I own all of this and our actions, and all I can do is work to make it right,” he wrote.

Now, Dorsey is a “strong believer that any content produced by someone for the internet should be permanent until the original author chooses to delete it.”

“Content takedowns and suspensions should not be possible,” he wrote.

He also addressed “moderation” on the site after the “Twitter Files” revealed how conservative voices were shadow-banned on the site.

“A ‘follow’ action should always deliver every bit of content from the corresponding account, and the algorithms should be able to comb through everything else through a relevance lens that an individual determines,” he wrote, rather than the old system, where staffers were able to manipulate such mechanisms.

Dorsey also made clear that he not only supports the release of the scandalous “Twitter Files” — he wishes Musk would go further and release all the documents rather than just journalists’ takes on them.

“I wish they were released WikiLeaks-style, with many more eyes and interpretations to consider,” he said, stressing that despite all the scandals, “there’s nothing to hide … only a lot to learn from.”

Dorsey has repeatedly backed Musk’s free-speech vision for the site, while warning against the potential woes of one person having such power at the helm.

Musk has likewise spoken warmly of his new company’s founder, insisting recently that “Jack has a pure heart.”

Despite his own attacks, Dorsey remained optimistic that the site could improve and learn from his mistakes.

“I do still wish for Twitter, and every company, to become uncomfortably transparent in all their actions, and I wish I forced more of that years ago,” he wrote.

“I do believe absolute transparency builds trust.”
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