My sides
Please
If this dude had any experience running an online site he would know how many stolen credit cards are out there.
X is a fly-coated chum bucket.
Hey now…that’s really rude! If fly-coated chum buckets could read they would be very very upset!
Was just about to say this.
You know how easy it is these days to get credit card dumps? Legally, I don’t know the exact answer, but…
Or PayPal accounts.
This seems like further confirmation of that theory that I saw posted on here that the Saudi oil barons funded Elon’s purchase of Twitter for the sole purpose of destroying it. They want to silence online discussions of climate change and other left wing topics.
Combined with Reddit being owned by Tencent, Facebook being eternally evil, and TikTok being unconducive to any form of coherent dialogue, there are not many places for left wing discourse on the internet anymore.
I’ve had the same theory for a while. They saw the Arab Spring and other populist movements. With their vast oil wealth, tanking Twitter was a small price to pay to re-fracture descent and silence the left. The concentration of wealth has given insane power to wealthy who skew overwhelmingly on the side of themselves. The rise of the right is a direct result of billionaires funding across numerous avenues. The right aligns best with their self interest. They played the long game because they only have to pay people and let them do it for them. Regular folks have to stay engaged in the battle after working to support themselves. Billionaires are the matastasized cancer of capitalism.
The purchase itself was a leveraged buyout, they didn’t pay the entire $44bn as Twitter took out a loan to cover $13bn. Like all leveraged buyouts (eg Toys R Us) the purchase itself is meant to kill the business. Even before Musk started screwing the revenue there was little hope Twitter could pay the interest, let along the principle. Now, Twitter is worth less than the debt, by some estimates.
Twitter is really big there. It’s basically the most used social media by a vast majority compared to other ones. It’s way more plausible that some ‘too much rich to know what to do with all the money’ Saudi princes decided something like a few percent of their wealth to own the biggest social media on their country for bragging rights and admin privilege to be worth it. Plus, they probably thought Twitter was too big to fail and die, They didn’t expect Elon would fuck it up so bad. I don’t think anybody expected Elon to fuck it up so bad.
Yeah that’s possible too. It’s all speculation until the Netflix documentary comes out years later lol
This seems like further confirmation of that theory that I saw posted on here that the Saudi oil barons funded Elon’s purchase of Twitter for the sole purpose of destroying it.
Then why did Twitter needed to sue him to get him to abide by the deal? Musk often promotes stuff in a pump and dump scheme. One of the many examples is when he briefly promoted bitcoin. He made loads of money off that.
I’m guessing he thought he could make a lot of money quickly in some way. But then interest rates rose quickly and whatever he was planning fell through.
It’s possible it was a initially pump and dump that turned into a Saudi funded venture. He’s a useful idiot from the Arabs’ perspective.
Conservatives are desperately trying to force TikTok to sell because even though its format is garbage, it’s gathered a large leftwing userbase
Holy shit you might be right
This seems like further confirmation of that theory that I saw posted on here that the Saudi oil barons funded Elon’s purchase of Twitter for the sole purpose of destroying it.
Then why does it still exist? Musk took Twitter private, they could’ve just pulled the plug if they wanted to.
That terse action would have made mastodon flourish. It had to be gradual.
Reddit’s owned by tencent now? When did this happen?
My bad, Reddit is still owned by an American company but Tencent has a large stake in it since 2019, at least enough to influence the platform into complying with pro-CCP censorship and etc
Why would they spend billions for this when they could (and still can) just block the website? It’s not like you can sue the King in Saudi Arabia (lest you think you have too many heads)
deleted by creator
WHY THE FUCK IS ANYONE ON TWITTER ANYMORE.
It has a “chicken or egg” problem. There are better alternatives, except many don’t use them because their userbase is still on Xitter, and said userbase don’t want to move away from Xitter because their faves are still there. I deleted it from my phone, but I keep my account in case I need to look up something there, or to not get my identity stolen and exploited.
Don’t discount the FOMO factor as well. It’s what kept me on Reddit.
twitter has fomo?
Absolutely. Journalists post the latest news. Stuff they don’t report on trends. Maybe you’ll miss something big if you leave Twitter! That’s the thinking anyway.
I went to check it out yesterday and I think I actually got dumber in 5 minutes I spent there.
So you’ll be returning there tomorrow?
lol I actually never liked Twitter even when I was an early adopter but I’m only interested in it as a professional case study. I do like Mastodon a lot though and so I get the appeal of Twitter done right!
Find any good witch hunts? We cancelling Markiplier because he totally blinked a desire to oppress women and minorities in morse code? That sounds like Twitter
Wrong year for that propaganda
Elon’s Twitter has no interest in canceling anyone for the “oppression of women”, whether it’s true or not
Not really propaganda when it’s STILL a common problem for the internet to go on witch hunts against people for “Grooming” and other such thigns based on the flimsiest of evidence, sometimes continuing to do so even after the person was proven innocent.
Porn
There are so, so, so many other platforms for that, and many are far better
And I agree I use mastodon, e621, pornhub, etc.
But when I want to see more of that one particular content creator that is only on Twitter, then I’ll utilize Twitter, it’s pretty simple.
Absolutely. I’ll poke my head in there when there’s someone on insta who I’m curious to see if they get naked on Twitter. And that’s 100% of my interaction.
For some (few) users, it’s required for work. The rest are addicts or Musk fans.
Musky: Hmm, how else can i drive away actual human users?
Pretty much. 1usd per bot is a small price for maintaining a bot farm.
Or do they plan on banning accounts that use the same billing info? If CNN or BBC pay for their employees accounts, would they get banned?
You have to pay him so that you can do the work of creating content for his platform? No thanks
Anyone who still uses Twitter/X is an actual fucking moron.
True to a degee, but too many international journalists still depend on that plattform. Makes it hard to ditch it completly, until finally one of the alternatives really pick up.
Mastodon is picking up steam - it’s only a matter of time
Let’s hope. But they have to change the way that likes are shown. It always feels lonely over there.
International journalists should know better than to use a centralized platform to share information.
Never used it. Never plan to do so.
Very aggressive, I use Twitter for porn, I don’t know how that’s any more moronic than using any other platform that hosts porn.
Who is going to pay to post on twitter? Not only has he destroyed what was there but he’s stopping any route for growth with new users. Most people won’t bother.
He really has managed to destroy that company with his knee jerk decisions.
People with “hot link in bio” and all that jazz
I hate that twitter has the seo that it does. I always accidentally click on a link to see the “log in or get fucked” screen.
Its staying power is really annoying TBH.
I guess it could be worse (AKA everyone just going to Discord instead).
I stole this line from someone else, but its great.
Elon Musk has invented fee speech, not free speech.
It’s a clever line, but Musk hasn’t invented a single goddamn thing in his life.
Hey that’s not fair - he invents his own narrative about reality all the time.
Yeah, pay to post was Something Awful founder lowtax’s idea.
This is not going to stop bots.
here’s hoping it stops site growth
Most people don’t get out of bed for a dollar so no, it won’t outside the usual 10-30% pareto ratio, which is probably already getting impacted by Xitter being run into the ground.
This will absolutely stop by far the most bots, because hostile governments like Russia and China use THOUSANDS of bots, having to pay $1 extra to maintain each bot, will be prohibitively expensive for those governments. Remember this can mean THOUSANDS in extra cost for those programs. No way either Russia or China will be able to afford that. So my guess is this will be 99.99% effective at preventing bots. The problem for Musk that he may not have foreseen is, the same will be true for MAGA racist anti LGBT propaganda bots. So now Twitter will go back to be dominated by liberals and socialists. Making it necessary for Musk to pay for another platform all over again, if he wants to have a free space to blurt his idiocy.
/s
Isn’t that the started intent? Like adding a small roadblock or captcha.
I’m not saying I agree but the simple logic should work. It’ll likely reduce the user base and still let bits in with cash to burn.
In theory, maybe. In practice, the bots might just pay and post anyway. If they can recoup those costs in the scam, it costs them basically nothing.
So bots pay to continue what they’re doing, but Musky now gets money for it?
Ray Charles could see what’s going on here.
I work in bot protection and it’s a sound idea but doesn’t really work in practice. As long as there’s more than 1$ of value to be gained it’s worth it for the bot makers.
This also makes it so that botting is only accesible to select few actors that have the required resources i.e. russian troll farms or large bot networks from china, in turn this increases their value. This is very good for them.
Reality is that the only way to stop bots is to constantly change up the detection system. This is called a “cat and mouse” sort of problem and it really is the only way to do it. The attacker always has to catch up and it can be trivial that takes them couple of hours to do but it also reveals behavior patterns for marking bot accounts. This actually works really well in practice but requires a lot of dev resources and many companies low-key like bots which is another thread entirely.
As long as there’s more than 1$ of value to be gained it’s worth it for the bot makers.
That’s what I was coming in here to suggest, so I’m glad someone in the field was able to back that idea up. I think it’s unlikely many bots that aren’t made for fun are being put on Twitter unless they are generating a lot more than $1 for whoever is putting them up.
I’ll ask anyway. Why do companies like bots?
As Kungen already answered - stats! You can sell bot traffic as real traffic which inflates your numbers.
For stuff like social media, bots increase engagement too. Many new products and networks actually generate a lot of fake content to attract organic growth. I.e. if bot likes your comment you’re likely to engage more. If it likes your product review you’re likely to review more stuff etc.
Tracking bots can also generate reverse analytics. For example if you know that your competitors are scraping fishing equipment data from your store it could mean they’re working on a competing fishing related product.
Lastly, you can feed fake data to bots to manipulate competitors. This is somewhat illegal (no real legal precedent yet afaik though its a clear intent to harm other businesses) but it can really powerful in the wrong hands.
Edit: worth nothing that a lot of bot traffic is good. Sometimes you want to be scraped as it is a form of organic engagement and increases the value of your data and often backlinks growth (e.g. indexers like Google etc)
More eyeballs.
Enough updoots or retweets and other algos pick up on it. Some random twitter discussion ends up on BuzzFeed, YTers start making influencer vids, and Reddit / Lemmy repost bots.
Do this enough and it’ll gain traction. Now everyone is talking about your stupid fuckin Stanley mug, corporate rumor,or political talking point.
And this can be automated end to end, 24/7, by market and keyword, will real time feedback as to how well it’s doing via upvotes, shares, likes, or even data mining emails and convos via Gmail or WhatsApp.
Bot protection? Call me ignorant but what exactly do you do?
develop systems that can identify unwanted users like bots, spammers, people who abuse the product and break ToS etc. Most bad actors are very dumb but fighting this at scale is actually very interesting. Also most bots (like 90%) are just scrapers (data collectors) especially when it comes to Twitter which has absurd API pricings but cost almost nothing to scrape lol
Oh my god I’m a fuckin idiot. Granted, I’ve had a couple drinks tonight but I thought you were protecting bots… not protecting against them lol
Protect the bots!!!
yeah sorry “protection against bots” just doesn’t roll of the tongue as easily lol
people who abuse the product and break TOS
You’re welcome.
Hey man it gets me employed and I even get to work on foss on work hours sometimes. Thanks! :)
This also makes it so that botting is only accesible to select few actors that have the required resources i.e. russian troll farms or large bot networks from china, in turn this increases their value. This is very good for them.
I’d bet that is explicitly part of the funding model. Pay to influence consensus, cuz this is a publicly traded stock and numbers need to go up, regardless of who is paying.
Twitter is private. Musk took it private when he bought it.
Yes only Russia and China do bad things with technology!
Never had to deal with attacks originating from US or Europe so thats kinda true actually :)
Go to r/worldnews and r/europe on reddit
The amount of bots is….
Free speech, now only $9.99 per month
Upgrade your free speech to premium speech now for only $17.99
You don’t know what free speech means.
This is like claiming Blizzard is infringing on your free speech because they banned you from world of Warcraft for saying racist shit.
Better yet. This is like claiming blizzard is infringing on your freedom of speech because they deactivated your account as a result of you not paying your subscription.
Do better.
Corporations should be allowed to own vital services so they can ban people from them at will. This is a good thing somehow. I love monopolies that suppress activists and organizers because it would only be bad if the government is doing it.
That’s the thing about private property and private services. They can terminate your involvement at will for any reason. It’s in the user agreement you consent to when you sign up.
You’re not entitled to these services. They aren’t your god given right or any other bullshit you’re imagining.
Comparing this to freedom of speech is laughable.
That’s not what free speech is, and there never has been free speech on Twitter, and that’s mostly a good thing. Jesus.
That’s not what free speech is
Well yeah, obviously. It’s just wordplay based on the two common definitions of free.
Everybody knows what free speech means. It’s just a bit of wordplay that you’ve taken very literally.
Everybody knows what free speech means.
i really dont think so.
free speech is a pretty complicated thing and i feel like many people dont have a solid grasp on it. i think a good number of people think they know what free speech means because they know “it only applies to what the government can do to you”, but there’s quite a bit more to it than that. like how to deal with hate speech, threats, misinformation, disinformation, etc.
and this is directly related to the problems twitter is facing: elon musk started out by saying hes a “free speech absolutist”, but twitter has been slowly rediscovering why “free speech absolutism” doesnt work. and you can see those discoveries in real time with twitter reintroducing moderation policies (among other things)
Ok then. People know enough about what it means to know it doesn’t refer to not having to pay a fee to open your mouth.
It’s very clear that the headline is a little wordplay joke. It doesn’t literally convey that the journalist thought free speech means you don’t have to pay to make a twitter post. You’re taking it way too literally.
elon musk started out by saying hes a “free speech absolutist”, but twitter has been slowly rediscovering why “free speech absolutism” doesnt work.
I’m in agreement that it doesn’t work.
But it should also be called to attention that Musk never tried free speech absolutism on his platform (not that I think he actually should). He has been willing to bend over backwards in assisting dictatorships in censoring content, and he culled a lot of left-leaning and anti-Musk accounts/comments on day one. It’s always been a lie to pander to the freeze peach crowd.
Elon Musk said free speech like once and then immediately threw a bunch of journalists off the site. And apparently every news article for the rest of my life is going to be about how he was hypocritical instead of whether he wants power or influence or has power and influence or the meaning of giving him those things.
Don’t trust every industrialist you meet even if they invested in one company where competent people make cool space ships. He’s clearly on Ket and some uppers. Grimes divorced him and her music isn’t even good. He’s not that complicated.
Elon and his sycophants have been the idiots talking about free speech on Twitter. It’s perfectly fine to use that talking point as criticism. If he’s not interested in free speech then what was he doing allowing banned Nazi accounts back on?
Lol I’m not paying shit, have fun everybody else. X is garbage
When will people stop supporting this clown?
Remember when some people were like “well, I don’t support him, but I’ve had this Twitter account forever, so I’m not leaving.” This is what happens. Things just get worse until you gain plausible deniability for continuing to support the bullshit.
Perhaps when his name/companies will stop being on the headlines every single day multiple times. Unless it’s something really big that could actually harm his reputation people should restrain from posting and upvoting news about him. This article is about shit that hasn’t happened yet, this guy is tricking you all around.
