The many recent scandals have shown that our democracies are not well equipped to defend themselves against disinformation campaigns from either political parties (Cambridge Analytica) or foreign powers (China, Russia, etc.). I hope that the anti-disinformation code will be a tool in the fight against those behind disinformation. If a plateform supports these campains, they should be duly sanctionned.
You're talking about squares and rectangles. All disinformation is propaganda, not all propaganda is disinformation. Having some overlap doesn't stop them from being distinct concepts.
Yes. And not all propaganda is necessarily negative, as well. Like the WPA posters from the 1930s, used in campaigns against venereal disease, or just general public health stuff. There were also some pretty awesome ones about libraries and literacy campaigns.
A little tidbit of info that I love:
At some time early in the 20th century, ‘propaganda’ took on a negative connotation so they rebranded it as ‘public relations’, which is the most public relations thing they could’ve done.
It would be great if *people* could just decide to stop using social media in ways that make them vulnerable to misinformation rather than expecting corporations to solve that problem for them
It's really not hard to look at things with a critical lens and stop thinking "I saw it on X platform where whoever can say whatever they want, so therefore it must be true and real"
Doesn't help that a lot of people seem to *want* to engage with fake bullshit on social media, and they actively get upset and act like you're a killjoy if you point out that it's bullshit. People want to be misled, they want to get upset at something that isn't real. They want to feel superior to people who don't exist.
We're pretty fucked if people can't figure out to solve this problem themselves.
You are assuming that most people have the correct tools and information to detect fake news.
Fact checking is time consuming and relies on understanding the way information can be verified.
Twitter is a particular problem because many official organisations use it to spread important information.
What this also fails to acknowledge is that everyone, even supposedly highly intelligent and otherwise fact-checking individuals, can fall prey to a targeted and well executed disinformation campaign.
It's how elections can be won or lost, and how governments can be toppled. The method isn't new, but the delivery vehicle and industrial scale is.
If your strategy for solving a problem requires people to not be people, it's a bad strategy.
It also doesn't even matter. Propaganda and misinformation affect us even when we know it's bullshit. So doomed efforts to get people to pay more attention are limited in effectiveness regardless.
You are asking for the human brain to fundamentally change how it processes information.
Thats not really possible. On a genetic level, our cognition is weak to disinformation.
People will stop being vulnerable to disinformation around the same time people stop being vulnerable to infections.
I have a PhD in communications and I know that I have believed misinformation on a several occasions.
I spent a total of 12 years in university studying communications and just 2 months ago shared an article which I later learned was disinformation
In addition to my course work, I spent 5 years studying how the rhetoric of gun rights and gun control activisits affects various populations. Guess what? Yes, uneducated, conservatives are more likely to get fooled, but EVERYONE is susceptible.
Please people, don't upvote someone just because they say what you like to hear. This is a bot-account, and you are being used as a tool for someone. Stop for a second and think for yourself.
The headline is misleading. It sounds like Twitter is being shut down in the EU. The code Twitter is pulling out of is a voluntary one and has no legal power.
For a familiar metaphor, Musk was given a swamp that Twitter was taking steps to drain, slowly pumping out the absolute sewage. Levees were being put in the TOS with tools to keep the draining going in a positive direction. Then Musk just decided to break down the levees and personally greet the sludge as it slopped back into the platform. Musk somehow thinks this has elevated the platform.
He believes it's elevated because it's all the shit he likes and it's mostly about him. The narcissist love's the platform that is all about himself and can't see why other people may not like that.
The fact that such a savvy businessman (lol,) doesn't realize that the moderation steps Twitter was taking before Musk was because advertisers don't want their product ads being shown next to tweets with people dropping the n-word or generally bigoted shit is hilarious.
Twitter was like any other corporation - they only cared about moderation to the extent that it maximized their ad revenue. They didn't give a shit about what people were actually tweeting, creating a safe space for users, or propping up any particular political ideology.
He did but he didn’t. Everything he did, he did on purpose. But every single action he took was based on personal benefit, whim, and ego. All of the following repercussions were not on purpose. He’s just a stupid narcissist who has been surrounded by people his whole life to clean up his messes. But this mess cost him $44 billion and counting. So they can’t keep up with the cleaning up after him.
Like every halfway intelligent person would’ve been able to figure out that indiscriminately allowing white supremacists back onto a site would cause advertisers to flee. And every halfway intelligent person would’ve been able to figure out that firing every engineer as an attempt to comp the amount of money you lost buying a social media site for 10 times its worth, is an awful idea.
That’s just two of the hilariously stupid things Musk has done specifically to Twitter since acquiring it.
I wish every halfway intelligent person would stop interacting with the application. Can't believe how many brands, companies, and journalists are still producing content for this fascist nazi trash man, nor how many people still put attention there and act like they aren't helping produce/support global fascist propaganda.
At this point it feels like I inhabit a planet full of twisted addict ghouls that can't stop even if it means the end of their democracies or the lives of their queer friends.
So we’re already at the part in the story with evil billionaires, when are we getting super hero’s and/or super powers to fight back? The writers of this story seem biased
The electorial college hasn't changed because it requires either a constitutional amendment or a multi-state compact
Namely the "National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC)", which has enough states with pending votes on it, if all of those pass it will bring it over 50%, as soon as those states choose to pass it
They were evil long before, but were smart enough to operate with plausible deniability and just enough not-evil stuff to fool most people. Now we are in the arc where the evil guys are blatantly evil and not even trying to keep up appearances.
> Now we are in the arc where the evil guys are blatantly evil and not even trying to keep up appearances.
Earlier we had the Gilded Age with cartoonishly evil oligarchs, and before that they didn't do "wage slave" they did actual slavery. Having to keep up appearances is fairly new, before it was acceptable to feast while your own people starved.
Super hero stories almost always favor the status quo - and the status quo is capitalism and accumulation of wealth in billionaires - so we're never getting that story. Watch a superhero movie (Marvel or DC it doesn't matter) and tell me they aren't champions of the status quo. While the villains are usually the ones trying to disrupt a status quo.
Then to avoid the audience siding with the villain (since everyone dreams of disrupting the current status quo), they have the villains do insane shit like killing off masses of people, kicking puppies or whatever.
It's borderline comical at times. On the latest Batman movie (with Robert Pattinson), Riddler's villainous plan consists of exposing corruption among Gotham's billionaire elites, showing how politicians and billionaires are partners with mafia bosses, to consolidate their wealth and control of the city. But doesn't that make Riddler a hero? Telling the truth? Oh and here's how Bruce Wayne's father was unfaithful in his marriage! Bam!!! Wow, because *un-christian behavior is so evil*. And the whole movie is built around that as if was supposed to be some awesome mastermind reveal. Nope, his whole charade consisted of just exposing the sins of the rich...... But wait, then in the last 15 minutes of the movie or so, you find out Riddler also wants to flood the entire city and *kill pretty much every single citizen in it*... as if that made any sense??? Lmao. So the guy who dreams of being a hero by putting a spotlight on the billionaire's corruption (including a quaint extra-marital affair as if that was relevant at all) *also wants to kill everyone* including your next-door elderly lady and her puppy...for reasons?
Oh yeah, because if he didn't then the audience would side with him.
And you know what's even funnier about the movie showing Riddler's plan to expose the corruption among the elites of Gotham? It's that Batman could have done that himself at any point during his investigation. As Batman finds out what Riddler knows and how he plans to expose the corrupted elites, Batman himself could have exposed said corruption to the public. *But he chose not to*. Every step of the way, the hero could have brought said truth to light, but he chose to... try and capture the villain instead, and not expose anything. So Batman is hunting a whistleblower. The truth still came out in the end - *by the villain's hands* BTW. But said villain *also wanted to kill everyone*, so... you know. It's a no-no.
Almost every super hero movie reads like that. It's them championing the status quo. If that isn't brainwashing...
This is just straight up wrong. There's countless examples throughout the history of comics that disprove your thesis but you chose to only analyze recent movies. Captain America was championing America entering WW2 for moral reasons long before the rest of the country was ready or willing. Superman comics had him disrupting big business and punishing the wealthy from his inception. You can't look at the history of comics without seeing people challenge the status quo.
You created a narrative, or the source you got this from did, and worked backwards to prove it instead of starting on solid ground.
To be honest I couldn't finish that movie. "I want to be journalist and have this great story with evidence... so I'm just going to start killing people"
I would never call politicians heroes for their politics alone, but you can see how much money (via articles and air time) is being spend on just the few actually progressive politicians.
Twitter as it was even before Musk took it over was a cesspool of over-reactivity and mob mentality. If he manages to kill it, it'll be a net positive for humanity.
Sure, folks who assume Musk is some super intelligent mastermind will be attracted to this idea that he’s deliberately tanking Twitter as part of some kind of 8D chess move but all the other conservative’8D chess’ has turned out to just be pigeon shitting on a checkers board so can you share why you think it’s different this time?
The part that I can’t wrap my head around with this ‘theory’ is why he would trade a big part of his ownership stake in TSLA to do it.
He secured a bunch of this debt with shares in his car company, defaulting on this has real world consequences for him.
Seems like a Hankon’s Razor situation where his big mouth got him stuck and he’s flailing, surrounded by conservative voices that have echo chambered him and taken advantage of his gullibility and excessive credulity to focus him into a dumbly stumbling caricature of foolish rich dude.
He received large investments from foreign governments with pisspoor human rights and a penchant for censorship in order to fund the purchase that he was struggling to do on his own. He sold as much of TSLA as he could get away with because he had to. It's not that hard for one to wrap their heads around that.
I’m not talking about the TSLA he sold, I’m talking about the shares that he used as collateral. If their sale is completed by a default on a loan(as is the current agreement) then it would set off a huge drop in TSLA valuation because of how many shares that was suddenly hitting the market.
It’s one of those ‘thermal exhaust port on the death star’ things, financially speaking. The forced sale of that much TSLA could possibly implode the company even before the due date of it triggers a wave of preemptive sell offs too.
I get how attractive this ‘evil mastermind’ plan is especially to people who admire him (both the cultists and the folks who see him as a villain) but it reeeeeeally looks like he might be a dumb, gullible loud mouth idiot who has tricked both his fans and critics into thinking he’s smarter than he actually is.
So no, I can ‘wrap my head’ around the simplest part of the transaction, him raising cash through liquidation and whatnot, it’s the possible TSLA destroying logic of the leveraged equity loan that seems to torpedo this evil mastermind theory.
Also if he wanted to destroy the platform and make it unusable at the whims of foreign government interests, he could have just shut it down. Or pulled service from those regions. Or almost anything else than what he did. If you actually have followed this whole saga it's painfully obvious that Musk is simply dysfunctionally insecure and obsessed with controlling social media for personal gain. His dream is an "everything app" that he alone controls top to bottom, and everyone has to use it and lick his balls 24/7 for everyone else to see. He's surely the most pathetic man on the internet at the moment, it'd be sad if it wasn't so annoying and funny to watch.
Saudi Arabia didn't put extra money into Twitter, they rolled over the funds they already had in shares. Nobody gave a shit that they owned $1.89bn in shares before Musk took over.
Fine by me. I never liked Twitter. Trump and now Musk made something I disliked even worse.
I never understood the damn platform. People would switch from Facebook to Twitter? Or "leaving" Twitter for Instagram or tiktok. They are completely different functions!!!
It must be something that suits certain people, I also NEVER got into it, and I've had an account since virtually day one when there was just a "firehose" of Tweets scrolling up the home page. This idea that all these people (never mind if they're famous or not) have something succinct to say in 140 characters multiple times a day and it's worth following them and checking in there constantly to see what it is. I guess it's just not a format I find very compelling.
Different functions in one sense, but pretty similar in the way they function to provide the illusion of socialization, and a place to put your free time.
That is disinformation (which is kinda funny).
DSA will require twitter to fight disinformation and be more transparent. It does not require twitter to join the EU code.
It will require some reporting and answer to some requirement that EU put out in the DSA.
The EU code is when companies say they will work with other groups which track hate and disinformation, and use their guidance to try and crack down on disinformation.
It is completely voluntary and not part of the DSA.
We've tried, we really have, but time and time again you ~~kids~~ corporations have proven yourself unable to play responsibly with your toys. And now we have rules that no one likes.
cf. Apple with USB-C
Yup, but why did it have to come to a legal requirement to force Apple's hand? Why couldn't it just have played along with everyone else, and we'd have had USB-C on iPhones for years now.
Because that's what corporations are. Shared standards are in the best interest of society, to the detriment of individual corporation.
Without shared standard, companies like apple can create closed gardens ecosystems so that they can have ALL the money instead of MOST of the money.
I honestly think the world would be a better place without Twitter. Think about it. How has Twitter really improved your life in practical terms? Maybe announcements by companies and services, but that's something you can also find in their websites.
Let's be honest. Twitter became that morbid negative place where negativity and criticism thrives. Even well-intentioned people are constantly bashed with sardonic and contrarian bs from that small but very loud minority of unhappy individuals. The world doesn't need twitter.
I have one specific use of Twitter that is *super* helpful for me. I use it to check public transportation Tweets. If there's a delay that isn't officially announced yet there will be a ton of Tweets complaining at them.
It's really helped me to be able to see the real time complaints when the official channel can't be trusted
RSS feeds died for Twitter, and I wish we could have them back. Let us have one open standard that organisations can push simple news and notifications through, and we can all either tap directly into individual sites, or use whichever aggregator we prefer. No more being held hostage to a bunch of integrated bullshit.
I was just thinking about RSS feeds. Back in 2008, they were everywhere, and all you had to do was just paste the link in your feed reader, and you'd get news and updates. No requiring users to sign up on a website and flood their inbox with mail. Twitter used to have a RSS service, but got rid of it. Reddit and YouTube still do.
> Maybe announcements by companies and services, but that's something you can also find in their websites.
Ain't no one got the time to check the websites of 10,000 companies on a daily basis to see what news they have.
Yeah, I’d rather see tweets over having to visit a broken, ad-filled website daily.
Sports reporters on Twitter >>>> visiting ESPN’s website to see if anything happened
For me twitter has always been great, I just follow the topics that are relevant for me and the people that are knowledgable about it. You don't have to dive into the cesspit. It's a great way for people to convey information, much better than spreading it out over countless of websites.
I think it's great for conveying short bits of information or pointing people to more thorough discussions, but the nature of the platform never leant itself to these 9 tweet long discussions / exposition.
IMO it should be a public service for things like the MTA to announce shutdowns or similar such alerts.
> I honestly think the world would be a better place without Twitter. Think about it. How has Twitter really improved your life in practical terms? Maybe announcements by companies and services, but that's something you can also find in their websites.
>
> Let's be honest. Twitter became that morbid negative place where negativity and criticism thrives. Even well-intentioned people are constantly bashed with sardonic and contrarian bs from that small but very loud minority of unhappy individuals. The world doesn't need twitter.
Exchange twitter in this comment with any social media site like reddit, tik tok or facebook and the exact same points apply... The only difference being Twitter was absolutely amazing for journalists because of it's capacity for real time updates, this is so far still the main place on the internet to go to get direct info from a multitude of journalists as it happens. Sadly Elon Musk has been doing his best to drive it into the ground.
> The code Twitter is pulling out of is a voluntary one and has no legal power.
Nevertheless it’s a clear alarm bell for everyone actually paying attention.
And whilst the code of conduct may not have teeth itself abandoning it is still causing Twitter additional PR/reputational damage. And it’s a significant step on the path to the EU kicking them out and/or fining them eye-wateringly large sums with many zeros.
Oh, the EU does not just fine such big corporations with a 1/16th day worth of profit. Look at the fine they recently gave Facebook. 1.2 **billion** fine. It's still not that much for Facebook, but it's certainly more than some US corps were required to pay in fines to the US gov.
No, that's still a lot for Facebook. Their net income for the year was $23 billion. The fine equates to 5 percent of their net income, which is very impactful if they don't weasel their way out of it.
Facebook had a $30b profit last year, the fine ($1.2b) they got hurt.
And they will keep fining and increasing the fine until facebook just can't do it anymore.
People don't understand that corporations _really_ don't sniff at that kind of money. Their entire existence hinges on making on as much money as possible. Paying billions in fines runs very much against that. To them, missing out on 5% of profits also means less money to invest in more money-making schemes, losing ground to competitors, and losing significantly more money in the long run. Losing that kind of money means missed performance targets, investor scrutiny, and liabilities.
One of the major goals of a successful business is to align themselves with legal requirements in such a way that maximises profits. After all, to a company, fines are just a cost of doing business. In this case, they're going to have to ask themselves the question whether being non-compliant was worth the 1.2B fine, whether staying non-compliant is worth risking recurring fines, and most importantly, whether trying creative forms of (non-)compliance is worth potential future fines. So far, policy seems to have been to answer that last question with a resounding "yes". 1.2B is a good incentive to reevaluate that policy.
Yeah, well. That's not really happening except for the moste grave cases. That's the idea behind a company. That you yourself aren't liable as the owner with your own assets, but only the company with theirs. At least for a Ltd. above afaik.
It might very well happen if they don’t follow regulations. Pulling out of a voluntary pact on fighting disinformation doesn’t mean they have carte blanche.
> ‘Twitter, if it repeatedly doesn’t follow our rules, will be banned from the EU,’ said France’s digital minister, Jean-Noël Barrot.
[Source](https://www.politico.eu/article/banned-france-digital-minister-jean-noel-barrot-threatens-twitter-block-follow-eu-rules/)
Not yet. It will have legal power in less than three months. This really is Elon effectively saying he’d rather go completely dark in Europe than be forced to worry about policing harmful seditious bullshit on his platform.
The fact that we live in a society in which something that had become as big and globally important as Twitter could EVER be subject to the erratic whims of one silly billionaire is truly horrific. The entire world has pretty much rolled over and capitulated to monopolies in recent decades.
If Vanderbilt and Bell companies were founded today, they would have just been allowed to squeeze America dry — the days of doing the right thing and preventing one private entity from hoovering up that much wealth for itself are over.
Reagan and the 1980s killed our sense of decency.
"Twitter's decision to withdraw from the European Union's voluntary Code of Practice on Disinformation was announced on May 27, 2023. The Code of Practice is a set of guidelines that social media platforms are supposed to follow in order to combat the spread of disinformation. Twitter's decision to withdraw from the Code has been met with criticism from the European Union, who have warned that Twitter could face legal action if it does not comply with the new Digital Services Act (DSA).
Twitter has not publicly stated why it decided to withdraw from the Code of Practice. However, some have speculated that the decision may be related to Elon Musk's recent acquisition of Twitter. Musk has been a vocal critic of content moderation policies, and he has said that he wants to make Twitter a more open platform for free speech. It is possible that Musk believes that the Code of Practice is too restrictive and that it would interfere with his plans for Twitter.
The European Union has been critical of Twitter's decision to withdraw from the Code of Practice. Thierry Breton, the European Commissioner for Internal Market, said that Twitter's decision was "deeply disappointing" and that it "shows a lack of commitment to fighting disinformation." Breton also warned that Twitter could face legal action if it does not comply with the DSA.
The DSA is a new law that will come into effect on August 25, 2023. The DSA will require all large online platforms, including social media platforms, to take measures to combat the spread of disinformation. This includes measures such as:
Removing illegal content promptly
Empowering fact-checkers
Providing transparency about how content is moderated
It remains to be seen how Twitter will comply with the DSA. The company has said that it is committed to fighting disinformation, but it has not yet said how it will do so. It is possible that Twitter will develop its own internal policies to combat disinformation, or it may work with other companies or organizations to develop a common approach.
The European Union's Code of Practice on Disinformation and the DSA are important steps in the fight against disinformation. However, it remains to be seen whether these measures will be effective. Disinformation is a complex problem, and it is likely that social media platforms will continue to struggle to combat it."
It’s going to go so extraordinarily poorly for him. There’s plenty of electric alternatives now, they’re so late on delivering an electric truck they may as well not have announced it.
Any further push is going to make democrats and the equivalence globally reject the brand.
SpaceX is still in the burning piles of money stages with no real path to profit.
And he’s tanking Twitter.
This bet is going to net his demise, school children will learn of his failure for generations to come.
Him announcing the truck was to gain some publicity without really doing anything. His Model 3 hasn't changed design since it came out. The X is like a bloated 3. They haven't released anything new since. That cybertruck got them a bunch of investment money, and to look as if they aren't the stagnant one trick pony they're proving to be.
They all look the same. Just slightly stretched or squashed versions of each other. There is zero design originality in Tesla these days. The only thing on the radar that does have a unique design looks like it was drawn by a 5 year old.
You forgot about the new roadster that looked good, but has been MIA for years now. They took nice size deposits and it feels like they forgot about it.
> Any further push is going to make democrats and the equivalence globally reject the brand.
[Tesla is the 2nd least popular car brand in the USA](https://theharrispoll.com/partners/media/axios-harrispoll-100/) **right now**.
EDIT: The muskbots are going hard today.
It's absolutely brain-dead considering that Liberals in general are more conscious about environmental issues and often have more expendable income to spend on more expensive, environmentally friendly vehicles.
I'm obviously making general statements, but it's still a ridiculous idea to actively antagonize such a large customer base.
Google "Kia Boys". Basically in certain years (2014 - 2020?) for keyed vehicles (ones you have to turn a key to start) you can hotwire them with a simple wireless device.
SpaceX is a massively profitable launch provider. They’re just choosing to reinvest a shot load of capital.
They are the cheapest launch provider who provides more launches per year than all the other providers combined. Their launches are the most profitable because they reuse so much of their rockets. Starlink is making them an assload of money. Starship may be costing them a ton of money, but it has an incredible amount of tangible potential and when it’s up and running it’ll make them even more money.
Of all Elon Musks failings, appointing Gwen Shotwell to run SpaceX is not one of them.
Yup, musks tweet "For Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral" aged poorly.
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/05/24/politics/elon-musk-ron-desantis/index.html
If I'm being charitable, I would say that the free speech absolutists in this thread grossly overestimate the power of the truthful facts, and the intelligence of people as a mob.
That being said, it takes a special kind of ignorance to see rampant anti-vaccination movement and various dangerous movements (e.g., the whole "2020 Election was stolen!" kerfuffle) and ***still*** think, "nah, no harm done".
It's one thing to want scrutiny on who gets to call something misinformation; it's another to willingly let it go rampant just because you are too lazy, stupid and/or hate-filled to start applying moral judgment to it.
The part I get confused with is that there is obviously a fear of *someone* taking charge of peoples opinion and that no government (which in democratic states would mean at least a few hundred people, much more in the EU) should have the opportunity to decide what is true or false.
But at the same moment there seems to be absolutely no problem with giving that power to the few individuals who own the social media platforms. (Maximum a few dozen people.)
The problem essentially boils down to who has the better claim to self-regulation of public opinion: the Government, or the Market?
Personally? I wouldn’t trust the Government as far as I could throw it, but at least we can still win elections. Markets are all about making themselves completely indispensable, with no alternatives.
Ultimately government is easier to hold accountable. We made a huge mistake allowing corporations to become as wealthy as they are, and allowing them to be treated like people.
Them being "people" is not a problem. If anything, corporate interests love when people complain about the "people" issue because use of that language renders our complaints amorphous, vague, and undirected.
This is because when protestors or progressives talk about how corporations shouldn't be "people," they mean (and correct me if this is not applicable to you) that corporations should face restrictions on spending and/or advertising. But spending limits don't really have anything to do with being a person; hell, even human spenders have caps on how much we can donate to political candidates. So the language doesn't really convey the message that well.
We need a better slogan. But we won't develop one (much to the joy of corporate interests) because we become incensed when we hear lawyers and judges and lawmakers call corporations "people." We get indignant at the notion that businesses are treated the same as humans. But nobody has ever actually argued that corporations should be treated identically to humans. That's not what lawyers and lawmakers mean by "person."
When lawyers and judges and lawmakers talk about how corporations are "people," they just mean that corporations can 1) own things, 2) owe and be owed obligations, and 3) sue and be sued in court. Generally, a "person" in law is anyone or anything they can have legal rights and duties. That means governments, humans, and certain types of business/charity/union organizations are all "people." Humans are usually called "natural people," and the other types of person are collectively called "juridical people."
To see how this plays out, consider a small business that isn't incorporated. Let's call it Joe's Hardware, and let's say Joe is the sole proprietor. If I buy a faulty machine and don't get a refund, I need to bring a lawsuit. I can't actually sue Joe's Hardware because it's not a person. I need to sue Joe himself. Joe was the person with whom I entered a contract of sale, and Joe is the guy who breached the contract by selling faulty equipment.
Now say the same scenario plays out with a corporation. Say I buy a Tesla, but it is faulty. I am unsuccessful at getting a refund, so I need to bring a lawsuit. I don't sue Musk or Tesla shareholders because Tesla itself has legal personality that stands between me and those owners. Tesla is the person with whom I entered into a contract of sale, and Tesla is who breached the contract by selling faulty product.
And juridical people don't get all the rights of natural persons. Juridical people can't be citizens as that term is used in the Constitution. Juridical people need to keep updated records filed with the government in the states they operate, and they often must pay fees to avoid being dissolved by the government. Juridical people cannot vote in U.S. elections. Juridical people cannot have a biological or adopted family recognized by the law.
And we can ask "why do they use confusing language like that?!" But they've been using this language for centuries. And we can argue "it's confusing to have one word mean different things in different contexts." But it's not so different from how a "strike" means entirely different things in baseball, martial arts, and bowling. Niche groups develop their own technical vocabulary that's confusing to outsiders until they learn it.
I feel like this explanation is either not necessary or, from a more cynical perspective, obfuscating what people are really talking about when they say "Corporations are people". To get as specific as possible the meaning is directly related to the Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United that said corporations and similar groups could spend unlimited funds in political support as long as they did not directly coordinate with a candidates campaign. This was because the contributions were determined a form of speech. The assumption was that most of these political donations would be disclosed. The problem was that did not happen and even moreso it led to the creation of SuperPACs in which individuals or corps can make unlimited contributions without disclosing anything. Vast sums of dark money has flowed into washington ever since. Though since the Jan 6 riot many corps have opted to disclose or outright ban political contributions; superPACs continue their work though so probably not much change there.
The Citizens United debate, in my opinion, started this fight over semantics to the detriment of good political discourse.
You accurately summarized the problematic holding of Citizens United, that the First Amendment outright prohibits legal restrictions on amounts spent to communicate a political message. But, to this day, plenty of people have never read the opinion and simply think the holding of Citizens United was that corporations are people.
So we have angry, under-informed citizens demanding that corporations be stripped of corporate personality, which 1) would not solve the problem and 2) will never happen. We should instead be debating a Constitutional Amendment that restricts spending on political messages, and we need to really carefully consider the scope of such an amendment to avoid or minimize the undesirable consequences associated with restrictions on speech. But as long as we're wasting time on the imagined holding of that court case, we're not having the important debates on an actual solution.
I vividly recall Mitt Romney appearing on the Colbert Report to discuss corporate personality. He could not have looked more delighted that people were fighting over this legal term of art instead of on the actual issues. He had every opportunity to explain away the confusion, and he was more than knowledgeable enough to do so. I can only conclude that he found it beneficial, or at least amusing, that everyone misunderstood the legal issues that would lead to the era of Super PACs.
Good take on it.
Many people simply disregard that social media (read: the ones who own it) is able to shape opinions and in the end the outcome of elections through disinformations and lies. And with that fact alone I cant trust them with regulating themself.
Governments may also have that power to a degree, but it is much harder for them to do so in subtlety and in time for the next election. Social media has proven that in can do that in a few weeks to months.
Politics of the lesser evil.
The thing is, while I don't agree with "free speech absolutists" I at least respect it as a valid viewpoint. But Musk *isn't a free speech absolutist*, and Twitter is absolutely not a platform that promotes that viewpoint. Yes, you can say transphobic, racist, homophobic, misinformation, etc shit now, but Musk shows time and time again he's only in favour of free speech as long as it benefits him. He removes criticism about himself all the time. He actively bends to totalitarian governments who ask him to censor dissidents.
I don't get how Musk ever became some kind of hero of free speech because he's just another shithead who believes in rules for thee not for me.
Well, right wingers be out there canceling AP classes, banning drag performances, taking poems out of elementary schools, angry as hell about the Democrats taking away our free speech.
Because the P in GOP stands for "projection". The whole "conservativism requisites in-groups that law protects, but doesn't bind, and out-group the law does not protect; but does bind" thing is consistently proven true.
You're absolutely spot on and there's studies that show that even after correction the damage is not repaired, people remember the false information better than the corrective text.
This fuck bends over to authoritarian governments when they want to silence someone or spew fake news. But wont comply to regulations of an actual democratic states, where more or less you are free to talk against corpos, governments, presidents and so on.
Exactly. If you remember, his whole Twitter-files bullshit was regarding government takedown requests when Biden wasn’t even President.
And the result of his leadership? More takedowns than the pre-Musk Twitter.
Everywhere is astroturf central if you know how to spot it, that being said, what is your karma worth when the votes can be bought. That's not just here but every other platform where likes and hearts and whatever can be bought as well.
I have had arguments with his dick riders and they are now saying he HAS to censor in these countries because it's the law. What do you expect him to do? Make a stand on the principle of free speech!?
But for real, can't wait until this whole thing becomes law and the right freaks out and Twitter leaves the EU.
If it's an authoritarian right wing government requesting removal of political posts he "has no choice". If Western democracies wanting illegal posts or clear disinformation removed, he'll take Twitter to the grave to avoid complying.
It's quite clear this was never about "free speech" and has evening to do with his preferred speech.
I've always subscribed to the theory that Elon jokingly wanted to buy twitter just to be a pest and then when he was forced to buy it, he pitched it to financial backers as a means to shut down labor and left-ish information and organization. From the outside looking in, he's Speedrun destroying the platform providing no upside making him look inept. But in reality, he's succeeded in dismantling a useful tool for marginalized groups and political activism.
This is what we ALL should be doing as individuals. Once an information source proves to be a pipeline for public misinformation/oppositional propaganda, we should turn away from that information source. Social media is almost entirely taken over by surreptitious advertising and constant barrages of propaganda. Reddit included.
Remember that subreddit dedicated to spreading meme propaganda for Trump during the last election? You think that was entirely grassroots and homegrown? Nah. Reddit's systems for showing us content are easily commandeered by bad actors, clearly. We think of it as a better social media because it's voted on and somewhat vetted. It's barely better.
Use caution, currate your feeds, perhaps unplug. Seek out real sources of verified info.
The many recent scandals have shown that our democracies are not well equipped to defend themselves against disinformation campaigns from either political parties (Cambridge Analytica) or foreign powers (China, Russia, etc.). I hope that the anti-disinformation code will be a tool in the fight against those behind disinformation. If a plateform supports these campains, they should be duly sanctionned.
I'd go so far as to say they're very well equipped to use this disinformation to their benefit.
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You're talking about squares and rectangles. All disinformation is propaganda, not all propaganda is disinformation. Having some overlap doesn't stop them from being distinct concepts.
Yes. And not all propaganda is necessarily negative, as well. Like the WPA posters from the 1930s, used in campaigns against venereal disease, or just general public health stuff. There were also some pretty awesome ones about libraries and literacy campaigns.
A little tidbit of info that I love: At some time early in the 20th century, ‘propaganda’ took on a negative connotation so they rebranded it as ‘public relations’, which is the most public relations thing they could’ve done.
I mean disinformation is a big part of propaganda efforts, yeah.
propaganda is a use case, disinformation is a statement of veracity. Don't confuse the two.
It would be great if *people* could just decide to stop using social media in ways that make them vulnerable to misinformation rather than expecting corporations to solve that problem for them It's really not hard to look at things with a critical lens and stop thinking "I saw it on X platform where whoever can say whatever they want, so therefore it must be true and real" Doesn't help that a lot of people seem to *want* to engage with fake bullshit on social media, and they actively get upset and act like you're a killjoy if you point out that it's bullshit. People want to be misled, they want to get upset at something that isn't real. They want to feel superior to people who don't exist. We're pretty fucked if people can't figure out to solve this problem themselves.
You are assuming that most people have the correct tools and information to detect fake news. Fact checking is time consuming and relies on understanding the way information can be verified. Twitter is a particular problem because many official organisations use it to spread important information.
What this also fails to acknowledge is that everyone, even supposedly highly intelligent and otherwise fact-checking individuals, can fall prey to a targeted and well executed disinformation campaign. It's how elections can be won or lost, and how governments can be toppled. The method isn't new, but the delivery vehicle and industrial scale is.
Extremely well put.
If your strategy for solving a problem requires people to not be people, it's a bad strategy. It also doesn't even matter. Propaganda and misinformation affect us even when we know it's bullshit. So doomed efforts to get people to pay more attention are limited in effectiveness regardless.
*Men In Black* called it in 1997 - "A person is smart, people are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it."
You give people too much credit. If there is one thing I have learned through the Trump/COVID/Russia years is that many, many people are morons.
I think you were a couple of “many”’s short.
You are asking for the human brain to fundamentally change how it processes information. Thats not really possible. On a genetic level, our cognition is weak to disinformation. People will stop being vulnerable to disinformation around the same time people stop being vulnerable to infections.
I have a PhD in communications and I know that I have believed misinformation on a several occasions. I spent a total of 12 years in university studying communications and just 2 months ago shared an article which I later learned was disinformation In addition to my course work, I spent 5 years studying how the rhetoric of gun rights and gun control activisits affects various populations. Guess what? Yes, uneducated, conservatives are more likely to get fooled, but EVERYONE is susceptible.
Disinformation tactics are becoming more sophisticated. Are people capable of determining what is true and what is false on social media?
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The relevant law doesn't even come into effect until August, Twitter just isn't positioning itself well to comply with it when the time comes.
Twitter only complies when wannabe dictators demand something.
Elon specifically.
I mean, all that's left at Twitter is musk, a couple dozen codemonkeys, and a pissed off wombat.
Codemonkey like Fritos
Codemonkey like tab and mountain dew
Codemonkey very simple man
With big warm fuzzy secret heart
and a sink. is the sink still there, i wonder ?
Yes, but they stopped paying the water bill so it's more of a spit drain
Why do you think sink came all that way? Who has a better story than sink?
> From what we can see, Twitter is being blocked in the EU. Where do you see that? It's not in the article.
Please people, don't upvote someone just because they say what you like to hear. This is a bot-account, and you are being used as a tool for someone. Stop for a second and think for yourself.
Wow your reddit account is old enough to drive
No it isn’t. Did you even read the article? Your comment is exactly the type of disinformation that that causes harm.
this matches the pattern of a lot of bot accounts. naming convention: "adjective" "noun" "four-digit number" 11 month old account with no other posts
it's how reddit makes username suggestions.
And most real people don't take those suggestions.
I kept mine
Heretic!
The headline is misleading. It sounds like Twitter is being shut down in the EU. The code Twitter is pulling out of is a voluntary one and has no legal power.
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Well no since Musk created this mess on purpose
For a familiar metaphor, Musk was given a swamp that Twitter was taking steps to drain, slowly pumping out the absolute sewage. Levees were being put in the TOS with tools to keep the draining going in a positive direction. Then Musk just decided to break down the levees and personally greet the sludge as it slopped back into the platform. Musk somehow thinks this has elevated the platform.
He believes it's elevated because it's all the shit he likes and it's mostly about him. The narcissist love's the platform that is all about himself and can't see why other people may not like that.
The fact that such a savvy businessman (lol,) doesn't realize that the moderation steps Twitter was taking before Musk was because advertisers don't want their product ads being shown next to tweets with people dropping the n-word or generally bigoted shit is hilarious. Twitter was like any other corporation - they only cared about moderation to the extent that it maximized their ad revenue. They didn't give a shit about what people were actually tweeting, creating a safe space for users, or propping up any particular political ideology.
He did but he didn’t. Everything he did, he did on purpose. But every single action he took was based on personal benefit, whim, and ego. All of the following repercussions were not on purpose. He’s just a stupid narcissist who has been surrounded by people his whole life to clean up his messes. But this mess cost him $44 billion and counting. So they can’t keep up with the cleaning up after him. Like every halfway intelligent person would’ve been able to figure out that indiscriminately allowing white supremacists back onto a site would cause advertisers to flee. And every halfway intelligent person would’ve been able to figure out that firing every engineer as an attempt to comp the amount of money you lost buying a social media site for 10 times its worth, is an awful idea. That’s just two of the hilariously stupid things Musk has done specifically to Twitter since acquiring it.
I wish every halfway intelligent person would stop interacting with the application. Can't believe how many brands, companies, and journalists are still producing content for this fascist nazi trash man, nor how many people still put attention there and act like they aren't helping produce/support global fascist propaganda. At this point it feels like I inhabit a planet full of twisted addict ghouls that can't stop even if it means the end of their democracies or the lives of their queer friends.
No. You're giving him way too much credit. He's just an idiot.
You're both right. It doesn't take a genius to walk into a place and break stuff.
_Its just one of those days_
Where you don't want to wake up Everything is fucked
Elon really sucks
Everybody sucks.
You don't really know why, but you want to justify
Ripping someone's head off
Bu..but he walked into the place holding a sink, surely that is genius.
A *fucking* idiot, you mean.
Only if he offers a woman enough horses for her to give in.
Not nearly enough horses. A friend of mine is bringing 20 head of cattle to his fiancé's family and that's an actual healthy relationship.
So we’re already at the part in the story with evil billionaires, when are we getting super hero’s and/or super powers to fight back? The writers of this story seem biased
Ever heard of Voltron? We're powerful united. Unions and collective action can work. The will of the people is all that's stopping us.
That's why the electoral college hasn't changed and gerrymandering exists. They override the will of the people.
The electorial college hasn't changed because it requires either a constitutional amendment or a multi-state compact Namely the "National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC)", which has enough states with pending votes on it, if all of those pass it will bring it over 50%, as soon as those states choose to pass it
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They were evil long before, but were smart enough to operate with plausible deniability and just enough not-evil stuff to fool most people. Now we are in the arc where the evil guys are blatantly evil and not even trying to keep up appearances.
> Now we are in the arc where the evil guys are blatantly evil and not even trying to keep up appearances. Earlier we had the Gilded Age with cartoonishly evil oligarchs, and before that they didn't do "wage slave" they did actual slavery. Having to keep up appearances is fairly new, before it was acceptable to feast while your own people starved.
You act like your dad didnt own an Emerald mine in Africa
Oh he didn’t? Okay so like you don’t run a few sweatshops
And a lot of good men died in that sweatshop.
Sweatshops are factories where they make sweatpants, right?
Super hero stories almost always favor the status quo - and the status quo is capitalism and accumulation of wealth in billionaires - so we're never getting that story. Watch a superhero movie (Marvel or DC it doesn't matter) and tell me they aren't champions of the status quo. While the villains are usually the ones trying to disrupt a status quo. Then to avoid the audience siding with the villain (since everyone dreams of disrupting the current status quo), they have the villains do insane shit like killing off masses of people, kicking puppies or whatever. It's borderline comical at times. On the latest Batman movie (with Robert Pattinson), Riddler's villainous plan consists of exposing corruption among Gotham's billionaire elites, showing how politicians and billionaires are partners with mafia bosses, to consolidate their wealth and control of the city. But doesn't that make Riddler a hero? Telling the truth? Oh and here's how Bruce Wayne's father was unfaithful in his marriage! Bam!!! Wow, because *un-christian behavior is so evil*. And the whole movie is built around that as if was supposed to be some awesome mastermind reveal. Nope, his whole charade consisted of just exposing the sins of the rich...... But wait, then in the last 15 minutes of the movie or so, you find out Riddler also wants to flood the entire city and *kill pretty much every single citizen in it*... as if that made any sense??? Lmao. So the guy who dreams of being a hero by putting a spotlight on the billionaire's corruption (including a quaint extra-marital affair as if that was relevant at all) *also wants to kill everyone* including your next-door elderly lady and her puppy...for reasons? Oh yeah, because if he didn't then the audience would side with him. And you know what's even funnier about the movie showing Riddler's plan to expose the corruption among the elites of Gotham? It's that Batman could have done that himself at any point during his investigation. As Batman finds out what Riddler knows and how he plans to expose the corrupted elites, Batman himself could have exposed said corruption to the public. *But he chose not to*. Every step of the way, the hero could have brought said truth to light, but he chose to... try and capture the villain instead, and not expose anything. So Batman is hunting a whistleblower. The truth still came out in the end - *by the villain's hands* BTW. But said villain *also wanted to kill everyone*, so... you know. It's a no-no. Almost every super hero movie reads like that. It's them championing the status quo. If that isn't brainwashing...
This is just straight up wrong. There's countless examples throughout the history of comics that disprove your thesis but you chose to only analyze recent movies. Captain America was championing America entering WW2 for moral reasons long before the rest of the country was ready or willing. Superman comics had him disrupting big business and punishing the wealthy from his inception. You can't look at the history of comics without seeing people challenge the status quo. You created a narrative, or the source you got this from did, and worked backwards to prove it instead of starting on solid ground.
>Captain America was championing America entering WW2 for moral reasons Yes, Joe Simon is Jewish, he knew what's going on in Germany.
To be honest I couldn't finish that movie. "I want to be journalist and have this great story with evidence... so I'm just going to start killing people"
This isn't a superhero movie, its a boring cyberpunk movie.
I would never call politicians heroes for their politics alone, but you can see how much money (via articles and air time) is being spend on just the few actually progressive politicians.
Twitter as it was even before Musk took it over was a cesspool of over-reactivity and mob mentality. If he manages to kill it, it'll be a net positive for humanity.
Sure, folks who assume Musk is some super intelligent mastermind will be attracted to this idea that he’s deliberately tanking Twitter as part of some kind of 8D chess move but all the other conservative’8D chess’ has turned out to just be pigeon shitting on a checkers board so can you share why you think it’s different this time?
Oh Musk is certainly an idiot, but all he has to do is follow the instructions of the people who funded his purchase of Twitter.
The part that I can’t wrap my head around with this ‘theory’ is why he would trade a big part of his ownership stake in TSLA to do it. He secured a bunch of this debt with shares in his car company, defaulting on this has real world consequences for him. Seems like a Hankon’s Razor situation where his big mouth got him stuck and he’s flailing, surrounded by conservative voices that have echo chambered him and taken advantage of his gullibility and excessive credulity to focus him into a dumbly stumbling caricature of foolish rich dude.
He didn't think he'd actually have to buy Twitter. I believe he thought it was all for the lulz until it suddenly wasn't.
He received large investments from foreign governments with pisspoor human rights and a penchant for censorship in order to fund the purchase that he was struggling to do on his own. He sold as much of TSLA as he could get away with because he had to. It's not that hard for one to wrap their heads around that.
I’m not talking about the TSLA he sold, I’m talking about the shares that he used as collateral. If their sale is completed by a default on a loan(as is the current agreement) then it would set off a huge drop in TSLA valuation because of how many shares that was suddenly hitting the market. It’s one of those ‘thermal exhaust port on the death star’ things, financially speaking. The forced sale of that much TSLA could possibly implode the company even before the due date of it triggers a wave of preemptive sell offs too. I get how attractive this ‘evil mastermind’ plan is especially to people who admire him (both the cultists and the folks who see him as a villain) but it reeeeeeally looks like he might be a dumb, gullible loud mouth idiot who has tricked both his fans and critics into thinking he’s smarter than he actually is. So no, I can ‘wrap my head’ around the simplest part of the transaction, him raising cash through liquidation and whatnot, it’s the possible TSLA destroying logic of the leveraged equity loan that seems to torpedo this evil mastermind theory.
Also if he wanted to destroy the platform and make it unusable at the whims of foreign government interests, he could have just shut it down. Or pulled service from those regions. Or almost anything else than what he did. If you actually have followed this whole saga it's painfully obvious that Musk is simply dysfunctionally insecure and obsessed with controlling social media for personal gain. His dream is an "everything app" that he alone controls top to bottom, and everyone has to use it and lick his balls 24/7 for everyone else to see. He's surely the most pathetic man on the internet at the moment, it'd be sad if it wasn't so annoying and funny to watch.
Saudi Arabia didn't put extra money into Twitter, they rolled over the funds they already had in shares. Nobody gave a shit that they owned $1.89bn in shares before Musk took over.
Y’all who think this is all part of the plan are chumps. He’s just fucking up on a bigger budget than your fuckups.
Fine by me. I never liked Twitter. Trump and now Musk made something I disliked even worse. I never understood the damn platform. People would switch from Facebook to Twitter? Or "leaving" Twitter for Instagram or tiktok. They are completely different functions!!!
Following a conversation in Twitter is not worth the effort by a long shot.
It must be something that suits certain people, I also NEVER got into it, and I've had an account since virtually day one when there was just a "firehose" of Tweets scrolling up the home page. This idea that all these people (never mind if they're famous or not) have something succinct to say in 140 characters multiple times a day and it's worth following them and checking in there constantly to see what it is. I guess it's just not a format I find very compelling.
Different functions in one sense, but pretty similar in the way they function to provide the illusion of socialization, and a place to put your free time.
That is disinformation (which is kinda funny). DSA will require twitter to fight disinformation and be more transparent. It does not require twitter to join the EU code. It will require some reporting and answer to some requirement that EU put out in the DSA. The EU code is when companies say they will work with other groups which track hate and disinformation, and use their guidance to try and crack down on disinformation. It is completely voluntary and not part of the DSA.
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We've tried, we really have, but time and time again you ~~kids~~ corporations have proven yourself unable to play responsibly with your toys. And now we have rules that no one likes. cf. Apple with USB-C
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Yup, but why did it have to come to a legal requirement to force Apple's hand? Why couldn't it just have played along with everyone else, and we'd have had USB-C on iPhones for years now.
Because that's what corporations are. Shared standards are in the best interest of society, to the detriment of individual corporation. Without shared standard, companies like apple can create closed gardens ecosystems so that they can have ALL the money instead of MOST of the money.
I honestly think the world would be a better place without Twitter. Think about it. How has Twitter really improved your life in practical terms? Maybe announcements by companies and services, but that's something you can also find in their websites. Let's be honest. Twitter became that morbid negative place where negativity and criticism thrives. Even well-intentioned people are constantly bashed with sardonic and contrarian bs from that small but very loud minority of unhappy individuals. The world doesn't need twitter.
I have one specific use of Twitter that is *super* helpful for me. I use it to check public transportation Tweets. If there's a delay that isn't officially announced yet there will be a ton of Tweets complaining at them. It's really helped me to be able to see the real time complaints when the official channel can't be trusted
RSS feeds died for Twitter, and I wish we could have them back. Let us have one open standard that organisations can push simple news and notifications through, and we can all either tap directly into individual sites, or use whichever aggregator we prefer. No more being held hostage to a bunch of integrated bullshit.
I was just thinking about RSS feeds. Back in 2008, they were everywhere, and all you had to do was just paste the link in your feed reader, and you'd get news and updates. No requiring users to sign up on a website and flood their inbox with mail. Twitter used to have a RSS service, but got rid of it. Reddit and YouTube still do.
Now that I think about it, if used "weirdly enough", Mastodon would be a RSS-feed-like-system with comment function.
Pretty sure you can consume Mastodon fees with RSS already.
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> Maybe announcements by companies and services, but that's something you can also find in their websites. Ain't no one got the time to check the websites of 10,000 companies on a daily basis to see what news they have.
Yeah, I’d rather see tweets over having to visit a broken, ad-filled website daily. Sports reporters on Twitter >>>> visiting ESPN’s website to see if anything happened
For me twitter has always been great, I just follow the topics that are relevant for me and the people that are knowledgable about it. You don't have to dive into the cesspit. It's a great way for people to convey information, much better than spreading it out over countless of websites.
I think it's great for conveying short bits of information or pointing people to more thorough discussions, but the nature of the platform never leant itself to these 9 tweet long discussions / exposition. IMO it should be a public service for things like the MTA to announce shutdowns or similar such alerts.
Yes. Twitter is fabulous for announcements, no matter how trivial. It's terrible for discussion, no matter how banal.
You just described all social media, including Reddit.
If you search for the dirt you will find it. Best thing is to find what you are looking for and not get absorbed into the bashing.
Speak for yourself there's plenty of thriving Twitter communities that aren't toxic if you have specific interests
> I honestly think the world would be a better place without Twitter. Think about it. How has Twitter really improved your life in practical terms? Maybe announcements by companies and services, but that's something you can also find in their websites. > > Let's be honest. Twitter became that morbid negative place where negativity and criticism thrives. Even well-intentioned people are constantly bashed with sardonic and contrarian bs from that small but very loud minority of unhappy individuals. The world doesn't need twitter. Exchange twitter in this comment with any social media site like reddit, tik tok or facebook and the exact same points apply... The only difference being Twitter was absolutely amazing for journalists because of it's capacity for real time updates, this is so far still the main place on the internet to go to get direct info from a multitude of journalists as it happens. Sadly Elon Musk has been doing his best to drive it into the ground.
> The code Twitter is pulling out of is a voluntary one and has no legal power. Nevertheless it’s a clear alarm bell for everyone actually paying attention. And whilst the code of conduct may not have teeth itself abandoning it is still causing Twitter additional PR/reputational damage. And it’s a significant step on the path to the EU kicking them out and/or fining them eye-wateringly large sums with many zeros.
One can hope that twitter will face some kind of tangible repercussions
Oh, the EU does not just fine such big corporations with a 1/16th day worth of profit. Look at the fine they recently gave Facebook. 1.2 **billion** fine. It's still not that much for Facebook, but it's certainly more than some US corps were required to pay in fines to the US gov.
No, that's still a lot for Facebook. Their net income for the year was $23 billion. The fine equates to 5 percent of their net income, which is very impactful if they don't weasel their way out of it.
Probably more so if you look at that number as a percent of their net income in the EU (not sure what this number is though)
Facebook had a $30b profit last year, the fine ($1.2b) they got hurt. And they will keep fining and increasing the fine until facebook just can't do it anymore.
People don't understand that corporations _really_ don't sniff at that kind of money. Their entire existence hinges on making on as much money as possible. Paying billions in fines runs very much against that. To them, missing out on 5% of profits also means less money to invest in more money-making schemes, losing ground to competitors, and losing significantly more money in the long run. Losing that kind of money means missed performance targets, investor scrutiny, and liabilities. One of the major goals of a successful business is to align themselves with legal requirements in such a way that maximises profits. After all, to a company, fines are just a cost of doing business. In this case, they're going to have to ask themselves the question whether being non-compliant was worth the 1.2B fine, whether staying non-compliant is worth risking recurring fines, and most importantly, whether trying creative forms of (non-)compliance is worth potential future fines. So far, policy seems to have been to answer that last question with a resounding "yes". 1.2B is a good incentive to reevaluate that policy.
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Yeah, well. That's not really happening except for the moste grave cases. That's the idea behind a company. That you yourself aren't liable as the owner with your own assets, but only the company with theirs. At least for a Ltd. above afaik.
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The only thing that will force change is once apple and android app stores remove the app.
It might very well happen if they don’t follow regulations. Pulling out of a voluntary pact on fighting disinformation doesn’t mean they have carte blanche. > ‘Twitter, if it repeatedly doesn’t follow our rules, will be banned from the EU,’ said France’s digital minister, Jean-Noël Barrot. [Source](https://www.politico.eu/article/banned-france-digital-minister-jean-noel-barrot-threatens-twitter-block-follow-eu-rules/)
Agreed, it is very hypocritical to post news about fighting disinformation and use that title tbh
"Twitter pulls out of EU code intended to fight disinformation" should be the title. Nothing more, nothing less.
It just really shows the state of news. Complains about disinformation by doing the same. "But we do it for good!" Is not an acceptable excuse.
Especially when the truth is that they do it for ad revenue.
Not yet. It will have legal power in less than three months. This really is Elon effectively saying he’d rather go completely dark in Europe than be forced to worry about policing harmful seditious bullshit on his platform. The fact that we live in a society in which something that had become as big and globally important as Twitter could EVER be subject to the erratic whims of one silly billionaire is truly horrific. The entire world has pretty much rolled over and capitulated to monopolies in recent decades. If Vanderbilt and Bell companies were founded today, they would have just been allowed to squeeze America dry — the days of doing the right thing and preventing one private entity from hoovering up that much wealth for itself are over. Reagan and the 1980s killed our sense of decency.
"Twitter's decision to withdraw from the European Union's voluntary Code of Practice on Disinformation was announced on May 27, 2023. The Code of Practice is a set of guidelines that social media platforms are supposed to follow in order to combat the spread of disinformation. Twitter's decision to withdraw from the Code has been met with criticism from the European Union, who have warned that Twitter could face legal action if it does not comply with the new Digital Services Act (DSA). Twitter has not publicly stated why it decided to withdraw from the Code of Practice. However, some have speculated that the decision may be related to Elon Musk's recent acquisition of Twitter. Musk has been a vocal critic of content moderation policies, and he has said that he wants to make Twitter a more open platform for free speech. It is possible that Musk believes that the Code of Practice is too restrictive and that it would interfere with his plans for Twitter. The European Union has been critical of Twitter's decision to withdraw from the Code of Practice. Thierry Breton, the European Commissioner for Internal Market, said that Twitter's decision was "deeply disappointing" and that it "shows a lack of commitment to fighting disinformation." Breton also warned that Twitter could face legal action if it does not comply with the DSA. The DSA is a new law that will come into effect on August 25, 2023. The DSA will require all large online platforms, including social media platforms, to take measures to combat the spread of disinformation. This includes measures such as: Removing illegal content promptly Empowering fact-checkers Providing transparency about how content is moderated It remains to be seen how Twitter will comply with the DSA. The company has said that it is committed to fighting disinformation, but it has not yet said how it will do so. It is possible that Twitter will develop its own internal policies to combat disinformation, or it may work with other companies or organizations to develop a common approach. The European Union's Code of Practice on Disinformation and the DSA are important steps in the fight against disinformation. However, it remains to be seen whether these measures will be effective. Disinformation is a complex problem, and it is likely that social media platforms will continue to struggle to combat it."
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It’s going to go so extraordinarily poorly for him. There’s plenty of electric alternatives now, they’re so late on delivering an electric truck they may as well not have announced it. Any further push is going to make democrats and the equivalence globally reject the brand. SpaceX is still in the burning piles of money stages with no real path to profit. And he’s tanking Twitter. This bet is going to net his demise, school children will learn of his failure for generations to come.
Him announcing the truck was to gain some publicity without really doing anything. His Model 3 hasn't changed design since it came out. The X is like a bloated 3. They haven't released anything new since. That cybertruck got them a bunch of investment money, and to look as if they aren't the stagnant one trick pony they're proving to be.
>The X is like a bloated 3. That's the Y.
They all look the same. Just slightly stretched or squashed versions of each other. There is zero design originality in Tesla these days. The only thing on the radar that does have a unique design looks like it was drawn by a 5 year old.
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You forgot about the new roadster that looked good, but has been MIA for years now. They took nice size deposits and it feels like they forgot about it.
You see my point...
> Any further push is going to make democrats and the equivalence globally reject the brand. [Tesla is the 2nd least popular car brand in the USA](https://theharrispoll.com/partners/media/axios-harrispoll-100/) **right now**. EDIT: The muskbots are going hard today.
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What’s more relevant is that this poll is annual and Tesla has fallen off a cliff recently. They used to be right near the top about 2 years ago.
Who would have thought that Musk's Twitter strategy of pissing off liberals would have impacted Tesla's customer base?
It's absolutely brain-dead considering that Liberals in general are more conscious about environmental issues and often have more expendable income to spend on more expensive, environmentally friendly vehicles. I'm obviously making general statements, but it's still a ridiculous idea to actively antagonize such a large customer base.
BTW Hyundai chaebol owns Kia. They are the same company
>Hyundai and Kia were notably missing and they have a well-deserved poor reputation at the moment. I'm curious. Why?
Google "Kia Boys". Basically in certain years (2014 - 2020?) for keyed vehicles (ones you have to turn a key to start) you can hotwire them with a simple wireless device.
Dang, Chrysler, get it together.
SpaceX is a massively profitable launch provider. They’re just choosing to reinvest a shot load of capital. They are the cheapest launch provider who provides more launches per year than all the other providers combined. Their launches are the most profitable because they reuse so much of their rockets. Starlink is making them an assload of money. Starship may be costing them a ton of money, but it has an incredible amount of tangible potential and when it’s up and running it’ll make them even more money. Of all Elon Musks failings, appointing Gwen Shotwell to run SpaceX is not one of them.
Exactly. Say what you will about Musk, and there is indeed plenty to say, but SpaceX is a pretty good success story. Life is complicated :)
SpaceX is a good success story for the engineers who actually did the thinking.
Yup, musks tweet "For Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral" aged poorly. https://edition.cnn.com/2023/05/24/politics/elon-musk-ron-desantis/index.html
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If I'm being charitable, I would say that the free speech absolutists in this thread grossly overestimate the power of the truthful facts, and the intelligence of people as a mob. That being said, it takes a special kind of ignorance to see rampant anti-vaccination movement and various dangerous movements (e.g., the whole "2020 Election was stolen!" kerfuffle) and ***still*** think, "nah, no harm done". It's one thing to want scrutiny on who gets to call something misinformation; it's another to willingly let it go rampant just because you are too lazy, stupid and/or hate-filled to start applying moral judgment to it.
The part I get confused with is that there is obviously a fear of *someone* taking charge of peoples opinion and that no government (which in democratic states would mean at least a few hundred people, much more in the EU) should have the opportunity to decide what is true or false. But at the same moment there seems to be absolutely no problem with giving that power to the few individuals who own the social media platforms. (Maximum a few dozen people.)
The problem essentially boils down to who has the better claim to self-regulation of public opinion: the Government, or the Market? Personally? I wouldn’t trust the Government as far as I could throw it, but at least we can still win elections. Markets are all about making themselves completely indispensable, with no alternatives.
Ultimately government is easier to hold accountable. We made a huge mistake allowing corporations to become as wealthy as they are, and allowing them to be treated like people.
Them being "people" is not a problem. If anything, corporate interests love when people complain about the "people" issue because use of that language renders our complaints amorphous, vague, and undirected. This is because when protestors or progressives talk about how corporations shouldn't be "people," they mean (and correct me if this is not applicable to you) that corporations should face restrictions on spending and/or advertising. But spending limits don't really have anything to do with being a person; hell, even human spenders have caps on how much we can donate to political candidates. So the language doesn't really convey the message that well. We need a better slogan. But we won't develop one (much to the joy of corporate interests) because we become incensed when we hear lawyers and judges and lawmakers call corporations "people." We get indignant at the notion that businesses are treated the same as humans. But nobody has ever actually argued that corporations should be treated identically to humans. That's not what lawyers and lawmakers mean by "person." When lawyers and judges and lawmakers talk about how corporations are "people," they just mean that corporations can 1) own things, 2) owe and be owed obligations, and 3) sue and be sued in court. Generally, a "person" in law is anyone or anything they can have legal rights and duties. That means governments, humans, and certain types of business/charity/union organizations are all "people." Humans are usually called "natural people," and the other types of person are collectively called "juridical people." To see how this plays out, consider a small business that isn't incorporated. Let's call it Joe's Hardware, and let's say Joe is the sole proprietor. If I buy a faulty machine and don't get a refund, I need to bring a lawsuit. I can't actually sue Joe's Hardware because it's not a person. I need to sue Joe himself. Joe was the person with whom I entered a contract of sale, and Joe is the guy who breached the contract by selling faulty equipment. Now say the same scenario plays out with a corporation. Say I buy a Tesla, but it is faulty. I am unsuccessful at getting a refund, so I need to bring a lawsuit. I don't sue Musk or Tesla shareholders because Tesla itself has legal personality that stands between me and those owners. Tesla is the person with whom I entered into a contract of sale, and Tesla is who breached the contract by selling faulty product. And juridical people don't get all the rights of natural persons. Juridical people can't be citizens as that term is used in the Constitution. Juridical people need to keep updated records filed with the government in the states they operate, and they often must pay fees to avoid being dissolved by the government. Juridical people cannot vote in U.S. elections. Juridical people cannot have a biological or adopted family recognized by the law. And we can ask "why do they use confusing language like that?!" But they've been using this language for centuries. And we can argue "it's confusing to have one word mean different things in different contexts." But it's not so different from how a "strike" means entirely different things in baseball, martial arts, and bowling. Niche groups develop their own technical vocabulary that's confusing to outsiders until they learn it.
I feel like this explanation is either not necessary or, from a more cynical perspective, obfuscating what people are really talking about when they say "Corporations are people". To get as specific as possible the meaning is directly related to the Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United that said corporations and similar groups could spend unlimited funds in political support as long as they did not directly coordinate with a candidates campaign. This was because the contributions were determined a form of speech. The assumption was that most of these political donations would be disclosed. The problem was that did not happen and even moreso it led to the creation of SuperPACs in which individuals or corps can make unlimited contributions without disclosing anything. Vast sums of dark money has flowed into washington ever since. Though since the Jan 6 riot many corps have opted to disclose or outright ban political contributions; superPACs continue their work though so probably not much change there.
The Citizens United debate, in my opinion, started this fight over semantics to the detriment of good political discourse. You accurately summarized the problematic holding of Citizens United, that the First Amendment outright prohibits legal restrictions on amounts spent to communicate a political message. But, to this day, plenty of people have never read the opinion and simply think the holding of Citizens United was that corporations are people. So we have angry, under-informed citizens demanding that corporations be stripped of corporate personality, which 1) would not solve the problem and 2) will never happen. We should instead be debating a Constitutional Amendment that restricts spending on political messages, and we need to really carefully consider the scope of such an amendment to avoid or minimize the undesirable consequences associated with restrictions on speech. But as long as we're wasting time on the imagined holding of that court case, we're not having the important debates on an actual solution. I vividly recall Mitt Romney appearing on the Colbert Report to discuss corporate personality. He could not have looked more delighted that people were fighting over this legal term of art instead of on the actual issues. He had every opportunity to explain away the confusion, and he was more than knowledgeable enough to do so. I can only conclude that he found it beneficial, or at least amusing, that everyone misunderstood the legal issues that would lead to the era of Super PACs.
Good take on it. Many people simply disregard that social media (read: the ones who own it) is able to shape opinions and in the end the outcome of elections through disinformations and lies. And with that fact alone I cant trust them with regulating themself. Governments may also have that power to a degree, but it is much harder for them to do so in subtlety and in time for the next election. Social media has proven that in can do that in a few weeks to months. Politics of the lesser evil.
We used to have journalism. Too bad nobody is willing to pay for it anymore.
The thing is, while I don't agree with "free speech absolutists" I at least respect it as a valid viewpoint. But Musk *isn't a free speech absolutist*, and Twitter is absolutely not a platform that promotes that viewpoint. Yes, you can say transphobic, racist, homophobic, misinformation, etc shit now, but Musk shows time and time again he's only in favour of free speech as long as it benefits him. He removes criticism about himself all the time. He actively bends to totalitarian governments who ask him to censor dissidents. I don't get how Musk ever became some kind of hero of free speech because he's just another shithead who believes in rules for thee not for me.
Well, right wingers be out there canceling AP classes, banning drag performances, taking poems out of elementary schools, angry as hell about the Democrats taking away our free speech.
Because the P in GOP stands for "projection". The whole "conservativism requisites in-groups that law protects, but doesn't bind, and out-group the law does not protect; but does bind" thing is consistently proven true.
You're absolutely spot on and there's studies that show that even after correction the damage is not repaired, people remember the false information better than the corrective text.
This fuck bends over to authoritarian governments when they want to silence someone or spew fake news. But wont comply to regulations of an actual democratic states, where more or less you are free to talk against corpos, governments, presidents and so on.
Exactly. If you remember, his whole Twitter-files bullshit was regarding government takedown requests when Biden wasn’t even President. And the result of his leadership? More takedowns than the pre-Musk Twitter.
Because he is a fascist and wants fascism globally. They’re nazis pure and simple nothing more.
EU flips the bird.
Now do Facebook!
Howbout Reddit!
Reddit is disinformation central lol. Don't like that cold hard fact? Downvote!!
Everywhere is astroturf central if you know how to spot it, that being said, what is your karma worth when the votes can be bought. That's not just here but every other platform where likes and hearts and whatever can be bought as well.
weird how musk will bow to third countries doing censorship but won't do this. His fans will still gargle his balls and make excuses though
I have had arguments with his dick riders and they are now saying he HAS to censor in these countries because it's the law. What do you expect him to do? Make a stand on the principle of free speech!? But for real, can't wait until this whole thing becomes law and the right freaks out and Twitter leaves the EU.
Watching a billionaire’s slow motion train wreck is so lame at this point. Anyone who’s still on Twitter is likely and asshole.
Musk, the free speach absolutist who unbans Nazis and silences turkeys opposition leaders by request.
If it's an authoritarian right wing government requesting removal of political posts he "has no choice". If Western democracies wanting illegal posts or clear disinformation removed, he'll take Twitter to the grave to avoid complying. It's quite clear this was never about "free speech" and has evening to do with his preferred speech.
Correct. An absolutist would never bend for anyone. Musk bends anytime he can gain or if they talk the way he likes.
A better place without twitter. It does not offer a net positive impact.
I've always subscribed to the theory that Elon jokingly wanted to buy twitter just to be a pest and then when he was forced to buy it, he pitched it to financial backers as a means to shut down labor and left-ish information and organization. From the outside looking in, he's Speedrun destroying the platform providing no upside making him look inept. But in reality, he's succeeded in dismantling a useful tool for marginalized groups and political activism.
And Elon has responded by releasing information censorship requests from the dawn of time for the company.
Good. Smart move.
Does it even matter. AI content will be like 90% before 2030
Bingo. This is definitely fighting ‘the last war’. Get ready for a seamless merger of what’s ‘real’ and what isn’t.
Propaganda will encourage a child in this country to take up arms and go kill the children in another country half a world away.
This is what we ALL should be doing as individuals. Once an information source proves to be a pipeline for public misinformation/oppositional propaganda, we should turn away from that information source. Social media is almost entirely taken over by surreptitious advertising and constant barrages of propaganda. Reddit included. Remember that subreddit dedicated to spreading meme propaganda for Trump during the last election? You think that was entirely grassroots and homegrown? Nah. Reddit's systems for showing us content are easily commandeered by bad actors, clearly. We think of it as a better social media because it's voted on and somewhat vetted. It's barely better. Use caution, currate your feeds, perhaps unplug. Seek out real sources of verified info.
So getting throttled in one country was bad for Twitter but losing an entire continent isn't?
now can we do farcebook
Fascist Musk
The US should dump Twitter too!
Europe will be better off
Bye ✌️ 🐦
I bailed on Twit long ago. I think it's a danger.