# Now that Elon Musk has bought Twitter - now the Pit edition (Part 1) **URL:** \ **Category:** The BBQ Pit\ **Created:** [April 25, 2022, 10:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/now-that-elon-musk-has-bought-twitter-now-the-pit-edition-part-1/963442 "2022-04-25T22:50:17Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 337
**Author:** ![Smapti](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/smapti/32/17938_2.png) [@Smapti](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Smapti)\ **Post date:** [September 19, 2023, 3:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/now-that-elon-musk-has-bought-twitter-now-the-pit-edition-part-1/963442/6726 "2023-09-19T03:48:04Z")
> ---
**Author:** ![BigT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bigt/32/12044_2.png) [@BigT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigT)\ **Post date:** [September 19, 2023, 3:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/now-that-elon-musk-has-bought-twitter-now-the-pit-edition-part-1/963442/6727 "2023-09-19T03:57:13Z")
> [@Leaper](#): > > > [@Airbeck](#): > > > > People largely feel how they feel, and part of that can be due to online influence, but just getting the opposing views artificially blasted at you all day every day is not going to change your feelings to the opposite, it’s just going to annoy you and, for me at least, make you less likely to see things that way. ⁢ > > I dunno, plenty of people believe Fox News and its ilk have shifted/brainwashed formerly liberal relatives into hardcore conservatives. Maybe he’s trying to recapture that in social media form. ⁢ They chose to watch Fox News. They were already liking what they saw. ---
**Author:** ![epbrown](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/e47774/32.png) [@epbrown](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/epbrown)\ **Post date:** [September 19, 2023, 4:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/now-that-elon-musk-has-bought-twitter-now-the-pit-edition-part-1/963442/6728 "2023-09-19T04:08:49Z")
Sounds like getting advertisers back is like fighting ignorance - taking longer than he thought. ---
**Author:** ![Gyrate](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gyrate/32/3588_2.png) [@Gyrate](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gyrate)\ **Post date:** [September 19, 2023, 10:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/now-that-elon-musk-has-bought-twitter-now-the-pit-edition-part-1/963442/6729 "2023-09-19T10:26:50Z")
> [@LSLGuy](#): > > If vehemence were votes, the MAGATs would defeat all comers 90/10. The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. ---
**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\ **Post date:** [September 19, 2023, 1:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/now-that-elon-musk-has-bought-twitter-now-the-pit-edition-part-1/963442/6730 "2023-09-19T13:42:22Z")
> [@Airbeck](#): > > People do fall into these rabbit holes, but you cannot get a critical voting mass of the public by influencing only these closed information silos. You can if enough people have been lured down the rabbit hole. Here in 2023 maybe enough have been lured. As long as these rabbit holes are attracting some people, and almost no one escapes later except by eventually dying, they’ll keep growing. And growing, and growing and … . The key thing with a brainwashing campaign is to have a gentle on-ramp until you get folks hooked. Then crank the wacko-level until they’re utterly isolated in your silo. It’s Cult Recruitment 101. Something like 90% of pre-Musk twitter users never posted; they simply subscribed and read content. Twitter was _almost_ as top-down as Faux News. The difference is there were many tops, and not all of those tops were RW wacko. Musk is now driving out all the non-wacko tops and adjusting the algorithms to feed wacko starter drugs to the _entire_ audience. Some of whom are take-charge people and will be repulsed and switch off. But many others will passively “watch whatever’s on TV” until they’re sucked in. Given the way US voting works, local majorities in a minority of jurisdictions can produce state- and federal- level majority rule for the minority party. And often does. The RW wacko faction is pushing that advantage hard. They can rule almost perpetually as a minority party if they can get the right numbers in the fairly few right places even without any illegal skullduggery. Once skullduggery is added in, it’s Katy bar the door! Musk is totally pushing in that direction, albeit for reasons of his own, not any fealty to the Republican party as an organization. ---
**Author:** ![steronz](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/steronz/32/11765_2.png) [@steronz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/steronz)\ **Post date:** [September 19, 2023, 1:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/now-that-elon-musk-has-bought-twitter-now-the-pit-edition-part-1/963442/6731 "2023-09-19T13:51:42Z")
See I think he does understand, he was just never interested in maintaining that business model. Twitter was an ad sales company, but being in ad sales means kissing up to advertisers who have, in Elon’s view, all been infected by the Woke Mind Virus. For as many stupid decisions that Elon’s made in the last year, I think he knew from the get go that 1) fighting the woke mind virus would result in drastically decreased ad revenues, 2) dealing with decreased revenue would require drastically cutting costs, and 3) slashing the workforce and shutting down data centers were the best ways to cut costs. We can all agree, I’m sure, that voluntarily tanking your own company’s revenue to fight a culture war is stupid. But given that’s the premise he started with, the rest follows. And now he’s trying to create an alternate revenue source based on subscriptions, a model that _rarely_ ever works. XBox Live and Amazon Prime are only a couple examples I can think of of the sort, and neither of those are granting access to a social network. ---
**Author:** ![Great\_Antibob](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e47c2d/32.png) [@Great\_Antibob](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Great_Antibob)\ **Post date:** [September 19, 2023, 1:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/now-that-elon-musk-has-bought-twitter-now-the-pit-edition-part-1/963442/6732 "2023-09-19T13:56:18Z")
I don’t buy much of that Musk is convinced of his own genius. I’m sure there’s a part (maybe a large part) of his mind that thought his natural genius and ability to cut through BS would be refreshing to companies tired of being ‘woke’ and lead to large profits I’m also pretty sure he really did think slashing the workforce was purely a cost cutting figure and that, again, his natural genius would cut through to the 10% (or whatever small fraction) he believes actually contributes ---
**Author:** ![Airbeck](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/airbeck/32/6574_2.png) [@Airbeck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Airbeck)\ **Post date:** [September 19, 2023, 1:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/now-that-elon-musk-has-bought-twitter-now-the-pit-edition-part-1/963442/6733 "2023-09-19T13:58:11Z")
We have several election cycles in a row where it is clear that Twitter/X likes and engagement did not translate into electoral success. Remember all of the “Red Wave” talk before the 2022 elections? Constantly talked about on social media, regular media, feeding each other. And yet, what happened? Nothing like what was predicted on Twitter RW circles. Independent and moderate voters are moving away from the extreme right. Look at polling on Ukraine/Russia. The extreme right says the country is split, but the reality it is the right which is split. The left, the middle, independents are all largely in agreement, whereas the right is split about 50/50. The extreme right is also throwing anyone that isn’t extreme out of the party as RINOs. They are distilling themselves down to the most noxious and extreme. This is generally how cults go. Also look at special election results since 2022. Democrats are running 10 points ahead of the typical partisan lean in those districts. Even better than special elections between 2020 and 2022. Also, we hear a lot about these general election polls for Biden v Trump that are over a year out and there is a lot of hand wringing over the 50/50 results right now, but if you look into past elections, the challenger always has a big lead over the incumbent in these polls over a year from the election, but then the incumbent pulls back up when their voters start paying attention. Can MAGA even get any more fired up than they are already? The fact that he’s only tied with Biden in those polls right now is a bad sign for him. Does any of this guarantee anything? Not at all, but it tells me not to spend the next 13+ months panicking. The right is definitely trying to force their manufactured narrative of reality on everyone, but the numbers do not show that it is having any effect at this point. They are preaching to the choir, and that choir is far smaller than they believe it is. ---
**Author:** ![Atamasama](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/atamasama/32/12961_2.png) [@Atamasama](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Atamasama)\ **Post date:** [September 19, 2023, 8:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/now-that-elon-musk-has-bought-twitter-now-the-pit-edition-part-1/963442/6734 "2023-09-19T20:15:57Z")
So this video isn’t new, in fact it’s a couple of weeks old, but I just now got around to watching it. It is 20 minutes long (so longer than most Legal Eagle videos) and it’s done by Scowl Owl, who isn’t as entertaining as the regular guy (though still informative and watchable). It talks about how Twitter reacted to a warrant from the DOJ requesting Trump’s information, how and why they resisted it, and what resulted. The first half of the video is pretty dry, explaining the law in detail. It’s a law channel after all. But if you skip to the halfway point, pretty much right at 10 minutes, that’s when it starts getting juicy. This covers what happens when Twitter went back to the judge who signed the warrant and told them why they weren’t complying. I was highly entertained regarding the description of how Twitter’s lawyers dug a hole for themselves and kept going, until they were held in contempt. It’s not “Alex Jones’ lawyer accidentally giving the plaintiff all his info” good, but it’s pretty damn good. It helps illustrate how much of a fiasco Twitter is. [![](https://img.youtube.com/vi/P6VMe0Y1K4g/maxresdefault.jpg "When Elon Musk Fought Jack Smith's Search Warrant for Donald Trump") ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6VMe0Y1K4g) ---
**Author:** ![Darren\_Garrison](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/darren_garrison/32/92_2.png) [@Darren\_Garrison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darren_Garrison)\ **Post date:** [September 20, 2023, 1:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/now-that-elon-musk-has-bought-twitter-now-the-pit-edition-part-1/963442/6735 "2023-09-20T01:57:25Z")
> **[Elon Musk Suggests He Will Charge All X/Twitter Users a Fee to Be on the...](https://variety.com/2023/digital/news/elon-musk-charge-all-x-twitter-users-fee-1235726693/)** > > Elon Musk may flip the switch to make X — the social network formerly known as Twitter — an entirely subscription-based platform. Musk brought up the idea of charging all users of X/Twi… ---
**Author:** ![ekedolphin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ekedolphin/32/10003_2.png) [@ekedolphin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ekedolphin)\ **Post date:** [September 20, 2023, 2:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/now-that-elon-musk-has-bought-twitter-now-the-pit-edition-part-1/963442/6736 "2023-09-20T02:15:03Z")
That would make me, literally, an ex-Twitter user. ---
**Author:** ![Smapti](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/smapti/32/17938_2.png) [@Smapti](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Smapti)\ **Post date:** [September 20, 2023, 2:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/now-that-elon-musk-has-bought-twitter-now-the-pit-edition-part-1/963442/6737 "2023-09-20T02:19:27Z")
> This man is not well. ---
**Author:** ![Dr\_Paprika](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dr_paprika/32/3042_2.png) [@Dr\_Paprika](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr_Paprika)\ **Post date:** [September 20, 2023, 2:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/now-that-elon-musk-has-bought-twitter-now-the-pit-edition-part-1/963442/6738 "2023-09-20T02:29:39Z")
He claimed that forcing a small monthly payment will greatly reduce bots if each payment method must be unique. But why would that be the case, can’t a corporation buy many memberships? In any case, _that’s_ the only reason Musk might do that… ---
**Author:** ![Airbeck](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/airbeck/32/6574_2.png) [@Airbeck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Airbeck)\ **Post date:** [September 20, 2023, 2:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/now-that-elon-musk-has-bought-twitter-now-the-pit-edition-part-1/963442/6739 "2023-09-20T02:49:41Z")
We’re really witnessing the origin story of a Bond villain, aren’t we? ---
**Author:** ![Dr\_Paprika](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dr_paprika/32/3042_2.png) [@Dr\_Paprika](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr_Paprika)\ **Post date:** [September 20, 2023, 2:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/now-that-elon-musk-has-bought-twitter-now-the-pit-edition-part-1/963442/6740 "2023-09-20T02:54:51Z")
As I child I was also fascinated by the letter X, but this made me laugh. (This is a joke.) **Excerpt (WaPo): Things my toddler and Musk both do that are signs of genius, apparently:** - Is awake and asleep at surprising times - Is thrilled by the mere existence of the letter X - Demands that people give them their labor on holidays and be grateful to do it - Is mad that Mars is not a place we can easily go - Wants to be center of attention at all times - Is excited by babies - Is mad at gravity - Gets furious that car needs to be driven and will not just magically go when they sit in it > **[Opinion | Things both my toddler and Elon Musk do that are signs of genius,...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/09/19/elon-musk-toddler-alexandra-petri/)** > > Both like to seize nice things and ruin them. ---
**Author:** ![Walken\_After\_Midnight](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/b487fb/32.png) [@Walken\_After\_Midnight](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Walken_After_Midnight)\ **Post date:** [September 20, 2023, 3:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/now-that-elon-musk-has-bought-twitter-now-the-pit-edition-part-1/963442/6741 "2023-09-20T03:46:30Z")
> [@Airbeck](#): > > We’re really witnessing the origin story of a Bond villain, aren’t we? I think this is an excerpt from the Isaacson biography: [![](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F56gnlsWkAAcZY2?format=webp&name=small) ](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F56gnlsWkAAcZY2?format=webp&name=small) ---
**Author:** ![Dissonance](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/85f322/32.png) [@Dissonance](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dissonance)\ **Post date:** [September 20, 2023, 4:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/now-that-elon-musk-has-bought-twitter-now-the-pit-edition-part-1/963442/6742 "2023-09-20T04:06:48Z")
That’s another thing we have to thank Elmo for. If not for him, I wouldn’t know that Grimes isn’t very smart. Apart from having to be pretty dumb to let your partner name your children X Æ A-Xii, Exa Dark Sideræl Musk, and Techno Mechanicus\*, not even knowing the origin of the alleged meaning of your child’s name isn’t a good look. > Nobody tell her that the elves didn’t have a word for “Artificial Intelligence”. Or a language. Or exist. [Elmo has apparently taken care of letting her know that she can’t remember the name of her favorite aircraft](https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/08/entertainment/elon-musk-grimes-baby-name-pronunciation-scli-intl/index.html). > Although Musk later corrected his partner, saying it was actually “SR-71.” \*Am I the only one wonders if he really wanted to name their third spawn Adeptus Mechanicus but knows how sue happy Games Workshop is? ---
**Author:** ![Walken\_After\_Midnight](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/b487fb/32.png) [@Walken\_After\_Midnight](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Walken_After_Midnight)\ **Post date:** [September 20, 2023, 4:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/now-that-elon-musk-has-bought-twitter-now-the-pit-edition-part-1/963442/6743 "2023-09-20T04:14:15Z")
> [@Dissonance](#): > > Am I the only one wonders if he really wanted to name their third spawn Adeptus Mechanicus but knows how sue happy Games Workshop is? Hmm (from the [Warhammer 40,000 wiki](https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Adeptus_Mechanicus)): > [@](#): > > The Adeptus Mechanicus is the official Imperial name within the Adeptus Terra for the Cult Mechanicus or Cult of the Machine based on Mars which provides the Imperium with its scientists, engineers and technicians. > > The tech-adepts of the Mechanicus are the primary keepers of what is viewed as sacred wisdom, a privileged caste of Tech-priests who jealously guard the knowledge required to maintain and construct much of the Imperium’s advanced technology. ---
**Author:** ![crowmanyclouds](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/crowmanyclouds/32/19884_2.png) [@crowmanyclouds](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/crowmanyclouds)\ **Post date:** [September 20, 2023, 4:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/now-that-elon-musk-has-bought-twitter-now-the-pit-edition-part-1/963442/6744 "2023-09-20T04:15:30Z")
I just so curious how an aircraft that has “No weapons, no defenses, just speed” is “Great in battle”? ---
**Author:** ![Smapti](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/smapti/32/17938_2.png) [@Smapti](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Smapti)\ **Post date:** [September 20, 2023, 4:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/now-that-elon-musk-has-bought-twitter-now-the-pit-edition-part-1/963442/6745 "2023-09-20T04:28:01Z")
I’ve seen a number of righties, fascists, and Elmo stans who are in general bad at understanding satire or subtext and think that the Imperium in 40k is a glorious utopia keeping the light of civilization shining in the darkness, and not a failed state that’s been slowly decaying for thousands of years just like its skeletal emperor, comatose and strapped to a machine that can only slow down his inevitable death while he rots away, like its creators intended it to be. (Just do a Google image search and you can find plenty of fan-art of Elmo as the Emperor of Mankind.) Wouldn’t surprise me the least if Elmo fancies himself that way as well. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/now-that-elon-musk-has-bought-twitter-now-the-pit-edition-part-1/963442.md?page=336) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/now-that-elon-musk-has-bought-twitter-now-the-pit-edition-part-1/963442.md?page=338)