Free speech absolutism!
Elon is absolutely in charge of speech!
And now he’s posted a Twitter poll about whether he should step down from running Twitter, and promises to avoid by the outcome of the poll. The current vote so far is “yes”.
I’m a bit confused about whether he’s already rescinded the policy about outside social media links. The article does say he apologized in reference to the policy.
Musk apologized after putting the policy in place and wrote: “Going forward, there will be a vote for major policy changes. My apologies. Won’t happen again.”
Eta: gift link, since this is a paywalled article.
WTF is this obsession with putting corporate decisions up for a vote? He’s the owner of the company; he should just make his own decisions.
Well, we’ve seen how well that’s been going, now haven’t we?
Who’s actually counting the votes? Hitler and Franco held plebiscites; doesn’t mean they cared about democracy.
Nevermind. I may have misread the article.
Twitter has been having major problems in Australia for the entire working day now. I can’t access it on my laptop but my phone can access it although with issues like DM notifications arriving on the phone but messages not arriving for several minutes.
Gee, what a shame Elmo fired all his lawyers, for telling him that he couldn’t post a picture of Hunter Biden’s dick.
The offenses detailed in the suit include strings of complaints about specific twitter accounts made through 2021 and 2022 by the way. So Twitter’s sins here predate both Elon’s takeover and his bid.
First, credit to @naita for pointing out that the problems predate the actual takeover.
However, I do suspect that everyone at the pre-Musk twitter was pretty busy updating resumes and trying to figure out the next trends in management long before the final begrudging purchase was made.
Second, I similarly suspect that Backgrid was willing to try to keep working with Twitter (it’s an easy way to get clicks after all) and along with the rest of the world sees the ever decreasing value and increasing technical issues as a bad sign. If so, then better to be first in line to sue rather than last if you don’t think it may be recoverable later.
In 2022, sure. In 2021, probably not.
The suit states:
Backgrid sent Twitter at least 73 DMCA take-down notifications
encompassing at least 49 timely registered infringing photographs on the ‘BSO’
account.
Then lists a bunch of tweets and the date of the DMCA take-down notification. The notifications start in late September 2021 and goes until November with one or two a day, with some breaks, and then there is a gap until April 2022. The tweets in question are older than that, sometimes years older, so it looks to me like Backgrid has some strategy in mind with these takedowns and aren’t expecting Twitter to comply.
This is repeated for a different account. Both accounts are still up as of this post, as are those of the Tweets mentioned I randomly chose to check.
Well, the people who sold it at $54 last year (including all of us who own an index fund, who had a little bit) made a nice profit vs the $26 IPO price…
The Washington post reporter who highlighted potential issues with Elon’s “Everyone with $8 gets a blue check” policy by impersonating US Senator Ed Markey highlights the shortcomings of Elon’s new “Everyone with $8 gets a blue check, but they’ll be manually authenticated” policy by impersonating US Senator Ed Markey again.
Casey Newton who has been one of the top journalists covering the entire Twitter saga has a long form article out at NY Mag:
An excellent time capsule of the last few months of craziness sprinkled in with a few new details.
Some new bits I really liked:
Just then, David Sacks, a venture capitalist and friend of Musk’s who had advised him on the acquisition, walked into the room. A fellow native of South Africa, Sacks had worked with Musk at PayPal and later led the enterprise social-networking company Yammer to a $1.2 billion sale to Microsoft.
“David, this meeting is too technical for you,” Musk said, waving his hand to dismiss Sacks. Wordlessly, Sacks turned and walked out, leaving the engineers — who had gotten little engagement from Musk on anything technical — slack-jawed. His imperiousness in the middle of a session he appeared to be botching was something to behold.
And
Twitter might have had a reputation as a left-leaning workforce, but there had always been a faction that disapproved of its progressive ideals. On Slack, some of these workers had formed a channel called #i-dissent, where they asked questions like why deadnaming a trans colleague was considered “bad.” When Musk announced he was buying the company, one of the more active i-dissenters was thrilled. “Elon’s my new boss and I’m stoked!” he wrote on Linked-In. “I decided to send him a slack message. I figured you miss 100% of the shots you don’t make
.” This employee was cut during the first round of layoffs. Soon, all the prominent members of the #i-dissent Slack channel would be gone.
Does Musk not believe in giving employees coffee and pizza at work? Or do they just not need it all after laying off a bunch of employees?
I keep forgetting this thread exists. I’ve been posting everything in the pit version. 
Guess they’ll have to make do with tiny frozen pizzas cooked in Black & Decker toaster ovens like the rest of us lowly office folk!
(My office actually got a very fancy coffee and cocoa dispenser years ago, but one of the conditions of use is that you have to sign up to clean/refill the machine. I admit this seems fair, but I don’t have this amount of time in my schedule, so I never use it.)