Elon Musk's X pushes Trump tags on all US users
X, the social media platform owned by Trump megadonor Elon Musk, is promoting Trump campaign-curated content to all U.S. users, regardless of whether they have opted out of Trump-related content.
On the platform formerly known as Twitter, banner ads for the Trump campaign donning the #Trump2024 tag appear for all U.S. users, even those who’ve blocked words, topics, and hashtags related to the candidate or his campaign or muted the advertiser.
Additionally, the #MAGA tag displays an edited image of the former president from his attempted assassination and the #Trump2024 hashtag displays an American flag.
It is unclear whether the Trump campaign paid for the images on the #Trump2024 and #MAGA tags, though an advertisement for the tag on the site’s trending page reads “Promoted by Team Trump.” As Mashable noted, it is the first time the platform has enabled the image feature to promote a specific political candidate.
Clicking the Trump2024 tag also prompts American flag graphics to flood the screen.
Honestly? If you’re still on Twitter at this point, that’s on you.
But I need it for my ________. There are simply no alternatives.
That's what they say.
Then your _________ is a cancer and needs to fail.
I totally get the sentiment... But there are people that I can't get anywhere else.. mostly my local police, fire department, and local govt are only on xitter... Also heavily use for the national weather service, but if drumpy wins that will be going away.
The last couple days I've been investigating if any of those are on threads, so I can try find a way to follow them mastodon... But doubt they have their accounts enabled for the fediverse... But I'd also have to migrate my mastodon account to an instance that hasn't de-federated threads...
The thing is, they are there because the users are there. After all, they want to reach the most people with their important official messaging.
You have to leave to make them leave.
Like it or not, Twitter is still the de-facto place for breaking news stories. You just have to sift through the dross.
As much as Mastodon is a far nicer and healthier social platform, it has a long way to go before it gets anywhere close in this particular regard.
For certain content there really is no alternative. One example would be gaming, almost no studios/developers are on Mastadon.
I do have a gaming-focused Mastadon account and I do use it, but it's not really comparable.
Oh no, what ever would we do without the tweets from game developers? How How will clickbait articles survive? On the plus side, they'd get a lot less death threats for updates to their games. And we wouldn't have a new news article for every fucking tweet that gets made.
I see where you are coming from (even if you are being a bit glib), but the reality is such that the vast majority will go with the flow.
And trust me, my hate for Musk is way more than you can imagine. This is serious stuff.
Are you still using Twitter?
Yes, I do.
My national background and the current situation in my country makes Twitter an important source of information (I follow local news sites as well).
I used the gaming as an example as a more neutral topic of conversation.
Then you are part of the problem.
This also works the other way though - once a critical mass moves elsewhere, the mob is quick to follow. I would encourage you to be part of that early snowball that starts the avalanche - be the change.
I already mentioned that I do use Mastadon. You're preaching to the choir.
As a game developer that has curated my mutual list of fellow developers, I’m saddened by the state of Twitter and genuinely have no alternative. A few folks have left for Threads, Mastodon, and BlueSky, but no community has coalesced on one platform. I would love to leave, but the fact is that if we want to communicate in a similar medium, we have to go where the people are. Right now, the people are still on Twitter.
Indies use twitter to create buzz. Be snide all you like but that's a big deal for those people.
Write to their social media manager and ask them to mirror their content on a mastadon account so their community can grow with those that no longer use twitter.
I actually did try that twice (in a context where they would have more motivation than a typical dev/studio), no luck.
Don't get me wrong, I do think we have to move of corporate social networking systems. I started actively using Lemmy about two months ago and I am enjoying it. However, we do have to be realistic about the state of the market.
If you still have a Twitter account, you are a piece of shit. That goes for everyone of you
Most of the world doesn’t know or care about US politics. X is a hellish platform though that does crack on pro-Palestinian users.
If you don't care about US politics then don't use an American Nazi's website
Way ahead of you. I got banned from Twitter before Elon even bought it for a joke on the biased representation of Arabs in media. It has gotten worse since then.
i got rid of mine shortly after he officially owned it but i used to follow a lot of certain people on nitter for a long time but the past year or so ive even been doing that less and less because i don't care about it anymore
I don't ever use it to think to delete it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
👍
A bit harsh I think
Nah it's fine
I should change my name to INHALE_BEEF
Is it? I don't think anyone gets a pass on supporting a nazi.
OMG A GUY IS DONATING MONEY TO A POLTICAL CANDIDATE!!!
You know very well that musk is not just "a guy", he is ultrarich and is using his money to get more money, no matter the cost to the rest of the world.
You know very well that the amount musk promises to donate monthly is more money than most people will see in their entire lifetime - including you.
You know very well that trump is not just a political candidate. He is a fascist piece of shit and has already stated that he will be a dictator.
Why do you simp for these fuckers? They wouldn't bother to piss on you if you were on fire.
Annnnnd this is where you go off the rail.
I simp for the truth and consistency. Elon is just another billionaire that is influencing things, the only reason you care about what he is doing is because your team tells you to care. You guys used to like elon, but since he left the circle jerk he is the enemy. You should like a troll billionaire but you cant get past the agenda.
None of the statements I made are wrong.
Did you not pay attention when trump said he'd be a dictator on day one? Or are you just ignoring that easily verifiable fact?
Will you be disappointed if he doesn't behave like a proper dictator on day one, considering your love for truth and consistency?
What were the two things he listed after he said he was going to be dictator on day one?
The issue is that they are misleading you with lying facts. For example if I said "A person is YY times more likely to die in a hospital than at the grocery store", that would be true but its misleading to believe that if I go to the hospital I am more likely to die than at the grocery store.
I believe that it was related to immigration and further ruination of the environment - Two hot topics among the majority of his cult; the racists and the coal rollers. Really makes no difference. His intentions are to shit on due process and law and order and do whatever he wants. Perhaps it will be for one day only, but that just doesn't seem likely considering his general approach to the law and the sycophants he got in the SCOTUS.
Uh yeah it does because the two things he listed are under presidential control, and it shows he was making a joke. You might not like the joke, but there is not stated intent to be an actual dicatator. And the all the rest is guess work or projection.
I guess this is down to opinion then. I think the only type of joking and humour trump is capable of is putting other people down and I think that everyone should be wary of every single word coming out of his mouth (how difficult that might be) because he speaks his mind with very little filter.
Sure, but the opinion has to be based in reality. If you hadnt noticed right now, the attack on trump has shifted to him being a fascist and a direct danger to democracy. Nothing has really changed, its the same basic trump.
It's really not.
Damn I just got back from twitter... It really changed in the past month it's all political stuff and I never used twitter to research politics I'm not even American I'm a Canuck but maybe that is close enough.
Moral of the story: I agree with you
It really has changed. I noticed it a few months back. Subtle rightwing and like, morbid "shock" content and even some animal abuse started popping up more and more. I just gradually started using it less and less, it was pretty obvious what was going on.
I still have a Twitter account. I mostly watch the cess pit argue with each other and to keep up with the latest misinformation.
But even that is growing tiresome.
I'm willing to bet that Elon donated the money to be kicked back to Twitter in order to fraudulently make it look like revenue was improving.
Damn that's so obvious too. Like their whole best seller book scam. You're probably right.
This is SOP in silicon valley so I'm sure you're correct.
Maybe it's time to stop drinking at the nazi bar.
Woah who woulda seen this coming? Free speech, politically centered Elon Musk of all people? Crazy!
I don't think anyone truly believes that anymore. He's been mask off dirtbag for awhile now.
for a bloke who likes to accuse people of being paedophiles, he sure is simping hard for an actual pedo
It's all about projection.
Probably has something to do with both their names being in the Epstein files
Lets all remember the following tweet by Elon
Guys you are all too left, calm down a bit please.
The USA doesn't even have a left in any meaningful way. There are two parties, one is right and the other is far right.
As someone from a not-US country, I'm always amazed at how right wing the US "liberal" policies are. If Biden was our PM he'd be more right wing than our most recent conservative PM.
My country 's right wing government, with actual full blown fascists in the parliament, is more leftist than Biden...
Yeah. Americans are brain washed. It’s a fact at this point imo.
You know what? I'm gonna left even harder.
This is true though. 1992 Bill Clinton would be a republican today. Biden supported a 1994 crime bill that is considered racist today. Obama didn't support gay marriage in 2008. Now liberals are fighting for sex change treatments for children. People 30 years ago would consider such an idea a grotesque absurdity.
1992 Bill Clinton thought that we should have universal single-payer healthcare. In 2016 Hillary said that would "never, ever, ever happen."
If you look at Hillary's broader statements, she has always favored universal single-payer healthcare. She worked her ass off to get a plan passed in 1994, and she was relentlessly attacked for it.
The last time Democrats got successful movement on healthcare was March 2010 with a filibuster proof Democratic majority in the Senate, a majority in the House, and a popular new president in the White House. Even then, only a relatively tepid compromise bill was passed, with even the "public option" stripped out (thanks Joe Lieberman).
Will conditions change in the future? Quite possibly, especially as our health care becomes increasingly unaffordable. Maybe it's not so helpful to have senior politicians telling voters something is impossible and potentially affecting the Overton Window. But Hillary's warning, that Bernie Sanders' plan hadn't a chance of getting passed, was a good reality check.
Most republicans prior to Reagan are more like today’s liberals. They did things like make national parks, codify civil rights, and invest in social programs. Today’s liberals are trying to do what those republicans did - save natural lands, implement social programs, and enhance rights for people.
That said, just because a liberal does some things a conservative might approve of doesn’t make them a Republican, nor would the inverse be true.
Wasn't Eisenhower the last of those republicans?
Like Terry Pratchett said: Bad times make good men
Good men make good times
Good times make bad men
Bad men makes bad times
I tried to spread it out. I don’t know if Ike was pro-civil rights, but he was certainly an advocate of investing in the country. His battleship speech certainly made him seem like an advocate of social programs.
maybe we should all ask our ancestors what they think about our society. you know 80 years ago people wouldn't be so keen on integration so much, maybe we should give this whole "having black people freely move around" a second thought, what do you think?
also you're massively misunderstanding the whole political spectrum but i don't have the energy. I'll just suffice to say liberals are not and have never been left wing. left has gained some traction in recent years but that's not about liberals. also for every inch the democrats have moved to the left, republicans have moved a mile to the right. the Overton window has shifted, but not to the left overall.
I understand that politics is multi-faceted however the chart I responded to is 2D.
Because that's what I'm saying 🙄 Calling someone a racist or a nazi for not hating all of human history is a low-tier cop out but go ahead and take your upvotes.
Remember I responded to a meme chart
Literally just an opinion.
Conservatism is dead. Climate change is scientifically proven to be catastrophic.
If we do nothing, change will come to us, and fuck up everything. If we elect to change our society and systems, we save ourselves but our way of living changes.
One way or another there's change. There's nothing to conserve. Stop yelling and kicking like an irrational kid trying to save conservatism and crony capitalism.
Ah remember the days when you could be left and still donate to an immigrant hating, sexist and racist billionaire? Those were the good days.
Thanks for proving my point
np
It is true. And that's OK. Failure to change with the times and to learn from scientific advancements and social improvements is a conservative trait.
You are accurate, but it begs the question: Is not changing your opinions with time and new info a respectable way to live your life? Will you be on the right side of history? Who knows? But I feel like giving people more options is more often better than the alternative.
Literally lolled at this. This post is in response to a "far right" Elon Musk who owns the first company to ever fire a rocket into space, retrieve and reuse it. I'm sure he's just taking credit for all the bleeding heart liberal geniuses working under him.
🥱 Wow way to load your rebuttal to make yourself seem so erudite and above it all. The reality is that a ton of the "new info" turns out to be proven false or even to be outright lies. The reality is that you should be incredibly suspicious of "new info" because chances are it hasn't been properly vetted and could be driven by an agenda similar to how companies fund research to prove their desired conclusions.
Hey I was trying to say your point was valid but I guess you'd rather be told to go fuck yourself? /shrug
Be honest. You were shitting on conservatives not agreeing with me.
I actually think young liberal folk are the ones downvoting you not conservatives. I'm pretty liberal myself but I lived through the changes in the world so I can see how someone can feel left behind when they considereal themselves moderate or liberal their whole lives and now they're being called conservative when they haven't changed beliefs at all.
before i make a user note for you can you clarify if you mean what you're saying or if you're just being a silly bee
Some context is required there, though. The 1994 crime bill did have significant support among Black leaders and activists. It was seen as an imperfect solution to a critical issue that disproportionately affected Black neighborhoods at the time.
leftist here, I'm fighting against sex changes for children (specifically intersex infants)
And how is that an economic redistributive position ?
That doesn't surprise me. The left and right paradigm flattens a ton of complexity into a boolean spectrum when the reality is far more complex than that.
As a leftist I think that transsexuals should not be discriminated against. I'm also highly disturbed by the idea of medicalizing everything and turning a sexual identity into an excuse for prescribing dangerous and harsh drugs and body modification surgery. The whole thing feels like an op by the for-profit healthcare industry.
"I don't think transsexuals should be discriminated against, expect medical discrimination. Cus conspiracy theories."
Pushers shouldn't be pushing. The sickness industry is a vile and evil institution that ruins people's health and cuts up their bodies for profit. That is a leftist position.
i know a lot of trans girls who source their own estrogen or get it from the black market (they also tend to be socialist ra types)
Clinton was a rightward leap of the Democratic party. In reality the left and right move in response to each other, but the direction it goes is not fixed.
Mastodon/Bluesky > Birdsite. Always.
I'd say the / should be a > but agreed.
I have no idea why people just jumped to another billionaire owned walled garden when Mastodon is sitting right there.
People would cut their arm off of the marketing was good enough.
So the whole Twitter acquisition hullabaloo was all about electing more tax breaks after all wasn't it. And here I was thinking it was perhaps about the ability to do some more sophisticated propaganda or just because of Elon's pure stupidity.
You're giving him too much credit. Influencing elections is an incidental benefit to the real purpose. Which is that now Elon gets to ban anyone who disagrees with him on Twitter.
A Billionaire simping THIS HARD for a Politician who is a known Child Rapist who doesn't pay his workers or taxes is PROOF that Democrats are the Swamp and REPUBLICANS care about the Working Class!
How to get every business to leave your platform in one simple step.
Yea, right.
At this point he could push porn with himself as every second shiit you see and people would still mindlessly scroll
Idk I thought they would have already left a long time ago but they are still there
I can hear the internal justifications of the “journalists” still using the platform.
A major Danish news site recently said they'd delete their accounts on Twitter :)
Although no plans for making a Mastodon account instead :(
What platform are journalists supposed to be using when almost all of them seem to be biased?
Any platform that doesn’t openly advertise (and have an owner who openly donates to the campaign of) one particular candidate. I would not expect to find any self respecting journalist to have an account on Truth Social for instance. Being on either platform directly contributes to the election campaign of Donald Trump.
Idk I think there are probably a lot of journalists who qt least go truth social, to study and report on what the most right wing groups are doing.
Which platform would that be? I am not trying to be difficult, but I think probably all platforms are heavily biased.
X/Twitter
Then why dont you like it?
Maybe this will make people finally stop using the site for good. But I doubt it.
Who wants to see a child rapist every time you go to their site?
I mean, people already go there to see Elon Musk and he's on the Epstein list...
It's time to start putting everything Republicans love under the Trump tag. Come on Internet, you know the drill!
So is Elon Musk paying himself for these ads? What are the implications around that ideology? If he’s donating 34 mill a month and that all is going to Twitter for this…
"Paying for these adds" lol he owns the platform, sure he'll probably get some mega donation tax breaks but like all he has to do is flip a couple bits, which is pretty damn cheal
I think they mean paying for these ads in the "creative" bookkeeping way.
Wouldn't the value of this advertising be a direct campaign contribution that could violate campaign finance laws?
That’s kinda what I’m playing at. The whole things stinks. Essentially a way for him to project Twitters advertising as bumping back in a big way cause of all the “campaign funds” funneling back into Twitter. So paying himself maybe isn’t the right wording but I think it nails the context of what I mean. Edit: spelling.
I'd say this is a great time for even more advertisers to abandon that platform, but really anyone who would care about this should have left a long time ago.
Does this represent a taxable benefit for Trump’s campaign?
That has been my question with the pedo files hash tags were being removed haha
Lmao I don't use x ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
If the Trump campaign paid for it as an ad, I'm not upset by it assuming anyone else could have paid to promote an alternative political candidate.
If it's an in-kind donation to the campaign, that's troublesome.
I want to transfer my tweets to my Mastodon before deleting my Twitter account.
I don't understand why a tool like still doesn't exist.
Wow, you must really value your thoughts.
Wow, you must really not value your thoughts.
Guess why he’s got a better life than you
IMO, that tool probably doesn't exists mainly because it'd be a thankless pain in the ass.
In general, unless you're self-hosting Mastodon, you probably mean "my Mastodon account on someone's server". And that "someone's server" probably has some moderation rules which differ significantly from Twitter. So, re-posting a bunch of tweets (i.e. "transferring") to someone's server can get hairy. Maybe some or all of your past stuff isn't copacetic with the new server - but who wants to re-litigate a sudden influx of old posts?
So, IMO, whoever writes (or uses) a tool to copy over a bunch of Twitter posts to any arbitrary Mastodon server is probably going to get yelled at a lot.
You can already export your Twitter/X data.
You can already transer data between mastodon accounts.
Why not import data to Mastodon from Twitter/X using the same past dates?
Pixelfed already does it with Instagram as well.
Just write a blog, if your brain defecations are interesting enough, people will find them. Sheesh.
You can transfer following / follows between Mastodon accounts. You cannot currently transfer posts
this is forcing
I'm surprised Twitter is still running. How many engineers do they have?
Maybe those engineers should go rogue and just.. not do this. But no, probably the ones left are jerks who support this, or people with visa worries.
Maybe someone will push Musk in front of a bus though.
There is a point in every cult where the leader increases restrictions and demands purity. What this does is eliminate the free thinking people by forcing them to chose. The more you impose these restrictions the crazier they get targeting only the most devote and the most codependent people.
What you end up with is an army of sycophants that will die before they leave the cult. Twitter will be the largest imposition of this strategy on a targeted group of people that i can think of. It's time to start being afraid of the cult of elon.
He's said he's going to donate $45m per month to Trump until November. It's becoming very clear he bought out Twitter to suppress free communication of people.
He sees which way the wind is blowing and is hoping he can help install Dictator-for-a-day Trump who'll deregulate every industry and cut every tax that might apply to him.
Isn't that illegal in some way?