Musk deletes controversial X post on lack of Harris assassination attempts

vegeta@lemmy.world to politics @lemmy.world – 562 points –
thehill.com
136

“Well, one lesson I’ve learned is that just because I say something to a group and they laugh doesn’t mean it’s going to be all that hilarious as a post on X,” he wrote Monday, adding later, “Turns out that jokes are WAY less funny if people don’t know the context and the delivery is plain text.”

The owner of Twitter is learning how text-based communication works in realtime before our eyes.

"I wAs JoKiNg!"

If only the Bible said something about this.

Now we need people to read and remember what their book actually says.

Thanks. A handy verse to throw in the face of those who claim to be Christians.

You think the Secret Service got the joke?

I wouldn’t be surprised if he got a visit. Any of the rest of us might have for statements like that.

Any of the rest of us …

I think you have answered your own question.

Slash he surrounded himself with people absolutely willing to step on one another to gain power and wealth so of course they're going to laugh at all of his "jokes"

probably one of the lawyers told him to cool it.

He's incredibly paranoid and conspiracy minded. He probably realized after "just asking questions / joking" that "they" might send a few of these guys for him next! 2spooky4him

Lol at "the context". Bitch, WHAT context would make it any better?

I’m sure the yes men he surrounds himself with was “the context”.

I can just see him making his “joke” then doing that annoying over the top laugh with all his sycophants grinning along.

Turns out some things simply aren't funny. Not posting a thought right when it comes to your head also helps.

Lots of regular people know thats its risky to send a sarcastic text

WHY THE FUCK HAS EVERYONE NOT DELETED TWITTER

there is literally no correct answer

I just said goodbye to it today. I realised there's a bigger, unselfish choice to be made in the scheme of it all

I was only ever there to follow a wide variety of parody star trek accounts which were hilarious and thought provoking.

They're all gone, now that musk is doing his thing. Twitter was cancer, now it's terminal bullshit and I've deleted it long ago

there is literally no correct answer

I deleted mine years ago but, in Japan, it's still one of the main ways small shops communicate with their customers. Some use FB or insta instead. They don't have the knowledge, money, or desire to create a whole website that is far more difficult to interact with and update than the platforms that are free, people use, and are easy to update.

We need to get libraries running mastodon/lemmy/fediverse world-wide

I'm worried my library would ban me for wanting more stuff to be owned like libraries.

I don't disagree, but the majority of Japanese are just using whichever device is in their pocket (largely iPhones or Android, some feature phones, the occasional tablet, and much more rarely (outside of official business work), an actual full-sized computer).

I think they're suggesting that business owners create Lemmy communities with their phones, hosted on library servers.

Ah. That'd be a nightmare here, probably. Japan is pretty notorious for low tech literacy outside of a few narrow areas. I also think that this might have reliability impacts that just drive people away. Finally, no average japanese person has any idea what the fediverse is, so that's another hurdle to jump.

There is no one true replacement for the utility that it provides. Not with sufficient penetration of network effect, anyway.

Same reason most people don't delete Facebook (edit: or Reddit).

You may not personally find utility in either of them. But just like boner pill spam, clearly someone does, or they would just go away.

lol the comparison of useless social media to useless boner pill ads is perfect. of course someone finds it useful. just like someone finds crack cocaine useful

But boner pills aren't replaceable (like Twitter) or unnecessary (like crack). Sexuality isn't a vice.

i'm not talking about boner pills. or any pills. we're talking about the uselessness of twitter and ads

if you're making your meds decisions based on ads made by the company selling them to you, then sorry--that's dumb af

You could say the same thing about Reddit, yet a lot of us left there a year ago on principle. Sometimes taking a stand means doing without.

damn, it's already been over a year, hasn't it?

Yeah, over fifteen months since I created my account here for that reason

same. when the blackout protest changed nothing about the 3rd party apps, I decided I was done, and never went back

granted, it had been getting toxic for other reasons, but being forced to use their shitty app was the final straw for me

Same with me. Well, that in combination with the way they treated the app developers. I honestly didn't have an issue with Reddit trying to make money, or trying to prevent all the LLMs from skimming their content for free, but there was no reason to cut the app developers off at the knees.

I had already changed my relationship/view of Reddit years prior when the internet connection to Russia was severed for a day or so and so many subs (especially political ones) became fundamentally different. Hard to ignore that. But i just couldn't continue to give free content to such an awful company.

The two are not mutually exclusive. But OP's question was why "EVERYONE" has not deleted their account. And the objective answer is that some people obviously still use the service. But once again people are treating the downvote button as an "I don't like this" button.

Edit to add: Why? What exactly is wrong with what I said?

If it weren't for twitter, i wouldn't have even known there was another attempt on Trump. I don't sort Lemmy by new and there was nothing in the top posts about it (that I saw, at least) until HOURS after it happened. None of the other social media sites I use showed anything for a while either.

What did you gain by knowing unconfirmed information a few hours earlier? Did you need to act on that “information” that quickly?

People who view policymaking as "entertainment" are the reason we have Trump in the first place.

I would rather have my entertainment sooner, as opposed to never.

In this case it's not "never", I don't use twitter and saw this news on Lemmy this morning.

This isn’t some fucking game. Here let me make it more concrete and personal for your pea-brain:

I will find it very entertaining when your family and friends are lined up and shot to death while you watch.

You might consider reading some real news, vetted and produced by professional journalists. Twitter is not news source, neither is Reddit.

I typically do, twitter happened to be the first place I saw any information about it, nothing else tipped me off about it happening until then.

You could simply open a news site a couple times a day. They all had the assassination attempt up pretty quickly.

I didn't know it happened. Why would I have thought to go looking for something I don't know about?

I didn't know it happened either, but I check the news a couple times a day to see if anything happened.

It seems like you're being disingenuous. You said you need Twitter to find out about things like the assassination attempt, so obviously you check Twitter, but the concept of checking the news is apparently strange to you.

He didn't mean to check if there had been an attempt to eradicate Trump specifically, he meant open a news app occasionally, as one does a social media app.

“Don’t believe initial reporting about any dramatic event. The rush to be first often overrides the responsibility to try to be correct. As with any event like this, some of this information is likely to change as more information becomes available.”

https://youtu.be/sgpYzFTtJug?feature=shared

In any case, I heard about the attempt shortly after I started scrolling through lemmy last night, so from my pov the information had gotten to me in a timely manner.

nothing in the top posts about it (that I saw, at least) until HOURS after it happened.

in other words, since it can be assumed that you're checking multiple social medias often enough for "HOURS" to make such a huge difference, then basically your life is driven by FOMO, and you see no problem with that.

kudos for the honesty at least. you do you and keep supporting that nazi safespace

Pretty glad that all of these responses are assumptions about my character just because I somehow managed to not see that someone tried to merc trump again for the whole day.

you're trying to defend twitter with "i need it for news"

that says a lot about your character. no assuming needed

I knew here within 30 minutes. Also on Bluesky. Also on any major news source.

If you're not finding the stuff I think that's on your

The ap app notified me so you can't be trying that hard to replace twitter

It's such a non-event that even the Conservative lemmy didn't post about it until yesterday.

Elon Musk deletes his stochastic terrorism tweet.

The best thing that could come from the Harris election is cut ALL Musks government contracts.

Good thing it didn't get out to the internet. That would be embarrassing to keep being reminded of.

Even if it did get out to the Internet, though, all you have to do is delete it and it instantly disappears.

"Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?"

Damn, made this joke too late

If it's any consolation, I saw yours first, so this other guy is copying you as far as I'm concerned!

I'm also noticing a lack of Elon Musk assassination attempts.

Would creating the cyber truck be considered as a suicide attempt?

More like opening his big stupid mouth to opine on Russia / Ukraine, or Palestine / Israel, or European civil war or other such examples would be.

He's already made his request public, doesn't matter if he takes it down now.

It is odd that this man has any government contract, let alone any national security contract with the United States government

Yeah... spend some time actually interacting with people with clearances. They are people just like any other so you have some humans and some deranged chuds. And everyone in positions of power are either political appointees (elected or otherwise) or ladder climbers who want to suckle on the teat of those appointees.

So when you point out that someone is actively cheering for russia in a conflict with our allies or is openly calling people slurs? You get told that people are allowed to have political opinions and you are the problem. Because YOU are the reasonable person who will drop it. Whereas they will then bitch and moan that someone in IT has "blue hair" and whine until a local politician runs on that and suddenly everyone has very strict dress codes.

Which, in turn, leads to people leaving in droves which just leaves the shitheads and the appeasers.

I've actually had clearances and government contracts. I've seen them pulled for much less than what Elmo did here.

Not for the upper managers though, right? I've also had clearances, and I know about some shocking things that some of the government managers did while never so much as being investigated for them.

Contractors are different though.

Know of a company that misrepresented a product to the government. When the government found out they frooze all purchases from them for 3 years. Once that was found out, wall street crashed their stock. After that happened, the CEO was fired.

Which is a completely different topic.

starlink works... if it isn't out in the sun for too long. spacex works... for the purposes of what the actual contracts are for.

the issue is musk being highly likely to be compromised and openly calling for the rape and murder of people he doesn't like. Which gets back to "politics is allowed and you are the intolerant one" level responses.

The DoD has wanted a Starlink network for a long time. I think we should nationalize SpaceX, of course paying Elmo fair value.

I mean, nationalized spacex is just NASA again. Which I am all for since spacex (and blue origin and the other one) mostly just came out of poaching staff from NASA and JPL in the first place.

NASA is more of an engineering master contractor. They build specifications to be met by others.

That is 95% false and is the nonsense that has mostly been pedaled by the musks of the world to justify privatized space flight.

Like everything with the US military industrial complex, we split everything up to nonsensical degrees. So much of the research and designs NASA uses are based on work and spec by the Army and Air Force. Which, in turn, leads to very specific proposals for companies like Boeing (eep) and the like.

But the actual design and research and even "small scale" testing? That is generally NASA and JPL. JPL in particular being a government research lab (similar model used by the Navy and the DOE) that coordinates with in house talent as well as university groups around the country.

But as spacex and the like basically poached so much of the top talent out of NASA and JPL and universities? It stopped being "Build this rocket to these specs" and more "Hmm. That rocket you are trying to sell us looks REAL familiar but we have been told by congress we can't design it ourselves so here is your money. Say hi to Fred for us."

Well I dealt with NASA quite a little bit. But, you know best I Suppose.

Sure, you can argue that the.space race was formed, and many accomplishments that came from it, are a result of a military dick measurement exercise. But, maybe there is something you don't know. When man adventures, the development of technologies follows. This has happened throughout history.

BTW, JPL fixed Voyager the other day. Launched in 1977 it is the first man made object in interstellar space.

Indeed. He seems like a dangerous and unstable individual. Shouldn’t he be on a watchlist instead?

How the fuck has he not been visited by the feds?

I guess to be fair they're still getting a headcount on the people who were stupid enough to fall for the "Chase Infinite Money Glitch"

(For those who haven't heard what that is, TikTok tricked a bunch of people into committing Check Fraud by describing it as a "Free Money Glitch" and a bunch of 20 somethings who've never seen Catch Me If You Can or even heard of a check fell for it..)

Elon has been such a jackass this year.

There was never a time when he wasn't a jackass. He just abandoned his job of running companies in exchange for being a full time dumbass.

He was always a jackass, he just used to be a quiet jackass that nobody ever heard from so we couldn't tell. Now that he is fully incapable of shutting the fuck up, his jackassery is on full display.

Tfw you censor your own free speech on your “free speech” platform

First, I wouldn’t assume that there isn't anyone planning to assassinate Harris.

Second, let's not pretend that there hasn't been political violence coming from Trump's side of the aisle. For example, does the phrase "where's Nancy" ring a bell?

Third, Trump has positioned himself as an authoritarian strong man who will not be restrained by laws, facts, institutions or norms. He has embraced extremism and excused violence. He promotes hatred, division and conspiracy theories. He attacks law enforcement and courts when they apply the law to him, while simultaneously threatening to wield them as a political tool to persecute his enemies. He has managed to get the Supreme Court to declare the president to be above the law up to and including being able to order the assassination of political rivals. He has rejected democracy, attempted to steal the last election, and incited a riot at at the capital in order to coerce congress into going along with his coup attempt. When that failed, he called for the constitution to be thrown out, and stated that members of his own administration that didn't support him should be executed. He's wielded his influence in the Republican party to undermine the defense of Ukraine and support for NATO, and has single-handedly weakened NATO by threatening to withdraw and sowing doubt as to whether the US can be counted on to honor the defensive pact at the heart of the alliance. He encouraged opposition to basic public health protections during a pandemic simply because they looked bad politically, fanning the flames of an anti-science and anti-health movement that significantly increased the death toll. He has promised to be a dictator, and wants to purge the federal government of anyone who is not loyal to him and his agenda. He has a base full of rabid nutcases who routinely threaten violence and intimidate those that get in the way or try to enforce the law. He uses Nazi rhetoric and is supported by neo nazis, white supremacists, and other militant groups. He also has the backing of numerous billionaires that wield disgusting amounts of power and influence, and he's made no secret that he is willing to sell policy in exchange for contributions.

And that's not even an exhaustive list, just the first things that come to mind. Quite frankly, Trump is so toxic and such a clear threat to basically everything that America and liberal democracy is supposed to be about that it's not a surprise that someone would take a shot at him.

I hate this brand of pseudo-intellectualism.

Adversity doesn't mean you're right. Lack of adversity doesn't mean you're wrong. It just means some people agree with you and some people disagree. That's it.

I am trying to figure out what I can say without it sounding like I am asking for someone to be shot.

If I'm honest, and bear in mind that I HATE ELON MUSK, I don't think he was calling for anyone's assassination. He is just such an idiot that he didn't realize that his attempt at a fabricating a conspiracy would be misconstrued as such a call.

I've heard that autistic people are usually more concerned with justice than the average person. Is it because they're really bad at hiding unjust meaning behind their words?

Narcissists tho care less about justice and more about revenge. Guess which aspect dominates his personality?

I'm GLAD that Instead of my Taxdollars going to Feed STARVING AMERICAN CHILDREN it's INSTEAD going to a Person openly calling for the Assassination of our Vice President!

The tech leader has faced scrutiny for various posts and reposts on X in recent months, including last November, when he engaged with a post about an antisemitic conspiracy theory.

He’s not leading anything. Not at all. He buys in and lets others innovate or he runs them into the ground like his shitty website. His leadership is poison.

Elon Musk after somebody invents time travel: "why is everybody only going back in time to assasinate Hitler???"

Both assassins donated to progressive causes. They were not republicans. The second guy they caught on the golf course with a scoped rifle poking through the bushes. Idk how that "didn't happen?" Next you will be saying it was Trump who staged these events himself. You are deep in the propaganda. Good luck to you

The second guy voted for trump in 2016 and was a huge Vivek stan in the republican primary. They were both republicans just not the MAGA ones who are motivated purely by racism.

Not saying he staged them himself, but the campaign had those fundraising emails ready to go very quickly after the second one. Since the SS didn't kill this one, maybe we'll get some actual answers about who he is rather than more armchair speculation.

Democrats are extremely calm about the fact their followers have attempted to assassinate their main political opponent twice this election cycle. Is murdering your political opponents "protecting democracy?" The only reason to kill your political opponent in a democracy during an election is if you believe they will win the election. Sad state of the country.

Neither was a Democrat. The first was a Republican and the second was a former Trump supporter. It's conservatives that are trying to do the assassination.

1st attempt was a republican shooter. He was

2nd attempt didn't actually happen. They didn't see Trump or draw their weapon. It was just someone who owned a gun in America.

It's the republican party who have consistently displayed the attitude that the 2nd amendment is there for this type of thing, not the democrats.

How calm are you about your party doing this?