Twitter takeover: how a year of Elon Musk rendered the platform useless | Pranav Dixit

BobTheBoozer@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 318 points –
Twitter takeover: how a year of Elon Musk rendered the platform useless
theguardian.com
24

Here's the best summary I could come up with Out of touch megalomaniac with money to burn, burns money after failing to understand the sector. Doubles down on bad decisions.

Elon was simply following an article sent to him by a fascist explaining how to use Twitter to own the left and he did it. He followed the article to a T.

This NBC article, which was quite a challenge to find, discusses this.

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/was-elon-musks-strategy-twitter-rcna118490

It's more X marks the spot than following to a T

If we can hit that bull's-eye, the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards. Checkmate.

So, essentially try to force Xitter to the hard right, making it the social media equivalent of Faux News. Anyone with a little common sense will bail, leaving the echo chamber to ferment in its own toxic vapors. Now, if only a Smartmatic incident would occur.

"Instead of showing you posts from people you follow, the platform now defaults to a “For You” mode filled with grifters, recycled memes, idiots, AI hustlers, cat videos, car accidents and far-right influencers."

What's the most money ever spent on a presidential campaign?

(About 14 billion total for 2020. So roughly 7b per side.)

Relevance?

The reasons he bought Twitter are many, but absolutely include political influence. Twitter and Reddit's hard right shift are going to affect elections around the world. Hopefully not enough.

The global elite started realizing that the common human can communicate and organize on these platforms. Destabilize the platforms, you dismantle the means for the common human to fight against the propaganda machine the elites have put into place. They needed a dumb, rich person to burn it to the ground in exchange for entry into their little club.

So why keep this useless, failed platform in the news? Stop giving Musk publicity of any kind.

Nothing even happens there anymore, half my links used to be to twitter, or screenshot of twitter.

It's already dead, just a bu ch of addicts circling the drain. We don't nerd to talk about it anymore aside from pouring one out when the servers finally turn off

Hopefully that will be Elon moving them once again with a team of undocumented workers to save a couple bucks.

This is the best summary I could come up with:


He’s booted journalists he doesn’t like from the service, labeled NPR as “state-affiliated media”, throttled traffic to news sites, reinstated previously-banned white nationalists, resurrected Donald Trump’s account, unleashed threats and harassment on former staff members, killed the best bots, feuded with the Anti-Defamation League, deprecated headlines, toyed with putting the whole site behind a paywall, installed a CEO who will forever be known for a disastrous first public interview, and destroyed one of the world’s most recognizable brand names – Twitter – by changing it to X.

Devoid of moderation teams, X’s official safety account suggested that people rely on crowdsourced Community Notes to figure out truth from lies (it didn’t work).

A recent analysis by NewsGuard showed that X’s verified users, who had paid for their blue checks, were responsible for 74% of Israel and Hamas war-related falsehoods that went viral on the platform.

Before she was one of the thousands of employees Musk laid off from Twitter at the end of last year, Melissa Ingle worked on a team responsible for civic integrity and tackling the spread of political misinformation on the platform.

Instead of showing you posts from people you follow, the platform now defaults to a “For You” mode filled with grifters, recycled memes, idiots, AI hustlers, cat videos, car accidents and far-right influencers.

Sensible, informative posts appear to get virtually no engagement – links are explicitly deprioritized, stifling the news while viral garbage floats to the top, thanks to an algorithmic tweak that Musk says optimizes for time spent on the platform above anything else.


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Ok so as someone who has always loathed twitter, I am irritated by journalists bemoaning the platforms irrelevance while still using it to lazily farm quick takes for their stories.

Don’t think twitter is relevant anymore? Stop using it. Governments and companies should stop using it too if they don’t see it as a legit social network anymore

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someone had to make history by sinking a company like he did. object lesson in what not to do...

I can't believe it's only been a single year. Definitely feels more like 2-3 years with all the shit that has happened and all the different news articles.