elon musk – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Elon Musk, Who Now Claims Boycotts Are Illegal, Happily Joined The #DeleteFacebook Boycott Himself

from the it's-only-okay-when-we-do-it dept

Elon Musk’s recent claims that corporate boycotts of social media platforms are criminal reek of hypocrisy, given his own eagerness to join the #DeleteFacebook boycott just a few years ago.

In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Musk publicly supported the #DeleteFacebook campaign, even going so far as to remove the official SpaceX and Tesla pages from the platform. Yet now, as the owner of ExTwitter, he’s singing a very different tune — suing advertisers who choose to boycott his platform over content moderation concerns.

The blatant double standard is notable, if not surprising. Musk was happy to wield the power of the boycott when it suited his interests and let him mock his rival, Mark Zuckerberg. But now he condemns the tactic as criminal when turned against him. This “rules for thee, but not for me” attitude deserves to be called out even if he and his supporters will happily ignore the rank hypocrisy.

Earlier this year, Elon sued GARM — the “Global Alliance for Responsible Media” — a tiny non-profit that sought to advise brands on how to advertise safely on social media in a manner that (1) wouldn’t tarnish their own brands, and (2) was generally better for the world. GARM had no power and didn’t demand or order any company to do anything. It just worked with advertisers to try to establish some basic standards and to advocate that social media companies try to live up to those basic standards in how they handled moderation.

As we noted, just weeks before Elon sued GARM, ExTwitter had “excitedly” rejoined GARM, knowing that many advertisers trusted its opinion on determining where they should focus their ad spend.

But it seems clear that Elon felt differently. After a very misleading report was put out by Jim Jordan, Elon declared war on GARM and sued a bunch of advertisers. In response, GARM was shut down.

Musk and his friends are now going around saying that participating in an organized boycott of social media is criminal. Right around the time he sued, Musk suggested such a boycott might just be “RICO”:

And, as we just discussed, here’s Musk-backer and friend, Marc Andreessen, claiming that such boycotts are criminal.

However, my cohost on Ctrl-Alt-Speech called out in last episode that Elon Musk himself was quite happy to support a similar boycott not all that long ago.

After the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which Facebook data was used to try to influence voters to vote for Donald Trump (yes, this is ironic, given what Elon did with ExTwitter), some activists kicked off a boycott campaign called #DeleteFacebook.

Elon Musk showed some interest in the campaign by joking to someone “What’s Facebook?” in response to a (now deleted) tweet about the campaign. Some users then challenged him to join the #DeleteFacebook campaign by removing the SpaceX and Tesla accounts from Facebook, which he did.

As far as I can tell, to this day, there are no official, verified Tesla or SpaceX pages on Facebook.

Years later, after he had taken over Twitter, Elon even mocked Facebook for “caving” to the very boycott that he participated in himself.

Musk’s brazen hypocrisy on boycotts is just the latest example of his free speech double standard. He delights in wielding his immense power and influence to mock, criticize and yes, boycott those he disagrees with. But the moment anyone turns those same tactics against him, he cries foul and literally makes a federal case out of it.

This kind of self-serving double standard is corrosive to public discourse and the principles of free speech that Musk claims to hold so dear. While he and his supporters will almost certainly choose to ignore the stench of hypocrisy, the rest of us shouldn’t. Musk’s boycott hypocrisy deserves to be dragged out into the light again and again for everyone else to recognize.

Filed Under: boycotts, delete facebook, elon musk, hypocrisy
Companies: facebook, garm, meta, twitter, x

from the hypocrisy-is-the-only-principle dept

As we head into next week’s election, it is worth taking a step back and realizing how absolutely ridiculous it is that we spent five or six years with people insisting that Facebook and Twitter absolutely needed to be punished for supposedly engaging in biased content moderation (something they did not do).

While any private media entity has a First Amendment right to use its editorial discretion however it wants, including in a biased way, we were subject to years of freakouts from (usually) Republican politicians and supporters about how social media moderation was clearly illegal election interference.

Remember, we had to sit through multiple hours-long hearings in which Republicans screamed at tech company CEOs about their apparent “bias” in how they ran their companies, despite no actual bias being evident. Hell, the GOP is still engaged in a lawsuit claiming that Gmail’s spam filter is illegally biased against them (it’s not) and somehow that’s election interference (it’s not).

Even more ridiculous, even Mark Zuckerberg’s totally non-partisan attempt to donate to groups working on making sure elections were safe and fair was turned into a giant conspiracy theory claiming he was abusing his wealth to elect Biden (again something multiple studies — not to mention common sense — showed was not at all true). It got so ridiculous that Zuckerberg felt the need to cower before Jim Jordan and apologize, despite doing nothing wrong.

At the same time, we had Congressional hearings (sometimes the same ones!) in which Democrats demanded tech CEOs explain how they were dealing with “election misinformation.” This led to various companies setting up “election integrity” teams who tried to do good work… until Jim Jordan pretended that even the actions of having election officials alert social media companies to people impersonating election officials, or pushing voter-themed phishing scams, was election interference.

Of course, all of this is just background to the fact that, today, at this moment, Elon Musk is doing way more to swing the election to Trump than what the GOP falsely imagined big tech companies were doing in the past to help Biden.

And… we hear crickets.

I don’t expect that the modern GOP would call out this hypocrisy. After all, the driving principle behind the modern GOP is “everything anyone who is not a MAGA Trumpist does should be considered against the law, and everything MAGA folks do is perfectly fine.”

But, shouldn’t someone be calling it out?

Over at the Atlantic, Charlie Warzel has the latest example of extreme nonsense happening now on ExTwitter. Rather than Election Integrity, Musk appears to be using his control of the platform to further ridiculous, nonsensical, election conspiracy theories and propaganda.

Nothing better encapsulates X’s ability to sow informational chaos than the Election Integrity Community—a feed on the platform where users are instructed to subscribe and “share potential incidents of voter fraud or irregularities you see while voting in the 2024 election.” The community, which was launched last week by Musk’s America PAC, has more than 34,000 members; roughly 20,000 have joined since Musk promoted the feed last night. It is jammed with examples of terrified speculation and clearly false rumors about fraud. Its top post yesterday morning was a long rant from a “Q Patriot.” His complaint was that when he went to vote early in Philadelphia, election workers directed him to fill out a mail-in ballot and place it in a secure drop box, a process he described as “VERY SKETCHY!” But this is, in fact, just how things work: Pennsylvania’s early-voting system functions via on-demand mail-in ballots, which are filled in at polling locations. The Q Patriot’s post, which has been viewed more than 62,000 times, is representative of the type of fearmongering present in the feed and a sterling example of a phenomenon recently articulated by the technology writer Mike Masnick, where “everything is a conspiracy theory when you don’t bother to educate yourself.”

Elsewhere in the Election Integrity Community, users have reposted debunked theories from 2020 about voting machines switching votes, while others are sharing old claims of voter fraud from past local elections. Since Musk promoted the feed last night, it has become an efficient instrument for incitement and harassment; more users are posting about individual election workers, sometimes singling them out by name. In many instances, users will share a video, purportedly from a polling location, while asking questions like “Is this real?” This morning, the community accused a man in Northampton County, Pennsylvania, of stealing ballots. Popular right-wing influencers such as Alex Jones amplified the claim, but their suspect turned out to be the county’s postmaster, simply doing his job.

The most important feature of the Election Integrity Community is the sheer volume of posts: dozens per hour, such that scrolling through them becomes overwhelming. It presents the viewer with fragmented pieces of information—more than any casual news consumer (or most election offices, for that matter) might be able to confirm or debunk. And so the feed is the purest distillation of what Musk’s platform wishes to accomplish. He has created a bullshit machine.

It’s not new that Musk has built himself a snowglobe of confirmation bias. We know that’s true. It’s somewhat ironic that he’s now doing so under the name “Election Integrity,” which was the very function forced upon social media companies in the hopes that private companies would magically protect our elections against malicious interference attempts.

But at least someone should be calling out the blatant hypocrisy. All of the non-Musk tech execs spent years being raked over the coals for completely hallucinated concerns about “bias.” And here is Musk not just turning ExTwitter into a full time pro-Trump propaganda engine, but the very same people who screamed about (non-existent) “election interference” from those other companies are somehow cheering Musk on.

Remember the whole “Google is engaging in election interference because Gmail puts more GOP emails in spam” thing? The study they based that on didn’t really show any indication of bias. First off, it found the reverse in Outlook and YahooMail (more Dem emails went to spam, but somehow no one ever mentions that). Also, as the authors of the study explained, the entire “effect” in Gmail went away if someone made any attempt to “train” their spam filter. This was a complete nothingburger, and yet the GOP is still trying to make a big deal of it.

Or, hell, just last week, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey (who has shown himself willing to push all sorts of censorial, partisan bullshit) “launched an investigation” into Google, claiming that it puts pro-Trump results further down in search rankings.

Yet, where is Bailey’s investigation into this?

This algorithmic prioritization represents the second prong of the approach: granting far-right influencers and the MAGA faithful greater reach with their posts. A Washington Post analysis of lawmaker tweets from July 2023 to the present day show that Republican officials’ posts go viral far more often than Democrats’ do, and that Musk’s right-wing political activism has encouraged Republican lawmakers to post more, too, “allowing them to greatly outnumber Democrats on users’ feeds.” According to the Post, “Republicans’ tweets totaled more than 7.5 billion views since July 2023—more than double the Democrats’ 3.3 billion.” Musk has effectively turned the platform into a far-right social network and echo chamber, not unlike Rumble and Truth Social. The difference, of course, is X’s size and audience, which still contains many prominent influencers, celebrities, athletes, and media members.

No such investigation is forthcoming. Indeed, Bailey regularly cheers on Musk for doing this kind of thing.

So here I am, shouting into the wind. What Musk is doing may be legal. But so was what every other company was doing in the past (which wasn’t even biased in the first place). It’s not just the hypocrisy that is so ridiculous. It’s the fact that they continue to insist that companies are doing “illegal” things that are biased against them when (1) that’s not happening and (2) they’re doing way more biased things on behalf of Trump.

In the end, sticking with the GOP credo, their issue was never actually about bias or “election interference.” It was always about “wait, why aren’t we engaging in this kind of thing?”

I know it doesn’t matter. Trump fans will make up reasons this is “different” (and it is, because this is actually happening as opposed to the other stuff they claimed, which wasn’t), but it does feel that someone should call out this hypocrisy.

Filed Under: anti-conservative bias, bias, content moderation, donald trump, election interference, elon musk
Companies: facebook, google, meta, twitter, x

Donald Trump And Joe Rogan Think Elon Musk’s Starlink Is Akin To Magic Pixie Dust

from the first-do-no-harm dept

Wed, Oct 30th 2024 05:27am - Karl Bode

To be very clear: SpaceX’s Starlink service can be a game changer for those completely out of range of broadband access. Getting several hundred megabits per second in the middle of nowhere is a decidedly good thing, assuming you can afford the $120 a month subscription and up front hardware costs.

But contrary to what many press outlets imply, it’s not magic. And it comes with a growing list of caveats.

The technology has been criticized for harming astronomical research via light pollution. Starlink customer service is largely nonexistent. It’s too expensive for the folks most in need of reliable broadband access. The nature of satellite physics and capacity means slowdowns and annoying restrictions are inevitable, and making it scale to meet real-world demand will be impossible. And Starlink was caught abusing taxpayer subsidies to get money it didn’t deserve.

In addition to screwing up research of the night sky, scientists warn that the steady parade of thousands of disposable, smaller low-Earth orbit satellites constantly burning up in orbit could release chemicals that could undermine the progress we’ve made repairing the ozone layer. To be clear this isn’t just a “Starlink problem.” There’s a bunch of companies, including Amazon, rushing into this space ass first.

So this week, a coalition over more than 100 space researchers signed a letter urging the FCC to perform an environmental review before allowing SpaceX to continue launching thousands of low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellites:

“The environmental harms of launching and burning up so many satellites aren’t clear. That’s because the federal government hasn’t conducted an environmental review to understand the impacts. What we do know is that more satellites and more launches lead to more damaging gasses and metals in our atmosphere. We shouldn’t rush forward with launching satellites at this scale without making sure the benefits justify the potential consequences of these new mega-constellations being launched, and then re-entering our atmosphere to burn up and or create debris This is a new frontier, and we should save ourselves a lot of trouble by making sure we move forward in a way that doesn’t cause major problems for our future.”

“Hey, maybe you should think before you act,” is not a particularly lofty request, and I’m sure it will met with the usual nuanced understanding Musk fans (and his assorted Republican cheerleaders like the FCC’s Brendan Carr) are known for.

Musk has recently been leveraging Starlink as an election season wedge issue, falsely claiming that the Biden FCC’s refusal to slather him with unwarranted subsidies put Hurricane Helene victims at risk. Folks in the Elon Musk fan fiction universe see Starlink as some kind of pixie dust you can just sprinkle across the entirety of rural America to immediately solve the entirety of U.S. connectivity woes.

Exhibit A, from Joe Rogan’s recent interview with Trump:

JOE ROGAN: I used it recently in Utah in the mountains. It’s good.

DONALD TRUMP: Did you find it good?

JOE ROGAN: Oh, it’s phenomenal. It’s the size of an iPad. You just set it down on the ground, you get high speed internet. It’s incredible. It’s outstanding.

DONALD TRUMP: Just to show you. We’re spending a trillion dollars to get cables all over the country, right? Up to upstate areas where you have, like, two farms and they’re spending millions of dollars to advocate.

JOE ROGAN: Well, talk about the 42billionthatwaswastedonthisinternetaccessprogram.Theydidn’tgetanybody.Theyhaven’thookedup.Notoneperson.Theyspent42 billion that was wasted on this internet access program. They didn’t get anybody. They haven’t hooked up. Not one person. They spent 42billionthatwaswastedonthisinternetaccessprogram.Theydidn’tgetanybody.Theyhaven’thookedup.Notoneperson.Theyspent42 billion. They could have gotten Starlinks to everybody with that kind of money

DONALD TRUMP: For almost nothing. For a monthly charge.

JOE ROGAN: And it would have been incredible. And it’s high speed internet everywhere you want to go.

DONALD TRUMP: And he wanted to do that.

They’re talking about the $45+ billion in telecom subsidies headed to the states courtesy of the 2021 Covid relief and infrastructure bill bills (that Republicans voted against, but still somehow take credit for among their constituents). Some of that money is going to be wasted, but a lot of it is going to be building some incredible, ultra-fast fiber networks at speeds upwards of 10 Gbps, including community-owned and operated broadband networks taking direct aim at shitty, giant telecom monopolies.

Trump pulled the “$1 trillion” number out of his ass. And the “cables” he complains about funding “upstate” are billions of dollars of essential, high-capacity next-generation fiber connectivity that’s going to bring significantly faster speeds to countless schools, farms, businesses, libraries, community centers, and rural and suburban residents in red and blue states all over the country.

States are finalizing their plans now, and the reason it’s taking a little longer than usual is because state and federal governments, to their credit, actually tried to map broadband access this time before throwing billions of dollars at the problem. The NTIA is also, shockingly enough, trying to make sure that the companies taking taxpayer infrastructure bill money can actually deliver the speeds they promise (something the Trump FCC didn’t do, resulting in a bunch of legal chaos as companies defaulted on bids).

The NTIA correctly decided to prioritize this taxpayer money on funding more affordable, faster, and reliable fiber connections, filling in the gaps with stuff like 5G and fixed wireless. From there, it makes sense to fill in the remaining gaps with LEO satellite connectivity. But that involves also being realistic about the potential harms to the environment and research posed by these newer satellites.

So far, regulators haven’t even done that. As the scientists note, the FCC hasn’t even considered the environmental impact of tens of thousands of disposable LEO satellites constantly burning up in orbit year after year. Asking the FCC to do its job and do that shouldn’t be viewed as that big of a deal, but I’m sure that even this minimalistic ask will be treated like “government regulation run amok.”

Again, Starlink is a great tech if you can afford it (affordability is arguably now the primary obstacle for access for many), but when it comes to fixing the digital divide, it’s more of a niche solution than some kind of magical cure all. It’s nothing personal about Starlink or Musk, it’s simply physics. It simply can’t scale up to fully meet demand anytime soon. Musk himself has made this clear for years.

Only recently, once he realized he could leverage Starlink as a political prop to aid Trumpism, has Musk started acting like it’s some unlimited-capacity magic technology that the mean old liberal government is somehow trying to undermine.

Filed Under: donald trump, elon musk, fcc, fiber, joe rogan, leo, low earth orbit satellite, satellite, starlink, subsidies, telecom
Companies: spacex, starlink

from the decentralize-all-the-things dept

Last week, Bluesky, where I am on the board (so feel free to consider this as biased as can be), announced that it had raised a $15 million seed round, and with it announced some plans for building out subscription plans and helping to make the site sustainable (some of which may be very cool — stay tuned). A few days prior to that happening, Bluesky hit 13 million users and continues to grow. It’s still relatively small, but it has now done way more with a smaller team and less money than Twitter did at a similar point in its evolution.

I’m excited with where things are trending with Bluesky for a few reasons, but I wanted to actually talk about something else. Just before I joined the board, I had met up with a group of supporters of “decentralized social media,” who more leaned towards ActivityPub/Mastodon/Threads over Bluesky. Even though I wasn’t officially representing Bluesky, they knew I was a fan of Bluesky and asked me how I viewed the overall decentralized social media landscape.

Similar questions have come up a few times in the last few months, and I thought that it made sense to write about my thoughts on the wider decentralized social media ecosystem, just as we’ve hit the two year anniversary of Elon Musk taking over Twitter. Since then, he’s wiped out billions of dollars in value and revenue, turned what had been a pretty neutral open speech platform that fought globally for free speech, into a one-sided, bot-filled partisan platform that only fights for free speech when it disagrees with the government, but is happy to cave if the authoritarians in charge are friendly with Musk.

But the one key thing is that the decentralized social media landscape has been invigorated and supercharged, almost entirely because of Elon Musk. Thank you, Elon.

I previously told the story of my attendance at a conference in New York in October of 2022, where there was a very interesting presentation predicting the adoption of decentralized alternatives to centralized social media with this chart being shown:

As I noted, this chart and the “events that trigger disillusion” in particular struck me as a bit too underpants gnomey:

What those “events that trigger disillusion” actually are becomes pretty damn important. So, I had asked a question to that effect at the event. For years since my Protocols, Not Platforms paper came out, I had struggled with what would actually lead to real change. I didn’t find the presenter’s answer all that satisfying, but little did I know that literally while that presentation was happening, Elon Musk was officially saying that he would drop his attempt to get out of buying Twitter, and would move forward with the acquisition.

At that point, Bluesky was still just a concept of a protocol. It was far from any sort of app (it wasn’t even clear it was going to be an app). But in the events that followed over the next few weeks and months, as Elon’s approach to dismantling basically everything that he claimed he supported with ExTwitter became clear, Bluesky realized it needed to build its own app.

Indeed, it’s astounding how much Elon has become the one man “events that trigger disillusion” from that chart above. With it, he has become a singular driving force towards driving adoption in alternative platforms.

I’m not betraying any internal secrets in noting that people within Bluesky have referred to some of the big influxes of new users on the platform to “EME: Elon Musk Events.” Whenever he chooses to do something reckless — ban popular users, launch a poorly planned fight with a Brazilian judge, take away the block feature — it seems to drive floods of traffic to Bluesky. But also to other new alternative platforms.

Thank you, Elon, for continuing to supply “events that trigger disillusion.”

But waiting for Elon to fuck up again and again is not a long-term strategy, even if it keeps happening. It is introducing more and more people to the alternatives, and many people are liking what they’ve found. For example, well-known engineer Kelsey Hightower recently left ExTwitter and explained how ATProtocol (which underlies Bluesky and enables much of what’s great about it from a technical standpoint) is one of the most exciting things he’s seen in years.

But, the reality is that no one quite knows what is going to really “click” to make decentralized social media more appealing long term and for more people than centralized social media. Many of us have theories, but the reality is that what makes something really click and go from a niche (or dying!) thing to essential is only possible to understand in retrospect, rather than prospectively.

Just as I spent a few years trying to work out what kinds of things might be “events that trigger disillusion,” I think we’re still in the discovery stage of “events that trigger lasting value.” People leaving the old place because they’re disillusioned is a starting point. It’s an opportunity to show them there are alternatives. But to make it last, we need to create things that people find real value out of that weren’t available at the old place.

The key to every “killer app” on a new system, even ones that start out mimicking the old paradigm, is enabling something that couldn’t be done on the old system. That’s when things get really fun. Early TV was just radio with video until people figured out to embrace the medium. Smartphones were initially just tiny computers, until services that embraced native features like location were better understood.

We need that for decentralized social media.

But right now, we don’t really know what that trigger is going to be. I can think that some of Bluesky’s features — things like domains as handles, using standardized decentralized IDs, composable and stackable moderation, and algorithmic choice — are part of what will get us there, but I don’t know for sure what the big breakthroughs will be. And neither does anyone else.

As such, we need more experiments and experimenting, and not all of that should be done directly within the ATProtocol system (the ATmosphere). Because, even while I think it’s extremely clever in what it enables, the choices made in its approach might limit somethings enabled by other approaches. So I don’t so much see other decentralized social media systems like ActivityPub (Mastodon, Threads, etc.), nostr, Farcaster, Lens, DSNP, etc., as competitors.

Rather, I see them as all presenting unique experiments to see where the real value can show up. I think there’s a ton to learn from all of them. For example, I think Mastodon’s focus on local community and the power of defederation is a fascinating experiment. We’re also seeing some interesting new systems built on ActivityPub that challenge the way we think about decentralized apps. I think that nostr’s simplicity that makes it ridiculously easy for anyone to build clients and relays is important. Farcaster has a number of really cool ideas, including things like Frames that allow you to create apps within social feeds.

In other words, there is a lot of experimentation going on right now, and all of that helps the wider ecosystem of decentralized social media, because we can all learn from each other. We already see that Mastodon has been making changes in response to the things that people like about Bluesky. I’m sure that everyone working on all of these systems are looking at what others are doing and learning from each other.

The simple reality is that right now, no one really knows what will “click.” We don’t know what the real “killer app” is that convinces more people to switch over from centralized systems to decentralized ones. “Events that trigger disillusion” are great for getting people to look. But, getting people to stay and eagerly participate requires adding real value.

I’m happy to see all this experimentation going on to figure out what that is. Just “being decentralized” is not a value that attracts most users. It has to be what that decentralization enables, preferably the kinds of things that a centralized system can’t actually match, that will create the next breakthrough.

Since no one can predict exactly what that breakthrough is, the best way to find out what will really make it work is having the wider decentralized ecosystem all experimenting. This isn’t even a “rising tide lifts all boats” kinda thing. It’s more of a “we need lots of folks digging holes to see where the oil is” kinda thing. Letting each of these systems test things out with their own unique approach is the best way to discover what will actually excite and attract users positively, rather than just in response to yet another Elon Musk Event.

I’m enthusiastic about Bluesky’s approach. I think the ATProtocol gives us the best chance of reaching that breakthrough. But I’m happy to see others trying different ideas as well, because all of these experiments will help bring us to a world where more people embrace decentralized systems (whether they know it or not) and move away from old walled gardens. Not because of “events that trigger disillusion” but because what’s happening over here is just that much more useful and powerful.

Filed Under: atprotocol, competition, decentralization, decentralized social media, elon musk, social media
Companies: bluesky, farcaster, mastodon, twitter, x

Lies, Damned Lies, And Elon Musk

from the we-used-to-believe-in-reality dept

What do you do when the misinformation is coming from inside the house?

In the recent book Character Limit, about Musk’s takeover of Twitter, there’s an anecdote that is in the introduction. A data scientist who worked at the company (and had survived the early purge), who was horrified at how Musk had fallen for a blatantly obvious made up conspiracy theory, decided that he’d take the opportunity Musk had offered to talk to anyone personally to explain just how gullible Musk seemed:

Musk’s assistant peeked back the muttered and said he had another meeting. “Do you have any final thoughts?” she asked.

“Yes, I want to say one thing.” the data scientist said. He took a deep breath and turned to Musk.

“I’m resigning today. I was feeling excited about the takeover, but I was really disappointed by your Paul Pelosi tweet. It’s really such obvious partisan misinformation and it makes me worry about you and what kind of friends you’re getting information from. It’s only really like the tenth percentile of the adult population who’d be gullible enough to fall for this.”

The color drained from Musk’s already pale face. He leaned forward in his chair. No one spoke to him like this. And no one, least of all someone who worked for him, would dare to question his intellect or his tweets. His darting eyes focused for a second directly on the data scientist.

“Fuck you!” Musk growled.

This is a pattern. Musk has all the money in the world. He has the ability to be one of the best informed people in the world. And he’s built for himself a snowglobe of confirmation bias, making sure that a randomly floating combination of grifters and morons continue to feed him the dumbest shit imaginable, rather than take the slightest effort to actually inform himself of reality.

We just recently had a post contrasting how science educator Hank Green approached some possibly damning information about voting, compared to how Elon Musk handled it. Green was concerned, but spent the time researching it, and realized his original concerns were misplaced, and the institutions had actually done things in a smart way. Elon does no research, and assumes the worst, and simply will retweet any nonsense he comes across so long as it confirms his (very, very confused) biases.

This keeps playing out day after day on ExTwitter, the website that Elon owns. Just recently, I saw Elon post a tweet that was so egregiously wrong, it got Community Noted twice, not that Elon ever acknowledged it was false. As I write this a few days later, the tweet is still up:

That’s a quote tweet from Elon Musk saying “They are literally foaming at their mouth” in response to a tweet from some rando saying “Completely insane story in The Atlantic today” with a faked screenshot of an Atlantic piece with the false headline “Trump is Literally Hitler.” Both the original tweet and Elon’s tweet have a Community Note on it saying “this is not a real article.”

But millions of people saw the original, without the Community Note, and seem to think it’s true.

The original tweeter later admitted that he faked the headline. But because Elon wanted to believe it was true and had to retweet it, giving it a bunch of attention, even The Atlantic was forced to put out a statement noting they never published any such article.

The Atlantic concludes that statement with the following rather straightforward point:

Anyone encountering these images can quickly verify whether something is real––or not––by visiting The Atlantic and searching our site.

The bare minimum effort, which Elon couldn’t be bothered with.

Amusingly, the same day my piece comparing how Green and Musk deal with such information came out, Green released another video, this time talking about how he looked at one day’s worth of Elon tweets and was shocked to see how blatantly and easily Musk publishes easily disproven false information with the implication that Musk believes it’s true. Green found six outright lies posted in just 24 hours.

Again, this is not a one-off thing. Recently, the NY Times looked at five days’ worth of Elon’s tweets and found almost one-third of them “were false, misleading, or missing vital context.”

Nearly a third of his posts last week were false, misleading or missing vital context. They included misleading posts claiming Democrats were making memes “illegal” and falsehoods that they want to “open the border” to gain votes from illegal immigrants. His misleading posts were seen more than 800 million times on X, underscoring Mr. Musk’s unique role as the platform’s most-followed account and a significant source of its misleading content.

[….]

His most-viewed post, seen more than 100 million times, was a misleading projection of the presidential race that showed Mr. Trump winning most battleground states. The data was based on an outdated forecast from Nate Silver, an election modeler. By the time Mr. Musk shared the data, Mr. Silver’s forecast had shifted, suggesting instead that Vice President Kamala Harris was faring better than Mr. Trump. Some users quickly noted that the data was wrong, but Mr. Musk did not remove the post or make a correction.

It wasn’t just one bad week. Bloomberg just came out with an even bigger report, looking at all of Elon Musk’s tweets from 2011 through this week. It’s a really fascinating piece of data-based journalism, showing how he was a pretty ordinary tweeter in the early days, but obviously things changed after he took over Twitter.

As the report notes, in recent weeks, Musk has become obsessed with false and disproven conspiracy theories about the election and immigration.

Musk’s posts about immigration primarily promote misleading narratives: that the election will be unfair because of migrants; that migrants are dangerous, and flooding unchecked into the country; that the vast majority of immigrants have not settled into the US in the “right” way; that migrants have gotten unreasonable, special treatment from the government; and that Democrats are responsible for ushering in large numbers of migrants who go on to commit crimes in the US.

Bloomberg ran a machine learning model on the posts to identify subjects that Musk most often discusses on X, and found that about 1,300 of Musk’s posts in 2024 revolved around immigration and voter fraud. Reporters then manually reviewed hundreds of them to ensure they were properly categorized. Posts were provided by researchers at Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub and the data platform Bright Data.

Musk’s commentary on noncitizens voting is based on a “weak to non-existent” understanding of election law, said David Schultz, a professor of political science at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota. Federal law bars non-US citizens from voting in presidential elections, and voters must legally swear, under penalty of criminal prosecution, that they’re eligible to cast a ballot.

In order to become a US citizen and vote, undocumented immigrants have only a few viable paths, some which take years, such as securing asylum or successfully challenging a deportation order. Meanwhile, state-led investigations by both Republican and Democratic officials have repeatedly found that noncitizen voting is extraordinarily rare — and it’s never been shown to affect the outcome of any election. “Given what we know about how infrequently voter fraud has occurred over the last two or three elections in the US, the odds of drawing a random ballot, and that ballot being fraudulent, approach that of winning the Powerball,” Schultz said.

It also appears that there’s some element of “audience capture” going on. Musk appears to track closely what sort of response his posts get (which is partly why he ordered the company to make his tweets get more attention) and then responds accordingly:

Any time Musk talks about immigration on X, the reposts, replies and views reliably roll in. Though Musk has written about immigration and voter fraud issues in 2024 with about the same frequency as he’s written about Tesla, the automaker he is chief executive of, his immigration-related posts have amassed more than six times the number of reposts.

The article includes a lot more, like the reporters talking to some Trump supporters who are praising Musk while repeating the easily debunked nonsense that he regularly tweets, retweets, or engages with.

There is nothing illegal in what he’s doing, though presenting potentially harmful misinformation about elections, specifically around where and how to vote, can cross the line. But it’s quite striking how Musk, driven by his insatiable desire to be “liked” on his own platform, has shown that he has zero interest in actual truth, and is happy to push any lie that works for his current support for Donald Trump’s campaign.

It’s not new that greedy, disconnected billionaires will often use the media to push lies to support their favored candidates. Yellow journalism is a thing that existed throughout American history. However, it’s pretty shocking just how frequently and how often Elon will directly promote baseless claims or outright falsehoods, never ever taking responsibility or admitting to having promoted bullshit.

This is why, though, it’s important to call it out and for people to recognize what’s happening. Musk is actively miseducating people. And people are believing what he’s posting.

People can argue over why he’s doing this. Some say that he knows he’s spreading lies to idiots and cultists who follow him, because he knows he can get away with it. However, I don’t think that’s true. Having followed the guy and his statements for a while, I honestly think he believes the shit he’s tweeting, and believes the likes and the cultists cheering him on prove that he’s correct.

That he could easily find out the truth is not particularly important to him. It’s not about the truth. It’s about the truthiness of the world he wants to inhabit, where he is the only person who matters.

Whether or not this actually has an impact on the election or other important events in the future is impossible to predict. But it hardly seems like a good state of affairs.

Filed Under: disinformation, donald trump, elon musk, hank green, lies, misinformation, propaganda
Companies: twitter, x

Elon’s Demands For Media Matters’ Donor Details Hits A Surprising Hurdle: Fifth Circuit Says ‘Not So Fast’

from the didn't-see-that-coming dept

Elon Musk’s SLAPP suit against Media Matters has hit a roadblock, as the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals—not exactly known for its progressive rulings—has granted a stay on Judge Reed O’Connor’s order compelling the nonprofit to reveal its donor information.

These days, the Fifth Circuit is where good law goes to die, but apparently even they have some limits. We’ve been following the story of Elon Musk’s SLAPP suit against Media Matters over the advocacy group’s article detailing (accurately) how it found ads from big companies next to neo-Nazi content on the platform.

Judge Reed O’Connor (owner of a bunch of Tesla stock, which he doesn’t think conflicts him out of this case) has been consistently siding with Musk despite the absurdity of the case. The case should have been thrown out for any number of reasons, starting with jurisdiction and venue questions. The lawsuit was brought by a (then) Nevada company headquartered in California, against a DC-based group and a Maryland-based writer. Note the lack of Texas.

The case is so obviously a bogus attack on Media Matters’ free speech and an attempt to punish the company for that speech. Also, in a related matter, another federal judge has already called out Musk’s attack on Media Matters as obviously trying to suppress critical speech (free speech absolutist, my ass).

However, as Judge O’Connor seems willing to bend over backwards to help out Musk, that has included saying that Media Matters has to turn over its donor rolls and related documents as part of the discovery process. The judge (falsely) claimed that Media Matters waived any claim of privilege in those documents by failing to provide a privilege log.

Media Matters asked Judge O’Connor to stay the order while it could appeal, pointing out how damaging it is to the First Amendment to have a non-profit be forced to hand over all its donor info. Judge O’Connor, once again siding with Musk, denied the motion but said that Media Matters wouldn’t have to comply until the Fifth Circuit responded to the organization’s request for an emergency stay.

Over the weekend, the Fifth Circuit granted the stay, meaning that it doesn’t yet need to hand over the donor info. It’s a short per curiam ruling that is not entirely supportive of Media Matters but shows that, unlike Judge O’Connor, the panel of judges recognized there are larger issues beyond “who do we like, Elon Musk or Media Matters?”

In particular, they realized that the Supreme Court had already rejected a law in California that required non-profits to reveal their largest donors. In that case, it was about Democratic government officials trying to force conservative non-profits to reveal donors. O’Connor doesn’t seem to care about how his own rulings might be used against non-profits he supports. He seems to only care that he’s supporting Elon Musk’s censorial campaign.

But the Fifth Circuit, at least, is willing to take a broader view of things. However, it admits that Media Matters’ refusal to even search for or create a privilege log of the materials was kind of stupid for the organization to do. But, also forcing non-profits to reveal donors could have serious First Amendment impacts. Weighing those two things against each other means that Media Matters can’t yet be compelled to give up the info, because of that case regarding California’s law.

Media Matters primarily claims that the order violates its donors’ First Amendment rights. It contends that, under Bonta, the district court could not order disclosure unless it satisfied “exacting scrutiny” because “compelled disclosure of donor identity imposes a widespread burden on donors’ associational rights under the First Amendment.”

In Bonta, the Supreme Court held unconstitutional a California regulation requiring charities to “disclose to the state . . . the identities of their major donors.” 594 U.S. at 600–01. “[C]ompelled disclosure of affiliation,” the Court explained, “may constitute as effective a restraint on freedom of association as other forms of governmental action.” Id. at 606 (quoting NAACP v. Alabama ex rel. Patterson, 357 U.S. 449, 462 (1958)) (cleaned up). The Court thus applied “exacting scrutiny” to California’s regulation. Id. at 611. The regulation failed exacting scrutiny because (1) there was no “substantial relation between the disclosure [regulation] and a sufficiently important government interest,” and (2) California had not “narrowly tailored” the regulation to its claimed interest. Id. at 611, 612.

“[E]xacting scrutiny is triggered by state action which may curtail the freedom to associate.” Bonta, 594 U.S. at 616 (emphasis added) (cleaned up). Conversely, the discovery order here compels a private party to disclose information to another private party.

But, the court says Media Matters didn’t do itself any favors by simply refusing to even look for the documents or creating a log:

In the intervening four months, however, Media Matters refused to search for these documents or to log its claims to privilege over them. It says that it had several more months to comply under the district court’s updated discovery timeline. But that’s not how it explained its refusal; instead, it told X Corp. that it was “not separately searching for donor-related documents” under Requests 17 and 18 and that X Corp. would find out about those documents only if they fell within other discovery requests. It similarly maintains here that those requests “substantially overlap” with other requests.

The district court granted X Corp.’s second motion to compel. It reasonably concluded that Media Matters never intended to log responsive documents. It thus found that by defying the order, Media Matters had waived any applicable First Amendment privilege. In addition, it found that Media Matters had abandoned its First Amendment privilege by not properly raising it in its updated discovery responses.

It is puzzling why Media Matters defied the district court. As that court explained, Media Matters “could have complied with the Order by, at a minimum, independently searching for the documents and creating a privilege log.” In other words, it didn’t yet have to turn over the purportedly privileged documents. Does Media Matters think that the First Amendment excuses it from explaining why withheld discovery is privileged?…

“A trial judge’s control of discovery is granted great deference.” HC Gun, 201 F.3d at 549. If litigants refuse to comply with the trial court’s reasonable discovery orders, they do so at their own risk. Even when we reversed a discovery order mid-litigation in Whole Woman’s Health, the adversely affected party had diligently searched for and turned over a substantial number of responsive documents….

But, weighing those two things against each other, the court feels that forcing Media Matters to hand over such info at this time might do undue damage to the First Amendment. It also notes that (1) Elon Musk has promised to go after Media Matters’ funders and, (2) the demands for information on donors appears to be way too broad:

We doubt that X Corp. needs the identity of Media Matters’s every donor, big or small, to advance its theories. Nor does it need the full residential addresses for any of those stated purposes. Conversely, Media Matters and its donors would bear a heavy burden if Media Matters had to release this information. It could enable others to harass or intimidate Media Matters or its donors. Indeed, X Corp.’s owner, Elon Musk, has said that X Corp. would “pursue not just [Media Matters] but anyone funding that organization. I want to be clear about that anyone funding that organization, will be, we will pursue them.”…

[…]

The other requestsfor production are not as broad but still encompass irrelevant information. Request 18 asks for communications “reflecting . . . attempts to solicit donations or financial support, including . . . discussions with donors” or potential donors. Request 21 asks for “sources of funding for research, investigation, reporting, publication, or any other work related to X, the Platform, Elon Musk, or Linda Yaccarino.” Request 35 asks for communications with donors or potential donors regarding “this Matter, Elon Musk, Linda Yaccarino, X, Twitter, or the Platform, including misinformation, brand safety, or ad pairing on the Platform.” There is no apparent reason why these documents need to identify all donors or potential donors, but we agree with the district court that the communications could otherwise be relevant to X Corp.’s theories. Indeed, Media Matters seems to agree that Requests 21 and 35 are appropriate.

Because X Corp.’s discovery requests are disproportional to the needs of the case, Media Matters is likely to succeed on the merits of its appeal.

Of course, they also appear to suggest ways that O’Connor can still compel some discovery by issuing a protective order on the information:

The district court might have alleviated some of these burdens by issuing the protective order to which the parties had stipulated. It declined to do so, reasoning that parties could always “agree to any confidentiality or discovery-related contract” without using judicial resources. Unlike a private agreement, however, court orders are backed by courts’ coercive power. True, the district court required X Corp. to “ask the Court before using an information beyond the Attorney’s Eyes Only designation.” But that was far from a blanket ban on sharing confidential information. We conclude that Media Matters was reasonably concerned, not because we doubt the “character of [X Corp.’s] lawyers” or the judgment of the district court, but because of the sensitive nature of the requested data.

Still, this is a small but important win for Media Matters. Even the Fifth Circuit thinks that O’Connor is going a bit overboard in his direct support of Elon over the basics of the First Amendment.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, 5th circuit, donor information, donors, elon musk, reed o'connor
Companies: media matters, twitter, x

Everything Is A Conspiracy Theory When You Don’t Bother To Educate Yourself

from the not-everything-is-a-conspiracy-theory dept

I talk a lot about confirmation bias here because it’s at the heart of many of the debates and discussions regarding disinformation. It’s something we can all fall prey to, at times. But lately, I’ve been thinking a lot more about what makes one more susceptible to confirmation bias, and I’m increasingly coming around to the idea that it has to do with a combination of intellectual curiosity and trust.

I had a bit of a Baader-Meinhof moment over the weekend, when I heard variations on the same phrase twice, in two completely unrelated contexts. The first was in an MSNBC article by former Twitter employee Eddie Perez talking about how little Elon Musk understands how elections work. He started out his piece with this phrase:

Here’s a timeless dictum that aptly applies to election administration: Everything looks suspicious when you don’t know how anything works.

There are some really good points in Perez’s article, including this tidbit:

Perhaps Musk’s most bizarre argument came when he argued U.S. elections are vulnerable due to a lack of paper ballots. “The last thing I would do is trust a computer program,” he told the audience. This was a very strange comment from a businessman who is pitching automated driverless robotaxis and robovans that depend on computer-driven artificial intelligence to protect human lives, as well as computer-driven rockets that hope to extend human civilization through the colonization of Mars.

I’m certainly sensitive to questions around electronic voting, as someone who spent many of the early years of this blog calling out sketchy electronic voting schemes. However, really over the last decade, there have been vast improvements in the security and process behind electronic voting, such that most such systems now include important safety valves and backstops, including voter-verified paper trails and risk-limiting audits. Not every state has those systems yet (even though they should!) but calling for such things is very, very different from saying that all electronic voting is untrustworthy.

But, by now it’s clear that if anyone lacks intellectual curiosity to understand reality, it’s Elon Musk. After all, he’s not only (falsely) trashing electronic voting, but he’s also been trashing mail-in ballots (which he calls “insane”), even as his own Super PAC is pushing people to vote early by mail. Oh, and also, Elon himself has regularly voted by mail.

But, back to that statement. The same day I read Eddie’s piece, I also saw the recent Hank Green video in which he talks about how he received his election ballot in Montana, and at first worried that something nefarious was underfoot. On his ballot, he noticed that in every category, the Democrat was listed last on the ballot, and he wondered if it was an attempt to sway votes (there is some science suggesting that people lower on a ballot get fewer votes).

However, Hank (unlike Elon) didn’t just run with his hunch. He investigated things and found that his worry was not valid. Montana “randomizes” the ballots by starting in alphabetical order by candidates, but then rotating the candidates down one on different ballots, so that each candidate appears on the bottom and the top of the list an equal amount of times.

In other words, election officials in Montana do something right, even if seeing just the one bit of info caused Hank to worry they might have done something wrong. Hank calls out a (more popular) variation on the quote that Eddie uses above, citing the saying:

“Everything is a conspiracy theory when you don’t understand how anything works.”

I like that formulation even better. But, as Hank points out, this saying is a bit too mean and inaccurate. A more accurate version would be:

“Everything is a conspiracy theory when you don’t trust anything.”

I’d add a caveat to that as well, though. You have to not trust anything and also not have the intellectual curiosity to find out what’s true. Hank is the kind of person who does have that intellectual curiosity. Even though he was initially concerned, before he spouted off, he did the research and found out that his concerns were unfounded.

Elon Musk, somewhat incredibly, seems to lack the basic intellectual curiosity to ever try to seek out why something is the way it is. He always assumes he can somehow “reason from first principles” as to why things are the way they are. This makes him ever more susceptible to the dumbest fucking conspiracy theories around. He’s constructed for himself a media environment mostly designed to reinforce those biases, rather than challenge them.

In the long run, I’d say folks are better off being more like Hank Green (intellectually curious, willing to seek out information and be proven wrong) and less like Elon Musk (intellectually uncurious, willing to believe utter nonsense so long as it reinforces your priors).

Filed Under: ballots, conspiracy theories, elections, elon musk, hank green, intellectual curiosity, research, voting

ExTwitter’s New Terms Focused On Screwing Users, Benefiting Elon, And If You Don’t Like It, Elon’s Favorite Judge Gets To Decide

from the just-ridiculously-petty dept

Often when internet companies change their terms of service, there will be a short freakout from people overreacting and not really understanding the language of what’s in there. We see these stories every so often, frequently around things like licensing terms (which sites are effectively required to have to get permission to host user-generated content).

But, Elon Musk is changing ExTwitter’s terms of service yet again. The new ones are set to go into effect on November 15th, and they’re raising some eyebrows. I see three major areas of concern.

Venue: Elon wants biased Tesla-owning judge to hear all disputes, despite being nowhere near HQ

The new terms say the following:

All disputes related to these Terms or the Services, including without limitation disputes related to or arising from other users’ and third parties’ use of the Services and any Content made available by other users and third parties on the Services, will be brought exclusively in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas or state courts located in Tarrant County, Texas, United States, and you consent to personal jurisdiction in those forums and waive any objection as to inconvenient forum.

Now, as you may know, ExTwitter just recently moved its headquarters from California to Texas. So, you might say, “no big deal, they’re just moving disputes to the local court.” But that’s not what’s happening. Because ExTwitter’s new headquarters is nowhere near the Northern District of Texas. It’s in the Western District of Texas. Nor is it near the state courts in Tarrant County.

Indeed, the courthouse that ExTwitter is directing all disputes through is over 200 miles away from its new headquarters, a three hour drive (if there’s no traffic).

It’s not at all about convenience. It’s about Elon Musk’s new favorite judge, Reed O’Connor, who has been bending over backwards to help Elon out in Elon’s censorial SLAPP suit against Media Matters.

Remember, Media Matters had tried to get the judge thrown off the case, noting that he owned a ton of Tesla stock and that Elon treated Tesla, ExTwitter, and all his other companies as basically the same thing. But the judge insisted that was crazy, and that his ownership of a vast quantity of Tesla stock would not bias him in a case involving Elon.

Notably, just last week, O’Connor’s latest filings revealed that he still owned a ton of Tesla stock. And, as Musk has discovered, if you file in specific districts in Northern Texas, you are effectively guaranteed to get Judge O’Connor on the case.

Steve Vladeck, a legal ethics expert, told NPR how fucked up all of this is:

“For X to say we want all of our litigation to go into a forum that may have no connection to where we’re located, to where plaintiffs are located, runs headlong into the federal system’s preference for convenience,” Vladeck said. “Are we going to allow companies to override that principle of convenience in the name of trying to stack the deck in their favor whenever they have the power to get you to agree to terms of service?”

This is cynical and destructive. It’s not unheard of for companies to play games with venue to try to seek out a favorable court. I mean, it basically created an entire industry in East Texas. But I can’t recall ever seeing a company put into its terms of service an agreement that all cases basically have to go to a biased judge who owns stock in one of the owner’s companies.

ExTwitter added a liquidated damages clause if you view too much ExTwitter

Elon has gone to war with researchers who have been trying to study how much damage he’s done in enabling waves of hate speech and harassment on the site. But, have no fear, the new terms say that anyone trying to actually analyze that may have to pay him. There’s a new liquidated damages clause that seems to be targeting researchers and journalists who try to scan portions of the site:

Protecting our users’ data and our system resources is important to us. You further agree that, to the extent permitted by applicable law, if you violate the Terms, or you induce or facilitate others to do so, in addition to all other legal remedies available to us, you will be jointly and severally liable to us for liquidated damages as follows for requesting, viewing, or accessing more than 1,000,000 posts (including reply posts, video posts, image posts, and any other posts) in any 24-hour period – €15,000 EUR per 1,000,000 posts. You agree that these amounts are (i) a reasonable estimate of our damages; (ii) not a penalty; and (iii) not otherwise limiting of our ability to recover from you or others under any legal or equitable theory or claim, including but not limited to statutory damages and/or equitable relief. You further agree that repeated violations of these Terms will irreparably harm and entitle us to injunctive and/or equitable relief, in addition to monetary damages.

I’m not entirely sure this is actually enforceable because it’s ridiculous. But, of course, in this age of companies trying to squeeze money out of AI companies, it might also be seen as a way to set up a potential legal claim to file against AI companies that won’t pay up for the right to scan.

I can just imagine that Elon is itching to sue OpenAI (with which he’s already in court on other issues) over this one.

Still, this is a bold move, considering that under the DSA, platforms (including ExTwitter) are required to give researchers access to data under Section 40.12. Chances are Elon doesn’t know or doesn’t care about that, but given that the EU is already investigating the company, it’s a choice to poke at the EU even more.

But also, Elon wants to make sure he can sell your tweets to AI companies

The final change that is raising some eyebrows is that if you continue using the site, you’re giving Elon the right to profit from your tweets as he sells them to other AI companies. This is highlighted in two places. First in the section on “your rights”:

By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display, upload, download, and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods now known or later developed, for any purpose. For clarity, these rights include, for example, curating, transforming, and translating. This license authorizes us to make your Content available to the rest of the world and to let others do the same. You agree that this license includes the right for us to (i) analyze text and other information you provide and to otherwise provide, promote, and improve the Services, including, for example, for use with and training of our machine learning and artificial intelligence models, whether generative or another type; and (ii) to make Content submitted to or through the Services available to other companies, organizations or individuals, including, for example, for improving the Services and the syndication, broadcast, distribution, repost, promotion or publication of such Content on other media and services, subject to our terms and conditions for such Content use. Such additional uses by us, or other companies, organizations or individuals, is made with no compensation paid to you with respect to the Content that you submit, post, transmit or otherwise make available through the Services as the use of the Services by you is hereby agreed as being sufficient compensation for the Content and grant of rights herein.

And then again in the license section, just to double down:

You agree that this license includes the right for us to (i) provide, promote, and improve the Services, including, for example, for use with and training of our machine learning and artificial intelligence models, whether generative or another type; and (ii) to make Content submitted to or through the Services available to other companies, organizations or individuals, including, for example, for improving the Services and the syndication, broadcast, distribution, repost, promotion or publication of such Content on other media and services, subject to our terms and conditions for such Content use. Such additional uses by us, or other companies, organizations or individuals, is made with no compensation paid to you with respect to the Content that you submit, post, transmit or otherwise make available through the Services as the use of the Services by you is hereby agreed as being sufficient compensation for the Content and grant of rights herein.

So, Elon is making it quite clear that if you’re posting to ExTwitter, you’re willing to feed everything you write into his AI, while also allowing him to sell your content to other AI companies without getting any compensation.

But if you were to scrape that same content, you might have to pay liquidated damages. If any of that leads to a legal dispute, it will go in front of a heavily conflicted, biased judge who has made it clear that he does not remotely care about the appearance of bias in cases involving Elon.

Seems less than ideal.

Remember when Elon insisted that a key reason he wanted to buy ExTwitter was to create the “global public square” and promised to be more open about the site? These new terms do the opposite of that. They are effectively locking up the site in a way that allows Elon to profit more from selling everyone’s content, while blocking anyone else from reviewing what’s on the site… and putting any dispute in front of a judge who has already shown a willingness to side with Elon in ridiculous cases.

Filed Under: ai, elon musk, liquidated damages, northern district of texas, reed o'connor, scanning, terms of service, texas, venue
Companies: twitter, x

The $1M Question: Is Elon Musk’s ‘Petition’ Drive Actually Legal?

from the just-flip-the-parties dept

Remember a few weeks ago when Elon Musk misleadingly claimed that George Soros was secretly “buying a propaganda machine to influence how you think”? Can you imagine the kind of shitstorm that would be playing out on ExTwitter and Fox News if George Soros were out there offering $1 million per day to people to sign a petition and encouraging them to vote?

It would be pandemonium.

But, it’s actually Elon Musk who is doing it and the press coverage seems pretty muted. Over the last few weeks, Elon has been offering smaller payments to get people to sign a petition the PAC he created was pushing. Originally, he was offering 47toanyoneinaswingstateiftheyreferredafriendtosignhispetition.Thenheuppedthatofferto47 to anyone in a swing state if they referred a friend to sign his petition. Then he upped that offer to 47toanyoneinaswingstateiftheyreferredafriendtosignhispetition.Thenheuppedthatofferto100 to anyone in Pennsylvania.

Over the weekend, though, he got a lot more attention by promising to give away $1 million each day until the election to a “random” signatory of the petition. Each day the giveaway will be in a different battleground area:

He claims he’s doing this to “maximize awareness of our petition to support The Constitution.”

The “petition” itself is a joke. There’s no “petition” at all. It just says that it’s a “petition in favor of free speech and the right to bear arms.” But there is no indication of who the petition is for. There is no further text of the petition beyond what I quoted. It’s literally just the following:

The First and Second Amendments guarantee freedom of speech and the right to bear arms. By signing below, I am pledging my support for the First and Second Amendments.

The idea that Elon Musk supports the First Amendment is laughable, given that he has regularly acted in ways that suppress free speech, including suing multiple critics for their free speech. He remains actively engaged in at least three cases where he sued people and organizations over their speech.

But, more to the point, this isn’t an actual “petition.” It’s a scammy “get out the vote” effort at a time when the Trump campaign has handed a large portion of its “get out the vote” effort to Elon, and that’s reportedly been flailing. Again, nothing is being done with the petition except that it is being used to collect names, addresses, and email addresses which Elon’s team can use to push people to vote:

It’s traditional list building. By framing it as being about “the First and Second Amendment,” they’re expecting to find likely Trump voters (though it’s possible that the $1 million lottery might incentivize non-Trump supporters to sign just for the hell of it, polluting the list). The fact that you have to be “registered to vote” in a swing state to receive the payout makes it clear that this is a petition about voting, and that appears to make it illegal.

On Saturday, Rick Hasen, one of the leading election law experts in the world, wrote that it was clear this violates election law designed to stop vote buying, as the law applies to paying people to entice them to register:

Though maybe some of the other things Musk was doing were of murky legality, this one is clearly illegal. See 52 U.S.C. 10307(c): “Whoever knowingly or willfully gives false information as to his name, address or period of residence in the voting district for the purpose of establishing his eligibility to register or vote, or conspires with another individual for the purpose of encouraging his false registration to vote or illegal voting, or pays or offers to pay or accepts payment either for registration to vote or for voting shall be fined not more than $10,000 or imprisoned not more than five years, or both…” (Emphasis added.)

See also the DOJ Election Crimes Manual at 44: “The bribe may be anything having monetary value, including cash, liquor, lottery chances, and welfare benefits such as food stamps. Garcia, 719 F.2d at 102. However, offering free rides to the polls or providing employees paid leave while they vote are not prohibited. United States v. Lewin, 467 F.2d 1132, 1136 (7th Cir.1972). Such things are given to make it easier for people to vote, not to induce them to do so. This distinction is important. For an offer or a payment to violate Section 10307(c), i t must have been intended to induce or reward the voter for engaging in one or more acts necessary to cast a ballot.… Moreover, payments made for some purpose other than to induceor reward voting activity, such as remuneration for campaign work, do not violate this statute. See United States v. Canales 744 F.2d 413, 423 (5th Cir. 1984) (upholding conviction because jury justified in inferring that payments were for voting, not campaign work). Similarly, Section 10307(c) does not apply to payments made to signature-gatherers for voter registrations such individuals may obtain. However, such payments become actionable under Section 10307(c) if they are shared with the person being registered.” (Emphases added.)

Another legal expert, campaign finance lawyer Brendan Fischer, told the NY Times that this was “alarming”:

“I thought the initial arrangement was lawful because the PAC was just paying one person who referred another person to sign a petition that itself made no reference to registration or voting. The latest version of this plan comes much closer to the legal line,” he said. “There would be few doubts about the legality if every Pennsylvania-based petition signer were eligible, but conditioning the payments on registration arguably violates the law, which prohibits giving anything of value to induce or reward a person for registering to vote.”

I am sure that Musk, Trump, and their supporters will insist that this isn’t vote buying, since it’s not about voting, just about “awareness of the petition.” But the only purpose behind the petition is to build a list for get out the vote efforts. And the inclusion of the voter registration in a swing state to be eligible for a payout kinda gives away the game.

Again, I challenge literally anyone who supports this to say they’d be totally fine with George Soros doing the same thing. If they won’t respond affirmatively to that, they are admitting they are full of shit.

While the fines for violating this law are small ($10,000), they can also include up to five years in prison. I doubt Musk is seriously facing time behind bars (he’s rich, the law doesn’t apply to him), it is notable.

Just a few weeks ago, Musk made one of his conspiracy theory nonsense claims about how if Harris won the election, she might throw him in jail. That was such a stupid claim at the time, because that’s not how any of this works. And, if Harris is (as Musk & crew assert) just a continuation of Joe Biden’s administration, the Biden admin has not only not thrown Musk in jail, they’ve given him billions of dollars in contracts.

But maybe what Elon really meant was that he was going to break the law as much as possible to try to support Trump and that’s why he would end up in jail if Harris won…

Filed Under: 1st amendment, 2nd amendment, campaign finance, donald trump, elon musk, list building, lottery, paying people to vote, petition, rick hasen, swing states

ExTwitter Makes It Official: Blocks Are No Longer Blocks

from the block-this dept

It has been rumored for a while that Elon wants to remove the official “block” functionality on ExTwitter, but now it’s official. The company has announced that it will soon start rolling out a new version of “block” that no longer blocks content, only interactions.

That’s ExTwitter’s engineering team saying:

Soon we’ll be launching a change to how the block function works. If your posts are set to public, accounts you have blocked will be able to view them, but they will not be able to engage (like, reply, repost, etc.).

Today, block can be used by users to share and hide harmful or private information about those they’ve blocked. Users will be able to see if such behavior occurs with this update, allowing for greater transparency.

This is a bad idea for a variety of reasons, though I’d push back on people calling it a “crazy” idea. There actually is some logic to it. As many people will point out, even with the existing “block” functionality, you can still see the content in question if you just switch to an incognito view. And, of course, there is something slightly odd in posting some content publicly, and then expecting that certain people should be “blocked” from seeing it.

That’s the theoretical argument for why what Elon is doing here seems to make sense.

But reality and theory don’t always match up. The reality is that the current “block” feature acts as a form of friction to stop abuse, and it’s somewhat, though not perfectly, effective in that role. That friction does not stop abusive people from viewing tweets or passing them along, but it does seem to help in some form.

The simple fact is that (even though Elon probably doesn’t know this or care to look at the history), Twitter tried this. A decade ago. And it was a complete flop. Such a flop that Twitter backtracked almost immediately.

On Thursday, the social site tweaked the way users block others who harass, spam or otherwise bother them. Under the change the blocked user would still be able to see the profile and tweets of the other user, as well as retweet their posts.

By Thursday night, however, the change was gone, reversed in stunningly abrupt fashion after a flurry of user protests, on a platform perfectly suited for both flurries and protests.

Part of the issue is that the block feature is a somewhat crude tool for dealing with multiple forms of abuse. Some of that abuse is still stopped via the new version (blocking interactions, but still showing content), while an awful lot is not. That’s the real problem. While block is far from a perfect tool in stopping people from ganging up on and abusing people, it does help. And with the new changes, that mostly goes away.

This plan is taking away an important, if imperfect, tool for stopping abuse, while not providing any alternative. It’s likely based on Elon’s near total inability to have empathy for people who are not himself. Over and over again, he has shown that he thinks the real problems on ExTwitter are just the ones that impact him directly: spam and scam repliers (even though he’s made that problem worse).

He has no concept of marginalized and targeted people and the kinds of abuse and attacks that can be heaped upon them. Thus, a tool that works towards minimizing such an impact is not even remotely interesting to him.

At the same time, it’s been said that the legacy blocking system is expensive computationally, because figuring out who can (and who cannot) see certain tweets is a pretty complex issue. I’ve noticed that this system breaks a lot since Musk took over, in that in the last few months I have repeatedly seen tweets from people who block me.

So, what this seems to come down to is (1) Elon trying to reduce more costs as the company continues to collapse, combined with (2) an inability to understand or care about the actual harassment that happens on his own platform. It doesn’t seem like a recipe for success.

Filed Under: blocks, elon musk, engagement, harassment, social media, trust and safety
Companies: twitter, x