As someone who considers Twitter to be equivalent to a disease I’m entertained by Elon Musk burning the company to the ground. He’s like Tony the security guard in this RiffTrax short about Hormel.
Tony has the Guinness world record for Most wrong decisions made in a lifetime.
Firing staff only to realize that some of them were necessary to maintain operations wasn’t great.
Blocking links to rival social media platforms is quite astounding. Something tells me that agencies like the FTC or the Swedish Competition Authority will take exception to that kind of move. It also goes down very poorly with netizens, which seem like an important part of the demographic for Twitter.
Now Twitter is issuing new shares to stay afloat.
In comes the EU to make the situation even worse. In writing this I’m reminded of JonTron’s attempt at being politically correct in his criticism of a bad game. The EU arguing that reporters’ ability to use a privately owned and operated service is an important part of media freedom is quite embarrassing. The remarks are not made more reasonable by the implication that a reporter has greater rights than non-reporters. The EU don’t condemn arbitrary suspensions of ordinary Twitter accounts, just those of reporters or politicians. It would have been nice if they had at least pretended to uphold egalitarian principles.
Not that it was a clever move for Twitter to ban the reporters in the first place. On account of issues faced by Elon Musk personally Twitter now takes the view that providing information about people’s real-time location is “doxxing”:
Any account doxxing real-time location info of anyone will be suspended, as it is a physical safety violation. This includes posting links to sites with real-time location info.
Elon Musk quoted by the BBC | https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-63978323
While restrictions of publishing people’s real-time location isn’t entirely unreasonable the ElonJet-account simply tweeted publicly available information about the movement of airplanes. To then go on a banning-spree of reporters who write about the suspension of the ElonJet-account and blocking links to Mastodon…
Can we now start talking about Hyperloop being a boondoggle from the very start and that Tesla has been promising more than it can deliver? Paypal and SpaceX are great accomplishments and Tesla has had a net-positive impact on the world(even if it makes promises it can’t keep) which Musk should be given credit for. But people shouldn’t trust his judgement in all matters more than they trust their own common sense.
2022-12-19
Well that escalated quickly. First banning people for referencing their accounts on other social media platforms: https://www.svt.se/nyheter/utrikes/twitter-forbjuder-lankar-till-konkurrenter [ In Swedish ]
And then Elon holding a public vote on whether he should step down as head of Twitter: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-your-money-64021412
Credit to him for taking complaints seriously, but I think it would be sufficient for him to run major changes by some people before rolling them out. You’ve got employees, most of them are probably at least of average intelligence. Why not avail yourself of their recommendations? You don’t have to abide by them. But listening to these questions carefully would have served Elon well these past few weeks:
- Are we sure all these employees are redundant? Maybe we should understand the company a bit more before we fire half the workforce?
- Banning people from linking to competitors might not be great. Don’t we risk picking a fight with the EU at the very least? The US DoJ might not be super-happy with it either…
- Should we really be talking about freedom of speech in such black-and-white terms? It’s kind of a tricky issue – it has been for centuries – so saying that we’re for free speech is going to lead to lots of misunderstandings and accusations of not living up to our commitments. Because everyone has their own idea of what “free speech” is exactly.