Office workers. Are the coming back in the new economy?
Elon Musk say employees working from home are like Marie Antoinette: Let them eat cake! (Like the folks who have to deliver your groceries every day and can't "work from home.")
Kevin O'Leary is great.
WATCH:
Since anyone can get the blue check now, for $8.00, they're not that glamorous any more.
At the New York Times, "Are Blue Checks Uncool Now?":
Once a coveted status symbol, Twitter’s verification badge — which can be purchased for a monthly fee — is no longer fashionable, according to some users. Twitter’s blue check mark was once a coveted status symbol. Now, some users are calling it “the dreaded mark” or that “stinking badge.” Last week, Twitter began stripping the verification symbols from the profiles of thousands of celebrities, media personalities and politicians. The shift came as Elon Musk, the company’s chief executive, continued to roll out Twitter Blue, a subscription service that offers special features like tweet-editing in addition to the blue badge — for $8 a month. Now that anyone can purchase a blue check, many users find the symbol newly uncool. The icon makes its owner appear “desperate for validation,” according to the rapper Doja Cat. To others, it signals support for Mr. Musk amid his bumpy takeover of the platform. Users who value the symbol enough to pay for it are being shouted over by a chorus of prominent users who say verification is no longer worth it. Can the blue check remain desirable now that it has lost its air of exclusivity? “The idea that you would pay for status, and that it’s something that’s not conferred upon you, seems to be fundamentally undesirable for people who have status,” said Robyn Caplan, a senior researcher at the Data & Society Research Institute. Jacob Sartorius, 20, a musician and content creator, said he was elated to get a blue check in 2016. “It was an honor. It was kind of a symbol of, wow, something’s happening,” he said. Mr. Sartorius said he would now rather spend $8 on a sandwich from Subway than on Twitter Blue. “It’s not something that’s cool anymore,” he said. Twitter users’ self-consciousness when it comes to their blue checks speaks to the symbol’s evolution from a tool designed to prevent impersonation into a fickle marker of cultural relevance. Twitter introduced verification badges in 2009 during what Dr. Caplan called the “red carpet era” of social media, when companies were trying to coax celebrities and brands onto their platforms. The badges reassured public figures that they would not be impersonated, and the recognition served as an ego boost. Because so many public figures received badges, and the faceless masses did not, jockeying for verification became something of a blood sport — and the blue check a symbol of victory. Guides proliferated online advising users on how to gain entry to the club. Mr. Musk sought to undermine that two-tiered approach, which he called a “lords & peasants system.” He has framed Twitter Blue as a move to democratize the platform. Waves of blue-check paranoia began to sweep across the platform last year, when Mr. Musk said he would soon start removing check marks from users’ profiles. After allowing the expected judgment day to come and go at the start of this month, Mr. Musk began removing the badges on April 20. (Mr. Musk has long shown an affinity for the number 420, which is often used to allude to marijuana, once dropping it into a tweet that landed him in hot water with the Securities and Exchange Commission.) Mr. Musk did not respond to a request for comment, and an email to Twitter’s communications department was automatically replied to with a poop emoji...
Now that Musk let the rabble in, Twitter's no longer an insider's club of elite bad actors who have no interest in preserving the regular, majoritarian values of the this country.
A great interview. The more I see Elon unfiltered the more I love the guy. He doesn't get ruffled.
From Abigail Shrier, on Substack, "Policies to Discourage Stalking Do Not Equal Suppression of Political Speech":
Whether Musk is in fact a free-speech warrior or simply a self-interested CEO with incomprehensible power to shape public debate remains to be seen. But those of us who published pieces about the Twitter Files never claimed nor implied he was a “free speech warrior.” Musk himself did. The systemic suppression of anti-Woke speech on a social media platform that sets the news agenda for our largest media companies and hundreds of millions of users remains a critical revelation. When Nikita Khrushchev took power in the Soviet Union and in 1956, began revealing Stalin’s purges of his political enemies and ethnic cleansing, Krushchev did history a service whether or not his regime turned out to be more liberal and freedom-affording than the one it replaced. (Of course, it did; anybody’s would have.) Musk is a strange man. A consummate jokester and an undeniable genius. He bought a company for which, by his own estimation, he paid three times what it was worth. “At least,” he said, when I and Michael Shellenberger and Bari Weiss asked him about this. “I thought this was important to the future of civilization,” he said. “I told investors that too…. And I thought this was important to the future of civilization to have a digital Town Square that people thought was fair and a level playing field and that, I don’t know, pro civilization essentially.” He told us he bought Twitter to protect the “expansion of consciousness.” I pressed him on this. Were President Donald Trump’s tweets really necessary for the “expansion of consciousness?” I expected Musk to back off of this claim. He didn’t. “If we are to understand more about, I don't know, the world, then we do have to have like freedom of expression and freedom of speech. If we constrain it, then we are limiting our understanding of the universe or of reality,” he said. So is suspending the journalists, as Musk did in the last twenty-four hours, the first indication that the new regime is as bad as the old? Doubtful. That Musk is no “free speech warrior” after all? Maybe...
RTWT.
Also, "The FBI Paid Twitter Three and a Half Million Dollars to 'Help' It Censor 'Misinformation'."
And from yesterday, "Twitter Files Part 7: The Guns Begin to Smoke."
See also, Michael Shellenberger, from yesterday:
We expect the FBI, our highest law enforcement organization, to be above politics. The Twitter Files show that it isn't.
— Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) December 20, 2022
We need a serious congressional investigation and perhaps a special counsel to get to the bottom of its apparent corruption. https://t.co/AtU08zfsYS
It was a bad day for Elon Musk, it turns out. Folks on the platform are talking like it's the end of the world. If goes down, it goes down. RIP. WTF.
At the Wall Street Journal, "Company follows up with practical details after billionaire challenges remaining employees to be ‘hardcore’ or leave: ‘This is not a phishing attempt’."
And Paige Spirinac is ready, "Here’s my cleavage for the last time on twitter if it shuts down."
At the Wall Street Journal, "The social-media company is under a spotlight in the early days of Elon Musk’s ownership":
Twitter Inc.’s reputation among consumers and advertisers is at risk from the tumult unfolding under new owner Elon Musk, some branding executives and other observers say, even as some Twitter users think the change in leadership could improve the platform. Mr. Musk, who closed his acquisition of the social-media company on Oct. 27, fired Twitter’s top executives, laid off about half its staff and floated several ideas for changes to the way the platform works. Some advertisers have paused their advertising on Twitter, largely either out of concern that Mr. Musk might weaken content moderation, potentially leading to more hate speech on the platform, or because of the uncertainty surrounding the company’s direction. “This uncertainty and instability, entirely of Musk’s making, will quickly damage Twitter’s brand and unsettle users,” said Darren Savage, chief strategy officer of Omnicom Group Inc. -owned digital marketing agency Tribal Worldwide London. But the new era at Twitter could also be an opportunity for the company to redefine its brand for the better. Sixty-four percent of Twitter users said Mr. Musk will have a positive impact on the product, according to a survey of 1,212 adults who use the platform by polling firm Harris Insights & Analytics between Oct. 28 and 30. The platform also has gotten an incredible amount of publicity since Mr. Musk’s takeover, said Tim Calkins, marketing professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. “And in many ways, that’s great news for Twitter, because now people are thinking about Twitter for the first time in a very long time,” he said. But it remains unclear what Twitter under Mr. Musk will actually be, Mr. Calkins said. Twitter didn’t respond to requests for comment. Mr. Musk has indicated that he wants Twitter to be less restrictive about what users can share, and in his first weekend as owner posted a link to a conspiracy theory about the assault on the husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. He later deleted the tweet, and more broadly has said he would form a special council to tackle questions of content moderation. Twitter will likely have to prove it can keep advertisers “safe” from appearing near content they might find concerning, while assuring those advertisers that they aren’t helping to fund a platform that allows racist or hateful content to flourish, ad executives said. “Advertisers are thinking about how their dollars spent on the platform could be perceived as their direct support of Elon’s personal views,” said Toni Box, senior vice president of social media at media agency Assembly, part of ad holding company Stagwell Inc. “And Musk’s own personal tweets are being questioned in regard to brand safety and adjacency, so this could be very damaging if it’s not addressed quickly.” Howard Belk, co-CEO of Omnicom Group brand consultancy Siegel + Gale, said the events at Twitter are likely changing the way people view it. “Recent turmoil at the company has had the effect of objectifying Twitter, raising the question with users and advertisers of whether Twitter is a safe media channel to desired consumers, or merely a plaything for Musk and a misinformation tool for bad actors domestically and around the world,” he said. Twitter will now need to work to communicate with users in an attempt to mollify them, or risk potentially losing them, Mr. Belk added. Twitter before Mr. Musk weathered a number of controversies that rattled some advertisers and users. The number of Twitter’s monetizable average daily active users increased to 237.8 million in the second quarter this year from 229 million in the first quarter and 206 million a year earlier. The company’s marketing team over the years developed advertising campaigns that positioned Twitter as a place for people who wanted to quickly know what was happening in the world and bring their most authentic selves to the internet. Ads aimed to boost the platform’s active user base by mimicking or reproducing the often-irreverent copywriting displayed by users on the platform. It ran a commercial during the Oscars in 2018. But news coverage and Mr. Musk’s tweets could continue playing a big role in perceptions of Twitter because the company’s ad spending is relatively modest, and recently declining. The company spent $1.4 million to advertise itself in the U.S. from January through August of this year, down from $2.2 million in the equivalent period a year earlier, according to estimates by research firm Kantar Media. Those figures include media such as TV, radio, outdoor ads, magazines and the internet, but exclude social media. By comparison, advertising to promote the hot social-media platform TikTok in the U.S. from January through August totaled $51.6 million, up from $32.7 million in the same months of 2021. “The brand drives strong engagement and relevance with their core users and has achieved significant presence in culture,” said Andrew Miller, an executive strategy director at Interbrand, a brand consultancy owned by Omnicom that annually ranks companies’ brand values. But this is a potential inflection point for Twitter, Mr. Miller said. “When brands go through business change, either being acquired, merging, or going private in this case, one of the most important near-term objectives is to assuage the concerns of the user and customer base to minimize attrition through the transition.” Twitter’s brand would benefit if its new owner took a step back from micromanaging day-to-day operations and avoided unhelpful tweets, including a new one Friday about a “massive drop in revenue” from advertiser cutbacks, said Aaron Kwittken, founder and chairman of Stagwell public-relations firm KWT Global...
Folks see Musk as a free-speech savior, so it'd be a bummer if the deal doesn't go through. That said, frankly, Twitter's valuation was below $44 billion when Musk first made the bid. It's dropped precipitously since then, not to mention the market value of Musk's Tesla electric car company, whose stock was being used to leverage the deal.
We'll see, in any case. It's still awful bad on that hellsite.
At the Verger, "Twitter says it’s going to sue Elon Musk for trying to back out of the deal."
From Caroline Glick, at the Jewish News Syndicate, "As long as revolutionary progressives maintain their control over key U.S. national institutions, Republican election victories will be insufficient to save the U.S. and restore liberty to its citizens":
May 8, 2022 / JNS) America is in the throes of a revolution. As historian Victor Davis Hanson has noted, progressives now control nearly every national institution. They control Wall Street, Silicon Valley, universities, local school boards, the teachers’ unions, the entertainment industry, the vast majority of the media, the Justice Department, the FBI and the U.S. military, and currently, the White House and both houses of Congress. Progressives use their control over these institutions to change both the character of the United States and the rules of the game in a manner that will enable them to perpetuate their power regardless of the sentiments of the American people. Progressives are rewriting American history. They are taking aim at God and believers, and at the nuclear family, while indoctrinating children against their families and their country. There is no area of human endeavor that progressives have not politicized. One of the last national institutions where the conservatives hold sway is the Supreme Court. And last Monday, the Supreme Court came under a malicious assault whose clear goal is to subvert its independence. In a move without precedent in U.S. history, Politico published a draft Supreme Court decision written by Justice Samuel Alito. Alito is a member of the Court’s conservative majority. Today’s Supreme Court comprises five conservatives, one centrist and three progressives. Alito’s draft explained why the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which removed the power of states to determine the legality of pregnancy termination, making abortions legal nationwide, was unconstitutional and overturned it. If Alito’s decision, which is supported by his fellow conservative justices, becomes final, the power to determine the legality of pregnancy termination will devolve back to the individual states. Second, the leaker sought to incite righteous rage among progressives, that will pressure the two remaining moderates in the Democratic majority in the Senate to vote to abrogate the Senate filibuster. By preventing Republicans from using the filibuster, the razor-thin Democrat majority will be able to ram through radical legislation ahead of their expected losses in the congressional elections in November. Among other things, unfettered by the filibuster, progressives will be able to expand the number of justices on the Court from nine to 15. And if they move fast enough, President Joe Biden will be able to pack the court with an additional six progressive justices and thus effectively seize permanent control of the high court. As for those elections, all major polls foresee progressives suffering crushing, historic defeats in both houses. Until Obama’s presidency, when progressives seized control of the Democrat Party, polls like the current ones would have compelled the Democrats to abandon their progressive policies and make a ninety-degree turn to the center. But today, every demonstration of public opposition to progressive policies convinces progressive revolutionaries to double down. When last year parents began protesting anti-American, racist and increasingly pornographic indoctrination of their children in K-12 schools, Attorney General Merrick Garland instructed the FBI to treat protesting parents like “domestic terrorists.” Progressive-controlled state and local governments have responded to public outcries against skyrocketing crime rates by passing laws banning pre-trial detention and bail, sending violent criminals back on the streets. In every sphere of public endeavor, progressive politicians, bureaucrats and activists have met public opposition and protest with tyranny and rebuke. One of the main weapons in the progressive arsenal is disinformation—the deliberate distortion of information to advance an agenda... This disinformation campaign brings us to Twitter, the social media platform purchased last month by Elon Musk, the world’s richest man. Over the past decade, Twitter became the social media network with the largest influence on the public discourse. No self-respecting journalist, activist or policymaker can afford not to have an active account. Twenty years ago, the internet and the social media platforms it generated became the largest free market of ideas in human history. They were also the engine for political victories for conservative politicians in the United States. For the first time, the internet gave conservative candidates the ability to communicate directly with voters, without the mediation of liberal/progressive media behemoths. All of this began to change during Obama’s presidency, as more and more conservative voices suffered a spectrum of sanctions, from shadow bans, which blocked their audience from seeing what they were posting, to banishment from Facebook and other social media platforms. The process accelerated and became more extreme in the aftermath of Trump’s defeat of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential race. Trump’s victory was a grave embarrassment for the Silicon Valley oligarchs. Clinton blamed them for her loss. Her basic claim was that had Facebook, Twitter and Google not permitted the Trump campaign more or less the same use of their platforms as they ostensibly offer everyone, Trump would not have won. As Clinton and her supporters put it, Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey and their colleagues were supposed to prevent Trump and his supporters from “disseminating disinformation,” that is, campaign materials, on their platforms. Freedom of expression, Clinton and her supporters insisted, wasn’t for everyone. Chastened, to prevent Trump’s reelection in 2020, Zuckerberg donated $340 million to election non-profit groups he founded for the purpose of increasing Democrat vote numbers in key swing states like Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona and Georgia. At the same time, Facebook and Twitter initiated a censorship campaign against Trump and his supporters the likes of which no one had ever experienced. That censorship campaign reached its height weeks before the election, when the New York Post published the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop. President Joe Biden’s son, a crack addict, had abandoned his laptop in a repair shop in Delaware. After his efforts to return the laptop were unsuccessful, the owner of the store turned its contents over to the FBI because the computer contained evidence that Biden and his family may have committed several felonies. At a minimum, the contents of the laptop exposed that Hunter Biden and his uncle Jim Biden had pocketed millions of dollars from foreign firms with direct ties to the Chinese, Ukrainian and Russian governments. Hunter Biden seemed to implicate his father in the influence-peddling operations in several of his emails. The Post story was explosive because it was entirely true. It was Hunter Biden’s laptop. All the details of the deals were authentic. They exposed a web of influence peddling with hostile governments that made clear that Biden and his family were ripe for extortion by those governments. Yet, rather than allow their platforms to be used to inform the American people of this information, Twitter led the way in preventing the public from hearing about it. Twitter de-platformed the New York Post and private users who dared to link to the story. Facebook followed suit. Fifty retired U.S. intelligence and security chiefs proclaimed the story was “Russian disinformation.” It took a year for the New York Times and Washington Post to admit that the laptop was indeed Hunter Biden’s laptop and that the New York Post stories were entirely true. In the meantime, in the name of fighting “disinformation,” Twitter, Facebook, Google and other internet giants had denied the American people access to information that, as post-election polls made clear, would have swung the election in Trump’s favor. Since its first days in office, the Biden administration has openly pressured technology giants to increase their censorship and block conservative voices, claiming that such silencing and suppression is necessary to fight racism and fake news...
Following-up, "Space-X Falcon 9 Launches 53 Starlink Satellites Into Orbit (VIDEO)."
Via Twitter (and with Kara Swisher here).
Hey, the guy bought Twitter, but as the owner of Space-X and other big properties, can he keep all his balls in the air?
WATCH:
Watch Falcon 9 launch 53 Starlink satellites to orbit → https://t.co/3Cr99l2Cre https://t.co/2SPtX3ketY
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) April 29, 2022
From David Auerbach, at UnHerd, "Elon Musk has sided with the rabble":
Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter is a litmus test of where you stand in the online ecosystem. To some, it means a dawn of “free speech” on a platform that has increasingly cracked down on unwanted views. To others, it means the takeover of a valuable public forum by a capricious and unaccountable oligarch. Triumphalism and horror abound, but both responses are a distraction. While it is difficult to predict exactly what Musk will do with Twitter (he has announced his intention to soften content moderation and make the algorithm open-source, but only time can tell on both), what his purchase represents is considerably clearer: it is a major flashpoint in the shift from a centralised culture of public elites to a more decentralised, chaotic, and devolved world. In this context, debates about free speech and accountability miss the point. There was nowhere near this much panic when Jeff Bezos purchased the Washington Post in 2013. Nor, for that matter, do people worry about the fact that Warner Bros Discovery owns CNN or that Comcast owns MSNBC. So why all the hoopla about Musk? There are two reasons for the excitement. The first is related to Musk himself: his perceived character and affiliations. Elite media and progressive circles tend to regard him as more dangerous than Jack Dorsey, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos not because he is richer or more powerful, but because he is more culturally aligned with various deplorables, from crypto-bros to MAGA-heads to Joe Rogan. This perception helps to explain the fretting over Musk’s claim to be a “free speech absolutist”, which human rights groups have warned could usher in a torrent of online hate. But whether or not you think unrestricted free speech is a good thing, it is unlikely to be put into practice. There is widespread agreement that unmoderated public forums are completely unmanageable due to trolling and abuse, and any administrator of any social media platform will have to engage in some filtering or censoring. The worry is about what kinds of speech he will and won’t let through. The second reason relates to Twitter’s tenuous role in preserving an established national elite in an age in which the very idea of such an elite is dying. Twitter has in recent years, just like the internet itself, bifurcated into two broad strata: a national “overculture” of elites — academic, celebrity, political, or journalistic — and a more shadowy, disparate “underculture” of often-pseudonymous hoi polloi, who increasingly define themselves in opposition to the traditional elites. For many years now, the undercultures of Reddit, 4chan, and other online forums have made the idea of a respectable, professionalised online discourse more difficult to maintain. And the ability of the underculture to mobilise masses of anonymous users to push against the elevated voices of the overculture has shaken the established media culture to the bone. This dynamic was on display last week in the conflict between Washington Post journalist Taylor Lorenz and the formerly anonymous Libs of TikTok Twitter account...
It's the great Freddie DeBoer, "This really gives the game away, if you think for five minutes"...
There are plenty of models for where this site is likely headed. I'm on those sites all day. I cover extremism and lies for a living. You're not gonna like it.
Nowadays “left” opposition to free speech in principle is more or less explicit, though not coherent. As I’ve documented before, a core dynamic in left-of-center American politics is the transition from “lol that’s not happening” to “lol of course that’s happening and it’s good.” Extreme social justice ideals from cultural studies departments were never going to spread outside of campus, you dumb idiot, and then they did, and suddenly they always knew that would happen and were in favor of it. Free speech is in the awkward zone in between, where lots of liberals will dutifully argue that they’re the ones fighting for free speech while many of their fellow travelers are insisting that free speech is an inherently reactionary concept. The cool thing now is to put free speech in sneer quotes, which ensures that other left-of-center people know you’re one of the good ones. It does not, I’m afraid, represent clarity about what they actually believe the correct perspective on speech should be.
Anyway, it’s important to remember that the original justification for left censorship was that they were only interested in getting rid of the really noxious stuff - literal fascism, literal white supremacy. You don’t want literal fascism on the internet, do you?? You know how that movie goes: what they consider literal fascism just grew over time, so that things that were perfectly common conservative positions 10 years ago now fall under that umbrella, and whatever simplicity and limitation that rule contained is gone. It’s led us to a place where discussing factually correct reporting on Hunter Biden was banned on social networks, as was criticizing Anthony Fauci, whose leadership is certainly questionable and who by admission has worked on horrific experiments on lab animals. Meanwhile, as Collins’s tweet here points out explicitly, the most noxious stuff still flourishes online. So here’s the question, Ben: if you acknowledge that far-right sentiment flourishes on the internet in many places, what does keeping it off of Twitter accomplish? If the ideas and arguments and symbolism of fascism and white supremacy can be traded on the internet elsewhere, what are you preventing from getting more and more censorious on major social networks? Do you think people are going to go to Twitter to treat it like Stormfront, find themselves censored, and just give up? People like Collins believe that far-right sentiment is very prevalent and dangerous, that’s his job description. So in what world does a Twitter ban function as any sort of check on that? What’s the idea here? Last year I wrote a piece making the simple point that heavyhanded attempts to censor extremism are bound to fail because the flow of information cannot be stopped in the digital era - that we can’t ban ideas, as a matter of fact, so there’s no matter of principle to discuss. Should we stop the free flow of ideas is a meaningless question because we can’t. France and Germany’s decades-old laws against far-right arguments and organizations have failed entirely to prevent extremism in those countries. Drug cartels communicate around the world effortlessly. When ISIS was being pursued by the entirety of the Western military and intelligence establishment, they still actively recruited. In English! They got white middle-class teenagers to fly to goddamn Syria to sign up! And you’re telling me that tweaking Twitter’s terms of service is going to eliminate the ideology that wasn’t ended by a war that killed 4% of the world’s population? What the fuck are we talking about here? No, liberals and leftists are afraid of Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter not because they think it will contribute to right-wing extremism, which exists and always has and always will but which is also far more marginal than they like to pretend. They’re afraid because Twitter is where they perform the personalities they lack in real life, where they act like the confident and clever people they patently aren’t, and where they pretend to do politics by telling the same terrible jokes, over and over, while the political “movement” they represent remains totally powerless and reviled. Twitter, in other words, is where they wage busy little PMC lives. And they’d prefer that space be pleasant for them. They have eliminated the existence of any contrary opinion in their personal lives and private lives, and now they want to do the same in Twitter, which as sad as it is to say is the center of their emotional lives. Which is why it’ll never stop at “the really bad stuff.” The things that liberals believe should be eliminated from social media have grown and grown as time has gone on, and will continue to grow. Eventually people will say that those who disagree with them about the correct size of the Earned Income Tax Deduction are literal fascists...
Still more.
Heh.
At the Wall Street Journal, "Wait, you mean Twitter could ban one party’s political speech?":
My, what a progressive panic Elon Musk’s $44 billion purchase of Twitter has inspired. MSNBC host Ari Melber warns that Mr. Musk could hack the political debate by having the website “secretly ban one party’s candidate” or “turn down the reach of their stuff, and turn up the reach of something else, and the rest of us might not even find out about it until after the election.” Uh, hello? Twitter has banned President Trump. A month before the 2020 election, it moved to “turn down the reach” of the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop. Those actions weren’t secret, but Mr. Melber’s alarm echoes what conservatives have been saying for years about big tech’s censorship. As long as the usual Silicon Valley overlords controlled all of social media, progressives didn’t mind. But Elon Musk buys Twitter, and suddenly freer speech is a national crisis...
The shoe's on the other foot, and it's hurting.
WATCH: "MSNBC's Ari Melber is worried that Elon Musk would use Twitter for partisan political purposes!"
Dems are scared, alright.
At AoSHQ, "UPDATE: MUSK CALLS HER CENSORSHIP OF THE HUNTER BIDEN LAPTOP STORY 'INCREDIBLY INAPPROPRIATE'."
Heh.
More at London's Daily Mail, "Elon Musk slams Twitter's top lawyer who sobbed after he bought social media network and blasts her for 'incredibly inappropriate' censorship of Hunter Biden laptop story [PHOTOS]."
Ace suggests she's out. *Shrugs.*
"Sparking concern," lol.
That's putting it mildly, indeed. These people have lost their minds.
At Fox News, "Democrats worry Trump will return to Twitter":
Congressional Democrats sounded the alarm this week after Tesla CEO Elon Musk struck a deal to buy Twitter for roughly $44 billion and take the social media company private. Among the lawmakers' chief concerns was that Musk could allow former President Donald Trump, who was permanently banned from Twitter in January 2021 after spreading misinformation about the 2020 election, back onto the platform. While Musk has not said whether he plans to lift Trump's Twitter ban, the tech executive is a frequent citric of the platform, which he has previously accused of stifling free speech. In the past, Musk, who describes himself as a "free speech absolutist," has proposed relaxing Twitter content restrictions, fueling speculation that Trump could return to his onetime favorite social media website. During a recent interview at a TED conference, Musk argued that social media networks should not remove comments that are offensive if they are still legal. "If it's a gray area, let the tweet exist," Musk said...
Still more.
At at the Hill, "Musk buying Twitter alarms Democrats."
