Volewica: Twitter

Showing posts with label Twitter. Show all posts

Monday, March 24, 2025

All you need to know about Twitter

From Mark Cuban

Monday, January 20, 2025

Last post on Xitter

I myself left Xitter a while ago, deleting both my accounts.

I wish I'd been as eloquent as George Monbiot. This is his last post on that platform:

Here, broken down into a thread, is a copy of my last post on X.

1. This is my farewell post. I am not deleting this account, as I don’t want to lose the archive, and I don’t want my name taken by imposters. But, for as long as Musk owns the platform, I’ll no longer use it.

2. Since Elon Musk bought X, he has transformed it from one on which millions could converse as equals into his personal megaphone. Now the world’s richest man uses it to wage his class war, transferring blame for the ills of capitalism onto vulnerable minorities ....

3. .... boosting the grimmest and most antisocial accounts while suppressing the humane voices with whom he disagrees. He has used X not only to subvert the election for the US presidency, but to create a role for himself in US politics ...

4. .... which, though he has never stood for election and would not be eligible, grants him immense power over the citizens of that nation. X has been used as a tool to help replace democracy with oligarchy. Musk claimed, on purchasing the platform, to be a “free speech absolutist”.

5. He is in fact a prolific censor, suspending dissenting accounts and using lawsuits to shut down free speech, while employing an algorithm to increase the reach of his own posts 1,000-fold. He cannot abide a level playing field.

6. He has permitted or encouraged the growth of a ghost army of bots and trolls to degrade the experience of all who disagree with him. Their task is not just to abuse opponents but, perhaps more importantly, to drown intelligent conversation with a tsunami of stupidity.

7. They respond to data with denial, expertise with execration, insight with insult and thinking with thuggery. They suck the meaning out of everything. The stupidity trends in one direction: in the service of economic power. It is a weapon used to suppress the possibility of a better world.

8. Many years ago, when I lived in Brazil, I learnt that the military dictatorship had actively sought to suppress educational levels in schools, as it saw a well-informed population as a political threat. A confused, distracted and ignorant population is easy to manipulate.

9. Now this counter-educational model is being rolled out worldwide, and Elon Musk is its primary sponsor. I stayed on X long after I first considered leaving, as I believed it was wrong to cede the ground to an oligarch and his minions.

10. But I came to see that those of us who do not subscribe to Musk’s grim project are being used as groundbait: stimulating the feeding frenzy of 15-minute, 24-hour hate that now powers X. Brute force – the unmediated power of money – has beaten humanity, intelligence, humour and democracy.

11. On Bluesky I can be the person I want to be, a better person than I am on X, where it is almost impossible not to get dragged into the mud. I feel I can be understood because I am not confronting a deliberate effort to misunderstand me. So I can speak more quietly.

12. There's no guarantee that Bluesky will not also one day be monetised by its owners or captured by self-serving billionaires. But for now it's a place in which interesting conversations can be had, kindness can be shown to strangers and a better world can be imagined. I hope to see you there.

Just so.

Sunday, January 19, 2025

Like a six-year old

This cartoon is 30 years old --- but still applies. Just replace radio talk show with YouTube channel or Twitter membership.

Sunday, August 18, 2024

Elon Musk may sell Tesla stock to prop up dying Twitter

From Futurism/The Byte

Masterplan

Usually, telling advertisers to "go fuck themselves" isn't a winning strategy if you're running a social media site that depends on ad revenue.

And X-formerly-Twitter owner Elon Musk is learning this the hard way.

Or if he isn't already, he's about to. Because, as he's suing those advertisers for not buying ads on Twitter — which is exactly what he told them to do — the company is entering some of its worst financial straits yet: in the second quarter, it only made $114 million in revenue in the US, according to internal figures obtained by The New York Times — a 53 percent drop from the same quarter last year.

Now, as Fortune reports, this is so dire that even longtime Tesla investors predict that Musk might have to sell some of his own shares in the automaker to prop up his failing website.

"I would be expecting something between $1 and $2 billion in stock," said Bradford Ferguson, president and chief investment officer of asset manager Halter Ferguson Financial in a YouTube comment on Wednesday, as quoted by Fortune, noting that this could cause the stock to lose between five to ten percent of its value.

"It's a massive hole they need to plug," he added.

Bail-Out Button

It's a last-ditch option that Musk has already resorted to in the past.

In 2022, after a disastrous several months that followed his takeover of Twitter that fall, Musk sold over $7.5 billion in Tesla stock between November and December. He said he "definitely" wouldn't sell anymore for at least another 18-24 months after that, or "probably" not until 2025.

But he also made a similar promise earlier that year in April, after selling about $7 billion worth of his shares in the automaker to fund his Twitter deal.

The point being: Musk is willing to dupe his own investors to dig himself out of a huge financial hole — a hole that, according to Fortune, is looking like an astounding 84 percent decline in revenue from the second quarter of 2022, before he bought out Twitter and took it private.

And it's not just the advertising crisis contributing to the site's decline. The number of active daily users is down by around 23 percent, according to an analysis released in March.

Keep On Sellin'

With all that in mind, Musk will have to see the writing on the wall at some point, and that means he may fall back on selling stock yet again.

"The bleeding of X will continue and at some point Elon will have to sell more Tesla shares to plug the $1-2 billion per year hole at X," tweeted Gary Black, managing partner of Future Fund and an investor in the automaker.

Ferguson argues that Musk may need the money to stay within the terms of his loan agreement for the $13 billion debt Twitter took on as part of his scheme to buy the platform.

However Musk decides to worm himself out of this one, Twitter's current trajectory on the business end of things looks far from sustainable, and it seems like it's just a matter of time before its owner's reckless decision-making comes home to roost.

More on Twitter: Elon Musk Makes Up Cyber Attack After Donald Trump Interview Crashes and Burns

Saturday, December 2, 2023

Friday, July 28, 2023

Colonisation is good....according to the Right

From a Xit by Mike Carlton

Colonisation was “the luckiest thing that happened to this country...” John Winston Howard OM AC.

[Howard is a former "Liberal" (so called) Party PM of Australia]

Tuesday, July 18, 2023

The coveted terrorist endorsement

Twitter gets us. By Daniel Boris

Friday, December 30, 2022

Tuesday, December 20, 2022

Elon Musk should get back to his real jobs

Elon Musk should get back to his real jobs---making EVs ubiquitous and getting mankind to Mars. His bizarre obsession with Twitter is costing Tesla shareholders heavily.

Yes, high growth companies have underperformed, as they always do when interest rates rise. But Tesla's share price has fallen much faster than other high-tech stocks. And the decline has accelerated as the market, dismayed, watches Musk making an idiot of himself with Twitter.