Elon Musk: Always A Douche

[Valmy]

- he will keep saying what he wants even if it costs him money

Which is why Tesla and SpaceX will probably eventually have to remove him as CEO. His whole public role as CEO is to say things that make Tesla and SpaceX money, not cost them.

Of course removing him has a large cost as well, eventually that might be less than the cost of keeping him on.

[viper37]

Under Elon Musk, Twitter has approved 83% of censorship requests by authoritarian governments

It's nice to have numbers.

He's fighting the good fights, not letting those woke win the battle for censorship!

[PJL]

Those figures are bad but were they much better before Elon took over? Tech companies generally haven't had a great record in resisting censorship requests from authoritarian regimes in the past.

Edit - actually read the article and yes it is significantly worse under Elon.

[Syt]

The article says it was 50% before.

[Valmy]

Those figures are bad but were they much better before Elon took over? Tech companies generally haven't had a great record in resisting censorship requests from authoritarian regimes in the past.

Edit - actually read the article and yes it is significantly worse under Elon.

Elon is particularly vulnerable to this kind of corrupt bargain because of his other business interests. The regimes can hit him by attacking Tesla and SpaceX if he doesn't do what they want with Twitter, old Twitter didn't have that problem to this extent.

[Sheilbh]

Yes. Massive investments/supply chains in China and partnering with Saudi investors/funds - I think as much as anything else that was reason to worry about him buying a social media company.

[viper37]

Tesla Whistleblower dumps 100gb of reports to German news site

Elon is going to cover this extensively on Twitter, the free speech platform.

[celedhring]

https://www.politico.eu/article/twitter-to-pull-back-from-europes-disinformation-crusadwe/

Twitter to pull back from Europe's disinformation crusade
EU commissioner Thierry Breton has said he would personally hold site owner Elon Musk to account for complying with the bloc's content rules.

Twitter is on the verge of withdrawing from one of the Europe Union's efforts to stamp out disinformation.

In the coming days, the social networking giant, which is owned by Elon Musk, is expected to end its participation in the bloc's code of practice of disinformation, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter, who were granted anonymity to speak to discuss internal discussions between the company and the European Commission.

The code of practice is a voluntary rulebook that was revamped last year and includes obligations for companies like Twitter, Meta and Alphabet to track political advertising, stop the monetization of disinformation, and provide greater access to these platforms to outsiders. While not mandatory, companies' participation in the code was designed to help offset some of these firms' obligations within the separate, and mandatory, Digital Services Act — new social media rules that include fines of up to 6 percent of a company's annual revenue.

A Commission spokesman said that as the code of practice was voluntary, it was up to individual companies to determine if they would participate. So far, the spokesman added, Twitter had not complied with its obligations under the code.

An email sent to Twitter for comment was returned with a poop emoji.

Twitter is expected to officially withdraw as a so-called co-signatory of the code of practice sometime next week after Musk officially signs off, according to one of the individuals who spoke to POLITICO. Ever since the billionaire fired half of Twitter's employees last fall, the company has drastically pulled back its participation in Europe's online content rulebook, and

was the only tech giant that failed to meet its transparency obligations under quarterly reports mandated under the code of practice.

Thierry Breton, Europe's internal markets commissioner, has publicly stated he would personally hold Musk to account for complying with the bloc's content rules, though Twitter's decision to withdraw from the code of practice on disinformation directly goes against that pledge.

[Jacob]

Makes sense. I expect Musk's play is to become the market leader in monetizing disinformation and serving the needs of the enemies of the West and democracy in the Western social media space. It could potentially be a good revenue stream.

[viper37]

That 44 billion US$  isn't gonna pay for itself.  He's got to do something.

[Sheilbh]

https://www.politico.eu/article/twitter-to-pull-back-from-europes-disinformation-crusadwe/

Although I'd note that tech lawyers and civil liberties groups about some of these laws (which the code of practice supports). It's true of the Digital Services Act and the UK's Online Harms Bill, which is worse because it's becoming a real christmas tree piece of legislation.

These are laws that are aiming to target real problems online like disinformation (though I'm less sure on that), content promoting self harm or eating disorders etc. There's good stuff in them about enhancing transparency and rights of users.

But there are really worrying things in these laws. To an extent they outsource the quasi-regulatory duties to large platforms like Twitter, Meta and Google - as Thierry Breton noted the law will still apply to Twitter, which it will. The corollary of that is that European law on those issues will be primarily enforced by teams run by Elon Musk. It is particularly concerning around, in the terms of the UK law, content that is "harmful but legal" where the platforms are required to take action against content based on the "harm" it has rather than its legality.

In the EU context there is a legal right for national judicial or administrative authorities (so basically any government agency) to issue mandatory takedown orders directly to the platforms. This is a power that doesn't require a judicial order or anything like that as power isn't limited to the courts instead you have a very broad set of state actors who can make the determination that content is unlawful and order removed from platforms (largely through geo-blocking, though there are powers for EU wide or worldwide orders).

A similarly broad range of state entities can order platforms to unmask their users or disclose their data to that agency. The recitals of the law (which are persuasive, but not law) say obviously this needs to be done in line with GDPR etc - I'd just point out that GDPR doesn't apply to law enforcement agencies or national security/intelligence agencies (this leads to the common irony that, in some ways, Europeans' data is vastly more protected if it's transferred outside of Europe ). Again there is no requirement for a court order, however there is a right to appeal.

There's also issues around trusted flaggers - again there's not really any checks and balances or udicial oversight. Some platforms have these types of systems in place already. But trusted flaggers at a European level include Europol (recently discovered to have been holding "billions of points of information" about EU residents unlawfully) and at a national level can include law enforcement or even for profit companies.

The example always given in the EU is Hungary or Poland and sligthly generic rule of law issues. But I think a better one would maybe be France - Macron has already tried to criminalise filming policy acting in the course of their duties, largely in response to people filming police violence against protesters. You add those powers up and you could easily see states trying to scrub the internet of films of police violence or misconduct and using their powers to identify the source, or, from a Polish example, targeting abortion providers - both of which have been accused by states in the past of constituting "disinformation". And obviously one of the issues with the way the law works is if failure can get a fine of 6% of turnover and some of the tasks are quasi-regulatory on platforms, my suspicion is they'll take a very risk-averse approach to avoid fines that may not be in the public interest - obviously it also makes it difficult to challenge the use of similar legislation by, say, Turkey or India (or social media companies complying with them).

There's a real challenge with these laws because they're normally presented as solutions to various issues online and often have quite a lot of support from specific in those sectors - for example disinformation, cyber-bullying, eating disorders etc. They are also often framed in this way of good European regulation v bad American (or Musky) platforms (needless to say that's the preferred framing for European/UK lawmakers - digital wild west v ordered regulation). But in my experience when you speak to specialists in the area whether tech lawyers or tech journalists or civil liberties groups (especially those focused on privacy and online rights) find them very concerning.

Edit: It's not to say that we shouldn't regulate or that it's just all too hard - but I think in the EU and the UK the focus has been on laws that I think get the balance wrong. In part it's just challenging, you have experts worrying about the impact of disinformation on our democracies or the parents of children who killed themselves after cyber-bullying, or spending lots of time looking at self-harm videos - and in political and press terms those are very persuasive arguments around problems that need fixing. As ever worrying about state over-reach or the impact on other forms of speech of such broadly drawn laws is less popular and resonates less with the public and politicians. As I say you even see this within newsrooms of single papers where the home affairs or political correspondents paint it as trying to fix real problems v corporate lobbying and American social media companies; but you read tech reporters from the same newsroom and they'll be raising exactly the concerns I've just flagged.

[Syt]

[HVC]

I'm starting to think he's been replaced by a beta version of a ChatGPT competitor.

[Syt]

Hooray, Twitter is saved!

[Josquius]

Twitter creators are a thing?