Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter and right-wingers.

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Well, it seems like Twitter is down in the dumps since Elon Musk purchased it. Truth be told, I actually liked Musk because of what SpaceX has achieved but a social media platform is very different from a car or aerospace company. Since he said for a while that he was a "free speech absolutist" and that he was going to go laxer on moderation when he took over Twitter, hate speech had spiked on the platform, a day after he took over the platform due to neo-nazis testing the waters. The problem was solved for a short time afterwards due to the moderation team under Yoel Roth clamping down on the spike but since then, Yoel, along many other worker workers have resigned from the company, Musk unbanned many previously banned accounts (which I wouldn't necessarily have a problem with if there was at least a group within Twitter who could go through the banned accounts to make sure they were safe to unban) and a ton of advertisers have left or dialled down their advertising platform because they're afraid their brand safety.

I don't think that Elon Musk really cares about "free speech" on Twitter at this point, I think that cares about trying to get back some money from the platform that he was forced to overpay for and if he thinks that he can get that by appealing to neo-nazi hate-mongers, he'll do that. The problem is that he can't make money off Twitter by doing that because most of Twitter's money came from advertisers and they don't want to advertise next to hate speech. Both Apple and Google have huge influence over this too since they distribute the Twitter app over the iStore and Google play stores respectively, which is why Elon recently had a meltdown on Twitter over Apple threatening to pull the Twitter app from their app store. Twitter may have had problems before but despite Elon Musk claiming that he wanted to fix it, it appears to have gotten worse, with Twitter having the opposite problem to what it did before.

What do you think the future of Twitter is now?

I'm just glad I never used Twitter.

As a daily user, it's way better, and all the reports of it's imminent demise are blatant wishcasting.

Elon Musk get's a pass from me because he's doing incredibly innovative work.

Pre-Musk, twitter earned approx US$5B per year and spent $5.2B. A deficit, but within striking distance. Musk's financing of the twitter deal has saddled them with $13B in debt, with approx $1B in INTEREST per year, which means, best case scenario, he's increased their losses from $0.2B to $1.2B per year. Best case scenario.

But Musk doesn't even have best case scenario. The majority of his advertisers have cut back or canceled. Some of them are saying they don't even have anyone at twitter they can contact anymore, but most are leaving because moderation has gone to hell. It's become a friendlier place for fascists, and contrary to his stated intent, a hostile place for free speech. Other than for fascists.

Even Musk is admitting there's a possibility that Apple will drop the twitter app from the iOS app store. His response? He'll develop his own phone. LOL.

I just know there's a lot of weird buzz, everything from Apple talking about pulling Twitter from the app store to talks of Twitter bankruptcy. Considering the current political climate I'm not going to buy into any of it until it actually happens.

Also glad I never used Twitter - the character limit makes it sound like it's only fit for breezy one-liners, which isn't a great way to talk about reality but a great way to peepee joust. Even if Musk gets this whole thing wrapped up and bow-tied and makes it two or three times as profitable for shareholders I still don't know how he'll exactly stop it from being a cesspool. I did like the idea of throwing the codebase on GitHub, if he does that it will be helpful in terms of having people understand the mechanics, although I really don't think he wants people to have easy access to the jwt / cookie configurations.

No special post on the latest Twitter revelations?

Never tweeted a day of my life, and I'm not about to start now.

I don't use twitter at all. It doesn't bother me.