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Boac
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Twitter

#1 Post by Boac » Tue Nov 01, 2022 10:03 am

Interesting that not one of our 'free speech' warriors picked up on my query
Will his take-over of Twitter aid or hinder the promotion of free speech?
It looks as if the much feared 'New World order' is in full swing now with Musk at its head, tweeting an unfounded anti-LGBTQ far-right conspiracy theory about the attack on Pelosi.

I think/hope Twitter is in its death throes. That is not what free speech is about.

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Re: Twitter

#2 Post by Woody » Tue Nov 01, 2022 10:30 am

I’m only on it as JuniorWoody’s school use it quite a lot, but otherwise it’s complete bollox :)
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Re: Twitter

#3 Post by Boac » Tue Nov 01, 2022 11:15 am

It has, unfortunately, taken on the mantle of 'this is where I announce new policies' for politicians.

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Re: Twitter

#4 Post by barkingmad » Tue Nov 01, 2022 11:19 am

Maybe this is why so many refer to it as "Twatter"?

"twat
twŏt
noun
1) The vulva.
2) A woman or girl.
3) A foolish or contemptible person."

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition. :)) =))

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Re: Twitter

#5 Post by Boac » Tue Nov 01, 2022 11:33 am

Maybe this is why so many refer to it as "Twatter"?
Indeed - and normally my reference.

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Re: Twitter

#6 Post by PHXPhlyer » Tue Nov 01, 2022 3:24 pm

Celebrities are starting to leave Twitter. Here's a running list.
TV powerhouse Shonda Rhimes, "Madam Secretary" actor Téa Leoni and others in the entertainment world say they're dropping the platform after Elon Musk's takeover.

https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/cel ... -rcna54831

Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter has some in Hollywood heading for the exit.

"Grey's Anatomy" creator Shonda Rhimes and others in the entertainment industry say they plan to quit the platform now that it is owned by Musk, a self-proclaimed "free speech absolutist" who has vowed to make sweeping changes — including potentially reversing the ban on former President Donald Trump.

"Not hanging around for whatever Elon has planned. Bye," Rhimes tweeted to her nearly 2 million Twitter followers Saturday afternoon, two days after Musk closed his $44 billion deal to purchase the service.


Here's a running list of other folks from the overlapping worlds of television, movies, music and sports who say they plan to leave.

Sara Bareilles
The Grammy-winning singer/songwriter tweeted to her nearly 3 million followers Sunday: "Welp. It's been fun Twitter. I'm out. See you on the other platforms, peeps.

"Sorry, this one's just not for me," Bareilles added, capping her post with heart and prayer-hands emojis.


Toni Braxton
In a tweet to her nearly 2 million followers Friday, the Grammy-winning R&B star decried the content she said she had seen on Twitter since Musk's takeover, writing in part: "I'm shocked and appalled at some of the 'free speech' I've seen on this platform since its acquisition.

"Hate speech under the veil of 'free speech' is unacceptable; therefore I am choosing to stay off Twitter as it is no longer a safe space for myself, my sons and other POC," Braxton added, using an initialism for people of color.


Mick Foley
Foley, a retired professional wrestler and actor, said in a post on his public, verified Facebook page that he is taking a "break" from Twitter "since the new ownership — and the misinformation and hate it seems to be encouraging — has my stomach in a knot."

"I really do enjoy connecting with all of you on social media, but it can get overwhelming sometimes. I think I’ll be back on in a few weeks, but in the meantime, I will continue to post on Facebook and Instagram," Foley wrote Friday. "I hope all of you will be kind to one another.

"Please vote if you can too — our democracy seems to be hanging on by a thread," he added. (Foley's Twitter account appears to have been deactivated.)

Brian Koppelman
Koppelman, a co-creator of the Showtime dramas "Billions" and "Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber," recently tweeted: "Y’all’s, for real, come find me over on instagram and the tok. Gonna really try to take a breather from here for a minute or a month come deal close time."

The screenwriter and producer has since locked his tweets, meaning only approved followers can see what he posts.

Erik Larsen
Larsen, a comic book creator and artist best known for "The Amazing Spider-Man," reportedly tweeted in April that "the day Elon Musk buys Twitter is the day I delete my account and leave Twitter."

Larsen's handle, @ErikJLarsen, appeared to have been deactivated Monday.

In an email, Larsen confirmed he is finished with Twitter.

"Yeah, I left. I said I would leave if Musk bought Twitter. Musk bought Twitter," he said. "So, I had no choice. The move only emboldened those most toxic users. The racists, 'patriots' and creeps are back in full force."

"I have no regrets," he added.

Téa Leoni
Leoni, an actor best known for starring on the CBS political drama "Madam Secretary," tweeted to her roughly 124,000 followers Saturday: "Hi everyone. I’m coming off Twitter today—let’s see where we are when the dust settles.

"Today the dust has revealed too much hate, too much in the wrong direction," Leoni added. "Love, kindness, and possibilities for all of you."


Ken Olin
Olin, an executive producer of the NBC show "This Is Us" and a former star of the ABC drama series "Thirtysomething," tweeted to his roughly 293,000 followers that he is "out of here." He then made a plea for kindness and peace.


Alex Winter
Winter, an actor and filmmaker best known for playing Bill in the "Bill & Ted" film series alongside Keanu Reeves, locked his Twitter account sometime after Musk's acquisition. His bio on the site now says "Not here" and links to his Instagram profile.

"Elon Musk taking over Twitter and making it a private company with less oversight has immediately made the platform more prone to hate speech, targeted attacks, and the spread of disinformation," Winter said in an email. "If Twitter returns to being a public company run by rational actors, many of us will return."

PP

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Re: Twitter

#7 Post by boing » Tue Nov 01, 2022 4:26 pm

Please tell me how the departure of a bunch of individuals who create and live in Fantasyland is going to hurt Twitter? I have never heard of any of the people on the list and all I see is a bunch of spoiled brats who want to grab their toys and tearfully go home because they can't have their own way.

I would say good riddance but since their existence has never effected mine there is no reason I should be concerned to offer even that little concern.

"If Twitter returns to being a public company run by rational actors, many of us will never return."
There, fixed that for you.

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Re: Twitter

#8 Post by Boac » Tue Nov 01, 2022 4:31 pm

That's a relief! I was beginning to think I ought to know who they were =))

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Re: Twitter

#9 Post by boing » Tue Nov 01, 2022 4:36 pm

Now this thread has aroused my interest I thought I would investigate a little. A report from the Guardian of all places.

[media]https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... -says-firm[/media]

Apparently the departure from Twitter by left-leaning individuals is mainly hurting the left-leaning politicians and commentators who remain.

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Re: Twitter

#10 Post by llondel » Tue Nov 01, 2022 5:07 pm

I appear to have had my Twitter account longer than 99.99% of all users. I signed up in 2007 when it had about 50,000 users.

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Re: Twitter

#11 Post by OFSO » Tue Nov 01, 2022 5:28 pm

What's Twitter?

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Re: Twitter

#12 Post by Boac » Tue Nov 01, 2022 5:30 pm

One opinion from the financial circles:
"Musk paid $44 billion for Twitter, a company worth maybe $12 billion, and seems to be trying to get it down to $0 billion as fast as possible"

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Re: Twitter

#13 Post by barkingmad » Tue Nov 01, 2022 7:11 pm

Boac wrote:
Tue Nov 01, 2022 5:30 pm
One opinion from the financial circles:
"Musk paid $44 billion for Twitter, a company worth maybe $12 billion, and seems to be trying to get it down to $0 billion as fast as possible"
Sounds like the standard airline ambition to make a million (choose your favourite currency) by starting out with 10,000,000 and ending up with 1,000,000 or considerably less.

Apart from Ryanair, Squeezy and Go, but that's another story.

Are we all certain he's from the US Red wing and not that he might be a patsy from the Blue corner? :-? :-w

If he wrecks Twitter, will that not play straight into the hands of the improperly named 'Democratic' party, who will then be able to continue their left-wing socialist strangulation of any form of free speech?

A bit like the 'conservative' party in the UK... No wonder I'm confused?

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Re: Twitter

#14 Post by Boac » Tue Nov 01, 2022 7:25 pm

OFSO - it is the noise birds make.

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Re: Twitter

#15 Post by boing » Tue Nov 01, 2022 7:54 pm

Musk knows the Twitter deal alone is a disaster, he was eventually forced to buy the operation to avoid a pointless long adjudication. His plan is to extend Twitter activity into other areas. Who knows? online commerce, banking, travel, there are a hundred start up ideas that Twitter could move into and take over because of his financial investment. He is certainly playing hard, did you see he locked out all of the software engineers at Twitter before they could carry out any form of sabotage?

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Re: Twitter

#16 Post by barkingmad » Tue Nov 01, 2022 8:01 pm

boing sez:---"did you see he locked out all of the software engineers at Twitter before they could carry out any form of sabotage?"

'Tis a pity BA didn't do the same many years ago in the 90s after one or more IT geeks left under a cloud.

Rumour has it they left behind a digital bomb which went off many weeks later, resulting in yet more BA computer outages which cost scullions and pissed off more customers. [-X

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Re: Twitter

#17 Post by barkingmad » Thu Nov 03, 2022 1:23 pm

Never in my wildest nightmares would I have imagined that a social meeja site could posssibly affect the outcome of our current Eastern European war with all the lives, the hardware and products of the military industrial complex being chucked into it.

Is this the reason the hawks in the West and the intellectual elites were sooh opposed to the Musk takeover?

“David Sacks: Ukraine is turning into Woke War III” – Watch UnHerd‘s Freddie Sayers speak to PayPal cofounder David Sacks, who argues the West had entered into ‘Woke War III’ and that over the course of the war, “the woke Left and the neoconservative Right have been marching in lockstep, and using ‘woke cancellation tactics’ to suppress any dissenting opinions”. Sacks is also currently at Elon Musk’s side planning the next steps for Twitter and spoke to Freddy about that, saying “Elon Musk buying Twitter is just the start“.


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Re: Twitter

#18 Post by Boac » Mon Nov 07, 2022 12:00 pm

Didn't he do well?

"Platformer journalist, Casey Newton, reported that now-fired employees were reached out by the company, asking them to return after they received emails that they’ve been laid off. He also shared a message from Twitter’s Slack account, telling former employees that they would put together names and rationales by Sunday.

“sorry to @everybody on the weekend but I wanted to pass along that we have the opportunity to ask folks that were left off if they will come back. I need to put together names and rationales by 4PM PST Sunday."


Perhaps he is looking for a job in the UK Conservative Party................ =))

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Re: Twitter

#19 Post by TheGreenAnger » Mon Nov 07, 2022 12:23 pm

Boac wrote:
Mon Nov 07, 2022 12:00 pm
Didn't he do well?

"Platformer journalist, Casey Newton, reported that now-fired employees were reached out by the company, asking them to return after they received emails that they’ve been laid off. He also shared a message from Twitter’s Slack account, telling former employees that they would put together names and rationales by Sunday.

“sorry to @everybody on the weekend but I wanted to pass along that we have the opportunity to ask folks that were left off if they will come back. I need to put together names and rationales by 4PM PST Sunday."


Perhaps he is looking for a job in the UK Conservative Party................ =))
You couldn't make it up! I trust that anybody who chooses to take up the company's "kind" offer, demands at least double their previous salary and the right to retain their severance package! What a shower, headed up Musk, a total shower head!

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... ducts.html

Dorsey, the previous head idiot, sounds like the kind of guy that deserves a good shoeing!
In court filings, Dorsey was revealed to have contacted Musk and discussed the direction of the company.

'A new platform is needed. It can't be a company. This is why I left,' he texted Musk.

When Musk asked him what the new model should look like, Dorsey responded that Twitter 'should never have been the company' and that was the 'original sin.'

'I think it's worth both trying to move Twitter in a better direction and doing something new that’s decentralized,' he said.

'Elon is the singular solution I trust,' said Dorsey in an April 2022 tweet. 'I trust his mission to extend the light of consciousness.'
What a total prat.
My necessaries are embark'd: farewell. Adieu! I have too grieved a heart to take a tedious leave.

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Re: Twitter

#20 Post by PHXPhlyer » Mon Nov 07, 2022 4:14 pm

With Twitter in chaos, Mastodon is on fire

https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/05/tech/mastodon/index.html

In the week since Elon Musk took over Twitter, the number of people signing up for a small social network called Mastodon has surged.

You may not have heard of Mastodon, which has been around since 2016, but now it’s growing rapidly. Some are fleeing Twitter for it or at least seeking out a second place to post their thoughts online as the much more well-known social network faces layoffs, controversial product changes, an expected shift in its approach to content moderation and a jump in hateful rhetoric.

There may be no clear alternative to Twitter, a uniquely influential platform that is fast-moving, text-heavy, conversational and news-oriented. But Mastodon scratches a certain itch. The service has a similar look to Twitter, with a timeline of short updates sorted chronologically rather than algorithmically. It lets users join a slew of different servers run by various groups and individuals, rather than one central platform controlled by a single company like Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook.

Unlike larger social networks, Mastodon is both free to use and free of ads. It’s developed by a nonprofit run by Mastodon creator Eugen Rochko, and is supported via crowdfunding.

Mastodon is a free open source software for running self-hosted social networking services.

Rochko said in an interview Thursday that Mastodon gained 230,000 users since October 27, when Musk took control of Twitter. It now has 655,000 active users each month, he said. Twitter reported in July that it had nearly 238 million daily active monetizable users.

“It is not as large as Twitter, obviously, but it is the biggest that this network has ever been,” said Rochko, who originally created Mastodon as more of a project than a consumer product (and, yes, its name was inspired by the heavy metal band Mastodon).

Who’s joining Mastodon?
Mastodon’s new sign-ups include some Twitter users with big followings, such as actor and comedian Kathy Griffin, who joined in early November, and journalist Molly Jong-Fast, who joined in late October.

Sarah T. Roberts, an associate professor at UCLA and faculty director of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry, started using Mastodon in earnest on October 30, just after Musk took over Twitter. (She had created another account years ago, she said, but didn’t really get into it until recently because of the popularity of Twitter among people in academia.)

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk provides an update on the development of the Starship spacecraft and Super Heavy rocket at the companys Launch facility in south Texas.
Elon Musk wants Twitter users to pay to be verified. It could create a new set of headaches for the company
Roberts, who worked at Twitter as a staff researcher earlier this year while taking a leave from UCLA, said she was inspired to start using Mastodon due to concerns about how Twitter’s content moderation may change under Musk’s control. She suspects some newcomers are simply sick of social media companies that capture lots of user data and are driven by advertising.

And she pointed out that Twitter users may migrate to Mastodon in particular because its user experience is pretty similar to Twitter’s. A lot of Mastodon’s features and layout (particularly in its iOS app) will look and feel familiar to current Twitter users, though with some slightly different verbiage; you can follow others, create short posts (there’s a 500 character limit, and you can upload images and videos), favorite or repost other users’ posts, and so on.

“It’s about as close as it gets,” she said.

Feeling like a social-media newcomer
I’ve been a Twitter user since 2007, but as a growing number of the people I follow on the social network began posting their Mastodon usernames in recent weeks, I got curious. This week, I decided to check out Mastodon for myself.

There are some key differences, particularly in how the network is set up. Because Mastodon users’ accounts are hosted on a slew of different servers, the costs of hosting users is spread among many different people and groups. But that also means users are spread out all over the place, and people you know can be hard to find — Rochko likened this setup to having different email providers, like Gmail and Hotmail.

This means the entirety of the network isn’t under any one person or company’s control, but it also introduces some new complications for those of us used to Twitter — a product that has also been criticized over the years for being less intuitive than more popular services like Facebook and Instagram.

On Mastodon, for instance, you have to join a specific server to sign up, some of which are open to anyone, some of which require an invitation (you can also run your own server). There is a server operated by the nonprofit behind Mastodon, Mastodon.social, but it’s not accepting more users; I’m currently using one called Mstdn.social, which is also where I can sign in to access Mastodon on the web.

The Twitter logo is displayed on the exterior of Twitter headquarters on October 26, 2022 in San Francisco, California.
Elon Musk's Twitter lays off employees across the company
And while you can follow any other Mastodon user, no matter which server they’ve signed up with, you can only see the lists of who follows your Mastodon friends, or who your Mastodon friends follow, if the followers happen to belong to the same server you’re signed up with (I realized this while trying to track down more people I know who recently signed up).

At first, it felt as if I was starting over, in a sense, as a complete newcomer to social media. As Roberts said, it is quite similar to Twitter in terms of its look and functionality, and the iOS app is easy to use.

But unlike on Twitter, where I can easily interact with a large audience, my Mastodon network is less than 100 followers. Suddenly I had no idea what to post — a feeling that never nags me on Twitter, perhaps because the size of that network makes any post feel less consequential. I got over it quickly, though, and realized the smaller scale of Mastodon can be calming compared to Twitter’s endless stream of stimulation.

A social-media escape hatch
I’m not quite ready to close my Twitter account, though; for me, Mastodon is a sort of social-media escape hatch in case Twitter becomes unbearable.

Roberts, too, hasn’t yet decided if she will close her Twitter account, but she was surprised by how quickly her following grew on Mastodon. Within a week of signing up and alerting her nearly 23,000 Twitter followers, she has amassed over 1,000 Mastodon followers.

“It might be pretty soon that people don’t want to be caught on Twitter,” she said.

In some ways, starting over can also be fun.

“I thought, ‘What’s it going to be like to start over again?’” she asked. “It’s kind of interesting: Oh that person is here! Here’s so-and-so! I’m so glad they’re here so we can be here together.”

PP

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