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Fox3WheresMyBanana
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Re: Twitter

#61 Post by Fox3WheresMyBanana » Sat Nov 19, 2022 8:45 pm

It is distributed across a large number of servers which are not directly interlinked like Twitter.
Effectively, you need to know their server name as well as their handle to find someone.
OTOH, it's open source software.
I expect there'll be a workaround if Twitter collapses and at least part of the world switches to Mastodon. Maybe some sort of search crawler that checks all the servers for a handle.
Don't take that as Gospel. I've only spent a minute looking at it myself.

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Re: Twitter

#62 Post by PHXPhlyer » Sun Nov 20, 2022 2:17 am

All the more reason to not be on Twitter!

Elon Musk reinstates former President Donald Trump’s Twitter account


https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/ ... -rcna54243

Elon Musk reinstates former President Donald Trump’s Twitter account
It wasn’t immediately clear if Trump would use his old account, which had 88.8 million followers. He said in April he would stick to his own social media app.

SAN FRANCISCO — Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, announced Saturday that former President Donald Trump will be allowed to return to the social media platform, nearly two years after the company suspended him, citing his role in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.

The platform's CEO announced the decision Saturday evening after allowing his Twitter followers and others to vote on whether to reinstate the former president, with nearly 52% of those weighing in favoring Trump's return. The twitter poll logged more than 15 million votes.

"The people have spoken," Must tweeted Saturday evening. "Trump will be reinstated."

Trump's account returned shortly afterward.


Musk’s decision is easily his most anticipated one since he took control of Twitter on Oct. 27. It comes four days after Trump announced he would run for president in 2024.

Twitter was central to Trump’s political rise, allowing him to broadcast his thoughts, provocations and insults to millions of fans and critics without the filter of the traditional media or anyone else. Around 2011, he began using Twitter to falsely claim that then-President Barack Obama hadn’t been born in the U.S., and later, he used Twitter as president to fire Cabinet officials and threaten North Korea. He also tweeted or retweeted out a variety of false and misleading statements from Antifa conspiracy theories to false Covid treatments. At other times, he used his account to attack his critics, the media, Democrats and Republicans who were not sufficiently loyal.

Trump had 88.8 million Twitter followers when the company banned him.

The move signals a new direction for Twitter, which in recent years has pivoted from an embrace of all-out free speech to take more aggressive action on abuse, harassment, misinformation and calls for violence. Musk has said he will loosen Twitter’s rules, although he tweeted shortly after the takeover that the platform “obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape. ...”

Trump’s return also comes at a time of heightened expectations that he and other Republicans are set to renew misleading or false claims of election fraud, which Trump routinely tweeted before he lost his account. The decision to welcome Trump back carries risk for Musk, putting him in a position to be blamed for Trump’s future behavior and any potential calls to violence.

It wasn’t immediately clear how often Trump might use his old account. He told Fox News in April that even if Musk succeeded in buying Twitter, he wouldn’t go back and would instead stay on his own social media app, Truth Social.

Trump remains suspended from other major online platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.

Musk, the world’s wealthiest person, according to Bloomberg News, had forecast the invitation for Trump to return in May, a month after he offered to buy Twitter, when he called the expulsion “morally wrong and flat-out stupid.”

Twitter users have fiercely debated Trump’s absence. He repeatedly tested the limits of Twitter’s rules over the years, and in 2018 the company carved out an exception to ensure “world leaders” could largely do as they pleased without getting banned. On the other hand, Trump is the Republican Party’s chief figure, and his absence from Twitter has meant the service doesn’t accurately mirror the reality of U.S. politics.

Musk fell into the second camp.

“I think permabans just fundamentally undermine trust in Twitter as a town square where everyone can voice their opinion,” he said at a Financial Times conference in May.

Twitter and most of the tech industry locked Trump’s accounts during the violence of Jan. 6, 2021, saying he had broken their terms of service and posed a threat to public safety.

In one provocation, Trump tweeted that afternoon that “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution” and “USA demands the truth!” The tweet came just minutes after his supporters had breached the Capitol doors.

Twitter interpreted those statements and others as violations of its “civic integrity policy,” and it announced Trump’s suspension at 7:02 p.m. ET on Jan. 6:

“If the Tweets are not removed, the account will remain locked. … Future violations of the Twitter Rules, including our Civic Integrity or Violent Threats policies, will result in permanent suspension of the @realDonaldTrump account.”

The San Francisco-based company announced two days later, Jan. 8, that it was making Trump’s suspension permanent. Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, then the company’s CEO, later defended the decision by citing the possibility of offline harm.

“After a clear warning we’d take this action, we made a decision with the best information we had based on threats to physical safety both on and off Twitter,” Dorsey said then.

At the time, one consideration was that Trump might use social media during his final two weeks in office to continue to spark violence, a danger that alarmed even many free-speech advocates.

Twitter and Trump fed off each other for years before the ban. Twitter gave Trump easy access to millions of people and a largely free pass to violate its rules, while Trump brought constant attention to a service often overshadowed by larger platforms such as Instagram and YouTube.

Twitter, founded in 2006, had its first profitable quarter in late 2017 while Trump was president.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has left open the possibility of letting Trump back on as soon as Jan. 7, two years after it suspended him. The company said it would look to experts “to assess whether the risk to public safety has receded.”

“If we determine that there is still a serious risk to public safety, we will extend the restriction for a set period of time and continue to re-evaluate until that risk has receded,” Nick Clegg, the company’s vice president of global affairs, said in a blog post last year.

Clegg’s statement came after the Oversight Board, a quasi-independent body funded by Meta, criticized the idea of an open-ended suspension.

Susan Wojcicki, the CEO of Google subsidiary YouTube, has said the video site would lift its suspension of Trump “when we determine that the risk of violence has decreased.”

PP

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Re: Twitter

#63 Post by Fox3WheresMyBanana » Sun Nov 20, 2022 2:30 am

My schoolmasters always used to say that the best way to prove the evil and idiots were so was to let them speak their own words.
My history master thought everyone should read 'Mein Kampf', and since he'd been up against two SS Panzer Divisions on the Bridge at Arnhem, who was I to argue?

“when we determine that the risk of violence has decreased.” - my @rse!
Remind me how many involved in the Jan 6th "Insurrection" have actually been charged with Insurrection?

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Re: Twitter

#64 Post by TheGreenAnger » Sun Nov 20, 2022 7:20 am

Fox3WheresMyBanana wrote:
Sun Nov 20, 2022 2:30 am
My schoolmasters always used to say that the best way to prove the evil and idiots were so was to let them speak their own words.
My history master thought everyone should read 'Mein Kampf', and since he'd been up against two SS Panzer Divisions on the Bridge at Arnhem, who was I to argue?

“when we determine that the risk of violence has decreased.” - my @rse!
Remind me how many involved in the Jan 6th "Insurrection" have actually been charged with Insurrection?
Methinks Musk, the patron Saint of "Free Speech" and bad deals, and smells, is very keen on the 88 million Twitter followers that Trump was reputed to have had. Like all things Trumpian I would treat that figure with a great deal of scepticism, and wouldn't bet on the revenue of corporates that will not return to Twitter as a result of this news, and Musks' own inept corporate management.
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Re: Twitter

#65 Post by Fox3WheresMyBanana » Sun Nov 20, 2022 11:24 am

It's amazing that he made any money at all - until you remember he made it off government subsidies.
You can be the dumbest entrepreneur in America, but you are still cleverer than the government ;)

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Re: Twitter

#66 Post by TheGreenAnger » Sun Nov 20, 2022 11:46 am

Fox3WheresMyBanana wrote:
Sun Nov 20, 2022 11:24 am
It's amazing that he made any money at all - until you remember he made it off government subsidies.
You can be the dumbest entrepreneur in America, but you are still cleverer than the government ;)
Beware self-made ‘genius’ entrepreneurs promising the earth. Just look at Elon Musk
Trussonomics trashed within eight weeks. Donald Trump’s anointed candidates cut down in the US midterms. Sam Bankman-Fried, the poster boy of the crypto world, collapsing into bankruptcy. Elon Musk throwing Twitter into turmoil. The bursting of myths and the shredding of reputations seem to be the themes of the day.

Each of these cases is, of course, distinct and the root causes of each disaster different. There is a danger, too, in discussing these developments, of seeming to revel in failure. Too much of the debate about Musk and Twitter, especially, has mixed despair with schadenfreude. Yet, viewed collectively, these cases also tell us something deeper about our age and in particular about the ways in which we think about innovation and change.

Since the death of Steve Jobs in 2011, Musk has emerged as the leading virtuoso of technological innovation. “His brilliance, his vision and the breadth of his ambition make him the one-man embodiment of the future,” fawned Fortune mwagazine in 2014.

Look closely at Musk’s record and the mystique begins to vanish
The world seems to divide into Musk lovers and Musk haters, a cleavage that has become particularly acute since his acquisition of Twitter last month. For Musk supporters, the critics are little more than know-nothing dullards, attempting for political reasons to hack down a genius of the day. “It’s remarkable how many people who’ve never run any kind of company think they know how to run a tech company better than someone who’s run Tesla and SpaceX,” tweeted the computer scientist and venture capitalist Paul Graham.

Look more closely at Musk’s record, though, and the mystique begins to vanish. Musk was removed as CEO of each of the first companies he helped found: Zip2, an online business directory; X.com, an online bank; and PayPal, created by the merger of X.com with its much more successful competitor Confinity, co-founded by another Silicon Valley wannabe, Peter Thiel. Nevertheless, the sale of Zip2 netted Musk $22m (£18.5m) and the acquisition of PayPal by eBay $176m. He used that money to set up a series of other ventures, most notably the electric car company Tesla and SpaceX, which manufactures and launches spacecraft. Yet his record here, too, is hardly that of an entrepreneurial genius.

Tesla is today the world’s most valuable car company. It has, however, been plagued by a host of major problems, from fatal crashes to fines for alleged fraud to accusations of creative accounting. Tesla has also been accused of garnering more than $295m in green subsidies from the state of California for a battery-swapping technology that was never made available to customers.

SpaceX nearly folded in 2008 before a last-minute $1.6bn contract from Nasa. Before that contract, Musk acknowledges, “we were running on fumes”. His projects were so reliant on public money for survival that in the days before he discovered the necessity of voting Republican to provide “balance” to American politics, conservatives derided the degree of state support for his ventures.

The icon of the self-made entrepreneur of genius has survived only because of fabulous state subsidies. Nor is it just public money that Musk arrogates. According to his biographer Ashlee Vance, Musk constantly appropriates for himself the credit for the work of his engineers and programmers. “I don’t really have a business plan,” he has boasted, never letting, in the words of Vance, “the fact that he knew very little about [an] industry’s nuances bother him”.

Musk’s real genius is in creating an aura around himself, of making vast promises and getting people to believe that he can deliver. Sometimes he does deliver; many times he does not. It is an approach, however, that yields dividends in an age in which people yearn for the visionary, without particularly scrutinising the vision, who will on the disrupter without necessarily caring what the disruption will be.

As the self-proclaimed titans and saviours tumble, what becomes nurtured is a cynicism about change and innovation
It’s the approach that allowed figures such as Elizabeth Holmes, last week jailed for 11 years for marketing a seemingly miraculous but in reality fake blood-testing system, and Bankman-Fried, whose cryptocurrency exchange FTX collapsed earlier this month, to win acclaim and adulation from investors, politicians and pundits.

Before he finally bought Twitter, Musk was sued by the social media platform for seemingly backing out of the deal. As part of the litigation, a huge document of emails and text messages, sent and received by Musk, was made public by the court. What they reveal is a world of very rich people who, for all their self-mythologising, are defined largely by the shallowness of their understanding and their use of their wealth to insulate themselves from having to think too closely about what they might be investing in or what change might entail. “Solve free speech,” Mathias Döpfner, the CEO of the publisher Axel Springer, tells Musk in his “#Gameplan” for Twitter, as if to state it is to solve it.

“I’m very sceptical of books,” Bankman-Fried claimed in an interview in September (a flattering piece that since the collapse of FTX seems to have been deleted by Sequoia magazine). “I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that.” He added that “if you wrote a book, you **** up and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post”.

I doubt Bankman-Fried has never read a book and I doubt whether reading a book would have helped save FTX from bankruptcy. But it is the kind of flaunting of ignorance, the parading of shallowness, that in certain circles now passes for profundity.

Not just in technology or business but in politics too, we can see the yearning for the visionary who promises the world so long as you don’t look too closely at the small print, and the creation of politicians, from Trump to Truss, who come to believe in their own fantasies. It is an age of growing support, especially among the young, for authoritarian leaders and “strongman” politics, the inevitable product of disenchantment with democracy and of a lack of faith in traditional agencies of change.

There is a danger in all this that, as the self-proclaimed titans and saviours tumble, what becomes nurtured is a cynicism about change and innovation. The problem is not having a transformative vision about the future, whether in technology or in politics. It is the shallowness and lack of seriousness of those who today present themselves as messiahs.

Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist
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Re: Twitter

#67 Post by Fox3WheresMyBanana » Sun Nov 20, 2022 12:26 pm

Would this be the same Observer that said 10 years ago, like the entire rest of the media, that Elizabeth Holmes was the New Messiah?
That used to say Elon Musk was God's Gift to business.

They are not "self-proclaimed titans". The media does the proclaiming.
And then they join in the lynching afterwards.
This used to sell them newspapers both times.

They still think it does, but people have noticed how the media doesn't do intelligent thought.
Inaccurate news and blinkered, wholly wrong forecasts have got people looking elsewhere for their information.

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Re: Twitter

#68 Post by TheGreenAnger » Sun Nov 20, 2022 12:48 pm

Fox3WheresMyBanana wrote:
Sun Nov 20, 2022 12:26 pm
Would this be the same Observer that said 10 years ago, like the entire rest of the media, that Elizabeth Holmes was the New Messiah?
That used to say Elon Musk was God's Gift to business.

They are not "self-proclaimed titans". The media does the proclaiming.
And then they join in the lynching afterwards.
This used to sell them newspapers both times.

They still think it does, but people have noticed how the media doesn't do intelligent thought.
Inaccurate news and blinkered, wholly wrong forecasts have got people looking elsewhere for their information.
I can assure that Musk has always thought he was the Messiah. Ask anybody who knew him at Pretoria Boys High!

He was bullied unmercifully at Bryanston High. :))
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Re: Twitter

#69 Post by Fox3WheresMyBanana » Sun Nov 20, 2022 12:54 pm

South Africans unmerciful??

I'm shocked, I tell you, shocked!


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Re: Twitter

#70 Post by Woody » Sun Nov 20, 2022 1:08 pm

Don’t wind them up, the Saffers are a very sensitive bunch =)) =))
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Re: Twitter

#71 Post by Fox3WheresMyBanana » Sun Nov 20, 2022 3:43 pm

Trump has told Twitter where they can stuff their offer to reopen his account.

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Re: Twitter

#72 Post by TheGreenAnger » Sun Nov 20, 2022 4:02 pm

Fox3WheresMyBanana wrote:
Sun Nov 20, 2022 3:43 pm
Trump has told Twitter where they can stuff their offer to reopen his account.
Quelle surprise! =))

There is a Marx brothers' anecdote somewhere here!

Maybe Vladimir Putin can be persuaded to fill in, where Trump has left off. ;)))

I suspect Trump will eventually start posting again, although some think he might be trying to take his own site public, so who knows what will prevail, his ego and immediate need to be heard by millions of acolytes, or his need to support and inflate the value of his own product.

Almost as drama filled as this place eh! What with sundry site debates, temporary bannings, toys thrown out of cots, and subscription dramas, the whole tutti, with our own Admin cast in the mould of Musk perhaps? :-ss ;)))

Nah, my imagination gets the better of me sometimes! Forgive me... =))

This place is far more fun than Twitter.
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Re: Twitter

#73 Post by barkingmad » Wed Nov 23, 2022 9:11 am

Where will it all end? Possibly not with a bang but a whimper?

Some of us look on from the outside and marvel at the tricks of the blue-tick pricks and their ilk;

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/11/2 ... ck-pricks/

Yes, I have posted some stuff here in O-N from Twatter, only because it drifted in via other channels and no, I am not on Twatter as a member, contributor, subscriber nor any other affiliation.

Having enjoyed the ‘spiked’ takedown, I will continue to enjoy life, what’s left of it, free from the hassle and aggro it seems to cause those who presumably signed up into it using “fully informed consent”.

And we all know what an oxymoron that has turned out to be! :-?

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Re: Twitter

#74 Post by barkingmad » Mon Dec 12, 2022 1:58 pm

Some more info on Twatter, lockdowns and apparently national security which floats like scum to the surface;

https://brownstone.org/articles/what-is ... it-matter/

I’m glad I don’t rely on that particular meeja for comms though they do appear to have the odd nugget of gen which may not be available nor easily forwarded.

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Re: Twitter

#75 Post by Pinky the pilot » Tue Dec 13, 2022 10:41 am

Don’t wind them up, the Saffers are a very sensitive bunch
\
No!!! :-o Say it 'aint so, Joe!! :-ss
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Re: Twitter

#76 Post by Fox3WheresMyBanana » Wed Dec 14, 2022 11:07 pm

Three weeks after promising not to, Musk has shut down the Twitter account tracking his private aircraft.

Pretty safe there, almost everyone on Twitter has an attention span of 3 seconds.

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Re: Twitter

#77 Post by llondel » Thu Dec 15, 2022 12:12 am

Apparently the account is back after a short break.

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Re: Twitter

#78 Post by Fox3WheresMyBanana » Thu Dec 15, 2022 12:50 am

Any explanation given for the re-instatement?

Or is it the usual - Ban it, see who complains - if there's a backlash, re-instate it and claim it was a computer error ?

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Re: Twitter

#79 Post by barkingmad » Thu Dec 15, 2022 9:22 am

Things getting heavy if this is to be believed;

Elon Musk taking legal action over Twitter account that tracks his private jet https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-63978323

But he must be able to afford a couple of F35s to accompany the aerial limo? And to suitably 007-style modify his car...?

Maybe he’ll buy out and bury FR24 and spoil it for the rest of us?

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Re: Twitter

#80 Post by Fox3WheresMyBanana » Thu Dec 15, 2022 12:13 pm

It appears to be shut down permanently as of now. The originator has taken the tracker to Telegram.
The Tw@tter rules have been changed to ban publishing locations of people without their permission.
Naturally, with knee-jerk sulky reactions by jerks, there are unintended consequences.
The geolocation of Russian troops in Ukraine is now nominally illegal.
Way to go, Elon.

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