Rob Fahrni

This guy is just like every other bully in the world. And to top it off he has money so he’s allowed to get away with behavior most people find abhorrent.

He ignores rules and laws and generally does whatever he wants free of consequence.

He’s a terrible human being.

Some of these links are fairly old since I haven’t posted one of these in a long time.

Yoel Roth • The New York Times

Backed by fans on social media, Mr. Trump publicly attacked me. Two years later, following his acquisition of Twitter and after I resigned my role as the company’s head of trust and safety, Elon Musk added fuel to the fire. I’ve lived with armed guards outside my home and have had to upend my family, go into hiding for months and repeatedly move.

Chris Taylor • Mashable

“This X shit’s got to go,” author Stephen King tweeted Thursday. That post received 71,000 likes by the end of the day. Elon Musk, creator of “this X shit,” responded to King with a “XX” and a winking-kiss emoji. Musk’s reply had a relatively tiny 7,300 likes at time of writing, despite the fact that Musk has 150 million more followers than King.

Jacob Kastrenakes • The Verge

Elon Musk wants X to be the center of your financial world, handling anything in your life that deals with money. He expects those features to launch by the end of 2024, he told X employees during an all hands call on Thursday, saying that people will be surprised with “just how powerful it is.”

Dan Sinker

A year ago Elon Musk took over Twitter. Too much has happened in the 365 days that followed to even begin to chronicle it all here, but the short version is that he quickly fired 80% of the staff, broke a bunch of things, paid racists, misogynists, and homophobes to set up shop, picked (sometimes literal) fights with anyone who struck his fancy, lost billions of dollars, and changed the iconic name and logo to the letter X just because.

Zoe Schiffer • platformer.news

On Friday, the National Labor Relations Board issued its first complaint against Elon Musk’s X Corp. The board accused X of illegally firing Yao Yue, a widely respected principal engineer at the company, for pushing back on Musk’s return-to-office policy, according to a copy of the complaint obtained by Platformer.

Eric Hananoki • mediamatters.org

X’s internal reporting system repeatedly responded that posts claiming “Hitler was right” and that there needs to be a “final solution” regarding Jewish people don’t violate the platform’s “safety policies.” This isn’t an isolated example: The Center for Countering Digital Hate similarly released a report today finding that X has failed to remove neo-Nazi content on its platform in numerous cases.

Techdirt

CNBC is running an excerpt from the new Walter Isaacson book about Elon that details what happened with the closing of the data center, and it is way, way, way crazier than even I expected. When Musk talked about how he “disconnected one of the more sensitive server racks,” he meant that entirely literally, in that he literally unplugged it, involving a series of improbable (and ridiculously dangerous and stupid) decisions that resulted with him under the floorboards in the data center pulling the plug, after multiple people warned him not to.

Unprecedented

In July 2023, Mohammed al-Ghamdi, a Saudi Arabian Twitter user who had criticized the Kingdom’s corruption and human rights violations via an anonymous account with only 9 followers was sentenced to death.

Kylie Robison • Fortune

Elon Musk plans to remove headlines from news articles shared on X

Anne Applebaum • The Atlantic

But the drones ran into a problem: Starlink, the satellite-communications system that Ukraine had been using since Russia invaded early last year, unexpectedly wasn’t working. This was a surprise to the engineers. Several people, in Ukraine and elsewhere, frantically called and texted Elon Musk, the owner of Starlink, to persuade him to enable the system.

Sheldon Cooper • Forbes

Twitter, the social media platform officially known as X, appears to have deleted all images from the website that were posted between 2011 and 2014. Links that used Twitter’s native shortening service are also broken.

Pete Syme • Business Insider

An NYU professor with 560,000 followers says he’s been locked out of his X account for over 2 weeks after declining to meet with Elon Musk

Casey Newton • platformer.news

Today let’s talk about a wild weekend of backtracking at the company formerly known as Twitter — and how it should inform the way we cover Elon Musk and his frequent promises in the future.

Nitish Pahwa and Nitish Pahwa • Slate

An Interview With the Guy Who Was @Music on Twitter Until Elon Musk’s X Took the Username Away

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Another week in the books. It’s my favorite time of the year. Trees are changing color and dropping leaves. Temperatures are beginning to drop. We have Halloween and Thanksgiving coming up. What a wonderful season!🍁🎃🦃

Robert D. McFadden • New York Times

Dianne Feinstein, 90, Dies; Oldest Sitting Senator and Fixture of California Politics

A friend of mine worked for Dianne Feinstein when he was in college. He was a registered Republican but that didn’t matter to her. She still hired him.

RIP 🪦

Moira Warburton and David Morgan • Reuters

WASHINGTON, Sept 29 (Reuters) - Hardline Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives on Friday rejected a bill proposed by their leader to temporarily fund the government, making it all but certain that federal agencies will partially shut down beginning on Sunday.

And, here we go. All these knuckleheads want to do is tear down democracy. They don’t legislate and pass laws. You’re there to do the work of the people you represent back home.

Anyway, the modern GOP is full of idiots like Gaetz, Boebert, and Green. Why Republicans are so angry and hateful is beyond me. 🤬

Jacob Kastrenakes • The Verge

“Did he say we were moving to it specifically or is thinking about it?” Yaccarino asked.

That was Linda Yaccarino’s reply when asked if Twitter was going to start charging a fee for all users, a claim Space Karen made. She was caught off guard, she didn’t know that was the plan. She’s not the CEO of the company. She’s probably there just so Space Karen can say he lived up to his stupid poll.

I’m sure Linda Yaccarino is a more than competent executive but she’s made a deal with the devil. She should be nervous. Especially once he’s fired her. I originally said she be gone in six months. I’m sticking by that. She’s 100 days into her new role and already out of the loop.

Christian Tietze

SwiftUI.View is actually a view model – a model of the view. It’s a blueprint for what to display, but doesn’t contain any actual pixel drawing.

This is an interesting take and I think Christian is right. Once you think about it for a bit it starts to make sense. At least it did for me.

Now, I’ve done a bit of work on one of my apps — Arrgly — that has a few view models and they fit right into the new SwiftUI I’m writing. So, view models work as well, but is it an unneeded level of indirection? Maybe. 🤔

Jenny Gross • The New York Times

A 16-year-old boy was arrested Thursday on suspicion of criminal damage after one of Britain’s most famous trees, a sycamore that stood in a dip in Hadrian’s Wall, was cut down overnight in what the authorities described as “an act of vandalism.”

This is one of those head scratchers. Why in the world would someone just cut a down a random tree?

Hopefully we find out.

Craig Hockenberry

The only explanation I can find for the Timer’s design regressions is an unfamiliarity with some use cases. In the following critique, I’ll focus on how the watch is used in the kitchen and how older customers struggle with the new layout. Suggestions will be kept to a minimum: the effort here is to be descriptive, not prescriptive.

Wow! Craig does a deep dive into the Apple Watch Timer. I also used the built in timers when I’d grill.

Umar Shakir • The Verge

Google is offering its employees a new incentive to come into its Mountain View, California office: discounted hotel stays. The company is promoting $99 per night rates for its on-campus hotel to help remote employees transition into a hybrid working schedule, according to a report from CNBC.

Yeah, that’s not what I’d call good marketing. 🤣 you pay us $99 a night so you don’t have to commute to work! Brilliant! How ‘bout you just let folks work from home? 🧠

Gabriela Galindo • WIRED

The Fruit Union Suisse is 111 years old. For most of its history, it has had as its symbol a red apple with a white cross—the Swiss national flag superimposed on one of its most common fruits. But the group, the oldest and largest fruit farmer’s organization in Switzerland, worries it might have to change its logo, because Apple, the tech giant, is trying to gain intellectual property rights over depictions of apples, the fruit.

If Apple goes after a company over 100 years old because the have a logo with an apple on it they’re pathetic. 🤬

Believe it or not it’s part of what motivated me to change my little company’s name from Apple Core Labs to Hayseed.

Scott Jenson

Android and iOS share a common problem: they copied desktop text editing conventions, but without a menu bar or mouse. This forced them to overload the tap gesture with a wide range of actions: placing the cursor, moving it, selecting text, and invoking a pop-up menu. This results in an overly complicated and ambiguous mess-o-taps, leading to a variety of user errors.

I’ve mentioned I compose all my blog posts on my iPhone. I do it largely out of laziness. 😁

I’ve used Tot for a number of years and it has the best editing experience of any iPhone apps I’ve used.

Once I’m happy with my post I copy it to Micro.Blog and post it to my blog. Easy peasy.

Jeff Seldin • Voice of America

White supremacists appear to have settled on a new strategy to grow their numbers and ready capable fighting forces across the United States, Canada and Europe while avoiding the scrutiny of law enforcement.

I’ve been waiting for a war to break out in our country. At the least a bunch of very targeted attacks. If these wannabe soldiers can actually get their act together folks may have to start worrying. If they’re as disorganized and dumbass as they were on January 6, we’ll be fine. Yes, people will die, and that’s a terrible price to pay for stupidity.

Rogers Cadenhead

I publish this blog and seven other sites with Wordzilla, a CMS I wrote for myself and have never released. I began it 20 years ago and the PHP codebase is best examined in small doses because to look upon its full extent would bring a descent into madness worthy of Yog-Shoggoth.

I’ve read Rogers blog for years and years and I had no idea it was a home rolled solution. Good for you, Rogers! I’ve always wanted to create my own publishing system but I don’t have the gumption any longer to do it. 🎩

Ross Dellenger • Yahoo Sports

About 20 minutes after the conclusion of, let’s call it, the Autzen Stadium Massacre — Oregon 42, Colorado 6 — Prime Time himself nicely summed up the sordid affair.

I knew they’d lose eventually. It’s just going to happen, especially with a program in rebuild mode. They’ve already doubled last years win total so I’d say this year has already been a success. I also suspect they’ll win quite a few games this season. More than they lose. 🏈

X Out Hate

We are a group of rabbis, leaders of Jewish organizations, artists, activists, and academics. We have diverse ideologies and beliefs, but we have come together to address the danger Elon Musk and X represent to Jews and others.

Space Karen strikes again. He’s a racist and antisemite and has no place running a social media sit with so much power. X has become a home for the worst of the worst and it all his fault.

Hopefully we get some regulation around trust and safety issues that force social media companies to police their platforms better. 🤞🏼

It’s beyond time to leave Twitter. You now have much better choices; Mastodon, Threads, and Bluesky. Very selfishly I’d recommend Mastodon. It’s not controlled by a corporate entity who’s interest is using your data as the product. It’s a rag tag, loosely federated, collection of misfits and absolutely beautiful people carrying on the best conversations. It’s a place to build your community with a site controlled by your community. You don’t answer to anyone but yourself.

Aaron Brooks • MakeUseOf

A critical vulnerability in the WebP Codec has been discovered, forcing major browsers to fast-track security updates. However, widespread use of the same WebP rendering code means countless apps are also affected, until they release security patches.

Yikes! Make sure you patch your browser ASAP.

Evan Low • The Mercury News

Contrary to how some have misrepresented the letter my colleagues and I sent to California Attorney General Rob Bonta, we are not asking to “unilaterally strike (Donald) Trump’s name” from the ballot.

I’d love to see Trumps name stricken from as many states as possible. Especially those where he encouraged election fraud.

As a nation we need to do everything legally possible to keep this dangerous man out of office.

David Jays • The Guardian

A star with incredible presence, Gambon – who has died at the age of 82 – brought heft and delicacy, mischief and feeling, to the stage and screen

Most folks will remember him as Dumbledore. I remember him best for his roles in Sleepy Hollow and Mary Reilly. He played a real nasty piece of work in Mary Reilly and that stuck with me. 🪦

I finally did it. I deleted my Twitter account.

After the shenanigans Space Karen pulled with third-party Twitter clients I knew I wasn’t going to use my trusty fahrni@twitter.com account again but I held onto it until now. I kept it because I didn’t want anyone else to have the handle, especially some Nazi asshole.

It’s obvious Elon Musk is an antisemite wing nut and his support of Russia in the war against Ukraine was kind of my final straw.

He’s just a horrible human being. A big baby man full of himself and high on his own supply.

Good riddance.

Hey, Space Karen, when you finally jettison that wonderful Twitter domain I hope someone turns it into a wildly successful Mastodon instance.

Follow me on Mastodon.

No commentary this time around. I haven’t posted anything about Space Karen in a while so the articles have been stacking up.

Enjoy.

Juli Clover • MacRumors

Twitter or “X” CEO Elon Musk today said that he plans to speak with Apple CEO Tim Cook about lower App Store fees for creators who earn money through subscriptions on the Twitter/X social network.

Charlie Warzel • The Atlantic

This question, with its exclamatory urgency, has never been more relevant to Twitter than in the past 48 hours, when Musk decided to nuke 17 years’ worth of brand awareness and rename the thing. The artist formerly known as Twitter is now X. What is happening?! indeed.

Tom Warren • The Verge

Twitter Blue, which Elon Musk is currently rebranding to X Blue, now includes the option to hide the notorious blue checkmark. Twitter Blue subscribers recently started noticing the “hide your blue checkmark” option on the web and in mobile apps, offering the ability to hide that they’re paying for Twitter and avoid memes about how “this mf paid for twitter.”

Asher Notheis • Washington Examiner

Actor Mark Hamill has called for people on social media to partake in a boycott of X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

Robert Reich

Yesterday, it was reported that Elon Musk’s X Corp., parent of Twitter, has sent a letter to the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) accusing the nonprofit of making “a series of troubling and baseless claims that appear calculated to harm Twitter generally, and its digital advertising business specifically” — and threatening to sue CCDH.

Casey Newton • platformer.news

The X Corporation has in recent days devoted more time to signage-related issues than is prudent for a company that continues to lose advertisers, employees, and users’ time. But it’s consistent with Musk’s current incarnation as a cultural vandal, using his money and power to deface once-influential institutions and dare anyone to stop him.

Daring Fireball

Any normal company planning a product name change would have everything sorted out with the iOS App Store and Android Play Store ahead of time. Needless to say, X Corp is not a normal company and so of course they didn’t have anything sorted out.

Matt Binder • Mashable

Elon Musk and company take @x handle from its original user. He got zero dollars for it.

Rumman Chowdhury • The Atlantic

Everyone has an opinion about Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. I lived it. I saw firsthand the harms that can flow from unchecked power in tech. But it’s not too late to turn things around.

Casey Newton • platformer.news

On Monday afternoon, a crane rolled up to Twitter’s headquarters on Market Street. The plan was to remove the sign from the historic building’s facade, putting a symbolic end to the company that owner Elon Musk had over the weekend re-branded to X.

Taylor Lorenz • The Washington Post

Far-right Twitter influencers first on Elon Musk’s monetization scheme

Reuters

Elon Musk said Twitter’s cash flow remains negative because of a nearly 50% drop in advertising revenue and a heavy debt load.

Lora Kelley • The Atlantic

Musk is mainstreaming new standards of behavior, and some of his peers are joining him in misguided acts of masculine aggression and populist appeals.

MIKE ISAAC and Ryan Mac • The New York Times

The day after Elon Musk challenged Mark Zuckerberg on social media to “a cage match” last month, Dana White, president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, received a text.

I’m not a fan of Mark Zuckerberg but I think he’ll knock Musk on his butt pretty quickly, if he has the guts to step into the ring.

Matt Binder and Matt Binder • Mashable

Twitter’s new API may now cost tens of thousands of dollars per month, but the service being provided to its customers appears to be worse than ever.

It’s really sad to see what was once a decent service turn into a junker of a service.

Oh, BTW, that API was the way to limit folks from overwhelming your servers. If the API was still open, or cheap enough, folks wouldn’t be scraping the site and you could’ve controlled API access by throttling just that for bad actors.

Once again. Stellar job.

There’s nothing better than a self own! Nice work Space Karen. You DDOS’ed yourself. Genius! 😂

The Verge

Elon Musk continues to blame Twitter’s new limitations on AI companies scraping “vast amounts of data” as he announced new “temporary” limits on how many posts people can read.

This kind of checks out. Genius indeed. More like grifter with too much money.

He’s not really killing Twitter, he’s just making it a really crappy platform. He has so much money the thing will probably keep running for years and years to come but it’ll remain a crummy experience.

I’m a big biased because I have my own instance but Mastodon is a very good — not Twitter — experience. I’ve heard technically savvy people say it’s hard to figure out. I didn’t have that experience but I did not like the default web UI experience. It defaulted to a three way split screen with views of different data. I was able to fix that to be more like Twitter in settings then it looked and felt much better.

If you follow the rich and famous and are into shitposting then Mastodon might not be for you. Each server in the federation has its own set of user rules to abide by and if you break them you’ll be blocked or your server could be defederated, which is a very bad thing.

If you’re a techie I’d encourage you to consider starting your own instance with friends. It’s what I did with Curmudgeon Cafe and it’s been wonderful. I use masto.host to host my instance and I’m sure there are others. More smaller instances are a good thing.

If you’re on iOS there are really great iOS client apps for you to choose from; Mona, Ivory, Toot!, and Ice Cubes are really solid client applications and I will hop between them from time to time to see how they’ve improved.

The latest bad press for Space Karen and his mismanagement of Twitter.

To think Reddit CEO Steve Huffman thinks Musk has done a great job running Twitter with less is shocking.

I’m not sure how anyone labels this guy a genius. He’s a huckster, racist, masochist, and anti-Semite among other things.

If you still believe in him dig deep and ask why you believe that. The answer should scare you or at least make you think about your values as a human being.

Enjoy the links.

Daring Fireball

There are some moments in this video interview that are just cringe-inducing. Even just the awkward pauses. (Faber, to my mind, did a hell of a job — Musk is obviously a very difficult person to interview.) I’m starting to get real Bobby Fischer vibes from Musk — a genius, yes, but descending into conspirational hateful madness. But Fischer became a recluse; Musk is one of the most prominent people in the world.

Vox

In the past five days, Musk has doubled down on a conspiracy theory about the Allen, Texas, shooter; tweeted that billionaire philanthropist George Soros (who has long been the target of antisemitic conspiracy theories online) wants to “erode the very fabric of civilization” and “hates humanity;” and promoted a quickly debunked rumor that falsely claimed Washington Post journalist Taylor Lorenz was related to the founder of the Internet Archive.

The Atlantic

Twitter has long been described, even by its most ardent users, as a hellsite. But under Elon Musk, Twitter has evolved into a platform that is indistinguishable from the wastelands of alternative social-media sites such as Truth Social and Parler. It is now a right-wing social network.

France 24

Researchers have documented an explosion of hate and misinformation on Twitter since the Tesla billionaire took over in October 2022 – and now experts say communicating about climate science on the social network on which many of them rely is getting harder.

Platformer

Their high-profile event on Twitter Spaces, where DeSantis had just announced his run for president, had been plagued by technical glitches. The first audio livestream cut out before DeSantis could get his news out.

Daily Kos

Billionaire conspiracy promoter Elon Musk spent $44 billion on Twitter to implement his special brand of “free speech,” essentially bringing back all the Nazis, conspiracy theorists, and all-around deplorables that were once moderated out of the platform, relegated to darker corners of the internet.

The Daily Beast

Twitter is failing to remove 99 percent of hate speech posted by Twitter Blue users, new research has found, and instead may be boosting paid accounts that spew racism and homophobia.

Ben & Jerry’s

We’ve watched with great concern the developments at Twitter following Elon Musk’s purchase of the social media platform. Hate speech is up dramatically while content moderation has become all but non-existent. In addition to the changes on the platform that have led to an increase in hate speech, Musk himself has doubled down on dangerous anti-democratic lies and white nationalist hate speech. The platform has become a threatening and even dangerous space for people from so many backgrounds, including people who are Black, Brown, trans, gay, women, people with disabilities, Jewish, Muslim and the list goes on. This is unconscionable in addition to being plain bad business.

Erin Reed

As Pride Month began, Elon Musk stated his intention to lobby for the criminalization of gender-affirming healthcare for transgender minors - a move that is unequivocally harmful and contradicts all major medical organizations in the United States and standards of care.

Ars Technica

Twitter’s US advertising revenue plunged 59 percent year-over-year during a recent five-week period, The New York Times reported today. The firm’s US ad “revenue for the five weeks from April 1 to the first week of May was $88 million, down 59 percent from a year earlier, according to an internal presentation obtained by The New York Times.”

The Business Journals

Judge orders sheriff to evict Twitter from Boulder office

Turkish Minute

Twitter succumbs to Erdoğan’s pressure, silences key voices in Turkey on election eve

Space Karen really wants to live in a racist, white, Christofascist America.

The Verge

Twitter 1.0 was particularly notable for standing up to government censorship around the world. Twitter 2.0 under Elon Musk is actively complying with authoritarian government censorship demands ahead of elections.

See statement on the first link. I like this version because Nilay Patel called the post Welcome to Hell. Accurate.

NBC News

Graphic videos of animal abuse have circulated widely on Twitter in recent weeks, generating outrage and renewed concern over the platform’s moderation practices.

Psychopaths like to torture and kill animals. Twitter is the perfect place for them! It already has a narcissist sociopath as an owner. Why not add some psychopaths?

Ars Technica

Graphic images from a Texas mass shooting on Saturday that killed nine (including the gunman) and wounded seven are still circulating on Twitter after spreading virally all weekend.

So, yeah, more of the same disturbing behavior as the link above. What’s wrong with these people?

The Beaverton

KINGSTON, ON – Queen’s University has reached out to Elon Musk offering eight dollars a month to stop telling people he attended the higher learning institution.

This is an older link and I’m not sure if I’ve already posted it but I don’t care because it’s funny and perhaps a new way Space Karen could grift more cash out of folks to pay for his $44 billion mistake?

Robert Stribley

Instead, he’s making changes to satisfy the whims of his real core audience now, a ramshackle collective of alt-right extremists, Proud Boy/white supremacist types and Q-Anon whackos.

More on the abuse of the LGBTQ+ community at the hands of Twitter’s new policies. This article about the plight of the Transgender community in particular.

Variety

Elon Musk Confirms Linda Yaccarino as Twitter’s New CEO, Focused on Business Operations

Oh, look, he’s finally picked a new CEO. Perhaps Ms. Yaccarino will be able to figure out how to make money for the company now they’ve lost many of their best advertisers.

Good luck.🍀

Also, over or under on her making it six months in the position?🎲

NPR

Elon Musk has threatened to reassign NPR’s Twitter account to “another company.”

Tech Dirt

Today is six months since Elon took over Twitter and began this bizarre speedrun of the content moderation learning curve in which he seems to repeatedly… not learn a damn thing.

Ars Technica

The judge overseeing a wrongful death lawsuit involving Tesla’s Autopilot system rejected Tesla’s claim that videos of CEO Elon Musk’s public statements might be deepfakes.

The Verge

Okay, I’ll admit it: I did not expect the Twitter checkpocalypse to result in Dril accusing Elon Musk of violating federal consumer protection laws.

Slate

LeBron’s media adviser then went on the record that James did not pay, and Musk confirmed thereafter that he was paying for some Blue subscriptions himself…

Mashable

Now, that it’s finally happened though, the campaign to “Block the Blue” – that is, any user still with a blue checkmark which signifies they are paying Musk for it – is in full swing.

Still not a genius.

Good old Elon Musk is proving day after day he’s not a good leader — he’s an absolutely terrible leader — and he’s not the genius everyone makes him out to be. He’s not to be taken seriously.

Some of Tesla’s investors are finally asking the board to get the man back to work at Tesla and stop splitting his time between companies. Good for them. Honestly they should find a new CEO so he can spend more time with his pet bird project. Running it in the ground is a full time job.

Great idea. Let’s boost regimes who are the worst of the worst when it comes to human rights violations. Nice work.

Free speech is allowed as long as Elon Musk agrees with it. Again, nice work dude.

Wow, you have a trans kid and you do this? You should be father of the year. You’re a horrible human being, Elon. Shame on you for doing this to your own flesh and blood.

Musk proves time and again he’s not to be taken seriously. Daddy’s money got him started and like every great grifter he’s fooled everyone into making him wealthy. That is his true talent, hoodwinking people.

It’s really hard to know exactly what he’s playing at. He’s definitely working to move the country to an extreme right wing agenda.

The blue check was intended to verify identity but it turned into a status symbol for many — not saying Dan took it as such — now it’s a sign of shame, not to be trusted.

Seriously?

I’m pretty sure Mr. King wasn’t thanking you Elon.

Dare Obasanjo is definitely not an idiot. Quite the opposite, he’s a very intelligent, thoughtful, human being. Even he admits he was fooled by the great grifter. Yes, we all were but now we know better.

To have a rocket go out in a blaze is perfect for his 420 obsession. At least he got that right.

I post this yesterday but it’s too good not to post again.

How the boards of SpaceX and Tesla believe this man is a genius I have no idea. If you really, truly, believe in space exploration and electric vehicles, fire this man.

Yep, I’m a Monday morning Quarterback. Yep, I’m a nobody. Yep, I see him for what he’s worth. I’m sure a lot of folks are now awake to his nonsensical bullshit.

The New York Times, CNN, and other news orgs should really consider aggregating their content on Mastodon with their own instances, or one for all news orgs, that verify the organization. Their reporters could get their own accounts elsewhere so it’s easier for them if they choose to move on.

I think it would be extremely cool to see things like nytimes@breaking.news or something like it.

I wish I had some kind of influence in media. I’d push really hard to bring everyone together to pay for this effort.

Can you imagine a coop of news orgs? It would be glorious.

I usually provide my own commentary under each snippet of news with my big link posts but not today. I collected so many links before posting I figure it’s just better to throw in some commentary here at the top and call it good.

TL;DR: Space Karen is out of touch with how his social network was being used and why it had become the defacto place for breaking news. By trying to monetize it he’s busted it.

Tech Dirt

Elon Musk has demonstrated contempt for free speech in general, and journalism in particular, with his behavior at Twitter.

NPR

Twitter labels NPR’s account as ‘state-affiliated media’, which is untrue

WP Tavern

Twitter suspended WordPress.com’s access to the Twitter API without notice yesterday.

Platformer

His arraignment was carried live on cable news and National Public radio, but I learned of the day’s events where I still see almost everything first: Twitter, which, despite its perilous decline under Elon Musk, remains home base for the U.S. press corps even as the site itself increasingly orients itself to make fools of them.

Reuters

NEW YORK, March 31 (Reuters) - Elon Musk asked a U.S. judge on Friday to throw out a $258 billion racketeering lawsuit accusing him of running a pyramid scheme to support the cryptocurrency Dogecoin.

The Editorial Board

Musk sucks at Twitter, succeeds at fascism

The Atlantic

Today, Twitter feels more expired than evil. The company is worth less than half of what Musk paid when he bought it in October, according to the chief twit himself.

ArsTechnica

Twitter has made good on one of CEO Elon Musk’s many promises, posting on a Friday afternoon what it claims is the code for its tweet recommendation algorithm on GitHub.

Vox

When Elon Musk took over Twitter, he said he wanted to protect its place as a “digital town square,” where ideas from all corners of the internet could flourish. But soon, if you want your voice to really be heard in the town square, you’ll need to pay.

Tech Crunch

It’s five months since Elon Musk overpaid for a relatively small microblogging platform called Twitter.

Reason

The layoff would’ve been bad enough on its own, but because of the rules of Vong’s visa, it landed him in a bureaucratic mess that now prevents him from returning to the United States.

Platformer

But Twitter does have a different standard for celebrities – including Musk himself. For months, the platform has maintained a list of around 35 VIP users whose accounts it monitors and offers increased visibility alongside Elon Musk, according to documents obtained by Platformer.

NBC News

Elon Musk took aim at a disabled Twitter employee Monday who tagged him in a tweet to ask if he’d been laid off.

BBC

A Twitter employee has appealed to Elon Musk on the platform to ask whether he had been sacked.

Sure, let’s pick on the guy in a wheel chair, Space Karen.

Stay classy, ass hole.

[Platformer](<https://open.substack.com/pub/platformer/p/how-a-single-engineer-brought-down)

Twitter’s website is breaking in novel new ways — and while the company managed to recover from its latest outage within a couple hours, the story behind how it broke suggests there are likely to be similar problems in the near future.

I feel like Twitter will survive, but not because of Musk “magic.” It will continue because it will slowly lose users and the folks who remain will be able to apply more duct tape, bailing wire, and bubble gum to it to keep it going.

Rewrites are not really an option. You can swap out pieces — slowly — but that takes time. Declaring it needs a rewrite is a very lofty ideal. Best of luck with that.

Why not just pack it in and use Mastodon? 🐘

The Daily Beast

A Twitter engineer identified only as Sam told BBC News: “Wherever he goes in the office, there are at least two bodyguards—very bulky, tall, Hollywood movie bodyguards. Even when [he goes] to the restroom.” He said the constant use of bodyguards suggested that Musk, who has sacked a huge number of Twitter staff including coders, does not trust his remaining staff at Twitter HQ in San Francisco.

He should be paranoid of some angry geek handing him his ass one day.

BBC

Twitter insiders have told the BBC that the company is no longer able to protect users from trolling, state-co-ordinated disinformation and child sexual exploitation, following lay-offs and changes under owner Elon Musk.

Fascists gonna fascist.

Twitter is doing just fine! 🤣

Platformer

When bleary-eyed engineers began to log on to their laptops, the nature of the emergency became clear: Elon Musk’s tweet about the Super Bowl got less engagement than President Joe Biden’s.

Vox

The broken Twitter everyone warned us about is finally here.

Business Insider

Twitter suffered another outage during Rihanna’s Super Bowl halftime show Sunday, despite Elon Musk’s efforts to make the platform as stable as possible.

Forbes

An attorney who says she represents approximately one-third of all Twitter employees that were fired since Elon Musk bought the company late last year, told a federal court in a new filing that the company is not serious in its attempts to resolve worker disputes through private arbitration and is asking the court to halt that process.

HuffPost

Elon Musk made an announcement Friday morning that could make Twitter users with legacy blue checks feel blue: He wants to take away the social media status symbol.

Platformer

Employees showed Musk internal data regarding engagement with his account, along with a Google Trends chart. Last April, they told him, Musk was at “peak” popularity in search rankings, indicated by a score of “100.” Today, he’s at a score of nine. Engineers had previously investigated whether Musk’s reach had somehow been artificially restricted, but found no evidence that the algorithm was biased against him.

Rolling Stone

Late yesterday — the day after firing the engineer who theorized that he might not be as interesting or popular as he believes — Musk announced that Twitter’s recommendation algorithm would be “fixed” by today. So don’t be surprised if you start seeing a lot more of him in your feed.

TechCrunch

Twitter claims it is “committed to keeping people safe and secure on Twitter.” This is not true. Instead, you’re looking at one of the stupidest security decisions made by a company playing out in real-time.

Let’s see how Mr. Musks management of Twitter is going!

TL;DR - it’s a mess.

The Verge and New York Magazine

Those who remain at the company mostly fall into two camps: people trapped by the need for health care and visas or cold-eyed mercenaries hoping to ascend through a power vacuum.

This piece is really wonderful. Take a few minutes and read the entire thing. Musk is so arrogant and is burning Twitter to ashes one bad move at a time.

Instead, he interrupted. “I was writing C programs in the ’90s,” he said dismissively. “I understand how ­computers work.”

All that’s missing in that scene is him smacking the lady he’s talking to on the butt then taking a drag off of his cigar and a sip of bourbon.

Dude, I was also writing C programs in the 90’s and I’ve been around the block a few times. When someone is investing valuable time out of their day to explain things to you, listen. Only talk if you need clarification. Twitter is a giant machine with many moving parts. I cannot imagine one person knowing and understanding how it operates. Web services are hard, even little ones. Can you imagine how hard it must be to serve millions and millions of users daily?

Arrogant and not a genius.

Engadget

In case there was any doubt about Twitter’s intentions in cutting off the developers of third-party apps, the company has quietly updated its developer agreement to make clear that app makers are no longer permitted to create their own clients.

The Iconfactory

We are sorry to say that the app’s sudden and undignified demise is due to an unannounced and undocumented policy change by an increasingly capricious Twitter – a Twitter that we no longer recognize as trustworthy nor want to work with any longer.

A beautiful goodbye written by one of Twitterrific’s long term caretakers. Sean has spent most of his career working on the best Twitter client on the platform. It was ahead of it’s time in so many ways.

It was the first desktop client, the first mobile client, one of the very first apps in the App Store, an Apple Design award winner, and it even helped redefine the word “tweet” in the dictionary.

If anything we need to remember Twitterrific for all its firsts. It made Twitter usable on a mobile phone. It paved the way.

Twitter realized it needed an iOS client of its own, bought Tweetie, and promptly turned it into a user experience mess. Many of us used third-party clients because they were just better.

As the world turns so does the mess Elon Musk is making at Twitter.

Who knows how much of this once titan of social will exist once he’s finished dismantling it. Who will be the lucky company to buy twitter.com when the place fails?

Of course that’s probably a bit premature but it sure seems like it’s headed that direction.

How about his effect on Tesla? Yeah, it’s been bad.

Axios

Tesla’s stock plunged by 9% on Tuesday, poised to end 2022 on a grim note after having shed over 70% of value this year.

How about his own wealth? Yeah, it’s been bad.

Bloomberg

The Tesla Inc. chief executive officer has now achieved a first of his own: becoming the only person in history to erase $200 billion from their net worth.

How are things going inside Twitter? By some accounts it really smells. Talk about a shit show.

New York Times

That has left the office in disarray. With people packed into more confined spaces, the smell of leftover takeout food and body odor has lingered on the floors, according to four current and former employees. Bathrooms have grown dirty, these people said. And because janitorial services have largely been ended, some workers have resorted to bringing their own rolls of toilet paper from home.

I’m sure the site is running just fine since Mr. Musk is a genius computer programmer and has probably optimized the site to the point of being able to run on a single 8 MHz 8088 PC, right?

Oh, there have been service disruptions? I see. 🤔

TechCrunch

If Twitter isn’t loading fine for you, you’re not alone. Tens of thousands of users are complaining that they unable to access the Elon Musk-owned social network, seeing scores of strange error-messages instead.

I’m trying not to embed Tweets into my blog these days but this chart shared by Dare Obasanjo is too good to skip. Tap or click on the embed below to see the chart.

This took longer than I expected.

Each week we learn a new lesson about what all those people at Twitter used to do. pic.twitter.com/3bEL31D6eH

— carnage4life@mas.to (@Carnage4Life) December 29, 2022

Who knows, maybe once Musk as destroyed Twitter he’d like to run a Mastodon instance on musk.social? It’s still there for you, Elon.

So, yes, Twitter is going great! 🥳

Even I didn’t think @elonmusk would screw Twitter up this much.

It’s turned into a Right Wing Haven.

Tech Dirt

Look, I fucking warned Elon that this is exactly how it would go. It’s how it always goes.

Texts from an unknown sender, from discovery in the Elon Musk/Twitter suit months ago.

Pretty remarkable to read after these suspensions of journalists tonight. pic.twitter.com/clCw8xxioE

— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore\_\_) December 16, 2022

Daily Kos

This week, its new owner, Elon Musk, signaled to his 121 million followers that, not only is he now red-pilled, but he too subscribes to the QAnon universe of conspiratorial beliefs—with a simple one-word/one-emoji tweet: “Follow [rabbit emoji].” Like much of Musk’s recent right-wing trolling, its simplicity offers plausible deniability, but “follow the white rabbit” is a well-established QAnon motto urging its adherents to plunge down its otherworldly conspiracist rabbit holes.

yo this is getting wild, @lopezlinette is both a great markets reporter and someone who also just happens to have done great investigative work on @elonmusk’s $TSLA pic.twitter.com/GVdc3o4LIn

— talmon joseph smith (@talmonsmith) December 16, 2022

PC Magazine

The former CEO and co-founder of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, says it’s time to move on from the troubled social media platform and embrace a more open and decentralized approach.

And soon, ladies & gentlemen, the coup de grâce

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 16, 2022

Futurism

Remember that ElonJet Twitter account? Well, under the site’s new CEO — the self-identified stalwart free speech champion Elon Musk — it just got suspended, despite Musk previously promising he would leave it alone.

The ban appears to be what we thought it was. An impulsive attempt to lash out against accurate reporting Elon Musk didn’t like. This is exactly the role of an independent press - to hold powerful and public officials to account. 1/2

— Jason Kint (@jason\_kint) December 16, 2022

NPR

Twitter owner Elon Musk says he’s pulling back the curtain on how the social network has handled high-profile content moderation decisions, including banning then-President Donald Trump after his supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

UPDATE: I had posted an image here earlier that I found out was a fake, so I’ve removed it. Hat tip, Tommy Williams.