Category: Elon Musk

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Elon Musk GOP Social Media

GOP Sen. Mike Lee’s Twitter Account Suspended Despite His Sucking Up To Elon Musk

Even though it’s only March, we may already have a frontrunner in the race for biggest sap in the U.S. Senate circa 2023.

Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) found his personal Twitter account suspended today after he made threatening remarks aimed at Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.

Specifically, Lee sent this tweet to the Japanese PM after the Japanese government refused to release U.S. Navy Lt. Ridge Alkonis from prison.:

“You’ve made your choice, I hope you’re ready for some conversations on the Senate floor that you’re not likely to enjoy. This issue isn’t going away, and neither am I.”

Alkonis is serving a three-year sentence in a Japanese prison for his role in an automobile accident that left two people dead, CNN reports:

Navy Lt. Ridge Alkonis was sentenced to three years in a Japanese prison in October for what Japanese courts deemed to be the negligent driving deaths of two Japanese citizens in May 2021. Alkonis appealed, but his sentence was upheld last month.

Alkonis has maintained that he suffered from acute mountain sickness as he was driving down from Mount Fuji with his family on May 29, 2021, and fell unconscious behind the wheel, leading to the deadly crash. An 85-year-old woman and her 54-year-old son-in-law died in the accident.

The Japanese high court did not believe Alkonis’ argument that he fell ill, and instead accused him of falling asleep at the wheel. Under those standards, Alkonis’ sentence could have been longer – under Japanese law, he could have faced up to seven years in prison, according to the Japanese government.

Lee’s tweet aimed at the Japanese Prime Minister resulted in him being suspended from Twitter, and he immediately began whining about it on his official Senate account.

Prior to Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter late last year, Lee sounded euphoric about the idea of the billionaire becoming CEO of the social media platform:

“I sometimes suffer from unfettered exuberance, especially where Elon Musk is involved… I think it’s going to be a complete game changer if, when he finally completes this transaction — and I sincerely hope that he does… I think you will see an actual fair, even playing field for people to communicate their ideas without people being shadow banned.”

Lee’s account was later reinstated, along with this note from Musk:

It remains unclear at this point who now qualifies for the title of Whiniest Bitch on Social Media, Mike Lee or Elon Musk.

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Business Elon Musk Social Media

Musk Lays Off Another 10% Of Employees As The Social Media Site Continues To Implode

Twitter CEO Elon Musk laid off another 200 employees over the weekend, including product managers and engineers tasked with keeping the social media site online.

HuffPost reports:

Dozens of employees at the social media giant wrote they found themselves locked out of the company’s email and internal message boards. The cuts ultimately impacted people on several important teams, including product managers and engineers that help keep Twitter online.

[…]

The layoffs amounted to about 10% of Twitter’s remaining 2,000 employees, The New York Times reported. The company had about 7,500 workers when Elon Musk acquired the platform in October.

Chief executive of Twitter payments Esther Crawford told The Verge she was one of those dismissed by Musk, along with Martijn de Kuijper, a senior product manager who founded the tool Revue, who noted:

“Looks like I’m let go. Now my Revue journey is really over.”

Ever since he paid $44 billion for Twitter last year, Musk has been looking for ways to increase profits at the site, but has so far not been unable to turn around its fading financial future.

Shortly after he took full control of Twitter, Musk also began reinstating banned accounts such as the one belonging to failed former president Donald Trump, who has yet to return to the platform and continues to communicate via his failing Truth Social site, which is reportedly desperate for investors who will agree to prop it up.

Musk’s embrace of COVID conspiracy theories and right-wing extremists has also hurt Twitter’s bottom line.

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Elon Musk Social Media WTF?!

Elon Musk Now Engaging In Blackmail – Will Charge Users For Basic Security Features 

Chief twit/CEO Elon Musk is about to make your Twitter account much less secure unless you pay him a monthly fee that will enable to you keep SMS two-factor authentication.

If you signed on to Twitter this morning, you probably got a message that looks like this:

According to Sean Hollister of The Verge, this appears to be Musk’s latest move to bring in additional revenue because the platform is running on financial vapors and on the brink of collapse.

Now, it’s official: You have to pay for the privilege of using Twitter’s worst form of authentication. In fact, if you don’t start paying for Twitter Blue ($8 a month on Android; $11 a month on iOS) or switch your account to use a far more reliable authenticator app or physical security key, Twitter will simply turn off your 2FA after March 20th.

[…]

That’s how Twitter is trying to justify this change, too, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a simpler reason: it costs money to send SMS messages, and Twitter does not have a lot of money right now.

Many Twitter users, however, were not impressed with Musk’s move and suggested that it reeks of desperation and is yet another churlish decision by a man who clearly doesn’t know how to run a business despite his bragging about what a success he is.

There is, however, a way around this latest bid for bucks by Musk.

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Elon Musk Social Media WTF?!

Elon Musk Fires Engineer For Daring To Tell Him Fewer People Are Reading His Tweets

The next time you think you have the worst job in the world, consider the case of a Twitter engineer who dared to tell Elon Musk the reason he wasn’t getting nearly as much engagement from users with his tweets.

According to Platformer, Musk was whining about his tweets no longer getting the same interest they did when he first bought the platform last year.

On Tuesday, Musk gathered a group of engineers and advisors into a room at Twitter’s headquarters looking for answers. Why are his engagement numbers tanking?

“This is ridiculous,” he said, according to multiple sources with direct knowledge of the meeting. “I have more than 100 million followers, and I’m only getting tens of thousands of impressions.”

One of the company’s two remaining principal engineers offered a possible explanation for Musk’s declining reach: just under a year after the Tesla CEO made his surprise offer to buy Twitter for $44 billion, public interest in his antics is waning. 

 



Musk didn’t take being told the truth very well:

“You’re fired, you’re fired,” Musk told the engineer.

Several weeks ago, Musk decided to add public view counts to every tweet on the platform, suggesting at the time that the numbers would show “how much more alive Twitter is than it may seem, as over 90% of Twitter users read, but don’t tweet, reply or like, as those are public actions.”

 

But it turns out that decision has come back to bite Musk because the counts also have the opposite effect, emphasizing how little engagement most posts garner when compared to the overall size of the potential audience.

Oh, and there’s also this troubling number for Musk as he tries to grow the platform nearly every expert agrees he overpaid for: Twitter usage in the United States has declined 9% since he took over.

Adding to the bad experience that may be driving away some users is the endless glitches which have popped up since Musk began dumping top engineers in a desperate attempt to cut payroll and increase profits.

For example, on Wednesday many users signed on and tried to tweet, only to be given the following message: “You are over the daily limit for sending tweets.”

 

What is the daily limit for tweets? 2,500, which most people never even come close to reaching. If you do, then you probably need to consider logging off and getting some semblance of a life.

The reason for that message is simple: “A Twitter employee had inadvertently deleted data for an internal service that sets rate limits.” The team that worked on that service exited the company in November.

Instead of listening to those who can tell him the reason for whatever ails Twitter, Musk, some report, will react instead to something said in reaction to one of his postings.

“There’s times he’s just awake late at night and says all sorts of things that don’t make sense,” one employee said. “And then he’ll come to us and be like, ‘this one person says they can’t do this one thing on the platform,’ and then we have to run around chasing some outlier use case for one person. It doesn’t make any sense.”

Do you get the feeling that Musk may try to dump Twitter before the end of the year? He probably will, if he can ever put his ego aside long enough to admit that he made one hell of a mistake buying it in the first place.

 

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Elon Musk GOP Social Media

Adam Kinzinger Puts Elon Musk On Full Blast For Spreading Lies – And He Brought The Receipts

Former Illinois Republican Adam Kinzinger is calling out Twitter CEO Elon Musk for repeatedly telling lies about the horrific attack on Paul Pelosi, the husband of former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and he’s making sure to bring the receipts incase Musk wants to deny his remarks.

The Independent reports that Kinzinger went after Musk shortly after police bodycam video of the Pelosi attack was made public on Friday.

The graphic clip showed a suspect identified as David DePape, 42, wildly strike the 82-year-old husband of Nancy Pelosi over the head at his San Francisco home on 28 October last year.

In the aftermath of the assault, Mr Musk amplified a “deranged” conspiracy theory that the two men were romantically involved.

“There is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye,” Mr Musk tweeted, before quietly deleting the post days later.

Shortly after that bodycam footage was released, Kinzinger posted on Twitter:

“Hey @elonmusk care to react to the Pelosi video? You spread the big conspiracy.”

That led Musk to respond that he was merely attacking media outlets for “misleading the public.”

But Kinzinger was far from finished with Musk, and he laid out the receipts proving the Twitter boss was lying his ass off, along with members of the GOP who consider Musk to be a hero.

Twitter has gone to shit since Elon Musk took over. Now he’s trying to rewrite history to serve his own purposes. But thanks to people like Adam Kinzinger, he won’t be allowed to.