General Elon Musk Fukkery Thread

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NPR quits Twitter after being falsely labeled as 'state-affiliated media'​


April 12, 20238:57 AM ET
Heard on Morning Edition

David Folkenflik


ap34053526436_custom-00239ba039420b5a46f629065ff31a85e96392f8-s800-c85.webp


NPR announced it would cease posting to Twitter after the social media platform labeled the nonprofit "Government-funded Media."
Charles Dharapak/AP

NPR will no longer post fresh content to its 52 official Twitter feeds, becoming the first major news organization to go silent on the social media platform. In explaining its decision, NPR cited Twitter's decision to first label the network "state-affiliated media," the same term it uses for propaganda outlets in Russia, China and other autocratic countries.

The decision by Twitter last week took the public radio network off guard. When queried by NPR tech reporter Bobby Allyn, Twitter owner Elon Musk asked how NPR functioned. Musk allowed that he might have gotten it wrong.

Twitter then revised its label on NPR's account to "government-funded media." The news organization says that is inaccurate and misleading, given that NPR is a private, nonprofit company with editorial independence. It receives less than 1 percent of its $300 million annual budget from the federally funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

By going silent on Twitter, NPR's chief executive says the network is protecting its credibility and its ability to produce journalism without "a shadow of negativity."

"The downside, whatever the downside, doesn't change that fact," NPR CEO John Lansing said in an interview. "I would never have our content go anywhere that would risk our credibility."

In a BBC interview posted online Wednesday, Musk suggested he may further change the label to "publicly funded." His words did not sway NPR's decision makers. Even if Twitter were to drop the designation altogether, Lansing says the network will not immediately return to the platform.

"At this point I have lost my faith in the decision-making at Twitter," he says. "I would need some time to understand whether Twitter can be trusted again."

NPR is instituting a "two-week grace period" so the staff who run the Twitter accounts can revise their social-media strategies. Lansing says individual NPR journalists and staffers can decide for themselves whether to continue using Twitter.

In an email to staff explaining the decision, Lansing wrote, "It would be a disservice to the serious work you all do here to continue to share it on a platform that is associating the federal charter for public media with an abandoning of editorial independence or standards."

For years, many journalists considered Twitter critical to monitoring news developments, to connect with people at major events and with authoritative sources, and to share their coverage. Musk's often hastily announced policy changes have undermined that. Lansing says that degradation in the culture of Twitter — already often awash in abusive content — contributed to NPR's decision to pull back.

Musk proves conciliatory and erratic in BBC interview​

PBS, which also receives money from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the BBC, which is funded by a uniform license fee charged to British television viewers, are among those whose Twitter accounts were given the same designation.

In the new interview with the BBC's James Clayton, Musk almost appeared to be seeking a compromise with the journalist. He said Twitter would adjust its labels for the British public broadcaster to "publicly funded."

"We're trying to be accurate," Musk said. "I actually do have a lot of respect for the BBC." He said the interview offered him a chance to "get some feedback on what we should be doing different."

When questioned by Clayton, Musk replied that the "publicly funded" label would apply to NPR as well. The change was not made before NPR's decision on Wednesday morning, however.

The BBC exchange showed Musk as alternately conciliatory and erratic. He also said that he's sleeping on a couch at work, that he followed through on his promise to purchase Twitter only because a judge forced him to, and that he should stop tweeting after 3 a.m.

"The point is the independence," NPR leader says​

Lansing says Musk is focusing attention on the wrong element of the equation.

"The whole point isn't whether or not we're government funded," Lansing says. "Even if we were government funded, which we're not, the point is the independence, because all journalism has revenue of some sort."

NPR's board is appointed without any government influence. And the network has at times tangled with both Democratic and Republican administrations. For example, NPR joined with other media organizations to press the Obama administration for access to closed hearings involving detainees held by U.S. authorities at Guantanamo Bay. And "All Things Considered" host Mary Louise Kelly stood her ground in questioning then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo over then-President Donald Trump's actions in Ukraine despite being berated by Pompeo.

Most of NPR's funding comes from corporate and individual supporters and grants. It also receives significant programming fees from member stations. Those stations, in turn, receive about 13 percent of their funds from the CPB and other state and federal government sources.

It isn't clear that a withdrawal from Twitter will materially affect NPR's ability to reach an online audience. NPR's primary Twitter account has 8.8 million followers — more than a million more than follow the network on Facebook. Yet Facebook is a much bigger platform, and NPR's Facebook posts often are far more likely to spur engagement or click-throughs to NPR's own website. NPR Music has almost 10 times more followers on YouTube than it does on Twitter, and the video platform serves as one of the primary conduits for its popular Tiny Desk Series.

Musk uses Twitter to question the legitimacy of media outlets​

NPR's decision follows a week of public acrimony, as Musk has used his platform to cast doubt on the legitimacy of major news organizations.

The billionaire, who bought Twitter in October, previously announced he would remove check marks from the accounts of legacy news organizations unless the outlets paid for them. The coveted marks once meant Twitter had verified the authenticity of an account belonging to a news organization, government or public figure. Now, they can be bought through a monthly subscription.

Musk also singled out The New York Times earlier this month, removing its check mark and calling its reporting "propaganda." Twitter's communications shop now simply responds to reporters' emails with poop emojis.

At least three public radio stations preceded NPR to the exits at Twitter: Member stations KCRW in Santa Monica, Calif., WESA in Pittsburgh and WEKU, which serves central and eastern Kentucky.

Fears that Twitter label could endanger journalists​

Journalism and freedom-of-speech groups have condemned Twitter's labels, including PEN, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and the Committee to Protect Journalists.

"NPR receives public funding, but is not state-controlled, meaning Twitter's listing could pose risks for journalists reporting from areas where suggestions of government affiliation have negative connotations," CPJ's Carlos Martínez de la Serna said in a statement urging Twitter to revisit its decision.

Twitter's own guidelines previously said, "State-financed media organizations with editorial independence, like the BBC in the UK or NPR in the US for example, are not defined as state-affiliated media for the purposes of this policy."

That language has now been removed. In addition to NPR and the BBC, Twitter recently labeled the U.S. broadcaster Voice of America as government-funded media. Voice of America is part of the federal U.S. Agency for Global Media. But its editorial independence from government officials — at times hard won — is enshrined by law.

"The label 'government funded' is potentially misleading and could be construed as also 'government-controlled' – which VOA is most certainly not," VOA spokesperson Bridget Serchak said in a statement to NPR.

Serchak says VOA will continue to raise the distinction in talks with Twitter as the label "causes unwarranted and unjustified concern about the accuracy and objectivity of [its] news coverage."

At Elon Musk's Twitter, unpredictability is the norm​

Like so many policy decisions at the social network of late, Musk applied the label to NPR's Twitter account abruptly. It's still not clear why he became so animated about the issue.

In his exchanges with NPR reporter Allyn, Musk said he was relying on a Wikipedia page dedicated to "publicly funded broadcasters" to determine which accounts should receive the label.

When pressed for how he justifies the disclaimer considering NPR receives meager funding from the government and has complete editorial independence, Musk veered into conspiratorial territory.

"If you really think that the government has no influence on the entity they're funding then you've been marinating in the Kool-Aid for too long," Musk wrote to Allyn.

Musk's push to label the network even ran afoul of the site's own rules. A former Twitter executive who was involved in crafting the guidelines told NPR that the deciding factor in whether to issue the designation was whether an outlet had editorial freedom. The labels, the former executive said, were intended to give users context that a tweet they are seeing may be propaganda.

The messy deliberations on display in Musk's email exchanges over labeling NPR's account are in line with his impulsive leadership style. His changes to the platform often are announced by tweet, with sudden reversals not uncommon, or promised changes never coming to fruition. Because Musk relishes troll-like behavior, there is always a possibility that his pronouncements turn out to be jokes. He has announced that the effective date for the change in the check mark verification system is April 20. The date is an inside joke among people who smoke or consume marijuana.

Disclosure: This story was reported and written by NPR Media Correspondent David Folkenflik and edited by Acting Chief Business Editor Emily Kopp and Managing Editor Vickie Walton-James. NPR's Bobby Allyn and Mary Yang contributed to this story. Under NPR's protocol for reporting on itself, no corporate official or news executive reviewed this story before it was posted publicly.
 

MushroomX

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:mjgrin: Elon letting his jealously get to him.


Elon Musk reportedly bought thousands of GPUs for a Twitter AI project​

The company also recently hired two former DeepMind researchers.

Igor Bonifacic

3–4 minutes


More than a month after hiring a couple of former DeepMind researchers, Twitter is reportedly moving forward with an in-house artificial intelligence project. According to Business Insider, Elon Musk recently bought 10,000 GPUs for use at one of the company’s two remaining data centers. A source told the outlet the purchase shows Musk is “committed” to the effort, particularly given the fact there would be little reason for Twitter to spend so much money on datacenter-grade GPUs if it didn’t plan to use them for AI work.

The project reportedly involves the creation of a generative AI that the company would train on its own massive trove of data. It’s unclear how Twitter would utilize the technology. Insider suggests a generative AI could augment the platform’s search functionality or assist the company in rebuilding its advertising business. In any case, the report colors Musk’s recent decision to sign an open letter calling for a six-month pause on AI development.

Musk has been a vocal critic of OpenAI, the artificial intelligence research organization he co-founded in 2015. “I’m still confused as to how a non-profit to which I donated ~$100M somehow became a $30B market cap for-profit. If this is legal, why doesn’t everyone do it?” Musk said in one of his recent Twitter missives against the lab’s for-profit subsidiary, OpenAI Limited Partnership.

However, a recent report from Semafor suggests his feud with OpenAI is more personal. In 2018, Musk reportedly told Sam Altman, one his fellow co-founders at OpenAI, the lab was falling too far behind Google. Musk then suggested that he should be the one to run the firm, a proposal Altman and OpenAI’s other founders rejected.

The power struggle led to Musk’s departure from OpenAI, though publicly both parties maintain Musk left due to a conflict of interest involving Tesla. At the time, OpenAI said the billionaire would continue to fund its research. However, according to Semafor, Musk’s payments stopped after his departure – despite a promise to provide the firm with roughly $1 billion. The sudden shortfall left OpenAI scrambling to raise cash. In 2019, the organization announced it was creating a for-profit subsidiary to secure the capital it needed to fund its work. That same year, the firm announced a $1 billion investment from Microsoft. When OpenAI opened ChatGPT to the public in November and the chatbot began to dominate headlines, Musk was reportedly “furious.” One month later, he cut OpenAI’s access to Twitter’s “firehose” of data. And now it would appear he wants to compete against his old organization head-on.
 

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:mjgrin: Elon letting his jealously get to him.

How does a man who can’t control his emotions make so much fukking money? :mindblown:

This whole Twitter debacle made me really think Musk just got lucky a few times. He seems incompetent. But maybe he’s not. I just don’t understand it at all.
 

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PBS Joins NPR in Quitting Twitter Over State-Backed Label​

800x-1.jpg


Photographer: Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images


By
Gerry Smith
April 12, 2023 at 5:53 PM EDT

Follow the authors
@gerryfsmith

The Public Broadcasting Service has followed National Public Radio in quitting Twitter after the social media network labeled both organizations as government-backed media.

“PBS stopped tweeting from our account when we learned of the change and we have no plans to resume at this time,” PBS spokesman Jason Phelps said in an email. “We are continuing to monitor the ever-changing situation closely.”

The spat began after Twitter tagged NPR as “state-affiliated media,” a description it also uses for propaganda accounts from Russia and China. Twitter later changed the wording to “government-funded media,” but the organization has called the description inaccurate and misleading because it’s a nonprofit group with editorial independence.

Twitter owner Elon Musk has cited NPR’s reliance on US government money, though the Washington-based organization only gets a small fraction of its funding from federal agencies.

“Guess they won’t mind losing federal funding in that case,” Musk said in one tweet. “Defund NPR,” the billionaire wrote in another.

He acquired the social media platform last year for $44 billion and has been making sweeping changes, including removing the verification system for media, celebrities and other prominent Twitter users.
 

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[/U]

Elon Musk’s Free-Speech Charade Is Over​

Now that the mogul has swung Twitter to the right, conservatives no longer believe that social-media policies violate the First Amendment.
By Adam Serwer

APRIL 12, 2023, 10:42 AM ET

When the right-wing billionaire Elon Musk wanted a journalist to spread the word about supposed left-wing censorship under Twitter’s previous ownership, he went to Matt Taibbi. But last week, Twitter began to throttle traffic to the newsletter platform Substack, where Taibbi does most of his writing, and apparently began hiding Taibbi’s tweets in Twitter's search results. Musk’s chosen conduit for exposing what he described as past Twitter’s censorship was now being censored by Musk’s Twitter.

Although Musk has insisted the temporary throttling of Substack was a mistake, Taibbi claimed that it was in response to a “dispute” over the company’s new Twitter-like service.

Blocking access to a competitor may seem, well, at odds with the “free-speech absolutism” that Musk has proclaimed and that admirers like Taibbi have praised. As the reporter Mike Masnick writes, the above behavior clearly falls into what Musk fans described as censorship under Twitter’s previous ownership. But it’s consistent with what more perceptive observers noted about Musk as he was considering buying the network: The mogul’s treatment of union organizers and whistleblowers suggested that “free-speech absolutism” was mostly code for a high tolerance for bigotry toward particular groups, a smoke screen that obscured an obvious hostility toward any speech that threatened his ability to make money.
Read: Elon Musk is spiraling

ment about the focus of a right-wing cult of personality been so swiftly vindicated. During his tenure at Twitter, Musk has suspended reporters and left-wing accounts that drew his ire, retaliated against media organizations perceived as liberal, ordered engineers to boost his tweets after he was humiliated when a tweet from President Joe Biden about the Super Bowl did better than his own, secretly promoted a list of accounts of his choice, and turned the company’s verification process into a subscription service that promises increased visibility to Musk sycophants and users desperate enough to pay for engagement. At the request of the right-wing government in India, the social network has blocked particular tweets and accounts belonging to that government’s critics, a more straightforward example of traditional state censorship. But despite all of that, he has yet to face state legislation alleging that what he does with the website he owns is unconstitutional.

That’s notable because, until Musk bought Twitter late last year, conservatives were arguing that the company’s moderation decisions violated the First Amendment, even though Twitter is a private company and not part of the government. Now that Musk is using his editorial discretion as owner of the company to promote people and ideas he supports—primarily right-wing influencers—and diminish the reach of those he does not, the constitutional emergency has subsided. At least until his allies and defenders on Substack found themselves unable to promote their work on Twitter, free speech had been restored, because “free speech” here simply means that right-wing ideas and arguments are favored. This outcome—that Twitter under Musk would favor right-wing content—was predictable, and I’m saying that because I wrote last April that that’s what would happen.

The episode reveals something important about the way that many conservative jurists and legal scholars now approach the principle of free speech. Florida and Texas passed laws prohibiting social-media companies from moderating user-generated content, in retaliation for what they characterized as liberal “censorship.” A federal judge appointed by Trump, Andrew Oldham, then upheld the Texas law with a ruling that scoffed at the idea that “editorial discretion” constituted a “freestanding category of First-Amendment-protected expression” and insisted that the platforms’ moderation decisions did not qualify for that protection. Whether “editorial discretion” is a “freestanding” category of protected speech is irrelevant; engaging in protected speech is impossible absent the freedom to decide what to say, or for that matter what ideas are worthy of publication. Conservatives agree, as long as those platforms are conservative; right-wing platforms such as Parler and Truth Social have strict moderation policies that conservatives are not challenging as unconstitutional.

Like the newfound opposition to vaccine mandates, this blinkered view of free speech was met by conservative judges eager to validate right-wing cultural shifts, no matter how bizarre or contradictory, through their strained method of constitutional interpretation. The ghosts of the Framers may be summoned through the necromancy of undead constitutionalism, through which the authors of our founding document can be confirmed to have had the same concerns and priorities as extremely online conservatives. Now that Musk is utilizing his editorial discretion to move the social network in a right-wing direction, however, no one is insisting that his exercise of editorial discretion violates the Constitution—not even his liberal critics.
Adam Serwer: Why conservatives invented a ‘right to post’
 
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bnew

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Conservatives built an entire body of jurisprudence around the First Amendment’s protection of corporate speech when large corporations were reliably funding Republican causes and campaigns—the late Justice Antonin Scalia declared in the Citizens United decision that “to exclude or impede corporate speech is to muzzle the principal agents of the modern free economy.” But once some corporate actors decided it was in their financial interests to make decisions that the GOP disliked, conservative lawyers then turned around and argued that speech was no longer protected if it was used for purposes they opposed. If your freedom of speech is only protected when it aligns with the ruling party, then you do not have a right to freedom of speech.

Faced with right-wing outrage over the moderation decisions of social-media platforms, conservative judges turned the First Amendment upside down by upholding—or signaling their sympathy with—state laws designed to punish social-media platforms for being insufficiently conservative. They invented a “conservative right to post” in which the First Amendment restricted private platforms the way it does the government, but only if those platforms were perceived as liberal. Perhaps nowhere is this inversion of the First Amendment more clear than on the issue of abortion rights; the same lawmakers insisting that the content-moderation policies of private firms violate the First Amendment are feverishly attempting to criminalize online speech related to abortion.
The platforms targeted by anti-moderation laws were never liberal; they imposed moderation policies because it is difficult to maintain advertising revenue when your platform is overrun by teenage Nazis with anime avatars and aspiring far-right intellectuals desperate to impress them. Musk’s changes were far more ideologically driven and have reportedly, by his own evaluation, halved the value of his company.

Conservatives rapidly reversed their stance on corporate free-speech rights when they were angry at Twitter for being too left-wing, then changed their mind again once Musk bought Twitter and began amplifying right-wing voices at the expense of others. Musk owns the platform, and he can use it to magnify or ignore whatever ideas and sources he chooses. But it’s not a right that most of these conservative, self-styled defenders of free speech think you should have. For them, free speech is when they can say what they want, and when you can say what they want.
 
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The theory is that Taibbi made this turn after being wrongfully #MeTooed for the stuff he was writing while in Moscow. He had a satirical, edgy magazine and a book with Mark Ames. Hunter S Thompson wannabe, pretentious bullshyt about how great they were for living amongst Russian savages, how much better Russian women were because they expect to be raped on first date, etc.

Also even before the MeToo stuff, Taibbi's magazine project with billionaire Pierre Omidyar fell through. So after all the props he got for his 2008 recession work all he got for it was a podcast and still writing for Rolling Stone, so that probably also left a sour taste in his mouth.


People are now also questioning his positions back in 2008, saying that his work back then on subprime mortgages/recession had a libertarian slant.

Yo, I've never paid any attention to Taibbi, is he kinda slow? Why does he come off as some sort of college "bro" who doesn't know what he's talking about and can't even argue coherently?
That early onslaught of me too was wild because you had names showing up on spreadsheets on toxic men in media where the offense they allegedly committed being that they ghosted someone, asked multiple people out on dates, didn't offer cabfare after a sex, next to people being accused of rape and sexual assault. I think that caused taibbi to go right-wing because at the time they were the only o es pushing back on scorched earth effects of early #metoo. Hate to see it.





This dude is a fukking child

Such a pathetic person. He obviously thinks he's being "epic".
 
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