General Elon Musk Fukkery Thread

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Why is their thing always fetishizing fat white old men as an Adonis or Rambo??? :patrice:

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Japan Earthquake Alert App Says Sayonara to X​


Japan Earthquake Alert App Says Sayonara to X

NERV app

Picture: Canva

Himari Semans​


Many people in Japan depend on the NERV service for earthquake alerts. Unfortunately, they'll no longer be able to receive them on X. Here's why the NERV app is parting ways with the platform.

Japan’s best safety app for natural disasters will withdraw from X (formerly Twitter). 1.9M followers have relied on the app NERV for live information about real-time natural disasters and weather reports. Now, this life-saving information will begin its fadeout from the social media platform.

An important lifeline​


The Japanese IT service management company Gehirn Web Services made the announcement on August 7th. The company said it will no longer post information regarding power outages and evacuation measures on its official account on X, citing harsh API constraints.

Gehirn owns and manages the NERV Disaster Prevention App (called Tokumu-Kikan-NERV (特務機関NERV in Japanese). NERV swiftly distributes the company’s analysis of real-time earthquakes, tsunamis, typhoons, and weather information.

The app instantly gained recognition from the government’s Japan Meteorological Agency when Gehirn released it in 2019.

The speed of delivery is what distinguishes NERV from other distributors. NERV is “10 seconds or more faster than breaking news on TV,” say experts. NERV retrieves data from real-time earthquakes, analyzes it, and posts information in just 0.3 seconds. The media has praised NERV, saying that “there is no app that delivers such information as quickly and accurately.”

Monday’s post on the official X account for NERV shared Gehirn’s plans to discontinue its use of X. The same post stated that the company will share future NERV content on its app and on Mastodon.

An expensive API​

pixta_86023350_M.jpg
Picture: gttkscg / PIXTA(ピクスタ)

By 9 PM on Monday night, NERV users were demanding answers to the questions raised by Gehirn’s decision. NERV responded to two questions.
Why not use other social media platforms?

“We are moving forward under the premise that our operations should move from platforms managed by other companies to those within our control. Our app of course works on Apple and Google but these are different in terms of API constraints. On the other hand, distribution on ActivityPub is where we can manage our content completely independently. For this reason, in response to requests to move our operations onto different platforms will eventually only result in the same outcome as this time and therefore will not be considered. As NERV posts are still accessible via social media linked with ActivityPub, we plan to continue sharing there.”

What is the situation with X’s API plan?

Currently, we subscribe to the API’s “Basic plan”. With the Basic plan, we are granted 100 posts per 24 hours for the cost of $100 (under current rates this amounts to for the cost of $100 (under current rates this amounts to for the cost of $100 (under current rates this amounts to ¥14,236). The plan above this is the “Pro plan” which costs $5,000 (¥711,715) per month. Our operations run with a budget spent on various studies and development projects.

This month, we find ourselves in the red by n the red by ¥6,000,000 which can hardly qualify as a good financial situation as we continue with our operations. If we upgrade to the Pro plan, we will incur a cost of over ¥8,540,000 per year. We have decided that if we were to spend over ¥700,000 per month that it would be better if this money could go to developing our NERV app and strengthening our ActivityPub servers instead of X’s API. Therefore, we are beginning to cut down on our posts on X.


Repercussions for other Japanese services​


NERV’s issues with X’s API constraints began earlier this month on August 1st when it announced that it was “unable to automatically publish posts due to API constraints.”

Gehirn is not alone in its recent concerns over X’s API constraints. The Japanese website Togetter which specializes in processing viral Tweets experienced glitches with X’s API too when X demoted its plan to the “Free plan.”

As for now, the NERV account on X is still posting real-time updates every few hours on weather patterns as well as passing typhoons in Japan.

NERV’s origins​


The name NERV comes from the Japanese anime Neon Genesis Evangelion, of which the app’s founder is a huge fan.
Ishimori Daiki created the first account for NERV in 2010 while he was still a student at Tsukuba University in Japan. NERV was a hobby to him. A hobby that had just 300 followers.

But then, the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami happened in 2011. The home Ishimori had grown up in was destroyed. He lost his aunt. Ever since, Ishimori has poured all of his energy into improving the distribution of information for natural disasters.

When Ishimori’s company Gehirn released the NERV app in 2019, there were 10,000 downloads. Now, there are 206,000. Hopefully, its app continues to enjoy success – and serve its important purpose for users in Japan.
 

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Elon Musk has finally locked down Tweetdeck (XPro) for paid subscribers only

Omer Dursun · Aug 16, 2023 04:16 EDT3

TweetDeck now locks down
Elon Musk's X, formerly known as Twitter, has made its TweetDeck exclusive to paying subscribers. TweetDeck, which X acquired in 2011 for $40 million, is a popular tool that allows users to track multiple Twitter lists and trends.

In early July, Twitter Support announced that you'd need to pay to use TweetDeck in 30 days. It said users will need a Verified account. Furthermore, today, many users reported being unable to access TweetDeck without an X Blue verification subscription.

The change means news organizations, journalists, researchers, and social media consultants who relied on TweetDeck to monitor X will now have to pay to continue using it.



Under Musk, X has been pushing its Blue subscription by packing features beyond just the verification checkmark. Blue subscribers can now post longer text and videos, see 50% fewer ads, get priority ranking for their replies, mentions, and searches, access article bypass paywalls, receive a "prioritized content" tag, and have the ability to share ad revenue with X.

However, the exclusivity of TweetDeck for paying users is likely to upset many users who aren't interested in the other perks of Blue. TweetDeck felt neglected for the past few years, and its Windows app was even shut down in 2016. Tests of a new TweetDeck version began in 2021 but have yet to launch fully.

Anyone using TweetDeck will now be migrated to the newer TweetDeck preview. According to an X employee, the company is now "working on migrating everyone to the preview version". Anyone can chime in with feedback on a new Twitter community for TweetDeck.

On the other hand, the TweetDeck app is undergoing a name change as Elon Musk pushes Twitter's rebranding to X. With Musk's decision, it will now be called XPro.

The move to make TweetDeck paid-only mirrors other recent changes at X intended to boost subscriber numbers and revenue. However, it remains to be seen whether limiting access to the tweet tracking tool will drive more users to pay up or frustrate them.
 

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  • NEWS FEATURE
  • 16 August 2023

Thousands of scientists are cutting back on Twitter, seeding angst and uncertainty​


A Nature survey reveals scientists’ reasons for leaving the social-media platform now known as X, and what they are doing to build and maintain a sense of community.
A partially removed sign at Twitter headquarters in San Francisco, California with a distant bird flying across the sky

Hundreds of respondents to a Nature survey say they have left the platform formerly known as Twitter. Credit: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty

Emilia Jarochowska joined Twitter in 2016 in the hope that it might help to enhance her career. She was finishing her PhD in palaeontology at the time, and felt that the platform would help her to connect with colleagues and find job opportunities. But that was, she says, before the platform became a “sea of bad trolls”.

Last December, after much consideration and several experiences of fighting misinformation on climate change and COVID-19, Jarochowska closed her account, feeling that her reputation could be at risk if she kept using the platform. She felt that Twitter was promoting provocative discourse over facts and encouraging a type of controversy that “is not what scientists should be associated with”, she says.

A survey conducted by Nature suggests that Jarochowska, now at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, is far from alone in curtailing her use of the platform. Since entrepreneur Elon Musk took control in October 2022, he has made a series of largely unpopular changes to Twitter, including cutting down on content moderation; ditching its ‘blue-check’ verification system in favour of one that grants paying members additional clout and privileges; charging money for access to data for research; limiting the number of tweets users can see; and abruptly changing the platform’s name and familiar logo to simply ‘X’. His management has left scientists reconsidering the value of X, and many seem to be leaving.

To get a better sense of how researchers are currently interacting with the site formerly known as Twitter, Nature reached out to more than 170,000 scientists who were, or still are, users; nearly 9,200 responded. More than half reported that they have reduced the time they spend on the platform in the past six months and just under 7% have stopped using it altogether. Roughly 46% have joined other social-media platforms, such as Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads and TikTok.

With this migration has come widespread uncertainty. Many academics worry that the changing social-media landscape is undoing some of the advances that Twitter helped to facilitate in diversity, equity and inclusion for academia.

For example, Cristina Dorador, a microbial ecologist at the University of Antofagasta in Chile, says that Twitter helped her promote her research to her country and the world. Without a social-media platform that is as universal as Twitter, she worries that she and others won’t have a lot of options to make their work more visible, and many researchers don’t have the resources to keep up with the changes that X is making. “I don’t see a Latin American researcher paying to verify their account so people read what they’re publishing,” she says.

For now, it’s hard to predict what will become of X, but the changes are creating angst in the scientific community and challenging scientists and the academic establishment to redefine how they share science and build community. “If everybody disappears from Twitter, if it goes belly up or just becomes completely useless, I think that’s going to limit the reach of some of my work,” says Stuart Pearson, a coastal engineer at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. Although he has started to see people from his network leave or become less active, he’s not ready to let go himself, because it took him years to gather followers and build his network. “I can’t say I’m too eager to repeat that again.”

Why are they leaving?

Nature obtained the e-mail addresses of thousands of scientists who were identified through a social-media research project as having tweeted about papers on which they were a corresponding author1. The survey from Nature asked whether people had changed their use of Twitter in the past six months and why. The reasons respondents gave varied, but many of those who had markedly reduced or stopped their activity on X mentioned Musk’s management of the platform. Many said that they had noticed an uptick in the amount of fake accounts, trolls and hate speech on the platform.

Žiga Malek, an environmental scientist at the Free University of Amsterdam, mentioned in the survey that he had started seeing a lot of “strange” political far-right accounts espousing science denialism and racism in his feed. He has to block them constantly. “Twitter has always been not so nice let’s say, but it is a mess right now,” he said.

Researchers have found that, contrary to such public claims from Musk, hate speech increased after he took over2. Musk has threatened to sue at least one group studying these trends.

A lot of experts and specialists are leaving the platform, says Timothy Caulfield, a law scholar and science communicator at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. “If that happens, are we just making room for a massive echo chamber that can spread misinformation in a way that is very harmful to society?”

X did not respond to Nature’s request for comments.

Where are they going?

The most popular alternative social-media site that respondents mentioned opening accounts with was the free, open-source software platform Mastodon. Compared with X, Mastodon allows for better community moderation, says Rodrigo Costas, an information scientist at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands, who has been studying scientists’ use of Twitter since 2011. In February, he and Jonathan Dudek, a communications researcher also at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies, examined the Twitter profile information of 400,000 researchers — obtained for a previous research project3 — to see who was broadcasting their movement to other platforms. Roughly 3% of the profiles mention a Mastodon account, according to the researchers’ preliminary analysis.

Although it has been around for some seven years, Mastodon has a much smaller user base than do other social-media platforms. In Nature’s survey, LinkedIn was the second most popular place for respondents to open new accounts, and Instagram, owned by Meta, was third. Threads, also owned by Meta and pitched as an alternative to X, had started just a few days before the survey was launched. It reportedly attracted 100 million users in its first five days, and was the fourth-most-popular platform among survey respondents, with about 1,000 people saying that they had joined (See ‘Signs of dissatisfaction’).

Signs of dissatisfaction: charts that show the results of a survey from July 2023 on how scientists' use of Twitter has changed.



The proliferation of platforms has created a fragmented landscape for science communication and community, says Inger Mewburn, an education and technology researcher at the Australian National University in Canberra. One of the advantages of Twitter was that it was the main platform where researchers could go to find specific information. “People would just go to that hashtag and they’d see everyone who was talking about a very particular interest,” she says. Now, researchers need to hop from application to application following specific communities and individuals. “It’s just hard to know where people are hanging out,” Mewburn says.

Some researchers are trying to stick around. Malek says that, for the time being, he will continue using X to promote his work; he published a paper on land degradation in Asia in July and he’s working on another one about livestock grazing in Europe that he also hopes to promote through X. But a lot of the people that he follows have left and he’s not sure how much longer he will continue.

What is being lost?

There is still no consensus on whether X will survive its current chaotic management. In July, Musk announced the company is running on a “negative cash flow” because it has lost 50% of its advertisement revenue. And a lawsuit against the company is claiming it owes US$500 million in severance benefits to former employees.

Many scientists lament what is being lost in the process.
 

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{continued}


One of the benefits of Twitter was how it created a sense of community for scientists, particularly for those from under-represented groups. It gave a voice to female researchers about issues such as harassment and unequal pay, and served as an organizing point for scientists of colour to speak out against inequity. Scientists could discuss suspicions of research fraud, often anonymously, and because many journalists used the platform, people who might otherwise have been ignored sometimes got results. Dorador says that Twitter helped to raise awareness and accountability for concepts such as scientific colonialism and gender and sexual diversity.

The dynamics of networks on Twitter were also of great interest to researchers. Unlike many other social networks, Twitter had, until recently, an open application programming interface (API) that allowed scientists to explore how people interacted with the platform and with one another, leading to studies on how users were discussing climate change, how people with autism were using it to be heard and the patterns of account suspensions relating to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, among other things.

In February, the platform announced that it would close the free access to its API, although the change didn’t come into effect until the end of June. Since then, research on misinformation, disaster responses and social dynamics on the Internet has been halted or hampered. Costas and Dudek, for example, don’t have free access to new data to further their research on how users engage with science and create communities. They now have to rely on information from previous analyses. “There’s still so many things that I would like to do,” Dudek says.

He and Costas also worry that these changes will halt their collaborations with other scientists in the field. “The way academics could access Twitter also created a nice framework for sharing data,” Costas says. Now, someone who pays to access X data will not be able to share it with others to do complementary research or replicate findings unless the other team also pays, he says.

What happens next?

Whether X will manage to regain its attractiveness to scientists, or whether some other social-media platform will grow into its space, is unclear. Mewburn doesn’t see the loss of Twitter as a fatal blow to the scientific enterprise. “I don’t think science has become overly dependent on social media,” she says. Scientists might find it more difficult to network and build their careers, especially if they don’t have the money to go to conferences, but she expects that people will come up with creative new ideas.

Jarochowska suggests that scientists focus on organizing webinars, building networks to share data and methods, and finding original ways to stand out. In some ways, she’s glad to have put Twitter behind her. “If you appear with your scientific contents between videos of cats,” she says, “it’s not a particularly good medium for promoting yourself professionally, anyway”.

Mark Carrigan, a digital sociologist at the Manchester Institute for Education, UK, argues that the idea that Twitter helped democratize academia “was a bit simplistic” because social media created a space where academic celebrities thrived. Even when it helped to diversify science, he says, it did so through the reinforcement of the same kinds of hierarchy. “Rewards flow to those who are known, valued and heard while those who are unknown, unvalued and unheard struggle to increase their standing,” he wrote in a 2019 article.

He now emphasizes that conventional networking organizations should be eyeing this as an opportunity. Professional associations, societies, study groups, research networks, research centres and laboratories have a responsibility to curate and support their own networks, he says. “I’m 99% convinced that Twitter, as we know it, is dead, and the sooner academics accept that, the better, in terms of finding solutions to these problems.”
 

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NYU Professor Locked Out of Twitter After Reportedly Declining to Meet With Elon Musk​


Scott Galloway says he was locked out of his account after Elon Musk felt the podcast had "unfairly attacked" him.​

By
Nikki Main
Published Yesterday



New York University professor and Kara Swisher’s podcasting buddy Scott Galloway voiced his outrage at being banned from posting on Twitter in a Threads post on Tuesday. Galloway claims he’s been locked out of Twitter (aka X) two days after allegedly declining an invitation to meet with the chief Twit himself.


Galloway posted on Threads that, as of Tuesday, he had been locked out of his account for 17 days, following it up with a post saying: “A mutual friend reached out and said Elon feels ‘unfairly attacked,’ by me, and wants to meet. I declined. 2 days later I was locked out of ‘X.’”

Galloway has consistently criticized Musk following his Twitter takeover, telling Huffington Post last year that Musk has a “total lack of grace” when it comes to his leadership at Twitter. “This is someone who, in my opinion, shows a bit of a God complex,” Galloway added. In yet another Threads post on Monday, Galloway appeared to voice that he would have supported Musk, had it not been for his outspoken opinions on Twitter. “Elon would have been a legend … if he hadn’t started tweeting,” Galloway wrote.

He has also commented on a Reuters investigation into Tesla vehicles’ driving range while also taking a shot at Musk’s ambitions to turn Twitter into an everything app. “Tesla intentionally gave drivers rosy driving range projections, leaving many stranded,” Galloway posted on Twitter. “BUT you should totally bank with X.” Musk clapped back on Twitter, calling Galloway an “insufferable numbskull,” and advising the best way to invest would be doing the opposite of what Galloway suggests.


Musk, who is a self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist,” has a history of punishing anyone who deigns to criticize him, most recently appearing to slow down links to news outlets and Twitter competitors on his social media platform. Both The New York Times and Reuters were targeted, showing a roughly 10-second slowdown when opening a link via Twitter, while Facebook, Threads, and Bluesky were likewise affected.


Galloway also seems to be taking a leaf out of Musk’s own playbook by challenging him to a battle in a separate Threads post. “Lord Elon,” he wrote, “After refusing to take a knee (meet), you banished me from the Twitter Hamlet—true story. I demand trial by combat! Don King has agreed to host a battle to the death before a Taylor Swift concert. If you agree, I shall get an MRI that reveals bone spurs. FREEDOM (speech)!”


Surprisingly, Musk is keeping his mouth shut for once. He has yet to respond to the allegations that he reportedly banned Galloway from posting on Twitter, nor has Musk confirmed if he had actually attempted to meet with him.
 

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Two brands suspend advertising on X after their ads appeared next to pro-Nazi content​


By Clare Duffy and Brian Fung, CNN
Updated 8:24 PM EDT, Wed August 16, 2023

New York CNN —

At least two brands have said they will suspend advertising on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, after their ads and those of other companies were run on an account promoting fascism. The issue came less than a week after X CEO Linda Yaccarino publicly affirmed the company’s commitment to brand safety for advertisers.

The nonprofit news watchdog Media Matters for America documented in a report published Wednesday that ads for a host of mainstream brands have been run on the account, which has shared content celebrating Hitler and the Nazi Party.

Ads for brands including Adobe, Gilead Sciences, the University of Maryland’s football team, New York University Langone Hospital and NCTA-The Internet and Television Association were run alongside tweets from the account that had garnered hundreds of thousands of views, CNN observed.


Spokespeople for NCTA and pharmaceutical company Gilead said that they immediately paused their ad spending on X after CNN flagged their ads on the pro-Nazi account.

“We take the responsible placement of NCTA ads very seriously and are concerned that our post about the future of broadband technology appeared next to this highly disturbing content,” NCTA spokesperson Brian Dietz said in a statement, adding that the organization had opted into X’s brand safety measures including keyword restrictions and limiting its ad placement to the “home feed of target audiences.”

“Brand safety will remain an utmost priority for NCTA, which means suspending advertising on Twitter/X for the foreseeable future and heavily limiting NCTA’s organic presence on the platform,” Dietz said.

A spokesperson for Gilead said the company will pause its ad spending while X investigates the issue.

Jason Yellin, University of Maryland’s associate athletic director, expressed concern about the placement of the football team’s post on the account and said Maryland Football has not spent money on advertising on X since 2021, meaning X may have promoted the post despite it not being a paid ad.

A spokesperson for NYU Langone said in a statement that the hospital was “completely surprised by this and are extremely concerned with any appearance of our advertising and brand next to obviously objectionable content that promotes hatred,” adding that it expects its advertising partners to “act responsibly.”

X did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CNN. Hours after the Media Matters report was published Wednesday morning and CNN observed additional brands’ ads running on the account, the account appeared to be suspended.

Adobe did not immediately respond to requests for comment from CNN.

The issue comes as X has been trying to lure advertisers back to the platform after many left in the wake of Elon Musk’s takeover of the company last fall over concerns about content moderation, mass layoffs and general uncertainty over the platform’s direction. Musk said last month that the company still had negative cash flow because of a nearly 50% drop in its core advertising revenue.

Yaccarino — who joined the company in June, just ahead of a major rebrand from Twitter to X — told CNBC in her first public interview as chief executive last week that many of the platform’s advertisers have returned and that the company is “close to break-even.” She touted the company’s “freedom of speech, not freedom of reach” policy, which aims to limit the reach of so-called lawful but awful content on the platform and to protect brands from having their ads appear alongside such content.

X last week said it had rolled out additional brand safety controls for advertisers, including the ability to avoid having their ads show next to “targeted hate speech, sexual content, gratuitous gore, excessive profanity, obscenity, spam, drugs.” In addition to human content moderation reviewers that monitor for content that violates the platform’s rules, X says it has automated software that determines where and how ads are placed on the platform.

“Your ads will only air next to content that is appropriate for you,” Yaccarino said during last week’s interview.

But Wednesday’s report suggests that the company still has work to do if it wants to avoid monetizing, and placing ads alongside, objectionable content. “Media Matters and other observers have documented how X has remained a dangerous cesspool of content, especially for advertisers,” Wednesday’s report states. Media Matters says it has also documented instances of brands’ ads being placed next to content from Holocaust denial and white nationalist accounts.

While she did not publicly comment on the ads appearing alongside pro-Nazi content, Yaccarino did post on X Wednesday that, “Sensitivity Settings is live globally in the X Ads Manager — making it even simpler for all advertisers to find the right balance between reach and suitability.”
 
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