from "beyond the paywall": In October, Musk, SpaceX’s chief executive officer, denied that he had spoken to Putin. In a post on Twitter, the social media platform he’s since renamed X, the billionaire wrote that he’d spoken to the Russian president only once, roughly 18 months earlier, about space. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...-staff-he-spoke-to-putin-before-starlink-call
Elon Musk has a lengthy history of supporting authoritarians including numerous examples of Musk having Twitter 2.0 suppress information from the opposition on the behalf of dictators. Numerous examples include Musk's support of Modi, Erdogan, and others. The situation with Putin is even worse, Musk is actively supporting a brutal dictator who militarily invaded a sovereign nation and committed numerous war crimes on the flimsiness of pretenses. This is your reminder that there is an active arrest warrant for Putin (plus his cronies) for war crimes. Musk deliberately went out of the way to coordinate with Russian leaders to prevent Ukraine from defending itself. The concept of stopping "horrific bloodshed" is nothing more than a Kremlin talking point saying that the victim here, Ukraine, should surrender and adhere to all Russian terms for the seizure of their country -- anyone pushing this talking point should be mocked. The proper response is that Russia should stop its aggression, withdraw from all of Ukraine including Crimea, pay reparations (via seized assets), and have all the Russian war criminals placed on trial -- and this is just the starting point. As noted by numerous sources, the situation with Musk goes beyond not providing Starlink in the occupied areas. Musk also refused to provide Starlink services in other parts of Ukraine to allow coordination of rescue & medical services when he attempted to high-jack the United States government to pay more than 10x the going prices for service and terminals. After talking with Putin, Musk publicly proclaimed his "peace plan" numerous times -- which was basically just the Kremlin talking points (i.e. Ukraine should just surrender and give Russia whatever it wants) -- notably this occurred after Musk spoke with Putin. Musk is also two faced -- which is about what you expect from a drug-addled tech idiot. It is now clear that he met with Putin and with other Russian military and diplomatic officials as well. Musk directly told Pentagon officials that he met with these Russians when he was trying to high-jack the U.S. government over Starlink in Ukraine. This was Musk trying to forcefully push his (meaning the Kremlin's) peace plan by using strong arm tactics. It failed. Yet, of course, Musk the clown later denies that he met with Putin. This is just a lie -- like his many others. No wonder the U.S. military and government is quite nervous at dealing with Musk who regularly becomes unhinged and reverses direction on a whim while spewing continuous mis-truths and fiction.
excellent expose highlighting what yours truly has obviously concluded: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/08/28/elon-musks-shadow-rule Elon Musk’s Shadow Rule How the U.S. government came to rely on the tech billionaire—and is now struggling to rein him in.
Just Musk turning Twitter into an anti-scientific shiatshow. Scientists used to love Twitter. Thanks to Elon Musk, they’re giving up on it https://www.latimes.com/business/st...er-thanks-to-elon-musk-theyre-giving-up-on-it In the first couple of years of the COVID-19 pandemic, Peter Hotez, an expert in vaccines and tropical medicine at Baylor University, found Twitter to be “a useful and at times almost essential tool for timely and important exchange of information.” The platform banned the most aggressive anti-vaccine and anti-science trolls, leaving a relatively safe space “for mainstream physicians, epidemiologists, and biomedical scientists to share their unpublished findings” or make others aware of recent postings on professional sites. After Elon Musk acquired the site in October 2022, he reopened its gates to trolls trying to counteract sound science with misinformation and outright lies and attacking responsible researchers with harassment and death threats. (He has also rebranded the site as “X,” for no discernible reason.) Twitter has become such a toxic place that you almost wonder, when is it no longer constructive to post on it. — Timothy Caulfield, University of Alberta “Now it’s just a cesspool of trolls and bots” dispensing hate, Hotez says. He no longer allows users to post replies to his tweets because of the trolls’ torrent of “death threats and fascination with Nazi and other hate symbols.” And he has reduced all his activities online. Hotez is not alone in mourning the disintegration of this once-indispensable social media platform. Scientists are abandoning X in droves, according to a recent survey by Nature. Of the survey respondents, “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.” The survey attributed the decline in usage to Musk’s “largely unpopular changes to Twitter, including cutting down on content moderation; ditching its ‘blue-check’ verification system in favor of one that grants paying members additional clout and privileges; charging money for access to data for research; [and] limiting the number of tweets users can see.” And it was conducted before Musk said the platform would eliminate the ability to block harassers. Concerns about the decline of X as a source of reliable information extends beyond the scientific and academic communities. During the apparent coup attempt in Russia in June, journalists noticed its relative uselessness at helping them find real-time, breaking information from the ground and sifting fact from fakery, due in part to Musk’s trashing of its account verification system. Public safety officials such as weather forecasters and emergency managers have expressed fears that the site’s deterioration will interfere with their efforts to disseminate urgent messages to residents of a crisis zone and inundate them instead with dangerous misinformation from unverified but seemingly genuine accounts. Sure enough, during the Maui fires, X quickly became filled with conspiracy theories about the disaster’s cause. Still, it’s in the scientific and academic communities where Twitter’s onetime promise seems to have evaporated the most. Only a few years ago, using Twitter “became almost the norm,” says Timothy Caulfield, an expert in science communication at the University of Alberta and a veteran debunker of pseudoscience. “Academics and scholars were encouraged to go to places like Twitter to build their community, to disseminate their research and to create content the general public, policy-makers and the media could access.” As long ago as 2014, Twitter stood out in a Nature survey as a general, nontechnical social media site that researchers could consult on their own initiative to follow discussions, discover peers and content, post their own work and follow and comment on scientific discussions. By late 2022, in the pre-Musk period, more than a third of all scientific papers were getting tweeted, according to a group of European researchers; in the first 12 months of the pandemic, they found, “more than half of all journal articles on COVID-19 ... were mentioned at least once on Twitter.” Despite the political discord caused by the pandemic, Twitter remained a valued “sounding board, megaphone and common room,” Nature reported last December, calling the platform “a place to broadcast research findings, debate issues in academia and interact with people who they wouldn’t normally meet up with.” By then, however, scientists were already anxious about the platform’s continued value as a communications tool. Almost immediately after taking ownership of Twitter on Oct. 27, Musk eviscerated its content moderation team. On Nov. 23, Twitter announced that it is “no longer enforcing the COVID-19 misleading information policy,” which had been in place since early 2021 and was crucial in suppressing dangerous disinformation about the pandemic. For some researchers, the last straw was a Dec. 11 Musk tweet in which he stated, “My pronouns are prosecute/Fauci.” The tweet did more than mock the LGBTQ+ rights movement, members of which often post their preferred pronouns online; it aligned Musk with the witless efforts of right-wingers like Florida’s buffoonish Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, to turn Anthony Fauci, a revered expert in virology and immunology, into a villain — even a putative criminal — because of his advocacy of sound anti-pandemic policies. University of Washington biologist Carl T. Bergstrom wrote on the social media platform Mastodon that Musk’s tweet was “the straw that broke the camel’s back” for him, prompting him to leave Twitter. “You can’t have meaningful and productive scientific collaboration on a platform run by a right-wing troll who denies science when its results are inconvenient to him and just simply to hear his audience cheer,” Bergstrom wrote. Fauci had already received death threats from members of this benighted group, resulting in the government placing him under the protection of armed federal agents. Asked about the Musk tweet, Fauci labeled Twitter, accurately, “a cesspool of information.” Musk’s vast reach on Twitter, Fauci said, “stirs up a lot of hate in people who have no idea why they’re hating — they’re hating because somebody like that is tweeting about it.” That’s not to say that the platform was ever devoid of misinformation or even harassment, Hotez and Caulfield agree. But the tools existed to wean them out, and the balance of good versus bad tended to tip toward the former. “In the early days, 10% to 20% of the replies and engagement I got were negative — trolls and harassment,” Caulfield told me. “Now, it’s 90%, and for some of my posts, 100% — trolls, harassment, death threats.” Topics that have been infected with right-wing ideology bring out the most toxic responses, Caulfield says, such as vaccines, LGBTQ+ issues and climate change. Today the question in many scientists’ minds is where to find an alternative to X. There’s no scarcity of choices — the social media sites Mastodon, Spoutible, Bluesky and Threads (a service of Meta) have all offered themselves as Twitter-like platforms, as have many others. But none has yet come close to the critical mass of users that the old Twitter assembled, nor the ability to curate one’s own set of accounts to follow or followers to accept. Most lack the ease of use valued by experienced Twitter users. And the very abundance of options works against any one of them supplanting X in the near term. As a result, many scientists and other users are hanging on to X, hoping that a single alternative will emerge or, more optimistically, that X’s glide path will be reversed before it becomes utterly worthless. Caulfield, like many other users, already has found himself thinking harder before tweeting about research that might draw out the trolls, racists, Nazis and other ghouls whom Musk has welcomed back onto the platform. “Twitter has become such a toxic place that you almost wonder, when is it no longer constructive to post on it,” Caulfield says. “It’s gotten really dark. I’ve always thought that if we leave, we just make room for more trolls, more misinformation, more rage, and to have science-informed content on Twitter remains important. You don’t want the dark forces to win. That’s still my position, but I’m wavering.”
Yes, we know all this "science". Most of the public science now is political crap. Caulfield is a great example of it. He is not a scientist anymore, just a nice public figure, a talking head. Remember Fauci, the Mr. Science himself? What a shit show it was!
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Let's see X/Twitter's response to requests to suspend the account of Pride Flag Killer. An account which had endless hate posts which obviously violated Twitter's written policies. First the X/Twitter response - "“After reviewing the available information, we want to let you know [the account] hasn’t broken our safety policies.” Only when media outlets poured attention on X/Twitter's absurd response was the account taken down. X took two days to suspend account of suspect in Pride flag killing https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/23/tech/x-account-pride-flag-killing-suspect/index.html X has suspended an account that posted numerous anti-gay and antisemitic posts and was used by the man accused of killing store owner Lauri Carleton over her display of a Pride Flag. But the account had remained live two days after law enforcement publicly confirmed its existence on the platform formerly known as Twitter. The social media company finally suspended the account Wednesday evening. Alejandra Caraballo with the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard Law School posted on X Wednesday that she reported the account’s content, but received a reply from the company indicating: “After reviewing the available information, we want to let you know [the account] hasn’t broken our safety policies.” As CNN reported, the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s office said on Monday that the suspected killer — who himself was shot and killed in a gun fight with police — used X, as well as Gab, a platform popular among far-right extremists. The X account used by the suspect contained a pinned tweet with an image of a Pride Flag set on fire. The account also contained other anti-LGBTQ and anti-Semitic material, as well as posts referring to police as using “sociopathic schemes.” A request for comment to X regarding why the account remained active generated an auto-reply from the company indicating: “We’ll get back to you soon.” Approximately 30 minutes after CNN’s query, the account was suspended. Under past leadership, X was typically quick to suspend accounts associated with violence. It was not clear if the suspension of the account was a result of CNN’s query. Elon Musk, who owns X, laid off about 80% of the company’s staff over the past year, including a large number of employees who had worked in the company’s compliance department.