Musk offers to buy Twitter

[Herdfan]

Every time a hyperpartisan rabid Republican brings up the president's son's laptop...

Are you implying there is nothing to the story?

 

[Cmaier]

Let’s try to keep the Tech Talk part of the forum mostly free of politics and get back on topic if we can.

 

[Eric]

Are you implying there is nothing to the story?

No, I'm implying it's not THE story that for some reason has Republicans losing their shit more than a war, more than the capital riots and more than an "actual" sitting president who spent his term sowing doubt, racism and mistrust in the entire country.

Sorry but it's just that people can't take it seriously when it's so blatantly hypocritical.

 

[Eric]

Let’s try to keep the Tech Talk part of the forum mostly free of politics and get back on topic if we can.

Just caught after my post but noted, I'm done on that topic.

 

[DT]

Let’s try to keep the Tech Talk part of the forum mostly free of politics and get back on topic if we can.

I mean, it is about a laptop ...


(I'll see myself out)

 

[SuperMatt]

New York Post for the Hunter laptop story. Twitter locked their account until they removed the story.

Twitter Still Blocking a NY Post Story Based on Alleged Hunter Biden Emails, Newspaper’s Account Remains Frozen

Twitter is inconsistently applying policy to a series of unconfirmed reports by the New York Post about Joe Biden's son Hunter.

variety.com

You know the one that came out in October of 2020 and was dismissed as Russian propaganda by most of the media. The same one that the NYT finally said it was true and the WaPo called it an "opportunity for a reckoning".

And for some reason they still don't understand why their public trust is so low.

This is inaccurate... Twitter did NOT block their account until they removed the story. They unblocked it and left the story up. If you actually read the article (yes a novel concept):

Yesterday, CEO Jack Dorsey admitted blocking URLs without context was “wrong,” and the company said it was revising its policies on sharing hacked materials. A Twitter spokesperson said it was allowing the NY Post’s Hunter Biden-Burisma story to be shared “because the information had spread across the internet and could no longer be considered private,” per the New York Times.

The New York Post’s Twitter account continues to be locked, after the social net froze it Wednesday over violations of the hacked-materials policy. “We do not retroactively change enforcement decisions, so the NY Post’s account will be unlocked as soon as they delete the earlier Tweets which we indicated were violations,” a Twitter spokeswoman told Variety. But Twitter did retroactively change its decision on at least two of the Post’s stories in unblocking them.

I bolded the most relevant information for those too lazy to read something other than a headline. You ignored all the context in this story: It was based on a “hacked content” policy that likely would have applied to something like the Pentagon papers or Wikileaks too. The intent of the policy is to prevent hackers from stealing private data and use Twitter to distribute it. Twitter changed the policy after this event.

Under Twitter’s revised hacked-materials policy, it will no longer block or remove such links “unless it is directly shared by hackers or those acting in concert with them” and will instead “label tweets to provide context instead of blocking links from being shared on Twitter.” Currently, Twitter is not appending any such label to tweets linking to the Post’s Hunter Biden/Burisma stories. A company rep said additional details of the new policy “are coming soon.”

This was NOT about blocking right-wing content. But once you get the right-wing grievance machine going, there’s no stopping it. Twitter definitely made a mistake, but they fixed it immediately. Definitely a self-PWN from Twitter, but the fact that right-wingers use this as an excuse to claim Twitter is biased against them is moronic.

And maybe I’m not supposed to discuss politics here (although let’s face it - you can’t discuss big tech without it crossing into politics, which was something the Weaselbots at MacRumors never figured out), but:
A) I didn’t bring it up and
B) I do not like allowing people to spread lies without debunking them. We cannot have an honest discussion if people start with lies.

PS - To counter some other false claims in the post I replied to: The information on Hunter Biden’s laptop was, in fact, modified by others after the fact. Because of that, none of the information can be trusted to be authentic.

https://wapo.st/3EiXQEn

(paywall removed)

“The experts found the data had been repeatedly accessed and copied by people other than Hunter Biden over nearly three years,” our report explained, with those we spoke with being unable to “reach definitive conclusions about the contents as a whole, including whether all of it originated from a single computer or could have been assembled from files from multiple computers and put on the portable drive.”
For example:

“[An expert] also found records on the drive that indicated someone may have accessed the drive from a West Coast location in October 2020, little more than a week after the first New York Post stories on Hunter Biden’s laptop appeared.”
“Over the next few days, somebody created three additional folders on the drive, titled, ‘Mail,' ‘Salacious Pics Package’ and ‘Big Guy File’ — an apparent reference to Joe Biden.”

 

[Cmaier]

 

[Eric]

Then he'll finally be able to ban the guy who keeps posting his jet locations.

 

[DT]

Then he'll finally be able to ban the guy who keeps posting his jet locations.

OMG, hahaha, maybe it's all about that. Option1, pay the kid $100K to remove this posts, Option 2, spend $43 billion and kick the kid off ...

 

[Cmaier]

OMG, hahaha, maybe it's all about that. Option1, pay the kid $100K to remove this posts, Option 2, spend $43 billion and kick the kid off ...

BTW, where’s he getting $43 billion from? He doesn’t have $43 billion.

 

[Renzatic]

Problem is, first thing he’ll do is “free speech”-ize it. He can do a lot of damage to society on the way down.

It won't do any more damage than what's already been done, but we'll get a good working example of it along the way.

 

[Renzatic]

BTW, where’s he getting $43 billion from? He doesn’t have $43 billion.

He's currently worth $226 billion. I imagine there's just enough liquid assets available to him to make the purchase.

 

[ronntaylor]

BTW, where’s he getting $43 billion from? He doesn’t have $43 billion.

It's all a classic Pump 'N Dump scheme for the asshole.

 

[Chew Toy McCoy]

OMG, hahaha, maybe it's all about that. Option1, pay the kid $100K to remove this posts, Option 2, spend $43 billion and kick the kid off ...

The upsetting thing about option 2 is if he did drop $43 billion on buying Twitter, within 6 months that $43 billion will somehow be back in his bank account (or stocks, or whatever)….and probably more than that, and probably sooner.

Can somebody please show me what 6 months of hard work worth $43 billion looks like.

 

[Renzatic]

The upsetting thing about option 2 is if he did drop $43 billion on buying Twitter, within 6 months that $43 billion will somehow be back in his bank account (or stocks, or whatever)….and probably more than that, and probably sooner.

Can somebody please show me what 6 months of hard work worth $43 billion looks like.

Just look up some pictures of hedge fund managers.

 

[Cmaier]

He's currently worth $226 billion. I imagine there's just enough liquid assets available to him to make the purchase.

But:

Musk Says He Has the Means to Buy Twitter, but Investors Aren’t So Sure (Published 2022)

Elon Musk could pledge his Tesla shares, borrow from banks or team up with private equity to raise the funds. Each option comes with caveats.

www.nytimes.com

 

[lizkat]

Every time a hyperpartisan rabid Republican brings up the president's son's laptop...

Yeah. By the time the rabid end of the GOP gets done beating something to death with all kinds of innuendo about some murky situation --pick one, any one-- really no one cares any more except the people still waving the stick over the dead horse, and the beancounters in media still making a buck off the show.

That's a little different to the "public trust" in newspapers being low, and a little difficult to disentangle from the cause of that low trust as well.

Lately the sideshow about Hunter Biden seems to me a distraction, possibly from the fact that the fundamentals of the US economy are doing quite well in terms of jobs being added and people still spending money into it, despite concerns in the short term about inflation. I can't get too excited about this level of inflation because the fundamentals are different from inflationary periods we've experienced before.

The Fed will take rates well in hand, and even now states are considering gas tax holidays in order to take some of the pressure off kitchen table budgets. Now if we could just get that moron in Texas to quit redundantly inspecting veggies coming into the USA... maybe the tomatoes and avocados wouldn't cost quite the extra penny they are likely to in the very short run.

The other thing about pounding on Hunter Biden, Hunter Biden, Hunter Biden is pretty risky for the GOP, even though I get it that some in the GOP may regard it as a song of praise to Donald Trump. Trump may enjoy it, too, but it reminds a whole lot of other people that one of Trump's two impeachments was about his having schemed to withhold military aid to Ukraine, in hopes that Ukraine would"do a favor" to Trump and help dig up dirt to discredit his political opponent, Joe Biden.

This isn't the most politically advantageous time for the GOP to remind us that Trump tried to stick it to Ukraine and its ability to defend itself, just in hopes of making some personal political gains. But then the GOP lost all sense of logic along with its ethical compass when it rebooted its core principles to one that boils down to faking participation in the cult worship of Trump that is still exhibited by his base, all in hopes of retaining their loyalty at the polls. The USA is not on the side of sticking it to Ukraine... and the GOP would do well to keep that in mind.

Let’s try to keep the Tech Talk part of the forum mostly free of politics and get back on topic if we can.

Sorry to have contributed to the digression....

 

[Yoused]

Would be very bad news if he succeeds.

Just wondering why you think that?

Perhaps alt.noise.twitter – when was the last time you visited Usenet? Seems like 90% of the country has no idea what it even is. That is what Musk would do to twitter.

 

[Eric]

Another theory...

https://www.twitter.com/i/web/status/1514816433389068292/

 

[diamond.g]

Another theory...

https://www.twitter.com/i/web/status/1514816433389068292/

Isn't pump and dump illegal?