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Notes -
https://www.independent.co.uk/space/elon-musk-russell-brand-caroline-dinenage-mps-twitter-b2415346.html
https://twitter.com/CountDankulaTV/status/1704607541852844072/photo/1
I think that it is important. But I am at loss of words so I am not even sure where to begin to make it effortpost. It is outrageous, indefensible and at first I though it was satire.
Do think this is rogue action? (my guess no), Will there be punishment for the MP for overstepping greatly any boundaries? (also no).
By all accounts Russell brand is a scum bag whether he technically committed rape or the women technically consented. But, and here’s the but, powerful parliamentary chairwomen do not need to be personally intervening to see justice served unless he’s not being charged with the crime(s) of which he stands accused due to corruption/political interference/whatever.
He’s a garden variety scumbag who, guilty or not, I wouldn’t allow to date my daughter. He should face legal penalties in a court of law and the government shouldn’t be pressuring extrajudicial sanctions onto him.
It's unsurprising the government is doing it, but it's also very much against the values it's supposed to defend. Ofc it makes perfect sense how it behaves, a 'democratic' government is more often than not a government by the bureaucracy for the bureaucracy, wearing 'democracy' as a skin suit.
That aside: a rather hilarious detail surfaced on twitter that sums up what's wrong with women these days.
/images/16952976384799938.webp
I distrusted the guy from the get-go based on vibes. (my vibe module says "wannabe cult leader, drop a grenade on him from a drone). Learning he was pushing OWS style socialism nonsense cca 2008 and is now on completely another bandwagon and that he was also dating 16 year olds at age.. 31 is unsurprising.
Yeah, the about-face here is just so exactly on the nose of the sort of thing that leaves me utterly repulsed by the impoverished language people have to discuss sexual malfeasance. Pretty much any guy could immediately tell you that Brand was going to be a lascivious womanizer, this is completely obvious from his physiognomy and demeanor, to the point where he's cast accordingly in movies. But we live in a time where the prevailing attitudes are that you can't judge people based on such surface-level appearances and you definitely can't judge any sex that people say is consensual, what whaddya whaddya. Upon hearing that he's exactly the guy that I would have expected, my sympathy for the "victims" is substantially dampened, while the people that would have told me that you can't judge now want him cast as a vicious rapist rather than just the exploitive perv that he always obviously was.
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What boundaries?
Musk wasn't legally required to do anything.
Someone asked him a question.
That question was asked as a political stunt, sure. That's what politicians do.
The point is that the politician have absolutely no right to even ask such question in official capacity. Especially the make sure they don't monetize. Which implies some kind of social media obligation to comply.
Legislators have the right to ask questions relevant to potential legislation (and to compel answers if the person being asked is within the jurisdiction) - - in Con Law textbooks this is called the investigative power of the legislature. Since the UK has no written constitution, everything is a potential subject matter for legislation by the Westminster Parliament (and regulation of offensive speech on social media platforms is, in fact, a current subject of active political debate). So she isn't violating any constitutional principle here. She is being a grandstanding idiot, and if I lived in Gosport it would make me significantly less likely to re-elect her. OTOH, in the UK right now everyone hates Russel Brand except the actual fans of his show, so I'm sure she will gain votes on net.
She implies her desire to see him demonetized without having any kind of lawful reason to. I am fairly sure that the state wanting to harm someone without any kind of trial or court order breaks at least some kind of british principles. Britain is going crazy on wokism though - even more extreme than the US so who knows.
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Why do they not have that right?
Again, they absolutely don't have the right to say 'and if you don't dump him there will be legal sanctions against your company'.
Or, who knows if they have that right in the UK, I imagine there's be a whole thing about to figure that out if they tried.
But just asking the question? Politicians do stuff like that all the time.
If you want politicians to not be allowed to make public statements disapproving of things, that would be a pretty huge change to how things work.
Yes, it is threatening when politicians make public statements disapproving of things, because it implies that the government might take action against those things. Yes, this is in some sense a coercive abuse of a powerful position (like, you know, a boss who tries to cajole their employees into sleeping with them, which apparently we're all fine with).
Nonetheless, it happens a thousand times every day, it's one of the main things politicians do.
If you think that's wrong, then mention it any other time.
If you think it's fine normally but want to call it out when it impinged on one of your issues, that's arguments as soldiers.
Asking what are you doing about X implies that X is both your responsibility and you have obligation to do something. But it is obvious that they don't have that obligation - otherwise she would have just cited the required law.
Also she seems to be doubling down with one of her letters.
My explanation moves to - she is the one woman in UK Brand refused to fuck. Or he fucked her and she caught feelings but he threw her away as a napkin.
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Dear Dame Caroline,
I can confirm that Mr. Brand is able to monetize his content on our network and will continue to be able to do so unless his content is found to violate our terms and conditions as listed here: <link>
Please refer to the same document for <company>'s policy regarding inappropriate and illegal behavior on our site.
Sincerely,
Some Person, PR Drone, <company>
Was that so hard?
Here are the X rules for monetization. I see a few avenues of attack if parliament wants to throw the book at him.
I'm not too familiar with the timeline, but if he committed sexual assault at the same time he was earning Twitter revenue, then technically he was in violation of the terms and conditions. (This one is extremely nitpicky.)
Would you want to be the PR drone responsible for telling an MP that nothing Russell Brand did is directly counter to X's purpose or principles? I wouldn't.
Seems fairly easy. Just say if he is guilty of these charges then I trust you will prosecute him and he will be unable to earn revenue while imprisoned.
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Musk has appealed to this provision to justify cooperation with EU wrongthink laws, meaning Tweets that would be legal in the US but not in Germany are not protected by TOS- X can and has cooperated to help legal authorities punish those who engage in that even if it were completely legal in the US. I don't think this provision has ever been used to refer to behavior outside of Twitter.
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It seems terrible in that allegations are enough to demonetize someone who earns income from the internet meaning their ability to fully defend themselves (legally and in court of public opinion) is curtailed.
I hope Dame Caroline is accused of something, loses her income streams as a result, cannot defined herself, and goes to prison for something of which she is innocent.
Edit: I don’t know if Brand is innocent, guilty, or somewhere in between. I do know that what Dame is doing is wrong.
If you want to nationalize a content hosting platform that no one is allowed to be kicked off of, or set up a decentralized Tor-alike platform with no moderation possible in principle, or etc., I am 100% in favor.
If we're going to use for-profit private companies as markets, then I don't know, the invisible hand of the market pretty much determines what happens, and a lot of consumers don't like people they think are probably rapists.
It seems just fundamentally incompatible to me to want these platforms to both be private for-profit enterprises governed by market forces, and to enshrine absolutist free-speech principles. I mean, it would be nice if that was something the market did on its own, but obviously it doesn't.
That's why we have a government with a constitution and a Bill of Rights, because those are the things that won't happen spontaneously if things are left to market forces alone.
Something that increasingly sticks in my craw is modern socprogs appealing to the "invisible hand of the market" whenever something like this happens - that is, when they're not accusing free markets of being corrupt, predatory, immoral, unsustainable, and demand more "ethical" dictats to be handed down from authorities.
If the accusations against Brand are made public, and his audience decides to give him 0 dollars the next morning, that is the invisible hand at work.
If a group of journalists, activists, and politicians bypass audience response and go straight to spooking management to cut him off, that is preempting feedback from the market. You are not letting the hand do its thing; you are calling God and demanding he intervene precisely because your faith in letting the market decide doesn't exist.
As if the decisions and personal preferences of Youtube, Rumble, Amazon, Steam constitute 'the market', and all the rabble like you and I don't count. As if those people (their CEOs or their beuraucratic layers that weigh in on these controversies) are what we are referring to when 'let the market decide' is invoked.
"Jeff Bezos doesnt like Confederate flags because racism, and now he has banned their merchandising on his storefront! See, you free-market right-wing capitalists? The market decided! You have literally nothing to complain about unless you're a hypocrite. Consumers are rejecting your racism."
That's been a decade-long refrain by now, and it has not gotten less idiotic or obfuscatory (by intention, I've come to believe). I'd wager that all these attempts to cut people off from their sources of income, to appeal directly to a storefront's management to have something taken off the shelf, to algorithmically suppress 'bad content' and 'bad people', are actually driven by fear. The fear that if you went hands-off and let the chips lie where they fell, progressives would have to face the truth that their shit is not as popular as they think it is, and oh gawd these peddlers of hate, sexism, racism, PUA-ism, COVID misinformation, election denialism might have more appeal than us! Or at least enough to make us sweat.
That must be psychically turbulent to experience, so best take steps to avoid that scenario. Just cut off some heads and say "Consumers were begging me to do it! Nothing unnatural occurred at all. Im just following the will of the people". And it really explains everything between the night of Trump's 2016 win and what we see today.
This kind of hypocrisy has been in the playbook of the activist left for decades; eg "Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules."
They don't believe in Christianty/Capitalism or whatever, but they will appeal to these things when it is useful and then immediately discard them as credible.
Hardly unique to the activist left: "your rules, enforced fairly > your rules, enforced unfairly" is heard commonly even around here.
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It kinds of sounds like you are implying that CEO's shouldn't try d to guess where the market is going and adjust their strategy ahead of time, they should wait until they've already lost a bunch of money and brand equity and then scramble to correct afterwards.
That doesn't seem like an efficient way to run a company, or a market.
Or, alternately, you are implying that large billion-dollar CEOs make their business decisions based on their personal moral ethics instead of what they think will make them the most money, to which I can only reply with an appropriate meme.
The market's not perfectly efficient, but it's more efficient than that. If there were some massive consumer demand for racism and accused rapists and so on and so forth, then all the right-wing social media startups that try to provide a platform for it wouldn't keep fizzling out into embarrassing clouds of nothing.
That's not a reply, that's empty mockery, both low-effort and needlessly inflammatory.
While you're reasonably good at padding the wordcount, I'm increasingly concerned with what I can only characterize as a continuing pattern of low effort posting. You show up to contradict people, including people who have put a lot of careful evidence and argument together, but about half the time you post there's no substance at all in your reply--just, well, hollow sneering. You dress it up well! And tone matters, here. But keeping just to the edge of the rules is not the goal. The goal is discussion, and one thing that undermines productive discussion is disingenuous or sneering engagement.
Combined with your username, this sort of thing pings the troll-o-meter really hard. Maybe... aim for quality rather than quantity? Aim less for policing other people's wrongthink, and aim more toward contributing your own actual thoughts?
But certainly don't post shit that boils down to "my response to you is only disdain." If that's your response to an idea, then you have failed to adequately steelman your interlocutor.
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Are they anticipating where the market is going, or where the ADL, NYT, and advertisers are going? Of course any CEO is going to factor them into their business proceedings. But it leaves the very likely possibility that the CEO is not demonetizing people or terminating deals because he's worried about his userbase rebelling against him and jumping ship, but because he's worried about a hit piece, ad networks getting the willies, or being subjected to all sorts of extended, motivated muckraking if they decide otherwise. CEOs are also not a separate species from humans; they socialize, fret, have principles with about as much 'integrity' as anybody else, and are subjected to many of the same social pressures most other people deal with, even if their venues and peers are gilded upper-class. I don't think they mind losing some money if they already have a lot, somebody else is willing to cover their losses with ESG funds, or if they can sit in security with no viable competition. And this should go without saying, but they too can be stupid.
I contend that when people refer to the free market, they usually mean a decision or assessment gleamed by the aggregate, collective spending decisions of consumers en masse - if a plurality of citizens respond positively or negatively to a product, as expressed by how much money they threw at it, and if it's enough to keep production going. You are pointing to a small cadre of Lords and Tastemakers who either step in before the product hits shelves - or has them removed because Sprint Mobile doesn't like having a booth next to it or whatever - while using that same term. These are clearly very different things. And if you insist on using that framing with justifications such as "Well, of course CEO anticipations and decision making are part of the market!", that's... fine, I guess. I can't even say you're wrong on any technical level.
But be clear. Because this always comes off as a low-effort gotcha. If the stuff I want to reward or patron are being removed from the menu by executive or committee's political fiat, the free market did not operate as most people would understand it. And yet, many progs will insist it did, if only for the cynical retainment of the feel-good glow around "every voice must be heard" and "power to the people" sentiments you need to half-heartedly pay lip service to so people don't see what's really going on.
Remember that the Artist Formerly Known As Twitter is a (mostly) advertising-funded social network, so the advertisers are the customers. Russel Brand and his fanbase are the product. Recalling a possibly-contaminated product before confirming whether or not it really is contaminated is very normal commercial behaviour. Trying to get ahead of your customers by responding to a press campaign run by the media they read (which is the NYT for bigcorp marketing execs) is also normal corporate behaviour.
Musk is trying to move to a subscription model because he wants to run a social media network with free speech for right-wing American witches (but not left-wing investigative journalists or dissidents in the dictatorships where his other companies do business). He knows that the only people willing to advertise on media which is full of witches are alt-med and crypto scammers, and is trying to avoid that trap.
Distortion of media based on advertiser preferences is as old as media. "Married fathers are doofuses" predates modern feminism - it happened because the TV sitcoms where the meme originated were funded by adverts for packaged detergent (hence the term "soap opera") and the advertisers wanted to appeal to the women buying the detergent.
How would advertisers be "poisoned" by "consuming" Brand's fanbase?
Advertisers get publicly called out for advertising with 'problematic' people or groups pretty regularly. You can often see it happening on the front page of Reddit when there's some new scandal around someone who hasn't been fully demonetized yet.
That creates negative brand associations that are like hot coals in the face of any director of marketing for a large company. Avoiding and smoothing over shit like that is a large fraction of their job description.
One screencap of a Coke advertisement sitting above a Brand tweet on the left, with a screencap of a lurid accounting from an anonymous accuser on the right, is all it takes to make a 'Why is Coke supporting rapists?' meme that will reach the frontpage.
This will get X and angry letter from Coke, which they'd rather avoid.
And again, none of that is really good, but it is based on the fear of how normal consumers who see that meme will alter their purchasing decisions because of it. It's how the free market works in our particular hell world.
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I think my point here is that these have never, actually, been different things in practice.
Libertarian types talk about the invisible hand as though it were the abstract ideal case where every consumer has access to every possible product and perfect knowledge to make the best choice for themselves and products only ever succeed or fail based on those choices.
But they also invoke the invisible hand to justify real things that happened in real markets, which never, ever work like that.
Those two version of the term are inextricably confounded with each other already, at least in political discourse.
So it's an isolated demand for rigor if you point at the market responding to things you don't like and say 'that's not the invisible hand, there's real politik involved that's different from the ideal hypothetical case that term refers to!', then the next day invoke the invisible hand to justify some outcome of the market that you like.
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The invisible hand of the market isn't exactly the relevant force in play when government officials are checking in with a company regarding whether someone will rid them of the meddlesome misinformer. In fact, one might say that it's the entirely visible hand of the government.
If the government were using or even threatening to use legislation or the courts to attack or compel the company, than sure.
I would like that hypothetical world a lot less than the one we're actually in.
In the world we're actually in, the politician is just trying to publicly embarrass the company, with the threat being that consumers who agree with their politics will turn against the company and use it less. The threat is to their brand equity, not their liberty.
Which is what they were doing and why the Biden administration has been forced by a court to stop talking to social media companies.
I don't think this case illustrates that, but yes the government has been threatening for a while.
There is a big difference between a law enforcement agency asking questions and an individual legislator doing so, in that one carries an implied threat which the other doesn't. Dame Caroline's committee can issue strongly worded reports, and it can recommend future legislation, but it can't arrest or prosecute anyone.
As I said: "I don't think this case illustrates that, but yes the government has been threatening for a while."
I think I posted the link as a response to another person. On mobile and can't check.
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I'd like to answer but I don't know what court order you're talking about, can you link?
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-likely-violated-first-amendment-covid-19-pandemic-federal-judge-says
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This comment just seems crazy to me. Here you have a government official pressuring a private company to censor someone and your response is “nationalize a platform.”
The government doesn't cut off water and electricity to people accused of sex crimes. It doesn't prevent them from using the roads. it even provides them public defenders.
Politicians can put pressure on private companies with rhetoric, without actually enforcing any laws on them, because private companies are dependent on profits and political rhetoric can shift consumer opinions.
When a program is actually run by the state, it at least theoretically has to follow the law, and politicians have to actually defend any changes to that law to the voters.
And, like I said... 'or a decentralized system', if you don't like a nationalized one.
Politicians “just asking” is never solely just putting reputational pressure.
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It's amazing that seemingly overnight, a norm was kayfabed into existence that people accused of sex pestery should be deplatformed/demonetized off all social media. Like this has always been the case, and has been applied in a politically neutral way. Despite, to my knowledge, this is literally the first time it's ever happened.
The political motivations for this are naked as can be. Even in the initial reporting, it was included in the article that none of the women chose to come forward, they were sought out by reporters. At least that's what I heard reported at The Hill, still can't read the initial article due to paywall and archive links not working for me for some reason.
It wasn't out of nowhere, I was telling everyone this would become standard fare to unperson dissidents after Alex Jones, and there we are.
I mean, yes and no. Yes, the fact that the rules were being made up as we went so that anybody against The Narrative could be unpersoned was plain as day for anyone with a functioning long or even short term memory. Or any actual principles at all, that weren't subject to immediate and thoughtless reversal when the next NPC update rolled out.
But no in that, the powers that be are pretending that isn't what they are up to, and that the "rule" being broken is some byzantine TOS violation about "harmful behavior off platform". As though that rule always existed, and was always enforced in this way. And, naturally, since they dictate the narrative, quibbling over whether Brand's behavior actually violates this rule is what has sucked all the air out of the room. Not discussion about how the rule is complete bullshit, when were the TOS updated to include it, and has it ever been invoked in this way before?
Maybe I'm in a bubble but it seems to me that at this point people can see right through the bullshit and focus is rather on how power is operating it's arbitrary than any discussion of legitimacy. Who even has the color of legitimacy?
My Twitter feed is full of the letter from that MP trying to give marching orders and the risible apparent defects in the evidence against Brand.
If feel as if we are way, way past the formal arguments about the law. Remember "it's a private company they can do what they want", or my favorite "free speech is entirely contained in the first amendment therefore private censorship is A-OK"? Venerable echoes of the ancient past by now.
Everyone knows and can plainly see they're making it up as they go along.
You're in a bubble. Roughly half the people I know in real life, through family, hobbies or the kid's school, swallow this shit hook line and sinker. Your twitter feed is not real life.
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I mean, yes, in the past, well-known rapists and sexual harassers faced little to no economic and social consequences if they had enough power or popularity to being with, and continued to rape and harass people throughout long and successful careers.
The new way is very far from perfect, and since it's new there's a lot of refinement still needed.
But it is definitely better than the old way.
Of all the new progressive-led 'ways of doing things', are there any examples of one that got 'refined' and dialed down a bit from its prior fervor?
Will this refinement entail not trying to cut off people from their income based on public accusations made under anonymity and that nobody attempted to bring to court?
I mean, basically all of them?
Look at the Black Panthers to MLK, look at the Stonewall Riots to Ellen. It always starts with militancy and fringe extremists bringing an issue to light, and then moderates and respectability politics processing it into something palatable over a decade or three.
The Black Panthers were literally founded after the March on Washington.
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Aren't you basically agreeing with the parent? The extreme elements interact with the mainstream and get some of what they want. The extreme stays extreme, but over time, the mainstream moves further and further to the left, even though they never adopt the extreme policies wholesale.
I don't think so? I though OP was implying that leftist movements never get moderated from the initial extreme agitator incarnations, and I disagree.
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I said 'new', as in recent. What does a 'refinement' of #metoo in regards to wrongfully accused men look like? What does a refinement of antiracism in regards to making the OK gesture look like? If we're already admitting that some of this stuff in the zeitgeist has gotten unreasonable in its zeal, what are the 'sane' rollbacks we can all soon expect? And do you honestly expect progressives to acquiesce and go along with them?
I also do not share your take on the historical progressive stances being moderated over time. I would say many of them started moderate, or at least had a prior moderate incarnation it eventually arrived at (gay people are normal folk just like me and you wouldn't even be able to tell, dont judge somebody by their skin) and only got more extreme with their ambitions once they settled in and enjoyed the comfort of their power (drag shows for children, venerating blackness as unique and special).
Perhaps this is the 'refinement' you gesture towards? They've certainly done a magnificent job of grabbing the reigns of media and ensuring their takes are the only acceptable ones. That is a success story, in a way. And yet it does nothing to address any of my concerns with the fundamentals of their arguments and ideologies. I want them turned back, not grandfathered into respectability they'll proceed to exploit.
I think we were more sane and moderate about these things in previous decades, and progressives ruined that. Why should I wait for them to sort themselves out again?
Oh, you mean what refinements have been made to things that are more recent than the timeframe in which refinements happen.
Ok, well, maybe my framing of the question reveals my answer here. But to play along...
People supporting Johnny Depp and Al Franken way more than they did Harvey Weinstein and bill Cosby?
Literally that meme dying out in the course of a few months and no one talking about it anymore?
Yes, that was my thesis statement.
Yeah this is just ahistoric as far as I can tell.
Like, how old were you in the 80s? Do you actually remember the sequence of events? 'Gay people are normal folk and you can't even tell' came after 'It's genetic and we can't help it, pity us instead of persecuting us' which came after drag queens and queer bars rioting in the street and warring with cops.
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Ah yes, the progressive supremacist "right side of history" argument. The perfect thought terminating cliche to sidestep any inconvenient facts, debate, concern, new ways to abuse the system, or the obvious political motivations of any egregious act.
I guess you get points for not literally saying "right side of history", even if your argument is little more than that.
Pretty funny to use the phrase 'thought-terminating cliche' in a short post where you offer no position or argument or evidence besides that phrase.
If you disagree with my position and have something to say about the topic, please go ahead.
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You omit one big fact though - Russel Brand has raped and harassed no one.
Q: What's the difference between Brand's punishment and Hester Prynne's from The Scarlet Letter?
A: Even Prynne, who was nursing physical evidence of her offense, got a trial first.
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Damn, I didn't know you had the ability to definitively tell who has or hasn't raped and harassed people at a distance, you should really get a job in the criminal justice system.
Anyway - yeah, I agree that consumers having imperfect information and mistaken beliefs is one of the many distortionary factors that make capitalism not work so well in practice. But hey what can you do, consumers are going to act on their beliefs, true or not..
with this do you mean that the government is the consumer of X?
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Call me old fashioned but I prefer innocent till proven guilty in a court of law when it comes to punitive actions like suspending someone's income
So you think that employers should not be allowed to fire people unless a court finds justifiable cause to do so?
That is frankly a little bit too communist for me, but I at least appreciate teh direction you're going.
(obviously all economic relationships under capitalism are voluntary and a platform can dump people for any reason they want)
I think employers should have the right to fire pretty much at will. I simply don't think they should do so. Much like parents in the West have the right to kick their kids out of the house or make them pay rent when they turn 18, but it's still a terrible decision all around.
Certainly I'd expect higher standards at play than what's been the case with Brand.
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The MP in question is a Conservative ex-Minister (under Cameron, May and Johnson) while Brand is an anti-establishment Marxist (to the extent he is anything). So if there is a political motivation it's might not map exactly to what people may think.
This is like Google confessing to the censorship of the World Socialist Website to prove how neutral they are. The UK conservatives in particular are an especially bad example of opposition to the woke establishment.
Conservatives (most of them at least) are the establishment, how "woke" they are varies. In many cases political stories in the UK are better explained by looking at establishment vs anti-establishment than left vs right.
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I get what you're saying, but in my perspective it's the same old story - establishment vs counter culture.
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The greatest Substack-era Yarvin piece is "Big Tech Has No Power At All". All of the hidden forces presumed to be exerting influence on Zuckerburg have been revealed in the open to be operating in the same way against Musk. It was only through sheer force of will that Elon was able to endure the onslaught -- at great personal cost. That 40 billion dollars is never coming back. Nobody who has to answer to shareholders could ever pull the moves Musk is making with X.
Never coming back? He has twitter. It's not like the $40 billion was put in a furnace. and also, Twitter Blue generates considerable revenue by now. same for Twitter Gold. People will willingly use big tech companies like Google and Facebook even when they know such companies willingly share private info with governments. I hope Musk succeeds in turning twitter into the much needed competition big tech is lacking.
Does it? Twitter Blue currently has around 700,000 subscribers, which means that Twitter Blue should be bringing in around $21m per quarter for Twitter. At this rate, it would take over 500 years for Twitter Blue revenues to cover the $44 billion acquisition cost. This doesn’t include advertising and other revenue, but it also doesn’t include operating costs either. Elon can probably get X running a profit, but he will never make back his initial investment.
https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/elon-musk-twitter-sharing-revenue-creators-ads-replies/652645/#:~:text=Based%20on%20current%20estimates%20(reduced,m%20per%20quarter%20for%20Twitter
This sounds like a very low estimate given that I have hundreds of checkmarked followers, yet my account is still very niche.
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how is this obtained? being private, twitter does not have to disclose this.
a valuation is a multiple of revenue . it's not like Elon needs to recoup the entire $44 billion with revenue. He can go public or resell it at some multiple ..maybe 30-50x or something if he can demonstrate rapid growth and profitability
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The ADL and its allies can keep the big advertisers away indefinitely. It's not quite clear why this is so, but I have two theories, lighter and darker:
Lighter: The entire advertising industry is ideologically captured and puts the desires of leftist ideological leaders over the well-being of their clients. Barriers to entry (in particular reputation and connections) are too high for any defector to take advantage.
Darker: This sort of advertising is worthless anyway, and the industry (though probably not all its clients) knows it. The whole thing is a transfer of consumer-products-company dollars to serve leftist ideological goals. There's no defectors because there's nothing to be gained by defecting.
I've always wanted to ask if your name is a futurama reference, because your black pills are so dense each pound of them weighs over ten thousand pounds.
My name is older than Futurama; it's a reference to Apple ][ nybble copy programs, and the tool used to cut a notch allowing you to use the back side of floppy disks (a 'nibbling tool').
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has there been any real research showing that ads being placed next to, say, fbi crime table tweets has any effect on anything?
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We have always been at war with eastasia ...
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