Must have been one of those useless 80% micro services. /s
Doesn't this have legal ramifications? I was pretty sure that studios etc. have contracts with companies like Twitter where Twitter guarantees some sort of effort to prevent copyrighted movies being uploaded in exchange of not being taken to court and held accountable.
There's a whole lotta comments on that thread about angering The Mouse, one pointing out that 'Musk thinks he's hardcore? He hasn't yet dealt with the angry Mouse'. And, downchain, there's a tweet posting the first 2:30 of Avatar (Disney), and many mentions of a bunch of the Fast & Furious films (Universal) posted in their entirety in 2:30 long clips.
Monday 10 AM will be interesting for the Twitter legal team. Oh, right, seems they were mostly fired . . .
On the one hand, I'm happy to see copyright systems breaking down! On the other: I sure hope those moderators and systems are down because they're currently being re-tasked with taking down child abuse media (and not, say, just completely shut down due to massive layoffs), otherwise that site is about to become horrifying.
I'm pretty pessimistic, given that they've cut their moderation teams so close to the bone. Asia-Pacific in particular has gone to near-zero, and that's an enormous source of CSE content. It's hard to believe that Twitter will really have much capability to handle this content (let alone responding to police reports about it) unless they do something to build this capability back up. On the other hand they chopped out some low-hanging fruit by removing hashtags and getting a burst of good PR, which seems good but probably not sustainable.
Seems like in the scheme of things the loss of moderation capability is the real story here, but I guess we can always be hopeful that the reality will match the short-term PR.
This seems like the kind of argument one invents when one has an axe to grind. Everyone agrees CSE on social networks needs to be moderated, there isn't a lot of controversy around it. I'm sure you didn't spend 50% of your time being angry about CSE moderation on Instagram last week, that doesn't mean all your other opinions are invalid.
You only need to look at Epstein to know that they're in on it. Best case they're happy to allow and enable and excuse it so long as there is money and power in it for them. Worst case they actively use it for blackmail and control and keeping their members in line.
This isn't a "conspiracy theory" and would not even be a new shocking fact about their behavior. It would actually be more surprising to learn the rulers who cheerfully conspire to start wars that kill hundreds of thousands of people and steal trillions of dollars from the commoners would draw the line at abusing a few more children. That is a baseless fringe theory that would require extraordinary evidence to substantiate.
This one is down, but there are plenty more movies linked just in the thread below that are still working at the time of writing. If this is indeed related to the layoffs (very conceivably so), this could easily spiral to a point where the objectively best option (financially, legally) for Musk would be to take the site offline asap.
If it actually came to that, he could just disable the videos/media feature.
I don't personally like Mr Musk, and I don't approve of how he has handled this takeover, but I wonder if some of those hurrying forth with negative predictions about every Twitter development are just saying what they hope happens. The blind praise is just as bad, of course.
(The 'some' people I am referring to isn't the parent commenter, btw. I'm referring to the news articles and (like the linked content) Twitter posts I see getting posted about this.)
I agree, I think it’s way too early to tell. It’s also interesting that pre-acquisition, I personally observed a widely shared sentiment that 7500 employees was an absurdly high number given the actual functionality of Twitter.
Sure, there is some element of disaster voyeurism to observing Twitter right now, and a lot of people surely do have vested interests (for any other medium, Twitter is a competitor for ad revenue, tech employees might be concerned that the layoffs might serve as an example,...) - but that concern was genuine as far as I can say. It's not my base case, but it is something I'd be concerned about if I was one of Musk's co-investors.
Disabling media wouldn't tackle nearly all the problems that a broken monitoring system could create, but you're right that it might demonstrate enough effort so that it's legally sane to keep the site up until you can fix it.
Where’s the proof that this automatic system ever existed before? I could upload a picture of a horse and say that since my account wasn’t taken down the antihorse system is malfunctioning.
Either destroy it or improve it in a materially important way.
Nate Silver has a good observation on the latter, "Mastodon seems like a honeytrap for hall-monitor personality types. Honestly if Elon gets all the hall monitors to migrate to Mastodon that might be his greatest contribution toward the betterment of humanity." https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1594350639844294656
Hmmm. Nate Silver got completely suckered by the R operation to flood the zone with RW-biased polls, predicting the "red wave" that never happened. He stated before the election that 'the averages would look more blue if they were based on the long-standing polling orgs', but made no appropriate weighting adjustment. Afterwards, he blamed his failure on the Dems not running a similar bogus operation to bias the averages & narrative. He got pretty roasted on Twitter for both. So no surprise that he would want to avoid the "hall monitor types".
The funny thing about Nate Silver is that the one thing he is famous for is using good, solid statistical analysis to get better results than most pollsters/predictors's gut opinions.
But then he got old/lazy/arrogant/whatever and started thinking that his gut opinions were worth something.
Nate is the same as he always was. It's just that other people have become more tribal and don't like when any of his output doesn't support their bias.
> The funny thing about Nate Silver is that the one thing he is famous for is using good, solid statistical analysis to get better results than most pollsters/predictors's gut opinions.
Yes, in that it's the public image that he crafted for himself, and a lot of gullible people believe(d). It wasn't ever really true though. I love this https://i.imgur.com/6Z9QQj3.jpeg despite it being a bit trollish, really dispels the idea that Nate had his finger on the pulse or that his 20% chance of Trump winning actually means he was right all along "and if you think otherwise then you're a math-denier".
What it shows is the pattern of a pretty typical political hack who, far from an impartial reporting of fact, is actually trying to make news and influence opinion to curry favor with segments of the ruling class. It wouldn't take Einstein to work out he was spouting total nonsense pretty quickly, but a lot of people read something they like, and hear the words "data", "logic", "science", and take that cue to switch their brains off.
What Nate Silver did -- what they all do -- is use fact and data and statistics to build their careers as influencers, if and where that intersects with telling the truth is only as a means to that end.
I don't get the impression from 538's podcasts. He certainly found their 'deluxe' model more compelling, but he was also open to the possibility of Democrats performing better than it. Twitter just seems like a bad platform to get nuance from.
(deluxe had R's at 55% for the Senate for example, slightly favored)
Particularly if you watch/listen to the model talk episodes (just Galen and Nate talking) they addressed these points many times.
I'm not sure Silver is right about the Mastodon thing (so far I'm enjoying Mastodon hugely; it's a bit like Titter was 15 years ago when I joined; that is, far better than modern Twitter), but he, _many, many times_, raised the possibility of a polling error in favour of the Republicans on the 538 podcast, and did also specifically address the weird behaviour of the partisan polls.
I've been trying out Twitter lately for the first time in at least 10 years.
No social network has ever made me as mad at my fellow humans as that one does. 10 min reading comments and I'm outraged at the constant stupidity, attention seeking and political virtue signaling on both sides. It's like everyone is on a team and trying to score points on their opponents and become the MVP, instead of communicate.
I'm not sure if it's being related to real identity that makes people behave like that or if it's the focus on statements (tweets) rather than conversation, but holy crap what an unpleasant place to hang out.
I'm still drawn to it like a car crash but think I'll happily go back to pretending it doesn't exist soon enough.
It also affirms my belief that anonymous social networks are the way to go for discussion. An official announcements platform from the famous the the masses has value as well but it's a different thing entirely.
I have no choice but to short Tesla stock, no matter how much I like the technology or company. Elon's 30B stake he put up to buy Twitter will have to be sold when the Twitter revenue dries up - and with advertisers and big names leaving that path is inevitable. He really doesn't realize that once you lose market penetration, your done forever no matter how nice you make it. Myspace taught us that. They had a beautiful revamp once upon a time, but it was too late. Facebook ate it's lunch. Same will happen here, only worse.
Excellent point, but how likely is a good outcome from this trade?
Assume that Twitter is 90% likely to tank at least badly enough that he has to cover the loans, and that $30B is entirely collateralized with TSLA stock (vs Twitter or some other assets).
That $30B is about 5.7% of the $527b market cap. Selling it all at once would certainly depress the stock. But would he have to do that, or just dump enough each month to make the payments? If that's over something like 5-10 years. it'd somewhat depress the curve, but enough to make a short work? If it's a 10-year timespan, it's more like 0.6% per year of 'extra' sales from the event, which seems getting down in the noise. Seems he's also make a variety of moves, e.g. a rollover loan, stock buybacks, etc. to minimize the impact on TSLA price...
Your analysis has some merit, but I still wouldn't agree overall.
First, he can't sell any of that 5.7%. Collateral is an all or nothing deal, like any other loan. Technically who ever collects it may not sell it either, they may hold onto it rather than dump it, but it is entirely their decision.
Second, he owns about 21% of TSLA (so the web tells me). And Twitter lost 1.14B in 2020. That is likely to be a steeper loss this year. Selling 1+B / year - with very little end in sight to the pain - will eat into his remaining 15% share. Liquidating 1+ B a year of stock is not a trivial amount and it will not be looked on favorably by investors. It will signal his pet project is more important than his very serious business - a business where investors have been all to happy to short in the past.
IDK, just my opinion. Not financial advice, obviously.
Thank you for the analysis; I was thinking of only the share-flow effects and not at the message the market takes from the situation, which, I think you are right, is likely to be even more important. Why shorting instead long-dated options?
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 105 ms ] threadDoesn't this have legal ramifications? I was pretty sure that studios etc. have contracts with companies like Twitter where Twitter guarantees some sort of effort to prevent copyrighted movies being uploaded in exchange of not being taken to court and held accountable.
Monday 10 AM will be interesting for the Twitter legal team. Oh, right, seems they were mostly fired . . .
Seems like in the scheme of things the loss of moderation capability is the real story here, but I guess we can always be hopeful that the reality will match the short-term PR.
It almost makes one question the objectivity of the ruling media elite, when they inflate or diminish things so arbitrarily.
You could aim this statement at media selective outrage too, and you'd be much more correct.
> Everyone agrees CSE on social networks needs to be moderated, there isn't a lot of controversy around it.
Yet there wasn't a lot of controversy about Twitter ignoring it. To such an extent that, in your own words, they left even low-hanging fruit unpicked.
This isn't a "conspiracy theory" and would not even be a new shocking fact about their behavior. It would actually be more surprising to learn the rulers who cheerfully conspire to start wars that kill hundreds of thousands of people and steal trillions of dollars from the commoners would draw the line at abusing a few more children. That is a baseless fringe theory that would require extraordinary evidence to substantiate.
I don't personally like Mr Musk, and I don't approve of how he has handled this takeover, but I wonder if some of those hurrying forth with negative predictions about every Twitter development are just saying what they hope happens. The blind praise is just as bad, of course.
(The 'some' people I am referring to isn't the parent commenter, btw. I'm referring to the news articles and (like the linked content) Twitter posts I see getting posted about this.)
“What do they all do?”
Personally I don't claim to have any strong predictions, but find it fun to think about the most entertaining scenarios.
Disabling media wouldn't tackle nearly all the problems that a broken monitoring system could create, but you're right that it might demonstrate enough effort so that it's legally sane to keep the site up until you can fix it.
Nate Silver has a good observation on the latter, "Mastodon seems like a honeytrap for hall-monitor personality types. Honestly if Elon gets all the hall monitors to migrate to Mastodon that might be his greatest contribution toward the betterment of humanity." https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1594350639844294656
But then he got old/lazy/arrogant/whatever and started thinking that his gut opinions were worth something.
Yes, in that it's the public image that he crafted for himself, and a lot of gullible people believe(d). It wasn't ever really true though. I love this https://i.imgur.com/6Z9QQj3.jpeg despite it being a bit trollish, really dispels the idea that Nate had his finger on the pulse or that his 20% chance of Trump winning actually means he was right all along "and if you think otherwise then you're a math-denier".
What it shows is the pattern of a pretty typical political hack who, far from an impartial reporting of fact, is actually trying to make news and influence opinion to curry favor with segments of the ruling class. It wouldn't take Einstein to work out he was spouting total nonsense pretty quickly, but a lot of people read something they like, and hear the words "data", "logic", "science", and take that cue to switch their brains off.
What Nate Silver did -- what they all do -- is use fact and data and statistics to build their careers as influencers, if and where that intersects with telling the truth is only as a means to that end.
(deluxe had R's at 55% for the Senate for example, slightly favored)
Particularly if you watch/listen to the model talk episodes (just Galen and Nate talking) they addressed these points many times.
No social network has ever made me as mad at my fellow humans as that one does. 10 min reading comments and I'm outraged at the constant stupidity, attention seeking and political virtue signaling on both sides. It's like everyone is on a team and trying to score points on their opponents and become the MVP, instead of communicate.
I'm not sure if it's being related to real identity that makes people behave like that or if it's the focus on statements (tweets) rather than conversation, but holy crap what an unpleasant place to hang out.
I'm still drawn to it like a car crash but think I'll happily go back to pretending it doesn't exist soon enough.
It also affirms my belief that anonymous social networks are the way to go for discussion. An official announcements platform from the famous the the masses has value as well but it's a different thing entirely.
How do you short a private company?
Assume that Twitter is 90% likely to tank at least badly enough that he has to cover the loans, and that $30B is entirely collateralized with TSLA stock (vs Twitter or some other assets).
That $30B is about 5.7% of the $527b market cap. Selling it all at once would certainly depress the stock. But would he have to do that, or just dump enough each month to make the payments? If that's over something like 5-10 years. it'd somewhat depress the curve, but enough to make a short work? If it's a 10-year timespan, it's more like 0.6% per year of 'extra' sales from the event, which seems getting down in the noise. Seems he's also make a variety of moves, e.g. a rollover loan, stock buybacks, etc. to minimize the impact on TSLA price...
What am I missing here?
First, he can't sell any of that 5.7%. Collateral is an all or nothing deal, like any other loan. Technically who ever collects it may not sell it either, they may hold onto it rather than dump it, but it is entirely their decision.
Second, he owns about 21% of TSLA (so the web tells me). And Twitter lost 1.14B in 2020. That is likely to be a steeper loss this year. Selling 1+B / year - with very little end in sight to the pain - will eat into his remaining 15% share. Liquidating 1+ B a year of stock is not a trivial amount and it will not be looked on favorably by investors. It will signal his pet project is more important than his very serious business - a business where investors have been all to happy to short in the past.
IDK, just my opinion. Not financial advice, obviously.