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Musk cannot be discouraged – his is not rational behaviour
If the purpose is to wreck the upcoming legislation that tries to force social media companies to do a better job of taking down child sex abuse material, then it is perfectly rational behaviour, albeit distasteful.
I agree with some others that if Musk continues or escalates his garbage then we should legislate blocking X in interests of national security or similar
Just feeds their paranoia, The only sensible option is to refute the allegations once and move on. They will eventually find some other nonsense that diverts the attention of the people that follow the Alt-right for the nano-second attention span that they're all competing for.
They will eventually find some other nonsense that diverts the attention of the people that follow the Alt-right for the nano-second attention span that they’re all competing for.
Yes, but there's always the general undercurrent of bigotry to fall back on. Specific issues are anathema to the populists because they can be backed into corners by facts. But the general feeling of being ruled over by immigrant-loving elites is always there for the next issue to be projected onto.
tjagain
Full Member
This was me. there was no one I could vote for in my constituency
I am struggling to understand how someone who constantly provides Scotland as a positive political example to the rest of the UK had zero confidence in any of the candidates in his constituency.
When did you first realise that you had so little faith in Scottish politics?
This latest nonsense has made me delete my Twitter/X/Whatever account. It was a handy tool for work but it’s now well beyond the pale. A far right cesspit.
I know that in the grand scheme of things it makes sod all difference, but I think if all the sane people do and it just leaves the far right and Russian bots on there, then I can’t see many reputable businesses wanting to carry on contributing to Musks advertising revenues.
Not that he cares, I’m sure. It’s obvious now that it was never about the money. He wanted a mouthpiece to air his toxic views and if you’ve got that much money then you can buy yourself one
I wasn’t entirely joking about special forces
Nah, not special forces. It sounds more like a job for a loan assassin type. Potentially a sauve mi6 agent, the type of bloke who looks good in a dinner suit and drives an Aston..
Tbh it would make a great film script. Genuinely surprised noone has thought of it before. I'd have Amber Heard playing the femme fatale..
I am struggling to understand how someone who constantly provides Scotland as a positive political example to the rest of the UK had zero confidence in any of the candidates in his constituency.
When did you first realise that you had so little faith in Scottish politics?
1) this was a westminster election not a scots one so its not about Scottish politics
2) the tories were never going to get in thus it makes no difference to who gets in government who I vote for
3) the Labour party support brexit thus I cannot vote for them
4) the SNP candidate lied to my face hence no vote for her
5)No lefties stood
6)No independents I could vote for
7)No green candidate
8) lib dems still have Carmichael the liar as a front bench MP and have nev er apologised or repudiated his lies
I thought long and hard about this. Its the first time ever I have not voted but as my vote would make no difference to who the westminster government is and I had strong objections to all the candidates then I abstained. If it had been a chance of a tory getting in then I would have voted for the candidate most likely to beat them
Packed in a couple of months back and don't regret it for a second. Debate I can handle as well as different opinions but that place is so loaded towards the insane it's not worth the time.
Bluesky seems better than Threads although I've pretty much weened myself of them all.
14% of votes cast in the UK general election were for Reform.
Assuming those that didn’t vote were happy to be dealt whatever outcome those who did vote generated, then we must assume 14 of every hundred non-voters would have voted Reform.
It’s not that **** difficult to understand.
Not difficult if you take such a one dimensional simplistic view.
Other, better informed views are available.
This will not come as a shock, but listening to Professor Jay this morning on R4 (1hr 33 in for those interested - Today - 07/01/2025 - BBC Sounds). highlighted the stark contrast to what an intelligent, informed person with the right motivations sounds like in comparison to some of the absolute melts such as Musk and Jenrick. Considering the cauldron of publicity I thought it was a stellar interview and really worth listening to for anyone coming at this from a social media and rabid headlines only perspective. It depresses me enormously that the great majority of members of the public will have an opinion on this stuff without actually listening properly to the people who genuinely matter.
Words here in summary, but I'd really encourage you actually listen. I don't think you can have a proper opinion on Musk's intervention until you understand what the experts in the field think, what has already been done, and what the experts actually think needs to happen next. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp836w074gko
This latest nonsense has made me delete my Twitter/X/Whatever account.
I only keep it for this account. https://twitter.com/footbalIfights
Just feeds their paranoia, The only sensible option is to refute the allegations once and move on.
It's not just about Musk's petulant outbursts though is it? These platforms are doing real damage in our society. Are you saying we shouldn't regulate or control them because the likes of Musk and his acolytes will wail about free speech? Defending 'free speech' has been the cover of far right nutcases throughout history. They don't need to be passively ignored they need to be aggressively stamped out. The longer we as a society shy away from this fight the more ground they take. Social media is the frontline, take away their platform(s) for spreading hate and disinformation and they'll be reduced to standing on street corners shouting into the wind.
But the general feeling of being ruled over by immigrant-loving elites
Although a somewhat awkward one given Trump and his (admittedly almost certainly temporary) love for the immigrant Musk
loan assassin
Do you have one I can borrow?
This was me. there was no one I could vote for in my constituency
There was an anti-Brexit Party standing in your constituency, seems from other posts you 100% want to rejoin so why didn't you 'hold your nose' and vote SNP?
@tj the greens did field a candidate in the Edinburgh north and leith constituency Kayleigh O’Neill she came third
Ta bikepawl. I must have forgotton.
intheborders - because the SNP candidate lied to my face to try to get my vote, she is vile
Tbh it would make a great film script. Genuinely surprised noone has thought of it before.
Tomorrow Never Dies would be a good starting point.
5)No lefties stood
6)No independents I could vote for
7)No green candidate
BikePawl's link suggests there were both Socialist Labour Party and Communist Party standing as well as an Independent (no idea where she fell on the political spectrum) in addition to the Green. I can almost always find a reason not to vote for any particular candidate, based either on their personal characteristics or the party they are associated with. So if that is TJ's seat it doesn't really add up.
Its the first time ever I have not voted but as my vote would make no difference to who the westminster government is
Individually almost nobody has any meaningful power to influence who the UK gov is. However 37% of the electorate in that constituency didn't vote... that's more than the winning candidate got, so certainly the abstainers had the power to influence who their local representative was. They also have the power to send a message which will influence future policy decisions (every vote for Reform is understood by politicians to mean "I care about immigration more than other things", every vote for green is understood to mean "I care about the planet more than other things" and at one point every vote for SNP was understood to mean "Scottish independence matters a lot to me" - its a gross simplification but I think that is how other parties see those votes).
But of course political apathy is the biggest "party" in the UK and actually achieving that is what keeps the two big parties in power! For those who look at the candidates and think there really is nothing here I can get behind, and with so many people not backing any candidate it does beg the question why not stand yourself.
Not difficult if you take such a one dimensional simplistic view.
Other, better informed views are available.
Are they?
What other, better informed views are out there than a full UK General Election with pretty much universal suffrage, a long campaign period and actual polling stations?
Opinion polls? Bless.
Conversations down the pub or in the office?
intheborders – because the SNP candidate lied to my face to try to get my vote, she is vile
Johnson lied to the Queen, was her lie on this level?
Ok - I was wrong about the minor candidates in my post - apologies.
I know at the time I researched every candidate and couldn't find one I could back. I do not remember all the reasons now. It was NOT an apathetic abstention - it was a principled one
As for the lie from the SNP candidate - it was a couple of election cycles ago. I run a pressure group about the Stasutory notice scandal. We wrote to every major candidate asking to meet with them. Most refused but she agreed and, then kept on putting it off until she was elected then ghosted us. This scandal had the potential to both bankrupt me and make me homeless. so yes to me a very serious lie. I thought I had a politician who would help. She lied. My MSP on the other hand did meet with me
Are they?
What other, better informed views are out there than a full UK General Election with pretty much universal suffrage, a long campaign period and actual polling stations?
Which the people in question didn't participate in.
You don't know why they didn't participate but I can almost guarantee that unless an 'Apathy Party' exists nobody avoids voting for a party they approve of. Splitting the results amongst non-voters makes absolutely no statistical sense, you're just making stuff up at that point.
I don’t think you can have a proper opinion on Musk’s intervention until you understand what the experts in the field think, what has already been done, and what the experts actually think needs to happen next.> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp836w074gko
Remember though, we've had enough of experts...
I can remember before the election Labour's futile gloves off campaign. ("Rishi doesn't) - endorsed by many a centrist commentator - a la James O'Brien. We need to play dirty was the reasoning.
I always thought it would be best to not engage like this as the bone-headed right will come back with something much worse.
Here we are.
I can't see anything other than a race to the bottom because the arguments are no longer about inequality and material conditions; things that genuinely change people's lives.
You fix the correct stuff for people and Farage and Musk become irrelevant especially when you have such a majority.
We are so far away from useful politics now.
Well he's summed up Ed Davey rather nicely:
Elon Musk • x
@elonmusk
What exactly do I fail to understand about your failure to stop the mass
rape of little girls in Britain, you snivelling cretin?
You fix the correct stuff for people and Farage and Musk become irrelevant especially when you have such a majority.
Exactly
Well he’s summed up Ed Davey rather nicely:
He really hasn't. He's resorted to abuse to continue to push his vile lies about a devastating tragedy. I'm not an Ed Davey fan, but I know who I'd prefer to be in a position of power and influence out the two of them.
Interesting post here - ElMo spent 11 hours tweeting continuously. You’d have to assume that Tesla/Space X engineers are quite glad he’s got no time left to interfere with what they’re doing.
https://bsky.app/profile/petertl.bsky.social/post/3lf5mzs2dec2b
Also, as above, resorting to abuse when challenged suggests he hasn’t really got a grasp of the arguments. But being sleep deprived will do that.
ElMo spent 11 hours tweeting continuously.
Or the AI bots have taught themselves to do drug fuelled paranoia on his behalf.
Interesting post here
That is. I'm now wondering myself if that's all him. But I suppose it's why he took control of Twitter, so he might as well spend his time on it.
Back in the UK... Jenrick is really going for the Musk adjacent money and attention now, isn't he?
Ed Davey has a good point.
and it’s nice to see former PM David has waded back in to this cess pool with an interesting new line of work:
In other social media ****er news
“Meta to get rid of factcheckers and recommend more political content. Mark Zuckerberg says company will ‘dramatically reduce censorship’ across Facebook, Instagram and Threads”
I’d love to disrupt these pricks by sticking a permanent bung up their arses until they explode in their own shit.
Peter Walker has thoughts on this
https://bsky.app/profile/peterwalker99.bsky.social/post/3lf5sxyq25k2b
I assume the EU will take a dim view of reduced fact checking.
Theres a race to the bottom, and then there's A Race To The Bottom.
FFS.
How does that even make sense business sense? There's the X end of the SM spectrum doing it's best to force governments to legislate for greater control/responsibility/censorship* and losing users as a result, and there's the "new Twitter" style SM gaining those users, why the **** would MetaFB move towards the Musk end of the spectrum? Are the algorithms so ****ed up that the revenue they generate from fewer people sharing ever more vile opinions is greater than more people being "normal"?
*which I accept is it's own risk to free speech
@MoreCashThanDash I think, between this and the suggestion of flooding people’s timelines with AI bots when they’re already full of ‘recommended’ cruft rather than what brought people to FB in the first place, that there’s a decent body of evidence that Zuckerberg is an idiot who got lucky.
I think it was Brian Klaas who said that he wasted $30bn on the Metaverse, which resembled a PS1 game from 2001 and never took off.
Does anyone think Meta actually deals with any of that shit already? It doesn't take more than a step off of your normal path to find yourself immersed in hate speech that there is no reporting mechanism for.
I think it was Brian Klaas who said that he wasted $30bn on the Metaverse, which resembled a PS1 game from 2001 and never took off.
As opposed to Musk, who wasted a good chunk of 44bn on Twitter, which now resembles a pamphlet from 1935.
Does anyone think Meta actually deals with any of that shit already?
Fairly well established by a few whistleblowers that they do very little in combatting it. The most prominent one was a lass, whose name escapes me. She even talked about how in some countries Facebook was being used to facilitate people smuggling and slavery and they did jack shit.
Edit: Frances Haugen was her name. She's worth a listen.
Someone else did a study on Musks tweeting patterns at the tail end of last year. It was published in either the Guardian or the Conversation. He was regularly posting huge numbers of tweets per day across like a 12 hour plus time frame. As above, it's hard to see how he finds the time to do anything else (spoiler, he likely doesn't!).
The meta stuff is just insane, part of my PhD is looking at online disinformation of climate change.....I mean it's just a total ****ing endless pit of utter nonsense on there already!
I use Bluesky and it's been quite useful for my work etc. I'll not be on X, Facebook etc again other than in small doses for work now.
Back in the UK… Jenrick is really going for the Musk adjacent money and attention now, isn’t he?
Nick Robinson gave him a pretty good going over on the Today programme this morning.
this is where things are heading
blessed be the fruit
https://bsky.app/profile/rubenmathisen.bsky.social/post/3lf5fwquz3k2i
@martinhutch I never said Musk was any better. The thing is that much of his wealth depends on Tesla, which is massively overvalued as a result of the cult-like devotion of his f@n8ois.
I think the phrase is “two cheeks of the same arse”
Splitting the results amongst non-voters makes absolutely no statistical sense, you’re just making stuff up at that point.
Which is what extrapolation actually is.
So what's your better method?
Because until you do come up with a better method than superimposing the votes of those who did exercise their right in July, I'm going to keep asserting that 1 in 6 eligible UK voters favour Reform UK Ltd.