Elon Musk

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.

Here is 11 hours of almost unbroken tweeting by Elon Musk, starting at midnight GMT/7pm EST on Monday. How is he getting anything else done?

— Peter Thal Larsen (@petertl.bsky.social) 2025-01-07T12:18:52.190Z

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.

Are you saying we shouldn’t regulate or control them

No.

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 **** 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”

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/07/meta-facebook-instagram-threads-mark-zuckerberg-remove-fact-checkers-recommend-political-content

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

Is there a wetter blanket, anywhere, than Mark Zuckerberg?

— Peter Walker (@peterwalker99.bsky.social) 2025-01-07T14:05:14.532Z

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 **** 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 **** 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.

Someone else did a study on Musks tweeting patterns

Even Grok has flagged him for misinformation!

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

New Working Paper: Teenage boys and girls in Norway are more ideologically polarized than ever. Using data for 130,000 high-schoolers over 34 years, I find that a surge in anti-feminism among boys is driving much of the recent trend.?Read: osf.io/preprints/os…Findings ??

— Ruben Mathisen (@rubenmathisen.bsky.social) 2025-01-07T10:11:54.108Z

@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”

Nick Robinson gave him a pretty good going over on the Today programme this morning.

They played a clip on the lunchtime news. Totally exposed him as the chancer he is, but suspect it won’t get the attention it deserves

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.

Which is what extrapolation actually is.

Extrapolation doesn’t work when there is a noisy minority. What you can probably extrapolate is that likely Reform had a higher election turnout of supporters than the majority parties.

Jenrick v Robinson

As those who follow me know, I hold no brief for BBC News and Politics save the honourable exception of @vicderbyshire.bsky.social but today on BBC R4 Today, Nick Robinson tore the far-right bigot Robert Jenrick a new arsehole and it was glorious. Scroll to 2:10:39.www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/…

— Andy Burge ???? (@andygjburge.bsky.social) 2025-01-07T10:02:55.652Z

Jenrick v Robinson

That really is utterly magnificent. The ****er was completely turned over.

Unfortunately it won’t matter one jot to the people he is trying to appeal to.

Both Baroness Jay’s and Jenrick’s interviews made the 6 o’clock news.

(Does look like Clive Myrie has a black eye ballooning though)

So what’s the word on the street/ other forums?

Are the knuckle draggers siding with musk or Nij Al Farage?

Interesting from @Mark:

After Zucks policy change on misinformation I’m now going to do a deep review on the actual value of Singletrack’s use of Meta platforms. Did a talk to publishers last year on how we (publishers) over value social platforms. Often it’s a case of chasing reach numbers that have very little value.

— Mark Alker (@singletrackmark.bsky.social) 2025-01-07T18:07:07.499Z

I posted this on the Starmer thread, but it’s worth repeating

If you’re in any doubt about peoples motivations for what’s presently happening and who actually gives a shit about the victims of the grooming gangs, I suggest you watch the Victoria Derbyshire interview on tonight’s Newsnight with Jess Phillips

An incredible woman who has dedicated her life to the victims of sexual and domestic violence, being called ‘a genocide rape apologist’ by a man who is presently the lap dog of a ****ing multiple rapist and friend of Epstein. Jess Phillips has now had to have increased security due to the death threats she’s received since all this kicked off.

Elon Musk is a ****ing cancer. And as for those jumping on his bandwagon…. ? My opinions on those ****s would explode the swear filter

That is my facebook account deleted now, I only probably logged on twice in the past 12 months anyway, the shitifacation happened years ago, but I kept my account open just in case old friends wanted to reach out, but with Zuckerberg deciding he wanted to go down the same path as musk and even stop pretending it will be used for anything other than right wing propaganda I don’t even want my account an their claimed readership.

I should have done it after brexit, and definitely after the Cambridge analytics story broke, I am a little disappointed in my personal moral compass that it has taken so long for me to act.

Youtube will probably go soon as well, I do find it can be useful, but it is an incredible time sink if I am not careful, and ignoring the damage these scummy propogandists are doing to society now on a world wide level is not really an option I am comfortable with. Tearing myself away from the google infrastructure will take some work, especially as that is my main email account, but I think they are just the same as musk and zuckerberg really just without the easily hateable figurehead to focus on.

 Bannon said, “The Democrats don’t matter, The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” 

2018 Steve Bannon interview with Mark Lewis

Musk is clearly wrong on Jess Phillips on this issue but I remember her attitude at the election to the clear misogynistic behaviour in some of her opponents and the local community over fear of the Palestinian protest vote.

You fix the correct stuff for people and Farage and Musk become irrelevant especially when you have such a majority

It’s not that simple. Given we don’t (and never will) exist in a utopian world there will always things impacting people negatively and those things will differ between people. You can’t fix it all (you can’t even really fix most of it) and anything remaining will still be susceptible to this kind of subversion of social media in order to spread misinformation.

Whether you believe there’s some hidden global conspiracy of the rich/powerful to keep the masses in line so they remain in control or if it’s just individual chancers looking to make a quick buck (or, more likely, somewhere in between) there will always be a motivation to try an polarize people via spreading misinformation etc., it’s only recently though with the pervasiveness of social media that it’s become so easy and cheap to do. At least before Musk’s acquisition of X it was mostly about SM companies failing to properly regulate such misinformation (as keeping their platforms popular and relevant is their primary driver in order to keep making money), Musk has changed that though and one of the chancers with an agenda now has much more ability to control and spread that misinformation. I can’t see how you address that other than via government regulation, it’s no surprise then that buying politicians in order to avoid that is happening in plain sight.

That is my facebook account deleted now, I only probably logged on twice in the past 12 months anyway, the shitifacation happened years ago, but I kept my account open just in case old friends wanted to reach out, but with Zuckerberg deciding he wanted to go down the same path as musk and even stop pretending it will be used for anything other than right wing propaganda I don’t even want my account an their claimed readership.

Interesting. I closed my Twitter account recently and never use Instagram or Tiktok or anything else but Like you I use Facebook to stay in touch with my running clubs, some friends and a few interest groups. Closing this account will actually inconvenience me and isolate me as well. What irony.

That’s the thing with youtube as well, there is some useful stuff on there, but the shitification now means wading through tons of shit to get to the nuggets. This past few weeks I have been trying to learn some home automation stuff for “home assistant” and the amount of absolute garbage that people post is just drowning out anything useful, after watching hours of content I just gave up on youtube as a useful resource for what I wanted, there may be a home assistant equivalent of dcrainmaker, but unless you already reasonably knowledgeable knowing who that might be is impossible.

That is my experience over the past years, I have now realised that I probably spend about 10 to 20 times as long getting frustrated sifting through crap than I actually spend watching anything useful or informative, and I think that is intentional on youtubes behalf as it keeps us engaged on their site just searching. I think it might have been dcrainmaker who wrote something about it a couple of years ago, how the youtube payment algorithm basically encourages content creators to create overlong, and more regular content than is realistically worthwhile or of acceptable quality.

With that and the political discourse it is creating, I have come to the conclusion that the negatives really do outweigh the positives and I am probably better of disengaging.

It is a shame, social media as a concept could really be a benefit for society, but the way the owners are running it it has become a big negative IMO.

…and I also think as AI slowly advances it will probably get a lot worse unless there is some serious legislation. I accept the principle of the importance of free speech, but the current situation isn’t free speech, this is owned speech and propaganda and we are all paying the costs.

You fix the correct stuff for people and Farage and Musk become irrelevant especially when you have such a majority.

This is the political version of that Business cartoon, where one says to the other, “I’ve had a great idea, let’s just make profitable things from now on”

Yeah FB useful for community stuff (events, snowy roads, local sale/swap) providing you’re predisposed to not arguing with idiots. Otherwise I could bin it tomorrow. I haven’t used it for relating to current and past friends for years.

You fix the correct stuff for people and Farage and Musk become irrelevant especially when you have such a majority.

Dunno if it already been pointed out, as i’m only dipping in and out of here, but the stuff that Farage, Musk and their fans think need fixing, for the most part, aren’t f**king broken. It’s extensively fluff and misinformation.

All you can do is refute the claims that it’s broken. And we’re shafted on that as Musk owns twitter, and Farage gets a shit load of coverage because he’s Farage and he says what those that own much of the media want to hear (and it generates revenue/clicks).

Google results have gotten way worse too, I think we’re being pushed towards using their AI tools which will summarise all the youtube stuff, as it’ll be the next thing undergo enshitification, with endless adverts embedded in the replies until it becomes as useless as everything else.

The irony…

Original vid to ensure it’s not a faked image… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0L9Eucq6sps

but the stuff that Farage, Musk and their fans think need fixing, for the most part, aren’t f**king broken. It’s extensively fluff and misinformation.

All you can do is refute the claims that it’s broken.

What is broken is the connection between established political parties/politicians and voters, and delivery of voters expectations.

This isn’t just a UK phenomena it represents a political crisis across much of the Western world.

That is what Musk, Farage, Trump, Le Pen, etc, are exploiting and what needs to be fixed to diminish their influences. How that is to be achieved isn’t easy and quite frankly no one wants to take it very seriously. Maintaining the familiar status quo seems to be the preferred easy option, with fairly devastating consequences.