Category: Facebook and Social Media

Twitter’s Ministry of Medical Truth fact-checked by a medical school professor

by philg

If you love Internet and love medical school, what’s not to love about this page in which a med school professor fact checks the folks at Twitter who suspended a user for posting “misinformation”:

(Note that I think the most harmful misinformation ever distributed regarding COVID-19 came from the CDC and similar enterprises, i.e., that cloth masks protected humans from an aerosol virus. I have been ridiculing that advice here since March 2020, e.g., by reference to “saliva-soaked face rag” or “use a bandana as PPE” but I never questioned whether the Covidcrats had the right to say what they said.)

Speaking of misinformation, the headline writers at Politico deserve a Pulitzer for this one:

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Twitter should have a range of reactions?

by philg

In the pre-Elon days, Twitter’s only option for reacting to a tweet was/is a heart (“I love it”).

It doesn’t make sense to “love” a tweet about a person suffering a pulse oxygen decline to 79 (“If it’s below 90, you’re reading your IQ” is the aviation standard). Could Musk give Twitter a usage lift by adding the ability to respond with a range of emotions (Facebook) or a limited-only-by-Unicode range of emojis (Signal)?

Another example, a teacher in Australia fired for refusing the Sacrament of Fauci:

Presumably 7,700+ people didn’t actually “love” that she was fired and is unhappy about it. But there is no other way for users to show support.

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Revisiting my investment question regarding Twitter

by philg

From 2013, Should we short Twitter?

Folks: It has come to my attention that Twitter has gone public at a valuation of $18 billion. The company has modest revenue (about $600 million per year) and no profit. Is it a short?

What is the explanation for how this service can make enough profit ($1 billion per year?) to justify an $18 billion valuation? It doesn’t seem like a natural advertising medium. Given the possibility of distributing information for free via Facebook or Google+, Twitter does not seem to offer a unique capability to users.

Generally I am a believer in the efficient-market hypothesis but I can’t understand this one.

What if one had shorted Twitter to buy the S&P 500? The following chart isn’t complete because the S&P 500 pays a dividend while Twitter did not. If we use Yahoo! Finance to create a custom chart starting on the date of my post,

The S&P has gone up 134 percent (and paid a dividend of 2 percent per year?) while Twitter is worth 20 percent more than on November 6, 2013. Note the lift in 2020 after the government made most non-screen-based activities illegal, but even that wasn’t enough to bring Twitter’s performance even with the S&P 500.

(I’m wondering if the market cap number I cited in my blog post was inaccurate. Elon Musk is paying $44 billion for the company and the stock price is only barely higher. Either the $18 billion number was wrong (maybe it was the initial pre-bounce IPO target price?) or Twitter has issued a ton more shares since November 2013 (acquisitions? to enrich executives and board members?).)

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Karen gets COVID-19 and asks “What about the kids?”

by philg

Poking around within Twitter, I found this gem:

The text:

Rage crying this morning. Two years of isolating and keeping my toddlers safe, and I get infected with #COVID19 at a mandatory team offsite, even while wearing a KN95 mask myself. Now my toddlers are exposed. 🤬 This isn’t over. @US_FDA we need to #ImmunizeUnder5s now!

Think of the children!

His/her/zir/their fellow Karens also got sick, despite practicing the protocol that Science dictated for airline travel:

So far one other team member has tested positive, out of eight of us. Most of us were wearing masks except for when drinking coffee or eating lunch/dinner.

Where does Mx. Nelson work? His/her/zir/their profile:

Program Manager with @Microsoft Philanthropies, leading a $1.15B tech grant program for @msftnonprofits, helping nonprofits leverage technology to do more good.

He/she/ze/they is based in Seattle. In case this tweet is deleted, a screen capture:

Here’s something else fun, the U.S. Ministry of Truth:

Text from the above tweet:

You are welcome to follow us, but rest assured—we are already following you.

I’m surprised that Twitter doesn’t down-rate content from anonymous accounts like this and even more surprised that Twitter has held together given how apparently easy it is to set up an anonymous account. I think that one reason Facebook is so successful is that they authenticate most accounts.

Related:

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What if Twitter stopped trying to establish the truth of what is posted there?

by philg

A typical reaction to Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter seems to be that it is easy to toss out a term such as “free speech” but that it is difficult to implement a plan. Internet conversations need moderation, is the theory, especially on platforms where users aren’t authenticated by real name.

Here’s a tweet from a friend back in Boston, a law firm partner:

Toucan Sam has pointed out here that I myself established a comment moderation policy on photo.net, carried over into this blog. Sam’s tweet got me thinking about whether there was a difference between what Twitter has been doing and the policy that I established. I responded to Sam:

photo.net never tried to do what Twitter tries to do. We moderated out Reader A attacking Reader B. We never deleted content because we believed it to be false and thought that readers needed to be protected from misinformation/disinformation. The antidote to someone saying something false, e.g., “don’t go to France because everyone there is rude”, was other readers posting their own experience and perspective, e.g., “French people were nice to me.”

The most famous Twitter bans have been because Twitter said that it believed information to be false. The New York Post’s stories regarding a laptop allegedly belonging to Joe Biden, for example. A long list of folks saying that COVID-19 vaccines weren’t preventing infection with COVID-19. People saying that children were not experiencing an “emergency” such as they needed to be injected with an emergency use authorized COVID-19 vaccine.

What if Elon Musk simply got Twitter out of the business of figuring out whether tweets were true, false, misinformation, disinformation, etc.? Would that solve most of what irks people regarding Twitter as the public square?

Related:

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How does Twitter earn $44 billion before Elon Musk dies?

by philg

Twitter will soon be owned by African American entrepreneur and investor Elon Musk, who is paying $44 billion for a company that lost $493 million in 2021 on revenue of $5 billion (press release). The company would have earned something like $273 million if it hadn’t had to pay out on a big shareholder lawsuit. So if we look at things in the best possible light, and forget the fact that the government gave all of these screen-based companies a big lift in 2020 and 2021 by making non-screen-based activities illegal (except “essential” marijuana shopping in Maskachusetts and California), it will take 161 years for Twitter to earn $44 billion in profit. Unless the Silicon Valley life extension enthusiasts can deliver, Elon Musk will have died of old age before the Twitter investment pays back.

What could Elon Musk possibly do to make this platform worth $44 billion (other than wait for a few years when $44 billion could be the price of a Diet Coke)? Is the answer that Twitter can become as addictive as Facebook and therefore as profitable, on a percentage basis? Meta earned something like 30 percent profit after taxes. If Twitter could do the same it would earn $1.5 billion per year and Elon Musk would have paid 29X earnings for a company that is slowly growing (in other words, if everything goes perfect at Twitter it still isn’t an obviously good buy at $44 billion). Can we add this to the long list of things about the stock market that baffle me? (Remember that I’ve been skeptical of Tesla stock and Bitcoin for about 10 years, which is nothing to brag about in the investment world.)

Let’s look at some fun stuff from Twitter regarding Twitter….

Jeff Bezos says that it is good when a billionaire owns Atlantic magazine (Laurene Powell Jobs, who made money by marrying Steve Jobs, and promotes low-skill migration) and it is, presumably, good when a billionaire owns the Washington Post (Jeff Bezos himself). But it is bad when a billionaire owns Twitter:

Here’s a look at the likely thoughts of the Twitter Thought Police:

Here’s a chart of enthusiasm for censorship by party affiliation:

A summary of the situation:

Suppose that Elon Musk cancels the cancelers who work at Twitter. The folks who permanently suspended Donald Trump, for example, would have to look for other work. What if they re-formed as an independent company that took the entire Twitter feed and bowdlerized it by filtering out anything from the New York Post, vaporizing anything that says something positive about Donald Trump, etc. This would become a cherished safe space for Joe Biden voters. What to name the site? How about SafeTwit?

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Earth Day: Pinterest will help heal our planet?

by philg

Happy Earth Day, especially to those who live in single-family houses and drive SUVs!

This would be a great day to post a photo of your pavement-melting Ford Bronco to Pinterest, which will happily collect ad revenue from photographs of lavish consumption that burns the Earth’s resources. What can’t you post? “Pinterest announces ban on all climate misinformation” (Guardian, 4/6/2022):

Pinterest is to block all climate misinformation, as the image-focused social network seeks to limit the spread of false and misleading claims.

Under the new policy the site is committing to take down content that distorts or denies the facts of the climate crisis, whether posted as adverts or normal “organic” content.

Pinterest is defining misinformation broadly: the company will take down content that denies the existence or effects of climate change or its human causes, as well as content that “misrepresents scientific data” in order to erode trust in climate science and harmful, false or misleading content about natural disasters and extreme weather events.

Would it be possible to thrive on Pinterest posting photos of a soft-on-the-Earth lifestyle? Would there be a lot of users and ad revenue if a person posted pictures of his/her/zir/their one-bedroom apartment, 5-year-old bicycle, and donation of all surplus income to a tree-planting enterprise? The first result that I stumbled on after searching for “home” on Pinterest is 6,200 square feet:

A lot of what drives people to consume more is envy and shame-avoidance, right? If Pinterest wants to help the Earth, wouldn’t the correct course of action be shutting down Pinterest so that people would be more likely to be happy with what they already have?

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People banned from Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube can buy back their Freedom of Speech for $1,595

by philg

Folks who’ve been unpersoned by Twitter, Facebook, and/or YouTube/Google might feel that their practical freedom of speech is gone. The good is is that it can be bought back from the U.S. Mint for $1,595 via the First Amendment to the United States Constitution 2022 Platinum Proof Coin – Freedom of Speech:

If you want the FBI’s January 6 task force to come to your house, add a Donald Trump medal to your shopping cart:

If you want to celebrate a Nobel laureate who has been complicit in what the U.S. now says is “genocide”, the Daw Aung San Suu Kyi Bronze Medal:

Continuing the theme of celebrating the achievements of strong women, here’s one for the Apollo 11 astronauts:

To celebrate weekend warriors who like to put on uniforms, give themselves officer rank and uniforms, and buzz around in mighty Cessna 172s, one for the Civil Air Patrol:

To remember that Big Government is not always competent, one regarding the USS Indianapolis (Navy failed to notice that the ship hadn’t arrived and failed to take any action, not even a search plane launch, in response to a distress call received from the vessel before she sank):

The Mint celebrates John Muir, who advocated eliminating low-skill immigration to the U.S. in order to preserve the environment:

(See “The Extremist Campaign to Blame Immigrants for U.S. Environmental Problems” (Center for American Progress): “John Muir, known as the father of national parks, expressed racism toward Black and Native Americans and promoted ideas of restricting immigration by nonwhites.”)

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Should I add a Like button to this blog?

by philg

Everyone loves Facebook and Twitter (except those who’ve been banned for heresy!) and the Like button is credited as making those apps addictive (who doesn’t want to be liked?). Is it time to add a Like button for posts and comments on this blog? I’m pretty sure that there are WordPress plugins that will do it (a list of 10 from 2020).

One concern that I have is making sure that a rainbow reaction emoji is available, taking inspiration from Facebook:

(On Facebook, the rainbow reaction is available only during Pride Month, but I would want to offer it to readers all year.)

A comment as the only method of feedback doesn’t seem adequate in this day and age. A 1958 UNIVAC airline reservation system was clicked on by nearly 6,000 people in the past five months (plus viewed by an additional few thousand who saw it when new as part of the home page), so presumably folks liked it, but only 7 people reacted to it with a comment.

Related:

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Why does Twitter make thoughtcriminals delete their own thoughtcrimes?

by philg

“Twitter suspends Babylon Bee for naming Rachel Levine ‘Man of the Year’” (New York Post):

Twitter locked the account of a right-leaning parody site, The Babylon Bee, after it awarded Rachel Levine, the transgender Biden administration official, the title of “man of the year.”

The Babylon Bee story was a reaction to USA Today’s naming of Levine, who is US assistant secretary for health for the US Department of Health and Human Services, as one of its “women of the year” last week.

Twitter says it will restore the account, which has more than 1.3 million followers, if the Bee deletes the tweet, but CEO Seth Dillon says he has no intention of doing so.

Apparently, Mr. Dillon was not unpersoned and could still tweet:

My question concerns the requirement that the Babylon Bee heretics delete their own tweet. Why didn’t Twitter’s orthodoxy enforcers delete it once they noticed the thoughtcrime?

A Facebook friend’s take on the original story:

it’s a meta-joke. The joke isn’t that he’s a man, the joke is that saying so is such a transgression of the orthodoxy that everyone immediately reacts, “omg, I can’t believe they said that” and bans them from social media

Is it an important part of the healing process for a thoughtcriminal to delete his/her/zir/their own tweet?

Related:

  • “Facebook and Twitter restrict controversial New York Post story on Joe Biden” (Guardian, October 14, 2020): Twitter said it was limiting the article’s spread due to questions about “the origins of the materials” included in the article, which contained material supposedly pulled from a computer that had been left by Hunter Biden at a Delaware computer repair shop in April 2019. … Facebook, meanwhile, placed restrictions on linking to the article, saying there were questions about its validity. “This is part of our standard process to reduce the spread of misinformation,” said a Facebook spokesperson, Andy Stone.
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