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Failed internet troll Elon Musk fails miserably [1]
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Date: 2022-12-03
Man, you just can’t make this stuff up.
Elon Musk, widely known for his recent acquisition of the Twitter social media platform, yesterday gleefully promised a damaging expose that somehow, someways, would skewer the right’s favorite pinata, the long-suffering Hunter Biden.
Channeling the postings of world-renowned “journalist” Matt Taibbi, Muskie even Tweeted a cute emoji to add emphasis to his looming bombshell.
x This will be awesome 🍿 — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 2, 2022
Has it dawned on anyone yet that we’re dealing with someone with the maturity of a twelve year-old here? (Apologies to twelve-year-olds everywhere, by the way).
As the Washington Post reports, Musk’s big expose fairly laid a big, fat, empty egg:
It was billed as a bombshell: Elon Musk, after rifling through his new company’s internal files, would finally expose how Twitter engaged in “free speech suppression” in the critical run up to the 2020 election.
The plan (as I understand it) was to show that Democrats somehow influenced The Twitter (yeah, the company Musk just bought and is now [I guess] intentionally driving into the dirt) not to cover a story about Hunter Biden doing...something.
OMG where is my “shocked” emoji when I need it??? Oh wait—I don’t have one, damn!
But I digress:
The Twitter thread, based on internal communications posted by Substack writer Matt Taibbi, showed the company independently decided to limit the spread of the article, without Democratic politicians, the Biden campaign or FBI exerting control over the social media network. In fact, the only input from a sitting politician that Taibbi noted was from Silicon Valley Rep. Ro Khanna (D), who told Twitter executives they should distribute the story, regardless of the potential consequences for his party.
Whatever that mysterious story about Hunter Biden was — and I’m sure it was profound! — quickly got forgotten in the uproar about Musk disseminating the names of the hapless Twitter workers who were inadvertently sucked into this non-event through no fault or action of their own.
As the Post reports:
In the process, Musk took the extraordinary step of promoting the leak of internal company communications to Taibbi, exposing the names of several rank-and-file workers and Khanna’s personal email address.
Musk’s followers then proceeded to dox every revealed name they could look up with their nimble Google fingers. As the Post reports, “The online mob descended on the Twitter workers on the chain, threatening them and circulating their photos online.”
And unsurprisingly, this didn’t sit well with many of those so “exposed.”
“Publicly posting the names and identities of front-line employees involved in content moderation puts them in harm’s way and is a fundamentally unacceptable thing to do,” former Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth, who was among the employees named in the tweets, said in a social media post.
Blech! Nasssty hobbits! Yeah, I’m really just Jonesing for photos of Twitter software engineers involved in content moderation!
The reaction of the reality-based community to Musk’s dud bombshell was … laconic. (Yes, Elon, I know you had to look that one up!)
“I’m not persuaded these are anything close to a bombshell,” said Jameel Jaffer, the director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, in an interview.
No kidding.
You know, Mr. Musk, there are actually people out there who try to help others with all their money.
You may want to think about that sometime.
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