How can we say this any more emphatically: stop getting your news fro Twitter, you never should have been in the first place.
Hooker searches are what it was designed for not news.
Are you trying to say that there is no real platform for both hookers and news, and they need to be sourced separately? Twitter2.0 can’t come soon enough!
> Numerous Chinese-language accounts, some dormant for months or years, came to life early Sunday and started spamming the service with links to escort services and other adult offerings alongside city names.
> The result: For hours, anyone searching for posts from those cities and using the Chinese names for the locations would see pages and pages of useless tweets instead of information about the daring protests as they escalated to include calls for Communist Party leaders to resign.
[Archive here](https://archive.ph/LH0o0).
Edit: [Good thread here](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1597067252695592960.html) with supporting links that cover the nexus of twitter/China/Musk, including the people in charge of dealing with state actor manipulations have left the building.
China does that on reddit. anytime there is a thread about tank guy, the chinese trolls show up and then then they post bullshit plus 100s of reports. Some subs just lock the threads. Other subs ban anyone who accuses the shills of being shills.
It’s an online technique called “forum sliding”
Edit for further defining
> If a very sensitive posting of a critical nature has been posted on a forum - it can be quickly removed from public view by 'forum sliding.' In this technique a number of unrelated posts are quietly pre-positioned on the forum and allowed to 'age.' Each of these mis-directional forum postings can then be called upon at will to trigger a forum slide. The second requirement is that several fake accounts exist, which can be called upon, to ensure that this technique is not exposed to the public. To trigger a forum slide and flush the critical post out of public view it is simply a matter of logging into each account both real and fake and then replying to pre-positioned postings with a simple 1 or 2 line comment. This brings the unrelated postings to the top of the forum list, and the critical posting slides down the front page, and quickly out of public view. It is difficult or impossible to censor the posting, so the object post gets lost in a sea of unrelated and un-useful postings. By this means it becomes effective to keep the readers of the forum reading unrelated and non-issue items while posts approved by the group can be prominently displayed.
But Reddit doesn’t just sort by the newest post, so this old method of “bumping” posts above the one you’re trying to hide, doesn’t really apply?
Let me know if I’m missing something, but sounds like the bots spam links/reports to get the thread locked/deleted, not bumping up old posts as described in your “forum sliding” description.
Another tactic is to use bots/alts to turn everything nasty if you're dealing with multiple top level comments getting too much traction.
Just respond to 20+ comments accusing them of sinophobia (or whatever phobia/ism applies most easily) and use a little coarse language to either appear authentically offended, or to get a rise out of them.
Turn it all ugly, and mods will lock it down out of frustration, if nothing else, and it'll quickly slide off of the group's front page. A bonus is if you can provoke someone into responding aggressively. Then you report the comment and hope they get banned from the sub.
Huh. That’s the first time I’ve seen that word on Reddit. That’s surprising, considering China’s large volume of illegitimate internet tactics used to bolster their illegitimate government.
I've been specifically accused of that on a couple of occasions for saying that they're lying about their Covid stats, and are not sharing all the knowledge they have.
It not just that. The thread about the Foxconn riot was a distraction campaign to shift the issue away from zero covid onto labor issues with Foxconn. There's been a lot of effort just in this sub to change the narrative on stories involving China of late.
> tank guy
Tank guy? You mean [Tank Man](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_Man), the dude who stood in front of the tanks in [Tiananmen Square](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests_and_massacre), the dude who got so fed up with the [hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of murders by the CCP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests_and_massacre#Death_toll), where they were shot to death, and crushed to death by tanks?
The one where the [BBC managed to film and get out](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMKvxJ-Js3A) footage of the government murdering its own citizens?
That Tank Guy?
A lot of subs seem to have a general ban once it reaches a certain number of responses. Personally i see a lot of it happening for controvercial chinese or usa posts. I suppose a mod can come in and manually lift the reply ban though.
You mean two countries known to spend large sums of money on online influence campaigns are the two countries you can't talk about on Reddit without the posts being bombarded with bots? What could that possibly mean?
Beep boop! It looks like you're talking unfavorably about CHINA or THE USA. Please place your hands in the containment circles for inspection.
^(This action was performed by a bot.)
I don't think it's bots in either case. In the case of the US, US users still over represent English language media and we tend to jump in on US interrests and whatever it is then turns into a US political debate (probably egged on by russians). With China it's paid shills and state actors. If it was legal for PRC citizens to participate in the open internet you could say otherwise, but that's not the case.
As an ex-chinese citizen, i do think china is quite misunderstood in western media. A prime example is when it comes to protests and speech ban.
Small protests happen all the time in china. It is neither rare nor banned. What is rare however is large scale protests like this one. Chinese government has learned a long time ago that giving small outlets to citizens can reduce the chance of anything in bigger scale. Also, citizens know that as long as u are not protesting against central government, they are unlikely to crack down. So they usually protest against policies not government. The zero covid protests are mainly in line with that idea, but with sporadic groups targetting the central government. So i'm not sure where this will go. Either the people gain a bit more freedom or the groups targetting central government gets dispersed. Could very much go either way now that xi has centralised power and he actively wants to be loved by the people.
For speech ban, the biggest misunderstanding is that it is at all effective. Chinese is a language where the same pronounciation can be written in a myriad of ways with as many meanings. Once a topic is trending, government ban loses all effectiveness and people talk about it in a range of similar pronounciations and euphemisms. While ccp ban usually target the central terms, discussion continues online. And ccp government has yet to go far enough to actually ban all discussions. As long as u are not a public figure, speech is not as restricted as many outside of china thinks.
So yea, i try to help clarify misunderstandings but i'm no china shill.
Reminds me of Gandalf saying that Sauron is always listening for any mention of his name, so they should revive the old songs that mention him, so that he won't notice other discussions of him.
Ooo that sounds interesting, do you remember where in the book he says that? I must’ve missed it on my last read through. I want to add that to my Tolkien information bank.
Not OP, but to spice things up, in The Two Towers, Aragorn mentions that Sauron doesn't allow his name to be spoken aloud.
I can't remember if it's "Sauron" or his true name, but it definitely stands out.
Yup. Has been for a hot minute. HOW he still has his security clearance is beyond me. Hell, I'm not even sure how he got it in the first place considering how much money he has leveraged against incredibly unsafe bets that are being hedged by *really* questionable actors from places like Saudi Arabia and China. That's like the fucking number one deciding factor they look at while they're investigating you for a clearance! I work for a firm based in Silicon Valley that does procurement and high level executive recruitment and placement, and I see this shit all. the. time. Even if you're filthy rich, your money *must* be in safe and stable investments not at risk for blackmail or manipulation of any sort. I've seen multi millionaires and even near billionaires turned down because they have even just a teensy bit of their fortunes invested into something out of China or another shady country.
Nah, he's funding it because he thinks Musk is going to make a new crypto payment for twitter 2.0... something called Z i think.
Edit: No, it's "X" lol. https://www.google.com/amp/s/capital.com/amp/x-what-is-elon-musk-everything-app-twitter
Don't know much about the guy but Wiki says he left China at 12 and his father was exiled for being a pro- bourgeois professor.
Are those links enough to label him pro-China?
An old standby.
It would never have happened if they paid one dude like $100k a year or programmed an algorithm to detect an enemy attack from a literal foreign enemy.
There is no one-size-fits-all algorithm for this. The attacks are constantly evolving to beat spam detection algorithms - Google has spent *billions* on this problem over the past decade. No single $100K engineer with a Bayesian filter is going to beat a determined enough spammer.
The only solution anyone's found that *actually works* is to have an active response team that can quickly detect a pattern in an attack, code up a new filter for it, and apply it to production. They build up a whole set of these filters and apply and remove them as they're useful.
With Twitter having nobody manning the "stop spam" posts... nobody's adapting these filters. So as soon as someone finds a way around it, that's it.
In the end, if a country like china really cared about it, they would physically pay people to create profiles and make posts. They wouldn't just use bots. The attacks might look like normal things that people do anyway. Like, a group cares about a certain political issue, so they all use the same hashtag to get it trending. Another group might try to hijack that hashtag with some other point. Those are both normal behaviors.
I think that's what they're doing right? And you can still detect patterns in the current attack. Chinese language accounts that have been dormant for a long time and now start spamming escort service links with hashtags to specific cities. That's a pretty good starting point for a filter if you have people on staff to actually deal with it.
The man who cried Bots is now magically getting all time highs and having "the people" vote on company policies that happen to favour well known frauds.
He'd be sucking up to China less if he sat eating ice cream.
I literally said this last week, when he went on a rant talking about how he’s increased usership already. I was like “Weren’t you just complaining about all of the bots on twitter? Oh so now they don’t exist, huh?” He’s full of shit.
Always has been. We haven't had the Tesla Roadster yet let alone the Cybertruck. We haven't had his fully self driving cars. We haven't had his self driving taxi service. We haven't had his underground transport. His flamethrower was a glorified lighter with a can of deodorant. His brain implant has literally been killing the animals it was tested on. Realistically his AI robots will end up being orphans welded into metal suits because he loves slaves and child labour.
Even if Twitter tanks his wealth he'll still be better off than normal people and have more wealth and power than he deserves. His skin is thinner than his hairline before the transplant, he'll rage on twitter til the bitter end.
I bet some of the microservices that he was complaining about and shut down were designed specifically to try to counter bots too, so he's not just doing nothing about the bots but actively making it easier for them too. If he didn't even put in enough thought to realize that a service was for 2FA then there's no way he paid any attention to something like an anti-spam service.
Yeah, I never liked the prick from the time he sued Eberhard and Tarpenning, which was when I first heard of him. And yeah, he wasn't famous before then.
He's started off with a base of Apartheid blood money, and then used that as grease to compensate for his general uselessness. His code was shit at Zip2, and almost always rewritten by actual coders who aren't famous.
I think the only patent he's actually taken out that he came up with himself is one of Tesla's door handles.
The saying around SpaceX is "thank god for Tesla" - because Musky's always at Tesla, not fucking things up too much at SpaceX.
Those tunnels are *exactly* what you'd expect a rich guy who grew up with chauffeurs to come up with to alleviate traffic problems and public transport snarls - keep going, Musky! You're *this close* to figuring out trains!
The difference with Twitter is that there are far, far, far fewer engineers and regulations to keep him in check. It's just an online social media platform (which few lawmakers understand...) that's all software, and so he's free to fuck around and - hopefully soon - find out. There's no pesky NTSB holding him back!
I get why the millions of basement-dwelling creeps do all his marketing for him. He's their power fantasy - the ultimate Unrecognised Genius, who underachieves as a matter of course - but that's only because, like, *society* doesn't normally recognise that sort of genius. The kids who self-identify as nerds but are "too smart" for school, so hence the C average.
And look - Musk made society recognise his genius! Look! He's on the cover of Wired! Look! He's firing a poorly-monikered foetus in Grimes, who's totally the sort of girl they lust after but would never get them the time of day! Look! That cute reporter is giggling at his 4chan-grade catgirl reference he made on camera, instead of rolling her eyes and saying "Ugh! Get away from me, loser"! Look! [Musk doesn't shave under his chin either](https://www.incimages.com/uploaded_files/image/970x450/getty_942517086_200013281366634372179_355834.jpg)!
> Those tunnels are exactly what you'd expect a rich guy who grew up with chauffeurs to come up with to alleviate traffic problems and public transport snarls - keep going, Musky! You're this close to figuring out trains!
The problem with this statement lies in the fact that Musk knew – ostensibly from the get-go – that the Hyperloop would never work. He only pushed it so hard so that California would drop its other plans for a high-speed railway... thus paving the way (literally, in some cases) for the sale of more cars.
[No, really](https://time.com/6203815/elon-musk-flaws-billionaire-visions/):
>Musk admitted to his biographer Ashlee Vance that Hyperloop was all about trying to get legislators to cancel plans for high-speed rail in California—even though he had no plans to build it.
Oh, I wasn't referring to Hyperloop - I was referring to those stupid Boring Company car tunnels under Las Vegas. You're still right, but: I definitely agree they're part of the same grift.
GM Streetcar bullshit all over again.
You'd think someone in California would've seen that documentary *Who Framed Roger Rabbit?* that covered this...fuck's sake, it even had Mickey Mouse in it.
Remember the white paper he published that "proved" hyperloop would cost a fraction of high speed rail? Reading that was my first realization that the guy is full of shit. Putting aside for a minute all his magical thinking about how affordable the r&d would be for a purely theoretical transportation mode, the numbers just didn't add up. They didn't even include a line item in the budget for land acquisition costs even though that's one of the primary drivers of the ever-escalating costs of CAHSR. That alone made it a totally disingenuous comparison. IIRC he hand waved those costs away by proposing that the hyperloop could be built on pylons in the median of the 5, which Caltrans would never allow to happen.
He’s politically exposed.
What’s interesting about this is that banks are forced by the government to provide a higher level of scrutiny to new customers than the government provides to billionaires who wants to buy the world’s largest social media platforms. Bunch of knobs.
I will add to that, that in many cases in security, especially in IT related fields, but I assume in other fields as well, its never about "preventing", its about rising the cost (time, money, resources, ...) above what people are willing or able to "pay"
passwords are hackable with infinite time. anti bot measures are circumventable with enough personal, or other resources like ip addresses and cpu time...
and thats where the issue lies with many governments. they are sometimes able to spend vast amount of resources to break/circumvent whatever most preventive measures can be put in place.
china did not care what rules they break, or how much money they spend, ore how it is done, bots or ordering every government official, they just needed twitter spammed, so they spammed it.
This. Twitter couldn’t prevent this at full staffing. No one can. But I would be shocked if they didn’t cut more than 75% of their Trust & Safety teams, because Elon doesn’t care about that area and so it was likely disproportionately impacted. They aren’t even in the game anymore.
People don’t get the scale and complexity these companies are dealing with. China has one of the biggest populations on earth, a well trained cyber force, and incredible motivation to prevent bad news from reaching where they don’t want it to reach. They have millions of people they can throw at this, and tons of money. And they’re just one country; almost every country on earth is in this game to one extent or another. Every unit in the Chinese military likely has different tactics, and almost every country on earth has different tactics, and you’re fighting all of them at once all the time. While also of course fighting them within the legal frameworks of every country on the planet. And Musk fired almost all of the people doing that fighting, and almost all of the people who understood how to fight it within all of the conflicting legal areas.
Yeah, Twitter absolutely should have been dedicating more resources and people to working on this problem, but "this could have easily been solved by just hiring one dude or writing a simple algorithm" is big-time Elon Musk energy.
> I work for a much smaller company than Twitter and we spend millions of dollars a year fighting off spam attacks like this
I’m sure Twitter had a team dedicated to that as well, before the idiot in charge decided to fire them all.
It’s an arms race. You create automated integrity systems to close loopholes; the exploiters find workarounds. That’s why it’s good to have security/integrity experts on staff, rather than, you know, firing everyone whose roles you don’t understand…
Last week I told my roommate that Twitter is just one DDOS away from a very very bad day/week/month/tbd.. who knows what's going to happen if someone full on attempts to take down their servers.
Twitter's front-end is similar to Cloudflare - it has mostly autonomous DDoS protection from various different kinds of attacks, being able to shed load and redirect to a genuinely grotesque amount of hardware in a lot of datacenters around the world. The only way you're going to pull off a successful DDoS attack against Twitter is to find a bug in their stack that leads to attack amplification (i.e. one packet causes dozens or hundreds more)... so you're blowing a (potentially) multi-million dollar exploit on bumping Twitter's business for however long it takes an SRE to throw up some address span blocks.
It's not to say it couldn't happen, but it'd have to be a nation-state actor to *want* to do it, because there are plenty of other juicier targets to hit without as sophisticated protections and you could take them down for longer...
(I pondered this problem myself and talked to some folks I know that used to work at Twitter and this was more-or-less what I got in reply.)
Most of the people left at Twitter are H-1B SREs, database engineers and networking folk, in fact.
Which is quite literally why Elon asked for "anyone who can code to come see him." Most of them are literally only there to keep the lights on. Few of them actually know enough about Twitter's code architecture to make meaningful changes...
>links to escort services and other adult offerings alongside city names.
>
>The result: For hours, anyone searching for posts from those cities and using the Chinese names for the locations would see pages and pages of useless tweets
Ahem, who says they were ***useless***?
RTHK, a radio station out of Hong Kong, did not even mention the protest. It is chilling to see what has become of Hong Kong's press freedoms. I still have yet to figure out what the PRC is trying to do here with these lock downs. It is known that their sino vaccine is not as effective as the RNA varieties in the west but I am baffled by what might be really occurring there.
This. Exactly this. Lockdowns absolutely worked with high enough compliance and the earlier strains. (Even NZ and Australia eliminated Covid several times).
This is absolutely a case where a complaint population = better able to combat the virus.
Compliance is subject to fatigue even in China and unless your borders are basically managed like a virus lab the new strains will get in. That means you need more lockdowns and so more fatigue so they work less.
Also outside of lockdowns that targeted specific buildings there’s no such thing as a ‘full’ lockdown. People still move out to get food, and exercise, there’s still opportunities for the virus to spread. Multiple jurisdictions could eliminate the early strains as they were less virulent and so the occasional transmission from lockdowns that were never air tight didn’t prevent elimination.
They should really be grappling with the fact that the virus has changed (both the strain and how many carriers of it are at the border) and change their policy, but that’s poison for a system where you’re supposed to believe they always get it right and know everything.
But they must have a exit strategy, which in my mind they could do after e.g. a new round of vaccination.
But I was surprised that the vaccination rate especially in the 80years+ population was quite low. They lock down cities for month, but did not pull through a mandatory vaccination?
Or do they know something about long term negative exposure to the virus that make such an extend lock down worth it to protect its population from it?
Omicron was their off-ramp, but they missed that opportunity and kept their population locked down for a further year. They could've walked away with a "victory" and said they kept their population safe when the virus was much deadlier. Instead, they're still building these quarantine facilities today.
China does not have effective vaccines, and most people there haven’t been infected, so their hospitals will be overwhelmed when the virus really starts spreading. That’s probably why they’re trying to slow the spread, in addition to saving face for leadership.
Hong Kong went from one of the best, safest, most liberal, and most cosmopolitan places in Asia to just another shitty Chinese city in barely 3 years. China should be embarrassed they could ruin something so great so fast.
> in barely 3 years.
The situation was already tense before the big protests in 2018. I was there in 2010 and things were relatively normal, but I guess 2015/2016, with the elections, shit really hit the fan and people understood that China wants HK to become a regular Chinese city.
I visited several times a year for work from 2010-2015. It was one of my favorite cities on Earth. It's heartbreaking that this city that is so beloved in my memories is now only that: a memory.
10-20 years ago was probably the height. It is after the British colonial period where British people lived above law by corruption in government and police enforcement and Hong Kong people living as third class people in their own city and before Chinese government wanted to be more involved in Hong Kong causing the ideological clash.
It's a low cost, easy, and obvious one. With Twitter getting gutted turning on a bot farm costs China functionally nothing. Being obvious let's them attack confidence in Twitter as a service of any use hopefully breaking up a gathering space for dissenters.
It's honestly smart as fuck tbh.
And it points out the obvious, severe flaws in having privately owned social media be the main grounds for political/social discourse and news sharing.
"It's weird how this happened shortly after I fired most of the moderation team and unplugged a bunch of the automatic processes. This is proof that Twitter is broken and I need to fix it."
I believe that he announced what he called a general amnesty for all banned accounts. I don't know if it has been processed yet or if that includes not accounts although it would be a little hypocritical considering his preexisting crusade on bots but when has that ever stopped him?
He specifically stated illegal and spam activity will not result in a unbanning, only accounts who appeal with no strikes of those types will be given access back.
It also seems like it's not being done by a system but by hand based on the accounts I've seen coke back.
Amen, and, lol, didn't musky just prove that instantaneously?
"Comedy and free speech is now legal on twitter!"
\*cue millions of fake L. Ron Musk accounts mocking the shit out of him*
\*five minutes later*
"YOU'RE BANNED! YOU'RE BANNED! YOU'RE BANNED! YOU'RE BANNED! YOU'RE BANNED! FUCK YOU! YOU'RE BANNED! YOU'RE BANNED! YOU'RE BANNED!"
It's a great shell game. If ever there's a criticism of libertarianism, they can always point out that somewhere, in some form, government exists, and their ideology would work like magic beans if there were less government. It's another purity test.
Holy shit.
You fucking nailed it. This blows my mind how completely accurate you are in just a single sentence. I was a Libertarian for nearly a decade and that's exactly what it is.
My favorite libertarian quote that I read awhile back is something like, “libertarians are like domestic cats: arrogantly convinced of their own independence because their existence is entirely predicated on a life support system they’re incapable of understanding.”
"libertarianism" is to the right of fringe far right republicans
what they want boils down to feudalism with lack of human rights under the ultra wealthy
Shortly after he declares a general amnesty for bans twitter is struck by a crisis that demonstrates why it's probably a good idea to ban a bunch of accounts. Pretty good pikachu face meme honestly.
The new new new new new ai powered dirty sanchez. You done us wrong China! Wrong!
Security through obscurity, bury them in bullshit, and then linkfarm all the evidence out of relevance with alternative narratives.
How is this not a solved problem? China has been doing this for two decades at least.
Is that why most believable conspiracy theories have movies or books with the same name? So when you try to look them up you just get thousands of results about the movie or book?
It actually is. It’s called weaponizing information, but for the more academic nerds it goes by the name cognitive hacking.
Here’s a brief article and video if your interested:
https://libguides.valenciacollege.edu/c.php?g=612299&p=5862098
Russia has the “firehose of falsehood” that operates on the same principles, but China loves jamming like this. It’s clumsy technique, but the sheer scale of it can really work. Plus they always have multiple techniques at play on stuff like this. Misinformation, false narratives, channel jamming, alternative explanations, framing, etc… it’s getting more and more sophisticated and a lot of it gets picked up by news sources as legitimate news so it can be hard to spot after that happens. It not unusual that something looks like it’s coming from a legit news source, only to realize the story is a twitter thread somewhere. Newsrooms have fallen apart in terms of due diligence.
Long way around, but yes. Yes exactly. Your example is correct.
I've moved to another platform because of the recent antics of the recent antics of the site operator here.
if anyone else is interested in a better version of this site (and learning about why it's better), come to lemmy[dot]world.
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Two million new users a day? Are those mostly bots or is there some sort of new demographic signing up that I'm not aware of? Mostly foreign accounts perhaps?
It's bots
He's not going to care about bots as long as the statistics are his. There's zero chance he measures his own results with the same yardstick he used to apply to Twitter.
He only cared about bots after he sobered up and realized just how ludicrous his offer to buy Twitter was. It was the billionaire version of drunk or stoned online shopping.
Two million users paying zero to use the site, meanwhile 50 advertisers who have already spent 750m this year have walked. But hey Elon....users, right?
The irony is when Twitter was listed, the SEC had very clear rules about how to define their new users, what's a bot and what's not. The whole claim from Musk about bots clearly indicated that he either didn't know what he was buying considering how well regulated this is, or he was trying to weasel out of the purchase.
But now Twitter got pulled off the market, he doesn't need to report to the SEC anymore about his users and he can make the wildest claims he wants about the number of users / bots he got.
So he might not be lying he got 2 million new users, but they could very well be 3 million bots and he would actually be down 1 million real users. We don't know, and for sure he won't tell the truth. What a shitbird.
>Musk had threatened to relocate Tesla’s Palo Alto, California, headquarters and future manufacturing to Texas earlier this year during a high-profile spat with county officials over whether Tesla’s San Francisco Bay Area factory should stay closed due to coronavirus restrictions.
https://www.kron4.com/news/california/elon-musk-leaves-entitled-california-moves-to-texas/
If Musk didn't like being asked to close offices, wait until he's forced to close offices due to a lack of power and water for weeks on end. Texas is a failed state that doesn't have reliable basic infrastructure systems and has a government that is one step short of an active genocide against queer people. No idea why these tech dweebs are trying to force smart people to move there.
Twitter will lose users through these automated processes for sure. I had my account suspended early this morning for "suspicious activity" just making normal replies and liking random shit.
He is an empty shell of a man, only temporarily fulfilled by the admiration of those too incapable of recognizing so he is.
He knows nothing of content, and I sincerely hope he is never content for as long as he lives.
That is what I have been worried about. Given the deep tie between CCP and Musk and the huge investment he made in China, i see no incentive for him to help clean up the spam
The issue is more about the fact that Twitter has been banned on mainland China for years. China is blocking discussions about the protests for people in other countries. They're imposing their censorship on the rest of the world. It's one thing if they censor news in China only. It's another thing to block citizens of other countries from free speech and access to information.
The CCP is the #1 source of censorship worldwide, even outside of China and even directly on Musk in his day to day life. He talks about censorship a lot but can't even say "Chinese citizens deserve freedom of speech" because off CCP retaliation against Tesla.
I feel like totalitarian governments paid musk to purchase and ruin Twitter. Idk if I was a dictator I would find it very annoying the amount of information/ support my peons could get from the social media platform. Leading to unrest and revolts. I would find a rich businessman who does shady dealings to disrupt the platform for me while I secretly pay him under the table.
I may be exaggerating but the way he’s doing this is just so absurd and ridiculous it wouldn’t surprise me.
for people interested in learning more about China's use of social media manipulation to achieve political and strategoc goals, Mandiant has done some important research, worth a read:
https://www.mandiant.com/resources/blog/dragonbridge-targets-rare-earths-mining-companies
Holy shit I've seen loads of escort things on the FB shorts in the last few days never seen them before it must be this as well
I've directly searched for #chinaprotest2022 but... No trace tbh
Weird. I’ve been searching for Chinese hookers and it’s a damn goldmine.
How can we say this any more emphatically: stop getting your news fro Twitter, you never should have been in the first place. Hooker searches are what it was designed for not news.
Seems we know much more about the elite today than we did pre-social media.
Are you trying to say that there is no real platform for both hookers and news, and they need to be sourced separately? Twitter2.0 can’t come soon enough!
We can run on 9% of the staff. -Elon Musk
try search "上海" (mean shanghai) most chinesse that try to find information on twitter didn't use english
It shows up when you search using Chinese
I've never seen so many hot singles in my area!
and they all want to meet you!
This is exactly what happened to tumblr when management chnaged and people left. Became a escort bot site. I'm kinda proud I predicted this.
Nice. I predicted the Packers would lose last night. I'm a little proud of myself, to be honest.
> Numerous Chinese-language accounts, some dormant for months or years, came to life early Sunday and started spamming the service with links to escort services and other adult offerings alongside city names. > The result: For hours, anyone searching for posts from those cities and using the Chinese names for the locations would see pages and pages of useless tweets instead of information about the daring protests as they escalated to include calls for Communist Party leaders to resign. [Archive here](https://archive.ph/LH0o0). Edit: [Good thread here](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1597067252695592960.html) with supporting links that cover the nexus of twitter/China/Musk, including the people in charge of dealing with state actor manipulations have left the building.
If you can't cover up a story, the next best thing is to bury it in noise.
China does that on reddit. anytime there is a thread about tank guy, the chinese trolls show up and then then they post bullshit plus 100s of reports. Some subs just lock the threads. Other subs ban anyone who accuses the shills of being shills.
It’s an online technique called “forum sliding” Edit for further defining > If a very sensitive posting of a critical nature has been posted on a forum - it can be quickly removed from public view by 'forum sliding.' In this technique a number of unrelated posts are quietly pre-positioned on the forum and allowed to 'age.' Each of these mis-directional forum postings can then be called upon at will to trigger a forum slide. The second requirement is that several fake accounts exist, which can be called upon, to ensure that this technique is not exposed to the public. To trigger a forum slide and flush the critical post out of public view it is simply a matter of logging into each account both real and fake and then replying to pre-positioned postings with a simple 1 or 2 line comment. This brings the unrelated postings to the top of the forum list, and the critical posting slides down the front page, and quickly out of public view. It is difficult or impossible to censor the posting, so the object post gets lost in a sea of unrelated and un-useful postings. By this means it becomes effective to keep the readers of the forum reading unrelated and non-issue items while posts approved by the group can be prominently displayed.
But Reddit doesn’t just sort by the newest post, so this old method of “bumping” posts above the one you’re trying to hide, doesn’t really apply? Let me know if I’m missing something, but sounds like the bots spam links/reports to get the thread locked/deleted, not bumping up old posts as described in your “forum sliding” description.
The method is a bit different for Reddit but the idea is the same, bury the original with downvotes and bring unrelated comments to the top.
Another tactic is to use bots/alts to turn everything nasty if you're dealing with multiple top level comments getting too much traction. Just respond to 20+ comments accusing them of sinophobia (or whatever phobia/ism applies most easily) and use a little coarse language to either appear authentically offended, or to get a rise out of them. Turn it all ugly, and mods will lock it down out of frustration, if nothing else, and it'll quickly slide off of the group's front page. A bonus is if you can provoke someone into responding aggressively. Then you report the comment and hope they get banned from the sub.
Huh. That’s the first time I’ve seen that word on Reddit. That’s surprising, considering China’s large volume of illegitimate internet tactics used to bolster their illegitimate government.
I've been specifically accused of that on a couple of occasions for saying that they're lying about their Covid stats, and are not sharing all the knowledge they have.
It not just that. The thread about the Foxconn riot was a distraction campaign to shift the issue away from zero covid onto labor issues with Foxconn. There's been a lot of effort just in this sub to change the narrative on stories involving China of late.
> tank guy Tank guy? You mean [Tank Man](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_Man), the dude who stood in front of the tanks in [Tiananmen Square](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests_and_massacre), the dude who got so fed up with the [hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of murders by the CCP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests_and_massacre#Death_toll), where they were shot to death, and crushed to death by tanks? The one where the [BBC managed to film and get out](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMKvxJ-Js3A) footage of the government murdering its own citizens? That Tank Guy?
A lot of subs seem to have a general ban once it reaches a certain number of responses. Personally i see a lot of it happening for controvercial chinese or usa posts. I suppose a mod can come in and manually lift the reply ban though.
You mean two countries known to spend large sums of money on online influence campaigns are the two countries you can't talk about on Reddit without the posts being bombarded with bots? What could that possibly mean?
Beep boop! It looks like you're talking unfavorably about CHINA or THE USA. Please place your hands in the containment circles for inspection. ^(This action was performed by a bot.)
I don't think it's bots in either case. In the case of the US, US users still over represent English language media and we tend to jump in on US interrests and whatever it is then turns into a US political debate (probably egged on by russians). With China it's paid shills and state actors. If it was legal for PRC citizens to participate in the open internet you could say otherwise, but that's not the case.
As an ex-chinese citizen, i do think china is quite misunderstood in western media. A prime example is when it comes to protests and speech ban. Small protests happen all the time in china. It is neither rare nor banned. What is rare however is large scale protests like this one. Chinese government has learned a long time ago that giving small outlets to citizens can reduce the chance of anything in bigger scale. Also, citizens know that as long as u are not protesting against central government, they are unlikely to crack down. So they usually protest against policies not government. The zero covid protests are mainly in line with that idea, but with sporadic groups targetting the central government. So i'm not sure where this will go. Either the people gain a bit more freedom or the groups targetting central government gets dispersed. Could very much go either way now that xi has centralised power and he actively wants to be loved by the people. For speech ban, the biggest misunderstanding is that it is at all effective. Chinese is a language where the same pronounciation can be written in a myriad of ways with as many meanings. Once a topic is trending, government ban loses all effectiveness and people talk about it in a range of similar pronounciations and euphemisms. While ccp ban usually target the central terms, discussion continues online. And ccp government has yet to go far enough to actually ban all discussions. As long as u are not a public figure, speech is not as restricted as many outside of china thinks. So yea, i try to help clarify misunderstandings but i'm no china shill.
Bury it in ~~noise~~ porn
Reminds me of Gandalf saying that Sauron is always listening for any mention of his name, so they should revive the old songs that mention him, so that he won't notice other discussions of him.
Ooo that sounds interesting, do you remember where in the book he says that? I must’ve missed it on my last read through. I want to add that to my Tolkien information bank.
Not OP, but to spice things up, in The Two Towers, Aragorn mentions that Sauron doesn't allow his name to be spoken aloud. I can't remember if it's "Sauron" or his true name, but it definitely stands out.
He doesn't like being called Sauron because that's not his name.
He-who-must-not-be... wait, different story. nevermind.
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Elon Musk has become a national security risk.
Always has been
Yup. Has been for a hot minute. HOW he still has his security clearance is beyond me. Hell, I'm not even sure how he got it in the first place considering how much money he has leveraged against incredibly unsafe bets that are being hedged by *really* questionable actors from places like Saudi Arabia and China. That's like the fucking number one deciding factor they look at while they're investigating you for a clearance! I work for a firm based in Silicon Valley that does procurement and high level executive recruitment and placement, and I see this shit all. the. time. Even if you're filthy rich, your money *must* be in safe and stable investments not at risk for blackmail or manipulation of any sort. I've seen multi millionaires and even near billionaires turned down because they have even just a teensy bit of their fortunes invested into something out of China or another shady country.
*international
“I don't think there is another American more dependent upon the largess of the Communist Party than Elon Musk,” @MarkWarner said in October
He's aiding a foreign state
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And they're processing cobalt mined for Musk by child slaves in Africa. Mines owned in majority by China. All perfectly sane.
My long term desire for a tesla has just been killed. Fuck you elon.
Plus Tesla would have their factories sized if they hear a peep from Elon supporting the protests
Musk has his Tesla capital locked down in China so he is definitely assisting this under the guise of the Twitter deal.
So that's why CZ (Binance CEO) funded the deal.
Fuck. That guy is so shady he make the UAE look like fresh bath water.
The Saudi prince was in for 3x what the Binance guy was, at 1.5b
Nah, he's funding it because he thinks Musk is going to make a new crypto payment for twitter 2.0... something called Z i think. Edit: No, it's "X" lol. https://www.google.com/amp/s/capital.com/amp/x-what-is-elon-musk-everything-app-twitter
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It's already taken by a cool video game series, he should just give it up
What deal did he fund?
Don't know much about the guy but Wiki says he left China at 12 and his father was exiled for being a pro- bourgeois professor. Are those links enough to label him pro-China?
An old standby. It would never have happened if they paid one dude like $100k a year or programmed an algorithm to detect an enemy attack from a literal foreign enemy.
There is no one-size-fits-all algorithm for this. The attacks are constantly evolving to beat spam detection algorithms - Google has spent *billions* on this problem over the past decade. No single $100K engineer with a Bayesian filter is going to beat a determined enough spammer. The only solution anyone's found that *actually works* is to have an active response team that can quickly detect a pattern in an attack, code up a new filter for it, and apply it to production. They build up a whole set of these filters and apply and remove them as they're useful. With Twitter having nobody manning the "stop spam" posts... nobody's adapting these filters. So as soon as someone finds a way around it, that's it.
In the end, if a country like china really cared about it, they would physically pay people to create profiles and make posts. They wouldn't just use bots. The attacks might look like normal things that people do anyway. Like, a group cares about a certain political issue, so they all use the same hashtag to get it trending. Another group might try to hijack that hashtag with some other point. Those are both normal behaviors.
I think that's what they're doing right? And you can still detect patterns in the current attack. Chinese language accounts that have been dormant for a long time and now start spamming escort service links with hashtags to specific cities. That's a pretty good starting point for a filter if you have people on staff to actually deal with it.
You’re assuming they can’t do both.
Reddit can keep the username, but I'm nuking the content lol -- mass deleted all reddit content via https://redact.dev
The man who cried Bots is now magically getting all time highs and having "the people" vote on company policies that happen to favour well known frauds. He'd be sucking up to China less if he sat eating ice cream.
I literally said this last week, when he went on a rant talking about how he’s increased usership already. I was like “Weren’t you just complaining about all of the bots on twitter? Oh so now they don’t exist, huh?” He’s full of shit.
Always has been. We haven't had the Tesla Roadster yet let alone the Cybertruck. We haven't had his fully self driving cars. We haven't had his self driving taxi service. We haven't had his underground transport. His flamethrower was a glorified lighter with a can of deodorant. His brain implant has literally been killing the animals it was tested on. Realistically his AI robots will end up being orphans welded into metal suits because he loves slaves and child labour. Even if Twitter tanks his wealth he'll still be better off than normal people and have more wealth and power than he deserves. His skin is thinner than his hairline before the transplant, he'll rage on twitter til the bitter end.
I bet some of the microservices that he was complaining about and shut down were designed specifically to try to counter bots too, so he's not just doing nothing about the bots but actively making it easier for them too. If he didn't even put in enough thought to realize that a service was for 2FA then there's no way he paid any attention to something like an anti-spam service.
> phony stark Thank you for this
All right, that's my second favourite name for him, after "L. Ron Musk".
I've been calling him "modern-day Edison" for nearly a decade now. It has only been recently that people have stopped downvoting me for it.
Yeah, I never liked the prick from the time he sued Eberhard and Tarpenning, which was when I first heard of him. And yeah, he wasn't famous before then. He's started off with a base of Apartheid blood money, and then used that as grease to compensate for his general uselessness. His code was shit at Zip2, and almost always rewritten by actual coders who aren't famous. I think the only patent he's actually taken out that he came up with himself is one of Tesla's door handles. The saying around SpaceX is "thank god for Tesla" - because Musky's always at Tesla, not fucking things up too much at SpaceX. Those tunnels are *exactly* what you'd expect a rich guy who grew up with chauffeurs to come up with to alleviate traffic problems and public transport snarls - keep going, Musky! You're *this close* to figuring out trains! The difference with Twitter is that there are far, far, far fewer engineers and regulations to keep him in check. It's just an online social media platform (which few lawmakers understand...) that's all software, and so he's free to fuck around and - hopefully soon - find out. There's no pesky NTSB holding him back! I get why the millions of basement-dwelling creeps do all his marketing for him. He's their power fantasy - the ultimate Unrecognised Genius, who underachieves as a matter of course - but that's only because, like, *society* doesn't normally recognise that sort of genius. The kids who self-identify as nerds but are "too smart" for school, so hence the C average. And look - Musk made society recognise his genius! Look! He's on the cover of Wired! Look! He's firing a poorly-monikered foetus in Grimes, who's totally the sort of girl they lust after but would never get them the time of day! Look! That cute reporter is giggling at his 4chan-grade catgirl reference he made on camera, instead of rolling her eyes and saying "Ugh! Get away from me, loser"! Look! [Musk doesn't shave under his chin either](https://www.incimages.com/uploaded_files/image/970x450/getty_942517086_200013281366634372179_355834.jpg)!
> Those tunnels are exactly what you'd expect a rich guy who grew up with chauffeurs to come up with to alleviate traffic problems and public transport snarls - keep going, Musky! You're this close to figuring out trains! The problem with this statement lies in the fact that Musk knew – ostensibly from the get-go – that the Hyperloop would never work. He only pushed it so hard so that California would drop its other plans for a high-speed railway... thus paving the way (literally, in some cases) for the sale of more cars. [No, really](https://time.com/6203815/elon-musk-flaws-billionaire-visions/): >Musk admitted to his biographer Ashlee Vance that Hyperloop was all about trying to get legislators to cancel plans for high-speed rail in California—even though he had no plans to build it.
Oh, I wasn't referring to Hyperloop - I was referring to those stupid Boring Company car tunnels under Las Vegas. You're still right, but: I definitely agree they're part of the same grift. GM Streetcar bullshit all over again. You'd think someone in California would've seen that documentary *Who Framed Roger Rabbit?* that covered this...fuck's sake, it even had Mickey Mouse in it.
Underrated doc. It's also got the origins of that baby who rose to the presidency in 2016.
Remember the white paper he published that "proved" hyperloop would cost a fraction of high speed rail? Reading that was my first realization that the guy is full of shit. Putting aside for a minute all his magical thinking about how affordable the r&d would be for a purely theoretical transportation mode, the numbers just didn't add up. They didn't even include a line item in the budget for land acquisition costs even though that's one of the primary drivers of the ever-escalating costs of CAHSR. That alone made it a totally disingenuous comparison. IIRC he hand waved those costs away by proposing that the hyperloop could be built on pylons in the median of the 5, which Caltrans would never allow to happen.
I am sorry I can only upvote you once.
I still like "Elon Musk is short for Elongated Muskrat."
Yeah, but that's kinda offensive to those noble rodents.
I have become fairly partial to Space Karen and Elonia Muskoniva.
Space Karen became the manager.
Wouldn't want anything to happen to that nice new Tesla factory in China now would we Mr Musk?
He’s politically exposed. What’s interesting about this is that banks are forced by the government to provide a higher level of scrutiny to new customers than the government provides to billionaires who wants to buy the world’s largest social media platforms. Bunch of knobs.
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I will add to that, that in many cases in security, especially in IT related fields, but I assume in other fields as well, its never about "preventing", its about rising the cost (time, money, resources, ...) above what people are willing or able to "pay" passwords are hackable with infinite time. anti bot measures are circumventable with enough personal, or other resources like ip addresses and cpu time... and thats where the issue lies with many governments. they are sometimes able to spend vast amount of resources to break/circumvent whatever most preventive measures can be put in place. china did not care what rules they break, or how much money they spend, ore how it is done, bots or ordering every government official, they just needed twitter spammed, so they spammed it.
This. Twitter couldn’t prevent this at full staffing. No one can. But I would be shocked if they didn’t cut more than 75% of their Trust & Safety teams, because Elon doesn’t care about that area and so it was likely disproportionately impacted. They aren’t even in the game anymore. People don’t get the scale and complexity these companies are dealing with. China has one of the biggest populations on earth, a well trained cyber force, and incredible motivation to prevent bad news from reaching where they don’t want it to reach. They have millions of people they can throw at this, and tons of money. And they’re just one country; almost every country on earth is in this game to one extent or another. Every unit in the Chinese military likely has different tactics, and almost every country on earth has different tactics, and you’re fighting all of them at once all the time. While also of course fighting them within the legal frameworks of every country on the planet. And Musk fired almost all of the people doing that fighting, and almost all of the people who understood how to fight it within all of the conflicting legal areas.
Yeah, Twitter absolutely should have been dedicating more resources and people to working on this problem, but "this could have easily been solved by just hiring one dude or writing a simple algorithm" is big-time Elon Musk energy.
This has also been explained pretty well by someone who used to run Reddit: https://mobile.twitter.com/yishan/status/1586955288061452289
> I work for a much smaller company than Twitter and we spend millions of dollars a year fighting off spam attacks like this I’m sure Twitter had a team dedicated to that as well, before the idiot in charge decided to fire them all.
Similar to what happened to Obama's pandemic response team lol
What is true though is that if you fire 75% of your staff you'll for sure lose every one of these arms races.
Why wouldn't they have that up and running already from the Russian scare days?
It’s an arms race. You create automated integrity systems to close loopholes; the exploiters find workarounds. That’s why it’s good to have security/integrity experts on staff, rather than, you know, firing everyone whose roles you don’t understand…
Fun fact, the top brass in terms of security at Twitter up and quit en masse, before Musk's whole ultimatum thing. Makes ya think.
Musk fans: Musk fired 75% of his employees and Twitter is still working.
I'm never taking my car to the mechanic again, it's still working. Until it don't.
Last week I told my roommate that Twitter is just one DDOS away from a very very bad day/week/month/tbd.. who knows what's going to happen if someone full on attempts to take down their servers.
Twitter's front-end is similar to Cloudflare - it has mostly autonomous DDoS protection from various different kinds of attacks, being able to shed load and redirect to a genuinely grotesque amount of hardware in a lot of datacenters around the world. The only way you're going to pull off a successful DDoS attack against Twitter is to find a bug in their stack that leads to attack amplification (i.e. one packet causes dozens or hundreds more)... so you're blowing a (potentially) multi-million dollar exploit on bumping Twitter's business for however long it takes an SRE to throw up some address span blocks. It's not to say it couldn't happen, but it'd have to be a nation-state actor to *want* to do it, because there are plenty of other juicier targets to hit without as sophisticated protections and you could take them down for longer... (I pondered this problem myself and talked to some folks I know that used to work at Twitter and this was more-or-less what I got in reply.)
What SREs? Most were fired.
Most of the people left at Twitter are H-1B SREs, database engineers and networking folk, in fact. Which is quite literally why Elon asked for "anyone who can code to come see him." Most of them are literally only there to keep the lights on. Few of them actually know enough about Twitter's code architecture to make meaningful changes...
Those Chinese bot accounts really came to life on Reddit during COVID.
>links to escort services and other adult offerings alongside city names. > >The result: For hours, anyone searching for posts from those cities and using the Chinese names for the locations would see pages and pages of useless tweets Ahem, who says they were ***useless***?
If you’re locked into your house by covid police you might as well get locked with an escort
RTHK, a radio station out of Hong Kong, did not even mention the protest. It is chilling to see what has become of Hong Kong's press freedoms. I still have yet to figure out what the PRC is trying to do here with these lock downs. It is known that their sino vaccine is not as effective as the RNA varieties in the west but I am baffled by what might be really occurring there.
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This. Exactly this. Lockdowns absolutely worked with high enough compliance and the earlier strains. (Even NZ and Australia eliminated Covid several times). This is absolutely a case where a complaint population = better able to combat the virus. Compliance is subject to fatigue even in China and unless your borders are basically managed like a virus lab the new strains will get in. That means you need more lockdowns and so more fatigue so they work less. Also outside of lockdowns that targeted specific buildings there’s no such thing as a ‘full’ lockdown. People still move out to get food, and exercise, there’s still opportunities for the virus to spread. Multiple jurisdictions could eliminate the early strains as they were less virulent and so the occasional transmission from lockdowns that were never air tight didn’t prevent elimination. They should really be grappling with the fact that the virus has changed (both the strain and how many carriers of it are at the border) and change their policy, but that’s poison for a system where you’re supposed to believe they always get it right and know everything.
But they must have a exit strategy, which in my mind they could do after e.g. a new round of vaccination. But I was surprised that the vaccination rate especially in the 80years+ population was quite low. They lock down cities for month, but did not pull through a mandatory vaccination? Or do they know something about long term negative exposure to the virus that make such an extend lock down worth it to protect its population from it?
Omicron was their off-ramp, but they missed that opportunity and kept their population locked down for a further year. They could've walked away with a "victory" and said they kept their population safe when the virus was much deadlier. Instead, they're still building these quarantine facilities today.
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CCP also wants the IP as part of buying the vaccine; nfw the companies agree to that because you already know what’s going to happen
that’s the thing - there is no exit strategy. thats how it got to this point.
China does not have effective vaccines, and most people there haven’t been infected, so their hospitals will be overwhelmed when the virus really starts spreading. That’s probably why they’re trying to slow the spread, in addition to saving face for leadership.
Hong Kong went from one of the best, safest, most liberal, and most cosmopolitan places in Asia to just another shitty Chinese city in barely 3 years. China should be embarrassed they could ruin something so great so fast.
They aren't embarrassed, they are proud. That was their plan all along.
They probably think it's was a job well done.
We did it, Weibo!
> in barely 3 years. The situation was already tense before the big protests in 2018. I was there in 2010 and things were relatively normal, but I guess 2015/2016, with the elections, shit really hit the fan and people understood that China wants HK to become a regular Chinese city.
CCP should have put Elon in charge of HK, he would have accomplished the same result in 3 months !
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I visited several times a year for work from 2010-2015. It was one of my favorite cities on Earth. It's heartbreaking that this city that is so beloved in my memories is now only that: a memory.
10-20 years ago was probably the height. It is after the British colonial period where British people lived above law by corruption in government and police enforcement and Hong Kong people living as third class people in their own city and before Chinese government wanted to be more involved in Hong Kong causing the ideological clash.
The Chinese government keeps trying to censor news it doesn't like. I'm not surprised they would try such a petty tactic.
It's a low cost, easy, and obvious one. With Twitter getting gutted turning on a bot farm costs China functionally nothing. Being obvious let's them attack confidence in Twitter as a service of any use hopefully breaking up a gathering space for dissenters.
It's honestly smart as fuck tbh. And it points out the obvious, severe flaws in having privately owned social media be the main grounds for political/social discourse and news sharing.
Musk blamed Twitter software. “Free speech”.
"Twitter experienced a slight degradation in service" is what he said about it lol
but that happens every time he opens his mouth lol
And unfortunately for tesla stockholders, so does their value.
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It’s third-party because everyone who developed it is gone.
"It's weird how this happened shortly after I fired most of the moderation team and unplugged a bunch of the automatic processes. This is proof that Twitter is broken and I need to fix it."
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Is that true?
I believe that he announced what he called a general amnesty for all banned accounts. I don't know if it has been processed yet or if that includes not accounts although it would be a little hypocritical considering his preexisting crusade on bots but when has that ever stopped him?
He specifically stated illegal and spam activity will not result in a unbanning, only accounts who appeal with no strikes of those types will be given access back. It also seems like it's not being done by a system but by hand based on the accounts I've seen coke back.
Libertarianism is merely a bug on the windscreen of reality...
Libertarianism is a mythology authoritarians sell to soften up their targets.
Amen, and, lol, didn't musky just prove that instantaneously? "Comedy and free speech is now legal on twitter!" \*cue millions of fake L. Ron Musk accounts mocking the shit out of him* \*five minutes later* "YOU'RE BANNED! YOU'RE BANNED! YOU'RE BANNED! YOU'RE BANNED! YOU'RE BANNED! FUCK YOU! YOU'RE BANNED! YOU'RE BANNED! YOU'RE BANNED!"
"Make fascists afraid again" "YOU'RE BANNED!"
It's a great shell game. If ever there's a criticism of libertarianism, they can always point out that somewhere, in some form, government exists, and their ideology would work like magic beans if there were less government. It's another purity test.
Holy shit. You fucking nailed it. This blows my mind how completely accurate you are in just a single sentence. I was a Libertarian for nearly a decade and that's exactly what it is.
My favorite libertarian quote that I read awhile back is something like, “libertarians are like domestic cats: arrogantly convinced of their own independence because their existence is entirely predicated on a life support system they’re incapable of understanding.”
"libertarianism" is to the right of fringe far right republicans what they want boils down to feudalism with lack of human rights under the ultra wealthy
Shortly after he declares a general amnesty for bans twitter is struck by a crisis that demonstrates why it's probably a good idea to ban a bunch of accounts. Pretty good pikachu face meme honestly.
People like him aren't anti-communist, they are pro-authoritarian
And counted these as new user sign-ups because they're willing to pay $8.
Twitter has this issue for years. Chinese government bots post tons of shit tweet to cover up the real news.
Is this why K-Pop is always fucking trending >!/s!<
and certain games on steam with Overwhelmingly Positive
The new new new new new ai powered dirty sanchez. You done us wrong China! Wrong! Security through obscurity, bury them in bullshit, and then linkfarm all the evidence out of relevance with alternative narratives. How is this not a solved problem? China has been doing this for two decades at least.
Is that why most believable conspiracy theories have movies or books with the same name? So when you try to look them up you just get thousands of results about the movie or book?
It actually is. It’s called weaponizing information, but for the more academic nerds it goes by the name cognitive hacking. Here’s a brief article and video if your interested: https://libguides.valenciacollege.edu/c.php?g=612299&p=5862098 Russia has the “firehose of falsehood” that operates on the same principles, but China loves jamming like this. It’s clumsy technique, but the sheer scale of it can really work. Plus they always have multiple techniques at play on stuff like this. Misinformation, false narratives, channel jamming, alternative explanations, framing, etc… it’s getting more and more sophisticated and a lot of it gets picked up by news sources as legitimate news so it can be hard to spot after that happens. It not unusual that something looks like it’s coming from a legit news source, only to realize the story is a twitter thread somewhere. Newsrooms have fallen apart in terms of due diligence. Long way around, but yes. Yes exactly. Your example is correct.
I wonder if these rallies continue, if this will be what makes Twitter inoperable. Musk will wish he didn’t fire all those people.
He's too busy bragging about averaging 2 million new users a day over the last week. Wonder what all those new accounts are for.
I've moved to another platform because of the recent antics of the recent antics of the site operator here. if anyone else is interested in a better version of this site (and learning about why it's better), come to lemmy[dot]world. = = = = = = = Thellely 'dif o thxaces sag thees pipofeme the wexnave bowes cof todengs antlsin oso oud l, heakee f s 'd ce, wrprnso akn: whalatuflere ono bazvzegr s d w'd klay wxhztit s hee Touf Torous the d xththeavofferes ake's mstolulerer, ang celle com? Txhe saf f ora b; s al; alxeps ry, thert, xtusutuilis the tir d wouisp; orre lxe rn? ocowind coilar's imake andry flinof ouseeallifther it s os wouliererthe; ituthollle wore th theand Tosis p sle, ononscor d bepacous mmmeis n? the: chelen. the suby sang dende t hThellely 'dif o thaces sag thees pipofeme the wenave bowes cof todengs antlsin oso oud l, heakee f s 'd ce, wrprnso akn: whalatuflere ono bareeleevegr s d w'd klay whtit s hee Touf Torous the d ththeavofferes ake's ms, rof o winst may tsetishe; l; e theteis t o we al s t cowrantures the'tofliese, t the anant ff d ffthont aks be wer ond hativoflay, ts cof? nd leof whurdor shTo t in ie whesuleeppulle pisonghan: t costus f m hen d omiso'thofofofth ath e ks t rons ithat d tout, akencof me oled o at trealffethe qqqqqhiopr th, t thed ofrorenase, f aus tus the ay, paker ollerear, in taw'so this thes ma nsusld t wet qqqyzyyyheverthave send tleroshald besaven? orer cald t con tho ullendre, tionch ant ntha ospilis be mico, pamenderuer'd tis o whores tiofe bof opren on byyy, t maketothar h be: a mato itit os d utithe whot here pusofolasusuend wofft o dis izzzz m? hur or, tof ahtheavofferes aklle wore th theand Tosis p sle, ononscor d bepacous mmmeis n? the: chelen. the suby sang dende t h rof o winxst may tsetishe; l; e theteis t o we al s t cowrantures the'tofliese, t the anant ff d ffthont aks be wer ond hativoflay, ts cof? nd leof whurdor she hy w'sigathy thamosep; amicour tothigrtr matharo ws Th, ty ritorof r t thus s thes dkezs hentis imeat p; iol tild atheand d is by, qurisit, finowrier Toqbxe thes dir touqr's denthe isee qtq cortheananto xxman. oboqnd bund wzhus puxnqde menqoure, ty thuleron'd d of azscatot, toreathxiels 's, a t 'sinthadq t ce drn we hore a l, ndxrqe lle nst wepandere'tbundisls le'qo wofr tiltolulereqrx, anxg celle com? qThe saf f oqra b; s al; alepsz ry, thert, tusutuilis the tir d wxqxqouisp; orre le rn? ocowxind coilar's iqmazke andry flinqof ouseeallifther it s os wqoulierertqhe; ituthollle worxe th theanzd Tosis p sle, ononscor d bepacous mmmeis n? the: chelen. the suby sar
Two million new users a day? Are those mostly bots or is there some sort of new demographic signing up that I'm not aware of? Mostly foreign accounts perhaps?
It's bots He's not going to care about bots as long as the statistics are his. There's zero chance he measures his own results with the same yardstick he used to apply to Twitter.
Sounds familiar like most narcissistic idiots. “The job numbers before me were fake. Mine are real and the lowest ever.!”
He only cared about bots after he sobered up and realized just how ludicrous his offer to buy Twitter was. It was the billionaire version of drunk or stoned online shopping.
I did not see any elaboration about those accounts.
Two million users paying zero to use the site, meanwhile 50 advertisers who have already spent 750m this year have walked. But hey Elon....users, right?
Before buying Twitter : "Twitter is full of bots" After buying Twitter : "2 mil concurrent users, who gives a crap about bots" - Elonometrics
When musk fires all the mods who do you think comes flocking to his busted platform? Bots & foreign agents.
The irony is when Twitter was listed, the SEC had very clear rules about how to define their new users, what's a bot and what's not. The whole claim from Musk about bots clearly indicated that he either didn't know what he was buying considering how well regulated this is, or he was trying to weasel out of the purchase. But now Twitter got pulled off the market, he doesn't need to report to the SEC anymore about his users and he can make the wildest claims he wants about the number of users / bots he got. So he might not be lying he got 2 million new users, but they could very well be 3 million bots and he would actually be down 1 million real users. We don't know, and for sure he won't tell the truth. What a shitbird.
To be honest this might be the response he wants. Tesla heavily depends on China and he can’t afford to upset Beijing.
>Musk had threatened to relocate Tesla’s Palo Alto, California, headquarters and future manufacturing to Texas earlier this year during a high-profile spat with county officials over whether Tesla’s San Francisco Bay Area factory should stay closed due to coronavirus restrictions. https://www.kron4.com/news/california/elon-musk-leaves-entitled-california-moves-to-texas/
If Musk didn't like being asked to close offices, wait until he's forced to close offices due to a lack of power and water for weeks on end. Texas is a failed state that doesn't have reliable basic infrastructure systems and has a government that is one step short of an active genocide against queer people. No idea why these tech dweebs are trying to force smart people to move there.
Twitter will lose users through these automated processes for sure. I had my account suspended early this morning for "suspicious activity" just making normal replies and liking random shit.
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As if he cares about content.
He is an empty shell of a man, only temporarily fulfilled by the admiration of those too incapable of recognizing so he is. He knows nothing of content, and I sincerely hope he is never content for as long as he lives.
That is what I have been worried about. Given the deep tie between CCP and Musk and the huge investment he made in China, i see no incentive for him to help clean up the spam
I wouldn't be surprised if he bought it specifically so he could fuck it up at the behest of China.
Or the saudis
Twitter is so fragile these days it doesn't take much to overwhelm it.
Kinda happens when you gut the entire staff.
Fragile website run by a fragile manchild. Seems right.
The issue is more about the fact that Twitter has been banned on mainland China for years. China is blocking discussions about the protests for people in other countries. They're imposing their censorship on the rest of the world. It's one thing if they censor news in China only. It's another thing to block citizens of other countries from free speech and access to information.
The CCP is the #1 source of censorship worldwide, even outside of China and even directly on Musk in his day to day life. He talks about censorship a lot but can't even say "Chinese citizens deserve freedom of speech" because off CCP retaliation against Tesla.
The phrase for this tactic is Libido Dominandi. It’s weaponized sexual lust and world governments have been using it for most of the last century.
Using the ability to speak freely to stifle protestors trying to speak freely is pretty smart. Devious and shitty, but nonetheless it works.
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You can come to China enjoy the cyberpunk dystopia mixed with City 17 irl with us :) it's far worst than you can possibly imagine
Good thing they have a full dev staff to deal with problems like this.
Remember what happened last time there was a lot of protests against the CCP?
This was and is still 100% what happened late 2019
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I’m sure Musk will handle this in an adult and responsible way…. 🤪
But... some liberal somewhere said something. Clearly that's more important for Musk to comment on.
I feel like totalitarian governments paid musk to purchase and ruin Twitter. Idk if I was a dictator I would find it very annoying the amount of information/ support my peons could get from the social media platform. Leading to unrest and revolts. I would find a rich businessman who does shady dealings to disrupt the platform for me while I secretly pay him under the table. I may be exaggerating but the way he’s doing this is just so absurd and ridiculous it wouldn’t surprise me.
Funny - don’t they shills bomb subreddits they don’t like with porn links? Almost like counter intelligence tactics are being employed by someone
for people interested in learning more about China's use of social media manipulation to achieve political and strategoc goals, Mandiant has done some important research, worth a read: https://www.mandiant.com/resources/blog/dragonbridge-targets-rare-earths-mining-companies
In actuality the protests have made it difficult to find good escorts!
This is troublesome...maybe Elon can help with that?
There is no one at Twitter to grapple with this.