That’s a good point. When will the ripples hit Tesla?
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I don’t have to read it. I just searched on Wuhan and see no spam and loads of tweets about protests in Wuhan. So the problem was fixed before I even knew it existed. Problem resolved. How do you know the previous regime would have?
We’ll see! His links with China are the most disturbing thing about this whole thing.
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Well him and the big guy. 
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And don’t forget the “smartest man he knows.”
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So…just because a problem was fixed before you knew it existed, doesn’t mean that the problem wasn’t problematic during the window of you not knowing its existence, right?
Twitter had deadwood sure, but some essential services have been completely neutered or at least heavily stripped down, defanged. We could never look at this in two different timelines, but it shouldn’t be a cognitive hardship to envision that twitter with a heavily reduced trust and safety team would be much more sluggish in responding to an influence operation from a state actor.
Here you go, if you are actually interested in how Musk is going about viewing China’s most recent psyop:
Without mentioning the specifics of the China protests, Elon Musk tweeted early on Monday morning that “the amount of pro psy ops on Twitter is ridiculous!” before joking that “at least with new Verified they will pay $8 for the privilege.” He followed up with an image of Pepe the Frog accompanied by the slogan “I don’t care about this particular psyop, honestly.”
Source:
Twitter hit with wave of porn and spam obscuring tweets about China protests - The Verge
Keeping it classy. Cool. Certainly nothing suspect to see here regarding Musk’s China ties…
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Problems happen. Musk doesn’t control the entire CCP internet apparatus so that he can prevent anything they might do. This seems at most–if it even happened on the scale suggested–to be a problem that Musk’s Twitter was able to quickly handle and is now in the past. I can easily get news about China protests on Twitter, and furthermore it would seem Musk’s Twitter is actively seeking to ensure that I can do so, which alleviates some of the concerns I had about Musk’s ownership actually.
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None of the accounts I’m getting my China protest news from were affected at all. A little porn in the mix would actually have been a nice break from all the gloom and doom.
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I get what you are saying and chuckled at the porn bit, but it is completely missing the point of how twitter works, and how what was done (and was sluggishly responded to) worked entirely. Oh well.
The article says: “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.”
How was this supposed to be dealt with exactly? Porn’s allowed on Twitter. Musk’s Twitter is working. I don’t have the same confidence about the former management based on some other things actually.
I think there are legitimate concerns about Musk’s business interests in China and how that may potentially affect decisions he makes regarding Twitter. In this case, there doesn’t seem to be a problem.
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Well shucks I guess you are right. Who needs timely foreign influence operation mitigation anyways? That spam, for a good window of time, really muddled people’s ability to find information about the protests, certainly not having any measurable impact. I suppose it shouldn’t be problematic at all that that fire raged on for as long as it did before it was extinguished. /s
There seems to be a massive disconnect here regarding how potent information warfare is and how it has a measurable impact on populations. I don’t know if this is due to a generational gap, deeply rooted cynicism, or perhaps a combination of both. The internet is not candyland, the activities taking place on it not at all linked to reality…
These types of operations have, or at least intend to have, high impact on populations of people, hoping to mold the narrative, or at least impede society’s understanding/confidence of what is going on. With that being understood, Musk flippantly tweeting what he tweeted regarding what China did on Twitter recently, acting like a manchild brandishing a pepe meme, should throw up some red flags to anyone paying attention. These operations should be taken seriously, and the funding to help mitigate their efficacy should not be slashed like it has been. But I get it, you seem to identify with this childish meme Musk thought appropriate for the situation:
It’s the principle honestly. Was the effect catastrophic, no. But the spam stayed far longer than it should have, especially if there was enough people to quash it like there should have been.
Apparently we have it, so I don’t know what you mean. I don’t have as much confidence in the former management at present. If what you’re getting at is that we need an army of politically motivated censors stopping all kinds of people from sharing their views so that maybe they might stop a Chinese spam operation faster than fast enough for almost no one to notice it even happened, no I don’t agree with that.
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A fire department reacted to a fire much more sluggishly than usual, and it makes sense to you to not criticize the problem in that, but just be thankful that the fire department eventually responded? Since you didn’t get property damage/singed or know of anyone who did, no harm no foul?
How do you know it was much more sluggishly than usual? It seems to me you don’t. The previous management let those accounts hang around for years, why don’t you blame them?
What I do know for a fact is that the fire was put out with very little if any damage and the affected property is now 100% functioning normally.
I admire the temerity exhibited in that statement.
I guess I am just not so cynical regarding the idea that having a team of experts assembled to handle an issue, usually translates to a more timely, elegant, and efficient defusing of said issue. I know it’s in vogue to look down upon the educated “ivory tower” types, and exchange them for grimy “thought leaders” like Trump or Musk though. Musk, admittedly, is an expert in some fields, he should really just stick to them instead of duping the public into believing he is some sort of ubermensch. I wonder how you must have felt about Trump gutting State. A needed separation of wheat from the chaff? No operational hamstringing happened back then due to it? Some parallels here…
I don’t even know what you’re talking about. Anyway, having a large staff doesn’t necessarily translate into efficiency. Again, this looks like an essentially unpreventable attack that never totally disrupted the flow of information and was quickly put an end to. My confidence in Musk’s management is considerably increased by this news, particularly in the light of the concerns I have had about his attitude towards offending China. For that, I thank you for bringing it to my attention. I’ll leave it there.
I don’t know about that. The staff was bloated. Now, it’s been cut back. Let’s see what they can do. They won’t be able to do everything, but I have faith that people will step up and do their job and not do their job for some reason other than they pay you to do it.
Right. Excess breeds weakness in normal business circumstances.
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Wow! So much better. Thanks.
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Who could have seen it coming.
It’s ok though, he won’t lose any orbiters/ring-kissers - he still hits all the right notes with them at this point in time, especially when he “owns the libs”!