After Musk’s mass layoffs, X says it’s expanding safety and election teams

Fatesrider

Ars Legatus Legionis
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"We're currently expanding our safety and elections teams to focus on combating manipulation, surfacing inauthentic accounts and closely monitoring the platform for emerging threats," the company said in a blog post today.
This should be good, given how detached from reality Musk is.

From any other company I'd see this as a fight to support truth and reality. In this case, I imagine that anyone saying the election WASN'T rigged will get their account suspended.
 
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SometimesISeeLivePeople

Smack-Fu Master, in training
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The whole situation reminds me of the principle of Chesterton's fence, which says: "Don't remove a fence until you see why it was put up in the first place."
Indeed. Every time I see a piece of absurdity in the strata of the code I maintain for my day job I have to remind myself of this before I glibly reintroduce a decade-old edge-case. Something Twittex's engineers might be repeatedly reminded of in the upcoming weeks.
 
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Sajuuk

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Why am I not convinced that this is going to work as intended?
Oh it'll work exactly the way Musk intends it to. The floodgates will open for every kind of lie imaginable from Republicans and their ilk, while Democratic ads will be taken down or rejected for saying "abortion".

2024 is gonna be a fun ride, y'all.
 
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157 (159 / -2)

lakerssuperman

Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
191
Every single one of these moves should be ridiculed and condemned. Lil' Musky has a demonstrable public pattern of political ideology that veers way right and seems to align with all kind of ism's that are problematic. It's his platform and he can do what he wants with it, but we need to stop pretending that these changes are designed to do anything but stroke his ego and create avenues for his particular ideologies to flourish.

He's acted in bad faith the entire way with Twitter and should be treated as such until evidence suggests a change in pattern.
 
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88 (90 / -2)

faffod

Ars Praetorian
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X probably wouldn't need to hire more staff if not for owner Elon Musk's extreme cost-cutting. Since buying Twitter in October 2022, he has reduced the employee count from about 7,500 people to around 1,500.
Sure the linked story mentions the nearly 80% staff reduction, but it don't include the number of contractors that were also cut. It's a far larger swath of layoff and destruction than the ~6,000 mentioned, per Ars at least another 5,000 contractors were cut. No way that could have any impact on operations... none.... well maybe just a little.
 
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Oh it'll work exactly the way Musk intends it to. The floodgates will open for every kind of lie imaginable from Republicans and their ilk, while Democratic ads will be taken down or rejected for saying "abortion".

2024 is gonna be a fun ride, y'all.

"Cishet"

AmanoJyaku has been banned from Twitter

#FreeSpeech
 
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quamquam quid loquor

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Twitter made less than $10 million on political ads in 2018. The liability has got to be far greater than $10 million.

The total pie is $10 billion, but most is going to TV. The part that's digital gets sliced into Facebook/Meta and Youtube/Google.

If there is no clear financial motive, there has to be another motive.
 
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rcduke

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Why even call the site X to begin with? Does Elon get angy and threaten news outlets that still call it Twitter or something?
Because officially that's the name of the site, so journalists with any skill or integrity state that. Then the journalists with humor add in the "...which most people call Twitter", which is perfect.
 
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Mardaneus

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Sure the linked story mentions the nearly 80% staff reduction, but it don't include the number of contractors that were also cut. It's a far larger swath of layoff and destruction than the ~6,000 mentioned, per Ars at least another 5,000 contractors were cut. No way that could have any impact on operations... none.... well maybe just a little.
Well yeah it seriously streamlined the whole organization since they didn't have to reply to requests for information needed for the report that was being compiled for the FTC. Or spend time away from hardcore coding to ban people, other then the ones that Musk doesn't like, for violating the ToS.
 
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Raging Spirit

Smack-Fu Master, in training
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X's blog post today said its political-ad policies in the US prohibit "the promotion of false or misleading content..."

And my first thought was about the list of hand picked Xitters that got the early ad revenue. About a third of them were, unsurprisingly, political nonsense peddlers. Nope, not believing those promises for a second, in fact, expecting even more nonsense.
 
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