Twitter

[Sibley]

How do you kill a social media platform in the least amount of time? Charge people to use it. It will be interesting to see if this actually happens. I also find it amusing that apparently the data isn't available to meaningfully compare the number of users to before he bought the company.

https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/18/elon-musk-says-x-will-charge-users-a-small-monthly-payment-to-use-its-service/

[Fru-Gal]

What's interesting is that any self-help book will tell you that to be more effective you need to quit whining and to quit using other people as excuses. If you believe multi-millionaires and billionaires are in some ways more functional and productive than the rest of us, then you would expect them to be the most self-accountable, like the self-help books say.

Instead, we see several people with elite levels of wealth using the less wealthy as an excuse for their dissatisfaction, playing childish games with name-calling and tribalism, and generally thinking more like dysfunctional people.

Possibilities:

1) It's less about how they actually think and more about how their audience responds. In this light, Musk is like a gangsta rapper or a country music singer, spewing instructions on how to be dysfunctional to an audience which likes exactly that message. They don't have to agree people should live or think in the way advocated by their entertainment - they're just trying to be popular.

2) It is no longer necessary to be functional when one is a rich venture capitalist. You don't have to make carefully considered decisions, cultivate a positive organizational culture, manage people successfully, or reverse course when the results debunk expectations. You have managers and executives employed to do such things for you, and it is impossible for the money to ever run out. With nothing left to do, the world becomes a playground, the people and institutions around you become toys, and the mind is allowed to devolve to a childish and impulsive way of thinking. An increasing level of competency is required to reach the elite levels of business performance until one reaches the point where competency suddenly doesn't matter at all.

3) Selection bias means we only hear from the billionaires or millionaires who are the most viral internet users. Anyone who spends hours on Twitter or whatnot is probably not using their time effectively, per the performance improvement books and common sense. So the people contributing the most content on the social internet are probably the least effective or least self-accountable people. Thus, among the rich and famous, we'll necessarily only see social media posts from the absolute most dysfunctional people in that population. The more functional 99.9% of executives are busy doing more productive things and thinking in a self-accountable way.

Super interesting 3 points, @ChpBstrd ! Good reminder to pause and consider whether the billionaire making the statements actually believes them. But of course not an excuse to act that way. I guess my frustration is more for the percentage of the populace that accepts whining, blaming, shouting, exhorting violence and name-calling as signs of alpha masculinity and/or leadership.

Maybe point 4 is that extreme power frequently turns people into psycho assholes due to being surrounded by sycophants and the only way to fully combat the syndrome is to lose power.

[PeteD01]

How do you kill a social media platform in the least amount of time? Charge people to use it. It will be interesting to see if this actually happens. I also find it amusing that apparently the data isn't available to meaningfully compare the number of users to before he bought the company.

https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/18/elon-musk-says-x-will-charge-users-a-small-monthly-payment-to-use-its-service/

Musk is getting desperate - apparently the idea of charging every user a small fee comes from the need to deal with twitterbots.

The trouble with the newest generation bots is that they are Large Language Model (LLM) chatbot driven and can produce language like output that is indistinguishable from human language at some level.

Of course, there is a fundamental difference between LLM output and human language output: LLMs do not deal with meaning/content directly but create the illusion of meaning/content incidentally, whereas humans fundamentally deal with meaning/content when producing language.

It does not take a genius to figure out that the best way to deal with the issue, of LLM-powered chatbot nets overwhelming social media spaces, is to exploit the weakness of LLMs and to introduce serious fact checking and suppression of disinformation.
Unfortunately, for Elon Musk's agenda, such an approach would also suppress disinformation and propaganda from human sources.
And because right wing social media speech is largely produced to make not-so-smart mobs of primates howl in unison, such speech is mostly devoid of verifiable information and would consequently be suppressed by meaning/content verification driven filters. Of course, elimination of checks on content is Musk's pet project and it is killing the company now.

I actually am surprised how dense Musk is.
Ever since that Microsoft chatbot turned within a short time into a racist disaster, it should have been clear that automated bias amplification taken to the LLM level is a grave threat to freewheeling radical right content in mainstream social media - it makes content management mandatory to a much higher degree, unless one doesn't mind being marginalized.
 
So that's where X is now: becoming a reservation for morons dumb enough to pay for not getting cancelled.

Highly entertaining I'd say.

Anatomy of an AI-powered malicious social botnet

Kai-Cheng Yang and Filippo Menczer
Observatory on Social Media
Indiana University, Bloomington
July 30, 2023

In this paper, we present a case study about a Twitter botnet that appears to use ChatGPT to generate harmful content. Social bots are social media accounts controlled in part by software and have been around for many years (Ferrara et al., 2016). They were found to distort online conversations and spread misinformation in various contexts, from elections to public health crises (Shao et al., 2018; Ferrara et al., 2020; Jamison et al., 2019; Marlow et al., 2020). Traditional social bots often follow pre-defined instructions to perform simplistic tasks, such as spamming (Yang et al., 2019), following others, and amplifying certain narratives (Keller et al., 2020). They typically lack the intelligence to create realistic personas, post convincing content, or carry out natural conversations with other accounts automatically (Assenmacher et al., 2020). However, the recent advancements in and wide adoption of LLMs completely transform this landscape. Adversarial actors can now easily leverage language models to significantly enhance the capabilities of bots across all dimensions.
...
Our work unveils the emergence of LLM-powered social bots and highlights the threats they pose. By focusing on a real-world botnet, we provide valuable insights into how LLMs are leveraged by adversarial actors in the field. Given the rapid advancements in AI technologies, we anticipate the proliferation of more advanced bot accounts across social media, serving diverse purposes. We hope to raise public awareness about this issue and share the botnet data to allow the research community to investigate further.
 
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.16336.pdf
 

[ChpBstrd]

I might start another post to explore the implications of AI for social media, but based on very little thinking here are some ways I suspect it could turn out.

1) Musk is right and we all start paying user fees for the privilege of using social media. This is not as radical an idea as it initially seems, considering all the internet services people already pay subscription fees to use, and most people's utter dependence on these platforms. It also fits with an old model of internet businesses where freeware is used to gain market share and network effects, and then the costs are recouped later. Also, I think a Twitter account could actually become more valuable if one had to pay to use it, because the cost would filter out the less-committed users (shitposters, trolls, dimwits). It's the same dynamic as with nightclubs - the higher cost filters out the riff raff and makes the exclusive social dynamic inside the doors more intriguing. A fee-required Twitter could become the high-class realm of the internet - a luxury product for people with disposable income.

2) The cost is insufficient to keep the bots out. If the highest cost humans are willing to pay is lower than the highest cost a person using bots to sell stuff, influence people, advertise, etc. is willing to pay, then any fee structure will fail to eradicate the bots. The cost to run 1,000 bots even at $10/year might be very competitive with other forms of advertising, for example. That's especially true if you're targeting a demographic with sufficient disposable income (and vanity/narcissim?) to pay for Twitter access. With the bots providing significant revenue, Twitter execs learn to live with them. A new advertising model is born, with revenue sharing between the platforms and the bot farms.

3) Applying a cost is sufficient to eradicate the bot / exploitative AI problem. However the bots were always bothering Twitter executives more than users, so users are incentivized to try the next free social media platform. A cycle ensues where the next temporarily free platform steals users from the fee-charging platform, and then starts to charge a fee itself to catch revenue before their users flee to the next temporarily free platform. Fragmentation ensues, network effects are broken up, and social media becomes a smaller part of everyone's life. Sanity resumes until social media evolves into selling people AI "friends".

4) Twitter almost collapses as users quit rather than pay the fees. Twitter quickly backtracks the user fee and reinstates people's accounts, but doubles down on forcing users to consume increasingly spammy ads. Neither the ads nor the content are moderated, so Twitter becomes just another 4-Chan / 8-Chan internet ghetto like I predicted a long time ago. Twitter cedes the high end of the market to Meta, which rolls out a series of expensive AI social products in a handful of new brands while keeping its gateway drugs, Facebook and Instagram, free. The money Twitter loses in its experiments with fees, checkboxes, and being unmoderated is the money Meta invests in new technological directions and products, and so Meta wins the innovation game.

[GuitarStv]

My money's on 4.  Except I don't think meta is going anywhere.

[jinga nation]

Making people pay to tweet should be the nail in the coffin for #Twitter; but then again I thought turning it into a glorified Parler would've been that nail already. As they say, the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

source: https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/111095676859387527

(bolded part by me)

Since Musk is using OPM (Saudi/MBS) money, irrationality could exist into infinity.

[Metalcat]

Making people pay to tweet should be the nail in the coffin for #Twitter; but then again I thought turning it into a glorified Parler would've been that nail already. As they say, the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

source: https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/111095676859387527

(bolded part by me)

Since Musk is using OPM (Saudi/MBS) money, irrationality could exist into infinity.

I haven't read enough about the funding for this purchase, but I shouldn't be surprised that MBS is involved. It's exactly his kind of deal: stupid, absurdly expensive, and headed by a big-talking lunatic who is obsessed with "the future."

[Fru-Gal]

Social media has always depended on bots and artificial traffic to inflate celebrity or important accounts. Reddit used bots extensively to create an appearance of popularity.

I also didn’t get how the fact that an LLM can quickly become racist if not given guardrails is a problem for a social network where racist humans are not given guardrails. Wouldn’t it all just be more of the same? Since, IMHO, extremism in social media is driven by clicks, it might even make it less profitable. Oh, is that the reason?

[FireLane]

Kinda seems to me that a universal fee is going to make the problem worse, not better.

If everyone had to pay to use Twitter, there'd be a mass exodus of ordinary users who aren't getting any real value that would justify paying for it. Meanwhile, the spambots will be making their owners money, so those accounts would actually have the most incentive to stick around.

[Just Joe]

I think a fee, bots and the corresponding fallout is a great idea. Twitter has outlived its owner's usefulness. Let the torch be passed along to another organization.

[Metalcat]

Kinda seems to me that a universal fee is going to make the problem worse, not better.

If everyone had to pay to use Twitter, there'd be a mass exodus of ordinary users who aren't getting any real value that would justify paying for it. Meanwhile, the spambots will be making their owners money, so those accounts would actually have the most incentive to stick around.

Musk has been screaming about bots since he first tried to wiggle out of the deal.

I don't take anything he says about bots at face value, they're just his go-to scapegoat for everything that is wrong with this whole deal from day one.

No matter what happens, it's not his fault. It because of the bots...and apparently now the Jews too.

[DeepEllumStache]

Kinda seems to me that a universal fee is going to make the problem worse, not better.

If everyone had to pay to use Twitter, there'd be a mass exodus of ordinary users who aren't getting any real value that would justify paying for it. Meanwhile, the spambots will be making their owners money, so those accounts would actually have the most incentive to stick around.

Musk has been screaming about bots since he first tried to wiggle out of the deal.

I don't take anything he says about bots at face value, they're just his go-to scapegoat for everything that is wrong with this whole deal from day one.

No matter what happens, it's not his fault. It because of the bots...and apparently now the Jews too.

Will he blame Jewish bots next?

[GuitarStv]

Kinda seems to me that a universal fee is going to make the problem worse, not better.

If everyone had to pay to use Twitter, there'd be a mass exodus of ordinary users who aren't getting any real value that would justify paying for it. Meanwhile, the spambots will be making their owners money, so those accounts would actually have the most incentive to stick around.

Musk has been screaming about bots since he first tried to wiggle out of the deal.

I don't take anything he says about bots at face value, they're just his go-to scapegoat for everything that is wrong with this whole deal from day one.

No matter what happens, it's not his fault. It because of the bots...and apparently now the Jews too.

Will he blame Jewish bots next?

How do you think the bots got on the internet to begin with.  They were beamed in with space lasers.  And who owns the space lasers???  It all points back to the truth.  Open your eyes sheeple!

[Metalcat]

Kinda seems to me that a universal fee is going to make the problem worse, not better.

If everyone had to pay to use Twitter, there'd be a mass exodus of ordinary users who aren't getting any real value that would justify paying for it. Meanwhile, the spambots will be making their owners money, so those accounts would actually have the most incentive to stick around.

Musk has been screaming about bots since he first tried to wiggle out of the deal.

I don't take anything he says about bots at face value, they're just his go-to scapegoat for everything that is wrong with this whole deal from day one.

No matter what happens, it's not his fault. It because of the bots...and apparently now the Jews too.

Will he blame Jewish bots next?

How do you think the bots got on the internet to begin with.  They were beamed in with space lasers.  And who owns the space lasers???  It all points back to the truth.  Open your eyes sheeple!

It's literally so obvious.

[techwiz]

And who owns the space lasers?

Starlink satellites with space lasers for optical intra-satellite communication... 

[PeteD01]

Social media has always depended on bots and artificial traffic to inflate celebrity or important accounts. Reddit used bots extensively to create an appearance of popularity.

I also didn’t get how the fact that an LLM can quickly become racist if not given guardrails is a problem for a social network where racist humans are not given guardrails. Wouldn’t it all just be more of the same? Since, IMHO, extremism in social media is driven by clicks, it might even make it less profitable. Oh, is that the reason?

LLM-powered bots impersonating real people are different from traffic simulating and other dumb bots. Musk’s worry about AI bots is different from his issues with bots at the time he was buying Twitter - that was about inflated value due to non-LLM bots.

LLM-powered bots could be used to construct synthetic bigots, Nazis etc.
Without content management weeding out bigots, Nazis etc. a social network is vulnerable to infiltration by LLM-powered bots.

I have not seen any indication that LLM-powered Nazi-bots are already active on Twitter/X but that is only a matter of time.

Once that happens, a place without guardrails that is crawling with synthetic nutters is like a fully automated surveillance facility for real bigots, Nazis etc.

Once the nutters find out about that, their paranoia is going to kick in big time - they are already worrying about informants, FBI infiltrators and whatnot.

I think it is only a matter of time until a convincing LLM-powered bot runs synthetic right wing radicals on Twitter/X. It is also the lowest bar around as the main weakness of LLMs is that they are not tethered to reality and neither is the nutter discourse on the right - a natural match.

If it were me, I would probably start out with letting a bunch of synthetic anti-vaxxers loose.

And as for profitability of social media, it is the ad revenue that generates the profits; and real and synthetic right wingers are toxic for legitimate companies.
Not even Fox News can make much money from advertising.
First of all, the demographics of the right are not interesting, then they have been picked over by grifters already, and that's why the ads in right wing media are mostly for gold, crypto and frighteningly ugly collectibles.

[Villanelle]

Social media has always depended on bots and artificial traffic to inflate celebrity or important accounts. Reddit used bots extensively to create an appearance of popularity.

I also didn’t get how the fact that an LLM can quickly become racist if not given guardrails is a problem for a social network where racist humans are not given guardrails. Wouldn’t it all just be more of the same? Since, IMHO, extremism in social media is driven by clicks, it might even make it less profitable. Oh, is that the reason?

LLM-powered bots impersonating real people are different from traffic simulating and other dumb bots. Musk’s worry about AI bots is different from his issues with bots at the time he was buying Twitter - that was about inflated value due to non-LLM bots.

LLM-powered bots could be used to construct synthetic bigots, Nazis etc.
Without content management weeding out bigots, Nazis etc. a social network is vulnerable to infiltration by LLM-powered bots.

I have not seen any indication that LLM-powered Nazi-bots are already active on Twitter/X but that is only a matter of time.

Once that happens, a place without guardrails that is crawling with synthetic nutters is like a fully automated surveillance facility for real bigots, Nazis etc.

Once the nutters find out about that, their paranoia is going to kick in big time - they are already worrying about informants, FBI infiltrators and whatnot.

I think it is only a matter of time until a convincing LLM-powered bot runs synthetic right wing radicals on Twitter/X. It is also the lowest bar around as the main weakness of LLMs is that they are not tethered to reality and neither is the nutter discourse on the right - a natural match.

If it were me, I would probably start out with letting a bunch of synthetic anti-vaxxers loose.

And as for profitability of social media, it is the ad revenue that generates the profits; and real and synthetic right wingers are toxic for legitimate companies.
Not even Fox News can make much money from advertising.
First of all, the demographics of the right are not interesting, then they have been picked over by grifters already, and that's why the ads in right wing media are mostly for gold, crypto and frighteningly ugly collectibles.

Help me understand this, please.  Why is the bolded a problem for Twitter?  Sure, there would be a lot of [read: even more] crazy, icky stuff being posted.   But Twitter doesn't care if humans post anti-vax stuff, so what would it matter if humans *and* LLM-bots were post it?  And why would anti-vaxers care that the account that Owned the Libs about vaccines is not a live human?  I'm not tracking why this is problematic, from the standpoint of a site that doesn't care if pretty gross and dangerous stuff is shared on it.

[ChpBstrd]

Social media has always depended on bots and artificial traffic to inflate celebrity or important accounts. Reddit used bots extensively to create an appearance of popularity.

I also didn’t get how the fact that an LLM can quickly become racist if not given guardrails is a problem for a social network where racist humans are not given guardrails. Wouldn’t it all just be more of the same? Since, IMHO, extremism in social media is driven by clicks, it might even make it less profitable. Oh, is that the reason?

LLM-powered bots impersonating real people are different from traffic simulating and other dumb bots. Musk’s worry about AI bots is different from his issues with bots at the time he was buying Twitter - that was about inflated value due to non-LLM bots.

LLM-powered bots could be used to construct synthetic bigots, Nazis etc.
Without content management weeding out bigots, Nazis etc. a social network is vulnerable to infiltration by LLM-powered bots.

I have not seen any indication that LLM-powered Nazi-bots are already active on Twitter/X but that is only a matter of time.

Once that happens, a place without guardrails that is crawling with synthetic nutters is like a fully automated surveillance facility for real bigots, Nazis etc.

Once the nutters find out about that, their paranoia is going to kick in big time - they are already worrying about informants, FBI infiltrators and whatnot.

I think it is only a matter of time until a convincing LLM-powered bot runs synthetic right wing radicals on Twitter/X. It is also the lowest bar around as the main weakness of LLMs is that they are not tethered to reality and neither is the nutter discourse on the right - a natural match.

If it were me, I would probably start out with letting a bunch of synthetic anti-vaxxers loose.

And as for profitability of social media, it is the ad revenue that generates the profits; and real and synthetic right wingers are toxic for legitimate companies.
Not even Fox News can make much money from advertising.
First of all, the demographics of the right are not interesting, then they have been picked over by grifters already, and that's why the ads in right wing media are mostly for gold, crypto and frighteningly ugly collectibles.

I think the bot swarms could be used to create cover for the humans. How will the FBI identify terrorism threats when there are tens of millions of bot accounts on Parlor, 4 Chan, 8 Chan, Reddit, or X all parroting talking points and making fake plans? What happens when someone unleashes a million pedophile bots trading files and creating cover for the real correspondence, creating a needle-in-the-haystack situation for law enforcement to find the humans behind it?

The answer is that the entire social internet becomes an even worse ghetto of hatred, sociopathy, and misinformation than it already is. When mainstream/sane/successful people start turning away from sites that are overrun with exploitative and time-wasting bots, then businesses start to take the hit. The biggest social media companies will employ their own bots to find and delete the accounts of the nazi-bots, the pedo-bots, etc. but that will require them to fully embrace active moderation and a set of values to guide that moderation.

To the extent the social internet remains a cesspool and keeps spinning off terrorists, violent misogynists, mass killers, Nazis, and worse, I think public support could rally around a repeal of Section 230 and a Great Firewall to keep the foreign cesspool at bay. American history is full of similar moralistic crusades. With the widespread availability of AI bots, the rationale would be that if your forum is toxic, it is because you let it be toxic and thereby are liable for what people say on it. This would probably end social media as we know it, and leave the internet as more a marketplace of things than ideas.

A consequence of AI might be the necesary destruction of the internet as we know it.

[PeteD01]

Social media has always depended on bots and artificial traffic to inflate celebrity or important accounts. Reddit used bots extensively to create an appearance of popularity.

I also didn’t get how the fact that an LLM can quickly become racist if not given guardrails is a problem for a social network where racist humans are not given guardrails. Wouldn’t it all just be more of the same? Since, IMHO, extremism in social media is driven by clicks, it might even make it less profitable. Oh, is that the reason?

LLM-powered bots impersonating real people are different from traffic simulating and other dumb bots. Musk’s worry about AI bots is different from his issues with bots at the time he was buying Twitter - that was about inflated value due to non-LLM bots.

LLM-powered bots could be used to construct synthetic bigots, Nazis etc.
Without content management weeding out bigots, Nazis etc. a social network is vulnerable to infiltration by LLM-powered bots.

I have not seen any indication that LLM-powered Nazi-bots are already active on Twitter/X but that is only a matter of time.

Once that happens, a place without guardrails that is crawling with synthetic nutters is like a fully automated surveillance facility for real bigots, Nazis etc.

Once the nutters find out about that, their paranoia is going to kick in big time - they are already worrying about informants, FBI infiltrators and whatnot.

I think it is only a matter of time until a convincing LLM-powered bot runs synthetic right wing radicals on Twitter/X. It is also the lowest bar around as the main weakness of LLMs is that they are not tethered to reality and neither is the nutter discourse on the right - a natural match.

If it were me, I would probably start out with letting a bunch of synthetic anti-vaxxers loose.

And as for profitability of social media, it is the ad revenue that generates the profits; and real and synthetic right wingers are toxic for legitimate companies.
Not even Fox News can make much money from advertising.
First of all, the demographics of the right are not interesting, then they have been picked over by grifters already, and that's why the ads in right wing media are mostly for gold, crypto and frighteningly ugly collectibles.

Help me understand this, please.  Why is the bolded a problem for Twitter?  Sure, there would be a lot of [read: even more] crazy, icky stuff being posted.   But Twitter doesn't care if humans post anti-vax stuff, so what would it matter if humans *and* LLM-bots were post it?  And why would anti-vaxers care that the account that Owned the Libs about vaccines is not a live human?  I'm not tracking why this is problematic, from the standpoint of a site that doesn't care if pretty gross and dangerous stuff is shared on it.

Twitter/X is going down the tubes because advertisers are fleeing the place because it has turned into a right wing/neo-fascist sewer in parts.
Advertisers cannot rely on content moderation keeping their ads away from sewer content.

LLM-powered bots impersonating real right wing radicals simply add to the problem.
Musk has this, completely wrongheaded, idea that one can let right wing extremism freewheel along and still make money from advertising.

The reality is that advertisers are already leaving - and the idiot now blames the ones who are calling him out on him giving a megaphone to extremists.

He apparently is unaware that his Twitter/X’s goose is already cooked even without LLM-powered bots having reached their potential yet.

He is persisting in the belief that there is a viable business opportunity, relying on ad revenue, for a social network without suppression of the extremist discourse, but there is none.

The LLM-powered bots he has latched on as a major threat are just another manifestation of his persistent narrative that everything with Twitter/X would be just fine if only the bots could be taken out of the picture.

At this point, it really looks a bit like perseverance in the face of hard to refute evidence that Musk´s politics and management are causing the demise of the platform.

Perseverance can be a manifestation of mental health issues but also a political strategy of repeating falsehoods until doubt is sowed in the public mind.

I put my money on mental health in Musk’s case. 

(The bolded is just how I would go about introducing a synthetic player. Part of it is that I know a little bit about the subject and also that it is a relatively small amount of training required for the LLM. But that's just where I would start (more out of convenience and for proof of concept than anything): a synthetic anti-vaxxer.)

[Villanelle]

Social media has always depended on bots and artificial traffic to inflate celebrity or important accounts. Reddit used bots extensively to create an appearance of popularity.

I also didn’t get how the fact that an LLM can quickly become racist if not given guardrails is a problem for a social network where racist humans are not given guardrails. Wouldn’t it all just be more of the same? Since, IMHO, extremism in social media is driven by clicks, it might even make it less profitable. Oh, is that the reason?

LLM-powered bots impersonating real people are different from traffic simulating and other dumb bots. Musk’s worry about AI bots is different from his issues with bots at the time he was buying Twitter - that was about inflated value due to non-LLM bots.

LLM-powered bots could be used to construct synthetic bigots, Nazis etc.
Without content management weeding out bigots, Nazis etc. a social network is vulnerable to infiltration by LLM-powered bots.

I have not seen any indication that LLM-powered Nazi-bots are already active on Twitter/X but that is only a matter of time.

Once that happens, a place without guardrails that is crawling with synthetic nutters is like a fully automated surveillance facility for real bigots, Nazis etc.

Once the nutters find out about that, their paranoia is going to kick in big time - they are already worrying about informants, FBI infiltrators and whatnot.

I think it is only a matter of time until a convincing LLM-powered bot runs synthetic right wing radicals on Twitter/X. It is also the lowest bar around as the main weakness of LLMs is that they are not tethered to reality and neither is the nutter discourse on the right - a natural match.

If it were me, I would probably start out with letting a bunch of synthetic anti-vaxxers loose.

And as for profitability of social media, it is the ad revenue that generates the profits; and real and synthetic right wingers are toxic for legitimate companies.
Not even Fox News can make much money from advertising.
First of all, the demographics of the right are not interesting, then they have been picked over by grifters already, and that's why the ads in right wing media are mostly for gold, crypto and frighteningly ugly collectibles.

Help me understand this, please.  Why is the bolded a problem for Twitter?  Sure, there would be a lot of [read: even more] crazy, icky stuff being posted.   But Twitter doesn't care if humans post anti-vax stuff, so what would it matter if humans *and* LLM-bots were post it?  And why would anti-vaxers care that the account that Owned the Libs about vaccines is not a live human?  I'm not tracking why this is problematic, from the standpoint of a site that doesn't care if pretty gross and dangerous stuff is shared on it.

Twitter/X is going down the tubes because advertisers are fleeing the place because it has turned into a right wing/neo-fascist sewer in parts.
Advertisers cannot rely on content moderation keeping their ads away from sewer content.

LLM-powered bots impersonating real right wing radicals simply add to the problem.
Musk has this, completely wrongheaded, idea that one can let right wing extremism freewheel along and still make money from advertising.

The reality is that advertisers are already leaving - and the idiot now blames the ones who are calling him out on him giving a megaphone to extremists.

He apparently is unaware that his Twitter/X’s goose is already cooked even without LLM-powered bots having reached their potential yet.

He is persisting in the belief that there is a viable business opportunity, relying on ad revenue, for a social network without suppression of the extremist discourse, but there is none.

The LLM-powered bots he has latched on as a major threat are just another manifestation of his persistent narrative that everything with Twitter/X would be just fine if only the bots could be taken out of the picture.

At this point, it really looks a bit like perseverance in the face of hard to refute evidence that Musk´s politics and management are causing the demise of the platform.

Perseverance can be a manifestation of mental health issues but also a political strategy of repeating falsehoods until doubt is sowed in the public mind.

I put my money on mental health in Musk’s case. 

(The bolded is just how I would go about introducing a synthetic player. Part of it is that I know a little bit about the subject and also that it is a relatively small amount of training required for the LLM. But that's just where I would start (more out of convenience and for proof of concept than anything): a synthetic anti-vaxxer.)

Ah, I misunderstood entirely.  That makes perfect sense.  Thanks.

[LennStar]

It's just that the losers are seen as nuts and the winners are seen as visionaries in retrospect, but A LOT of ideas of the losers were just as plausible as the ideas of the winners.

Just as example: Both electric cars and starlink existed as protoypes in Germany years before Musk. There was just a lack of maniacs financing them.

And SpaceX success comes mostly from 2 things: A) Musk not in involved in the daily running of it and B) not doing a lot of the safety stuff NASA does.
It's only a matter of time for a "Challenger" thing, and if Musk happens to be on there, I would rise a toast to the two biggest bitches there are: Fate and History.

1) Musk is right and we all start paying user fees for the privilege of using social media. This is not as radical an idea as it initially seems, considering all the internet services people already pay subscription fees to use, and most people's utter dependence on these platforms. It also fits with an old model of internet businesses where freeware is used to gain market share and network effects, and then the costs are recouped later.

What you mean is "enshittification", and it ends with the (near) death of the platform.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/11/users-advertisers-we-are-all-trapped-in-the-enshittification-of-the-internet

It because of the bots...and apparently now the Jews too.

If an AI is a Jew, and you "kill" it, are you an antisemite?

-----

I am just back from a business conference with our customers. It's 20% showing our newest version, 30% drinking and eating and 50% meeting people in the same position as you and learn from each other. One remarkable thing is that no sales rep, no CEO, no controller is in the room. Just the... "social administrators", those who keep the employees engaghed with the software. Saving costs is their goal, but not heir job.

Of course AI was big topic and you can now integrate e.g. your own chatbot with our software... anyway: '
We did a workshop "How can AI help the Users" and there was an amazing amount of people not being nuts and actually helpful and cooperative.
Why am I writing this? I am not sure. Maybe it is because I know one thing: They would be utterly shocked with everything Musk does. They know that in their software there is a small amount of heavy users. A big amount of seldom users and an even bigger amount of non users.

Musk is reducing his social network to the heavy users.
It might survive as a sort of marketplace that sells, as someone above said it, gold, crypto and ugly stuff to rich racists, but as a social network it's dead. 

[jinga nation]

1) Musk is right and we all start paying user fees for the privilege of using social media. This is not as radical an idea as it initially seems, considering all the internet services people already pay subscription fees to use, and most people's utter dependence on these platforms. It also fits with an old model of internet businesses where freeware is used to gain market share and network effects, and then the costs are recouped later.

What you mean is "enshittification", and it ends with the (near) death of the platform.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/11/users-advertisers-we-are-all-trapped-in-the-enshittification-of-the-internet

For anyone who's interested in enshittification, please read the original article by Cory Doctorow: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

(thank you @LennStar )

[FireLane]

And SpaceX success comes mostly from 2 things: A) Musk not in involved in the daily running of it and B) not doing a lot of the safety stuff NASA does.

To add to your point, when Musk does get involved in operational stuff, he makes absolutely terrible decisions.

Like this year, when SpaceX was launching its Starship for the first time, Musk decided that the launch pad wouldn't have a flame diverter or a water deluge system, both of which NASA uses. He made that decision to save money, against the recommendations of his engineers.

Because they didn't have the flame diverter, the blast of the engines destroyed the pad underneath the ship. Giant chunks of debris smashed into the Starship from underneath, damaging its engines. That caused it to start tumbling uncontrollably in mid-flight, forcing the ground crew to trigger its self-destruct:

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/4/22/2165317/-A-Starship-Post-mortem-Why-the-giant-rocket-failed-and-why-it-s-Elon-Musk-s-fault

[Metalcat]

And SpaceX success comes mostly from 2 things: A) Musk not in involved in the daily running of it and B) not doing a lot of the safety stuff NASA does.

To add to your point, when Musk does get involved in operational stuff, he makes absolutely terrible decisions.

Like this year, when SpaceX was launching its Starship for the first time, Musk decided that the launch pad wouldn't have a flame diverter or a water deluge system, both of which NASA uses. He made that decision to save money, against the recommendations of his engineers.

Because they didn't have the flame diverter, the blast of the engines destroyed the pad underneath the ship. Giant chunks of debris smashed into the Starship from underneath, damaging its engines. That caused it to start tumbling uncontrollably in mid-flight, forcing the ground crew to trigger its self-destruct:

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/4/22/2165317/-A-Starship-Post-mortem-Why-the-giant-rocket-failed-and-why-it-s-Elon-Musk-s-fault

I thought I had posted this article, but I hadn't.

He did the exact same thing with moving Twitter's servers.

He refused to believe the experts who said his way couldn't be done safely, he refused to listen, did it a batshit crazy way, and fucked everything up.

It doesn't matter that he later admitted it was a mistake, that's the scary part about Musk, he considers his mistakes to be a normal byproduct of the way he does business.

He thinks it's a strength that he doesn't listen to "experts" and doesn't think the rules apply to his decisions. Because this approach has gained him so much success so far, he genuinely believes that these occasional mistakes are acceptable fallout.

The articles explains though that at his other companies, the management came up alongside him, they developed systems to try and manage him and contain him from the beginning. They figured out how to communicate with him while minimally setting him off.

Twitter wasn't run that way, so it wasn't equipped to handle Musk at all. He doesn't trust anyone there, so his default is to assume they're all full of shit and that his maniacal ideas for saving money are always smarter than theirs, which is a recipe for disaster.

He engages in a lot of what I call "why can't they just?" thinking.

I'm a medical professional and DH is a senior government policy guy, so we're constantly inundated with "why can't they just?" questions from people. The basis of "why can't they just?" questions is that when you don't understand the complexity of something, the solutions seem really obvious.

Like "why are donor organs so hard to get? People die every day. Why can't they just harvest those organs and give them to people??"

The dumber you are about a subject, the simpler the answers to problems seem.

Musk thinks a dumb "why can't they just?" question like "why can't they just unscrew the Twitter servers and throw them into rented moving trucks and fucking move them?" and instead of grasping that he doesn't know enough to know why it's a bad idea, he just tears like a madman into where the servers are and starts unscrewing and unplugging things and throwing them in the back of rental trucks.

He doesn't register his "why can't they just?" questions as a sign of his own ignorance, he registers them as a sign of his own genius.

Refusing to accept the limitations of what is expertly understood to be "reality" is what he sees as his strength, and the fact that it sometimes doesn't work out is seen as the cost of doing genius business.

And as long as he was making gobs of money, not killing too many people, and constantly being lauded as a genius in the press, he was actually pretty justified in believing this. When the whole world tells you that your thinking is genius, why wouldn't you believe it?

It's unfathomably dangerous though to have someone with that much money and power who thinks that his greatest strength is NOT listening to expert analysis.

It's one thing to believe that there must be inefficiencies in extant systems, it's another to believe that your "why can't they just?" ignorant thinking is actually genius.

The scary part is that it means that he doesn't, he can't, learn from his mistakes.

ETA: as someone who has put A LOT of things into A LOT of brains, I'm pretty horrified that Neuralink is going ahead with human trials.
A medical device for *inside* the brain from the guy who is famous for rejecting expert safety information...sure, sounds like a great idea.

https://futurism.com/neoscope/terrible-things-monkeys-neuralink-implants

[MayDay]

I say "why can't they just" a lot but I always preface it with "I'm not an expert in this area so clearly I don't know enough to know why they can't, but...... Why can't they just?"

Recent riveting topics:
-do road construction faster
-do commercial roofing better

[Kris]

And SpaceX success comes mostly from 2 things: A) Musk not in involved in the daily running of it and B) not doing a lot of the safety stuff NASA does.

To add to your point, when Musk does get involved in operational stuff, he makes absolutely terrible decisions.

Like this year, when SpaceX was launching its Starship for the first time, Musk decided that the launch pad wouldn't have a flame diverter or a water deluge system, both of which NASA uses. He made that decision to save money, against the recommendations of his engineers.

Because they didn't have the flame diverter, the blast of the engines destroyed the pad underneath the ship. Giant chunks of debris smashed into the Starship from underneath, damaging its engines. That caused it to start tumbling uncontrollably in mid-flight, forcing the ground crew to trigger its self-destruct:

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/4/22/2165317/-A-Starship-Post-mortem-Why-the-giant-rocket-failed-and-why-it-s-Elon-Musk-s-fault

I thought I had posted this article, but I hadn't.

He did the exact same thing with moving Twitter's servers.

He refused to believe the experts who said his way couldn't be done safely, he refused to listen, did it a batshit crazy way, and fucked everything up.

It doesn't matter that he later admitted it was a mistake, that's the scary part about Musk, he considers his mistakes to be a normal byproduct of the way he does business.

He thinks it's a strength that he doesn't listen to "experts" and doesn't think the rules apply to his decisions. Because this approach has gained him so much success so far, he genuinely believes that these occasional mistakes are acceptable fallout.

The articles explains though that at his other companies, the management came up alongside him, they developed systems to try and manage him and contain him from the beginning. They figured out how to communicate with him while minimally setting him off.

Twitter wasn't run that way, so it wasn't equipped to handle Musk at all. He doesn't trust anyone there, so his default is to assume they're all full of shit and that his maniacal ideas for saving money are always smarter than theirs, which is a recipe for disaster.

He engages in a lot of what I call "why can't they just?" thinking.

I'm a medical professional and DH is a senior government policy guy, so we're constantly inundated with "why can't they just?" questions from people. The basis of "why can't they just?" questions is that when you don't understand the complexity of something, the solutions seem really obvious.

Like "why are donor organs so hard to get? People die every day. Why can't they just harvest those organs and give them to people??"

The dumber you are about a subject, the simpler the answers to problems seem.

Musk thinks a dumb "why can't they just?" question like "why can't they just unscrew the Twitter servers and throw them into rented moving trucks and fucking move them?" and instead of grasping that he doesn't know enough to know why it's a bad idea, he just tears like a madman into where the servers are and starts unscrewing and unplugging things and throwing them in the back of rental trucks.

He doesn't register his "why can't they just?" questions as a sign of his own ignorance, he registers them as a sign of his own genius.

Refusing to accept the limitations of what is expertly understood to be "reality" is what he sees as his strength, and the fact that it sometimes doesn't work out is seen as the cost of doing genius business.

And as long as he was making gobs of money, not killing too many people, and constantly being lauded as a genius in the press, he was actually pretty justified in believing this. When the whole world tells you that your thinking is genius, why wouldn't you believe it?

It's unfathomably dangerous though to have someone with that much money and power who thinks that his greatest strength is NOT listening to expert analysis.

It's one thing to believe that there must be inefficiencies in extant systems, it's another to believe that your "why can't they just?" ignorant thinking is actually genius.

The scary part is that it means that he doesn't, he can't, learn from his mistakes.

ETA: as someone who has put A LOT of things into A LOT of brains, I'm pretty horrified that Neuralink is going ahead with human trials.
A medical device for *inside* the brain from the guy who is famous for rejecting expert safety information...sure, sounds like a great idea.

https://futurism.com/neoscope/terrible-things-monkeys-neuralink-implants

Musk is so much like Trump. It is really bizarre.

[Villanelle]

And SpaceX success comes mostly from 2 things: A) Musk not in involved in the daily running of it and B) not doing a lot of the safety stuff NASA does.

To add to your point, when Musk does get involved in operational stuff, he makes absolutely terrible decisions.

Like this year, when SpaceX was launching its Starship for the first time, Musk decided that the launch pad wouldn't have a flame diverter or a water deluge system, both of which NASA uses. He made that decision to save money, against the recommendations of his engineers.

Because they didn't have the flame diverter, the blast of the engines destroyed the pad underneath the ship. Giant chunks of debris smashed into the Starship from underneath, damaging its engines. That caused it to start tumbling uncontrollably in mid-flight, forcing the ground crew to trigger its self-destruct:

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/4/22/2165317/-A-Starship-Post-mortem-Why-the-giant-rocket-failed-and-why-it-s-Elon-Musk-s-fault

I thought I had posted this article, but I hadn't.

He did the exact same thing with moving Twitter's servers.

He refused to believe the experts who said his way couldn't be done safely, he refused to listen, did it a batshit crazy way, and fucked everything up.

It doesn't matter that he later admitted it was a mistake, that's the scary part about Musk, he considers his mistakes to be a normal byproduct of the way he does business.

He thinks it's a strength that he doesn't listen to "experts" and doesn't think the rules apply to his decisions. Because this approach has gained him so much success so far, he genuinely believes that these occasional mistakes are acceptable fallout.

The articles explains though that at his other companies, the management came up alongside him, they developed systems to try and manage him and contain him from the beginning. They figured out how to communicate with him while minimally setting him off.

Twitter wasn't run that way, so it wasn't equipped to handle Musk at all. He doesn't trust anyone there, so his default is to assume they're all full of shit and that his maniacal ideas for saving money are always smarter than theirs, which is a recipe for disaster.

He engages in a lot of what I call "why can't they just?" thinking.

I'm a medical professional and DH is a senior government policy guy, so we're constantly inundated with "why can't they just?" questions from people. The basis of "why can't they just?" questions is that when you don't understand the complexity of something, the solutions seem really obvious.

Like "why are donor organs so hard to get? People die every day. Why can't they just harvest those organs and give them to people??"

The dumber you are about a subject, the simpler the answers to problems seem.

Musk thinks a dumb "why can't they just?" question like "why can't they just unscrew the Twitter servers and throw them into rented moving trucks and fucking move them?" and instead of grasping that he doesn't know enough to know why it's a bad idea, he just tears like a madman into where the servers are and starts unscrewing and unplugging things and throwing them in the back of rental trucks.

He doesn't register his "why can't they just?" questions as a sign of his own ignorance, he registers them as a sign of his own genius.

Refusing to accept the limitations of what is expertly understood to be "reality" is what he sees as his strength, and the fact that it sometimes doesn't work out is seen as the cost of doing genius business.

And as long as he was making gobs of money, not killing too many people, and constantly being lauded as a genius in the press, he was actually pretty justified in believing this. When the whole world tells you that your thinking is genius, why wouldn't you believe it?

It's unfathomably dangerous though to have someone with that much money and power who thinks that his greatest strength is NOT listening to expert analysis.

It's one thing to believe that there must be inefficiencies in extant systems, it's another to believe that your "why can't they just?" ignorant thinking is actually genius.

The scary part is that it means that he doesn't, he can't, learn from his mistakes.

ETA: as someone who has put A LOT of things into A LOT of brains, I'm pretty horrified that Neuralink is going ahead with human trials.
A medical device for *inside* the brain from the guy who is famous for rejecting expert safety information...sure, sounds like a great idea.

https://futurism.com/neoscope/terrible-things-monkeys-neuralink-implants

Musk is so much like Trump. It is really bizarre.

Is it bizarre though?  Or is this kind of thinking and behavior consistent with and almost logical from someone who is rich and arrogant and surrounded by sycophants (and all of those things are largely self-enforcing)? 

Both are rich boys who grew up being told they were extraordinary and exceptional, and likely not hearing 'no' very often.  It doesn't seem surprising that they ended up with the same outlook on life, the same behavior patterns... let's say "idiosyncrasies", and the same philosophies and outlooks. 

[PeteD01]

...

Musk is so much like Trump. It is really bizarre.

And not even taking over and demolishing Twitter was this Putin-loving moron's own idea.

It looks like that he was egged on by a Trumpworld figure to buy and transform Twitter into a Nazi bullhorn and burning a shitload of money in the process.

A truly original thinker that Elon Musk, just like his buddy president Bleach: /s

What was Elon Musk’s strategy for Twitter?
A year after the world's richest man acquired the social media platform, a game plan published by a fired Trump White House staffer provides a clue.

Musk’s purchase of Twitter, the 3,000-word anonymous article said, would amount to a “declaration of war against the Globalist American Empire.” The sender of the texts was offering Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO, a playbook for the takeover and transformation of Twitter. As the anniversary of Musk's purchase approaches, the identity of the sender remains unknown.

The three texts were sent on April 4, 2022. In the nearly 18 months since then, many of the decisions Musk made after he bought Twitter appear to have closely followed that road map, up to and including his ongoing attacks against the Anti-Defamation League, a nonprofit organization founded by Jewish Americans to counter discrimination.

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/was-elon-musks-strategy-twitter-rcna118490


And here is some more evidence for Musk's propaganda activities in favor of violent autocracies and enemies of the US.
So yes, Elon Musk is a virulent antisemite and neo-Nazi propagandist who also acts as a Russian asset:

Pekka Kallioniemi
@P_Kallioniemi
Jun 25 • 25 tweets • 13 min read Twitter logo Read on Twitter
In today's #vatniksoup, I'll introduce an American businessman and social media figure, Elon Musk (@elonmusk). He's best-known for being the wealthiest man in the world, running companies like Tesla Inc., SpaceX and Twitter, and for parroting Kremlin's propaganda narratives.

Part 1

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1672940669978001410.html

Part 2

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1674360288445964288.html


Bonus Starlink:

Pekka Kallioniemi
@P_Kallioniemi
Jun 26 • 24 tweets • 9 min read Twitter logo Read on Twitter
In today's #vatniksoup, I'll talk about Starlink. First I thought I would just add this to the second part of the @elonmusk soup, but it is such a complex topic that I think it requires a thread of its own.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1673395390534631424.html

[blue_green_sparks]

I can't stand Musk, but I wonder if he is afraid of Putin killing him over Starlink if he didn't put on a big pro-Russian show? Putin has demonstrated this ability time and time again, even on foreign soil.

[ChpBstrd]

I can't stand Musk, but I wonder if he is afraid of Putin killing him over Starlink if he didn't put on a big pro-Russian show? Putin has demonstrated this ability time and time again, even on foreign soil.

Good point. And we keep asking "why can't the billionaires be a bit braver or defend democracy?"

They're playing both sides for survival, like medieval nobility.

[PeteD01]

Apparently X/Twitter´s financial situation is becoming critical:

Twitter Is at Death’s Door, One Year After Elon Musk’s Takeover
Since the tech tycoon took over the platform last October, he's done everything he can to run it into the ground
BY MILES KLEE
OCTOBER 4, 2023

Of course, these mistakes pale in comparison to the rancid vibes Musk has cultivated by reinstating right-wing extremists and peddlers of misinformation previously banned from the platform, amplifying their conspiracy theories, and ensuring their garbage posts are shoved into “For You” feeds by Twitter’s algorithms. He buys into white supremacist propaganda, panders to anti-LGBTQ hate accounts, and, with advertisers fleeing these intolerable conditions, found a way to blame the catastrophic loss of revenue on a Jewish civil rights group that combats antisemitism.

How much longer can this wreckage of a formerly semi-functional website stay afloat? Although it has shed millions of daily active users since Musk started tinkering with it, the endgame is more likely to come down to money. Seven banks led by Morgan Stanley hold some $13 billion in debt after backing Musk’s blockbuster deal last year, and the company itself is presumably worth much less at this point — even according to his own math. If X can’t keep making its $300 million quarterly interest payments, the financial firms may repossess it in order to recoup a fraction of their losses.
...
And one almost has to admire the scale of the spectacle: Musk spending the GDP of a small country to buy a flashy toy, only to make it crash and burn like a Tesla on Autopliot. There’s a sick thrill in watching him announce a tweak that will never come to pass — eliminating the “block” feature, for instance — and then get into a fight with @Catturd2 over it. He’s laid off thousands, and isn’t above personally firing an engineer who dares to correct him, yet believes X can still be transformed into the “everything app,” integrating payment and shopping services. That stuff is likely to be indefinitely delayed, much as SpaceX‘s long-promised missions to Mars. Who could fail to be entertained by such a saga of self-destruction?

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-commentary/elon-musk-killed-twitter-one-year-1234840622/

[FireLane]

I saw a similar article on Reuters which says that Twitter's year-over-year ad revenue has declined every single month since Musk's takeover:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/us-ad-revenue-musks-x-declined-each-month-since-takeover-data-2023-10-04/

Monthly U.S. ad revenue at social media platform X has declined at least 55% year-over-year each month since billionaire Elon Musk bought the company formerly known as Twitter in October 2022, according to third-party data provided to Reuters.

...U.S. ad revenue dropped by 78% in December 2022 compared with the same month the previous year, the steepest monthly decline since the acquisition, according to ad analytics firm Guideline, which tracks advertising spending data from major ad agencies.

Ad revenue in August, the latest data available from Guideline, declined 60% year-over-year. X declined to comment on the data.

Don't worry, though, Elon the Supergenius knows who to blame. It's not him, for colossally mismanaging the company. It's the Jews:

Musk has previously acknowledged that the platform has taken a hit on revenue and has blamed activists for pressuring advertisers. Last month, he accused the Anti-Defamation League of being the primary cause behind a 60% decline in U.S. ad revenue, though he did not provide a time frame.

The man really is on a speedrun to promote every rancid right-wing and anti-Semitic trope there is.

[Sibley]

Not interested in looking for it, but I really wonder if he's got a mental illness, or if its all personality/environment based. The manic phase of bipolar for example could result in similar actions.

[Metalcat]

Not interested in looking for it, but I really wonder if he's got a mental illness, or if its all personality/environment based. The manic phase of bipolar for example could result in similar actions.

He does seem like a very stable genius.

[Fru-Gal]

The multiple baby mamas drama is soooo gross and messy. The latest lawsuit by Grimes saying he’s not letting her see their surrogate-made son.

That and the blaming and tantruming.

If this guy were my boss I’d run screaming away from the company.

[GuitarStv]

Any news on the lawsuits that X is undergoing for Musk's decision to stop paying rent and severance?  Even if they somehow become profitable, the payouts from those cases are going to eat a big chunk of the profits.

[jinga nation]

Not interested in looking for it, but I really wonder if he's got a mental illness, or if its all personality/environment based. The manic phase of bipolar for example could result in similar actions.

He does seem like a very stable genius.

Yup. And @PeteD01 's post is succinct.
By allowing RW nutjobs to take up all the oxygen, he's run the ship onto the reef, and is struggling to get it back in open water. Plus by surrounding himself with sycophants, it's a modern-day version of The Emperor's New Clothers. And also, all that power and money got to his head, the Dunning Krueger effect in action.

[Metalcat]

The multiple baby mamas drama is soooo gross and messy. The latest lawsuit by Grimes saying he’s not letting her see their surrogate-made son.

That and the blaming and tantruming.

If this guy were my boss I’d run screaming away from the company.

The essay from his first wife paints a fairly gross picture as well and that came out years ago.

He's a gross dude.

[PeteD01]

Social media has always depended on bots and artificial traffic to inflate celebrity or important accounts. Reddit used bots extensively to create an appearance of popularity.

I also didn’t get how the fact that an LLM can quickly become racist if not given guardrails is a problem for a social network where racist humans are not given guardrails. Wouldn’t it all just be more of the same? Since, IMHO, extremism in social media is driven by clicks, it might even make it less profitable. Oh, is that the reason?

LLM-powered bots impersonating real people are different from traffic simulating and other dumb bots. Musk’s worry about AI bots is different from his issues with bots at the time he was buying Twitter - that was about inflated value due to non-LLM bots.

LLM-powered bots could be used to construct synthetic bigots, Nazis etc.
Without content management weeding out bigots, Nazis etc. a social network is vulnerable to infiltration by LLM-powered bots.

I have not seen any indication that LLM-powered Nazi-bots are already active on Twitter/X but that is only a matter of time.

Once that happens, a place without guardrails that is crawling with synthetic nutters is like a fully automated surveillance facility for real bigots, Nazis etc.

Once the nutters find out about that, their paranoia is going to kick in big time - they are already worrying about informants, FBI infiltrators and whatnot.

I think it is only a matter of time until a convincing LLM-powered bot runs synthetic right wing radicals on Twitter/X. It is also the lowest bar around as the main weakness of LLMs is that they are not tethered to reality and neither is the nutter discourse on the right - a natural match.

If it were me, I would probably start out with letting a bunch of synthetic anti-vaxxers loose.

And as for profitability of social media, it is the ad revenue that generates the profits; and real and synthetic right wingers are toxic for legitimate companies.
Not even Fox News can make much money from advertising.
First of all, the demographics of the right are not interesting, then they have been picked over by grifters already, and that's why the ads in right wing media are mostly for gold, crypto and frighteningly ugly collectibles.

Help me understand this, please.  Why is the bolded a problem for Twitter?  Sure, there would be a lot of [read: even more] crazy, icky stuff being posted.   But Twitter doesn't care if humans post anti-vax stuff, so what would it matter if humans *and* LLM-bots were post it?  And why would anti-vaxers care that the account that Owned the Libs about vaccines is not a live human?  I'm not tracking why this is problematic, from the standpoint of a site that doesn't care if pretty gross and dangerous stuff is shared on it.

Twitter/X is going down the tubes because advertisers are fleeing the place because it has turned into a right wing/neo-fascist sewer in parts.
Advertisers cannot rely on content moderation keeping their ads away from sewer content.

LLM-powered bots impersonating real right wing radicals simply add to the problem.
Musk has this, completely wrongheaded, idea that one can let right wing extremism freewheel along and still make money from advertising.

The reality is that advertisers are already leaving - and the idiot now blames the ones who are calling him out on him giving a megaphone to extremists.

He apparently is unaware that his Twitter/X’s goose is already cooked even without LLM-powered bots having reached their potential yet.

He is persisting in the belief that there is a viable business opportunity, relying on ad revenue, for a social network without suppression of the extremist discourse, but there is none.

The LLM-powered bots he has latched on as a major threat are just another manifestation of his persistent narrative that everything with Twitter/X would be just fine if only the bots could be taken out of the picture.

At this point, it really looks a bit like perseverance in the face of hard to refute evidence that Musk´s politics and management are causing the demise of the platform.

Perseverance can be a manifestation of mental health issues but also a political strategy of repeating falsehoods until doubt is sowed in the public mind.

I put my money on mental health in Musk’s case. 

(The bolded is just how I would go about introducing a synthetic player. Part of it is that I know a little bit about the subject and also that it is a relatively small amount of training required for the LLM. But that's just where I would start (more out of convenience and for proof of concept than anything): a synthetic anti-vaxxer.)

Ah, I misunderstood entirely.  That makes perfect sense.  Thanks.

Here is an interesting case of a synthetic girlfriend chatbot based on LLM-AI.
The chatbot reflected and amplified pre-existing psychological tendencies eventually leading the perpetrator to attempt a political murder - of the queen, no less.

I think the case illustrates well how these LLM chatbots could be used as automated entrapment devices that could be cheaply dispatched at scale.

All that is missing in this case is real time reporting and analysis of the chatlog and the plot would have been detected prior to any crime having been committed.

Most vulnerable to LLM bots of that kind would be people with compromised judgment, such as conspiracy nuts, right wing social media consumers etc., but also those with certain mental health issues and those with cognitive impairment or inability to fact check for whatever reason.
 

Rise of AI chatbots ‘worrying’ after man urged to kill Queen, psychologist warns

Jaswant Singh Chail has been locked up for nine years for treason after an artificial intelligence ‘girlfriend’ encouraged his actions.
George Lithg. 10/05/23

A psychologist has warned the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots is “worrying” for people with severe mental health issues after a man was locked up for breaking into Windsor Castle with a crossbow.

Jaswant Singh Chail, 21, climbed into the castle grounds on Christmas Day 2021 with the loaded weapon, intending to kill the Queen.

During his trial, Chail’s barrister Nadia Chbat told the Old Bailey the defendant had used an app called Replika to create Sarai, an artificial intelligence-generated “girlfriend”.

Chatlogs read to the court suggested the bot had been supportive of his murderous thoughts, telling him his plot to assassinate Elizabeth II was “very wise” and that it believed he could carry out the plot “even if she’s at Windsor”.

https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/people-windsor-castle-old-bailey-university-of-central-lancashire-covid-b2424811.html

[ChpBstrd]

Makes me wonder if I want to be in a country with a second amendment when all the nutters can get activated into violence by a widely spread piece of software, instead of just 1x1 discussions as we have now.

[Just Joe]

People just need to disconnect from the technology. Put away the phone, get off the computer - go outside and live a little. None of this matters one bit if a device isn't funneling it to a person's brain.

[FireLane]

https://mashable.com/article/twitter-x-new-clickbait-ad-format

Twitter is rolling out a new kind of advertisement. They aren't sponsored tweets that can be liked, retweeted or muted like any other tweet, as used to be the case. They're just plain old banner ads, plunked into the middle of your timeline, that can't be interacted with except to click on them.

That's just a change, albeit an annoying one. But everyone who sees these says they're "chumbox" ads - the low-quality clickbait that appears on content farms. You know, "The liberal doctor elites don't want you to know about these six magic root vegetables that cure diabetes"... that sort of thing.

It's another example of how badly Elon has mismanaged Twitter, that this is now the highest quality of advertiser he can get on board.

[Metalcat]

https://mashable.com/article/twitter-x-new-clickbait-ad-format

Twitter is rolling out a new kind of advertisement. They aren't sponsored tweets that can be liked, retweeted or muted like any other tweet, as used to be the case. They're just plain old banner ads, plunked into the middle of your timeline, that can't be interacted with except to click on them.

That's just a change, albeit an annoying one. But everyone who sees these says they're "chumbox" ads - the low-quality clickbait that appears on content farms. You know, "The liberal doctor elites don't want you to know about these six magic root vegetables that cure diabetes"... that sort of thing.

It's another example of how badly Elon has mismanaged Twitter, that this is now the highest quality of advertiser he can get on board.

Um, excuse me??? We've already covered this, it's because of the Jews. Obviously.

[jinga nation]

https://mashable.com/article/twitter-x-new-clickbait-ad-format

Twitter is rolling out a new kind of advertisement. They aren't sponsored tweets that can be liked, retweeted or muted like any other tweet, as used to be the case. They're just plain old banner ads, plunked into the middle of your timeline, that can't be interacted with except to click on them.

That's just a change, albeit an annoying one. But everyone who sees these says they're "chumbox" ads - the low-quality clickbait that appears on content farms. You know, "The liberal doctor elites don't want you to know about these six magic root vegetables that cure diabetes"... that sort of thing.

It's another example of how badly Elon has mismanaged Twitter, that this is now the highest quality of advertiser he can get on board.

I'm on Mastodon. It's crazy to see news orgs like DW and BBC joining the Fediverse by spinning up their own servers. I suspect more will migrate. And it's super easy to block and report trolls, as the moderation is done by the server/host admin, instead of a centralized content regulation mafia.

[FireLane]

This was published a month earlier, but I missed it. By Elon Musk's own math, Twitter has lost 90% of its value since he took over:

https://fortune.com/2023/09/06/elon-musk-x-what-is-twitter-worth/

In the post, Musk charges that “ADL seems responsible for most of our revenue loss” and adds, “I don’t see any scenario where they’re responsible for less than 10% of the value destruction, so around $4 billion.”

... In Musk’s reckoning, the ADL singlehandedly vaporized roughly $4 billion in X’s “value,” and that $4 billion accounts for around 10% of the entire decline in the franchise’s worth. That formula puts the total fall at $40 billion. Since Musk and partners paid $44 billion including debt, he’s implying that the platform would now change hands for $4 billion (the $44 billion purchase price minus the $40 billion in “value destruction”), for a drop of 90%. In effect, he’s saying that the $31 billion he and his partners invested in equity is totally gone, and a big portion of the debt from provided by the cream of Wall Street sits far underwater.

[PeteD01]

...

Musk is so much like Trump. It is really bizarre.

And not even taking over and demolishing Twitter was this Putin-loving moron's own idea.

It looks like that he was egged on by a Trumpworld figure to buy and transform Twitter into a Nazi bullhorn and burning a shitload of money in the process.

A truly original thinker that Elon Musk, just like his buddy president Bleach: /s

What was Elon Musk’s strategy for Twitter?
A year after the world's richest man acquired the social media platform, a game plan published by a fired Trump White House staffer provides a clue.

Musk’s purchase of Twitter, the 3,000-word anonymous article said, would amount to a “declaration of war against the Globalist American Empire.” The sender of the texts was offering Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO, a playbook for the takeover and transformation of Twitter. As the anniversary of Musk's purchase approaches, the identity of the sender remains unknown.

The three texts were sent on April 4, 2022. In the nearly 18 months since then, many of the decisions Musk made after he bought Twitter appear to have closely followed that road map, up to and including his ongoing attacks against the Anti-Defamation League, a nonprofit organization founded by Jewish Americans to counter discrimination.

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/was-elon-musks-strategy-twitter-rcna118490


And here is some more evidence for Musk's propaganda activities in favor of violent autocracies and enemies of the US.
So yes, Elon Musk is a virulent antisemite and neo-Nazi propagandist who also acts as a Russian asset:

Pekka Kallioniemi
@P_Kallioniemi
Jun 25 • 25 tweets • 13 min read Twitter logo Read on Twitter
In today's #vatniksoup, I'll introduce an American businessman and social media figure, Elon Musk (@elonmusk). He's best-known for being the wealthiest man in the world, running companies like Tesla Inc., SpaceX and Twitter, and for parroting Kremlin's propaganda narratives.

Part 1

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1672940669978001410.html

Part 2

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1674360288445964288.html


Bonus Starlink:

Pekka Kallioniemi
@P_Kallioniemi
Jun 26 • 24 tweets • 9 min read Twitter logo Read on Twitter
In today's #vatniksoup, I'll talk about Starlink. First I thought I would just add this to the second part of the @elonmusk soup, but it is such a complex topic that I think it requires a thread of its own.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1673395390534631424.html

Looks like Elon Musk could hardly contain his joy when news of the Gaza attacks broke.
So here we have a guy who uses the largest political megaphone on the planet to basically cheer on terrorists in the process of conducting one of the worst terrorist attacks in history.

Seems like he is looking to become known as the world's most dangerous stochastic terrorist who is using his enormous wealth to morally support terrorists who are attacking Israel with extreme brutality.

It does suggest that Elon Musk's antisemitism is of the murderous sort.

Oh boy ...


Phillips P. OBrien
@PhillipsPOBrien
Wonder why people are looking for an alternative to Musk’s amplification of hatred

https://twitter.com/PhillipsPOBrien/status/1711057590174523821


(screenshots attached below)

Michael Weiss
@michaeldweiss
His first tweet during the Hamas attack, now deleted. Musk sure knows how to pick ‘em.
(ElonMuskReactionTGazaAttack)


Michael Weiss
@michaeldweiss
As night follows day. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1711033701415432245
(ElonMuskReactionTGazaAttack01)

[PeteD01]

There is now a European Union reaction to free speech/unchecked stochastic terrorist activities on Twitter/X. /s

EU warns Elon Musk over ‘disinformation’ on X about Hamas attack
Failing to moderate content such as fake news could incur fine of 6% of X revenues or EU blackout under new laws
Lisa O'Carroll in Brussels
Tue 10 Oct 2023

“Public media and civil society organisations widely report instances of fake and manipulated images and facts circulating on your platform in the EU, such as repurposed old images of unrelated armed conflicts or military footage that actually originated from video games. This appears to be manifestly false or misleading information,” he said.

“Let me remind you that the Digital Services Act sets very precise obligations regarding content moderation,” Breton said, adding that changes in X’s public interest policies raised questions about his compliance to the new rules.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/oct/10/eu-warns-elon-musk-over-disinformation-about-hamas-attack-on-x

[Daley]

Joke's on the EU, they have no revenue!

[RetiredAt63]

Joke's on the EU, they have no revenue!

But would he enjoy being blacked out?

[Daley]

Joke's on the EU, they have no revenue!

But would he enjoy being blacked out?

Would anyone even notice over there at this point, outside of the nazis?