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Three Things: Crustpunk Nazi Bar Update, $42K Extortion Edition

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[NB: Check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]

It’s been a while since we had a chat about the crustpunk Nazi bar known as Twitter. The dead-ending bird decided press the issue for us.

~ 3 ~

Community members have been asking in comments about the now-empty widget in the right-hand vertical navigation zone.

It’s dead, Jim.

The widget in the right-hand navigation column which featured latest tweets by emptywheel contributors no longer works because Elon Musk changed the business model at Twitter yet again, requiring users of Twitter’s API to pay $42,000 to continue to do so.

That kind of money can buy a lot of original reporting as well as platform updates and hosting.

The original developers of that widget also stopped servicing it years ago.

It will be replaced at some time in the near future with a Mastodon or Fediverse-friendly widget though we don’t have an estimated time to completion.

Bear with us on this matter, please and thanks.

You can continue to follow Marcy, bmaz, Ed Walker, and Jim White on the bird app without having to log in –- just click on the embedded links. Unfortunately this will also count as engagement at the crustpunk Nazi bar which Musk will use to continue to claim the bird app is a going concern.

Whenever the major news outlets and U.S. officials both elected and appointed – yes, taxpayer-funded persons are using the crustpunk Nazi bar – get their heads out of their asses and migrate from the Nazi bar, more of Team emptywheel will move as well. But as long as the media and government entities continue to use the Saudi-funded right-wing mouthpiece the bird app has become, some of the team will tweet there.

As for the exorbitant and extortive fee Musk wants for API access, the damage is not just emptywheel readers being unable to read tweets through this site.

Now academic researchers and NGO monitors of hate speech, illegal activity, disinformation, and foreign influence may no longer be able to access bird app content. That’s not a bug but a feature.

~ 2 ~

Speaking of hate speech and illegal activity and other content typically moderated by reputable social media platforms, Mike Masnick at Techdirt created and shared an excellent game in which players can experience what moderators must do to boot crap out of comments and still keep their jobs:

Moderator Mayhem: A Mobile Game To See How Well YOU Can Handle Content Moderation

(Side note: Techdirt left the bird app this past week because of the $42K fee. Good for them.)

Moderation here at emptywheel is not as strenuous as Masnick’s Moderator Mayhem game because this site’s traffic simply isn’t a big factor 95% of the time. We can also predict most traffic spikes which lead to trolling upticks based on news events and specific posts as well, unlike most Big Tech social media platforms.

But the fuzzy nature of some comments which moderators must screen can be challenging and is likely to be more so over time here and at the big platforms as influence operations incorporate AI to weasel around moderation.

Unlike the Big Tech social media platforms this site doesn’t demand community members provide a cell phone number or verifiable email address or other personal data which links them personally to content they share in comments. It’s a careful balancing act between recognizing legitimate human participants commenting in good faith and assuring them privacy. Moderation at Big Tech socmed platforms compromises privacy to eliminate the necessity of validating legitimate community members.

Balancing community members’ privacy and site security means we spend a bit more obvious effort asking community members who want to comment to create and maintain a username which can be readily recognized over the history of their comments. The emergence of AI will make this more important to prevent spoofing of established community members.

All of which means emptywheel community members will continue to be nagged for a unique username consisting of a minimum 8 letters which they will use every time they comment, or risk moderation.

For more perspective on moderation, it’s worth reading Vanity Fair’s article about new socmed platform Bluesky’s problematic approach (or lack thereof) to moderation. You’d think Jack Dorsey would have had this nailed down before launch given his experience at Twitter but no – he’s proven he’s another “free speech absolutist” which is just code for crustpunk Nazi bar owner/operator.

~ 1 ~

Aside from how the bird app and moderation affects emptywheel’s site, the bird app continues to find out about its fucking around.

Or rather, certain persons foolish enough to trust Elmo and the bird app after he fired ~85% of its employees are finding out about Elmo’s fuckery.

In a debacle rivaling SpaceX’s 4/20 Starship launch explosion, we’ve all heard by now about Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis’ spectacular implosion on soft launch last Wednesday when Twitter Spaces failed to work as expected during his presidential campaign launch announcement.

One of Twitter’s top engineers, Foad Dabiri, quit on Thursday, amid much speculation the exit was due to the Twitter Spaces failure and not a resignation but a separation.

You’ll note the first comments at that Yahoo News piece are Elmo fanboi trolls who blame the Twitter Spaces’ failure on sabotage.

The other shoe dropped Friday: it seems Elmo didn’t pay the bill for the Redis Labs software which handled audio streaming traffic.

The best engineers in the world can’t turn a deadbeat into a viable production platform. No wonder the engineer left; one might wonder if Dabiri was a green card employee who had no choice to stay until it was obvious it would damage his personal cred.

The failure reflected badly not only on Elmo and Twitter but on DeSantis. Why would any sentient being risk their next desired job on a platform which has been riddled with problems since Elmo bought it, let alone a platform run by a guy who has twice tweeted supportive comments about a rival candidate Sen. Tim Scott and is in part funded by another major campaign contributor, Larry Ellison?

That’s just begging for an opportunity to find out.

~ 0 ~

As with all social media platforms, your mileage may vary. Engage wisely.

Three Things: Goodbye to the Once and Former Shitty Crustpunk Bar

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[NB: As always, check the byline. /~Rayne]

Social media sites can be like your favorite watering hole, whether a blog, a forum, a platform like Orkut. You find one you’re comfortable hanging around because of content, and then you stay longer if you like the regulars who are likewise attracted to the content.

You get to know the regulars’ names after becoming familiar with the dynamics of the digital neighborhood. After a while you realize you’re a regular too – you’ve gotten to know this person has kids, that person has a beloved pet, yet another has a quirky habit manifest in the way they comment.

They get to know you and call you by your name as if you were Norm entering that Boston pub called Cheers.

Site moderators get to know you, too, may cut you a little slack if you’ve been there long enough and paid your dues to the community by making your own form of contribution with credible comment material and respectful interaction.

With some investment getting yourself situated for optimum comfort, it’s easy. Everything just comes to you — the bartender now knows exactly what to serve you.

All of this is incredibly important to people who are marginalized offline. The digital neighborhood can be a lifeline of sanity, a place where they can escape the oppressive crap of the real world. They can join the community through a lingua franca within their circle of safety. They don’t have to burn any more precious energy to obtain a measure of peace.

Safety borne of familiarity, regularity, and connection, of a cultivated common culture — that’s what the digital refugees who are fleeing Twitter miss, that’s what they’re seeking.

It’s not at all easy to replace. It also feels like personal and social loss to leave it.

Except the refugees didn’t leave it. It left them.

~ 3 ~

A couple years ago there was a really great thread at Twitter in response to comments made about the far right’s weaponization of free speech.

We’ve seen the weaponization in action in many ways – the white nationalist Nazi-types terrorizing Charlottesville with tiki torches while exercising their free speech, ultimately resulting in the death of a young woman crushed by a white nationalist expressing himself with his car.

Cosplay Nazi-lite lighting smoke bombs during a rally without a permit on the National Mall, or planning to disrupt a Pride parade again in cosplay.

Disrupting community events at libraries, terrorizing families enjoying themselves.

Or the January 6 insurrectionists storming the U.S. Capitol expressing their anger as they laid bombs the night before, breached barriers, assaulted police, shat on the floor, stole equipment while hunting for the House Speaker and the Vice President in order to kill them. Multiple people died as a result of the insurrection.

Anyhow, this chap at Twitter noted the point at which this weaponization of free speech should be addressed to prevent the predictable overreach into violence, when Popper’s Paradox is optimally preempted.

The venue needs to deal with the hate speech as soon as it arrives with its hair neatly combed wearing a button down with an insignia-covered tie. Cut it off in the whitewashed alt-right larval form; grab the club and set on on the bar top long before the Nazi must be punched. That’s when the effort is most effective; that’s when you can still fight and eliminate the emerging Nazis.

Unfortunately, Elon Musk figured out how to get inside this OODA loop.

He bought the bar. He was simply faster at doing this than Paul Singer was back in 2019.

And now the once-beloved shitty crustpunk bar which many of us could comfortably call home is now a goddamned Nazi pub.

The longer you stay there, the more that shit rubs off on you: you’re one of the Nazi watering hole’s patrons.

You’re a Nazi by association.

~ 2 ~

Jack Dorsey is a crypto Nazi. He’s been encouraging Musk for some time, and now he’s nudging him to take all remaining restraints off the Nazis Musk has already freed, including insurrectionists like Roger Stone. “[M]ake everything public now,” which will allow right-wing propagandists to run amok and distort past moderation decisions.

The way Twitter responded to Trump’s racist crap back when Dorsey was at the helm should have been clue enough; the donation Twitter made to the ACLU was just whitewash, the few hundred thousand a feint when Musk would spend billions to upend the entire place to free his Nazi fanbois’ speech.

Dorsey tried to play both sides but it was ultimately easier to let his buddy Musk strip away the veil. Or hood, if you’d prefer.

Bari Weiss is a Nazi apologist who thinks she can escape what Nazis do by being their handmaid, carrying Nazis’ water, chopping their wood for them.

All the Musk fanbois who are Oh-My-God-Twitter-Moderated, amplified in turn by Fox News in the wake of Musk euphemistically ‘exiting’ Twitter’s counsel? Nazis.

And of course there are the Nazis Musk let back in the bar, putting out the Welcome mat for them.

They’re all hanging at the Nazi bar Musk bought in order to make sure Nazis had a cozy place to call home because Gab, Parler, and Truth Social don’t have the commercial cachet to realistically achieve any level of social and economic success.

The financiers who either bought stock or loaned Musk money are likewise good with Nazism. It’s not a stretch to see how three Middle Eastern fossil fuel producing countries might want to destabilize the U.S. by normalizing Nazis in American right-wing culture.

This normalization which heightens internal conflict is to them not a failure.

So long as the American left and center are preoccupied with fighting Nazis, they’ll have less wattage to undermine stultifying fossil fuels to the benefit of alternative energy development.

No idea what the hell Oracle’s CEO Larry Ellison was thinking by loaning Musk money to buy Twitter. We can only rely on first principles and allow his actions to convey exactly what they look like: Ellison wanted a chunk of Nazi bar action.

That goes for all the other investors who loaned Musk money for Twitter.

Remember that social success may mean their ideas as noxious as they are gain what has been a mainstream platform used by this country’s largest media outlets — they are legitimized by proximity.

Remember that economic success may mean benefits other than those obtained by Twitter’s profitability. Like stifling discussion about alternatives to oil. Or disrupting conversations about open source, open data, open systems in the case of a proprietary database corporation’s CEO. Or thwarting changes to tax code which may affect billionaires by throttling communications by elected representatives who’d like to pass a tax increase on the 1%.

$44 billion for a Nazi bar might be a bargain.

~ 1 ~

This is when it gets – and already has been – dicey for advertisers.

Because they’re buying ad space from a Nazi bar, to be shown in a space where their brands appear cheek-and-jowl with Nazis.

The back and forth between Musk and Apple about Apple’s ad buys shouldn’t fool anyone. Apple doesn’t want to leave Nazi money on the table.

I say this with great disgust and a letter to the board of directors because I own Apple stock and the cost to buy Twitter would have been chump change to Apple.

It would have been more valuable to have access to a big chunk of the Android market’s users for advertising purposes while preventing damage to Apple’s brand if Apple had stepped up this past March after Musk’s stake in Twitter became public. Just whip out some cash and cut off the incipient Nazi bar.

But no, Apple fucked up.

Instead of making a values-based statement about its products and service the way they would have in the past, they’ve remained silent too long as Musk taunted them about free speech and nagged them about advertising buys.

The company that literally smashed the iconography of then-giant IBM in 1984 and Microsoft to follow, the company which was the first to be valued at a trillion dollars and subsequently two trillion, has been tippy-toeing around a fucking Nazi bar owner tweaking its nose.

What’s really even more egregious: while Musk is trash talking Apple and Apple responds in a way totally unlike one of the wealthiest and most creative on earth should, Musk is using Apple and refusing to compensate the corporation for it.

He just jacked up from $8 to $11 a month the price of Twitter Blue, the subscription service with verification to be available only to Apple iOS users, so that he passes on the fee Apple charges for listing in its app store.

In other words, Musk expects Apple to validate every Twitter Blue account by virtue of being an iPhone or iPad user with access to the Apple app store.

And he’s not going to pay Apple one goddamned cent for this validation service.

Meanwhile, Apple will continue to look Nazi-adjacent in Musk’s Nazi bar.

I hate that I’m going to trash my own retirement account saying this; I have a big chunk of my portfolio in Apple stock.

But I hate even more that Apple — which could have afforded to buy Twitter without going to other lenders as Musk did — is fucking up so badly and torching its brand by advertising in a Nazi bar and allowing a Nazi bar to profit off its hard work.

If Google ever figures out how to do microblogging, they may yet eat Apple’s lunch if they can stay clear of the Nazi bar and avoid Musk’s predatory moochery.

~ 0 ~

Yeah, I know — people I know, care about, and even in some cases love are still using Twitter.

You don’t need to know any longer what it was like in the 1930s before Kristallnacht, before the Reichstag fire. This is what it looked like, all the rationalizations, all the denialism, all the lingering doubts about whether it’s better to remain and hold the space, stay and fight, or walk away even as people fled Germany for safety.

The fight’s done, though.

Think about it: what happens to you when you get into a fight inside a Nazi bar?

There are other bars. Some of them are shitty, some crusty, some punk. One of them may only need you to make it a shitty crustpunk bar.

Maybe even one with a surly bartender who clearly hates you but still keeps a hand on their bat for Nazis.

Friday: Sinnerman

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In this roundup: A look outside the U.S.’ borders — TTIP’s end, Turkey at risk, Chile and women’s reproductive rights, more.

Featured jazz artist today is Eunice Waymon, known best by her stage name Nina Simone. Recognized for her powerful political work, Mississippi Goddamn, Simone was an incredibly gifted pianist trained at Juilliard with a predilection for the works and method of Johann Sebastian Bach. She became a singer only after nightclubs for which she performed insisted she must sing and play piano together.

Two of my favorites apart from Sinnerman shared here are Feeling Good and I Put a Spell on You. I’ll always have a warm, fuzzy place for Ain’t Got No/I Got Life medley, a variation of the song from the 1960s Broadway musical Hair. I can remember singing along to this recording during long road trips.

Why Nina Simone today? Because of Sinnerman, which seems particularly appropriate during this election season.

Looking away from our nation’s navel

  • Op-ed: Is Turkey nearing civil war? (Süddeutsche Zeitung) — Guest contributor Yavuz Baydar reviews developments in Turkey after the so-called coup attempt, including calls to arm citizens, reestablish an Ottoman caliphate, and create militarized youth groups attached to mosques. Turkish media, operating with the blessing of President Tayyip Erdoğan, has shown maps featuring Mosul and parts of northern Greece as part of a Turkish empire.
  • TTIP may be in death throes, but resuscitation attempted (euronews) — This article quotes a Spanish automotive partmaker who complains the need to inspect parts both on export and import is expensive, and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) agreement would eliminate the costly redundancy. Except the existing duplicative inspections didn’t prevent Volkswagen Group and its vendor Bosch from shipping fraudulent vehicles and parts, did it? Yeah. Not so much…in spite of TTIP’s near-death, the US and EU met earlier this month to regroup and try to force TTIP through before the end of President Obama’s term.
  • Chile’s president aims to change restrictive anti-abortion laws (NPR) — Chile is among the five most restrictive countries in the world, outlawing abortion even to save the life of the mother. President Michelle Bachelet made it her goal to change the laws; the country’s lower house has already approved legislation to allow abortion in case of rape, to save the mother, or in case of mortal fetal defect. Chile’s senate must yet vote to approve this legislation before it becomes law. In the mean time, women must travel abroad to obtain abortions or risk jail if they attempt it in Chile on their own.
  • Radical Ukrainian nationalists rising (euronews) — Members of far-right groups Azo regiment and the Right Sector recently marched through Kyiv to celebrate Ukrainian patriotism while protesting pro-Russian separatists.

Tech Debris
Here’s a collection of odd technology bits I’ve run across recently worth a read:

  • Dutch researchers working on anti-hacking technology (euronews) — They’re working on unique identifiers for devices attached to the internet, like the myriad Internet of Things (webcams, baby monitors, so on). This seems like a waste of time given every device should already have an ID assigned by a network. Keep an eye on this; it’d certainly make surveillance easier. Ahem.
  • Troubling case of Facebook v. Vachani (NPR) — Fluffy overview of the suit filed against Steven Vachani whose portal site product pissed off Facebook greatly. But you should read the op-ed from July by Orin Kerr about this case — brace yourself for your freak out.
  • From the archives: Interview with John Arquilla on cyberwarfare (FRONTLINE) — Perspective on the origins of current cyberwarfare policies arising from Bush administration post-9/11. As you read this, keep in mind Arquilla is a proponent of preemptive warfare and the use of cyberwarfare against terrorism.
  • Twitter as a government tool against the people (Bloomberg) — We take for granted we can type anything we want in social media. Not so in much of the rest of the world, and Twitter is an example of social media with both great potential to inform while putting users at risk where speech is not free. Although after the recent revelations Twitter sold data to a U.S. intelligence front, speech isn’t exactly free on Twitter for U.S. citizens, either.

Longread: Did newspapers screw up?
We’ve watched the decline of newspapers for over a decade as its analog business model met the reality of a digital age. Jack Shafer wrote about the possibility newspapers may have made a critical error during the generational shift to online media — perhaps the seasoned existing outlets should have remained firmly committed to print. Two key problems with this analysis: 1) printing and distribution remains as expensive as all other factors in producing a newspaper, and 2) the population consuming newspaper content is changing, from a print-only to digital-only audience. This must be acknowledged or newspapers will continue to struggle, and large papers will continue to pursue consolidation in order to reduce costs to operate.

With that in mind, I still don’t understand why The Washington Post, owned by Jeff Bezos, hasn’t opted to offer a Kindle to subscribers willing to pay for a full print subscription a year in advance. A low-level Kindle is cheaper than the cost to print. Ditto to The New York Times; why hasn’t it considered a tie up with Kobo or another e-reader manufacturer?

That’s it for this week; have a good weekend!