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Home Front: Politix
Joe Biden Sounds Alarm About Elon Musk: Twitter ‘Spews Lies All Across the World'
2022-11-05
[Breitbart] President Joe Biden on Friday signaled his frustration that billionaire Elon Musk had purchased Twitter.

"Elon Musk goes out and buys an outfit that spews lies all across the world," he said.

The president commented on Musk’s purchase of the social media platform during a fundraiser in Chicago.

"There’s no editors anymore in America," he added, revisiting a theme he has complained about during this election cycle.

In October, Biden lamented the decline of the mainstream media’s ability to control the political narrative.

"The ability of newspapers to have much impact is de minimis," he said at a fundraiser with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, using a Latin phrase that means "lacking significance or importance."

"They’ve been overtaken by the Internet," he said lamenting the rise of new media.

"Look what’s happened now. Everything is changing because technology has changed," he said. "There are no editors anymore. There are no editors anymore."

At the event, Biden signaled his frustration that Americans would not be able to distinguish the truth if there were no editors to steer them in the right direction.

"How do people know the truth?" he asked. "What do they — how do they make — make a distinction between fact and fiction? There’s so much — so much going on. And we’re in the middle of this."
Posted by:Besoeker

#32  That sounds like a lot more than 50% of staff cut by Monday...
Posted by: trailing wife   2022-11-05 22:43  

#31  Musk and his brain trust are choosing to wipe out the bullshit “functions” that had fuck-all to do with building & selling product. Examples:

The human rights team has been laid off, according to a now former employee, Shannon Raj Singh, who said the team worked to protect those at risk in global conflicts, including in Ukraine.

The ML (machine learning) Ethics, Transparency and Accountability team is gone, according to a tweet of a laid-off manager.

The “internet technology team”, which helps keep the site running, has been cut to “a skeleton crew”, two sources told the Times.
An accessibility experience engineering team—ie people who try to make the site accessible to the blind and other disabled people— has been cut, according to a laid-off engineering manager.

The curation team, responsible for the Moments feature on Twitter — does anyone know WTF this is it what it does?—has also been cut, former employees reported.

Twitter’s communications department is almost entirely gone, according to the Verge.

Other areas that have been heavily impacted, the Verge reported, include product trust and safety, policy, research and social good.

😂
Posted by: Theamble Lover of the Geats2174   2022-11-05 20:19  

#30  …explains tedious unfunny asshole who wouldn’t know how to find the arse end of his P/L (if he had one)
Posted by: Theamble Lover of the Geats2174   2022-11-05 19:58  

#29  A billionaire bought a big picture
At cost beyond human conjecture.
"By washing it clean,
He conceals the machine,"
Explained expert, in boring Met lecture.

Posted by: Snaigum Ebberetch6009   2022-11-05 19:36  

#28   There's an enormous crash in internet advertising coming, courtesy of Joeflation. Companies that actually make stuff and rely on doing so at a profit will cut ad spending if a really hard recession hits. Gurgle and FarceBork will be paring back too in the face of that.

I disagree.
Posted by: swksvolFF   2022-11-05 19:00  

#27  Ah yes, those now oh so popular OKRs.

The larger companies are, the more interdependencies there are between units and the more requests individual units should take into account in their planning. In the best case, such dependencies are already identified in the planning phase and discussed between the units. However, because OKRs specify goals and not the path, dependencies on other units are sometimes discovered only during implementation, after the intended solution has been designed. As a result, individual units that actually want to plan and implement their own OKRs are suddenly overloaded with countless competing requests, all of which are also important. On the one hand, this ruins the ability to plan, and on the other, such a unit quickly finds itself in the prioritization dilemma from which OKRs were supposed to be the way out.

YMMV
Posted by: European Conservative   2022-11-05 16:52  

#26  /\/\/\ THIS!
Posted by: Solomon Grundy2686   2022-11-05 16:18  

#25   I don't see how he could have evaluated 7500 people in 7 days.

EC is clueless. E-staff set OKRs at the SBU level. They don’t evaluate individual contributors or anyone below an L3.

Musk is advised by his fellow PayPal Mafia crew— Peter Thiel, David Sacks et al. These guys have been running tech companies and investing and evaluating hundreds such companies for nearly 25 years. They know what they’re doing.

TWTR is a gold mine if run by competent tech-savvy management.
Posted by: Billy B   2022-11-05 15:48  

#24  My guess is he knows exactly what he's doing, unlike the feckless SOB's that are running this country.

If they've never signed the FRONT of a paycheck, they need to STFU.
Posted by: Besoeker   2022-11-05 15:39  

#23  Musk should move away from brand advertising and focus on clickable performance ads.

Not Audi and Pfizer but performance-driven, bottom of the funnel big spenders like GEICO, BestBuy etc.

Makes billions for Amazon and eBay. Super-scalable, and nearly all the operations and infrastructure can be outsourced.

Huge profit margins and none of the brand-image headaches or political posturing
Posted by: Billy B    2022-11-05 15:35  

#22  Why Elon bought Twitter is a complete mystery to me.

If you look at the acquisition as a pure business play, it is crazy, but as TW pointed out around #11, Twitter may have started from a vision of a digital town square, but it has been weaponized to support one political party. This is not good for America.
Either getting back to that original vision or removing it from the board are noble goals.

you can't run a platform without competent people, and I don't see how he could have evaluated 7500 people in 7 days.

Musk has been analyzing the company for a while now, certainly longer than 7 days. He has commented publicly on the overhead of too many managers. But as to the question of how many people do you need, let's look at the problem top down:

IT staff to keep the servers up and running. Critical people, but probably the smallest group. Keep them.

Developers to fix bugs and add features. Did I mention bugs? There are always bugs. Those new features? They have bugs we have not yet begun to find. Another critical group. Also comparatively small. Some of these people will be providing support for the content filtering groups. Bye!

Thought Police - someone has to keep wrong-think from spreading, inject the appropriate messaging and wrangle the vast herd of bots that exist on the platform. I suspect this is the largest cohort and the easiest one to fire en masse. I saw some gal complaining that her entire Climate Change department got the axe. Why does a digital town square need a Climate Change department?

Sales and Marketing - as a programmer it pains me to say it, but these guys probably have some corporate use, even though it escapes me at the moment. Keep at least a few of them. Especially the secretary that arranges parties and catering.

Posted by: SteveS   2022-11-05 15:30  

#21  "There’s no editors operatives anymore in America," he added, revisiting a theme he has complained about during this election cycle."

FIFY there, Brandon.
Posted by: Anomalous Sources   2022-11-05 15:23  

#20  There's an enormous crash in internet advertising coming, courtesy of Joeflation. Companies that actually make stuff and rely on doing so at a profit will cut ad spending if a really hard recession hits. Gurgle and FarceBork will be paring back too in the face of that.
Posted by: M. Murcek    2022-11-05 14:58  

#19  ^^ post-taker s/b post-takeover
Posted by: Nero   2022-11-05 14:51  

#18  @12 Imagine running a company worth 44 million with 7 people.

Wrong metric. What counts is revenue per head count, not a nebulous market capitalization.

Musk isn't doing individual evaluations, except perhaps at the VP level. He's eliminating functional organizations, focusing on those that aren't delivering value from his POV, and those that scale based on head count, not technology. Remember, this is the 'best part is no part' guy, and if he doesn't see a need for some group, kaboom!

I'll also add this is fairly normal proceeding for a post-taker tech acquisition Silicon Valley style. The core engineering groups get conserved, the marketing and overhead take it in the shorts. It's just that this time it's happening under the glare of politicized media attention. (And the fraction of engineering that's essential to value there may be lower than usual, per the comments above about the TWTR platform, with which I agree to the extent it's publicly visible.)
Posted by: Nero   2022-11-05 14:49  

#17  /\ As tech companies go, TWTR is a joke'

You mean like the USPS, Department of Agriculture, or FBI ?
Posted by: Besoeker   2022-11-05 14:40  

#16  As tech companies go, TWTR is a joke. It’s just a big version of Wordpress. Do they even have an SSP? Even TikTok and Snap are more advanced than TWTR.

Musk could and should get rid of 90% of the non-engineering staff. You could run that company profitably with a few hundred people and as little as 5% of the subs paying $96 per year.
Posted by: Billy B    2022-11-05 14:35  

#15  Of course not. We manage everything within our own company website. Since we keep a low profile and only have larger corporate clients, "social media shitstorms" aren't much of a concern here.
Posted by: European Conservative   2022-11-05 13:29  

#14  I mean, you wouldn't want to leave yourself at the mercy of Jack Dorsey or Christopher Wray.
Posted by: Abu Uluque   2022-11-05 13:26  

#13  My company isn't on Twitter or FB.

Well, then your company is doing something right.
Posted by: Abu Uluque   2022-11-05 13:26  

#12  Social media may be a lot of things but not social. Twitter even less.

That said, you can't run a platform without competent people, and I don't see how he could have evaluated 7500 people in 7 days.

Even Rantburg needs moderators, and while you are usually very lenient, you do ask stupid people to leave the internet.

To lay off half of your staff within a week is not a wise move. Sure, some might really be redundant, but a company that apparently is worth 44 bn is not losing money because of 7500 people.

Imagine running a company worth 44 million with 7 people.
Posted by: European Conservative   2022-11-05 13:23  

#11   Why Elon bought Twitter is a complete mystery to me.

He wanted to break their stranglehold on the discourse — whether by taking it over or destroying it does not seem to have mattered to him. Donald Trump on the same mission caused a competing platform to be built.

I agree that businesses in general should not be on social media — too much opportunity to annoy current and potential customers by saying something that turns out to push unexpected buttons. For the same reason businesses should stay out of politics beyond lobbying.
Posted by: trailing wife   2022-11-05 13:10  

#10  Owning a media outlet is a fine and proven tradition for people/organizations with money, even if the dividends are a bit abstract and not necessarily cash money.
Posted by: swksvolFF   2022-11-05 13:09  

#9  My company isn't on Twitter or FB.
Posted by: European Conservative   2022-11-05 12:32  

#8  Twitter and FB are Deep State social network monitoring and disinformation tools. Musk will flush out the top level Deep State agents and collaborators. He'll monetize Twitter and make big bucks. It's what he does.

Until Musk gets it cleaned up, use them at your own risk.
Posted by: Besoeker   2022-11-05 12:29  

#7  I took a look at Twitter's annual reports (2021). Why Elon bought Twitter is a complete mystery to me. 44 bn is just batshit crazy.
Posted by: European Conservative   2022-11-05 12:24  

#6  "There’s no editors anymore in America," he added, revisiting a theme he has complained about during this election cycle.

Yeah, well, there was Christopher Wray but Elon just canned his ass.
Posted by: Abu Uluque   2022-11-05 11:32  

#5  He's salty because he used to be able to lie with impunity. Now his lies are being fact-checked by Twitter.

Look for a drone strike on Musk soon. Either that or he gets epsteined.
Posted by: Spike the Hairy6811   2022-11-05 11:18  

#4  That video was the basis for my satire post yesterday.

And just like that, every Blue Check has been othered. Great work Joe, go grab a pizza.
Posted by: swksvolFF   2022-11-05 10:23  

#3  I was going to write something completely different. Then I found this lovely video.

Now I don't understand why Elon would "force" people to work here instead from home.
Posted by: European Conservative   2022-11-05 08:04  

#2  So, you are either all-in, or out, out, out.
Posted by: M. Murcek   2022-11-05 08:03  

#1  Sick man in West Wing sez "Musk and Twitter now evil", possibly even MAGA.
Posted by: Besoeker   2022-11-05 02:46  

00:00