So much for free speech at the new Twitter.
Kathy Griffin, you may recall, is a stand-up comedian who specializes in doing and saying outrageous things. For ten years, she was co-host of CNN’s New Years’ Eve coverage with Anderson Cooper. One of the running jokes was her effort to be seductive, since Anderson is gay.
Early in the Trump era, she posted a picture of herself holding Trump’s photo-shopped head, covered in catsup. She was immediately a pariah. The Secret Service treated her as a threat to the life of the president. She was put on the federal no-fly list. CNN cancelled her New Year’s Eve gig. A documentary was made about the price she paid for mocking the President. (Kathy Griffin: A Hell of a Story)
She is bad-ass and irrepressible. A day or so ago, she (as well as other people) posted a tweet on Twitter pretending to be Elon Musk. His photo, his name, but clearly tagged with her own name.
Musk, champion of free speech, banned her from Twitter. Not just suspended, but banned, for impersonating him. That created an outpouring of tweets supporting her and #FreeKathy was trending last night.
Kathy returned, however, tweeting on her dead mother’s account. @TpItMaggieG. It is accompanied by a photo of Elon and his name. She wrote:
I’m using my beloved mothers account. PS my IG and Facebook have also been hacked. Please remember. Today it’s me, tomorrow it will be you. Can any high profile onliners please amplify this for me? @ACLU_SoCal @elijahdaniel @BoutrousTed @StormyDaniels @JeniferLewis @sarahkendzio
She also tweeted:
Elon, this is Maggie contacting you from the spirit world tell u…you’re a douchebag. This is not parody. This is the actual ghost of Kathy Griffin’s boxed wine loving mother saying I’m gonna get tipsy & throw my bingo cards at you! NOT A PARODY.
To the moon, a**hole. #FreeKathy
So then the Trumpers chimed in to say, I didn’t hear you libs complain when Twitter banned Trump and Alex Jones.
Need I say that Trump was banned for fomenting a violent insurrection. Jones was banned for lying about the Sandy Hook massacre and has since been ordered by courts to pay his victims overc$1 billion.
Is humor equivalent? Musk boasts about his love of free speech (yet to be seen whether he includes racism, anti-Semitism, etc. in his definition of free speech, but he did fire a large part of the content moderation team).
One line can’t be crossed at Twitter: making a joke about Elon Musk. It’s only a matter of time until Kathy Griffin’s dead mother’s account is banned.
Why does it matter? Twitter has 400 million followers. It’s the biggest megaphone in the world. Controlled by one egotistical man. By the way, he urged his 115 million readers to vote Republican today for the sake of balance, since the president is a Democrat. That guarantees 2 years of gridlock, with no forward movement on any front, including climate change, which Elon says he cares about.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The sooner Twitter is killed, the sooner we can get back to “normal”.
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Hm, I’m trying to imagine the reaction on this blog if a right-winger posed with the photo-shopped head of Biden covered with catsup. I’m sure you’d understand it’s just a joke, right? And you wouldn’t expect the Secret Service to react at all, right?
I also find it amusing that people are squawking about the whole $8 for a blue check thing because how can people possibly know if an account is an impersonation or not without it, and simultaneously squawking about Musk banning people for impersonating others without clearly labeling it as parody. Help me out, is it okay or not okay to impersonate someone?
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Did you miss the part where the parody was labeled? I believe Kathy Griffin was roundly condemned by both liberals and conservatives and paid a big price. Did you even bother to go back and see how the majority of people reacted? and yes I would be offended if a comedian photo shopped Biden’s bloody, severed head. If it was a maga Republican, I would be even more concerned. and yes I would expect the Secret Service to react. That is their job.
Musk is seriously out of his depth.
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This is the account that was suspended – show me where it says “parody”: https://twitter.com/bennyjohnson/status/1589401140482883584
And the implication of this post seems to be that the Secret Service overreacted to Griffin’s stunt with the photoshopped catsup picture. But you seem to be saying that that would be an appropriate reaction if it were Biden. So are you saying it’s okay for Trump but not Biden?
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Kathy Griffey is a stand-up comic. She is not Trump or Biden. Banning her was stupid.
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She tweeted under the name Elon Musk, complete with a blue check, just with her own @. If I tweet as Diane Ravitch, complete with a blue check but with my own @ saying things that you would never say, is that okay with you? Or should I be suspended for that?
As for the catsup gag, it was just stupid and she deserved everything she got. You simply can’t make a gesture that can reasonably be interpreted as a threat to a sitting president no matter how much of a joke it is or how much you don’t like the target. I think most people on this blog are in favor of limits on free speech, so it seems like that should be a limit you would agree with. If it’s okay to depict Trump like that, then it’s okay to depice Biden like that, but I know how you would react if a right-wing comedian did so. . Personally, I don’t think it’s okay to depict either one like that.
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There is a Twitter account that impersonates me. Not humor. I ignore it. Kathy Griffin is a comedian. Other people did exactly the same thing—Musk name and photo, their account—and they were not suspended. I thought her severed head photo was tasteless and objectionable, but did not merit a SecretService investigation, the no-fly list, and effort to terminate her career.
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So much for free speech on Twitter, Musk is a total phony and joke. I never got involved with Twitter and with Musk in charge, I will never waste so much as 2 nanoseconds on the site. Love that Kathy Griffin has mocked the billionaire narcissist and egomaniac (or is it just plain maniac).
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Wasn’t aware Elon Musk held significant political influence with voters. Are there really that many people who hadn’t already decided to vote R who would do so because he recommended it?
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The good news is some big advertisers are paying attention and watchdog groups are sending “Open Letters” to corporations. Let’s see if they take ACTION beyond a “pause.” Google it!
The Wall Street Journal (hmm, maybe the silent hold your nose voters will see it) reports General Mills, Audi, Pfizer, Mondelez International and Volkswagen, and GM have “paused” their advertisers!
If there’s a “movement” on this it should be to flood CEOs with complaints and boycotts (even a dent – but it worked for State Testing and Teacher Evaluation!)
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Musk has blamed activist groups for the pressure from big advertisers, but it’s definitely cutting into his revenues. The NAACP has complained about the dramatic increase in racist tweets. Big advertisers don’t want their product alongside a bigoted tweet.
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He doesn’t need the money for sure, but revenue is revenue.
What should matter is that people are watching what the corporations do. The bottom line is revenue but they do care about their reputations. Look how many dumped Kanye.
No one wants their kid eating cereal or wants to drive a car made by a company that associates with racism.
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Twitter, for all its seeming omnipresence, is only the 15th largest social media company. People who follow political news pay a lot of attention to it, and that’s about it.
The one good thing from all this, aside the hopeful demise of the platform, is the revelation to those who live in a fantasy world that Musk is not some tech genius. He’s not, and never has been. He’s just another Randian libertarian, in the mold of Peter Thiel, who may be the single most horrible person in the country.
Well, after Trump.
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What are the 14 largest, other than Facebook?
Lots of people are looking for a platform to flee to. Some have chosen Mastodon, but it has only 600,000 subscribers.
There’s another I signed up for but can’t remember its name.
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If you can’t remember it’s name, how do you log in?
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Bad memory. It’s called toot.suite
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Mastodon is toot.suite
I have forgotten my password.
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Different lists get slightly different results. This list has them at No. 16: https://www.semrush.com/blog/most-popular-social-media-platforms/
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None of those compete in the same space with Twitter.
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Obviously, they compete in bigger spaces.
Twitter consists of a closed circuit for the smug. The rest of the world communicates to a far larger audience.
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Telegram is for Russians. Some of the others are Chinese. There is nothing similar to Twitter. I like it because it spreads the posts on this blog to about 250,000 or more people.
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The only thing I’m on is Facebook, and that, sparingly. It allows me to keep somewhat current on old, distant friends.
Frankly, the internet is hastening the demise of the world at the rate it’s going. Bread and circuses. And Pandora’s Box. I told them not to open it.
Pity about America. It was a nice place to grow up for me. It’ll be a worse place to die.
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Re Peter Thiel: Can you recommend an alternative to PayPal that is reliable, easy to use and highly secure? I have been meaning to change for some time.
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Well, I’m a cranky old guy, so I’m not too conversant in the ways of online payments (though I make a number of them anyway). I have a Paypal account, though I don’t use it much. I usually just pay via card through whatever system the buyer has. E.g., I just pay Amazon straight with my card without using a service. Hasn’t been a problem. Same with eBay.
I certainly don’t want to put money in Thiel’s pockets. Thiel, Robert Mercer, and other Randian billionaires are a cancer on America. They have no interest in, let alone fealty to, this country, its Constitution, or its people. They are bloodless ghouls, devoid of humanity. They live only to take.
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I have not been able to confirm this, but having watched Musk (unwillingly) since a short while before the Twitter thing, I find the following claim to be plausible.
He apparently used a Stack Ranking system to decide who to fire, and as you might expect, ended up firing most of the folks he really really needed to hold onto. Supposedly it was based on lines of code written per day but ignored the difficulties and complexities of the hardest tasks when compiling the numbers.
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He’s an idiot. I never used Twitter because the idea that you could communicate any serious idea using their truncated format was always a joke. So you get the sort of trolling that Twitter is famous for, without the benefit of any insight.
I hope this costs Musk every dime he has. He is the poster child for libertarian excess. Put him, Peter Thiel, and the Mercers in a SpaceX rocket with no fuel for a return trip.
Elon likes Mars. Let’s send him there. He’ll learn how gravity works in reality.
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What an idea! Would there be room for the Trumps?
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They should have their own hermetically sealed capsule. Without oxygen.
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I used to work as a programmer and in my opinion, anyone who uses “lines of code written per day” as a gauge programmer value or even productivity is a fool.
In general, the people who write the most lines of code in a given time are the ones who have spent the least amount of time thinking about the software ahead of time.
How good software is is generally directly related to how much thought went into it before one started coding.
From my experience, the fastest programmers usually produce the crappiest software.
Which should not really be surprising because it is true with most things. You would not expect the best house to be built by the carpenters who worked the fastest and put in the greatest number of nails per day.
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It’s no wonder that so many of Elon’s rockets blow up.
He could probably save money if his engineers thought about things a little more before they tested.
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Gauging how good a programmer is by lines of code written per day is a lot like gauging how good an author is by “sentences written per day”. It’s dumber than a bag of rocks.
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Then again, Twitter is such an idiotic platform that probably not much thought is required to program it, so maybe lines of code per day is actually a good gauge of programmer productivity.
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The same is true when organizations rank hospitals. Those that handle the most challenging cases with the greatest risk get penalized while hospitals that largely handle routine procedures may be ranked higher. We all know how unfair school rankings are as well.
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Bill Gates used stack ranking at Microsoft and nearly destroyed the company.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2012/08/microsoft-lost-mojo-steve-ballmer
And well after Microsoft had abandoned the process, Gates and Arne Duncan were forcing a similar process (using VAM ) on the nation’s teachers in order to qualify for Race to the Top funds.
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Ha! He discovered VAM and SLOs!
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Coming up Short
Twitter is tanking
And Tesla is too
Short-sellers banking
That Elon is screwed
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So, if Musk bans everyone from Twitter that jokes about him, let’s spread jokes about him on Twitter with hash tags like #MakeFunofMusk or #spreadMuskJokes or #MakeFunofMusk
If even one of those hash tags goes viral on Twitter and other social media sites, will Musk ban everyone that tweets and retweets the hash tags and Musk jokes.
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I’ll try it.
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Better watch out.
Musk may call you a “pedo guy” if he doesn’t like you , like he did with the cave diver who saved all those kids in Thailand.
All because Musk was ticked off that Thai officials chose the divers over Musk’s moronic tiny “claustrophobic capsule” that no kid or adult in his right mind would ever have agreed to get inside.
I’ll never understand how the jury in the libel suit believed Musk’s lame excuse on that one. It made no sense.
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This is a terrible loss!
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