I find the whole Twitter situation ridiculous. I have no idea whether there's a commercial justification for Elon Musk's lockdown of the platform, restricting viewership to logged-in accounts and cutting back on the number of tweets they can view at any one time. It seems more to me like deliberate censorship. I can't help wondering whether it's part of a Deep State effort to prevent people listening to voices such as Tucker Carlson's, who's been relentless in his unmasking of the nonsense perpetrated by the current Administration and its allies in the mainstream media.
(I'm not saying Elon Musk would personally do that, but he's already found a number of "hangover" employees at Twitter who are interfering with his efforts to promote free speech on that platform. To his credit, he appears to be getting rid of them as fast as he notices them.)
Fortunately, Tucker Carlson's episodes can still be found all over the Web, because his fans are re-publishing his videos on multiple platforms. Here, for example, are his Twitter videos on Rumble. You'll find multiple copies of each. The same is being made available on Instagram, Bitchute and elsewhere (although not, obviously, YouTube - Big Tech regards him as a threat, and they're not about to let upstart viewers bypass their censorship there).
I guess this is just one more aspect of the eternal struggle between free and restricted speech; between making money out of content up front, versus letting the content attract reader funds through its quality; and between Big Tech and the Deep State versus free, independent Americans who want to listen to and/or watch whomever they please, without anyone setting limits on their access. It won't be the last time this plays out.
Peter
10 comments:
The reason for the lockdown, and the rate limiting, is that AI creators have decided to use Twitter as a free training dataset and sucking down all the available bandwidth.
I liken these AI developers to the guy who empties the penny bowl at the market to pay for his purchase. "It's free, right, so why can't I abuse it?"
90 miles from tyranny has a post up today on what and why Musk is doing this.
I have to have a Farcebook account to see a Farcebook post, an Instagram account to see an Instagram post, and a MeWe account to see a MeWe post. But everyone is declaring the end of the world because you need a Twitter account to read a Twitter post.
@Dragon Lady: That's because Twitter was never a "closed shop" - until now, it's always been accessible by anyone who wanted to read it. The other social media sites you mention have always had an account requirement, so it's never been an issue.
That post at 90 Miles (mentioned by michigan doug) can be seen here:
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9vU8ONdxzjWdwV4fthGqsG2P9zJB40HPuXzCrawsyWLSVkQsm5JUpdY21XR4PjD2P2c_Rw46c67Ty9Dq7x1AvxiMibiwZdymzJV_1Kw3jculqkKW2rymb4huSQomZQXXxd6Tcv4MYIzKhN5F6CzWA5xsmu7YER3elfB2Iftm2bpV62_iHifVt83szI_-t/s1401/1%20sgrterterterter.jpg
(And I hope that url ends up readable...)
FWIW
More on Twitter’s new policy and why
https://open.substack.com/pub/coffeeandcovid/p/limitations-monday-july-3-2023-c?r=1vxw0k&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
But
More on that new Twitter policy in the added note which throws doubts
“Beware France – Macron Moves to Shut Down Internet Communication to Block Rebellious Uprisings
July 3, 2023 | Sundance | 394 Comments
I added a NOTE about Musk’s nonsense justification.”
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2023/07/03/beware-france-macron-moves-to-shut-down-internet-communication-to-block-rebellious-uprisings/
This explain a lot. I have been locked out of twitter since day one some 15 years ago but I could view Twitter video feeds until about 3 days ago.
“Musk’s Tweet-Limiting Move Is To Prevent The Completion Of The “AI-Censorship-Death-Star””
https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/musks-tweet-limiting-move-prevent-completion-ai-censorship-death-star
“Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock this weekend, you will know that Twitter CEO Elon Musk said Saturday that the social media platform will limit how many tweets users can read due to “extreme” levels of system manipulation and data scraping.”
From what I understand, Twitter is essentially being attacked by people training AIs to scrape the entirety of the Twitter database several times a day. Before this, the Twitter database was not protected or limited. Twitter has roughly 500,000 servers, all of their servers suddenly went to 100% load last week.
The people training AIs need to find another target.
Musk's experiment with Tucker is working well for Musk AND Tucker. Musk desperately needs content which people will seek, thus ad revenues. Musk needs to solve the problem of data-scraping, but that shouldn't be too difficult--if he has a solid programming staff.
The new limitation on Twitter limits you to viewing something like 6000 tweets per day. (It may be higher by now.)
If you're having problems because you can "only" view 6000 tweets per day, you're using Twitter for some purpose that most of us don't share.
It's only the click-hounds on Twitter who will ever see an effect from this.
Elon rocks.
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