Elon Musk – Page 5 – INANIMATE CARBON GOD

Other companies not OK with Nazism either!

X ad boycott gathers pace amid antisemitism storm

An advertising boycott of social media platform X is gathering pace amid an antisemitism storm on the site formerly known as Twitter.
Apple, Disney, Comcast and Warner Brothers Discovery have all halted advertising on X, US media report, following hot on the heels of IBM.
The European Commission, TV network Paramount and movie studio Lionsgate have also pulled ad dollars from X.
It comes after X owner Elon Musk amplified an antisemitic trope.
The corporate boycott has also been picking up steam in the wake of an investigation by a US group which flagged ads appearing next to pro-Nazi posts on X.
A spokesperson for X told the BBC on Thursday that the company does not intentionally place brands “next to this kind of content” and the platform is dedicated to combatting antisemitism.

And what do the ADL make of this?

On Friday evening, the ADL – one of the most vocal critics of how X moderates incendiary content – offered rare praise for Mr Musk’s steps to fight hate on the platform.
Mr Musk had posted on X that anyone using terms such as “from the river to the sea” – which the ADL has described as a coded call for Israel’s destruction – could be suspended from the platform.
ADL chief executive Jonathan Greenblatt replied that this was “an important and welcome move”.

I couldn’t resist posting on the Bad Place for once what Oolong had said about the ADL just the day before Greenblatt said that (not that he’ll notice):

One of the other terms Oolong is claiming implies genocide is “decolonisation”. I don’t understand that. Genocide against whom, the colonisers? And what else has the world’s favourite white South African billionaire had to say on the current matter?

Well, that’s certainly one way to get those advertisers to stop boycotting you, I suppose. But insulting the ADL has kept Stephen Greenblatt on-side, obviously, so maybe it’ll work this time too…

Cyberpiss

The latest tragic development in Oolong Husk’s increasing degeneration, apart from his endorsement of outright antisemitism, is his new… beer.

Cyberbeer. For fuck’s sake. What do you do, drink it while your Cybertruck is driving itself and crashing through other vehicles? I suppose at least the logo doesn’t appear to have 3 K’s hidden in it… But, being an Oolong product, not only is it preposterously expensive, it’s apparently shit:

Brian appears to be a Tesla fan, which I presume is what motivated the purchase in the first place. Let this be a lesson to him and all of us: just because someone you’re a fan of has merch available doesn’t mean you have to buy all of it…

Musk: the movie

Yeah, things just get stupider and stupider. I’m having flashbacks to when The Social Network was announced, cos that confused me terribly back then… the idea of a film about Facebook to be made by David Fincher struck me then as being as silly and perplexing as the idea of a film about Oolong Husk to be made by Darren Aronofsky… and I can’t escape the feeling the Oolong film will turn out to be much like the Zuck film, albeit probably without the critical plaudits the latter somehow earned; it’ll be perfectly well made but all the characters will be shit, especially the lead one. Indeed, in the review I wrote of it many years ago, I actually said this:

The film suddenly tries to humanise him near the end, but it rings false, as up to then we’ve only seen him as, basically, a charmless, graceless prick who’s kind of ultimately driven by spite over being dumped by a girl.

And I already feel that if I ever watch this putative film I will be able to use that exact same sentence in a review of it at some point.

In other news, Oolong has unveiled the, er, corporate logo for Cybertruck:

Spotted on Bluesky, with the poster brilliantly describing it as “almost wholly illegible and looks like it was scratched on a wall by a tweaker”. Oof. But then someone else also noticed you can read the logo another way:

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOH. Once you know, it’s impossible not to see the KKK in there. Oof again, and then some.

New(ish) Aamon

I wish someone had told me that Aamon put a new video out about a month ago so I could’ve been FREAKED THE FUCK OUT by it a month ago. Instead I was freaked the fuck out by it just now. GOOD LORD. It’s… yes, it certainly is.

…And the inanity

I really hate that I have so many posts about Oolong Husk here, but… when he does shit like this, I have to be able to mock it somewhere. Anyway…

Cybertruck! For when you can’t avoid that trip through Sherwood Forest, apparently. But it’s something else he said about it in response to one of his cultists that people have picked up on:

I mean… I can understand not knowing where the title Blade Runner came from (the film just thanks Alan Nourse and William S. Burroughs for letting them use it without otherwise explaining it), but thinking “Bladerunner” was the character’s name (as Oolong apparently does) is just baffling. Like it’s the adventures of Richard Bladerunner. Luke Bladerunner and his father Anakin Bladerunner. Forrest Bladerunner. Good Will Bladerunner. Bilbo Bladerunner of Blade End. HONESTLY.

Oolong’s having a normal one

So Jimmy Wales has found himself the latest target of Mr Husk’s penis envy or whatever it is. And granted, I find Wikipedia’s begging for money as tedious as anyone else does, but damned if I don’t want to become a regular donor now out of spite…

Actually, no, THIS is the ripoff for the ages

Good fucking grief.

Meta has a new plan to navigate the European Union’s tough new ad privacy rules – charge users $14 a month.
The tech giant is considering getting customers in Europe to pay monthly subscription fees to use Instagram and Facebook if they don’t agree to let Meta use their data to serve them ads, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.
Users who pay the subscription fee will be able to use Meta’s products without ads.
The monthly fee would start at around €10 ($10.50) for a desktop Facebook or Instagram account, but would rise to around $14 for accounts on mobile devices thanks to the commissions charged by Apple and Google’s app stores.
The new subscription tiers, which could roll out in the next few months, are an attempt to comply with the EU’s crackdown on personalized advertising, according to The Journal.

Yeah, it’s an attempt to comply with the EU’s laws rather than a cynical attempt to screw people out of an excessive amount of money for a service that isn’t worth that much. Fourteen bucks a month? We really are trying to make Oolong’s $1-a-year-for-now deal look lightweight, aren’t we, Mark… then again at least he’s not talking about cutting off the service to Europe entirely, unlike Oolong:

In recent weeks Elon Musk has suggested Twitter could stop being accessible in Europe in order to avoid new regulation enacted by the European Commission.
Musk is increasingly frustrated with having to comply with the Digital Services Act, according to a person familiar with the company. The Tesla billionaire, who acquired Twitter, now called X, a year ago for $44 billion, has discussed simply removing the app’s availability in the region, or blocking users in the European Union from accessing it, the person said. This would be similar to the way Meta is currently blocking people in Europe from using its new app Threads.
The DSA took effect in August and requires large online platforms like X to have effective and transparent systems in place for the moderation and removal of false, misleading, and harmful information. With a wave of misinformation regarding the Israel-Hamas war quickly going viral on X, the platform is likely already in violation of the DSA.
EU Commissioner Thierry Breton said last week the Commission is officially “investigating X’s compliance” with the new law and formally requested detailed information from the platform on its actions to mitigate and remove harmful or toxic information.
Cash-strapped X could face a fine if it’s found in violation of the DSA. The Commission can impose “periodic penalty payments,” or fines, up to 6% of a company’s global revenue.

So for having the temerity to tell him to stop his platform being shitty and harmful, Husk apparently thinks he cam “punish” Europe or something by cutting off Twitter there. I mean, sure, THAT’LL work, when you’ve already blown the value of your service by 80% why not just cut off hundreds of millions of potential users, the advertisers will LOVE that… I can see him doing that in Australia too, though, now the government here is also on his back about the amount of CSA material he’s also doing nothing about. The problem is, I can’t see them actually succeeding at getting that from him, even though it’s a pissy sum (about $600,000), because as a billionaire he is clearly above all man-made laws, and for all the talk that he could be fined a further $800,000 per day if he doesn’t pay up… well if he’s not going to pay the original fine, I can’t see him paying the even bigger extra. But I can imagine him just turning the service off altogether here just for considering making him do something to protect kids. And what a loss it’d be if it happened, eh…

Obviously

X makes cuts to disinformation and election integrity team

X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, has slashed the number of people on its disinformation and election integrity team just weeks after it said it was hiring for new positions to help it guard against foreign interference.
The cuts, first reported by the tech-focused media outlet The Information, included Aaron Rodericks, the head of the team, said a person familiar with the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of concerns about professional consequences.
The person familiar with the cuts said four people had been let go — the entirety of X’s election integrity unit in its Dublin office. It’s unclear how many people remain on the team. […]
The cuts, which were reported on the day of the second Republican presidential primary debate, are part of X’s broader pullback from its efforts to address false information and foreign interference that once ran rampant on the platform. Owner Elon Musk instituted broad layoffs when he took over the company, some of them on its once-sizable “trust and safety” team. […]
Musk has also aggressively criticized the company’s previous moderation efforts, releasing internal documents that he and conservative commentators have claimed showed a liberal bent to how it handled elections and misinformation.

Two shocking details stand out from this story:

One, it’s taken Musk until now to whack most of his integrity team;
Two, he’s not getting rid of it entirely for some reason. But I suspect that’ll change.

The detail that Shitter is cutting back on policing misinformation is, of course, saddening but not exactly shocking as such. I do, however, continue to be amused by the way every news article about X keeps calling it “the platform previously known as Twitter” or something like that… world’s most successful corporate rebrand ever, clearly…