From pushing the #TwitterFiles to tweeting baseless conspiracies about former employees, Mr. #Musk’s actions have normalized and popularized #vigilante accountability, and made ordinary employees of his company into even greater targets. His recent targeting of the #AntiDefamationLeague has shown that he views personal #retaliation as an appropriate #consequence for any #criticism of him or his business interests.
THREAD: This is harrowing. Saudi Arabia wanted the names of 6000 anonymous Arab Spring dissidents from Twitter. At first, MBS tried to get their names using EDRs - requests under emergency circumstances. When that proved cumbersome, KSA basically bought Twitter.
▪️They did so by threatening to pull twitter out of their market (biggest in the Middle East) and by offering to invest in heavily in Twitter. They also positioned two spies inside Twitter who helped funnel the personal information on dissidents out of Twitter to KSA
▪️In 2011, they invested $300M. In 2022, MBS bought that investment for $1.5B, worth $1.9B later that year, making KSA (The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia) the biggest shareholder of Twitter behind Elon Musk.
▪️The two KSA spies inside Twitter INFORMED Twitter that the personally identifying information they were gathering was for the Saudi Government. One received money and gifts from the KSA in exchange for the user data including $300K and a nice job after he fled the US.
When did Elon pull his dumbass #twitterfiles stunt? why?
When did Elon unlock Trump’s account, why? And why did Trump NOT go back to Twitter when invited? That whole, “Trump signed a non compete clause with Truth Social” excuse was too cute by half. (Like Trump follows any business rules, or laws, for that matter…) Trump must have been warned off by Elon.
@LaNaehForaday
Kushners, Musk and all the Saudi royalty in the stands
I'm so glad that my friend @dangillmor always refers to #X as the Saudi-funded social media company.
I wonder what the writer of the #TwitterFiles, #MattTaibbi, have to say about this?
(Of course now it would be the X-Files & would be on #Substack for his 30,000 paid subscribers only ) #ElonMusk#Twitter
@mastodonmigration Trying to rename Twitter and thinking that will help save it just reeks of desperation. So sad. And I'm not even a Musk Basher either, because #TwitterFiles was an important journalistic info release showing the Gov't collusion and showing Twitter was lying about their censorship, shadow banning, etc.
#Handelsblatt, a prominent #German business publication, has obtained a considerable amount of internal Tesla files that may point to #PublicSafety and vehicle #safety concerns that were possibly hidden by Tesla.
Apparently, Handelsblatt is releasing reports on these files in stages.
I will be watching this space... probably to add comments after more is publicly released.
At the time, it was easy to just read Jack's essay as an explanation for why he'd chosen to make $1M #StartSmall grants to four privacy-focused projects (Signal, Calyx, Tor, + GrapheneOS) in response to the #TwitterFiles disclosure:
Yet when I now compare his essay to bsky's proposed one-way dataflow (PDS --> BGS --> labeller --> AppView/FeedGen --> PDS), then a different question arises ...