Twitter's copyright strike system is no longer working
twitter.com
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Doesn't this have legal ramifications? I was pretty sure that studios etc. have contracts with companies like Twitter where Twitter guarantees some sort of effort to prevent copyrighted movies being uploaded in exchange of not being taken to court and held accountable.
Monday 10 AM will be interesting for the Twitter legal team. Oh, right, seems they were mostly fired . . .
How do you short a private company?
Assume that Twitter is 90% likely to tank at least badly enough that he has to cover the loans, and that $30B is entirely collateralized with TSLA stock (vs Twitter or some other assets).
That $30B is about 5.7% of the $527b market cap. Selling it all at once would certainly depress the stock. But would he have to do that, or just dump enough each month to make the payments? If that's over something like 5-10 years. it'd somewhat depress the curve, but enough to make a short work? If it's a 10-year timespan, it's more like 0.6% per year of 'extra' sales from the event, which seems getting down in the noise. Seems he's also make a variety of moves, e.g. a rollover loan, stock buybacks, etc. to minimize the impact on TSLA price...
What am I missing here?
First, he can't sell any of that 5.7%. Collateral is an all or nothing deal, like any other loan. Technically who ever collects it may not sell it either, they may hold onto it rather than dump it, but it is entirely their decision.
Second, he owns about 21% of TSLA (so the web tells me). And Twitter lost 1.14B in 2020. That is likely to be a steeper loss this year. Selling 1+B / year - with very little end in sight to the pain - will eat into his remaining 15% share. Liquidating 1+ B a year of stock is not a trivial amount and it will not be looked on favorably by investors. It will signal his pet project is more important than his very serious business - a business where investors have been all to happy to short in the past.
IDK, just my opinion. Not financial advice, obviously.
Nate Silver has a good observation on the latter, "Mastodon seems like a honeytrap for hall-monitor personality types. Honestly if Elon gets all the hall monitors to migrate to Mastodon that might be his greatest contribution toward the betterment of humanity." https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1594350639844294656
But then he got old/lazy/arrogant/whatever and started thinking that his gut opinions were worth something.
Yes, in that it's the public image that he crafted for himself, and a lot of gullible people believe(d). It wasn't ever really true though. I love this https://i.imgur.com/6Z9QQj3.jpeg despite it being a bit trollish, really dispels the idea that Nate had his finger on the pulse or that his 20% chance of Trump winning actually means he was right all along "and if you think otherwise then you're a math-denier".
What it shows is the pattern of a pretty typical political hack who, far from an impartial reporting of fact, is actually trying to make news and influence opinion to curry favor with segments of the ruling class. It wouldn't take Einstein to work out he was spouting total nonsense pretty quickly, but a lot of people read something they like, and hear the words "data", "logic", "science", and take that cue to switch their brains off.
What Nate Silver did -- what they all do -- is use fact and data and statistics to build their careers as influencers, if and where that intersects with telling the truth is only as a means to that end.
(deluxe had R's at 55% for the Senate for example, slightly favored)
Particularly if you watch/listen to the model talk episodes (just Galen and Nate talking) they addressed these points many times.
No social network has ever made me as mad at my fellow humans as that one does. 10 min reading comments and I'm outraged at the constant stupidity, attention seeking and political virtue signaling on both sides. It's like everyone is on a team and trying to score points on their opponents and become the MVP, instead of communicate.
I'm not sure if it's being related to real identity that makes people behave like that or if it's the focus on statements (tweets) rather than conversation, but holy crap what an unpleasant place to hang out.
I'm still drawn to it like a car crash but think I'll happily go back to pretending it doesn't exist soon enough.
It also affirms my belief that anonymous social networks are the way to go for discussion. An official announcements platform from the famous the the masses has value as well but it's a different thing entirely.
Seems like in the scheme of things the loss of moderation capability is the real story here, but I guess we can always be hopeful that the reality will match the short-term PR.
It almost makes one question the objectivity of the ruling media elite, when they inflate or diminish things so arbitrarily.
You could aim this statement at media selective outrage too, and you'd be much more correct.
> Everyone agrees CSE on social networks needs to be moderated, there isn't a lot of controversy around it.
Yet there wasn't a lot of controversy about Twitter ignoring it. To such an extent that, in your own words, they left even low-hanging fruit unpicked.
This isn't a "conspiracy theory" and would not even be a new shocking fact about their behavior. It would actually be more surprising to learn the rulers who cheerfully conspire to start wars that kill hundreds of thousands of people and steal trillions of dollars from the commoners would draw the line at abusing a few more children. That is a baseless fringe theory that would require extraordinary evidence to substantiate.
I don't personally like Mr Musk, and I don't approve of how he has handled this takeover, but I wonder if some of those hurrying forth with negative predictions about every Twitter development are just saying what they hope happens. The blind praise is just as bad, of course.
(The 'some' people I am referring to isn't the parent commenter, btw. I'm referring to the news articles and (like the linked content) Twitter posts I see getting posted about this.)
“What do they all do?”
Personally I don't claim to have any strong predictions, but find it fun to think about the most entertaining scenarios.
Disabling media wouldn't tackle nearly all the problems that a broken monitoring system could create, but you're right that it might demonstrate enough effort so that it's legally sane to keep the site up until you can fix it.