#Trump Twitter Suspension

[bettercallllilly]

Juniper: Save the Media

#SaveTheMedia

[unfabulous-at-home]

The Show Must Go On

[mehmetyildizmelbourne-blog]

Journalistic Censorship Intensifies on Social Media: A Look at Ken Klippenstein’s Suspension on X

Why X (formerly Twitter) suspended investigative journalist Ken Klippenstein and what it reveals about political censorship in the lead-up to the 2024 US elections As a retired scientist and public health professional, I have personally experienced the consequences of censorship impacting lives of innocent people, which gives me a profound understanding of the struggles authentic journalists…

[justinspoliticalcorner]

David Badash at NCRM:

Billionaire Elon Musk, the world’s richest man who purchased the social media platform Twitter and renamed it X, is “all in” on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, The New York Times reports. X has “reportedly worked with Donald Trump’s campaign to censor material that could be harmful to the former president’s White House chances as part of a pattern of election interference that is unprecedented in U.S. history,” according to The Daily Beast. Musk, The Times reports, “seen over the weekend jumping for joy alongside former President Donald J. Trump at a rally in Butler, Pa., is now talking to the Republican candidate multiple times a week.” Video (below) shows Musk wore a black “Make America Great Again” cap with the words “Never Surrender” embroidered on the side and praising the ex-president’s actions during the attempted assassination.

The relationship between Musk and Trump “has proved significant in other ways. After a reporter’s publication of hacked Trump campaign information last month, the campaign connected with X to prevent the circulation of links to the material on the platform, according to two people with knowledge of the events. X eventually blocked links to the material and suspended the reporter’s account.”

The reporter, Ken Klippenstein, whose work often focuses on national security issues, published the document because “it’s of keen public interest in an election season.” Klippenstein last month called his ban “political,” and wrote: “It’s been widely reported that my suspension from X (Twitter) is only temporary. Those reports are false. My ban from X, the company says, is permanent.” The New York Times’ Aric Toler writes: “Trump’s campaign worked with Musk/Twitter to implement a blanket ban on sharing the link to the Vance dossier.” NBC News’ Kevin Collier adds, “Per NYT, X’s crackdown on Ken Klippenstein and the Iran-hacked Vance doc came after the Trump campaign reached out. Well within each party’s right, but this is the exact same thing Musk, Trump, and the right threw a yearslong fit about over Hunter Biden.”

Right-wing psycho X owner Elon Musk has repeatedly engaged in election interference to help Donald Trump, such as banning Ken Klippenstein and suppressing the Vance Dossier.

[tomorrowusa]

The House was on the verge of passing a continuing resolution to keep the government running for another three months. Then Elon Musk started tweeting his objections to it.

The original deal was scrapped and Speaker Johnson substituted a Musk-friendly plan. It went down in flames on Thursday night.

For weeks now, House Republicans have been negotiating a traditional American funding bill. Since the government is broken and regular-order budgeting doesn’t happen anymore, Congress is routinely passing “continuing resolutions” (CRs) funding the government for a few months at a time, always at the last minute. The bill had the usual give-and-take. Members of Congress from areas hard-hit by hurricanes wanted disaster relief. Republicans wanted aid for farmers. Democrats were fine with all that but wanted some things in return, since they would have to provide the votes necessary for passage. And a number of bipartisan agreements on things like health policy and junk fees were added, because this was the last bill out of Dodge in this Congress. This is all very normal. The process has been ongoing for weeks and was almost complete, until Elon Musk stepped in. Out of nowhere on Wednesday, he started posting frantically on Twitter, demanding the CR be stopped and the government shut down until January 20, and threatening to primary anyone who voted for it. For the moment at least, that’s exactly what happened. Both President-elect Trump and Vice President-elect Vance turned against the bill. The latest is that a new bill was offered stripping practically everything out, but because it includes a temporary suspension of the debt limit, it lost 38 Republican votes in the House and failed. There is no path forward, and the government shuts down tonight at midnight without action.

Nobody voted for Elon Musk, but he seems to be running the shit show in Washington.

In short, the world’s richest man is running Republican Party strategy, through posts on his own social media network. Voters thought they elected Donald Trump, but Elon Musk is calling the shots.

It’s hard to say with any certainty what Musk’s motivation is here. One factor might be that his companies are under multiple federal investigations from the NLRB, EPA, FTC, and SEC, among others, and shutting down the government until Trump takes office would put a stop to that, probably permanently. But I think there is another factor. Musk’s frenzy of activity online bears all the hallmarks of what some call “poster’s madness.” Musk’s addiction to posting has gotten measurably worse over time—and dramatically so since he bought Twitter, turned it into the Völkischer Beobachter, and rejiggered the algorithm to blast his posts at every user on the platform, all the time.

You really need to get off of Twitter/X once and for all. Don't give me some lame bullshit like "I don't click the ads!" You empower Musk just by being there. The idiotic ads for vaping and crypto are irrelevant. It's the chief organ of autocratic propaganda in the US and you support it with your participation.

[mojave-pete]

It was over for kumsmella in 2020 she didn’t even receive jack chit support the money was gone the upper class sex worker never had a real job and the LYING POS dropped out of the race!

Then suddenly POOF she turned into a black woman and obiden selected the shape shifter as VP!

Then they rigged the election! Through disinformation, hiding the laptop truth, controlling big tech etc. illegally changing laws

[mitigatedchaos]

Trump at the 2024 RNC

(~1,300 words, 6 minutes)

Thoughts on the final night of the Trump Convention.

#1A: A lot of this stuff is, right or wrong, very obvious. For example, the stuff from the school safety speaker. It's obvious that having students assaulting the staff will be bad for both the staff and the other students.

#1B: I was in a group chat with some Republicans, and one woman asked why Obama/Biden instituted the rule from the school safety segment; I speculated that they probably saw a correlation between suspensions and later arrests, and assumed the suspensions caused the arrests. "That's so stupid," she said. (There is an alternative theory for school discipline - it applies smaller punishments to smaller infractions, so that students' first brush with institutional discipline isn't from the cops.)

#2: Hulk Hogan knew what he was there to do, and he did it. The classic shirt-ripping and muscles contribute to the sense of vigor, but really, the whole convention still feels ten years older than 2015. (I've heard that he took down Gawker with help from Peter Thiel, and Gawker was involved in obnoxious 2014-era antics beyond just harassing Hogan. I suppose with this, his debt is repaid.)

#3: It would seem the Erick Trump was chosen to speak for the "they... came after Trump!" faction of the Trump coalition, moreso than Trump himself. Makes sense strategically.

#4A: The "perhaps God... protected Trump" bit honestly feels crass, basically just there because Dems lost the active shooter roll. No, I don't mean because the shooter didn't hit; I mean they lost the roll to avoid having a shooter show up in the first place.

#4B: While Trump did have a segment on the shooting, and used a photo prominently circling the flying bullet, he doesn't call for revenge! and seemingly just groups it in with all his other complaints, like the lawsuits, media coverage that he's a "threat to democracy," and so on. I think implicitly, almost everyone is assuming the assailant was mentally ill in some way.

#4C: On Twitter, there were some attempts to argue that either Trump himself or the Trump movement don't care about the other victims of the shooter. At >$6.2M in fundraising, the Trump movement have basically raised a full weregild for each one. And of course, there was a dedicated segment on them with a moment of silence.

This fits with the Trump mentality. There are reports of him being obnoxious to bill by contractors, but 'that's business.' Trump likes to think of himself as generous outside of this context, or at least that's the image he likes to project. For him, I think this is one of the benefits of being rich.

This was always going to be a dumb angle of attack, but it's not surprising a lot of Twitter Democrats tried it anyway.

#5: Trump's language was quite simplistic in this speech, especially in the assassination section.

#6: Quite frankly, not all of these economic policies are great ideas.

With that said, the consistent message is "we're all going to be rich!" which, again, right or wrong, is an obvious message. Support for energy abundance? Also obvious.

'We'll let you choose whether to have either a gasoline, hybrid, or electric vehicle'? Very obvious, given current problems with electrical charging infrastructure. In some parts of the country, the cables for electrical chargers even get cut to steal the copper. (More information on that here.)

Aside: Fuels

Gasoline is a lower-trust energy storage and transportation option. Plug-in electric hybrids, which can charge at home and refill with gasoline on the go, are likely the future for the next several decades.

Thinking in terms of fundamental characteristics, there is different balance of trade-offs for synthetic fuel, electricity transmission, and battery storage. Both creating synthetic fuel and charging a battery result in energy losses. Synthetic fuel creation losses are higher on a per-charge basis than battery charging. However, the battery itself is much more energy-intensive to create than a fuel tank. Thus, an attacker would prefer to steal the gasoline instead of the fuel tank holding it, and the battery itself instead of the electricity it contains.

Electricity transmission requires long-distance material infrastructure between the source and the destination. If you have a favorable security environment, that's not a problem. There are reports that electricity pylons are being robbed of their structural supports in South Africa. A more obvious problem - building a massive solar farm in the Sahara and an intercontinental electrical grid to transmit the energy from it leaves you vulnerable along the entire transmission length.

Anywhere with lots of consistent sunlight and access to water (preferably salt water for ecological reasons), where political forces support the necessary infrastructure and are willing to hire engineers, can be a source of synthetic fuels. This is a much more favorable security environment.

#7: A good chunk of the speech is just Trump saying the things he's going to do.

Trump remains the low-trust candidate, which I think is something that a lot of professionals who are Democrats don't really understand. In a low-trust environment, where people don't trust that your rhetoric is correlated to the conversion of money into positive outcomes, you want simple promises with easily observable results, not high ideological rhetoric. (Matt Yglesias wrote about this in 2021. You may not trust Matt himself, but the logic of it is simple.)

Trump blowing off the fancy rhetoric frightens professional types, because it makes it look like anything could be up for sale, but establishes his credibility among people who think professional types are lying. (For example, how they continuously screw-up major blue municipalities.) This is part of the whole deal with Trump 1 and The Wall.

#8: Not a lot of 'uniting' going on here. There's a bit of it, but it's definitely leaning towards, 'we should unite... by voting for me,' rather than outreach.

If you thought he was going to deliver a galaxy-brain genius speech and completely break the context and win with 70%, you're going to be disappointed.

#9: A more competent, more virtuous, and more epistemically rigorous Democratic Party could have taken away 50% of Trump's issues, and left him with a lot less material to campaign on.

To me, it doesn't feel like Trump was selected by providence to lead the United States to a glorious new era - it feels more like he was selected to humiliate everyone else, by forcing them to make a choice.

To quote a random Twitter user:

"Ackshually Kamala wasn't 'in charge' of the border mkay she was just asked to study the 'root causes' of why migrants come from the top 3 nations we basically assigned her a term paper we wouldn't actually give her any real authority OK don't you get it?" This is, somehow, meant to be a defense of her. The press have adopted a lawyerly attitude toward "the truth." They are addicted to finding technicalities and have no interest in what is, in the broadest sense, true. This is why Trump deranges them: he serially exaggerates and bullshits while expressing fundamental truths.

In theory, this shouldn't be a close election. Obviously the reality TV star whose statements are extremely loose should lose.

In theory, this shouldn't be a close election. Obviously the faction that thinks it's OK for teachers to get beat up in schools should lose.

In the groupchat, I said, "The people that get mugged and change their party registration, I can work with. It's the people that get mugged and don't change their opinion that are scary."

One of the Republicans had an interesting response. "It's because they think they deserve it," he said.

[mariacallous]

X appears to be working with a well-known Republican consulting group, seemingly to handle the messaging around the social media platform’s suspension in Brazil.

When WIRED emailed X for comment about the rapidly evolving situation in Brazil, a reply came from Michael Abboud, the managing director of the conservative consulting and public relations firm Targeted Victory. According to his LinkedIn, Abboud worked for the State Department in the last year of the Trump administration and as press secretary for former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s campaign.

Targeted Victory has had contracts with several Republican campaigns and political action committees (PACs) this election season to the tune of more than $75 million, according to OpenSecrets. The group’s largest client is the Republican National Committee, which spent $11,128,739 on the firm between January 2023 and May 2024.

In his emailed reply, Abboud referred WIRED to a company statement from X about the suspension of the platform in Brazil, and said to reach out with further questions.

Elon Musk, X’s owner, has become more overt about his personal political views in recent months. In July, shortly following the assassination attempt on former president Donald Trump, Musk said he would be backing his candidacy for president. He then said he’d establish a PAC to support Trump to the tune of $45 million per month (he later backpedaled on the exact amount).

WIRED reached out to Targeted Victory and Abboud directly, and neither immediately responded to a request for comment.

X would not be the first tech company to work with the group. In 2022, reporting from The Washington Post found that Meta had hired Targeted Victory to run a campaign to sour public opinion on TikTok. The messaging campaign focused on framing TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, as a threat to Americans’ privacy and to the mental health of teens and children.

An emailed response from Targeted Victory on behalf of X is particularly notable; when journalists contact the press team at X, they rarely receive a reply. When Musk took over Twitter in 2022, one of his first moves as CEO was to lay off a substantial number of the company’s 6,000 employees. That move included not only the vast majority of the platform’s trust and safety team—the people who keep hate speech and disinformation off the platform—but also the company’s communications team.

For nearly a year, the auto-response to the press email returned the poop emoji. More recently, the auto-response says “Busy now, please check back later.”

But X and Musk have been having an unusually rough time in the public eye over the past few weeks. After X violated an April court order from the Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court, which had required the company to remove certain accounts and content that the court said spread disinformation about the integrity of the country’s elections, Judge Alexandre de Moraes ordered access to the platform blocked in Brazil. The country is X’s third largest market, and for months Musk has railed against Moraes online, calling him a dictator, accusing the court of censorship, and even comparing him to the Harry Potter villain Lord Voldemort.

Meanwhile, Nick Pickles, the company’s head of global affairs, announced on Thursday that he was resigning, and investors are saying their investments in the company are performing substantially worse than any had predicted.

[oblivion1990]

My account on twitter got a suspension for a week so I said fuck it and deleted the whole thing. Fuck Trump, fuck Elon, Fuck RFKJ and all the little nasty maga loosers.

I thought you little fuckers wanted free speech? guess not 🤣

Build a spaceship and fly into the sun, that’s all you good for! Or as I said on Twitter: Choke ok some raw milk and get sick🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻

[solarbird]

Followup Friday

I’ve got another very busy day so no essay for your Friday, I’m afraid. But I do have a follow-up.

Remember that article I posted recently about how the the fundamentalist – now Christofascist/MAGA – movement grinds out fake “science,” the methods they use, and how they’ve been adapted by the right in general? I gave a few examples, the most recent of which was the Cass Report against gender affirming therapy in Britain.

Well, the British Medical Association are calling them on it and demanding that absolutely none of it be implemented.

It’s good to see action starting to be taken over there. The Tory-American fundamentalist alliance has been allowed to go too far for too long.

The latest followup on Elon Musk’s efforts to use the former Twitter as a fascist propaganda fountain continues, with his suspension of the White Dudes for Harris account, clearly in retaliation for their highly successful fundraiser for Harris.

His MAGA/pro-Trump PAC is also running ads that intentionally mislead people into thinking they’re registering to vote online. Instead of registering you to vote, it all goes into their PACs database for individually-targeted propaganda.

Tell your friends and family about that one in particular, it’s extra skeevy even for Musk.

Trump keeps saying he’s really not concerned about the votes, that ‘we have all the votes we need,’ so here are a few relevant stories on that:

A Christian Nationalist ‘Trojan Horse’ In The Election Room

These Swing State Election Officials Are Pro-Trump Election Deniers

‘Wild west of election work’: How certification fights are already cropping up in battleground states

Russian propaganda sources themselves say that Russia is likely working with Trump and his team, just as before.

Remember that flurry last week about “you won’t have to vote anymore“? Well, as one might expect, given the chance to back off of that on Fox News, he doubled down on it instead.

All that MAGA asks is that you give Trump unending power and limitless immunity from the law, and in return, you get to have… uh… unending fealty to Diaper Don and… uh… MAGA!!!

Man, if you thought ear bandages day was weird, wait’ll you get to diaper week.

Remember to work on your Trumpy family and friends today, everybody. Let them know what’s at stake, because the media won’t. And good luck.

94 days remain.

[bettercallllilly]

Juniper: Save The New York Times

#SaveTheMedia

[tasteful-side-blog]

I was wondering if when you asked for their discord or when you exchanged discords, they were also verified? Cherp rules are kinda confusing and contradictory in certain parts like when it says you can’t move off site unless all are verified, but then the next rule says no discord exchanges or any social media exchanges. So then how would we move off site? Is it even okay if all are verified, but then you can’t even drop your discord handle without being banned?

lmao thank you for reminding me abt all that shit with Cherp it's been so long since i checked up on it. For the record it's still the only place (online or irl) I've ever been permanently banned and I think it's a really funny example of how you can take an active IP with a built in user base and still manage to fuck it up by being so deeply unprofessional and toxic that you're not worth putting up with. Twitter wishes it could blow up like Cherp.

If you think the rules are confusing and contradictory now you should have seen them back in the day, Throughout Cherubplay's entire existence there was never a ban on off-site promotion or exchanges and Cherp's rules about when/how interaction are acceptable have been showing up piecemeal ever since. At the time i was permanently banned the website had recently updated their rules stating that exchanging information was liable for a week suspension. Another user and I (who told me they regularly requested discord usernames with no issues and was not suspended when I was) exchange discords, I log in the next morning, my account has been permanently removed.

I join their discord group and learn that in the discord they decided the rules are changing now and all information exchanges are a permaban, if you weren't in the offsite discord to know that then tough shit, you're still gone.

I went through most of the important people on the mod team trying to discuss this, most seemed pissed that I dare question their supreme judgement Reddit mod style. I'm not exactly surprised the types of personalities who ran and ruined old-school RP forums still exist in lots of nerd spaces. I remember specifically bringing up that at the time the rule I'd been perma'd for still showed up on the website as a max 1 week suspension, the response was "we can decide to ban you for any reason, go away."

Like yeah! You sure can do that! It also just makes you a raging asshole and the last person that should have a customer facing position in your team.

One day someone's gonna do a YouTube essay deep dive on all the random bullshit that happened with their donations/ID verification/etc. but my brief experience with the whole team made me feel like they were the last people you should trust your personal information with. Also I'm not saying I'm a cyber crimes expert but either the problems the site faced w the FBI were unique (in which case, what the fuck) or they were trumped up to cover their asses when they faced public pushback (in which case, what the fuck).

idk dude all i can say is that i hope one day the nerds get the roleplay site they deserve

[sethshead]

Should I get off all social media because these platforms are willing to forgive and forget an attempted autogolpe? Would such an act of protest do any good?

[tomorrowusa]

Elon Musk continues to empower Nazis. Kanye West (or whatever he's currently calling himself) has been reinstated on Twitter (or whatever Elon is currently calling it).

Kanye West famously brought fellow Nazi Nick Fuentes to dinner with Donald Trump last year.

X, formerly known as Twitter, has reinstated Kanye West’s account on the social media platform. West will not be able to monetize his account, and no ads will appear next to his posts, the company told the Wall Street Journal on Saturday. The musician’s account was suspended in December for violating the platform’s rules on inciting violence. The suspension followed multiple antisemitic comments made by West – who has legally changed his name to Ye – including a threat to “Go death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE.” Those statements led to a swift disintegration of multiple business deals, including partnerships with Adidas and luxury fashion house Balenciaga.

If Elon Musk isn't a Nazi himself, he's a fellow traveler. He certainly doesn't want anybody keeping tabs on the explosion of hate speech on the platform since he took over.

Elon Musk has over the last year threatened legal action against tech competitors, employees and people who use Twitter, which he owns. Now he is also taking aim at an organization that studies hate speech and misinformation on social media. X Corp., the parent company of the social media company, sent a letter on July 20 to the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a nonprofit that conducts research on social media, accusing the organization of making “a series of troubling and baseless claims that appear calculated to harm Twitter generally, and its digital advertising business specifically,” and threatening to sue. The letter cited research published by the Center for Countering Digital Hate in June examining hate speech on Twitter, which Mr. Musk has renamed X.com. The research consisted of eight papers, including one that found that Twitter had taken no action against 99 percent of the 100 Twitter Blue accounts the center reported for “tweeting hate.” The letter called the research “false, misleading or both” and said the organization had used improper methodology.

Twitter Blue is apparently a license to post hate speech.

In a blog post Monday evening, X announced that it had filed a lawsuit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate for “actively working to prevent free expression.” The suit was filed in federal court in the Northern District of California. Twitter’s advertising business has been struggling under the ownership of Mr. Musk, who bought the company last year. U.S. ad revenue for the five weeks from April 1 to the first week of May was $88 million, down 59 percent from a year earlier. Advertisers may have been spooked by Mr. Musk’s changes to the social network, including the removal of rules of what can or can’t be said on the service and more ads featuring online gambling and marijuana products.

Hate speech is a major turnoff for most advertisers. Elon thinks that if the Center for Countering Digital Hate stops publicizing the massive hate speech problem at Twitter then advertisers will flood back to the platform.

Elon, did anybody ever tell you that you're a dumb shit? 🫵���

Twitter/X is not going to get any better – just the opposite. Elon Musk is determined to turn it into a safe space for far right hatemongers.

If you are still on Twitter then you will increasingly be associated with Nazis, conspiracy loonies, and other lowlife dregs of social media who are welcomed there. No matter how much you may try to avoid the mess there you will inevitably step in their shit.

Fight hate speech on Elon Musk's Twitter and on other platforms. Support the Center for Countering Digital Hate

[saydams]

well this article says that X (twitter) suspended the account of an independent journalist who publicly posted information allegedly from the hack. X (twitter) said the suspension was because he posted "unredacted private personal information" such as JD Vance's addresses and "most of his social security number"

the fact that the trump campaign worked with X to do this (the article does not explain how they had "coordinated" to do this) is unethical though possibly not illegal.

the fact that X suspended someone's account for posting someone else's private information is expected and fine.

What an unsurprising & completely expected turn of events that literally everyone saw coming 😮

Source 🔗

Free 🔗

[directnewssourc]

Far-right activist Laura Loomer suspended on X by Elon Musk: A Closer Look

Far-right activist Laura Loomer recently faced a 12-hour suspension on X following a dispute with its owner, Elon Musk, and the MAGA community regarding skilled foreign workers. Loomer expressed her concerns about the technocratic control in the country and the White House, leading to her temporary removal from the platform. She questioned the platform's commitment to free speech, especially in relation to the MAGA movement. The Online Conflict The conflict escalated when Loomer criticized Sriram Krishnan, President-elect Donald Trump's AI adviser, for supporting the entry of highly skilled immigrants into the U.S. This criticism extended to Elon Musk, with Loomer making controversial claims about immigrant living conditions. Prior to Musk's ownership of the platform, Loomer had been banned from multiple social media sites due to her dissemination of far-right conspiracies and anti-immigrant sentiments. Despite her controversial views, she maintains close ties to Trump and was even present at a presidential debate in September. Musk's acquisition of the platform, previously known as Twitter, aimed to create a space for open dialogue and free expression, contrasting with what he perceived as excessive censorship by the company. This acquisition reflects the ongoing tensions within the Republican Party, highlighting the diverging views within Trump's supporters. Musk's Response While Musk has not directly addressed Loomer's suspension, he emphasized the platform's algorithmic approach to minimizing the reach of users who face repeated blocks or mutes from credible accounts. Musk dismissed Loomer's actions as attention-seeking behavior, urging users to ignore her provocations. The public rift between Trump supporters in Silicon Valley and the anti-immigrant faction underscores the complexities within the Republican coalition. The discord between these groups signals challenges for the party moving forward, particularly in maintaining cohesion among diverse viewpoints. Despite the lack of direct intervention from Trump himself, his transition team referenced a post by Stephen Miller, emphasizing Trump's prior remarks on American innovation. The ongoing saga exemplifies the intricate dynamics at play within the political and social spheres of the online landscape.