patrick.net

Hate Elon Musk all you want, but he's got one management trick that every boss should emulate

In an email sent just before Thanksgiving, Musk told employees that "all managers are expected to write a meaningful amount of software themselves" and equated one's inability to code as an engineering manager to not being able to ride a horse as a cavalry captain. Musk's point is salient, and one I've made before: Managers need to be able to do the same work as those they are managing.

Managers have become alarmingly distanced from the average worker, making calls based on guesses that aren't informed by actual labor. This frustrating separation has poisoned most of modern management, creating a class system within organizations where a bloated sect of detached traffic cops extract labor without participating in or properly valuing it.

https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-twitter-takeover-good-idea-managers-bosses-work-employees-2022-12

https://www.piratewires.com/p/the-fifth-estate

Altogether, the Twitter Files — an ongoing story — paint a portrait of clear and inevitable partisan bias at one of the most dominant speech platforms in history. A small handful of very left-wing executives, who naturally perceived most opinion right of center as dangerous, worked tirelessly to limit those opinions from view. Empowered to censor “unsafe” content, and protected by a team of people who shared their political orientation, the executives produced, in a legal and decentralized manner, a key component of our defacto state censorship apparatus. While we don’t know for sure this is also happening at Google, Meta, or TikTok (which is for some reason still allowed to operate in this country), I think it’s a safe bet we’re looking at an industry-wide affliction.

But I do have questions.

Where is the full list of shadow-banned accounts? Which political campaigns, specifically, communicated with Twitter, and what specifically was taken down? What about requests from foreign governments? What about requests from our own government?

https://twitter.com/nicknam02636181/status/1602958612963495936?ref_src=patrick.net

“This relationship metastasized into something very close to authoritarianism during the Covid-19 pandemic, when a single state narrative was written by the press, and ruthlessly enforced by a fifth and final fount of power in the newly-dominant technology industry.”

Undoctored says

Sure, blame the lowly “activist employees.” Sounds like a way to dismiss direct pressure by government agents — some of whom, yes, may have been agents working as employees.

You may be onto something here. Since none of these blue-haired content moderators are irreplaceable, they hardly had any real power to pressure twatter bosses into anything.

Twitter has suspended an account that used publicly available flight data to track Elon Musk's private jet, despite a pledge by the social media platform's new owner to keep it up because of his free speech principles.

Tweets from the widely followed @elonjet account were no longer viewable Wednesday. The account had more than 526,000 followers as of Tuesday.

“He said this is free speech and he’s doing the opposite,” said Jack Sweeney, the 20-year-old college sophomore and programmer who started the flight-tracking account, in an interview with The Associated Press.

Started in 2020 when Sweeney was a teenager, the account automatically posted the Gulfstream jet’s flights with a map and an estimate of the amount of jet fuel and carbon emissions it expended.

Sweeney said he woke up Wednesday to a flood of messages from people who saw that @elonjet was suspended and all its tweets had disappeared. He logged into Twitter and saw a notice that the account was permanently suspended for breaking Twitter's rules. But the note didn't explain which rules were broken.

“I haven't heard anything else, sadly,” said Sweeney, who said he has already filed an online form to appeal the suspension.

The University of Central Florida student said Musk last year sent him a private message offering $5,000 to take it down, citing security concerns. Musk later stopped communicating to Sweeney, who never deleted the account. Their exchange was first reported by tech news outlet Protocol earlier this year.

But after buying Twitter for $44 billion in late October, Musk said he would let it stay.

“My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk,” Musk tweeted on Nov. 6.

Sweeney runs similar “bot” accounts tracking other celebrities' airplanes. His accounts tracking private jets used by Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and various Russian oligarchs were still on Twitter on Wednesday, as were his accounts tracking Musk’s jet on rival social platforms such as Facebook and Instagram.

Twitter didn't respond to a request for comment.

Sweeney had days earlier accused Musk's Twitter of using a filtering technique to hide his tweets, and revealed what he said were leaked internal communications showing a Twitter content-moderation executive in charge of the Trust and Safety division ordering her team to suppress the account's reach. The Associated Press has not been able to independently verify those documents.

Sweeney said that he suspects that he was banned because of anger over those leaks.

Musk has previously criticized that filtering technique — nicknamed “shadowbanning” — and alleged that it was unfairly used by Twitter's past leadership to suppress right-wing accounts. He has said the new Twitter will continue to downgrade the reach of negative or hateful messages but will be more transparent about it.

In his push to loosen Twitter's content restrictions, he's reinstated other high-profile accounts that were permanently banned for breaking Twitter's rules against hateful conduct, harmful misinformation or incitements of violence.

Sweeney said he originally started the Musk jet tracker because “I was interested in him as a fan of Tesla and SpaceX."

In the weeks since the Tesla CEO took over Twitter, the @elonjet account has chronicled Musk's many cross-country journeys from his home base near Tesla's headquarters in Austin, Texas, to various California airports for his work at Twitter's San Francisco headquarters and his rocket company SpaceX.

It showed Musk flying to East Coast cities ahead of major events, and to New Orleans shortly before a Dec. 3 meeting there with French President Emmanuel Macron.

In a January post pinned to the top of the jet-tracking account's feed before it was suspended, Sweeney wrote that it “has every right to post jet whereabouts” because the data is public and “every aircraft in the world is required to have a transponder,” including Air Force One that transports the U.S. president.

https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Twitter-suspends-account-that-tracked-owner-Elon-17653799.php?IPID=SFGate-HP-CP-Spotlight

Hugh_Mongous says

Twitter has suspended an account that used publicly available flight data to track Elon Musk's private jet, despite a pledge by the social media platform's new owner to keep it up because of his free speech principles.

Boo fucking ho on these communist censors.

They called releasing legally obtained internal communications owned by the company who literally owns those messages to be some kind of Fascist Doxing, because it showed members of the company were colluding with the government to censor people.

Now they're whinging because they can't "Track Elon's Plane", just like they tried to assert doxxing Libs of TIk Tok and SCOTUS in their homes was just "Free Speech" in the knowing hopes that somebody would assassinate them.

DD214 says

Managers have become alarmingly distanced from the average worker, making calls based on guesses that aren't informed by actual labor. This frustrating separation has poisoned most of modern management, creating a class system within organizations where a bloated sect of detached traffic cops extract labor without participating in or properly valuing it.

Great point.

To riff off what you said, it's like having Traffic Cops who never drove a car.

BTW, the result is the most NYC roads. Robert Moses literally never had a driver's license.

AmericanKulak says

Hugh_Mongous says

Twitter has suspended an account that used publicly available flight data to track Elon Musk's private jet, despite a pledge by the social media platform's new owner to keep it up because of his free speech principles.

Boo fucking ho on these communist censors.

They called releasing legally obtained internal communications owned by the company who literally owns those messages to be some kind of Fascist Doxing, because it showed members of the company were colluding with the government to censor people.

Now they're whinging because they can't "Track Elon's Plane", just like they tried to assert doxxing Libs of TIk Tok and SCOTUS in their homes was just "Free Speech" in the knowing hopes that somebody would assassinate them.

Principles are principles. If somebody condones violating free speach for one reason it doesn't mean I have to
like it violated for another. Elon promised not to do that shit anymore, didnt he? WTF?

Patrick says

What if the people of Canada want to track Elon's jet? Will they be muzzled?

https://sashastone.substack.com/p/musk-derangement-syndrome#details

As the new owner of Twitter, Elon Musk is, to quote, Ben Shapiro, moving fast and breaking things. He could see a big problem, as anyone outside the media feedback loop can. Twitter had become not just the propaganda arm of the State, but was being used as a filter to dodge the First Amendment, to police thought and speech.

They didn’t do it directly or overtly. They did it alongside enthusiastic “good soldiers” for the State. The users - the blue-checks - and the employees saw themselves as the #resistance. To them, banning Trump was spiking their flag at Iwo Jima. They won, or so they thought.

After the latest dump of the Twitter Files was released by Bari Weiss, showing a clear connection between the FBI and Twitter in their efforts to both suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story, and to censor and ultimately ban a sitting president, it was clear that the former management of Twitter, and its former owner, were on the ropes. This was the biggest tech story in 10 years, and the media went dark. Why? They’re the dogs that aren’t barking, that’s why. They were complicit in everything that happened on Twitter because they ARE Twitter.

Without Twitter, there can be no “cancel culture.” It is their Roman coliseum, their panopticon for surveillance, and yes, it’s their Ministry of Love, their Ministry of Truth, and their Ministry of Peace. Without Twitter, they’re just a bunch of do-nothings, drunk on their own power as they pull the lever for the dopamine hit like slot machine junkies at 2 am in Vegas. Someday, all of this will be embarrassing for all concerned. ...

Those who participated in silencing dissent and the suppression of facts should start preparing now because the internet is written in ink. There will be a reckoning on those who stood by and did nothing, and the weakest among us will be called upon to explain themselves. And what will they say? That they helped get Trump banned from Twitter? That they destroyed Space-X and Tesla? I think they better come up with something much better than that.

RWSGFY says

Patrick says

What if the people of Canada want to track Elon's jet? Will they be muzzled?

I'm just happy he doesn't allow child porn on the site anymore, and has the fucking pedophile faggot Yoel Roth out of there.

Baby steps, if you will.

"Move fast and break things" is not Shapiro's saying, it's Zukfuck's.

RWSGFY says

Principles are principles. If somebody condones violating free speach for one reason it doesn't mean I have to
like it violated for another. Elon promised not to do that shit anymore, didnt he? WTF?

The attacker looked like an Antifa dude.

AmericanKulak says

Principles are principles

“Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them…well, I have others.”

G. Marx.

Looks like Elon may be reading up on Groucho

DD214 says

AmericanKulak says

Principles are principles

“Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them…well, I have others.”

G. Marx.

Looks like Elon may be reading up on Groucho

His not elon ... err.. alone in this.

richwicks says

I'm just happy he doesn't allow child porn on the site anymore

Anybody here personally seen any of that on twatter?

Eric Holder says

richwicks says

I'm just happy he doesn't allow child porn on the site anymore

Anybody here personally seen any of that on twatter?

That's now how it worked, as I understand it. Basically Twitter was being used to allow groups to form through various hashtags.

Just fuck Twitter anyhow. It was a cesspool, and basically nobody on there is really worth engaging with. It was designed from the ground up to be a propaganda site and to elevate celebrities and politicians - i.e. people you should ignore because their "opinions" are purchased.

Every vile, murdering political whore on Twitter is getting a comeuppance at last. They can't take open dialog.

richwicks says

Eric Holder says

richwicks says

I'm just happy he doesn't allow child porn on the site anymore

Anybody here personally seen any of that on twatter?

That's now how it worked, as I understand it. Basically Twitter was being used to allow groups to form through various hashtags.

And? Did or did they not post the stuff?

LOL!

Another Manchurian infiltrator, Ukrainian spy from birth Vindman. We can use the Cracker Jax Satanist Inversion decoder ring to interpret everything he says.

Remember the subversive strategy is to make the insane, destructive treasonous voices are more numerous and powerful than they are by various fake amplifications. It's Illuminati 101.

Eric Holder says

And? Did or did they not post the stuff?

There was a case where minor that had been catfished into sending some images of himself to people pretending to be a 16 year old girl to have it removed from Twitter:

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/twitter-sued-by-sex-trafficking-survivor

Twitter refused. Fuck them.

It's not the only case, just the first one I found. Yoel Roth is almost certainly a pedophile, certainly a fucking asshole.

richwicks says

Yoel Roth is almost certainly a pedophile, certainly a fucking asshole.

Yes, no doubt his asshole has been fucked many times.

HeadSet says

richwicks says

Yoel Roth is almost certainly a pedophile, certainly a fucking asshole.

Yes, no doubt his asshole has been fucked many times.

I suspect his career is at an end. The dirt that is going to be uncovered on that motherfucker I think is just beginning.

https://notthebee.com/article/liberals-are-really-struggling-in-the-wake-of-elons-takeover-of-twitter-lets-help-them-find-some-viable-alternatives-to-the-site

https://notthebee.com/article/since-elons-takeover-twitters-offices-are-putting-espresso-machines-lounge-chairs-grills-griddles-pizza-ovens-and-more-up-for-auction

https://bid.hgpauction.com/auctions/8421/herita10194?page=2&pageSize=60

https://slaynews.com/news/elon-musk-uses-barack-obama-to-checkmate-his-woke-critics/

https://slaynews.com/news/elon-musk-threatens-man-who-stalked-his-small-child-legal-action-is-being-taken-against-sweeney-organizations-who-supported-harm-to-my-family/