Twitter calls Elon’s bluff

Elon Musk doesn't really want to buy Twitter. And he thought Twitter's refusal to provide user data was his way out. But Twitter just agreed to share the data. What now, Elon?

Jun 08, 2022

Twitter just reversed itself. Now Twitter says it will comply with prospective owner Elon Musk and his demand to see user data.

Musk demanded the data weeks ago, and Twitter refused. Now, in what sounds like passive-aggressive compliance, Twitter will give Musk the “full firehose” — more than 500 million tweets a day. That “firehose” may be provided as early as this week.

To me, this feels like a game of chicken, where Musk really doesn’t want to buy Twitter for a variety of reasons (listed below), and Twitter is basically daring him to.

Some weeks ago, Musk raised suspicion that buying Twitter would be a bad deal for him, claiming that he doesn’t know how many fake users and bot accounts are on the platform. Twitter refused to supply that data.

Two days ago, Musk said he had the right to back out of the deal because Twitter wasn’t supplying the information requested. The stunt was Musk’s face-saving way to chicken out. Now Twitter has called his bluff.

My guess is he’ll use the data to demand an absurdly low price by claiming that spam and bot accounts make it harder to sell ads on the platform.

Musk’s demand for data is a ruse. Twitter’s full dataset has been available to many analytics companies for years, and they’ve already publish information of the kind Musk claims to be looking for. All his rocket science and car-building robots won’t enable Musk to extract different data from what other companies have extracted.

Musk will find that between 9% and 15% of Twitter accounts are fake or bot accounts. Another large percentage is essentially inactive accounts. We already knew this.

The truth is that Musk can’t possibly want to buy Twitter now. For starters, it’s more expensive than it used to be. He agreed to buy Twitter for $44 billion in April, committing $33 billion of his own cash. But recent stock market declines have greatly reduced the value of stocks Musk owns, as have his own comments about Tesla and announcement of layoffs at the company.

Musk should also know by now that buying Twitter is the worst idea he’s ever had.

Disgruntled users would boycott and publicly trash his other ventures, including Tesla and SpaceX, over their complaints about Twitter.

Twitter would make Musk vulnerable to manipulation — for example, the Chinese government could demand that Musk terminate the accounts of pro-democracy voices on Twitter as a condition for allowing Musk to open new factories or sell Teslas in China.

And Musk’s pro-free speech claims would be tested to the limit. Trolls, racists, Chinese and Russian paid-troll accounts, AI spam bots and legions of shitposters would either engender suppression — “censorship” — or this activity would be allowed, causing Twitter to descend into some 4chan-like nightmare that would be rejected by journalists, celebrities and advertisers.

There is no conceivable scenario in which Musk succeeds with Twitter, Tesla AND SpaceX.

Twitter’s top lawyer told staff a few minutes ago that the board would vote on the Musk acquisition by August.

My prediction: Elon Musk will never own Twitter.

Mike’s List of Brilliantly Bad Ideas

Ford trolls Tesla with Tesla-charging accessory

Ford wants to promote the ability of its electric F-150 truck to send electrical power in the other direction and charge things. So to drive that point home, Ford is apparently including a third-party accessory from a company called Lentz for charging a Tesla from an F-150.

Now, it’s only a matter of time before an F-150 truck own charges a Tesla in public, and the resulting photo will go crazy viral. This is a next-level marketing stunt.

What the world needs now: shitposting antisocial AI

Georgia Tech scientists are building a better graffiti robot. Called GTGraffiti, the wall-defacing machine not only writes graffiti, but also mimics the body movements of human graffiti writers as they’re tagging.

It does this by using motion capture equipment on graffiti writers, which is then applied to a robotic cable and pulley based robot.

The research aims to be able to record graffiti as it’s being created, and eventually to expand the capabilities of graffiti artists — for example, to enable to tag an entire building with magnified versions.

Meanwhile, An AI researcher and YouTube influencer named Yannic Kilcher trained a chatbot using three years of toxic trolling posted on the Politically Incorrect 4chan message board. And then he figured out how to enable his bad bot to post on that very board. The bot, called GPT-4chan, perfectly captured 4chan’s “mix of offensiveness, nihilism, trolling, and deep distrust of any information whatsoever.”

The bot posted roughly 15,000 times in 24 hours.

Some AI researchers criticized Kilcher’s project. But he countered that nobody on 4chan would be shocked by what his bot posted. It’s really just holding a mirror up to 4chan’s “Politically Incorrect” board. He also pointed out that he doesn’t allow the bot to be downloaded and used for targeted campaigns and that, in any event, his bot is extremely hard to control.

I’m probably in the minority, but I’d love to see these projects combined into a single robot that spends its days shitposting on 4chan and its nights defacing public property all over the city. If anyone is going to be replaced by a robot, it might as well be the sociopaths.

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