The IT Nerd

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in an interview with CNN called out Elon Musk in epic fashion. Here’s what he said:

“The Brazilian justice system may have given an important signal that the world is not obliged to put up with Musk’s extreme right-wing anything goes just because he is rich,” the president said.

I agree with this 100% simply because the best way to take down Elon Musk is to call out his behaviour and punish him for it. And surprisingly the Brazilians were the first to do that. I had my money on the EU to be first, but at least someone is doing God’s work. Hopefully, this emboldens other countries and the like to make Elon pay for his behaviour. Again, I’m looking at you EU. But the US can step up and do the same thing as well.

Bravo Brazil!

Elon Musk fired a whole lot of people when he took over Twitter. And others, particularly those who were responsible for guardrails around the platform simply left. That has made the platform a train wreck next to a dumpster fire as it has become to every right wing nut job and Nazi among others. That in turn, along with Elon’s antics, have driven away advertisers. But the guardrails may, and I stress may be about to go back into place. Tech Crunch is reporting that Twitter is doing some hiring:

Nearly two years after the layoffs across X’s trust, safety and security teams, Elon Musk’s social media company is now trying to hire new employees to help moderate content and secure its platform, according to X’s official job listings. 

In the last month, X posted two dozen job openings evenly split across its safety and cybersecurity teams. 

The jobs on X’s safety team range from director of strategic response on X’s safety team to government affairs managers. On its cybersecurity teams, X is hiring several security engineers and a threat intelligence specialist. 

I personally think that this might be a Hail Mary from Elon. Assuming that he isn’t actively trying to destroy Twitter. Which to be frank, I wouldn’t put it past him to do that. He’s got to make money somehow. And having the appearance of a group of humans who are capable of moderating content on Twitter would help with that as Elon could use that to appease and attract advertisers back to the platform. And in turn make money that way. There’s also the fact that the EU is demanding that Elon moderates content on Twitter. And perhaps he doesn’t want to fight the EU because Elon knows that he’d lose.

The question is, who would want to work for Elon given his behaviour to date? I sure as Hell wouldn’t want to. And I suspect that he might have difficulty filling these roles as a result of that.

Seriously, this doesn’t come as a big shock to anyone who has been watching the downfall of the toxic mess that is Twitter which is of course owned by that not so fine person Elon Musk. Mother Jones is reporting that Elon seems to be okay with Twitter being the biggest source of election disinformation:

Elon Musk is not just the Trump-supporting owner of the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter. It turns out he is also one of the platform’s biggest peddlers of election-related disinformation, according to a new report published Thursday by the Center for Countering Digital Hate.

The report from CCDH, a nonprofit organization focused on protecting civil liberties and holding social media companies accountable, found that 50 false or misleading posts shared by Musk on X between January 1 and July 31 of this year racked up a staggering 1.2 billion views. The group categorized the posts under three main themes: false claims that Democrats are “importing voters” through illegal immigration (the bulk of the content that researchers examined); false claims that voting is vulnerable to fraud; and a manipulated video, also known as a deepfake, of Vice President Kamala Harris.

According to the report, while independent fact-checkers found the content in all of those 50 posts shared by Musk to be false or misleading, none of the posts in question contained a “community note,” X’s user-generated fact-checking systemthat the company promise’s can contextualize “potentially misleading posts.” Just this week, Musk claimed in a post on X that community notes offer “a clear and immediate way to refute anything false in the replies,” adding, “the same is not true for legacy media who lie relentlessly, but there is no way to counter their propaganda.”

This is simply one more data point proving that Elon Musk isn’t trying to promote free speech. He’s instead trying to promote a specific agenda at any cost. Thus if you’re still on Twitter, it’s time to get off the platform and go someplace else for your social media needs. Bluesky for example is getting a lot of signups from Brazil from what I hear. Mastodon is a good place to go as well. Because Twitter sure isn’t what it used to be.

Well this didn’t take long.

After I posted a story that detailed the fact that Elon Musk owned Starlink wasn’t blocking Twitter which is also owned by Elon Musk in Brazil as per the Brazilian courts, they have flipped flopped and are now blocking Twitter in Brazil:

“Regardless of the illegal treatment of Starlink in freezing of our assets, we are complying with the order to block access to X in Brazil,” Starlink, which has more than 200,000 customers in the Latin American nation, said in a post on X.

This is one of these times where I will default to being skeptical. Starlink is blocking Twitter for now, but at some point Elon’s going to get ticked off and demand that they undo that because of his rather perverse version of free speech that he is a fanboy of. Then it’s all going to kick off with the Brazilians. And I strongly suspect that Elon will come out on the losing end when that happens.

I’ll go get the popcorn ready.