The IT Nerd

The last time I checked, Elon Musk folded up like a cheap suit when it came to his fight with Brazil by complying with everything they wanted him to comply with. But apparently its not quite over as Elon is going to have to write another cheque to Brazil:

Reuters and other publications have reported on an order from the country’s Supreme Court Judge Alexandre de Moraes stating that the Elon Musk-owned social network could “immediately return to its activities in national territory” if it pays a fine of 10 million reais (around $1.9 million).

That’s on top of the 18.3 million reais ($3.4 million) X had already been fined. Brazil froze accounts belonging to X and Musk’s satellite internet company Starlink in order to pay the fine, but to move forward, Moraes said Starlink needs to drop its appeal against the payments.

Well, this could be interesting. The Brazilians are clearly making Elon tap-dance to their tune. And Elon, at least for now, seems to be dancing away. Thus you have to wonder if he will continue this dance in order to get Twitter back into Brazil, or if at some point he will go back to the Elon that we all love to hate.

Watch this space.

Elon Musk has been in a running battle to avoid having to provide evidence to the SEC in relation to Elon purchasing Twitter stock prior to purchasing Twitter. Which the SEC finds to be suspect at best. Elon was supposed to testify on September 10… But:

In a filing today, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said that it intended to seek sanctions against Musk after Musk skipped a court-ordered appearance in a Los Angeles courthouse on September 10. Per the filing, Musk didn’t notify the SEC that he wouldn’t be appearing until just three hours before his testimony was set to begin.

“The Court must make clear that Musk’s gamesmanship and delay tactics must cease,” the filing reads. 

Musk instead spent September 10 overseeing the launch of Polaris Dawn, a spacecraft made by his space exploration company, SpaceX, according to the filing. 

The SEC’s legal counsel offered to reschedule Musk’s hearing to the following day, September 11. But Musk’s attorney declined, agreeing only to court dates in October.

And this is what the SEC wants in terms of punishment:

The SEC is seeking “meaningful conditional relief” if Musk doesn’t appear in court in October. The agency also signaled that it plans to file a sanctions motion against Musk to recoup its travel costs for the canceled testimony and other relief. (In the filing, the SEC said that it spent “thousands of dollars” to fly three attorneys to Los Angeles for the September 10 hearing.)

Hey Elon! Top tip. Pi$$ing off three letter government agencies is a really bad idea. Sooner or later they are going to get fed up with your antics and punish you. It looks like punishment is coming. Elon may shortly wish that he didn’t play a game of FAAFO with the SES because he’s not going to win against them.

You might recall that Elon Musk has been in a bit of a fight with Brazilian authorities over the fact that he won’t ban certain content within the country. That led to Twitter being banned in the country. Now Elon has been pretty defiant about this. And even going as far as antagonizing the Brazilian officials who were behind the Twitter ban. But that might be changing:

After defying court orders in Brazil for three weeks, Mr. Musk’s social network, X, has capitulated. In a court filing on Friday night, the company’s lawyers said that X had complied with orders from Brazil’s Supreme Court in the hopes that the court would lift a block on its site.

The decision was a surprise move by Mr. Musk, who owns and controls X, after he said he had refused to obey what he called illegal orders to censor voices on his social network. Mr. Musk had dismissed local employees and refused to pay fines. The court responded by blocking X across Brazil last month.

Now, X’s lawyers said the company had done exactly what Mr. Musk vowed not to: take down accounts that a Brazilian justice ordered removed because the judge said they threatened Brazil’s democracy. X also complied with the justice’s other demands, including paying fines and naming a new formal representative in the country, the lawyers said.

Brazil’s Supreme Court confirmed X’s moves in a filing on Saturday, but said the company had not filed the proper paperwork. It gave X five days to send further documentation.

Now why would Elon fold up like a cheap suit? The fines that he was dealing with may be hurting him. Or it might be that the fact that Brazilians were signing up for Bluesky and Tumblr in record numbers was something that he could not ignore. But I am going to put this out there. This isn’t over. I think that Elon may comply for a short amount of time. But he’ll go back to playing FAAFO with Brazil. I say that because Elon isn’t an honest broker and I have no reason to believe that he’s being honest now. Thus if I were the Brazilians, I would keep that in mind before considering any lifting of the ban on Twitter.

Given that Elon Musk is a bit of a sleazy person, I’m not surprised that I am reading this:

Elon Musk’s X faces steep daily fines in Brazil for allegedly evading a ban on the service there, according to a statement from the country’s supreme court Thursday.

The fines imposed by Brazil’s supreme court amount to $5 million in Brazilian reals, about $920,000, a day. The court said it would continue to impose “joint liability” on Starlink, the satellite internet service owned and operated by SpaceX, Musk’s aerospace venture.

The suspension of X in Brazil was initially ordered by the country’s chief justice, Alexandre de Moraes, at the end of August, with orders upheld by a panel of justices in early September. The court found that under Musk, X had violated Brazilian law, which requires social media companies to employ a legal representative in the country and to remove hate speech and other content deemed harmful to democratic institutions. The court also found that X failed to suspend accounts allegedly engaged in doxxing federal officers.

X recently moved to servers hosted by Cloudflare and appeared to be using dynamic internet protocol addresses that constantly change, enabling many users in Brazil to access the site. In a previous setup, the company had used static and specific IP addresses in Brazil, which were more easily blocked by internet service providers at the order of regulators.

Honestly are we surprised that Elon would do this? Although he, or more accurately his talking heads deny that anything nefarious is going onI:

“When X was shut down in Brazil, our infrastructure to provide service to Latin America was no longer accessible to our team,” a company spokesperson told CNBC on Wednesday. “To continue providing optimal service to our users, we changed network providers. This change resulted in an inadvertent and temporary service restoration to Brazilian users. While we expect the platform to be inaccessible again in Brazil soon, we continue efforts to work with the Brazilian government to return very soon for the people of Brazil.”

This sounds like one of those answers that you give when you get caught doing something you shouldn’t have. And I am a bit surprised that Cloudflare is going along with this as I would not be surprised if the Brazilians go after them for aiding and abetting this high tech game of hide and seek that Elon is playing. Though they too deny that anything nefarious is going on:

However, Cloudflare’s CEO Matthew Prince tells TechCrunch that X going back online in Brazil this week was all a “coincidence.”

“I don’t think anything about this change was intentional to overcome a block in Brazil,” said Prince in an interview with TechCrunch. “This was literally just [X] switching from one IT vendor to another IT vendor.”

Some months ago, Prince said, Cloudflare won a deal to provide X with cloud computing services in several regions across the globe, including Brazil. X had previously used Fastly, a competitor to Cloudflare, and the social media platform is currently in the process of rolling out that switch. Changing providers also changed IP addresses associated with X, which disrupted how Brazilian internet service providers were blocking the X platform.

“We have never talked with [X] about helping them get around the Brazilian dam,” said Prince. “They happened to transition a bunch of their traffic from Fastly over to us, especially in the Latin American region, over the last week.”

Prince describes this as wild coincidence, where his sales team won a deal, and as a result ended up inadvertently “wading into some geopolitical Elon Musk vortex of craziness” months later.

I personally don’t buy this because this to sounds like the sort of answer that you would give when you’ve been caught doing something that you shouldn’t have. At this point I hope the Brazilians really start to twist the screws on Elon as he honestly needs to pay a price for his actions. And a very steep one.

Twitter is a cesspool of hate among other negative things. Therefore we should not be shocked by the fact that CBS News is reporting that ads on Twitter are showing up next to hateful content:

The World Bank has ceased all paid advertising on Elon Musk’s social media platform X, which was formerly Twitter, after a CBS News investigation found promoted advertisements from the organization showing up under a racist post from an account that prolifically posts pro-Nazi and white nationalist content. 

CBS News found a verified X account with more than 115,000 followers that had posted a racist image alongside a post praising Europe’s colonization of Africa. CBS News is not publicly identifying the accounts spreading racist content on X. 

A promoted advertisement for the World Bank showed up in the comments section below the post. 

“The World Bank Group had already reduced its paid marketing on X while working with the platform to implement the strongest safety protocols X offers for our content,” a spokesperson for the World Bank told CBS News on Friday, adding: “This latest incident is entirely unacceptable, and we are immediately ceasing all paid marketing on X.”

And:

On at least five occasions, promoted advertisements for the backpack company Nordace showed up under white nationalist or pro-Nazi posts on X. This included an advertisement for a Nordace backpack under a post from another verified account with 161,000 followers. 

The thread shared by the account included pro-Nazi posts that said “antisemites will save the world,” and “Weimar problems require Weimar solutions” with the “Weimar problems” phrase painted in the colors of the LGBTQ rainbow flag. The Weimar Republic was a name used for Germany before Hitler rose to power with the Nazi regime. 

On its website, Canadian-owned Nordace describes its core values as including, “Respect People” and “leave a positive impact.”

A Nordace representative replied to an earlier CBS News query about its ads on Sept. 2, saying the company had halted paid advertising on X “until we have absolute certainty that such occurrences won’t happen again.” Nordace said the posts highlighted by CBS News were “counter to everything we stand for, including our core value of ‘respect people.'”

It’s stuff like this that makes advertisers run in the other direction from advertising on Twitter. Elon Musk who is in the process of killing Twitter really has no clue. And it’s stuff like this that will ultimately kill Twitter as Elon clearly has no interest in making Twitter a place where advertisers want to spend their advertising dollars with. That and the fact that he told advertisers to “go f**k themselves.”

Remember when Elon Musk told advertisers who left Twitter to “go f**k themselves“? And he also sued advertisers for boycotting Twitter? Well, Elon is finding out that when you do stuff like that, it doesn’t end well. I say that because it looks like companies are going to spend less on advertising on Twitter going forward. Here’s what this looks like via The Next Web:

The advertising exodus from X is set to accelerate. In 2025, almost half of marketers in Europe and North America plan to cut their spending on the platform.

That’s according to a new study from Kantar, a market research firm based in the UK. The company found that trust in ads on X is now “historically low.”

Unsurprisingly, the company’s reputation has plummeted under the leadership of Elon Musk.

When Musk bought the platform in 2022, trust from marketers stood at a worrying 22%. Two years later, it’s down to a dismal 12%.

Trust isn’t their only concern. Only 4% of marketers now think adverts on X provide brand safety. Google tops that ranking with 39%.

Gonca Bubani, Kantar’s global media director, believes a swift turnaround is unlikely.

“X has changed so much in recent years and can be unpredictable from one day to the next,” she said. “It’s difficult to feel confident about your brand safety in that environment.”

This could explain why Elon has decided to hire people to work in areas like security as well as trust and safety after he either fired them or they quit rather than work for him. He needs to give advertisers a reason to come back to Twitter so he doesn’t have to face the prospect of having to tank Tesla stock by selling a ton of it so that he get cash to keep Twitter afloat. But honestly, I think at this point advertisers are done with Elon and his antics and there’s no way back in terms of getting them on board. Plus since Elon put Twitter into a death spiral, other social media contenders have emerged. Threads and Bluesky being the ones that would likely benefit from advertisers looking to spend their dollars on a platform other than Twitter. While I am always free to be proven wrong, I don’t think I will be. This I believe is the latest nail in Twitter’s coffin. And it’s all Elon’s fault in terms of Twitter being in that coffin.

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.