Twitter and Elon Musk
Twitter and Elon Musk
The mania and panic over Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter borders on insanity.
Sometime back, a Stanford adjunct professor and friend, Fred Gibbons, clued me into Elon Musk. Gibbons, an old Silicon Valley maven who knew the ropes, said, “No matter what anyone thinks, Elon Musk is the real deal.” I knew what he meant by that since I was schooled by the valley BS and its legions of phonies and posers.
With that in mind, it’s doubtful that Musk is going to mess up Twitter to any real degree besides causing a panic among the liberals who think it is their personal sandbox. In fact, they are the ones doing what they can to ruin it for anyone who does not think their way. This group of knee-jerk liberals includes the ownership of the company.
Let’s remember that Twitter began as a “microblogging” platform where users could make short comments about the world around them. You could follow people you thought were interesting.
Musk, by definition, is a smart businessman (who uses the media to get attention in much the same way Trump does). You must assume that he actually sees some sort of money-making opportunity that nobody else sees or understands.
It’s not about politics or Democrats or Republicans; it’s about opportunity.
Twitter, in fact, does a piss-poor job of finding the psychographic groups that can be identified using their own tweets and targeting them for pricey ads. As it now works, the ad delivery mechanism is slipshod and relies on sketchy link-bait.
I’ve seen technology from the 1980s that could take a database of email from thousands of employees, break it down, and use to identify experts within any organization that were not working in their areas of expertise.
The idea was to mine the employee base to fill job openings without bringing new (and disruptive) people into the corporate culture.
These sort of systems, usually palmed off as A.I. (artificial intelligence), have been under development for decades. The closest anyone comes to using this sort of analysis for advertising is Facebook. But it seems distracted by virtual reality devices and Democratic election schemes.
Google also has a clue, although its natural mechanism is self-selection. In other words, when you search for a weed whacker you have self-selected. Google figures that if you search for weed whackers, you want to buy one – bingo, here is an ad!
Twitter, meanwhile, seems to be putting its efforts NOT into making money but rather moderating content. It wants to make sure that nobody at a cocktail party could think that the CEO might be a Republican. Heaven forbid!
I'm someone (with a blue checkmark) who has been using Twitter since 2008 (@therealdvorak). It’s obvious to me that the entire system slants in favor of liberal progressive politics and dissuades conservative voices.
It kicks off people who don’t follow certain government policies laid down by the CDC, for example. What does the CDC have to do with someone’s opinion? This is a ruse – and one among many – to keep you in line with the liberal belief system.
They will say that you, a customer of the service, cannot say that masks do not work because it is spreading misinformation – according to the CDC. Your retort might be that you are citing the CDC itself from an earlier study. Too bad, you are kicked off.
In other words, your ability to express any sort of new, differing, or contrary opinion about any number of topics is verboten. You are removed by edict with no due process (there it is again). It turns out that the policies are those of the Progressives within the Democratic Party. The rest of the users be damned.
Musk has to see this cavalier approach as throwing money away. Besides not maximizing advertising potential, the company alienates half of its potential customers.
And you know that I am only seeing a small piece of the potential for Twitter as a gold mine that needs the right mining engineers. Who knows what scheme is afoot?
That said, it makes you wonder what is wrong with the media and the panicked mavens who think this is the end of the world and of democracy. Get a grip. — JCD