OT subject but worth a main-stream read- OT News Feeds...

lousubcap

Another brief couple of paragraphs worth reading regarding thr Irn-Russia connection:

"What’s in it for Iran to help Russia in Ukraine?

National Security Council spokesperson JOHN KIRBY offered the administration’s view. “It’s another sign of how isolated both Russia and Iran are and they have to rely on each other. They continue to lie to the world but the facts are clear,” he told NatSec Daily. “The Supreme Leader should answer why he has Iran directly engaged on the ground and through the provision of weapons that enable Russia to kill civilians and damage civilian infrastructure in Ukraine. It’s just another example of Iran’s desire to export violence, and both Iran and Russia need to be held accountable for it.”

Experts we spoke to offered some straightforward answers. Russia, which is adept at sanctions evasion, could pass along its knowhow to Iran. Iran might be rewarding Russia for keeping Syrian President BASHAR ASSAD in power. And then there’s Occam’s Razor: Iran gets money for its sputtering economy in exchange for drones, missiles and training."

Happy Friday!

JohnInCarolina

Interesting times in China:

https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/10/22/china-xi-jinping-hu-jintao-ccp-congress/

HeavyG

Yep.

https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1583872847977381889

HeavyG

https://twitter.com/JewishWonk/status/1584237448489730049

Legume

HeavyG said:

https://twitter.com/JewishWonk/status/1584237448489730049

As much as this was nice to read in the moment, I can’t help fear more countries getting drawn into this. Let’s hope it doesn’t snowball.

lousubcap

That was a well-played left handed move given the challenging politics and beyond involved.  

lousubcap

Monday Russia-Ukraine update:

"The Ukrainian military said it used anti-aircraft missile units and mobile fire groups to destroy Russian cruise missiles during a string of attacks on energy infrastructure across the country on Saturday. “18 enemy cruise missiles were destroyed by aviation, anti-aircraft missile units and mobile fire groups,” a post from the Air Force of the Armed Forces of Ukraine said. “In addition, the Russians attacked from ships in the Black Sea with Kalibr cruise missiles. A total of 16 starts,” it continued. Several rockets flying towards Kyiv on Saturday were shot down by air defense forces in the region, the city’s Mayor Kyiv Mayor Vitaliy Klitschko said in a separate statement. The series of attacks across Ukraine on Saturday left residents in parts of Odesa, Cherkasy, Kropyvnitsky, Rivne, Khmelnytskyi and Lutsk without electricity, according to officials in each region. Pierre Meilhan and Richard Roth report for CNN.

90% of Ukraine’s wind energy infrastructure and between 40% - 50% of its solar energy infrastructure have been destroyed in the war, according to Ukraine’s First Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Emine Dzheppar. “Russia keeps terrorizing Ukrainians and it’s course [sic] to create energy crisis in our country,” Dzheppar said on Twitter, calling on allied countries to help protect Ukrainian skies. Jorge Engels, Dennis Lapin, Niamh Kennedy and Josh Pennington report for CNN. 

Russia’s defense minister accused Ukraine of planning to use a so-called dirty bomb – a claim that U.S. officials strongly refuted as a Russian false flag operation. The allegation from Russian defense minister Sergei Shoigu came during a phone call with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin yesterday. “We reject reports of Minister Shoigu’s transparently false allegations that Ukraine is preparing to use a dirty bomb on its own territory,” National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson said in a statement. “The world would see through any attempt to use this allegation as a pretext for escalation.” Similar calls were also made to French and British officials, who also strongly refuted the Kremlin’s accusation. Barbara Starr and Natasha Bertrand report for CNN. 

Ukraine’s efforts to repel Russian attacks with Iranian-made drones are becoming “increasingly successful,” the U.K. Ministry of Defense said in its latest intelligence update. According to official sources, including Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, up to 85% of attacks are being intercepted, the update says. Russia is likely expending a high number of Iranian Shahid-136 UAVs in order to penetrate increasingly effective Ukrainian air defenses, and is likely using them as a substitute for Russian-manufactured long-range precision weapons, the update adds. Lindsay Isaac and Radina Gigova report for CNN. 

Ukrainians will be the ones to “choose the moment and the terms” of peace in the war with Russia, French President Emmanuel Macron said yesterday. His remarks at a peace conference in Rome come as Moscow’s war pushes energy prices higher in Europe ahead of winter, threatening to erode support on the continent for Ukraine’s defense. Macron has been a vocal proponent of maintaining open dialogue with Moscow, citing it as a means for potential peace negotiations - something that has previously drawn criticism from Ukraine. Bryan Pietsch reports for the Washington Post. "

lousubcap

Some insights regarding Bob Woodward and his Trump interview tapes:  The essay is behind the Washington Post pay wall for you subscribers.

"WOODWARD SPEAKS HIS MIND — It’s a relatively slow news day, so we encourage you to read every word of BOB WOODWARD’s new essay about his 20 interviews with DONALD TRUMP — which are being fully released in audiobook format tomorrow as “The Trump Tapes” ( $24.99 ). Perhaps the biggest critique of Woodward over his many years of presidential reportage has been that while his hoovering of information is unmatched, he lacks a point of view.

“Bob Woodward is always the last person you want to ask about the lessons to be drawn from his books,” Timothy Noah wrote in a stinging critique in Slate back in 2004. “Woodward is an astonishingly good reporter, and when he’s got something hot, he knows it. But when it comes time to arrange all the facts and anecdotes into a coherent whole, he tends to flub it.”

That was always a tad unfair, but it would ring completely false today. Re-listening to his eight hours of Trump interviews has moved Woodward further into the camp of longtime establishment figures who see Trump as a danger to American democracy and to the future of the country. He is not coy about the lessons to be drawn:

“In 2020, I ended ‘Rage’ with the following sentence: ‘When his performance as president is taken in its entirety, I can only reach one conclusion: Trump is the wrong man for the job.’ Two years later, I realize I didn’t go far enough. Trump is an unparalleled danger.When you listen to him on the range of issues from foreign policy to the virus to racial injustice, it’s clear he did not know what to do. Trump was overwhelmed by the job. He was largely disconnected from the needs and leadership expectations of the public and his absolute self-focus became the presidency…

“‘The Trump Tapes’ leaves no doubt that after four years in the presidency, Trump has learned where the levers of power are, and full control means installing absolute loyalists in key Cabinet and White House posts. The record now shows that Trump has led — and continues to lead — a seditious conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election, which in effect is an effort to destroy democracy.”"

lousubcap

Tom Nichols from The Atlantic and a good piece about the "dirty bomb" commentary now front and center:

"

MONDAY, OCTOBER 24, 2022

Tom Nichols STAFF WRITER

Rationalization for Escalation? Vladimir Putin meeting Russian soldiers during an October 20 visit. (Mikhail Klimentyev / Sputnik / AFP / Getty) View in browser Over the weekend, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu called his counterparts in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and—interestingly—Turkey. In these calls, Shoigu claimed that Ukraine is about to use a “dirty bomb,” which would ostensibly allow Russia to open the door to retaliation with nuclear weapons. Today, General Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the Russian general staff, called his American and British counterparts to press the same case. What is a dirty bomb, and what was the point in making this claim now? A dirty bomb isn’t actually a nuclear bomb. It is, to use the clunky term professionals apply to it, a radiological dispersal device, which is just another way of saying that it is a conventional explosive wrapped around a lot of dangerous radioactive material. When the bomb explodes, it is not a nuclear detonation, but only the normal explosion of something like TNT or other munitions. The difference is that this conventional explosion spreads around a lot of radioactive material, poisoning anyone nearby and rendering the area highly dangerous—perhaps even impassable. The gunk inside a dirty bomb could be anything that is highly radioactive: nuclear reactor waste, the leftover pieces of a nuclear weapon, even radiological materials from a hospital. This dirty-bomb charge could be part of the preparation for a Russian “false flag” operation, in which the Russians will explode their own dirty bomb, perhaps in the occupied territories of Ukraine or close to the Russian border; blame Ukraine; and then demand that Ukraine surrender or face nuclear retaliation. It could also be a way of trying to scare offUkraine’s Western supporters with threats of escalation. Let’s hope that this is just the Kremlin trying to engage in scare tactics. If, however, Putin and his circle are really considering a dirty-bomb provocation, it is likely because they would see such a plot as solving multiple problems at once. Russia would probably try to flip the script, and go from an aggressor likely guilty of multiple war crimes to the victim of a nuclear “event.” It might then issue an ultimatum to the Ukrainians that elevates the war to a nuclear crisis (which is probably the only way Moscow thinks it can win, now that the Russian army lies in pieces on the battlefield). The Russians, in such a gambit, would likely be betting that a faked dirty bomb would alleviate the “first use” stain from any Russian decision to attack—or as they would almost certainly say in this scenario, “retaliate”—with a nuclear weapon. With nuclear weapons now in play, the West would have to decide just how much to commit to nuclear deterrence on behalf of Ukraine. Why are the Russians now pushing this plot? I suspect the attempt to put nuclear issues back in play is rooted in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s realization that he has, yet again, humiliated himself in his harebrained scheming to prosecute a war he’s been losing since its first days. In particular, his attempt to conscript 300,000 Russian males has been a political disaster; some reports suggest that twice that number of Russians have already fled their country, and even Putin has admitted to “mistakes”and is winding back at least some of the mindless dragooning of his young men. Thus, threatening this dirty-bomb ruse and risking subsequent escalation makes sense if you’re in a bunker under the Kremlin (which is why I think it’s Putin’s reasoning), but in reality, it is utterly unhinged and reckless. For one thing, no one is going to believe the dirty-bomb story. The Americans, French, and British have already told the Russians as much. (We do not yet have a readout on the response from the Turks, but I cannot imagine they’re buying this fantasy any more than the other NATO allies.) That may not matter to Putin, who would probably care only that enough Russians believe it. But that plan, too, may backfire: One Russian-made dirty bomb followed by a nuclear crisis might panic the Russian public more than Putin expects. And although the Russians may think that calling their nuclear attack a “second” use in retaliation will get them off the hook, it won’t. Putin is likely betting that the world will back off after some routine condemnations, but the story around the dirty bomb will collapse pretty quickly, and Russia will stand revealed as a nuclear aggressor, which might finally lead the rest of the world to the conclusion that this regime is an intolerable threat to global peace and security. Putin could then find himself in a nuclear standoff with the West that neither he nor we want, but that will come anyway because of his own inability to foresee the consequences of his actions. (Ironically, one of the reasons the Russian president is in this mess is because he has a remarkable and completely unwarranted confidence in his ability to control events.) I do not want to speculate on how such a larger crisis could occur, but if the Russians choose this desperate path, there are multiple roads that could lead to a major East-West nuclear confrontation. Putin, once again, is gambling with the lives of his own people and the world, and we can only hope that Moscow now understands—through warnings from Washington, London, Paris, and (ideally) Istanbul—that we see through this attempted fraud, and that such escalation will only hasten Russia’s defeat and endanger the stability of the Russian nation itself."

Gulfcoastguy

A country is about to use a dirty bomb on its own land and citizens? Land it had expended hundreds of lives to retake? That’s the smallest fig leaf I’ve ever heard of.

lousubcap

Tuesday Russia-Ukraine update:

"A U.S. State Department spokesperson yesterday suggested that Russia’s claims that the Ukrainian government plans to detonate a so-called “dirty bomb” could be a pretext for Russia using such a weapon. “We have seen a pattern in this conflict, in this war, in the lead-up to this war, where the Russians have engaged in mirror imaging,” said the spokesperson, Ned Price. “The Russians have accused the Ukrainians, the Russians have accused other countries, of what it itself was planning. That is our concern.” However, Price also said that the U.S. had seen no changes regarding Russia’s nuclear arsenal. “We’ve not seen any reason to adjust our own nuclear posture, nor do we have indications that Russia is preparing to use nuclear weapons,” Price said. “But we’ve heard these very concerning statements and we wanted to send a very clear signal.” David E. Sanger, Eric Schmitt and Edward Wong report for the New York Times.

Russia is expected to bring its allegation that Ukraine is preparing to use a “dirty bomb” to the U.N. Security Council today. Moscow sent a letter detailing its allegations about Kyiv to the U.N. late yesterday, and diplomats said Russia planned to raise the issue at a closed meeting with the Security Council. "We will regard the use of the dirty bomb by the Kyiv regime as an act of nuclear terrorism," Russia's U.N. Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia told U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and the Security Council in the letter. Michelle Nichol and Pavel Polityuk report for Reuters. 

The U.N.'s nuclear watchdog says its inspectors have regularly visited two sites in Ukraine at the centre of Russian claims that Kyiv is preparing a “dirty bomb.” Inspectors would return in the coming days following a Ukrainian request, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Rafael Grossi said in a statement. “The IAEA inspected one of these locations one month ago and all our findings were consistent with Ukraine’s safeguards declarations,” Grossi added. “No undeclared nuclear activities or material were found there.” BBC News reports. 

Russian-installed officials in Kherson are forming territorial defense units to defend the illegally occupied city against recapture by Ukrainian forces. The units were announced yesterday by Kirill Stremousov, the Russian-appointed deputy head of the Kherson region, who hailed the success of the city’s defense in a video address. In the address, he sat in front of a map dated March 18, which showed the extent of Russia’s occupation of Ukraine before it was driven out of the country’s north. “Everything is under control,” Stremousov said, adding that Russia would soon recapture territory it had lost. “Whoever doesn’t like our map, get used to it,” he said. Matthew Luxmoore reports for the Wall Street Journal. "

lousubcap

Wednesday Russia-Ukraine update:
(Note, my usual source has not yet arrived-here are some quick hitters.)

"A senior Ukrainian official predicted “the heaviest of battles” to come for the partially Russian-occupied strategic southern province of Kherson and said Moscow’s military is digging in to face advancing Ukrainian forces.Ukrainian

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy reiterated a pledge to retake the city of Kherson, the loss of which would be a big setback for Russian President Vladimir Putin, who wants to speed up decision-making in the military campaign in Ukraine.

Putin has also urged his government to cut through bureaucracy to crank out enough weapons and supplies to feed his troops in Ukraine

Russia took its accusation that Ukraine was preparing to use a dirty bomb – an explosive device laced with radioactive material – to the United Nations Security Council, voicing its concerns during a closed-door meeting of the 15-member body.

Kyiv says it fears Moscow’s dirty bomb allegation is a pretext for a “false-flag” operation.

Pope Francis on Tuesday led leaders of world religions in a peace appeal to politicians to avert the threat of nuclear war over Ukraine.

Russia has notified the United States about planned annual exercises of its nuclear forces, which Washington said lowers the risk of miscalculation at a time of “reckless” Russian nuclear rhetoric.

New British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak agreed in a phone call with US President Joe Biden on the importance of supporting Ukraine. Sunak also spoke with Zelenskyy."

lousubcap

Thursday Russia-Ukraine update:

"The White House has said that it sees no current prospects for negotiations to end the war in Ukraine. “Neither side is in a position to sit down and negotiate,” John F. Kirby, the strategic communications coordinator for the National Security Council, told reporters yesterday. “Putin is clearly continuing to prosecute this war in a brutal, violent way,” he said, while the Ukrainians given their momentum “are not in a position where they want to negotiate.” These comments come as President Biden faces new challenges keeping together the bipartisan, multinational coalition supporting the effort to drive Russia out of Ukraine. The domestic and international consensus that Biden has struggled to build has shown signs of fraying in recent days with the approach of midterm elections and a cold European winter. Peter Baker and Steven Erlanger report for the New York Times. 

Ukrainian officials have asked the U.S. for cold-war-era cluster munitions. The so-called dual-purpose improved conventional munitions, or DPICMs, are currently banned from export. However, Ukrainian officials have claimed that these artillery-launched weapons, which are designed to burst into scores of smaller submunitions to destroy mobile targets, are needed to reduce wear and tear on NATO-grade artillery. Jack Detsch reports for Foreign Policy. 

A senior Russian foreign ministry official has said that commercial satellites from the U.S. and its allies could become legitimate targets for Russia if they were involved in the war in Ukraine. Konstantin Vorontsov, deputy director of the Russian foreign ministry’s department for non-proliferation and arms control, told the U.N. that the U.S. and its allies were trying to use space to enforce Western dominance. Vorontsov, reading from notes, said the use of Western satellites to aid the Ukrainian war effort was "an extremely dangerous trend." "Quasi-civilian infrastructure may be a legitimate target for a retaliatory strike," Vorontsov said, adding that the West's use of such satellites to support Ukraine was "provocative." Reuters reports. 

Moscow’s propaganda about Ukraine has shifted in recent days, arguing that it is battling terrorism and falsely accusing Ukraine of planning a dirty bomb attack as part of that narrative. The push is meant to shore up Russian support for the war but also to denigrate Ukraine in the West, potentially softening support for more arms shipments to Kyiv, officials and researchers say. The counterterrorism narratives, according to U.S. officials, are also part of a wider propaganda web aimed at making Russians feel more involved in the war.  Julian E. Barnes reports for the New York Times. "

lousubcap

Friday Russia-Ukraine update:

"Russia has launched more than 30 drone attacks on Ukraine over the past two days, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said. He added that in total, Moscow had also carried out some 4,500 missile strikes and over 8,000 air raids. Zelenskyy’s comments came as U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken called Russia's aggressive use of drones "appalling". Blinken accused Russian commanders of using the devices to "kill Ukrainian civilians and destroy the infrastructure they rely on for electricity, for water, for heat" during a visit to the Canadian capital Ottawa. "Canada and the United States will keep working with our allies and partners to expose, to deter, and to counter Iran's provision of these weapons," Blinken said. BBC News reports. 

Russia has sent “up to 1,000” mobilized personnel to the west bank of the Dnipro river in its bid to defend the city of Kherson, the Ukrainian armed forces have said. This claim is supported by the U.K. defense ministry’s latest intelligence update which says it is “likely” that “mobilized reservists” have been sent to reinforce Russian troops on the west bank. It added that Russian forces across most of Ukraine had transitioned to a “long-term, defensive posture” over the last six weeks, “likely due to a more realistic assessment that the severely undermanned, poorly trained force in Ukraine is currently only capable of defensive operations.” Jo Shelley reports for CNN. 

Russian President Vladimir Putin decried “liberal elites” of the West in his address at the Valdai Discussion Club yesterday, whilst playing down fears that Russia would use a nuclear weapon in Ukraine. Putin said “there is no point, politically or militarily” to a nuclear strike on Ukraine, but he did not back off from unsupported claims that Ukraine is preparing to use a “dirty bomb.” In his address, Putin also called House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) decision to visit Taiwan in August “delusional.” Erin Cunningham, Kelly Kasulis Cho, Victoria Bisset, Adam Taylor and James Bikales report for the Washington Post. "

lousubcap

Some insights back to the 1962 Cuban Missile crisis.  A quick read-

"While running for president in 1960, Jack Kennedy had repeatedly claimed that Dwight Eisenhower's administration had allowed a dangerous "missile gap" to develop between the United States and the Soviet Union. This was untrue, which Kennedy knew.

The real story, as Benjamin Schwarz wrote in The Atlantic nine years ago, was that at time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviet Union had 36 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), 138 long-range bombers with 392 nuclear warheads, and 72 submarine-launched ballistic-missile warheads (SLBMs). "These forces were arrayed against a vastly more powerful U.S. nuclear arsenal of 203 ICBMs, 1,306 long-range bombers with 3,104 nuclear warheads, and 144 SLBMs -- all told, about nine times as many nuclear weapons as the U.S.S.R.," Schwarz noted. "Nikita Khrushchev was acutely aware of America's huge advantage not just in the number of weapons but in their quality and deployment as well."

And so, Khrushchev behaved not only humanely in looking for a way out of the crisis, but rationally. Is Vladimir Putin rational? The whole world hopes so, despite disturbing evidence to the contrary.

But even nations guided by rational leaders often pursue irrational courses of action, war being among the most obvious. And nuclear war, often described as "unthinkable," would be the most irrational possible course of action. We came close in 1962, and even closer in 1983, when a defective Soviet early warning system mistook the sun's reflection off a cloud for a missile launch. A cool-headed Russian military officer named Stanislav Petrov trusted his gut instinct instead of established procedures dictated by a machine, thereby saving the world. We were lucky, in other words. And not for the first time.

As he wrote his memoirs two decades ago, Kennedy administration Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara ruminated on this idea while discussing 13 fateful days in October 1962.

"I want to say, and this is very important: at the end we lucked out," McNamara wrote. "It was luck that prevented nuclear war. We came that close to nuclear war at the end. Rational individuals: Kennedy was rational; Khrushchev was rational; Castro was rational. Rational individuals came that close to total destruction of their societies. And that danger exists today.""

lousubcap

No twitter user here but this may be an indicator of those who are power players on the platform;

"Several years ago, I started using an app from Twitter called TweetDeck to track my likes and retweets—they call tools like these social media dashboards, but they're better understood as the vital signs for an internet dopamine junkie. One of the options in the app is to hear a shrill, school alarm bell sound anytime anyone interacts with one of your tweets. 

Out of curiosity, I enabled the feature. The first ring startled. The second one went down a little easier. The third ring calmed. And after that, I needed the fourth ring. When the alarm bells went off in quick succession, it felt good, like a song I wanted stuck in my head. So, that day, I decided to leave the feature on for a little while. 

That was about a decade ago. Since then, anytime someone responds to me, mentions me, retweets me, likes one of my tweets, shares anything re- lated to my newsletter, NextDraft, or links to any of my other writing online, I hear the ring. And I experience a positive response each time. Ring, response. Ring, response. It's like someone forgot to pick up after Pavlov's dog. 

I'm a small-fry, just one of the millions of middling addicts. For guys like Musk, with more than a hundred million followers, the dopamine hits are like tidal waves. So he kept tweeting. He kept tweeting when it hurt is reputation, even among prospective Tesla buyers. He kept tweeting when it led to nasty lawsuits or huge SEC fines. Even with all the fame, pressure, and influence associated with being the world's richest (and maybe most famous) person, Musk couldn't resist the blue tweet button. It was this Twitter addiction that led Musk to publicly ponder the possibility of purchasing the platform. That thread got him in so deep he was ultimately forced to wildly overpay for a company that will endlessly distract him from the several other much more impressive companies to run. Now that's a Twitter addiction. (On the plus side, I'm so bummed that Musk owns Twitter, it may actually help me kick my own habit.) "  FWIW-

HeavyG

It will be interesting to see what Musk does with his new toy.

Will Trumpy be coming back to Twitter? That would be hilarious. If he does how long would it take for Truth Social investors to sue him?

fishlessman

HeavyG said:

It will be interesting to see what Musk does with his new toy.

Will Trumpy be coming back to Twitter? That would be hilarious. If he does how long would it take for Truth Social investors to sue him?

Make Twitter great again

JohnInCarolina

HeavyG said:

It will be interesting to see what Musk does with his new toy.

Will Trumpy be coming back to Twitter? That would be hilarious. If he does how long would it take for Truth Social investors to sue him?

I’m not convinced he’ll be invited back, but if he is and returns, he’d be admitting that Truth Social is just another failure in a long list of them.  Like Trump University, Trump Steaks, Trump Water, and the Trump White House.

Botch

HeavyG said:

It will be interesting to see what Musk does with his new toy.

Will Trumpy be coming back to Twitter? That would be hilarious. If he does how long would it take for Truth Social investors to sue him?

That doesn't seem to have deterred him in the past.  
 
What I'm wondering about is this:
When kanye shot off his antisemitism, it took a couple weeks, but investors finally left him in droves.  The same could happen to musk if twitter descends into its former self (and I'll have to find that WaPo article this morning that indicated it is, at high velocity).  But, does musk need ad income to continue to run twitter?  I'm thinking, he doesn't.  We'll see.  

Botch

Here it is:
 

Racist tweets quickly surface after Musk closes Twitter deal

Anonymous Twitter accounts celebrated Musk’s takeover and argued it meant the old rules against bigotry no longer applied

Elon Musk said he would make “no major content decisions or account reinstatements” on Twitter until the convening of a new “moderation council.” (Dado Ruvic/Illustration/Reuters)

An emboldened cast of anonymous trolls spewed racist slurs and Nazi memes onto Twitter in the hours after billionaire industrialist Elon Musk took over the social network, raising fears that his pledge of unrestricted free speech could fuel a new wave of online hate.

The flood of racist posts was among the most prominent signs of how Twitter had changed in the first hours of Musk’s ownership. But those who were expecting even bigger changes, such as the restoration of former president Donald Trump’s account and the layoff of hundreds if not thousands of Twitter employees, will have to wait longer.

Musk on Friday tweeted that he would make “no major content decisions or account reinstatements” until the convening of a new “moderation council.” He promised that the council would have “widely diverse viewpoints” but offered no other information about who would be on it, how its members would be selected, what authority it would have or whether its views would be binding on the company.

Musk’s social media rival Mark Zuckerberg, chief of Facebook’s parent company, Meta, also turned to an outside group — known as the Oversight Board — to pass judgment on Facebook’s social media moderation actions after years of public criticism of its decisions. But whether Musk has a similar arrangement in mind was unknown.

Paul M. Barrett, the deputy director of New York University’s Center for Business and Human Rights, said such a council under Musk would face even more skepticism because of Musk’s “notoriously erratic and imperious personality.”

“To make an advisory body work, he would have to give it some degree of independence and make it very transparent,” Barrett said. “Frankly, I am not that optimistic, but as the whole Musk-Twitter saga has illustrated, he is full of surprises.”

Elon Musk bought Twitter. Now what?

Musk also did not meet with Twitter’s employees, something that had been widely expected — or, in some cases, dreaded. Rumors of widespread layoffs have roiled Twitter’s workforce since The Washington Post revealed last week that Musk had told potential investors that he foresaw cutting Twitter’s staff by nearly 75 percent. No layoffs were announced Friday, and Twitter workers at its headquarters in downtown San Francisco reported that they heard nothing from senior managers during the day.

Twitter did hear from one major advertiser, however, the auto manufacturer General Motors, which told CNBC that it was temporarily suspending advertising on the platform until the direction of the company under Musk becomes clearer. On Thursday, Musk tried to assuage advertiser worries in a tweeted letter in which he promised that the site would not become a “hellscape” or a “free-for-all” and pledged that the app would remain “warm and welcoming to all.”

The reality of those worries became clear after Musk closed the $44 billion deal, however, becoming Twitter’s owner and firing the chief executive officer, chief financial officer, chief policy officer and general counsel.

Within hours, Musk’s portrayal of himself as a “free speech absolutist” and his fierce criticism of the company’s previous leaders as overly rigid and suppressive seemed to have encouraged a wide range of anonymous Twitter accounts to act as if his takeover meant the old rules against bigotry no longer applied.

On Oct. 27, Elon Musk completed his purchase of Twitter and began taking control of the social media company, firing several key executives. (Video: Jonathan Baran/The Washington Post)

“Elon now controls twitter. Unleash the racial slurs. K---S AND N-----S,” said one account, using slurs for Jews and Black people. “I can freely express how much I hate n-----s … now, thank you elon,” another said.

Racial slurs were posted rampantly. One single-word tweet, showing a single racial slur in all capital letters, was retweeted more than 700 times and liked more than 5,000 times. It was tweeted Thursday night and remained online more than 16 hours later.

One account, created this month, included a Nazi swastika as its profile picture and retweeted quotes from Musk alongside antisemitic memes. Another tweet, showing a video montage glorifying Nazi Germany with the comment, “I hear that there have been some changes around here,” was liked more than 400 times.

The Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), a group that analyzes hundreds of millions of messages across social media, said use of the n-word on the app spiked nearly 500 percent over the 12 hours after Musk’s deal was finalized.

Elon Musk takes over Twitter, declares ‘the bird is freed’

By Friday afternoon, misogynistic and anti-LGBTQ messages had become increasingly prominent, including from accounts calling for the harassment and misnaming of transgender people or the use of terms, like “groomer,” to insinuate that they sexually recruit children.

“Almost immediately I noticed an increase in anti-trans harassment, it’s very visible,” said Erin Reed, a trans activist and legislative researcher. “I’m seeing more people in comments with explicit threats, more misgendering, more harmful slurs. I’ve gotten pictures of me getting shot by a shotgun. It’s a pretty scary environment on Twitter right now.”

Some anti-LGBTQ Twitter users began running “tests” of Twitter’s new rules by posting the previous names, known as “dead names,” of prominent trans media figures and by misgendering high-profile trans women.

Some accounts, including that of conservative commentator Matt Walsh, celebrated Musk’s takeover as helping supercharge opposition to “the trans agenda.” The “liberation of Twitter couldn’t have come at a more opportune time,” Walsh tweeted to his more than 1 million followers. “Now we can ramp up our efforts even more.”

The Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ civil rights group, said in a statement Friday that it was “very concerned” about Musk’s ownership. “Twitter has a right, and a responsibility, to keep its platform from being exploited to fuel a dangerous media environment,” the group said. “This isn’t about censorship or discrimination of ideas — it is about what kind of company they want to be and what kind of world they want to shape.”

Some of the Twitter influx was organized on other platforms, including on the anything-goes message board 4chan and the pro-Trump forum TheDonald, where its top posts Friday showed tweets celebrating lies about Trump’s 2020 election loss and memes criticizing transgender people under the headline “When you can’t get banned on Twitter anymore.”

“Cold Meme War, [Twitter] Defenses Down, Fire Away,” another poster said, attaching an image of a soldier with a rifle and a “Make America Great Again” hat.

Alex Goldenberg, NCRI’s lead intelligence analyst, said the swarm of racial slurs organized on anonymous forums such as 4chan was intended “to make as big a mess as possible for Twitter’s new management.”

“Online trolls regularly test the limits of moderation,” Goldenberg said. Rather than a “paradigm change” at the company, he said, the spike could show that these groups “are seeking to give Elon Musk all he can handle.”

Elon Musk dubs himself ‘Chief Twit,’ visits Twitter HQ with deal set to close

Musk’s acquisition and almost-instant firing of Twitter’s top executives was also widely celebrated in Telegram groups devoted to QAnon, the jumble of pro-Trump extremist ideologies and baseless theories. “Sometimes it takes a while, but the good guys win,” one QAnon influencer wrote.

Some Twitter rules, however, still appeared to apply. Stew Peters, a far-right conspiracy theorist and radio host who was banned from Twitter, created a new account Thursday night and posted, “I’m BAAAAAAAAAAACK.” By Friday morning, however, the account had been suspended.

But Musk’s takeover is still fresh. After a right-wing influencer tweeted that he continued to be “shadowbanned, ghostbanned [and] searchbanned” on the platform, Musk tweeted Friday morning that he would “be digging in more today.” (After Musk’s reply, the account tweeted about “liberal tears” and celebrated gaining more than 40,000 followers.)

Musk’s takeover also led some prominent Twitter users associated with Russian and Chinese state-backed media outlets to call for Twitter to remove labels identifying their accounts as propaganda.

Twitter and other social networks have used the labels since the 2016 election to defend against foreign election interference and misinformation.

Margarita Simonyan, the editor in chief of the Russian government-backed broadcaster RT, called for Musk to remove the “shadow ban” from her account and appealed to his stated commitments to “free speech.”

But European regulators reminded Musk on Friday that they’d be closely scrutinizing any changes he made to the platform, 75 percent of whose users live outside the United States. A sweeping new law set to come into force in the European Union would force Twitter and other tech companies to fight misinformation and limit the spread of illegal content. E.U. officials said during a news conference Friday that they will be watching to make sure Twitter complies with these new regulations, known as the Digital Services Act.

“In Europe, the bird will fly by our rules,” Thierry Breton, an E.U. commissioner who has helped oversee tech policy, tweeted Friday, a reference to Twitter’s bird logo. Musk earlier had tweeted that the bird had been uncaged.

How social media ‘censorship’ became a front line in the culture war

Alex Stamos, a former Facebook chief security officer who now leads the Stanford Internet Observatory, said the pitfalls and complexities of online content moderation will quickly become apparent to Musk, whose other business ventures, such as Tesla and SpaceX, could require interaction with foreign governments seeking to gain influence over Twitter’s reach.

With so much “at stake in China,” Stamos tweeted, “what is Musk going to do with these public requests to lift labeling on state propagandists and private asks to stop looking for covert influence campaigns?”

One person who remained noticeably absent from Twitter on Friday was Trump, whose account was indefinitely suspended because of fears of violent incitement after a crowd of his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Musk has said he would end lifetime bans, including Trump’s, on the basis that they weaken Twitter’s role as a platform for free expression. Trump, however, told Fox News on Friday that he would stay on his own company’s smaller Twitter clone, Truth Social, even if he was invited back, adding, “I don’t think Twitter can be successful without me.”

Trump’s Truth Social account has roughly 4 million followers, a small fraction of the 88 million followers he had at his Twitter peak.

JohnInCarolina

Botch said:

HeavyG said:

It will be interesting to see what Musk does with his new toy.

Will Trumpy be coming back to Twitter? That would be hilarious. If he does how long would it take for Truth Social investors to sue him?

That doesn't seem to have deterred him in the past.  
 
What I'm wondering about is this:
When kanye shot off his antisemitism, it took a couple weeks, but investors finally left him in droves.  The same could happen to musk if twitter descends into its former self (and I'll have to find that WaPo article this morning that indicated it is, at high velocity).  But, does musk need ad income to continue to run twitter?  I'm thinking, he doesn't.  We'll see.  

It would turn into an awfully expensive toy for him without any ad revenue.   I mean… that thing does not run itself.  Twitter has nearly a quarter billion users.  

Botch

JohnInCarolina said:
It would turn into an awfully expensive toy for him without any ad revenue.   I mean… that thing does not run itself.  Twitter has nearly a quarter billion users.  

Well, I played with some numbers (and I admit this is an extremely oversimplified exercise).  If elon retained/hired only folks at the $100K salary level (he's already axed some of the big rollers), that equates to each of them monitoring 2,500 users apiece.  Combined with software algorithms and automated filtering (not to mention AI), this doesn't sound like much of a workload; but again, this is oversimplified and I really have no idea how many people it takes to filter inputs to a website.  
 
So, I dunno.  It has frightened me to no end that another billionaire (Murdoch) could establish a "news" channel so skillfully to get 1/3rd of all Americans to vote against their own interests, just using repeated lies, constant repetition and incubation of Hatred against anyone who isn't Exactly Like You.    

JohnInCarolina

Botch said:

JohnInCarolina said:
It would turn into an awfully expensive toy for him without any ad revenue.   I mean… that thing does not run itself.  Twitter has nearly a quarter billion users.  

Well, I played with some numbers (and I admit this is an extremely oversimplified exercise).  If elon retained/hired only folks at the $100K salary level (he's already axed some of the big rollers), that equates to each of them monitoring 2,500 users apiece.  Combined with software algorithms and automated filtering (not to mention AI), this doesn't sound like much of a workload; but again, this is oversimplified and I really have no idea how many people it takes to filter inputs to a website.  
 
So, I dunno.  It has frightened me to no end that another billionaire (Murdoch) could establish a "news" channel so skillfully to get 1/3rd of all Americans to vote against their own interests, just using repeated lies, constant repetition and incubation of Hatred against anyone who isn't Exactly Like You.    

Twitter employees do quite a bit more than filter inputs, Botch.  This isn’t something like Etsy, it’s an entire social media platform, one that’s up and running in nearly every single country.  They need an army of people just to navigate the various laws alone.

Legume

I don’t even know where this goes, but JFC, Kyrie is going further down the path of Kanye.

https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/34898967/nets-condemn-kyrie-irving-promotion-anti-semitic-film

Botch

JohnInCarolina said:

Botch said:

JohnInCarolina said:
It would turn into an awfully expensive toy for him without any ad revenue.   I mean… that thing does not run itself.  Twitter has nearly a quarter billion users.  

Well, I played with some numbers (and I admit this is an extremely oversimplified exercise).  If elon retained/hired only folks at the $100K salary level (he's already axed some of the big rollers), that equates to each of them monitoring 2,500 users apiece.  Combined with software algorithms and automated filtering (not to mention AI), this doesn't sound like much of a workload; but again, this is oversimplified and I really have no idea how many people it takes to filter inputs to a website.  
 
So, I dunno.  It has frightened me to no end that another billionaire (Murdoch) could establish a "news" channel so skillfully to get 1/3rd of all Americans to vote against their own interests, just using repeated lies, constant repetition and incubation of Hatred against anyone who isn't Exactly Like You.    

Twitter employees do quite a bit more than filter inputs, Botch.  This isn’t something like Etsy, it’s an entire social media platform, one that’s up and running in nearly every single country.  They need an army of people just to navigate the various laws alone.

Agreed; however I'm embarrassed of my faulty math last night, wtf was I thinking?  d'Oh!  

JohnInCarolina

Legume said:

I don’t even know where this goes, but JFC, Kyrie is going further down the path of Kanye.

https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/34898967/nets-condemn-kyrie-irving-promotion-anti-semitic-film

Kyrie, much like Kanye, is a jackass.

lousubcap

A link to a Verge article about Musk's purchase of Twitter, (interesting perspective the platform):

https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/28/23428132/elon-musk-twitter-acquisition-problems-speech-moderation

JohnInCarolina

Good read about what Elon has gotten himself into over at Twitter:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/28/23428132/elon-musk-twitter-acquisition-problems-speech-moderation

HeavyG

Echo...echo...echo...

Is a good read. Trying to find a path to moderate content that pleases all the various parties is going to be "fun".